Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  1 went north last week. The anemones are in bloom. Do you remember their brightness, their sweetness? Do you remember how we walked together so many years ago, through flower-spangled fields!

  He had signed the letter simply, Your Yehuda, and enclosed a few blossoms in the envelope. The brittle petals fell, like scarlet teardrops, onto her palm. She held them and they crumbled, but their fragrance clung to her skin.

  The phone rang in the house, but Rebecca made no move to answer it. She folded Yehuda’s letter and thought of how he must have looked as he wrote it—his silken-gray eyes hooded, his full lips tightly compressed. He had searched deeply and offered her acknowledgment but not false promises. He recognized doubt and uncertainty. He had told Amnon that he would be with Rebecca, wherever she is. He countered the danger that he perceived only with memory and the fragile scarlet flowers of the Galilee.

  Her mother answered the phone. The French doors that led to the garden were open, and Rebecca heard Leah’s voice rise with excitement. Still, she did not stir, but read her husband’s letter again. Gentle, generous Yehuda. Strong and vulnerable Yehuda. Her heart broke for him and for herself. He should have written earlier, spoken sooner.

  “Rebecca!”

  Leah rushed toward her and seized her wrists, her face radiant.

  “Mindell’s had a girl. A beautiful baby, born this morning. A girl. Michael has a daughter.”

  “And we have a new granddaughter.” Boris Zaslovsky beamed. His own children had been killed at Babi Yar by the Germans, and he had never thought to know joy again. But he had learned, with the passing years, that each new life avenged a death and that the laughter of living children vanquished the fearful whimpers of the dying. Leah’s grandchildren were his own. He visited Lydia and Aaron’s children and crafted small wooden animals for Seth, the youngest. He told Paulette and David tales of the Russian steppes, of the wicked Siberian snow wizard and the brave prince of the Khazars. He studied the framed photographs of Amnon and Yaakov. One day he would travel to Israel and meet Rebecca’s children.

  “I’m so glad,” Rebecca said. She went to the phone at once, but as was often the case, all lines to Israel were busy. Instead she sent Yehuda a cable. It was Yehuda who had taken Mindell’s hand, so many years ago, and led her from fear and hiding into courage and freedom.

  Rebecca visited a radiant Mindell at the hospital and stood beside Michael at the nursery window, entranced by the newborn infant. She marveled at her new niece’s perfectly formed tiny pink limbs, the aureole of soft pale hair, and the long lashes that swept across tear-dampened cheeks.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said. “What will you call her?”

  “Shlomit,” Michael replied. “It means ‘peace,’ you know.”

  There was a hint of whimsical defiance in Michael’s voice. He would name his daughter for peace, although she had been born in a time of war. The war in Vietnam had escalated and angry mobs had besieged Hubert Humphrey in Paris. Michael’s students at Hutchinson College wore black armbands on their brightly colored sweaters. Young people stood vigil at the White House and chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Each night the honor roll of death flickered across their television screen. “Killed in Vietnam today were the following area residents…” Mindell’s labor had begun as the nightly tabulation concluded. War hovered over the Middle East. An air battle over the Sea of Galilee had destroyed six Syrian MIGs. Egyptian troops moved closer to Israel’s frontier. There was talk of closing the Straits of Tiran, and Nasser spoke vigorously of expelling the United Nations Emergency Force. U Thant posed for photographers with his hands lifted helplessly, his enigmatic smile betraying his impotency.

  That afternoon Michael had graded Lisa Ellenberg’s ambitious paper on “The Etiology of War.” He had, with regret, given the paper a B minus, which would disappoint Lisa, who strove for perfection. But he had named his daughter Shlomit because he shared Lisa’s dream of peace, and that would please her.

  “I know what Shlomit means,” Rebecca said. “I lived in Israel, after all. It’s a beautiful name.”

  Michael noted, with sinking heart, Rebecca’s use of the past tense, but he did not comment on it.

  “We will keep her in peace, then,” he said. Shlomit’s unseeing eyes opened, her tiny feet and arms flailed, and she began to cry.

  “We will try,” Rebecca said, but she was thinking of how hard it was to keep a child in peace. An Israeli lieutenant had been killed the previous week as he patrolled below the Golan Heights. He had been twenty years old, the son of Bergen-Belsen survivors. His mother had wept at his graveside and repeated again and again, “We only wanted to keep him in peace.” The newspaper report noted that she had said the same words in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew.

  “Shlomit,” Rebecca whispered, and smiled at her brother’s newborn daughter. If only names were talismans, guarantors of protection.

  “Amnon. Yaakov,” she added softly, invoking the names of her own sons in unarticulated prayer.

  She met Benjamin Nadler for dinner that night at a small East Side restaurant. The first daffodils of spring stood in a blue vase on their table. They smiled at each other across the butter-colored flowers and lifted their glasses in toast to Shlomit. There was a new buoyancy in Benjamin’s voice, and he filled his glass and her own again.

  “Another toast,” he said.

  She smiled. The evening had a holiday quality. With wine and laughter, at their leisure, they fended off the future. Her work for the Zalenko book was almost completed, and he was working well ahead of his deadline on a critique of the Impressionists. Briefly, they were freed of pressure.

  “What shall we drink to?” she asked.

  “To this.”

  He passed an envelope across the table to her. She held it tentatively, fearfully, in her hand. It was heavy, containing more than one sheet of linen-weighted paper. It would tip the scales, she knew.

  She removed it from the envelope. Three sheets closely typed, the cream-colored stationery embossed with the emblem of a California university. Benjamin Nadler was invited to assume the deanship of the school of fine arts. Attractive terms were set forth, including a large residence, to which the previous dean, a painter, had added a glass-enclosed skylit wing. There was a generous travel allowance to cover international seminars and lectures. The university participated in exchange programs with major universities, and the dean’s duties would include visits to campuses in France, Spain, Italy, and Israel.

  Rebecca read slowly. She imagined herself coming to Israel as a visitor, as the wife of a visiting academic dignitary. She smiled bitterly.

  “What do you think?” Eagerness lit Benjamin Nadler’s craggy features. She saw, for the first time, a gold cast in his amber eyes. “A house large enough for children. Wonderful country for youngsters. A marvelous studio.” He tallied advantages, envisioned a life. Her sons would sleep in wood-paneled rooms. She would paint in a glass-enclosed studio.

  The waiter brought their meal—a holiday repast, chosen for lovers. Leaf-shaped morelles floating on spinach pasta. A salad of russet-fringed lettuce, slender celery wands, ebony olives. Neither of them lifted a fork.

  “They want an answer soon,” he said.

  “So I see.” She handed the letter back to him.

  “Will you come with me?” His voice was very low.

  She did not answer.

  “Will you marry me and come with me?” Now his tone was firm and his eyes commanded a reply.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her hands cupped her wineglass. She stared at the yellow daffodils. She lifted the glass to her lips, but her fingers trembled and tear-shaped droplets of wine trickled onto the snow-white cloth. She looked at them and thought of the dried petals of the anemones that Yehuda had picked in the Galilee and that had crumbled in her hand.

  *

  MICHAEL GOLDFEDER, flushed with the joy of new fatherhood, stopped at the Barton’s candy shop in Grand Central T
erminal and bought two large boxes of chocolate-covered mints, which he distributed to the students who attended his seminar on “The Sociology of Politics” that afternoon. He also bought a can of Almond Kisses because he knew that the chocolate-covered nuts were Lisa Ellenberg’s favorites. But Lisa cut his seminar that day, although she was due to give an oral report. He asked the smiling girls, who flocked teasingly about his desk to accept his chocolates and offer their shy congratulations, if they knew the reason for her absence.

  “Spring is here,” someone suggested pertly.

  “That’s not like Lisa,” Michael said, and frowned.

  “I saw her last night,” a tall blond girl who lived in Lisa’s dormitory volunteered. “She was at some sort of teach-in at Columbia and almost missed the last train. She said she had a Lit paper due and would probably work all night. She’s probably at the dorm sleeping it off.”

  “All night?” Michael was vaguely disturbed. Lisa was pushing herself too hard, he thought. She had looked too tired recently to sacrifice a night’s sleep. But then he recalled his own student days at Princeton and at Berkeley. He, too, had often stayed up all night working on an assignment. A dramatic excitement accompanied those nocturnal work sessions. He remembered the secret satisfaction of working through the night in a building where everyone else was asleep while the light of his student lamp cast its cornucopia of brightness across the completed pages. Lisa was only doing what students had always done. Kids that age could afford sleepless nights, he assured himself.

  Still, he wanted to tell her of Shlomit’s birth. He called her dormitory and left a message asking her to call him during his office hours later in the day. He taught his second seminar and held conferences with two tutorial students. The department secretary handed him a sheaf of messages, but none of them were from Lisa. He frowned and tried her dormitory again.

  “Her room doesn’t answer, Professor Goldfeder,” the girl on phone duty said. “And I know she has a Lit class this hour.”

  His next scheduled appointment was canceled, and he glanced at his watch and decided that he would catch an earlier train and manage another visit with Mindell and Shlomit. As he packed his attaché case, he noticed the can of Almond Kisses, still unopened. He had time to drop them off at Lisa’s room and still make his train.

  Briskly, he walked across campus. Tiny buds had formed on the dogwood trees in the library meadow, and star-shaped yellow blossoms sprouted on the forsythia hedges that rimmed the dormitory compound. He was pleased that his daughter had been born in the season of sweet blooming. A child of spring named for peace. The student at the reception desk in Lisa’s dormitory looked up from the poster she was working on and smiled at him in recognition. She had covered a large sheet of oak tag with a rainbow and scrawled the word peace in different languages. Pace. Pax. Paix. Salaam. A Japanese student had painted the word in the graceful characters of her own language.

  “Can you think of any other languages, Dr. Goldfeder?” she asked flirtatiously.

  Michael selected a purple Magic Marker and penned his daughter’s name in Hebrew.

  “Shlomit,” he said, and wondered if the utterance of her name would always give him such pleasure.

  “Thanks.” She smiled at him. She was a pretty girl who was overtly conscious of her charms.

  “Is Lisa Ellenberg in?” he asked.

  “Gee, I haven’t seen Lisa today, although she was supposed to work on these posters with me. I just came on duty, though. She’s probably up in her room. Go on up. I’ll sign you in.”

  He hesitated and glanced at his watch. If he left the candy and a message at the reception desk, he would be in no danger of missing his tram. But he intended to call Joshua and Sherry that night, and he wanted to tell them that he had seen Lisa. They worried about her, he knew. He bounded up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, hurrying past open doors. In one room he glimpsed a group of coeds in plaid robes, seated on the floor in a semicircle, notebooks and texts open in front of them.

  “Rimbaud was a visionary,” one said.

  ‘‘Rimbaud was a romantic. Romantics are not automatically visionaries,” another protested.

  The chorus of “The Impossible Dream” drifted from another room and mingled with the strains of a student flautist practicing trilling scales. He looked at the girl and thought of his infant daughter. Smilingly, he considered the miracle of the passing years. One day she, too, would spend a spring afternoon analyzing Rimbaud, practicing the flute, drawing rainbows on sheets of cardboard.

  He tapped on Lisa’s door. There was no reply, and he knocked loudly now, insistently. The door across the hall opened and a Chinese girl in a red kimono looked at him worriedly. He recognized her. Sue Li. A good friend of Lisa’s.

  “Professor Goldfeder. I’m glad you’re here. Lisa hasn’t been out of her room all day, and her door is locked.” Sue’s voice was very soft, almost frightened.

  “Why didn’t you call someone?” he asked with a harshness born of the commingling of worry and irritation. His palms were very damp and his heart thumped with rapid beat.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “When I left this morning she was still sleeping, I thought. I knocked when I came back, and when she didn’t answer I thought she had gone out. But when I picked up my mail and messages, I saw that hers were still there, so I asked around and it turned out that she didn’t go to any of her classes—not even her Lit course, although she worked all night so that she could hand in her paper on time today. Then I began to worry, but I didn’t want to cause any trouble….” Her voice trailed off, but Michael was no longer listening.

  He pounded harder.

  “Lisa!” he shouted insistently. “Lisa, you must open the door.”

  Girls streamed out of the open doorways and gathered in the corridor. They clutched their books to their chests like shields, and their faces were pale and wreathed with worry. Someone switched off the phonograph, and the flautist no longer played. They stared at one another apprehensively in the sudden, unnerving silence.

  “Nancy went to find the resident adviser. She has a master key,” someone said, but Michael knew that he could not wait for the resident adviser.

  He stepped back, braced himself, and rammed his shoulder against the door. The weak lock yielded almost at once and the door flew open.

  “Oh no,” Sue Li whispered. “Please no.”

  Lisa, wearing her perennial jeans and black turtleneck sweater, lay on the floor, her bright hair fanned out about her pale face. Her skin was the color of palest parchment, and the black stylus pen whose ink stained her fingers was caught in a fiery tendril. Her bare feet were very white, and irrelevantly, Michael thought of Shlomit’s tiny pink toes clenching and relaxing. Tiny emerald-colored capsules that almost matched her open, staring eyes were scattered beside her.

  He rushed forward and knelt beside her. He lifted her wrist. It was ice-cold and slowly stiffening. He pressed his mouth against hers and breathed hard, rhythmically, but her mouth was fetid and dry. He knew, and had known, from the moment he saw her, that he would find no pulse, coax forth no life.

  Grief weighted him, slowed his movements, but now there was no urgency. Slowly, he disentangled the pen from her hair; he pulled the translucent lids down over her eyes while tears ran down his own cheeks.

  “Why?” Sue Li asked sorrowfully, but no one offered her an answer.

  The girls parted to allow Michael to pass, and he went to the phone, briefly bewildered as to whom he should call. At last he dialed his mother’s number. Leah would know what to do. As he waited for her to answer, he thought of the linkage of life and loss. Always, the celebration of his daughter’s birth would be commingled with memories of Lisa’s death. Behind him Sue Li sobbed with piteous softness.

  *

  THE ELLENBERGS held a private graveside service for Lisa. They could not bear the thought of a chapel. Walls could not contain their grief. Sherry and Joshua stood close together, each fearfu
l for the other. Joshua searched his wife’s face; she knotted his silk scarf, although the day was mild. Their children stood protectively beside them. Joanna touched Sherry’s sleeve, smoothed her hair as though to remind her that she still had a daughter—she, Joanna, was alive; her tear-streaked face was swollen with grief and love. Scott and Stevie stood side by side. Scott’s eyes were red-rimmed, his face blotched. Lisa had been his twin. Their lives had been linked. Her death left him strangely maimed, bereft of self. Resistance, incredulity, tempered the family’s sorrow; they wore the new mourners’ masks of bewildered and unaccepting grief.

  “How could it have happened?” Joshua had asked again and again as Michael and Aaron sat with him through the long night of watching beside Lisa’s coffin.

  Again and again, they repeated what the doctors had told them, what Lisa’s autopsy had revealed. She had been taking amphetamines, and her heart had not been strong enough to sustain the stimulant. She had not committed suicide. There was no question of suicide. That much comfort they could offer her father, but they knew that it was no comfort at all. Joshua Ellenberg had drifted into old age that night, and the friends of his boyhood could not soothe his sorrow.

  “What did we ask of her? What did we want of her? Only that she should be happy. That was all. Everything I would have given her. Everything I would have given for her.”

  Joshua rocked back and forth in the ancient rhythm of mourning. Again and again, in broken voice, he assured himself and his friends that there was nothing he would have denied Lisa. Always he had worked for his children, protected them. Station wagons had awaited them after school, after club meetings. An electrically controlled fence ringed the Great Neck estate. As a child, Lisa had suffered from frequent colds, and Joshua had sent her to Florida each winter and installed sun lamps in the house. Always, he had met her train at the station and insisted that she take cabs in the city because the subways were uncertain, unsafe. And then, on a spring evening, she had swallowed a glittering emerald-colored capsule that matched her eyes, and all his vigilant efforts were defeated, his precautions mocked. His beautiful firstborn daughter was dead, and he would never again be able to keep her safe, to keep her happy.