Leah's Journey (23 page)

“Look, how the blind send away the only sighted person in their midst,” David said, showing the magazine to Peter Cosgrove, who had unexpectedly found himself downtown and sought David out.

“Well, perhaps they don’t think they’re all that blind or he’s all that sighted,” Peter replied. “Perhaps we’re getting an exaggerated picture of what’s happening over there. Maybe it’s not all that bad.”

“No, it’s not all that bad,” David said dryly. “It’s worse. Look, Peter, Hitler came into power in thirty-three. Think of what he’s accomplished in less than four years. He’s done a marvelous job of stirring up the German people. Are we just to sit and wait for that to happen and say ‘maybe it’s not all that bad’?”

“Aren’t you being a bit extreme—even a little paranoid on the subject?” Peter asked.

“I haven’t been practicing psychiatry long but I have discovered one thing. Every paranoid I’ve encountered has a medically acceptable reason for his disease. I think, Peter, I have a historically acceptable reason for mine.”

Peter did not answer, and as the two men sat silently drinking their coffee, each locked into thoughts separate from the other, a young woman moved toward them across the room. She stopped a white-jacketed intern, asked him a question, and followed his finger as he pointed to the table where Peter and David sat. Swiftly she made her way across the crowded cafeteria, and tapped David on the shoulder.

“Bonnie,” he said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

Bonnie Eckstein smiled and he thought that she had grown amazingly pretty, remembering her from the days at Rosenblatts when her eyes were haunted with worry and her small form stooped from the long hours at the machines. Now her eyes were bright with excitement. As Leah’s assistant at S. Hart she had an exciting job for a young woman, and she moved with the easy confidence and grace of those who are secure in their own achievements and abilities. Her skin was still very pale but she had learned to dress in delicate colors that turned her pallor into a subtle asset. Today she wore a pale yellow dress and her fine light hair was scooped up into a French knot from which a few graceful tendrils teasingly escaped, licking her long white neck.

“Leah knew I was going to be in this area picking up some fabric samples and she asked me to drop by and remind you to try to get home early tonight. She tried calling the office but the service said you had already left.”

“You see how it is, Peter,” David said jokingly, “my wife no longer trusts my memory. Ach. Still, Bonnie, take a few minutes. Have a cup of coffee or some lunch with us. Do you know my friend Peter Cosgrove? Peter, this is Bonnie Eckstein, my Leah’s right hand and sometimes also her left.”

Bonnie laughed and slid into an empty chair.

“I will have some coffee,” she said. “The factory’s been a madhouse today. Your brother-in-law Seymour must have a new idea in mind and he’s been driving everyone mad checking hypothetical production schedules. You know, what if we had such and such a fabric and such and such a pattern and so many workers? He must have something in mind.”

“And you can figure that sort of thing out?” Peter asked with interest. The girl’s skin was so pale he could see a delicate network of veins on her neck and he found himself looking at her hands, surprised to see small roughened caps of flesh on the tips of her slender fingers.

“More or less,” she answered.

“Well, you explain your secrets to Peter,” David said. “I must get back. Tell Leah that I will certainly try but it has been a very busy day.”

He rushed off, but as he stood at the elevator he looked back toward the table and saw Peter toss his head back in laughter and Bonnie smile shyly and then laugh too, her eyes fixed on Peter’s face as though fascinated by the swift and spontaneous good humor for which Peter was famous among his colleagues.

The hospital clinic was very busy that afternoon and David worked steadily through the evening. Just as he was about to leave there was an emergency admission, an attempted suicide who had to be treated and sedated, then a conference with the family. The patient was an unemployed mason and his wife, a tiny colorless woman in a faded housedress, stared at David through pale frightened eyes as though he were a judge, not a doctor. She clutched the hand of her small son who had found his father bent over the bathroom sink, the blood from a severed wrist forming a sticky scarlet pool on the cracked tile of the floor.

“He needs a job. That’s all. A job. To make him feel a man again,” the woman said, tiny tears streaming down her papery cheeks.

David nodded. It was too late to disagree, to explain, and besides it would make no difference. He gave her a small bottle of tranquilizers and watched as the small boy, the son suddenly turned parent, led his mother from the room.

It was, after all, quite late when he arrived home in Brighton Beach. He had phoned Leah to say that he would eat dinner at the hospital but she had insisted that he come home.

“Mollie cooked a big brisket for everyone because I had to go to the factory this afternoon to talk to Seymour about something. And he wants to talk to you. It’s important. For all of us.”

“Yes. All right. I’ll come home as early as I can.”

But now, as he approached the house, he dreaded the family conference and felt the full impact of the day settle on him in a sudden rush of fatigue. All the lights in the house were on and through his own front window he saw Mollie and Seymour sitting at the table with the Ellenbergs. Perhaps Mollie was right after all, about a move to separate homes in the suburbs. It was really time that he and Leah lived their lives more privately.

Only the front porch was dark, but as he approached he saw Aaron move toward the stairway and the dim porch light briefly ignited his son’s bright hair. The copper curls had been shorn into a crew cut, and Aaron at sixteen stood taller than David, his height emphasized by the lankiness he had inherited from Yaakov. The Abraham Lincoln High School sweatshirt hung loosely about Aaron’s spare frame, and although David could not see his son’s eyes he knew that they were shadowed by a watchful fear. The boy seemed to exist on the edge of doorways, hovering always at the corner of a window or peering down a darkened stairway as though lying in wait for a dread event. Even when he played chess with Joshua Ellenberg or worked out math problems with his cousin Jake, his eyes roved uncertainly about the room. He was on the high school track team, and David had gone to matches and watched Aaron streak by, noting always that while the other runners kept their eyes rooted to the track, Aaron as he rounded each bend lost time by glancing up at the bleachers as though to assure himself that his family was still there.

Aaron was a good student and his peers liked him and sought him out. Since his bar mitzvah, Leah had been more at ease with her older son, had reached out toward him. But Aaron’s eyes remained wary and always his gaze moved toward doorways and windows, apprehensive and uneasy. The long days of his childhood, of his mother’s strange, inexplicable vigilance, those years of closed doors and silent evenings when poverty and loneliness pervaded an apartment crowded with strangers, had become the adhesive penumbra of his young manhood, and even when he laughed, a strange sadness trailed his mirth.

How different Rebecca was, David thought, watching his dark-haired daughter glide into the light just behind Aaron. The elasticized sleeves of her peasant blouse were pulled down to reveal the gentle curve of her shoulders and her bright red skirt swayed against muscular tanned calves. At thirteen Rebecca was a small, more robust replica of her mother. Her black hair was brushed back into a luxurious ponytail caught up in a wood barrette. Her skin had Leah’s delicate pallor, but even in winter a rosy sheen lit the girl’s cheeks and her full lips curved gently upward in a small, teasing rosebud of laughter.

Gentle and carefree, pleasing and knowing that she pleased, Rebecca spent her days after school walking with her girl friends down Brighton Beach Avenue, their arms linked about each other’s waists as they whispered small secrets to each other and smiled at their reflections in plate-glass windows.

Mischievously, Rebecca dashed from apartment to apartment in the red brick house, snatching covers off Sarah Ellenberg’s steaming pots, hiding knickknacks from her aunt Mollie’s collection of china figurines, teasing her cousins with whispered innuendos or hints of high school cabals. And yet no one ever grew irritated with Rebecca. Her room was littered with skirts and sweaters, papers and magazines, which her busy mother patiently put away. Her school projects were never submitted on time and her household chores remained undone. In the midst of drying dishes she decided to make a phone call. The garbage she had meant to bring down remained on the porch while she gossiped with her current best friend. Joshua Ellenberg raked the yard when it was her turn and mixed the colored flour-and-water mixture to make the relief map of South America which she had forgotten to complete. He found her favorite cardigan on the boardwalk bench where she had left it and brought up the bag of groceries she left on the staircase. But she was their American princess, born in this New World which she claimed unequivocally as her own. Her laughter vindicated them all and secret promises trembling toward fulfillment rode on the waves of her constant energy.

“Hey, Dad,” she called down to David from the porch. “They’re all waiting for you.”

“Dad,” David marveled. He was Dad? He, a Russian immigrant, former pants presser, former night school student, fledgling psychiatrist? What a wonderful country this was, that could turn him, David Goldfeder, into a Dad.

“All right. So I’m here,” he said. “Is Michael sleeping?”

But there was no answer. Both Aaron and Rebecca had disappeared into the house.

*

They sat around the table drinking tea as he ate the warmed-over brisket. The Ellenbergs clustered together in a corner, as though fearful of taking up too much room, always conscious of their role as appendages to the family, doggedly bobbing along in the swell of the rising fortunes of the Goldfeders and the Harts. Sarah Ellenberg had grown heavier and her husband smaller through the long years. Joshua towered over both his parents and directed their lives, a strange adolescent father to them in their childlike uncertainty. Joshua wore his hair in a crew cut like Aaron’s, but he wore neatly pressed slacks and soft collared shirts to the high school where he was a perfunctory student who dashed away as soon as the last bell rang, speeding toward the Hart factory where he seemed to be everywhere at once. He jerked ringing phones from their hooks, sped through the packing room in search of a misdirected shipment, darted from the cutting table to the finishing room with newly cut fabric stretched before him. He knew everyone by name, workers and salesmen, customers and vendors.

“Hey, Max, how you making out with the ballerina skirts? Sadie—what did you do with that gross of pearl buttons? Get a move on—this order has to be at Kleins by Monday, the latest.”

His parents were anchored in their bewildered failure but Joshua was speeding impatiently toward success, deftly turning pennies into dimes and the dimes into dollars that would pay his way into the world of commercial success toward which he had been steering since childhood.

Seymour Hart sat across the table from David, patiently stroking the small moustache which had evolved out of numerous pomaded experiments. The sleeves of his white-on-white shirt were rolled up but the blue-and-white polka-dot bow tie was still in place and as he sat he wound and rewound the heavy gold watch that sat on his thick hairy wrist. “More brisket, David?” Mollie asked.

“No.” He pushed the plate away and wished that Leah would come in from the living room where she was critically looking at the sketches on her drawing board, her pencil poised with surgical readiness. She wore a loose light-blue middy blouse over a pleated skirt and her hair was cut close to the nape of her neck. She looked almost like a schoolgirl, he thought, and was wounded to notice the small knot of vein in her leg that gave lie to the thought.

“It’s not good?” Mollie stood poised, fishing for compliment, anticipating insult. Rebecca giggled in the doorway and ignored her aunt’s patient scowl.

“Come on, Aaron. Lux Radio Theater is just going on,” she called, and Aaron and Joshua trailed after her into the bedroom, where Jake and Anne sat on the floor doing their math homework to the strains of drama beamed to Brighton Beach all the way from sunny California.

David spooned up the last of Mollie’s compote, complimented her on the blend of stewed fruit, and pushed his dish away.

“So, Seymour—what’s the big conference that I had to run home from the hospital for?”

“Seymour also had to run home. Maybe not from the hospital. From the factory. Sure, he’s not a doctor, a specialist like you, but he’s got plenty on his mind, plenty.” Mollie slammed down two dishes for emphasis, at once pleased and irritated that she had caught her brother-in-law making too much of his position. After all, who was it who had made him a doctor if not her husband? True, Leah’s designs had helped, but for years the bills for both families—and the Ellenbergs too—had been paid with income earned by S. Hart Inc. And S. Hart, after all, was her husband Seymour. She turned away and missed the amused glance Leah threw out to David, who had not bothered to reply to Mollie.

“Poor Mollie,” he thought, remembering Seymour’s eyes as he passed him on the stairway that morning, red-rimmed and drained of color. Seymour was getting too old to spend half the night in the beds of young girls. It was a long time since he and pretty Masha had flirted with each other in the Eldridge Street parlor. He was not up to that sort of thing any more. David would have to talk to Seymour one of these days, not as a brother-in-law but as a doctor.

“Come on, Mollie. Let me talk,” Seymour said impatiently.

He cleared his throat and, as though they had been waiting for a cue, the three Ellenbergs rose from the table.

“We go downstairs now. For us it’s very late and soon it will be time for the President’s radio talk,” Sarah said. She was addicted to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, kept a scrapbook of news clippings about him, and pasted a color photo from the magazine section of the Sunday Mirror on her refrigerator. At Christmas she had knit him heavy socks and received an engraved “Thank you” from Eleanor Roosevelt which was wrapped in cellophane and enthroned on a separate page of the scrapbook.