Leah's Journey (36 page)

It was to that chance that they all clung.

“In Jewish law,” David had said, “two witnesses must see a body before a person can be assumed dead. In Jewish law, our son lives.”

As though to affirm his faith in that law he had suddenly began attending synagogue again on Saturday mornings, often with Michael and Leah at his side.

“Poor Daddy,” Rebecca thought now and completed the letter she had begun earlier.

October 4, 1941

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, it’s taken me a while but now I realize that you were right to insist that I return to Bennington. I have begun to get involved in my courses again although it does seem absurd to be studying twentieth-century literature when no one knows whether there will be a twenty-first century. These pessimistic thoughts are not encouraged up here where most people think that the tide of the war will change. Hitler’s luck cannot last forever.

The best thing about my courses this year is that I am taking sculpture with a really terrific new young professor, Joseph Stevenson. Actually, I call him Joe because you know that one of the great things about Bennington is the terrific informality between faculty and students. Joe and I have had some terrific talks and he is very optimistic about the outcome of the war.

It took me two years but I finally did look up your old friend Eleanor Greenstein. She has a really neat little factory near Bennington and a couple of design majors in the work-study program are apprenticed to her. We had a good visit and she told me how you worked together at Rosenblatts when you were just starting out. It’s funny, Mom—I can never think of you as just starting out—I always see you as a prize-winning designer who knew just what to say and when to say it. Anyway, Mrs. Greenstein invited Joe and myself to a sort of party this afternoon so I had better hurry and get dressed. Did I tell you that one of Joe’s sculptures won a prize at the Museum of Modern Art? He’s really terrific.

Please try not to worry too much about Aaron. Somehow, I have the feeling that he is all right and that I would know if he wasn’t. You probably have a fancy clinical term for that, Dad, but I know he’s all right.

Tell Michael to stay out of my room and I love him—and all of you.

Your

Becca

Rebecca reread the letter, frowned at her notoriously illegible handwriting, and added several quick drawings to the corners. One showed a ponytailed girl in an oversized man’s shirt studying at a desk; another depicted the same ponytailed girl in a loose sweater and plaid skirt, working at a potter’s wheel; the third drawing was of a serious-faced young man wearing enormous horn-rimmed glasses. Rebecca pointed an arrow at him across which she wrote “Professor Joseph Stevenson.” She smiled, quickly folded the letter, and put it in an envelope, dislodging a pile of letters from Joshua. Poor Joshua. She would definitely write to him tomorrow.

Rebecca dressed quickly now, selecting a soft blue wool of her mother’s classically simple design, admittedly patterned on Madame Chanel. Still, it had been her mother’s idea to add the stole which Rebecca draped dramatically around her shoulders. Leah had been right, after all, to insist that Rebecca take at least a few “good” dresses, prevailing over Rebecca’s objections that all the girls at Bennington wore were skirts and sweaters or rolled-up dungarees with their fathers’ cast-off shirts. And of course most of the girls did dress like that except for a few who wore artsy-craftsy Bohemian clothes, tramping across campus in loose homespun dresses that created a curious tentlike impression, and another small group of girls who seemed to have arrived at Bennington through error and dressed in the style of the Midwestern campuses—loose mohair sweaters with plaid skirts and spotless white dickies, high white bobby sox and polished loafers with shiny pennies sparkling against the leather.

Rebecca, who had grown up in a home where styles and fashion had been a natural part of the atmosphere, was amused by the variety of uniforms on display at Bennington. If Lisa Frawley had come to Bennington with her as they had planned, how they would have laughed together at the pretensions of the tall blonde girl whose face was powdered to a snowy whiteness and who dressed always in a black leotard with various overlong faded cotton skirts, although she was not even a dance major. But Rebecca had not even heard from Lisa since her friend had abruptly left Scarsdale High School in the middle of their senior year, just about the time Aaron had been sent from England to Egypt. Rebecca had heard that Lisa was going to boarding school somewhere in the Midwest, but when she phoned the Frawley home to ask for her address, Lisa’s mother was cool and evasive—almost hostile, Rebecca thought, but then Rebecca knew herself to be oversensitive. Lisa was terribly busy, her mother said. She knew Rebecca’s address and if she were interested she would write. At school there were the usual foolish rumors and speculations and Rebecca slammed indignantly out of the locker room when one of the girls announced that Lisa had left school because she was pregnant. That was sheer nonsense, Rebecca protested angrily to Joshua Ellenberg. After all, she and Joshua knew that the only boy Lisa was at all interested in was Aaron. Joshua nodded and suggested that Rebecca would be wise not to write Aaron about those foolish rumors. Rebecca agreed and after a while Aaron’s letters no longer mentioned Lisa. Rebecca had called the Frawley house again when they learned that Aaron was missing in action.

“I thought Lisa would want to know,” she told Mrs. Frawley.

“I’m very sorry, of course, but I doubt that Lisa is very concerned about your brother anymore,” Mrs. Frawley said and she hung up without saying good-bye.

Rebecca seldom thought about Lisa now but she did miss her at times like this when she was dressing for Eleanor Greenstein’s party. And she would have liked to talk to Lisa about Joe Stevenson, something she could not do with her Bennington friends because Joe, after all, was a member of the faculty.

It was through a curious accident that Rebecca had, from the first, ignored Joe’s formal academic title. She had registered for the introductory course in sculpture at the suggestion of Charles Ferguson, who admired some of the small figures she had done in a summer workshop. She arrived early for the first class and found herself alone in the sunlit studio. A hunk of moist clay was on the worktable and idly she picked it up and tried to mold it. It was too hard and she sliced it on the wire and flung it on the hard wood table.

“Uh, uh. Not so hard.”

A sandy-haired young man in an open-necked blue cambric work shirt and faded jeans had come quietly in and stood beside her. He took the clay from her, worked it into an oval shape, and flung it down with a swift practiced motion. He picked it up, touched it, sliced it, and threw the two separate parts and then blended them. Again he tested its texture and she noticed that his dexterous fingers were scarred with traces of pale red clay and a small plaster scar ran along the rim of one lens of his enormous horn-rimmed glasses.

“There, now you can work it,” he said. “The trick is not to throw the clay too much—just enough to make it malleable.”

“Thanks,” she said gratefully. “I’ve just had this one sculpture workshop and I don’t know anything about it. I would have been pretty embarrassed at not even knowing how to work the clay. By the way, my name is Rebecca Goldfeder.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her, “most of the girls in the class are beginners. My name’s Joe.”

She assumed then that he was one of the male graduate students at Bennington and they talked easily, working together at the table, playing with the clay. She told him about her other classes and explained that she had chosen Bennington because of its unstructured atmosphere and its creative arts department.

“You want to be an artist, then?” he asked seriously.

Rebecca was startled. At home she was still treated as a small child whose whims had to be indulged. Her enrollment at Bennington was simply another offering in a constant buffet of pleasure and amusement. But no one had ever seemed to have serious expectations of laughing, enthusiastic Rebecca Goldfeder. She was cuddled and indulged, her whims satisfied, her brief passions assuaged. More than ever, since Aaron had been reported missing, her parents had relied on her for a flippant gaiety that would relax the tensions in the house. Now this serious-eyed young man was looking at her, asking her if she wanted to be an artist, assuming that she had a serious goal in life, and she found herself oddly pleased and flattered.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I think I have some talent and I’ve done some work. My mother is a designer and although I’m not interested in that field I’ve always liked to draw and paint. I’d like to sort of experiment this year and see how good I am and what I’d really like to do. You see, at home no one seems to expect me to do any serious work—everyone’s pleased if I’m just happy. Sometimes I felt that that was my job. But being away from the family, I think I’ll be able to concentrate on real work and maybe get an idea of what I want to do. Because I know I want to do something—to make my life count.”

Joe Stevenson nodded.

“It’s easy enough to imagine why parents feel that way—why they want their kids to have everything fun and easy. It happens most with people who have been through some hard times themselves. Then they think that joy and ease is a kind of heritage they can give their children. They don’t realize that their kids want—and need—something more.”

“That’s true. That’s the way it is with my parents,” Rebecca said and in a rush of words she told him about Leah and David’s early days in America, the east side apartment, the Brighton Beach house, and finally the Scarsdale home and then the war. She talked so swiftly and with such ease that she was startled when the bell rang and students trailed into the studio and took their places at the worktables. She was even more startled when one of the girls nodded to her and then turned to Joe and asked, “Did you have a nice summer, Professor Stevenson?”

He was not a graduate student but the teacher of this class—and she blushed deeply when he grinned at her and took his place in the front of the room where, perched on a high stool, he explained the aims of the introductory course.

She rushed out after the lecture and halfway to her dormitory she heard running steps behind her and knew that young Professor Stevenson was hurrying to catch up with her.

“Hey,” he called, “you’re not angry with me, are you?”

She had anticipated amusement in his voice—she was Becca who amused everyone, who made them laugh and smile and bring her small presents in exchange for a teasing comment, a cute reaction. But there was no amusement in Joe Stevenson’s voice, only worried concern. And so she stopped and waited until he was at her side and together, with measured pace, they continued their walk, not heading toward the dormitory but in the direction of the gentle Vermont hills where the leaves of the maples were already slashed with streaks of scarlet and the heads of the oak trees glowed orange and gold against the steel blue sky.

She missed the dormitory meal that night but in a small village restaurant she ate a spicy slice of Portuguese sausage on a thick home-baked roll, drank sweet black coffee, and learned that Joe Stevenson came from the Alameda Valley in California where his family had lived since the days of the Gold Rush, when they had come to root treasure from the ground and turned instead to growing golden citrus crops in orchards that ran for sun-blazened acre after acre. Each year they felled the trees whose harvest had been weak, digging up the roots so that the strong trees would have more room to expand. It was that soft fragrant citrus bark that Joe first used to carve the small animals and forms that sprang magically to life under the blade of his blunt penknife. At the rich banks of the shallow stream that bordered the orchard, the small boy dug up heaps of malleable mud of such a peculiar consistency that when he formed a small head, it grew obediently beneath his fingers and hardened in the strong sun. Often by summer’s end he had whole families formed of river mud, living quietly at the edge of the stream, only to be washed away in the torrential California rains. At school his gift was quickly discovered and an excited art teacher offered him tools and clay, wood and the use of paints and kiln, and finally, when she could no longer teach the boy, he went on to San Francisco and the art academy whose great windows were flooded with light. Earnest teachers taught him how to work with his materials and how to look at the work of other sculptors. He was twenty when he completed the academy and went on to the Chicago School of Fine Arts. Then there had been the Fulbright year in Italy and that terrible sense of wonder and fear when he gazed at the marble forms in the Piazza della Signoria—wonder at the work a man’s hands and eyes could accomplish and fear because his mind and fingers ached to fashion their own message but might-not-might, could-not-could. He did not know and was afraid to find out. Now, his doctorate earned, he confronted that terror, teaching and working. He thought now that he was happiest teaching others, freed of the doubt about his work.

Joe reminded Rebecca of Charles Ferguson and she told him about her mother’s teacher and then about her mother and father, about small Michael and Aaron, whose hair sometimes matched the burnished golden crowns of the oak trees they walked slowly past. When she spoke about Aaron, she began to cry, surprising herself but not Joe Stevenson, who held her hands gently and offered her a handkerchief streaked with ocher clay, and touched her hair lightly when her tears stopped as inexplicably as they had begun.

It was night when he took her back to the dormitory and they stood on the stone steps, not touching but standing in sweet silence for a long minute before she quickly turned and hurried inside. Since that first day, they saw each other almost daily, sometimes by arrangement but sometimes by chance, as though a mysterious tropism brought them to the same corner of the campus. On weekends they went together into the Vermont hills, their sketch pads underneath their arms. They walked for hours, stopping to picnic on the cheese and beef that Joe carried in his knapsack and to draw the stark trees, bereft of their foliage, that stood in haughty desolation, scraping the near-winter skies. Wrapped in their cocoons of heavy sweaters, they stretched out on a bed of soft fragrant pine needles and watched the sun sink low into the sky and become a huge golden ball balanced on a net of slate-gray clouds that slowly borrowed color and became threaded with fine gold streaks. Against this sky their friends, the barren trees, trembled fearfully, and they, on their bed of pine, felt the wonder and loneliness of mountains melting and disappearing into night. They came together then, in wonder and loneliness, and the loneliness melted, leaving only the wonder and the sweet lovely scent of dry, new-fallen pine needles.