Leah's Journey (53 page)

WEDDINGS. Leah had dreamed of them through the night before Aaron’s wedding. Clutching at the strands of memories, she lay quietly in bed and felt the damp, sultry breeze of New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain waft across her naked body. Just outside her door was the murmuring of patois French as two chambermaids argued about whether Madame and Monsieur le professeur would want café in their room. They settled at last on setting the tray just outside the door and Leah gratefully leaned back. She pulled the sheet up over her, careful not to disturb David who slept heavily beside her, his warm rhythmic breath caressing and moistening her neck. She turned toward him and, with light fingers, touched his thick short beard so intricately threaded with silver; when he did not awaken she moved the sheet up, curving it to the contours of his body like a solicitous mother.

Weddings. In the luxury of matutinal silence, in this strange hotel room in a strange city, she thought of all the different weddings of her lifetime at which she had danced and wept. She remembered her own first marriage when she had been a girl bride, dressed in a peasant costume of her own design. Her long dark hair had been threaded with flowers and the blossoms drifted to the floor as she and Yaakov whirled joyously to the tunes of what had seemed like a hundred horas. And then only a year later she had been a widow and then a bride once more. A pregnant bride in a shapeless dress, she had stood joylessly beneath the wedding canopy, beside the man whose body she covered now with such care, her quiet David who had nurtured her love and his own with a magical patience, nourishing it from a seedling into the full fragrance that had belonged to them now for three decades.

Other marriage days filled her mind and she thought of the quiet sad Depression-day wedding of their little boarder Pearl, in the parlor of the Eldridge Street apartment, and then of the gracious springtime wedding of her niece, Annie Hart, in a Westchester garden, the groom wearing his uniform, his eyes clouded with thoughts of war and death even as he pledged himself to love and life. Pearl’s son was a medical student now, her daughter a college senior, and Annie Hart had two fat babies and her uniformed groom wore a gray flannel suit and daily rode a commuter train from Stamford to a Madison Avenue office.

Weddings were, after all, only the beginning of the marriage, a fragile foundation of ritual and memory on which to build a shared life. Still, it pained her, even two years later, that she had not seen her daughter married but had to content herself with photographs of her Becca in a simple white dress and sandals, one hand holding a bouquet of wild flowers, the other linked to that of a tall man whose serious silken light eyes were lifted to a sun so bright that the photographed faces of the bride and her groom were brushed with its glow. There had been no time for Rebecca and Yehuda to wait for David and Leah to attend their wedding. They had seized their hour during the pause of a war, during a brief cease-fire, and on the October night that marked the end of their honeymoon week Yehuda had marched on Beersheva. Leah worried, then, that her own history would repeat itself in her daughter. It was an impossible war that they fought there, in the land where oranges grew golden and young trees shored up a shifting desert—a war of concentration-camp survivors, inadequately armed young men and women, even small children opposing well-equipped Arab armies. Would Rebecca, so newly a bride, coming at last into that legacy of happiness which had seemed her birthright but which had proven so elusive, become, as Leah had become, a young widow whose bridegroom wandered through shadowy dreams? But Yehuda had survived the war and he and Rebecca, with his two children and the small girl, Mindell, whom they had adopted, had joined a group of young people and set out to found a new kibbutz where the Red Sea licked at the sands of the desert.

“We wanted a new beginning,” Rebecca had written and Leah remembered her daughter’s words now. A new beginning was, after all, what all weddings were. Today was a new beginning for Aaron and Katie, the slight blonde girl, Aaron’s classmate, now his colleague and his bride. Katie, her daughter-in-law who would one day be the mother of her grandchildren. Leah smiled and David stirred lazily into wakefulness beside her, his hand reaching automatically upward to touch her face, to pull her lips down upon his own.

“Why the smile?” he asked. “It’s too early in the morning to smile.”

“My Aaron’s wedding day,” she said. “It’s hard to believe. Soon I’ll be a mother-in-law for the second time. No, it’s not true. I’m too young.”

She stretched luxuriously, arching her back and draping her long hair about her breasts. Wings of silver darted through her jet-black hair and laugh lines crinkled at her eyes but her skin was smooth and her body firm.

“Well, then, concentrate on Michael. Think of yourself as the mother of an adolescent,” David said.

“Michael’s been having a marvelous time. I’m glad Melanie, Katie’s cousin, was able to come early so that he had some company. I rather imagine that Katie’s family arranged that. They are such lovely people, I think. Don’t you like the Reznikoffs, David?”

“Yes.” But David’s answer was too abrupt and he shifted position suddenly, his arms dropping from the cushion of Leah’s outstretched body to his side as he often lay when he was thinking through a professional problem. Leah sometimes teased him about lying like that, marking the origin of that pose from David’s own didactic analysis and the long hours he had spent lying on the couch in Dr. Simonsohn’s office, struggling backward to frozen moments, immutable memories.

David frowned, trying vainly to remember the name of a young patient of whom Katie reminded him. A tall girl, a student at a professional school—perhaps a medical student. He had seen her only a few times and in the end had referred her to a colleague. But something about the way she had held her head, moved her hands as she talked, reminded him of the young woman Aaron was marrying. But her name and her history eluded him and he turned to Leah who was looking at him anxiously.

“What’s the matter, David? You’re upset about something. Something about the Reznikoffs? About Katie?”

She was alert now, all playfulness vanished. A quiet, barely perceptible danger signal had been sounded and she tensed toward it, her breasts suddenly hard as though flushed with milk for an infant who would not drink.

“A little,” he said. “Nothing I can pinpoint. But sometimes I get a strange feeling about Aaron’s Katie, a feeling that she is not quite with us—that she drifts in another world. Perhaps it’s this way she has of disappearing suddenly. It’s happened when she’s visited us at home and last night when she was opening her gifts. Suddenly she wasn’t there but it was her mother who was removing the wrappings, reading the cards, as though she were quite accustomed to picking up after Katie in that way.”

“Perhaps she and Aaron went for a walk,” Leah said remembering now that she too had looked about for Katie, wanting to ask her whether she liked the pattern on the sterling which Mollie and Seymour had sent.

“No. Aaron too was looking for her. I saw him on the terrace and then in the study. He looked concerned but not surprised.” David forwned, as though a missing piece of a puzzle had presented itself to him but he was reluctant to fit it into place. “I got the feeling he too has become used to this sort of thing―sudden moods, sudden silences,” he said at last.

“Well, everyone has their moods. Sometimes you have to forget you’re a psychiatrist, David.”

Leah jumped out of bed, feeling oddly relieved. David worried too much, read symptoms into everything. Katie was a lovely girl, brilliant and gentle, so loving to Aaron who had lost so much love. It was a beautiful day and it would be a lovely wedding.

David remained outstretched on the bed watching her, his arms again rigid at his sides. Leaves of light dappled Leah’s bare shoulders and as he watched them he thought of how strangely bright Katie’s eyes had been when she came quietly back into the room and settled herself between the mountains of gifts and the white hills of tissue paper in which they had been wrapped.

*

Michael Goldfeder changed his shirt twice that morning and settled finally for a white button-down collar broadcloth and an orange-and-black rep Princeton tie. He looked at himself for a long time in the mirror before phoning room service to have breakfast served on the small balcony with its filigreed black wrought iron railing that overlooked Baronne Street. He knew his mother and father expected him to eat with them, but he had been intrigued by the small balcony since their arrival at the Roosevelt Hotel earlier in the week and the idea of breakfasting out there alone made him feel cosmopolitan, debonair. It reaffirmed the feeling that had swelled in him last night when Katie’s tiny cousin from Baton Rouge, a girl called Melanie because, as she told him with a shy smile, her mother had just loved Olivia de Havilland in Gone With the Wind, had pressed her body close to his as they danced in the Creole nightclub in the Vieux Carré section of the city.

“I haven’t met many Northerners before,” Melanie had said. “We all thought it was so wonderful of Katie to go north to law school. But wasn’t it lucky that she did and met Aaron there. I think he’s so handsome.”

Michael felt a brief twinge of jealousy and glanced across the polished dance floor to the spot where Aaron and Katie moved slowly in time to the music, revolving in a single circle of rose-colored light, their bodies melding, Aaron’s chin resting lightly on her soft golden head. But why did Katie always look so sad? Michael wondered, and lowered his own head so that his chin touched the crown of dark curls into which Melanie had twisted her hair, but the girl moved her head impatiently and then, as though to compensate, shifted her position, allowing her small soft breast to touch Michael’s hand as they circled the floor.

“How old are you, Michael?” she asked in that soft slow voice, so like Katie’s own.

“Nineteen,” he replied, tacking on a year without conscience. He was after all almost nineteen, and many boys in his class at Princeton were nineteen.

“Oh dear. Do you think you’ll be called up for this terrible Korea business?”

He had not thought about it really, although he had read the United Nations proceedings and President Truman’s foreign policy statement. And of course his parents spoke of it, his father using the same pained, worrying tones in which he spoke of all war, all suffering.

“You would suppose that after Hitler they would have learned, we would have learned,” David had said bitterly, slamming the paper down. “Think of it, Leah. This will be the fourth war of our lifetimes—the fourth war to touch our lives.” His eyes found Michael who was bent over a physics text and he turned away.

“Perhaps there won’t be a war,” Leah replied, but Michael knew his mother did not believe her own words.

“There will be a war.” David’s voice was definite, resigned. “A shooting war in Korea and a war of words here with that maniac Senator McCarthy finding Communists under every bed, breeding hatred and fear. You know, Leah, when I decided to become an analyst I said to myself, ‘Goldfeder, instead of cursing the darkness, light a few candles.’ So I’ve lit my candles, hundreds of them, but see, they do not even pierce an inch of the darkness.”

He sat quietly then and Michael saw him reach for the small bottle of pills he kept in his pocket. When Leah turned away David slipped a pill into his mouth and remained seated, his hands stretched across the newspaper, blotting out its messages of new death, new destruction, of subversive activity in the world of the arts and theater, of angry exchanges in the United Nations, which had been formed to cope with international anger.

“Oh, I might go over to Korea,” Michael said now, in the dim nightclub, as he moved the girl’s light body through the fluid bright circles of red and blue light that shimmered across the dance floor. “I’m in ROTC, you know.” He held her closer, shutting out the memory of his father’s face.

“I’ll bet you look really neat in your uniform.” She looked up at him admiringly, as though envisaging him in the garb of war, the sunlight sparkling on his epaulettes. Rhett Butler home from the fray. Jay Gatsby in his well-pressed lieutenant’s uniform. She was a girl with a literary bent and her mother complained to her friends across the bridge table that Melanie was never without a book.

When Michael brought her home that night, to the large white house on the corner of Corondolet Street, where the Reznikoff family lived, he kissed her for a long hushed moment in the shadowed corner of the porch that smelled heavily of sweet fig blossoms and the tumid vines of wisteria that draped the garden. She touched his face with her soft hand that smelled of lemons and murmured into the darkness, “You’re so handsome, Michael. Even handsomer than your brother. I think I’ll go north to school too.”

They had both laughed then and Michael remembered her words as he studied himself carefully in the mirror of his hotel room. He was tall and slender like Aaron, but he had inherited his mother’s thick dark hair and his father’s even features and light eyes. He moved with the easy grace of the natural athlete and spoke with the slow assurance that his words would be acknowledged by a pleasant rejoinder, a quick smile. People enjoyed agreeing with Michael. He was a lucky boy with the added asset of being aware of, and acknowledging, his luck. Everyone liked Michael Goldfeder and he was not ashamed to like himself.

“He is the happiest of our children,” Michael had once heard his father tell his mother.

“Rebecca was always a happy child,” Leah had protested.

“Ah, Rebecca was happy because she thought it her job, her duty to be happy. But Michael was born into it.”

His father’s words had puzzled Michael and he posited them away beneath memories among which he seldom furrowed—the memories of the years when Aaron had been missing in action and their lives centered about the war map in David’s study and whispered phone conversations in Yiddish between his mother and his aunt Mollie; and then there was the year of the war in Israel when Leah had jumped to every ring of the telephone and kept a large picture of Rebecca in her studio.