Leah's Journey (55 page)

Aaron did not reply but he thought of the long nights of his own childhood when he had waited in the silent darkness for the touch of his mother’s lips, the gentle pressure of her hands-thinking always that this was the night she would forgive him at last for the mysterious sin he could not remember committing.

“Anyway,” Katie had continued, “I followed Eula over to where she was swimming. She was beautiful, all coffee-colored, and heir laugh sounded like bells on a quiet afternoon. She was laughing with some boys and I rushed toward her, splashing like mad, thinking I’d be in their game. Aaron, she acted as though I were a stranger. ‘Get back you, girl,’ she yelled at me. I felt as though she had hit me. And you know, she never hugged me again. Never.”

Katie clutched herself then, as though caught by a sudden chill, and he wrapped the towel about her shoulders which trembled although the day was still warm.

The long familiar silence, which he had come to recognize and fear, began then, and persisted through the days that followed. And last night she had vanished from a party in the midst of unwrapping gifts and he found her at last walking in the garden, silent tears coursing down her cheeks. He had known then that they hovered at the edge of a “scene” and he was relieved when Michael and young Melanie left the Vieux Carré nightclub early, knowing that Katie was poised at the brink of whirling misery.

It had come and run its course as he held and soothed her and now on his wedding morning, he sank back, exhausted by his bride’s aching sorrow. But she would not always be this way, he assured himself, and passed his hand over a scratch on his shoulder where her long nail had scraped at his flesh as he held her tight in his grasp. A fleck of dried blood came off on his finger and he looked at it closely, as though it held the secret to an urgent riddle, then flicked it away impatiently. Everything would be all right, he told himself. They would create a home together and the warmth of their love would seal them against those cold winds that raged against Katie’s calm and dragged her down into a whirling vortex of darkness. They would have children, small boys and girls with hair that glittered like amber in the sunlight or shone pale gold in the haze of wintry light. They would work together in the shared quiet of book-lined rooms and dash after each other down country lanes.

His lips curved into a smile and his eyes closed. Slowly he drifted back to sleep and did not hear the last bleat of a mournful saxophone as the funeral procession wound its way across Baronne Street to the Cemetery of Saint Vincent de Paul on the other side of town.

*

The wedding party that gathered that afternoon at the Touro Synagogue on Saint Charles Avenue was a large one and as the guests entered they blinked sharply, caught by the flash of the photographer from the Picayune-Times. The marriage of Judge Elias Reznikoff’s lawyer daughter to the son of the designer and painter Leah Goldfeder and the New York psychoanalyst Dr. David Goldfeder was no small event in New Orleans. The society page would forgive their Jewishness, even utilize it as an exotic dimension to a clearly brilliant match.

Mollie and Seymour Hart arrived in the limousine they had hired for their stay in New Orleans and smiled beamingly into the camera. They were used to being photographed; their pictures were taken regularly at art auctions for various charities, Hadassah donor luncheons, Israel Bond kick-off dinners. Mollie cut the pictures from the newspapers and maintained a current montage in a gilt frame in their living room, showing them proudly to visitors. Seymour had retired and S. Hart Inc. was run now by his son Jakie, a pleasant plump young man who had developed a paunch and an ulcer although he was still in his early thirties. It was Jakie now who phoned his fashionably thin wife in Woodmere to tell her he was staying over in the city to entertain a buyer, to catch up on work, to meet with designers. But he would not prolong his extracurricular activities as long as Seymour had, David predicted. By forty-five Jake would be content to stay at home and watch television and dream about slender, smooth-skinned models who had glided in and out of his office and joined him in double beds at the Plaza and the Waldorf and on long weekends in Puerto Rico. It was difficult to look at Jakie and remember the frightened boy, newly arrived from Russia, who had not dared to go out into Eldridge Street without clutching Aaron’s hand. But then, David reflected, within all the adults assembled in the gray-yellow brick synagogue there lurked the vanished children whose small voices still echoed back across the dangerous terrain of distant days and years.

Leah looked across the room to the corner where Katie stood between her parents. How beautiful the girl looked, but so pale and weary. Violet shadows stretched from below her eyes to her high ivory-shaded cheekbones, almost matching the spray of delicate gentians that rested on her white Bible. Her wedding dress, layered swathes of tulle and delicate lacework, time-faded into an eggshell color, had belonged to her grandmother who had been married in this very synagogue a century before.

Leah marveled at the luxury of heirlooms, of the miracle of a family remaining for an entire century in one place. Her own family had wandered throughout their generations, her grandparents fleeing the pogroms of Hungary to come to Poland, her own parents in turn seeking what they had thought would be greater protection in Russia, and finally she and Mollie emigrating to America and Moshe, her brother, to Palestine. What had happened to the beautiful wedding dress brought from Moscow for Mollie’s marriage to the shy rabbinical student Seymour Hart had been in that other lost life? She smiled bitterly. She did not know the fate of her own parents, her relatives and friends, yet wondered about a vanished bridal gown. Still, David had told her once, such trivia provided people with their greatest emotional protection. How much simpler it is to worry over the number of miles one gets to the gallon than to think of the fate of a relative ill with cancer, or of swiftly passing years, or alienated, alienating children. It was simpler to worry over a wedding dress than to ponder the fate of her parents, the gentle Talmudic scholar and his gentler wife, whom she had last seen standing together in the half-light of a prewar dawn, their hands clutching the wooden porch railing of the house that had been her childhood home.

Such ghosts would never haunt Aaron and Katie, children of the American dream. True, Katie was often moody, abstracted, but that would pass when she had children. And she wanted children, Leah knew, because Katie had told her so herself. A large family, she had said—think of it, a row of children all with hair the color of burnished copper.

Leah and David stood together beneath the bower of flowers as the rabbi intoned the nuptial blessings. They turned to each other as Aaron’s strong voice rang out in the ancient vow and he slipped a narrow gold band on Katie’s finger. “Behold, with this ring you are consecrated unto me, according to the laws of Moses and of Israel.”

Leah clutched David’s hand.

“At last,” she whispered. “Aaron is safely married.”

But David did not reply. He had remembered, suddenly, the name of the patient whom Katie so powerfully brought to mind. Marilyn Turner had been her name. She had shared Katie’s smile and soft voice, her powerful intellectual tenacity. She was involved in cancer research, haunted by her father’s death during her childhood of a carcinoma of the colon. One afternoon, a week after the publication of a brilliant paper, she had gone up to the roof of her apartment house to sunbathe; still holding the blanket she had brought with her, she stepped out on the roof’s edge and plummeted to the street below. David remembered the story well now, too well.

“Mazal tov, mazal tov, good luck!” Seymour Hart hugged David, his breath heavy with whiskey and tobacco.

“Yes. Thank you. Mazal tov. Good luck,” he said and hurried to kiss his new daughter-in-law, feeling a strange compulsion, as though the touch of his lips might somehow keep her from danger.

ALTHOUGH HIS GALLERY did not open until the afternoon, it was Charles Ferguson’s habit to arrive early, attend to clerical duties, read through catalogues and art journals, and slowly walk through the large, thickly carpeted room to look at his collection with as much interest as though he were seeing his paintings and sculptures for the first time. He then stepped out onto the street where he studied his display window, making a note to shift a particular painting from one location to another or to place a plant between a large sculpture and a small group of serial graphics. But on this particular spring morning he surveyed his window with pleasure, pleased with the two paintings displayed on twin easels. One was of an enormous butterfly, the winged creature poised on the stark canvas and given life in bright free strokes of gold and orange. The other was a primitive painting in bright acrylic colors showing a group of young farmers bending over rows of seedlings which seemed to dance out of the ground. The signatures on both paintings read “Goldfeder,” and Charles dabbed fussily at a spot on the plate glass’ and reflected proudly that he was probably the only gallery on Madison Avenue displaying the work of both a mother and a daughter. “Mr. Ferguson?”

He had not heard the quiet step of the small ferret-faced man who stole up beside him, an envelope in his hand. The man wore an overcoat although the day was warm, and spots of lint glinted whitely on his badly pressed pants.

“You are Mr. Charles Ferguson?” he asked and Charles braced himself for his usual speech to salesmen and unsolicited artist’s agents.

“Yes, I’m Charles Ferguson, but I’m afraid I have a crowded schedule today. I’ve no time for appointments.”

“I don’t want an appointment,” the little man said. “I just want you to take this.”

He shoved the outstretched envelope into the gallery owner’s hand and disappeared into the hurrying crowd of shoppers.

Charles looked at it in surprise, then opened it and withdrew a single sheet of paper. It was the stationery of the United States Senate and it informed him in terse legal phraseology that he was required to appear as a witness in the federal building on Church Street in a week’s time. He read it again and felt an arrow of fear pierce his heart with sudden pain. Only the night before he had been at a party and watched a well-known writer down drink after drink. The writer, someone explained to Charles, who had never seen the man drink before, had been called as a witness that afternoon. Before the Committee. There was no need to explain which committee, and Charles had left the party early and had not bothered to read the newspaper that night.

He read the subpoena in his hand again, searched through his wallet for a card, and then went inside and closed the door of his office. He dialed the number slowly and when the phone was answered, he hesitated for a moment as though unsure of whom he had been calling. It was with an effort, in an old man’s voice, that he at last said, “Mr. Aaron Goldfeder. Charles Ferguson calling.” He doodled on the pad beside his desk, fashioned a drawing of dancing flames, then crushed it with a nervous fist. “Aaron, how are you?” he said into the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you, but the thing is I’ve received a subpoena. To appear before the Committee. I know you’re busy but...”

An hour later, he was downtown in the small law office which Aaron Goldfeder shared with his wife, Katie. The newspaper rested on a table but he did not look down at the picture of the Senator from Wisconsin who brandished a pointed pencil as though it were a lethal weapon.

*

David Goldfeder, seated in an uptown office, did glance at the morning paper as his old friend, Dr. Sydney Adler, settled himself behind the polished mahogany desk, shuffled the papers in front of him, picked up a ringing phone to offer a curt monosyllabic reply, and fumbled with a cigar wrapper.

“So David, how is life treating you?” the portly internist asked. “Is Leah well? And the children?”

David took a long puff on his pipe. Syd Adler was procrastinating too much, spending too much time on small talk. He had spent a quarter of an hour locating an irrelevant X ray taken at least three years ago. The news must be bad. Well, he could always wait for bad news. He blew a smoke ring, watched it wreathe its way around Syd’s head, and told him of the success of Aaron’s law practice, of Michael’s record at Princeton. Syd was bald now, a small halo of gray hair fringing his forehead. David remembered sitting in back of Syd in a pathology laboratory and watching his friend’s too-long hair curl about his shirt collar. None of them could afford the time or the money for a barber in those days when they struggled together through medical school. Well, they had the time and money now but Syd had lost his hair. David smiled.

“And what do you hear from Tom Boder?” Syd asked.

The news must be really bad, David thought, if Syd was dredging up classmates neither of them had thought about for years. He shrugged and looked pointedly at his watch.

“I have a patient due in about forty-five minutes,” he said.

“Don’t worry. At least your patients don’t die if you’re late. Your daughter’s still living on that kibbutz. She hasn’t made you a grandfather yet?”

“Well, there are two children from her husband’s first marriage and a little girl they adopted. I expect they’ll have their own soon.”

He did not tell Syd that Rebecca had miscarried twice and he worried about her although her letters remained cheerful and optimistic. The new young kibbutz in the Negev heartland was flourishing and their last season had been a good one with a bumper crop of avocadoes. Avocadoes. David had never even seen an avocado before he was forty and now his daughter cultivated them in the sands of a distant desert. Rebecca’s painting too was satisfying. She had at last developed her own bright primitive technique, accomplished with layers of heavy acrylic paints. Her paintings were displayed in Paris and London, and often, on his way home, he walked past Charles Ferguson’s gallery for the joy of his daughter’s work and his wife’s, displayed in the same window. Yes. Rebecca was settled and happy. He was glad he could say that about at least one of his children.