Leah's Journey (59 page)

“Michael’s not all that much younger than you. Less than a dozen years. You’re a young man, Aaron. You’re up to a hiking trip in the Galilee.”

“Am I?” Aaron laughed harshly. “Some mornings I don’t think I’m up to tying my shoelaces.”

A squirrel scurried across the narrow cemetery lane and stopped briefly at their feet, its small furry body trembling, its eyes bright with fear. They too stopped and walked on only when the small animal streaked by. They were careful men, considerate of terror.

David waited for his son to continue talking but Aaron was silent. The crisp, newly fallen leaves crackled beneath their feet and just ahead of them Annie cried out suddenly and bent to lift her small daughter in her arms. Her mother had died and left her and the day would come when she would die and leave the small blonde child whose hair fell about her plump pink cheeks. She hugged the child too tightly and the little girl wailed shrilly but Annie clutched her even closer, fending off her own mortality with her daughter’s writhing body. Aaron stared at his cousin and wondered what it was like to hold a child who was flesh of one’s flesh, whose breath and blood would commingle with his own. Again he was intensely aware of his solitude, his aloneness.

“Aaron,” David continued, his voice soft, hesitant, as though the words he spoke were of such fragility that a harsher tone would shatter them. “I have never before spoken to you of Katie, of your marriage, because I sensed that you did not want me to. And because I felt that you would come to me if I could help. I thought perhaps that things would get better but I have seen that that has not happened. But now I can no longer remain silent. You have heard me speak of the tyranny of the sick. It is not the fault of sick people that they are ill. Their illness is not their fault, but it affects everyone around them. Katie’s illness—and I know that she is ill—has hurt you. I cannot, I will not talk to you about Katie, but how can I watch what happens to you without speaking? If I were an oncologist and saw you developing symptoms of cancer, would I remain silent? And so I cannot be quiet now. You must protect yourself, my son, and I, if I can, must help you.”

“I don’t see how you can help me, Dad,” Aaron said and David felt a bitter relief that no denial was offered but that at least the illness and the danger were acknowledged.

“Katie will not seek help?” he asked. “Not from me. But I could refer her. There are excellent therapists. Gifted analysts.”

“I’ve tried to get her to see someone. God, how I’ve tried. But she won’t go. She’s afraid—it sounds wild—but she’s afraid any treatment will somehow impair her intellectually,” Aaron replied, his voice leaden with despair.

“It is a common fear, you know, among talented people. Artists, writers. People who work with their minds as Katie does. But not insurmountable. If you can persuade her to see someone.”

“I can’t,” Aaron said shortly. “What else can I do?”

“Can I talk to her, perhaps?”

“No. I’ve already betrayed a promise by speaking to you at all.”

“I see.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, pausing to allow Seymour and Leah to pass them. Leah took a handkerchief from her purse and gently wiped Seymour’s eyes, as though he were a small boy. Her face was set in the lines David knew so well, the mask of strength that contained her sorrow. Only in the darkness of the night when she moved toward him, her arms seeking his body, would the tears come and release her grief. He yearned suddenly for the night, for the pressure of her weight against his, for the wet heat of her sorrow against his bare chest. He turned to Aaron.

“Have you thought of traveling—a vacation, a rest? Both of you have been working so hard. You know, your mother and I plan now to go to Israel. An ocean crossing. Two weeks of sea and sky. Perhaps if you joined us, there would be an opportunity for Katie and myself to speak. We have never been together for any sustained time. I have the feeling that something good might come of it. Will you think about it, Aaron?”

He was relieved when Aaron nodded.

“I’ll try, Dad. I’ll speak to her tonight.”

They walked swiftly now, anxious to reach their car, to drive through the cemetery gates and speed northward to the large house where bowls of fall flowers stood on gleaming dark wood tables and the smell of fresh coffee, of newly baked cakes, banished the vegetal odor of earth freshly dug to receive the burden of death.

*

It was late when Aaron left his parents’ Scarsdale home, where Leah, Jakie, Annie, and Seymour would observe the week of mourning. He drove slowly down the East River Drive and looked down at the lights that flickered in the watery darkness. A small ship stood stationary in the distant bay and he wondered if a young man leaned against its rail and searched for a sign of welcome among the low-burning harbor lights, remembering the young David who had caught sight of an unknown man on an unknown shore waving a white straw hat—a careless gesture of welcome and freedom. David’s words of that afternoon echoed comfortingly in his mind and he felt a brief surge of optimism. Others had suffered as Katie did, had sought help, found relief. They were not alone.

He hoped now that Katie would be home when he arrived and he pressed down on the accelerator and felt the salt breath of the river wind against his cheek. Tonight would be different, he assured himself, and fought back the memories of the many nights that he had let himself into the darkened apartment to find Katie, still wearing her hat and coat, lying rigidly across their bed, frozen into the posture of misery.

Through recent months, as the pressure of work had increased, her moods had grown more and more parallactic. Each day their office was bombarded with new and urgent calls. Men and women, distinguished in their fields, trembled with fear, broke into sweats at an unexpected knock, and reached for their telephones. Frantically, they called the few lawyers who would confront the accusers and force them to give substance to the shadows of inference which paralyzed their victims and forced friends to deny each other, colleagues to pass on the street without speaking.

Katie and Aaron struggled with a calendar crowded with such cases, and Katie’s quiet voice, laced with the disarming sweet accent of the South, was listened to attentively in hearing rooms where men’s pasts were probed and, too often, their futures destroyed. More and more often, as hysteria rose, she proved her point by using what she referred to bitterly as a public relations gimmick, rather than a legal argument. She planted press releases or ferreted out the photograph of the young son of a Hollywood actor accused of belonging to a union which was purported to be a Communist front. She introduced the photograph as Exhibit A, established the identity of the subject and the fact that he had been killed on Guadalcanal.

“Does a Communist whose philosophy has been programmed by the Kremlin send his nineteen-year-old son off to die for democracy?” she asked in the soft, reasonable tone her opponents had come to fear, and she read a letter in which the actor encouraged his boy to do his best “for the greatest country on God’s earth.” It did not hurt her case that the letter, found in the dead soldier’s pocket, was flecked with the dark blood of death.

But still the cases continued to pile up. One day when Aaron was visiting in Scarsdale, David had stared at a newspaper that reported the jailing of a prominent writer on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about colleagues. He had sighed deeply, his fingers reaching for the bottle of pills which he kept always in his pocket.

“It reminds me of Russia before the Revolution,” he said. “Do you remember, Leah? The sudden arrests, the fear, the Czar’s police?”

“And since the Revolution? Has anything changed? Ah yes, the Czar’s police are now the people’s police,” she replied bitterly.

Through the years, since the war’s end, letters had trickled in from their few surviving friends and relatives. Affidavits were requested and Seymour and David sent them at once and then again there was silence. Letters went unanswered and were returned undelivered. Occasionally Moshe would write to tell them of the arrival of an acquaintance in Israel—sad, bleak reports of broken people living out their broken lives.

Katie and Aaron worked with fierce intensity. She traveled back and forth from Washington, spent long nights in the law library. But still, with increasing frequency, she would arrive home at night and stare blindly into the silence until the tears came, then the sobs, then the steady stream of recriminations. She had not argued well enough. She was not doing enough. No, she was doing too much. No one helped her. Everyone conspired against her. No one cared. Aaron did not love her. She wanted to have a baby. Why didn’t she have a baby?

The questions, repeated again and again, had taken on the wail of an accusation, a susurrant lament, that haunted him even during their quiet times. Why wasn’t Katie pregnant? Was it his fault? The teasing doubt thrust itself at him when his body was intertwined with hers and they made love with the desperate urgency of those who had little time and feared unnamed dangers. Too often, then, he surrendered, feeling himself hopeless and helpless, as his penis shriveled within her and they withdrew and turned from each other, locked in their separate miseries.

“You don’t love me,” she would say, tossing the words into the silent darkness, shooting them out like small incendiary pellets, ignited to scorch them both with anguish.

“I love you.” But his tone was dead and he thought of how heavy a burden was the love she demanded. He could not sustain it.

Still, tonight he felt new hope. He had the feeling that Mollie’s death had ended one chapter and begun another and he sped home with a sense of urgency.

*

“Katie?”

The apartment was dark but she was or had been home because the mail was neatly stacked on the dining room table. He riffled through it quickly, thinking that they must be on every mailing list in America. He tossed aside the urgent requests from the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and quickly and eagerly read a letter from Rebecca. Her desert kibbutz had just completed the building of a communal dining hall and now, as they ate, they looked out on the gentle ocher-colored slopes of the Edomite Mountains. It was very hot but their swimming pool would be finished in a few months’ time.

She hoped Aaron and Katie planned a trip to Israel. She looked forward to meeting Katie and of course Yehuda and their children, Danielle, Noam, and Mindell, wanted to know their aunt and uncle.

Aaron smiled at the thought of gay, carefree Rebecca mothering a family of three, working in the fields and on construction projects, and finding time for her own painting which an Art News critic had recently called “a revolutionary approach to primitive perception.” Still, he was pleased with her letter and pleased too that it had arrived that day. It was an omen of a kind and he held it in his hand and went into the bedroom to find Katie.

She was stretched out on the bed as he had feared she would be, still wearing her pale-blue coat with the small matching pillbox hat askew on her soft golden curls. Her deep-blue eyes were rimmed with violet circles of fatigue and she stared vacantly up at the ceiling. She had not even bothered to peel off her white gloves which were covered with soot from the Washington journey and her fingers were listlessly intertwined.

Often when Aaron found her like this, he grew angry, almost repelled by what he had come to think of as her selfishness, her emotional sloth. The tyranny of the sick, David had said, and David had been right. Again and again Aaron rebuked himself for such feelings, arguing, with a reasonableness that he did not feel, that Katie could not help herself, but more often his argument was defeated by irritation and anger and he would leave the bedroom, slamming the door sharply. But tonight he sank down beside her on the bed, took her in his arms, removed her small hat—a doll’s hat, really—and gently ran his fingers through her soft hair.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t at Mollie’s funeral,” she said softly. “Was it terrible?”

“You know. Seymour took it very hard. And Jakie and Annie too. But my mother was strong. So strong.” He thought of his mother, tall and erect at the graveside, and remembered how her black suit had fit too loosely, its jacket billowing about her narrow frame. She had lost weight during her sister’s long illness.

“I’m sure she was. Where does Leah get her strength, her control? God, I wish she’d share her secret with me.”

“And you? How did it go with you yesterday?”

“You didn’t see the papers? Of course not. That was big time. The Senator himself. Holy Joe. He spits when he talks. A little-known fact vital to the archives of civil liberties. All his creepy aides keep handkerchiefs handy to wipe up the saliva.”

“They ought to use them to hold their noses. The stench must be awful.”

“It is. The Senator called General Marshall himself an instrument of the Soviet conspiracy. That ought to please Ike.”

“Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. But how did you do?”

He hated the dry bitterness of her tone and stroked her hair, Rebecca’s letter still between his fingers. Perhaps he and Katie should visit Israel, eat in the shadow of rose-colored mountains, swim beneath a desert sky, while the sickness that infected their marriage was burned to cinders by the scorching desert sun.

“Oh, I won a motion for adjournment and heard the Senator mumble something about how women lawyers ought to stay home and take shit out of diapers instead of bringing it into court. I almost told him that I’d prefer doing that to wiping his spit off my face.”

“Katie, Katie.” He smiled, stroked her neck, and felt her body relax beneath his touch.

“Oh, Aaron, I’m so tired.” The tension in her voice had melted and he saw, without surprise, the familiar tears, twin lambent droplets, course slowly down her pale cheeks.

“Of course you are.” He pressed her to him. “What we need, what we both need, is a vacation. A long vacation.”

“What kind of vacation?” she asked, her voice limpid, dreamy.