Leah's Journey (7 page)
“I think it’s a good idea,” David said thoughtfully. “Why not? What do you think, Leah? It’s time you went from this apartment a little.”
“I don’t know,” she replied and began to dish out the compote. Even as she was negative she knew that she wanted to walk through the doors of the settlement house, to hear the sounds of young people talking and laughing, to sniff the odors of chalk and paint and feel the electricity of learning. She felt again a stirring of the excitement that had spurred her from her parents’ village to the academy in Odessa. Of course, she must do something, study something. She was, after all, only twenty-three. Sarah was always on hand to look after the children.
Leah looked at David who calmly ate the compote as he read from a propped-up text, his mind riveted to a problem his professor had discussed that day dealing with Freud’s analysis of the root of involuntary action. How good David was, Leah thought, and how he always seemed to sense what she wanted, what she needed. But when he passed her chair and lightly touched her hair, an imperceptible shiver escaped her and he moved quickly on and went to sit with Shimon Hartstein, Morris Morgenstern, and Label Katz, who were angrily arguing against Sam Ellenberg that David Dubinsky and his ideas of trade unionism would mean the ruination of small manufacturers.
On Monday, Leah decided, she would go to the Irvington Settlement House and make inquiries. The determined thought pleased her and she hummed softly as she cleared the table. Aaron got up to help her and when he nuzzled shyly against her she bent and planted a soft kiss on the bright coppery crown of her child’s hair.
CHARLES FERGUSON STOOD at the window of his studio on the second floor of the Irvington Settlement House and watched the street below. His fingers were wrapped around a stump of charcoal which he idly moved across the thick white page of the drawing pad he had balanced on the windowsill. Small figures slowly crawled into life on the sheet of paper and now and then the young artist glanced away from the window to see whether his fingers had been faithful to his eyes. Critically, almost harshly, he stared at his work, and slowly corrected it. Using his fingers, he blurred and brushed the figure of the old Jew pushing a wheelbarrow through the streets, hoping that the newly imposed shadow would imply the sense of urgent movement that characterized the old man’s painful progress.
Everyone on the street below was hurrying because it was three o’clock on a wintry Friday afternoon and only an hour or so remained before the Sabbath hush would steal across the teeming, busy streets of New York’s lower east side. Bearded rabbis, their earlocks still damp from their Friday afternoon ritual immersion, hurried homeward, thin white towels tucked beneath their black gabardine caftans. Women dashed by, huddled within thick shawls, clutching straw market baskets. These were the poorest housewives, who waited until the shops were ready to close so that they might buy their food at half-price.
He watched one plump little woman rush from stall to stall. She wore a man’s heavy dark overcoat and her head was covered with a bright-red wool scarf. With the eagerness of a child finding a new toy, she plucked up a large cabbage and tossed it, with surprising skill, into her basket. Now she cajoled the aged fish merchant who leaned against his cart, his beard and once-white apron flecked with scales and blood, a narrow fishbone gleaming on the visor of his work cap. The woman pirouetted before him. She pointed to her cabbage and, digging into her basket, held up a bunch of scrawny baby carrots. With flying fingers and dancing vegetables, she demonstrated the dinner she could cook if only she had one fish head. The fishmonger looked up at the darkening sky and down into the slimy confines of his cart. Shrugging finally, he removed a thick glove, plunged his hand in, and held up a grinning carp head. He wrapped it in sheets of newspaper so thin they were soon stained with blood, but the small woman hugged the package with joy and held out some coins. The merchant ignored her outstretched hand and bent to hoist his cart. Slowly, bent almost double, he trudged on down Bayard Street and the woman arranged her purchases and hurried triumphantly home.
Charles Ferguson’s charcoal stub had swept furiously across his pad during these transactions and he looked down at the series of swift drawings. The one of the old woman plucking up the cabbage was not too bad and he added a line for emphasis and a smudge of shadow to hint at the mood of the darkening day. He was dissatisfied with the drawing of the fishmonger but he liked the outline of the cart, and he bent close to his work to add some small detail, sketching in the sheath of Yiddish newspapers draped over a wire hanger which the man used to wrap the ice-caked pike and carp and the small slivers of herring which the children carried home in cornucopias of newsprint. As he worked he glanced unnecessarily at his watch. He could tell by the noise in the corridors that it was almost three-fifteen and within minutes the low muted gong would sound and he would begin teaching his last class of the week.
His students were already assembling their equipment on the long, low worktables. Sheets of paper were clipped into place on drawing pads and pencils, rulers, and erasers were neatly ranged in slots on the table. One or two students were absorbed in erasing the previous week’s work so that the sheet of paper could be used again. Those who could afford them were setting up their colors, small precious jars of tempera purchased at a Greenwich Village shop where Charles Ferguson had made a special arrangement with the proprietor. The settlement house students walked the two-mile distance and were sold their supplies at a substantial discount, which Charles Ferguson later covered.
He walked up to the lectern now, glanced at his notes and then across the room. Automatically his eyes rested at the empty worktable in the second row where Leah Goldfeder usually sat. She was not here today. He understood her absence but, like so many things at this shadowed hour, it saddened him. She had explained, when he urged her to register for this class, that it was given at a very difficult hour for her. Friday afternoon was the busiest time of her week. She had to shop and prepare dinner for a houseful of boarders and make certain the laundry was up to date because no work could be done on the Sabbath.
Still, Ferguson had persisted. This might be the last year the course would be given. He was planning to return to Illinois—a plan he continued to diagram year after year so that the battered trunk in his Bleecker Street apartment remained perennially open. One week feeling restless, he would pack; the next, angry or despairing, he tossed his possessions out. Occasionally, particularly in the spring when small boys skittered down the sun-spattered streets on improvised skateboards and the chestnut trees in Washington Square burst into bloom, he closed it and covered it with a Mexican serape.
It had occurred to him that the reason he was so drawn to the people of the lower east side was because he too was a refugee, fleeing the calm stretches of fertile plains, the endless rural skyscapes, the farmlands with their fields ranged with geometric neatness, the houses and silos as trim as the small buildings carved for children’s play. Just as Leah had fled the sameness, the repetitious life cycle of the village of her birth, so had Charles Ferguson fled his rural fate for the studios of the city. He had studied at Chicago’s Art Institute, becoming familiar with terms like perspective and composition, and then he had come to New York, a tall blond man with a wisp of pale moustache, magic in his fingers, and uncertainty in his heart.
He had gone first to the Art Students League and stood before huge canvases splashed with light by the vast skylights. He struggled with thick brushes and plump tubes of oils that bled their rainbow hues across his palette, but on the canvas the bright colors froze and the uncertainty in his heart grew. He began to suspect that he had been cursed with talent but not blessed with a great gift. He found the job at the Irvington Settlement House, thinking of it at first as an economic necessity—his teaching would make his own studies possible. But soon he was spending more and more time on the east side and fewer hours on Fifty-seventh Street. He taught graphics and design, elementary drawing and oils. He offered lectures on art history and sat for hours over his students’ portfolios making comments, worrying, conferring.
His students came mostly at night, tired men and women, their backs habitually bent low in the habit of their work over sewing machines and ironing boards. But a new vitality gripped them in Charles Ferguson’s classroom and even those with little or no talent sparked with interest as the tall blond man who spoke in the flat tones of the Midwest shared with them the secrets of his craft—for that was how, in defeat, he had come to think of his talent.
Among these eager apprentices, he found talent of one sort or another. There was Theresa Mercuriotti, a bright-eyed young Italian woman who worked in a powder puff factory. Under Ferguson’s guidance she had learned to draw flowers so well that she soon started a small enterprise for herself, painting bouquets across china plates; when she married she and her husband opened a small shop where Theresa’s plates dominated the window with their bright offerings of rosebuds laced with baby’s breath and buttercups sleeping amid beds of fern. And there had been Faivel Goldstein, a stoop-shouldered Talmudist who had stayed after class one day and shown Ferguson his drawings of insects. Intricate spiders danced across thin sheets of tissue paper, crickets leaped upward in bold strokes of India ink, and graceful butterflies flew low across Yiddish circulars. Faivel was a fabric designer now and his delicately executed drawings appeared on men’s cravats and women’s stoles. Each year, at Christmas, he sent Ferguson a heavy silk scarf emblazoned with his small patterned creatures.
But it was not until Leah Goldfeder had entered his class, a year ago, that Charles Ferguson felt the surge of excitement peculiar to teachers who suddenly encounter a student of unexpected, unpredictable talent.
Leah, her thick dark hair coiled about in a glossy bun, her brow high and pale, reminded Ferguson of a Velasquez queen he had studied in a Madrid museum. She registered first for a class in geometric design and he saw at once that although she had had no training, there was a natural sophistication and ease to her compositions. While the other students struggled to order simple triangles and circles, her convex octagons formed graceful pyramids and her quick fingers shaped riots of concentric circles. He worked closely with her, lending her his own colors because he saw, from the careful mending of her cotton stockings and the frayed sleeve of her worn coat, that she could not afford supplies.
The following semester she took his class in composition and drawing, always rushing in just a bit late and hurrying apologetically to her seat. In the neighboring room the settlement house chorus met, and their high sweet voices, struggling to sing English words they barely understood, drifted over the transom into the studio. Leah hummed as she worked, and once when the chorus director gave Ferguson tickets to a concert he offered them to her. She blushed with pleasure and surprise but shook her head.
“I am sorry but my husband David goes to school every night and I would have no one to go with.”
“Every night?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes. To the City College. He already finished the high school courses. He studies very hard.”
“Then perhaps you’ll go to the concert with me. Your husband would not object?”
“Object? Be against? No,” she replied calmly and again he struggled to conceal his surprise. He knew that she practiced traditional Orthodoxy and he had lived among the Jews of the east side long enough to know that their religion was very rigid regarding social and sexual mores. He had seen men cross the street to avoid walking next to strange women and he knew that Orthodox women covered their hair lest they seem attractive to men other than their husbands. Yet Leah Goldfeder had, without hesitation, agreed to go to a concert at Carnegie Hall with him, a single man and a Gentile. Of course, his tall dark-haired student did not cover her hair (today she wore it in a loosely twisted bun and he found himself sketching the loosely wound coils and wondering how they would look brushed loose against her regally held back) and it was unusual that her husband was studying at City College. The Goldfeders appeared to be an extraordinary couple and his curiosity about Leah mounted. He arranged to meet her on the evening of the concert on the steps of Carnegie Hall.
Charles Ferguson’s invitation marked the first time Leah had traveled the subway beyond Fourteenth Street. She had lived in New York for five years but her life in the largest city in the United States had been confined to the crowded streets near her home where she did her marketing, took her children to the free clinic, went to the settlement house and the synagogue. Occasionally she and David went to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue but that too was within walking distance of her home. Only once had she gone as far as S. Klein’s imposing emporium on Fourteenth Street, with the enterprising Sarah Ellenberg.
Leah sat in the dimly lit subway car and studied the faces of fellow passengers. Students sat on the wicker seats with notebooks spread across their laps. The books danced skittishly as the train jerked to a sudden stop but the students read on, their concentration unbroken. So David must sit night after night, Leah thought. The speeding subway was his study hall too, and he had that rare capacity to remain immersed in his books, undisturbed by movement, children’s play, or men’s arguments. In one corner a group of Italian men argued vociferously until the debate suddenly became a joke and they laughed with such good feeling that even the engrossed students looked up, blinked, and smiled before returning to their books.
A beautiful young black girl sat across the aisle from Leah calmly applying makeup. Leah watched with fascination as the girl, with the care and precision of an artist, brushed her face with a tawny powder puff and etched new coats of redness around her full lips. Leah herself had never worn makeup but now she felt pale and colorless. She bit her lips and pinched her cheeks, glad that she had worn her brightly colored scarf. Twice she opened the leather purse, borrowed from Masha, and checked the small handkerchief into which she had knotted three nickels.