GOLDA
Golda was afraid to show Ben how she felt, her secret desires and dreams and most of all the stirrings of love in her heart. What if Ben did not feel them too? Sometimes, when they lay together after making love, she thought she saw a softness in his face. He would smile at her and even reach down to kiss her shoulder or her neck. It was a caress that made her heart pound.
Then, just as she was ready to say something to him, to open her heart, she would think, No, he will think me foolish. He never promised to love me. What if he doesn’t? And she would swallow the words she was about to say. Perhaps, she thought, he will love me if I become pregnant, and then we will truly be wed.
Each month she prayed that she would not bleed, but each month there would be the brown spots on her underwear and then the gush of red blood, and her heart would sink. For a few days she was heartsick, and then she squared her shoulders and told herself, Next month. It will happen next month.
Then came the month she did not bleed. She could not let herself believe. She did not tell Ben or Cousin Surah but kept it to herself, checking frequently to see if she was imagining things. Then her breasts became tender, and she went to Cousin Surah, and even before Golda said anything, Cousin Surah smiled and hugged her. “Du bist shvanger? You’re pregnant?”
Golda looked at her, shocked. “How did you know?”
“You have a glow. A glow of pregnancy. I am so happy for you. Mazel tov. Good luck to you and Ben.”
And that night Ben had touched her stomach in a silent question, and she had smiled and nodded. In bed that night they held each other, and she thought she heard him whisper, “You are a good woman, Golda. I am a lucky man that you married me.” It was not exactly a declaration of love, but Golda thought it was a very close thing.
Golda often had thought about luck. How lucky she had been to leave the old country when she did. March 1914. A few months later the war broke out in Europe, and it was harder and harder for immigrants to come to America.
She thought how lucky she had been to have a friend like Cousin Surah, strong and wise and loving. A place to stay. Food to eat. Even piecework, stitching bespoke dresses and embroidering shirtwaists for a tailor in the neighborhood where she could earn money and help pay their expenses. Cousin Surah had helped her find the language class she needed so she could learn English. She attended classes at the nearby public school once a week at night until she felt her English was proficient enough to get along.
She watched the other students in the class, wondering what they would do with this strange new language, in this strange new country. Most of them were serious, working to learn so they could get ahead. Golda was adept at languages and learned quickly. She was able to use her English with the women who came to the tailor to have her embroider their clothing. She began to feel useful, as if maybe she could make a good life for herself in this country.
She had decided on her dream. Of course, she would not be a nurse, but she could be a dressmaker; someday she would open her own shop and make her own money. Ben was earning enough at the mechanic’s shop where he was an assistant, no longer an apprentice, and with the extra money Golda earned, she and Ben were able to move to their own two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from Cousin Surah.
As the date of her baby’s birth came closer, she was more and more frightened, thinking about what had happened to Esther. But she didn’t dare put words to it. Maybe saying it out loud would make it happen.
Cousin Surah promised that she would tend her with the midwife who lived in the building. And in August, Golda went into labor. She was terrified, but Surah had said to her, “You are you, not your sister. You will be fine.” And Golda believed her, looking into her friend’s eyes each time a labor pain came, breathing through it, and finally pushing through the last hour until the baby was born.
“See?” Cousin Surah said. “I said it would be normal, and it was.” When it was over, the memory was a blur that Golda barely recalled. The baby was born, and Golda and Ben had another boy.
They named him Isaac. For a few weeks she nursed him, feeling his rosebud mouth latch on her nipple and gulp the nourishment her body provided him, loving how he sucked until he was sated and then dropped off to sleep. She could not help but remember how she had held Morton in her arms and prayed she would feel love for him. With Isaac, she did not need to pray for love. It was there, full blown in her heart.
She could not take her eyes off his face as he slept peacefully in her arms. She even found that having Isaac to love allowed her to acknowledge her love for Morton, whom she began to call Morty. She thought with amazement, There is always room to love more. And she took Morty into her heart.
He would stand at her knee, his normal three-year-old energy stilled as he looked at his young brother and asked question after question about him.
“Did I drink from you?” he asked, his blue eyes wide with curiosity.
“Yes,” Golda lied.
“I guess I liked it. He likes it, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, that is what babies like.”
Morty reached out a finger and touched Isaac’s silken cheek. Then he touched his own. “He’s soft,” he said.
“Yes,” Golda said. “Babies are soft, and then they grow up like you, big and strong,” and she smiled at Morty as he watched Isaac suck on her breast.
But then Golda developed a sore on her nipple, and the abscess made it too painful for her to allow Isaac to nurse. Her breast ached, her abscess leaked, and she developed a fever. She consulted the midwife who had attended Isaac’s birth. The midwife told her to put a salve on it, but that did not help. She did not know what to do, but in desperation began to feed Isaac with evaporated milk and bottles, the way she had when Morty was an infant. Hoping her abscess would clear up, she only nursed him on the other breast, but that nipple began to hurt, and then her milk was not enough for him. He cried and cried until finally she gave up, afraid to let him nurse at all lest the abscess return. Eventually her breast milk became so scarce that Isaac fed completely on canned milk.
Isaac seemed not to take well to cow’s milk. He developed diarrhea and began pushing the bottle out of his mouth. He lost weight. He developed a rash on his arms and his belly. Golda was beside herself, not knowing what to do. Cousin Surah told her to make a thin gruel of rice cereal and feed that to him, which she did. Over time, Golda believed that because she fed him evaporated milk, which did not agree with him, Isaac was not strong. He became a sickly baby, with a perpetually runny nose and chest colds all winter. He suffered from fevers. She fussed over him, worried about his scrawny arms and legs, his pitiful cries. She held him constantly, and although that seemed to comfort him, Isaac did not gain weight the way Morty had until he started to eat the mashed-up food she made for the family. Then she breathed with relief as he became the plump toddler she had prayed for.
Golda worked from home, embroidering beautiful designs on the linen, cotton, and wool clothing of wealthy women. With two little boys to take care of, she no longer did piecework for the tailors that had started her employment in America, but now she was making more money with her custom embroidery. After Isaac and Morty were asleep, she would work until late at night, uninterrupted.
She hardly had to plan her embroidery. She could just look at the garment and see the design. After first drawing her designs on paper and getting the approval of her customers, she copied them on thin tracing paper that she had bought in an art store on the avenue. She gradually purchased silk threads, colored with every hue of the rainbow, until she had a collection that allowed her to paint pictures on the bodices and collars and plackets of shirts and blouses and dresses. One day a week, she would drop the boys at Cousin Surah’s for her to take care of them, take the subway train into lower Manhattan, and sit at a bespoke tailor’s store where women came to have their clothing made.
This tailor, Mr. Herzog, printed a sign, HAND EMBROIDERY DONE HERE, which he placed in his window beside BESPOKE CLOTHING. Golda, sitting in the corner with her own treadle sewing machine and a box of colored threads, could observe the patrons who came in to be measured and to select the fabrics for their suits and dresses. Hanging beside the dressing room was a blouse and a dress, each decorated with Golda’s embroidery.
One young woman, her hair cut in the latest gamine look, held the blouse up against her, preening in front of the mirror. “I only came to this tailor because my friend told me about the lady who embroiders. She did a whole design with bugle beads on a silk dress. But this is really special. Like a painting.”
Golda could feel her face heating up. She loved the compliments, but they always made her blush. By this time, Golda’s language was good enough to be able to converse with the customers in heavily accented English, and when Mr. Herzog came to her to introduce her to the customer, she stood shyly and asked, “What you like me to sew on dress?”
“Flowers maybe? Gold thread?”
Golda sketched on a piece of paper, changing her design to meet the suggestions of the young woman. This was her favorite time, when she let her creative mind fly and drew on paper what they wished to have embroidered on their clothing; then she colored it with pencils. The tailor was glad to give her space because she began to bring in business as word of her beautiful handiwork spread from woman to woman and friend to friend.
Golda’s earnings helped her family’s livelihood, and she began to tuck away money in a drawer in her clothing cupboard. She wanted to send money to her family, but the war, raging now in Europe, made her fearful of sending money by post. Golda’s father wrote to her of the terrible siege in Przemysl and said that the Jews were constantly being set upon by both armies. Golda was very worried about her family, but there was nothing she could do for them.
Finally, in April 1917, America, enraged at the unrestrained use of submarine warfare by Germany and the loss of merchant ships and civilian lives, declared war on the side of the Allies and against Germany. In New York, doughboys were all over the streets, showing off in their uniforms, flirting with the shopgirls, and having a last fling before they were sent overseas. They loaded the troop ships for the fields of France, the trenches, the mud, the death, and the disease, and over the next year, with the draft established, hundreds of thousands of soldiers traveled through New York and across the Atlantic.
Then in March of 1918, while the war was still raging, the first cases of influenza were detected in an army camp in Kansas, and over the next six months there were flu outbreaks all over Europe and Asia. By August, what came to be called the Spanish flu had come to New York City.
New York was a cauldron, boiling in the summer heat. Crowds pushed on the subways during the rush hours, people breathing in each other’s faces. In Manhattan theaters, people sat close to one another. Tenements and apartment buildings were places where the disease flourished. And soon, coughing and sneezing were heard in the apartment building stairways. It seemed the flu was everywhere.
You could hear it in the hallways as you walked the stairs to leave the building for the streets outside. You could hear it in the shops, on the avenues, and quickly, often so fast that close friends and neighbors did not even know the individual was sick, the cough and fever killed, sometimes within twenty-four hours. The very young and the very old were not especially vulnerable. It was strong, healthy young adults who more often fell victim to the flu.
Golda stopped going to the tailor in Manhattan, afraid to ride the subway. Her neighbor, a twenty-four-year-old laborer, came home with a sniffle and was dead the next morning. Soon signs were posted on doors where individuals had the flu, warning the house was quarantined.
One of her neighbors described to Golda what the victims of the Spanish flu looked like in their last hours, and it seemed unreal to her. She told Cousin Surah what her neighbor said. “They turn lavender, like the color of lilacs. They call it ‘the purple death.’” She couldn’t picture it. Golda watched each member of her family carefully every day. She boiled the silverware the way she boiled the bottles and nipples for Isaac’s milk, hoping she was killing the flu before it attacked her family. They seemed well enough, and then, just as she was beginning to breathe with relief, they weren’t.
Ben came home one day in December with a cold, complaining that his throat was closing up. Golda made a sick room of their bedroom, pulling in a cot for Morty and Isaac’s little crib beside it. She knew she was supposed to quarantine the sick, but how could she care for Ben and the children if they were not all together? Besides, she told herself, babies and children were not as susceptible to the flu as young people like her and Ben. She made soup and tea for her family and fed Ben and Morty. Ben lay in bed, his breathing labored. First he sweated heavily, throwing off the blankets; then he shivered so with cold that he begged her for more blankets.
Golda rushed to pile another blanket on the bed, and then he was sweating again, and she had to pick the blanket up off the floor when he tossed it off his body. She made chicken soup and tried to feed it to him and to Morty. She sat on the edge of the bed and held the spoon to Ben’s lips. He tried to grasp the spoon, but his hand shook so hard he spilled the soup all over the blanket. He pushed her hand away. He sat up and said, “The room is moving.” He closed his eyes tight.
“What do you mean the room is moving?” Golda asked. She swiveled her head around as if looking to see a moving picture.
“In and out,” he said. “The walls are moving.”
“No, they aren’t,” Golda said. “It’s the fever.”
Ben was gasping for breath. “It hurts to breathe,” he whispered.
Golda was terrified. “Please, God, please, God,” she said, over and over, not able to even say the words for what she was praying for. “Let him live. Don’t take him too.” She looked hard for the telltale lavender color, but she didn’t see it. He was pale but not purplish. She patted his arm. “Try to sleep,” she said.
She went to Morty. He had a fever, but it didn’t seem to be so high. She fed him soup and tea. His eyes fluttered. She felt his forehead. Not too hot. Her heart swelled with relief. Thank God he was not too sick. She could not bear it if anything happened to him. She turned away, a new feeling in her heart. She turned back to him, saw his sweet face quiet and sleeping on the pillow. She went back to him, kissed his brow, and smoothed his hair. She wept silently as she prayed over and over, “Please, God, please, God.”
Then she hovered over Ben again. He was hallucinating, thrashing in bed. She dragged herself to the bathroom to wet towels to cool his fever and then had to cover him with blankets again as he began to shiver. She was exhausted but pushed on. She began to feel ill, but she thought it was mild. Not like Ben. She feared for Ben. She bargained with God. If he let Ben live, she would devote herself to Ben and Morty. She would love them forever. She vowed she would not allow him to get sicker. Soon, Morty just seemed fretful and listless. He slept a great deal. When she looked at Isaac, she thought he was impervious, standing in his crib, happy, it seemed, just to be in the company of all of them. She left him in his crib to observe them and rested as much as she could, secure in the knowledge that babies and small children seemed not to get sick. She herself seemed to be strong.
Gradually Ben’s fever broke, and he stopped shivering and sweating. He was weak and could barely walk, but she was convinced he had survived the illness. Then, when she and Ben were getting stronger and Morty had begun complaining that he was hungry, she noticed that two-year-old Isaac’s nose had begun to run. She could feel her heart speeding up, her anxiety mounting as she scurried about trying to ward off what she was afraid she would not be able to stop. Praying, she told herself that babies didn’t get as sick as young people with this flu, that Ben and Morty were fine and Isaac would be too. But somehow, she didn’t really believe it. He had been so sickly for so long. She took Isaac into her bed, covered him with her quilt, sang to him, rocked him. But nothing she did—not compresses, not steam, not hot baths or cool wet towels—stopped the unstoppable virus. Within forty-eight hours, Isaac’s skin had turned a cyanotic purple, and Golda knew she had lost the battle for him.
Her heart pounding, she began to cry and scream, “No, no, no! They said babies don’t die from it. Why? Why?” She held Isaac, but he stared sightlessly at the ceiling, and as Golda held him to her breast, sobbing, Ben extracted his son from her arms and placed him back in his crib with a blanket over his face. Then he went out to arrange for his burial with Rabbi Levy. There had been so much death in the community that they did not sit shiva. There was no visiting, lest people transmit the disease or become sick themselves.
After Isaac died, Golda could not function. She glanced at Ben, pale and thin, who sat at the table sipping his tea, and then looked away. She could not pay attention to Morty, the way she should have, making certain he ate and got stronger. Golda just could not bear to look at them. Where was Isaac? She was confused, conflicted. The tiny love feelings she had felt for Morty began to fade. If I was not so focused on Morty and Ben, I would have been able to see that Isaac was ill. I would have been able to care for him earlier. It was their fault that I neglected Isaac.
No. It was my fault. I’m to blame. Golda lay in bed, her eyes open but staring at nothing. Ben went to Cousin Surah’s and asked her to come to their apartment. Having survived the flu herself, she came. Golda did not appear to notice her. When Cousin Surah spoke to her, she didn’t answer. Cousin Surah straightened the apartment and tried to put clean linens on the bed, but Golda wouldn’t stir.
Cousin Surah conferred with Ben. “She won’t even bathe,” she said. “Should I force her?”
Ben stirred, got up, shuffled into the bedroom. “Golda, you must get up. You have to take care of yourself.”
Golda turned her head. Barely moving her lips, she said, “I have nothing to live for.”
Ben shook her. “Nothing? Nothing? I need you. Morty needs you.”
“Isaac,” she whispered. She turned her head away; she closed her eyes.
Finally, between the two of them, Ben and Cousin Surah got Golda to sit up in bed. Cousin Surah gave her a sponge bath, washing Golda’s limp arms and legs. She dressed her in clean underwear, pulled her up, and invited her to the table to eat with them. Golda sat staring at the plate but not picking up her spoon or fork. Cousin Surah spoon-fed her tea, then soup. She obediently opened her mouth, sipped the liquid, swallowed.
Cousin Surah said to Ben, “I can’t stay any longer. I have to get back to my family, but I will take Morty with me. And when you are ready to go back to work, if she is still like this, bring her to me, and I will keep her too.”
That is what they did. Golda went, compliant, to Cousin Surah’s house and sat silently in her kitchen. Normal life swirled around Golda. She began to talk, gradually, then offered to cook for Cousin Surah, knowing that the older woman did not like to make food. Cousin Surah cared for Morty, and Golda did not interfere. Golda did not talk about Isaac. She did not ask about Ben. She just did the tasks Cousin Surah asked of her and moved through the days, pale and ghostly.
Gradually she began to care for Morty as well, feeding him and telling him stories before he went to sleep. Ben came to visit often, staying for supper and spending time with Morty. The color came back into Golda’s cheeks.
One afternoon, before dinner, Cousin Surah sat Golda down and said, “Golda, we have to talk. I have something to say to you.”
Golda listened.
“You and Morty should go home with Ben now. He is your husband, and he needs you.”
Golda nodded. She knew what Cousin Surah said was right. But Cousin Surah’s next words shocked her. “You and Ben should have another baby.”
Golda gasped. It was like Cousin Surah had punched her. Her stomach churned with nausea. She looked away. As if a new baby could replace Isaac. She couldn’t find words to express what she felt. She sat mute. She couldn’t breathe. The walls were closing in on her. She pulled her sweater close to her and stared at her feet.
When Cousin Surah went into the bedroom for something, Golda fled the apartment and walked like a ghost out the door and down the street.
She walked. She walked fast. The first thing she noticed was that it was cold out. January. The wind whistled down the street, and she had only her thin sweater for warmth. Her breath made puffs of smoke in the air. She had not noticed that she was crying at first, but the tears became frost on her cheek.
She walked toward Mr. Cohen’s, the first shop she’d worked at, as if her feet remembered something her mind did not. At the shop, the window was dark, a sign posted on the door: CLOSED FOR DEATH IN THE FAMILY. Golda wondered if it was Mr. Cohen the elder or Mr. Cohen the younger. That handsome young man. He had been drafted into the army, and she didn’t know if he had come back from Europe. She wondered if he was still alive. She wondered if the tailor shop would open again after the flu epidemic subsided. Would she have a place to work again? She shook her head, dislodging unwanted thoughts. Then she turned and kept walking, the heat of the exercise warming her. There were people on the street, some wearing masks. She had none, but she had recovered from the flu. She would not get it again, she thought. Cousin Surah had said fewer people were getting sick now. It was as if the epidemic was abating. Too late, too late. The words thrummed in her head.
Her strides grew longer. Where was she going? Where could she go? She reached the end of the block and stopped to lean against the corner of the building, a little dizzy. She wished she could go crazy like the lady in Cousin Surah’s building who had lost most of her family. But Golda knew she had already had her moments when she had withdrawn from the world, sightless, speechless. She was not going to be graced with the oblivion of madness again. Just despair and sadness.
She could end it all and be done. That thought had occurred to her many times, but she knew she could not act on it. Or she could go on with a miserable life. And she knew what her choice would be. She was too sensible . . . wasn’t that what everyone had always called her? Sensible Golda. And she always did the sensible thing. Dreams aside, that was the way she would live out her life.
She turned and walked back the way she had come, keenly aware now of how cold she was and how foolish she had been to run out of the house without her coat. When she returned to Cousin Surah’s house and opened the door to the apartment, the warmth engulfed her, the smell of soup on the stove, the sound of Morty chattering.
Cousin Surah looked at her. “Where did you go? Without a coat? You could freeze to death.” She stared at Golda for a long time. There were questions in her eyes, but she didn’t ask them. She nodded. “But you are back now.”
“I’m back,” Golda said and took a deep breath as she sat at the table, aware that she could breathe now, and that many things could be said without words.
Cousin Surah nodded. “Come have some soup to warm you.”
Golda ate the soup, told Morty his bedtime story, put him to bed, and came back into the kitchen. “You are right, Cousin Surah. It is time for us to go home.”
The next day she packed up her few belongings, and when she came out with a small satchel in her hand, she said, “Cousin Surah, you have been an angel to me. I am grateful to you for all your help.”
“Please don’t be angry at me for what I said about a baby,” Cousin Surah said. “I just feel you must go on with life. You cannot live in this half life you have been in. It is enough.”
Golda did not look at her. She stretched out her hand to Morty. “Come, Morty. We will go home.”
Morty looked from Golda to Cousin Surah, seemingly unsure what to do, but then he walked to his mother, who turned at the door. “Thank you, Cousin Surah. I am going home now.”
They walked the three blocks to their apartment, Golda holding her satchel in one hand and Morty’s hand in the other. Morty had to almost run to keep up with her, she was walking so fast. When she entered the apartment, she dropped the satchel, let go of Morty’s hand, and sat, leaden, on the sofa. She wondered when Ben would come home. Would he go first to Cousin Surah’s and then come running here when he discovered what had happened? Or would it be one of the nights when he would not turn up at his cousin’s apartment but would instead just go . . . where? Golda realized she had no idea where Ben went on those nights when he didn’t come to check on her and Morty. She was suddenly very curious. She would have to ask him.
Sitting in her own apartment, surrounded by the familiar furniture, the familiar smells, brought back memories. The last time she had been here, Isaac had just died.
Golda could not forgive God. Why had Morty survived and not Isaac? Then she was pierced with the agony of guilt. Was she wishing Morty dead? Esther’s only child? She despaired of ever getting over her grief or forgiving little Morty for living, but she knew it was right that she had gone home to her apartment. It was time to start to work again.
Her needlework had always been a great comfort to her. She picked it up now whenever her grief or anger overtook her. While she pushed the needle with colored thread through the bodice of an ecru linen shirtwaist, she had daydreams. Up the needle went, trailing blue thread; pull and tug just so, then down, a puncture in the linen beside the earlier stitch. As she sewed, pictures came to her, and she remembered. She remembered her childhood, her mother’s soft bosom, sitting on her mother’s lap and she, Golda, comforting her mother.
Her mother was crying. Esther was a toddler, walking about with her thumb in her mouth, sucking, sucking. The cradle beside her mother’s chair was empty. Golda thrust the needle down through the next stitch, just so, spaced evenly, and then up again, the blue thread making a pattern along the placket.
Her mother’s sobs were soft. Golda knew why. The baby in the cradle was gone—fast—in the night; carried for nine months, birthed in anguish, suckled for a week, and then still. Lost.
Golda knew what that loss was. While she was embroidering, she often thought about Isaac. He had been gone for several months now. But loss was forever. The needle went into the linen and up again, making a zigzag line beneath which she would place pink and red roses in a chain, like the pattern on china she had seen in the store on the avenue. Expensive bone china, the same color as the ecru shirtwaist.
Sometimes Golda copied decorations she had seen on china and on wallpaper. They would have to be delicate enough to be adapted to embroidery. Her patrons loved the patterns. She changed the color of the silk fibers she was using, threading three needles with shades of rose, red, and pink, and began a small rosebud just beginning to unfurl. The designs were in her head. She did not need to sketch them on the garment anymore, so exact was her eye.
Her mother sobbed quietly for two days and then put the cradle aside. Golda soon learned there would be another baby in the cradle the next year. But sometimes as her mother rocked the new baby, she would weep in silence. And Golda knew, even as a child without the words to express it, that the new baby did not replace the old one. That loss was forever.
Accept loss forever, she told herself, like a mantra. Accept.
After the horrors of the Great War and the ravages of the Spanish flu came catastrophic pogroms in Eastern Europe. Letters from their families had thankfully resumed, but they told of murders in Ukrainian and Polish towns and cities. Even the major newspapers in New York City had stories, buried on page two or four, about thousands of Jews being murdered, raped, buried in mass graves. The populations began fleeing west, but there were movements to close the borders to immigrants from the east. And antisemitism, always present as an underlying thrum in Europe and even America, began to rise.
Golda and Ben tried to save money to send to their families so they could emigrate, but by the time they had almost enough for Golda’s family, the laws had changed, and America was limiting the numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe. By 1924 the Immigration Act had been passed, making quotas stricter and more permanent, and Golda’s and Ben’s families, never really anxious to emigrate, had decided to stay in Europe.
Golda and Ben resumed their lives. Golda let Ben hold and comfort her, and they made love, but not with the joy she had experienced at first. She wanted so much to become pregnant that she felt she needed to try and try. She began to pray again for pregnancy, but again she didn’t conceive, and she thought, I will be childless myself and have only Morty, my sister’s son, for solace.
“Why do some women get pregnant so easily, and I don’t?” she asked Cousin Surah one day.
Cousin Surah shrugged. “I don’t know. Even the doctors don’t know. There’s a lady I knew who got pregnant every time she even looked at her husband. She had so many children she had to go ask the rabbi if she and her husband could stay apart for a while, just so she could take care of the ones she had.” Cousin Surah shook her head. “And this rabbi, he said no. God would provide. She was so desperate she tried to get rid of a pregnancy, and it didn’t work.”
“What did she do?” Golda asked.
“She had another baby. She’s up to fourteen now.”
Golda’s head was swimming. Fourteen babies? Even her mother had only had six.
Golda tried so hard to settle in, to settle down and live a calm and happy life. But she could not stop her feelings, and sometimes Golda would erupt with anger at the way her life had been determined by events over which she had no control. To her great shame, she blamed Morty for things that had happened.
Sometimes Golda’s rage was like a pile of combustible paper and sticks, dry as desert tumbleweed, just waiting for a spark to ignite it into a conflagration. It sat in the center of her heart, always ready to burst into flame and consume her. But it was, to her great shame, especially sensitive to whatever Morty did, or even what he did not do.
There was no way to know when the anger would explode. It could be a comment he made at dinner that reminded her of the many ways in which she had given her life to him, although she owed him nothing. It could be a look on his face that reminded her of Ben as a young man, or even of her long-gone sister Esther. Sometimes Morty would sing tunelessly under his breath, and to Golda it was an irritant, like the off-key scratches on an old violin. She would grit her teeth and will herself not to say anything, not to give in to an angry outburst.
She knew he sensed it. And she knew he was befuddled by her anger. She hated herself for feeling this way. Once, in a moment of quiet, sitting alone at the kitchen table, waiting for the tea with honey she was preparing to help soothe his slight sniffle, he whispered in his plaintive six-year-old voice, “Why don’t you like me, Mama?”
She felt as if a knife had sliced through her heart. She closed her eyes, breathed. She looked at Morty, sitting quietly, his sweet mouth like a rosebud, his beautiful blue eyes focused on her face. Blue eyes. Like Esther’s blue eyes. She saw in him her sister when she was little, looking up at her with such complete adoration. He had such a lovely face, such beautiful blue eyes. His soft brown hair fell over his forehead.
Golda felt her throat close over tears. “Of course I like you. Don’t be ridiculous . . .” Her voice stumbled. “I love you,” she said, and she turned her back. She wondered. Did she in fact love him? Even like him? She placed the tea in front of him and then, as an afterthought, went back to the kitchen to bring him a cookie. She put it down and sat at the table watching him sip the tea and nibble on the cookie. It was hard to be near him and feel his distrust and think that she had failed them all . . . Ben, Morty, Esther, even herself. She thought, Maybe if I say it again and again, it will be true. I love you, I love you, Morty, I love you, Ben. She practiced and practiced, hoping to fill her heart.
Ben had begun to attend Rabbi Levy’s shul on most Shabbat mornings, sometimes taking seven-year-old Morty with him. They both seemed to enjoy it and came home for lunch afterward in a good mood. Golda also noticed that occasionally Ben would come home late from work and, when asked, tell Golda he had stopped off for a talk with the rabbi. Often, after these meetings with Rabbi Levy, there would be something lighter about him. He would smile and say something kind to her. Why?
One day she asked him if he wanted some tea. Morty was in his room reading. They were alone. As she went into the little kitchen, she asked Ben, “What is it that the rabbi says to you that makes you feel better?”
Ben thought for a moment. “I think he just listens, so I’m not talking to myself and saying things that make me unhappy.”
“Like what?” She put a glass of tea with a spoon in it before Ben. He liked to drink his tea in a glass, the way his parents had when he was growing up. He would sip the tea through a sugar cube that melted in his mouth.
Ben waited a minute, taking a sip of the hot liquid. Then he took a breath and said, “I sometimes wonder why I cannot seem to make you happy. I told him that.”
“And what does he say?”
“Different things. He told me to bring you flowers or sweets.”
Golda nodded, remembering when he had begun to bring her flowers on Friday night. She had liked that, but it hadn’t really made her happy.
Ben hesitated and then said, “He also said that I cannot make you happy. Only you can do that.”
She looked down at her hands. They were careworn, rough, the cuticles of her nails ragged. She closed her eyes, letting his words sink in. “You like him,” she said, more a statement than a question.
“Yes. He is very pious, but he never tells me what to do.” He chuckled a little. “I never spoke to the rabbi in my village at home. He was always telling everyone to daven. ‘Pray to God,’ he told me. When I said I didn’t like to pray, he cuffed my head.”
Golda smiled, thinking that Ben might have been a bit of a troublemaker as a young boy. She had a question buzzing in the back of her head, but it was hard for her to ask it. She took a breath and said, “Does he talk to women?”
“Of course he does. They come to him all the time, with all kinds of questions.”
“Maybe I could talk to him.” Golda looked into Ben’s deep brown eyes and held them for a long time. Her heart lurched.
Ben nodded. “Yes, he suggested that several times. I didn’t want to ask you to do it. But I think it would be a good thing to try.”
Golda went to Rabbi Levy’s one afternoon when she was coming home from delivering her embroidered shirtwaists to the tailor on Pitkin Avenue. As she came home, she passed the little shul on the corner. She hesitated, thinking she would go and ring the bell. Maybe he won’t be home, she thought. Maybe he will.
With a deep breath, she went to the side door and pushed the buzzer. After a few minutes a clatter of feet ran down the stairs, and the door opened to a young girl about ten years old. “Is Rabbi Levy in?” Golda asked.
“He’s at evening prayers,” the girl said.
Golda was embarrassed. “I’ll come back,” she said and turned quickly to walk away even before the girl nodded.
I should have known, she thought. Of course he is at prayers. Look at the time. Her father used to go to prayers each night. Golda felt her cheeks redden, and she walked quickly to let the breeze cool them. That night she did not tell Ben about her failed attempt to see the rabbi. Neither of them would know. She hadn’t given her name.
But the idea of going to see the rabbi persisted in her head, and a week later she went out again just before she started to shop for lunch. This time when she rang the buzzer, the teenage girl who answered took her upstairs to the parlor and asked her to sit. Golda thought the other girl must be in school. As she waited and looked around the room, she tried to quiet her beating heart. Would he remember her? After all, he had buried Esther and had married Golda to Ben. But that was a long time ago . . . seven years. Should she remind him of that? She wasn’t sure what she would say to him. She would start with her name. Maybe then he would know why she was there.
When the rabbi came into the room, Golda stood, surprised at how short Rabbi Levy was. She stood a head taller than he. “R . . . Rabbi Levy, I . . .” Her voice felt thick, like she was going to cry. “I am Golda Feinstein,” she stammered.
The rabbi nodded. “Ben’s wife,” he said. “Please sit. I am glad to see you again.”
Golda clutched her pocketbook. So he did remember her.
“How can I help you?”
“I don’t know. I am not sure anyone can help me.” And she burst into tears. How would she tell him all that was eating at her heart? There is such a long list of sins . . . a catalog of betrayals, she thought. I betrayed my sister. I did not save her on the ship. Even as she thought it, she knew it was not true. She was not a doctor. Still, she felt she had failed Esther. Hadn’t she suspected that Esther was already pregnant when she married Ben? Why hadn’t she said something? She should never have let Esther convince everyone to let her sail when she was so pregnant. She knew better.
But if she had stopped Esther from sailing, her sister would have had the baby at home and would probably have died anyway, Morty as well. And then where would she, Golda, be? She would most likely still be in Lesko.
Morty, Golda’s second sin. She had not loved him wholly. She had cared for him with cold resignation. She felt sick when she thought of that. Did it matter that she had realized how much she cared about him when he was sick with the flu? That she had saved him and Ben? She pushed that out of her mind. But then she had not been able to save Isaac. She was not God.
Isaac she had loved with all her heart, but she couldn’t save him anyway. God, if there was a God, was punishing her . . . for her jealousy of her sister, for her neglect of Morty, and that was why he had taken Isaac from her.
And she did not embrace Ben or love him as a wife should.
In the ensuing time, after the rabbi let her cry without trying to stop her, and then just listened as she poured out her pain and her sins and her fears and her anger, Golda felt a little better. He didn’t say much, which surprised Golda, but even so, just unburdening herself was helpful.
At the end of about a half hour, the rabbi said, “Now that I think I know what your situation is, is there something particular you want to ask me?”
Golda thought, I’ve told him everything. I’ve admitted why I’m angry, why I’m ashamed of myself when I’m not kind to Morty, why I’m bereft of my own children. What can I ask for help with? She stared ahead silently. “I don’t know if you can help me, Rabbi. I’m just so unhappy.”
“Is there something that you know would make you happy that you don’t have?”
“How many children do you have, Rabbi?”
“Baruch Hashem, seven,” he answered.
“I have Morty, and he isn’t even mine.”
“Whose is he, then, if he is not yours? You have held him since his birth.”
She didn’t answer that but simply murmured, “I want my Isaac.”
“Isaac?” He nodded, stroked his beard. “A lost lamb. May his memory be a blessing. God took him, we don’t know why.”
Golda closed her eyes, and the words came out before she knew what she would say. “I want a child again. But I don’t deserve one. It’s because of me that Isaac died.”
“No, no. How can you say that?”
Golda had hardly allowed herself to think that, but somehow, in the rabbi’s presence, the words came pouring out, mixed with sobs. How she had tended Ben so carefully, and Morty too. How she had been sick and could barely pay attention to her own boy. And then when he started to sniffle and cough, it was too late . . . too late.
“No, dear woman. You are not to blame. You did everything, everything right, and God made his decision . . .” After a moment the rabbi said, “I myself lost my oldest son. No one escaped untouched.”
Golda’s eyes widened. She shook her head. “I didn’t know. How do you bear it?”
Rabbi Levy did not answer. The two sat silently for a while.
Then Rabbi Levy said, “Do you want a child?”
Golda was still. “Yes. But I can’t . . . I don’t get pregnant. And there is no joy.” Golda shook her head, not able to speak. She was filled with shame. She couldn’t look at the rabbi, couldn’t say anything else.
He was silent for a while. Then he said, “If you deny yourself the joy of your husband’s love, then perhaps you deny yourself the possibility of a child again.” It was a simple statement, but Golda didn’t think it was true. By now she knew how women became pregnant. It was not through joy.
“God helps us to make a path in life, but we each make our own way. Think hard about what you want your path to be and how you will walk it.” The rabbi stood. “Come back in a few days. We will talk again.”
Golda stood. “I’m sorry I have taken so much time . . . with my woman’s foolishness,” she said. She didn’t really think she was foolish, but it was something she had heard her mother and father talk about—women’s foolishness.
“It is not foolishness to want a child, to be jealous, to yearn for happiness. Only human.” Rabbi Levy walked out of the parlor, and Golda followed him. As she walked down the stairs, he said again, “Come back in a few days. Maybe you will have a thought in between. Be well. You are a good woman, you know. Better than you think.”
Golda walked home, forgetting that she had been on her way to the market before she stopped at Rabbi Levy’s house. Just as she was about to enter the apartment, she remembered her errand and turned back to the street once more. She was a good cook. She would make a nice dinner for Morty and Ben. She would bake a cake for dessert. Cooking made her feel better, and eating good food put everyone in a better frame of mind. She headed back down the street again.
Golda saw Rabbi Levy a few more times. He never told her what to do, but he would give her a prayer to say. He always left her with “Be well. You are a good woman, better than you think.” She left him feeling lighter, although when she said the prayer he gave her, it did not mean much to her.
She pondered the things she had told the rabbi, about Esther and how envious she had been of her beauty; about Morty and how he reminded her of her failure to save her sister; of her own lost choices; and of Ben and how she never felt he could love her. She told the rabbi her secret dream to escape the prison that she felt her life was now, how she longed to get rid of the bitterness. Some of the things the rabbi told her made good sense to her. Some of them did not. He was, after all, just a man, and although he was a wise man, he didn’t know the answers to everything. But one thing Rabbi Levy said that she came to believe was “If you keep thinking back, you will never leave the prison of the past. Think about the rest of your life.”
She wondered, Can I do that? How can I do that? And then she found that each day the past faded a little bit more, and each day it was more possible to just live that day. One morning Golda woke to sunshine spilling in through the room’s curtains. She opened the window, and the air felt soft and fresh. At breakfast, when she served Ben his tea and oatmeal, she touched his shoulder as she leaned over to put the dishes before him. The solidity of his back sent a tingle through her fingers. He looked up at her, and she couldn’t stop the small smile that flitted across her face before she turned away.
All day she felt a thrill of anticipation. She would welcome Ben back and try to make the best she could out of what had been given to her in life. Her life maybe was not so bad, she thought. And if Ben could not love her as he had loved Esther, he was kind and good to her. She would have to settle for that. Maybe God would give her another chance to be a mother. But she had a son, Morty. He was hers and she cared for him. The thought lifted her heart. Golda dreamed of another child—a girl, she hoped. She would name her Zlata, Sylvia, after her beloved grandmother.