Read Online Leah's Journey by Gloria Goldreich - Free Book Online Page A

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