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

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