Chapter 5

The next morning I made an overseas call to Hong Kong. In the Fifties such calls used a problematic radio-telephone linkage. I finally reached a West Coast operator who said she would attempt the necessary connections and call me back. Twenty minutes later the phone rang and it was my uncle. The connection was terrible. I asked him when he was returning to New York City. The line was filled with fluctuating noise and faint, disjointed voices. I understood him to say the “political situation had changed and he needed to stay in Hong Kong”.

I raised my voice. “What about Leah?” There was a crescendo of buzzing and I heard his voice again. “beautiful bird with a broken wing that will never fly”. I was yelling now. “I am planning to go back to school this fall!” I heard his voice in the cacophony of noise say “telegraph”. There was only static on the line and I slammed down the phone.

Leah had heard me yelling and concernedly come into the study.

“Jeremy?”

I held my hand up. I didn’t want to talk. I stomped away, going up the circular iron stairs to the arboretum. I dropped in a chair to brood. I rehashed my uncle’s words from that last night. I couldn’t recall making a lasting commitment. This wasn’t fair.

Leah came into the garden wearing a short pink robe and carrying a beach-bag. She came to me and kissed my lips.

She took a beach towel from her bag and spread it on the sun-warmed tile. She took off the robe and was naked.

Taking a bottle from the bag she poured thick oil on the upper slopes of her breasts. It trickled over her nipples. Her free hand cupped below one breast catching the excess. She smoothed the sleekness over a breast, then running her hand in the deep divide of the firm globes to the other breast. She slowly, caressingly oiled her bosom. She smoothed the oil down her stomach to her mons. She squirted some on her pelvis and let it stream down her legs. She set the bottle at her feet. She ran both hands down her stomach to join at her cervix. She murmured with pleasure moving her hands down her thighs. Bending forward, she turned and thrust her firm buttocks upward toward me. Picking up the bottle, she reached behind her back and squirted oil between her cheeks. She palmed oil over the surface of her ass. She dropped the bottle and squatted. Using both hands she caressed and squeezed her butt. One hand parted her cheeks oiling the crevice. She murmured again. She threw her hair back in private ecstasy, running her fingers around her anus. She sinuously ground against her hand. Bringing her hands around under her hips she gracefully flowed prone to the towel. She began to slowly grind. Her spread thighs revealed her fingers stroking wantonly at her sex. She thrust against her hands. Her buttocks clenched. She gasped in orgasm. Relaxing she laid still on the towel.

“Leah,” I said.

She turned her head, opening heavily lidded eyes.

“Yes?” she answered softly.

She rose to her knees and shuffled to me. Pushing my legs together, she planted her elbows on my knees and rested her chin on a palm.

“Yes Jeremy?” she looked up at me.

“You overheard my conversation with my uncle?” I asked.

“I heard you yell my name. It was hard to miss,” she replied.

She walked her fingers up my leg. I was wearing shorts. She flattened her oiled breasts against my bare legs.

“I have to finish school!” I said in exasperation.

She cocked her head. “I am stopping you?”

I shook my head.

“Hold your head up,” I told her.

Puzzled she lifted her chin.

I unlocked her collar. I let it dangle from her neck.

“There,” I said.

She pulled it off and held it in her hands.

She looked at it and then to me.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said.

“Maybe it was time Leah” I replied.

“Now I really feel naked “ She observed.

“What if this is not what I really wanted? At first this was forced on me,” She held up the collar. “It took away that I had any say in my life. But, now maybe I am not ready to be free like this. Maybe I have come to like being this way.”

Her eyes searched my face.

“Are you getting ready to leave me too?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I just don’t know what I want.”

In the coming weeks we didn’t discuss this matter again.

June came to the city. Leah asked if she could go with me to the downstairs gym. I took her the next morning. She immediately loved everything about it. She hefted the smaller barbells and rotated the heavy iron plates on the stands. She ran her hand over the speed bag and rubbed her cheek against the battered, worn surface. “I love the smell of leather and men,” She winked at me.

Bertie was delighted with her. I asked him if we could put some muscles on her. He closed one eye and gave her a frank look over. He made a gap toothed smile. “She looks “purty” good to me already. But “wat” ever you say, Mr. Jeremy.”

He started her on a series of exercises doing push-ups, chin-ups and light weights. She had watched me spar with Bertie and asked if she could try that too. So everyday Bertie would patiently practice in the ring with her. He showed her to how to throw a punch. I watched her stalk Bertie around the ring, throwing lefts and rights at the thick pad he held out. I was proud seeing her growing confidence. I wasn’t worrying anymore what my uncle would think of the freedom I was giving Leah.

After dinner we routinely retired to the living room. We had found this an intimate time to enjoy a glass of wine and watch evening close over Central Park. We both shared parts of our lives that were difficult to discuss. She hadn’t been forthcoming about her war years. I hadn’t asked, feeling if she wanted to share it, she would when she was ready.

This night there was a rising full moon. The city looked surreal in the brilliant lunar light. The stark black and white absence of color made me think of a photographic negative.

I said, “Let’s go out and walk in the park.”

I suggested we could slip out through the freight area. No one would see us.

She considered it, then negatively shook her head.

“No. I’m sorry. No!” She looked beseeching at me.”You don’t know how bad I get when I try to leave the building. My heart starts beating like it going to pop from my chest. The worst part is I can’t get my breath and it is like I am going to asphyxiate. It is terribly frightening”.

She related they had tried before. My uncle had persuaded her they could go to the opening of the musical “Carousel” on Broadway. They planned to go in a curtained limousine and enter the theater from a back entrance. My uncle had reserved seating in a private balcony. She really wanted to see the play and had agreed to try. Leah told me when they entered the parking lot, she had panicked. My uncle had to carry her back to the elevator. She thought she was dying.

Leah opened up about her war years.

Life in her close Jewish community was idyllic with brothers and sisters and loving parents. She admitted her memories of then were perhaps rose colored because she had been a little girl. She said she knew that she must have been a happy child, because when the uniformed soldiers came with guns, that was the first time she had ever known fear. They had forcefully herded the females into one truck, separating from them from her brothers and father. She said that was the last she ever saw of them. She said they had traveled for days in that truck. It was cold and there was no bathroom. The soldiers would stop and let them relieve themselves beside the road as they watched. At arrival at a barbed wire open field she had been separated from her mother and sisters. That was the last she ever saw them. She had been with a small group of girls her age when the Colonel took her. She called him the Colonel. He took her to a big building with rooms and locked a chain on her ankle. She said she stayed in that room a very long time. He didn’t hurt her but he liked to bathe her with a big sponge. He also liked to watch her squat over the basin and make water.

She spent many long hours by herself.

This part of the story she paused. “I was told I was a prodigy child, Jeremy. I could recite the five books of the Torah verbatim when I was six. All of it. Poppa would read it to us every night. I heard it when I was very small and I remembered it. People in the village would come and listen to me,” Leah watched my reaction.

I smiled at her.

She continued. A Polish woman came daily to bring her sausage and a potato and to empty her waste basin. She had given her a doll. She told the doll the tales of Moses, Abraham and Noah. She had spent the hours alone with her doll reciting the books out loud.