Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  Though I seldom got to be with him, I loved him wholeheartedly and wanted nothing more than his attention and approval. For his part, he was driven to make me fearless and competitive, a process he regrettably began by pitting me in rivalry with my cousin Lynne, my alter ego and the friend with whom I spent almost every waking moment. Together we walked to P.S. 98 on 211th Street and back each day, traversing subway tunnels rather than crossing over Broadway, with its crush of traffic that our mothers thought more dangerous than the underground passageways of the Independent line. Often we were even dressed alike, in Madison Avenue finery passed down from Herbert’s daughters. Without exception, I always got the blue dress and my brown-eyed cousin the identical in pink, our mothers continuing the eye-color-based assignment that Alice had employed in outfitting her girls like twins many years before us.

  Leslie (L) and Lynne, cousins and constant playmates

  Despite our closeness, my father contrived to set up constant contests, the first of which was based on height. Almost weekly, he placed us back-to-back to judge which one was taller, and I stretched as high and straight as possible, hoping to measure up for him. With his hand weighing on my head, I strained to roll my eyes behind me to check the outcome, but Daddy’s disappointment was invariably palpable, impelling me to offer him consoling explanations as we rode the three flights home from Lynne’s apartment together in the elevator.

  “Lynne’s three weeks older!” I offered hopefully. “Are you sure you pressed her hair down?” All explanations he waved away, complaining that I would never grow to match her height unless I started eating more.

  Determined as he was to make me strong and self-reliant, he was frustrated to have to battle a range of childish fears that were no doubt fanned by the apprehensive worries of our Nana and our mothers. For them, the experience of war and persecution seemed to leave a residue that clouded every day with the possibility of ending in disaster. My father, however, had no patience for limitations he regarded as irrational: he could not abide my fear of dogs, and when we went to an amusement park, it exasperated him to see me shrink away from any ride more dizzying than the Ferris wheel. My delight in spending precious time alone with him was inevitably tempered by anxiety that lacking nerve, I’d let him down.

  Gary and Leslie at a fair on upper Broadway in New York City in 1956

  On wintry Sunday mornings, for example, when he took me to an outdoor ice rink to teach me how to skate, I begged him to hold on to me, but he insisted that I skate alone and struggle to catch up to him. He skated backward. He held his hands out, urging me to come to him, but he never made that possible: his method of instruction depended on his taunting me, slipping ever out of reach. The closer I got to him, the faster he backed away from me, beckoning, retreating, enticing, rejecting. Effortlessly, gracefully, he glided off into the distance, mingling with strangers, admiring agile girls in skating skirts spinning pirouettes for him. I inched across the ice with clumsy, frozen baby steps. I was frantic to keep sight of him, with his flashing can-do smile and nods of encouragement. Rigid on the ice, I wanted only to be enveloped in the warmth and safety of his arms, but he was always unattainable.

  Worst of all were nighttimes when the lonely darkness of my room was enough to keep me up, on guard, afraid of formless demons that crouched lurking in the shadows. How I yearned to claim my mother’s gentle solace in those nights that sleep eluded me and the hours crawled on implacably, with slowness that tormented me. And so I started creeping out to her, night after night, until finally, fed up with intrusions, my father warned of punishment more fearsome than my nameless fears if I so much as dared to step a foot beyond my bedroom door.

  Even so, the night arrived when I could not endure remaining in my room in bleak, fear-riddled solitude. Inspired by the dish and the spoon that perennially scampered off together in the picture on my bedroom wall, I decided to run away. I lugged a heavy dining chair across the foyer in order to climb up, reach the bolt, unlock the door, and tiptoe out of our apartment toward the shelter of an older generation that understood escape. I prayed my grandparents would be home, I hoped they’d hear the bell, and I wondered if they’d summon my parents or welcome me, a barefoot refugee in a flannel heart-print nightgown, desperate for asylum.

  Well, you’d think the kaiser’s daily birthday party had been bubbling behind their door! Sigmar’s brother Heinrich and his wife, Toni, had arrived a few hours earlier by train from Buffalo, and so a world away from the silence I had fled, there were blazing lights and conversation, Nash’s chocolate oak leaf cookies, Nana’s special pound cake, her lemon meringue pie laced with homemade whipped cream, and a platter of green grapes beside a bowl of water. My grandfather was nursing a cigar, and he and his brother were sipping German wine. I was delighted to see that it was Schwarze Katz, for then I knew that Bapa would give me the little black plastic cat that came tied around the bottle’s neck.

  Peering in disapproval over wire-rimmed glasses, my great-aunt Toni pursed her purple lips in a wrinkled ridge of condemnation. “How is this she sneaks away from home in the middle of the night, without her parents knowing?” she demanded. “Lisel, you cannot go along with this. Take her straight back home again.” My heart sank. But welcoming the opportunity to make an independent stand against her overbearing in-law, Nana fed me cookies and then took me in to sleep with her. She changed into a long white cotton nightgown with her initials embroidered on the collar, a remnant of her trousseau. Then, removing hairpins, she unwound the barely graying braid that I had never seen in any other style but coiled around her head. Soon we nestled in her mahogany twin sleigh bed on square European pillows, under downy claret-colored comforters, and we compared the peculiar shapes we saw in the darkness even with our eyes closed.

  I focused on the swirling shapes of white and gold and black that swam across my eyelids, patterns changing faster than I could describe them. “Ja, I see just the same,” Nana assured me. “Everybody does.” But by then my shapes had altered, and I struggled to pin them down. Fireflies! Bumblebees! Tiny dots of red and blue! Flashing silver fireworks! “Doch, the same,” she said. Her bare arm pressed close to mine, cool and hairless, the skin beneath the freckles as smooth and pale as moonlight. Guiltily, I doubted her. If my own description barely matched the thing that I was seeing, how could either of us know whether anything we saw was actually the same at all? Nana’s breath came soft and regular, so I guessed that she was sleeping now, while a few feet away from me, Bapa’s snoring filled the silence of the night. For the first time, though, it didn’t seem to bother me to be the only one awake. I scanned the room for monsters; I sought out old familiar witches writhing in the drapery, but they all had disappeared.

  The next morning, frantic that I was missing, my father was furious to find me being coddled with his in-laws, and the next time I tried absconding in the night, he nabbed me in the act. Before I managed to unlock the door, he came tearing down the hallway from his bedroom, scooped me off the chair, and threw me back in bed. But in truth I don’t recall his being very angry. Not himself a man to knuckle under to authority, he may have secretly applauded the audaciousness involved in my defying him again.

  In the spring of 1954 my mother overlaid the nubby, cherry-red upholstery of her living room couch with a lightweight floral slipcover reserved for warmer months and planted herself in front of her Zenith television set, rooted to the spot by the Army-McCarthy hearings. With morbid interest, cigarette in hand, she followed the evildoings of yet another ruthless demagogue who manipulated hatred and suspicion, fanning fires of persecution—this time of alleged Communists in the United States military. She didn’t miss a minute of that snarling drama. Meanwhile, at a very early age, I, too, was drawn to sit before the Zenith, in my case riveted by the Million Dollar Movie. The same film played several times a day, each day for a week, so that by the end, moved to tears and knowing every line by heart, I would kiss the actors each good-bye behind the glassy screen. Indeed, watching
them over and over only made me more devoted to my favorite movies, and in retrospect I realize that they shared a common focus: a pair of star-crossed lovers in a hopeless situation.

  The two films I liked best of all illustrated for me what havoc may result when a reasonably happy couple meets a third exciting character. In Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, a married, middle-aged, upper-crust Bostonian falls passionately in love with a siren of the deep, and although he seems callously prepared to abandon wife and daughter to live forever with his fantasy, he has to give her up. In the final scene, the mermaid disappears alone, deep within the grottoes of a black-and-white Caribbean.

  Yet nothing could compare with the romantic classic Casbah! At its close, the beautiful French heroine takes off from Algiers, stricken that her lover, the dashing jewel thief Pepe Le Moko—having stolen her from her fiancé—has not joined her on the airplane as they had planned. We see her through the little airplane window in gorgeous, grieving profile. Just beyond her view, Pepe lies bleeding on the tarmac, fatally shot in the back by the police while rushing to escape with her. With his last strength, the handsome thief reaches out in longing and despair toward the fleeting vision of the girl who is flying off without him. Her plane lifts into the air, and the heartbreak written on her face tells us she assumes that Pepe’s failure to make the flight means he has abandoned her.

  These were the scenes that would play in my mind’s eye when my mother later confided to me the story of her lost Roland. But Casbah, with its subplot of an earlier love that Pepe cruelly casts aside, also served as a cautionary tale. It taught me to be leery of the too-inviting smiles of women whose cheeks bloomed roses and whose voices kissed the air with music when encountering my father. It was a situation that I recognized within our very building when I was seven years old and returning from the park with him. Dad was wearing his tennis sweater with white shorts and sneakers when a pretty dark-haired woman with long and shapely legs beneath a frisky, pleated tennis dress rushed across the lobby to join us in the elevator. He flashed a rakish grin and held the door for her. Her name was Jean, and I knew her as my mother’s friend from the benches along the Dyckman House. She lived in our building with her husband and two young daughters, and to Alice’s annoyance, she’d already conquered Sigmar as a courteously vocal, though innocent, admirer. But Jean had not yet met my father.

  “Is this your daddy?” she patted my hair and cooed, not troubling to hide her interest. “You have to introduce me, honey. I’m always looking for a tennis partner!” I studied her animated face in the mirror of the elevator as she turned her charm on him. I was anxious to get us out of there, but when we reached our floor, my father blocked the door and paused to talk.

  “Why, I can’t believe you’re Janine’s husband and that we’ve never met before!” Jean trilled. “No wonder she’s been hiding you!”

  Returning home that day, we found my mother sitting on the carpet, intent upon a sewing project. Gary was in his playpen, and Louis Armstrong was crooning on the phonograph, “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time,” a record Dad had bought for her. She had taken apart one of her best cocktail dresses, a deep blue taffeta with silver polka dots, and cut it down to fit me so I could wear it as Queen Esther in a Purim play at Sunday school. Mom had sacrificed her lovely dress and spent the afternoon resewing it by hand and adding silver sequins that winked across its bodice. I gaped at it in wonder, overwhelmed by my mother’s generosity and handiwork. Yet schooled, perhaps, by the Million Dollar Movie, I also felt uncomfortable. It somehow felt disloyal to have witnessed that elevator scene without telling her about it, but I lacked language to define the special spark that electrified the atmosphere when Mommy’s friend encountered her very handsome husband.

  For the better part of two years, the quest to find the right suburban house at a price they could afford was the sole objective of my parents’ weekend travels through a region whose limits were defined by a twenty-minute radius of 204th Street. But I took comfort in believing the day would never come when—my father dreaming big and my mother always reining in—they would agree on how much they could spend and thus find what they were looking for, allowing us to move. Dad was adamant about climbing up in life and out of Inwood, though Mom was anything but eager to leave her family behind. She had made a significant mistake, however, in giving Alice a key to our apartment, and Nana used it freely, intruding on Dad’s privacy. Meanwhile, his business was doing well enough that he had bought a building for it in that northern region of New Jersey that Mom had finally identified as the suburban area closest to her parents. Now he was insisting that they find a house nearby.

  Even I couldn’t quibble with the fact that we were cramped in our apartment with its little kitchen and single bathroom, especially since my mother had hired a full-time housekeeper who slept in the bedroom I already shared with Gary. Still, the thought of leaving my beloved grandparents; and Lynne, my closest friend; and Trudi, like a second mother; and charming Norbert, the comedian, was too horrible to contemplate. And the prospect was only made more gruesome by the tedious process of looking for a home.

  Week after week, the only thing that seemed to change was the ball game on Daddy’s car radio as we drove from house to house in Bergen County. Crossing the Hudson gave my father the opportunity to extol the genius of the George Washington Bridge as a marvel of suspension engineering and often to indulge in full-throated renditions of “Ole Man River,” Paul Robeson–style. But it ended forever my ability to picture Paris perched atop the Palisades. The radio transmitter I had fantasized as the Eiffel Tower turned out to be planted firmly in Fort Lee, whose Champs-Elysées was an unattractive commercial stretch of Route 9W.

  In each house that we visited, my mother attempted to drum up my excitement by showing me the room that was soon to be all mine and telling me to plan how I would like to decorate it. But regardless of how I mentally placed the furniture, we rarely returned to the same location for a second look, which never left me disillusioned. No matter what, I didn’t want to move to any house beyond a Spalding’s throw of my favorite house, the Dyckman House. I was therefore stunned when suddenly they bought one—a new split-level in Englewood Cliffs on an unpaved street with half-built houses and empty lots for sale. They put down their deposit on the same day they went to see it—a day when, tired of seeing houses, I had stayed behind to play with Lynne—so my bedroom there came without my dreams installed.

  My parents each had different views about it.

  It’s really time we move now, so this will be our starter house, my father thought.

  I will never pack my bags again, so this is it, my mother vowed.

  My own feelings were expressed in an anguished note I slipped beneath the door of my aunt’s apartment on the morning that we moved:

  Dear Trudi,

  I can’t stand leaving you. Oh no! I won’t leave you what’ll I do? Please buy the house next to us. Please.

  Love,

  Leslie

  When we crossed the Hudson River from Manhattan on that day we pulled away from the shelter of our building and the protective circle of the family, I was going into exile in a foreign land. It gave me an entirely new appreciation of my mother’s story, of all the times she’d had to leave her home not knowing what would happen next. Then eight years old, I identified completely with how she must have felt on the day she crossed the Rhine, relinquishing her childhood. I realized that my life would never be the same again. In leaving Inwood, I, too, was moving to America.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE OTHER WOMAN

  THE OTHER WOMAN WHO infiltrated my parents’ marriage and undermined my father’s relationship with everyone who knew him was an iron-willed Russian Jew whose abhorrence of communism had prompted her to abandon her home and family in St. Petersburg at the age of twenty-one in order to pursue a life of freedom in America. Like my father, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum had been determined to shed her past and so changed her Jewish name, but she never quite
could lose her smoky Russian accent. Nor did her appeal for Dad, remarkably, have anything to do with her sexual attractiveness.

  An intense and compact woman with large and hungry eyes and short dark hair that capped her like Athena’s helmet, she was in fact older than my father by thirteen years. But from the moment in 1958 that he read her massive manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, the novelist-philosopher who had renamed herself Ayn Rand became his goddess. As another of her disciples later wrote of her psychological seductiveness, she “spiritualized” the secular, and my atheistic father rallied to the banner of her so-called Objectivist philosophy and its icy credo of rational egoism with the all-consuming fervor of fanatical religious faith.

  With his smoldering good looks and a slide rule in his pocket, Len embodied the Ideal Man that Rand worshipped through her novels: the romantic hero as thinking individualist, motivated by self-interest, battling conformity. Yes, the very incarnation of her own Howard Roark (the defiant protagonist of The Fountainhead, an architect played in the iconic movie by Gary Cooper) was seated at her feet in a Manhattan lecture hall in the person of my father, who became her avid student while in his early forties.