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

by Leslie Maitland

  How to understand that this man of fiercely independent intellect and spirit could lose himself within what amounted to a cult? That he could swallow whole not only Rand’s general philosophy of life, but also a range of judgments that prescribed his opinion on almost everything—from psychology and politics to literature, art, and music—and demanded his contemptuous rejection of anyone espousing views that she did not endorse? What unspoken need for meaning or approval did Objectivism fill for him—a midlife, midcentury, fledgling industrialist, first-generation American whose native optimism and personal ambition impelled him to insist that man can and must create himself?

  He viewed everything through the prism of her Self-adoring worldview: “My philosophy, in essence,” she wrote, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

  Lofty principles aside, conflict raged within our house when it came to applying Randist doctrine to the realities of life. It branded altruism as anathema, elevated selfishness to virtue, and shrugged off social responsibility for poverty and suffering. While it denounced the collective, the ideology Dad parroted seemed to border on the fascist, envisioning a super cadre of elite, right-thinking, steely individualists, men who refused to yield to any force on earth except Ayn Rand. She insisted on being hailed as the greatest human being who ever lived and the “supreme arbiter” of all morality. Incredibly, my father was bewitched.

  He had come upon Rand’s work thanks to an employee who presented him with a copy of Atlas Shrugged the Christmas after we moved to New Jersey. With Unisco installed in its own building, Dad began producing metal nameplates for machinery, finally branching out from sales to manufacturing. Now, in his ambition to build an empire, Dad found Ayn Rand cheering for him as “the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.”

  “The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality,” she preached, and so he worked most nights past eleven and on Saturdays as well. He reveled in his factory, toying with machinery, tackling engineering problems, enjoying the precision of production, inhaling without regard the toxic chemicals and metal filings that compounded the assaults upon his body already waged by the asbestos he had lived with in the war. With his employees, as with his children, insisting on perfection, Dad proclaimed they didn’t have to like him as long as they respected him. Still, in the silent, isolated space where his feelings burned, he held to a mythic vision of oath-pure loyalty and was stunned to find that his training incited treason instead of gratitude. Though several key employees quit, taking with them customer lists and knowledge of his product line, and then mounted competition, he never tried to modify his exacting style of leadership. Instead, each betrayal added to his sense that he stood alone in warfare with the world.

  We arrive in life an empty slate, Ayn Rand told him. Nothing is inborn, but anything is achievable. Not just intellectually, but physically as well, Leonard now embarked on a rigid program of self-perfection. In the early 1960s, long before bodybuilding gym rats became ubiquitous, he started working out with heavy weights he set up in the basement. True to form, he exercised with scientific exactitude, didactic mission, and unrelenting discipline. Regardless of how tired he was, near midnight he descended to his lair and through the early morning hours, even in our bedrooms two flights overhead, we could all appreciate his groaning efforts. Forcing out his last repetition of every set of exercises, Dad would drop his massive barbells clanking to the floor. The storm windows rattled in their metal frames. The house shook on its foundation.

  “Hit me!” he’d order at the kitchen table, rolling a sleeve or lifting his shirt to expose ready targets of unyielding flesh—bulging biceps or his chiseled abdomen with its well-defined six-pack. He insisted I punch him, a demand that I hated. “Harder, harder!” he urged. “What’s happened to you? Don’t be a sissy! Can’t you put any more force behind it?”

  The joke underlying his bellicose posing was that he neither required nor indulged in physical force to defeat his opponents. Yet time and again, he would volunteer to demolish the knave who dared to upset us, be it a boss, a teacher, a friend, or a neighbor. As a matter of fact, we never saw him get into a brawl, but he defiantly relished the concept of it, and from the safety of home he made boastful threats with the zesty enthusiasm of some teenage gang leader.

  “Did you tell him what I’m like?” he would earnestly ask—flexing his muscles, baring his teeth, his jaw sliding forward—regarding any imagined combatant. “How I could destroy him?” This he would ask with an innocent, hopeful look on his face, wanting nothing more from a wife or a daughter than to be idolized and daily acclaimed her one perfect hero with all of life’s answers.

  Unhappily, most of Dad’s answers came undiluted from Ayn Rand, and he soon began to proselytize on her behalf with everyone he met. Through years to come, I would witness his philosophical interrogations with my stomach tied in knots. He ambushed unsuspecting visitors and held them victim to his grilling, even high school boys who came to pick me up for dates and unguardedly agreed to sit down for a chat. All the more within the family, he pressured us unceasingly to accept her every word as Truth.

  Dad hired Mona’s son, Ken, a lawyer by education, to work for his company and was quick to convert his nephew into an Objectivist of equal fervor. He was frustrated when his attempts with Mom and me proved less successful. On any weeknight that he made it home for dinner, he took advantage of our time together to lecture on Rand’s precepts, igniting hot disputes. Starting around the age of twelve, I’d be drawn into the discourse by the intellectual challenge of it, never quite accepting that a difference of opinion on topics so abstract as the meaning of existence or the nature of morality would signal disrespect and turn the battle fiercely personal.

  “Don’t argue with him,” Mom advised, ever seeking peace. “Just do what I do, pretend that you agree. I sit and nod and let it all go in one ear and out the other, while I think of something else.”

  On weekends, however, every social outing became a nightmare for her, as Leonard’s dogmatism invariably led him to disparage and offend anyone who mistakenly believed that Objectivism might be the starting point of mutually enlightening debate. Publicly, she tried to hold her tongue, yet after they came home, late into the night, I would strain to overhear the quiet, mournful rumble of her voice as she chastised and lamented his intellectual arrogance and his rigid, alienating promotion of Ayn Rand. As she spoke, I knew she was mentally scratching another couple off the list of people willing to make plans for another social evening and another contentious round of Dad’s philosophizing. Friends were hurt by his disdain, she warned, hating how he snapped, “You’re wrong!” at anyone who disagreed with him.

  As a result, if the first decade of my parents’ union was lit by the happy glow of extended family, the next was plagued by raw dissention introduced into our home by Rand, whose own personal life was roiled by her widely publicized adulterous affair with her youthful protégé Nathaniel Branden. Still, in the arena of sex and love, as in all else, Rand laid out definitive expectations for her followers. Her heroines were “worshippers” of man—of the sort of Übermensch who made them yearn to yield in sexual submission, like maidens in some bodice-ripping period romance. On the other hand, she said that ideal man must have a woman “who reflects his deepest vision of himself,” a woman whose surrender allows him to experience his sense of self-esteem: “There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.… Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.”

  Where did this leave Janine? Having experienced the results when an all-defining “ism” captures a society, she recoiled from a philosophy with tentacles that wrapped around all aspects of our lives. She couldn’t go along with it, nor would she agree to attend Rand’s Objectivism lectures with my father until it was too late a
nd he had found another woman to take the seat beside him, sharing private communication on the pads where he took notes. A slim brunette with bitten nails, she was divorced from a magazine photographer and lived alone with two young sons. Len had hired her as his office manager, and she was ruthless in angling for a more important title.

  “BETSY,” she inked her name in his notebook in thick letters during one of Ayn Rand’s lectures where they sat together; and then again, coy and delicate, all in lowercase: “betsy ellen chase,” a last name that seemed fitting. Amid his notes on “pseudo-self esteem,” “psycho-epistemology,” and “integrated consciousness,” Len listed on his pad a half dozen possible titles for her within his company, ranging from Secretary-Treasurer to “Master of Arms @ Love.”

  “What’s the difference between Vice-Pres & Exec. Vice-Pres?” she jotted back.

  “You are a good looking dish tonite,” he scrawled to her in his notebook during another lecture, then scribbled over his words to hide them, like a teenager flirting with a classmate behind the teacher’s back in algebra.

  In a lecture on sexuality, he took copious notes on neurotic “indiscriminate promiscuity” in the pursuit of self-esteem. “Mr. Promiscuous” was the Randist label for the man who is “unable to achieve sustained sexual happiness” with a woman who reflects his own highest values, but is ever on the prowl for new and varied conquests. “ ‘I need constant approval, constant re-assurance,’ ” he placed the thought in quotation marks, as if that made the man at issue someone else. But he filled the back of the page, a little sheet of graph paper, with an emphatic warning to himself:

  “ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!!!”

  Moving to New Jersey was like settling in a foreign country in ways that I had not imagined. Now, in my small public elementary school, the war and persecution that had brought my mother to America seemed utterly removed from my classmates’ experience and curiosity, as did the Inwood neighborhood, which I missed terribly. I felt alone, and walking home from the bus stop every day, I kept my fingers crossed and whispered little prayers that my mother’s car would be standing in the driveway when I reached our corner, my sign that she was there for me.

  To alleviate my desolation over leaving my cousin, my mother had bought a trundle bed for my beautiful dusk-blue French Provincial room so that Lynne could visit us on weekends. It hardly seemed possible to own my new suburban life unless I could share it with my lifelong friend, and it caused me sorrow beyond telling to watch our closeness evaporate. Weekend after weekend, I begged her to stay over, but even when I managed to persuade her to accept, she unfailingly canceled by Friday afternoon, preferring to stay at home. After fluttering with excitement throughout the week in anticipation of her visit, I felt crushed each time that in spite of the fun I’d promised her, Lynne would not be coming after all!

  “Cripes, get over it!” Dad would chide me, sitting at the kitchen table eating roasted peanuts from the lid of a Planters jar and sipping the one extra-dry Beefeater martini he allowed himself each night. “It’s your fault for still expecting her!”

  By now, Trudi had a baby boy, Michael, and their family left Inwood, too, moving north to Riverdale, where they overlooked the Hudson River from the Bronx. But since this meant I no longer saw my cousin even when I visited my grandparents, our separation and my sense of loss only grew more painful.

  In the isolation of our house, so different from our family-filled apartment building and the cozy hubbub of the nearby benches, I found my mother. Suddenly deprived of my constant companionship with Lynne, I needed her. My mother, too, separated for the first time from her parents and her siblings, with my father unavailable, turned to me. We soon developed an extraordinary friendship. There was nothing we couldn’t tell each other, and the bond of trust we shared was one that we maintained even as we gradually made friends of our own ages. Now as then, I cherish our closeness as among my most important gifts in life.

  When did I learn about Roland? Actually, like my brother, Gary, I cannot remember ever not knowing about the Great Romance our mother was forced to leave behind in Europe, though I am often told it is unusual for a mother to be so open with her children. Still, it was only after I turned thirteen that she permitted the story of her first true love to carry overtones of irremediable remorse. Until she felt betrayed, she may have described her marriage to my father as a different type of life from the one she would have lived had war not intervened, but never as the wrong one. Then suddenly, things changed.

  As I approached my thirteenth birthday, I hoped to mark it by becoming a bat mitzvah. But my atheistic father opposed it, and my grandfather Sigmar became his unexpected ally because his traditional Jewish views did not include extending the religious rite of passage to females. So as a secular compensation for the religious ceremony I had wanted, Dad proposed celebrating my “coming of age” by taking me to the Metropolitan Opera to introduce me to the music he loved. For me, of course, it was not the same, though I was touched and delighted he had thought of sharing opera with me.

  Dad groused about the opera schedule: my first exposure to the art form should be something colorful or romantic with opulent costumes and scenery like Aida or La Traviata. Instead, the performance for which Mom was able to get tickets would be heavy and austere—Richard Strauss’s Elektra, based on the tragedy by Sophocles and legends of the Trojan War, presented in one perturbing act and sung in German. I nonetheless looked forward to this rare outing alone with both my parents, Dad generally so elusive in my daily life. And having developed an avid interest in Greek mythology, I myself was pleased by the selection. Indeed, as things evolved, the gods themselves could not have chosen more aptly, given this opera’s archetypal themes.

  Elektra is the story of a daughter and a son caught up in the passions of their parents’ adulterous relationships and grievances, a tale of suffering and guilt, of vengeance and murder and filial responsibility. As a memorable rite of passage into the adult world with all its stern realities, it taught me that secrets and infidelity can destroy a family from within. The fateful story of Elektra and her devotion to her father suggested that it was natural for children, with their sharp sense of justice and loyalty born out of love, to take sides and seek retaliation for a wounded parent. Its message soon proved timeless.

  On the afternoon of my birthday celebration, my father called home profusely apologetic to tell us we would have to go without him because some foul-up with an order and a delivery deadline required him to work all night. The outing felt ruined. At the end of the performance, sitting beside an empty seat, my sadness was only deepened to see Elektra fall lifeless to the ground, a crazed victim of her own emotions and thirst for blood, doomed with both her parents. But when the lights came up, Mom gamely tried to resuscitate a festive note.

  “Let’s call Daddy at work and see if he can take a break to join us for a late dessert,” she offered, as we drifted arm in arm into the neon night and the glittering buzz of Broadway. Our original plan had been to go to Sardi’s, my favorite treat and the best place for spotting actors enjoying after-theater suppers, but I readily agreed to try to lure Dad from his work to someplace closer to his office. As Mom encased herself in a glass-walled phone booth on the sidewalk, I stood admiring the glamorous crowd of opera patrons swirling out into the city. When next I glanced at Mom, however, I was stunned to see her weeping. Tears were running down her cheeks, an unfamiliar sight, as she fumbled to retrieve her coins and dropped them in the slot to make another call. It seemed she got no answer, but when I tried to open the phone booth’s folding door and ask her what was wrong, she mutely pulled it shut and shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. With the third call, someone answered—I could hear her speaking German, the habit in the family, so frustrating to us children, when grown-ups needed code—and I could tell that she was talking to her brother, Norbert.

  Drenched with fear, I had no way to guess why she sat there crying. The familial tr
agedy that had swept across the stage with costumed figures drawn from legend had devolved into this real-world drama, also in German, with my mother sobbing in a cage of glass on a busy city street. Was Daddy sick? Had there been an accident? I had yet to understand how her position in that phone booth, exposed in pain to any passerby, would later seem an emblem of her public humiliation in the face of Dad’s duplicity.

  With little conversation we were soon driving along the Hudson River and across the bridge, and then we veered off course as Mom headed for my father’s office in Ridgefield. But the one-story stucco factory proved dark, and the parking lot was empty. She left me in the car as she went to try the doors and peered into his office window, but everything was locked.

  “I bet Daddy finished earlier than he expected and just went home!” I said when she returned, the explanation seeming obvious. “Why are you so worried?”

  “I already tried there,” she responded flatly, eyes fixed upon the factory door.

  In fact, when we reached our house Daddy wasn’t there, nor would he appear for several hours. If my mother had been deceived, I felt, then so had I. If she had been rejected, then so had I, on what was meant to be my very special night.

  That summer Gary and I went off to camp, and in her lifelong quest for stability, afraid of ultimatums, Mom tried to close her eyes to the problem with her husband that was only growing worse. She had her dark hair fashionably cut and streaked with blond, but since her efforts to save her marriage stopped short of embracing Objectivism, Dad seemed to feel entitled to pursue a woman who shared his ideology. Miss Chase apparently endorsed the life of “rational self-interest” that Rand insisted was essential, and soon Dad was wooing her transparently, heedless of our feelings.

  He decided, for example, to give my brother’s bicycle to Miss Chase’s son. Despite Gary’s protestations, Dad told him he’d outgrown it and insisted on buying him a bigger one. Then he announced that he was giving Mom’s station wagon to Miss Chase, and he told Mom that she could buy any other car she wanted. Who could have imagined our sensible, cost-conscious mother pulling up in a new sleek, silver Thunderbird convertible sports car? It had black leather bucket seats and a black cloth roof that retracted automatically, vanishing into the trunk at the push of a button more smoothly than Dad had slipped away on the night of my birthday. The price tag was punishing.