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

by Leslie Maitland

  But on the day that autumn when my mother found Grace, the housekeeper, passed out on the floor of the living room and frantically called my father’s office for help in what appeared a medical emergency, Betsy Chase crossed all bounds.

  “I’ll send you Ken to deal with it,” Miss Chase answered curtly. “Len is busy.” When she hung up on my mother without so much as putting my father on the line, it was my cousin Ken—devoted to Janine and no fan of Miss Chase’s—who finally set my mother straight.

  A few days later, Mom told us that Daddy would be moving out at her request. My father asked to speak with me, but I refused to see him and hid in misery in my room. Uncle Norbert brought a truck to the house to help my father move his things to the garden apartment in nearby Leonia where he was going to live with Miss Chase and her children. Mom had loaded up big cartons with pots and pans and sheets and towels, magnanimously setting aside an assortment of furniture for him to take along as well. In his pile were his riding boots, his tennis racquet, and his ice skates—items he so seldom used that the fact that he was taking them fortified our impression that the breakup would be permanent. I pictured Daddy racing on the ice between Miss Chase’s sons and was sure they skated with more confidence than I did.

  With Dad and Norbert loading the truck, Mom decided to distract us by taking us to the movies, where she retreated to a phone booth to talk with Trudi. By the time we headed home, I had convinced myself we’d find him, as usual, sitting in the kitchen nursing a martini and waiting for Mom to cook him dinner. But no, like his office on the night of my birthday seven months earlier, the house was still and dark. It felt altered and vulnerable. Before, the dynamic energy of my father’s outsized personality and the crackling, pulsing life force of his restless spirit pervaded the atmosphere like the hum in the heating ducts. Now the silence of his absence was deafening.

  My father’s place in the bed he shared with Mom was never empty in the time that he was gone. That’s where I was sleeping. Whether by her invitation or by my own initiative, we spent every night together, holding hands. Although strong and over five foot seven, my mother seemed instantly diminished and, more than anything, I wanted to protect her—an overwhelming job assignment for a thirteen-year-old girl, herself suffering with feelings of abandonment. I also carried a secret sense of guilt. I agonized that the nighttime fears that had prompted me so often to invade the private space behind my parents’ bedroom door had fueled my father’s hunger to find another woman, a woman who wouldn’t tolerate children’s interruptions. What clearer proof could anyone require that I had come between my parents than the fact that I was sleeping now in my father’s place? Desperate to restore my mother’s happiness, I wanted to become like the hero in a fairy tale who slays the evil dragon and escorts the damsel in distress to a magic golden castle where all conflicts are resolved.

  In the quiet of late nights in her bedroom, her muffled tears and anguished sighs inspired me to coax my mother to talk about the past. Our magic golden castle was the world of Europe twenty years before, in which she had been loved by another, faithful man. Against the ticking of the pendulum and the half-hourly chimes of the antique French clock in the hallway, I traveled with my mother to her Freiburg girlhood, and I understood her pain at leaving home and lifelong friends when her family fled to France. She took me back to Mulhouse of 1939, frightened near the border on the eve of war, and she permitted me to know Roland, a slender, doe-eyed youth of exquisite sensitivity. Night by night, talking more than sleeping, we delved into her stories as we lay together in the darkness. The unraveling of history was far, far better than any Million Dollar Movie, and I relished all my mother’s stories, knowing they were real.

  I saw my mother as a teen barely older than myself when she caught Roland’s attention. I saw them at the party where a game of spin the bottle first emboldened them to kiss, and then along the banks of a green and curling river where they nestled in the reeds and let their fingers wander. Mom hunted through the pages of her memory and invited me to share the romance of her past. Perhaps it was her way of getting even with my father: as Daddy coupled with Miss Chase in a strange apartment, my mother brought Roland to life to spend the nights with us. She nullified the hurt of my father’s infidelity by evoking a greater love and a greater loss, turning Daddy into second best, a reluctant compromise. I lay there in confusion, simultaneously feeling angry with my father and disturbingly untrue to him. I deplored his cheating, even as we cheated with the memory of Roland. I wanted my mother’s story to have a happy ending: I longed to hear the episode that saw her reunited with Roland, even though that ending might have meant my not existing.

  When my closest friends inquired what had happened to my father, the reason for his leaving us, I wanted to protect my mother from any intimation that Dad had found another woman more worthy of his love. So I used Mom’s romance with Roland to turn everything around. There was another man, I said. The Nazis robbed my mother of the true love of her life. It hardly seemed to matter that my father had moved out, I said, because my mother’s broken heart still belonged in France. She had never gotten over him—Roland, who had loved her absolutely and whom she would have married had war not intervened. In its terrors and its tumult, they had lost each other, but Mom would always be in love with him: enduring, hopeless jealously had made my father leave.

  There were other aspects of the story that, being just thirteen, I felt I couldn’t tell a soul. Under cover of darkness, my mother had confided that she’d run to meet Roland on her final night in France and wound up hiding on a rooftop in the harbor of Marseille. Who knows where passion might have led them, she admitted, in those terrible brief hours before their separation, if only Nazi agents hadn’t raided their hotel? I lay rigid in my parents’ bed, amazed at the audacious girl who would become my mother. The dutiful woman who planted geraniums around our patio and fixed cream cheese sandwiches for my lunch box and picked me up from piano lessons had, once upon a time, trembled with her lover in the moonlight glinting off the waves that would carry her to Casablanca.

  “But why didn’t you stay with Roland and let your family go without you?” I pleaded, wanting to believe that love could conquer all. It was tempting for us both to mourn the losses of the past when the future loomed in jeopardy.

  “You know it wasn’t safe for Jews in France with Nazis taking over. If it had been up to me, the way I was insane for him, I would have spent my life hiding in an attic with him, but Roland was worried we’d get caught.”

  “Then how come he didn’t go with you?”

  “He couldn’t get the papers that he needed.”

  “And after the war, why didn’t you go back and marry him?” I needed to know everything, and that remained the crucial mystery.

  “I was afraid to leave my parents here without me. But I also thought Roland had given up on me. Bapa hid his telegram and maybe letters, too, for all I know. By the time that I found out Roland was looking for me, I was married to Daddy. I was already expecting you. I couldn’t just run off to France and steal you from your father.” Beneath the covers, Mommy squeezed my hand. I said nothing for some minutes for fear that I would cry. But I had another question.

  “Why don’t you go and find him now? Now that Daddy’s gone away.…” I held my breath, fearful of her answer. Trying to be generous, I waited for my world to fall apart, the fate Ayn Rand reserved for altruists. In the silence, the brass pendulum in the hallway vacillated back and forth.

  “It’s too late now. I’m sure Roland is married. He never had any problem attracting girls.” The recollected pain in her voice was washed in sepia. “But more than that, I could never leave you.”

  By day, I sat on the carpet in my mother’s bedroom beside a little walnut two-drawer French chest in which she kept her trinkets, and we examined everything, never growing tired of the comfort of nostalgia. An enameled brooch, a memento of cousin Mimi, was an eighteenth-century maiden dressed in petticoats, watering her flow
ers. There were class ribbons Mom had worn to school pinned onto a red beret, but she’d never stayed in any one school long enough, she said regretfully, to collect sufficient ribbons to feel that she belonged. I admired her Cuban swimming medal for prowess in the breaststroke. Yet her most important treasures were the tricolor poppy pin and the silver ring with its square blue stone that Roland had bought for her in Lyon as tokens of their engagement. She took off her wide gold wedding band and tried to slide Roland’s ring onto her finger, but it only fit her pinky.

  “I guess I was much thinner then,” she mused. “In the war, nobody had any food. We were always hungry.”

  “Couldn’t a jeweler make it bigger?” I suggested. Mom made no comment but kept it on her little finger. (My father, I knew, had never worn his wedding band, objecting that it “cut off circulation.”)

  When we finished with the chest, we moved on to her armoire. It was there she found the small black-and-white snapshot of Roland taken by a stranger from the deck of the Lipari. He was standing in the rowboat he had rented to follow her steamship out into the harbor, exactly as she’d told me.

  “He was very thin then, too,” she commented. “See how that coat is hanging on him. But I loved how lean he was. I don’t know why Daddy always feels he needs to build big muscles.…” Together we studied the old photograph for several minutes before she reached for her purse and tucked the snapshot of Roland behind the others she carried in her wallet—photos of me and Gary and my favorite picture of my father, grinning like a movie star, with the dimple in his chin and jet-black hair.

  “I’m sure that Roland’s letter must be here, too,” Mom said, rummaging through her shelves until she found the envelope. It was the letter Roland had slipped into her coat as they stood together on the pier and he held her in a last embrace in 1942. My French was not yet good enough to translate all that he had written, but Mom put it into English as she read aloud. I supposed that she had memorized it:

  “Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it.… Believe in the fulfillment of our happiness, believe in it with all your strength, all your will, all your love, and our test will end as we desire.… I give you my word that we will be married.… If I had to lose you, nothing good would come of my life. You are my goal.”

  Within a week of Daddy’s moving out, he showed up for Sunday breakfast carrying a bag of bagels. I remember retreating very quickly, while Gary and Mommy chatted at the table with him. Listening from the upstairs landing, I heard my father say he was working so late every night that he had trouble getting up on time, which prompted Gary, then nine years old, to volunteer to phone him every morning to wake him up.

  “Really, Dad, I’d like to do it,” Gary chirped, the innate generosity of his character coming to the fore.

  “Hey! That’s grand! That would be a super favor,” Dad answered in his most ingratiating salesman’s tone. I would have liked to pour chocolate milk all over Gary’s head and watch it puddle on the wax he slicked onto his crew cut. My brother was pawing through Mommy’s kitchen junk drawer for a paper and a pencil to write down Daddy’s number, and I was wondering how he would like it when Miss Chase answered the telephone and asked what he was doing, disturbing them at home.

  The following Sunday morning, Daddy came to visit us again; then, on a weeknight, he took Mommy out to dinner. To my surprise, she had gotten all dressed up, and her hair and nails were freshly done, but she told me that their meeting didn’t mean a thing. Of course there were details in any separation for a couple to iron out. But, oh, no! No, he wasn’t moving back, she swore, definitely not! By the end of that next week, however, my father told my mother he wanted to come home. He loved her and needed her and appreciated her even more than he ever had before.

  Aside from that, Betsy Chase had revealed herself to be as careless with his money as his first wife, Claire. She had outfitted their apartment down to the smallest knickknack, even buying beach chairs in the middle of December! The farsightedness of her shopping sprees seemed to horrify him. What’s worse, he grumbled to my mother, when he scolded her about it, she went wild and started throwing things! Now he needed to come home. He loved us all and missed us terribly. He had already fired Miss Chase from the company, and he swore he’d never see her—not her, not anyone who ever swished a skirt or winked an eye in his direction. From now on, Dad promised, he would be an angel. After all, my mother was the woman who matched his highest standards and reflected his deepest vision of himself.

  My father’s coming home displaced me from my mother’s bed and sent me back into my room, where I struggled to come to terms with warring feelings. I seemed to love him and to hate him, to rejoice at his return and to wish that I could hide from him. The aloofness I’d displayed in their weeks of separation, when I’d stood in loyalty to Mom, now meant I stood alone, the odd one out.

  I failed to understand how my mother took Dad back so quickly after all the pain he caused her, and I felt burdened by excessive knowledge—about both Miss Chase and Roland. Miss Chase had disappeared, and I was glad, but what to do about the tantalizing Frenchman whose fate remained a mystery? He languished in my fantasies, calling for attention, and I had to peek to check whether he had kept his place inside my mother’s wallet. I wondered what it meant to find him there, even after Daddy had returned.

  “Try to pull another stunt like you did with Betsy Chase, and I’ll go and find Roland,” Mom threatened, only half in jest.

  “You’d just be disappointed,” Dad retorted. “I’m sure you’d learn that I’m the better man. I’ll bet you he’s a weakling.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ATLAS

  ON SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 1965, my father overcame his slice and hit a drive that sent his golf ball flying like a well-aimed arrow, 195 yards to the seventh green at the Englewood Golf Club, where it struck the pin and plunked politely in the cup, giving him a hole in one. News of the achievement sped around the clubhouse. Someone even thought to call our home to tell my mother to come down, and by the time that Dad strode in—as proud as if he’d landed a rocket on the moon—the Grill Room was abuzz with fellow golfers prepared to help him celebrate. Earlier in the season, ever an optimist, Dad had paid the few dollars it required for “hole in one insurance,” which would now kick in, covering his tab for drinks for any fellow member who showed up to toast his feat.

  In his striped golf slacks and bright red shirt, Dad was ebullient and handsome and especially delighted that his hole in one had topped my mother’s on a different hole only two weeks earlier. From the moment she had scored one with my father looking on, he was hellbent to catch up, and the fact that his drive was fifty-five yards longer only added to his satisfaction. As he explained it, his powerful and well-directed shot straight to the pin reflected skill, whereas she had merely aced a hole through an uncanny touch of luck.

  “Mine was just an intelligent roller,” Mom readily agreed, uncomfortable at having made a hole in one before her husband. She demonstrated by example the advice she often gave to me—that it was psychologically unwise to outdo a man in any contest, because the sensitive male ego simply couldn’t handle it. But the caption underneath my parents’ picture, prominently published the following day in the Bergen County Record, summed things up in one snide word: “COPYCAT.” The photo showed my parents crouching on a green with two golf balls beside a hole, and the club chairman squatting between them with a hand on each one’s back. Mom and Dad are smiling at each other with impeccable eye contact and their profiles to the camera. Thereafter my mother took one look at their picture in the paper and pronounced her husband’s toothy smile disingenuous.

  “That’s his phony smile,” she said. “He doesn’t fool me for a second. I know he isn’t happy sharing the limelight.”

  The queen conch (photo credit 22.1)

  But he was happy with his feat, and that period was a good one for their marriage. Joining the golf club brought new friends and distracted Dad a little from his
ferocious Objectivism. The nature of the club itself, moreover, brought a Las Vegas sort of titillation to their everyday suburban lives. Located just across the river from Manhattan, it was a hangout for celebrities and entertainers who added glitz and glamour, and for well-connected mobsters who brought intrigue and a whiff of danger. Anecdotes about them never failed to make the rounds, and the occasional encounter with a famous or edgy character was fodder for the tables at formal dinner dances requiring closets full of silken evening clothes.

  (L to R) Leslie, Len, Janine, and Gary in 1970

  With other couples from the club, Mom and Dad now embarked on their first European trip together. They toured the Continent in a whirlwind, staying in the finest places, but Mom also planned a detour to reconnect with relatives. Most important, she and Dad peeled off from the group to stop for lunch in Mulhouse with Edy and Lisette, the first time Mom had seen them since the war. The visit proved awkward, as Mom’s cousin and his wife, listing toward divorce, refused to speak to one another and used their children as intermediaries, even as the family sat together at the dining table. But at a moment when the irrepressible Lisette had my father’s ear, Mom seized the opportunity to draw Edy aside and ask whether there was anything he could tell her about Roland. She didn’t have the luxury to meander subtly to her point. What did Edy know about him? Had he stayed in Lyon when the war was over, or was he back in Mulhouse? Had he ever married? Did Edy know if he had children? Had he gone on to practice law? Perhaps the two had met in Alsatian legal circles?