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

by Leslie Maitland

  Edy scowled and cut her short. “Laisse tomber! N’y pense plus!” Edy said. Drop it! Forget about him. “The only thing I can tell you is that Roland Arcieri was ruined by women.…”

  Janine asked him no more questions. She knew enough about Roland’s appeal for women to understand the message. Being married to Roland, she told herself, might well have proved even more tormenting than her relationship with Len. She would have to try to put aside the fantasies she’d nourished, in the event her husband went wandering again, of seeking out the lover whose memory she had conjured to help her through the awful year of Len’s affair. When they returned home, Mom sadly confided Edy’s words to me. Her dream of someday reuniting with Roland, she said, was one that she had finally buried in Mulhouse, exactly where it started.

  On a gray November morning in my senior year in high school, Dad wrote out a range of symptoms on a piece of paper—breathlessness, perspiration, weak pulse, hazy vision—and drove himself into the city to see Charles Friedberg, my mother’s former boss and the chief of cardiology at Mount Sinai Hospital. We learned the news from Dad’s secretary when Mom tried to call him from Newark Airport, as we were about to take off on a tour of colleges that we instantly aborted. Instead, we rushed to the doctor’s office and arrived there just in time to hear the verdict: “Shit, man! You’ve had a heart attack!” Dr. Friedberg exclaimed, studying the electrocardiogram. “I can’t believe you lifted weights this morning! And then you went to work and drove here on your own?”

  Dad was only forty-eight; Mom was forty-three, and in that awful moment when we first saw Dad as vulnerable, our lives were changed forever. The very picture of virile health and strength, an athlete and a bodybuilder, a man who never ate or drank to excess, Dad had had a heart attack! We were stunned and terrified by what it would mean for him.

  “For Chrissake,” Dad objected, “I maintain my body like a goddamn temple. There’s not a frigging man I know in better shape than I am, but none of them have had a heart attack! Even my own father, who never leaves his sewing table, totally ignores his health, he’s already eighty-six and his heart’s ticking just fine. It’s not fair, damn it!”

  Yet Dr. Friedberg said that youthful years of downing quarts of milk at every meal (as Dad had boasted) and eating meat and fats (not to mention his mother’s apple strudel) had done the damage. Cigarettes, excessive stress at work, and a tense, hard-driving, type A personality had all contributed. He ordered Dad home to bed until Mount Sinai called to say a room had opened up for him. He should expect to stay there several weeks in a serious attempt to do absolutely nothing but rest and recuperate and try to calm himself. And until further notice, no more driving, either.

  We headed home in silence, the first time I had ever seen my mother in the driver’s seat with Dad reduced to riding as a passenger. So my father’s personality was type A! I had never heard the term before, but felt relieved to learn they had a name for it. Mom was gripping the steering wheel of Dad’s long Cadillac as she headed northward to our exit, driving with scrupulous attention to avoid any sort of error that would invite his criticism. But Dad was lost in inner space. He sat there like a toppled general, bound in shackles and cursing careless strategies that had failed him in his last campaign. All at once, the world appeared immeasurably more dangerous. Dad was our protector: he had sworn he was invincible, and on some level we believed him. I felt weak and hollow, and the future seemed a precipice that dropped off every bit as steeply as the cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades, whose craggy edge we traced along the parkway home.

  By the time that Dad was ensconced in the hospital, however, Mom had plotted out a different life for him. As usual, she was wise enough not to broach her goal directly, but rather, as she put it, to slip it through “the back door,” where he could meet it on his own terms. At the time, he was sitting in his hospital bed, squeezing and releasing a coiled metal gripper, designed to work the muscles of the hand and forearm, which he had prevailed on her to smuggle in to him from home.

  “Wouldn’t it be crazy if Picasso gave up painting to become a dancer?” she casually put the question to him, forgetting for a moment that Objectivists had scant appreciation for any artist who distorted the noble human form.

  “Maybe that would do the world a favor,” Dad snapped. “You know Picasso’s not my bag. What the hell’s your point?”

  “Well, then, make it Michelangelo,” she persisted. “My question is the same.” She was crocheting in a chair beside his bed, where she spent the whole of every day from early morning until midnight and then drove home alone, taking care of Dad much as she had nursed Roland twenty-five years before. “It’s tragic if a person doesn’t use the talents he’s born with. You’re a natural salesman, but instead of doing what you’re really good at, you’ve been killing yourself in the factory, and this heart attack is your reward.”

  The demands of manufacturing created too much stress for a perfectionist like Len, she thought, while breathing metal dust and poison fumes all day were hazardous as well. She therefore wanted him to sell the factory, and inevitably she persuaded him. Whenever it came to the big decisions in their lives together, Dad trusted her advice completely. He would give up the factory that was his source of pride and, with it, the sacrifices it required and the self-destructive cycle of problems with his workers. But a great deal more reluctantly, he would have to abandon his vision of himself as one of Ayn Rand’s heroes, those defiantly indomitable captains of industry responsible for running the machinery of the world. Mom’s worries for his health, of body and of spirit, required him for the first time to acknowledge his vulnerable humanity. She led him by the hand to a path that saved his life, but it meant he had to walk again in a salesman’s pinching shoes.

  Within months of his return to work, Dad sold the factory and moved with his secretary into a two-room office suite in a building just six blocks from home. Once again he became the middleman between the thrumming factory fiefdoms owned and operated by other men of business, more lucky or successful—men whose hearts could take it. Instead of making products, he made sales. He worked the phone and traveled through his region, and year after year won the highest sales awards for the companies he represented, brightly flashing his “phony smile” in pictures of the winners.

  Three years later, when Dad gradually became aware of numbness in his fingers, affecting his dexterity and making it difficult for him to button shirts or pick up coins or turn a screw, he seized upon a German word to describe his problem. He had lost Fingerspitzengefühl, or “feeling in the fingertips,” he said, finding it less frightening to admit this new infirmity in a foreign language. Besides, how could any weakness that sounded so ridiculous actually be worrisome?

  Doctors could not identify the cause and advised him to make the best of it. He fashioned small devices that helped him compensate—a hook that pulled his buttons through their holes, for instance. But before long, his racquet met the tennis ball less reliably than usual, and then even longtime partners like Trudi’s husband, Harry, avoided playing with him, proffering excuses that were hurtfully transparent. On the golf course, when he lost his grip and his driver started flying from his hands as his golf ball left the tee, it was so humiliating that he decided to stop playing, and my parents quit the club. Membership, Mom said, was not worth the cost for her alone, and anyway, it seemed cruel for her to play when he no longer could.

  Instead, on summer weekends, though Gary usually begged off, my parents and I headed for the beach for the best times we ever spent together. Occasionally, we’d enjoy long weekends along the coast in Montauk, but often we made day trips to closer-in Long Island. At the beach, in his daring Speedo bathing suit, my father could pretend that nothing much was wrong. Once we were installed upon the sand, disinclined to waste a potentially productive moment, Dad would stage a public show of calisthenics before tackling a crossword puzzle. We’d pass the hours in harmony and always stay until the crowds packed up and the sea regained
its dignity. Then, with his white pith helmet clapped upon his head, sitting in a chair like a bwana on safari, Dad would pop the cork on the bottle of white wine he’d chilled all day waiting for our sunset moment. Mom would feed the squealing birds the scraps we’d saved from lunch—always on the lookout for stragglers too timid or hapless to claim their lot—or she’d sit and rake the sand with long red nails to hunt for shells worth taking home.

  Sometimes my parents allowed themselves to be lured into the ocean for one late swim. I’d watch them walking toward the water, Mom tucking golden curls into her bathing cap, and Dad with his long-legged, rolling shipboard gait, increasingly unstable, as if the sea were swelling underneath his feet. Hand in hand they’d plunge into the steel-gray waves. The lifeguards would have left by then, and I’d train my eyes to watch for them as they rose and fell beneath the churning Atlantic waters, heading ever farther out. Frantic and exasperated, I’d squint into the distance as I stood at water’s edge, waving my arms and stamping my feet and shouting uselessly into the wind to urge my parents back to shore.

  They’d laugh at me when they returned, Mom emptying her ineffective bathing cap, Dad slicking back his hair and shaking water off his body like a giant dog. I never left the beach without doing all I could to linger, wishing I might stop the sun and hold the day forever. Even as we trekked across the sand to the empty parking lot, even as the tide rushed in to reclaim that patch of beach where we had left our marks, I would turn and stare behind me, yearning to imprint the hours and store the blue-gold panorama in the treasure house of memory before the darkness drowned it.

  As time went by and Dad’s mysterious infirmity did not improve, I wondered whether that might be the reason for his mellowing, particularly when having finished college at the University of Chicago, I announced my hope to postpone a journalism career to study world religions at the Harvard Divinity School. In view of Dad’s hostility toward religion, I had expected him to object, but he accepted my decision and even moved me up to Cambridge. He rented a truck and astonished us by donning a sleeveless undershirt as an impromptu trucker’s costume. From the driver’s seat, Dad honked and waved in collegial greeting to every other trucker we passed along the highway, as he proclaimed his lifelong membership in that fraternity of working men who made their living on the road.

  When we arrived at dusk at my apartment building on Prescott Street behind the Fogg Museum, a snafu with the keys barred our entry until morning. But unwilling to leave the truck overnight with all my worldly goods inside it, Dad talked the janitor into lending him a ladder. Then, undeterred by his physical instability, he insisted on climbing up and entering my studio apartment by jimmying the courtyard window in the dark. He worked all weekend to make the small apartment cozy for me—a gift of time and effort he unstintingly devoted every time I moved for the next eleven years until his handicap prevented him from working with his hands and tools. He hung curtains and light fixtures and pictures and towel bars and extra locks on doors and windows and every other amenity or safety feature he could possibly imagine.

  That winter, a detached retina sent to him into surgery. He called me from the hospital early on a Sunday morning—the first time I could remember his calling me himself, instead of simply picking up the phone for a minute when I was on with Mom.

  “I’ve been lying here thinking, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason that you’re up there studying religion is that you’re looking to discover something—the meaning of life, or however you want to put it,” Dad began in a tone that also sounded unfamiliar for being hesitant and, to use his favorite word, respectful. “If that’s the case, I don’t know if this helps at all, but going into surgery sort of clarified my mind, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

  “Be happy!” he said, the engineer’s answer as true in his mind as a quadratic equation. “In the end, that’s the thing that really matters. Just be happy, dollface. Make the most of life in any way that counts for you. Of all the concepts that we’ve argued over, you and I, that’s the only one I really want to leave with you.”

  The first time I saw Carole Gordon she was dancing in a knee-length sleeveless dress, aglow in red chiffon, on the patio behind my parents’ house on the day in 1975 that I got married. I was dancing with my father—resplendent in a white suit and light blue shirt that matched his eyes—when she came wriggling beside us and started flirting with him. The deeply tanned and dark-haired wife of a convivial businessman, Carole was a casual friend of Mom’s friend Jean, who introduced her to my parents. I remember taking stock of provocatively sculptured calves, a muscled chest, and iron arms, a body that gave evidence to what I’d already heard described as her dedication to tennis. Less impressively, she spoke an exaggerated Brooklynese or a similar Long Island variant that I quickly learned to mimic.

  Indeed, I aped her manner and her speech with such dead-on, gum-snapping effectiveness that even Dad was forced to laugh, despite the fact he liked her, and despite the fact he knew my crude impersonation was meant to serve as a signal that I knew what she was up to. He showed restraint by responding in good humor to my less-than-subtle tactics. Yet it didn’t take me long to see that Carole Gordon was the effervescent embodiment of the very sort of female my father claimed that men liked best, as bouncy and as fuzzy as a yellow tennis ball. Nor could I fail to recognize that I had trapped myself within a hopeless contradiction: I felt that I could stand it better if my father had been dazzled by a woman I admired, while at the same time I felt relieved not to have to take her seriously, by all accounts a bimbo who could never hope to steal my mother’s place with Dad. Meanwhile, Carole connived around me and tried to be my mother’s friend. Yes, beneath the guise of friendship, she invited my parents to a lively stream of parties at her well-appointed Scarsdale home and insisted that my father follow—to quote Mom, “like a dachshund at her side”—ostensibly to help her. Certainly, that was a task for which his previous domestic duties did nothing to prepare him, as my mother never gave him any that did not involve a toolbox.

  My own marriage, hastened by my parents, ended by amicable agreement within two years. My husband, a television news producer, and I quickly proved unready for permanent commitment. But I was happily living and working in New York, having landed my first job at The New York Times, the fulfillment of my lifelong dream, the September after I received my master’s in religion. I still don’t know whether to credit my new economic independence, the imprimatur of The Times, my Harvard graduate degree, or a change in Dad or me for recalibrating our relationship on a more even-handed basis. He kept clippings of my news stories in his breast pocket to show off to friends and customers with the same delight and pride that other men reserved for photos of grandchildren. And when a front-page investigative series I had written on defective subway cars and corruption in New York City’s Transit Authority won several journalism prizes, Dad escorted me to a formal awards dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. It seemed fitting, as it was he who’d helped me understand the engineering of their undercarriages and the significance of stress cracks.

  Still, as the women’s movement stirred awareness in the country, I found myself reacting with discomfort to the royal treatment Mom bestowed on him, following the example of her parents. While it never disturbed me as a child to see Nana doting slavishly to meet Bapa’s every need, Dad’s self-centered demands began to seem abusive, since he took it as his due for Mom to wait upon him, even as he often paid her back with inconsiderate behavior.

  “Janine!” he called to her upstairs, for example, one weekend when I was visiting and sat beside him at the breakfast table reading morning newspapers.

  “Mom’s getting dressed,” I said. “Is there something I can get for you?”

  “No, I need your mother.” He raised his voice to carry farther: “Janine!”

  “What is it, Dad? I’m sure that I can handle it.”

  “Janine!” he called again, ignoring me.

  Mom came rushing to th
e kitchen barefoot, clutching at her robe. “What’s wrong?” she asked, studying our faces for signs of brewing friction. “I was getting in the shower.”

  “I’m ready for my coffee now,” he told her. I gaped, but he didn’t bat an eyelash when he muttered an explanation: “Your mother knows the way I like it.”

  “Butt out,” he’d say when I objected to his treatment of her. “I don’t need you to tell me how to run my marriage.”

  In February 1976 my parents were in Acapulco on vacation, when Trudi called them with the dreaded news that Norbert was in the hospital, not expected to survive for long, his two-year battle with lung cancer coming to its end. They were on the airplane rushing home when Dad spiked a fever, shivering uncontrollably, and by the time they landed, he could barely walk or move his hands in any coordinated effort. With double vision and his usual anchorman’s elocution replaced by garbled speech, he was admitted to the same New Jersey hospital where Norbert’s life was ebbing. There, a nightmare became reality. The elevators ferried us between the rooms of men we loved, in anguished navigation from helpless grief at one bed to nameless fear that hovered at the other, as doctors could not identify the etiology of Dad’s symptoms.

  The next day, Mom and I were standing at Norbert’s bedside when—dressed, handsome, and as freshly shaved and scented as if ready for a date—he died at only fifty-four. Hours later, Mom arranged for an ambulance to transfer Dad to Mount Sinai, the beginning of a dismal quest to analyze his illness, a crippling problem temporarily assigned the generic and understated label of “peripheral neuropathy.”