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

by Leslie Maitland

  In the evenings, when Gary came to see him after work, Dad had just one thing weighing on his mind. He didn’t like the woman in my brother’s life, and he roused himself from an unaccustomed fog of enveloping indifference only to harangue his son to give her up.

  “That girl is not for you,” Dad said, his only parting words of real advice for anyone. “Can’t you get it through your head? There are lots of other girls out there. Remember my night nurse at the hospital? Donna—wasn’t that her name, Janine? Now she was really something, and I could tell she liked you.”

  “Hell, after seeing you, she’d just find me a disappointment,” Gary answered with a comic frown, half joking in his reference to Dad’s endowments. Still, that Gary actually eloped with that same nurse within the year our father died—inflating Dad’s suggestion and hurriedly entering a marriage that ended in divorce only three years later—was testimony to our father’s enormous hold on him. Even with Dad gone, Gary was still clinging to that vestige of his guidance.

  At nights, in that last week of his life, as might have been predicted, Dad’s neuropathy was aggravated miserably by his new and deadly illness. Mom had given up their bed to him and was camping on the carpet, wanting to be close in case he needed something, while trying to protect herself from being whacked by flailing arms and legs. Restlessly, Dad tossed in bed, struggling to move his leaden limbs, and more than once he landed on the floor, bruised and moaning. Mom cried out in the darkness for me to come and help her lift him, and when we failed, we had to call the fire department.

  Men in boots and yellow slickers came charging up the stairs—the white lamps of their truck’s revolving lights bringing daytime to the sleeping street at three a.m.—the effort to restore my father safely to his marriage bed now finally become a medical emergency. With all good humor, exemplifying youth and vigor, the firemen lifted Dad and got him back between the sheets, but his helplessness in the face of their easy masculinity was mortifying to him. So on the morning we failed to recognize would be his last, Mom rented a hospital bed with railings. In order to make space for it, their queen-sized bed was dragged into the hallway and stood on its end, like a billboard advertising the temporary nature of the sickroom.

  We spent that final afternoon sitting in my girlhood bedroom. Mom had turned it into a study, and there Dad generally watched television, clicking from sports to news to some familiar classic movie in which he could depend upon the hero’s coming out on top. Now, however, suddenly and wordlessly, he twisted in his chair and fumbled on the skirted table at his elbow, clumsily attempting to reach the telephone. A large jar lamp wobbled precariously, and Mom shot up from the couch to steady it. She placed the phone onto her husband’s lap, and intuiting the meaning of his effort, crossed the room in search of her address book. Then, with no time left to repair the hurts between them, resigned to all the sorrows of a marriage that might have ended differently, she dialed Carole Gordon’s number.

  “Hold on, Len would like to talk to you,” she said into the phone, as efficiently impersonal as if she were his secretary. With such openhearted tact that she gave no sign of knowing who was on the other end, she handed the receiver to my father and drew me from the room so that he could say good-bye to the woman he had promised to give up countless times before, never really meaning it. Mom closed the door behind us and only then gave in to the tears she never let him witness, so determined was she to allow him to believe he was truly getting better.

  Indeed, all week, still following his lead as the doctor had advised, none of us indulged in any talk with Dad that seemed beyond the ordinary. To Mom, he had simply voiced regret that he was “a failure,” meaning he had not attained the level of financial success he expected of himself.

  “That’s not what ever mattered to me,” she answered him. “I only wish that you were faithful.” Now she said that regardless of how much we craved the closure of a deep and meaningful conversation with him, forcing final talks would just be selfish. But how terribly I ached to tell him how much I’d always loved him. The oppressive weight of silence with so much left unsaid was almost unendurable, while the words I longed to say and longed to hear from him never entered into speech to be engraved in memory.

  That afternoon I prevailed on Mom, who hadn’t slept in days, to hire a nurse to spend the night. Before the nurse arrived, Mom decided to turn dinner into a sort of picnic. Since Dad no longer had the steadiness to make it down the stairs, she set up a card table in the study so that we could eat with him. She sent me to buy fish and vegetables—the meal she had been pushing on him ever since his first heart attack more than twenty years before—and for the first time in days I went out into the world. Like a hostage escaping from the scene where a madman held my parents captive, I wished that I could summon help to free them. I drove into Fort Lee as the lights began to glitter on the bridge into Manhattan and on all the storied towers across the Hudson River that my father so admired. I was stunned to find the world proceeding in its pace.

  After dinner, as we helped him to his feet, his arms around us both, Dad went limp. Staggering together, Mom and I fought to keep him from sliding to the ground, and we called out to the nurse for help. We struggled to the bedroom with Dad’s knees buckling, and we lifted him onto the rented bed. Hollow and cruelly wan, his handsome face was robbed of resolution, yet as we tried to raise the railings to ensure that he would not fall out again, something within him snapped. This loss of his autonomy proved one loss too many. The furious fire of life in him could not be tamed or caged. My father, a lion to the last, roared and thrashed against the railings and gasped for breath, his blue eyes staring wide in fear and rage.

  I reached into the bed to calm him, but his arms were spinning crazily. His clawing fingers were ripping at the air, and some awful final panic took him, and he fought me off with all remaining strength, and wrestling in delirium, he slashed the skin below my thumbnail, drawing blood. Even now, the skin below the nail on my right thumb bears a small, white, ineradicable remembrance of my father, from that moment when we battled one another, fighting in our love, Dad asserting independence throughout his final hours.

  His suffering that night was horrible. Weeping in frustration at our inability to soothe him, Mom tried to reach his doctor, a man whose interest in this patient had evaporated on the day that chemotherapy sparked a heart attack. Now, past midnight, when the answering service succeeded in relaying a message filled with sufficient anguish for the doctor to call us back, he told us to give Dad a stronger sedative. It might conceivably hasten death by slowing down his heart, he warned, but bringing peace would be a mercy. Mom hung up the phone and stared at me in silence, her face devoid of color. Then she said that the noble view of human life that had always been the cornerstone of Dad’s philosophy was not well served by permitting him to suffer like a mute and wounded animal.

  Numbly, I stood beside her at the kitchen counter where so often at this early morning hour in autumn she had fixed us a special snack reminiscent of her childhood: roasted chestnuts with sliced apples and white wine. In deference to Dad’s limited dexterity, she always peeled his chestnuts for him, rummaging in the bowl to find him the biggest and the best. Now, with no less love but with tears coursing down her cheeks, she prepared to feed him one more time. Honoring the man with whom she’d shared her life, she took a pill and crushed it into applesauce and carried it upstairs. We sat with him until his limbs stopped thrashing and he drifted into sleep, but we failed to understand the ominous significance of the rattle in his chest. And so, past three a.m., I prevailed upon my mother to take a little rest herself. She told the nurse to call us the instant Dad awakened, and she came into the guest room with me, where, as we had done when I was just thirteen and Dad left home to try living with another woman, we lay beside each other in the dark.

  Now the other woman with my father was a nurse, a woman who had never known his many charms. No, she had never heard his eloquence or the sensual music of his deep
bass voice, had never been impressed by his lightning analysis of any complex problem, had never swirled across a dance floor with him, had never giggled as he trimmed her hair with a T-square to ensure he cut each strand precisely, had never watched him work all weekend to create a cozy home for her, had never heard him tell a joke in a faultless foreign accent, or seen the joy of life that sparkled in his eyes. No, never having known these things, she took advantage of the quiet of the night, sitting at his bedside in a chair where she was posted to keep watch, and fell asleep. And thus, at some unnoticed moment of a cruel, unguarded hour, my father fought with death alone.

  Dawn was gray and seeping underneath the blinds when I woke up to the nurse pulling on my toes through the blanket. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned me to follow her. Wedged between my mother and the wall, I crept out from the bottom of the bed, so as not to waken Mom. I was glad that after so many sleepless nights on the floor, she was breathing deeply and restfully.

  “He’s gone,” the nurse declared abruptly in the hallway where my mother’s antique clock, unwound for many weeks, had also ceased its ticking.

  I would have liked to build a barricade. I was afraid the nurse would summon some authority to steal him from us, and so I quickly ushered her out the door to keep the world at bay. I went back up and kissed Dad’s vacant face, the fine sandpaper of one day’s beard, and I clasped his cold and densely heavy hand between my own. Then, sinking into the yellow silk French provincial armchair that the nurse’s dozing body had left warm, I grappled with the fact that even as he’d left me at a distance totally unbridgeable, my elusive father seemed more wholly available than he ever had before. I considered letting Mom sleep a few more hours, her duty to him over, to keep him to myself. But I sat with Dad a little while and then went to awaken her. I realized that I needed her to stand between her husband and still another woman who had, in her own way, always been in love with him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MIDI MOINS DIX

  ON A WINTRY EVENING almost three months after my father died, his longtime stockbroker came to see Janine and Gary in order to discuss the family’s finances. A patrician German Jew with the sophisticated eye and necessary means to collect the edgy paintings of Lucien Freud, he made this house call to New Jersey as a favor, based upon regard for Janine’s father that stretched back all the way to Freiburg. With loyalty to generations gone, he bent his head to analyze bank and brokerage statements spread across the dining table and concluded that the details of Dad’s estate were particularly confusing.

  Len had died with records of his assets locked in his computer, protected by a secret password. Local computer firms failed to breach the barrier, and when Gary sent the hard drive to a company in Texas that specialized in hacking, somehow it got lost. Given the predicament they were facing, when the phone rang in the kitchen a little after nine p.m. and Janine excused herself to answer it, both men counted on her cutting short any interruption and returning to them promptly. But neither of them, nor in fact Janine, had any expectation of another echo from the past that night.

  “Allô? Bonsoir, Janine? C’est vraiment vous?” Is it really you? “This is Roland Arcieri.… I trust you still remember me, but I hope I’m not disturbing you. My sister in Mulhouse gave me your telephone number after your daughter visited her three months ago. But I confess I hesitated to call you until now.”

  The voice that came through the receiver was thickly accented in the Alsatian sort of French whose robust r’s slide into the throat, and the emphasis he placed on the first syllable of her name gave ZHA-neen its proper pronunciation, one that no American except for Len had ever tried to master. She heard Roland Arcieri speak her name and her knees began to tremble. The decades disappeared. Every weary muscle that had done its job to keep her moving forward, fulfilling all her duties to her parents and her children, her husband and his family, was jolted and revitalized. The world began to glimmer with endless possibilities she had summed up all her life in just one beloved name.

  “C’est Roland Arcieri! … J’espère que je ne vous dérange pas.” I hope I’m not disturbing you. She realized he’d addressed her in French with the formal form of you (vous), and she fumbled for the phrases to alter that straight off, not content, after waiting almost half a century, to be a crusty vous to him, even on the telephone.

  “Roland! I’m so happy to hear from you after such a long time. What a wonderful surprise! But couldn’t we still say tu when we speak together? At least to me, that would seem more natural: tu, not vous.” When she heard her words aloud in French, their waltzing trill, they surprised her by containing a grace note of flirtatiousness she no longer recognized as part of her personality.

  “You know, we can even speak in English,” he replied, disappointing her by skipping past her overture and seizing on our neutral you, with its disregard for degrees of familiarity. “I’ve been living in Canada since 1949, and if I say so myself, I’ve finally accomplished to speak the bloody language reasonably well.”

  Janine’s girlish peal of laughter drew glances from the dining room, where Gary and the broker sat waiting impatiently. “Well, then, if you don’t mind holding for a second, I’d like to take your call upstairs,” she answered. Switching into English, she was eager for more privacy, and so she motioned to her son to hang up the receiver in the kitchen as soon as she grabbed the call in her bedroom.

  “What the …?” Gary began to question her, but she slashed the air to cut him off and, grinning, dashed past him up the stairs and shut her bedroom door. In the twenty-minute conversation that followed, Janine told Roland that she’d married on July 28, 1947, a marriage not without its difficulties, and that she’d lost her husband that November. She spoke about her children and Trudi and then about her parents, both now gone, and about her brother’s dying prematurely in 1976, the victim of bad habits.

  “I’m very sorry, for your husband and for Norbert. I was hoping sometime or another I might get to see him again,” Roland said, a comment that buoyed her sudden hopes he meant to see her too. “You know, I always liked that fellow. But when it comes to habits, I’m no candidate for sainthood, either. I’m still quite loyally devoted to my scotch and cigarettes.”

  He told her that he’d married for the first time, though not by choice, exactly one month to the very day after she had married Len. He’d returned to Mulhouse in 1945 following his release from an uneventful stint with the Free French Army after liberation, and he’d bumped into Lisette. “She told me that you had a new life in America and that I should stay away from you or I’d only bring you misery,” he said.

  “Oh, my God!” Janine interjected. “She knew how desperate I was to hear from you. Did she really say that? You know, I think she never forgave me for the way I ditched her in a dump of a hotel room in Marseille to sneak off with you that night before we sailed for Casablanca. Even twenty years later, when she came here to visit me, she was still upset about it.”

  “What a shame, especially since you did me the discourtesy of falling asleep in our own very quaint hotel room, so in retrospect, you might just as well have brought her with you,” he jabbed.

  “After everything we went through, of course I was kaputt,” Janine said, the dream-created memory of their escaping from the Nazis through a window to the hotel rooftop still entirely real to her. “But then you should have woken me! I’ve never stopped regretting how I fell asleep that night!”

  “Ah!” he countered, his tone betraying more serious resignation. “That was just one of the irreparable mistakes we made in those days.”

  It was not until October, when he heard from his sister, that he finally understood how Janine’s failure to answer his many letters might not have been intentional, but rather the result of her father’s interference. Through all the years since they had parted, he assumed her silence meant she had resolved to move on and forget him, he said. She had obviously replaced him in America, much as Lisette intimated. Still, he remembered
being terribly hurt that she had never even deigned to write to him and tell him so, instead of leaving him to wonder brokenhearted.

  “You’ll have to take responsibility—my cynicism about love in general is all your fault,” he charged. There was a pause in which she heard him light a cigarette and take a drag, and that sparked her need for one as well, so she rummaged in her bedside drawer to find the pack she kept hidden for emergencies, despite the countless promises and resolutions she had made to quit. “Imagine my amazement,” he continued, his speech precise and somewhat stilted, “when my sister wrote to tell me that you’d sent your daughter to track me down in Mulhouse. It was quite flattering, of course, but also quite surprising, after so much time. I assure you, I did not know what to make of it.”

  “But I didn’t send her!” Janine interrupted, thoroughly embarrassed. “I had no idea that she was even going to Mulhouse. She was supposed to be in Freiburg at a meeting. I might have wanted to, but I would never have been that forward. It was entirely her doing! I only learned about it afterward.”

  “Well, that’s not the way I heard it,” Roland said, only partly teasing, “and my poor sister, la pauvre, is always very scrupulous in the way that she presents things. Here, I’ll read you her letter. It’s dated, I might add, October 22. I’m glad to say she wrote me far more promptly than you ever were inclined to do. So, I start:

  ‘Bien cher Roland,

  I must inform you right away of a visit that I received yesterday from a Madame Leslie Maitland, daughter of Janine Günzburger, whom you knew in the past. As she was making a trip to Europe, her mother charged her with seeking news of you, believing you were still living in Mulhouse. Leslie is a congenial person, speaking admirable French. She lives in Washington, and her mother near New York. Her mother had often spoken to her about you. Now I am supposed to tell you that if Janine never responded to your letters, it was because her father intercepted them, without destroying them. She only found them later, and then she was distraught at having failed to answer you. We spoke about you for a long while.…’