“But my sister, generally a person of irreproachable behavior, quietly decided not to pass along any information as to how or where I might try to contact you.” Roland apparently stopped reading but still went rushing forward before Janine could dispute Emilienne’s account of how I came to visit her. “Her letter—I tell you what, I’ll send it to you—gave me not the slightest hint at all. As if I wouldn’t notice that omission! ‘Come now, dear,’ I had to call her up and wheedle her, ‘surely Janine’s daughter left you her address or a phone number, considering she took the trouble to look you up and come to see you.’ But then, I confess, once I wormed the information out of her, somehow I was afraid to call you. I thought your husband might not appreciate your former beau popping up out of the blue, and so it’s taken me three months to gather up the courage.”
“By that point,” Janine said with a sigh, “Len was far too sick to object to much of anything anymore. But I hope your sister was not too shocked by my daughter’s visit. Really, I had no idea she would try to get in touch with you. Now I’m not unhappy that she did—it’s so wonderful to hear from you.… But tell me how you came to move to Canada. She told me you were living in Montreal?”
Before Roland could answer, they heard the sound of Gary lifting the receiver in the kitchen.
“Mom, what the hell is wrong with you?” he scolded her into the phone. “Just how long do you plan on keeping us waiting? We’re about to call it quits here!” With that, he slammed down the receiver.
“Oh, excuse me,” Roland said. “I can see I’ve interrupted something important. I should have asked you at the outset if my timing was convenient. Excuse me, it was so enjoyable to finally catch up with you that I’ve been selfish. Go now, before you get in trouble. I’ll call again some other time.”
“Wait! When?” Janine cried, terrified of losing the connection.
“I’ll try tomorrow,” he said, and again she noticed the French double r rolling down his palate, an accent in English much stronger than her own. “Tomorrow afternoon. Until then, I kiss you.”
The following day, however, Trudi drove out to New Jersey from Manhattan for a rare visit, and when, as promised, Roland called again, Trudi insisted that Janine pass the phone to her so she could say hello to him. “Ooh, this is so exciting!” Trudi gushed into the telephone. “I really can’t believe it’s you after all these years.” By the time she passed the receiver back to Janine, it was Roland’s turn to say he had to go. He would do his best, he told Janine, to call again the next day. Yet that night, when she told me what had happened, Mother sounded every bit the schoolgirl in her anxious need for reassurance that Roland would actually contact her a third time. For my part, having kept a cautious silence on the subject of Roland since coming home from Mulhouse, I allowed myself to fantasize that, just maybe, I had set the stars in motion for them to find each other once again. Now, however, my mother was afraid to let herself imagine it.
“He probably won’t call me back,” she groaned. “It’s just my luck.” She enumerated for the hundredth time all the many things and people responsible for having kept them separated. First the war, of course. Then most to blame, her father, having hidden Roland’s letters and his attempts to find her in New York. Then there was her cousin Herbert with his weekly lunchtime sermons on the dangers of leaving home and parents and going back to Europe by herself. She hadn’t known before, but according to Roland, even her friend Lisette had meddled, warning him emphatically not to follow her! (Repressed and thus far unrecovered, Norbert’s defamatory letter from Lyon in 1945 went unmentioned.) But Edy did his bit as well, years ago, she noted, with his dark insinuations that Roland had been corrupted. Then Emilienne had added to the pattern when she avoided passing on the information of where Roland could reach her now.
“On top of all of that,” she added, “Gary was so outrageous when he picked up the telephone that I hated to admit he was my son. And the next time Roland called, Trudi nabbed the phone and took up all our time. What chance have I ever had with the man I’ve wanted all my life?… I guess I should be thankful—if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t even know he was still alive.… But honestly, do you think he’ll call me back? Do you really think he’ll call again?”
The following night, she canceled plans for dinner with a friend in order to be home, just in case, and was rewarded with a phone call. This time, uninterrupted, they talked for hours, and she learned about his life, beginning with that last moment in Marseille when she’d watched him in a rowboat bobbing on the waves amid her sunshine-yellow, falsely gay mimosas, until his silhouette became a dot against the sky. On that brisk March day almost fifty years before, he said, adding his perspective, he rowed back to the dock and rushed to climb the hillside that rose above the city to the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde. From that summit above the Mediterranean, he followed the progress of her ship steaming toward North Africa for as long as he could make it out. Roger met him there by prearrangement, and as dusk approached and the Lipari disappeared into the clouds, they traveled back to Lyon. There, Roland had largely remained, living as unobtrusively as possible until the war was over.
Roger’s fate, like that of Janine’s cousins in Lyon, were topics both avoided, but the shadows of the dead hung between his words when Roland attempted to convey the country’s joy at liberation. After five hard years of suffering, many of their generation, feeling cheated by the war, reveled in survival. In that euphoric, carefree interlude that followed peace, Roland maintained, he was not alone in his eagerness to party. Returning to Mulhouse, he started making money selling fabrics he obtained through his father’s company. Then he enthusiastically engaged in spending every franc, earning more and playing even harder after his father’s untimely death in 1947. Sometime before that, though, Norbert came to town for a day from his base in Germany in an American Army uniform, driving an impressive car—a Packard with a knob on the steering wheel—with a German shepherd dog on the seat beside him. They went to have a drink together.
Roland returns to his family in Mulhouse after liberation: (L to R) Emil, Régine, Léonie, Roland, Emilienne
“I begged him to tell you that I was waiting for you—I needed you and loved you. I didn’t understand your silence,” Roland recalled. “He promised me he’d tell you, and after that I was certain that you’d write, but I didn’t hear a word from you, in spite of all the beautiful pledges we had made to one another. So I guess eventually I just got angry. Tant pis. C’est ça. I decided to amuse myself with any girl who wanted me. I vowed I would never fall in love again. Thanks to you, I became, comme on dit, l’homme le moins romantique du monde”—as they say, the least romantic man in the world—“And that, ma chère, has never changed.”
Janine did not know how to answer him. Norbert’s calculated silence, his failure to keep his promise and pass on Roland’s message, stunned her with the recognition, yet again, that the people who claimed to love her most had robbed her of the freedom to shape her life herself.
“You wouldn’t have liked me then, the guy I became with nothing to believe in. I’m almost glad you couldn’t see me,” Roland was continuing, confessing that in a casual sexual encounter, he had found himself responsible for an accidental pregnancy. Colette, the girl involved, then just twenty-one years old, had been similarly enjoying the pleasures of the postwar period. But when her parents, prosperous flower dealers, learned of her condition, they forcibly took charge. “That was the beginning of a whole hullabaloo,” Roland said, using an expression that Janine found startling, coming from her Frenchman. An image of Colette—a petite and bosomy blonde with curls—swam into her mind as a former schoolmate from the happy year she had spent in the all-girls lycée in Mulhouse before the war.
Colette boasted a higher economic status, he observed. Her mother, a Swiss Calvinist, was the aunt of the woolen textile magnates Hans and Fritz Schlumpf, who would go on, albeit scandal tainted, to found France’s National Automobile Museum in a form
er mill in Mulhouse. Her parents were therefore anything but eager for a son-in-law who, at the age of twenty-seven, had yet to define his financial prospects. Colette’s pregnancy, however, left no other choice. They hastily arranged a wedding in the council chamber of the Mulhouse City Hall. He was not in love with her, yet that no longer seemed to matter to him, and it was easier to comply than fight. They wed on August 28, 1947 (exactly one month after Janine’s nuptials), and their daughter was born seven months later, with the marriage doomed before it started.
“How could you let that happen?” Janine blurted out. “You didn’t take precautions?”
“What can I say? I was young and careless? In the end, I was punished for it.”
He moved into his in-laws’ home, while Colette’s parents saw to the remodeling of a fine apartment that was their wedding present. However, given his own increasing resentment and rebellion, he said, it soon proved a catastrophic arrangement because it placed him beneath the scrutiny of the family’s longtime housekeeper, Fifine.
“With Colette’s mother always busy in the flower business, Fifine took care of Colette from the time she was a baby and still watched over her as if she were a perfect pearl. When my predinner absences attracted Fifine’s attention, she had me tailed by a detective, who tracked me with admirable efficiency to a popular maison de passe.”
“What’s that?” Janine asked.
“A place at the edge of town, a modest sort of bar with some private rooms, where women who needed a little extra money discreetly came to sell their favors,” Roland replied. “But fortunately or unfortunately, the establishment happened to be a place where Colette’s father was among the clientele. And so one night I met the old guy there just as I was leaving and he was coming in.”
By the time Roland returned home, after stopping to meet some friends en route, both of Colette’s parents and Fifine were assembled in the living room, ready to condemn him.
“ ‘If you’d only had the judgment to come along with me when I make my little visits there after dinner, instead of raising eyebrows by coming home to dinner late, you would have saved us all a lot of trouble,’ ” Roland quoted his former father-in-law secretly admonishing, even as the florist called his lawyer, Maître Edmond Cahen, to handle the divorce he imposed upon his daughter. “It was testimony,” Roland archly told Janine, “to your illustrious cousin’s skill as an attorney, as well as to the status of my in-laws and the undisputable guilt of the wayward husband in this case, that divorce proceedings generally known to take a year, at least, were concluded in just two months. For my daughter’s sake, I would have kept the family together. But Colette’s parents insisted on divorce, and it was all quite friendly. After court, I even went out to lunch with Colette and Edy. And I think that was the last time I ever saw your cousin.”
“Don’t worry,” Janine said. “You left him with an indelible impression. When I was visiting Mulhouse in the 1960s and asked Edy if he knew what had happened to you, he warned me to stay clear of you. ‘Forget him!’ he told me. ‘He’s finished. Roland Arcieri was ruined by women.’ ”
“I was,” he said.
In the pointed silence that Roland allowed to trail behind the accusation hiding in that simple statement, she heard the metallic click of his lighter as he lit another cigarette. “After my divorce, I became the laughingstock of Mulhouse,” he went on. “You’re familiar with the game of gossip there. All the nasty tongues were wagging. And I’ll have you know, not a single blabbermouth who found my fall from grace so humorous was forced to march through town with the Klapperstein around his neck. So much for local custom. Even all my friends were laughing at me. First, I’m forced into a marriage I didn’t want. Then, for just a youthful indiscretion—nothing the other chaps weren’t doing, making up for time we’d all lost to the war—I’m tossed back on the street, having served my usefulness!”
“How awful for you!” Janine voiced sympathy, though she felt anything but pleased with his account. She couldn’t help but wonder what their marriage might have been like. Her torment would have been beyond endurance had she found Roland untrue to her. It was hard enough with Len. “I guess Lisette was right,” she added. “When she came here to visit me, she said it was a lucky thing that I never married you because I loved you far too much for my own good.”
“Looking back, maybe she was right,” he said, a candid answer that was not the one she longed to hear. “After all, what did I have to offer you?”
“But you know that never mattered to me!” she insisted ardently, as if that practical reality were still ripe for their debating. “I always swore I would have gladly lived my life in an attic with you, scrubbing floors, just for us to be together.”
“Ah, well, I did come looking for you,” he replied. “But as you may remember, when I got a friend—a chap I met aboard the ship to Canada—to write to your employer to get word to you that I had landed in Montreal and was planning to come for you, you no longer cared enough to send me any answer.”
“But I was pregnant! I didn’t see how I could run off carrying my husband’s unborn child! I didn’t trust myself to see you.… I was afraid what I might do.…”
“Bien sûr, of course, you had no alternative,” he said. “Yes, by then it was too late. I guess I didn’t understand that at the time. But all the same, after that, I no longer expected very much from my amorous relationships.”
Both of them fell silent. “Tell me how you chose to move to Canada,” she ventured.
“After the divorce, I wanted to get as far away as possible,” he said.
When a contact in the textile business put him in touch with a counterpart in Canada who offered him a job selling fabrics around Montreal, he grabbed the chance to start out fresh in another country where being French might prove an asset. That it was closer to New York and the possibility of finding her was another impetus, but he wouldn’t tell her that until a later conversation. Now he told her that the early years were lonely ones and difficult, not least because he arrived not knowing any English, a greater handicap than he’d anticipated. Moreover, he disliked and quit his job and then struggled to scrape by, driving cabs at night while scouting a more promising career. As it happened, he met a man who offered him a foothold in a copper-mining firm, and he thrived in that, climbing up the corporate ladder and ultimately becoming president. He had retired a few years earlier and had a lovely home that overlooked the city in the fashionable English-speaking Westmount district. As to his second marriage, to a woman eight years younger, he described it as a peaceful partnership that had never been a great romance, for once again, he had passively succumbed to wedlock to satisfy demands imposed by other people.
“I did not expect to fall in love again in my life,” he said. “The girl I married was a nice and caring person, and we had already been together for six years. Getting married didn’t matter much to me—it was basically a piece of paper, a contract—but it meant a lot to her and to her mother, so I went along with them.”
The fact that his wife spoke not a word of French, he noted, helped perfect his English. Although he returned to France every other year to visit his family, he had not been able to develop the relationship he’d wanted with his daughter. He sent her presents every year for Christmas and her birthday but almost never received an answer. Then, too, he said, his second wife would not allow him to invite his daughter to visit them in Canada. He never had another child. His days were quiet, now mostly spent in reading—history and politics remained his favorite subjects—yet the state of world affairs made him pessimistic. “In the war I started learning to expect the worst, and I was right,” he gibed.
Hours had passed in relating the details of the years, and when Roland realized how late it was, he told Janine that if she liked, he’d gladly call again the following Tuesday evening. There was nothing wrong with two old friends talking on the telephone, he said, but it would be much easier to indulge in conversation on the nights his wife was out,
and on Tuesdays she always met her friends for bridge. No need to make her worried or suspicious. (The irony, that Tuesday had been the day Len dedicated to his weekly trysts with Carole Gordon, did not escape Janine’s reflection.)
Thus began a pattern of disembodied conversations that reignited Janine’s zest for life. Each week when Roland called, she was transported to a period that, despite the war, she thought of as her happiest—that time in Lyon she’d spent with him. They laughed, they flirted, they recalled the people they had known and the places they had been and the hardships they’d endured, and they gradually dispensed and earned forgiveness for their bitter disappointment in having failed to find each other in time to share the future. There was healing in exploring dormant feelings, if only through the phone line that once a week connected them. Janine wished the weeks away in waiting for those Tuesday evenings.
Not seeing one another, both knew they still existed in the other’s eye of memory as the innocent and blushing lovers they had been, a flight of fancy that lent them youth again. At seventy and sixty-seven, they walked in recollection hand in hand down Lyon’s rue de la République, stealing kisses in darkened doorways while world war raged. There was no one else for either who could share the intensity of their memories of years when they were young and beautiful, strong and hopeful, and wholeheartedly believed that nothing could divide them. There was seductive magic to such talk that transported them through decades to a time preceding the mistakes that they regretted and gradually allowed them to fantasize about the future. Still, his marriage and her period of mourning confined them to the telephone, and many months went by before they even talked of meeting.
Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed Page 48
