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

by Leslie Maitland

  Meanwhile, though Mom was lonely and grieved that Dad had suffered and died so relatively young, she felt that she had actually lost her husband many years before—through repeated infidelity, his obsession with Ayn Rand, and a pattern of illness that fostered self-absorption. With the mercy of selective recall, she nonetheless blotted out the negative and extolled her husband’s noble qualities and often even claimed the flaws within her marriage had, in fairness, been her fault. She devoted too much time to her parents and her children, she told me in rueful warning not to follow her example. She should have put her husband first, Mom said. She should have treated Len with the same adoring love she had lavished on Roland. She saw that now.

  “Perhaps if I had treated Dad the way I’d treat Roland, he might not have had the need to run around,” she theorized. “Lord knows why, but Daddy was actually very insecure. He needed a woman to look up to him. But after Betsy Chase, I simply couldn’t offer him the complete respect he always wanted from me. And after Carole Gordon, I was through with him romantically.”

  Early the following October, almost a year after my father’s death, she stunned me by announcing she had decided to fly to Montreal. She had already bought herself a round-trip ticket and would stay for one night only. Perhaps she was afraid that I would try to talk her out of it. In truth, I was both elated and terrified she would come home disappointed, either because the man she met might not match her expectations, or else because the feelings Roland aroused might not be reciprocated. The fact that he was married could not be ignored. It felt so dangerous; she seemed so vulnerable; it was the single most affirmative, self-directed, and aggressive action I had ever witnessed from her in my life. I encouraged her to buy something fabulous to wear.

  “No,” she said emphatically. “He’ll have to see me as I am.”

  But it was she who saw him first. She spotted him in the airport outside the gate where he had come to meet her flight. He was tall, trim, and well dressed in a navy blue suit, white shirt, red striped tie, Bally loafers, and metal-rimmed aviator glasses. He stood waiting with the posture of General de Gaulle and wore a crown of thick snow-white hair combed straight back from a flawless horizontal hairline. She stared, aghast, and cursed herself and began to edge away. He was far too handsome and commanding—the sight of him unnerved her. She would slip into the crowd before he noticed her and fly straight back to the routine to which she’d grown resigned. She couldn’t let him see her. At least she’d have him on the telephone. But turning back proved not to be an option.

  “Midi moins dix! Janine! Over here,” he waved as he came rushing toward her. She extended her hand, but before she had a chance to move, he had grasped her by both arms.

  “You can, after all, give me a kiss,” he said, and he bent to kiss her on each cheek. Then, squinting, he looked her up and down.

  “What’s with the blond hair?” he demanded with a scowl. “I was expecting a brunette.”

  “Well, then, what’s with the white?” she bristled involuntarily. “I could say the same to you.”

  “Mine is natural,” he countered. “But I didn’t picture your becoming such a modern and flashy American.”

  He led her to his car, and they checked into her hotel, then he took her on an abbreviated driving tour around the city she had visited just once before, with Len on her honeymoon. They parked and walked, and he surprised her by daring on a public street to link her arm through his. When a cold rain began to fall, he took her to a restaurant for lunch, but like an awestruck teenage girl on her first date, she had no appetite and declined to order anything but coffee. Despite their months of talking on the telephone, she was completely unprepared for the shock of his reality. The dream of decades sat across the table, and once again she saw him as epitomizing everything she had always wanted in a man. The mutual history they explored, validating memories that no one else could share, brought a thrill that was unparalleled, for both had made their lives as immigrants in countries where their families had neither roots nor pasts. He was a man, Roland declared, without a nationality.

  As they spoke, he solicited her views and feelings with the sort of interest that Len, so certain of his own opinions, had long since ceased to show her, and she found that she was tongue-tied. Still, Roland’s courtly Old World manners made her feel like royalty. He lit her cigarettes, he opened car doors for her, he helped her with her coat, and with a wicked grin, he dubbed her la Baronne, Baroness. After lunch, they strolled throughout the vast commercial networks of Montreal’s Underground City, which tunneled through a nine-mile course beneath the urban center. Janine’s rain-soaked suede high-heeled boots, rarely worn at home, pinched and rubbed her feet such that every step was painful and created bleeding blisters; she said nothing for fear that he would think her feeble or complaining. Self-conscious, wanting more than anything to please him, she harshly judged herself.

  “I regret to say I cannot leave my wife,” Roland asserted out of nowhere.

  “Who asked you to?” she said, indignant that he could think she would so easily assume the guilt of destroying another woman’s marriage. What did she want? She felt challenged, all the same, to win him back—a strong, defiant part of her felt entitled to him. He had been hers, and lamenting years they might have spent together, she was determined not to lose him now.

  “It’s just that while I don’t pretend to be a saint, I am a man who keeps my word,” he persisted. “When I agreed to marry a second time, I told my wife I had reached a point in life when I could not tolerate contention. In exchange, I promised that I would never leave her. Those were the terms of my unsentimental contract.”

  When evening fell, he briefly went back home to walk his dog and then returned to the hotel to take Janine out to dinner. They talked into the early hours, nursing scotches at a bar, and after making plans to meet her in the morning, he embraced her noncommittally at the door of her hotel room. “When you build a thing of value,” he suggested, “like an old cathedral, you must go stone by stone and slowly build a firm foundation.”

  The following evening, Gary met her at the baggage carousel at La Guardia Airport in New York, and she wept beside him in the car the whole way home. Twisting in her seat to avert her face, she told him she felt mortified. She attacked herself for behaving with Roland like a silly lovesick girl, lacking the confidence to speak her mind, when she should have let him get to know the woman she’d become. Twice before, she’d lost him in the past, in Mulhouse and in Lyon, neither loss her fault, but this time was different and maybe even worse, with just herself to blame.

  “Oh God, I wish I’d find a cure for the way I feel about him,” she despaired. “It’s been a lifelong illness. And now I’ve wrecked my only chance with him.”

  “Mom, please, I’m sure you’ll hear from him again,” Gary stroked her shaking shoulder as she slumped beside him, giving in to tears of sorrow and pent-up rage. She was angry with Roland for presuming that she wanted him and furious with herself for having made her ardor so apparent that he’d attempted to discourage her from expecting more than he was free to give.

  Gary tried another tack. “I’m sure he saw you as the woman he always loved before.” But nothing reassured her: she sensed that this most decisive of reunions, the meeting she had painted in her dreams, had not gone well. She knew with piercing clarity that she would never dare to go to him again, a feeling that remained even though he called her the day after she got home.

  “You’re still my Hannele from Mulhouse,” Roland said affectionately, thanking her for visiting. “Granted, at first, it was hard to see you as a blonde—I remembered you châtaine, like the chestnut trees in the park behind your old apartment on the avenue Salengro. But for the rest, you haven’t changed at all.”

  A few months later, a leaky pipe required Janine to call a plumber to the house. It was the sort of fix-it job that Len would have handled in his prime with meticulous precision, but the plumber, with indifference born of strictly practical
priorities, smashed a ragged hole into her yellow-flowered bedroom wall, Mother gloomily observing him. Behind it, though, they were astonished to discover a porcelain figurine of a little German girl, standing in between the wooden studs, securely fixed to a lump of hardened concrete. Her hair was golden brown, her eyes were blue, her cheeks were pink; she was wearing a dirndl and clutching a doll between her arms. In secrecy and darkness, she had been trapped throughout the decades within the deepest framing of our house—a place where no one ever lived before us. Entirely inexplicable, a mystery, how she came to be there, utterly unknown! I couldn’t help but see her as a token of my mother’s girlish spirit, always present, yet in hiding, waiting to be found.

  In the time that followed, as Mother and Roland resumed their relationship, if only on the telephone, I was delighted to observe something of that youthful spirit infuse her personality. It seemed as if Roland had also broken through a wall that long confined the Hannele he remembered—the girl who animated all the stories of love and war that had sent me off to look for him.

  The porcelain figurine embedded in a lump of cement and hidden for more than three decades behind the wall in Janine’s New Jersey bedroom

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A LA FIN

  “GOOD GIRL, I can tell you’ve been eating your broccoli,” Dr. Zuckerman remarked to Janine half facetiously as he palpated her breasts prior to a routine mammogram in November 1994. “I don’t feel anything unusual.” But a half hour later, after her films had been examined, he snapped at her accusingly, “You’ve got cancer!” A tumor in her left breast would require surgery, and depending on whether the lymph nodes were involved, either radiation or chemotherapy. By the next afternoon, a second specialist confirmed the diagnosis, and Janine was consulting a surgeon. Forced so unexpectedly to contemplate the possibility of death and the imminent prospect of disfiguring surgery and treatment, her thoughts turned to Roland.

  Three full years had passed since their rendezvous in Montreal. Since that first and only meeting, his calls to her had steadily increased both in frequency and tenderness. Soon, several times a week and then every day, defying the frigid Canadian winter weather or rallying against the torpor of its humid summer heat, Roland would leave his house in Westmount near six p.m. and drive downtown to a public telephone. He escaped from wife and home with the excuse he needed cigarettes or a fresh baguette or wine for dinner, and sometimes he took his dog along, claiming it needed exercise. For her part, Janine made a point of getting home and waiting at the telephone by five-thirty every afternoon. The ritual of an appointed hour together was one that neither would exchange for the instant accessibility of a mobile phone, even when their use expanded. As it was, however, if Janine missed a call, she couldn’t call him back, so absolutely nothing was allowed to interfere with the schedule of their conversations. If we went out when I was visiting, she would check her wristwatch with military vigilance throughout the afternoon to be certain we’d get home in time. And on those very rare occasions when Roland called at an unanticipated early hour, and she wasn’t there to answer, she would listen to his message several times over, as if drinking in the daily dose of him that she required. Not until the next day, when she knew that he would call again, was she able to forgive herself. Tuesday nights, when they could talk for hours, were inviolable. And with every call I witnessed, long or short, I’d see her face flush pink with pleasure and the music of her laughter overtake the customary solemn timbre of her voice.

  In deference to Roland’s marriage, Janine sidestepped all his invitations to return to Montreal. It nonetheless remained her fervent dream that they would meet again someday. Now, in the face of a terrifying medical diagnosis, it became maddening and intolerable to realize that life could end without her ever knowing the consummation of their love. Envisioning the end of life or, at best, the end of her capacity to feel sufficiently alluring to offer him her nakedness—with the expected ravages of surgery and chemotherapy compounding the indignities of age after so many squandered decades—Janine decided to allow herself an unaccustomed act of selfishness. Furious at fate, she refused to die at seventy-one without her dream fulfilled. And although she knew she’d bear the weight of guilt and maybe even punishment for this wrongdoing toward Roland’s wife, she felt that she was owed this singular experience of love. After her surgery, scheduled two weeks hence, the romantic encounter she hoped to engineer could never be repeated.

  As Janine pondered how to go about it, she recalled the ruse that she’d devised in 1947 to encourage Len’s proposal by pretending that Aunt Marie’s steamship ticket back to France was really hers. This time, with Roland, she would need to figure out a way to encourage him to visit her. She wanted him entirely to herself, not merely to steal a few hurried hours in the impersonal confines of a hotel room and then be left to spend the night alone. She resolved to keep her diagnosis and impending surgery a secret, wanting neither sympathy nor to cast a pall on a uniquely magical occasion whose memory would be all she had. And so, searching for a plausible explanation to propose a sudden get-together, she hit on the idea of telling him that she wanted to make use of expiring frequent-flier miles. In fairness, she would say then, it was his turn to visit her this time. She would suggest that he arrive on the Wednesday afternoon and leave that Friday before her Monday operation, allowing them two days and nights together. It seemed to her the decent thing to make sure he got back home in time to spend the weekend with his wife. Janine felt guilty enough without trying to keep him with her longer.

  Roland arrived as handsome and impeccably attired in suit and tie as he had been in Canada. She met him at La Guardia and drove him home, and although she had always imagined sitting closely on the couch in the gentle glow of lamplight in her living room, instead they settled somewhat awkwardly at the kitchen table. She was conscious of the disparity that in Canada she had seen him extracted from his personal environment, yet now her world was spread before him in all its intimate reality. In old allegiance to her husband, she had hidden just one thing—a framed picture taken by The New York Times photographer in Freiburg that showed Gary pushing Len in a wheelchair down the Poststrasse with her walking at their side. Len would not have wanted his longtime rival to see him as disabled, so she put that picture facedown in a drawer. But for the first time in her life Janine had her own photographic aspirations, leading her to purchase a disposable camera to document Roland’s visit. She did not expect another opportunity, so at least she would have pictures of his visit to sustain her ever afterward.

  She prepared a snack and they talked all afternoon, chiefly of the past and the people they had known. But Roland also told her he had missed her terribly: he was surprised and overjoyed when she finally invited him. He fully understood her unwillingness to return to Montreal for a few clandestine hours together, but it seemed presumptuous for him as a married man to expect her to invite him to her home, so he never dared suggest it. When night fell, they went out to dinner, and afterward they gravitated once again to their separate swivel chairs at the brightly lit kitchen table, where she poured nightcaps, scotch for both of them. She could hardly have settled on a more domestic, less romantic spot in which to entertain him. Still, the hours wore on. Through the glass doors to the terrace, they saw the lights of the neighborhood extinguish all around them, the illumination of Manhattan rosy through the trees and across the Hudson. Yet she hated to bring things to a close, largely because she didn’t know how to handle which bedroom to offer him. Past two thirty in the morning, her inhibitions weakened by emotion, fatigue, and drink, she sketched out three alternatives.

  Roland’s visit to Janine’s home prompts her first attempt at photography.

  “You can sleep in the downstairs guest room,” she said, pointing to the room next to the garage, Dad’s former gym, which she had refurnished with twin beds and dressers for visits from Zach and Ariel. “Otherwise,” she added shyly, “upstairs of course there is my room and another guest room across the
hall.” He was quiet for a moment and then chose the upstairs guest room, so near to hers and yet so far. Roland mentioned that he always read in bed at night but had neglected to bring a book along, and from a corner bookshelf she unaccountably picked out a history of the Jesuits. It was written by a German Jewish refugee she’d met in Cuba in the war and who contacted me after my article about our European trip appeared in The Times in order to reach her and resume their friendship. Recalling that Roland had studied as a youth in a Jesuit lycée, Janine handed him that volume, dense and serious, and after modestly kissing him good night, retreated to her bedroom.

  But no sooner was she beneath the blanket, attempting to concentrate on a book herself, than she realized she was wasting her precious opportunity. With just two nights together to make up for all the losses of the past and of the future, she couldn’t bear to spend another minute separated from the man she loved. She climbed out of bed, rummaged in her armoire to find a sheer black nightgown—a gift from Trudi years before, though never worn—and hurriedly changed into it. Then, emboldened by the evening’s scotches and Monday’s scheduled surgery, she crossed the hallway with its antique French clock ticking in the silence and lightly rapped upon his door. She opened it to find him lying on his side, wearing pajamas, intent upon the Jesuits. On the wall facing him, in frames, were her great-grandparents and her grandparents and her parents and Norbert and Trudi and Len and Gary and me and numerous other members of the family. It was what she called in German her Ahnengalerie, her gallery of ancestors. Roland was lying on the outside right-hand edge of the queen-sized bed next to the night table.