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

by Leslie Maitland

  Our deep mourning for Norbert, with his ever-engaging personality and love of life, was necessarily layered by our fears for Dad and worries for Alice, who at eighty-four, had lived to bury her beloved only son. Thankfully, as weeks went by, the severity of Dad’s symptoms abated, his vision cleared, and he got back on his feet again. For the next five years he would suffer the same moderate level of functional impairment he had been living with before, though we saw foreboding hints of continuing decline. Still he did not complain, and he wouldn’t let his body beat him.

  Instead, he decided to create. He bought a piece of land near the beach in the Hamptons and planned to build a house befitting Howard Roark. The forward-looking design was his, with a great open space at the center of the structure, which he insisted be undisrupted by any sort of pillar or bearing wall. I was touched that he planned a balcony off my bedroom as a private outdoor aerie just for me to write, but he had trouble finding anyone who would agree to build the house the way he wanted. Not unlike Rand’s fictional heroic architect, Dad so vigorously insisted on the purity of his concept that the ideal prohibited the building of the real. On paper, he worked on it for years with an architecture professor from Columbia University, even as his ability to negotiate a beach, with its tricky footing, slipped away. Then once more, he heeded Mother’s voice of reason, resignedly insisting it was time to sell the land.

  Not long after, Dad acknowledged having trouble climbing the stairs to the second-story office he was renting. Besides that, although he’d hired a salesman to make road trips for him, his income had been dropping, so Mom suggested both for convenience and economy that he move his business into the lower level of their home. The narrow staircase that led downstairs had banisters to lend support, and Dad was well accustomed to descending there each night, as battling mortality he doggedly maintained his rigorous discipline of bodybuilding exercise.

  Now, with the business, secretary, and salesman all installed downstairs, Mom began to realize that every Tuesday without fail her husband disappeared. It was not an absence she could miss, because while she had started back to work part-time for a group of local cardiologists, she had Tuesdays off and was generally at home. She noticed that he kept a blanket and a coffeepot and his tennis clothes and racquet in the trunk of his car, and he claimed that he made tennis dates with a Grumman Aircraft buyer. But an overheard telephone conversation clarified the mystery: the reason Dad drove off at eleven thirty every Tuesday morning and did not return until late afternoon was that he was spending the day alone with Carole Gordon.

  When Mom confided her terrible discovery to Jean, her friend referred her to a psychotherapist who was brutally stark in summing up her options.

  “Put up with it or leave him,” he advised. “Just don’t imagine for a second you can change him. This has nothing to do with you, or even with his love for you.” He suggested that Leonard needed to establish over and over, by way of repeated sexual conquests, that women were attracted to him. With business and health reversals undercutting Len’s already damaged self-esteem, it was understandable that preserving sexual power would seem all the more important. “I’d recommend if you can stand it and want to save your marriage,” the therapist concluded, “your only option is to look the other way.”

  But Mom confronted Dad about it. How with any sense of decency could he do this to her once again, after having sworn to respect their marriage when she welcomed him back home in the aftermath of Betsy Chase? She felt mortified and hurt and resentful of the way he took advantage of her, when everything she did was aimed to nurture him. Why, even her decision to go back to work for cardiologists had been calculated to guarantee that he would always get preferential medical attention. But the real problem with his heart, she said, was that he lacked one. His heartless self-indulgence had killed their marriage.

  “Leave,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. Go make your life with Carole.”

  “Please believe me, I don’t love Carole,” Len insisted. “You’re the only woman I could love. I’m just having a little fun. You shouldn’t let it bother you.”

  And yet, just as in their courtship decades earlier, boasting of his amorous adventures, he seemed bent on advertising his infidelity. Betraying her was not enough. It was as if he had to prove not only to himself, but also to his wife, that there were always other women who fell captive to his charms. Indeed, whatever else it was, Len’s brash pursuit of other women appeared expressly meant to make her jealous, whether he was acting in retaliation or shrewdly playing to an innate need of hers for a challenge in romance.

  He, too, of course, had ample cause for jealousy, suspecting from the outset that Janine would never love him with the same consuming ardor with which she’d loved Roland. And just as Gary and I had grown up with the story of the love our mother lost in France, it was no secret to our father that everyone else around her came to learn the story also. To know Janine meant to know about Roland. Lost in stolen dreams, wedded in her heart to the Frenchman she had left behind, a love idealized, always perfect, she may have hoarded what my father needed. His unseen rival was unbeatable.

  Only later—when I read Dad’s letters from their early marriage and met the youthful husband who voiced nascent, hungry love for her—would I sense I had misjudged him. Then, painfully, I wondered at having viewed the shifting balance of their marriage only through my mother’s eyes. In all the years she shared with me her grief at Dad’s unfaithfulness, I had failed to ask the crucial question: when she allowed Roland to lodge between them, had she established the environment that would send my father wandering? What detours did he have to take to prove that he was lovable?

  Or perhaps both of them required the object of their passion to float beyond their grasp. They married relatively young, and the excitement of romance is not easily sustained amid the petty familiarities and bland routines of married life. The sort of passion that fuels myth and drama may require the threat of obstacles to keep the fire alive. Indeed, even Carole Gordon would brazenly declare that she preferred to maintain the illicit nature of her relationship with Len, when my mother, angry and exasperated, held out the alternative.

  “I’ve had enough of all of this. If you want Len, take him,” Mom said to her one day, when Dad was out and she picked up the office telephone to find her former friend calling for her husband.

  Carole laughed. “No thanks,” she scoffed. “I’m quite satisfied the way things are for now.”

  By the summer of 1982, my coverage of official corruption and organized crime resulted in my promotion to national correspondent, and I was transferred by The New York Times to cover the Justice Department in Washington. There I soon met Daniel Werner, the man who would become my second husband. Curiously enough, like my first, he was a television news producer. In the months that followed, I avoided subjecting Dan to my father’s rigorous dissection, wanting to decide my future for myself. So that March, when I told my parents I was engaged to someone they had never met, they were understandably dismayed, yet they shortly got to know Dan and warmly welcomed him into the family. We planned a simple springtime wedding. Before that, however, Dad embarked on a risky trial of plasmapheresis treatments aimed to cleanse his blood cells of excess antibodies thought to be contributing to his worsening neuropathy. The treatments were abruptly halted, however, when Dad contracted life-threatening hepatitis. I had just mailed out our wedding invitations when Jean called to say that Dad was far, far sicker than Mom had let me know. I needed to come home quickly, Jean warned, because it wasn’t clear that even Len could beat this one.

  Thus again I found him in the hospital, jaundice having turned his eyes and skin a gruesome shade of mustard yellow, and for the first time in my life, I saw him with a beard. The lion lay immobile in the cage of his hospital bed, and as a soaring bilirubin level edged him toward delirium, he barely knew me. My mother, who had tried to spare me frightening news while I was immersed in wedding plans, was again spending all her days and ni
ghts at Dad’s bedside, sleeping on a cot, and running home for a half hour every morning only to shower and change her clothes. If it was possible to pull a person from the maws of death through superhuman force of will and vigilant and loving care, my mother was resolved to stay the hand of God or slay the hounds of hell in order to accomplish it.

  Outside Dad’s room with Mom and Gary the following morning, the doctor told us that Dad’s liver was so ravaged he wouldn’t last the weekend. It was, moreover, information he planned to give my father if he could make him understand. Tears were streaming down Mom’s cheeks as she turned to us in horror and tried to speak, yet the only sound that she could manage was a strangulated gurgle.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t allow you to tell that to my father,” I objected to the doctor on Mom’s behalf, convinced, as she was, that the grim prognosis would prove more deadly than raging hepatitis. Such hopeless news itself would kill him—the death sentence self-fulfilling. As long as Dad believed he had a chance, I felt sure he’d fight and win, and Gary vigorously backed me up.

  Annoyed at being countermanded, the doctor shook his head and shrugged and turned to Mom. “Call me if you need me,” he said to her, and he walked off down the hall, his stethoscope swinging like a pendulum.

  Returning to Dad’s bedside, Gary dragged him into consciousness. Infuriated, he held our father’s head up off the pillow and, nose to nose, shouted in his yellowed face: “Goddamn you, don’t you die on me! I need you! Don’t you dare to fuckin’ die on me!”

  When doctors ordered a transfusion, Gary, whose blood type matched, insisted that the blood Dad got be his, and he showed up every day with protein shakes that he badgered Dad to drink—a process that took hours, Dad sipping feebly through a straw with Gary standing over him to goad him on to finish it.

  Within a week, a seeming miracle, Dad had proved the doctor wrong and was winning the war with death. Two weeks later, another miracle: Dad was able to walk me down the aisle by leaning on my arm and on the rows of wooden pews that lined the sunlit Jewish chapel on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park where we held a modest ceremony. Soon after, my parents went to recuperate together at a cousin’s place in St. Tropez. Unfortunately, when they returned from France, Mom went through the hospital’s itemized bill, which detailed extra charges incurred throughout Dad’s illness. And the hurtful thing that undermined the closeness they had reestablished was the statement’s revelation that every single morning when she’d left his hospital room just long enough to shower and change her clothes and race right back to him, Dad was on the telephone, groggy as he was, calling Carole Gordon. Fighting death his way by rising to romance.

  Before long, Dad’s diminished motor skills resulted in his totaling two cars in major accidents, one of them on a Tuesday jaunt to meet Carole Gordon, the other on a nearby business trip. After the second one, when his car flipped over an embankment on a highway exit ramp, Mom insisted he stop driving, but that didn’t curb his travels. His devoted secretary, Zoanne, now drove him to meet Carole every Tuesday morning and picked him up again in the afternoon. She nonetheless reported these outings to my mother. In addition, Zoanne recounted Dad’s daily conversations with Carole, which she couldn’t help overhearing in the office space she shared with him.

  Carole was a crass and needy fool, Zoanne told Mom. She called the office daily to ask for Len’s advice on everything and obeyed without question all he told her. Carole depended on him totally to help her run her life, and even, in the end, when Dad’s physical condition deteriorated further, to help her plot the machinations of her next affair. According to Zoanne, Carole had already selected her next lover—a younger man, a tennis pro.

  I felt compelled to ask my mother why she put up with all of this. She said she blamed herself for having focused so much time and loving energy on her parents and her children. She also recognized that ever since Dad’s first affair, she had not been able to offer him the sort of abject worship he received from Carole Gordon, if indeed she ever had. Yet now, with failing health making him so needy, Mom said that pity prevented her from leaving him. Dad’s philandering didn’t matter to her anymore, and although she understood the source of it, any romantic love she’d felt for him had been shattered by deception. Life had been so cruel to him, she argued, curtailed by so much illness, that she was ready to believe that he deserved any happiness he’d found. Carole was not usurping anything she needed for herself. In fact, Mom said, it no longer was an issue she even deigned to discuss with him.

  To the contrary, come Tuesday mornings, Mom was moved to lay Dad’s clothes out for him and help him look his handsomest. She saw it as a question of his dignity. Even with his hair thinner and grayer and his cheeks prematurely gaunt from the unnamed malady that was trying to destroy him only in his sixties, his distinctive looks remained a physical endowment she wanted to preserve for him. When he was ready to depart, Zoanne folded his metal walker—his “horse,” Dad called it with warrior’s pride—and placed it in her car. For the rest, whatever happened on those outings after Zoanne dropped him off at some unspecified location near Westchester was something Mom was happy not to learn. She was yielding to an enemy, an illness with no name that was stealing him away just as craftily and ruthlessly as Ayn Rand or Betsy Chase or even Carole Gordon.

  Intriguingly, Dad himself seemed to apprehend a link between his battle with mortality and the pursuits that lured him from the calm stability of home and marriage. The engrossing pleasure he found in women, projects, or ideas distracted him from the foreboding sense of death that had plagued him always. Four years after his recovery from hepatitis, he expressed this in a eulogy he delivered for his closest friend—Jean’s soulful husband, Jack—who had died within a week of being diagnosed with galloping leukemia. Dad was devastated. At the funeral, crushed, seated uncustomarily in a wheelchair, he spoke of suffering a “new sense of numbness” owing to Jack’s loss.

  “My dear beloved friend, Jack, did not die alone. A vital part of me died with him,” Dad said, his deep voice splintered with emotion. “The consciousness that differentiates our species is both a blessing and a curse. Our fears are terrible to contemplate, and we survive in part by our manufactured evasions and diversions. How else could we deal with the ominous invisible?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  TOGETHERNESS

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, Mom planned a family pilgrimage to Freiburg and the German towns of Ihringen and Eppingen where her parents had been born, as well as to Mulhouse, Gray, and Lyon, where she had lived in France as a teenager in the war. The idea occurred to her after hearing from her cousin Hannchen that scores of German cities were inviting their Jewish former citizens to come back for reunions, and Freiburg had arranged for such a gathering to take place that October. With inner conflict and trepidation, former refugees would come back to their birthplace from lands where they had built new lives and spend a thoughtful week in conferences and programs designed to introduce them to a very different Germany from the one that they had fled.

  It was too late for us to be included on that year’s list of official invitees whose travel expenses the city would reimburse. But Mom wondered if it might be possible for us to go there on our own and meet the other visitors, conceivably including former friends of hers. She broached the subject when I was in New Jersey with Dan and our two children—Zach then four, and Ariel two—and my husband encouraged me to go along with Gary and my parents for what was bound to prove a meaningful experience as we traveled to the scenes of long-familiar stories.

  Enticing as the prospect was, it seemed poignantly ironic that the most ambitious family adventure we had ever undertaken was one that now required my father to travel with a wheelchair. Except for visits to the zoo with his two adored grandchildren—whom he encouraged to call him “Grumps” in keeping with his flinty personality—he rarely submitted to what he viewed as a public admission of disability and hence refused to invest in a better model than the flimsy castoff he obtained from
the local ambulance department. Still, how ill suited it would prove for days spent rolling over knobby European cobblestones was an aspect of trip planning none of us considered. Also not discussed, but ultimately touching, was his unselfish generosity in agreeing to a difficult expedition solely to please Mom, who would not have gone without him.

  Better foresight was involved in my arranging to write about our journey for The New York Times. The paper assigned photographers in Germany and France to join us on the way, and later, when the article appeared, it surprised me by provoking the largest reader response of my career. Calls and letters poured in from strangers across the country telling of similar experiences, either in the war or on subsequent visits back to places they’d escaped. Of even greater interest, other former refugees who recognized Janine as someone they had known in Europe or in Cuba now reached out to get in touch with her again. Yet most significant for all of us, the newspaper assignment helped to turn the trip into a purposeful mission of fact-finding and rediscovery. It became my impetus for initiating meetings and explorations we might otherwise have missed, had I not been wearing the persona of a reporter bent upon historical research, albeit personal in focus.

  So it was in Freiburg that Mom and I were invited to the sixteenth-century Rathaus or city hall for an interview with Mayor Dr. Rolf Böhme and sat in his office with the ghost of my grandfather. Sigmar would have been amazed and overcome with German pride to see us welcomed with honor in the very town that had placed his name on an official boycott list, forced him to relinquish all his assets, and driven him to flee with nothing. A liberal-minded Social Democrat, Mayor Böhme had been instrumental in organizing the visits of Jewish former citizens as part of a broad campaign of reconciliation that included a student exchange program with Israel and the construction of a synagogue on land donated by the city near its glorious cathedral.