Crossing the Borders of Time (54 page)

The next day, before the newlyweds set out on their honeymoon trip, Janine insisted on making a detour to bring the gladiolas to Alice. They drove on to spend a few happy days at a rustic Adirondacks resort named Paradox Lake and then headed to Montreal. From Canada, the honeymooners each wrote to Sigmar and Alice, Len rhapsodizing about his new wife:

Janine is by far the most beautiful girl here and as I look at her I think she should be Miss America herself—she seems to get prettier, healthier and more self-assured and serene with each passing day. When I watch her do little things for us both and see how pretty and nice she is, I am sure that she is certainly the most wonderful wife in the world and I can’t believe that I was so lucky and that this is all true.

Yet how strange can life be, the mysteries that fix our paths and plot destinations? Janine and Len began their life as a couple exploring the same city where Roland would arrive less than two years later when he sailed from France determined to find back the woman he wanted to marry.

NINETEEN
LOVE LETTERS

I
CAME INTO THE BOOK
of life almost two years after my parents married, disadvantaged, as are we all, by not knowing what occurred before. Who can grasp that as a child? Unsuspecting, we fall into the plot of time and try to piece the past together. We puzzle over mysterious scars, we catch the scent of doubt in the air, and we stumble over relics of dreams that litter the intimate family landscape. Years go by before we discern our place in the story, yet as we open our eyes on the dawn of our lives, we may imagine the world begins with us.

The day that I entered the tale I am telling was one of the very few times in life I managed to show up anywhere early. Shortchanged at only eight months, I was ejected into the world prematurely, which apparently left me feeling aggrieved. I would later have to hear many times how I flailed and kicked so furiously in my bassinet that the nurses resorted to binding my legs together in the attempt to stop me from bruising myself. Then and there, they warned my mother that it appeared she would have a somewhat difficult case on her hands.

Did that sour professional view worsen the mood she was in the following day when my father failed to arrive until afternoon to visit us both at the hospital? He bounded into her private room sporting a novelty tie with a proud announcement splashed in yellow on a burgundy background: “It’s a Girl! It’s a Girl! It’s a Girl!” the tie squawked the news in a pattern of print from collar to belt. But that was not all. He arrived with a dozen fragrant gardenia corsages, which he proceeded to pin on all the nurses on the obstetrics ward. By the time he returned to my mother’s bedside, the florist’s box with its waxed layers of green tissue paper was empty: in a flush of munificence, Len had given all the creamy flowers away, neglecting to save a corsage for his wife. Thus it began. The first battle I witnessed between my parents evolved from my father’s needy compulsion to enchant other women.

“By all means, take those too.” Janine pointed to a lavish display of long-stemmed red roses, a gift from Norbert, still based in Germany. “I’m sure there must be some nurses you missed. You could always try a different floor.” Later that night after Len went home—and before a nurse extolling his charms wheeled me off to sleep with my newborn peers—my mother and I indulged in a solid postpartum cry together. They were not the last tears my father would cost us.

A basic premise of my parents’ marriage was my mother’s refusal to leave her parents. Having failed to leave them for Roland, nothing could make her move away once she’d married someone else. When Herbert offered Len a job, Janine insisted he turn it down because, while it was a leg up to a great career, it involved a six-month posting to Japan. No, she said, not possible even temporarily for her to leave New York. Reluctantly rejecting Herbert’s offer, Len continued in the engineering salesman’s job that cast him as a wandering peddler. And again, six years later, when Janine went with him on a business trip to California, in deference to her feelings Len sacrificed a lucrative opportunity that would have meant their moving to Los Angeles.

“
The people here keep telling me what a remarkable husband I have, and they offered him a very important job in the factory, which he would love to accept
,” Janine wrote home to Trudi. But the company president told her that Len had turned it down out of his “respect” for her attachment to her family—“
born out of the troubles we went through together
.” She confided to Trudi, “
I didn’t realize he was that understanding
.”

Janine was working now for Mount Sinai Hospital’s chief of cardiology, and when it came to household chores, Len initially took upon himself both the laundry and the gritty cleaning. Every Monday evening, he celebrated their Monday wedding with another anniversary present, and at the end of their first year, he gave his bride his handmade voucher—a
Gutschein
, as her parents termed it—for the belated purchase of a diamond ring. It was an offer she did not accept because she knew that he could not afford it. Happily, he plunged into the family circle and answered now to “Leonardle,” the
badisch
nickname Alice gave him in token of her growing fondness. So, for the time being, he took it as a fine arrangement when he and Janine found their own apartment literally steps away from his in-laws. Amid a serious postwar housing shortage, they, too, paid the superintendent’s $500 finder’s fee to rent a place across the hall from Janine’s parents. A penthouse on Fifth Avenue would not have pleased her more.

From the start, Janine and Trudi with their husbands spent their time together, and they were several sets into canasta on a sticky summer evening one year after they had married, when Trudi shared alarming news. She had taken Alice to the dentist that afternoon to see about a painful canker sore, and he had raised the possibility their mother’s lesion might be cancerous.

“God, no!” Janine burst out. “I’d better get pregnant quickly! If something happens to Mother, I’ll need someone to love!” She tossed out these words unthinkingly, like easy discards from a well-planned hand, and Len pretended not to hear her. Afterward, the devastating impact of her statement hit her, and she felt guilty, even as her goal remained. By summer’s end, while fears for Alice proved ungrounded, Janine and Trudi both were pregnant, and ever locked in rivalry, they conceived just weeks apart, so that Trudi’s daughter Lynne would be born merely twenty days ahead of me.

Trudi with Lynne (L), and Janine with Leslie

“What goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent?” Arthur Miller wrote of the salesman’s plight in the year that I was born. In my father’s case, his letters from the road in March 1949 voice the ache of exile from his cozy home and distance from his pregnant wife. “
Ich bin ganz allein in der großen Welt
,” I am all alone in the big world, he wrote to Janine from Hudson, New York, repeating words he knew that she had used in childhood, writing home in misery from her prescribed confinement in the Alps. “
I’m very lonesome without you and can’t wait till I get home to you again
,” he bewailed from Syracuse. “
It’s awful not to be near enough to call you during the day, and the nights are intolerable
.”

Finding my father’s needy, youthful letters only after he had died was a wrenching revelation to me. Even now, I read them with overwhelming grief of loss. How I wish I might have known this tender, ardent, open man.

Syracuse—My dearest, I think of you constantly and pray that you are all right—I miss you so terribly that it makes me sick sometimes.… It makes me so nervous and uneasy to be away that all I can think of is getting thru and getting home.… My darling, I love you so much and I want you with me always … I’ve been a good boy and haven’t even done anything bad—you’d be proud of me. But I have no desire for any one but you.… Take me in your arms tonight. I need you, and I’m loving you with all my heart. Len

He called her almost every day and shared his schemes to organize his business stops, scattered in far-flung towns around the state, in order to steer home to her as soon as possible. “
More and more
,” he wrote from Utica, describing his new outlook, “
I realize that family life is really the most important thing and can’t wait to get home to start it again with the girl of my dreams
.” Longing for her robbed him of necessary patience to study for his state engineering license test, he fretted, even as he also worried over racking up sufficient sales to justify his trip expenses to his boss. “
I’m shaking oak trees
” in hopes of knocking loose potential business, he wrote, but the market was so bad that “
each sale, no matter how small, is like pulling teeth—impacted molars
.”

But the letter that most captured me was one that showed how poorly Leonard understood the rival he was battling. What was Janine thinking when she shifted to her husband the anthem of her first romance? “J’Attendrai” was the secondhand love song that Len sang aloud in his hotel room to fill the cold space of his solitude. He could not have known the song belonged irrevocably to another man or that its words of loss and longing would conjure up Roland for her.

I miss you muchissimo and wonder how the devil I sleep at all without you. I’ve been so
allein
that I keep talking to myself nights to keep up a conversation and then sing “J’Attendrai” to you for an encore. A few more days of this and I’ll be as nutty as a fruitcake so please don’t mind if I seem a little peculiar at first when I return. I’m a-lovin and a-worshippin that girl of mine—you know who she is—yes, Hannele, and please tell her if you can. All my love and a thousand hugs and kisses, Len

When I read the letters of that eager, boyish husband, I see him on a marital minefield, like the “wide open flats” of the windy corporate campuses he described, but this one rigged with potent memories of an unseen rival. Len, Janine, and Roland—each betrayed by love and war.