Crossing the Borders of Time (60 page)

My parents each had different views about it.

It’s really time we move now, so this will be our starter house, my father thought.

I will never pack my bags again, so this is it, my mother vowed.

My own feelings were expressed in an anguished note I slipped beneath the door of my aunt’s apartment on the morning that we moved:

Dear Trudi,

I can’t stand leaving you. Oh no! I won’t leave you what’ll I do? Please buy the house next to us. Please.

Love,

Leslie

When we crossed the Hudson River from Manhattan on that day we pulled away from the shelter of our building and the protective circle of the family, I was going into exile in a foreign land. It gave me an entirely new appreciation of my mother’s story, of all the times she’d had to leave her home not knowing what would happen next. Then eight years old, I identified completely with how she must have felt on the day she crossed the Rhine, relinquishing her childhood. I realized that my life would never be the same again. In leaving Inwood, I, too, was moving to America.

TWENTY-ONE
THE OTHER WOMAN

T
HE
O
THER
W
OMAN WHO
infiltrated my parents’ marriage and undermined my father’s relationship with everyone who knew him was an iron-willed Russian Jew whose abhorrence of communism had prompted her to abandon her home and family in St. Petersburg at the age of twenty-one in order to pursue a life of freedom in America. Like my father, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum had been determined to shed her past and so changed her Jewish name, but she never quite could lose her smoky Russian accent. Nor did her appeal for Dad, remarkably, have anything to do with her sexual attractiveness.

An intense and compact woman with large and hungry eyes and short dark hair that capped her like Athena’s helmet, she was in fact older than my father by thirteen years. But from the moment in 1958 that he read her massive manifesto,
Atlas Shrugged
, the novelist-philosopher who had renamed herself Ayn Rand became his goddess. As another of her disciples later wrote of her psychological seductiveness, she “spiritualized” the secular, and my atheistic father rallied to the banner of her so-called Objectivist philosophy and its icy credo of rational egoism with the all-consuming fervor of fanatical religious faith.

With his smoldering good looks and a slide rule in his pocket, Len embodied the Ideal Man that Rand worshipped through her novels: the romantic hero as thinking individualist, motivated by self-interest, battling conformity. Yes, the very incarnation of her own Howard Roark (the defiant protagonist of
The Fountainhead
, an architect played in the iconic movie by Gary Cooper) was seated at her feet in a Manhattan lecture hall in the person of my father, who became her avid student while in his early forties.

How to understand that this man of fiercely independent intellect and spirit could lose himself within what amounted to a cult? That he could swallow whole not only Rand’s general philosophy of life, but also a range of judgments that prescribed his opinion on almost everything—from psychology and politics to literature, art, and music—and demanded his contemptuous rejection of anyone espousing views that she did not endorse? What unspoken need for meaning or approval did Objectivism fill for him—a midlife, midcentury, fledgling industrialist, first-generation American whose native optimism and personal ambition impelled him to insist that man can and must create himself?

He viewed everything through the prism of her Self-adoring worldview: “My philosophy, in essence,” she wrote, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Lofty principles aside, conflict raged within our house when it came to applying Randist doctrine to the realities of life. It branded altruism as anathema, elevated selfishness to virtue, and shrugged off social responsibility for poverty and suffering. While it denounced the collective, the ideology Dad parroted seemed to border on the fascist, envisioning a super cadre of elite, right-thinking, steely individualists, men who refused to yield to any force on earth except Ayn Rand. She insisted on being hailed as the greatest human being who ever lived and the “supreme arbiter” of all morality. Incredibly, my father was bewitched.

He had come upon Rand’s work thanks to an employee who presented him with a copy of
Atlas Shrugged
the Christmas after we moved to New Jersey. With Unisco installed in its own building, Dad began producing metal nameplates for machinery, finally branching out from sales to manufacturing. Now, in his ambition to build an empire, Dad found Ayn Rand cheering for him as “the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.”

“The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality,” she preached, and so he worked most nights past eleven and on Saturdays as well. He reveled in his factory, toying with machinery, tackling engineering problems, enjoying the precision of production, inhaling without regard the toxic chemicals and metal filings that compounded the assaults upon his body already waged by the asbestos he had lived with in the war. With his employees, as with his children, insisting on perfection, Dad proclaimed they didn’t have to like him as long as they respected him. Still, in the silent, isolated space where his feelings burned, he held to a mythic vision of oath-pure loyalty and was stunned to find that his training incited treason instead of gratitude. Though several key employees quit, taking with them customer lists and knowledge of his product line, and then mounted competition, he never tried to modify his exacting style of leadership. Instead, each betrayal added to his sense that he stood alone in warfare with the world.

We arrive in life an empty slate, Ayn Rand told him. Nothing is inborn, but anything is achievable. Not just intellectually, but physically as well, Leonard now embarked on a rigid program of self-perfection. In the early 1960s, long before bodybuilding gym rats became ubiquitous, he started working out with heavy weights he set up in the basement. True to form, he exercised with scientific exactitude, didactic mission, and unrelenting discipline. Regardless of how tired he was, near midnight he descended to his lair and through the early morning hours, even in our bedrooms two flights overhead, we could all appreciate his groaning efforts. Forcing out his last repetition of every set of exercises, Dad would drop his massive barbells clanking to the floor. The storm windows rattled in their metal frames. The house shook on its foundation.

“Hit me!” he’d order at the kitchen table, rolling a sleeve or lifting his shirt to expose ready targets of unyielding flesh—bulging biceps or his chiseled abdomen with its well-defined six-pack. He insisted I punch him, a demand that I hated. “Harder, harder!” he urged. “What’s happened to you? Don’t be a sissy! Can’t you put any more force behind it?”

The joke underlying his bellicose posing was that he neither required nor indulged in physical force to defeat his opponents. Yet time and again, he would volunteer to demolish the knave who dared to upset us, be it a boss, a teacher, a friend, or a neighbor. As a matter of fact, we never saw him get into a brawl, but he defiantly relished the concept of it, and from the safety of home he made boastful threats with the zesty enthusiasm of some teenage gang leader.

“Did you
tell
him what I’m like?” he would earnestly ask—flexing his muscles, baring his teeth, his jaw sliding forward—regarding any imagined combatant. “How I could destroy him?” This he would ask with an innocent, hopeful look on his face, wanting nothing more from a wife or a daughter than to be idolized and daily acclaimed her one perfect hero with all of life’s answers.

Unhappily, most of Dad’s answers came undiluted from Ayn Rand, and he soon began to proselytize on her behalf with everyone he met. Through years to come, I would witness his philosophical interrogations with my stomach tied in knots. He ambushed unsuspecting visitors and held them victim to his grilling, even high school boys who came to pick me up for dates and unguardedly agreed to sit down for a chat. All the more within the family, he pressured us unceasingly to accept her every word as Truth.

Dad hired Mona’s son, Ken, a lawyer by education, to work for his company and was quick to convert his nephew into an Objectivist of equal fervor. He was frustrated when his attempts with Mom and me proved less successful. On any weeknight that he made it home for dinner, he took advantage of our time together to lecture on Rand’s precepts, igniting hot disputes. Starting around the age of twelve, I’d be drawn into the discourse by the intellectual challenge of it, never quite accepting that a difference of opinion on topics so abstract as the meaning of existence or the nature of morality would signal disrespect and turn the battle fiercely personal.

“Don’t argue with him,” Mom advised, ever seeking peace. “Just do what I do, pretend that you agree. I sit and nod and let it all go in one ear and out the other, while I think of something else.”

On weekends, however, every social outing became a nightmare for her, as Leonard’s dogmatism invariably led him to disparage and offend anyone who mistakenly believed that Objectivism might be the starting point of mutually enlightening debate. Publicly, she tried to hold her tongue, yet after they came home, late into the night, I would strain to overhear the quiet, mournful rumble of her voice as she chastised and lamented his intellectual arrogance and his rigid, alienating promotion of Ayn Rand. As she spoke, I knew she was mentally scratching another couple off the list of people willing to make plans for another social evening and another contentious round of Dad’s philosophizing. Friends were hurt by his disdain, she warned, hating how he snapped, “You’re wrong!” at anyone who disagreed with him.

As a result, if the first decade of my parents’ union was lit by the happy glow of extended family, the next was plagued by raw dissention introduced into our home by Rand, whose own personal life was roiled by her widely publicized adulterous affair with her youthful protégé Nathaniel Branden. Still, in the arena of sex and love, as in all else, Rand laid out definitive expectations for her followers. Her heroines were “worshippers” of man—of the sort of
Übermensch
who made them yearn to yield in sexual submission, like maidens in some bodice-ripping period romance. On the other hand, she said that ideal man must have a woman “who reflects his deepest vision of himself,” a woman whose surrender allows him to experience his sense of self-esteem: “There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.… Love is our response to our highest values—and can be nothing else.”

Where did this leave Janine? Having experienced the results when an all-defining “ism” captures a society, she recoiled from a philosophy with tentacles that wrapped around all aspects of our lives. She couldn’t go along with it, nor would she agree to attend Rand’s Objectivism lectures with my father until it was too late and he had found another woman to take the seat beside him, sharing private communication on the pads where he took notes. A slim brunette with bitten nails, she was divorced from a magazine photographer and lived alone with two young sons. Len had hired her as his office manager, and she was ruthless in angling for a more important title.

“
BETSY
,” she inked her name in his notebook in thick letters during one of Ayn Rand’s lectures where they sat together; and then again, coy and delicate, all in lowercase: “betsy ellen chase,” a last name that seemed fitting. Amid his notes on “pseudo-self esteem,” “psycho-epistemology,” and “integrated consciousness,” Len listed on his pad a half dozen possible titles for her within his company, ranging from Secretary-Treasurer to “Master of Arms @ Love.”

“What’s the difference between Vice-Pres & Exec. Vice-Pres?” she jotted back.

“You are a good looking dish tonite,” he scrawled to her in his notebook during another lecture, then scribbled over his words to hide them, like a teenager flirting with a classmate behind the teacher’s back in algebra.

In a lecture on sexuality, he took copious notes on neurotic “indiscriminate promiscuity” in the pursuit of self-esteem. “Mr. Promiscuous” was the Randist label for the man who is “unable to achieve sustained sexual happiness” with a woman who reflects his own highest values, but is ever on the prowl for new and varied conquests. “ ‘I need constant approval, constant re-assurance,’ ” he placed the thought in quotation marks, as if that made the man at issue someone else. But he filled the back of the page, a little sheet of graph paper, with an emphatic warning to himself:

“ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!!!”