Crossing the Borders of Time (61 page)

Moving to New Jersey was like settling in a foreign country in ways that I had not imagined. Now, in my small public elementary school, the war and persecution that had brought my mother to America seemed utterly removed from my classmates’ experience and curiosity, as did the Inwood neighborhood, which I missed terribly. I felt alone, and walking home from the bus stop every day, I kept my fingers crossed and whispered little prayers that my mother’s car would be standing in the driveway when I reached our corner, my sign that she was there for me.

To alleviate my desolation over leaving my cousin, my mother had bought a trundle bed for my beautiful dusk-blue French Provincial room so that Lynne could visit us on weekends. It hardly seemed possible to own my new suburban life unless I could share it with my lifelong friend, and it caused me sorrow beyond telling to watch our closeness evaporate. Weekend after weekend, I begged her to stay over, but even when I managed to persuade her to accept, she unfailingly canceled by Friday afternoon, preferring to stay at home. After fluttering with excitement throughout the week in anticipation of her visit, I felt crushed each time that in spite of the fun I’d promised her, Lynne would not be coming after all!

“Cripes, get over it!” Dad would chide me, sitting at the kitchen table eating roasted peanuts from the lid of a Planters jar and sipping the one extra-dry Beefeater martini he allowed himself each night. “It’s
your
fault for still expecting her!”

By now, Trudi had a baby boy, Michael, and their family left Inwood, too, moving north to Riverdale, where they overlooked the Hudson River from the Bronx. But since this meant I no longer saw my cousin even when I visited my grandparents, our separation and my sense of loss only grew more painful.

In the isolation of our house, so different from our family-filled apartment building and the cozy hubbub of the nearby benches, I found my mother. Suddenly deprived of my constant companionship with Lynne, I needed her. My mother, too, separated for the first time from her parents and her siblings, with my father unavailable, turned to me. We soon developed an extraordinary friendship. There was nothing we couldn’t tell each other, and the bond of trust we shared was one that we maintained even as we gradually made friends of our own ages. Now as then, I cherish our closeness as among my most important gifts in life.

When did I learn about Roland? Actually, like my brother, Gary, I cannot remember ever
not
knowing about the Great Romance our mother was forced to leave behind in Europe, though I am often told it is unusual for a mother to be so open with her children. Still, it was only after I turned thirteen that she permitted the story of her first true love to carry overtones of irremediable remorse. Until she felt betrayed, she may have described her marriage to my father as a different type of life from the one she would have lived had war not intervened, but never as the wrong one. Then suddenly, things changed.

As I approached my thirteenth birthday, I hoped to mark it by becoming a bat mitzvah. But my atheistic father opposed it, and my grandfather Sigmar became his unexpected ally because his traditional Jewish views did not include extending the religious rite of passage to females. So as a secular compensation for the religious ceremony I had wanted, Dad proposed celebrating my “coming of age” by taking me to the Metropolitan Opera to introduce me to the music he loved. For me, of course, it was not the same, though I was touched and delighted he had thought of sharing opera with me.

Dad groused about the opera schedule: my first exposure to the art form should be something colorful or romantic with opulent costumes and scenery like
Aida
or
La Traviata
. Instead, the performance for which Mom was able to get tickets would be heavy and austere—Richard Strauss’s
Elektra
, based on the tragedy by Sophocles and legends of the Trojan War, presented in one perturbing act and sung in German. I nonetheless looked forward to this rare outing alone with both my parents, Dad generally so elusive in my daily life. And having developed an avid interest in Greek mythology, I myself was pleased by the selection. Indeed, as things evolved, the gods themselves could not have chosen more aptly, given this opera’s archetypal themes.

Elektra
is the story of a daughter and a son caught up in the passions of their parents’ adulterous relationships and grievances, a tale of suffering and guilt, of vengeance and murder and filial responsibility. As a memorable rite of passage into the adult world with all its stern realities, it taught me that secrets and infidelity can destroy a family from within. The fateful story of Elektra and her devotion to her father suggested that it was natural for children, with their sharp sense of justice and loyalty born out of love, to take sides and seek retaliation for a wounded parent. Its message soon proved timeless.

On the afternoon of my birthday celebration, my father called home profusely apologetic to tell us we would have to go without him because some foul-up with an order and a delivery deadline required him to work all night. The outing felt ruined. At the end of the performance, sitting beside an empty seat, my sadness was only deepened to see Elektra fall lifeless to the ground, a crazed victim of her own emotions and thirst for blood, doomed with both her parents. But when the lights came up, Mom gamely tried to resuscitate a festive note.

“Let’s call Daddy at work and see if he can take a break to join us for a late dessert,” she offered, as we drifted arm in arm into the neon night and the glittering buzz of Broadway. Our original plan had been to go to Sardi’s, my favorite treat and the best place for spotting actors enjoying after-theater suppers, but I readily agreed to try to lure Dad from his work to someplace closer to his office. As Mom encased herself in a glass-walled phone booth on the sidewalk, I stood admiring the glamorous crowd of opera patrons swirling out into the city. When next I glanced at Mom, however, I was stunned to see her weeping. Tears were running down her cheeks, an unfamiliar sight, as she fumbled to retrieve her coins and dropped them in the slot to make another call. It seemed she got no answer, but when I tried to open the phone booth’s folding door and ask her what was wrong, she mutely pulled it shut and shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. With the third call, someone answered—I could hear her speaking German, the habit in the family, so frustrating to us children, when grown-ups needed code—and I could tell that she was talking to her brother, Norbert.

Drenched with fear, I had no way to guess why she sat there crying. The familial tragedy that had swept across the stage with costumed figures drawn from legend had devolved into this real-world drama, also in German, with my mother sobbing in a cage of glass on a busy city street. Was Daddy sick? Had there been an accident? I had yet to understand how her position in that phone booth, exposed in pain to any passerby, would later seem an emblem of her public humiliation in the face of Dad’s duplicity.

With little conversation we were soon driving along the Hudson River and across the bridge, and then we veered off course as Mom headed for my father’s office in Ridgefield. But the one-story stucco factory proved dark, and the parking lot was empty. She left me in the car as she went to try the doors and peered into his office window, but everything was locked.

“I bet Daddy finished earlier than he expected and just went home!” I said when she returned, the explanation seeming obvious. “Why are you so worried?”

“I already tried there,” she responded flatly, eyes fixed upon the factory door.

In fact, when we reached our house Daddy wasn’t there, nor would he appear for several hours. If my mother had been deceived, I felt, then so had I. If she had been rejected, then so had I, on what was meant to be my very special night.

That summer Gary and I went off to camp, and in her lifelong quest for stability, afraid of ultimatums, Mom tried to close her eyes to the problem with her husband that was only growing worse. She had her dark hair fashionably cut and streaked with blond, but since her efforts to save her marriage stopped short of embracing Objectivism, Dad seemed to feel entitled to pursue a woman who shared his ideology. Miss Chase apparently endorsed the life of “rational self-interest” that Rand insisted was essential, and soon Dad was wooing her transparently, heedless of our feelings.

He decided, for example, to give my brother’s bicycle to Miss Chase’s son. Despite Gary’s protestations, Dad told him he’d outgrown it and insisted on buying him a bigger one. Then he announced that he was giving Mom’s station wagon to Miss Chase, and he told Mom that she could buy any other car she wanted. Who could have imagined our sensible, cost-conscious mother pulling up in a new sleek, silver Thunderbird convertible sports car? It had black leather bucket seats and a black cloth roof that retracted automatically, vanishing into the trunk at the push of a button more smoothly than Dad had slipped away on the night of my birthday. The price tag was punishing.

But on the day that autumn when my mother found Grace, the housekeeper, passed out on the floor of the living room and frantically called my father’s office for help in what appeared a medical emergency, Betsy Chase crossed all bounds.

“I’ll send you Ken to deal with it,” Miss Chase answered curtly. “Len is busy.” When she hung up on my mother without so much as putting my father on the line, it was my cousin Ken—devoted to Janine and no fan of Miss Chase’s—who finally set my mother straight.

A few days later, Mom told us that Daddy would be moving out at her request. My father asked to speak with me, but I refused to see him and hid in misery in my room. Uncle Norbert brought a truck to the house to help my father move his things to the garden apartment in nearby Leonia where he was going to live with Miss Chase and her children. Mom had loaded up big cartons with pots and pans and sheets and towels, magnanimously setting aside an assortment of furniture for him to take along as well. In his pile were his riding boots, his tennis racquet, and his ice skates—items he so seldom used that the fact that he was taking them fortified our impression that the breakup would be permanent. I pictured Daddy racing on the ice between Miss Chase’s sons and was sure they skated with more confidence than I did.

With Dad and Norbert loading the truck, Mom decided to distract us by taking us to the movies, where she retreated to a phone booth to talk with Trudi. By the time we headed home, I had convinced myself we’d find him, as usual, sitting in the kitchen nursing a martini and waiting for Mom to cook him dinner. But no, like his office on the night of my birthday seven months earlier, the house was still and dark. It felt altered and vulnerable. Before, the dynamic energy of my father’s outsized personality and the crackling, pulsing life force of his restless spirit pervaded the atmosphere like the hum in the heating ducts. Now the silence of his absence was deafening.

My father’s place in the bed he shared with Mom was never empty in the time that he was gone. That’s where I was sleeping. Whether by her invitation or by my own initiative, we spent every night together, holding hands. Although strong and over five foot seven, my mother seemed instantly diminished and, more than anything, I wanted to protect her—an overwhelming job assignment for a thirteen-year-old girl, herself suffering with feelings of abandonment. I also carried a secret sense of guilt. I agonized that the nighttime fears that had prompted me so often to invade the private space behind my parents’ bedroom door had fueled my father’s hunger to find another woman, a woman who wouldn’t tolerate children’s interruptions. What clearer proof could anyone require that I had come between my parents than the fact that
I
was sleeping now in my father’s place? Desperate to restore my mother’s happiness, I wanted to become like the hero in a fairy tale who slays the evil dragon and escorts the damsel in distress to a magic golden castle where all conflicts are resolved.

In the quiet of late nights in her bedroom, her muffled tears and anguished sighs inspired me to coax my mother to talk about the past. Our magic golden castle was the world of Europe twenty years before, in which she had been loved by another, faithful man. Against the ticking of the pendulum and the half-hourly chimes of the antique French clock in the hallway, I traveled with my mother to her Freiburg girlhood, and I understood her pain at leaving home and lifelong friends when her family fled to France. She took me back to Mulhouse of 1939, frightened near the border on the eve of war, and she permitted me to know Roland, a slender, doe-eyed youth of exquisite sensitivity. Night by night, talking more than sleeping, we delved into her stories as we lay together in the darkness. The unraveling of history was far, far better than any
Million Dollar Movie
, and I relished all my mother’s stories, knowing they were real.

I saw my mother as a teen barely older than myself when she caught Roland’s attention. I saw them at the party where a game of spin the bottle first emboldened them to kiss, and then along the banks of a green and curling river where they nestled in the reeds and let their fingers wander. Mom hunted through the pages of her memory and invited me to share the romance of her past. Perhaps it was her way of getting even with my father: as Daddy coupled with Miss Chase in a strange apartment, my mother brought Roland to life to spend the nights with us. She nullified the hurt of my father’s infidelity by evoking a greater love and a greater loss, turning Daddy into second best, a reluctant compromise. I lay there in confusion, simultaneously feeling angry with my father and disturbingly untrue to him. I deplored his cheating, even as we cheated with the memory of Roland. I wanted my mother’s story to have a happy ending: I longed to hear the episode that saw her reunited with Roland, even though that ending might have meant my not existing.