Crossing the Borders of Time (75 page)

“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

“G
OOD 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.