Crossing the Borders of Time (51 page)

A loner, an atheist, and a privately bitter, cynical man, Bernard proudly recalled his glory days in the czar’s army, a sentimental view of his youth that his avowed socialism left undisturbed. In fact, ever after, that dusty Russian door to his past was the only portal through which one might lure him into discussion. In the arduous life that had followed for him, his keen intellect was always stymied by the conditions that forced him to sew for a living. The tailor vowed to chop off Len’s fingers before he would sanction his taking up scissors or thread, yet there was no risk of that. Father and son could not get along, the language of music being the only one they amiably shared. What little money Bernard ever spent on himself went for standing-room tickets in the dizzying topmost balcony of the Metropolitan Opera, and at home he would whistle an accompaniment as Len, a powerful bass, sang their favorite Italian arias. But Bernard cast a permanent shadow over their relationship with a sardonic prediction about his son’s future.

“Hair will grow in the palm of my hand before you make anything of yourself!” Bernard habitually chided him. The Old World method of spurring a child to greater achievement rankled, and Leonard never forgot or forgave it, such that in the end, like an omen foretold by the blind Tiresias, my grandfather’s curse indirectly affected us all. Leonard’s own assessment of his success could never equal what he seemed to need to prove to his father, and as the years passed, resentment spawned cold criticism—of his father, himself, and then other people. Confronting his father’s limitless challenge, he assumed a combative stance in the world and could never quite put his anger behind him.

In 1940, Len was studying engineering at New York University when he disappointed his family by marrying—too young, at just twenty-one—a non-Jewish woman four years his senior. It was an impetuous elopement largely spurred by his zeal to escape his parents’ bleakly cluttered apartment. There, patterns and pins, thick bolts of fabric, all the detritus of the dressmaking business overwhelmed the musty confines of rooms where the whirring of Bernard’s old sewing machine stopped only when clients came in for fittings. For an extended period, Mona with husband and son lived there as well, making for an airless, irritable environment that Leonard detested almost as much as he loathed his parents’ stifling immigrant culture.

The new couple moved to a studio apartment near NYU in Greenwich Village, but before long his bride’s manic spending habits plunged Len into debt. Required to sacrifice college during the day in order to work full-time as a draftsman to pay for her lifestyle, he gave up his coveted place in the college choir and shifted to night school at the university’s Bronx campus. After classes, to cover their bills, he worked a second job as an assistant to a department store window dresser until the man’s sexual advances forced him to quit.

He had a scientific, analytical mind and insisted upon objective reasoning and factual research in regard to every issue in life. “Don’t make assumptions,” was the major lesson he took from his studies and later on drummed into his children, providing my basic training for journalism. When he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1943, with war raging and color blindness preventing him from fulfilling his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot, both logic and the lure of the sea led him to the Merchant Marine, which had issued an urgent national call for skilled engineers. He joined the effort that helped win the war through the greatest sealift the world had seen, ferrying fuel, ammunition, planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, and other crucial supplies over mine-infested foreign oceans to American and Allied troops in the fighting.

Though news of their losses was a well-guarded secret during the war, the Merchant Marine suffered a higher casualty rate than any branch of the military, with thousands of volunteer mariners killed or injured on hastily constructed Liberty and Victory ships, under lethal attack from land, sea, and air. By act of Congress in 1936, merchant seamen were considered military personnel in times of war, yet they were deprived of the GI benefits awarded all other veterans to attend college, buy homes, and start businesses. A pledge to remedy this injustice died unfulfilled with President Roosevelt. Sporadic efforts at redress still falter in Congress more than six decades later, even though most war-era mariners are now gone. Indeed, many former mariners would die of service-related lung diseases, haunted by memories of Victory ships where the asbestos used to insulate pipes floated like snow in the engine rooms.

For secrecy’s sake during the war, mariners were not permitted to know their destinations in advance, and even discharge certificates listed each voyage only as “foreign.” But Leonard later described perilous missions to the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, France, England, Italy, Africa, as well as the Soviet Union, with American ships slipping past Axis defenses. From his Soviet visits, he brought back a small wooden cigarette box inlaid with silver, a book on Stalingrad written in Russian, a memory of loudspeakers spewing Marxist dogma over the streets, and a lifelong horror of what he decried as the soul-crushing evils of communism. From walking the decks on cold, rolling northern seas, he adopted a sailor’s stability-seeking, wide-legged stance and loose-kneed, rubbery gait. From war-whipped oceans, serving a chief engineer whom he hated, he came home a lieutenant with a misanthrope’s credo: “Never educate a sucker, and when your boss is a bastard, don’t undertake to do any more than you are specifically instructed to do.” But he gave his doctrine lip service only and always demanded the most from himself, as well as from everyone around him. His shipboard nickname, “L-square,” or L
²
for Leonard Laurence, also fell by the wayside, later replaced in the minds of his family by “Leonard the Lion” for the way he restlessly paced in a cage of domestic convenience, exuding dynamic, ferocious potential.

As to his first youthful marriage, what commitment existed quickly died a victim of war. Between sailings in November 1944, Len discovered that during his absence his wife was openly living in Queens with a lover. Rejecting entreaties to take her back, he divorced her in 1945 on grounds of adultery, shipped out again, and resolved that he would never remarry. With his discharge, just two months before meeting Janine in 1946, he landed a job as a manufacturer’s representative for a sales engineering firm and went on the road. He took on New England and the cold reaches of New York State, a lonesome young man carrying heavy sample cases to sprawling factories in nondescript towns. He almost enjoyed the challenge of sales, the validation that came when he could charm and persuade, educate or downright bully hesitant customers into placing orders with him. But he found little pleasure in his travels, only long, empty miles leading to puny commissions, solitary dinners, and an endless string of barren hotel rooms.

He described his complaints about work in the many letters he wrote to Janine, though in the earliest months of their long-distance courtship he mainly endeavored to make her jealous. Their meetings were full of the banter that marked their early correspondence. He found Janine a challenge. He thought her “exotic.” Over sodas in what he mockingly called “the Orange Room at Nedick’s,” they teased each other and planted suspicions that may have sparked passion, but also left both of them feeling exposed and at risk.

On yellowed stationery imprinted with drawings of old, imposing upstate hotels—the Onondaga in Syracuse, the Van Curler in Schenectady, the Cadillac in Rochester, the Arlington in Binghamton—it is easy to recognize the insecurity behind the youthful salesman’s sexual swagger. “
I trust that this correspondence finds you in good health
,” he wrote her, “
and bubbling with poisonous enthusiasm for me
.”

January 7, 1947—These towns are really not very much fun, forcing one to create his own diversion. Naturally your correspondent is not lacking in fortitude in these directions. If you find me lacking in detail anywhere, you can assume that I have been a dirty bastard, as usual.…

January 23, 1947—If this traveling of mine doesn’t stop pretty soon, I will be in much trouble as I will probably have a femme fatale in every city I go to and that is not good because it makes for a very restless state of mind.…

January 27, 1947—I had a miserable time Friday night, but I had a wonderful time on Saturday. During the afternoon, I took my rifle and another chap and we went off and did some target shooting until it was almost dark and then quite by accident some girl got me a blind date and a very nice time was had by all, even me.…

Janine tried to get even, writing back letters—sometimes in French, just to annoy him—in which she made up theater dates, parties, and dancing with other dashing escorts in such specificity that he believed her. When she showed up for a date one evening wearing a thin gold anklet, his pride was outraged. Such an intimate token could only have come from some other suitor! How dare she wear it when she was with him! He grabbed her leg, took hold of the chain pasted under her stocking, and managed to rip it straight through the nylon, snapping the anklet’s tiny links. She kept the pieces but never had it repaired and never admitted it was a gift from Trudi. “Well, that certainly shows some interest,” she mused, unsure whether she ought to feel pleased or upset.

As weeks and months passed and she grew closer to Leonard, Janine tried to block out thoughts of Roland and to put him behind her. In the time since Norbert’s meeting with him in Lyon after the war, Janine never received the one thing she yearned for: a plea from Roland to come back to him. Had he really forgotten their sacred vow to marry each other? Had he been changed by the war, or had he just fallen for somebody else? Day after day, she prayed to receive a letter from him. And when God failed to answer, she resorted to magic or bargains with fate. If I walk home from the subway by way of Cooper Street instead of Broadway today, I know I’ll find a letter from him. If I make myself do the laundry first, before even looking at the mail, there’ll be a letter for me today on the table. If I don’t let myself think about him even once all day long, I’m certain to find an envelope from him. Day by day, once the war ended and regular mail delivery from Europe resumed, Janine’s grief and loneliness grew as no letter arrived and her hopes for Roland dripped slowly away.

Painful questions consumed her, and she confided her heartbreak to her cousin Herbert. Over a string of Saturday lunches near his apartment on Madison Avenue, she confessed her longing to go back to France and become Roland’s wife, or at least to see him again and determine the truth of whether their love for each other endured. Her friend Malou, now married and working as a dentist in Marseille, had written Janine with just that advice:

I am of the opinion that you have certainly both evolved and a period of reacquaintance will be required. But it is imperative that you go see Roland again before you do anything else. You might ruin your life with useless regret if you should abstain from seeing him now.

Reluctantly, Herbert offered to lend her money for a steamship ticket across the Atlantic, but Janine worried how she would repay him. He had loaned her $10 in pocket money for her first week of work, and when she politely offered repayment from her first modest salary check, despite his wealth he had not turned it down, if only to teach her the value of money. How would she manage a much larger debt after getting to France? Beyond that, Herbert’s willingness to grant her a loan was more than matched by his pessimism when it came to assessing the hazards of going:

How could she know for sure that Roland would want her? Had she fully considered what her leaving New York would do to her parents? Certainly they depended on her, as they struggled to build a new life in a world so unfamiliar to them. On the other hand, how would Roland support her in France while he had yet to finish his legal studies or prepare for any fruitful career? If things didn’t work out, where would she find the means to return to the States? Was she prepared to spend the rest of her life in a bad situation, in view of the fact that the Gunzburgers had never been people who indulged in divorce? How would she cope if she regretted her choice but had no way out?

All this had been in the back of her mind during the years before meeting Len, as she casually dated the occasional man, not away at war, who was presented to her in a life of routine, largely confined to the dull social wasteland at the northernmost reaches of Manhattan. This was not at all what she had envisioned when she and Trudi persuaded their parents to abandon plans to settle in upstate Buffalo near Aunt Toni and Uncle Heinrich, whom they had visited directly upon arriving from Cuba. (Celebrating Janine’s first American birthday, Sigmar’s brother presented her with
The Brothers Karamazov
in German.)

No, it was the razzle-dazzle, vibrant life of midtown Manhattan that Janine and Trudi had dreamed of exploring while waiting for war’s end: skyscraper canyons, Broadway theaters, swanky shops, and enticing people. The life that they had expected to find would glitter like mica in city sidewalks, twinkling in the glow of streetlamps or in flashing lights of carnival neon, proving the myth of streets paved with gold. Instead, Sigmar and Alice had followed the German Jewish refugee influx to Washington Heights, the so-called Fourth Reich, and to Inwood just to the north. The far end of Broadway at 204th Street, eight miles north of Times Square, where Sigmar was lucky to rent a small two-bedroom, one-bath apartment—not without paying a $500 bribe to the superintendent to get it—disappointed his daughters by being quiet and dark, with none of the glamour of the fabled city they had so long imagined.

Beyond that and much worse for Janine, despite her high grades on New York college entrance exams and the opinion of her Havana headmistress that she would qualify for any American university she chose, she had been obliged to abandon the sort of medical career that had been her goal since childhood. Even as Sigmar jokingly called her
die Medizinerin
, the medical student, he proved unwilling to underwrite the long and costly studies required for her to become a doctor. Rather, he believed that his daughters’ best prospects depended on finding affluent husbands. And while he failed to consider that Janine’s chances of marrying well might have been boosted by going to college and medical school—if only because she would meet more young men with promising futures—Janine never dared to press him about it.