Crossing the Borders of Time (53 page)

The next morning, Janine returned the ticket to Aunt Marie and announced her engagement, subject, of course, to her parents’ approval. But she was not inclined to wait long. While her twenty-fifth birthday was still more than a year away, she dreaded reaching the traditional milestone when an unmarried woman in France might receive a symbolic Sainte Catherine’s bonnet, signifying her status as “spinster.”

Indeed, on my own twenty-fifth birthday, my mother fashioned a primly delicate Sainte Catherine’s bonnet for me. She trimmed it with artificial sprigs of flowers in pink and lavender, and with mischievous glee wrapped it in tissue paper inside a silver Bergdorf Goodman box that she ceremoniously placed on my bed. To this day, I can summon the speechless upset I felt when I removed the ribbon and opened the unexpectedly promising gift—Bergdorf’s not being the place my cost-conscious mother generally shopped—but her message managed to work nonetheless. Perhaps she had already sniffed a nuptial wind, but only two months later I married—an immature union that quickly dissolved. Still,
both
my parents admitted regarding my being divorced as preferable to never having been married by then. Unwed by twenty-five? They concurred that such a sorry impression of being passed over could only scare away other suitors who would not understand my still being single.

In Janine’s case, sibling rivalry added further pressure in the spring of 1947, when Trudi and Harry Rawlings announced plans to marry. Survey results from the late 1940s showed that 62 percent of Jewish men who fled to America from Germany chose wives who were also German Jewish refugees, but in regard to my aunt and uncle, I prefer to cite the Freiburg legend: it warns that any native who stumbles into the mountain-fed waters of one of the city’s many foot-wide canals is certain to marry another Freiburger
Bobbele
.

Trudi’s wedding was set for June 15, 1947, and Janine did not look forward to living alone with the parents after her sister moved out. On Saturday nights when they had company coming and Leonard was traveling on business, Alice encouraged her older daughter to hide in her bedroom rather than be seen by their friends who would cluck about her lack of a date.

“I’ll understand if you choose not to come out to greet my guests,” Alice would say, her tone empathetic. “I’ll just tell them you’re not feeling well.”

And yet, Alice’s opinion of Leonard was muddled. Overwhelmed by the young man’s good looks, bluster, and kindness to her, she could not but admire what a “
schöner Mensch
” Janine had captured, even though his alien lineage gave rise to distress. “How can you marry a man when we don’t even know the family background?” Alice fretted over genetic hazards. “What if insanity runs in his family? How do we know?
Wirklich
, we know nothing at all.” She proclaimed herself to be mystified by him, wishing aloud that his head were “transparent” so she might “read” just what he was thinking—a wish I confess I frequently shared. But he forever remained an alluring enigma, a complicated, mercurial man with a brilliant, eager, principled mind, yet a soul that held back, a man who craved the validation of love, but could never quite learn to give or accept it.

Sigmar also regarded the match with mixed feelings. Leonard had labored to polish his college German and made concerted efforts to entertain Sigmar in his own language, which was easier for him with his hearing failing. And although Sigmar regularly looked forward to his political and business talks with Janine’s lively American suitor, when Len asked formal permission to marry his daughter, Sigmar mounted surprising resistance.

“
C’est un prince!
” He’s a prince! Aunt Marie roused her spirits to be the first in the family to argue for Leonard. But Sigmar demanded to see Len’s divorce papers and then voiced doubts that Len was Jewish. Out of embarrassment, Janine locked herself into the bathroom as Sigmar probed his background. First her father placed a yarmulke on the young man’s straight black hair and stood back for some moments, gravely appraising the total effect. It was almost as if he expected the prayer cap to send him a signal that the head where it sat was not, in truth, entitled to wear it. When Sigmar added a prayer book to the tableau and told him to read it, Len opened the volume from the wrong direction, thereby disclosing his unfamiliarity with the Hebrew right-to-left format. Finding out that Leonard
Maitland’s
parents were Fanny and Bernard
Friedman
—yes, Jewish, but humble immigrants from
Hinterberlin
, east of Berlin—equally dimmed Sigmar and Alice’s views of the marriage. The sense of superiority with which German Jews had long regarded their Eastern European brethren outlasted even Hitler’s efforts to destroy all Jews, irrespective of origin or social status.

“You make your bed, and you will lie in it,” Sigmar warned Janine on the day he granted grudging permission for them to marry. But if Sigmar’s misgivings eventually proved not entirely unfounded, the reasons for troubles between the couple would differ from any he had predicted.

Janine does not remember her marriage that summer as a particularly joyous event. Planning a wedding so soon after Trudi’s, she shrank from burdening her parents with a second costly, grand celebration. So when Estelle and Herbert offered to host an afternoon wedding at their posh country home on Long Island at the end of July, Janine was pleased to accept. With weddings barred on the Sabbath, that would have placed the ceremony on Sunday, July 27. But for Janine, of course, that date, always portentous, was out of the question, and so she set it for July 28, a Monday, which limited the guests who could spare the time from work to attend. Even Norbert, the instant life of any party, was missing, still with the army in Germany. To fill out the guest list, Herbert and Estelle invited their own country club friends, and the bride and groom felt awkward marrying in front of a crowd of indifferent strangers.

Logistics aside, factional conflict flared over the bridal gown. Ever practical, Janine eschewed white: she wanted something she could wear again and decided on blue, but when Leonard’s decisive sister directed her purchase of a navy blue taffeta dress with a deep décolleté, Estelle ruled it out. “
You’re
the one getting married here, remember?” Estelle said, dismissing what Mona termed “stunning” as too risqué and eccentric for a virginal bride. Instead, Estelle dressed Janine far more demurely at her favorite Park Avenue dress shop in an off-the-shoulder pale blue chiffon gown with a fitted waist and a flowing skirt of tiny pleats. To that Estelle added a floral tiara, her own graduated pearls, and white lace gloves that climbed past the elbows.

“Because God Made You Mine”—Janine and Len marry at the Winters’ summer home in Sea Cliff, Long Island on Monday, July 28, 1947
.
(photo credit 18.1)

The only music was the bridal march played on a phonograph, “Because God Made You Mine.” Janine had thought its lyrics meaningful in view of the historical forces, a half century of persecution, which had drawn her and Len from two thoroughly different worlds to exchange marriage vows in an American garden. But with Sigmar virtually deaf to the music, he could not march in step to its purposeful rhythm. Instead, he propelled his daughter in her silvery sandals down the grassy aisle to the chuppah of leaves, the Jewish ritual wedding canopy symbolizing a new couple’s home. Long, silky ribbons fluttered behind Janine’s compact bouquet, as father and daughter breezed past the meager standing assembly of guests. In the wedding pictures, Sigmar looks stern in his double-breasted, pin-striped gray suit, Janine almost mournful at points, the festive, white-blossomed tiara holding her veil incongruous with her far-off expression.

“Oh, my God, what am I doing?” Janine asked herself in panic, simultaneously squeezing her father’s arm in a useless effort to slow his gait. There are so many ways for a couple to part, but for Janine and Roland, free choice had played no role in their separation. And so even there, on her wedding day, with her first passion never willingly renounced, it still remained—a dream as elusive as a butterfly that hovered above the vows she would take. She sensed Roland there, the love of her young and innocent years, before war had taught them how time and events could conquer resolve and shatter even those goals that served to sustain them.

“May your love burn as brightly as these candles!” This was the blessing invoked by the rabbi, as he joined Janine to Leonard before a draped wicker table bearing two lit silver candelabra. But a strong gust of summer wind suddenly extinguished the flames. In her trailing ice-blue chiffon gown, as light as a kiss, Janine shivered and stared at the tendrils of smoke swaying like ghosts above six blackened wicks. Leonard had already placed the wide gold band on her finger, and she remembered that inside both of their rings, there were three words engraved:
à toi toujours
, yours always. It was a promise written in French but exchanged with an unimagined American husband.

That night the newlyweds first drove Alice and Sigmar home to Inwood in Len’s lumbering 1935 black Buick convertible, dubbed “Jackson,” and then headed toward the luxurious Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, where Janine had fantasized spending her wedding night. Embarrassed to pull up in his wreck of a car, she insisted Len park it several long blocks away. Indeed, while Jackson would carry them off on a honeymoon trip and return them safely to her parents’ door, that would prove its last mile, as it thereafter refused to start up again.

Exuberant stalks of white gladiolas standing stiffly bunched at attention saluted Janine in their room at the Pierre. They were Len’s favorite flower, “the biggest bang for the buck,” he thought—tall, showy, also long lasting—and he would buy them for her for the rest of his life. She never told him that the flowery totems seemed vulgar to her, rigid and lacking in grace with their discrete bursts of gaudy beauty. After Len’s death, out of nostalgia, Janine would begin to buy them herself. But she eyed them warily on their first night together, uneasy about the life she was starting.

Gladiolas for every birthday—this one in Glen Head, Long Island, 1949

Later, when she finally emerged from the bathroom in her frothy white peignoir—having delayed by washing her stockings and every other bit of underwear she might reasonably hope to dry overnight—her new husband had also changed into immaculate white pajamas with navy blue piping. He sat at the window waiting for her, patiently gazing out over the dark, wooded expanse of Central Park. With a fresh rush of pleasure, Janine admitted to herself that her husband did resemble, as Aunt Marie put it, a magnificent prince surveying his realm, a man even she should be happy to marry. Len heard her step, turned his head, raised his dark eyebrows appreciatively, and beckoned her closer to listen to the roar of the lions pacing their cages nearby in the zoo. He tenderly drew her into his arms.

“Oh, I thought that was you roaring,” she said with a smile, stroking his hair.

“Well, I was roaring too,” he said. “Any self-respecting lion would roar, given the length of time I’ve been waiting.”