Crossing the Borders of Time (73 page)

TWENTY-SIX
MIDI MOINS DIX

O
N A WINTRY EVENING
almost three months after my father died, his longtime stockbroker came to see Janine and Gary in order to discuss the family’s finances. A patrician German Jew with the sophisticated eye and necessary means to collect the edgy paintings of Lucien Freud, he made this house call to New Jersey as a favor, based upon regard for Janine’s father that stretched back all the way to Freiburg. With loyalty to generations gone, he bent his head to analyze bank and brokerage statements spread across the dining table and concluded that the details of Dad’s estate were particularly confusing.

Len had died with records of his assets locked in his computer, protected by a secret password. Local computer firms failed to breach the barrier, and when Gary sent the hard drive to a company in Texas that specialized in hacking, somehow it got lost. Given the predicament they were facing, when the phone rang in the kitchen a little after nine p.m. and Janine excused herself to answer it, both men counted on her cutting short any interruption and returning to them promptly. But neither of them, nor in fact Janine, had any expectation of another echo from the past that night.

“
Allô? Bonsoir, Janine? C’est vraiment vous?
” Is it really you? “This is Roland Arcieri.… I trust you still remember me, but I hope I’m not disturbing you. My sister in Mulhouse gave me your telephone number after your daughter visited her three months ago. But I confess I hesitated to call you until now.”

The voice that came through the receiver was thickly accented in the Alsatian sort of French whose robust
r
’s slide into the throat, and the emphasis he placed on the first syllable of her name gave
ZHA-neen
its proper pronunciation, one that no American except for Len had ever tried to master. She heard Roland Arcieri speak her name and her knees began to tremble. The decades disappeared. Every weary muscle that had done its job to keep her moving forward, fulfilling all her duties to her parents and her children, her husband and his family, was jolted and revitalized. The world began to glimmer with endless possibilities she had summed up all her life in just one beloved name.

“
C’est Roland Arcieri!
 … 
J’espère que je ne vous dérange pas
.” I hope I’m not disturbing you. She realized he’d addressed her in French with the formal form of
you
(
vous
), and she fumbled for the phrases to alter that straight off, not content, after waiting almost half a century, to be a crusty
vous
to him, even on the telephone.

“Roland! I’m so happy to hear from you after such a long time. What a wonderful surprise! But couldn’t we still say
tu
when we speak together? At least to me, that would seem more natural:
tu
, not
vous
.” When she heard her words aloud in French, their waltzing trill, they surprised her by containing a grace note of flirtatiousness she no longer recognized as part of her personality.

“You know, we can even speak in English,” he replied, disappointing her by skipping past her overture and seizing on our neutral
you
, with its disregard for degrees of familiarity. “I’ve been living in Canada since 1949, and if I say so myself, I’ve finally accomplished to speak the bloody language reasonably well.”

Janine’s girlish peal of laughter drew glances from the dining room, where Gary and the broker sat waiting impatiently. “Well, then, if you don’t mind holding for a second, I’d like to take your call upstairs,” she answered. Switching into English, she was eager for more privacy, and so she motioned to her son to hang up the receiver in the kitchen as soon as she grabbed the call in her bedroom.

“What the …?” Gary began to question her, but she slashed the air to cut him off and, grinning, dashed past him up the stairs and shut her bedroom door. In the twenty-minute conversation that followed, Janine told Roland that she’d married on July 28, 1947, a marriage not without its difficulties, and that she’d lost her husband that November. She spoke about her children and Trudi and then about her parents, both now gone, and about her brother’s dying prematurely in 1976, the victim of bad habits.

“I’m very sorry, for your husband and for Norbert. I was hoping sometime or another I might get to see him again,” Roland said, a comment that buoyed her sudden hopes he meant to see her too. “You know, I always liked that fellow. But when it comes to habits, I’m no candidate for sainthood, either. I’m still quite loyally devoted to my scotch and cigarettes.”

He told her that he’d married for the first time, though not by choice, exactly one month to the very day after she had married Len. He’d returned to Mulhouse in 1945 following his release from an uneventful stint with the Free French Army after liberation, and he’d bumped into Lisette. “She told me that you had a new life in America and that I should stay away from you or I’d only bring you misery,” he said.

“Oh, my God!” Janine interjected. “She knew how desperate I was to hear from you. Did she really say that? You know, I think she never forgave me for the way I ditched her in a dump of a hotel room in Marseille to sneak off with you that night before we sailed for Casablanca. Even twenty years later, when she came here to visit me, she was still upset about it.”

“What a shame, especially since you did me the discourtesy of falling asleep in our
own
very quaint hotel room, so in retrospect, you might just as well have brought her with you,” he jabbed.

“After everything we went through, of course I was
kaputt
,” Janine said, the dream-created memory of their escaping from the Nazis through a window to the hotel rooftop still entirely real to her. “But then you should have woken me! I’ve never stopped regretting how I fell asleep that night!”

“Ah!” he countered, his tone betraying more serious resignation. “That was just
one
of the irreparable mistakes we made in those days.”

It was not until October, when he heard from his sister, that he finally understood how Janine’s failure to answer his many letters might not have been intentional, but rather the result of her father’s interference. Through all the years since they had parted, he assumed her silence meant she had resolved to move on and forget him, he said. She had obviously replaced him in America, much as Lisette intimated. Still, he remembered being terribly hurt that she had never even deigned to write to him and tell him so, instead of leaving him to wonder brokenhearted.

“You’ll have to take responsibility—my cynicism about love in general is all your fault,” he charged. There was a pause in which she heard him light a cigarette and take a drag, and that sparked her need for one as well, so she rummaged in her bedside drawer to find the pack she kept hidden for emergencies, despite the countless promises and resolutions she had made to quit. “Imagine my amazement,” he continued, his speech precise and somewhat stilted, “when my sister wrote to tell me that you’d sent your daughter to track me down in Mulhouse. It was quite flattering, of course, but also quite surprising, after so much time. I assure you, I did not know what to make of it.”

“But I didn’t send her!” Janine interrupted, thoroughly embarrassed. “I had no idea that she was even going to Mulhouse. She was supposed to be in Freiburg at a meeting. I might have wanted to, but I would never have been that forward. It was entirely her doing! I only learned about it afterward.”

“Well, that’s not the way
I
heard it,” Roland said, only partly teasing, “and my poor sister,
la pauvre
, is always very scrupulous in the way that she presents things. Here, I’ll read you her letter. It’s dated, I might add, October 22. I’m glad to say she wrote me far more promptly than you ever were inclined to do. So, I start:

‘Bien cher Roland,

I must inform you right away of a visit that I received yesterday from a Madame Leslie Maitland, daughter of Janine Günzburger, whom you knew in the past. As she was making a trip to Europe, her mother charged her with seeking news of you, believing you were still living in Mulhouse. Leslie is a congenial person, speaking admirable French. She lives in Washington, and her mother near New York. Her mother had often spoken to her about you. Now I am supposed to tell you that if Janine never responded to your letters, it was because her father intercepted them, without destroying them. She only found them later, and then she was distraught at having failed to answer you. We spoke about you for a long while.…’

“But my sister, generally a person of irreproachable behavior, quietly decided not to pass along any information as to how or where I might try to contact you.” Roland apparently stopped reading but still went rushing forward before Janine could dispute Emilienne’s account of how I came to visit her. “Her letter—I tell you what, I’ll send it to you—gave me not the slightest hint at all. As if I wouldn’t notice that omission! ‘Come now, dear,’ I had to call her up and wheedle her, ‘surely Janine’s daughter left you her address or a phone number, considering she took the trouble to look you up and come to see you.’ But then, I confess, once I wormed the information out of her, somehow I was afraid to call you. I thought your husband might not appreciate your former beau popping up out of the blue, and so it’s taken me three months to gather up the courage.”

“By that point,” Janine said with a sigh, “Len was far too sick to object to much of anything anymore. But I hope your sister was not too shocked by my daughter’s visit. Really, I had no idea she would try to get in touch with you. Now I’m not unhappy that she did—it’s so wonderful to hear from you.… But tell me how you came to move to Canada. She told me you were living in Montreal?”

Before Roland could answer, they heard the sound of Gary lifting the receiver in the kitchen.

“Mom, what the hell is
wrong
with you?” he scolded her into the phone. “Just how long do you plan on keeping us waiting? We’re about to call it quits here!” With that, he slammed down the receiver.

“Oh, excuse me,” Roland said. “I can see I’ve interrupted something important. I should have asked you at the outset if my timing was convenient. Excuse me, it was so enjoyable to finally catch up with you that I’ve been selfish. Go now, before you get in trouble. I’ll call again some other time.”

“Wait! When?” Janine cried, terrified of losing the connection.

“I’ll try tomorrow,” he said, and again she noticed the French double
r
rolling down his palate, an accent in English much stronger than her own. “Tomorrow afternoon. Until then, I kiss you.”

The following day, however, Trudi drove out to New Jersey from Manhattan for a rare visit, and when, as promised, Roland called again, Trudi insisted that Janine pass the phone to her so she could say hello to him. “Ooh, this is so exciting!” Trudi gushed into the telephone. “I really can’t believe it’s you after all these years.” By the time she passed the receiver back to Janine, it was Roland’s turn to say he had to go. He would do his best, he told Janine, to call again the next day. Yet that night, when she told me what had happened, Mother sounded every bit the schoolgirl in her anxious need for reassurance that Roland would actually contact her a third time. For my part, having kept a cautious silence on the subject of Roland since coming home from Mulhouse, I allowed myself to fantasize that, just maybe, I had set the stars in motion for them to find each other once again. Now, however, my mother was afraid to let herself imagine it.

“He probably won’t call me back,” she groaned. “It’s just my luck.” She enumerated for the hundredth time all the many things and people responsible for having kept them separated. First the war, of course. Then most to blame, her father, having hidden Roland’s letters and his attempts to find her in New York. Then there was her cousin Herbert with his weekly lunchtime sermons on the dangers of leaving home and parents and going back to Europe by herself. She hadn’t known before, but according to Roland, even her friend Lisette had meddled, warning him emphatically not to follow her! (Repressed and thus far unrecovered, Norbert’s defamatory letter from Lyon in 1945 went unmentioned.) But Edy did his bit as well, years ago, she noted, with his dark insinuations that Roland had been corrupted. Then Emilienne had added to the pattern when she avoided passing on the information of where Roland could reach her now.

“On top of all of that,” she added, “Gary was so outrageous when he picked up the telephone that I hated to admit he was my son. And the next time Roland called, Trudi nabbed the phone and took up all our time. What chance have I ever had with the man I’ve wanted all my life?… I guess I should be thankful—if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t even know he was still alive.… But
honestly
, do you think he’ll call me back? Do you
really
think he’ll call again?”

The following night, she canceled plans for dinner with a friend in order to be home, just in case, and was rewarded with a phone call. This time, uninterrupted, they talked for hours, and she learned about his life, beginning with that last moment in Marseille when she’d watched him in a rowboat bobbing on the waves amid her sunshine-yellow, falsely gay mimosas, until his silhouette became a dot against the sky. On that brisk March day almost fifty years before, he said, adding his perspective, he rowed back to the dock and rushed to climb the hillside that rose above the city to the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde. From that summit above the Mediterranean, he followed the progress of her ship steaming toward North Africa for as long as he could make it out. Roger met him there by prearrangement, and as dusk approached and the
Lipari
disappeared into the clouds, they traveled back to Lyon. There, Roland had largely remained, living as unobtrusively as possible until the war was over.