Crossing the Borders of Time (64 page)

They’d laugh at me when they returned, Mom emptying her ineffective bathing cap, Dad slicking back his hair and shaking water off his body like a giant dog. I never left the beach without doing all I could to linger, wishing I might stop the sun and hold the day forever. Even as we trekked across the sand to the empty parking lot, even as the tide rushed in to reclaim that patch of beach where we had left our marks, I would turn and stare behind me, yearning to imprint the hours and store the blue-gold panorama in the treasure house of memory before the darkness drowned it.

As time went by and Dad’s mysterious infirmity did not improve, I wondered whether that might be the reason for his mellowing, particularly when having finished college at the University of Chicago, I announced my hope to postpone a journalism career to study world religions at the Harvard Divinity School. In view of Dad’s hostility toward religion, I had expected him to object, but he accepted my decision and even moved me up to Cambridge. He rented a truck and astonished us by donning a sleeveless undershirt as an impromptu trucker’s costume. From the driver’s seat, Dad honked and waved in collegial greeting to every other trucker we passed along the highway, as he proclaimed his lifelong membership in that fraternity of working men who made their living on the road.

When we arrived at dusk at my apartment building on Prescott Street behind the Fogg Museum, a snafu with the keys barred our entry until morning. But unwilling to leave the truck overnight with all my worldly goods inside it, Dad talked the janitor into lending him a ladder. Then, undeterred by his physical instability, he insisted on climbing up and entering my studio apartment by jimmying the courtyard window in the dark. He worked all weekend to make the small apartment cozy for me—a gift of time and effort he unstintingly devoted every time I moved for the next eleven years until his handicap prevented him from working with his hands and tools. He hung curtains and light fixtures and pictures and towel bars and extra locks on doors and windows and every other amenity or safety feature he could possibly imagine.

That winter, a detached retina sent to him into surgery. He called me from the hospital early on a Sunday morning—the first time I could remember his calling me himself, instead of simply picking up the phone for a minute when I was on with Mom.

“I’ve been lying here thinking, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason that you’re up there studying religion is that you’re looking to discover something—the meaning of life, or however you want to put it,” Dad began in a tone that also sounded unfamiliar for being hesitant and, to use his favorite word,
respectful
. “If that’s the case, I don’t know if this helps at all, but going into surgery sort of clarified my mind, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

“Be happy!” he said, the engineer’s answer as true in his mind as a quadratic equation. “In the end, that’s the thing that really matters. Just be happy, dollface. Make the most of life in any way that counts for you. Of all the concepts that we’ve argued over, you and I, that’s the only one I really want to leave with you.”

The first time I saw Carole Gordon she was dancing in a knee-length sleeveless dress, aglow in red chiffon, on the patio behind my parents’ house on the day in 1975 that I got married. I was dancing with my father—resplendent in a white suit and light blue shirt that matched his eyes—when she came wriggling beside us and started flirting with him. The deeply tanned and dark-haired wife of a convivial businessman, Carole was a casual friend of Mom’s friend Jean, who introduced her to my parents. I remember taking stock of provocatively sculptured calves, a muscled chest, and iron arms, a body that gave evidence to what I’d already heard described as her dedication to tennis. Less impressively, she spoke an exaggerated Brooklynese or a similar Long Island variant that I quickly learned to mimic.

Indeed, I aped her manner and her speech with such dead-on, gum-snapping effectiveness that even Dad was forced to laugh, despite the fact he liked her, and despite the fact he knew my crude impersonation was meant to serve as a signal that I knew what she was up to. He showed restraint by responding in good humor to my less-than-subtle tactics. Yet it didn’t take me long to see that Carole Gordon was the effervescent embodiment of the very sort of female my father claimed that men liked best, as bouncy and as fuzzy as a yellow tennis ball. Nor could I fail to recognize that I had trapped myself within a hopeless contradiction: I felt that I could stand it better if my father had been dazzled by a woman I admired, while at the same time I felt relieved not to have to take her seriously, by all accounts a bimbo who could never hope to steal my mother’s place with Dad. Meanwhile, Carole connived around me and tried to be my mother’s friend. Yes, beneath the guise of friendship, she invited my parents to a lively stream of parties at her well-appointed Scarsdale home and insisted that my father follow—to quote Mom, “like a dachshund at her side”—ostensibly to help her. Certainly, that was a task for which his previous domestic duties did nothing to prepare him, as my mother never gave him any that did not involve a toolbox.

My own marriage, hastened by my parents, ended by amicable agreement within two years. My husband, a television news producer, and I quickly proved unready for permanent commitment. But I was happily living and working in New York, having landed my first job at
The New York Times
, the fulfillment of my lifelong dream, the September after I received my master’s in religion. I still don’t know whether to credit my new economic independence, the imprimatur of
The Times
, my Harvard graduate degree, or a change in Dad or me for recalibrating our relationship on a more even-handed basis. He kept clippings of my news stories in his breast pocket to show off to friends and customers with the same delight and pride that other men reserved for photos of grandchildren. And when a front-page investigative series I had written on defective subway cars and corruption in New York City’s Transit Authority won several journalism prizes, Dad escorted me to a formal awards dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. It seemed fitting, as it was he who’d helped me understand the engineering of their undercarriages and the significance of stress cracks.

Still, as the women’s movement stirred awareness in the country, I found myself reacting with discomfort to the royal treatment Mom bestowed on him, following the example of her parents. While it never disturbed me as a child to see Nana doting slavishly to meet Bapa’s every need, Dad’s self-centered demands began to seem abusive, since he took it as his due for Mom to wait upon him, even as he often paid her back with inconsiderate behavior.

“Janine!” he called to her upstairs, for example, one weekend when I was visiting and sat beside him at the breakfast table reading morning newspapers.

“Mom’s getting dressed,” I said. “Is there something I can get for you?”

“No, I need your mother.” He raised his voice to carry farther: “Janine!”

“What is it, Dad? I’m sure that I can handle it.”

“Janine!” he called again, ignoring me.

Mom came rushing to the kitchen barefoot, clutching at her robe. “What’s wrong?” she asked, studying our faces for signs of brewing friction. “I was getting in the shower.”

“I’m ready for my coffee now,” he told her. I gaped, but he didn’t bat an eyelash when he muttered an explanation: “Your mother knows the way I like it.”

“Butt out,” he’d say when I objected to his treatment of her. “I don’t need
you
to tell me how to run my marriage.”

In February 1976 my parents were in Acapulco on vacation, when Trudi called them with the dreaded news that Norbert was in the hospital, not expected to survive for long, his two-year battle with lung cancer coming to its end. They were on the airplane rushing home when Dad spiked a fever, shivering uncontrollably, and by the time they landed, he could barely walk or move his hands in any coordinated effort. With double vision and his usual anchorman’s elocution replaced by garbled speech, he was admitted to the same New Jersey hospital where Norbert’s life was ebbing. There, a nightmare became reality. The elevators ferried us between the rooms of men we loved, in anguished navigation from helpless grief at one bed to nameless fear that hovered at the other, as doctors could not identify the etiology of Dad’s symptoms.

The next day, Mom and I were standing at Norbert’s bedside when—dressed, handsome, and as freshly shaved and scented as if ready for a date—he died at only fifty-four. Hours later, Mom arranged for an ambulance to transfer Dad to Mount Sinai, the beginning of a dismal quest to analyze his illness, a crippling problem temporarily assigned the generic and understated label of “peripheral neuropathy.”

Our deep mourning for Norbert, with his ever-engaging personality and love of life, was necessarily layered by our fears for Dad and worries for Alice, who at eighty-four, had lived to bury her beloved only son. Thankfully, as weeks went by, the severity of Dad’s symptoms abated, his vision cleared, and he got back on his feet again. For the next five years he would suffer the same moderate level of functional impairment he had been living with before, though we saw foreboding hints of continuing decline. Still he did not complain, and he wouldn’t let his body beat him.

Instead, he decided to create. He bought a piece of land near the beach in the Hamptons and planned to build a house befitting Howard Roark. The forward-looking design was his, with a great open space at the center of the structure, which he insisted be undisrupted by any sort of pillar or bearing wall. I was touched that he planned a balcony off my bedroom as a private outdoor aerie just for me to write, but he had trouble finding anyone who would agree to build the house the way he wanted. Not unlike Rand’s fictional heroic architect, Dad so vigorously insisted on the purity of his concept that the ideal prohibited the building of the real. On paper, he worked on it for years with an architecture professor from Columbia University, even as his ability to negotiate a beach, with its tricky footing, slipped away. Then once more, he heeded Mother’s voice of reason, resignedly insisting it was time to sell the land.

Not long after, Dad acknowledged having trouble climbing the stairs to the second-story office he was renting. Besides that, although he’d hired a salesman to make road trips for him, his income had been dropping, so Mom suggested both for convenience and economy that he move his business into the lower level of their home. The narrow staircase that led downstairs had banisters to lend support, and Dad was well accustomed to descending there each night, as battling mortality he doggedly maintained his rigorous discipline of bodybuilding exercise.

Now, with the business, secretary, and salesman all installed downstairs, Mom began to realize that every Tuesday without fail her husband disappeared. It was not an absence she could miss, because while she had started back to work part-time for a group of local cardiologists, she had Tuesdays off and was generally at home. She noticed that he kept a blanket and a coffeepot and his tennis clothes and racquet in the trunk of his car, and he claimed that he made tennis dates with a Grumman Aircraft buyer. But an overheard telephone conversation clarified the mystery: the reason Dad drove off at eleven thirty every Tuesday morning and did not return until late afternoon was that he was spending the day alone with Carole Gordon.

When Mom confided her terrible discovery to Jean, her friend referred her to a psychotherapist who was brutally stark in summing up her options.

“Put up with it or leave him,” he advised. “Just don’t imagine for a second you can change him. This has nothing to do with you, or even with his love for you.” He suggested that Leonard needed to establish over and over, by way of repeated sexual conquests, that women were attracted to him. With business and health reversals undercutting Len’s already damaged self-esteem, it was understandable that preserving sexual power would seem all the more important. “I’d recommend if you can stand it and want to save your marriage,” the therapist concluded, “your only option is to look the other way.”