A Twist in the Tale

She smiled. “I’ll be back even before you’ve had the time to change your mind about marrying me.”

I sat in my room at McGill all that afternoon reading and pacing—mostly pacing—but she never came back, and I didn’t go in search of her until it was dark. I crept round to her home, all the while trying to convince myself there must be some simple explanation as to why she hadn’t returned.

When I reached her road I could see a light on in her bedroom but nowhere else in the house so I thought she must be alone. I marched through the gate and up to the front porch, knocked on the door and waited.

Her father answered the door.

“What do you want?” he asked, his eyes never leaving me for a moment.

“I love your daughter,” I told him, “and I want to marry her.”

“She will never marry a Jew,” he said simply and closed the door. I remember that he didn’t slam it, be just closed it, which made it somehow even worse.

I stood outside in the road staring up at her room for over an hour until the light went out. Then I walked home. I recall there was a light drizzle that night and few people were on the streets. I tried to work out what I should do next, although the situation seemed hopeless to me. I went to bed that night hoping for a miracle. I had forgotten that miracles are for Christians, not for Jews.

By the next morning I had worked out a plan: I phoned Christina’s home at eight and nearly put the phone down when I heard the voice at the other end.

“Mrs. von Braumer,” she said.

“Is Christina there?” I asked in a whisper.

“No, she’s not,” came back the controlled impersonal reply.

“When are you expecting her back?” I said.

“Not for some time,” she said, and then the phone went dead.

“Not for some time” turned out to

be over a year. I wrote, telephoned, asked friends from school and university but could never find out where they had taken her.

Then one day, unannounced, she returned to Montreal accompanied by a husband and my child. I learned the bitter details from that font of all knowledge, Naomi Goldblatz, who had already seen all three of them.

I received a short note from Christina about a week later begging me not to make any attempt to contact her.

I had just begun my last year at McGill and like some eighteenth-century gentleman I honored her wish to the letter and turned all my energies to the final exams. She still continued to preoccupy my thoughts and I considered myself lucky at the end of the year to be offered a place at Harvard Law School.

I left Montreal for Boston on September 12, 1968.

You must have wondered why I never came home once during those years. I knew of your disapproval Thanks to Mrs. Goldblatz everyone was aware who the father of Christina’s child was and I felt an enforced absence might make life a little easier for you.

The rabbi paused as he remembered Mrs. Goldblatz letting him know what she had considered was “only her duty.”

“You’re an interfering old busybody,” he had told her. By the following Saturday she had moved to another synagogue and let everyone in the town know why.

He was more angry with himself than with Benjamin and should have visited Harvard to let his son know that his love for him had not changed. So much for his powers of forgiveness.

He took up the letter once again.

Throughout those years at law school I had plenty of friends of both sexes, but Christina was rarely out of my mind for more than a few hours at a time. I wrote over seventy letters to her while I was in Boston, but didn’t post one of them. I even phoned, but it was never her voice that answered. If it had been, I’m not even sure I would have said anything. I just wanted to hear her.

Were you ever curious about the women in my life? I had affairs with bright girls from Radcliffe who were reading law, history or science, and once with a shop assistant who never read anything. Can you imagine, in the very act of making love, always thinking of another woman? I seemed to be doing my work on autopilot, and even my passion for running became reduced to an hour’s jogging a day.

Long before the end of my last year, leading law firms in New York, Chicago and Toronto were turning up to interview us. The Harvard tom-toms can be relied on to beat across the world, but even I was surprised by a visit from the senior partner of Graham Douglas & Wilkins of Toronto. It’s not a firm known for its Jewish partners, but I liked the idea of their letterhead one day reading “Graham Douglas Wilkins & Rosenthal.” Even her father would surely have been impressed by that.

At least if I lived and worked in Toronto, I convinced myself, it would be far enough away for me to forget her, and perhaps with luck find someone else I could feel that way about.

Graham Douglas & Wilkins found me a spacious apartment overlooking the park and started me off at a handsome salary. In return I worked all the hours God—whoever’s God—made. If I thought they had pushed me at McGill or Harvard, Father, it turned out to be no more than a dry run for the real world. I didn’t complain. The work was exciting, and the rewards beyond my expectation. Only now that I could afford a Thunderbird, I didn’t want one.