‘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.
New girlfriends came, and went as soon as they talked of marriage. The Jewish ones usually raised the subject within a week the Gentiles, I found, waited a little longer. I even began living with one of them, Rebecca Wertz, but that too ended — on a Thursday.
I was driving to the office that morning — it must have been a little after eight, which was late for me — when I saw Christina on the other side of the busy highway, a barrier separating us. She was standing at a bus stop holding the band of a little boy, who must have been about five — my son.
The heavy morning traffic allowed me a little longer to stare in disbelief. I found that I wanted to look at them both at once. She wore a long lightweight coat that showed she had not lost her figure. Her face was serene and only reminded me why she was rarely out of my thoughts. Her son — our son — was wrapped up in an oversize duffel coat and his head was covered by a baseball hat that informed me that he supported the Toronto Dolphins. Sadly, it actually stopped me seeing what be looked like. You can’t be in Toronto, I remember thinking, you’re meant to be in Montreal. I watched them both in my side-mirror as they climbed onto a bus. That particular Thursday I must have been an appalling counselor to every client who sought my advice.
For the next week I passed by that bus stop every morning within minutes of the time I had seen them standing there but never saw them again. I began to wonder if I had imagined the whole scene. Then I spotted Christina again when I was returning across the city, having visited a client. She was on her own and I braked hard as I watched her entering a shop on Bloor Street. This time I double-parked the car and walked quickly across the road feeling like a sleazy private detective who spent his life peeping through keyholes.
What I saw took me by surprise — not to find her in a beautiful dress shop, but to discover it was where she worked.
The moment I saw that she was serving a customer I hurried back to my car. Once I had reached my office I asked my secretary if she knew of a shop called ‘Willing’s.’
My secretary laughed. ‘You must pronounce it the German way, the W becomes a V,’ she explained, ‘thus “Villing’s.” If you were married you would know that it’s the most expensive dress shop in town,’ she added.
‘Do you know anything else about the place?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘Only that it is owned by a wealthy German lady called Mrs. Klaus Willing whom they often write about in the women’s magazines.’
I didn’t need to ask my secretary any more questions and I won’t trouble you, Father, with my detective work. But, armed with those snippets of information, it didn’t take long to discover where Christina lived, that her husband was an overseas director with BMW, and that they had only the one child.
The old rabbi breathed deeply as he glanced up at the clock on his desk, more out of habit than any desire to know the time. He paused only for a moment before returning to the letter. He had been so proud of his lawyer son then; why hadn’t he made the first step toward a reconciliation?
How he would have liked to have seen his grandson.
My ultimate decision did not require an acute legal mind, just a little common sense — although a lawyer who advises himself undoubtedly has a fool for a client. Contact, I decided, had to be direct and a letter was the only method I felt Christina would find acceptable.