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Romance and Marriage

Buenos Aires, 1947-1949.


Two things bring back my parents’ romance and marriage. The first is Mom’s gorgeous engagement ring. The ring is in a beautiful golden hue with an arch of diamonds rising out of a flat surface of more diamonds, this time square ones. It is a classic Art Deco design, which Dad likely found in one of the BA antique shops in barrio San Telmo.  The second is a photo of my parents at a fancy dinner at the Embassy, a luxury restaurant of BA. I suspect that they were celebrating their engagement.


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From letters of Dad’s that Mom had sent to Uncle Jack, and which I read years later in the States, my father fell for her immediately. He romanced her in German. He did not have a circle of friends as lively as hers and he must have let himself be swept in. She may have reminded him of Hanna, the widow of The Merry Widow, Lehar’s operetta, some of whose lyrics she could sing from memory. She sang and spoke in a melodious Viennese, not at all Dad’s Hoch Deutsch, his High German. He probably could not believe his luck to have met such a woman. He may have daydreamed that there was still a chance for a family, maybe even children. He courted her, took her to restaurants and the opera, for walks in Parque Palermo.

Tante Rosl told me that Mom had worries about him: He had been a bachelor for so long, he did not speak much of his youth back in the Levant, he seemed set in his ways. But Mom softened. He was thoughtful and wanted to help her. She probably felt safer with him than she had in years. I imagine that she started enjoying Buenos Aires in ways she had not known before. He had willingly chosen BA and had become a mate-drinking porteño.  She, in contrast, had bribed a random consul in Vienna, landed in BA, but remained Viennese. Maybe, like Mauricio, Riqui may have hoped that with him she too could belong in Buenos Aires, so far from her past.

It is no coincidence that both of their childhoods had been similar. He was raised in the Levant into a world of European Kultur. She was raised in Leopoldstadt but wanting to be part of the sophisticated Kultur of Imperial Vienna. They met in BA, which is after all, the Paris of South America. It was all about Kultur with them, that vague German concept of learned finesse. The more their behavior was rooted in Austro-Hungarian refinement, the better. In the end, my parents were émigrés from the nostalgia of an Empire that was no more. They must have felt right at home with each other. I am pretty sure that nothing would have made Dad happier than marrying her.  

I imagine that one evening at Steinhauser he told her that he loved her. The formality I read in his earlier love letters was such that I easily hear him at his gallant best: “Riqui, I don’t know . . . I don’t want to appear too impetuous, but my respect and friendship for you have grown in the last months to a feeling that I can no longer deny.”

He proposed a few months later. I suppose that she was expecting his proposal, and from comments I heard from her intimates, said that she would think about it. She told her friends that she wasn’t sure if he was the right one, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to marry again so soon. She repeated her concerns in letters she wrote to her brother and mother in New York, and which they shared with me years later. Decades after Mom’s death, my Grandma, my Uncle Jack, and my BA aunties told me that they all advised strongly in favor.

Tante Rosl helped her overcome her mixed feelings. “And something else Riqui,” she said, and repeated it to me when I visited in the 1990s, “You’re not so young yourself and, since Walter died, your health hasn’t been the same. This man will take care of you.”

In the end, Riqui accepted. In early 1948, they traveled to Uruguay to be married. Marrying across the Rio de la Plata was a strategy that couples often used in the days before Argentina recognized divorces in 1987; in Uruguay, they were legal since 1907. My parents, together with many others, had the mistaken belief that, if necessary, they could divorce in Uruguay. Such was not the law, however, in that neither Riqui nor Mauricio lived or had property in Uruguay when they married there. Had they ever decided to divorce, their little stratagem may well have failed. It is curious, however, that they wanted to have the option. I wonder who suggested this rather sanguine idea. Perhaps Tante Rosl had said to her, “Just in case, Riqui, you never know.”  Mauricio must have swallowed hard as he heard Riqui accept his proposal, “Yes, Mauricio, I’ll marry you, but on one condition . . .”

 

They were married in Montevideo by a civil judge. No rabbi or synagogue for these two assimilated Jews cut off from their families. She was 40 and he was 55. They honeymooned in Bariloche, a gorgeous mountain village nestled on the Andean foothills of northwest Patagonia. During my childhood, Mom talked of Bariloche with great fondness. She often said that it reminded her of the Austrian Alps of her youth.

Among my box of old photographs there are a few of my parents’ honeymoon in Bariloche. In one of them Mom and Dad, smiling happily, are standing next to each other at a fence. Beyond the fence is Lake Nahuel Huapi, a glacial moraine, and, in the distance, a snow-covered mountain. In 2008, I went to Bariloche with Sandy and my girls to find the precise spot of that photo. That story is in my next chapter.


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Here are pictures of Mom’s beautiful engagement ring and of the night when my parents celebrated their engagement:



I cannot see Mom’s hands in the photo of their engagement dinner. Dad’s left one does not yet have a wedding band. A solemn waiter seems to be pouring wine. My parents appear happy. Dad is affectionately holding her shoulder, and she is smiling. She is wearing the bejeweled hat that I found among her hatboxes up there in the closet in 1968. Sadly, I trashed her cylindrical hat without pity. I wish I could hold it again, but at least I can see how happy Mom was that day.

Mom’s ring made its way to the US at the bottom of my blue velvet bag together with other small things that I could easily carry.  It stayed at the bottom of the little bag for many years, never having seen the light of day during my first two marriages. When I finally spread the bag’s contents on a table, a few years after marrying Sandy, we were both awed by its timeless beauty. I looked at Sandy and, without a moment’s hesitation, knew that it belonged on her hand.

It fits her perfectly.  She loves it and I love her when she wears it to a fancy outing, like the opera or a party. If I also wear Dad’s red cufflinks that day, my parents’ delighted ghosts join us for the celebration.


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