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A True Love, Love Story
A Rose for Raymonde gives romance a second wind
For many women today, romance can seem like a fictional concept. It’s still out there, we tell ourselves, if by out there you mean sandwiched between the pages of a Nicholas Sparks novel. News magazines are simultaneously celebrating the rise of women to power and decrying the decline of men as functional participants in society and relationships. We’re usurping men in education and employment, we’re told: now it’s time to reap the consequences, including, among all the gems, a dearth of romantic partners who can live up to our age-old expectations. As more and more men adapt to the demands of a role that no longer includes primary caregiver and protector of women, we struggle to strike a balance between independence and romance. “Where have all the gentlemen gone?” we wonder as we sift through disappointing relationship after disappointing relationship. Meanwhile, divorce rates remain high enough to put a damper on anyone’s romantic yearnings.
As for myself, I’d begun to doubt whether the fairytale romances ever really existed the way we imagine them. I’ve looked at happy, elderly couples who have spent their lives together in matrimonial bliss, and made the withering conclusion that the women must be lacking in spirit to have melded so seamlessly with her husband all those years. Yes, that was it, I decided. True romance had existed for many couples in the past, but only because those women were mere shadows of individuals, bending pleasantly to the wills of their partners. Fairytale endings could never happen for the headstrong women of today.
And then I met Wade. No, Wade is no sun-bleached throwback to come strolling off the pages of a summer romance paperback. He is an eighty-five-year-old man who scheduled a meeting last year at the publishing house where I work to discuss a book he’d written about his late wife. He sat before us in a brown cardigan with his hands clasped between his knees and told us that he wanted to commemorate the love of his life. His manuscript charmed us, and the rest is history.
Released this summer amid toasts and happy sentiments, A Rose for Raymonde offers something the romance novels can’t: a true truelove story. Grounded in a historical context and complete with photographs and unedited personal letters, this book tells the humble story of a young Swiss nurse who immigrated to the United States and found love with a U.S. Navy Reserve officer in the 1950’s New York. When the two met in 1951, Wade H. Foy Jr. was an Annapolis and North Carolina State College graduate preparing for active duty in the Navy Reserve; Raymonde van Laar had grown up in Switzerland and France and had endured the fear and privations of German occupation during World War II.
Love at first sight? Who’s to say? Raymonde had demurred meeting Wade at first, saying to their mutual friends that ‘she didn’t need any more boyfriends.’ But the attraction was quick and real, and the two soon fell in love and were married. As their story unfolds in A Rose for Raymonde, the reader is provided a rare and compelling glimpse of a life well lived together.
True to his introduction, Wade’s book is an “account of a pair of life streams that merged,” but he also set out to capture the portrait of the woman he loved, and he succeeds in exquisite detail. “Nowhere do I intend to imply that my wife was a candidate for sainthood,” Wade states, and he doesn’t feign to. The Raymonde to whom readers are introduced is no ethereal wife in waiting. She is a courageous and intelligent woman, willful in her actions and headstrong in her convictions. And yet through all the trials of their life and times, she and her husband struck the harmony that seems so elusive today. During my work on the book’s publication, I found my pessimistic appraisals of romance slipping away with each reading. I must have read the book dozens of times, but I never finished it with dry eyes.
Is their story a rarity? I don’t know, but it gratifies me to know that it happened once. In a world where real life and fiction have become increasingly blurred and inextricable, we’re at times in need of a reality check, and this is one that won’t leave you disillusioned. Eloquently written and beautifully arranged, A Rose for Raymonde is a memoir, a history and a love story of the sweetest, simplest kind. It’s a heartening reminder that true love is out there and that, once found, it can last a lifetime and longer.
For more information or to purchse a copy of A Rose for Raymonde visit amazon.com
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