Memento Park Read online

  “Fuck. You.”

  The bill fluttered to the tabletop as I released my finger and stomped away.

  * * *

  IN THE END, I couldn’t leave him there. I stormed out to my car, slammed the door, fired it up, got as far as the exit booth. The attendant waited for my ticket but I couldn’t go through with it. So I backed up and returned to the auditorium exit and waited there—for how long? Two hours? Three?—until my father emerged dragging his suitcase. If he felt any surprise at the sight of me, it didn’t show. I pressed the trunk release but did not get out. He loaded his suitcase, closed the trunk, and got into the car. We pulled away without a word.

  The drive in from the airport had been silent, or so I had thought. But the drive back to LAX was much worse for its awful stillness, a frozen silence. It was eighty-three degrees outside and I was shivering. I drove like a maniac, speeding down the freeways. We arrived at the airport three hours before his flight.

  “Just drop me at the curb,” he said. His first words. I ignored him and drove into the parking structure. He said nothing. I pulled into a spot and switched off the engine. The silence grew thicker. I turned to my father, who hadn’t moved.

  “Dad, why did you come here?”

  “For the show.” He continued looking straight ahead.

  “The same show you’ve ignored every year for the last decade?”

  “It’s a big show, Matt.”

  “Yeah. Dad, just once, please—say what’s on your mind. You’re here about the painting, I know you are. Tracy’s no cardplayer.”

  Did my father almost smile? I’m sure not. A nervous twitch, perhaps.

  “What did you mean, when you said don’t fuck this up?”

  My father surprised me by laying his hand upon my knee. His pinky ring, gold with an oval onyx stone, gently rapped my kneecap.

  “Mátyás…” he began, but the words failed him. “It’s complicated.”

  “So uncomplicate it for me.”

  He turned to me and, with surprising gentleness, said, “If it was that easy, I would, kisfiú.”

  Kisfiú. How can I convey the effect of that one Hungarian word, Virgil? The unexpected tenderness of the word, literally “little boy,” an affectionate nickname from father to son, one I’d heard often in childhood and despaired of ever hearing again. With one word, my father penetrated my rage and was briefly restored to me.

  * * *

  BOARDING PASS IN HAND, my father walked toward the security gates. I remembered something that I’d meant to ask.

  “Hey, do you remember the space toy?”

  “Hey is for horses.”

  “The space toy, the bet, do you remember?”

  He nodded.

  “The morning after I paid you, the money was back in my wallet. Did you do that? Or was it Mom?”

  He thought for a moment. I could see his historical archive flip past his inner eye. He shook his head.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think it was me. It must have been your mother.”

  “I guess it must have been.”

  “Not a big deal, either way.”

  “No. Not a big deal, Dad.”

  We stopped at the security checkpoint. My father turned to face me.

  “Well.”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “It was good to see you.”

  “Safe trip.”

  He nodded. Then, as he turned to enter the checkpoint:

  “Pushpushpush.”

  I stood there and waited until he was out of sight. I know it drove him crazy, the sentimentality of the gesture, and normally that would have been satisfaction enough. But there was something else keeping me there. At first I thought perhaps it was a desire to confirm with absolute certainty that the old bastard was safely out of my life again. Then I thought perhaps it was pity, not unlike the stab I’d felt the night before, watching him at his hotel. Something about his shrunken vitality haunted me. But the answer was simpler than that.

  I was sad to see him go.

  GOD RESTED ON THE SEVENTH DAY, we’re told. No killer instinct. I learned from Rachel that He also bestowed on us conflicting directives to commemorate His day of rest. Exodus exhorts us to “remember the Sabbath day,” whereas Deuteronomy commands that we “observe the Sabbath day.” The nuances of those two words have kept the rabbis arguing for centuries. Rabbi Wolfe did not share their fascination, however, and shrugged when I asked her how one might parse the differences. “What do you think?” she countered, as a therapist might. As it happens, there is nothing for me to remember, as nothing was ever observed. Again, that telling vacancy. My parents never once lit a Sabbath candle. The notion of resting in any form, excepting our annual two-week vacations to somewhere sunny and cheap, usually Florida, was anathema to my father, who seemed tortured by everything that was transpiring in his absence. To give over an entire day every week to do nothing but sit with one’s own thoughts? My father could have sooner breathed water.

  This omission has come to sadden me, along with the rest of my lost Jewish childhood. Of the many doors the saga of Budapest Street Scene has opened for me, it is, for some reason, the idea of the Sabbath that most moves me, and not just because of that unforgettable evening with Rachel. I am fascinated by this notion of sanctified time. Time that is set aside, sacred, a space of quiet in which daily activities, material pursuits, the relentless, insistent connection of our lives might be stilled. This is the part of my denied birthright that I most long for. Yet it’s too late in the game to start over, that much was clear to me as I sat with Rachel and her father, an outsider yet again.

  Rachel’s invitation came a week after my father left, at the end of one of our regular phone calls. Since our afternoon at the museum, we were finding more frequent, if trivial, reasons to be in touch. As often as not, the subject was Kálmán himself, some new tidbit I’d uncovered or something she had read. We had been discussing Kálmán’s Judaism, and his suicide just hours ahead of the Nazis’ entry to Budapest, and I became aware that it was one of the few times in our discussions that I had been faking it. Oh, I knew Kálmán front to back, could have played him in the miniseries by that point. But on the matter of his religion—no, not his, ours … but is that true, can I honestly claim that?—I fumbled, stammered, and simply agreed with Rachel wherever possible. A silence suffused the line, when she surprised me:

  “Would you like to come to a Sabbath dinner?” she asked.

  Picture me at a loss for words, Virgil. Is your imagination that good? She must have sensed something in my hesitation, because she hastened to add, “It’s nothing fancy. Just my dad and me, at his house. It’s kind of a ritual for us since my mother died.”

  Tracy had departed for Texas with Brian, and I’d been feeling aggrieved. I found myself thinking, why shouldn’t I also enjoy the company of an attractive attorney? But I knew my lines, and recited them:

  “Are you sure it’s not an imposition? I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “My father will enjoy the company. He’s never happier than when he’s educating someone.”

  “Educating?”

  “Have you ever been to a Sabbath dinner?”

  My silence was my reply.

  “A Jew who barely knows Abraham from Isaac? Yeah, I’d say you could use an education, Matt.”

  * * *

  RACHEL’S FATHER, Bernard—Bernie, he’d insisted—intimidated me, as I suppose all fathers must. I arrived, flowers in hand, shortly before sundown, it must have been before five, an hour at which I was unused to dining. Bernie, a retired litigator, quite fearsome in his day by all accounts, lived in an old Spanish duplex in the neighborhood where I’d gone mezuzah shopping. He owned the building, lived downstairs, and rented out the upstairs apartment. He would have preferred the top floor, he explained, but he was wheelchair bound, had been since a stroke on his sixty-eighth birthday. His health had continued to deteriorate and now, ap
proaching seventy-five, he was essentially a prisoner in his own home. A nurse—Ingrid, worthless, he snorted—saw to his daily needs, but it was Rachel who attended to Sabbath dinner, and had done so since her mother died three years earlier. Rachel hadn’t missed a Sabbath unless traveling for work, Bernie said with pride and, perhaps, a bit of territoriality.

  “I used to go to temple religiously”—he shrugged at the pun, as though he somehow wasn’t to blame for it—“but now…” He indicated the wheelchair. “Anyway, we’ve got candles, we’ve got bread, who needs to go out? Sabbath is for family.”

  Did I hear a trace of accusation in that last word? He scrutinized me, and I felt myself failing the first of many tests. He was such a contrast to my own father. Thick glasses had left permanent dents on the bridge of his nose. He had the frail, eggshell skull of an intellectual. But he burned, Virgil, he burned with a brightness that unnerved me. Is this, I wondered for the first time, what it was like to have God within? How diminished my father seemed to me in his shadow. Still, I thought back to Kálmán’s painting, to my father edging his way out of the frame, and it was all too easy to imagine Bernie among those left behind, those consumed.

  Rachel, who had been busy in the kitchen until now, chose this moment to appear in the doorway. We were unsure how to greet each other. Suddenly, the handshake of the office seemed too formal. At length, she leaned forward, offering her cheek, which I pecked. An awkward half-hug followed. I handed her the flowers, which she received graciously, disappearing to put them in water. My attention wandered around the sitting room. The furniture looked as though it had been in the family a long time, and the paint and carpet were worn, thin with age. The threadbare green shag was full of holes. Yet the fusty room felt inhabited, limned with echoes of family. I could remember no such room in my childhood home.

  Rachel returned and invited me to join them as she stood with her father before a pair of candles in dull bronze candlesticks on a silver tray. Bernie handed me a kippah—from his nephew Ari’s bar mitzvah, he explained—which I set on my head, and I was back in temple with my grandfather. As Rachel lit the candles, she explained this needed to be done before the commencement of the Sabbath, since the lighting of fire was prohibited.

  Once the candles were lit, Rachel set down the burning match on the tray, and she waved toward herself three times, as though beckoning a tired and frightened animal to approach. I was unprepared for the quiet, intense openness the invitation conveyed. She then covered her eyes and said the prayer, one I had never heard before. I maintained a respectful distance as I watched. It felt like I was intruding on some act of great intimacy. For the first of many times that evening, I was aware how out of place I was, and yet I wanted nothing more than to take my place beside them. Rachel and Bernie finished their prayer, exchanged a kiss on the cheek, and turned to me. A framed reproduction of a Chagall dominated the far wall where I stood. Rachel joined me in front of it. It was an image I’d seen many times before. A woman stands in the corner of a small apartment room, holding a modest bouquet of flowers. A man in a green shirt rises over her like a parade float, his head twisted back as if his neck is made of rubber, and kisses the woman. His eyes are closed but hers, I noticed, are open with what appears to be surprise.

  “It’s one of my favorites,” she said. “We’ve had it forever.”

  I nodded, speechless around her. In truth, the awkwardness I felt never dissipated, not to this day. I did not know where to sit, how to behave, what role if any I was expected to play. Following Rachel to the dining room, I hovered near the table until Bernie invited me to sit. He rolled up to his place at the head of the table. Rachel and I sat on either side of him along the battered rectangle. As Rachel brought out prayer books to place on the table, she spoke about the review panel that had been convened, about the makeup of its members and—

  “Rachel, please,” Bernie interrupted.

  She nodded and smiled. “Sorry, Dad.”

  Bernie turned to me. “We don’t discuss work matters on the Sabbath.”

  “We can talk about it tomorrow,” Rachel said to me.

  “Yes,” Bernie sighed, “Saturdays she works. But Friday nights, she’s mine.”

  I nodded my understanding. Did he blame me? Was he challenging me? I settled in and listened as they opened their prayer books—Rachel opened mine to the right page—and then they began to sing. Despite the reedy thinness of Bernie’s weak voice, the contrast with Rachel’s lilting contralto was not unpleasant. As I listened, I had a feeling, mistaken, as I would later find out, that I was listening to ancient music, tunes that had traversed the centuries. They are, in fact, twentieth-century creations, but they are still, I find, redolent of something. Of tradition? Or devotion? Of struggle and sustenance? Perhaps it’s merely the language that gives it the patina of the ancient. I watched Bernie as he sang with his eyes closed, thumping the table with his fist with surprising force, keeping time to the music. Rachel sang from the prayer book, and I sat there, mute, the page a welter of indecipherable symbols to me. And yet, I felt my eyes fill. I could not fathom this response, Virgil. Tears? Me? Over prayers? The lengths I would go to deny my irreligious father. I could think of no other explanation than delayed youthful rebellion for this sudden display of religious fervor. Bernie opened one eye and allowed it to fall on me as I fumbled with the pages of the prayer book, trying to find my place.

  “Eishet Chayil,” he said. “Usually the husband’s prayer to his wife. But for Rachel, I say it.” Bernie took Rachel’s hand, a bit wistfully, it seemed, and recited the Hebrew from memory. Rachel’s eyes briefly flitted in my direction, and she blushed. As Bernie concluded the prayer, he kissed his daughter’s hands. “Her value is indeed far beyond pearls.”

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed, to all of our surprise.

  I watched Bernie and Rachel kiss their prayer books as they set them aside. It felt absurd for me to follow suit, and it felt absurd for me not to. I brushed the musty book against my lips.

  “Come on,” said Rachel. “Time to wash our hands.”

  I followed them to the sink and watched as they removed their rings and then poured water from a bronze jug over each hand, twice on the right, then twice on the left. I followed, marveling at how foreign something as familiar as washing my hands could feel.

  It was over the first course of matzo ball soup that Bernie exposed me. You know the moment, you’ve seen it before. A scene not unlike this one:

  “Your parents are survivors, Matt?” he’d ask between slurps.

  Rachel would blanch. “Dad!”

  “No, it’s okay,” I’d say, impressed. “Yes. My dad. How did you know?”

  Bernie would have shrugged. “Your first Sabbath dinner. And from the way you handle a prayer book, I’m thinking you didn’t receive a Jewish education. More often than not, especially with Jews your age, it’s survivor parents. They don’t want to be reminded, you know?”

  I would have nodded, sadly. Something deep would have collapsed within me, Virgil, as if a lifelong house of cards had been flicked to the ground by this wheelchair-bound senior. That’s how it’s supposed to go, right?

  “Was he in the camps?”

  I’d shake my head. “Hungary,” I’d say.

  “Budapest?”

  “Yes.”

  Bernie would have nodded, as though he understood it all.

  “You’re lucky. Did your father ever tell you about those times?”

  A wild urge to laugh. A dozen responses would careen through my mind. “No, sir.”

  “Well, don’t wait until it’s too late.” Replete with kind eyes.

  Hah, there you are, snickering again. Those wise eyes of yours, Virgil. You know nothing of the sort transpired. How soothing such gentle schmaltz might have felt. What is it in me that seeks such platitudes, craves their comforting simplicity? But it didn’t happen like that at all. It never happens like that.

  Take two. Marker. Speed. And … action.

&nb
sp; It began innocently enough, as he asked me a series of conversational questions. And yet, all along, they seemed a formality, as though he already knew the answers. He had a disconcerting habit of answering himself, as though the truth were a private joke that he and I enjoyed—“But, of course, you’d have to have been bar mitzvahed to know that”—and I began to see what a sly, formidable attorney he must have been, polite beyond reproach but devastating. At least he saved me the embarrassment of having to answer “No” time and time again. Well, Hebrew is such a difficult language to master … A young man must have his Saturdays free … Being Jewish doesn’t mean the same thing to any two Jews. The questions deepened, and although my embarrassment became evident, Bernie persisted, gentle, relentless. A kindly battering ram.

  “Do you celebrate the high holidays?” He dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “Tickets are expensive, the synagogue is crowded. What about God? Do you believe in the big guy, at least? He comes in handy on bumpy airplane flights, I’ve found.”

  I felt very much like a slow-witted criminal being interrogated by a brilliant detective. I shook my head, looked to Rachel, as though I might find the answers in her eyes. She seemed uncomfortable, embarrassed on my behalf.

  “I don’t know.” Had I never before considered so fundamental a question?

  “That’s honest. How about the soul, Matt? Any spark of the divine within? Or are we just meat and bones?”

  Rachel had had enough and spoke up.

  “Dad. Matt’s our guest. It’s Shabbos.”

  Bernie exhaled, and the litigator deflated back into the invalid. “So it is. Forgive me. Fathers,” he said. “You know how it is,” he said. I did, indeed. All too fucking well.

  * * *

  OVER THE MAIN COURSE of roast chicken with wild rice, Rachel and Bernie engaged each other in a conversation on some fine point of Talmudic interpretation. Something about what they called Oral Torah and something else called Malbim, and questions about justification for halachic interpretation. It was nothing I had any hope of following, though Rachel made generous albeit unsuccessful efforts to include me. But I was fascinated despite my feeling of exclusion, so different from the exclusion I’d felt with Tracy and my father. They had traded in comforting small talk, but here I was missing something of weight, and not just from the moment at hand but from my entire life. I watched this father and his daughter, bound by faith and devotion. Unlike that afternoon in the museum, I now found myself listening to Rachel. Consuming her every word, digesting it, turning it over, looking for nuance, mining anything I could from it. I have always been good at appearing to listen when, in fact, I am merely waiting for my next turn to speak. But here, I was so thoroughly left behind that I knew no next turn was coming, and so I was free to truly listen, and it was in those moments, in that examination of Torah, that I think I began to fall in love, and not just with Rachel.