Memento Park Page 13

  We did not kiss good night that evening, though I believe we both wanted to. Go home, you smiled. Sleep it off.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I woke with the dawn and I tried to call my father to tell him the news. He did not answer, which was not unusual. I left a message asking him to call me back. Then I tried my mother, but her answering machine reminded me she was away on her Pyrénées retreat, disconnected from all communication for the rest of the month. Tracy was several time zones away, so I texted her the news. I then sat back, at a loss for what to do with myself. I had worked steadily since coming to L.A., had never not had a job or not known where my next job was coming from. Simon had warned me it might be a while before I was welcome to audition again. I should expect a half-life, a fallow stretch. I looked helplessly around the empty house, another unfamiliar condition. Even with her frequent travel, I had come to value the reliability of Tracy’s presence. The sheer physical fact of her being had always been enough to get me through the day. Did I inherit my extravagant standards from the old man?

  Inherit. See what I did there, Virgil?

  * * *

  I BURNED TO TALK TO MY FATHER. How unfamiliar that felt. Normally, I would have been pleased, relieved, to get his answering machine, able to discharge my filial duties without any actual interaction. Now, each time his machine answered, I plunged into disappointment. My first few messages had been polite, urgent: Dad, call me, please, I have news. As the days wore on, they became more clipped. I could hear the dejection in my voice. Me again. Call. I stopped leaving messages altogether, though I continued to call. Did I feel any worry, any dark premonition? No. None at all. My father would often ignore me for weeks on end. I would simply have to wait the old bastard out and stew in my urgency. I didn’t even know what it was I would say to him when we spoke. Would I gloat? Share a victory lap?

  Tracy’s return call, on the other hand, filled me with relief. She was overjoyed, of course, thrilled not for the money but for the symbol of the thing, of its return to the family. She asked me if I wanted her to come back, but I told her there was nothing to be done for a few weeks. I told her that the proceeds could be used toward McCabe’s defense fund. She thanked me dutifully.

  Have you heard from my father, I asked her before saying goodbye. She hadn’t.

  * * *

  I NORMALLY TOOK GREAT, SENSUAL PLEASURE in my Saturdays, a morning of late breakfasts and farmers markets, a satisfyingly untethered state. But now, without a job, the mornings blurred together, bleak and purposeless. I found myself thinking about Rachel, wondering where she was, what she was doing. It occurred to me that she would likely be at temple this morning, and quite unexpectedly, I gathered myself up and headed to the synagogue she and Bernie had mentioned over Sabbath dinner. I parked a few streets away to ensure I wouldn’t be seen driving up, and walked the last few blocks. I got as far as the threshold, close enough to hear the voices within, the music that had so moved me at Bernie’s, drifting my way. But the building emanated something that held me at bay. Though I realize now it was not the building at all, it was me. For just as I felt that the painting had not been earned, I somehow felt unfit to step inside. I imagined every covered head swiveling toward me, one giant furrowed brow of disapproval connecting them all. I believed Rachel would have taken me in, cleared the way for me. But I wasn’t sure. She would have had, I think, every reason to doubt my motives.

  She never got the chance. My nerve collapsed like a trailer in a tornado, and I headed back to my car.

  * * *

  I RETURNED HOME to find a missed call on the caller ID. My father, and his maddening habit of never leaving a message. I redialed him and when he didn’t answer, something unhinged in me. I left the message I would come to regret. I said I was tired of his evasions and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t simply be honest with me about himself, about our family. I said it was not hard to understand why my mother left him. I said there was more to life than a cellar full of toy cars, and that his obsessions were just a substitute for human interactions. I said that it was not I who risked fucking things up, it was he.

  So, whether or not he chose to call me back, this painting was now in our family, such as it is. Mazel tov, I said. And with that, I hung up on the old man.

  Quoth the actor, nevermore.

  * * *

  IN 1941, Kálmán destroyed a number of his paintings, some thirty-five canvases in all. Many of these were early works or preparatory sketches, which have led some to believe that he was burnishing his legacy, trying to craft a narrative of a talent that emerged fully formed. But several mature canvases were thrown to the flames as well, and as racial laws continued to tighten in Hungary, others have taken this as a precursor to his suicide, ensuring his work would not fall into unworthy hands. He was, we know, relieved that Budapest Street Scene was long ago sold to the Weisz family, to spare him the horrible decision about its fate. As he wrote in a letter dated August 12, 1941, to his friend and dealer János Gati, “I am certain these paintings will mark me among certain types as a degenerate or worse, but I am pleased they are in the world and hope they will remain safe from the pyre. I know I could not bear to extinguish them.”

  I found it hard to imagine, find it hard, still, that Kálmán would have been pleased to see his masterpiece fall into my hands, but there I stood, at last, with Rachel, a few days after I’d scurried like a rat from her temple. We were ushered into a massive vault, its gaping door hanging open obscenely. An armed guard sat on a stool outside the portcullis. Rachel pulled open a large, flat drawer—I thought of a mortuary slab—and we lifted out Budapest Street Scene and propped it against the wall, where we could examine it. I was surprised at how light, how insubstantial something so valuable felt.

  We stood back and stared at the painting. It was in the same gilt frame that had accompanied it across the ocean and decades. It was like the afternoon in the museum all over again. We were speechless. But this time, when I took Rachel’s hand, she grasped it, and we stood there together, taking in the sixth and final version of Ervin Kálmán’s Budapest Street Scene.

  “It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “And the colors…”

  “Yeah. Very. So…”

  We stood before the painting then as I stand before it now, but how different the moments are. Here tonight I am reconciled, in my fashion, but there, as we stood together, I was almost dizzy with the weight of it. It seemed a focal point upon which so many feelings and thoughts converged. I remembered the words of the Jew-hating poet, At the still point of the turning world … / … there the dance is / … Where past and future are gathered. In the figures I saw my father. In the colors I saw Rachel, whose warmth I felt radiating beside me. In the tableau I saw the approaching war, its specters and wraiths. In the ridges of the brushstrokes I saw Kálmán, broken, dead, and gone. I saw too much, more than I could digest, and I swooned before it all like the weak-kneed heroine of a gothic romance. Rachel steadied me, and before I knew it, we were kissing once again, but in earnest this time, and I felt promise flow through me, through her, through the painting. Unlike the public announcement of that first boulevard kiss with Tracy, this kiss was private, full of intention, and I thought again of the mezuzah and all it foretold.

  But two things happened that disrupted my fleeting hopefulness.

  First, Rabbi Diana Wolfe of Temple Beth Israel of Chicago filed a claim of ownership for Budapest Street Scene, which was followed by an injunction to stay the transfer of the painting to me. And then, that very day—Hashem’s black sense of humor at work—my father had his fourth, and final, heart attack.

  Part Two

  THE SECOND OF MY TWO CHILDHOOD MEMORIES of Judaism comes three years after my temple outing with my grandfather, during a visit to Miami with my mother. My father, always disinclined to visit family in general and hers in particular, remained behind. We had gone together to the Jewish cemetery
to visit her father’s grave, and had brought her mother along. She was my last surviving grandparent, now long gone, our tribe dwindled. She was a sour, miserable woman, incapable of taking pleasure in anything, including her grandson. Her lips perpetually pursed so that even when she smiled she frowned. The family legend was that she literally nagged my grandfather to death, and I never saw anything to make me doubt the story’s plausibility.

  Still, as she aged, her edge dulled and her anger transformed into a sort of cartoonish despair, mawkish tears its primary currency. They were in ample evidence on this warm afternoon, as she busied herself cleaning my grandfather’s black granite headstone with little cups of water ferried to and from a nearby drinking fountain. She fussed with the stones that had been set on the grave, arranging and rearranging them, and prodding my mother and me to add our own. I was fascinated by her performance, a borscht-belt parody of grief. My mother watched impassively, a scowl edging onto her face, hardness in her eyes, and muttered to me, “If she had given him that kind of care while he was here, he might still be alive.” With that, she turned and left my grandmother to her work, and I stood there for a confused moment, unsure whom I was meant to attend, before hurrying off after my mother.

  Virgil has silently placed a box of Kleenex at my elbow. It’s possible my sniffling has been irritating, and the gesture is more rebuke than kindness. But we’ve been through a lot together, and this evening is far from over. He is watching me with renewed interest, leaning almost rakishly in the doorway, more virgule than Virgil. He senses a dramatic turn approaching.

  My father’s condition, the doctors were reporting, was critical. The heart attack had been major, and now other organs had begun to fail. Infection was filling his lungs with fluid, and he was not expected to survive more than a day or two. Perhaps only hours. They urged me to hurry to New York, while there was still time, to say what needed to be said. A day or two. When a lifetime hadn’t been enough.

  As I rushed to pack and catch a midmorning flight, Tracy called from Bali. She’d already arranged a ticket and insisted that she meet me there. I told her that I loved her for offering but that she was unlikely to get there in time. It took some persuading. I wanted this moment to myself, my private reckoning, but I had Tracy’s deep affection for my father to reckon with. In the end, she reluctantly agreed to stay where she was. Did I detect the slightest layer of relief in her voice? Looking back, I’m sure it was there, and I’m sure that I missed it.

  I was in the taxi, en route to the airport, when Rachel called with the details about Rabbi Wolfe. Apparently news coverage of my case had reached her in Chicago, where she led a large congregation, and she was able to connect the image shown in the paper to a painting her family had been looking for since the end of the war. Rachel had no idea whether her case was strong or circumstantial or just a nuisance. She only had the judge’s order at this point. She promised she would keep me informed. Then she wished both me and my father well with a tenderness that made me flush.

  I remember so little of that journey, as recent as it was. Things were not so much the promised blur as a striated wash, like ocean ridges left in damp sand, featureless, impossible to gain purchase. At one moment I was in a taxi in L.A. and, moments later, it seemed, I was in a taxi in New York. The odors of Queens assaulted me. It was as though my sense of smell had been magnified by an accident that had cost me my other senses, and I could smell not only the familiar, noxious exhaust of the expressway, but also the rotting garbage sitting uncollected in the warm May evening in front of ramshackle brick town houses. The pungent salt of the river. I made my way up to my father’s room, aware of my heartbeat, my increasing dread. I have always been squeamish about the end of life. One evening during my first and only year at college, my father called me up at a friend’s house to come home and assist him in putting down our family dog, which had suffered a stroke the weekend before. I knew the task was beyond me, that I could not possibly face the moment, and so I lied, as I had done so often before, the pattern already well established. I told him that a friend was distraught following a breakup, and I feared he might turn suicidal without me. My father hung up—I could hear the disgust in his voice—and I left him to his own devices with the dog. I never learned what transpired that evening. It was enough that, when I got home, the dog was gone. But here, there was no avoiding my responsibility, the duty of the first, the only son. That hackneyed phrase “the man of the house” flashed through my mind, as I took a deep, steadying breath, and stepped into my father’s room.

  * * *

  I AM HORRIFIED at the sight of him. He looks deflated, a clot of tubes and wires the only thing keeping him alive. His pallor is gray, his thick stubble in its third or fourth day, his mouth sunken in an almost dainty pucker. I realize for the first time that he wears dentures, which now sit in a plastic cup at his bedside. The smell is nauseating, damp and sharp, urine and disinfectant. Dr. Rosenberg—Jewish, as my father would have insisted—briefs me with professional sympathy. It won’t be long now. He has occasional moments of lucidity. He’s been asking for you.

  The doctor leaves me, his brief visit underscoring how little remains to be done. I pull up a chair to my father’s bedside and sit beside him. I should take his hand, I know. It’s the correct gesture, what the script calls for. I lean forward and take his limp, clammy hand.

  I’m here.

  * * *

  IT IS HOURS BEFORE HE AWAKENS. When he does, I am unprepared for his response. My father smiles at the sight of me. His smiles are rare, indeed, rarer still since my mother left him. And I am such a perennial disappointment to him, my fame and financial success notwithstanding, that his smiles have come to feel like an exotic currency that he uses elsewhere but does not spend in my presence. And yet, when he flips a glittering doubloon my way, as he does in this moment, I am startled by how it can still move me.

  He beckons me to his bedside. Open the drawer, he says, voice barely audible. I slide the industrial metal nightstand open. A hundred-dollar bill sits amid tissues, rubber gloves, and cookie wrappers. Take it, he says. I look at him, confused. I was wrong. You were right. I left the Meccano at home. I look at the money but there’s no satisfaction in it for me, only ineffable sorrow.

  My father has never before said to me “I was wrong.”

  With all that remains unsaid, the words jam up like a rush-hour freeway, and I can barely think of what to say.

  “Thank you,” I whisper. My father looks at me with curiosity.

  “What for?”

  I shrug and mumble, “For giving me life.”

  We sit in silence until I blurt, “I’m sorry about that message I left.”

  “Vat message?”

  Such relief. “Never mind. Dad … the painting. It’s … ours. It’s ours now.” I do not mention Rabbi Wolfe.

  His eyes grow distant. “The painting … My street, where I grew up in Pest, it was named for a painter … Székely Bertalan utca. Street. Father knew him.”

  “I … I didn’t know that.”

  I don’t know anything. And now, it’s too late. The man lies dying before me and he takes his stories with him.

  And then he startles me again. “I’m proud of you, kisfiú.”

  I clamp my jaw but still my eyes run. His eyes close and he drifts into sleep.

  * * *

  IT SEEMS LIKE MY LAST ESSENTIAL DUTY. I resolve to sit here, at his side, in this stiff chair, until the end. I lean forward and whisper in his ear. It’s okay to let go. There’s no need to keep fighting. You’ve done enough.

  A nurse comes in to check on him. I am startled to see her tear-filled eyes. She pats his hand and whispers to me that my father is a good man. What has she seen in him, I wonder, to prompt such tenderness? What does she know about him that I don’t?

  In the distance, the quiet of the night is punctuated by beeps and whirrs of medical equipment, and a woman wails “No more!” Startled awake, my father looks around the room and command
s: “Stop the credit cards.” Then he turns his head slightly in my direction and drifts back into sleep. I watch his eyebrows rise as though his dream is surprising. His body heaves with the effort of breathing, his lips purse as if trying to coax a note from a defective trumpet.

  * * *

  DESPITE MY BEST EFFORTS, I eventually doze off in the chair and fall into a light, dreamless sleep. I don’t know how long I’ve been out when the nurse touches my shoulder and wakes me with a simple “He’s gone.”

  I rub my eyes and leap out of my chair, disbelieving, and approach his bed with trepidation. It’s my first time with a corpse. I hang back for a moment, as though his condition might be contagious. A dull fascination overcomes me, crowding out the guilt I feel over missing his passing. He has been switched off. Everything that I knew to be my father is lost. I feel light-headed as I lean over and draw my cheek gently across his stubble. He is cold, so cold, and it’s the coldness that finally makes me weep. Father. Dad. Daddy …

  IT WAS JUST AFTER DAWN when I arrived at my childhood home. The taxi wheezed off into the still Queens morning and I stood in the driveway, taking in the simple two-story brick house on a corner lot. My father bought my mother out after the divorce, simultaneously underwriting her Paris escape and ensuring he did not have to pack up his thousands of model cars. Signs of neglect were everywhere. Overgrown grass. Chipped flagstone. Peeling paint like patches of eczema. Rust-covered siding.