Memento Park Page 14

  I entered through the back door, an old habit, the front door having been reserved for guests and distant relations. I found the spare key, still under the geranium pot, and I slid it into the lock, propping the screen door open with my roller bag. The house was so still, something newly sepulchral to the place. I stood in the kitchen, exhausted, and listened to myself breathing. I left my bag right there on the red linoleum and walked toward the living room. I passed my childhood room along the way, and despite my fatigue, I poked my head inside. The room had been repurposed as an office for my father. Childish things had been put away. There was nothing, not even photos of family. I found myself wondering if there was anything at all in the house that once belonged to me, that could attest to my place in this family.

  I called Tracy, got her voice mail, and left her a message telling her what had happened, that I was fine. I also called my mother, still unreachable at her Pyrénées painting retreat, and left the same message. I grabbed a blanket from the linen closet and went into the living room. I cracked open a window to allow the spring breeze to caress the curtains. I kicked my shoes off and stretched out on the couch. To take to my father’s bed would have been more Oedipal than I could bear. I closed my eyes and thought about him, in his frigid repose beneath the hospital. I thought about him going into the void alone and I began to weep again, and that is how I fell asleep, the morning light streaming into the living room.

  * * *

  MY PHONE RANG in the early afternoon, rousing me from my slumber. As I sat up, massaging the ache in my neck, Rachel informed me that Rabbi Wolfe’s stay had been granted. It was, as she said, a whole new thing now. The rabbi’s filing with the court claimed that her grandparents had purchased the painting legally from the Weisz family, although the only evidence Rabbi Wolfe had was an entry referring to the painting in her family’s ledgers. The original bill of sale had been lost. But references to the work appeared in family journals and letters throughout the 1940s and ’50s, which she hoped would support her claim. This was enough to convince a judge that a second look was warranted before any final decisions were made.

  “Maybe I should go see her?” I wondered. Mostly looking for a reason to be elsewhere.

  “Oh no, Matt. That’s a terrible idea. That’s why you’ve retained me. Leave any conversations to me, please.”

  “You don’t think it’s worthwhile to just sort of take her temperature? See what she’s like?”

  “No,” she said with startling firmness. “Please. I need you to promise me you won’t do that. I mean it.”

  Rachel, it turned out, had learned something else. Rabbi Wolfe had terminal cancer, and was not expected to survive the year. The news distressed Rachel. She was all attorney again, at least for the moment, and wanted me to understand that she had always believed in me, in my claim, but if information came to light that swung the weight of evidence toward Rabbi Wolfe, it would be a struggle for her to argue my case. I told her I understood, and I offered her a chance to abandon my case then and there. Even in my addled state, it was, we both knew, a test. I wanted her to refuse me, to stay on, as though that affirmed a deeper commitment to me. She did as I hoped, and then asked about my father.

  He died, I said. The words felt foreign, as though I were trying out the idea, or talking about someone else.

  Rachel was silent for a moment and then her sorrowful sigh filled the line. “I’m sorry, Matt,” she said. Was she, I wondered, thinking about her own father, his precious remaining time? No, I think not. There was, is, something about Rachel, about her capacity to erase the boundaries of her heart that leaves me ever so slightly in awe to this day. She made me promise to check in with her each day until I got back to L.A.

  I should have cared more about her news, but I didn’t. All I cared about at the moment was going downstairs, into the basement, to see my father’s collection. As I traversed the hallway, I passed the nook that held my father’s answering machine, and I saw the counter set to zero. My message was no longer there. Was he bluffing to spare me, cagey cardplayer to the end?

  I opened the basement door and walked down the dozen steps into the dark, musty space. A damp smell filled the air, mold probably. I flipped on the light at the foot of the stairs, and I was startled by a jowly old man in a shimmering golden helmet who eyeballed me from the shadows. In an instant, I remembered the painting, this reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet that my father had hung here, I always imagined, to scare me away. As a boy, I spent many nights in bed, my bladder full, too scared to enter the painting’s field of vision. My father was proud of the cheap reproduction, though I learned later that it had been found not to be a Rembrandt but rather the work of one of his students.

  I inhaled sharply and took in what my father had wrought. It never ceased to amaze me and, perhaps, frighten me, with its familiar mania. Four interconnected rooms, each with floor-to-ceiling cabinets like you’d see at a jeweler’s. Every shelf, every nook, every inch jammed to overflowing with row upon row of toy cars. Twenty nearly identical roadsters might be grouped together, with only minute variations in color and detail to differentiate them. Looming over them, a large model, perhaps one of the 1:8 scale custom-built cars my father commissioned. One wall had been reserved for a row of bookcases, shelves sagging with automotive books and memorabilia. I wandered through each of the rooms, turning on lights, wiping away layers of dust with my sleeve. Here was a life’s labor, his one concrete expression of self. I thought about how I had derided him, but I’ve begun to see that perhaps there is something hopeful about the collector, striving toward an elusive completeness, forging ahead long after other, lesser men have packed it in.

  As I took in the various toys, remembering this show or that where the piece had been acquired, it began to dawn on me that all this, as the patriarchs like to say, would be mine. On the one hand, I couldn’t imagine my father leaving this to me. But he surely would not have left it to my mother. And in the end, isn’t that what fathers do? Pass their worldly possessions on to their sons? Whether or not I would come to possess Budapest Street Scene, I was now custodian of my father’s collection of molded plastic and die-cast tin.

  The prospect irked me. I could not, it’s true, imagine myself maintaining his collection, but neither could I see myself dismantling it, selling it off. Why hadn’t he talked to me about it, given me some indication of his wishes? I became irritated with him all over again. Then I noticed a toy that had beguiled me as a child. It was a large, red ’67 Corvette, substantial and rendered with remarkable verisimilitude. The parts all articulated, moving in concert on axles and crankshafts. It was a toy I had longed to play with, to roll along the floor, but like all the rest, it was forbidden. Now I slid open the display cabinet and carefully hoisted out the car. I sat down on the warping linoleum tile, flecked with water stains, and began to roll the car along the floor.

  * * *

  HOW LONG I SAT THERE PLAYING—yes, playing, Virgil; can you picture it?—I cannot say, but when my phone rang I answered expecting either Rachel, Tracy, or, for an instant, my father. How many times in the days, even weeks, ahead I would briefly forget that he was gone. Tenses confuse me, as you can see. No tense more so, perhaps, than the first-person present. To be. I am. I was surprised to be greeted by Rabbi Wolfe. Her attorney had advised her not to call me directly, but she’d learned of my father’s death and wanted to express her condolences. Baruch dayan emet, Blessed be the one true judge, I later learned. She also apologized for what she called “the unfortunate timing of all this.” She reminded me that death was not, in and of itself, a tragedy. And I oughtta know, she said. At least, I think she said it. She said other things, too, words intended to soothe, but although they were sage and appropriate her manner was brusque, brittle. Perhaps it was the husky rasp of her voice, more thorns than roses. A smoker, surely. The life, she said, signing off. We think of the life, remember the deeds. We celebrate as we mourn. She invited me to visit her synag
ogue in Chicago and said goodbye.

  * * *

  NOW I STAND HERE ALONE in the stillest and darkest moment of the night, with this strange painting and my strange story, tired and aching, and I can only think about all I have squandered, the astonishing lack of care with which I have blundered through life. So much beyond recovery, things that can never be restored, truths devoured by time, by neglect. The essence of a man. The street outside is deserted. There’s not a sound to be heard, not a move, a creak, a hiss. Even Virgil has deserted me, off doing heaven knows what, dozing in a storage room, perhaps. The darkness is complete, without and within, as though the sun has collapsed upon itself. Neither Rachel’s honey nor Tracy’s gleam can illuminate this darkness. Is this how Rabbi Wolfe will experience the death that stalks her, as implacable night? Is this how my father quit this world? How far they all seem from me now, how impenetrable, removed from everything I am, standing here in this dark, still room with a painting. His painting. My painting. Whose fucking painting?

  In 1944, Ervin Laszlo Kálmán put a gun in his mouth and killed himself. Coward or realist? What would my father say, who also fled, in his fashion? There must have been a moment when I wanted to know more, needed to know more? Was the desire so mercilessly brief that I missed it?

  In the half-light, the auction house has begun to take on the outlines of a temple. Melodrama, epiphany, or sleep deprivation, I cannot say, but the rows of chairs resemble pews, the framed posters of prior auctions throb like stained glass, and the curtains blocking off the offices suggest an ark. I again hear Rachel’s whispered prayers whipping through my ears like a desert wind, hear the not-so-ancient tunes drifting from the temple, and I feel the presence of something in this room. Is it my father? Is it God? I know You’re here. Show Yourself. The light shifts and all is again as it was, nobody here but us chickens. Don’t mind me, I’ll sit here alone in the dark.

  The life, Rabbi Wolfe said. The deeds. These are the facts of my father’s life, as I know them: He was born in Budapest. He left it twice, once for London in his childhood, only to return two years later, and once for New York. He married my mother when he was twenty-seven and they had me when he was thirty-five. He was a commercial painter and a cardplayer and a collector of vintage toy automobiles, and a Hungarian Jew. He was my father. Just the fucking facts. It would take a journey to the other side of the world for me to learn the rest.

  THERE WERE FIVE OF THEM in all, wedged into a small apartment that appeared to have been in the family’s hands since the Communist days. Cheaply furnished, groaning with belongings, so insistently foreign it seemed to me. My father’s first, second, and third cousins filled the room, the Lowenheims and Ujvaris I’d only read about, in the flesh, though not a Santos in sight. My relatives sat in a semicircle facing me, as though I were some alien specimen that had washed ashore and was now drawing their scholarly attention. Or was it worry? Did they all appear just a little bit worried? As they offered their condolences on my loss, I glanced across the room to Rachel for comfort, but found none in her jet-lagged eyes. Beyond the window, the sun baked the sweltering, muggy city. I shivered at the sight of it, even as another cool beverage was pressed into my hands.

  Rachel had persuaded me to submit my claim to arbitration. “Matt, this woman is dying,” she’d said little more than a week earlier, as I drove away from the funeral parlor. “This might be your only chance at a swift resolution. In the courts, this could drag out for years, and then you’ll have to deal with her estate, and all its competing interests.”

  The trip to Budapest was also her idea, to see if we could find evidence to explain how my family had come into possession of the painting to begin with, the one conspicuous hole in our case. The courts liked nothing better than original documents, she explained, and perhaps if we traveled to the source, we might uncover something useful. I agreed—New York was already halfway there—and so we found ourselves on a Saturday afternoon, the day after landing in Budapest, surrounded by my Hungarian relatives.

  Tibor had the best English and did the translating. Paunchy and gray, he had a silky accent that bore traces of the years he’d spent in Berlin on government business, back when that evoked something glamorous and sinister. A pompous man, he reveled in his role as interlocutor, though without him, I would have been lost. Despite my childhood visit to the Balaton sleepaway camp, I find Hungarian impenetrable. It eludes me, defies my attempts to form even its most rudimentary sounds. It’s as alien to me as Hebrew, though without the music. What language, I wonder, did my father think in? His English was serviceable if heavily accented, a touch of Bela Lugosi, though I like to imagine that he dreamed in his native tongue, the familiar sounds of his childhood language perhaps giving him some fleeting nocturnal comfort. He never seemed to mind my inability to learn it—it was useful for keeping secrets—but I wonder if he was perhaps a different man in Hungarian, more like the man I saw at the Tower Club; lighter, more at ease with himself. Like an aria transposed to another key.

  I tried to discern anything of him in the faces of those around me. The ridge of an eyebrow or contour of a chin. But there was that apartness again, something so separate in these people that I was reminded of the furtive figure in Budapest Street Scene planning his escape. Eszter, the elderly white-haired matriarch, asked Tibor a question in Hungarian. There was a smile embedded between her round cheeks, and at first I mistrusted it but soon came to see it was genuine. She seemed truly delighted to meet me. Although she still exuded that strange layer of worry. She grasped my hand when I sat down, and it remained there, sweaty, firm. Despite her frailty and age—she must have been in her late eighties—there was a vitality in her every syllable in which I finally recognized something of my father. Tibor translated for me as his elfin wife, Kati, shuttled beverages in and out of the sitting room.

  “She wants to know if you have been to the Oscars.” He pronounced it bean.

  Rachel suppressed a smile. I shook my head. “Not yet,” I answered.

  Eszter’s mother, Dora, the oldest living woman I had ever seen—she was believed to be 102—dozed in her chair, mouth wide-open. Wisps of a mustache adorned her lip, and in her denture-less pucker I saw my father’s deathbed visage. I asked about any memories they might have of him. Tibor made a show of remembering, the sort of man who trafficked in ostentatious gestures. I learned of my father’s sole, reluctant visit to his homeland. He’d left at the first opportunity in 1956, and waited until the wall came down to set foot on Hungarian soil again. He refused to return as long as the Communists remained in power. Apparently, it had been an uneasy visit for all, my father oddly American in his affect, restless, eager to leave almost as soon as he’d arrived. It was only when he visited his parents’ graves that he became still, ceased struggling against the pressures of memory. He’d missed the death of his father. She saw the regret in his eyes, Eszter insisted, as he lay the stones on the simple markers.

  Rachel asked all the right legal questions about how the painting came into the family’s possession, anything about documents left behind, letters, journals, that sort of thing, to little avail. The consensus was that it had simply appeared in the apartment without fanfare early in 1944. Vague promises were made to rifle safe-deposit boxes and dig through long-closed drawers. It went on for hours, the endless, guttural gibberish, the vain searching for clues, the sweetness, the smiles. They were kind, solicitous, and they drove me mad. I wanted out, Virgil. They offered every imaginable kind of help, but there was really just one thing I wanted.

  “I would like to see my father’s apartment. From his boyhood.”

  “Of course,” Tibor said, as though the question needn’t have been asked. “We will take you there.”

  * * *

  MY FATHER’S CHILDHOOD HOME. What I saw that afternoon … It was all …

  But first. Unfinished business. I’ve lost the script again, something that’s been happening with alarming frequency these days. Simon tries to convince me tha
t the relative quiet on the work front—few auditions, fewer callbacks, no offers—is the fallout from my on-set black eye, but I’ve begun to wonder if something hasn’t permanently shifted in me, and somehow the casting directors around town can feel it, too.

  It’s a bit hard to credit. I’ve been working for my entire adult life, and can’t imagine it just stopping. I do confess a mild irritation watching my parts go to others, my less talented competition. (Oh, not him. Really?) And there are practicalities to consider. Food. Shelter. BMW payments. But finally, this change, alleged, hinted at, is not, I think, complete. It’s begun, yes, the shapes are shifting, but I haven’t yet been delivered to … To where?

  To where the story ends?

  Fuck, Virgil. This is exhausting. Anyway, the script. Before Rachel and I made our way to Budapest, there was some pressing business left to resolve in New York. I had to lay the old man to rest, in body at least. I found a funeral parlor close to the hospital and presented myself to make the necessary arrangements.

  “What sort of a service did you have in mind?”

  I sat in the plush carpeted funeral parlor, irritated with my father, even in death. He’d never discussed it with me, had given me no indication at all of his wishes. Perhaps the old bastard just intended to go on forever, imagining that if he didn’t concede the inevitability of his demise, he would somehow outsmart it. I didn’t even know whom to invite, who might care or be bothered to attend. I thought my mother might know more, though I don’t know why, so thoroughly had she excised him from her life.

  I shrugged. The funeral director, a fellow named Glide, delivered his well-rehearsed options to me, and the whole thing felt rather businesslike—two from column a, one from column b—and in the end, we settled on a cremation without a funeral service. I struggled with the historical resonance of the choice but could not imagine my father being lowered into the earth in a box. I envisioned soil of any fertility vomiting him back up into the sunlight.