Memento Park Read online

  “And would you like for us to have the remains interred or returned?”

  Part of me would have liked to have outsourced the problem of his remains. To have the funeral house set his urn in a niche somewhere was not without its appeal. But the last shards of inconvenient filial duty kicked in, and I said I would take possession of the remains when I passed back through New York on my way home from Budapest, without the slightest idea of what I would do with them.

  * * *

  I STOOD IN FRONT of a covered mirror in my father’s hallway. I covered it because I couldn’t bear the sight of myself, couldn’t stomach my resemblance to my father, which seemed to have sharpened with his passing. But I told myself, and Rachel, that I was trying to honor custom. She had called to discuss travel arrangements.

  “Shiva—there’s something I’m supposed to do with mirrors, right?”

  “You’re supposed to cover them. You’re also supposed to tear a garment.”

  I looked at the James Perse crewneck I was wearing. I had no intention of tearing it.

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “Which? The mirror or the clothes?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s complicated. There are a number of reasons, some symbolic, some practical. It’s not one thing. It’s never just one thing.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, complicated.”

  We finished our call with a plan to meet in Budapest the following week. All brisk efficiency, she had already sketched out a full three days: interviews with relatives, a visit to the National Gallery to meet with their Kálmán expert, and even a lead on our Arrow Cross betrayer Halasz. I half listened when she got into the case’s particulars. I focused, instead, on how good it felt to talk to her, how her voice carried in it that mysterious ancient music, notes of faith that I believed could restore me. I think she sensed this because she inquired with genuine tenderness how I was holding up.

  I’m fine, Rachel. I’m always fine.

  * * *

  I LOGGED INTO MY FATHER’S E-MAIL to set his auto-reply with news of his death. He was always careless with passwords, had used the same one—littletoycarz—for everything for as long as I could remember. To my surprise, his inbox already contained more than thirty condolence e-mails. How had word spread so quickly? The funeral parlor? My mother? To this day, I have no idea.

  I hurried through them at first, just scanning to see if I recognized the senders. Then I sat back and began to read.

  Gabi will be missed. He was a true gentleman. Klara and Dezső

  He was? By what standard?

  Such courage! He lived his life on his own terms and was an inspiration to me. Viktor

  Yes, he was an obstinate, rigid bastard.

  Also buried in there somewhere: Will you be selling his collection? I deleted that one.

  For more than an hour I read on, taking in these memories of my father from his contemporaries. I couldn’t reconcile the picture they painted with the man I’d known. Classy. Generous. Charming. A straight shooter. A good man.

  I could only chuckle and think, You obviously didn’t know him like I did.

  And then a darker, more troubling thought announced itself.

  What if I was the one who didn’t know him? What made me think my impressions were the accurate ones? After all, the numbers were against me, thirty-seven to one. I sat back in my chair, deflated. How ungenerous had I been all these years? How wrong had I gotten the old man?

  One evening when I was fifteen, my father and I were walking back to his car from a shopping trip to a neighborhood mall. It was a winter night, slushy and cold. The icy night air pierced my wool coat. It hurt to inhale. As we hurried up the street toward the parking lot a young man intercepted us, bearing some kind of religious literature. Before he could utter more than a few words, my father cut him off. Not interested. A forceful parry. Something about the handouts had disturbed my father—Jews for Jesus? Moonies, perhaps? His anger was whiter than seemed warranted. I apologized to the young man with a glance, forever ashamed of my father’s hotheadedness. The fellow, thinking I had communicated interest in his wares, tried to slip me a brochure while my father waited for the light to change.

  My father erupted. Yahweh’s wrath. Shouting, he stepped between us and shoved the youngster, who lost his footing on the icy pavement and fell on his ass. I lowered my eyes as the light changed and my father charged across the intersection, hauling me along in his wake. Whenever I thought about that moment, I would shudder with embarrassment at his overreaction. Now I wondered, would these correspondents have seen it differently? A loving, protective father, shielding his son?

  My phone chimed. A text from Tracy, wanting to know how I was doing. She was taking my father’s death harder than I was. She had tearfully offered to come to Budapest with me, and part of me wanted her to, very much. But she had several Harvest Moon shoots lined up, more or less back-to-back, and I pointed out that one of us needed to be working. Now I texted that I was wrapping things up in New York, that I was as good as I could be under the circumstances, and that I missed her and loved her. All true, and yet once again, that strange carnival barker emptiness haunted me.

  I set the phone aside and resumed reading the e-mails. I was struck by the repetitions, the banal language of consolation. Are the options for offering comfort really so paltry, or did it just reflect the linguistic shortcomings of the e-mailers, most of whom were not native to English? However well intended, a tedium set in: We’re so sorry. I wish there was something I could say. I know how you feel, I lost a parent, too. You are in my thoughts and prayers. Please tell me if I can do anything to help. And so on until I choked on all the good intentions and shut the computer down. I closed my eyes and, for the briefest of moments, I saw my father’s paint-flecked pants, a storm of blues and whites and pinks, the cloth hardened beneath the layers.

  VIRGIL IS SNORING somewhere around here. I’ve lost track of his movements but I can hear his dry rumble. It reminds me of Tracy, rattling through the hallways like an unattended popcorn popper. Let’s liven things up with a complication. Perhaps it will rouse you, as it roused something in me. Indulge me these last few hours, Virgil. It will all be over soon enough.

  There was one more thing to do before I departed for Budapest, before I was ushered into the clutches of family. Despite my promise to Rachel, I took a flight to Chicago. I did not tell her, and the omission rattled me with guilt. I viewed the trip as a necessary bit of opposition research, though I wasn’t even sure I would speak to Rabbi Wolfe when I arrived. Still, I determined that it would be helpful to know a bit more about my adversary.

  I remember the steaming, pouring rain. Between the heat, the humidity, and the downpour, I felt like I was venturing into the Amazon as I dove into my rental car, which had been started and defogged for me. I punched the address of Temple Beth Israel into the GPS. It was an urban congregation, just steps from the lake. A touch under twenty miles. I followed my robotic narrator’s instructions and drove carefully out of the airport, worried about hydroplaning. Driving to temple on a Friday night. I know, Virgil. I know.

  Chicago, that somber city, whipped past me in a sodden, windy blur. I could sense the large, dark lake hovering just outside my window, though it was invisible to me. I could not manage to balance the temperature inside the car, either too cold and foggy or sweltering and damp. It chilled me, and I thought of my father’s awful chill as he lay still on the hospital bed. You have arrived at your destination, my vehicle informed me with what seemed like a sneer.

  At first I thought I had been delivered to the wrong location. The synagogue looked jarringly modern to me, sandstone with casement windows, more like a university research library than a house of worship. A flight of exterior stairs saw-toothed their way along the perimeter wall, and it was only when I saw the gold-inlaid Hebrew lettering over the doorframe that I switched the car off. For a moment I thought of Rachel and considered restarting the car and re
turning to the airport. It wasn’t too late, not yet.

  Instead, I hurried across the street, jogged up the stairs, and rushed inside. I would like to say some deepening sense of self enabled me to bound into the lobby. It was the deluge, nothing more, that prevented any dithering.

  The lobby was carpeted, climate-controlled, and inviting. Wood-paneled walls with plaques identifying generous donors. The cantor’s muffled song throbbed behind two massive closed doors. A well-heeled middle-aged couple in the lobby had been whispering when I entered. They stopped and looked at me briefly with ill-concealed hostility. They took their conversation down a side corridor. I’m sure they were merely vexed at the interruption, but it seemed they knew I did not belong.

  I patted my hair dry and grabbed a kippah from a conveniently placed wooden box and eased the door open. I found myself squinting against the radiance of the temple. It was a soaring, modern space, built in a triangular frame with the pulpit at its apex. The room was full of sharp edges and hard angles. The ark looked like a space capsule. There were perhaps two or three hundred prosperous-looking people gathered, bent over prayer books. I wondered what Béla-bácsi would make of these modern, American Jews, and of his grandson, setting foot, at last, into a temple for the first time since that childhood visit decades ago. I marveled, Grandpa, at the unexpected familiarity of it all. Do I have you to thank for that?

  I slid into a bench near the back. In front of me, a beautiful baby boy slept in his mother’s arms. His lush black hair shone thick and curly, and his limbs had all gone slack. He might have been dead except for the complete serenity on his face and the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He was so tiny, not more than six months old. Yet he slept, safe and secure in his mother’s arms. I envied him, Virgil. How I envied him. His mother’s eyes never left the rabbi, who now, finally, drew my attention.

  I don’t know what I expected to find. Frailty, weakness, my fallback handbook of Hollywood clichés and types. I was taken aback by her blunt vitality. Thick-limbed, she had short, gray hair that bobbed only about a foot over the lectern. The graveled voice was as I remembered it from our brief phone call. She closed her prayer book, removed her glasses, and began her sermon, which concerned itself—serendipitously? Inspired divinely?—with the role of community and its importance in Judaism. She muddled her way through with neither style nor wit, a plodding presence at the pulpit. It was hard to believe she had so central a role in the spiritual deliverance of so many. Perhaps this was where her illness had taken its toll. Yet for all my estrangement from my faith, and for all the dryness of her delivery, I found myself nodding as she spoke, semi-listening as I studied my fellow worshippers. I was surprised at how casually dressed many of them were. There were blue jeans in evidence, many open-necked shirts, and even the occasional pair of sneakers. Gone was the dark-suited severity of my grandfather’s temple. There were more children and teenagers than I’d expected, bright-eyed and engaged. As I listened to Rabbi Wolfe, as I began to relax, my feeling of otherness began to lift and—I know it’s all illusion, Virgil, but illusion is what I do—I felt the room begin to warm toward me. My muscles unclenched, my shoulders dropped, and, more or less at the very moment that Rabbi Wolfe said “Do not separate yourself from the community,” the room began to feel familiar to me. I believed that I could have been in any temple in any city anywhere in the world, and these faces would have been known to me. And as I scrutinized Rabbi Wolfe from the rear of the temple, I wondered not whether the painting was mine or hers, but whether there was a deeper claim to be laid, a claim beyond mere ownership, a claim of worthiness. Whether or not Budapest Street Scene actually belonged to her, I had a strange sense that she was entitled to it. Though she was, in some ways, a performer, too; but look at the value of her lifetime role, against the dozens of nameless, faceless hats I’ve worn.

  Rabbi Wolfe ended her sermon and introduced a vocal sextet, young girls, perhaps thirteen or so. I looked at the six of them, dark-eyed, lovely, and as they opened their mouths I felt the breath briefly leave my body, so beautiful were the sounds they made. I didn’t know the song, another modern ditty all gussied up to sound ancient, I expect, but it soared into the golden space of the temple, sung by these six who smiled beatifically with the realization, I think, that they were part of something indelible. I turned to look at my fellow congregants, to watch them watching. Some of them smiled at me, at the surprising dampness around my eyes. I felt as though I’d stepped through a door that had been held open on my behalf.

  All at once, I wanted to see Rachel. To tell her. To share the moment with her. I felt so foolish for not having gone inside her synagogue in Los Angeles, for having missed this opportunity. I wanted her to know what I was feeling. Yes, to have her approval, of course, to have her see she was right, I was not so far gone after all. But I couldn’t tell her. The impulse behind the trip would have undermined me.

  My mind flitted to Tracy, and all I have kept from her. Had kept. Again those damned tenses. I tried to imagine her in this room, taking it all in as she had taken in the Van Goghs, a little tired, a little mystified. I wondered how she would fare with every eye trained upon her flaxen beauty. Though it’s fair to say she has always stood out in any room she enters, it now seemed clear that more than Ricky McCabe had begun to separate us.

  These long, dark tunnels. They all look so much alike.

  A new note began to creep into my darkening interior melody, so vivid a counterpoint to the angelic tones rising from the stage before me. For all at once, I was angry with my parents, furious at my denied birthright. Yes, I was here now; yes, I felt warm in the room but there was no escaping the truth: that I was an outsider. All the years of study and devotion that marked the lives around me, whereas I had nothing to clutch but my blankness. My fists hardened into white-knuckled blocks and I muttered “Fuck” to myself, to my parents. To my emptiness. I was appalled as soon as the word passed my lips, but the comment went unheard. Or did it? You heard, didn’t You? You up there. In Your house.

  The six girls onstage continued to sing, these beautiful young treasures, containing infinite and varied futures. But now, unbidden, all I could see were their young corpses lying in an open grave somewhere in Poland. Or Russia. Or bobbing in the Danube. I looked back down at the sleeping boy in front of me, certain in the knowledge that he, too, would have perished, that his safety was nothing more than an illusion. No parent could have saved him. No parent can.

  I was assaulted by the kaleidoscope of faces, of these girls, this boy, my dead father in the hospital, Rachel’s understanding eyes, Kálmán’s devastated street, until, at last, I hurried out of the temple, found the bathroom, and threw up my in-flight snacks.

  * * *

  IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY enough for me to disappear among the crowd streaming from the building. But something in me would not relent, some strange force sent me back into the temple at the service’s end, so that I could insert myself in line and greet the rabbi. I can’t imagine what I thought I had to gain, what knowledge might be transferred to me in the course of a simple handshake. I watched her as I neared, and now I saw something of the toll her illness was taking. She was weak, trying to keep her interactions as brief as possible, limited to a friendly “Shabbat shalom,” though I sensed friendliness did not come easily to her in the best of times. She bent down stiffly to greet the children, the first betrayal of any physical discomfort. She knew a good many congregants by name. I felt my heart speed up as I neared her, as the foolishness of my idea became clear. What if she recognized me? Though I am not, as I have said, famous, nor is my face entirely unknown. The news coverage she had seen would have included a grainy photo or two, and the riches of the Internet would have been just a few clicks away. What a foolish impulse, Virgil.

  She did not seem to recognize me. There was, perhaps, the tiniest hesitation as she took my hand, though I may have imagined it to soothe my ruffled ego. How dare she not recognize me, I thought, as she Shabbat-shalome
d me like I was just another wealthy Chicago macher. I wanted a sign, Virgil. Yes, a sign. Divine inspiration, a twinge in the gut, something, anything to tell me what I was meant to do next. Instead, her fingers released me, without so much as a backward glance. And yet, as I left the synagogue, I felt her eyes on my back, though I looked over my shoulder twice, and each time found her consumed with her greetings.

  Another day, another walk-on to add to my résumé, albeit one, unlike the rest of my oeuvre, that would return to haunt me.

  VIRGIL IS OFF SOMEWHERE talking on his cell phone. I can’t make out what he is saying, his conversation is muffled by the walls separating us. But the timbre of his voice is not at all what I expected. I assumed he’d have a sonorous basso profundo to match his Falstaffian girth. Instead, there’s a reediness to his nattering, and I’m suddenly alive to a new dimension of my hitherto silent comrade. Whom can he be talking to so urgently at this late hour? A lover, surely. What do they discuss with such intensity at two-thirty in the morning? The dim contours of a life outside the auction house begin to emerge from the mists, and I am curious to know more. I am aware of the silent, shattered cell phone in my own pocket, heavy and still.

  I return my attention to Budapest Street Scene. I’m feeling renewed, a second (or is it third? Fourth?) wind upon me, and I am drawn to the Andrássy út facades, the sight of which casts me back to that first day in Budapest and revives all the disappointment that I experienced as I strolled down the actual boulevard.

  Rachel and I had arrived midafternoon on a Friday, a week to the day after my Chicago sojourn. We checked in to our hotel, a turn-of-the-century landmark recently restored to its full Belle Époque grandeur. The lobby was rich with gilt and Russian mafia. I was restless, anxious. An amorphous foreboding had settled on me, almost from the moment I’d cleared passport control, and I wanted to take a walk. Rachel was ragged with jet lag and begged off, opting for a short nap in her room. We agreed to meet in two hours in the lobby and then head off to Kálmán’s studio, where we would meet with its curators.