Memento Park Read online

* * *

  TRACY HAD TAKEN UP TEMPORARY RESIDENCE with a friend of hers, another model, Simone, who lived about fifteen minutes away, so I drove Brian over there. We rode in silence even as there were a million things I wanted to ask him. I wanted to know about his marriage, his happy family. To know how he did it. I wanted to know if he ever considered Tracy a prospect. I wanted to know why he did this kind of work, so fraught, so difficult. To know what in him was so configured for justice, for righteousness. To be able to do the right thing seems so mysterious to me, yet it comes so easily to some.

  Instead, I asked, “Are you okay?”

  Brian stared straight ahead at the road, his classical profile presenting a perfect visage of depth and reflection. He was silent and I worried I’d overstepped, then he spoke in a low voice that I had to strain to hear.

  “I’m fucking pissed.”

  I knew what he meant, and I liked him, Virgil. It was too late, but I liked him.

  We pulled up to Simone’s house and I indicated her front door. I felt it was best for me to hang back, and Brian agreed. We shook hands and I watched him stride down the path and ring the doorbell. Tracy opened the door and I felt a flood of love, sorrow, and shame overtake me. Surprise registered on her face at the sight of Brian, and as I watched the silent film from afar, her expression crossed into bewilderment. It was clear from her face that she quite literally did not understand what she was being told. It was a terrible sight, and I could only console myself that she had, at least, briefly enjoyed the sustaining power of belief, and I hoped she would believe again. She sagged against the doorframe, and Brian stepped forward to hug her. He closed the front door and I drove off to flee the city, to flee my own self-inflicted wounds.

  * * *

  NOW I WAS BACK IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE, the dutiful son once more. His absence had taken hold, and this emptiness was of a different character than the days after his death. The house was sweltering, having spent the summer months shuttered. It was an angry, accusing heat. Dust had settled in layers and the air was still and thick. The bathroom tap coughed and sputtered before spitting out whiskey-colored water. The place was a mess, a snapshot of the moment I’d left it behind months earlier. There was so much to do. Fortunately, I had some time on my hands. Only the footprints to and from the basement door gave any indication of the activity that had taken place in my absence.

  I stood before the door for a long moment, afraid to go downstairs. I knew what awaited me, what I had put in motion, and laughed to think how my unsentimental father would have scorned my discomfort. I pushed the door open and crept down the stairs, as one enters a room that might contain a burglar or a corpse. I felt along the wall at the bottom of the stairs and found the light switch, which I flipped up with a satisfyingly loud, old-fashioned click. The man in the golden helmet scowled at me but that familiar frisson of fear was gone. He looked old and tired, and those eyes that I had once found so forbidding now seemed plaintive and downcast. I swept past him with the sadness one feels beholding senescent, fallen heroes and turned into the main room. I knew what to expect, and still I stopped breathing at the sight.

  The basement appeared denuded, like a clear-cut forest. I had found a dealer in model toys who agreed to inventory and pack the collection for a modest sum, providing he could have first refusal on some of the rarest items. He would sell off the pieces for a cut of each transaction. The collection had been boxed up and cataloged, everything was tagged with admirable efficiency. It was too much for me to take in. It was as though I’d been afflicted by a kind of snow blindness, a brightening white light that obscured my field of vision. My nose and lungs began to freeze as though I were in an actual blizzard, and I began to shiver. My father was gone. It was all I could do to turn and stumble down one of the hallways and hurry into the small bathroom at the end of the corridor.

  I ran the shower as hot as it would go and filled the tiny room with steam. I inhaled deeply, began to warm, the shivering subsided. My phone rang, its electronic chime a thunderstroke in that small, still space. The glass display still shattered from my beating. I’d left it that way, as a reminder. I grabbed for the phone. Whom did I hope for? Rachel? Tracy? Both?

  It was Rabbi Wolfe. I hesitated, nearly missing the call. She was calling, she explained, because she had been meaning to speak to me since my incident in Budapest. This was what people called it now. My incident. I hurried up the stairs as she spoke, careful not to look in the direction of my father’s boxed collection. Whatever our circumstance, she went on, this fell outside of those considerations. One of her people had been beaten, she said, and that affected her, affected everyone. She went on to tell me stories, Talmudic tales mixed with historical vignettes, painting a portrait—yes, painting, that’s how it felt—of Jewish persecution and Jewish resilience, and I marveled as she spoke, she who had been my adversary, she who was so close to her own creeping, implacable death. Her voice was different now. Not merely weaker, though yes, the exhaustion was inescapable. But I heard, between the words, between syllables and inhalations, something new, something that felt very much like what I felt when Rachel laid her finger upon her mezuzah. In this hidden layer, Rabbi Wolfe now carried with her …

  Fuck. Why can’t I say it? Just say the word, you coward.

  God.

  She carried God in her voice.

  And Rachel carried God and Bernie carried God and the fireplug at the Budapest synagogue carried God and Kálmán carried God and Tracy carried God and even my father, yes, even he carried God, and everyone but me, godless Matt Santos, carried God.

  * * *

  AFTER RABBI WOLFE’S CALL I broke into my father’s measly stash of booze. He was never much of a drinker, and the choices were grim: an ancient Chablis, a bottle of Pimm’s, a sticky, dusty bottle of Lillet. All the way in the back was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the seal unbroken. A gift probably, or something kept on hand for visitors. It would do, and it wouldn’t take much. I poured three fingers’ worth into a coffee mug, collected a pair of empty cardboard cartons, and went into my father’s bedroom. I grimaced at my first sip though I found the medicinal bite bracing. There were some clothes laid out at the foot of the bed, a pair of beige corduroy trousers and a purple polyester turtleneck. I wondered if this was the outfit my father had planned for himself the night before his heart attack, set out like a child’s school uniform for the morning. I picked up the turtleneck and smelled it—a heady mix of sweat, old man, and aftershave. How soon before my own clothes reeked like that? I gagged slightly and took another sip of the whiskey.

  There were so few personal effects to be found. His alarm clock was flashing twelve o’clock. There’d been a power outage since my last visit. On the dresser, a small framed photo of me aged ten or so. More surprising, a single, small black-and-white photo of my mother posed in front of the Funicular Railway on Buda Hill. He never spoke of my mother, but apparently she endured in his memory. I drank down the last finger and pulled open the dresser drawers, hoping to find something more in the way of personal effects, but found only a deck of playing cards containing soft-core photographs of fifty-two sexual positions. I discovered this contraband as a teenager and spent many hours reviewing them.

  One by one, I tipped out the drawers onto the bed to begin the business of sorting the clothing and packing it into the cartons for charity. It felt like a violation, handling his clothes in this manner, poring over objects that had been against his body. I was aware of the foot within every sock, the chest beneath each undershirt. And handling his underwear? I needed to refill my coffee cup with another splash of Jack Daniel’s to be able to continue. In his closet, the hangers were packed so densely that I could barely pull them out at first. The man kept everything.

  I worked for hours. Night slithered in and I was in my cups, sitting amid the piles of my father’s old clothes, when I heard my mother knock at the door and enter. Back from her artists’ retreat, she had offered to help me with the packing. She appeared
in the doorway and regarded me amid the fallen leaves of menswear.

  “Ugh. I pleaded with him not to buy that shirt.”

  I looked down at the shirt I was folding. It was a hideous lilac polo made from some sort of synthetic.

  “Not much fashion sense, your father.” She walked over and held out her hand. I gave her the shirt, which she examined, smiling.

  “He always bought me these blue flowers, blue irises,” she said. “I hated them but he always got them for me. They only lived for a day.”

  The years have been kind to my mother, she has achieved a sort of attractive sturdiness. Prematurely gray in her thirties, she has aged into her mane, which, in the last decade, she has opted to leave loose, as I suppose befits her bohemian identity. It was good to see her.

  “You look like hell, son,” she said, taking the drink from my hand. “I brought groceries. Let me fix us some dinner.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS SOMETHING COMFORTING about the awfulness of my mother’s cooking. For the occasion, she’d outdone herself, and the modest meal was inedible. A shriveled pork cutlet, drier than the lid of a shoebox. A gelatinous mass of egg noodles. And a handful of brussels sprouts, burnt crisp in an inch of butter. It made me feel like a child again, and I loved it.

  We sat at the dining room table where the three of us ate almost every dinner of my childhood, cheap laminate an unnatural shade of orange, the leaves unevenly jutting up against each other like a fault line. We ate from mismatched plates, using the same tarnished silverware we always used, a dull, gray set with an inset oval of black slate along the shaft. We spoke about all sorts of things, my mother and I, about the case, my trip and beating, her retreat, anything, at first, but my father. I omitted the details about Tracy and Rachel. Only at the end of the meal, when she returned the coffee mug filled with her strong, black brew, did he come up. She asked about the collection, and I told her that the plan to sell it was moving ahead. She frowned at the news.

  “What else should I do?” I asked, feeling judged. “I don’t want it. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Would you?”

  “Of course not. It’s the right thing, the only thing to do.” She surprised me by brushing aside an errant tear. “It’s just, you know. That was him. Everything, really, every admirable trait, every maddening one, he funneled into those goddamned cars.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I was unsettled by my mother’s sorrow, yet heartened to learn that she hadn’t completely rid herself of my father. We held hands from across the table. There were stubborn flecks of aquamarine paint beneath her fingernails.

  Eager to change the subject, I said, “Hey. Do you remember the whole thing with the space toy?”

  “Of course. Your father was such a softie.”

  Softie? “What do you mean?”

  “The way he replaced your money while you were sleeping. So typical.”

  “He told me you replaced the money.”

  This surprised my mother. I watched as she reviewed the mental footage. “This was the blue spaceship, right? The fifty dollars.”

  “It was pink, a car, and it was sixty-five dollars,” I said with irritation.

  “How odd.” This seemed to amuse my mother, and her amusement infuriated me. How could she be so sanguine in the face of such uncertainty? She shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s possible. It was a long time ago, you know.”

  Why didn’t this bother her more? Between the three of us, we couldn’t agree on the simple facts of a story we’d all been part of within the last twenty years. How was I expected to place any faith in the outcome of this arbitration, given the span of time, the gaps in the tale, the absence of firsthand witnesses that apparently didn’t count for much? Which story are we ever to believe, Virgil? She could see the anger on my face, the helplessness, and she kissed my cheek and said, not without tenderness, “You were always such a silly boy, Matt.” She cleared the table, stayed on a few more hours to help me finish packing my father’s clothes, and then she was gone into the night with vague promises of a California visit.

  I returned to the basement. I had noticed something earlier, out of the corner of my eye, and it had been nagging at me since then, and as I sobered up, I remembered what it was. There was a DVD atop one of the packed boxes. Apparently, my dealer had found it buried on one of the shelves and wanted to make sure I noticed it. It was a documentary on toy car collecting, filmed a few years earlier by a British film crew. I looked at the track listing. One of the DVD’s twenty chapters included a brief interview with my father. I’d never seen it, and he had not told me about it.

  * * *

  IN THE VIDEO, my father looks sickly beneath a sallow light as he stands in front of one of his display cases. I’m taken aback at the sight of him alive, talking, briefly restored to me. From his first words, I’m fighting back tears. His eyes look past the camera, addressing an unseen interviewer. He talks slowly, deliberately. He was always aware of his accented English, his tendency to trip up or be misunderstood. He talks about his collection in the broadest terms and at first there’s nothing new, I’m mostly just swimming in the stream of his words, this unexpected gift of a last conversation. Then he makes a reference to his own past, to being a young man in Budapest and being an obsessive gambler. This is news, something else he’d never mentioned to me. All at once, the Tower Club makes a new kind of sense and I cannot help but laugh: a DVD has told me more than I was able to learn about him myself. What made me think I could understand this man?

  And yet, as I stand amid the boxes containing his collection, his life’s work, it seems inarguable that this, here, all this, was where my father’s essence was to be found. Not in Budapest Street Scene. Not in synagogues across the ocean. Right here, in these neatly wrapped capsules, packed away, waiting to be sold off.

  I poke through the boxes until I find the piece I want, the Corvette, and place it under my arm. With a jaunty nod to Rembrandt’s man in the golden helmet, I switch the lights off and I’m up and out for the night.

  * * *

  WITHIN A WEEK, I erased my father’s home. I could not watch as the trucks hauled the collection away, and instead took myself to a movie, some asinine Hollywood thing, all stunts and noise and drunken camera work that gave me a headache. I remembered it vaguely, had auditioned for the part of the computer hacker. Watching the actor who got the role, I had to concede that he played it better than I would have. We crossed paths all the time going out for the same parts. Here, his choices were all interesting and fresh, little flourishes that would never have occurred to me, and he managed to make an unmemorable part linger in memory. I returned from the movies to an empty house, locked it up for the last time with little ceremony, and caught a flight home, to wait on Judge Handlebar’s ruling.

  IT ALL ENDED with a terse message from Rachel on my voice mail.

  “The decision is in. It’s yours.”

  That was all I heard from her. Her paralegal forwarded me a copy of the decision and called to inquire about my plans, whether I wanted to collect the painting or have the firm assist with its disposition. I had no idea what to say. Handle it, I told him.

  I thumbed through the fourteen-page decision. I’d expected more complexity, more impenetrable legalese, but in the end, it was all straightforward. It seemed Rabbi Wolfe’s claim foundered due to its lack of documentary evidence. Right as always, Rachel. Judge Handlebar had found the photograph of my grandparents’ sitting room dispositive. Had the beating I’d received played a role in nudging along his sympathies? I would never know. It was a surreal moment in which, among other things, I was suddenly a millionaire. I know people feel numb at momentous occasions but I wasn’t numb. Nor was I elated. I felt forsaken.

  I had no one to call with the news. My father. Rachel. Tracy. I wondered whether it was appropriate to contact Rabbi Wolfe, to express my condolences of sorts. Instead, I walked. It seemed a subversive thing to do in this vehicular city, to light out for points unknown and wa
lk as far as your feet will carry you. My phone had begun vibrating. I left it rattling on my dining room table, slipped on a hooded sweatshirt, and set off into the late afternoon’s fading light.

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, I CAME UPON AN OFFICE PARK a few miles from my house and paused before my favorite fountain. It was situated in a fenced circle of green, spires of water leaning in toward one another. I dropped onto a metal bench and gazed into the floodlit waters. I was an incongruous patch of stillness amid office workers streaming from buildings to begin the long commute home. A few passersby seemed to glare at me, offended by my apparent lack of purpose. There was almost nothing preventing me from sitting here, staring at the fountain, for as long as I chose, forever really. The thought disturbed me and I stirred from my perch.

  Across the street from the office park was a collective of art galleries, and I decided to wander over and take a look. Most were already closed for the evening, but there were signs of life coming from one. An opening was in progress. Voices and bodies spilled out into the courtyard. I stepped inside to investigate.

  The moment I entered, a drink was pressed into my hand. I took a taste: an ordinary red wine that was somehow just what I needed. I gulped it down, set the empty cup on a passing tray, and took a second. Fortified, I began to wander, taking in the art and the audience.

  Classical music piped in through overhead speakers to a monochromatic crowd. How much did I stand out, I wondered, the only one not dressed in black? It was an attractive gathering and my eye drifted to women as they passed by, usually deep in conversation with slim, earnest, bearded lads. It took little effort to spot the man of the hour. Muscular, a dark buzz cut, and covered with tattoos—an angry lizard crawled up his neck—he was surrounded by adoring young women and not a few young men. He reminded me of Kálmán, although he was, of course, nothing at all like him. I think at that moment any artist would have brought Kálmán to mind.

  I wanted to go over and talk to him. I wanted to ask him how he would feel if seventy years after his death, people were slugging it out in the courts for his paintings. Would he care about the outcome? Would he care about the sort of person who finally took possession? I looked at him more closely. The way he worked the crowd, he seemed a climber, on the make, someone not much concerned with the messy details of posterity. Slugging it out for me, dude? I imagined him asking. Rad. It would take a few more drinks for me to approach someone like that.