Memento Park Read online

  In my teenage years, I learned to lock my bedroom door, as I did one Saturday morning when my college grades arrived in the mail. I’d flamed out that semester, distracted by the toxic haze of a romance gone awry and a newfound devotion to weed. The sheet in my hand was a welter of red, and I panicked as my father pounded at the door, insisting he be let in. I stuffed the indictment into my back pocket, and as I opened the door, he nearly fell into me, flushed and disheveled and demanding my grades.

  “I … I don’t have them,” I stammered.

  “What are you talking about?” he bellowed.

  I repeated myself, stalling. “I don’t have them.”

  “Did you flush them down the toilet?” he asked, bristling with suspicion, supplying the very course of action that he himself would have taken, one that had not occurred to me. But I knew a lifeline when I saw one. Only in the ways of deception could I claim him for a role model.

  “Yes. I did.” I hung my head in an excellent facsimile of shame, already the promising performer. There was a beating, of course, but the older we both got, the less the lashings stung. More important, I’d bought the necessary time to forge a replacement set of grades, one that told a less dire story than the grades I’d supposedly flushed.

  This, I suppose, is my father’s legacy, the ease of the lie, the comfort of the half-truth. The actor born in fear, borne by fear.

  DAZED, I LEFT MS. MOCKLEY, clutching the buff folder like a life preserver. I felt light-headed, disoriented, as I tried to banish thoughts of the Arrow Cross, to force aside images of my grandmother dead in the waters of the Danube, another distended human cork bobbing in the river. And this yarn of exit papers and stolen paintings? It felt like something out of Casablanca, although in the space of ten minutes, an Australian bureaucrat had told me more about my family than I had ever learned from my father. I dialed Tracy, but the call went to her voice mail, something that had begun happening more often. I hung up without leaving a message. It was all more than I could absorb, so apparently—I say “apparently” because I have no memory of any agency—I wandered down to the library and headed into the art department. I found a large, musty old catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Ervin Kálmán and sequestered myself among students, retirees, and the homeless using the computers to look at pornography. One moment I was at the embassy and a moment later, it seemed, I was huddled over the catalog, which smelled of spoiled cheese and crackled as I laid it flat. I flipped through it until I found a striking, full-page reproduction of Budapest Street Scene. The brief catalog entry—little more than dimensions and material—ended with the words Whereabouts unknown. The book had been published in 1962, before Budapest Street Scene reemerged as part of Cassian Yuhaus’s tax settlement.

  The colors in the library book were far more vivid than those in Mockley’s photograph, which I now set beside it. Which was closer to the thing itself? Or was the real painting a third variation that neither picture captured? I wondered how long it would be before I might stand in front of it and see for myself. These questions were displaced by a dozen others: Why hadn’t my father snatched up this windfall? Would pursuing this painting bring us into yet another conflict? Did I have the patience, the energy—the curiosity—to see me through to the end, where a considerable pot of gold appeared to wait?

  I closed the book and returned it to a nearby cart, and it was only much later that evening that I realized I had left my photo of Budapest Street Scene tucked between its pages.

  * * *

  I’VE DESERTED MY POST, and after some restless wandering through the auction house, Virgil ever at my heels like a loyal spaniel, I have come to rest before a display case that contains a toy car. It’s a shabby piece of tin, cheaply made. The once-white tires are brown, cracked with age. The thin film that passes for a windscreen is cloudy. Sunburnt flakes of red paint peel from its body. The driver’s head is missing. Unlike my painting, this was once a child’s toy, purchased for a pittance, designed to bring some passing pleasure to a little boy. Now it sits encased, awaiting a buyer who will shell out a terrific sum—the official estimate for this tattered rarity is twenty-two thousand dollars—only to place it inside another glass case. This fascinates me, the way trivial pieces of our lives assume such importance, while the object itself has only degraded with age.

  That brief flare of recognition I’d experienced in Ms. Mockley’s office at the sight of Budapest Street Scene continued to glow. Arriving home, I tried again to reach Tracy. Again no response, though also not unusual when she was working, and so I went into the garage, where I keep my files, and began searching through drawers. Although I am not a collector, I am organized. Collecting was my father’s grand passion, the reflex around which he organized his life. I do not have that kind of singleness of purpose and I often derided his obsession with his massive collection of toy cars; an obsession that ruled him, consumed his time, energy, and money, but also brought him the only moments of happiness I can remember.

  His particular passion was for Corvettes, an affectation, I suspect, through which he was determined to demonstrate devotion to his adopted nation. There could not have been a more potent symbol of America, all open roads and convertible tops and bright, primary colors, though in the garage my father always kept Volkswagens, oblivious to any historical resonance. He was a completist by nature, and the basement of my childhood home was filled with model cars of increasingly rare vintage and escalating value. I hated the things, the smell of them, the glass cabinets that separated them from me, the exaggerated care that my father used on the infrequent occasions when he was required to handle them. As I got older, I found the whole thing juvenile, embarrassing. I never spoke of the collection to my friends, who probably would have been amazed at the sight of it. In truth, I never quite got over my resentment of my father’s willful cruelty—thousands of beautiful toy cars, and I was not permitted to touch, much less play with, any of them. I was only allowed downstairs with supervision, lest the urge to tear a car free from its display and roll it across the floor overwhelm me. And so, over time, I stopped going downstairs.

  After twenty minutes of searching, I found a file of old family photos that I’d been looking for. Tracy once offered to arrange these pictures into an album, to afford them the presentation that she felt was lacking. But I prefer them disorderly in this file, never sure which picture will come up next, which long-dormant memory will be stoked, flare to life, then sigh back into obscurity.

  I withdrew an early photo, in which I’m about four. On the whole, my father seems … happy. Happy with me. My mother is busy watering plants in the background, and I’m sitting on his lap, facing the camera. He’s holding my arms out, as though I’m his marionette, and there appears to be genuine joy on his face. I realize this sounds less unusual than it probably is, but I can’t seem to remember feeling that happiness, his happiness. Clearly, it was there, if the photographic evidence is to be believed, but my memories of those early years are featureless, like a vast desertscape.

  I pulled out another photo of us standing on a busy Manhattan street. In this picture I’m twenty, taller now than the old man, long hair curling about my shoulders, and although my father is still smiling, he stands awkwardly, at a distance from me, his outstretched arm resting on my shoulder. I appear to stiffen against his touch, but I smile, too. How much are photographic smiles to be trusted? There’s a real difference between the two pictures, a happiness in the early one that can’t be forged, despite the wan attempts of the latter. What happened to us between these two shutter clicks?

  * * *

  MY BACK BEGAN TO ACHE from hunching over the files, and I was about to go inside to use the bathroom when I found the object of my search. A black-and-white photo about three inches square with a serrated border that might have been cut with pinking shears. A crack runs through the top right corner of the photo, where it had been folded years before. On the back is written Szantos család, Székely Bertalan utca, Aprilus 1944. Sz
antos family, Bertalan Székely Street, April 1944. The photo is of the sitting room in my grandparents’ Budapest flat. The room is cramped, the overstuffed furniture leaving little room to walk around. A shaft of light crosses the room from a sole window on the left. There’s tea paraphernalia on the lace-covered coffee table in front of a sofa upon which my grandfather reclines, trying to keep his errant son still for the photo. My grandmother leans on her forearms on the back of the sofa, stiff, smiling thinly for the camera. How little she would have had to smile about in April 1944. The photographer is unknown. In the past, I have always been drawn to my father in this photo, first shocked, later dismayed to see how much I resembled him as a boy. Not just in our full-lipped, dark-haired looks but in that same restless apartness. But this time my eye skips past family, past the furniture, the tea, the books on the shelves, and goes straight to the painting on the wall behind them. A third is cut off on the right, out of frame, but there’s no mistaking Budapest Street Scene, hanging crookedly over the hearth.

  * * *

  I CLUTCHED THE PICTURE, dizzy, my innards seeming to bend as in a carnival mirror. None of it made the slightest sense. My father never said the first word about art—painting, sure, but art? Never—and nothing suggested that his barely middle-class family had enough bourgeois cultivation to gesture in the direction of modernism. Before leaving the garage, I extracted a second file from the cabinet, but this time I did not look inside. With an unsteady hand, I slid the family photo into it and stepped inside the house to find Tracy pacing the living room, talking urgently into her cell phone. She nodded at me as I walked in and kept talking and pacing. She mouthed the word “Brian” to me.

  Of course. Brian. The omnipresent third member of our happy household. A lawyer representing a Texas death row inmate with an IQ of 62 named Ricky McCabe, on whose behalf Tracy had been interceding for nearly a year, helping to underwrite his legal team and coordinating an “awareness campaign” for clemency.

  She covered her mouthpiece and whispered to me. “Bledsoe is recanting.”

  I immediately understood the urgency. McCabe was accused of killing a young woman in the parking lot of a bar for refusing his advances. The police built a circumstantial case around him, despite the victim’s physically abusive ex-husband and an unsolved string of armed robberies of women in the same area. That her stolen handbag was never recovered and no gun was ever found hardly impeded their certainty. Instead, a perfect storm sent Ricky McCabe to death row: A small blood splatter on his shirt, which he said happened when he found the victim in the parking lot and tried to wake her up. A sole witness, Amelia Bledsoe, sixty-eight, who, driving past the lot at night, claimed she saw him hurrying from the crime scene. A defendant abandoned by a mother who drank heavily during pregnancy, and unable to influence his lackluster defense.

  The case had already twice delayed our wedding.

  I pursued her hard, my flaxen goddess, proposed early, knowing how rare openings for men like me are with women like her. Yet months after my proposal was accepted, all urgency receded in the face of the life-and-death matters that consumed her time and energy. I confess, I struggled to understand her devotion to the cause. I pressed from time to time, but her answers felt like evasions, platitudes. True, Tracy grew up in a home devoted to causes and mistrustful of the establishment. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that she had been raised with love that disposed her so compassionately to others. But I felt there was something deeper, perhaps darker, driving her along.

  I occasionally allowed myself to wonder whether she might be having an affair with the lawyer, Brian, whom I envisioned as tall, fair-haired, a Gentleman of the Old School. I bristled when she spoke to or texted him, which was often. I sat down on the couch and made a mild show of waiting for her to finish.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Talk tomorrow.”

  She turned her attention to me at last, dropping down onto the sofa beside me.

  “Sorry about that. Big day.”

  “All around.”

  “It opens everything back up. Her testimony was such a key part of the original case. Maybe this will make the difference.”

  “It is Texas…”

  She shook her head at me. “Cynic.” She kissed my cheek and regarded me with what seemed to be affection. “How about you? How did it go with that Australian woman?”

  “Well, a little weird, actually.”

  “Weird? How so?”

  As my recap of the morning unfurled, I was disquieted by two things. First, although I was telling Tracy the truth, I felt somehow dishonest, like a carnival barker. There was something a bit too staged in my rendition, it felt false even while painting a picture of perfect accuracy. Ceci n’est pas la vérité, to paraphrase Magritte.

  The second thing I noticed was that, in my otherwise accurate-to-the-last-detail retelling of the day’s adventure, I omitted the value of Budapest Street Scene. At the time, it struck me as benign. I am forever withholding this or that bit of the truth as suits me, it’s just another technique in my repertoire, as every actor learns the fundamental lesson that less is more. But looking back, I wonder if that fact withheld, and not Mockley’s phone call, was the real beginning of things.

  As I neared the end of my tale, Tracy’s phone began bleating, the word about McCabe no doubt having spread. She picked it up and began reading and answering her texts as I spoke. Brian. I was sure it was Brian, and even if it wasn’t, it was Brian. I stopped talking and she didn’t notice for a moment. Then she looked up at me.

  “I’ll wait until you’re done.”

  I’d said it evenly, but she registered the rebuke and set down the phone with an apologetic look. She slithered up beside me and, making amends, whispered in my ear.

  “Would you like to fuck me now?”

  It’s her standard invitation, its unromantic bluntness something of an in-joke, the joke, of course, being that the answer is never no. How could I, how could any man, refuse such largesse? And yet.

  “Later, I think.”

  She seemed surprised though not altogether disappointed. She was, perhaps, too focused on the news of the night, and too eager to return to poor, doomed Ricky McCabe to linger on the moment. We said good night and she disappeared up the stairs. I sometimes looked forward to the evening hours after Tracy settled into bed and I could enjoy a little nocturnal privacy. At length, her snoring would echo throughout the house, kettle drums tumbling down a flight of stairs. I find it one of her most charming traits, for some reason. To the world, in magazines and on billboards, she epitomizes refinement, but in the privacy of her dreams, only I know her to be the window rattler she is.

  I settled into my study. The house was slipping into darkness but for the spotlight of the desk lamp illuminating the file I had retrieved from the garage. I opened the folder, which contained an old family tree. There was a thick hum in my ears, and it seemed as though the whole of gravity itself had converged upon this printout. Turning the first page required a Herculean effort.

  The document had been created a dozen years earlier by an elderly cousin of my father’s. I still remember his phone call, his accented politesse, as he inquired whether I could supply a few missing details about my family. I had little to offer beyond my own birthday, but he sent me the completed family tree a few weeks later. Did he chastise me for my ignorance? I’m sure he must have. I hope he did.

  It was a confusing document, ten pages of difficult-to-read dot matrix printouts in no apparent order. At the time, I tore the envelope open and flipped through the pages looking for my own name, finding it on the last line, nestled beneath my parents’. Above them, my grandparents’, and though I knew the story, I was nevertheless brought up short by the entry for my grandmother, which ended d. 4-14-1944 in Budapest.

  That was all the attention I gave it, and I filed it away for some unknown future purpose. Now I returned to it, experiencing the same leap in my stomach. But for the first time—how was it possible I was just no
ticing this?—I became aware of the cluster of names above my father, all siblings of my grandparents, all abruptly terminating with the stark designation d. 1944 in followed by a variety of locations: Auschwitz, Mauthausen-Gusen, Budapest. These, I now realized, were my father’s aunts and uncles—aunts and uncles he had never mentioned.

  I began to flip back and forth between the pages, trying to connect the links and see how far back I could follow. After nearly thirty minutes of fiddling with highlighters and color-coded Post-its, a clear line tracing back to a 1770 patriarch emerged. The lineage sputtered out at that point. But for the first time, sitting alone in my study, I considered the Szabos of nineteenth-century Debrecen, the Lowenheims of Kecskemét, and the Ujvaris of Esztergom. These tributaries of family ran into a wider river than I’d ever imagined, and amid them all, Szantos emerged like a thin green shoot rising out of Europe’s rubble. As for Santos, how banal and ugly our variation looked at the end of that long and distinguished line.