Memento Park Page 5

  It was at college that Kálmán befriended Gyorgy Heti, whose name today is remembered for having urged Kálmán to contemplate the life of the artist. It was also Heti, an opium addict, who introduced Kálmán to the pleasures of narcotics. Some of Heti’s sketches survive to this day and they remind me of nothing so much as my mother’s earliest efforts. There’s something plaintive and earnest about these Budapest cityscapes, clichéd renderings of iconic sights such as the Chain Bridge and the Fisherman’s Bastion. Of greater interest are the letters he wrote to Kálmán, impassioned missives about the role of the artist, the sanctity of painting, and a dozen other points that Kálmán would steal in later years, rolling them into his Duna Manifesto, often transcribing pages of Heti’s letters verbatim without crediting his friend, who had by then disappeared into the mud and snow of the eastern front.

  Tapping the pen to my temple, I sought to note something comparable about my father, nothing more perhaps than the name of his closest or oldest friend, when I realized that I could not recall meeting any of my father’s friends. There were acquaintances, certainly, but my father avoided intimate companionship. I would watch as he hung up the telephone with someone he had known for years, only to mutter idiot as he retreated to his cellar full of toy cars.

  The more I learned about Kálmán, the barer my father’s page felt. For example, whereas I knew that Kálmán finally broke with his parents and left college in 1907 to pursue his art full-time, I could not remember whether my father had left college or been ejected. And when I read about Kálmán’s success in arranging a small allowance from his parents to enable him to move to Paris, it merely underscored that I had no idea whether my father ever lived outside the family home, ever sought his independence as a young man before his great leap westward.

  I remembered packing my bags for my own great move to Los Angeles. I filled two medium suitcases and had five thousand dollars in my pocket, all of my savings. My father watched me pack and inquired how long I intended to give it. It was, I suppose, a reasonable question but to me it underscored how little he understood me. I paused in my hurried folding, looked up, and said—quite self-importantly, as I recall with some shame—as long as it takes. Now, as it happened, as long as it took was not very long at all, but neither of us had any way of knowing that at the time. He looked at me with an indecipherable sadness, nodded, and left. What was he feeling? Perhaps he was saddened by my certainty, a melancholy echo of his own youthful vitality. Or perhaps he felt nostalgic for his own great youthful escape, crossing the border hours ahead of Soviet tanks in October of 1956, and arriving in America without a friend or a word of English? Is it possible that he was simply sad at the prospect of not seeing me for many years? That’s a possibility I cannot bear to consider, not now.

  My cell phone rang. I glanced at the display—Mockley. She had been hounding me for days, eager to know what steps I was taking toward “resolving the matter,” as she put it. I ignored her call, as I had the others, though I knew I couldn’t continue to do so indefinitely. I pulled the World Jewish Congress letter from the file. It said I would be hearing from a Rachel Steinberg, Esq., who would guide me through the restitution thicket. At that moment, the production assistant returned and I was shuttled onto the set, maneuvered into position, my feet on bits of tape as lights were adjusted around me. But my mind was still thrumming with shame, with questions, with … with what else, Virgil? I must have sensed something gathering, my mind was full of my father’s absence, his blank page. I was abstracted, my performance off, to the growing irritation of the director and the crew. It’s a desperately expensive business, after all, and my unreliability was costing the production no small sum. But my mind kept trailing back to my papers, my research and, above all, my father’s single empty page, and now I became angry at how much I knew about Kálmán’s life, how thoroughly it has been documented, examined. What makes one life more worth examining than another? My father left the world no art, it’s true. But can that fact alone account for the disproportion in interest, in information? Can it justify the many full pages against the single empty page?

  These questions exhaust me, Virgil. All these months with so little answered. Even now, I can feel the weight of his blank page in my pocket.

  I remember playing Hamlet in an amateur theatrical production shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, when I was still under the illusion that such vanity productions had any career value. But for all the aching earnestness of the affair, I comported myself with some distinction, made some interesting choices, as actors like to say. I was a natural Hamlet, I had the melancholy part well in hand—again that sadness, that useful sadness—even if no one would mistake my brooding Semitic countenance for Danish. But something deeper in the role spoke to me, something off the page. Was it the fear at the first sight of the Ghost Father? Such a familiar fear. I knew that tightening in the chest all too well. Or perhaps it was the sense of thwarted promise, of things that were simply never to be. No throne for our hapless lad, no love, not even, in the end, life. Or was it the obvious take, the young prince’s chronic indecision, his inability to do the one necessary thing, that so resonated with me? After all, the drama of Budapest Street Scene was going nowhere and still I balked at the one step remaining.

  I flubbed a line I had been trying to get right, and the director, his frustration evident, called an end to the day’s shoot. He pulled me aside to register his concerns and I made a great show of listening with deference and interest, and promised him things would be different in the morning. There was something in his manner, Virgil, and it occurred to me that I could lose this gig, something that had never happened to me. I wasn’t about to let it happen now. Things would be better after the holiday break, I assured him. Whether he was mollified or not, I can’t say, but I was excused and I returned to my trailer, where I was greeted by a photograph from my archive that brought most of my visitors up short. It’s a photo of Kálmán, dead, his head surrounded by a halo of flowers arranged to hide the hole in the back of his skull. Why did I choose to display this photo so prominently, taped up at eye level on the door of my wardrobe? There was something about his mouth cracked open as if he had expired midsyllable, about the emerging razor stubble (I wondered about the diligence of Hungarian undertakers), about the fact that it was a photograph of a dead man, that I could not look away from. I’d not yet been in the presence of a dead body, and something about the finality of the image made me slightly dizzy. I would look back and forth from his head to his paintings, trying to connect creator and created.

  I picked up the letter from the World Jewish Congress and looked it over one last time before sliding it back into its file. I couldn’t continue to cower in my trailer from the long arm of Ms. Mockley. There was one thing left to do.

  To call or not to call. That is the question. Angels and ministers of grace defend us. Mark me.

  VIRGIL APPEARS SUFFICIENTLY CONVINCED of my harmlessness to have begun a game of solitaire, which he attends with a dogged consistency that’s almost touching, though the cards do not favor him. Once or twice, a groan floats my way as yet another unwanted red king is turned over. I loathe the tense tedium of card games. My father played cards every Friday night at a Hungarian social club in Manhattan. Social club. The words evoke images of a world so foreign, a world in which people might socialize for no other reason than shared nationality. My father’s mood was unfailingly bad the day after he’d lost, which was often, and he railed against the stupidity and—the greater sin in his view—the timidity of his partners who had no killer instinct. Those were his words: killer instinct. Something he imagined he possessed in abundance.

  When I was ten, he had occasion to visit the Club, as he called it, in the middle of the day, and he took me along on an errand, the purpose of which is long forgotten. I’d only heard talk of it and had constructed such an elaborate fantasia of glamorous men and women, music and danger, that I leapt at the opportunity to see firsthand where my fathe
r spent his Friday nights.

  I suspect my disappointment was palpable as we mounted the steps of a sagging brownstone in Yorkville, the Hungarian neighborhood of Manhattan, off Second Avenue in the mideighties. A battered green steel door embedded with a small square of safety glass gave way to a narrow corridor littered with refuse. Broken mailbox doors dangled at odd angles like decaying teeth. As the elevator approached, the silence was punctuated by the thunk of each floor brushing past. My bladder tingled as it often did in exciting situations. The door slid open in quarters that disappeared into each other, and we stepped into the tiny cab. My father let me press one of the six raised black buttons, and the floor number glowed amber. The elevator reeked of ammonia.

  We stepped out and walked down the linoleum-tiled corridor. My ghost father’s footsteps rattled along cream-painted cinder blocks. We arrived at a dented and scratched olive door with a security eyepiece and a doorbell bearing the legend THE TOWER CLUB. As I looked around for evidence of a tower, my father pressed the black lozenge firmly and a full, round chime answered. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with orange shellacked curls, rhinestone-studded glasses, an architectural bosom, and eyebrows drawn at a rakish angle. This was Ildiko, and she smiled at the sight of my father, beckoned him to enter, and cooed over me, applying special accented ministrations upon the much discussed but never seen prodigal son. My father transformed, became Gabi the boisterous, jovial charmer, a creature I’d glimpsed at dinner parties. It was a bravura turn, and I do know about such things. The scope of the part was small—a critic might even call it one-note—but he owned it and delivered a convincing if broad performance.

  Ildiko’s interest in me spent itself quickly, and she assumed her place behind a bar stocked with dusty bottles of Crown Royal and Cinzano, speaking rapid Hungarian into a black telephone, and I was able to take in the room. What struck me first was the smell: stale, like the cosmetics section of a cheap department store. The combination of scents laced with cigarette smoke and Ildiko’s hair spray should have been revolting but I swooned.

  There were eight round tables covered with white tablecloths, nearly all of which were cratered with cigarette burns. Abandoned half-full glasses with cigarette butts floating in them. Two of the tables were occupied. At the first, three men my father’s age were playing cards. It was to this table that my father attached himself, with an admonition for me to stay put and not bother anyone. But it was the players at the second table who riveted me.

  Two elderly men sat in old military uniforms. One of the two was emaciated, his stubbled turkey jowls disappearing into his collar, which sat loosely around his blue-veined neck. All gray wisps, he seemed to vanish within his uniform. His friend suffered from the opposite problem, straining at the buttons of his jacket, constantly tugging at his waistband for elusive comfort. Moth-eaten ribbons rested upon their chests. Tarnished medals failed to catch the light. There was an absurd formality in their posture. Despite their dotage and infirmities, they sat rigidly upright with a wan, martial dignity. I strained to listen as the thin one drew a card and threw what I took to be some chips into the pot.

  “I see your twenty thousand Romany souls, and raise you five thousand souls.”

  The fat general perused his cards once more and nodded decisively.

  “I raise you a hundred thousand Bulgarian souls.”

  A terrible expression crossed the thin general’s face, as though a herald had just delivered the worst possible news. Bottom lip trembling slightly, he set his cards facedown and spat an obscenity. The fat general nodded, as if in agreement, and collected his winnings—not chips but a pile of multicolored bottle caps intended to represent the souls in question. Fanta oranges, Pepsi blues, Sprite greens, Coke reds. Ildiko noticed my interest and leaned over the bar to whisper to me.

  “The fat one, he commanded five thousand men in Hungary. Terrible battles in the war, almost died during the siege of Budapest. Now he is a janitor. The skinny one, he led three battalions, was tortured by the Germans. Told them nothing. Here, he delivers newspapers.” She leaned in close. “They say the fat one pushed Jews into the Duna. Who knows?” She shrugged, a gesture meant to explain all tragicomic inequities to me, and I wished I was old enough to decipher it. I glanced over to where my father was kibitzing with his buddies, and saw that he had noticed my interest. He looked at the two generals with distaste and, after thumping his friends theatrically on the back, rose and collected me. Effusive goodbyes were exchanged and we found ourselves in the hallway waiting for the elevator.

  “What is the Duna?”

  “The Danube. A river in Budapest.”

  “The woman told me she thinks the fat man pushed Jews in the river. Why did he do that?”

  My father did not answer. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he was continuing a lifelong pattern of not discussing the war. I persisted.

  “Who were those men, in the uniforms?” I asked.

  His reply was clipped, tense. “Nobody.” The elevator arrived and we stepped inside. My father pressed the ground-floor button, depriving me of my little pleasure, but he rested his hand on my shoulder, a rare bit of physical contact that gave me even greater joy. Then he spoke again, hoarsely. “Ghosts, Mátyás. They are ghosts.”

  He jabbed at the ground-floor button, eager to get me the hell out of there. I was never invited back to the Tower Club, which was demolished last year to make way for a luxury condominium. My two generals are surely dead by now, though I imagine them taking their game of souls elsewhere and continuing it until the moment when their own souls would be collected on another, larger table.

  * * *

  YEARS AGO, I WROTE DOWN THE FEW THINGS my father and I had in common. I kept the list in my nightstand drawer, handy whenever I had an uncomfortable interaction with him, a touchstone of sorts. It wasn’t a very long list, nor a particularly deep one: We both liked to drive fast, recklessly even. We loved dogs. We both hated to shave. There was something I loved about his prickly stubble, his five o’clock shadow typically settling in around three o’clock, a characteristic I’ve inherited. I continued to hug him well past the age he thought such displays appropriate and he finally called a stop to it after my tenth birthday, when I was instructed to address him henceforth as “Dad,” my preferred “Daddy” having been deemed unmanly. With the banishment of Daddy, the hugs also came to an end, though to this day I can still summon the sharp pricks of his incipient beard against my always tender skin, something comforting, reassuring in the pain.

  I lay in bed, watching Tracy prepare for her shoot. It was the last day of the year. The curtains were parted, the room suffused with the warm blue of a clear Los Angeles winter morning. Despite the early hour, Tracy was already dressed and was assembling the day’s necessities: iPad, water bottle, and a small army of moisturizing lotions disappeared into her Brobdingnagian bag.

  “You’re going to be late, aren’t you?”

  She shrugged. “Only a little. They’re always behind anyway. Eager to get rid of me?”

  I smiled and twisted the sheet anxiously around my ankle. “Of course not. Come here.”

  She leaned in to kiss me goodbye, and I held her wrist and fingered the scar on her radial. It’s a tight little bug of a wound, the remnant of a burn her kid brother gave her as a child. He was, he said, unnerved by her perfection. She’d long forgiven him—it was the tiniest of marks—but I always marveled at how he’d left his permanent imprint on her. I kissed her wrist gently. Her engagement ring was absent.

  “No ring?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s too easy to lose at these ocean shoots. I misplaced it last week and it freaked me out. It’s safer here. That’s okay, right?”

  I smiled and released her hand. “Of course, it’s fine.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “So. Big day?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Well, you know.”

  She sighed, opened the drawer, pulled out my list, and placed it on m
y stomach. “Call him. And give him my love.”

  She kissed my forehead and began to head out. “Cell phone,” I called after her. She stopped, returned to her bedside, unplugged her phone from her charger, and hurried out with a goodbye smile in my direction.

  After she left, I remained motionless for several minutes, dreading the task that lay ahead. Finally, I propped myself upright against two pillows and studied the list as I autodialed his phone number, as though intense focus on it might raise some kind of protective shield around me. Pointless. I was sure my heartbeat could be felt through the phone. After seven rings—my father rushed for no one—he answered the phone.

  “Hi, it’s Matt.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “How are things?”

  “Not bad. Same as alvays. You?” The w in “always” softened into a sludgy v.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Good.”

  “Tracy sends love.”

  “Same to her.” The only warmth in his voice.

  “Will do.”

  “Are you vorking?”

  “Yeah. A recurring guest star on cable. Five episodes.”

  “Congratulations. Good money?”

  “My quote.”

  “Vhat’s that these days?”