It was, but an artillery round had ripped a massive hole through the double balcony and right into the apartment. “You could see the snow and wind blowing through,” my father said. “It was very cold.”
“What did you do?”
“We went in.” The viewfinder was still plastered to her eye. “It was all rubble inside.” The shops on the ground floor had been plundered, she recalled, their display cases looted. “Eventually my father found a vacant unit in the building, more or less livable, on the first floor.”
“That was fortunate.”
“A high-ranking Hungarian officer used to live there. A real Nazi type. He’d fled to Germany, we heard.” Later, she said, Smallholders Party leader Ferenc Nagy moved from his flat in the building into the larger Friedman apartment. “He was in the government, so he could get money to do the repairs.”
“Shall we cross the street?” I said.
My father lowered the camera. “Why?” I heard a clatter of dishes and the sound of people laughing. The café umbrellas fluttered in a gust of wind.
“To see it better.”
“You can see fine from here.”
I crossed the street anyway and tried the knob on the heavy front door. The door glass was framed in dark wood and reinforced with a metal lattice in a geometric design. It was locked. I studied the list of names on the gilt-plated building registry.
I sensed a presence and turned to find my father behind me, her lips pressed together in a thin, tight line.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m going to buzz someone.” There were a few businesses listed among the tenants—a tax consultant, an ice cream shop, a beauty parlor. I opted for the button next to Várady Szalon. My father pushed my hand away.
“You are bothering people.”
“I just want to see—”
“I told you, there’s nothing to see.”
I hit the buzzer.
“You are making a pest of yourself.”
No one answered. I tried the tax consultant.
“Stop it!”
Just then, a man came out of the building. I stuck my foot in the door before it closed.
“Two minutes. Just show me the lobby.”
Ilonka, who had followed us across the street, touched my father’s elbow and said something in a low voice. They filed in after me into the foyer.
The front hall was refurbished. The red-tiled wainscoting gleamed, and the freshly painted walls glowed a warm creamy yellow, white moldings buffed to a high shine. The interior Art Nouveau friezes had been restored; they ran in a long white panorama down either side of the hallway and across the ceiling. I gazed upon the lithe nudes in playful motion: a girl in ecstatic mid-twirl with arms flung wide; two nubile dancers prancing together with wild abandon, their fingers interlaced; a muscular and naked Adonis reclining with a book. Had these been the daily muses of my father’s boyhood?
The beautification project came to an abrupt halt at the end of the corridor. To the right, a dim, sour-smelling stairwell led to the upper floors. Half the lights were burned out. In an alcove under the steps, garbage overflowed from trash bins. Graffiti spattered the walls, which bore a few chipped remnants of a once colorful geometric mosaic. A rusted cage elevator sat at its center, its walls patched with plywood. Directly ahead, the corridor led to a large interior courtyard, open to the sky. Four levels of yellow-brick galleries with floral-ornamented iron railings ran around its sides, like an inverted layer cake. The apartment doors opened onto the galleries. The geometric floor tiles were torn up. Exposed wiring dangled from the walls. A withered plant potted in a plastic canister sat in the center of the courtyard, its spindly stem drooping, half its leaves scattered on the ground.
I picked my way across the shards of tiles, then turned to look back. My father was standing by the potted plant. “The sukkot booth was here,” she said. “My father would build it right in the courtyard.” She was talking about the small temporary hut made of branches to mark the Jewish harvest festival, a tribute to the ephemeral abodes of the Israelites during their forty-year exile in the desert.
“See how dark it gets toward the back of the building?” she said.
I nodded.
“My father was very ingenious. He hung giant mirrors in the courtyard. So all the lower apartments at the back would get the light.”
We began to make a slow circuit of the courtyard. The ground-floor shops that had thrived in my father’s youth—the patisserie, the furrier, the beauty parlor—were all gone. The storefront that housed the patisserie—where my father used to eat Bavarian pastries (its specialty; the owner was German) and where Rozi Friedman used to take coffee with Ferenc Nagy—was now home to the Várady Szalon. A sandwich sign announced its services in a mongrel Hunglish: kozmetica, masszage, manicure, tarot. Not everything was new. In the opposite corner of the courtyard, behind a padlocked iron grate, a set of cinder-block steps descended into darkness. Bolted to the wall, a small sign with an arrow pointing down the stairs announced, ÓVÓHELY. Bomb shelter. The sign had been hanging there since World War II.
“For a little bit during the war,” my father said, pointing to the szalon but referring to the vanished confectionary, “I worked here with my friend Tamás—after we couldn’t go to school.” Tamás Somló was a boy a few years younger than my father, whose family rented one of the apartments in Ráday 9. The Somlós were Jews who converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. When the war came, Tamás’s father, the neighborhood pharmacist, was sent to forced labor and then, after returning to Budapest in the fall of 1944, arrested and deported to Mauthausen. “There wasn’t much business,” my father recalled of István and Tamás’s brief wartime stint behind the counter of the German patisserie. “We got to eat the leftover pastries before they got thrown out.”
I proposed we go upstairs. My father shook her head and backed toward the front hall. When she reached the alcove with the elevator, she froze.
“Look at what they’ve done,” she said. She pointed an accusatory finger at the oxidizing shell of a once glamorous lift. “It was glass and hand-carved wood, mirrored walls. A beauty.” She turned and gestured toward the bare cement of the alcove. “There used to be a beautiful mosaic here. … LOOK AT THIS! THEY’VE STOLEN EVERY TILE.”
My father whipped around and started toward the foyer. “I need to get the camper,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s not safe to leave it on the street.”
“But couldn’t we—”
“I BROUGHT YOU HERE. I SHOWED IT TO YOU. ENOUGH.” Her raised voice ricocheted off the bare walls.
“Don’t yell at me.”
“I wrote them a letter,” she said. She had lowered her voice but not her rage.
“Who?”
“The people who live in our apartment. I wrote them that I’m the family owner of this house and they shouldn’t buy this property, because the ones who are selling it, it’s not theirs to sell. … I TOLD YOU THIS. YOU SHOWED NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER.”
She turned away and headed down the corridor at a furious pace, her heels clip-clopping on the tiled floor. The street door opened and shut with a heavy thud. Ilonka murmured an apology and scurried after my father. I stood alone in the gloom of the alcove, trying to picture the mirrored walls of the elevator, the giant mirrors my grandfather had hung in the courtyard that once brought light into the dark recesses of my father’s youth.
My father was waiting by the camper, her shoulders bunched in a posture I’d known since childhood, and knew to fear. She disabled the alarm and unlocked the doors. Ilonka took the backseat. I envied her refuge. We rode for a long time before my father broke the silence. Our silence. She wasn’t the only one in a rage. “I had to get the car,” my father said, her jaw tight. “They steal things.”
My recorder, which I’d forgotten to shut off, caught my subsequent meltdown. I was dismayed when, months later, I transcribed that segment, and not just because for the first ten minutes the traffic h
ad drowned out half the words. I had remembered the drive home as a culmination, the moment when we finally, coherently, grappled with the demon in the room. But when I played the tape, what I heard was a jumble of disconnected words, unfinished sentences, repetitions that went nowhere, dialogue from a Mamet play, or the non-dialogue of my childhood.
SUSAN: … only asking … few minutes …
STEFI: … stole the car … my house.
SUSAN: … don’t care …
STEFI: … nothing to see …
SUSAN: … not talking …
STEFI: … ringing people’s doorbells …
SUSAN: … that’s not what …
STEFI: … We went inside …
SUSAN: … not about the house …
When we had crossed over the Chain Bridge and started the climb through the Buda Hills, the traffic diminished, and the recording was less broken.
STEFI: … bought the apartment from people in no position to sell it. It’s stolen property. Thieves. … They took what’s rightfully mine. And yours. …
SUSAN: You keep saying that, but I want to—
STEFI: They took it. … Why should I … some sentimental voyage? …
SUSAN: What I’m—
STEFI: … I’m not interested. … It was always a dark house.
SUSAN: It’s not about the house. … If you can’t talk to me, I—
STEFI: I’ve talked to you for days. I came here, I found a parking place, I showed you the house.
SUSAN: … Why can’t … a daughter and her father … I came here to see if there’s anything—
STEFI: I don’t want to be in that house.
SUSAN: Stop talking about the fucking house.
STEFI: I was thrown out of my own house. Kicked out by—
SUSAN: That’s not—
STEFI: Kicked out by your mother.
If this were about a house, it wasn’t just the one at Ráday 9. There was the other house, a tract home in an American bedroom community a world and a time away, when she was a parent and I was a child. We were cruising the quiet back streets when we finally got to that night in Yorktown Heights. The voices on the tape were clear.
STEFI: … And you went along with it. When I hadn’t done a damn thing.
SUSAN: You—
STEFI: Accused by the whole family, you know? Normal families stick together. They don’t fight each other for no reason.
SUSAN: There was a reason—
STEFI: A family should stay together. I brought my parents together. I saved my family. You took your mother’s side against me—
SUSAN: Because you—
STEFI: How would you like it if I threw your mother out of the house? How would you like it if a woman gets thrown out of her house?
SUSAN: You did—
STEFI: You took your mother’s point of view that I should be thrown away, for some reason that she thought up that is not so. Some fantasy. I don’t know why.
SUSAN: You attacked—
STEFI: I haven’t got any muscles. How could I beat anyone up?
SUSAN: I was there. You—
My father was shouting. I was, too, and also crying. Ilonka reached over the seat and began patting my arm, making soothing, clucking noises. I jerked my arm away.
STEFI: There was no violence. I’m weak.
SUSAN: Then how come—
STEFI: She had the police take me away—when I was ABSOLUTELY INNOCENT.
SUSAN: YOU broke down the door. YOU came into—
STEFI: Your mother destroyed my life. She destroyed my family.
SUSAN: … YOU, with a knife, attacked—
STEFI: This was a million years ago. There’s no need to go back to these ancient family things. These are dead things in the past. We’re different people now.
SUSAN: I’m not—
STEFI: I’ve forgotten the whole thing. It’s like it wasn’t even me.
There was a long indecipherable section as a truck went by. Then the tape cut off.
PART II
10
Something More and Something Other
“Excuse me, are you … ?” I debated how to end the sentence: Melanie? Mel?
The woman at the next table was wide-shouldered and sported a Chanel knockoff pantsuit, chunky earrings, and a frosted bob. She had been looking around as if she might be expecting someone.
“… Melanie?” I settled on.
She shook her head. I sat back down and continued my clandestine inspection of the customers and their putative genders.
I’d been home from Budapest for a week, the last twenty minutes of which I’d spent at the Coffee People on Twenty-Third Avenue in Portland, Oregon, waiting for the arrival of someone I’d never met.
“I’m not sure whether I’ll be dressed as a woman or a man,” Melanie Myers told me when I set up our meeting. Melanie had been Mel until three years earlier, when he had gone to Thailand to get the same operation as my father, with the same surgeon. Melanie now lived part of the year in Portland, her hometown. “Call Melanie,” my father had advised. “She’s practically down the street from you. She would make a good interview for your book.” The rest of the year Melanie lived in Phuket, Thailand, where she ran Melanie’s Cocoon, a guesthouse for postoperative transsexuals recovering from surgery. My father had stayed there for several weeks after her sex reassignment surgery. Melanie had been on the scene for my father’s transit from one sex to another. I’d only known my father as before and after—suburban über-patriarch or ultra-femme hausfrau—separated by an empty moat of many years. Melanie knew the in-between. If I were searching for the fluidity in my father’s story, as opposed to the either/or, Melanie might bear witness to my father’s most liminal moment.
I scanned the café. Did this “woman” in a dress look like someone who was once a man? Did that “man” in a suit look like a former man who had become a woman and was now a “man” trying to pass as a man? After a while, everyone seemed to be in drag.
Another quarter hour went by. The door of Coffee People swung open to admit a middle-aged man—or “man”—in a shaggy crew cut, wire-rimmed oval glasses, a striped-blue men’s dress shirt, and khaki pants. He had a round face and a charming gap between his front teeth that reminded me of Lauren Hutton’s. He hesitated a few steps inside the door and looked around.
I stood up, deliberated. “Are you … ?” To my relief, he nodded and came over.
“I’m going by Mel now,” he said as we shook hands.
“I was a really good-looking guy when I was a man,” Mel told me as he settled in with an iced latte. “A real man, I mean … I mean, I’m going back to being a man now but”—he rolled his eyes at his own verbal tangle—“picture a football quarterback type. Big strong chin, square jaw, Charlton Heston, Marlboro Man.” He pulled out a Palm Pilot and began clicking through pictures, looking for an old photograph.
“Women found me really attractive. But I always dreamed of being a girl. I dreamed of it when I was six years old. I just loved everything about being a woman, the way they got to be treated, pampered, the attention. If I could have gotten that attention as a guy, maybe I wouldn’t have done it.”
As he spoke, he punched at the buttons on the Palm Pilot. “It’s in here somewhere,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of pictures. Hundreds.”
“You don’t have that square jaw anymore,” I said.
“No, I had the jaw flanges cut off and the chin narrowed. I had my whole face redone.” He pushed back his hairline to show me. “I had several millimeters of bone taken off my forehead. Titanium pins put in my forehead. Seven millimeters off my nose, seven off my chin. They had to peel off the skin, peel off my face basically.”
I winced. “Sounds excruciating.”
“I wouldn’t have done the surgery if I couldn’t have the face,” Mel said. “I could never be a clown. If I’m going to be seen in women’s clothes, I’m going to be genuine. I had one of the best facial surgeons in the country, Dr. Douglas Ousterhout i
n San Francisco—he practically invented FFS.” Facial feminization surgery. “They say he based it all on his one ideal woman.”
Later, I’d look up Ousterhout on the Internet and find before-and-after photographs of his patients, YouTube promotional videos, and patient testimonials to his magic touch. A website developed and run by “Diane,” one of his former patients, praised Ousterhout’s work and trumpeted FFS as the path to “achieving your dream” and enabling “you to pass as the woman that you are. … Dr. Ousterhout will try to improve your appearance so that you feel that you fit back into society as the person you want to see in the mirror.”
“It cost thirty-two thousand dollars,” Mel said. “For the face surgery, I mean.” He spent tens of thousands more for the breast and genital surgery, hair implants, speech therapy, and an extensive new wardrobe. “I was like the poster child for Best Trans Person in Portland.”
He held up his Palm Pilot. “See, there I am. Don’t recognize me, do you?”
As advertised, the original Mel looked like a high school quarterback.
He clicked some more. “See that?” Three women stood arm and arm in the picture, two petite Thai girls and a Caucasian who towered over them. “I showed this picture to my brother and he said, ‘Who’s the woman in the middle?’ And I said, ‘That’s me.’ ”
“How did your family handle it?”
Mel was quiet for a moment. “My daughter doesn’t speak to me anymore.” He looked back down at the Palm Pilot. “I have a picture of her in here somewhere.” He searched for a while and then gave up. “This thing has six hundred pictures.” He smiled, a sheepish gap-toothed grin. “Most of them are of me. When I first came out, I went overboard. I dressed like eye candy, the best makeup, the most expensive wigs, beautiful clothes from Nordstrom. I got attention all the time.”
“And now?”
“Well, I had my dream. It was a great three-year dream. But now it’s back to reality.”
After the operation, Melanie lost her job as a commercial printing salesman—a firing that she suspected was prompted by her change in sex: “My boss caused me to lose clients by not delivering my orders on time and used that to slide in the knife.” Before sales, he’d worked ten years in a lithography darkroom, “manipulating photographs for the big catalogues—Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus. I was brightening, darkening, kind of like what you say your father did.” The two never connected over their previous work lives: that was in the past. Now Mel was “flat-out broke,” in danger of losing his condo, and trying to make ends meet with a part-time telemarketing gig, selling enrollments to “remote learning opportunities” for an online university. He was desperately looking for more remunerative employment, and to improve his chances, dressed as Mel for job interviews. In the sales profession, he noted, a woman had to contend with sex discrimination.