In the Darkroom

  “Everything reproduces,” she said. “Birds, bees, even these little weeds in the ground.” She gestured toward a tuft of crabgrass, pushing through a crack in the pavement.

  I looked down the tracks, willing the tram to come.

  “Without children, your existence has no meaning.” And, when I didn’t answer: “Your books will stop selling. People will forget all about what you wrote.”

  I kept my eyes on the rails.

  “It’s the most important thing,” she said.

  I turned to face her.

  “Family,” she finished.

  If family meant so much, I thought and didn’t say, why had she cut herself off from the one she was born into and the one she’d sired? Wasn’t she still cutting herself off—“I’m Stefi now”—from her whole fraught history as a troubled son and embattled husband and father.

  But what if something else was going on? “My daughter likes me now,” my father had told her new trans friends at the party she hosted in my honor. “She comes to see me.” In the article about my father in Replika, the interviewer had asked about her relationship with her family since the operation. “My daughter was very happy about it,” my father had replied. “She came here right after the surgery. Before that, you know, due to the separation of sexes, even between father and daughter, we were further away from each other.” I thought of an observation Ilonka made to me: “I believe your father was attracted to me because he was attracted to being a member of my family.” I thought of the headline in the article in Mások: “Stefánia, a családapa,” Stefánia, the Father.

  As we stood waiting for the tram on the platform at Moszkva tér, my father’s words rattled in my head. Why hadn’t I come years earlier? An ear-piercing screech of metal wheels announced the approach of the tram. My father fixed a sharp eye on me. “You are ending the family,” she said. “When a family gets discontinued, it’s suicide—for all these people who lived, all these people who came before you.” She wasn’t wrong, I thought. I had denied her family. Not just by failing to have children, but by letting our estrangement drag on for so many years. It was the latter that caused me shame.

  The #59 squealed to a halt in front of us. I told my father I’d come by the next morning. I was heading back to Pest for the evening. We studied each other for a moment, then I leaned over and gave her an awkward hug good-bye. She climbed up the steps, steadying herself with the railings. The train was brightly illuminated, and through its series of windows, like frames in a strip of film, I followed my father’s progress down the aisle to a seat. She arranged her pocketbook on her lap, folded her hands on top of the clasp, and stared straight ahead. I lingered on the platform, hoping she’d look out and see me waving, but she didn’t. Then the doors closed and the train clanked around the curve, carrying my father out of the brightness of Moszkva tér to her fenced-in kingdom in the Buda Hills, where the view was more obscure.

  Midway through Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic horror story, Dr. Frankenstein is hiking near the base of Mont Blanc, above the village of Chamonix, when he spies a figure approaching across the glacial expanse of the Mer de Glace, bounding across crevasses with a superhuman speed. As the shape draws near, Dr. Frankenstein realizes “that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach and then close with him in mortal combat.” But the monster doesn’t want to fight. He wants to tell his story. It’s a tale of disconsolate travels through a world of humans who despise and flee from him, and culminates in his discovery, peering through a chink in his hiding place at an adjoining rustic cottage, of a tender domestic circle. He spends a full year spying on the happy family, making a careful study of all their customs and relations:

  I heard of the difference of sexes, and the birth and growth of children, how the father doted on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child, how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge, how the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge, of brother, sister, and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds.

  The knowledge that he will never have such bonds fills the monster with despair, and then a murderous rage. “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses,” he berates his creator, “or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. … I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?”

  The author of Frankenstein denied her creation relief. Family was a complicated quotient for Mary Shelley. Her mother, famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had tried to commit suicide after the father of her first child deserted her, and had died giving birth to her second, Mary. Mary’s lover, Percy Shelley, had chased after other women even as she had grieved the death of their premature newborn and composed her famous tale. In the narrative Mary Shelley concocted, Dr. Frankenstein first agrees to make a monster Eve for his tortured Adam, then recants, destroying his progeny’s only hope for happiness.

  “A family should stay together,” my father had yelled the day we drove home from our abortive visit to her childhood apartment at Ráday 9. “Normal families stick together.” I wondered: Had my father ever felt like a member of any family? Or had she only stolen glimpses, peering through the chink of her camera viewfinder?

  In the fall of 1976, the year of the U.S. Bicentennial, my mother declared her independence. She filed for divorce.

  My father fought it with everything he had. When pity didn’t work—he turned a minor hernia operation into a battle wound (“You are doing this to an injured man,” he yelled at my mother one night, yanking open his pajama drawstring to display his scar)—he tried intimidation. One Sunday afternoon, I heard shouting and a scuffle. I came out of my room to see my father charging toward my mother with one of our Scandinavian “moderne” dining-room chairs hoisted over his head. He brought the chair down on her back. I ran up and jumped him from behind and, not knowing what else to do, covered his eyes like I was riding a run-amok horse. My mother escaped out the back door.

  I no longer recall the precise order of things that fall and winter. The restraining order my mother obtained and that my father ignored. The Thanksgiving weekend she took her children to New York City and we holed up in someone’s apartment. The afternoon some days after we returned, when he hurled a hiking boot at her head. My mother got another restraining order. He ignored it. My mother tried to make a citizen’s arrest. No charges were filed. Then there was the mysterious car that would park some evenings outside our house, and drive away when we approached. Had my father hired a private eye to spy on us?

  The night my father dragged me out of bed and hit my head against the floor was only one of the threatening episodes from that season: My father standing in the driveway, screaming at me “I disown you,” for taking my mother’s side. My father, in a rage that someone left a box of matches in the cellar, striking them in our faces: “You could have started a fire!” Another weekend toward evening, sometime in late autumn: My father has pulled out the ingredients for Hungarian lecsó and is slicing sausage and green peppers with a knife. He calls me into the kitchen. “Where’s your mother?” he asks. I say I don’t know. My mother left the house early in the morning and has yet to return. “You do know.” He whips around, knife in hand. “You know what I could do to her?” I go into the hallway and put on my sneakers. My father follows. “Where are you going?” Running, I say, and I do. I run the several blocks to a friend’s home and phone my mother. My father is right. I do know where she is. When I leave half an hour later, it’s getting dark, but I can make out the figure in the shadows across the street from my friend’s house, watching.

  Another night, I wake to someone shaking me. It is my father, who is now living in a studio in Manhattan. He has climbed in a window. My mother has changed the locks. “Where is she?” he demands. My mother has gone to a friend’s in the
city. He stands there, staring, then heads down the hall to the master bedroom. A half hour passes. I go to find him. Every drawer of my mother’s dresser has been yanked out and plundered. He is seated on the floor, surrounded by file folders he’s found in a box in her closet, going through their contents, examining every page. What are you doing? “Getting evidence,” he says, and slams the door in my face.

  Some weeks later, I come home from school and see a massive bouquet of bloodred roses lying on the dining-room table.

  “Who sent the roses?” I ask my mother.

  “Your father.” He delivered them himself. He told her “the family” needs to come first. The roses lie on the table, unwrapped, their red petals fading to brown. Eventually, I throw them out.

  My father’s violence had been concentrated in that one exceptional season, during my parents’ divorce. Yet what erupted then had been churning beneath the surface for a long time. His rage was a preexisting condition, so ancient it semed foundational. The collapse of the marriage shook the rubble of earlier catastrophes. The first traumatic marital breakdown my father had suffered was his parents’, which had left young István abandoned in a time of global terror. For more than twenty years, ever since he’d come to the United States at the end of 1953, my father had struggled to fit himself into the ready-made template of American husband and dad—until his marriage fell apart just as his parents’ marriage had, and his estranged wife deposed him not just from a home but from an identity.

  My parents first met at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village in 1957. My father had been invited there by some Hungarian Jewish émigrés he’d met on the Upper West Side, where he was renting a basement room with a half window looking out on overflowing trash bins. Since he’d arrived in New York, he’d held a series of darkroom and technical jobs in the photo departments of Manhattan advertising agencies, perfecting shots of satisfied shoppers and happy families. “In the darkroom, I’d always listen to this Hungarian-American radio program,” my father recalled. “I was so excited the day I heard on the radio about ’56,” the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. “I was thinking, maybe I could go back.” Eighteen days later, the uprising collapsed.

  His first job, at $35 a week, was as a darkroom assistant at a photo studio in the city’s Diamond District, designing food ads. “We cheated,” my father recalled, “greasing up the cold cuts so they looked better.” He made extra money at night with an unofficial assignment, photographing attractive young women his boss met in nightclubs. “He’d have me take their pictures in sexy lingerie or naked while he and his friends watched,” my father told me. “It was in very bad taste, pornographic.” After two years, he left for Illustrators Incorporated, where he designed images for the Saturday Evening Post with an epidiascope, an optical projector. He projected photos of ur-domestic Americana—Mom in an apron serving Thanksgiving dinner, Dad in his armchair smoking a pipe—onto the illustrators’ drawing boards, “so that everything came out real-looking.” In his own real life, he wolfed down a sandwich at a cheap Broadway deli that catered to freshly arrived Eastern European immigrants, then went home to the room by the garbage cans.

  Late that night at the Greenwich Village party, my father overcame his shyness enough to ask my mother to dance. He invited her to the Tanglewood Music Festival the following weekened to hear a jazz concert. He preferred classical but figured that proposing jazz would make him sound “more American.” That Sunday they drove to the Berkshires in my father’s 1955 Ford convertible, “red and white, a really flashy thing,” my father said. Another prop in his new red-white-and-blue performance. Six weeks later they married in Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on Eighty-Third Street, over the objections of her parents.

  “Such a hurry to get married!” I said to my father one evening in Budapest.

  A shrug. “It seemed like the thing to do,” she said. Then, “Your mother wanted to.” My father’s uncle Ernő, who had emigrated to New York years earlier, was his one family witness at the ceremony. There was no honeymoon: the ad agency where my father projected shots of family joy wouldn’t give him the time off. Half a year later, the newlyweds marked the occasion with a long weekend in Niagara Falls. It was another “thing to do.”

  In short order, my father had attained the big-box model of the postwar American Dream, male division: the house in the suburbs, the commuter job in the city, the stay-at-home wife, the two children and a dog, the quarter-acre lawn with dog house and playset and perimeter white-picket fence, all built in his home workshop in the cellar. The realization of such comfort and security and order must have astounded him. But the security was booby-trapped. Organization-Man America was a store-bought landscape—kitschified, prettified, market-ready—whose images of cowboy-rugged individualism and Father-Knows-Best authority masked a simpering Hallmark sameness. “The American Male: Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?” Look magazine’s headline asked in its 1958 series on the debilitated postwar man (later issued as a book, The Decline of the American Male). The article’s composite character was “Gary Gray,” a compliant suburban husband and dad who had swallowed the “subtle poison of adjustment and conformity,” and who one winter morning “awakened and realized he had forgotten how to say the word ‘I.’ ”

  The emblem of the embattled American self, circa 1950s, was a browbeaten, emasculated male, returned from heroic combat only to fall prey to the domesticating forces of consumerism and “momism” and “mass society” homogenization, an ex-GI turned cringing cream puff, the aproned epicene dad in Rebel Without a Cause delivering dinner trays to his domineering wife. In “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s influential 1958 Esquire essay, the social critic singled out one news event as “impressive evidence” of that crisis—indeed, its embodiment. “It appears no accident,” he wrote, “that the changing of sex—the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon—so fascinates our newspaper editors and readers.” Coming across Schlesinger’s words all these years later, I considered my father’s odyssey as a twentieth-century Zelig, present at the identity Götterdämmerung of fascist Europe, present again as the question of the age took on new form in postwar America. In both times and places, and whatever ideologies were in play, the politics on the surface hid a roiling conflation of identity and gender. As both European Jew and American Dad, my father’s manhood had been doubted, distorted, and besmirched.

  “The key to the recovery of masculinity lies rather in the problem of identity,” Schlesinger concluded in that 1958 article. “When a person begins to find out who he is, he is likely to find out rather soon what sex he is.”

  ————

  By the 1970s, my father’s cinematic productions of American domesticity—the home movies of our first family Christmas, our first Easter, our first strained family visit to the Florida Keys to visit my mother’s disapproving parents—had declined into sporadic snapshots more Diane Arbus than Norman Rockwell. I found a bunch of them at the bottom of the mothball-ridden box of photos my mother had mailed me—a dank clump of stills, color fading, edges curling, a disorderly chronicle of familial decline.

  On my return from one of my visits to Budapest, I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to get those photos to lie flat on my desk; as soon as I lifted my hand they’d recoil, as if ashamed of what they revealed. Here were my parents on a browning front lawn: my mother looking worn and seated in a sagging lawn chair; my father kneeling nervously at her side, sporting scraggly sideburns and a mullet-like mane that made him look more Tutankhamen than Tom Jones. Another photo: the family gathered around the picnic table on the back porch, funereal over half-eaten hot dogs. And: my brother and me on our chipped concrete front stoop, him in a crooked homemade haircut and mismatched hand-me-downs, me in equally crooked cat-eye glasses with the stems held together with adhesive tape.

  The box contained several shots of our house, its faux rusticated shingled exterior now genuinely weather-beaten—or rather, putrefied, an
ulcerated mess of scaling paint and mold, the shutters at alarming angles. A picture of the backyard captures a tarp over a pit in the ground—what was once the Japanese goldfish pond—and the understructure of the porch, its wood beams eaten through with dry rot. In a shot looking down from the top of the drive, you can see foot-high weeds, flourishing in the macadam in front of the garage door. Which dates it to the late ’70s—after my father moved out. My non-driving mother had no need of a car. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” she used to say back then, as mice (or worse) scrabbled back and forth audibly in the attic. Porch railings mulched and came away in our hands, termites swarmed around the rotted windowsills, and, one by one, the kitchen linoleum tiles came unglued and stayed that way. One day, in a stab at imposing order, I collected the tile shards and stacked them in a corner. It’s hard to look at these pictures now and not revisit the disintegration of a family on the brink. The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

  The fissures first became evident on the hiking trail. After my adolescent rebellion eliminated me as a trekking partner, my father had enlisted my mother. Unlike his grumpy teenage daughter, his wife discovered that she adored the great outdoors. For a few years, she was my father’s regular wilderness companion. In 1973, after months of training, they flew to Mexico and assailed the volcanic slopes of Popocatépetl and Pico de Orizaba, the country’s two highest peaks. Henceforth, mountaineering, their one shared pleasure, became the stage set of their crack-up. The Mexico trip was the last they took together.

  The way my father explained it to me later was: “Your mother wanted to do different mountains—the more minor peaks.” In fact, she was an intrepid hiker. When the four of us were caught in a blizzard on a climb to the first hut of the Matterhorn, my mother was the only one who thrilled to the experience—as evidenced by a photograph that she framed and kept on display in her apartment for years after the divorce: she stands in the foreground in a thin windbreaker and kerchief, her face turned up to greet the snow as if it’s a glorious blast of sun, while her miserable teenage daughter cowers behind her, glaring at her sodden desert boots. My mother didn’t want “different mountains.” She wanted different company.