by Ed Ifkovic
Someone called out to us in English. “Hello.”
Seated in the shadows at Tabán, nearly hidden by an umbrella, Harold was waving frantically to us. A bottle of water and a carafe of coffee rested at his elbow.
“Hello, Mr. Gibbon,” I answered.
He was sitting with someone whose back was to us, but at that moment the man turned, following Harold’s greeting, and I stared into the face of Endre Molnár. A cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth. Slouching in his seat, he appeared more relaxed than he did last night when he’d locked eyes with Cassandra. Now, a halo of cigarette smoke over his head, one arm draped over the back of a chair, his head tilted to the side, he looked comfortable, lazy. He smiled at us, almost bashfully, the corners of his mouth giving his bronzed cheeks boyish dimples. His huge moustache twisted like a disturbed caterpillar. I found myself contrasting him to the dour, stolid Count Frederic, and I understood to my soul Cassandra’s dilemma.
“Join us. Please.” From Harold. Endre nodded, though I noted hesitation in his eyes.
“I’d rather not,” Winifred whispered to me.
But I was already headed toward their table.
Endre Molnár stood and bowed to us, and looked ready—eager?—to kiss our hands. Instead, stepping around the table, I slid into a chair. Harold, of course, was talking nonstop. He signaled to a waiter. Endre, sitting back, smiled indulgently, eyes slatted as he watched Harold rattle on. A sidelong glance at Winifred and me, conspiratorial, I thought—and amused.
Endre was a beautiful man. His long lanky body moved with the grace of a man comfortable with himself. A sudden turn of his head, the languid shifting of a raised shoulder, a finger tapping his knee—a man who understood that women enjoyed looking at him. That shock of brilliant black hair, so dramatically swept back from his forehead, that elegant Roman nose over a wide fleshy mouth. The way he slowly sat up, arching his back like a roused cat, spreading his long arms across the table, one hand absently reaching for a glass. The eyes held you, mesmerized. An Hungarian matinee idol, I thought, an intrepid horseman of the windswept plains.
Suddenly I realized what especially compelled: the lined, dark face was flawed—one eye was lazy, slightly closed, so that you were caught unawares. The exquisite Ming vase with a hairline crack that made you cherish it. I found myself staring, rudely, unabashedly, into that face. I couldn’t help it. That lazy eye gave his glance a raw intimacy, a sensual—almost feminine—softness that warred with the ruddy Wild West moustachioed countenance. I wanted to reach out to touch that face.
Of course, I didn’t.
Of course not.
I only wanted to.
Winifred was staring at me curiously. She’d glanced at Endre, dismissed him, and was content to glare unhappily at the rattling, chattering Harold.
For a few seconds the two men spoke in Hungarian. Harold’s version was admittedly halting and scattered—Endre winced once or twice, though he found it amusing—but then Endre spoke in English, a precise British schoolboy English. “Mr. Gibbon is a fascinating man, yes?”
“Your English, sir, is…”
Harold broke in. “The result of being a student at Oxford.”
“Of course,” Winifred said.
“He tells me I talk like an American cowboy,” Harold laughed. “A csikós, a horseman.”
“Mr. Gibbon,” Endre said directly to me, shaking his head at Harold, “wants me to tell him the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Finis Austriae.”
“What?” I asked, startled.
Harold made a face. “I’ve known Endre here for nearly a year—a friend, I’d call him. We seek each other out for late-night romps to the wine cellars in the Buda hills. He thinks my idea of the coming war is faulty. But I need to quote him in my reports—in researching my unwritten book. He’s a witness to the twilight of the gods. To tell you the truth, as a scion of the Zsolnay porcelain fortune down in Pécs, gold spilling out of his pockets”—he flicked his finger toward a smiling Endre—“drinks on him, of course, well, he understands the heart of the troubled economics of this land.”
Endre shrugged. “Ah, yes, the Götterdämmerung so beloved of the decadent writers. My friend Harold Gibbon wants me to condemn our Emperor and King Franz Josef to oblivion.”
Harold whispered loudly, “Endre is a proud Hungarian, a passionate Magyar. The moribund world of Vienna”—Harold pointed down the Danube—“is over, dead, weakened. Anemic. Franz Josef and his outdated army of horse regiments in an age of rat-a-tat machine guns. Lovely Budapest waits and waits for its moment in the sun. Remember that rebellion squashed in 1848. It’s been one thousand years since Árpád crossed into this land. The Habsburgs stole the land from oppressive Turkey, and then they oppressed. Franz Ferdinand speaks of the Hungarians as traitors. The Austrian army orders its Hungarian recruits around—in German.” Endre held up his hand but Harold rushed his words. “No, no, it is true, dear Endre Molnár. You know what I say about Vienna is true.”
Endre looked embarrassed and lapsed into silence. Oblivious, Harold prattled on.
“Mr. Molnár,” I began, “why do you put up with this impudent American?”
His eyes widened as he broke into a hearty laugh. “Are all Americans like my friend Harold?”
“Lord, no,” said Winifred.
“Mr. Gibbon is a special breed,” I noted, nodding my head at Harold, who was beaming. “Everyone’s business is his own.”
Endre smiled affectionately at Harold, shaking his head slowly. “But Americans—do they ask such…such personal questions?”
“Like what?” I asked.
Endre’s deep-red color suggested he regretted what he’d just asked.
Harold blustered, “I was asking him about last night at the café—when he walked in and saw Cassandra Blaine sitting there.”
Endre sucked in his cheeks, unhappy.
“Mr. Gibbon, please…” I said.
A waiter approached the table but Endre waved him away.
“Hey, just curious, no? I mean, Cassandra’s behavior…” Harold shrugged his shoulders.
“She is a confused girl,” Endre whispered. “I don’t think…”
“She laughs too much, she cries a lot. She makes scenes in public. She teases you still, Endre. Last week, crossing paths with her and that…that hideous Mrs. Pelham, when you and I were having dinner in City Park, well, she…It’s clear that she’s thinking of you.”
Endre looked serious, his voice dropping. “Dear Cassandra must marry Count Frederic.”
Harold sat back. “Oh, I wonder about that. I see how she looks at you. Even last night.”
Endre impatiently tapped an index finger on the table. “A woman must listen to her mother.”
I interrupted. “Well, not always.”
“Really, Edna,” said Winifred, frowning.
“My mother is determined to keep me…unmarried.”
Endre looked puzzled. “But why?”
“You haven’t met my mother.”
Immediately I regretted my remarks. An image of my long-suffering mother assailed me—probably at that moment discussing her errant daughter with the cousins in Berlin. I squirmed, uncomfortable.
Harold continued, “Hey, you forget that I watched the whole drama unfold. Cecelia Blaine frowned on you even before she decided she wanted her daughter to be a countess. Don’t you remember how she shunned you last fall?”
Endre stood up, towering over us and said with an edge to his voice and a thin, forced smile, “We were talking about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”
Harold wouldn’t stop. “Hey, Count Frederic von Erhlich is a part of this sick empire. He’s just as much a prig as his stiff cousin Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to a corpse. A collector of instruments of torture, a man who seeks out palm readers for advice, a man who hates books.”
Endre sighed and looked toward passersby on the quay. “It is not wise to talk ill of Franz Ferdinand.”
Harold looked around him. “But all the Hungarians do—in whispers. Dual Monarchy, my foot. Slavery.”
Endre took a step away from the table, his voice ragged. “Cassandra will marry Count Frederic and her mother will dance at court balls.”
“Fat chance. Even Franz Ferdinand’s wife Sophie ain’t royal enough to be received before Franz Josef. Franz Ferdinand has to enter a room alone. The countess’ll be at a ball but not in the palace—not with Cassandra, the American princess.”
“That is because she is not…” He paused, a finger touching his moustache. “Never mind.” He stepped away. “My friend Harold, again you invite me for coffee and I end up running away from you.”
Winifred smirked, “Not an uncommon reaction to the man.”
Endre Molnár bowed to the waist, formally, nodded at Winifred and me, winked mischievously at Harold, and left.
“Harold,” I said, “must you alienate the people in whose country you’re a guest?”
Harold grinned. “I understand Endre Molnár, my dear. Like other Hungarians, he is a radical at heart. He’s waiting for the war. They wait for Franz Josef to die. No one yells, ‘Éljen a király! Long live the king!’ unless ordered to do so. The fact that Cassandra will marry that fussy, pretentious Count Frederic—that pasteboard royal mask—only makes folks like Endre more radical. Sit with him late at night with a couple bottles of Bull’s Blood wine from Eger, and he’ll tell you his soul.”
“I don’t have time for such revelations,” I said.
He snickered. “Well, I wasn’t inviting you, my dear. Men have province where…” His voice trailed off.
“And so it goes,” Winifred concluded.
But Harold ignored her.“I only got a few minutes before I gotta head to the telegraph office on Andrássy. The New York Journal needs my column.”
I recalled meeting him at the 1912 Republican Convention in Chicago. He interviewed everyone, even me. “Edna Ferber just walked in…she’s wearing pearls. ‘Are those pearls real, Miss Ferber?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course, I paid $1.29 for them at Montgomery Ward…’” That paragraph followed by a revelatory quotation from Teddy Roosevelt about his newly formed Progressive Party. A satiric barb aimed at William Howard Taft. A smorgasbord of the sublime and the ridiculous.
So, perhaps, Harold Gibbon might be Hearst’s most inventive reporter.
Preparing to depart, he couldn’t resist a farcical account of his battles with the creaky dumbwaiter in his room on the second floor of the hotel. I’d already had my own battles with that contraption. In the ancient rooms everything worked…sporadically. Sometimes the telephone would—most times it didn’t. “I called down to the kitchen for tea,” Harold said, “and they send it up by the dumbwaiter. A bell rings. I open the door. The tea goes up half a floor, spills, the bell rings again, the tea comes back, most of it spilled.”
“Well, I gave up,” I admitted. “I feel I’m in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in this hotel.”
He wasn’t through. “I open the panel door and I hear someone in the kitchen complaining about me wanting tea so late at night. I hear Markov telling György he’s an ass, just like everyone in Markov’s wife’s family, and he’s not supposed to stare at the pretty girls with his tongue wagging out of his mouth. I missed most of it because it’s a dialectical Hungarian or something, but György says he will marry a pretty girl someday and…”
“What is the point of this?” Winifred interrupted.
But I was laughing. “As I said, I gave up. I called down for coffee with whipped cream—ordered it in perfect German—and a strange voice says ‘Ja ja ja, mein Herr’ and I scream, ‘Herr?’ and the voice says, ‘Ja ja.’ I gave up. Then the bell rings and I open the door to find a tea biscuit on a tray. When I was first shown the room, the bellboy kept pointing at a garish painting of Franz Josef, eye level and out of place, the emperor an old balding man, and I kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Finally, to show me, he unlatched the panel holding the painting and opened up the dumbwaiter.”
Hurt, Winifred defended the hotel. “Franz Josef’s redundant painting aside, the old rooms have…a coziness to them.”
Harold grimaced. “When the war comes, those paintings of Franz Josef that seem to be in every room—mine shows him as a young man on horseback, which I believe he never was—will be gone. Burned in a pyre of celebration.”
“And my cup of coffee will still be going to the wrong floor.”
Harold waved his typed sheets at us. “I’m off. America awaits my words.” He performed a little dance step, looking like a vaudevillian, and bowed.
Winifred grunted. “Edna,” she said before he was out of earshot, “you find him amusing?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
She shook her head. “A foolish man, and a dangerous one.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He talks too freely with the Hungarians about Franz Josef, the Habsburg Empire, the war he expects. Franz Josef’s agents are around. Spies everywhere.”
“Are you serious?”
“The Austrians don’t expect the Hungarians to be loyal to their empire. Yes, Queen Elisabeth loved Hungary, but an Italian anarchist killed her in 1898 in Geneva. Nowadays the Austrians hate the Magyars. Harold Gibbon, stoking the fire, is a troublemaker. And someone could get hurt.”
We lingered at the table, shaded under an umbrella as the heat of the day rose, and the tables filled up with folks. A young couple, giddy with each other, smiled over orange ice, the girl in a Capri blue dress, the boy in a suit with billowing trousers, a brass-studded belt, and glossy high boots. A man strolled by with a string of pretzels on a stick, calling out to passersby.
A lazy afternoon, my eyes half-shut.
“There.” Winifred pointed. Nearby, debating whether to approach us, were the two young artists who were sketching in the café—and who shared with us that menacing caricature of Cecelia and Marcus Blaine.
Winifred, sitting up, waved them to our table. They hesitated, looked at each other suspiciously, and then walked over.
“What?” I asked Winifred. The invitation struck me as odd because Winifred turned away from men.
Winifred leaned into me. “The tall one—whatever his name—intrigues me with that drawing of those awful Blaines.” She smiled broadly. “And I have a love of artists. Painters, well…” Her voice got foggy as she stared intently into my face. “Something you don’t know about me, Edna.” Then she confided, “In Paris Gertrude Stein showed me Picasso.”
I had no idea what she was talking about—she’d mentioned a woman I’d never heard of. Modern art confused me, though I’d enjoyed the news accounts of last year’s scandalous Armory Show in New York, with that scandalous Nude Descending a Staircase abstraction making clergymen across America sputter in their pulpits. Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote me gushing letters about my short stories, had condemned the invasion of decadent French art into America. I’d seen one painting by Picasso in a gallery window in New York, and it struck me as the work of a madman. Obviously Winifred Moss, my traveling companion, was a more complicated woman than the forceful, monomaniacal protestor for woman suffrage I’d come to know.
And, I soon learned, the two young Hungarian artists understood they’d encountered an advocate for their vision. Winifred, her voice animated, told us that her father had been an art historian at Cambridge, drummed out because of his passion for the new Impressionists. “Cézanne,” she hummed. “My father met him.”
Both artists were wide-eyed, staring at her.
The tall one introduced himself as Bertalan Pór, and I rehearsed the name in my head. He was a lithe, willowy man, dressed in a hard-pressed linen suit, a perfectly knotted purple bowtie. With his watery blue eyes and long bony fa
ce, a high forehead that exaggerated the sadness of those eyes, he struck me as patrician, an aristocrat in a way the brutish Count Frederic was not.
“I speak a schoolboy’s English,” Bertalan Pór admitted. “Learned in Paris, of all places.”
But I found I could not take my eyes off his companion, introduced as Lajos Tihanyi, who could neither speak nor hear. “But,” Pór added, “Lajos reads lips, understands German and some English, and will sputter sounds he believes are words he cannot hear. He can manage some words, though it seems his private dictionary.” Then he sighed. “I need to warn you—he gets frustrated when he can’t get across what he wants to say, and he…he gets moody, even angry. But just smile when he does that.” He laughed and touched Tihanyi on the arm. “It’s part of his charm.”
Tihanyi, I noticed, was following the words closely, his eyes glued to his friend’s lips, and he didn’t look happy with him.
Bertalan Pór tapped a pad he’d extracted from a pocket, and said Lajos Tihanyi would jot down remarks. “In Hungarian or German, as you prefer.”
Frankly, I preferred nothing at the moment, uncomfortable with the small man who stared at me with untoward attention, his head bobbing and his eyes amused. He was the one who wanted to paint me. Yes, me. Of course, I had little patience with that notion. In Bavaria Clara Ewald had executed a reasonable likeness—all my features positioned where God intended them to be. I would not be a part of any composition titled Edna Ferber Descending a Staircase.
Lajos Tihanyi had a disheveled look, his skinny body lost in a rumpled tan jacket, stained, with a thin scarf wrapped tight around his neck despite the day’s sticky temperature. A jester’s mobile face, with small squinty eyes and a slack mouth, a vaudeville comic up to no good—or looking to prank for fun. He reminded me of the old rollicking comedians of the New York Yiddish theater, all whoop-it-up guffaw and grotesque pantomime. Perhaps it was my own horrible bias. Poor Tihanyi grunted, gestured, rolled in his chair, at one point looking jealous of Winifred’s attention to his friend. And yet, as I watched that sad-sack face, I discovered softness in his eyes, a faraway melancholy that utterly charmed me.