“She’ll sleep for a long time,” Varga-Sinka said at our kitchen table. “I think she’s having a mental breakdown.” My father told him about the breakdown she had suffered as a girl in Hungary when her father had advertised in the newspapers for a new wife.
“What can we do?” my father asked.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said, “let’s see how she is in the coming days. This is not uncommon. I have had other Hungarian patients, other women who came through the camps and the war that this has happened to. Maybe it’s everything together that causes it—coming to a new country, their fears, abuse, poverty. You two have to stay strong to help her.”
She was still asleep the next morning when I left for school but when I came home that afternoon I could hear her screaming from half a block away.
When I burst through the door, I saw that Dr. Varga-Sinka was there again.
“Take him away, Jozsi,” my mother begged me when she saw me. “Don’t let him poison me. Please. Don’t let them poison your own mother.”
She was wearing her rosary around her neck again. She didn’t have her false teeth in and the words and kisses she was suddenly showering me with were filled with spittle.
“Don’t be with them, Jozsi,” she said, and her voice suddenly grew harsh. “Do you want to go to hell? Is that what you want, Jozsi?” She was yelling at me now. “To burn in hell? You’re going to burn in hell, you filth!” and she started to laugh her hyena laugh.
My father moved me quickly out the door and down the stairs while Dr. Varga-Sinka stayed with her.
She had been sleeping peacefully, my father told me downstairs, when he went to the printing shop in the morning. Two hours later, when he went back upstairs to check on her, she was sitting calmly at the kitchen table reading her prayer book.
She had put glue into all of the electrical outlets. She had cut the cords of the radio and the lamps. She had unscrewed all of the lightbulbs and smeared bacon fat into their housings. She had glued all the windows shut with rubber cement. She had broken her false teeth into little bits with a hammer. She had stripped the cover off the couch where I slept and jammed as much of it as she could into the toilet.
We went back upstairs and Varga-Sinka was still trying to calm her. She was ranting about rays coming out of the electrical outlets, poisoning her, torturing her. They were trying to kill her, to poison her, to drive her crazy. They were putting thoughts into her head. They were watching her—when she went to the bathroom even, when she wiped herself, they were laughing because she smelled so bad.
We were back at the kitchen table with Dr. Varga-Sinka, who had given my mother another shot.
“She’s very ill,” he said, “she’s ill not in her body but in her mind. I’m not a psychiatrist. She needs a psychiatrist. This is paranoia, this business with the rays, the watching. She’s always been such a shy woman.”
“Who can we go to?” my father said.
Varga-Sinka said there were no Hungarian psychiatrists in Cleveland; he would find the name of an American one.
“An American?” my father said. “She can hardly speak any English. How can she be helped by someone who doesn’t understand her?”
“I don’t know, Steve,” Dr. Varga-Sinka said. “But we have to try.” He left some pills for her to take and when my mother woke up the next day the first thing she did was flush them down the toilet.
She wasn’t going to see any other doctors, she said. She wasn’t going to tell anyone else that she smelled bad when she wiped herself. Besides, all the doctors were in cahoots with my father and me.
For about a month or so she became mute again. She continued cooking our meals but wouldn’t speak or respond to us.
I kept repeating to myself what my father kept repeating to me: that I mustn’t take her actions personally, that my mother loved me and was sick.
But it was hard to believe it. She was so cold, so distant.
I stopped trying to kiss her when I came back from school.
One morning I woke up and she was staring at me, the ice-towel around her head. The crucifix which my parents kept on their bedroom wall was in her hand and she was pointing it at me.
I looked up at her and smiled tentatively and said, “Hi, Nana.”
She hissed, “Clean yourself! Clean yourself of your filth!” and backed away from the couch, still pointing the crucifix at me.
Then she did it again: rubber-cemented the windows, cut the cords to the electric outlets, bacon-fatted the lightbulb housings. This time she even took our old Philips shortwave and hammered it into bits.
She refused to have new false teeth made because she said the teeth were “receptors for the transmitting rays.”
And then, suddenly, unbelievably, miraculously, she was her old self. Affectionate, loving, warm.
Yes, she said, she had been sick but now she was fine and she loved me so much, she said, and I was growing up to be such a big boy … and the next day she was mute again … and the following week she was cutting the cords again … and the week after that she was her old self again.
In the beginning I prayed to God at night to make her well, because I missed my mother so awfully much, but after a while I just prayed for day-to-day improvement. Please, God, don’t let her be silent today, please, God, don’t let her cut the cords tomorrow.
I started doing screwy things, knowing they were screwy even as I did them: I waited for Tuesdays because St. Anthony of Padua was her favorite saint and she had dedicated Tuesdays to St. Anthony and the chart I kept of her behavior showed me that she had never cut cords on a Tuesday.
And I rolled my dice at night sometimes to tell me how she’d be the next day: doubles meant she’d be better the next day; snake eyes meant we’d have to call the doctor again.
I tried to stay off the playgrounds and the alleys and tried not to touch myself at night. I feared that she was listening to every rustle of my couch and I felt guilty about touching myself. In some part of me there was a nagging and paralyzing fear that I had caused my mother’s illness, that my nighttime seed spillings had somehow driven her into this madness.
So I cut a deal with God: If you make her better, I won’t touch myself.
My father bought a blue 1950 Nash at Dunajszky Brothers’ secondhand cars on Lorain Avenue and West 65th Street.
I washed it and polished it and Simonized it every week.
The back seat of the car folded down into a bed and my father planned a vacation to Pennsylvania. We were going to fold the seat down and sleep in the car at night on the way there.
We pulled the car over to the side of a rural road on the first night of our vacation and my mother, my father, and I changed into pajamas and tried to sleep.
It was a steaming hot summer night and the mosquitoes were eating us alive.
Just as we were falling asleep, the police arrived. They told us it was illegal to sleep at the side of the road.
“I will never understand America,” my father said. “Why do they sell cars where the seats fold into beds—if it’s illegal to sleep at the side of the road?”
We were driving along on a highway. My father was afraid of highways; the Hungarian roads he had driven weren’t jammed with big tractor-trailers. My father drove with his beret pulled low and both hands gripping the wheel.
A highway patrolman pulled us over. He asked my father for his driver’s license.
“You’re driving too slow, Steve,” the highway patrolman said. “Minimum’s forty.”
“I am no Steve,” my father said, “I am Dr. Stephen Eszterhás.” He pronounced it “Steffan Eszterhosh.”
My father had a law degree from a Hungarian university; anyone who had a law degree in Hungary referred to himself as “Dr.”
“Sorry.” The highway patrolman smiled. “Didn’t know you were a doctor.”
“No doctor,” my father said. “Lav-yer.”
The highway patrolman said, “What?”
I said, “Law
yer. My father was a lawyer in Hungary.”
The highway patrolman looked at me and then at my father. “Gotcha,” he said. “But tell him he’s going too slow. Minimum’s forty, he was going thirty.”
Before I had a chance to translate it, my father said, “Free country.”
The highway patrolman stared at him and said nothing.
“Translate it,” my father said to me in Hungarian.
I said, “He says it’s a free country,” to the highway patrolman.
My father said, “America free country.”
The highway patrolman was still staring at him. He said, “Yes sir?
“What’s he mean by that?” the highway patrolman said to me.
I said, “I think he means America’s a free country.”
My father said, “Eef vant, drey-ve shlow. America free country—no?”
The highway patrolman said, “Yeah. For sure. But there’s still a minimum,” he said. “Listen, I don’t wanna have to give you a ticket, okay?”
My father said, “No tick-et—America free country—no?”
The highway patrolman said, “Yes sir, but—”
My father said, “Zank you ver-ry mooch. Goo-bye,” and drove away.
I looked back and saw the highway patrolman standing at the side of the road, staring after us.
Every time we bought gas for the car on that vacation, my father tipped the attendant.
One attendant looked at the coin my father was pressing into his hand and said, “What’s this?”
“Five cent,” my father said.
“What the hell for?”
“Teep,” my father said.
The attendant smiled at him and said, “Big spender, huh?”
“What did he mean by that?” my father asked as we drove away from the gas station.
I said, “I think he meant that you didn’t have to give him any tip.”
“You know what I think, Jozsi?” my father said. “I think these Americans find it hard to say thank you.”
My mother was mute for a couple days after we got to Scotty’s Cabins in Cook Forest, Pennsylvania, and then she was suddenly affectionate and then one day shortly before dinner she started again: We were devils and we were poisoning her with our rays and our filth and we were watching her in the bathroom as she wiped herself.
She was screeching at us and shrieking that awful, bloodcurdling laugh.
My father got out his violin, turned his back to her, and played a csárdás.
I bolted out the door of the cabin and started to run … wildly … blindly … desperately. I could hear the shrieks and the violin blending into each other and fading slowly.
I ran down a lane and up a hill and jumped a fence and ran across a farm field and then another and now there were cows around me and I kept running, barely able to breathe now, until I fell.
I was gasping for air. My nose was bleeding. Every part of me was shaking. I heard myself sobbing, my moans echoing across these lovely green hills.
I started to throw up … and I passed out.
When I woke up it was pitch-black and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. Then it all came back—the shrieking, that awful laughter, the violin.
I got up and started to walk back to the cabin. Something, I knew, was different now. A part of me had either died or a part of me had been born. I felt that my mother could never hurt me again. I felt that nothing or no one could ever hurt me like that again.
When I was married in California to Gerri, I had an affair with a woman in Cleveland and drove her one weekend to Cook Forest.
We took a cabin for the weekend at Scotty’s Cabins and we walked the hillside where I had run and fallen down.
We did nothing but drink Jack Daniel’s and red wine and make love … and one night I heard a violin solo on a static-filled radio station that sounded like it was very far away.
A few years later, I took Gerri to Scotty’s Cabins for a month in the winter and I finished my first book there … this time in the very same cabin where I had been with my mother and father.
Gerri and I had fun in that little cabin. We kept the fire in the fireplace going for a full month … and I tried to find the same faraway radio station on which I’d heard that violin solo, but I couldn’t.
Gerri and I were at Scotty’s during Valentine’s Day and one night as the snow fell we came out of our cabin to take a walk. We passed Scotty’s restaurant’s front window.
It was late and the place was empty and closed but completely lighted up inside. The hardwood floor had just been washed and was gleaming; a wall-sized stone fireplace was blazing; above the fireplace, spotlighted, was a huge woodcut of a bright red Valentine’s heart.
Gerri and I stared at that scene openmouthed and held each other, sure that we’d live together happily ever after.
I was back in the alleys and on the playgrounds. I didn’t want to be home and around my mother, and my father understood and didn’t try to stop me. Whenever she started to rant and rave, he took out his violin and turned his back to her and played. Sometimes the violin seemed to settle her down.
At other times she screeched as he played, almost as though they were performing a duet.
I never knew what I was going to find when I got home. Sometimes she was okay and sometimes she was ranting or laughing and sometimes she stared vacantly and mutely at the wall.
My father and I were almost afraid to talk to her, certainly afraid to initiate any conversation. We never knew what would set her off.
Dinner was especially difficult. My father read at dinner now and she’d usually smoke and stare and I’d scarf the food and listen to the radio. My father had bought a small, battery-powered Arvin radio so she couldn’t cut the cord.
One afternoon I stopped at a playground on Franklin Avenue and there was a pickup ball game in progress. I knew some of the kids. Most of them were a few years older. One of them was an Irish kid named Jimmy Murphy.
He was a big, good-looking, “cool” kid, his hair ducktailed like Conway Twitty and Fabian, cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt. He was a kind of neighborhood playground hero, a home run hitter on the field (I had trouble hitting line drives, never mind homers) who always had pretty girls around him.
He’d always disliked me. He imitated my accent. He called me “DP” and “greenhorn” and “asshole” and “creep” and the one that hurt the most, the title of a hit song, “Jo Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy.” I tried to fight him twice and got beaten up twice.
After my last beating, he called me “numbnuts.”
On this day he didn’t say anything to me at all. He saw me, grinned a supercilious grin, and stepped up to the plate. I was just lolling around the batting cage, feeling one of the bats there, watching Jimmy Murphy, and I calmly sauntered up behind him, bat in hand, and swung as hard as I could at the back of his head.
He went straight down on his face, blood gushing from his head, his nose, his ears, his arms and legs jerking. I heard screams and yells and one of his friends hit me in the mouth with his fist, but I hardly felt the punch.
I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t shaking. I wasn’t upset. I was calm. Police and an ambulance were there within minutes. Jimmy Murphy’s friends screamed at me and kept trying to hit me. The cops put me into the backseat of their car. Kids spat at the backseat window.
“Did you hit him with the bat?” a cop asked.
I nodded.
“What’d you hit him for?”
I shrugged.
“I asked you a question!” the cop said, hard.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Jesus,” the other cop said quietly, “you better hope he doesn’t die.”
They took Jimmy Murphy to Lutheran Hospital, not far away, and the cops took me there, too, and put me in a little room that they locked from the outside.
When they came back they told me that Jimmy Murphy had a cerebral hemorrhage and was going into surgery and asked me where my parents liv
ed. I told them.
A little while later a police car brought my father, wild-eyed, his face very red. He was wearing a white undershirt and pants, an unusual sight. My father never went out on the street in anything but one of his Salvation Army or Volunteers of America suits.
He sat down in the little room next to me with the policeman there—there were more policemen there now in suits—and he said to me in Hungarian, “Did you hit this boy?”
I said yes.
He said, “Why?”
I said, “I don’t know, Papa.”
“Did he hit you?”
“No.”
“Te Jó Isten,” my father said—My good God—“What have you done?”
I looked at him. He was covering his face with his hands. I felt numb. Suddenly I felt exhausted, like I’d run for miles, like the day in Cook Forest when I’d run and fallen down.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette. One of the policemen gave me a look and I said, “Can I smoke?”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
He looked at another policeman, shook his head, and shrugged.
I lit up. My father stared at me.
Father John Mundweil arrived. My father had called him when the police came to the printing shop to bring him to the hospital. Father John was in all black, wearing his priestly collar, and he spoke to the police in fluent but Hungarian-accented English and then he spoke to us.
“I’m calling a lawyer who will meet us at the juvenile,” Father John said.
“Will he go to jail?” my father asked. His voice was hoarse.
“If this boy dies,” Father John said, “he will go to jail.”
My father put his head between his hands and started soundlessly to cry.
“Why did you hit him?” Father John asked me in Hungarian.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to.”
“Did you know what you were doing?”
“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to hurt him.”
Father John’s eyes narrowed at me a moment and he said, “Don’t tell that to the police.”
The policemen drove us downtown to juvenile hall, where a Hungarian lawyer, John J. Vasko, tall and very in charge, was waiting for us.
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