Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  “But it’s not necessary, really.”

  “Mom?” you said. “Please?”

  I could not win this one, but I was lousy at losing. “Don’t you like Yuki? I’m sure you could stay with Yuki.” I wasn’t sure of this at all.

  “If you’re worried about anything—I’ll leave you all my numbers,” your father said, his hair flopping in front of his face and his mouth set tight as he tried to figure out how to prove his ability to take care of you. “Are there food allergies I need to worry about? That sort of thing?”

  You were holding his hand.

  “No,” I whispered. “No food allergies.”

  “Okay,” your father said. For a moment, then, we were all holding hands: you holding your dad’s, him holding mine. But then he let go of mine.

  “Ann Brown, Kyle’s mother, has a car,” I finally said. “She lives in our building. She’ll get him tomorrow.” Although I had no idea if Ann could get to New Jersey tomorrow.

  “Karen, he doesn’t have to stay with anyone else tomorrow. He can stay with me.”

  “You have to work,” I said.

  “I can take a day off,” he said.

  “It’s not necessary,” I said quickly, looking up somewhere near the television, where the end credits of whatever horrible show we were watching started to roll. “You’re kind to be so helpful in a pinch, but after this I’ll secure more stable emergency plans. I just really didn’t think we’d end up like this. Ann is usually very dependable. Her husband was ill, that’s all.”

  “Karen,” he said. He was looking at me with those eyes that were so uncannily like yours, I don’t know why it still surprised me how much they were like yours. And his blondish-brownish hair curled like yours, around the edges. And his mouth—almost seven years I’d kissed your mouth, and in a weird genetically magical way, I’d also been kissing his. (Yes, Jake, I kissed you right on the mouth, I did, I didn’t care, you were mine, my baby boy.)

  “I’m happy to be helpful here. It’s more than that—I mean, to tell you the truth, I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled I can, I mean I’m not thrilled that you’re sick, that’s not what I mean, but I’m grateful I can be of use.”

  “That’s kind of you,” I said dully, but I could feel the ice creep into the spaces where the morphine was a minute ago. He was going to take you. And then he was going to try to keep you. “It’s nice of you to be helpful,” I said as casually as I could, “but I have all my systems set up here, Dave.”

  “You know, if you want, I could even take a week off, I could take him to Quogue.”

  “Please, Dave,” I said. I was freezing. The ice—I was freezing to death. “Please. That’s not necessary.” I turned to you. “Jake, I’ll be out of here tomorrow or the next day, and you’ll come home.” The urge to pass gas, so elusive, had now disappeared, but it would come back. It had to come back. I would fart and I would leave and I would never let you near another phone. “Kyle’s mom will be around tomorrow. There’s no need for you to stay at Dave’s house for more than the night.”

  “Are you sure?” Dave asked.

  How could a person change so much in so few years? Not to drag up difficult memories, Jacob, but if you could have only seen the look on his face when I found out I was with child—and now suddenly it was all Playmobil and the house in Quogue. Why, Jacob? The wife? Marriage? Was that really all it took? Or was it the looming mortality apparent in a receding hairline?

  Or was it, simply, the magic of you?

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Or maybe”—he said—“I mean what if, if you’re feeling better, I mean—what if you and he come out to Quogue in a week or two? It’s a huge house, you’ll see, we’ve got tons of room. And you can see what it’s like so you can feel comfortable with him visiting.”

  He wanted me to go to his house in Quogue.

  “Can we do that, Mom?” you asked.

  “We cannot,” I said. “I’m sorry, Dave. But we cannot.”

  “But, Mom, why?”

  “Because—” I said, and I was suddenly so faint I could barely remember what we were talking about. I maybe had been pressing the morphine button again and again.

  “Mom?”

  Did I mention to you how much I had loved this man, Jacob? Did I make it clear? It wasn’t just a fling, Jacob. It wasn’t just six months and see you later, gator. I loved him. He had broken my heart. “You can’t have him, Dave.”

  “What?”

  “I mean he’s not—” What did I mean? I meant you were mine. Only mine. It was amazing to me that your father didn’t seem to understand this or understand how compromised I was at the moment. He could not take my son. I would kill him first. I would die in jail, relieved. “He has to come back home.”

  “As soon as you’re ready,” he said.

  “I’ll be ready tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “Dave, this is not the time to fight with me.”

  He nodded. He finally got it, as much as he could get anything.

  And then a new television show began, and the chirpy theme music filled the room, and we all turned to it to gaze at the pretty lights, the pretty dancing teenagers on the screen, and then the nurse came in to take my vitals, and before I could stop her she asked me—

  “And have we passed gas yet, Karen?”

  And your father had the good manners to pretend he hadn’t heard what the nurse just said and you’d already scooped up your backpack, you were so eager to get out of there, and some part of me wanted to remind you about the nightmares and the bed-wetting and how once upon a time the thought of my death meant that you’d be an orphan and now it just meant you’d get to spend time in Quogue with your really cool dad, this guy you just met who bought you toys.

  “I’m trying to eat,” I muttered as she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm. “Jake, don’t leave yet.”

  So you and your father watched stoically as I got cuffed and temperatured and the nurse began to remove my blankets to check my bandages (and, Jesus Christ, my catheter), but I asked her to please hold off until my child and my former boyfriend left. “Are they going soon?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes, let’s get out of here,” your father said. “I mean, is there anything else, Karen, that you need?”

  “I want you to call me when you get there. Jacob, you call me.” I knew you knew how to use the phone.

  You both nodded, same nod, same expression.

  “And I’ll call you to say good night tonight. Dave, his bedtime is at eight thirty. I don’t want him up later than that, okay? Leave me all your numbers. House, cell, all of them.”

  I could not believe he was taking my son. I could not believe I was letting him take my son. My heart monitor was beeping faster. The nurse looked at it for a moment, then slid her eyes to you and Dave. Dave scribbled down his numbers on a pad on the bedside tray, next to the uneaten Jell-O. “Your address too,” I said, although I remembered his address.

  “Ann will be there in the morning. I’ll ask her to get there by eight so you can get to work.”

  He nodded. You looked disappointed but had the good sense to be grateful for what you’d gotten. We were all quiet then.

  “So I guess that means we’re off?” Dave said, with the courtesy to sound uneasy.

  I felt faint again. “I don’t think I’m forgetting anything. He’ll need a toothbrush, of course. Jacob, did you pack a toothbrush? And pajamas?”

  You nodded. “Yuki helped me.”

  Dave came to me, gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Thank you, Karen. I know this isn’t easy for you.”

  “You know nothing,” I spat. Then you came and I squeezed you to me despite how much it hurt—despite all the morphine, Jesus it hurt—and then I watched as you and your father, same bearing, same cowlick, same expression, same nod, walked out the hospital door to a place I could not follow.

  “Away we go!” said your father as you disappeared.

 
; The nurse had the courtesy to change me quickly and hum a little bit while she did it. “Don’t worry,” she said to me softly, handing me a tissue for my cheeks. “He’ll be back. Don’t worry. Your son will be back soon.”

  “But what if he takes him forever?”

  “How could he do that, sweetie?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” I said.

  “Why would he take your son from his sweet mama? What good would come from that?”

  And I wanted to tell her about how he wasn’t just a lawyer—how he was a vampire, a shape-shifter, one of those mythological characters that started out as one thing but had become something entirely else. And once upon a time I would have known how to defame his character so hard that no judge would have ever let him near a six-year-old boy, much less parent one, but those days were over, and now I was as powerless myself as a child.

  9

  Now, Jacob, I want to tell you a story.

  Eighty-four years before you were born—eighty-four years to the very week, in fact—a banker’s wife delivered a son, her first child, in an upstairs bedroom in a tall brick house near the Danube, in Budapest, Hungary. The banker and his wife had wanted a child for many years, but by the time their son was born in 1923, they were shocked, as they were both past forty and had been married for almost two barren decades. They were also slightly frightened. What would they do with a little boy? At that point, they had settled into their childlessness, had filled their lives with art and music (she was an amateur pianist; he played the cello). Moreover, according to rumor, the banker was also an insatiable philanderer, spent his lunch hours with alternating mistresses, although from what I know of the couple their domestic life remained tranquil. (One can never really know what happens in another person’s marriage, Jacob, and one should never expect to.)

  They named their baby Janos. He grew up to be smart and independent, played chess, learned English courtesy of a British nanny (evidently British nannies were all the rage in bourgeois Hungary between the wars). After school and on the weekends, in between strictly enforced piano lessons, Janos played with other children in the beautiful parks of Budapest, and as he grew older he established himself as the leader of a crew of other well-heeled boys, and together they would prowl the avenues and side streets of their lovely city. In his early adolescence, he developed a crush on a girl named Lina, who was the leader of her own crew of girls, each one uglier than the last. Janos admired Lina’s strategic thinking—why surround yourself with ugly girls if not to make yourself more beautiful?—her tinkling laugh, and the way she could smile with her mouth while frowning with her eyes.

  At night, after dinner with his parents, Janos would do his homework, crawl into bed, and dream of living in his own tall brick house in Budapest one day, with Lina and their strategically minded children.

  Although no photographs of Janos’s parents survive, we do have a large oil portrait of the family, which was discovered in the basement of a New York gallery in 1974 (how it got there remains as much a mystery as life itself). The portrait shows a tall, patrician man standing behind his wife, who wears pearls and a fox stole; she is seated on a piano bench, and he rests his hand on her shoulder. On his fourth finger you can see, glimmering, a wide platinum ring. Between them is a boy, their son, with his mother’s blonde curls and his father’s severe stare. He is thirteen years old. Scribbled on the back of the portrait is “Neulander family, Budapest, 1936: Sandor, Eva, Janos.” There is also a dashed line of Hebrew and the artist’s smudged name.

  The Neulanders were intellectual atheists, more invested in gardening and poetry than religion, but they must have felt sentimental enough to celebrate the bar mitzvah of their only child and to commission a portrait on that occasion.

  So okay, Jacob, here’s some history for you: even though Hungary formed an alliance with Germany during the war, its (otherwise corrupt and fascist) government allowed, for a time, certain Jews to remain in the country unmolested. Therefore, the Neulanders survived the first several years of World War II in declining but still acceptable levels of comfort. True, Sandor was removed from his position at the bank, but he was ready to retire anyway. And true, the Ladies’ Gardening Society of Buda and Pest replaced Eva as head of the Newcomer Committee, but she’d been getting sick of all those old crones and their dahlias. The Neulanders spent much of the years between 1939 and 1944 indoors, playing music, reading English literature, and using whatever pull they still had to protect their son from the draft.

  When Germany broke its alliance with Hungary in March of 1944, the Neulanders felt safe enough in Budapest not to try to escape—not that there was anywhere to go. All of Europe was in flames, and they’d lost so many of their connections with the outside world. Besides, they barely practiced Judaism; besides, they had once counted among their closest friends the mayor, the mayor’s wife, and the director of the symphony orchestra. If connections like that couldn’t keep you safe, what were connections for?

  Sandor and Eva and Janos were rounded up in October of 1944: mother and father and son, lined up and sectioned off like livestock. Just before they parted for what they knew to be eternity, Sandor took the platinum ring off his finger and handed it to Janos. Go! his father said. Go? Where would he go?

  Janos knew the streets of Budapest like he knew his father’s voice; a guard turned his head for a moment, and Janos went.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is hazy: food stolen from farmers, occasional shelter in a barn or a church, and winter nights spent in a hole dug out of the floor of the half-frozen forest. Janos ate squirrels and acorns and drank his own urine, hid from soldiers in trees, and found out the European war had ended from a drunk Russian soldier. He returned to Budapest, but there really was no more Budapest, or no more of the Budapest he’d known; the only home he’d ever lived in had been bombed to its frame, and his parents were figments of another time. He started walking, came upon a group of Allied soldiers, was placed on a convoy to Enns, a displaced-persons camp just over the border in Austria. The Americans who ran the camp at Enns put Janos to work immediately, as his English was excellent and he seemed relatively sound in mind and body. It was his job to help welcome and settle the refugees who were streaming in from Mauthausen and Birkenau, from Romania and Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

  He enjoyed the work, and because he felt useful, because he knew he was truly helping other people, he grew to like musty Enns. Families were sheltered in cramped one-room apartments, but there was usually enough heat and enough food, and there were rumors, every so often, that soon the British would allow them all into Palestine.

  In early 1946, a young woman arrived at the camp on her own. She heard Janos speaking English to someone from the Joint Committee and asked him for help in her own British-inflected English. She too had once had a British nanny, she said; she too had once lived in Budapest. She looked familiar to him, or maybe it was just her voice. Or maybe he had known her in another life? He was busy, though, so he didn’t ask, and she was so shy she didn’t say.

  He helped her get settled in a dormitory with other single women, and although it wasn’t kind of him, he hoped no family would come to claim her. For weeks, they circled each other at Enns, on the grounds, in the dormitories, walking past each other along the nearby river, looking across the border into Hungary, a country whose air neither of them would ever breathe again. Finally the girl spoke to him at the commissary on a freezing February morning.

  “You really don’t recognize me, Janos?”

  He looked at her closely: the frowning eyes, the unsmiling smile. “Lina?”

  “Ha,” the girl said. “Lina was shot with her entire family by an Arrow Cross guard. I’m Berthe. Remember?”

  He sort of remembered: one of Lina’s ugly friends, although now she seemed as beautiful as summer. She’d been taken in by a Catholic dairy farmer and spent the war taking care of his remaining cows. It could have been worse, she said. For most people it had been.

  Three years later,
in a tiny Bronx apartment, they embraced their new life with whatever gusto they still had in them. They opened a music school and taught their students in fluent English. Still, moved by sentiment or memory, sometimes they would say a few words of Hungarian to their young son, Gil, and sing him Hungarian songs. Now almost seventy years later, Gil sits by a window in Bellevue, Washington. He almost never speaks, but when he does, the word he seems to say most often is szerelmem, which is Hungarian for “love.”

  ANOTHER STORY NOW. A love story of my own.

  Maybe six weeks into my—fling, romance, whatever—with your father, I returned for a night to my old apartment in Chelsea. I’d told your dad I’d be home for about twelve hours to water the plants and get my mail. In the morning, I’d be shuttling back to Baltimore.

  It was winter, a New York City winter, gray and dark more hours than not, everyone hiding behind burkas of coats and scarves. If Christmas was in the air, I couldn’t smell it. I had interminable meetings the next few days and was hoping to schedule some New York fund-raising events, and maybe California too. Were there any celebrities we could get behind Griffith’s cause? Maryland celebrities? Griffith was the biggest client I’d scored so far. If we lost, it wasn’t going to be because I hadn’t worked my ass off.

  So that was mostly what was on my mind when I returned home that weekend: Griffith, money, polls, work. Still, your dad was also on my mind. Like I said, we’d been emailing each other a lot. I had something called a BlackBerry then, which was like this phone you could use to email. It was sort of primitive, but in those days it was an impressive thing. People saw me with one and knew I was somebody who mattered. I liked whipping it out whenever I sensed I was being underestimated. I sent emails during meetings—behavior that I would never condone anymore.

  So anyway, I was on my twelve-hour furlough, waiting there by my building’s elevator, roller suitcase, wrapped in a coat, checking my BlackBerry, not even looking to see where I was headed. I got in the elevator, pressed the button. I marched down the hallway, fished for my keys in my purse. And then someone said “Boo!” and I almost keeled over from the fright. Dropped the BlackBerry right there on the floor.