“Helping a guest in need. This is Molly.”
“Mariah Moore,” I whispered in awe, “I really admire your work.”
“No time for congratulations!” Tilla whispered, “Come on, Anna, work at that window!”
“Am I correct?” the amused Mariah Moore asked. “You are breaking into the kitchen of a well-known art colony funded by the National Endowment for the Arts?”
“We are getting a hungry woman something to eat.” He said voman. “Now,” he instructed the world-famous novelist, “hold this.” He passed her a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. Anna was passing the loaves to Linda. I just stood there.
“Uncle Tilla!” Anna exploded from the kitchen. “Everything else is locked! All they’ve left out on the counter are these loaves of breakfast bread.”
“What an unusual dinner I am feeding you then,” Tilla announced.
As we toasted our cinnamon raisin bread in the dining room of the farmhouse, Tilla congratulated his nieces on their performance and shrugged off my gratitude. Mariah Moore, who, I learned, usually stayed aloof in her faraway cabin and never came to meals, adored Tilla’s story and asked him question after question about Hungary in 1956 when, at age seventeen, he left his home for America. He told about the detention camps, and, when he and his father and mother and three sisters and two brothers finally came to be released from the camp into the West, what he saw:
“Apricots! I saw beautiful apricots. My family had not had such fruits for years and years. All the colors so dull, everything mud, and then we are beyond the fences and there are shops and vendors and here was a man selling apricots. My God! My mother, she loved fruit, and there she was, dragging my tired little sisters by their hands and I said to myself, I’m going to get my mother these apricots! We are free! (And my stubborn father would never think of giving her a thing.) So I took my only possession of value, my pocket watch I had smuggled with me, and I walked up to the vendor of the fruit and I could not believe that no one would stop me. No guards! I talked to the man, because of course I had no money, and arranged to trade my watch for eight apricots and six pieces of American bubble gum—I had often heard of this gum—and thought I had a very good bargain! My mother, she was so happy, and we each ate a fruit, even my father. They were delicious, well worth a pocket watch! There was one piece of bubble gum for each of my sisters and my brothers and me and we chewed and chewed! This was our big bite of freedom.”
He gestured, he smiled, he grinned, every emotion he felt passed from his face through his body and into our shining faces as we drank his story and ate his bread. We were at his table, seated in the places he assigned to us, and we were enraptured, as were audiences and critics wherever Tilla could manage to perform.
He was not a novelist or painter or sculptor or composer, the usual crop at an art colony: he was a producer of performances, I learned from Mariah Moore when he left temporarily to usher Anna and Linda back to their nearby motel room, an artist who choreographed updated traditional Hungarian dances, assembling the dancers from his family network, creating the sets and backdrops for the dancing, and editing collages of music for the dancing, from rock and roll to jazz to the Hungarian folk tunes themselves on traditional instruments—then asking famous actors to donate their time to narrate the little stories that formed the background. He was multi-talented, and befriended by many, and poor. He understood how talented he was, Mariah said, and he felt, of course, that everyone should help him. You could not help but succumb to his charm, the novelist acknowledged. Of course, he had not applied to the art colony and been accepted like everyone else, nor had his application been waived, as Mariah’s was, because he was super famous. One of his champions on the board had simply called Tilla up and invited him to come for the summer. “In short,” Mariah concluded, “he owns this goddamned place.”
“Mrs. Moore,” Tilla said, reentering the dining room, “I own practically nothing, let alone a whole art colony!”
“You know you own the world, my dear.”
“I wish I had owned the world in 1956,” he spat.
Encouraged by Mariah, he added further detail to the story of the apricots, then went on to describe how the family first lived in Belgium, then in New York, learning new languages, working in factories…Mariah had her hand poised as if she were pressing the record button on an invisible tape recorder while Tilla moved through each story almost bodily, though he sat next to us and did not stir from his chair. Stupefied, caught in the headlights of his excitement and the powerful tractor beams of the novelist’s eyes, I could not leave. What energy he exuded, what energy had been required for him to lead his life, so completely attuned to his own needs he seemed, and so fascinating because he overcame, again and again, his circumstances.
Although Tilla and I looked nothing alike—he was tall and sallow-skinned with a shock of thick dark hair, and I, at least a head shorter, was many shades fairer—there was an indefinable similarity between us, a fact confirmed by Mariah Moore. “Good God,” she said to me regally, “turn in profile.” I obeyed, of course. “Now, Tilla, you turn in profile.”
“Mrs. Moore, you are an empress who commands me,” he said, turning his whole torso elegantly.
“Hah!” she said. “Both of you now, go to the mirror above the fireplace and turn in profile.” There were our noses, exactly alike.
“We could be in the same family!” Tilla exclaimed. “You could be my cousin! Are you Hungarian? Don’t you have Hungarian blood?”
By breakfast the next day the capture of the loaves of bread was even more worthy of gossip because mysterious Mrs. Moore had been involved, and, shockingly, she herself appeared at dinner to tell the story. As our adventure was repeated, I found myself swept into their royal circle. The dinners stretched to fill whole evenings with talk and a nighttime swim or an ice cream cone or a movie with the group of artists. Tilla was the organizer. It was an apparently decorous group for an art colony, since both the king and queen were married, Mariah to her fourth husband (though most of her stories involved the infamous first husband, Dr. Moore) and Tilla to a woman whose Hungarian ancestors had come to America generations ago.
“She is not really Hungarian,” Tilla announced on the farmhouse porch where the guests gathered to watch the sun plunge below the horizon. “She is American through and through, though she is a wonderful Hungarian dancer. She has inherited all the steps and she has the body for it. But she loves the malls, always she wants things! On her birthday I made her a cake with my own hands! A beautiful hazelnut torte. But she would not speak to me. She wanted pearls. Imagine! Where would I get money for them? We are artists!
“Well, she is not an artist, really. She dances, but she prefers the mall. She cooks and bakes and makes holidays with her mother and my mother and her sisters and my sisters and my aunts—they and my uncles are also in this country, and we all dance, all of my family—I feature sometimes my family in my work, Molly.” He had turned directly to the two of me. Molly One wanted to write poetry, while Molly Two was ready for a big affair with an important artist I could tell my biographer about when I was a famous elderly poet with a fabulous romantic past. “Don’t you have an agent?” I asked him.
“Agents! What an extravagance! I do the deals myself. I’m not going to give some agent his percent. I can get along on very, very little money. It is my pride. See this shirt? It is five years old. Looks like new, right? I do not know when I’m going to get another shirt. I take care of this shirt. It never goes in the washing machine. I wash it by hand. I can’t afford to ruin the fibers on your American washing machines.”
It actually never occurred to me that washing machines ruined fibers. “I handwash, too,” I said meekly.
“I do not need agents or bookkeepers. Nina does this work, and my brothers and sisters. I am the inspiration behind it all, but they do the nuts and bolts. I am busy taking the old dances and making them new with new steps over the old ones, and I am doing the lighting, and I am drawi
ng the designs of the sets for my father to build, and designing the new costumes for my aunt to make and my mother and sisters to embroider, and I am busy finding great new rock musics for us and working with my cousin who plays all the old songs for the dances, and then I am getting the movie stars to volunteer their voices.”
“My God, you’re making family art!”
“Hah! My family. We fight all the time, I am murdering my father daily, and my aunt is driving me crazy, and my sister is pregnant for the third time at the wrong moment! But of course we are all in this together, this is what we do, but it is all on me, like a wolf in a sack I must carry and never let the wolf out or it will eat me and eat all of us.”
Knowing no English and having no education beyond the eighth grade, Tilla had managed to get a high school certificate and to get the musical and ballet training that had led him to the wide network of connections he had. Some of the members of his family still spoke no English at all, though all of the younger ones had American educations. He had taken them on his back, though not completely: They kept slipping off. Some of them wanted to do only traditional dancing, some only rock. Some, like Nina, wanted pearls and malls. And all, at times, had been jealous of Tilla, who now had a Guggenheim fellowship, and was determined to keep every dollar of it to himself.
“I need this support!” he declared in a higher pitch than he usually spoke in. “I am the mainstay! I am the one they all need, and I need to be here at the art colony because I need the silence to make our dances.”
Of course the Szabos did not see it his way. He had insisted on, and they had begrudged him, this visit of a whole summer. He had never gone away for summer camp, for college, for graduate school; he had been with them in their village and then in Budapest, as they watched the tanks come down the streets, and as they fled to the border, and as they were interned in camps far, far from summer camp….He had worked heavy construction in Belgium until the permission had come to climb in a cramped bunk on a boat to New York. In the tiny, thin-walled Brooklyn apartment he could hear his sisters coughing and his brothers farting and his parents making love.
—
Molly One took over. If Mariah could skip meals, I could too. The proofs for my first book of poems had arrived. I shut myself in my studio with takeout food for two days and made massive changes that the University of Missouri Press threatened to charge me for. I was a poet. This was what I was here for. When I surfaced for dinner Tilla welcomed me back to his table from my business trip. By the time I got to dessert, I was Molly Two.
Dessert was terrible: canned fruit. It was an ice cream night for sure, but first came the postprandial sunset-watching ritual. The guests sat silently on the veranda, some puffing on Tilla’s proffered Balkan Sobranies. He had a burly but strangely light body. He was thickly graceful in the angles at which he held his head and neck. “Molly!” He suddenly turned that muscular neck toward me. “Why are you out in this night air without a sweater? You will catch cold! Here, here.” He began to take off his jacket to give to me.
“I’m OK. I don’t really need a sweater tonight. I feel fine.” I really did feel fine.
“Nonsense! How can you not feel cold? Of course you need a sweater! You must have one. If you will not take my jacket, and thank you, because I am cold, too, then you must go and get another layer of clothing for yourself.” He could not imagine another person might feel different from him.
“Really, I’m fine!”
He stood up in a fury. “I cannot allow you to sit here in the cold! I cannot bear to watch you! Look, you have gooseflesh!”
“I have goose bumps because you’re scaring me!”
“You do not know your own body,” he stormed, to the bewilderment of the others who sat in the near darkness of the sunset’s afterglow. He faced me, red with anger. “Your body says if you are hot or cold! You are not listening to your own body!”
“All right, all right,” I groused. He was so sure I was cold, maybe I wasn’t in my own body, after all. He was monstrously upset, and my donning a sweater would soothe it. I went inside the farmhouse and borrowed an abandoned sweatshirt off a hook in the coatroom which contained the odds and ends of clothes forgotten by years of guests.
“Tell me that you don’t feel much better!” Tilla crowed as I banged the screen door returning to the porch. He slapped a mosquito. Everyone was being eaten alive. None of us would be able to sit there much longer.
“Well, at least I’m protected against mosquitoes,” I said.
“It is another advantage of being warmly dressed!” he said in delight. The others were preparing to get in their cars and go to the local ice cream place.
“Want a ride?” I asked everyone in general.
“Actually,” Mariah announced, “I could take some people in my car, too.” This was so unusual that all the younger writers immediately volunteered to go with her. But those who were left, and this included Tilla, piled into my Toyota, the color of cinnamon raisin toast, and, as Mariah Moore had immediately noted, the color of Tilla’s eyes. Mine were blue, however. There were differences between us as well.
“Nice car, is it new?” Tilla marveled from the front seat.
“Yup,” I said, feeling honored that he chose to ride with me. I backed out of the gravel driveway, passing the stone-walled garden.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Tilla said politely, “how do you afford such a car?”
“I can’t—I borrowed to buy it,” I said, laughing, as we turned down the hill. The others in the back seat started talking cars.
“But who would lend you this money?” Tilla said, perplexed.
“A bank!”
“But why would a bank lend you money for a brand new car?” He was suspicious.
“Well, I filled out the forms,” I said at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. “You know, telling my income from my job, blah, blah.”
“You have a job?”
“Of course I have a job! I’m poet-in-residence for my state arts council. I go into schools and teach poetry.”
“It is good to have a job like this. It is good to be able to support yourself as you do. Me, it is impossible. If I had a regular job, I could not run the company.” He fell silent, then said, “Perhaps I could send my family into schools! We could show everyone dances.”
“Hey, maybe you could.”
In the back seat sat three stolidly uncommunicative young sculptors, each with a Budweiser can.
“So,” Tilla began again slowly, “you are a very smart woman. You have your job, and you have your nice car, and soon you will have your book. Too bad you don’t know when to feed yourself dinner and get yourself a sweater.”
“I guess that’s what I need you for,” I said boldly.
“Hah! And I need you to show me how to get jobs in schools for my family, and then we will buy such new cars!”
My car was stopped at a railroad crossing. We were waiting for the train to go by.
“I despise trains. They make me think of Hungary,” Tilla mused.
“Speaking of Hungary,” one of the dour sculptors suddenly said from the back seat, “I see your wife’s coming.”
“Yes, my wife, Nina, she is coming to visit this weekend,” he confirmed. “And some of my cousins. We are going to do some dances for all of you on Saturday.”
The minute we got to the Tasti Freeze I ordered a double chocolate milk shake.
“My God, Molly, you drink that whole thing?”
“Why, aren’t I supposed to have a milk shake?”
“Of course! If your body is hungry, then feed it.” Now he was telling the three sculptors about his Hungarian village.
“Wasn’t that weird?” Mariah asked me, after her carload had arrived. I was standing in the middle of the ice cream stand parking lot feeling stunned at the prospect of Nina. Mariah picked chocolate sprinkles off her muumuu dress and long tangled necklaces.
“What was weird?”
“That business w
ith the sweater!”
“It’s hard to figure him out,” I trailed off cautiously.
“But not hard to figure you out, darling,” she said. “You’re in love with him.”
I laughed uncomfortably. “He’s married,” I began.
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” she sneered.
“Mrs. Moore,” Tilla called to the famous novelist, “I am telling these people that you have five children! They are not believing me, so you will be telling them also this is true, will you? We have six children in my family also,” he said to the sculptors, “three girls and three men.”
“Oh heavens yes, it is absolutely true,” Mariah gurgled.
“I salute you, Mrs. Moore, how you must concentrate! To write novels with five children in the house—at least all the children in my family were taught to dance.”
“Hah! I didn’t write novels while my kids were little, heavens no, I wrote short stories. I only wrote novels later on when they all started school. I had them one right after the other, in the succession of my husbands, and no regrets.”
Tilla threw his arm around her. “I admire you, Mrs. Moore! How you wrote even short stories with your babies. My sisters’ babies are screaming right this minute. If I close my eyes I can hear them screaming all the way from Brooklyn! Hear them?” Tilla made wah-wah baby sounds, and we watched his whole body reshape into an infant’s. His typically graceful gestures were suddenly spastic, and he cried crocodile tears. “All three of my sisters have babies now,” he said as he finished his tiny parking lot performance. “Thank God my brothers’ and cousins’ kids are more grown up.”
“So everyone has children but you and Nina,” Mrs. Moore said.
“Oh yes, Nina would like to have a child, I think, but I do not! My sisters and brothers have enough children for me. How can I dance and run the company and take responsibility for one more child, even my own? And the screaming, Mrs. Moore, I cannot take it!”
“But what about when you are too old to dance and need your sons and daughters to dance for you?” she asked.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 16