In the Darkroom (32 page)

“Can I ask a few questions?”

Dr. Misley indicated, through my father, that he was amenable.

“Do you see a difference, since the operation?”

The doctor dawdled with his answer.

“He says my face is very nice now,” my father translated. “He says I have very few wrinkles for a man my age. This is hormones, but also genes.” She reached over and patted my face. “You have the genes, too.”

“What I meant,” I said, “was, does Dr. Misley see a difference in your
personality
?”

The reply was longer in coming.

“Dr. Misley says that I'm a happy man,” my father related. “A happy
person,
” she corrected herself. “Dr. Misley says this is very important, because we don't know how many years a life brings, but at least a person must live it in happiness.”

Dr. Misley, I thought, dispenses platitudes as well as pharmaceuticals.

“Is my father one of your more”—I turned over adjectives in my mind—“unusual patients?”

The answer came back through the linguistic bucket brigade. “He says he has one even more unusual. He brought into the world a girl who was twelve years old.”

This did sound unusual.

“The
patient
was twelve years old,” my father amended. “She came to the hospital and she didn't know she was pregnant. He had to cut open that thing.”

“What thing?”

“You know, where the vagina is.”

“The hymen?”

“Right.”

I still wasn't following.

“Sperm got smeared on her somehow,” my father related. “There was a little hole in the hymen. The sperm got in.”

Somehow?
My father conferred again with the doctor.

“The girl got raped.”

My pen froze over my notepad.

Another round of Hungarian.

“It was her father,” my father said.

“Christ,” I said.

Dr. Misley continued beaming.

Doctor and patient chatted for another long stretch. From time to time, my father chuckled. No translation was forthcoming, and after a while I retired my notebook.

“Dr. Misley wants to know how old you are,” my father said.

“Forty-nine.” And thought, peevishly:
Don't you know?

The two conferred.

“He says you look much younger,” my father said. “Like me,” she added.

And then, after a few more minutes: “Dr. Misley says that he once had a patient who had her first baby past forty-eight. … So this is your last chance. Dr. Misley wants to know if you've tried fertility treatments.”

“I don't—”

“And if you've ever been pregnant before.”

“Not”—I hesitated—“no.”

“Dr. Misley says you should monitor your ovulation.”

The gynecologist reached into a drawer and pulled out a small plastic device shaped like a kazoo.

“You spit into it,” my father translated, “and it tells you on the days you are impregnable.”

Impregnable?

“Whether you can have a baby.” My father elbowed me. “Okay, deaaar, he says now he can do the exam.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“But he's got free time.”

“I don't want an examination.”

“You want to come back?”

“No, I—.”

“He says he can recommend another doctor, if you don't feel comfortable with him.”

The doctor reached into his desk and handed me a flyer, an advertisement for Mini Mikroszóp, the ovulation monitor. On the front, in girlish pink script, and in English, it said, “Maybe Baby.”

“It will only take ten minutes,” my father said.

“No!”

My father snatched up her purse and headed for the door, her face contracting into a familiar scowl.

We rode the elevator in silence. Downstairs, we stopped at the pharmacy—she had to pick up her hormones—and found our place at the end of a long queue. A cranky clerk behind the counter took her time filling the order, eyeing my father doubtfully.

I could feel my father appraising me.

“This business of no children,” she said. “It's not normal.”

Normal? At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as normal life. I remembered that it saved me. I also remembered an older woman I was close to, someone I much admired, whose life was devastated by not being able to do the same. In the mid-1950s, she had sought the help of a back-alley abortionist, and the horrors that ensued—the botched operation, a life-threatening delivery, late-term, to a long-dead fetus—was a trauma that haunted her the rest of her life. The story of her ordeal fed my young feminism.

When the prescription was finally ready, my father snatched it from the counter and flung herself through the door. I had to hurry not to lose her as she clacked furiously down a warren of back streets, her white pocketbook swinging like a mainsail from the gaff of a bunched shoulder. At one point she disappeared around a corner, and I was overcome with a childlike terror of being lost, left to wander forever amid incomprehensible signage and surly drugstore attendants.

I caught sight of the flapping purse again just as she was making the turn onto the broad thoroughfare of Margit körút. She was swallowed up by a sea of shoppers, pouring in and out of that 105,000-square-meter temple to post-Communist freedom, the Mammut Mall. (“Mammut Mall I,” that is. Mammut II, equally mammoth, was under construction on the next block.) At least here, I consoled myself, I could read the signs. (Extreme Digital, Cinema City, D.I.V.A., Royal Croissant … ) At least I knew we were only a few minutes from our destination: Moszkva tér, the city's huge and hugely ugly outdoor transport junction still bearing at the time its Communist-era appellation. Six tram lines, eighteen bus lines, and a major subway line intersected here. By the time we arrived, I'd closed the gap. I followed at my father's heels as she crossed several sets of railroad tracks and came to rest on the platform for the #59, the tram that headed toward the district where she lived. Some minutes into our wait, my father broke the silence.

“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:

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.