In the Darkroom (33 page)

Another night, I wake to someone shaking me. It is my father, who is now living in a studio in Manhattan. He has climbed in a window. My mother has changed the locks. “Where is she?” he demands. My mother has gone to a friend's in the city. He stands there, staring, then heads down the hall to the master bedroom. A half hour passes. I go to find him. Every drawer of my mother's dresser has been yanked out and plundered. He is seated on the floor, surrounded by file folders he's found in a box in her closet, going through their contents, examining every page.
What are you doing?
“Getting evidence,” he says, and slams the door in my face.

Some weeks later, I come home from school and see a massive bouquet of bloodred roses lying on the dining-room table.

“Who sent the roses?” I ask my mother.

“Your father.” He delivered them himself. He told her “the family” needs to come first. The roses lie on the table, unwrapped, their red petals fading to brown. Eventually, I throw them out.

My father's violence had been concentrated in that one exceptional season, during my parents' divorce. Yet what erupted then had been churning beneath the surface for a long time. His rage was a preexisting condition, so ancient it semed foundational. The collapse of the marriage shook the rubble of earlier catastrophes. The first traumatic marital breakdown my father had suffered was his parents', which had left young István abandoned in a time of global terror. For more than twenty years, ever since he'd come to the United States at the end of 1953, my father had struggled to fit himself into the ready-made template of American husband and dad—until his marriage fell apart just as his parents' marriage had, and his estranged wife deposed him not just from a home but from an identity.

My parents first met at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village in 1957. My father had been invited there by some Hungarian Jewish émigrés he'd met on the Upper West Side, where he was renting a basement room with a half window looking out on overflowing trash bins. Since he'd arrived in New York, he'd held a series of darkroom and technical jobs in the photo departments of Manhattan advertising agencies, perfecting shots of satisfied shoppers and happy families. “In the darkroom, I'd always listen to this Hungarian-American radio program,” my father recalled. “I was so excited the day I heard on the radio about '56,” the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. “I was thinking, maybe I could go back.” Eighteen days later, the uprising collapsed.

His first job, at $35 a week, was as a darkroom assistant at a photo studio in the city's Diamond District, designing food ads. “We cheated,” my father recalled, “greasing up the cold cuts so they looked better.” He made extra money at night with an unofficial assignment, photographing attractive young women his boss met in nightclubs. “He'd have me take their pictures in sexy lingerie or naked while he and his friends watched,” my father told me. “It was in very bad taste, pornographic.” After two years, he left for Illustrators Incorporated, where he designed images for the
Saturday Evening Post
with an epidiascope, an optical projector. He projected photos of ur-domestic Americana—Mom in an apron serving Thanksgiving dinner, Dad in his armchair smoking a pipe—onto the illustrators' drawing boards, “so that everything came out
real
-looking.” In his own real life, he wolfed down a sandwich at a cheap Broadway deli that catered to freshly arrived Eastern European immigrants, then went home to the room by the garbage cans.

Late that night at the Greenwich Village party, my father overcame his shyness enough to ask my mother to dance. He invited her to the Tanglewood Music Festival the following weekened to hear a jazz concert. He preferred classical but figured that proposing jazz would make him sound “more American.” That Sunday they drove to the Berkshires in my father's 1955 Ford convertible, “red and white, a really flashy thing,” my father said. Another prop in his new red-white-and-blue performance. Six weeks later they married in Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on Eighty-Third Street, over the objections of her parents.

“Such a hurry to get married!” I said to my father one evening in Budapest.

A shrug. “It seemed like the thing to do,” she said. Then, “Your mother wanted to.” My father's uncle Ernő, who had emigrated to New York years earlier, was his one family witness at the ceremony. There was no honeymoon: the ad agency where my father projected shots of family joy wouldn't give him the time off. Half a year later, the newlyweds marked the occasion with a long weekend in Niagara Falls. It was another “thing to do.”

In short order, my father had attained the big-box model of the postwar American Dream, male division: the house in the suburbs, the commuter job in the city, the stay-at-home wife, the two children and a dog, the quarter-acre lawn with dog house and playset and perimeter white-picket fence, all built in his home workshop in the cellar. The realization of such comfort and security and order must have astounded him. But the security was booby-trapped. Organization-Man America was a store-bought landscape—kitschified, prettified, market-ready—whose images of cowboy-rugged individualism and Father-Knows-Best authority masked a simpering Hallmark sameness. “The American Male: Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?”
Look
magazine's headline asked in its 1958 series on the debilitated postwar man (later issued as a book,
The Decline of the American Male
). The article's composite character was “Gary Gray,” a compliant suburban husband and dad who had swallowed the “subtle poison of adjustment and conformity,” and who one winter morning “awakened and realized he had forgotten how to say the word ‘I.' ”

The emblem of the embattled American self, circa 1950s, was a browbeaten, emasculated male, returned from heroic combat only to fall prey to the domesticating forces of consumerism and “momism” and “mass society” homogenization, an ex-GI turned cringing cream puff, the aproned epicene dad in
Rebel Without a Cause
delivering dinner trays to his domineering wife. In “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s influential 1958
Esquire
essay, the social critic singled out one news event as “impressive evidence” of that crisis—indeed, its embodiment. “It appears no accident,” he wrote, “that the changing of sex—the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon—so fascinates our newspaper editors and readers.” Coming across Schlesinger's words all these years later, I considered my father's odyssey as a twentieth-century Zelig, present at the identity Götterdämmerung of fascist Europe, present again as the question of the age took on new form in postwar America. In both times and places, and whatever ideologies were in play, the politics on the surface hid a roiling conflation of identity and gender. As both European Jew and American Dad, my father's manhood had been doubted, distorted, and besmirched.

“The key to the recovery of masculinity lies rather in the problem of identity,” Schlesinger concluded in that 1958 article. “When a person begins to find out
who
he is, he is likely to find out rather soon what sex he is.”

————

By the 1970s, my father's cinematic productions of American domesticity—the home movies of our first family Christmas, our first Easter, our first strained family visit to the Florida Keys to visit my mother's disapproving parents—had declined into sporadic snapshots more Diane Arbus than Norman Rockwell. I found a bunch of them at the bottom of the mothball-ridden box of photos my mother had mailed me—a dank clump of stills, color fading, edges curling, a disorderly chronicle of familial decline.

On my return from one of my visits to Budapest, I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to get those photos to lie flat on my desk; as soon as I lifted my hand they'd recoil, as if ashamed of what they revealed. Here were my parents on a browning front lawn: my mother looking worn and seated in a sagging lawn chair; my father kneeling nervously at her side, sporting scraggly sideburns and a mullet-like mane that made him look more Tutankhamen than Tom Jones. Another photo: the family gathered around the picnic table on the back porch, funereal over half-eaten hot dogs. And: my brother and me on our chipped concrete front stoop, him in a crooked homemade haircut and mismatched hand-me-downs, me in equally crooked cat-eye glasses with the stems held together with adhesive tape.

The box contained several shots of our house, its faux rusticated shingled exterior now genuinely weather-beaten—or rather, putrefied, an ulcerated mess of scaling paint and mold, the shutters at alarming angles. A picture of the backyard captures a tarp over a pit in the ground—what was once the Japanese goldfish pond—and the understructure of the porch, its wood beams eaten through with dry rot. In a shot looking down from the top of the drive, you can see foot-high weeds, flourishing in the macadam in front of the garage door. Which dates it to the late '70s—after my father moved out. My non-driving mother had no need of a car. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” she used to say back then, as mice (or worse) scrabbled back and forth audibly in the attic. Porch railings mulched and came away in our hands, termites swarmed around the rotted windowsills, and, one by one, the kitchen linoleum tiles came unglued and stayed that way. One day, in a stab at imposing order, I collected the tile shards and stacked them in a corner. It's hard to look at these pictures now and not revisit the disintegration of a family on the brink. The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

The fissures first became evident on the hiking trail. After my adolescent rebellion eliminated me as a trekking partner, my father had enlisted my mother. Unlike his grumpy teenage daughter, his wife discovered that she adored the great outdoors. For a few years, she was my father's regular wilderness companion. In 1973, after months of training, they flew to Mexico and assailed the volcanic slopes of Popocatépetl and Pico de Orizaba, the country's two highest peaks. Henceforth, mountaineering, their one shared pleasure, became the stage set of their crack-up. The Mexico trip was the last they took together.

The way my father explained it to me later was: “Your mother wanted to do different mountains—the more
minor
peaks.” In fact, she was an intrepid hiker. When the four of us were caught in a blizzard on a climb to the first hut of the Matterhorn, my mother was the only one who thrilled to the experience—as evidenced by a photograph that she framed and kept on display in her apartment for years after the divorce: she stands in the foreground in a thin windbreaker and kerchief, her face turned up to greet the snow as if it's a glorious blast of sun, while her miserable teenage daughter cowers behind her, glaring at her sodden desert boots. My mother didn't want “different mountains.” She wanted different company.

A dozen yellow containers of Ektachrome slides bear testament to the fatal divergence. One box is marked, in my mother's handwriting, with her initials, denoting that these are shots of one of her summer solo treks. Inside is slide after slide of my mother in the Austrian Alps, striding up steep trails, scrambling over boulders, bundled in her orange 60/40 parka in a rainstorm, waving from a peak. She is tan, her calves muscular, her hair in girlish braids, and her face—so drawn and despairing in those wedding and early marriage pictures—illuminated with a kind of stunned joy. She is forty-four but looks younger than in the photos from her early twenties. Rarely alone, she is laughing, sharing food with the other hikers in her group, lounging on a rock soaking up the sun, clinking beer glasses in a candlelit hut. One day, armed with a handheld viewfinder, I worked my way through all the slides of my mother's Austria trip and her other independent vacation through the Dolomites in northeastern Italy. I know Paul Simon meant the lyrics in “Kodachrome” to be ironic, yet an ingenuous version kept burbling through my head as I peered into the plastic window at my suddenly alive, suddenly-in-color mother, released for two weeks from the drab walls of her marriage. “They give us those nice bright colors. … Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah …” Four more years would pass before the divorce, but the whole story was right there in the viewfinder, visible to any but the blind.

I opened the other boxes, the ones that held slides of my father's solitary travels during that same period. Dozens of transparencies from his first summer in the French Alps featured what looked like an identical shot: a vast river of white ice filled the bottom half of the frame, an iron-black mass of rock the top, its leviathan shanks blotting out the sun. In all, I found only two pictures in which my father appears, both taken during his second summer trip, when he hired a guide to lead him on several alpine climbs. In one of them he is posed by a cliff face, holding an ice ax. In the other, he is a dot in an endless field of snow. No one else is in the frame. The slides were also shot with color film, not that you could tell.

“Where was that?” I asked my father, describing an image from the first trip. We were talking over the phone.

“Chamonix,” my father said. He didn't stay in the village long. “I was ten days in a mountain hut. I was by myself. I even hiked by myself. When you're alone”—she stopped—“it's a funny feeling.”

“Funny?”

“Like humanity had ceased. Like you were the only human being on earth. Like the whole world had been bombed and you were left all alone. … Waaall”—I could picture her hand, brushing away my remark before I made it—“I was careful not to do anything too risky.”

My father had hiked up from the village “to the base of Mont Blanc. What a mountain, indescribable. …”

So that was the menacing mass of iron. And the empty field of white, the famous four-mile glacier that flows along Mont Blanc's northern flank, the Mer de Glace. My father's route was the same as the one that Mary Shelley's creature followed, on the day he confronted his creator. After we got off the phone, I pulled
Frankenstein
off my shelf, the novel that had inspired, among so many others, Susan Stryker, whose manifesto had framed her transgender identity in terms of that lonely figure on the Mer de Glace: “I will say this as bluntly as I know how,” Stryker wrote in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”