Gratitude (17 page)

As Lili tried to imagine what it must have been like to have such a man, this young man from another planet, traipsing around Klari’s living room, the room they sat in brightened, as if the light of heaven were shining through the window.

Simon looked restless. He said, “Is that when Sandor started courting you, Mother?”

“You really are a troublemaker, my dear son, my only son.”

“You should have had another one,” said Simon, “to balance me off.”

Klari said, “Sanyi didn’t
court
me. I wouldn’t describe it as courting.”

“How would you describe it, then, Mother?”

Lili thought Simon looked especially tough with his black eyes and broken nose. He looked like a warrior.

“Wouldn’t he skip out in the middle of the afternoon at the law office and come get you to take you to the movies?” Simon went on.

Klari giggled as she remembered. “Yes, we went to the very first moving picture house in Hungary, and guess where it was? In the New York Café, that’s where. They started it at the New York because the coffee grinder was a big brute of a man who could crank the projector the whole way through a film. It took some strength. It was before I met Robert, needless to say. I spent a great deal of time with my cousin Sanyi.”

Lili shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she watched Simon, felt his restlessness, his discomfort, perhaps, at hearing about his mother’s earliest infatuation.

“I must confess,” Klari went on, as she checked a wave of red hair at her temple, “Sanyi was a silly boy, really, but a strikingly handsome and smart one. And a dreamer—my Lord, what a dreamer he was! Aunt Ernesztina had three sons—Sanyi was the eldest.”

“And the handsomest,” Simon put in.

This time it was Lili who said, “Troublemaker.”

“Yes,” said Klari, awkwardly. “He was the handsomest. Anyway, you should have seen the nice office Father had renovated for Sanyi, against his own better judgment, in his building on Vaci Street. He would do things for his sister that he would never have done for his brother.”

“Why don’t you talk about when he came calling on you?” said Simon, and he walked to the gramophone. He winced as he bent down and put his hand on his ribs.

He selected Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and pulled it from its sleeve. A moment later, the composer’s insistent music filled the room. Klari turned an invisible knob in the air, and Simon obeyed, turning the spirited symphony down somewhat.

“The trouble was that Sanyi was not interested in the law,” Klari said, “and hardly ever visited Mr. Odon Grunwald. He would slip away to watch movies.

“I still clearly remember that man in there, cranking that projector. How ridiculous. How ridiculous and wonderful at the same time.” Klari chuckled. “What an experience! What magic, really!

“Sandor loved that place, loved the moving pictures he saw, loved the very aroma of the place. And he used to tell me that he wanted to make pictures like that. They were pictures, he was sure, that could move people the way he had been moved.

“When more theatres were built, like the beautiful Tivoli in the seventh district—”

“I’ve been there!” Lili shouted and clapped her hands together. “We saw the Marx brothers there. It was wonderful.”

Simon put his arm around Lili. Klari said, “Sanyi loved it, too. He would steal away from his dreary office, come take me out of school and spirit us over to the Tivoli, or later the Octagon, where we would sit in a
paholy
so as not to be spotted.”

“I’ve seen those,” Lili said, “the private boxes around the sides of the theatre and in the mezzanine. They were intended for lovers.”

Robert put his head in to say, “When you put on Beethoven, you have to listen only to him. Beethoven is not background music.” But then he saw the bundle in his wife’s lap. “Oh, the letters and pictures,” he said, and went away.

The parlour fell silent, except for Beethoven. Klari closed her eyes to listen. After a time, she said to Simon and Lili, “Do you ever wonder, as you listen to a beautiful piece of music, the kind that goes straight to your heart—do you wonder, is it all right for me to love this melody in this way, or did the composer not intend it for my ears? In other words, am I
welcome
here? Or conversely, if Wagner, say, disapproved of us Jews, is it all right for my heart to go on this voyage at all, or must I hold it back?”

Klari looked down at her feet. It was another minute before she resumed her story. “Of course, we were not lovers, Sandor and I. Cousins sometimes were, but we were not. At the theatre, Sanyi would clasp my hand in his as if we were getting set for a ride on a Ferris wheel. The lights would dim, the piano player would start to play, the great curtains would be drawn open as if upon the panoramic windows of a palace, but instead of looking outside, we’d gaze upon another world altogether, the world of an Alaskan in
The Spoilers
, the world of a penniless little hobo in
The Tramp
with Charlie Chaplin. Sanyi loved them all, and so did I—Mack Sennett with his Keystone Cops, the chilling
Birth of a Nation
, made by a man named D.W. Griffith, then Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim, that lovely Mary Pickford…”

Her voice trailed off here as Beethoven’s lilting allegretto began, rhythmic and imploring. Klari said, “Oh, now listen to this impossibly beautiful music.” Klari closed her eyes and placed her right hand over her heart.

They all listened, but then Lili asked, “How old were you and Sandor then, Miss Klari?”

“I was eighteen or nineteen, and Sanyi was a year younger—too young, really, to apprentice to a lawyer.”

“But not too young to fall in love,” Simon said.

“No, not too young, but he was more interested in the love on the screen, the adventure, the safe adventure, I suppose, the safe love—the unreal love, that’s what it was—than he was in me or anyone else. Little did I know at the time that he was apprenticing to the film directors, not to Odon Grunwald with his hefty law books, poor man. He tried so hard.”

Klari sighed, but then she smiled. “Things went quite badly between Father and our cousin after a time. Young love was too frivolous for our father.”

To Lili, it felt as though they were talking about the love stories in films, not in real life. They paused to listen to the Beethoven. Simon wished they could go out to the movies themselves, sit in a
paholy
and drink coffee. How did that world slip away? He listened to the Beethoven again. He said, “My cousin Paul loves to quote that American poet, Emily Dickinson. She wrote, ‘Some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we can all listen.’”

“That’s lovely,” Lili said.

“He’s referring to himself, dear,” Klari said to Lili. “Just don’t ask him to sing.”

Lili giggled, and he laughed, too.

Klari got to her feet. “I think we’ve had enough of these ancient recollections. We’ll continue another time.”

“I haven’t had enough,” Lili said. “I want to know what happened.”

“Show her one of the photographs,” Simon said.

Klari looked down at the bundle of letters and photographs in her lap. She gingerly untied the knot in the ribbon and pulled a photograph from the bundle. She passed the picture to Lili. It was of an elegantly dressed man and woman, the man in a light suit and a white Panama hat, the woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat, laughing up toward heaven. The man was throwing some bits of bread to pigeons by a fountain. The pigeons were everywhere.

“That’s Sandor and—guess who,” she said.

“You look so much younger, but lovely as ever,” Lili said.

“We were in Siena—Sandor, my mother, my sisters and I. By the fountain in the square—Il Campo, they call it—where the horses run. They have a race there, in this ancient piazza.”

“What a nice couple you were,” Lili added, “happy and carefree.”

“Thank you, but we were hardly a couple, as I’ve said.”

“Ha,” said Simon.

“Don’t you be smart,” his mother said.

“What went wrong?” Lili asked Klari. “You were saying things went very wrong between him and your father.”

“Sandor had violent arguments with our father,” Klari said. She huffed out a breath with some force, as if she were expelling smoke.

Klari said, “When word got back to Father that his nephew had been spotted at the New York Café or the Orpheum, he began to speak of him as an ungrateful lout. And whenever he found out I had been with Sanyi, he punished me terribly. I was to stay in my room, without music, without walks, without family meals, for a week or longer at a time. And he banned me from the picture palaces for a year.

“Sandor seemed unperturbed. He would show up at our house anyway. It was a big place, and he’d stayed with us, so he knew where to hide out. He’d sneak me out of my room and steal me away for the last show of the evening.”

“Didn’t anyone catch you?”

“No, because everyone was in on our little racket. My sisters enjoyed Sandor’s company, and he was generous with it. There was plenty of wit and charm to go around. Even the servants thought he was sweet and were eager for him to regale them with tales of Jules Verne or Victor Hugo. The trick was that our parents’ room was at the back of the house, half a city block away from ours, so it was easy enough. But our father’s wrath would become the least of our problems.”

“What happened?” Lili asked.

“We snuck out to the movies late one evening, Sandor and I. My sisters knew we were going, as always. In the end, everyone knew, even our mother. Juliana loved him as much as the rest of us.

“Sanyi and I sat in our usual spot at the Tivoli. Sanyi even had wine and flowers brought to our seats—he really was silly. I don’t remember what film we saw that evening. If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you. All I remember was the news. That was in the day when serious people went to the movies to watch newsreels, to get a better sense of what was happening in the world. On this particular night, there was news of a crackdown on communists in Budapest…” she hesitated “…and even pictures of young men who had been hanged, friends of Sanyi’s, people he used to meet up with at the New York and the Japan—artists, bohemians, people just like Sanyi.

“We left the cinema numbed. Sanyi said his days in Hungary had come to an end. It was time to start life over in a more sensible place.”

“Was he a communist?” Lili asked.

“Hardly, but his artistic friends were, some of them. Miksa was, the cousin he was staying with, the poet. But Sanyi was anything but. He was more like our father than either of them liked to admit. He had a fire in his soul, but he seemed to have command of that fire, if that’s possible, and command of the people around him, much like Father. Much like my nephew Paul. He even looked like Paul. He was tall and dashing.

“That same night, the night of the newsreel, we were caught again by Father as Sanyi tried to sneak me back into my house. Hermina, bless her heart, tried to stop our father, but he cursed Sanyi from the door.”

Klari stood now to act out the role. “‘How dare you defy me in this way?’ he said.” Klari used a deep voice. “‘It’s not just your life you’re wasting, here, but my daughter’s, your mother’s. How dare you disobey me so flagrantly and senselessly? I want you away from here. I want you to pack your things in the law office and clear out. I want nothing to do with you. You are a disgrace to the family name.’”

Klari paused dramatically. Then she said, “Sandor looked at our father and said calmly, ‘A disgrace? A disgrace to the family name? In what way could I possibly be a disgrace? The only disgrace to be brought upon the family will be the disgrace of hypocrisy and blindness. Uncle Maximillian, I will not take your kindness for granted anymore.’ Our father turned his back on Sanyi, and he never saw him again, nor heard from him directly.

“And he did bring plenty of honour to the name,” Klari said. “In Britain, he became known as Alexander Korda.”

Simon said, “And he wrote only to Mother, never to the rest of the family.” Klari hung her head. “Show her a letter, Mother. Show Lili the one about one of the films.”

“Did he come back?” Lili asked.

“Once or twice. Mostly, he stayed in England and helped found the British film industry, as we like to brag, although we had little to do with his achievement except to drive him away. Suddenly, it was his name we were seeing up there on the screen for some of the big pictures:
The Private Life of Henry VIII
,
The Four Feathers
,
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Sandor was even knighted by the king recently, with that silly name he’d picked out. Sir Alexander Korda, he became. I could barely contain my excitement every time we went to the movies, Robert and I, because it was like a postcard from abroad with moving snapshots thrown in, and yet I must confess it was never again as exciting to go to the picture palaces as it had been with Sandor.”

“Why?” Lili asked.

“Because I was going with someone in love.”

“With you?”

“No, with movies.” She looked Lili directly in the eye. “He had a kind of glow about him, like someone already in the movies, someone born to it.” She sighed. “I’ll never forget those evenings. Impossible days. It’s not at all what Simon says. It’s a good thing our love was never realized. Reality wouldn’t have been good for it.”

Klari coughed and got to her feet.

“Do you have that letter he wrote to you from America?” her son asked.

“Was he in America?” Lili said.

“Oh, yes, he tried to make a go of it there, too, and in Berlin at first, and Vienna. But he went to the United States at the outbreak of the war. He wrote from there.”

Klari found the letter with the American postmark and handed it to Lili.

Beverly Hills Carrington Hotel
Beverly Hills, California
August 16, 1943

My dear Klari,

Did you manage to get out again in these dark and depressed times to catch that old movie of mine called
The Man Who Could Work Miracles?
I can’t remember if you saw it the first time around. It’s a slightly corny affair based on a story by that clever H.G. Wells, about a man named George Fotheringay, played by Roland Young. He’s a clerk who finds he has the power to change anything in the world simply by command. The power naturally goes to his head—why should he be any different from the rest of us?—and he wants ultimately to stop the Earth’s rotation. I won’t tell you how it turns out in case you haven’t caught it.