Hollywood Animal (69 page)

Puszi
, in Hungarian, means “a kiss.”

(Really.)

I noticed the girls first, naturally, at Ursuline High School. There were so many girls here in so many shapes and sizes! And they were friendly and chatty and smiling. So were the boys. So were the nuns.

My first day, the new kid in school, I was asked by three different people—boys and girls—to sit with them at lunch.

I was overwhelmed at first. At Cathedral Latin, I had put myself into an aggressive mode on the way to school each morning. I had keyed myself up—ready for hostility, ready to return a punch or a shove. But there were no shoves or punches here. I didn’t need to feel aggressive.

It took me a while to figure out why the atmosphere was so different at Ursuline.
One:
it wasn’t a rich kids’ school. Youngstown was a steel town and the kids came from all class levels to Ursuline.
Two:
there were
girls
here and their very presence softened and scented the air.

When the priests dropped me downtown on the way to their seven o’clock Mass, I had two hours to kill before school began. I spent those hours sitting on a stool at a diner filled with workers from the steel mills, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, playing the jukebox, and reading. I could have all the coffee I wanted for a dime and when I got hungry, I’d order myself some toast.

I read a book at the diner that would change my life. I had taken it out from the school library. It was called
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I cried when I finished it and the waitress said, “Are you okay, honey?”

Well, no, I wasn’t, really. I wasn’t okay at all.

The kids in school viewed me as an exotic figure. I was living alone—without my parents. And I was living in a monastery that looked like a castle most of them had read about in the
Youngstown Vindicator
. And I had spent my early years in refugee camps! For the first time in my life, I was popular. Even the nuns liked me. For the first time in my life, I really studied, getting all As and Bs. And everyone—kids, nuns—pronounced my name right.

The Franciscans, I discovered, couldn’t care less
when
I got back from school. They ignored me.

If I wasn’t there at dinner, no one said anything. I arranged with one of their servants to leave me a glass of milk and a sandwich each night.

Father Ákos, the rat-griller, captured a deer in the woods and kept it in a fenced-off area of the park. He was fattening it. He said we would soon eat Transylvanian Venison Stew with garlic and paprika.

On the way to school one morning, wearing his cowboy hat, Elvész blasting on his tape recorder, Father Lászlo asked me: “Have you kissed any girls yet?”

“No, Father.”

“You haven’t?”

“No.”

I was embarrassed.

“Have you put your tongue in their mouth?” the priest asked.

“No, Father.”

“Have you sucked on their breasts?”

“No, Father!”

I laughed louder, more embarrassed.

“Have you spread their legs apart?” His face was red.

I looked away and shook my head.

“Have you put your fingers into their behinds?”

I said nothing, looked out the window of the car.

“Have you stuck your
pimpli
into their hole?” His voice was hoarse.

We stopped at a red light.

“I’ve gotta meet somebody,” I said, opened the door, and jumped out of the car.

I was walking away from the car. I heard his laughter, amplified and guttural. He had the loudspeaker under the hood turned on.

Father Lászlo moved from the main house of the monastery to the room next to mine above the garage. I could hear his tape recorder blasting rock and roll all the time.

He’d come into my room unexpectedly sometimes. Once he said he’d taped a new song I had to hear. Once he came in wearing nothing but his underwear. Once he came in while I was getting dressed.

My door didn’t have a lock on it.

On the way to school one morning with Father Steve, the American Hungarian Franciscan, I told him about Father Lászlo and how he’d come into my room wearing his underwear and the questions he’d ask me about girls.

Father Steve put a lock on my door.

From then on, only Father Steve drove me to school in the morning.

On a pretty moonlit night, I sneaked into the woods and freed the deer from its fenced-in yard.

Father Lászlo moved back into the monastery and out of the garage.

I went home every other weekend on the Greyhound, happy to be seeing my parents but afraid each time of what I would see. My mother was back in the printing shop, working the linotype machine, breathing the lead in.

She was alone in the apartment a lot of the time now; my father was often away making speeches to chapters of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation in other parts of America. I asked him how she was doing and he looked away for a moment, his eyes weary.

“I have come to the conclusion,” my father said, “that there is great wisdom in saying
fein
to everything. How is your mother? Your mother is
fein
.” His smile was a sad one.

They weren’t speaking much, he said. For years, he said, they had been putting $10 a month away and hiding it in a book on the shelf. It was money they were going to send me to college with.

One morning he discovered that the money—more than $400—was gone. My mother admitted that she’d taken it. She had sent it to her stepmother in Hungary, the former prostitute her father had found with his ads in the Budapest newspaper.

“To that
kurva
,” my father said, “whom she has always hated. I asked her why and she said, ‘They’re poor.’”

My father smiled. “What are
we
, millionaires?”

They moved down to Youngstown a few months later. The Franciscans had bought us a house on a quiet suburban street only a block away from the new printing shop.

Compared to our apartment on Lorain Avenue, the house was a mansion—two stories, three bedrooms upstairs, with a yard in front and back. For the first time in a long time, I saw joy in my mother’s eyes. “This is so beautiful!” she said. “
Oh
, this is
so
beautiful!”

Kay Jeffries had freckles and green eyes and thick auburn hair. She came to school from nearby Sharon, Pennsylvania, each morning on the bus and she sat next to me in French class.

I asked if I could walk her downtown after school to the bus station, and she said sure. Pretty soon I was walking her every day and we were having lunch
together
in the cafeteria every day, too. I bought her ice cream cones and cups of coffee after school and we were kissing on street corners and holding hands in the school hallways.

When I wasn’t with her, I thought about her all the time. Not just about the way her breasts felt when I pulled her up against me, but about her smile, her throaty laugh, the way her eyes sparkled and the way the wind tousled her hair. We even had our very own love song: “Daddy’s Home” by Shep and the Limelites.

I was in love and, for the first time in my life, really happy.

My father was waiting for me in the living room of our beautiful house when I got home.

“Jozsi,” he said, “I’m sorry. I know you’re happy here, but at the end of your school year we’re going to have to move back to Cleveland.”

I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. “
Why?
” I said. “You just got here. We’ve only been in this house for six weeks.”

“You will be going to college in a couple of years,” he said. “I asked the Franciscans for a raise, but they refused to give it to me. I found another job at a Hungarian life insurance company on the East Side in Cleveland. I will do that job and I will also still do the newspaper job from Cleveland. I will send my articles down here to Youngstown by mail.”

“But where will we live?” I asked.

“We will find an apartment in the Hungarian neighborhood on the East Side,” he said, “on Buckeye Road. That’s where the insurance office is.”

“Where will I go to school?”

“You will finish your last year at Cathedral Latin,” he said.

“No!” I said. “I don’t want to go back to Cathedral Latin! I hate Cathedral Latin! I don’t want to leave here!”

I started to cry.

“Jozsi,” my father said, “I’m sorry, but we have no choice. You have to go back to Latin. How would it look if you went to
three
different schools in high school? We will be living closer to Latin. We’ll be on the East Side. It will be easier for you to get there.”

I was crushed.

My mother was in the backyard of our house on Portland Avenue in Youngstown, looking at the roses she had planted, the roses she would never see bloom. She was crying soundlessly, the tears on her cheeks.

“He misses his friends,” my mother said, “he misses the applause. There aren’t enough Hungarians here to make speeches to. There aren’t enough Hungarians to come into his office to tell him he is a great man. It doesn’t have anything
to
do with your going to college, it has to do with
him
, with the silly stickers he sticks in his books.
Ex Libris!
He knows that what he is doing by taking us back to Cleveland is terrible.
He is using you as his alibi
.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Nana, please, stop it.” I felt myself starting to tremble.

“He doesn’t love you,” she said. “He doesn’t love me. He is not capable of loving anyone else. He loves himself.”

I turned and ran from her into the house.

I was reading a book about Auschwitz in my bedroom. My father came into the room.

“Auschwitz,” he said, “a terrible thing.”

“Tell me about Mauthausen,” I said. “This book mentions Mauthausen.”

“I can’t tell you much,” he said.

“But you told me we were there. When I was little.”

“No,” he said, “we were not exactly at Mauthausen. Not at Mauthausen itself. We were at an adjunct of Mauthausen called Perg.”

“But you said we ate the same food that the Jews did.”

“Yes,” he said, “but we were removed from them.”

“Did you know that at least five hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were taken to Auschwitz?” I asked.

“By the Germans,” he said. “They invaded our country. Their troops occupied Hungary just like the Russians occupy it now.”

“Did you know that the Jews were taken down to the Danube in Budapest and murdered?”

“We all heard rumors,” he said. “But that’s all they were.
We didn’t see anything firsthand
. We didn’t know.”

“What would you have done,” I asked my father, “if you would have seen it yourself? Would you have tried to stop it?”

My father looked at me a long moment.

“I could tell you that I would have,” he said. “It would be easy for me to say that to you. I could look like a big hero in my boy’s eyes. But it was a feverish and insane time. The Nyilas [Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross] were terrorizing everyone. I don’t know what I would have done if I would have seen it myself. But I hope I would have done the right thing.”

He thought about that a moment and handed the book back to me. He smiled.

“Why are you engaged in such depressing reading?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t I be reading it?”

“Of course you should,” my father said. “The more you know about history, the better. We must learn not to make the mistakes of the past.”

CHAPTER 23

[Naomi’s Journal]

Please Take Care of Joseph

CARLY

Did you and Naomi sleep together?

ZEKE

I hardly knew her.

CARLY

She told someone you had an affair with her.

ZEKE

It never happened. Maybe she fantasized. She did have an affair with your friend.

CARLY

What friend?