In the Darkroom (6 page)

Above the Odense photo albums, on two upper shelves, a set of figurines paraded: characters from
The Wizard of Oz
. My father had found them in a store in Manhattan, after my parents divorced and he'd moved back to the city. They were ornately accessorized. Dorothy sported ruby-red shoes and a woven basket, with a detachable Toto peeking out from under a red-and-white-checked cloth. The Tin Man wore a red heart on a chain and clutched a tiny oil can. The Scarecrow spewed tufts of straw, and the Lion displayed a silver-plated medal that read
COURAGE
. My father had strung wires to the head and limbs of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West, turning her into a marionette. I paused before the dangling form and gave it a furtive push. The witch bobbled unsteadily on her broom.

My father pulled the drapes aside a few inches so we could slip through a glass door onto the terrace. I'd asked to see the view. The deck ran the length of the house and was lined with concrete flower boxes. Nothing was growing in them, except weeds. “You have to plant geraniums in May,” my father said, by way of explanation. In May, she had been lying in a hospital room in Thailand.

The lawn sloped steeply to the street. Down the center, a path of paving stones was shaded by huge and gnarled chestnut trees, an arboreal specter that put me in mind of Oz's Haunted Forest (“I'd Turn Back If I Were You …”). Smashed shells and shriveled bits of nut meat littered the steps. From our aerie, you could see down a series of hills to a thickly wooded valley. To the right of the deck was a small orchard my father had planted when she first moved in. She enumerated the varieties: sour cherry, peach, apricot, apple, walnut. “Strange, though,” she said, “this year they bore no fruit.” Her horticultural inventory reminded her of the long-ago resident gardener who had tended the grounds of the Friedman villa in the Buda Hills, the villa where my father had spent every summer as a boy. “The gardener's family lived in the cottage on our property,” she recalled.

She leaned over the far edge of the deck and pointed to a bungalow a half block below us, the only small structure on the street. “He lives there,” my father said.

“Who?”

“Bader.”

“
Bader?
”

“
Baaader
,” my father enunciated, correcting both my pronunciation and my failure to recognize the name. “Laci Baaader.” Laci, diminutive for László. “The gardener's son.”

“You were playmates?”

“Haaardly. I was one of those.” Jews, she meant.

“That's weird,” I said.

“What?”

“The coincidence. His living on your street now.”

My father didn't think so. “He lives in his father's house.” The gardener's cottage that sat on my grandfather's property. She pointed to one of the residential McMansions a stone's throw from the Bader cottage. I could just see over the high concrete wall that moated it. It was, she said, the old Friedman villa. “There!”

The news rattled me. I had suspected that my father had purchased Buda Hills real estate as a way of recovering all that the Friedmans had lost. I hadn't understood that my father had bought a house directly overlooking the scene of the crime.

“Waaall, it
waaas
there,” she amended. “They remodeled it, into that atrocity.” Nonetheless, some weeks after my father had arrived in Budapest on an exploratory visit in 1989, he'd tried to buy the atrocity. “It wasn't for sale.” When a house nearby came on the market that fall, he'd paid the asking price at once, $131,250, in cash.

The house proved to be a disaster zone of shoddy and half-finished construction. My father summoned Laci Bader. “He took one look and he said, ‘This is no good!' ” The roof was a sieve, the pipes broken, the insulation missing, the aluminum wiring a crazy-quilt death trap. “If you drilled into the wall, you'd get electrocuted.” It took most of a year, and tens of thousands of dollars more, to make the place habitable.

The house still needed significant maintenance, for which my father often enlisted Bader. “Now that I'm a lady, Bader fixes everything,” she said. “Men
have
to help me. I don't lift a finger.” My father gave me a pointed look. “It's one of the great advantages of being a woman,” she said. “You write about the disadvantages of being a woman, but I've
only
found advantages!” I wondered at the way my father's new identity was in a dance with the old, her break from the past enlisted in an ongoing renegotiation with his history. She hadn't regained the family property, but by her change in gender, she'd brought the Friedmans' former gardener's son back into service.

We went back inside, my father pulling the drapes shut again. She said she'd show me to my quarters. I followed her up the dark stairwell to the second floor, and into one of the three bedrooms.

“I sleep here sometimes, but I'm giving it to you because it's got the view,” she said. She gestured toward the far wall of windows, which was shrouded in thick blackout liners covered by lace curtains. I inched the layers aside to see what lay behind them: closed casement windows that looked out over a concrete balcony, covered in dead leaves. A fraying hammock hung from rusted hooks. The walls were painted a pale pink and the room was blandly, impersonally furnished: a double bed in a white-painted wood frame, a white wooden wardrobe, a straight-back chair (an extra from the dining-room set downstairs), and an old television on a metal stand on wheels. A generic oil painting of a flower bouquet seemed to belong, like the rest of the decor, to a '60s Howard Johnson's.

“I had Ilonka sew this,” my father said, gesturing toward the matching fuschia duvet cover and pillowcases. “I built the bed frame. And the wardrobe.”

“You're still doing carpentry?”

She said her workbench was in the basement. “Like in Yorktown.” She rapped her knuckles on the side of the wardrobe to demonstrate its solid craftsmanship. “You can hang your things in here,” she said.

I opened the wardrobe doors. My father followed my gaze into its shadowy innards and grimaced. Stuffed inside her hand-built armoire was a full armament of male clothing: three-piece business suits, double-breasted blazers, pin-striped shirts, khaki trousers, ski sweaters, rock-climbing knickers, plaid flannel jackets, hiking boots, oxfords, loafers, boat shoes, silk ties, wool socks, undershirts, BVDs, and the tuxedo my father wore to a family wedding.

“I need to get rid of all of this,” she said. “Someone will want these.”

“Who?”

“Talk to your husband.”

“He's not my—” My boyfriend and I wouldn't get married for a few more years. I could hear an old anxious hesitancy rising in my voice, which had suddenly lofted into helium registers. “He's not your size,” I said, willing my voice to a lower pitch.

“These are quality clothes!” The hangars rattled as she slammed the closet door.

She left me to unpack. Ten minutes later, a summons from the adjoining bedroom. “Susaaan, come here!”

She was standing before a dressing table with a mirror framed in vanity lights. I recognized it: the makeup table for fashion models that used to sit in my father's photo studio in Manhattan. She held an outfit in each hand, a yellow sundress with flounces and a navy-blue frock with a sailor-suit collar. “Which should I wear?”

I said I didn't know. And thought, petulantly: change your clothes all you want, you're still the same person.

“It's hot out—I'll wear the sundress.” She started peeling off her top. I backed toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To unpack.”

“Oh, come now,” she said, half in, half out of her blouse. “We're all women here.”

She pulled the top over her head and gestured toward the closet. “Help me pick out the shoes to go with the dress.”

I stood in the threshold, one foot in, one foot out.

My father gave me a familiar half-grin. “Come closer, I won't bite!”

One evening in the early winter of 1976, an event occurred that would mark my childhood and forever after stand as a hinge moment in my life. The episode lay bare to my seventeen-year-old mind the threat undergirding the “traditional” arrangement of the sexes. Not just in principle and theory, but in brutal fact.

I was in my room, nodding over a book, when I was jolted awake by a loud crash. Someone was breaking into the house, and then pounding up the stairs with blood-curdling howls. It was my father, violating a restraining order. Six months earlier he had been barred from the premises. I heard wood splintering, a door giving way before a baseball bat. Then screams, a thudding noise. “Call the police,” my mother cried as she fled past my room. When I dialed 911, the dispatcher told me a squad car was on its way.

“Already?”

Yes, the dispatcher said. Some minutes earlier, an anonymous caller had reported “an intruder” at the same address.

The police arrived and an ambulance. The paramedics carried out on a stretcher the man my mother had recently begun seeing. He had been visiting that evening. His shirt was soaked in blood, and he had gone into shock. My father had attacked him with the baseball bat, then with the Swiss Army knife he always carried in his pocket. The stabbings, in the stomach, were multiple. It took the Peekskill Hospital's ER doctors the better part of the night to stanch the bleeding. Getting the blood out of the house took longer. It was everywhere: on floors, walls, the landing, the stairs, the kitchen, the front hall. The living room looked like a scene out of
Carrie
, which, as it happened, had just come out that fall. When the house went on the market a year later, my mother and I were still trying to scrub stains from the carpet.

The night of his break-in, my father was treated for a superficial cut on the forehead and delivered to the county jail. He was released before morning. The next afternoon, he rang the bell of our next-door neighbor, wearing a slightly soiled head bandage, trussed up, as my mother put it later, “like the Spirit of '76.” He was intent on purveying his side of the story: he'd entered the house to “save” his family from a trespasser. My father's side prevailed, at least in the public forum. Two local newspapers (including one that my mother had begun writing for) ran items characterizing the night's drama as a husband's attempt to expel an intruder. The court reduced the charges to a misdemeanor and levied a small fine.

In the subsequent divorce trial, my father claimed to be the “wronged” husband. The judge acceded to my father's request to pay no alimony and a mere $50 a week for the support of two children. My father also succeeded in having a paragraph inserted into the divorce decree that presented him as the injured party: by withdrawing her affections in the last months of their marriage, my mother had “endangered the defendant's physical well being” and “caused the defendant to receive medical treatment and become ill.”

“
I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside
,” my father had written me. As I confronted, nearly four decades and nine time zones away, my father's new self, it was hard for me to purge that image of the violent man from her new persona. Was I supposed to believe the one had been erased by the other, as handily as the divorce decree recast my father as the “endangered” victim? Could a new identity not only redeem but expunge its predecessor?

As I came of age in postwar America, the search for identity was assuming Holy Grail status, particularly for middle-class Americans seeking purchase in the new suburban sprawl. By the '70s, “finding yourself” was the vaunted magic key, the portal to psychic well-being. In my own suburban town in Westchester County, it sometimes felt as if everyone I knew, myself included, was seeking guidance from books with titles like
Quest for Identity
,
Self-Actualization
,
Be the Person You Were Meant to Be
. Our teen center sponsored “encounter groups” where high schoolers could uncover their inner selfhood; local counseling services offered therapy sessions to “get in touch” with “the real you”; mothers in our neighborhood held consciousness-raising meetings to locate the “true” woman trapped inside the housedress. Liberating the repressed self was the ne plus ultra of the newly hatched women's movement, as it was the clarion call for so many identity movements to follow. To fail in that quest was to suffer an “identity crisis,” the term of art minted by the reigning psychologist of the era, Erik Erikson.

But who is the person you “were meant to be”? Is
who you are
what you make of yourself, the self you fashion into being, or is it determined by your inheritance and all its fateful forces, genetic, familial, ethnic, religious, cultural, historical? In other words: is identity what you choose, or what you can't escape?

If someone were to ask me to declare my identity, I'd say that, along with such ordinaries as nationality and profession, I am a woman and I am a Jew. Yet when I look deeper into either of these labels, I begin to doubt the grounds on which I can make the claim. I am a woman who has managed to bypass most of the rituals of traditional femininity. I didn't have children. I didn't yearn for maternity; my “biological clock” never alarmed me. I didn't marry until well into middle age—and the wedding, to my boyfriend of twenty years, was a spur-of-the-moment affair at City Hall. I lack most domestic habits—I am an indifferent cook, rarely garden, never sew. I took up knitting for a while, though only after reading a feminist crafts book called
Stitch 'n Bitch
.

I am a Jew who knows next to nothing of Jewish law, ritual, prayers. At Passover seders, I mouth the first few words of the kiddush—with furtive peeks at the Haggadah's phonetic rendition and only the dimmest sense of the meaning. I never attended Hebrew school; I wasn't bat mitzvahed. We never belonged to the one synagogue in Yorktown Heights, which, anyway, was so loosey-goosey Reform it might as well have been Unitarian. I'm not, technically speaking, even Jewish. My mother is Jewish only on her father's side, a lack of matrilineage that renders me gentile to all but the most liberal wing of the rabbinate.