Paris: A Love Story (11 page)

In the process of researching the biography of the Swedish hero, I learned of my Jewish roots. While interviewing a woman in Budapest who had been rescued by Wallenberg, she remarked matter-of-factly, “Unfortunately, Wallenberg arrived too late for your maternal grandparents.” We were Jewish. Raised Roman Catholic, I was shocked to learn this. I had been told my grandparents died under an Allied bombing raid. So many Hungarians had—I had no reason to question this.

I called my parents that evening from Budapest. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked my father. He turned cold and did not want to discuss our roots, or how my parents survived
while my grandparents did not. “You will never understand any of this,” he said flatly. “You are an American. You have no idea what we went through. We were never Jewish. We were not religious people. We were Hungarians.”

I returned to Budapest a number of times, each time learning a little more about our family history. My great-grandfather, I discovered from Jewish archives, Maurice Mandl, born in 1848, was the son of the chief rabbi of Dobris, Bohemia. German was his mother tongue, Franz Joseph his emperor. In his early twenties, he jumped onto a rickety train to Budapest. He soon learned Hungarian and rode the crest of Budapest’s golden years in the late nineteenth century. His rabbi father traveled from Bohemia to Budapest only once, to officiate at Maurice’s wedding in the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street in 1876. Somewhere along the way they
magyarized
their name from Mandl to Marton. Maurice and his wife, Tekla, had six children, among them, in the style of the newly emancipated and secular Hungarian Jews, a lawyer, an engineer, a teacher, and a grain merchant, my grandfather. Great-grandfather Maurice’s apartment in Budapest’s fashionable Leopoldtown overlooked the Danube. His sons were decorated in World War I. Thirty years later, his grandsons were forbidden to wear their country’s uniform or to bear arms. They—my father among them—were sent off to forced labor on the Russian Front.

The Martons stayed through the Nazi terror, which they barely survived. My maternal grandparents were less fortunate. Living in the northeast city of Miskolc, they were among the first Jews rounded up by Adolf Eichmann and his Hungarian
allies and forced onto an Auschwitz transport. The last word my mother had from her parents was a postcard slipped through the crack of a cattle car headed for the death camp.

•   •   •

With my insistent explorations of our family history, for the first time in his new life in America my father had lost control of his own narrative. My parents, bruised survivors of the twentieth century, were not pleased with my probing. For quite a while, our bond frayed, and they kept their distance. Peter was wonderful during this painful time for me. “How much more interesting to have a Jewish wife,” he said, “than a lapsed Catholic.” He played mediator between my parents and me, and slowly we healed the rift. Peter returned from one of his Middle East trips with a beautiful ring he had made for me from an early Jewish coin minted in the Holy Land. I still treasure it.

Wallenberg changed my life in another way. I decided to become a full-time writer. It was a big leap: from knocking out minute-and-a-half television scripts to writing a full-size book. Peter could not have been more supportive. To encourage me, he had the ABC art department make up a framed sign that said, “One page at a time, One day at a time. You are a great talent.” He hung it on the wall over my desk, where it stayed.

When I finished
Wallenberg,
I remember Peter’s mother, a woman I admired for her elegance and dry wit, saying, “Well, Kati, I hope you got
that
out of your system.” She meant writing books. But I had not. I was already at work on the second.

I had a moment of clarity. The children and I were staying at my mother-in-law’s house in Ottawa. Lizzie and Chris,
perfect English tots, had composed a poem to their granny. I did not want to be in the room when they recited it, as I knew I would be reduced to tears. So, from around the corner, I listened to them stumbling over their childish ode. From Granny Jennings only silence. Poking my head around the corner, I asked, Did you like it, Granny? “Yes, dear,” she answered, crisply. “But no sense giving them a big head with too much praise.” Oh, I said to myself. That is how you raised your son, too. And no amount of love on my part will ever fill that deficit.

But we were so happy as a family, doting on our beautiful children and our new house in Hampstead. Peter could still be the world’s most loving, irresistible charmer. When the
Atlantic
published my story about the missing Swede, Peter wrote me a “fan letter.” “I just wanted to say that I read your article on that Swedish fellow in the
Pacific Monthly
and the way you put things together, I just wanted to say, aw shucks, it would be worth going missing to have you start out in search of me. Signed, a Fan.”

Bleary-eyed from night feeds, I struggled to hang on to my precarious identity as a writer.
Wallenberg
’s strong reception gave me a huge boost, however. The
Washington Post
reviewer wrote that my work “excels in descriptions of her native Hungary and the Soviet Gulag . . . and the sensitive treatment of personalities involved. It is the best written of the four [Wallenberg biographies] and may well become the standard Wallenberg biography.” I was encouraged by letters from all over the world. The distinguished French film director Louis Malle
wrote, “I just finished reading
Wallenberg
and was deeply moved by the tragedy of his life . . . which seems to come right out of Kafka . . . Your book is wonderfully written and I was very impressed by the care and thoroughness you put into researching this incredibly complex life story.”

I also started writing a column for the London
Times,
mostly on the theme of British sexism—something I was experiencing as a pregnant (again), no-longer-employed “mum.” “It was during my first London dinner party,” I wrote in my October 30, 1982, column, “that I was initiated into my new status as woman-to-be-seen-not-heard.”

•   •   •

But not even my more housebound life as a freelance writer and full-time mother calmed our explosive relationship. “I wish sometimes that I didn’t have these weird bouts of
need,
” Peter wrote to me from a reporting trip to Budapest. “But I never wish I didn’t love you as much as I do (even when it hurts). I do not wish ever to be with
anyone else.
”

The very qualities that my family and friends encouraged—my irreverence and my drive—through Peter’s eyes became liabilities. “Glib,” he called me, and “ambitious.” I vowed to change—to transform myself into a London “mum,” content to push Lizzie and Chris’s prams in Holland Park and Hampstead Heath. What could be so hard about that?

We eventually accepted the network’s call to move to New York. Here is how Peter described our decision: “My first instinct was to say no, altogether. Kati was the one who
convinced me this was a very important job and you didn’t just say no idly. We had a long, very difficult time in deciding to come.”

Things changed irrevocably for us once we moved to New York. The relentless public attention and pressure to stay at the very top of the network’s precarious summit slowly eroded our intimacy. My husband became a star—America’s favorite anchor. We lived what seemed a dream life: a golden couple in Gotham. To a large degree, the week’s news ratings governed his mood, and there was always another one coming.

•   •   •

On June 16, 1989, Peter and I stood side by side in a sea of 300,000 Hungarians in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square and shared a powerful and, for me, personal moment. The reburial of the fallen leaders of the 1956 uprising marked the ceremonial end of Communist rule. Though my parents and I were not together for this deeply satisfying moment, we had lived to see the fall of the twentieth century’s second destructive movement. My joy was reflected in the tear-stained faces on that crowded Budapest square.

•   •   •

Despite his great talent and tremendous success, Peter was an insecure man. He never got over the stigma he felt regarding his lack of a formal education. Combined with an emotionally chilly mother, this bred his insecurities but also fueled his drive to reach the very top of his profession. Peter was both proud of my multilingual education and resentful of my two college degrees. He also thought I was overly confident, and
needed taking down a peg. He enjoyed throwing me off balance. But he was as hard on himself as he was on me.

Once, en route to a Washington dinner in honor of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Peter, appraising my black velvet strapless gown, asked, “Are you sure you want to wear
that?
” Seated next to Prince Charles, I spent the evening tugging self-consciously at my décolletage, anxious not to offend His Royal Highness with the display. The other thing I recall about that dinner was that every time the prince moved his chin five inches to the left, a courtier on bended knee would appear.

Ten years into our marriage, I fell in love with a warm, funny, loving man who did not think me glib or overly ambitious, just funny. I told Peter I had found happiness and did not think I could give it up. He pleaded and I stayed. I could not bear breaking up our family. During the next six years, Peter and I raised our children and I wrote two more books.
^**
But I missed the bone-deep happiness we once had, without which I could not thrive. I began to think that Peter loved the
idea
of me. In reality, he was searching for a wife who would fill the role his mother had not: a full-time supporter of all his efforts and needs, only minimally distracted by her own.

*
Peter had been ABC News anchor once before, in the sixties, before he was ready for it. It was then that he began his apprenticeship as a serious television journalist, covering the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, before becoming the network’s chief foreign correspondent, based in London.

**
The Polk Conspiracy—Murder and Cover-up in the Case of CBS Correspondent George Polk
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) and
A Death in Jerusalem
(New York: Pantheon, 1994).

We always returned to [Paris] no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it.

—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

It is Christmas 1993. I am spending the holidays at my sister’s house just outside Paris, with Elizabeth, now fourteen, and Chris, twelve. After fifteen turbulent years, I have left Peter. It was a seemingly trivial incident that finally decided it. A few months earlier, in late summer 1993, we were just leaving a party in East Hampton at the home of our friends Howard and Jennifer Stringer. Standing in their driveway as others were saying good night, I turned to my husband and said, “Shall we go, sweetheart?” In answer, Peter tossed the car keys at me and said, “You can go, if you want.” I felt humiliated in front of our friends and vowed never again to submit to such looks of pity and embarrassment.

The next morning, when Peter and the children packed the car to begin our annual family vacation in Canada, I told Peter I would join them later. Later that day, I called him in Ottawa and told him I wanted a divorce. It was a cowardly way to break the news, but I knew he would try to stop me from leaving, as he had done before, if I asked him in person.

By Christmas, Peter had not yet moved out of our apartment. He was sleeping on a couch, and life was unbearably tense.

•   •   •

In Paris, my sister, Juli, is her steady self and we are determined to produce our usual festive Christmas for our children, her two and my two. Paris never looks more magical than at Christmas, when the shops dazzle with tiny white lights, and the food markets show off their delicately arranged, rosy filets of beef, pearly fish in heaps, and, of course, the dizzying array of cheeses, fruits, and pastries. With our four children in tow, we shop for our feast of roast goose and chestnuts. I marvel at the pride with which the butcher presents us our goose, and how lovingly he slips paper socks on the bird’s legs. I am feigning a festive spirit I do not feel. I feel lost.

I have passed forty and I have no sense of my own future. I am exhausted from trying to keep our family together, from the high-wire act of our marriage, often played out in the media. It was assumed I was leaving because I could not adjust to life in the giant shadow of Peter’s celebrity. Our problems went so much deeper than tabloid reports, of course. But so did the ties that bound us. Their names were Elizabeth and Christopher.

On Christmas Day, Peter arrived at my sister’s house. He said he wanted to try one last time to save our marriage. “Our family,” he said. I wasn’t leaving him, but “our family.” I adored our children. I wanted more than anything to preserve
us
. I was still torn, still conflicted, I still loved him, but I could not stay with him. Time and breathtaking professional success did not diminish his bouts of jealousy and insecurity. Moreover, I had given him cause for his anger: I had confessed to an affair
and then stayed when he pleaded with me to try one more time to save our marriage.