Siege 13 (21 page)

At one of these dinners, my father did something I'll never forget: getting up from the table, he lurched drunkenly against a shelf of figurines and caught them as they fell, picking them out of the air one two three four five as if they were suspended there, holding them between his fingers afterwards, staring, as if he was more amazed than any of us at his reflexes, at the fact that he'd managed to do it.

“See, Mariska,” Aunt Rose said, “it's nice to have a man around.” But she didn't seem very confident then, gazing at
my father in bewilderment, as though she not only hadn't expected him to catch the pieces, but didn't want him to, as if watching them shatter on the floor would have been preferable to him standing there amazed at his capacity to save something. The thing she was after, the thing she wanted from him, it would not happen until he was no longer surprised by that—his capacity to step forth, reach out, and take hold.

She was sick of the game they played.

 

I'd see that look on Aunt Rose's face many times over the years, nights I'd awaken to her sitting on my bed staring at me, as if I was a problem for which she had no solution.

“Go back to sleep,” she'd whisper. “I'm just checking on you.”

But it was impossible, closing my eyes while she was looking at me like that, and as I got older they became the times we really talked, as if the late hour, the lights off, gave us permission to broach subjects otherwise left alone.

“Did you ever want kids, Aunt Rose?”

She sighed and shrugged, muttered something about her “first husband,” one of “those pseudo-radical academics,” she called him, “about as far from your father as you could get, a narcissist who didn't realize that having an ‘open relationship' applied to the wife as well as the husband,” and then something about the “dedication” required for “making it as a woman scholar. Men have wives at home who take care of the kids,” she said, “but I'd never have that, and without the time to work I wouldn't have gotten anywhere.” She
shrugged again, looking at me. “And I'm too old for that now.” She continued sitting there a while, the room filling with whatever I was expecting her to say, something to do with my father, that it wasn't what she wanted but what he
didn't want
that was in the way—not just between the two of them, but between her and me—his inability to risk loss, to lay claim to anyone or anything. She said nothing, and I knew, even then, that it was her way of trying to protect me from disappointment, from what she had already predicted would and would not happen between them, though if she stayed quiet long enough, unnaturally enough, I might hear it anyhow—the silent admission that she didn't need kids because she had me, because I
was
her own—and that this withholding of what I wanted her so badly to say would, long after, be both an admission and my protection from it. Had she spoken the words it would have led me to form an even greater attachment to her, which would only have further confronted my father with what he was too afraid to have, driving us all apart. Though the truth is, her not saying it had exactly the same effect, at least for me.

 

I was nineteen when their relationship ended. But I was on my own long before that, in the way you're alone when your parents haven't yet realized how separate your life has become, how innumerable your secrets, though I was still nominally at home, nights when I wasn't out with friends, with boys, in deserted playgrounds, drinking, smoking dope, giggling as we rode merry-go-rounds, swings, even the slides, as if childhood joy could be restored with something as
simple as booze. More often than not part of me was hoping my father would find me—I would make a point of going out when he wasn't working nights—that he'd walk square shouldered into the field or playground or bush party and catch me with Jim MacDonald, whose hand was up my shirt, and break his arm or teeth. But he never showed.

Then there was Marc Lancaster. He was the one dealer Aunt Rose couldn't crack, never once looking distressed when she left behind the remains of a chess set. He dumped them into a bin and sold them for a quarter each, kids coming in to replace some pawn or rook gone missing from the game back home, and which was pure profit since Aunt Rose had already paid for the full set. I don't know how many times I stood there with her, trying to appreciate a bit of jade or tortoise shell or walrus tusk carved into the shape of a rearing horse. “Master Diederich made truly sublime knights,” Lancaster would say. “His pawns look like something a dog spat out, but knights, they were his forte.” Sometimes he tried to give her the chess pieces for free, but Aunt Rose refused, and the best he could do was keep a constant lookout for things she was interested in. He even travelled to Europe in the summers, always bringing back some treasures just for her.

His shop was different from the other places we went to, neat and orderly and regularly dusted. There was none of that smell you get in pawnshops or standard junk stores, the scent of something people have lived with for too long, on which they've spilled one too many beers, smoked one too many cigarettes, lain one too many children sweating sick with flu. His place was a shop of wonders. There were
original copper etchings of the collections of Albertus Seba, pictures of two-headed snakes, rare shells, Amazonian plants and butterflies laid out as if it was possible to collect every detail the world had to offer. He owned a cabinet of curiosities that belonged to Alexander Von Humboldt, beautiful with its ebony veneer, its floral marquetry, the nooks and crannies still rich with dust from the eighteenth century. One time he even showed me one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, which I spent an hour looking at, filled with vials and clippings from old maps, Lancaster leaning over my shoulder saying Cornell was a collector masquerading as an artist.

Unlike the other shop owners, he was impeccably dressed, in bespoke suits, with that perfect drape of fabric picked up in London and Paris and Milan during the summers, and worn with the kind of carelessness that makes clothes look even better.

I loved him. I couldn't help it. He was younger than Aunt Rose and my father, though still quite a bit older than me. Compared to what I knew of the world, or the little bits of Hungary my father let slip, or Aunt Rose's anecdotes, so odd as to be unreal, Lancaster seemed a window onto what I
could
know, all that was still obscure but tantalizingly out there, a real life that I might actually encounter beyond the books and stories I was already bored with.

“Why not have a game with me before you defile the set?” he'd smile, flirting with Aunt Rose. He'd reach under the counter and pull out a bottle of cognac and wag it side to side. “We could have a drink. Your daughter here could keep track of the moves.” When he winked at me his eye stayed closed for longer than it should have.

“She's not my daughter,” Aunt Rose said. By then I was too old, or too disheartened by their refusal to marry or move in together, to care.

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “What do you say?”

“I hate chess,” she replied. “It's a stupid game.”

He stood back. It was the only time I'd see him at a loss. Aunt Rose smiled: “It's one of the reasons I like collecting the figurines,” she said. “I like breaking up the sets.” She shrugged. “Chess is a stupid idea: a totally logical world with only one possible outcome.”

“There are two outcomes,” I interrupted her. She looked at me surprised, and then smiled, already nodding at what I was going to say. “There's winning, and there's stalemate,” I said, but instead of smiling back at her I was smiling at Lancaster.

“There's also forfeiture,” she whispered, frowning at both of us.

Lancaster would show up everywhere we went that last year. He always appeared with a chessboard tucked under his arm. Even when Aunt Rose took me shopping, the two of us wandering the sidewalks of Uptown, where I so rarely went, picking out the clothes I loved back then—leg warmers, jodhpurs, gauchos—somehow he was always there. I thought he was stalking Aunt Rose, though neither of us was particularly alarmed, since he seemed slick but harmless. To some degree she encouraged it, inviting him to sit with us, to set up his chessboard, then making a move or two before she waved him away, laughing, “No, really, it's so boring.” She'd motion for me to get up, and I'd look back and Lancaster would be sitting there smiling at me, pointing at the chessboard,
inviting me to take up the game Aunt Rose wasn't willing to play—at least not entirely.

If my father noticed, he said nothing. He was indifferent to Lancaster, didn't know the guy, wouldn't have recognized him on the street, never made a single comment when his name came up between Aunt Rose and me.

It was a whole half year before I got up the nerve to walk into Lancaster's store one evening, come up to the counter, and tell him I wanted to play.

He was looking through a box of old jewellery, his fingers scraping the bottom as if looking for a hidden compartment. “You ready to play chess?”

He turned over the sign in the front door, twisted the lock, and motioned with a finger for me to come into the back room, where there were two couches and a couple of easy chairs arranged around a low table covered with empty wine, whiskey and beer bottles that he swept into a box. He dragged the arm of his linen shirt across the table to clear away any remaining crumbs or ash, then pulled a chess set off a shelf and set up the figurines. I sat down, sinking so far into the sofa it felt as if I was going to fall out the bottom.

Lancaster showed me how the pieces moved, basic strategy, took my hand and placed it on each pawn, rook, knight, and together we moved them along the white and black squares. “Would you like a drink?” he asked, and when I nodded he came back with two glasses of red wine, proposing a toast to “all the pieces left over” by Aunt Rose.

It took me a second to get up, struggling against the pull of the couch. But I did it, leaning over to place my mouth on his. And then he was the one who couldn't find his feet.

We did eventually play, not just that night, but across many nights, huddled in that room half undressed, drinking wine, and laughing. I didn't bother to hide it from my father, walking out the front door, through the overgrown yard with its piles of bricks and firewood and the two old trucks my father must have been interested in enough, who knows when, to put up on blocks and cover with blue tarps against the rain. I went along Michigan Avenue, my intentions plain for the neighbors to see, hoping they'd tell my father I was out at all hours, and finally arriving at Lancaster's shop.

Lancaster was self-involved enough to think I believed the things he said: that he'd inherited enough money to do as he pleased, and what pleased him, he said, were “Beautiful things.” We were on the couch when he said this, our bodies wedged beside each other, a quilt protecting us from the cold that winter in the uninsulated back room. “Beautiful things,” he said, running a hand down my breasts, lingering on my belly, between my legs.

He never once asked what I was interested in, either thinking he already knew, or not caring, though I wouldn't have known what to say if he had, only that I liked hearing about the places he'd gone, descriptions of Rome, London, New York, the view from the Eiffel Tower, pubs along the Thames, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Schönbrunn, and the things he showed me, things that never made it onto the shelves of his store, already sold before he'd bought them, placed into registered packages sent out after hours. But what I loved the most, what he never stopped tempting me with, were the descriptions of Budapest, the city my father refused to speak about—lights along the Danube as casino boats and
barges from Turkey and Bulgaria and Greece drifted in the night; the neo-Gothic architecture of the parliament buildings, like the whitened bones of a fallen bird; the grime of the ninth district and its alleys twisting onto some new bar, cellar restaurant, another statue of some failed statesman; the New York Kávéház and its chandeliers and steam and ghosts of a hundred writers and artists perished in wars, concentration camps, the interrogation rooms of the ÁVÓ and SS. They were the places I'd fantasized about long ago, when I was a girl checking out books from the library, but now I could ask questions of someone who'd actually been there, an emissary from my dreams. It was all my father had denied me, my heritage, a sense of self beyond the vinyl factory, the black-rimmed snow along Michigan Avenue at the end of winter, the phony room at Aunt Rose's.

Our relationship didn't last, of course, and it's easy to see now that beyond the stories, the exoticism that had more to do with recovering my father than any attraction to Lancaster, I really had no use for him. He was still part of that town, a mouthpiece for its banal escape fantasies, still someone I could get to by walking along Michigan Avenue.

I was staying at Aunt Rose's the night everything fell apart. We were supposed to have dinner, Aunt Rose flitting around the place more excited than usual, setting candles on the table, putting a bottle of champagne into the fridge, working hard at getting the roast just right, far more preparation than she normally did. When I asked what the occasion was she only winked at me. “Your father and I have been together for many years,” she said. “He spends more time here than he does at home.”

I nodded. It was true. But I didn't tell her it was because to have her at his place, night after night, was to let her in, and as the danger of that increased over the years he was always in Aunt Rose's bed, which meant she was shut out completely.

My father never showed up for dinner. Aunt Rose grew silent as the minutes ticked by, until finally she shrugged, told me to sit down, and I sat and ate in the midst of that empty banquet, watching her lean against the wall by the front window drinking glass after glass of wine, occasionally reaching into her pocket to clutch at something, drawing out her hand as if she'd been bitten by whatever was in there.