In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  The doctor, the orderly said, wouldn’t be in until eight p.m. “Come back later,” Ágnes translated.

  “Stefi?” I whispered, laying aside the Lindt chocolates and P. Howard pulp novels I’d brought to cheer her up. “Stefi, can you hear me?” She gave no response. “Stefi, please wake up. It’s Susan. Talk to me.”

  Four hours later, the doctor appeared. The room was dark now, a radio announcer chattering from a boom box on the other side of the ward. My father’s breath came in guttering gasps. Her condition hadn’t improved.

  Dr. Anna Mária Molnárné advised me (though she spoke English) to relay my questions through Ágnes and answered them in streams of Hungarian, not meeting my eye.

  “Maybe gallbladder inflammation,” Ágnes summarized.

  Another flood of words.

  “Maybe an infection. Or it could be a little stroke.” Ágnes hesitated. “The doctor says, ‘You should prepare yourself for the worst.’ ”

  I returned that night to my father’s house. The doctor’s words hadn’t sunk in, or rather, I hadn’t let them. I was thinking I needed some sleep to prepare for tomorrow’s rounds: a morning appointment with a dementia-care specialist, a strategy phone session with a home nurse I’d hired, an afternoon consultation with a guardianship lawyer. I was plotting how to spring my father from St. János. I let myself in the front door—blessedly, in the haste of her forced departure, she hadn’t armed the burglar alarm—and wandered through the silent rooms. I’d never been in the place alone. I’d so often felt confined here by my father’s overweening presence. Now her absence overwhelmed me. I opened the fridge, considered the pizza that Ágnes had kindly left for me, closed the door again. I wasn’t hungry. I climbed the dark wooden stairs to bed.

  Toward morning, a nightmare gripped me, a terrible one. In the dream, I am lying in bed in my father’s house. A noise startles me. Someone has broken in. I arm myself with a serrated grapefruit knife and make my way into the hall. I see that my father’s bedroom door is shut. I reach for the knob, but it’s locked. I hear a sound behind me. I turn. My father is racing up the stairs, her raised arm brandishing a cleaver.

  Terror woke me. The clock on the bedside table read 5:15 a.m. I lay awhile, quelling my panic. Was I still so afraid of her, even as she lay unconscious in a hospital room? Or was it her fear I was channeling? Maybe the meat cleaver wasn’t aimed at me but intended for one of the many invaders of the many homes she’d spent her life defending, “saaaving.” Or maybe, for all our recent intimacy, I remained among the invaders. I drifted in a troubled twilight until the phone rang. It was just past six a.m.

  “Hallo,” the voice in the receiver said. “This is Dr. Molnárné.”

  Yes, I said, unsure if I was awake or still in a dream.

  “I’m sorry to inform you. Your father is dead.”

  “What? How could … this be?”

  “Some time after five this morning.”

  “I see,” I said, now alert—and accusatory. “What was the cause?”

  “Nothing special,” the doctor said. “She just died.”

  What was the cause? How could this be? The deeper questions weren’t for the doctor. But the person I wanted to ask them of was gone. Days later, compelled by an inchoate urgency, I would search the recesses of the house for answers. What was the cause? How could this be? In the cellar, I found the key hanging from its string beneath the workbench pegboard, unlocked the steel cabinet, and yanked out the cardboard box that contained the “important” documents she’d allowed me only glimpses of. “If anything happens to me, you should know where this is.” What trove of illumination did it hold?

  Here were the property deeds and the high school report card she’d shown me years before, the many lapsed passports and her U.S. naturalization papers. Here was my parents’ divorce decree, my father’s letter of application to repatriate in Hungary, my mother’s handful of letters to my grandparents in the late 1950s, with the addendum from my father announcing my birth. Beneath them was a manila envelope with five aerogrammes from the early to mid-’90s, addressed in spidery handwriting in Hungarian, postmarked Tel Aviv: letters from my grandmother Rozi in the last decade of her life. Later I would have them translated. They were appeals for a response: “My health is very bad.” … “I have been very weak and I am still weak.” … “I have a horrible life.” … “My Pistike, do not leave me!” The last letter, dated October 27, 1995, when Rozi was 95, ended this way: “Please write me, Pista. I suffer very much because you do not think of me. I am very alone, please let me know that you are alive, how you live, about your work. Please reply immediately. With many loving kisses, Mommy.”

  At the very bottom of the box, swathed in several layers of plastic, I discovered a six-inch stack of yellowing papers bearing stamps and seals and button-and-string closures, scores of sheets, individually folded. I sunk to the floor and pawed through them, looking for what, I couldn’t say.

  Születési anyakönyvi kivonat: Friedman Sámuel. 1867 Október 15. Férfi. (Certificate of Birth: Sámuel Friedman. October 15, 1867. Male.)

  Halotti anyakönyveből kivonat: Friedman Jacob. 1886 Március 25. Férfi. Izraelita. (Certificate of Death: Jacob Friedman. March 25, 1886. Male. Jewish.)

  Házassági anyakönyvi kivonat: Spišské Podhradie/Szepesváralja, Ezerkilencszázhuszonhárom, 1923 November 4, négy. Friedman Jenő—kereskedő—izr. Grünberger Rozália—izr. (Certificate of Marriage: Spišské Podhradie/Szepesváralja, November 4, 1923. Jenő Friedman—Dealer—Jewish. Rozália Grünberger—Jewish.)

  Certificate after certificate after certificate, some of them duplicates. And duplicates of duplicates. In a quarter of an hour, I’d reached the end of a cache of legal identities, opaque and unenlightening.

  I couldn’t get into the attic. My father had locked it, and when she’d summoned the police that fateful night, they’d taken the interior keys. And then lost them. I called a locksmith to break into the attic, and then into the attic’s two inner rooms.

  The reconstructed darkroom was just as it had been when my father gave me the tour of the house in the fall of 2004. Dust covered every surface of every piece of equipment: wall-mounted enlargers, developing sinks, processing trays, brown jugs for fixer and developer fluid, printing tongs, timer, safelight. … A steel cabinet against one wall held a retinue of top-of-the-line cameras: Hasselblads, a Rolleiflex, a Leica, Olympuses, a bellows camera with mahogany frame. Another cabinet bulged with lenses, battery packs, cables, filters, tripods, video cams, lightboxes, a sound-recording console. On the floor, beside a furled projector screen and tucked into carrying bags and leather cases, were a half-dozen movie cameras of various generations, including the old Swiss Bolex that a teenage István had purchased during World War II. I thought: my father’s house was already a mausoleum when she was alive. She had locked up her history in every room: her boyhood in a cabinet in the basement, her profession behind an attic door, her cross-dressing “flamboyance” in a wardrobe in the upstairs hall. I closed the door and headed for the attic’s neighboring inner sanctum.

  This room was also part darkroom. The six-foot-high photo-print drum dryer was strung with cobwebs. The cabinets behind it were stuffed with studio lights, more tripods, and box after box of contact sheets. The husks of several beetles and a wasp lay on the floor. A large mound rose beside the drying machine, covered with a utility blanket. For a crazy moment, I thought the drape hid a body. I lifted a corner and peered beneath to find a mountain of discarded men’s clothes: suits, coats, blazers, trousers, vests, button-down shirts, polos, dress shoes, hiking boots, mountain parkas, and a dozen or more large plastic bags into which male apparel had been sorted by category: pajamas, undershirts, briefs, belts, ties. One bag contained nothing but shoelaces. I stared at this midden heap of masculinity for a long time before letting the curtain fall. My presentiment had been right; a corpse was hidden here.

  I called the locksmith again and asked him to replace the locks on the attic
doors. For so long I had been determined to decode the riddle of my father. Now, it seemed important to honor her inscrutability.

  On the morning of May 14, an hour after the doctor’s phone call, I climbed the four flights of stairs in the internal-medicine building of St. János and traveled a long corridor to its terminus at the physician’s station, where Dr. Molnárné was seated.

  “Explain to me why she died,” I insisted, but she insisted she didn’t know. “Sepsis, heart problem, stroke. Could be anything.”

  She gestured toward a large transparent trash bag. “Here,” she said. “Don’t forget this.” The sack contained my father’s “effects”: damp towels, her compression hose (for varicose veins), a set of unwashed eating utensils, her reading glasses, her terry cloth slippers, and the plastic sip cup with her name on it.

  A maid making a desultory show of mopping the floor began prodding me out of the way with her mop handle.

  “Stop it!” I snapped. She made a face and plowed past me.

  “Do you want to view the body?” Dr. Molnárné asked.

  ————

  My father lay on the far cot by the window in the overpopulated ward, the cot where I’d sat with her the day before. She’d died without privacy, but at least, I consoled myself, she hadn’t died alone. Early morning shadow dimmed the room. A sheet covered the bed and her body, a white rose placed on top of it. I inched the sheet aside to find another shroud beneath, wound around her. I felt for the beginning of the winding and unspooled it slowly from her head and shoulders. Her face was turned toward the window. Her eyes, so resolutely shut during her last miserable days, were open. I began to shake, and then, control faltering, to sob. An elderly patient in the adjacent bed leaned over to pat my back. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said. I was grateful for her touch. And oddly comforted by the knowledge that my father had died here in the female wing, surrounded by women.

  I studied my father’s face, averted as it so often had been in life. All the years she was alive, she’d sought to settle the question of who she was. Jew or Christian? Hungarian or American? Woman or man? So many oppositions. But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought: there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death. Either you are living or you are not. Everything else is molten, malleable.

  As I tucked the sheet back around my father, a nurse came into the room. She presented me with a repurposed bandage envelope, containing two small items that hadn’t made it into the trash bag of my father’s loose effects. The nurse had collected them while preparing the body.

  When I left for the United States a few days later, I would take the items with me, along with another token of remembrance, the cloth-bound prayer book my father had received on the occasion of her bar mitzvah, on the day a boy became a man. “For you,” the nurse said, as she handed me the envelope. “Stefánie’s.” Inside it was a pair of pearl earrings.

  ALSO BY SUSAN FALUDI

  The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

  Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man

  Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SUSAN FALUDI is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Baffler, among other publications. You can sign up for author updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Preface: In Pursuit

  PART I

  1. Returns and Departures

  2. Rear Window

  3. The Original from the Copy

  4. Home Insecurity

  5. The Person You Were Meant to Be

  6. It’s Not Me Anymore

  7. His Body into Pieces. Hers.

  8. On the Altar of the Homeland

  9. Ráday 9

  PART II

  10. Something More and Something Other

  11. A Lady Is a Lady Whatever the Case May Be

  12. The Mind Is a Black Box

  13. Learn to Forget

  14. Some Kind of Psychic Disturbance

  15. The Grand Hotel Royal

  16. Smitten in the Hinder Parts

  17. The Subtle Poison of Adjustment

  18. You’re Out of the Woods

  19. The Transformation of the Patient Is Without a Doubt

  PART III

  20. Pity, O God, the Hungarian

  21. All the Female Steps

  22. Paid Up

  23. Getting Away with It

  24. The Pregnancy of the World

  25. Escape

  Also by Susan Faludi

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Metropolitan Books

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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  Metropolitan Books® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Faludi

  All rights reserved

  “I Am Easily Assimilated” from Candide by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by

  Leonard Bernstein. Copyright © 1994 by Amberson Holdings LLC. Copyright renewed, Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, publisher. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  Excerpt from “Red Riding Hood” from Transformations by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1971 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1999 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Optimistic Voices (You’re Out of the Woods)” from The Wizard of Oz. Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Music by Harold Arlen and Herbert Strothart. Copyright © 1938 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., renewed 1939 by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. Rights throughout the world controlled by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. (publishing) and Alfred Music (print). Used by permission of Alfred Music. All rights reserved.

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  eISBN: 978-0-8050-9599-9

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  First Edition 2016

  This is a work of nonfiction. The names and identifying characteristics of three individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.