Mr. Jacob P. Malin sang another song for me, and I told him that I would bring him greetings from my father when I came the next day. Up to the minute I said it, I hadn’t thought about going to the old folks’ home three days in a row.
The lady at the front desk told me that I would find my mother upstairs, and I did. I found her sitting in a chair in front of a lady in a wheelchair. I assumed it was a woman because Mother was feeding her, and she had said that she would be feeding a Miss Ilona. The woman looked like a troll or one of those dolls that they make by drying an apple and letting it get all wrinkly. She had short frizzy hair on the top of her head, but it was so thin that each hair seemed to stand up like a tiny flag making claim to a quarter-inch of territory.
Mother said, “Phillip, this is Miss Ilona,” so I knew that I was right in guessing that it was a woman.
The first thing Miss Ilona said to me was, “I hope, Phillip, that you did something more interesting to break your arm than I did. I fell in the bathroom.”
Maybe when people get as old as this woman was, they’ve gone to the bathroom so much that they don’t get embarrassed talking about it. I said, “I wasn’t going to the bathroom.”
“I fell in the bathtub,” she said.
“Oh,” I added.
“A common enough accident. I would rather have broken my arm skiing with Robert Redford.”
I laughed. It struck me as funny that this old person here who seemed so out of time should know about movie stars, let alone think about wanting to go skiing with them.
“He’s very handsome,” she said to my mother. I didn’t know whether she meant me or Robert Redford. I thought she meant me. Mother dabbed at Miss Ilona’s chin with a napkin. Miss Ilona continued, “I always look at a pretty face this way though: it’s only half an inch away from being homely. And me, I’m only half an inch away from being beautiful. If I had half an inch less of nose and half an inch more of chin, I’d be a regular bald-headed beauty queen.” She laughed.
“What kind of accent is that you have?” I asked.
“Hungarian. But not pure Hungarian. It’s confused with French.”
“Can I record it?” I asked.
I showed her my cassette player, and I was ready to explain to her in simple terms how it worked when she said, “A cassette? I’d love to hear myself on a cassette. But wait until I am done eating. I was taught never to talk with my mouth full.”
When Mother finished feeding her, I held the microphone for her, and she said, “I am Ilona Szabo, presently known as Miss Ilona, from Budapest, Hungary, by way of Paris, France, Vienna, Austria, and New York, New York, and alive and not altogether well in an old folks’ home.” Budapest came out Budapesht.
She asked me what I planned on doing with her cassette, and I told her that I was practicing doing impersonations and that I thought that learning to do different kinds of accents would be valuable and that it seemed to me that everyone at the old folks’ home spoke with some kind of an accent and that I could certainly get a lot of types out of this one place.
Miss Ilona said, “You’ll probably get a greater variety of accents than of stories. The people here speak a common language. It’s called boring. All except me. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you how being so ugly saved my life.”
I asked her to tell me now, but she said no, that she wanted to think about how she was going to tell me and how much she was going to tell me. So I left with Mother and asked her to stop at the discount store on the way home so that I could pick up a couple more blank cassettes, one hour on each side, and my mother stopped without being sarcastic about it.
The following day I found my singing Ukrainian, Mr. Jacob P. Malin, and played him “Hello” from my father, and then I went up to Miss Ilona’s floor. After Mother had finished feeding her, she began telling her story into my cassette, and that was all right, that was perfectly all right, except for Mother.
There was Mother standing beside me listening and smiling. To tell the truth, I would rather have her sarcastic, because if there’s anything a guy doesn’t need—ever—is a mother standing right beside him approving of him right out in public. What a guy needs is a mother who pretends not to notice him in public, but who acts crazy about him in the privacy of his own home or condominium.
About all I found out that day was that Ilona means Helen in Hungarian and that Hungarian means Magyar in Hungarian.
“You know,” I said to my mother as we were leaving, “if you sign a note for me to take Bus Eighty-two instead of Ninety-four, I can get off at the corner of the home on my way back from school, and I can feed Miss Ilona her supper.”
“How will you get home after that?”
“I’ll walk.”
She gave me a look of what you might call surprise and said, “So now that you’ve broken your arm, you’ve discovered that you have legs?”
“It happens,” I said, “that it was exactly trouble with my legs that got me a broken arm. Will you write the note?”
“I’d be proud to,” she said, and I glanced at her, and she wasn’t looking sarcastic. I guess she meant it.
So the following day I went to the home after school, and Miss Ilona started telling me her story.
“I promised that I would tell you about how being so ugly saved my life,” she began. “Well, it all started in Budapest. My father was the second son of a rich doctor. My grandfather, the doctor, was everybody’s rich relative. At least he was the rich relative that everyone bragged about. There were some others who were richer, but their money didn’t come from such nice things as making sick people well. I was the first born, and when my grandfather took his first look at me, he said to my father, ‘You better educate her, Isaac, because she’s never going to catch a man.’ In his line of work, my grandfather had seen a lot of babies, so he knew right from the start that I was no beauty, and he knew that there was no hope that I would grow into one.
“I had two sisters born after me and then a brother. My first sister was not a great beauty, but compared to me, she was quite acceptable. My second sister was better looking than the first; she was almost pretty; and my brother was downright handsome. He had eyelashes as dark and as thick as mustaches, and he had thick, straight black hair that gave him a romantic look. It would seem that my parents had been practicing on me and my sisters and by the time my brother came, they finally knew how to make a proper-looking child.
“But if I had been born semi-pretty like my sisters, I wouldn’t have been sent to the French school to be educated, and if I had not been sent to the French school at the early age I was, I would not have been able to speak French fluently and without an accent, and if I had not been able to speak French fluently and without an accent, I would not have saved my own life.”
That is all I got on the first day. I couldn’t coax another word of her story out of her. She said much more, but it was mostly about what I did in school and what subjects I liked best and what the world was like outside the home.
I told her about my teacher and about some of the kids in my class, and she listened with interest, as they say.
“Now, what about you?” I asked. “Tell me about your schedule.”
“Oh,” she answered. “Nothing ever happens among the Beige and Grays.”
“The Beige and Grays?”
“Yes,” she said, “everyone who lives here is either beige or gray or some other shade of boring. Except me.”
“Will you continue with your story tomorrow?” I asked.
“If you come, I will.”
The next day was Saturday. The school bus couldn’t drop me off at the home, but it occurred to me that old folks have to eat lunch as well as supper, so I asked my mother if she would drive me over to the home so that I could help Miss Ilona with her lunch.
“Legs work only in one direction?” she asked.
“It’s a question of time,” I said.
“Yours or mine?” she asked.
“Yours or mine w
hat?”
“Your time or my time? Which is it a question of?”
“If you drive me over, it’s a question of both our times. Will you?”
“I’d be proud to.”
That made twice in two days that she had said that, but this time I was not too sure she wasn’t being sarcastic.
She drove me to the home at eleven-thirty on Saturday.
Miss Ilona was dozing in her chair when I got there. I didn’t know if I should wake her, but the nurse nodded that I should, so I did. Miss Ilona seemed glad that I did. She seemed to enjoy me more than she enjoyed her lunch. “Phillip, dear,” she said, “the food here is fit only for cloven-hoofed animals.”
“Maybe I can bring you something from home,” I suggested.
“Please don’t bother. Just your presence and your cassette is all I expect you to carry with one broken arm. But the subject of cooking does figure into my story, and I think that now I ought to introduce you to the two things that Hungarians are proudest of. One of them is their cooking. They are very proud of it.
“If you go into fifteen of the best restaurants in New York City, one will offer French food and another Italian and another German or Chinese or Russian and so on and so forth.” (She said and so on and so forth a lot. And it just broke me up. It came out and zo on and zo force. Her accent was very complicated, impossible to imitate, even for a professional, I’m sure.) “But in Budapest, if you go into fifteen of the best restaurants, they will all offer Hungarian cooking. And something else you should know about Hungarian cooking. Hungarian fine cooking is not very different from Hungarian everyday cooking. A lot of paprika. Do you know paprika?” (I nodded yes. I didn’t, but I figured that I could look it up, and I didn’t want to slow down her story now that she was almost started.) “A lot of paprika, a lot of onions, but good. And Hungarian baked goods are the best in the world. The French don’t really understand whipped cream.
“It’s important for you to understand about Hungarian cooking because it is important at a certain place in my story.”
“But,” I interrupted, “you said that there were two things that the Hungarians were proudest of. What is the other?”
“Their language,” she answered. “You have to know something about the Hungarian language. It is unrelated to any other European language except Finnish, and people that I have known who have been to Finland are not so sure that it’s related there either. It’s as if when they were building the Tower of Babel, a solitary Hungarian—we are a very solitary people, you know—was working in some outside corridor, talking to no one. When God’s wrath fell, the Hungarian continued with his labors longer than the others so that while most of the people left the Tower in huge families, the family Germanic and the family Celtic, the Slavs and the Romantics, the lone Hungarian stayed on. Finally, sensing that he was totally alone and altogether outside, the Hungarian left and met the Finn. But the Hungarian and the Finn soon parted, for Hungarians can never keep an ally.
“Hungary has been conquered time and time again, so there is no one in Budapest who cannot speak at least two other languages. Hungarians speak other languages to strangers so that they can speak Hungarian among themselves. It is a peculiar language, almost all consonants. I think we donated our share of vowels to Hawaii. The vowels that we do have, we put fancy dots and dashes over, just to make them complicated, too. It is a runt in the litter of languages, but we love it the way you can love only a runt. Conquerors have all thought of our Magyar language as worthless and have seldom taken the trouble to learn it. And we help them because, as I said, everyone in Budapest knows at least one other language. Hungarian remains our secret code.”
“But you told me that learning to speak French saved your life. Tell me about that.”
“I will,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
And I could not get another word out of her that day.
I had forgotten about Sunday School the next day, and I called the home and told them that I had an urgent message for Miss Ilona, and when she got to the phone (I suppose someone wheeled her there), she sounded so disappointed when I told her that I couldn’t make it for lunch that I immediately told her that I would see her at supper, and I didn’t even want to.
I fed her in a very businesslike manner, and she must have guessed that there were at least two other things I would rather have been doing because she got on with her story immediately.
“After I finished high school,” she said, “I was very well educated and suited to appreciate good literature, mostly French, and good art, mostly French. I probably could appreciate better than anyone else in Budapest. My looks had not improved, and my family had no hopes of my making a good marriage. There was a tradition among my people—rather common at the time—that the second daughter could not marry until the first one had, and the third could not marry until the second, and so on and so forth. So there was only one thing for my poor father to do, if he was not to get stuck for the rest of his life supporting three daughters. So he did it. He sent me away. He sent me to Paris.”
At this point there is a pause in the tape because Miss Ilona was studying her paralyzed hand. “That was 1938, one year before 1939.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I guess I could figure that out. I guess 1938 came before 1939, just the way that 1948 came before 1949 and 1958 . . .”
“I see, Phillip, but don’t you understand why 1939 was important?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Hitler,” she said. “In 1939 Hitler started his war to conquer the world. And in 1939 the head of our Hungarian government, thinking that this time Hungary shouldn’t be conquered again, took himself on a little trip to Germany and met with Herr Hitler and promised him—by way of showing good faith—that he would cooperate with the Nazis and pass some anti-Jewish laws.”
There is another pause on the tape where you can hear me being a little ashamed of myself. “So because you were ugly and couldn’t get married, and your Father sent you to Paris, you got out just in time.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Is that how being ugly saved your life?”
“That,” she said, “is the first part of the first part.”
“Did you like Paris?”
“Loved it. But, as you probably guessed, my one talent—speaking French without a Hungarian accent—was not considered a talent at all in Paris.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, being ugly came to my aid again. There was in Paris at that time a wealthy family who wanted a governess for their children. The father wanted a young woman of some intelligence and culture and so on and so forth, and since the father had something of an eye for pretty young girls, the mother wanted one who was ugly. I was qualified on both counts, you see. So I got the job.”
“Is that how being ugly saved your life?”
“That is only the second part of the first part,” she answered.
The nurse came and took Miss Ilona’s tray, and Miss Ilona told me that she had nothing more to say, but that she would be happy to continue with her story tomorrow, if I would care to come back.
I said that I would.
On my way out I met Mr. Malin, and he asked me if my father would like a few more songs. I told him I would find out, but that the songs would have to wait a while because I was busy recording Miss Ilona. He walked with me to the front door and said, “I’ll sing for you whenever you like.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll see what I can arrange.” He was practically following me out onto the sidewalk.
Over the next few days Miss Ilona did continue with her story. But there is a lot of stuff on the tapes that has nothing to do with how being ugly saved her life. I just kept the cassette playing, and the microphone turned on all the time that I fed her. I’m glad I did because when I play it back now, I can hear it all. Like the time the napkin fell off her lap.
On the cassette you’ll hear me saying, “I’ll get it.”
Then Miss Ilona s
aying, “Never mind, Philip, we’ll just use Kleenex.”
“No, it’s no trouble. Let me pick up the napkin.” Then you’ll hear clatter, clatter, bang. “I’ll get it,” one voice. “I’ll get it,” another. Then a thump. Then a crash. When I listen to that cassette, I see a movie of it in my mind where I reached for the napkin, and the cast on my arm bumped the tray and made Miss Ilona’s fork and spoon fall to the floor, and then I reached for them and the whole tray fell over, and we called for the nurse and she came, and on the tape you can even hear the nurse being patient. It’s there to hear in her voice as she kept asking Miss Ilona if she would like some other help with her lunch and Miss Ilona kept saying, “No, no, thanks.”
There were other times when I arrived at the home and Miss Ilona would be dozing, and I would start to tiptoe away so that I wouldn’t wake her, but she always woke up. And at those times she seemed especially glad to see me, and we would make good progress on her story.
“I had been governess for about a year and a half,” she told me, “when the Nazis occupied Paris. Mr. Pomfret—that was the name of the man who had hired me—was sent away to a Nazi labor camp, and Mrs. Pomfret fell apart. Her total training in running a household had been in how to give orders to a houseful of servants. I am not being unkind when I tell you that she was a useless woman. I told her that I would stay on and help her if she would swear that I was her cousin and buy me some forged papers.”
“You blackmailed her?”
“Of course. If the Nazis had found out that I was Jewish, my life would have been over. If I had not been there to help her, the lives of Mrs. Pomfret as well as her two children would have been over. They would have dissolved in their own tears. Mrs. Pomfret cried a lot. So we developed this strange household. I ran everything. I cared for the children, did the shopping and the cooking, made all the decisions and so on and so forth, and at the same time, I made it appear that Mrs. Pomfret was in charge and that I was merely running errands for her.”
Throwing Shadows Page 6
