“We didn’t go to school like they did, like you did. We barely spoke the language. But the fact that Hungarians don’t get screwed over no more, all those Hungarians who came out here or Chicago to work in the factories, is thanks to guys like me and Jake Arvey in Chicago.”
I said, “Maybe I’ll write an article one day about that, too, Mr. Russell.”
“I don’t give a shit what you write,” Jack Russell said. “I just wanted to look you in the eye and tell you so you can’t pretend to yourself you didn’t know it.”
I told him then about the visit my father and I had made to him when I was sixteen.
“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you,” he said. “I took care of your old man with the money and he took care of me with the paper. The Hungarians took care of me at the ballot box and I took care of their streets, their neighborhoods. That’s the way this great country works. And maybe one day the day will come when you won’t stick your nose so goddamn high and mighty in the air about it.”
“Was there any politician you endorsed who didn’t buy ads in the paper?” I asked my father.
“Just one,” he smiled. “Kennedy. Nixon bought many ads but I couldn’t bring myself to endorse him.”
“Did the Franciscans give you any of the money they got for the endorsements?”
“The Franciscans?” He laughed. “Those swine! You’ve got to be kidding.”
A Hungarian ball was held at the St. Patrick’s Church hall, just a couple of blocks from us on Bridge Avenue.
“I think we should go,” my father said to my mother. “It will be a big Hungarian event. As the editor of the paper, I should be there.”
“You go,” my mother said, “I’m not going.”
She changed her mind. She found a long black dress at one of the rummage shops on Detroit Avenue and told my father the morning of the ball that she was going. He was happy and hugged her. Even I was going. I had agreed to work in the kitchen and wash dishes with other Hungarian kids for a dollar an hour.
I watched them from the kitchen when they arrived. He wore his favorite suit—a white flannel one from St. Vincent DePaul’s. Her new used dress looked good on her—a little tight maybe. She’d gained weight again. She wore lipstick and makeup, which she rarely did.
As the ball began, I saw them sitting with other Hungarians, talking, enjoying the waltzes. I saw my father dance with other women. I knew how shy my mother was and how much she hated to dance.
I was washing dishes in the kitchen when my father came in.
“Have you seen your mother?” he said.
I went out into the hall with him but we couldn’t find her anywhere. No one had seen her.
“Maybe she went home,” my father said. “We should go.”
We left, walking quickly down Bridge Avenue toward our apartment. It was late and very dark. We came up 41st from Bridge and hurried down Lorain Avenue.
As we passed Nick’s Diner, I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She was inside, sitting at the counter. Neither my father nor I could believe our eyes. My mother never went inside American bars or diners or restaurants.
I stared at her a moment. She was wearing her long black rummage store dress, a cup of coffee in front of her, a cigarette in her hand. Her head was down. She seemed to be examining the counter. The place was nearly empty.
We went inside.
“What are you doing, Mária?” my father asked, his voice shaken.
Next to my mother on the counter I saw, neatly placed on a napkin, her new false teeth.
“I’m drinking a cup of coffee,” she said, her voice even. “My teeth hurt. The hot coffee feels good on my gums.”
My father said, “Let’s go home, Mária.”
My mother said to him, “When did you stop loving me? Did you ever love me?”
My father said, “Mária, please, don’t act like this. Let’s go home. I love you. Jozsi loves you.”
She looked up at him and smiled. “No,” she said, “you don’t.”
It was like I wasn’t there. She never looked at me.
“I am not going home,” my mother said, “you go home with the boy.”
She sipped her coffee and calmly lit up another cigarette.
“Jozsi,” my father said, “go home. We’ll be there in a little while.”
He saw me staring at her and asked, “Please Jozsi, let me talk to your mother alone!”
I was lying down on my couch when they came in about an hour later. They thought I was asleep and said not a word as they went into their bedroom. They didn’t talk or whisper in there, either, and I fell asleep.
Sometime in the night, I felt her lips brush my face but I pretended to be asleep. She hadn’t kissed me in a long time. In the morning, when I woke up, I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.
I saw her in the kitchen and said, “Good morning, Nana,” but she didn’t respond. It was one of those days when she said nothing. A few days later, I saw that she had thrown her new used black dress into a garbage can.
My father was asked to go to a meeting with other fathers at Cathedral Latin. He took the buses and the rapid transit just like I did every morning; something was wrong with our new used Ford.
When he came home late at night I saw he wasn’t in a talkative mood but I pressed him anyway.
“What did they talk to you about, Papa?”
“Money,” he said. “They want money for new classrooms.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I told them I’m a poor man and I can’t give them money.”
“What did they say?”
He didn’t answer the question for a moment and then he said, “Nothing. And then this priest laughed at me. And then the other fathers laughed at me.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Papa.”
He smiled. “Perhaps they thought I was making a bad joke.”
The United States Marine Corps was staging an amphibious landing on Lake Erie. It was in the Plain Dealer and on the radio and the TV. Everybody was talking about it. A hundred thousand Clevelanders would watch it from specially constructed bleachers at Edgewater Park.
My father told me we were going to see the marines land.
He took me to an office downtown and he explained in his broken English that he was the editor of the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday and I was his newspaper’s American correspondent. They took our photographs and put them inside plastic tags that said “Press.”
On the day of the mock Marine Corps invasion, as the other Clevelanders sat in the bleachers, my father and I were allowed on the ships and on the landing crafts and on the beach as the marines charged ashore.
“Are you having fun?” he asked me as armed vehicles roared by us.
I was wide-eyed and excited.
“Yes,” I said, “this is great!”
“You see?” he laughed. “Your hunkie DP greenhorn father is a powerful man, isn’t he?”
The Cleveland Indians had a player I liked as much as the now departed Rocky Colavito. His name was Walter Bond. He was 6-7, 235 pounds. He was a towering home run hitter. Casey Stengel said, “Everything he hits is in the trees.”
He was exciting to watch. The Sporting News compared him to Hank Aaron. He was traded. And then he died. Of leukemia.
Big news!
The Franciscans were moving the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday to Youngstown, about eighty miles southeast of Cleveland. They had already bought a monastery there. We would move, too. They would buy us a house there!
There was one wrinkle: the move wouldn’t take place until next March, but my junior year of high school was beginning next month. I couldn’t switch from Cathedral Latin to a new school mid-year, so I would have to go to Youngstown next month and come back to see my parents on the weekends.
Where would I live while I was alone in Youngstown?
With the Franciscans … at the monastery!
I was overjoyed that I could leave Cathedral Latin, but I was sick t
hat I would be living with the Franciscans.
I loved my parents and would miss them. But I wouldn’t miss seeing my mother cementing windows, going mute, or laughing her hyena laugh.
The Franciscans enrolled me at Ursuline High School in Youngstown and we drove down to their new monastery. It was a castle, with its own wooded park grounds and was bigger than Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. The Franciscans even had servants and maids.
“The newspaper, I see, is doing very very well,” my father said ruefully as he looked at their new monastery.
He was responsible for the newspaper’s success. It was thanks to him that the Franciscans were able to buy their new castle and pay their servants and maids … while we lived in our cramped, dank apartment on Lorain Avenue and they paid him $100 a month.
It was decided that I would live in a room above the monastery garage. I would eat with the Franciscans. One of them would drop me off at school in the morning on his way to saying Mass at a parish downtown.
My father gave me a present before they drove back to Cleveland: a transistor radio small enough to fit into my shirt pocket.
From my room above the garage, I watched my father and mother drive away in our green Ford. I missed Lorain Avenue already. I missed the cussing, foul-mouthed voices in the street. And I missed my blazing neon Papp’s Bar sign.
Father Peter was in Youngstown. So was Father Gottfried, whom I’d hailed with my chunk of lead … and Father Ákos, still grilling his rats.
There were other Franciscans I hadn’t met on Lorain Avenue, including Father Steve, a second-generation American Hungarian who spoke better English than Hungarian.
At dinner, the priests were mostly silent, eating heaping platters of sausage and dumplings prepared by the Hungarian cooks. When they spoke, they spoke angrily about the presidential election only a month away. They hated the Catholic candidate, these Catholic priests. “Kennedy is surrounded by Jews,” they said. “He is a Jew-lover. He is just like the Jew president, Rosenfeld.”
I had two joyous moments my first few months living at the monastery in Youngstown. When Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit a home run in the World Series and beat the hated New York Yankees. And when John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States.
One of the Franciscans I hadn’t met on Lorain Avenue, Father Lászlo, offered to drop me off at Ursuline my first day of school. He had come to America after the freedom fight.
He was in his thirties, grossly overweight, and bald. When we got into his car, he reached into the back seat and put a white cowboy hat on. He had a tape recorder hooked up to his radio and switched it on. It blasted Elvész and Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon.
When we stopped at traffic lights, he reached over and picked a microphone up. If a girl or an attractive young woman was crossing the street, he whistled or said “Gimme litta puszi puszi.” He had a loudspeaker under the hood of his car.
Puszi, in Hungarian, means “a kiss.”
(Really.)
I noticed the girls first, naturally, at Ursuline High School. There were so many girls here in so many shapes and sizes! And they were friendly and chatty and smiling. So were the boys. So were the nuns.
My first day, the new kid in school, I was asked by three different people—boys and girls—to sit with them at lunch.
I was overwhelmed at first. At Cathedral Latin, I had put myself into an aggressive mode on the way to school each morning. I had keyed myself up—ready for hostility, ready to return a punch or a shove. But there were no shoves or punches here. I didn’t need to feel aggressive.
It took me a while to figure out why the atmosphere was so different at Ursuline. One: it wasn’t a rich kids’ school. Youngstown was a steel town and the kids came from all class levels to Ursuline. Two: there were girls here and their very presence softened and scented the air.
When the priests dropped me downtown on the way to their seven o’clock Mass, I had two hours to kill before school began. I spent those hours sitting on a stool at a diner filled with workers from the steel mills, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, playing the jukebox, and reading. I could have all the coffee I wanted for a dime and when I got hungry, I’d order myself some toast.
I read a book at the diner that would change my life. I had taken it out from the school library. It was called The Diary of Anne Frank. I cried when I finished it and the waitress said, “Are you okay, honey?”
Well, no, I wasn’t, really. I wasn’t okay at all.
The kids in school viewed me as an exotic figure. I was living alone—without my parents. And I was living in a monastery that looked like a castle most of them had read about in the Youngstown Vindicator. And I had spent my early years in refugee camps! For the first time in my life, I was popular. Even the nuns liked me. For the first time in my life, I really studied, getting all As and Bs. And everyone—kids, nuns—pronounced my name right.
The Franciscans, I discovered, couldn’t care less when I got back from school. They ignored me.
If I wasn’t there at dinner, no one said anything. I arranged with one of their servants to leave me a glass of milk and a sandwich each night.
Father Ákos, the rat-griller, captured a deer in the woods and kept it in a fenced-off area of the park. He was fattening it. He said we would soon eat Transylvanian Venison Stew with garlic and paprika.
On the way to school one morning, wearing his cowboy hat, Elvész blasting on his tape recorder, Father Lászlo asked me: “Have you kissed any girls yet?”
“No, Father.”
“You haven’t?”
“No.”
I was embarrassed.
“Have you put your tongue in their mouth?” the priest asked.
“No, Father.”
“Have you sucked on their breasts?”
“No, Father!”
I laughed louder, more embarrassed.
“Have you spread their legs apart?” His face was red.
I looked away and shook my head.
“Have you put your fingers into their behinds?”
I said nothing, looked out the window of the car.
“Have you stuck your pimpli into their hole?” His voice was hoarse.
We stopped at a red light.
“I’ve gotta meet somebody,” I said, opened the door, and jumped out of the car.
I was walking away from the car. I heard his laughter, amplified and guttural. He had the loudspeaker under the hood turned on.
Father Lászlo moved from the main house of the monastery to the room next to mine above the garage. I could hear his tape recorder blasting rock and roll all the time.
He’d come into my room unexpectedly sometimes. Once he said he’d taped a new song I had to hear. Once he came in wearing nothing but his underwear. Once he came in while I was getting dressed.
My door didn’t have a lock on it.
On the way to school one morning with Father Steve, the American Hungarian Franciscan, I told him about Father Lászlo and how he’d come into my room wearing his underwear and the questions he’d ask me about girls.
Father Steve put a lock on my door.
From then on, only Father Steve drove me to school in the morning.
On a pretty moonlit night, I sneaked into the woods and freed the deer from its fenced-in yard.
Father Lászlo moved back into the monastery and out of the garage.
I went home every other weekend on the Greyhound, happy to be seeing my parents but afraid each time of what I would see. My mother was back in the printing shop, working the linotype machine, breathing the lead in.
She was alone in the apartment a lot of the time now; my father was often away making speeches to chapters of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation in other parts of America. I asked him how she was doing and he looked away for a moment, his eyes weary.
“I have come to the conclusion,” my father said, “that there is great wisdom in saying fein to everything. How is your mother? Your
mother is fein.” His smile was a sad one.
They weren’t speaking much, he said. For years, he said, they had been putting $10 a month away and hiding it in a book on the shelf. It was money they were going to send me to college with.
One morning he discovered that the money—more than $400—was gone. My mother admitted that she’d taken it. She had sent it to her stepmother in Hungary, the former prostitute her father had found with his ads in the Budapest newspaper.
“To that kurva,” my father said, “whom she has always hated. I asked her why and she said, ‘They’re poor.’”
My father smiled. “What are we, millionaires?”
They moved down to Youngstown a few months later. The Franciscans had bought us a house on a quiet suburban street only a block away from the new printing shop.
Compared to our apartment on Lorain Avenue, the house was a mansion—two stories, three bedrooms upstairs, with a yard in front and back. For the first time in a long time, I saw joy in my mother’s eyes. “This is so beautiful!” she said. “Oh, this is so beautiful!”
Kay Jeffries had freckles and green eyes and thick auburn hair. She came to school from nearby Sharon, Pennsylvania, each morning on the bus and she sat next to me in French class.
I asked if I could walk her downtown after school to the bus station, and she said sure. Pretty soon I was walking her every day and we were having lunch together in the cafeteria every day, too. I bought her ice cream cones and cups of coffee after school and we were kissing on street corners and holding hands in the school hallways.
When I wasn’t with her, I thought about her all the time. Not just about the way her breasts felt when I pulled her up against me, but about her smile, her throaty laugh, the way her eyes sparkled and the way the wind tousled her hair. We even had our very own love song: “Daddy’s Home” by Shep and the Limelites.
I was in love and, for the first time in my life, really happy.
My father was waiting for me in the living room of our beautiful house when I got home.
Hollywood Animal Page 53
