Trouble in Transylvania (15 page)

“I think Romania is the correct version now,” said Archie. “What do you say, Cassandra?”

“The Romanians like
Romania
because it connects the current state with the Roman Empire and makes them feel good. The Hungarians always want to call it
Rumania.
Of course, some feminists prefer the more modern spelling of
Romynia,
so as not to privilege the men any longer, the people naturally being called
Romminians.
Finally,” I added, watching Zsoska slam forward through the swinging doors, with her arms full of plates and a hostile look on her face, “some think the citizens are more properly called
Romaniacs.
”

A pork chop slid off one of the sharply angled plates Zsoska was carrying. She retrieved it and slapped it back on a pile of French fries, then handed the whole thing to Archie.

“Swine!”

He pretended not to notice.

“Zsoska,” he said, thumbing quickly through the phrase book. “Zsoska…”

But before he could find the right words, she was gone again.

A
FTER DINNER
our party repaired to the square by the lake. Gladys’s dogs were patiently waiting for her and crowded around as she fed them French fries and some pork bones. Bree had disappeared, saying she was going to look for Jack and Eva, and Emma and Cathy wandered away too. Archie sat down by me on one of the benches by the lake.

It was still light and the evening was, on the cusp of April and May, scented in layers. The fresh, piercing scents of the evergreens were like sopranos that soared over the altos and tenors of the spicy plum and apple blossoms in an a cappella group. The cuckoos sang their falling two notes with sweet regularity.

Archie had on his soft felt hat and a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches.

“I’m not getting anywhere with Zsoska,” he said. “Do you think you might be able to help?”

“With that phrase book? Probably not.”

“She speaks a little English. And she speaks Romanian, too, so you could talk to her.”

“What about?”

“You know.” Archie looked furtive.

“Archie, do you honestly think this is the best idea? The poor woman gave up her child three years ago. Isn’t it going to be kind of a shock when you tell her Emma is hers?”

“It might be good for both of them. Listen, I thought how you could do it. Ask Zsoska if she would take you sightseeing tomorrow. She might be glad of the extra money. I’m not saying you have to tell her about Emma, though if it comes up, it comes up. But maybe you could find out something about her past and her circumstances now. It would be a start anyway.”

“Archie, I can’t. I’m here to help Gladys. I can’t get embroiled in something else.”

“It’s just that I feel so frustrated,” he burst out. “Cathy and Mark were such great kids. You wouldn’t think so to see Cathy now, but she and I had a ball when she was growing up. We drew pictures, wrote stories, made our own post office. Mark had a mathematical bent like his mom, and pretty soon he outstripped me, but Cathy was always special to me. We made cities and harbors with Legos; we did science experiments, we looked at the stars through telescopes, and at the insect world through microscopes. I didn’t mind staying home with the kids while Lynn worked. I loved it!

“But Emma’s never been a kid. She doesn’t play like Cathy and Mark did. She just sits staring at things, with that vague look on her face. Games don’t interest her, toys don’t interest her. She doesn’t seem to know what they’re for, however much you show and explain them to her.”

“How soon did you notice that something was wrong with Emma?”

“Don’t say wrong,” said Archie. “Say different.”

“Okay, when did you know she was different?”

“Lynn says she knew at the hospital, because Emma didn’t cry or move very much. She thought once we got Emma home to Michigan everything would be all right. She was willing to take a chance. It took me longer to see Emma’s problems, maybe because I didn’t want to see them. You’d talk and she’d seem to look at your face and hear you, but she didn’t respond.

“The pediatrician said she didn’t seem to be deaf, but that she could be mildly retarded. That was a blow. But we were still optimistic. As the second year passed Emma learned to walk and to eat by herself. She could understand directions. She didn’t seem developmentally disabled except for her speech. We couldn’t get her to stop sucking her thumb and rocking in her bed at night, but during the day she seemed happy enough in her own little world. Sometimes when I read to her she would start rocking back and forth or beating her hand on the floor.

“And then Cathy noticed how Emma seemed to pay attention to music on the radio and enjoy it. We got her a xylophone and then one of those little Casio keyboards with a recorded tape that you can play along with. It amazed all of us, how Emma picked it up.

“It was Lynn who thought of giving her violin lessons. We started her in Ann Arbor and now she has a teacher in Munich. It’s phenomenal how she’s taken to it. I can’t understand it—how Emma can hear music and imitate it just fine, but how she can’t somehow get the idea that speech is the same thing. One child psychologist told us that what seems to be either missing or delayed is the sense of language as communication.”

“You said that Cathy and Mark loved to learn,” I said. “But it sounds to me that Emma has them both beat. For a four-year-old to play Mozart is quite astonishing, don’t you think?”

Archie didn’t say anything for a minute, then, in a lower tone of voice, he said, “I know I’m no genius. I’ve always felt it was my role in life to help people who were smarter than I was. Lynn is the brain of the family and Mark and Cathy take after her. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of all of them. I gave the kids the childhood I never had. But sometimes, I guess I hoped that Emma would be more … average.” He paused, and became the journalist again. “Tell me about
your
family, Cass.”

To my surprise, I found myself talking. Perhaps Archie’s confidences had disarmed me, or perhaps he was a better interviewer than I gave him credit for.

“My mother more or less raised us, but my dad was the fun one. He liked to listen to the radio with us and read to us from the newspaper,” I said. “He collected people and their stories. He was what my mother called ‘a real card.’ Of course he drank too, but he was one of the happy ones. He sang a lot. He could tell a story to make you fall down laughing. There was a lot of goodwill in him, a lot of the dreamer, and not much judgment. My mother always said I took after him—shiftless but lively. She went to church and prayed for him. There were eight of us kids. We didn’t have much money. After my dad died, things kind of went to hell. I ended up leaving home right after high school. I’d run away a couple of times before that.”

“So you’ve come up from nothing too,” said Archie. “It’s optimism, isn’t it? It’s looking on the bright side of things. I’ve always been an optimist. I got out of the house by getting two paper routes, by playing baseball, working my way through high school and college. I always believed that I could change my life, and I did. I made sure that my kids would have a different life.” He paused and stared at the lake. “I don’t drink much. My father wasn’t like yours.”

He didn’t say what had happened to him, why he had to get out of the house, but I didn’t need to ask. I wondered how bad it had been, and what his memories were.

These are some of my memories: I see my older sister Maureen braiding my frizzy hair and buttoning my dress; I see myself feeding one of the babies a bottle, holding it close and smelling its soft sweet breath. I see my father balancing me on his knee, telling me nonsense, singing me songs, a glass always on the table next to us. I also see myself screaming at my older brother Kevin to stop teasing me, or for Maureen or Eileen to leave me the hell alone. I see myself in church fidgeting, see myself not coming home for dinner, staying out half the night. I see my mother’s closed face, and her open hand swinging. I was never an optimist, but I knew that I was going to have a different life than that of my family.

I grew up fighting to get a word in. No one sat around waiting to hear me speak, no one took care of my needs without my asking. Words may have been a great source of pleasure, but they were also a necessary means of protection, the only means, besides your fists and fingernails, of getting what you needed.

Maybe Archie hovered too much, maybe Emma had never had to ask for what she needed. Maybe she was just waiting to speak until the time was right.

“So you’ll help me with Zsoska?” asked Archie again.

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll see what I can find out. No promises though. Can I borrow your dictionary?”

Archie pumped my hand a few times and then left me to return to the dining hall, where Zsoska was half-heartedly polishing glasses.

To my surprise she gave me a friendly smile. “Yes. You wanting?”

“I’m wondering,” I said in English, “if you are free tomorrow? I would like to see more of the countryside, and I don’t have a car.”

“Yes?”

I repeated this in Romanian, with a few gestures.

This time she understood me, but she stuck to English. “Where you wanting going?”

“Oh, anywhere, just to see the mountains and farms.”

“Yes. I having car. We going.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Just you, yes, no others? No Snapps?”

“Just me.”

When I went back out to the square nobody was around, so I decided to take a walk before dark. I followed the path leading to the lake and strolled around its shore. Firs hid cuckoo nests; the birds sang their two notes in rounds. A kind of squirrel I’d never seen before lived in these woods: it had long pointed ears like a rabbit. The sun had dropped behind the mountains in the distance and the air was cooler now; the flowery scent of backyard orchards was gone, like a woman who’d passed by.

After I’d rounded the lake, instead of going back to my room, I made my way along a road, paved with small flat stones, that wound up behind the hotels, and in a few moments I had left behind the world of mass tourism and was back in an earlier era. Large villas were set back from the road, surrounded by trees and orchards. There were benches set about in overgrown, but not unkempt, lawns of bluebells, daisies and yellow buttercups. Had they once belonged to Magyar families who spent their summers here, in the coolness of Arcata’s woods and lakes? Painted in soft browns and forest greens, the villas were gabled and spired, embellished with scrolls and other carvings around the window and door lintels. Many had fanciful turrets, shingled and conical, and romantic little dormer windows under eaves decorated with filigreed fretwork.

There were evergreens here, but also many birches, white calligraphed with black, their new leaves only a breath, not yet a canopy, of green. Wild abundance was in wait; in July and August these gardens and orchards would explode with flowers and fruit and the heavy, intoxicating scents of summer. But for now, in the twilight of a spring evening, all was tentative, a little ethereal.

Up near the top of the hill were two wooden gates, facing each other across the stone road. They had plump, hollow roofs of scalloped shingles, wide at the bottom, rising pagoda-like to needle spires. Perched on the carved wooden gateposts these roofs were like oversized hats, fanciful and strange. The two gates were carved and painted with stylized blue pots of red tulips and green leaves, which curled in vines all around the posts.

One gateway was much larger and more elaborate; it formed part of a picket fence, broken at intervals by wooden posts turned on a lathe, and all painted that same soft shade of brown. The door of the gateway stood open and I walked through, up a path of tiny river pebbles to an enormous house. It was a creamy chocolate color with window lintels of bright blue. The lower part of the structure seemed to be constructed of logs, while the second story was paneled in an openwork pattern of tulips in pots. The house had two turrets, one a tall peaked tower that looked like a witch’s hat, and the other a spire with a weathervane. The doorway was painted dark brown and the door composed of four long panes of glass; the whole was surmounted by a carved lintel and further embellished by a profusion of carved, painted and gold-leafed flowers. There were words, also in gold, running up and down the doorway and the windows close to the door. I saw the names György and Erzsébet Lazsló, 1864–1934.

I looked in the big front window and saw empty rooms. This magical house was uninhabited. Oh, if only I could live here! I sat on the stone front porch and surveyed my new territory. Tall firs surrounded the house, but there had been beds of flowers once, and could be again. Across the road I saw the other, smaller gate, with a blur of wild-flowers visible through its opening. Where did it lead? Was there a house somewhere farther back in the trees? Was it even more fairy tale-like than this one?

I was back suddenly in Kalamazoo, on South Street, where the rich had built their beautiful gingerbread Victorians at the turn of the century. I supposed that nowadays some of the houses were offices or antique shops, but in my childhood they had belonged, or so I imagined, to fabulously wealthy families called Arbuthnot and Churchill. Sometimes on a Saturday, babysitting my younger brothers and sisters, I would drag them from where we lived behind St. Augustine’s for a walk down South Street, and together we’d admire the ornaments, the decorations, and especially, the size and orderliness of these houses. The house where we Reillys lived was not small, but there were ten of us before my father died, and I never had a room of my own. I shared an attic dormer room, stuffed with crucifixes and holy cards of female saints, with my two older sisters, Maureen and Eileen. Maureen wanted to be a nun, until she had to get married at seventeen; Eileen held out for a church wedding after high-school graduation. Both of them had little or no interest in school, in books, in art. Nor had I, then; I only knew that there was something else, and that something didn’t live in our home, only in houses like those on South Street.

There was one house that had been my special favorite when I was about ten. I called it the fairy-tale house. It had a turret room upstairs and downstairs a big picture window draped with lace, through which a piano was visible. A woman as blond and refined as Grace Kelly lived there, and a stout, prosperous man who always seemed to have on a suit and tie, even on weekends. They had a maid who wore an apron and cap, a large black poodle, and two children, a girl about my age, with a feathery cap of blond hair, and a boy a little younger. I imagined that the girl lived in the tower room, that she was lonely for a friend, and that one day, when I was just walking by, she’d invite me in. I’d say I was an orphan, and the family would adopt me. The girl would become my sister, they’d give me piano lessons, I’d say to the maid, Hilda, bring me my breakfast in bed. I’d have French toast and fresh orange juice every morning.