Coming to Terms with a Transylvanian Heritage
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The Girl Who Never Came Back And Other Essays John Karl C!"#$ P%&'(&') *+ P#(#$ C,!$%! B!!- D#.&)' *+ F$#/ T$%'0/ Copyright © 2021 by John Karl Contents Present at the Creation • 1 Attending the party where your parents fell in love 2e Girl Who Never Came Back • 12 A renegade stepmother’s gift of sport Haunted Homeland • 58 Coming to terms with a Transylvanian heritage 2is Joy, 2is Freedom, 2is Challenge • 87 Re!ections on a lifetime of running In the Ashes of Music Row • 115 A "nal visit to New York’s legendary street of music shops Two Left Hands • 130 Concerning a certain minority 2ere Used to be a Ballpark • 156 Of fan dancers, hog-calling contests, donkey ball, and exploding scoreboards My Name, My Destiny • 209 #e age-old search for divine messages in our names 2e Choice • 229 A mother’s secret suitor emerges in pages from the past Bohemian Rhapsody • 268 Dreaming of Paris on the Upper West Side The Girl Who Never Came Back And Other Essays Present at the Creation Attending the party where your parents fell in love onight, I attended the party where my teenaged T parents met and fell in love. It was a hot July evening in Manhattan, and the art studio was loud, smoky, crowded with college students; tables were cluttered with spent wine bottles and over4ow- ing ashtrays; modern jazz skirled from a record player and drifted outside through large windows 4ung open to the city’s tropical heat. I’d felt a thrill when I pushed on the studio door and it swung away to reveal the revelry within — when I realized that the two pages I held, after searching through boxes of my parents’ papers, were my mother’s memories of the party, written a few weeks later, in August 1956. “I don’t know what it was that brought us together with such violence that night,” she began, and the words set me back a moment. 2eir suggestion of bodice-ripping erotica gave me pause, but more signi5cantly, I saw that these two pages of typed red ink told a story I had long sought. At my dining room table, I read on as my nineteen-year- old mother recounted for her 5fty-year-old son a Dionysian celebration that would lead to my parents’ courtship and 3 T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ marriage, the births of two boys, divorce, remarriages, and all the rest of our shared and separate destinies. 2rough my mother’s pages — and the discovery later in the night of my father’s account of the party — I was given a child’s singular privilege: to be present at his parents’ 5rst kiss. A11 7,&1/$#' %.- (,#&$ 8%$#'(. to tell the story of how they met and married, as awareness dawns that those in their home haven’t always shared a roof. However, children have di9culty believing in a world before their birth or that their parents had once been young and romantic. And I had an additional barrier to imagining my parents’ earlier life: I had no recollection of their living marriage. 2ey had separated before my brother and I were in elementary school and they had soon remarried. I had never, in memory, even seen them together in the same room. 2ey were linked only by telephone, from their new apartments on opposite edges of our island — my father in the Village, near the Hudson River, my mother on the Lower East Side, near the East River. 2ey spoke rarely, and only to arrange their sons’ visits with their father or to discuss his alimony and child-support payments. 2ese conversations, parts of which I sometimes overheard from one apartment or the other, were brief and businesslike, though occasionally their tone turned bitter, and ended with my father shouting or my mother cursing and slamming the receiver. Once, in a rage, she grabbed a vase from a table and 4ung it across our living room, shattering a window, which set me wailing in fear. 2ose months following their separation were a dark period for both of them, and particularly for her. She was a single mother, nearly alone in Manhattan, struggling to emerge 6 P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' from the wreckage of a marriage, without a career, without a cohesive family to return to in Ohio, and with two demand- ing, disorderly boys under her wing. I remember her then as often unresponsive, distracted, and withdrawn — qualities quite uncharacteristic of her, though her diary pages con5rm this memory. At the end of one sad, dreary day in 1969, she concluded an entry: “I want to go home, but I don’t know where home is or how to get there. I’d like to put my head down somewhere, but there is nowhere to put it.” Y#( (,#$# ,%/ *##' % (&;#, I knew, when we had been a true family, when we’d all lived together near Gramercy Park, on a quiet street of red-brick townhouses and pre-war apartment buildings. I imagined those unremembered years as our lost golden age, but with only my parents’ overheard phone calls to go by, I couldn’t quite picture that sunlit time, even as I yearned for it. It felt terribly important to possess that story, like something warm and alive held inside my coat while I navigated our bleak new world of weekend visits, apartment moves, strange schools, remarriages, a resisted stepfather, and the muggings which my brother and I were learning to endure in the slum that would later gain notoriety as Alphabet City. 2e story of my parents’ meeting was our Book of Genesis; Gramercy Park was our Garden of Eden before the exile. (I once dragged my reluctant mother to make a pilgrimage to our former home, to prove to myself that this dreamed-of place was real; the ordinary apartment building I confronted was deeply disappointing.) I clung to a fading hope that my mother and father would reunite, despite their marriages. I was ignorant of : T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ how thoroughly my parents’ love had been destroyed by years of rancor, of spiteful acts, of betrayals, of bruising words, of unspoken resentments, and hopeless misun- derstandings. Only the responsibilities owed to their sons compelled them to speak, by telephone. 2ey had embarked on new, divergent paths, while I persisted with tiresome questions about how they had met and married and why they had separated. Still, they were loving parents and no doubt discerned the sense of loss that prompted their son’s interrogations. 2ey answered honestly yet cautiously, creating a sort of cordon sanitaire around their marriage, which, I believe, was the best they could o=er under the circumstances. 2ey would not have gone so far as to coordinate their responses, but these were weirdly similar, so that I had virtually the same, repeated conver- sations in their apartments: “We met at a party,” they said. “How did you meet there? What sort of a party was it?” “It was a college party.” “Did you know that you loved each other right away and that you’d get married?” “Yes, we knew right away. We loved each other very much.” “If you loved each other, why did you get divorced?” “People change,” they said. 2rough such judicious replies my parents thwarted all attempts to form the picture, the story, I sought of their 5rst love, which had created our family, and to fathom their divorce, which had rent it. 2eir unvarying answers acquired a ritualized quality: they knew what I’d ask, I knew what they’d say. Nevertheless, I took some comfort in these < P$#.#'( %( (,# C$#%(&!' exchanges; it reassured me to hear them say “your mother” or “your father” without bitterness, because it allowed me to believe they hadn’t completely forgotten their love. In adolescence, I culled a few more particulars about their early romance. Perhaps my questions became more incisive, or my parents decided I was old enough to hear more of the truth, or the distance of years had made such discussions less emotionally fraught for them, or some combination of all of these. But whatever the reason, by the time I left for college, I‘d gathered these facts: In July 1956, my parents were students at Antioch College, in Ohio. My father was in Manhattan, preparing to travel by freighter to Paris, where he would spend the better part of a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne. My mother, as it happened, was also in the city, working at a medical insurance company for academic credit, through the college’s work-study program. She and three other Antioch girls lived on West Fifty-seventh Street, in Sherwood Studios, a nineteenth-century building which had o=ered spacious, high-ceilinged ateliers for generations of artists. On July 31, my mother turned nineteen. Her roommates threw her a party that evening. My father was among the guests. He and my mother had been aware of each other through mutual friends at college, but it wasn’t until the party that they spoke. All of these facts my parents in time had revealed. But there was one fact that I discovered only when I explored their papers: the night she met my father, my mother was engaged to be married to an Antioch student of Dutch descent named Jan DeVries, who was away in Chicago that summer, working at a theater. > T!" G#$% W!& N"'"$ C()" B(*+ (,- O.!"$ E//(0/ A0(#$ ;+ 8%$#'(.’ /#%(,. — my father died in 2010, my mother three years later — I stowed their papers in a closet.