Tiger Lillie (6 page)

“That’s the flesh speaking,” he told me. “God made us so this would feel good. But the timing must be proper.”

I hoped that meant marriage, but with me being only fifteen, I wasn’t about to assume a twenty-two-year-old man was talking about commitment of that magnitude. I’d feel so young at times like that.

But he protected me from a lot of the jerk boys at school who I’d have been interested in, the boys that Barb and Melanie talked about all the time. I got so sick of hearing their whining and felt so thankful a mature man kept me from worrying about all that. I tried not to say anything to them about Rawlins or to look down on them for liking guys like Jeremy, Brian, and that weird guy Philippe Stanes, who was undeniably a future candidate for the state penitentiary, in the criminally insane ward no less. Besides, Rawlins bought them nice things too, so they liked him well enough.

And then, on my sixteenth birthday, I saw Rawlins’s picture in the paper with some socialite on his arm. I freaked out! When he came to pick me up at Barb’s house, I had already snipped it out of the paper. I hopped in the car, and after he got in, I held it out. “What’s this, Rawlins?”

He took the scrap, and I could tell he was controlling himself because of the way he inhaled a couple of times through his nose. Then he turned to me and cupped my neck with his hand. He went for some warm type of smile, but he missed the mark a little. My memory finds it smarmy. “This is just my lifestyle, dear one. Of course I’m going to occasionally escort women to these type of functions. You don’t think I could actually take you, do you?”

How my youth betrayed me. I realized how second-class and insignificant to the world-at-large I really was. I should have broken up with him right then. He didn’t even temper his remark with some kind of explanation or reassurance. I should have broken up with him. But I didn’t. I loved him. He’d hold me in his arms as I sat on his lap and tell me what a lovely girl I was, how he’d always be there for me. He was so strong and masculine. Not like Daddy.

I loved my dad. But he was so oblivious and content and Mom had to care for him and not the other way around, which, I know, I really know, was probably harder on Daddy than it was on Mom. But still, it wasn’t the life I wanted for me. And Rawlins made me feel so protected and safe. He told me that he’d give me the perfect life, that he’d make sure I never had to worry about a thing. Nothing like the life Mom and Dad had. My dad was a great dad, but I didn’t want to come home every night to a man so content to have so little. Rawlins wanted it all. And Mom, she got so achy in the shoulders from shelving books all day in that dim library, and her eyesight? Wow, I swore she’d be blind by sixty!

Lillie

The rest of the Bajnoks begin funneling in from the surrounding areas around four o’clock. We Bajnoks stick close to the motherland. Mom and Dad arrive from Bel Air. Dad, giving me a kiss and hug as warm and big as his soul, settles down at the kitchen table and pulls out a Braille copy of
Imitation of Christ
and a Walkman. He likes to be in the thick of the action, but Sundays never stop rolling around. He greets everyone who makes their presence known and says hi to my cousin Rick before Rick says hi to him. Rick’s a natural, nondeodorant type. Fine for him. It’s the rest of Baltimore that suffers.

Mom folds me into her strong arms and kisses first the top of my head, then my forehead, then my nose, then my lips, then my chin. And then she says in perfect English, “Everything smells delicious, Lillie.”

You’d never know the woman grew up all the way over there.

Her two younger sisters, twins named Babi and Luca, join us in the kitchen for more hugs. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and any of my neuroses can only be blamed on myself and maybe what happened to Teddy, because if the expectations have always been high, the resources to meet them were even greater. And then, there’s something humiliating about carrying an inhaler with you wherever you go. I can’t explain why, but ask any asthmatic, and they’ll confess the whole thing embarrasses them. Oh, not in a huge way, but just enough to place a niggling doubt about yourself just behind your forehead. Nobody likes to admit their imperfections, so when yours hangs out there, puffing away, it just eats away the first layer of varnish. And, of course, there’s always that big question—“Will I ever get a bad attack and not be in reach of medication?”—and you picture yourself suffocating to death and it’s horrible, horrible, horrible.

My aunts kiss me just like Mom did, a tradition Grandma Erzsèbet started in Hungary after my grandfather was murdered by the communists.

Aunts Babi and Luca were only six when they left Hungary, so they’ve assimilated completely into American culture. Sometimes it feels odd to be so Hungarian and yet so American at the same time. But this is Baltimore, where people hold on to their nationalities like the metal bar on a roller coaster, the only thing that seems to stay put on the wild ride up and down the hills of a changing society. Out-of-towners call us provincial in these parts. They’re right.

Cousins and spouses mingle through my two floors at the row house. Babi’s youngest hooks up his GameCube to my TV down in the clubroom, and Luca’s oldest daughter, twenty-five-year-old Terri, styles hair and manicures nails in my bedroom. Girly squeals of delight whistle from my young female cousins and second cousins, and I decide maybe Terri can do something interesting with my braid.

Dinner, eaten all over the house by men and boys in crew cuts and girls and women in braids, begins in silence. The sister and I done good. Long live paprika. And halfway through, the volume soars as conversations heat up and appetites quiet down—conversations about Mayor O’Malley, the Ravens, or what to do about terrorism. I hear Cristoff sneak up the hall steps to his small upstairs apartment. He won’t come in. Our family gatherings pain him, reminding him how insufficient his own family was. His dad, military to the core, didn’t realize sons needed affection too, and his mother? Good heavens! The woman could have intimidated Barbra Streisand! They’re dead now and I’m not sorry.

Well, I’m not!

Somewhere in the midst of the outside group, a water gun rears its soppy head and my uncles Stu and Jimmy yell in unison, “Knock it off!”

But finally, after the Strong Hungarian Women return the kitchen to the pristine condition in which they had left it the year before, I light some cheap bamboo torches and stick them in sand-filled buckets all around the tiny cement yard. Mom and the aunts pour the wine while I blend milk shakes for me and the kids, and we all congregate around Grandma Erzsèbet’s Nightmare, a ten-foot-tall, gangly rhododendron that grows by the back fence. Though she died four years ago of diabetes, it’s her legacy to all of us. And I suspect she willed the house to me, her eldest granddaughter, because she may have considered me the least likely to sell the place and leave that bush, her first purchase after disembarking the boat from Ellis Island.

And unfortunately she was right.

It’s a strong American bush watered and fertilized by a Strong Hungarian Woman. Grandma Erzsèbet never learned English, but she never regretted the night she followed in my mother’s footsteps, tore off those Soviet chains, and fled to freedom.

My uncles yank open lawn chairs from my yard, from car trunks, from any willing neighbor’s porch, and we wait in quiet expectation around the Nightmare, torchlight sharpening our Strong Hungarian Features, ready to hear my mother tell the tale of her ride to freedom.

She smiles into my eyes and begins. My gosh, I love that woman. I don’t feel the same kindred spirit with her as I do with Daddy, but, truthfully, if I thought for one minute I could be half the woman she is…what? I’d get it through my thick head Teddy is dead? My life would be better? I’d find a husband? I’d be happy?

I don’t know.

I pass out sweatshirts and blankets and we all snuggle in for the tale. The night temperature plummets into the forties, nipping at little fingers and causing tennis shoes to slide snugly beneath bottoms.

Mom breathes deeply, her strong posture and stillness demanding silence. The matriarch now, she exudes poise, confidence, and a working, hard-won wisdom. Ten seconds of quiet whisper by.

She begins as though in the middle of the tale, as though she’d already begun in her mind.

“The ÁVH, our secret police, had become extremely powerful. In 1951 things got really bad when they took my father and my brother away. Class Enemies, they were called, because my father was a professor at the forestry university in Sopron. My father died a month into his imprisonment in a work camp south of Budapest. Never a well man, really, the work in the cotton fields did him in. The cold, the rain. It filled up his lungs. It devastated us girls left at home. My mother mourned him until the day she died. She called it homicide.”

Mom begins to speak of her older brother, Istvàn. She remembers the lack of news from him, the way all had been silent after his deportation to a work camp. “When he finally wrote to us, he said, ‘I see the sun rise each day as we set out toward the fields in the east and set each night in the west as we trudge back to the barracks.’

“You cannot understand it, my dear ones,” Mom says from where she stands on my iron back stoop, looking slim and fashionable in gray slacks and a blushing summer twinset only I know she bought at the Goodwill thrift store in Bel Air. “You cannot understand what freedom means until it is gone. Who is an informant? Who is not? Who is friend? Who is foe? It’s a mixed up, frightening world of smoke and mystery, and when the mist clears, those around you may still be wearing masks.”

The flesh on my arms rises like dotted Swiss when she speaks in this manner. We think we can imagine. We think we all are in some form of slavery, some form of bondage. But we don’t know what it’s like to look over our shoulder constantly, to carefully consider everything we do and wonder if it is suspect. I steal a look at my sister. Well, maybe some of us do. Rawlins stands behind her by the chain-link fence, a few paces away from us all, leaning stiffly against the railing, arms crossed over his chest.

“It is no way to live. No way for human beings, made in the image of God, to spend their lives. I remember the nights we’d huddle in our attic room, all Grandma Erzsèbet could afford after our house had been seized. She worked at a winery all through the night, and we lay upstairs on a small mattress on the rough wooden planks of the floor. I held my baby sisters in my arms”—the twins nod—“and in the dark I would remember what the priests had said. I was only eight at the time, but I would whisper the portions of the mass that were ingrained upon my memory: ‘Behold the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world.’ And I would pray, ‘Have mercy on us. Grant us peace. Lord, hear our prayer.’”

Now, prayer is important to me. I’m single. I’m lonely and I’m often floundering in a world of married people, strollers, Koala changing tables, and gum in the shape of tapeworms. But see, God is with me all the time. He walks beside me, talks with me, and He tells me that Lillian Elaine Bauer belongs to Him. No matter what, which is unbelievable, but upon thought, the only way it can be. For who, by their own performance, can begin to please a Holy God? And so I can easily picture my mother and my baby aunts up there beneath the eaves of the red-tiled roofs of Sopron. I can hear her murmured words of pleading and praise behind the whitewashed walls. And I know that I stand in a line of faith-filled womanhood and I am thankful. Thankful for my faith. Thankful to be a woman.

I mean, who wants to eventually grow ear hair? Not exactly something to look forward to.

“We lived this way for years. Educated by the state. Taught to be good little communists. Doled out hard little hunks of black bread for sustenance. Always feeling cold or hot, never in between. Wearing clothes in conditions we almost never see here in America.” She raises her index finger. “But we could not complain about the government or even our living conditions.”

“Why, Aunt Kathy?” one of my cousin’s children, a boy named Brandon, asks. I think, at five, Brandon is actually listening for the first time. Her words begin to color him in.

“Again, my loves, one never knew who was an ÁVH informant. One never knew who would go running to the secret police, very powerful by this time, in search of gathering some brownie points.”

I doubt if they called them brownie points in Hungary. But she’s employed that phrase every year, and I always forget to ask her where she learned it.

“Mama took care of Babi and Luca during the day and worked all night. I was with them while we slept. Finally, in 1956, news of a revolution against the Soviets erupted! I was twelve by this time and Babi and Luca were six. The tale of the uprising in Budapest flooded the country like a sweeping wave, as though the stagnant ocean suddenly filled with spring water and washed away the suffocating despair that had encrusted our lives for years.”

No wonder Daddy loves this woman. I mean, she’s so naturally lyrical.

“Do you remember, Babi?” Luca turns to her twin, who nods in reply, her eyes slick with tears.

Mom nods at them. “We heard our national anthem ‘
Himnusz
’ afresh that October. ‘God bless Hungarians with good will and plenty.’ It meant more than ever before, even the times I watched those tight-lipped atheist communists endure it during the dark years.”

Go, Mom. I like it when she editorializes. And she editorializes because she can now.

“We heard about the way our countrymen had seized the Russian tanks and had fired at the ÁVH. We heard about the horror in the square in Budapest, how the ÁVH had mowed down people like they were nothing more than a flock of lambs.”

My mother tells of the first shot fired into the square. How an ÁVH guard had triggered one stray bullet into the crowd. How that stray bullet, that single, deadly shot had pierced the body of an infant in her mother’s arms. How the force had thrown the mother backward. How she had walked up to a Russian tank, held aloft her lifeless baby, and screamed. “You’ve killed my child! Kill me, too!”