people say or do when I’m not there. What might my daughters
overhear? What might others tell them despite my efforts to keep the
truth locked away?
To my relief, Dickie’s mother moves the conversation in a new
direction. She prompts Dickie and his older sister Barbara to tell
Marianne about the best teachers at the school she will start in the fall.
Has Béla instructed her to maintain the conspiracy of silence? Or is it
something she has intuited? Is it something she does for my sake, my
children’s sake, her own? Later, as their family gathers at the door to
leave, I hear Dickie’s mother whisper to him in English, “Don’t ever
ask Auntie Dicu about the past. It’s not something we talk about.” My
life is a family taboo. My secret is safe.
* * *ere are always two worlds. e one that I choose and the one I
deny, which inserts itself without my permission.
In 1956, Béla passes the CPA test, earns his license, and a few
months before our third child—Johnny, a son—is born, we buy a
modest three-bedroom rambler on Fiesta Drive. ere is nothing but
desert behind the house—pink and purple ceniza blooms, red yucca
Ęowers, the throb of rattlesnakes. Inside, we choose light-colored
furnishings for the living room and the den. Over fresh papaya that
Béla crosses the border to buy in the Juárez produce markets on
Sunday mornings, we read the headlines. In Hungary, an uprising,
Soviet tanks rolling in to quash the anti-Communist rebellion. Béla is
terse with the girls, his stutter edging back. It is hot, I am very
pregnant. We turn on the swamp cooler and gather around the TV in
the den to watch the summer Olympics broadcast from Melbourne.
We tune in just as Ágnes Keleti, a Jew from Budapest on the
women’s gymnastics team, warms up for her Ęoor routine. She is
thirty-ĕve, six years older than I am. If she had grown up in Kassa, or I