CHAPTER FIVE, FOX CHAPEL, PA, SPRING 1994: OSCAR
It was a beautiful spring evening, the fading light clear and pleasantly chilled. Olivia lay on a garden lounge on her father’s patio. Barney, the large gray tom cat, snuggled on her chest. He’d wandered into Oscar’s back yard three years before, his ribs a mess from a prior owner’s farewell kick, his coat still decent. He’d spent some time evaluating his prospects. Food came first. He ate the tuna and mackerel Oscar put out, ravenously for a few days, then more calmly. Then, sensing Oscar’s loneliness, he consented to stay and be pampered.
That evening, for the first time in weeks, Olivia was feeling no pain, neither mental nor physical, and that had less to do with the medications she was using than with her emotional state. Her anxiety over what she was about to do had simply burnt itself out and her body had responded by relaxing. She had made her separate peace with what her country was becoming, and that was that.
Barney purred soothingly on her, vibrating deep into her lungs and heart.
When Oscar had learned of Olivia’s airplane crash, his first response was to get a carrying cage for Barney, then the first available flight. He was halfway to the airport before he realized that he’d forgotten to pack the rest of his luggage and snacks for the cat. That took less than twenty minutes after he got back, with Barney noisily unhappy in his crate. Oscar and Barney flew to Los Alamos, then stayed on to care for Olivia as she went into out-patient rehab. Olivia first met Barney while in a hospital wheel chair, sitting for the first time outside. They’d exchanged a single thought. You know what it means to be hurt. And then, You know what it means to keep going. Barney had become as much a healer to her as to her father. But he did not like her house and in his own way, scenting about, he indicated that he was aware of someone who’d been there before, whom he did not like. The boyfriend who had become the former boyfriend while she was still in the hospital, after a single look at her injuries, her new surgical scars, and her pain. The boyfriend who, as he explained on the phone, gracefully bowed out because her father was there and he didn’t want to interrupt their time together.
Oscar, who’d taken a total dislike to the boyfriend in less than one minute of hospital visiting time—the boyfriend had stayed less than ten—had sensed Olivia’s uneasiness at remaining in a house that had so many memories in it, of an affair that should have ended more decently. One night he’d told her that staying in the Fox Chapel house after her mother died meant more than continuing to live in her creation. It meant not living in anyone else’s. Ever. He considered it less a sacrifice than a sacrament. But she had no reason to stay in her house. Then they’d looked at Barney together, who had mewed in agreement. That settled that.
The three of them had moved her quickly to her Santa Fe apartment. Oscar had done the lifting, the housework, and a lot of ample Hungarian cooking. Barney, perhaps feeling under-appreciated, had taken it upon himself to bring Olivia animals on an almost-daily basis, usually dead but sometimes not quite dead: snakes, mice, moles, prairie dogs, eventually not-so-small leverets. Oscar sternly admonished him that there were no Hungarian recipes of any note for snakes, mice, moles, or prairie dogs. If there was anything for leverets, he wasn’t aware of it and had neither the time nor the desire to research the matter. Barney, somewhat miffed at Oscar’s limited repertoire, had nonetheless continued to minister to Olivia. Often in the nights, she had woken in pain to find Barney on top of wherever she hurt the worst, purring loudly, as if to proclaim there was nothing so bad that loving him wouldn’t make better. He was probably right. It was hard not to be soothed by a cat’s purr vibrating through your bones, no matter how much pain you were in, or not to ache for him when you felt his ribs. And it hadn’t taken him long to get back in the habit of sleeping on her once she arrived at her father’s house. Certainly he had soothed her that first night, perched on her back, rumbling steadily away while she had wept into her pillow. And all the other nights.
Oscar walked out onto the flagstone patio, stepping around the sunken barbecue pit. He carried a platter with a bottle of rosé champagne, two flutes, and a plate of caviar with blini and crème fraîche. Barney seemed unimpressed.
At first, Olivia had been unusually irritable and tense and then, for the past two days, calm. Her serenity reminded Oscar of Lavinia after she had decided to die on her own terms.
Olivia looked up at him. “I didn’t know you drank, Papa.”
“Not often, but tonight, I thought we might make an exception.” He set the tray down beside her, then from the wood stacked neatly beneath the eaves, he built a bonfire in the pit of rough stone. He had a sudden memory, overwhelmingly physical, intensely sensuous, of himself and Lavinia building that pit together, hauling and stacking rocks until their hands bled and their nails were cracked and torn, then mortaring them into place. And after, blood and dirt on their skins, sweating in the cool evening air, Lavinia told him, in defiance of their past experience and evanescing hopes, in defiance of the advice of her doctors that she was almost certain: She was finally pregnant. And then in defiance of all rationality, she uttered the most rational words he had ever heard on the subject of fertility.
Just to make sure, would you please…
My pleasure, Madame.
Olivia had been born nine months and four days later.
On top of the dry wood, Oscar laid green windfalls from the sour cherry trees he had planted the day of his daughter’s birth, in her honor and her mother’s. The tinder caught quickly. Soon the green branches would release their fragrance. Satisfied, Oscar reclined on his chaise next to his daughter, handed her a glass. “L’Chaim.” To life.
She touched the rim of her glass to his and repeated the Hebrew toast. “L’Chaim.”
A beautiful champagne, a luminous and pale rose-gold, in which she could smell spices and stones, taste ginger, coffee, the intensity of fig jam, the bitterness of orange peel, the dry, tobacco richness of smoke, winey and silky. The fine bubbles floated calmly in the glass; her blood heat caused the flavors and the scents to blossom in her mouth.
Suspicious, she looked at the bottle. Krug’s first rosé, released in 1983. “Papa, how much did you pay for this?”
“A wedding, or even just a wedding dress would have cost me far more.”
“Touché.”
“It’s the custom for fathers to drink with their sons. I do not think mothers teach their daughters how to drink. Do they?”
“I’ve seen no evidence of that. I think it would save some trouble if they did.”
“Your mother and I raised you almost as a son.”
“Except that none of us ever seemed in any doubt that I was a girl.”
They ate. The blini and crème fraîche, topped with the grey-brown eggs, nutty and creamy, provided a stunning foil to the champagne, which had blossomed into the scent of berries.
“Let’s do this again when I get back.”
Oscar decided to change the subject. “I am curious about something. Perhaps I shouldn’t ask but…”
“But…”
“Do you remember that boy?”
She cocked an eyebrow at her father. “Which boy?”
“There weren’t so many.”
“When you’re the only child of a widower who is also an old-school Hungarian Jewish immigrant, there are more than you let on to your papa.”
“Are you telling me you were sneaky?”
“I’m telling you I was very damned sneaky. You and Mama didn’t raise no fool.” She paused. “I am remembering that boy. Tall, black hair, brown eyes, on the cross country team. About two years older than me. We were both sophomores.”
Not that the boy was dumb. She’d been advanced two years, if only because various teachers and principals felt that her combination of excessive achievement and ill-concealed boredom was harmful to the self-esteem of the less gifted. “John Dubinsky. We used to run together. Puke after hill intervals.”
“And that was all there was to it?”
> “Not exactly.”
Oscar stared at her. “You mean you saw him after I forbade you to see him again?”
By normal American standards, it had not been a horrible fight, or even much of a fight. But they had not been normal Americans. Olivia was fourteen and it was near the one-year anniversary of Lavinia’s death. As always, before doing anything rebellious, she researched it thoroughly, so as to have a convincing rationale available later. From assorted biology books, she learned that boys reacted to the hormone flux of adolescence by withdrawing and becoming sullen, girls by becoming aggressive. Estrogen, after all, was an anabolic steroid just like testosterone, but had far more powerful effects at far lower blood levels. The typical girl’s biological need to seek conflict was all the more powerful because she had no socially sanctioned outlet for aggression and was expected to resist sexual desire, her own as well as that encouraged in boys.
Oscar had been wise enough to give Olivia an outlet for the increased aggression and energy of adolescence, encouraging her to run and to lift seriously. Sex, on the other hand…
I’m disappointed in you, Olivia. For this, for you to maybe get pregnant by some boy. Your mother would even be more disappointed in you.
Papa, I’m not a Hungarian mädel. I’m an American teenager. Deal with it.
He’d wanted to slap her; the sudden tensing of his body communicated that more clearly than words. But educated, aristocratic Jews—and the men of his family had been both for generations, before the Jews had become the scapegoats for Hungary’s ills—were not violent. Particularly not when they’d seen and done what Oscar had as a young man in Hungary during World War Two and in the first year of Communist rule.
Olivia had neither flinched from nor challenged him, just remained staring at him fixedly, calm beyond defiance. They’d looked at each other, shocked by their quick descent into emotional manipulation and guilt, teenage brattiness, and the whisper of possible violence, and then carefully began backing away from the abyss that had opened up before them.
Olivia took a swallow of champagne, nerved herself. “Yes, I saw him quite a bit, actually.”
“He didn’t…” Oscar couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
“He did. He was very kind and very sweet and he made damned sure he didn’t get me pregnant.”
“He was older than you!”
“Thank goodness. Also a natural gentleman.”
“About that, I didn’t think. You were my little girl and you had no mother and…and my own sister died in childbirth. She was twenty.”
Olivia was shocked to her core. “You never told me that.”
“My generation didn’t really talk of such things. We knew them too well to have to speak of them. Is it better or worse for your generation, daughter?”
“I don’t know. I know I’m thirty-four and unmarried.”
“By choice,” Oscar said quietly. “Choices were not as great back then.”
“Except,” Olivia answered, “for those who wanted them to be.”
Her mother had wanted them to be. During the war, Lavinia Lathrop worked as an architect for a genteel but struggling Philadelphia firm. The partners hadn’t wanted her, at first. But with so many men away, and her family’s social standing…she was hired for those reasons, paid little, and liked less. She was a “for the duration only” employee. After the war, some worthy young male would take her place; it was his right. She never disputed them, only resolved to stay on until she could leave on her own terms. One day in April 1946, without prior notice, her male replacement arrived and took over her desk. The next day, Lavinia announced that she was leaving to start her own firm. No one wished her well. Lathrop & Associates opened for business in a run-down four-room office suite with no furniture, no associates, and no clients. The clients came quickly. Associates took longer to find; few men were willing to work for a woman. The office never did get fully decorated.
Four years before and a universe away, Oscar was a Hungarian Jew with a brand-new civil engineering degree from the Royal Joseph University. It was 1942, not an auspicious time to for a Jew to start a career in a country so sympathetic to fascism that it had joined the Axis in 1940 and participated in the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis wouldn’t occupy Hungary until 1944, but the persecutions and the killings had started long before that. Ultimately, three out of four Hungarian Jews would be murdered, by Hungarians and Germans. Oscar would not be among them. One of his engineering professors had a brother, a Catholic priest who provided Oscar with false birth and baptismal certificates. The professor found him a job as a draftsman with a small company that did considerable business with Germany. They accepted him, no questions asked. Nor did Oscar’s parents ask much about where their only son was going. Just…away.
Oscar spent three years as a junior engineer in a company that numbered the SS among its clients. When not working, he hid in his apartment, mostly reading, taking in an occasional dog or cat whose owners had vanished. He never saw or heard from his family again.
The Soviets replaced the Germans. Oscar stayed in Hungary long enough to learn his family’s fate and to appropriately repay a Hungarian he’d known before the war for revealing to the Germans where his family was hiding. Then he fled west to the American-occupied zone of Austria. He found employment as an assistant with a State Department technical team assessing what was left of the country’s infrastructure. A year later, after much conniving and with the help of a remorse-stricken, career-terminal State Department official who’d connived on his behalf even more, he found himself in Philadelphia. There, sitting in a small diner, violating what was left of his observant Judaism by eating his first Philadelphia steak and cheese sandwich, then his second, he noticed a newspaper help-wanted notice. Lathrop & Associates was looking for draftsmen. Low starting salary but lots of potential. Since he was penniless and could use some potential, he applied.
A new thing, working for a woman who demanded much but also gave much. Lavinia helped him receive partial university credit for his Hungarian engineering degree, found him scholarship money for a few required courses, then nurtured and cajoled him through his professional exams. Oscar Tolchin was now Oscar Tolchin, P.E. In return, he offered her long hours of unpaid work and total loyalty. For her part, Lavinia kept him in Philadelphia steak and cheese sandwiches, asked him no questions about his past, and trusted him completely.
The firm prospered. They moved to larger offices that also never got fully decorated. Lavinia hired an American draftsman, then promoted Oscar to senior associate and ordered him, finally, to stop addressing her as “Madame” and start calling her Lavinia. As the firm grew larger, their hours together grew fewer, and Oscar began to seek a life of his own. Dating was hard. There was no such practice in Europe and his semi-clandestine status during the war meant that seeking female companionship could be fatal. Now he was thirty and a lot of experiences with women that he should have had, weren’t there. Dutifully, he tried dating American Jewish women, then realized in a moment of profound relief that the only woman he truly loved was unattainable. Since he had no interest in spending the rest of his life with a compromise, he no longer had to look for one.
The day came to take his oath of citizenship. He asked Lavinia, who had tutored and quizzed him until he practically knew the Constitution by heart and could sing (more or less) every verse of the Star-Spangled Banner, to accompany him to the ceremony. There were nearly a hundred others in the courtroom, most still far more foreign than he. Looking at them, feeling the distance, he realized that he had indeed become American. This was home now.
There was a reception afterwards.
“Let’s skip it,” Lavinia suggested. “You will permit me to take you to dinner?”
“Please.”
“One condition. You order something besides…”
Oscar Tolchin, P.E., new American citizen, laughed happily. “I will ask you to order for us both.”
An hour later, ov
er rosé champagne and caviar, she said quietly, “I know very little about what Jewish people do in certain circumstances.”
“Which circumstances?”
Lavinia took his hand. “When a Gentile woman with no attachment to Christianity desires to marry a Jewish man, is it necessary and appropriate for the woman to convert before the wedding?”
Oscar flinched, then enclosed her hand in his and said formally, “If that is your way of suggesting marriage, I was about to mention something on that order myself.”
“No, you weren’t.”
Oscar peered into his glass. “Yes, I was. I wouldn’t have, perhaps not this evening. But I was. Or I would have when the…”
“Oscar.”
“What?”
“Hush, darling. Just hush.”
The conversion process went much faster than normal. They found an immigrant rabbi who needed the money and was happy to keep it simple, light, and fast. He married them in a small ceremony up in a Bucks County inn on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware River, not far from where George Washington had crossed with what was left of his army to win the Trenton victory that saved the Revolution. Lavinia’s family, who had always regarded her ambition as defiance and her success as insult, and Oscar as the final defiance and insult, did not attend.
“Ours was a different generation, daughter.”
“Did you have affairs before I moved out?”
“Me? Never. I wasn’t going to bring anyone home while you were still here. And you?”
“The same. My men had to wait until I moved out.”
“Your men?”
“Well, more than one, and usually a little older.”
Oscar had insisted that she live with him until her junior year at Carnegie-Mellon University. Starting college at sixteen is one thing; moving into a dorm at that age, quite another.
He shrugged, drank some champagne, ate some caviar and blini. “In truth, I had a few women after you left. But never here. This always will be your mother’s house. One widow, one divorcée, one or two still single. But too many issues. Too much baggage. And I wasn’t going to leave here. Ever.”
Olivia calmly helped herself to caviar, this time with a large helping of crème fraîche and refilled their glasses. Barney, still perched on her, sniffed at her mouth, looking for caviar. “Cats do not eat fish eggs. Too expensive.” She handed him, instead, a blini smeared with the crème. Purring loudly, he licked the blini clean before eating it.
Oscar looked at his daughter, wondering where a lifetime had gone and what she was going to do next and forever.
He had no regrets, except that it had all gone so fast. A week after their honeymoon, a Caribbean cruise that left them alternately bored to agony with their fellow passengers and amazed that they could wring so much passion out of each other in so many ways, Lathrop & Associates dissolved. The new sign on the door: Tolchin & Tolchin. The firm prospered. Relations with Lavinia’s family remained virtually nonexistent. Perhaps a grandchild might have made a difference, but none was immediately forthcoming. After about a year, they began to discuss the possibility of getting out of Philadelphia.
“What about Pittsburgh?” Oscar asked one night in bed.
“I’ve been there. Fortunately, it was closed.”
“I’m serious. They’re finally cleaning the city up. There’s a whole new downtown under construction and other projects all over the area. The cost of living is less than here. And it would be far enough from your family that we’d only have to see them if you want to.”
“We don’t want to,” Lavinia said tonelessly. “Neither do they.”
Six months later, Tolchin & Tolchin moved to Pittsburgh. They built a house of Lavinia’s design. No matter how much they worked, it was never quite finished. Oscar realized that his wife had planned it that way. For architects as for other artists, completion is a kind of death.
Olivia, Oscar knew, had none of that about her. She was always finishing something. She’d skipped two years of public school, graduating at sixteen and entering Carnegie-Mellon University two weeks later for the summer session. She graduated in three years. Her final year and a half, she lived in a dorm. Oscar, desperate to see more of her but unwilling to constrict her by admitting it, did the next best thing. He began to taper off his professional work and entered graduate school part-time at Carnegie-Mellon. They got together enough, coffees and lunches mostly, to ease the transition. Olivia graduated in 1979, then headed off to MIT for her doctorate. Oscar, at loose ends, sold the business to some Yuppie types who understood that in a few years, after steel and the other local heavy industries had committed assisted suicide, Pittsburgh would reinvent itself again. They expected to do well, and did. Oscar went into part-time consulting while working on his own Ph.D. Father and daughter competed to see who would finish first. Olivia did. In 1984, Carnegie-Mellon offered him one of those perpetual visiting professorships that sometimes come to older men and women of considerable non-academic accomplishment. Oscar accepted. Between consulting and teaching, he now knew how he would spend the rest of his life.
“So, daughter…tell me about your trip to Europe.”
She gave him a long, very steady look over the rim of her flute. “I thought I might start in Vienna with a conference, work my way back west.”
“The last time I was in Vienna was in ‘46. You could still smell the bodies in the rubble. What do you plan to do?”
“Look around. See the Spanish Riding School. Yodel.”
“And after that?”
She shrugged. “I have money and a valid passport and for the first time in my adult life, no responsibilities. See Europe. Ponder my future.”
Oscar paused. It wasn’t that Olivia was being unwise. Nothing could be wiser for her than to take some time off and travel, think about what she wanted to do for the next phase of her working life. It was just utterly out of character for her. She was not the sort of woman to six months wandering around Europe, visiting museums and cafés, and doing little else.
Oscar rose, put more wood on the fire, went back into the kitchen for the second bottle of champagne, and refilled Olivia’s glass. She eyed the bottle, also Krug, and shook her head. “Don’t worry, last bottle. And remember, a hell of a lot cheaper than a dress.” After a while, Oscar spoke again. “What do you plan to do with your car?”
Calmly, half-drunk, she looked at him. It was the test question. Not, what do you plan to do with your life? but What about your car?
“I’d planned to drive it up to New York, sell it to a dealer for whatever I could get. I’ve decided I don’t like the color.”
“Perhaps you could sell it to me. I like the color and I’m due for a new car. Newer car.”
“Blue book value for excellent condition, then.”
“Friend and family discount?” Oscar countered.
“Ten percent.”
“Done deal. Would you like me to have my bank transfer the money, or shall I give you a check or get you traveler’s checks?”
“Bank will be fine,” she said, and poured him out more champagne. Then remembering, “I’ll even throw in a pistol. I won’t be needing it anymore.”
“That .45?”
“No, just a plain old Beretta.”
“What happened to the .45?”
“I…” Olivia paused. “It’s in safekeeping. Papa…if you don’t hear from me for a while, or only once in a while, and I’m vague about what I’m doing…don’t worry.”
“So,” Oscar said slowly, “this is more than just a tourist excursion.”
“Papa…I think I’m drunk enough to go to bed. I’m leaving tomorrow and it’s another long drive.”
She stirred enough to let Barney take the hint and jump off. She kissed her father, then went upstairs.