The Choice Read online

  I didn’t want the kind of marriage my parents had—lonely, lacking in intimacy—and I didn’t want their broken dreams (my father’s, to be a doctor; my mother’s, to be a career woman, to marry for love). But what did I want for myself? I didn’t know. And so I erected Béla as a force to push against. In place of discovering my own genuine purpose and direction, I found meaning in fighting against him, against the ways I imagined that he limited me. Really, Béla was supportive of my schooling, he paid for my tuition, he loved talking with me about the philosophy and literature I was reading, he found my reading lists and analyses interesting complements to his favorite subject: history. Maybe because Béla occasionally expressed some resentment for the time I gave to school, or because in the interest of my own health he sometimes cautioned me to slow down, the notion took root and grew in me that if I wanted to progress in my life, it would have to be on my own. I was so hungry, so tired of discounting myself.

  I remember traveling with Audrey to a swim meet in San Angelo in 1967, when she was thirteen. The other parent chaperones got together in the hotel in the evening and drank and caroused. If Béla had been there, I realized, we would have been at the center of the activity, not because either of us liked to be around heavy drinking, but because Béla was a natural charmer—he saw a room of people and he couldn’t stay away. Any room that he occupied became a social sphere, people drawn into convivial relationship because of the atmosphere he created. I admired this about him, and I resented it, too, resented the ways I became silent so that his voice could ring. Just like in my family growing up, there was room for one star. At our weekly prime rib and dancing dates with friends in El Paso, I got to share the light when everyone made room for Béla and me on the dance floor. Together, we were sensational, our friends said, it was hard to look away. We were admired as a couple—but there wasn’t space for just me. That night in San Angelo, I found the noise and drunkenness of the other parents unpleasant, and I was about to retreat to my room. I was lonely, feeling a little sorry for myself. Then I flashed on Frankl’s book. On my freedom to choose my own response to any situation.

  I did something I had never done before. I knocked on the door of Audrey’s hotel room. She was surprised to see me, but she invited me in. She and her friends were playing cards, watching TV. “When I was your age,” I said, “I was an athlete too.” Audrey’s eyes opened wide. “You girls are so lucky and beautiful. You know what it is to have a strong body. To work hard. To be a team.” I told them what my ballet teacher had told me a lifetime ago: “All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.” I said good night and started to walk out the door, but before I left the room, I did a high kick. Audrey’s eyes glittered with pride. Her friends clapped and cheered. I wasn’t the quiet mom with the strange accent. I was the performer, the athlete, the mom whose daughter admired her. Inside, I equated that feeling of self-worth and elation with Béla’s absence. If I wanted to feel that glow more often, perhaps I needed to be with him less often.

  That hunger for self fueled me in my undergraduate studies too. I was voracious, always in search of more knowledge, and also the respect and approval that might signal to me that I was of value. I stayed up all night working on papers that were already good, for fear that they wouldn’t—or would only—be good enough. When a psychology professor announced to our class at the beginning of the semester that he only gave C’s, I marched to his office, told him I only earned As, and asked what I could do to continue my exceptional academic performance. He invited me to work with him as an assistant, augmenting my classroom learning with field experience usually granted only to graduate students.

  One afternoon, some of my classmates invited me to join them for a beer after class. I sat with them in the darkened bar near campus, my chilled glass on the table, enthralled by their youthful energy, their political passion. I admired them, social justice advocates, pacifists. I was happy to be included. And sad too. This stage of my life had been cut short. Individuation and independence from my family. Dating and romance. Participation in social movements that were bringing about real change. I had lost my childhood to the war, my adolescence to the death camps, and my young adulthood to the compulsion to never look back. I had become a mother before I had grieved my own mother’s death. I had tried too fast and too soon to be whole. It wasn’t Béla’s fault that I had chosen denial, that I often kept myself, my memories, my true opinions and experiences hidden, even from him. But now I held him responsible for prolonging my stuckness.

  That day over beers, one of my fellow students asked me how Béla and I had met. “I love a good love story,” she said. “Was it love at first sight?” I don’t remember how I answered her, but I do know that the question made me think, again, about the kind of love I wished I’d had. With Eric there had been sparks, a flush all over my body when he was near. Even Auschwitz didn’t kill the romantic girl in me, the girl who told herself each day that she might meet him again. But after the war, that dream died. When I met Béla, I wasn’t in love; I was hungry. And he brought me Swiss cheese. He brought me salami. I could remember feeling happy in those early years with Béla—when I was pregnant with Marianne, walking to the market every morning to buy flowers, talking to her in my womb, telling her how she was going to blossom like a flower. And she had, all of my children had. And now I was forty years old, the age my mother had been when she died, and I still hadn’t blossomed, still hadn’t had the love I thought I was due. I felt cheated, denied of an essential human rite, trapped in a marriage that had become a meal consumed with no expectation of nourishment, with no hope of erasing hunger.

  * * *

  My sustenance came from an unexpected source. One day in 1968, I came home to find a letter in the mailbox addressed to me in a European-looking hand, sent from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. There was no name above the return address, only initials: V. F. When I opened the letter, I almost fell over. From one survivor to another, the salutation read. The letter was from Viktor Frankl.

  Following my predawn immersion in Man’s Search for Meaning two years earlier, I had written an essay called “Viktor Frankl and Me.” I had written it for myself, it was a personal exercise, not an academic one, my first attempt to speak about my past. Timidly, cautiously hopeful for the possibility of personal growth, I had shared it with some professors and some friends, and eventually it had found its way into a campus publication. Someone had anonymously mailed a copy of my article to Frankl in Dallas, where, unbeknownst to me, he had been a visiting professor since 1966. Frankl was twenty-three years my senior—he had been thirty-nine years old, already a successful physician and psychiatrist, when he was interned at Auschwitz. Now he was the celebrated founder of Logotherapy. He had practiced, lectured, and taught all over the world. And he had been moved enough by my little essay to contact me, to relate to me as a fellow survivor, as a peer. I had written about imagining myself onstage at the Budapest opera house the night I was forced to dance for Mengele. Frankl wrote that he had done something similar at Auschwitz—in his worst moments, he had imagined himself a free man, giving lectures in Vienna on the psychology of imprisonment. He had also found a sanctuary in an inner world that both shielded him from his present fear and pain, and inspired his hope and sense of purpose—that gave him the means and a reason to survive. Frankl’s book and his letter helped me find words for our shared experience.

  So began a correspondence and a friendship that would last for many years, in which we would try together to answer the questions that ran through our lives: Why did I survive? What is the purpose in my life? What meaning can I make from my suffering? How can I help myself and others to endure the hardest parts of life and to experience more passion and joy? After exchanging letters for several years, we met for the first time at a lecture he gave in San Diego in the 1970s. He invited me backstage to meet his wife and even asked me to critique his talk—a hugely important moment, to be treated by my mentor as a peer. Even his
first letter nourished in me the seed of a calling: the search to make meaning in my life by helping others to make meaning, to heal so that I could heal others, to heal others so that I could heal myself. It also reinforced my understanding, however misapplied when I divorced Béla, that I had the power and opportunity—as well as the responsibility—to choose my own meaning, my own life.

  * * *

  I had taken my first conscious step toward finding my own way in the late 1950s, when I noticed Johnny’s developmental challenges and needed help in meeting them. A friend recommended a Jungian analyst who had studied in Switzerland. I knew next to nothing about clinical psychology in general or Jungian analysis in particular, but after looking into the subject a bit, several Jungian ideas appealed to me. I liked the emphasis on myths and archetypes, which reminded me of the literature I had loved as a girl. And I was intrigued by the notion of bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of one’s psyche together into a balanced whole. I remembered the images of dissonance between Vicky Page’s inner and outer experience in The Red Shoes, and of course I was suffering in the grip of my own inner conflicts. I wasn’t consciously entering therapy to heal that tension in myself—I really just wanted to know what to do for my son and how to heal the rift between Béla and me over what to do. But I also felt drawn to Carl Jung’s vision of therapeutic analysis: It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost. “Saying yea” to myself. I wanted to do that. I wanted to blossom and improve.

  My therapist gave me dream homework, and I studiously recorded my dreams. Almost always, I was flying. I could choose how high or low to the ground to fly, how fast or how slow. I could choose which landscapes to fly over—European cathedrals, forested mountains, ocean beaches. I looked forward to sleep so that I could have these dreams in which I was joyful and strong, flying free, in control. I found in those dreams my power to transcend the limiting assumptions that others often imposed on my son. And I found my desire to transcend what I perceived to be the limitations imposed on me. I didn’t yet know that the limitations that needed transcending weren’t without—they were within. So when, years later, under the influence of Viktor Frankl, I began to question what I wanted out of life, it was easy for me to think that saying no to Béla would be one way of saying yes to myself.

  * * *

  In the months after the divorce, I felt better. For several years I had been suffering from migraines (my mother had also struggled with debilitating headaches; I assumed they were hereditary), but right after Béla and I separated, the migraines disappeared, departing like a season. I thought it was because now I was living free from Béla’s weather—his yelling and cynicism, his irritation and disappointment. My headaches disappeared and so did my need to hide, to retreat. I invited fellow students and our professors to my house, I hosted raucous parties, I felt at the center of a community, open to the world.

  I was living the way I wanted to live, I thought. But soon a fog set in. My surroundings looked gray-washed. I had to remind myself to eat.

  One Saturday morning in May 1969, I sit at home alone in the den. It’s my graduation day. I am forty-two years old. I am graduating with a BS in psychology from the University of Texas–El Paso, I am graduating with honors. Yet I can’t make myself walk in the ceremony. I am too ashamed. “I should have done this years ago,” I tell myself. What I really mean—the subtext of so many of my choices and beliefs—is, “I don’t deserve to have survived.” I am so obsessed with proving my worth, with earning my place in the world, that I don’t need Hitler anymore. I have become my own jailor, telling myself, “No matter what you do, you will never be good enough.”

  * * *

  What I miss the most about Béla is the way he dances. Especially the Viennese waltz. As cynical and angry as he can be, he also lets joy in, he lets his body wear it, express it. He can surrender to the tempo and still lead, hold steady. I dream of him some nights. Of his childhood, the stories he told me in letters when he courted me. I see his father collapse into an avalanche, his breath lost in all that white. I see his mother panic in a Budapest market and confess her identity to the SS. I think of the sad tension in Béla’s family stemming from his mother’s role in their deaths. I think of Béla’s stutter, the way his early trauma marked him. One summer day Béla comes to pick up John. He’s driving a new car. In America, we have always owned frugal cars—dumpy cars, our children say. Today he’s driving an Oldsmobile with leather seats. He bought it used, he says, defensive, proud. But my look of disbelief isn’t about the car. It’s about the elegant woman sitting in the passenger seat. He’s found someone else.

  * * *

  I am grateful for the necessity of working to support myself and my children. Work is an escape. And it gives me a clear purpose. I become a seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher in the El Paso barrio. I receive job offers from more coveted schools in the wealthy parts of town, but I want to work with students who are bilingual, who are facing the kinds of obstacles Béla and I did when we came to America: poverty, prejudice. I want to connect my students to their choices, to show them that the more choices they have, the less they’ll feel like victims. The most difficult part of my job is countering the negative voices in my students’ lives—sometimes even their own parents’ voices—that say they will never make it as students, that education for them isn’t a viable course. You’re so puny, you’re so ugly, you’ll never find a husband. I tell them about my crossed eyes, about my sisters’ silly chant, how the problem wasn’t that they sang these songs to me—the problem was that I believed them. But I don’t let my students know how deeply I identify with them, how hate obliterated my childhood, how I know the darkness that eats you when you’ve been taught to believe that you don’t matter. I remember the voice that rose up through the Tatra Mountains, If you’re going to live, you have to stand for something. My students give me something to stand for. But I am still numb and anxious, isolated, so brittle and sad.

  The flashbacks persist, they happen sometimes when I’m driving. I see a policeman in uniform at the side of the road and my vision tunnels, I feel like I will faint. I don’t have a name for these experiences, I don’t yet understand that they are a physiological manifestation of the grief that I haven’t dealt with yet. A clue my body sends as a reminder of the feelings that I have blocked from conscious life. A storm that assaults me when I deny myself permission to feel.

  What are my disowned feelings? They are like strangers living in my house, invisible except for the food they steal, the furniture they leave out of place, the mud they trail down the hall. Divorce doesn’t liberate me from their uneasy presence. Divorce empties the room of other distractions, of the habitual targets of my blame and resentment, and forces me to sit alone with my feelings.

  Sometimes I call Magda. She and Nat have divorced too, and she is remarried to Ted Gilbert, a man closer to her age, a kind listener and stepfather. She and Nat have maintained a close friendship. He comes to her house for dinner two or three times a week. “Be careful what you do when you’re restless,” my sister cautions. “You can start to think the wrong things. Unimportant things. He’s too this, he’s too that, I’ve suffered enough. You end up missing the same things that drove you crazy.”

  It’s like she has read my mind, the little edge of doubt, the concession that maybe divorce isn’t fixing what I thought was broken.

  One night a woman calls my house. She is looking for Béla. Do I know where he might be? It’s his girlfriend, I realize. She’s calling my house as though I keep tabs on my ex-husband, as though I owe her information, as though I am his secretary. “Don’t ever call me again!” I shout. After I hang up, I am agitated, I can’t sleep. I try to have a flying dream, a lucid dream, but I can’t take flight, I keep falling, waking. It is a terrible night. And a
useful one. Audrey’s sleeping over at a friend’s house, Johnny is already in bed. There is nowhere to go to escape from my discomfort; I just have to feel it. I cry, I feel sorry for myself, I am furious. I feel every wave of jealousy, of bitterness, of loneliness, of indignation, of self-pity, and on and on. And in the morning, although I haven’t slept, I feel better. Calmer. Nothing has changed. I still feel abandoned, however illogically, by the husband I chose to leave. But my storminess and agitation have run their course. They aren’t permanent features. They move, they change. I feel more at peace.

  I will have many more nights and days like this one. Times when I am alone, when I begin to practice the work of not pushing my feelings away, no matter how painful. That is the gift of my divorce: the recognition that I have to face up to what’s inside me. If I am really going to improve my life, it isn’t Béla or our relationship that has to change. It’s me.

  * * *

  I see the need for change, but I don’t know what kind of change will help me feel freer and more joyful. I try a new therapist, for fresh perspective on my marriage, but her approach isn’t useful—she wags her finger at me, telling me that forcing Béla to do the grocery shopping was emasculating, that I should never have mowed the lawn and taken his male responsibilities from him. She picks at the things that were working in my marriage and recasts them as problems and faults. I try a new job, this time at a high school, where I teach introductory psychology and serve as a school counselor. But the sense of purpose I felt at the beginning of my profession begins to be eroded by the bureaucracy of schools, the huge class sizes and case loads, the inability to work effectively with individual students. There’s more I have to offer—I know this, although I don’t yet know what it is I am meant to do.