An Excerpt from ‘Finding Maria’

She was still laughing, and for a moment she had the lively expression of a little girl. It faded in and out as I studied her face, searching for more of it.

“Ice cream?” she said suddenly.

A pushcart had somehow materialized in front of us. The late-fall warmth had brought out the street vendors, keen for a final infusion of cash before winter set in. They had appeared as crocuses do in unusually mild spells during that time of year, bright and eager, yet out of place for the season.

“Why yes,” I said. “Chocolate éclair, please.”

She paid the man and we started up Central Park West. I extended my elbow for her hand. “Why don’t we go into the park?” I said after a bite of the ice cream.

When we reached the park entrance at Sixty-Fifth Street, she hesitated. “It is safe?” she said.

“Oh yes,” I said, chuckling.

We turned in and walked along a path in silence, enjoying our treats. War filled my mind again ⎯ bombs crashing into the zoo, my grandmother hiding in basements. We sat down on a bench near some ball fields. And then a thought filled an absence in her story. They were Jews. They had hid. I experienced a rush of enlightenment, similar to what a child experiences as they solve a difficult math problem for the first time ⎯ the component parts falling into place, the relationship of one to the other understood, the extrapolation of the principle fundamental to so many other things all at once. Holocaust. The word floated into my mind like a thin cloud on a soft breeze, and I searched my memory for a time she or my father had uttered it. No, never. But they had been Jews in Budapest. The Germans had taken over. Never? Sprinting to keep up with my thoughts, a question escaped almost without notice. I looked at my grandmother and said, “How many people you knew were lost in the camps?”

She was quiet for a while. My heart pounded, and a tingling heat surged to my head and my hands.

“About sixty friends and family,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“How many were family?”

“Maybe thirty,” she said, adding, “They lived in the countryside,” in a tone that suggested this explained things.

“Who were they? Can you tell me about any of them?” I asked, filling with anguish.

She did not answer. Her face was pale, her eyes shifting, unfocused.

“My cousins Simon and István, that is, Steven Berger,” she said. “With the motorcycle, you remember? He was a decorated officer in the army in World War I.”

“Who was?” I said.

“István,” she said, her face turning hard and gray. “They didn’t care. The Nazis came and they took him away.” Her last word, “ah-vay,” sounded like a bottle shattering against a wall. “Him and his wife and their children. And his mother, too.”

Nearby, two teams of elementary schoolers, one in green uniforms, the other in blue, were playing soccer. A boy kicked a ball just past the opposing goalie’s outstretched arms and everyone on both sides shrieked.

My mind was on fire. She seemed to say “sixty friends and family” so matter-of-factly. And to have said nothing to me until now? What in her life—

“I have not been to Central Park in nearly thirty years,” she said, looking out at the field and the children as play resumed. “Thank you, dear Peter.” She tapped me on the thigh and smiled. “I will tell all my girlfriends that I have been to the Central Park.” She stood up. “They will never believe it.”