In life there are dividing lines. These moments become a way to chart our time; they are the signposts for our lives. There was my life before acting—and then there was my life after I discovered it. There was drinking—and then life after I stopped. And more and more, it seems that there was a time before we decided to finally get married—and now there is after.
Before all of this, before Patagonia, before the Amazon and Costa Rica, before we decided to take the final step—there was Vienna. At the time it just seemed like a fraught, unwieldy family outing, nothing life-altering—at least I didn’t think so at the time.
Moe showed me around the apartment—the master bedroom and bath, the large office that had been converted to a second bedroom for our purposes. The ground-floor loft with the wide plank floors was to be not only D’s and my temporary home but our daughter’s and D’s parents’ as well. It was a frigid February morning in Vienna, yet Moe took pains to point out the garden, which he considered a major asset of the apartment in the converted silk factory. He showed me how to slip the key into the lock. He handed me a folder with pertinent information, maps and phone numbers. He was gracious and solicitous.
“And this is how you work the stove,” Moe explained. He picked up a single detachable magnetic knob, placed it on the appropriate circle corresponding to the selected ring on the sleek, black electric stove, and then turned to the desired temperature. It made no sense to me.
“Everything is in the folder?” I asked. I knew I wouldn’t remember anything he had said to me in the fifteen minutes that he had been showing me around the apartment. I had just flown ten hours, overnight, not slept at all on the plane (what if the pilot needed my help?), it was my first time in Vienna, I was completely jet-lagged and disoriented. I just wanted to be left alone.
Moe showed no sign of wrapping it up so I interrupted him and thanked him and hurried him to the door. On the way there I began to worry that my rush might make him think I was engaged in some kind of shadowy activity in the apartment he had just rented me, and so, to appear casual, since he had a Middle Eastern accent, I asked where he was from.
“Oh, you noticed,” he said with pride. “I am from Iran, but I have been in Vienna for ten years.”
“Do you like it?” was all I could think to ask.
“I love it,” he told me. I nodded, and he told me he had a friend with a video camera and if I wanted a personal tour I could get myself taped as I experienced the city.
“Let me think about that one and get back to you,” I said. “Thanks, Moe.”
“And where is the rest of your family?” he asked as he stepped into the doorway.
My instinct was to correct him—D’s parents were not technically my family, nor, at that time, was there an imminent probability of their becoming my family—but rather than burden Moe with my personal doubts and insecurities, I felt the tightness in my throat as I said, “Oh, they’ll be getting in tonight,” and closed the door on him.
I had most of the day to myself before everyone arrived. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or how I might accomplish it if I did. I showered and drifted out onto the street. A red and white tram was stopping on the corner, heading in the direction of what I assumed to be the center of town. I got on. Ten minutes later, the tram crossed over the Ringstrasse, I saw some imperial-looking buildings I later discovered were the Hofburg Palace, and I made my way on foot toward a tall spire, the highest point I could see in what was clearly the center of the old town. The air was biting, but the streets were full of people. The closer I got to the spire the busier and narrower the streets became. My confused mental state, coupled with no knowledge of where I was—I had neglected to take the tourist map Moe had left me—allowed me a freedom from expectation that I usually lack. Perhaps some of D’s laissez-faire attitude toward organization was rubbing off on me.
The streets became pedestrian-only and funneled toward a large square surrounding the Romanesque and Gothic Stephansdom Cathedral. Solemnly dedicated in 1147, the cathedral was rebuilt and expanded over the span of centuries, and Viennese life still radiated out from its 445-foot tower, which was visible for miles. But it was the cathedral’s steep roof, covered in ornate tiles that formed a mosaic of the double-headed eagle, symbol of the Hapsburg dynasty, that was its most telling feature.
The air inside was cold, but in a different way than outside. It was an old cold, the way cold feels when it has been trapped inside stone over centuries. I watched a Buddhist monk in an orange robe take photos of the high altar. I stared up at the symbols of my Catholic upbringing, uncertain, as I always am, what exactly I felt about them. These were figures that had strongly affected my family, dictated a great many of our actions, and with whom I was forced to spend a considerable amount of time in my youth, yet I didn’t know them at all. I had changed a great deal since my last real contact with them but they had remained exactly as they had always been. They were strangers with whom I was deeply familiar. I lit a candle and thought of my children.
Back outside the cathedral, I saw a small sign that read MOZART’S HOUSE. The gray town house was through an archway and down a narrow cobbled street. I bought a ticket and climbed a flight of stairs, wandered through the apartment where the genius apparently lived happily for a short time and wrote The Marriage of Figaro. Nothing was evocative of what the place might have been like at the time he lived there. Only the view out the window, down Blutgasse, the cobblestone street below, a gas lamp attached to the wall of a nearby building, gave my imagination a start. Images of foggy nights and horse-drawn carriages and men hovering in the shadows wearing long cloaks suddenly materialized in my sleep-deprived mind.
I sought out the neo-Renaissance opera house, where much of Mozart’s music premiered. Final preparations were under way for the famous Opera Ball in a few days’ time—I was denied entry. I looked across the street and up at the other apartment I had considered renting and wished I had taken it, here in the bustling heart of the city, instead of the one I had rented from Moe, in a far-flung neighborhood.
Across the street from the opera house was the Hotel Sacher, Vienna’s most famous lodging. D’s parents, particularly her father, Colm, were avid dessert lovers, and he had recently told me about the famous Sacher torte.
“You’re going to love it, Andrew,” he shouted over the phone as I packed my bag in New York. “It’s worth a trip to Vienna for that alone.”
The chocolate cake, filled with a layer of apricot jam, was apparently so legendary, its recipe had to be defended in court. I went in to see if I could perhaps get a slice to take away, so that it would be waiting for him on his arrival.
Conservatively dressed men held whispered conversations on red damask couches under ornate chandeliers in the small lobby. Gilt-framed mirrors hung from the walls. Ladies with stiff hair, wearing fur coats, strode regally past. Given the elegant, old-world, and buttoned-up feeling it exuded, I very much doubted the Hotel Sacher would indulge in such crass American behavior as “takeout.” I was wrong.
Three hundred sixty thousand little chocolate cakes are sold every year at the designated takeaway café, each ranging in price from twenty to thirty-five euros apiece.
“Small, medium, or large,” the stout woman behind the counter said to me in English before I had a chance to speak. She swiped my credit card and pressed a wooden box into my hands. I hadn’t even laid eyes on one of the famous tortes and she was looking past me—“Small, medium, or large.”
When I stepped out of the metro at Westbahnhof—at what I hoped was a few blocks from my new apartment—the day was nearly gone, the sky had taken on a pink and purple patina, and there was a smoky, foggy haze that struck me as what I had always thought the light in Vienna must be like. I didn’t know I held this preconception until I looked up and saw the bell tower of a small local church, shrouded in a gauzy glow. This moment, this image, lodged in my mind. What is it about the brain that chooses images, seemingly at random, to hold on to and empowers them with significance? I saw more beautiful churches and prettier winter sunsets while in Vienna, but this fleeting image asserted itself as the mental postcard for my time there.
I needed to find some groceries so that everyone would have something to eat when they arrived. The Bio-Market Organics around the corner was closed, as was the Eurospar, as well as the Merkur. Apparently, on a Sunday afternoon in Vienna, everything outside the tourist-choked center is locked up tight. I was in trouble. I cursed myself again for not taking the apartment in the center. I cursed myself for not taking care of this chore earlier in the day. It was late now. Everyone would be arriving in just over an hour and I would have nothing. I could easily imagine D, with our daughter, who was battling a cold, tired in her arms, and her parents dragging far too many suitcases.
I panicked. I marched in circles around blocks I knew I had been down before. The unpronounceable German names on every closed and shuttered shop began to enrage me. I considered returning to the center of town to get something, but I could remember only clothing boutiques and Mostly Mozart souvenir shops and cafés. The burden of having to provide for these people began to swell up inside me and I wished I were there alone. I grew angry with D and her parents for needing me to take care of them. It wasn’t the first time I’d decided that the burden of family was too much for me, something I didn’t know how to handle or even want. I wished I had no contacts or ties. I loved my children, but the rest of them—the hell with it! I was on the verge of a full-blown tantrum.
Whereas D would find the idea of fetching groceries for the nourishment of her loved ones in a strange city a pleasurable way to express her affections, I resented it. I felt trapped, taken advantage of, and (preemptively) unappreciated.
At Europaplatz I saw the bright lights of the Westbahnhof train station—across from the metro stop I had exited an hour earlier when my hunt began. Misreading the pedestrian traffic signal, I raced across the four lanes of Neubaugürtel and was almost hit. The station was swarming with people on the fringes of life who typically haunt such transit hubs in large cities.
Down a level, in a far corner, I found a small convenience store that was open. It was packed with some of Vienna’s less desirable denizens, all picking over shelves that were close to bare. I found some eggs and a loaf of white bread and some butter. I bought some yogurt for our daughter. Hardly a feast, but everyone would be able to eat something, and they would understand my difficulties in an archaic city that still shuts down on a Sunday—they would hail my ingenuity and my generosity.
Everyone arrived amid a clamor of shouts and hugs. I hadn’t seen our daughter in a week and she’d grown. Whereas I had come in from New York, D and our daughter had been in Dublin, visiting her parents, which is why they were all arriving together. Unable to miss school and join us, my son was back in New York with his mother. As predicted, D’s parents had to hire a second taxi to carry their luggage.
I showed everyone the apartment. D’s mother, Margot, an Irish charmer of regal bearing, of keen observations, and with an eye for mischief, insisted that D and I take the master bedroom, although I had already settled us in the office/second bedroom. Eventually she relented and the subject of food was brought up. I presented my haul.
“Oh. Well . . . ,” Margot said, her voice rising an octave upon seeing the eggs and white bread laid bare on the kitchen table. “Maybe we’ll just go out, leave you three to catch up.”
D had assured me everyone would be tired after the long trip and would not want to go out for an extended meal in a restaurant. Consequently, I hadn’t scouted for any during the day. I was more or less relaxed around D’s parents—they had welcomed me swiftly and without question into their world seven years earlier—but I had always been their guest, and the burden of hosting people who had spent a lifetime receiving and seeing to the needs of others was already proving too much for me. I froze.
“Come on now, Andrew,” Colm hollered, “you must have seen some restaurants on your travels today.” D’s father was a Kerry man, from the west of Ireland. He had run hotels for most of his life; he knew people and food. “Where should we go for a nice bite to eat in this neighborhood?” he shouted—he was also hard of hearing.
“Um, I think I saw a little café that was open, just down the street to the left, on our side.”
“Perfect,” Margot said, and they set out.
I snuggled with our daughter, who was feeling under the weather, and then D and I put her to bed. We sat down with a cup of tea.
No matter what was happening in our relationship, seeing each other after a time apart always gave us a fresh start—one that was often needed. This time was no exception. We had been struggling with our usual power play, not as bad as it once was, but bad enough that her trip back to Dublin had come at a good time.
The following day was D’s birthday and the original reason for our trip. D was born and spent the first six months of her life in Vienna, when her father was managing one of the city’s biggest hotels. She had never been back and had dreamed of one day returning to her birthplace. Her wish gave me an idea that I presented to a magazine: to discover Vienna from a “local” angle.
Then she invited her parents to join us.
Sitting on the couch now, we couldn’t remember what we had been arguing about when we last saw each other a week earlier. Then we heard the front door open.
“How was the restaurant, Mum?” D asked.
“Well,” Margot replied, “it was just grand.”
“Now, Andrew, I don’t know what you call cafés in New York . . . ,” Colm called out.
“Oh, no.” D stood up. “What happened?”
I had sent Margot and Colm to a greasy, dirty Viennese fast-food deep-fry joint.
“How about a little chocolate cake?” I asked, pulling out my ace in the hole, the Sacher torte.
“Andrew, you’ve redeemed yourself,” Colm roared out, and took a seat at the table. With elaborate ceremony, I presented the famous torte. Colm lifted his fork and tasted it. There was silence as we all looked on. “No.” He shook his head. “It’s dry.”
Then Margot tasted it. “Oh, dear.”
And then D. “It is a bit dry, luv.”
“Not what I remember at all.” D’s father shook his head in final judgment, pushing the plate away.
Maybe tomorrow would be better.
I left a small birthday gift, a box with a bracelet, beside D for when she woke up.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said with a sigh, and showed it to her parents, who made a fuss while sipping their coffee.
“I’ll go get us some croissants across the street,” I said, looking forward to a few minutes on my own.
As I put on my coat Colm called after me, “I’ll join you, Andrew. I could use the air.”
There went my five minutes alone for the day.
After breakfast, D turned to me. “You go on with Mum and Dad, luv. We’ll stay in this morning.” Our daughter was still not feeling well.
“Are you sure? I’m happy to stay home.”
“Go on, get to work.”
Margot, Colm, and I headed to the local open-air Naschmarkt, to stock up on groceries. Because I was supposed to be writing a story from a local angle, I insisted we take either the metro or the tram, as often as possible, instead of simply jumping in taxis. We changed trains twice, got lost, had to walk fifteen minutes and ask four people for directions. It took us nearly an hour, but once we found the market, there were hundreds of stalls, crammed one after the next, selling fresh fish and sausage, warm breads, freshly squeezed juices, cold meats and hot coffee, flowers, cheeses, and herbs. There were thousands of olives on display, stuffed with garlic or cheese or peppers. Small Asian women stood selling sushi beside large men hawking Palatschinken—Austrian crepelike desserts. Turkish immigrants sliced chunks of lamb from a spit while men and women in their winter coats stood elbow to elbow at outdoor tables drinking beer and slurping oysters. For block after block along the broad Linke Wienzeile boulevard, it went on.
“Oh, Colm, look at this.” Margot stopped at the fishmonger.
“Margot, try this.” Colm was tasting a piece of salami on offer.
D’s parents spent a long time talking to a woman named Daniela who sold vinegar at a stall she worked with her husband. With an eyedropper, D’s mother and father tasted and tested a dozen types of the nearly seventy fruit vinegars before settling on currant berry. Margot could make a stone sing, and she learned Daniela’s history and how she met her husband. “I was a very eager customer,” Daniela confided, “very eager,” and the two women laughed like sorority sisters. “But,” she lamented, “vinegar is Erwin’s life.”
“Oh, I know,” Margot told her, patting Daniela’s arm in solidarity. “I know.”
A little farther along, a very stout woman named Maria wielded a long machete, hacking off bits of cheese and thrusting them under Colm’s nose on the tip of the long blade. She had a gleam in her blue eyes and cackled wildly. When we were about to walk away with only a few French wedges, Maria locked her eyes on me—I had been only observing the long exchange and was surprised she had even realized we were all together—and raised her machete. Margot stepped in quickly and purchased a hunk of Bergkäse.
We bought four different pâtés, half a dozen types of salami, and three kinds of bread—each purchase preceded by a long chat. Eventually we came to Leo Strmiska, the sauerkraut man. He stood like a carnival barker behind two large wooden barrels of fermenting white cabbage. D’s father engaged him in a dialogue on the subtleties of preparation (“You must cook until translucent, and only then do you add the bacon”), then they digressed to discussing the greed of bankers, and then the conversation drifted back to Leo’s childhood and the war, and as we were leaving, Leo handed me the clear plastic bag containing a pound of the stuff. “Remember,” he said in a stern voice, his hand still clutching the bag, “fermentation never stops, take it out of the bag the minute you get home.” I nodded, but apparently without proper solemnity. “Do you need to write it down? Pay attention, now.”
“We’ll take care of him, Leo,” Margot told him, and ushered me away by the arm.
We sat down for an outdoor coffee, our winter coats zipped up tight. Then, as we crossed the street to head back to the metro, we passed a taxi stand. Margot opened the door and slipped into the back of a cab.
“My feet are tired, Andrew, my love.”
The ride home took five minutes.
When we got back to the apartment, D scoured the unfamiliar cabinets for platters and bowls, and everything we had bought was spread out on the table. I had an idea that somehow we shouldn’t do this. “We just got all this stuff,” I wanted to say. “It took us hours. Shouldn’t we save it?” It was a silly notion and I kept it to myself, but it spoke to my innate lack of understanding of harvest and communal bonding through food.
Meals growing up in my house were not a time of sensuous delight but more a perfunctory ritual. There was nothing wrong with our family dinners, but they certainly weren’t a shared celebration of food and fellowship. For the most part, they were unremarkable. We sat most evenings, when my father was not away on business, at the large dining room table (large to me as a child). My brother Peter and I sat on one side, Stephen alone—and then later with Justin—on the other. My mother was at the end of the table near the kitchen and my father at the opposite end. It was made clear that he was at the “head” of the table. When guests came over, as they occasionally did, the table was pulled apart and a center section was added. There was a large, cut-glass chandelier overhead.
Only two meals stand out in my memory of childhood: Once when my mother told us that we were going to have a younger brother. I knew they wanted us to be happy with the news, and so in an over-compensatory fashion, I shouted, “Really, a goo-goo, ga-ga? A goo-goo, ga-ga?” I kept repeating it, over and over, very loud, until my father became irritated. And another time when my father told Peter that he wasn’t getting up from the table until he ate his asparagus, at which point he promptly ate one and threw up all over his plate.
We ate to live and in no way lived to eat. This trait has followed me into adulthood—and it’s yet another point of disparity between me and D. Whenever her family sat down to eat, they did so with gusto, and this time was no exception. Everything was tasted and commented upon. “This salami is delicious.” “Pass me one.” “Oh, my, that’s extraordinary.” “Oh, you must try this pâté. Just take a forkful.” “These olives are unbelievable.” “Wow, that’s spicy!” “Can you smell that cheese?” Forks were flying all over the table. I looked over at D, our flushed daughter perched happily on her lap. She looked relaxed and confident, like she always did when she was surrounded by her family. It made me both happy to see her like this and nervous. Was I intimidated by the serene confidence I saw in her at such moments? Or did I merely feel insecure that I might never be able to provide the kind of companionship she craved and felt she needed in order for her to live a full life?
After lunch, we went into the center of town and walked the old, cobbled streets. Down by Stephansdom Cathedral we passed the Zara shop and the McDonald’s. “Seem familiar, Margot?” I asked.
“Actually, no, Andrew, it doesn’t.” She shook her head. When we entered the great cathedral we all stood silently. “Now, this I remember,” Margot said softly after a time. D had been baptized here. “In one of these side chapels. Can you remember, Colm?” she asked, and looked off, squinting into the past.
Colm looked around as well, “I’m not sure, Peg,” he said, calling his wife by his pet name for her.
After an uninspired birthday dinner taken at an informal student restaurant near our apartment—so that we could keep our daughter close to home—we walked home and took off our shoes.
“What are you doing?” Margot said, putting her own feet up. “You two go on, hurry up and leave us alone.” Then she pointed to D’s iPad. “You just set up that machine there, and my little angel and I will watch The Sound of Music while you two go out for a birthday drink. I only wish our little boy were here to watch it with us.”
At home it’s easier to accept the pattern of togetherness and absence that divorced parenting creates, but on a family trip like this, with one member of the family absent, the occasional and unforeseen moments of melancholy were easily explained. So many times on this trip I saw things and was reminded of my son and imagined how he might have responded to them. That we had downplayed the trip with him before we left, and promised him another special trip, did little to assuage everyone’s disappointment.
D and I slipped out the door, into the night. We took one of the older red and white trams, the kind with the wooden seats, and rattled toward town. We went to a modern café. Everyone in the bar was “nerd chic.” All the furniture was for sale; a price tag of 533 euros hung from my chair. Our young waitress wore an orange mini-dress and white knee socks. She wore thick, black-framed glasses, and we got into a long conversation with her about food and sex and Freud.
We went to the Rote Bar, in the regal Volkstheater. Opened in 1889, the “people’s theater” was a reaction against the constraints of the national theater, Burgtheater, down on the Ringstrasse. There, a woman in a flowing evening gown played a grand piano before a red velvet curtain under a massive chandelier. The marble floor shone beneath our feet. We sat at a cocktail table with a dripping candle and our waitress there told us of another café.
“Just follow the tram tracks, and when they turn, keep going straight. You’ll see a metal, unmarked door. Knock three times.”
So we did. We were admitted into a gray, dark cave, filled with arches and pillars. Henna-like tattoo patterns were projected onto every inch of the walls and ceiling. A DJ played techno music and smoke filled the crowded room. There was a projection on the wall behind the bar that read ENGLISH IST DIE GAUNERSPRACHE—“English is the language of crooks.” The female bartender had black hair, wore heavy black eye shadow, and was dressed all in black. She wore a tiny silver birdcage that hung from a chain.
“I like your necklace,” D told her.
“I am a caged bird,” she whispered.
We went to another café, thick with smoke. D bummed a cigarette and happily puffed away.
“If you can’t beat ’em . . .” She shrugged. It was yet another difference between us. The idea that that I might be able to smoke just one cigarette every now and again, the way she did, was inconceivable to me. I had been a pack-a-day smoker who had quit years ago and intended to keep it that way.
Back on the street, arm in arm, we searched for another dive. D and I had never been bar hopping together in our life. We had never courted. We never had a playful period of dating, holding hands over a late-night cappuccino, sharing silly quirks that the other would find so charming and revealing. We had never strolled home after a movie and made out on the stoop before saying good night, only to call ten minutes later and say good night again. Our coming together as a couple had been so immediate—after only three meetings—and so complete that we were sharing a home and a life before we had given the matter any real thought.
D moved in with me in New York from her home in Dublin seven years ago and was instantly cast in a stepparenting role. My then-two-and-a-half-year-old son wondered who my “special friend” was. I existed in a constant state of anxiety over what I had done to him and to my previous life. Nothing we did was well considered or advised. I tried to tell a few friends of the sudden and life-altering changes that were happening to me. They told me I was being “insane.” Their advice to slow down wasn’t helpful, or plausible, under the circumstances. I simply stopped talking to them. “Love will carry the day” was our motto—perhaps it should have been “Fools rush in.”
Yet here we were, years later, in Vienna, and every night, after we all went out to dinner, we would leave our daughter at home with Margot and Colm eager to go back out—just the two of us. We went to old Viennese coffee shops with surly waiters, to hip, smoky joints, and to Art Deco salons; we didn’t care where. We laughed and played together, night after night, like we hadn’t before. We discovered we were excited in each other’s company, the way we were those first few days when we met in the Irish countryside.
“I can’t be in Vienna and not go to the Hofburg Palace,” Colm declared.
So a few days later, when our daughter was well again, we all boarded the tram into town.
Designed to impress and awe visiting heads of state from the thirteenth century onward, the winter home of the Hapsburg dynasty—rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the Hofburg Palace is a sprawling complex of imposing buildings constructed in various architectural styles through numerous centuries and connected by massive formal gardens and plazas filled with fountains and statues of emperors and their horses. The palace withstood three major sieges, a fire, and the vagaries of taste through generations of royalty. It is home to the current president of Austria. It has twenty-six hundred rooms. It is difficult to miss.
I got us off at the wrong tram stop. We could see the rooftops of the royal buildings far off. I apologized profusely but Margot stopped me.
“It’s perfect, gives us a chance to take some air,” she said, leaning hard into the brogue.
We walked. And walked. Eventually we came to a side gate that led us into a large formal garden. This might have impressed D’s parents, who were avid gardeners, except all the plants had been pruned and tied up tight under canvas sacks for the winter.
Finally we made our way inside the first building we came upon. I hurried ahead and bought tickets.
“Do you know what this is, luv?” D asked.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be great,” I said, having no idea where we were. I handed all the tickets to our daughter to present to the guard.
Inside was a labyrinth of room upon room of silverware, napkin holders, and candlesticks, all behind tall glass cases.
“Oh, no,” I said, gasping. I tried to guide us toward an exit and only took us deeper into the honeycomb of rooms.
I knew Margot had little tolerance for museums, and our daughter was already squirming hard. Colm tried to show some interest but couldn’t keep it up for long, and then D turned up a flight of stairs.
“Come on, luv,” she said.
“No, no. We don’t want to go up there,” I shouted after her, still looking for an exit. I could feel sweat under my heavy coat as I followed everyone up the marble steps.
We emerged into a room with an evening gown on display, and then into another with a headless mannequin filling out a massive ball gown. The girls began to ooh and aah.
We were in the imperial apartments, once the living quarters of Franz Josef the First and his wife, Empress Elisabeth—known to her loyal subjects as Sissi. Her story was full of intrigue. A free spirit and a modern woman before her time, Sissi struggled with her role in the monarchy and, much like Princess Diana a little more than a century later, was beloved by her people. Her death, by assassination, while walking along a promenade beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland, sealed her destiny as a tragic heroine.
“This should interest you, Andrew,” Colm said, absorbed in reading about Sissi. “She was an avid traveler.”
I chased our suddenly happy daughter through Sissi’s bedroom and into her private gym. We laughed at Sissi’s personal water closet. Eventually we descended the steps and reemerged into the hard bright day.
“See, not so bad.” D shrugged, taking my arm.
After lunch, I had a surprise for everyone—the one event I had booked before arriving in Vienna. The famed Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School, a local institution and a hallmark of imperial Vienna, were practicing for their twice-weekly shows in a nearby section of the palace. The shows were sold out but I had arranged for us to see the daily practice session—which is open to the public—by finagling ringside seats reserved for special guests and dignitaries. These seats were rarely occupied during practice. My daughter would be thrilled to be so close to the action, and D’s parents would bask in the elegant surroundings and the tradition and pomp, to say nothing of the special treatment. D would be pleased with my family-focused initiative.
I sought out my contact. Mrs. Drabanek was a prim woman with straight blond hair and a direct manner. She told us that the session had already begun, and entrance or exit to this special section of the hall was forbidden in midaction. D’s mother looked confused; her father sank his hands deeper into his pockets. D tried to console our daughter, who got the gist that there was a problem.
I took Mrs. Drabanek aside.
“Please,” I begged. “I’m so sorry we’re late, but my daughter has been dying to see the horses, it’s all she’s talked about since we came to Vienna. ” In truth, we had just told her about the stallions a few minutes earlier—but she was immediately very excited. “And my in-laws,” I said—not even choking on the words—“it’s been a dream of theirs for many years.” There was no truth in this either, but they were happy enough to go along.
She looked into my pleading eyes and then over my shoulder, where the family was playing their part by looking suitably bereft.
“Come,” she said, and marched toward the door.
“Thank you,” I whispered as we slipped into the hushed hall. I may even have said, “Bless you,” I can’t remember for sure.
We settled in beneath crystal chandeliers and Corinthian columns. Under the tutelage of erect riders in brown coats with hazelwood switches, six majestic white stallions were prancing and preening, accompanied by the sounds of Chopin.
Silently we slid into the front row, just a few feet from the horses, alone in the VIP section. I gave Mrs. Drabanek a large grin; she nodded curtly and exited.
Perhaps the shows themselves present a dazzling and dizzying exhibition of equine majesty, or perhaps to the educated eye, the minute steps we saw practiced over and over and over again would be a fascinating display of discipline and skill—but within minutes we were bored. My daughter began to fidget on my lap. Margot looked at her watch, while Colm folded his arms and his chin sank toward his chest. D refused to meet my eye; she struggled to keep the grin from her face. We still had forty-five minutes to go.
Then my daughter began to talk. Loud. A few discreet glances came from the riders inside the ring. Margot leaned over and said she was going for a coffee. “You’re not allowed to leave,” I wanted to say. She nudged her husband awake and with D following, they slid out.
“You and me will stay and watch the horses, huh, pumpkin?” I whispered to my daughter on my lap.
“Yeah,” she whispered back, and snuggled closer. Twenty seconds later, “I want a hot chocolate, Daddy,” she said in her normal voice.
“Shh. Soon, pumpkin, soon.”
“Where’s Mommy?” she called out.
When I raced past a shocked Mrs. Drabanek in the lobby, I couldn’t bring myself to meet her glare as I whispered a hurried, “My daughter’s sick,” and lunged for the exit.
Outside, a white carriage hitched to a white horse was standing by the curb. D and her parents were already inside, waiting. She swung the door open wide for us.
“I knew you wouldn’t last long, luv,” D said. My daughter climbed in, thrilled—this was her kind of horse action. She sat up tall on her granny’s lap, a blanket tucked high up under her chin. Her blue eyes were wide and both she and her granny looked out with pride as we rolled over cobblestone streets.
I have no such rosy memories of my own grandparents. My mother’s father died before I was born, and her mother, a small, creased woman who insisted we call her Grandmom, lived in our town, a half dozen blocks away. She would occasionally come over to babysit in the evenings. She was constantly turning off lights around the house, and my memories of time spent with her are always dimly lit.
One evening, while babysitting, she tripped over one of our dogs and fell. I heard the crash from the den and went running into the dining room. My grandmother was on the floor, disentangling herself from Duchess, our Airedale. I loved Duchess; she had an independent streak and a slightly disinterested manner that I appreciated.
“I tripped over Duchess,” my grandmother said when I rushed in. Her wig was askew, and she was struggling to straighten it. From the sound of her voice I could tell that she was shaken. Duchess, who had been roused from sleep, was merely looking at her.
“She’s okay, Grandmom,” I said without thinking, and began to stroke Duchess’s fur.
“No, not the dog, me!” my grandmother shouted. “I fell and hurt myself.” On the floor in the dark of the dining room my allegiances had been exposed.
And I was no closer to my father’s parents. I saw them only once a year, on Thanksgiving. They terrified me. My grandmother I remember as a hard, stout woman with a stern voice. I steered clear of her as much as I could in her cramped apartment on Thirty-fifth Street in Union City, New Jersey. She and my grandfather lived on the ground floor while my more welcoming aunt and uncle lived up the flight of stairs with their daughter and two great mastiffs—dogs far too large to be comfortable in the small apartment.
I have only one distinct memory of my paternal grandfather, who was an intimidating and remote man with a thick head of white hair. It was shortly before he died, when I was around ten. It was nowhere near Thanksgiving, and we had made a special trip to Union City to see him. The end was near and he was bedridden. My father led me into the old man’s room, “to say good-bye,” I was told. It was very hot, and I remember my grandfather lying in a single bed under a heavy burgundy blanket. It was the middle of the day and the shade was pulled down; only a thin stream of light entered the room below it. My grandfather seemed barely conscious and was looking straight up at the ceiling. I could feel my father behind me.
“Pop, you remember Andrew,” my dad said. “He wanted to say hello.” I don’t remember if I spoke or not, and I recall nothing of what my grandfather might have said. Even at the time I felt like there was some kind of protocol that we all needed to follow, yet none of us seemed to know what that protocol was or how we should follow it. My eyes stayed focused on the dust motes drifting across the thin beam of light that fell over the bed. After a few minutes I was led out of the room and I asked my father if I had done all right.
“You did just fine,” he said, but it didn’t feel fine. I felt like I had failed somehow. I walked upstairs to my aunt’s to pet one of her giant dogs.
Our days in Vienna fell into a rhythm centered around late-morning coffee and afternoon tea. These were not ten-minute refueling stops but, rather, long sessions at some of Vienna’s more famous cafés—Demel with its elegant salons and dessert-filled trays, its glass-walled kitchen where my daughter and I watched chocolate bunnies being poured, filled, and sculpted by a dozen bakers in tall white hats; Café Sperl, where scores of newspapers in a dozen languages were strewn across the carambole billiards tables beneath crystal chandeliers; and even the smoky Café Alt Wien, with its protest posters lining the walls while students at small wooden tables hunched over loose paperbacks and nursed espressos. Everywhere we went, Colm ordered extravagant pastries and desserts. Plates and forks were passed around, judgments made and then reevaluated. More coffee was drunk. Often my daughter and I grew bored and would wander off together. One afternoon before walking into yet another café, Margot turned to me.
“Andrew, my love, you don’t like all these desserts, why don’t you go take some time to yourself?”
I knew exactly where I would go.
Down a flight of dingy red-carpeted steps off Karlsplatz and into the Burg Kino, across a lobby heavy with the smell of burned popcorn, through a chipped burgundy door, and into a sparsely filled dark room late on that blustery Tuesday afternoon, I first heard the famous line—“I was a friend of Harry Lime.”
“Everyone ought to be careful in a city like this,” and noir classics like “You were born to be murdered,” “Leave death to the professionals,” and a classic Graham Greene theme, “Humanity is a duty,” were uttered from the scratchy black and white print of the 1949 Carol Reed film.
Few movies are so identified with a particular city as The Third Man is with Vienna. Shot while the city was still under the rubble of the Second World War and divided into four quadrants controlled by U.S., French, British, and Soviet forces, Graham Greene’s script is a classic cat-and-mouse tale of deception, a study of loneliness and duplicity. Anton Karas’s score, played on a zither, infiltrates the proceedings, adding to the discomfort, and has come to define the genre. I had never seen it before.
As a child, I hadn’t gone to the movies often, and I had never seen a movie alone until I went off to college. But as a student in New York, I joined the last generation of moviegoers who frequented the half dozen revival houses that would soon disappear with the advent of home video and cable TV. At the Eighth Street Playhouse I first saw On the Waterfront and The Wild One in a Marlon Brando double bill. At the Hollywood on Eighth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street I watched Midnight Cowboy, and way uptown on Ninety-fifth Street at the Thalia I was introduced to James Dean and Buster Keaton, and the films of Antonioni and Godard. I would go to the movies in the afternoon, by myself, while the world I knew carried on in my absence outside. It was my first real experience of travel—solo excursions to places that were so alien. And as I would soon discover on the road, powers of observation were rewarded, my imagination was fired, and this encouraged still further exploration. I discovered the neorealistic films of De Sica and the playfully amoral world of Chabrol. The things I saw on-screen made sense in a way that felt deeply familiar, and as with the first time I acted, I innately understood my place in it. Alone in the dark, I located myself.
In Vienna, sitting in that scrappy cinema, my two universes converged. When I walked back out into the early evening, onto the same streets where I had just seen Joseph Cotten pursue Orson Welles, I felt I understood something about Vienna and myself that I hadn’t before. I possessed a sense of belonging I had lacked just a few hours earlier. When I walked past number 5 Josefsplatz, across from the statue of Emperor Josef II on his horse, and saw the statue of four maidens supporting the portico of the building where Harry Lime was supposedly killed at the start of the film, I felt like a member of some kind of a secret society, in possession of a certain knowledge and its resulting confidence. But as I walked farther, a thought began to play in my mind: perhaps this feeling of confidence and comfort wasn’t just the result of having seen a movie.
D’s family had accepted me from the moment she and her mother picked me up at the airport in Dublin for the first time seven years earlier. Driving back to their home to serve me a full Irish breakfast, Margo kept up a steady patter and began an active embracing of who I am that has not abated. That I have seen more of D’s family in the past seven years than I have of my own in the last thirty speaks to both the active closeness of D’s family and the casual distance of mine. Perhaps my mood of confidence and security that night on the Vienna streets was more reflective of my beginning to feel a part of something bigger, something I wasn’t yet ready to reconcile.
Or perhaps, I thought, my feelings of familial inclusion and cinematic belonging were all of my own creation; perhaps it was just some neurotic need looking to be filled.
So the next day, I headed to Vienna resident Sigmund Freud’s house on Berggasse. Perhaps a visit to the home of the great psychoanalyst would help clarify these conflicting impulses.
Colm was eager to join me. We hopped the number 2 tram, which I thought would circle the Ringstrasse. Instead, it turned off on Alser Strasse and headed in the wrong direction. Colm was patient with yet another of my navigational mistakes and eventually we righted ourselves and saw the large red sign with FREUD in bold block letters.
At the top of a flight of stairs, we were greeted by a small, trim man with a deliberate manner and precise movements, dressed entirely in black. With a watchful expression, he directed us toward a door across the hall. It was in these half-dozen rooms that Freud lived and worked for forty-seven years. His walking stick, suitcase, a few hats, and a personalized flask were behind Plexiglas in the cramped entryway lit by the filtered light of a single leaded glass window. To the right was the waiting room, still laid out as it was in Freud’s time. Glass cabinets contained many of his more than three thousand Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Egyptian objects—tiny statues and fragments. (The good doctor had a bit of an obsession.) A red damask couch lined one wall; above it were four copperplate engravings depicting the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air—love and strife, Eros and destruction, vying for dominance. Opposite was the entrance to the room where the doctor listened with “evenly poised attention” to the complaints of his patients. The famous couch was conspicuously absent, having gone with Freud to London when he fled the Nazis in 1938. Instead, the chamber was left nearly empty.
Large black and white photos depicting how the room once looked covered the bottom half of the walls, while personal letters and photos adorned the top. I could only imagine what Freud might have thought, looking out the single window, beside which he used to listen and take notes (and according to his own reports, occasionally doze off during sessions). The room beyond was his inner sanctum, where Freud wrote and smoked his beloved cigars. Above a desk and between windows that looked out onto a courtyard hung a mirror where he often inspected the results of the thirty operations he underwent for jaw cancer. “Since I can no longer smoke freely,” he once lamented, “I no longer wish to write.” His books lined one wall. The rooms revealed a decidedly human man of great insight, large ego, prescience, vanity, clarity, and obsession.
Despite rumors of an affair with his sister-in-law, Freud’s personal life was typically conservative, with a long and successful marriage that produced six children. And while his family life offered no insight into my own evolving notions on the subject, copious evidence of his obviously contradictory nature provided relief and encouraged some empathy in me for my own vacillating ways.
Reassured in my conflicted humanity, I found Colm patiently waiting by the door. As we descended the marble stairs I tried to remember if I had ever done anything like this with my own father.
The last time I had seen my dad was when D and I took the kids up to visit him and his wife a few summers earlier. My parents had divorced several years after I went to college; my father then met a woman, married her, and resettled in rural Maine, effectively vanishing from our lives, with only occasional phone calls and rumored visits to New York that rarely transpired.
My kids mentioned they were eager to see their grandfather—my son had met him only once, our daughter never had. The last time I had seen my father was when D was heavily pregnant. We headed to Maine.
We pulled into his driveway and my father and his wife were waiting on the stoop. They greeted us warmly, fawned over the kids, and showed us their home on a hill a few blocks from the water. “An old captain’s house,” my father called it. I recognized various furnishings from my childhood that I hadn’t seen in years, a coffee table, a bookcase, a few paintings. It was odd to see them there, these relics of my childhood that I hadn’t thought of since I left home as a teenager. I felt possessive of them; what were they doing here, in this strange house so far from home?
My father and his wife had prepared lunch for us, but he was nervous and couldn’t eat. He kept up a steady patter with the kids. They adored him.
That evening it poured. My father bragged that there was a place not far away that served the best ice cream in the world. I put the two kids in the back of my father’s Oldsmobile and drove as he sat beside me. The speedometer in the car didn’t work, and only one headlamp would light. The rain was lashing down. We drove along the two-lane highway for a long time. I squinted to see in the dark.
“Maybe we passed it,” my father said.
“Turn around, Dad,” my son called from the back.
Then it appeared on the right, a purpose-built, Swiss chalet–like structure with two take-out windows. We huddled under the narrow eave of the roof out of the rain and ordered. On the way back to the house my father finished his ice cream sundae before either of the kids. I had no idea my father loved ice cream.
The next day was bright, and my father’s wife suggested we go for a walk out on a nearby breakwater to a lighthouse. A soft breeze blew and sailboats floated in the shimmering sea. The stone breakwater was much longer than I had expected—nearly a mile out to the lighthouse. There were wide and deep crevices between the unevenly spaced rocks. It was difficult to get a rhythm walking, particularly for the kids. But they raced ahead anyway, with D and my father’s wife trying to catch up. I fell back with my dad.
His walking seemed labored and slow. I thought he was merely taking care of where he was putting his feet, but that kind of caution seemed uncharacteristic of the man I used to know. He asked after my mother, the way he always did when we spoke on those rare occasions over the phone—“How’s your mama?”
When we were growing up he never referred to her as “your mama,” but it is the term he has always used when asking about her over the past twenty-five years.
When we got to the lighthouse it was locked up tight. We started back. My son began to hang back with my father; soon the distance between us was getting greater and greater. I kept looking over my shoulder. Then a woman came running up. “The man back there, is he with you? He fell.” I went racing back.
My father was up on his feet; two women were helping him. He was walking slowly, but he seemed confused, and he was beginning to arch his back, putting his weight on his heels. D and I took over for the women and walked with him. My father’s arching became more pronounced and we called an ambulance. We sent my son running down the long breakwater to wait for the paramedics. We were still nearly a half mile out on the rocks.
Soon my father’s back was completely stiff, the arching even more severe. If we hadn’t been holding him up he would have fallen straight back. With his full weight pushing back on our arms, he was extremely heavy. A man came and took over for D, who went to try to calm my father’s wife while simultaneously holding on to our daughter so she wouldn’t fall into the deep spaces between the rocks. As our progress slowed, my father’s head cleared and he kept up a strangely upbeat conversation with the man helping us. It was typical of him; he was having what I assumed to be a stroke, and yet he was chatting away to a stranger about where the man was from, and who my father knew from that part of Pennsylvania, and what the man did for a living. I’ve often wondered if my reticence with strangers grew out of a reaction to my father’s more gregarious efforts, efforts that to me as a child seemed so at odds with the more volatile man I knew at home.
He tried hard to appear completely normal as we struggled along the breakwater, unaware that his body was arching drastically back. His hips had begun to lock and his already awkward steps had become even more labored. It became more and more difficult to keep him moving toward help. Eventually we sat him down on a small step. Then my eight-year-old son arrived with the paramedics.
We followed behind the ambulance to the hospital and spent several hours waiting while various tests were performed. No cause was immediately evident, and my father began to regain normal movements and clarity. The doctor said that it was perhaps a TIA—a transient ischemic attack—a kind of mini-stroke, but that he couldn’t be sure.
I had to be back in New York for work the next day. If this had been D’s father, there would have been no question that she would have stayed, no matter the consequences. But it spoke to the distance and lack of pull that had grown to define our relationship that after consulting the doctors and his wife several times, we ultimately left my father at the hospital, where they were to keep him overnight and then send him home.
When I went to say good-bye, I pulled back the curtain in the hospital room and he sprang up in bed, like a jack-in-the-box. He broke into a wide and startling grin. It was a desperate smile, a salesman’s smile. It was so typical of him, and it broke my heart and made me love him. If either of us could have acknowledged the fear of the moment out on the jetty, or the bizarre intimacy it had created between us and cast over the visit, perhaps there would have been an opening to move closer. But instead, my self-conscious withholding and his mask of bravado left me shaking my head, at both of us.
We spoke a few times in the days immediately after, to make sure everything was all right with his health and to relive the more pleasurable aspects of our visit. Sometime later he called and said that he and his wife would be coming to New York and would love to see the kids, and us, but their trip never materialized and we haven’t made it back to Maine.
As D’s father and I stepped out of Dr. Freud’s house and onto Schwarzspanierstrasse, the sky had begun to cloud over, and there was a sting in the winter wind. I wondered how much transference Freud might have detected in the mixture of deference and offhanded impatience with which I treated Colm as we squabbled over which direction to head to catch the tram.
On our last full day in Vienna, I woke before dawn and while everyone slept, I walked out. In the deserted gardens of Maria-Theresien-Platz, I saw a lone man standing up in a pruned tree, posing like a statue. I wanted to speak to him, to ask what he was doing, and how long had he been up there, but I didn’t. I watched him for some time, until finally he moved his arm. I wandered down to Stephansdom Cathedral and walked in on the dawn Mass, being said in the first side chapel, beside the main entry. I passed Mozart’s house again and walked into a baroque church where I sat for a few silent minutes, alone in the last pew. Outside, I passed Kleines Café, where D and I had had coffee the night before.
It was when we had left there that we strolled into the Hotel Sacher. While D ordered a drink in the Blaue Bar, I excused myself to the bathroom but went instead to the front desk to get us a room. I walked back into the bar and dropped the key on the table, and D followed me up to the third floor. We made love with the glow of the opera house shining a golden light over us.
When I walked back in the apartment after my early-morning stroll, everyone was at the breakfast table.
“Where have you been, luv?” D asked.
“Never you mind,” Margot broke in. “Leave the man some privacy, he’s had enough of us all by now.”
Surprisingly, she wasn’t correct in her analysis, but I appreciated not having to explain myself.
“Now, Andrew,” Colm started, “I don’t know what you’ve got planned for today, but tonight I am taking us all out to a Heuriger.” Colm had been trying to drag us to one of Vienna’s traditional—and tourist-infested—wineries up in the hills on the edge of the Vienna woods for the entire trip.
“Now, there’s no use arguing, Andrew, my love.” Margot shook her head. “He has his mind made up and we are going to go. And we’ll just enjoy it as best we can,” she said, patting my arm.
I studied the public transportation map, and when night fell, we headed on our usual tram toward the center of town. We switched at the Volkstheater to the same tram that had led Colm and me astray on our way to Freud’s house, and we began to climb the hills out of town. The tram was crowded with late rush-hour commuters heading home. Then an announcement was made over the loudspeaker. Our tram was being taken out of service. People grumbled, and we were deposited on the side of a dark road on a steep incline.
“Perhaps we should have taken a taxi,” Margot said quietly, “just this once.”
Ten minutes later another tram arrived and we climbed aboard. After a while, Colm discreetly asked a fellow passenger which was the stop for the famous Heuriger.
“This next stop,” the woman replied.
As the station approached everyone began to rise and squeeze toward the door.
When the tram stopped I heard myself say, “No,” in a clear, strong voice. “It’s not this stop. We need to go two more.”
“Are you sure, luv?” D asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Margot looked at me, then at her husband.
D sat down, so did our daughter, and then Margot. Colm bit his tongue. The tram went on, up the hill. No one spoke.
“This is it,” I said when we arrived at an unlit corner across from a gas station. We were the only ones to get off the tram. “It’s two blocks up that hill.”
And to all our great relief, it was.
“That a boy, Andrew!” Colm shouted, patting me on the back. “Never doubted you for a second.” He of course had no belief in my navigational abilities at this point, but he had remained silent and demonstrated faith nonetheless.
Through a cobblestone courtyard, under a vine-covered trestle above, we entered a low and long room with blond-wood-paneled walls and hard wooden booths. There was a man playing an accordion by the fireplace, at the far end of the room. There was no busload of tourists, as I had feared. Only a few of the tables were filled, with locals. A waitress dressed in a traditional Austrian dirndl came over and Colm ordered a few different carafes of the fresh wine from the most recent harvest that is the Heuriger’s specialty. D’s parents tasted and commented on the bouquet and flavor. The man playing the accordion took frequent breaks and visited the tables of the other patrons. He drank copious amounts of wine, moving slowly, with great and deliberate care, back and forth to the bar to refill his glass.
We went across the courtyard and ordered from the small women behind the buffet counter—traditional cold cuts and pickled cabbages. We ate several kinds of salami that my son would have devoured.
Eventually Colm got up to invite the accordion player to come over and sing us a song. For a long time the man didn’t come and we assumed that in his drunkenness, he had forgotten. But then there he was, on a stool at the end of our booth. Close up he looked like a bloated Robert Goulet, with a thick dark mustache and watery eyes. He spoke only German, but even in a language I didn’t understand, I could tell his words were formed with the extravagant care of a drunkard.
Margot requested “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music. I wanted to crawl under the table.
When the man began to sing, his voice was as rich and clear as it was thick and clouded when he spoke. My daughter, who was wearing her authentic Austrian dirndl bought by her granny and had begun to drift off to sleep with her head on my lap, now suddenly sat up.
“Mommy, how does he know this song?” she asked in wonder, and stared at the musician as he pushed and pulled his accordion, closed his eyes, and emptied himself into a song he must have sung every night of his life.
D’s parents swayed back and forth in unison and then began to sing along. Colm put his arm around his wife and she leaned into her husband, their eyes burning with unapologetic happiness.
I took out my phone and snapped a photo of them across the table. It is slightly out of focus, but their eyes are clear. They’re sharing a look of such unguarded joy in each other. It’s a look that trumps all of the baggage that I know they carry after fifty years of marriage, and all the baggage that I don’t know about. At that moment, in their togetherness, they rose above all that life does to weigh people down.
I looked at D and she smiled at me and tilted her head toward her parents, as if to say, “See that? It’s all worth it, this feeling right now, it’s worth it, isn’t it?” I smiled at her and looked down at the table. She touched my cheek, in acceptance of my awkwardness. I looked at her again and took her hand.