Gila Konig, born Tsilya Konig, somewhere in Hungary, 1939. Survivor of Bergen-Belsen, survivor of a DP camp outside Munich called Foehrenwald, refugee in the new state of Israel, 1950–1980. In 1980, Gila Konig had come to New York with a few hundred dollars and no connections, thinking she might find work as a designer, or if not as a designer, doing something in the fashion industry. Eventually, with my father’s help, she managed to enter into the dress business, selling wholesale to department stores — Macy’s, Dillard’s, Neiman Marcus — from her own small showroom on Seventh Avenue. And for a brief span early on in this trajectory — for a little more than a year — she had scraped by as a Hebrew school teacher at a temple on the Upper East Side, the congregation my family happened to belong to in the year my mother began dying of cancer.
I noticed that throughout our conversation she had almost never referred to Lansky by name. It was “the man I told you about,” or “the man I knew, the American.” It occurred to me that you could read this two ways. It was either an indication that she was lying and was nervous that her story sounded untrue, or that she was telling the truth and was nervous that her story sounded untrue.
When I returned to the table, she was talking on her cell phone. After she finished, there was a silence as we readjusted to the people we were now, as opposed to the people we’d been all those years ago. She looked away, at the long line of tables to our side, most of them empty. They each had a tiny white vase with a white orchid and a sprig of fern, which in the shade of the porch stood in subtle but dramatic contrast to the white tablecloths.
“I’m lucky I know Hugh,” she said. “I don’t have many people in my life. He’s waiting for me. He’s at the apartment. I’ll finish telling you the story and then we should go.”
She took another sip of water, as if in preparation, and then she told me what I would have guessed a long time ago if I had wanted to think about it. She told me that her affair with my father had started before my mother’s death, not after it. She admitted that from the moment she’d met my father she could see what he would ultimately want. She could see the opening, I suppose you could say, but of course she put it differently. He was “lost” in “grief,” she said. It wasn’t what my father “wanted,” it was what he “needed.” It was “naïve,” she went on, to wish for men to be “better” than they were. I feel somehow prim writing this all down now, inserting these quotation marks. I look at my past and what infuriates me is not my father but the rigid predictability of everything I did in the hopes of getting back at him — my marriage after a promiscuous past, the affair that then broke that marriage up. All of that by my midtwenties. All so that I could for a brief time pretend to be better than my father and then repeat the kind of behavior I held against him. When you’re young, your power is self-destruction. It occurred to me that my being there at that lunch was just a late echo of that self-destruction.
“You’re not angry at me,” Gila said.
“I told you already, it was a long time ago.”
“You haven’t told me what your intentions are. What your interest in all this is.”
“If you’re asking if I want to write about your past, then I don’t have any intentions. I have other things I’m working on right now.”
“I would think there would be money in a story like this, but maybe that’s a little vulgar for you, getting money for something you’re not that interested in, or that wasn’t your idea. I guess I think about money because I wasn’t born into a world like this one, the kind of world you were born into. The kind of world your father was able to give you access to.”
She sat up very straight, her hands placed before her on the table, and looked at me with something like reproach. Perhaps hearing someone’s confession is inherently draining. Its effect at that moment was to prevent me from pressing her to tell me anything more. I knew that’s what she wanted, and to ask would have made me feel I was indulging her, granting her story more interest than I wanted it to have. As I said, I was familiar with people overestimating the specialness of their stories. People imagine movies. They imagine a best seller, not a vanity press book. It’s the way the world is, everywhere, not only in America. You can go through Bergen-Belsen, Foehrenwald, and still be prey to this myth.
I knew I couldn’t write in good faith about Gila’s past with Lansky without writing about her past with my father — perhaps that explains my lack of interest at that lunch. I knew that to write about my father would only be to open up the old wounds, and I’d already done some of that years before in the memoir I’d written about my marriage and its collapse. I was tired of memoirs, I thought, tired of myself. But perhaps I was simply tired of struggling with my father and his opinion of my opinions. Which is to say that it was probably inevitable that I would eventually write about Gila and Lansky, Gila and my father, for I was still angry with my father, even if I didn’t want to be.
The waiter came with the bill. We weren’t friends, so although I offered to help Gila with the check, I didn’t press it when she refused.
“I’ll tell you more the next time,” she said. “When we see each other again. How about that?”
She smiled. She wanted more from me even now. She wanted the waiter to take our photograph. I forced myself to move my chair around the table, closer to Gila’s, my hand on her shoulder, so he could fit us both in the frame.
“Thank you for coming,” she said then, flatly.
Hearing that sudden hardness in her voice, I had a moment of regret. I began to feel that I had judged her too harshly. She took one last look at the photo on her digital camera, then drew back the lens and put it in her purse. We smiled at each other — my smile transparently false — and before saying goodbye I made an equally false promise that we’d see each other again soon.
2.
I went to visit my father a few days later. He lives now on 72nd Street, about eight blocks from where we’d lived when I was growing up. When the elevator door opens on the third floor, even when you know what to expect, the light-filled spaciousness can still come as a surprise. The living room, like a vast hall, has three different groupings of sofas and chairs — it even has one of those peculiar circular couches, usually seen in hotel lobbies, with a tall bouquet at the center like the pistil in a giant lotus. Floor lamps, framed etchings, a bronze boddhisattva standing lankily in a far corner. In the room he uses as his study, he switched off the TV and I told him about my lunch with Gila. He listened inattentively, eating cold beef consommé out of a bowl.
“She lives in Sag Harbor,” I said. “Like she’s been trying to get back there ever since that weekend.”
He wiped his hands on a large napkin, licking his teeth. “She came in to say hello about a year ago,” he said. “Right before I closed up the shop. She had cancer, she told me. They didn’t know yet how serious it was. Maybe she just didn’t want to tell me.”
“You never told me you saw her.”
“Once or twice over the years she came in to say hello.”
He was even less interested in my meeting with Gila than I’d expected him to be. I understood then that he seldom if ever thinks about her, just as, in the wake of all the trouble I brought him when I was younger, he seldom thinks of me. I made it hard for him — I frustrated and ultimately baffled him. He had only wished me well all those years. I was so accusative for so long that in his eyes that’s who I am now, no matter how often we see each other.