different cultures, and through the vagaries of opportunity wound up in Indianapolis. Franz, who had been a professor of economics at the Technical University of Budapest, where the revolution began, became a cabinetmaker. Ilona taught piano. They were quiet, perhaps because their English never became proficient. When Henry came into their lives they were already in their early sixties, and both in fragile health. Henry was four. They weren’t ready for another child in their lives.
Ilona was kind but passive, traumatized by having the life she had planned for torn apart. She didn’t know where to fit in, or how. Her strategy was to encourage others. Henry grew up listening to her praise her students, rewarding them with walnut cookies or kolaches, even when they hadn’t practiced. And she did the same with him; she was a fountain of encouragement with little life of her own. She had her pleasures, however, in the garden and the kitchen, but mainly in music. The house was always full of it, whether it was the students muddling through sonatinas from the Schirmer catalog or Ilona herself playing the Hungarians—Liszt or Bartók—with a passion that was nowhere else evident in her life. Her favorite composer was the melancholy Austrian, Schubert. She would listen to Vladimir Horowitz play a grave Schubert impromptu and weep. Her kindness was in some way a noble expression of grief.
Franz, on the other hand, used to frighten Henry with his ferocity and bitterness. Perhaps he regretted the life he had forced on his family. He must have resented the loss of the status he had enjoyed in Budapest as an esteemed professor with a secure position. It wasn’t until the end of his life that he talked with Henry about the old days, and then it was as if he were remembering a lost love. Loss, indeed, was the defining element of the Bozsik household. They had all lost Henry’s mother.
Franz imparted two things to Henry that would mark him for the rest of his life. One was his hatred of religion, which he blamed for seizing his daughter’s mind and leading her to catastrophe. “They stole her! Like robbers, they take her away,” Franz said in his accented English. He spoke of it in the same way he talked about the loss of Hungary to communism—with a puzzled fury about how a dangerous belief system could take over the minds of reasonable people.
The other thing that Franz taught Henry was to prepare himself. Franz recognized that Henry was small and sickly and full of fears, but he also saw strength in him. He saw intelligence and curiosity. Henry later supposed that these were qualities his mother also had. “She was smart, she was talented, your mother,” Franz told Henry. He wouldn’t say her name. He devoted himself to making sure that Henry was armored against the assaults that life would present. Henry would need to make himself physically strong. He would have to be skeptical and intellectually rigorous. He must make a career that would always provide support.
Most of all, Henry would have to confront his fears. He was easily startled and shied away from confrontation. Even when Henry was really young, Franz would taunt him, he would shout “Boo!” or toss him in the air; later, he would attack Henry’s ideas and force him to stand up to ridicule. Franz was dying of heart disease, and his lessons were sometimes cruel and too urgent. He knew time was running out. He passed away while Henry was in his second year of high school.
All of his life, Henry had been losing the people closest to him. The lesson that he drew is that others cannot protect us. This was what Franz had sought to impart. Like him, Henry had a need to repair the past, which was unfixable. His grandfather’s death steered him into medicine. Without money, he had to be the best, and so he excelled in his studies and received scholarships all the way through Purdue University and medical school at Johns Hopkins. Henry would not have been the man he became if his own parents had lived. It was Franz and Ilona who showed him how to live.
As abbreviated as his time with the Bozsiks was, they at least gave him the idea of a family. Henry knew that he was not by nature a particularly caring person. He was happiest in the lab or in his reading chair. Like many persons of extraordinary intellect, he