Page 26, “The Persuasion”
Our time in the café that day lasted long enough for Tonin to recount three centuries of his families’ histories, two world wars, persecution, migration, and bloodlines that linked him to names familiar to anyone growing up in New York in the Fifties and Sixties—U Thant, Millicent McIntosh, Calder, and many more.
His grandfather was a Czech count born in 1895. “Papa” married “Babi,” whose family manufactured printing presses, in 1923.
“They could see what was happening,” he said. “Got their money and families out by ’38, opened accounts in London and New York, bought the place on 86th Street.” He spoke as if he’d been party to the decision, as if he’d been there when the papers were signed. He knew exactly when they’d moved to London, the date they had flown to New York to settle there, precisely which furniture dealer Papa had contracted with to provision his office at Broadway and West 58th. “His name never made it into the papers for his role in forming the U.N.,” Tonin said, “but Janos more than made up for that.”
“Janos? What’s he got to do with it?”
Janos was responsible for The Lone Emperor, the famous photo of the penguin, standing sentinel on an outcropping of ice, the Pegasus Berg in the distance. I knew the picture, everyone knew the picture—ever since it appeared on the front page of The Times. The original, in color, first was shown in an exhibition of Janos’s Antarctic work at the Metropolitan where everyone, including me, clambered for tickets. The black-and-white version was on posters, T-shirts, bumper stickers. Even I, who hated fads, the last of my friends to buy a Beatles album, the sole holdout in kneading bread, had the Emperor in my card collection. The solitary penguin, noble in a barren world, an emblem of hope.
“Yes. He’s my father.”
