Tragedy Reveals a Tender Family Secret

When Mario Aguilar is laid to rest in Hayward this morning, beside his mother, aunt and two brothers, an 82-year-old Romanian refugee will sit alone in a spare apartment off Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, consoled only by photographs of a boy he called Motik’l--Yiddish for sweetie--and a pile of love letters.

That man is Mario Aguilar’s father, Julius Szabo.

He is a man whose true identity was kept from Aguilar until he was 18. For the next eight years Aguilar whispered the secret only to those closest to him. And most of them--including his mother, Maria Valenzuela; aunt, Ramona Cota; half brother, Joseph; and adopted brother, Joey--died along with Aguilar when a chartered jet crashed last week in Aspen, Colo.

The love letters, written by a young Mexican bride to a Jewish man 30 years her elder, and later from a young man to his father, trace a bittersweet and tangled story of a child fathered outside a troubled marriage. It is a tale born of deceit, bred in secrecy and nearly silenced by tragedy.

“I’m bleeding inside of me,” Szabo said, peering out at the same schoolyard where his beloved Motik’l once played, across the street from his apartment. “She’s gone, her sister Ramona, Mario, Joseph, Joey--five from one family. Would you believe such a tragedy? And I so wanted to go there and say a few words.”

But he will not go to the funeral. Instead, Szabo dictated a few thoughts to a girlfriend of Mario, a budding entrepreneur and model. Mourners will know--some for the first time--of the choked-back joy of being a dad without being able to say it. Of watching a knob-kneed reed of a boy become a striking young man, 6 feet tall, freckled and fair-haired. Of finding out that fate had given them just eight years as true father and son before separating them forever.

“He promised to take care of me when I got old,” Szabo said. “It’s not a story for one day. It’s 26 years long.”

It began with Maria. She was a vivacious, attractive 25-year-old Mexican immigrant from Esperanza--Spanish for hope--in the scorching desert state of Sonora. Thirty years and a wide cultural gulf separated the two when they met in the kitchen of a convalescent home where they worked in the early 1970s.

Szabo escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Romania in 1939 for what was then British Palestine. He told her his story. A shipwreck in Crete. Lifeboats. Another boat to Palestine. British troops firing to repel their landing. Slipping in again, under fog. A brief marriage in Israel, with two daughters. Coming to Los Angeles via New York in 1970.

The way Szabo tells it, it was love at first sight. Maria was in a bad marriage and had been unable to conceive. “She told me, ‘I’m a few years married, and I can’t have a baby with him,’ ” Szabo said. “This was a secret all my life, for her, for me.”

They conceived a child. Maria stayed in her marriage and brought the baby, Mario, into it. The couple already had an adopted son--Joey--rescued from a violent home life. A few years later, she would have another child, by her husband, and name him Joseph.

Maria wanted to have the second child with Szabo. “You, my love, don’t forget about our next baby,” she wrote. “I hope you will help me.”

Szabo, his hands thickened from years of kitchen work, sorts through the stiff pages of love notes Maria scrawled on pink and yellow memo paper--snippets that range from a quick hello or goodbye to an adolescent gush of love. Szabo is nearly deaf, troubled by gout and arthritis. But he can read the notes, like this one scrawled on a napkin: “Love you always, yours, Maria and the baby.”

The last letter from Mario came on Father’s Day, 1999: “I am glad my mom came over Friday to visit you because it was nice to see the two people that created me in the same room, smiling and being happy. You had a wonderfully big smile on your face, and it made me happy. I want you to know that there is no doubt in my mind that you are my father and that you have always loved me since I was born.

“I want you to know that although you and Mom were never together when I grew up, I would never trade you for another dad. I am proud to have you and call you my dad no matter how sick or old you will get, and I will always be around to help you as much as I can, because I love you more than any son can love a dad.”

Hampered by a language foreign to her emotions, Maria’s notes in English were always more abrupt. But her Spanish was eloquent. It was left untranslated until now. It didn’t matter. He knew what they would say.

An undated note on bright yellow paper translates this way: “For Julius my love: Julius, I told you time and again I love you more than my entire life and if you would marry me, I would be the most happy woman in the entire world.

“I tell you in all seriousness, my love, boss of my life and every minute that I have in it. But unfortunately you tell me you’re old, but for me age doesn’t matter, neither now nor in the future. What is important is that you love me and you adore me and you never leave my side. Yours forever, Maria.”

‘This Is a True Love Story’

Szabo smiled, pleased but unsurprised by the words. “She didn’t write professional, like the son does, but for me it means everything,” he said.

Szabo slips constantly into present tense, as if to beg: See these things with me. He points to a binder full of Polaroid photographs. There’s Maria and Julius, in this very apartment. There’s Motik’l, when he was born. There he is at 3. Here he is a teenager--before he knew who the family friend he always called “grandfather” really was.

“It’s a love story,” Szabo said. “You can write a film. They have love stories, but they are fake. This is a true love story.”

Maria’s marriage didn’t last long after Joseph was born, and Szabo has no idea what happened to her husband, Joseph’s biological father. Maria’s family in Hayward refused requests to speak to a reporter.

But one thing, Szabo says, is certain: Maria was relieved to admit the truth to her son. “She said, ‘Now I can die in peace,’ ” Szabo recalled. “It was a burden to her.”

It was easy when Mario was young and just tagged along on Maria’s visits to Szabo’s apartment. But as the years went by, Mario began asking questions about him that were hard to avoid.

“The minute he was 18 years old, then I didn’t care if she found out,” Szabo said. “I sat him down and told him. He was thrilled. We talked for hours.”

Now it was Mario’s turn to keep a secret. Not letting on that he knew the truth, he cornered his mother.

“I asked my mom if you were my father, and she said yes,” Mario wrote to Szabo on Nov. 29, 1993. “Before, she used to tell me that you were my dad, but she would say it in a not-serious manner. Now I asked her and I told her to be serious, and she said yes. So now the famous question is answered and there is no doubt in anybody’s mind.”

One former girlfriend, who said she dated Mario for six months, said she had never heard him mention Szabo. “Mario was from a different father than the others,” said the former girlfriend, who requested anonymity. “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

But April Davis, who dated Mario for nearly two years, said she heard the tale firsthand from Mario, who waited three months to reveal it, after she was accepted into an inner circle she describes as “this big, chaotic family.”

“He was always the grandfather to a lot of people,” she said of Szabo. “He only told a few people. Everybody on the plane knew.”

Referred to as ‘Grandfather’

Davis now thinks “grandfather” was a useful fiction to mask Mario’s bewilderment over this kind old man from a Jewish neighborhood befriending a Mexican American.

“He said he didn’t understand why Julius always took care of Mario more than the other boys,” Davis said. “He always referred to him as his grandfather. Even when he talked to his friends, he talked about his grandfather.”

In the letters, however, it was always “Daddy,” and always “Love, Motik’l.”

June 18, 1995: “I thank you for not running away like a lot of other fathers would have done. It takes a lot of courage to stay around like you did when my mom made it really hard for you. . . .

“I think that although time and distance does not allow for me to see you so much, we have still created a very secure bond between us that is very hard to separate. I’m very sorry that I’m not able to change my name to yours and that is because of a lot of complicated reasons. . . .

“I know it is hard for you to call me by this name, but it is neither our faults, because we were both put into this strange situation. I also want to tell you that I don’t care how old or sick you are. Like you said, my mom chose you to have me, and so you are my father. I love you no matter what is wrong with you. I know you might think sometimes that I am embarrassed of my old dad, but that is nonsense, because I would never be ashamed of you.”

At one point--for shame or something else--Maria had tried to keep father and son apart. She once sicced a lawyer on Szabo, accusing him of plotting to steal Mario. She apologized 10 years ago, and assured him, “I still love you the same as I loved you in our love letters.”

It is why an 82-year-old man keeps 30-year-old letters.

“I never wanted to steal him--I wanted to see that he grows up all right,” Szabo said. “I went every day to see him, to every school he went. She was so jealous; she didn’t want me to tell him. . . . He asked, ‘Mom, why is this man so good to me? He buys me all these toys. . . . ‘ I bought him a baseball, a glove to catch the ball. It is a story for 26 years to tell.”

Stories within stories, all carried by Mario, who is gone.

“I was so happy to have him,” Szabo said. “He let me talk and talk. To me, he was a good listener. He told me once, ‘You know why I do well in school? I listen carefully to the professor.’ I couldn’t teach him much--just about life, about girls. I teach him to cook, to shop, all about life. After lunch I’d tell him the stories--real stories from life.”

Those stories echoed three days ago when Davis met Szabo for the first time. She sat and cried for hours in his apartment, hearing the same things Mario had recounted to her. Szabo, for his part, wanted to hear one thing, one more time.

“He asked me, ‘Did my son love me? Really?’ ” she said.