The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (15 page)

Trust was there, and love followed over the next years. Jacob was my first partner, and I his. I loved being in his tiny room in John Jay Hall, entwined with this sweet man, laughing. We were compatible; we were like twins. In every picture taken of us we look young, beautiful, satisfied.

After all this, I pushed him away. Why? Because it was easy, and obvious, and there the story would end. No trauma. No chosenness. No selection. My tale would pale next to that of my parents, who had looked into the heart of darkness and lived, my mother banging pots and eating apples, my father fixing timepieces and chanting at the altar. My mother, it is true, was thrilled with Jacob—but the one I was trying to impress, all my life, was my father. He was my own private Selection Committee. Marriage at twenty-one, to a guy from a big house in the boroughs (with a country house in Connecticut)?

This, I think, was my mental reckoning:

Should I stay with, and soon marry, this wonderful guy, who wants to go to law school (that, or medicine, being the only choices then for a smart Jewish boy), comes from a nice Jewish family, understands me and my world, went to a yeshiva like mine, and will almost certainly be good to me for the rest of my life?

Nah.

Of course, I had loved being with Jacob and his parents, who instead of serving exhausted pasta with ketchup at dinner took me out to “fish restaurants” where you could get a “nice piece of sole” and a baked potato in foil, followed by a rich hunk of cheesecake. Other than the delis for hot dogs and a
greps
after our Doris Day ritual, my family had never “gone out” to restaurants, and on the very rare occasion that we went to a coffee shop, my mother would invariably help the busboy wipe the table. Jacob’s mother, hair frosted in three shades of metallic blonde, would light up a post-fish Newport, exhaling like a movie star. His silver-haired, silver-moustachioed father (who actually looked like Mr. Lodge, Veronica’s father) would unwrap a cigar with a great sense of quiet entitlement. And then we’d all get into the “champagne” colored Cadillac Eldorado and drive, soundlessly ensconced, to their sprawling Tudor-style “private house” in Forest Hills, Queens.

Jacob had a large backyard, with flagstone paving and a basketball hoop. He had a basement “rec room” with cork on the walls, lavender carpeting in the powder rooms (with matching monogrammed guest towels and mini soaps), a dining room as well as a citrus-colored “kitchenette,” and a wood-paneled trophy room for all the father’s philanthropic contributions to the Jewish world.

Sometimes the contrast between Jacob’s upbringing and mine pained me. I once overheard his parents refer to my own tiny apartment as a “shoebox.” My parents had invited them over to Washington Heights. Jacob’s parents walked through the apartment (that would take about thirty seconds) and clucked about the two bedrooms, the one tiny baby blue bathroom with a sink that stood on skinny metal sticks, and the small kitchen. We had no dining room; we ate in the kitchen, at a small round table covered with a flowery oilcloth, its centerpiece a vase of plastic flowers. If you listened carefully, as you sat there, you could hear loud salsa playing out of someone’s car radio. Dominicans and Colombians were joining the Puerto Ricans in my neighborhood, and now there were serious drug sales, there was frequent shooting.

Perhaps worst of all, Jacob’s parents had bluntly asked that horror question: “So where does your brother sleep?”

“It’s sort of a slum,” they informed me, as we drove away in the Caddy, as though I could do something about it. Oh, is it? I’ll move away at once! Thanks for letting me know! I’ll move into something larger and more luxurious, in an expensive stylish neighborhood now!

I was both mortified and angry at them for belittling my parents. After all, we lived in Manhattan, even if it was the tip of the island, above uptown, above Harlem, at the end of the end of Ellington’s “A” train. At least we didn’t live in Queens! Slum-dwellers or not, we lived in THE CITY But I had always wanted a quiet, gracious life, a childhood like Jacob had had, a garage with bikes and wooden sleds inside it.

I could have married this boy and had my own gracious home with wall-to-wall carpeting, an ecstasy of toilets, diamonds in my ears and circling my neck, not to mention a rock to weigh down my small-boned hand. I could have gone all Riverdale, and had pool parties and bridge nights like my mother’s old friends. I could have gone to Junior’s and had the maitre d’ know how I liked my fish and my cheesecake.

Is this in the great tradition of the operatic movie magazines, which my mother and I both adored? Is it to defy my mother—who warned, like Cassandra: “A goy will hurt you. Watch out!” Am I trying to be heroic, jump into the subway tracks, join the Lithuanian army, like my father? Or is it simply the case that troubled people who have had a taste of hell are most familiar to me? The ambivalent, the torn, the wounded—these are my true fellow travelers, even as I get my A’s at school. I like the minor keys, the complex atonalities.

I eventually find it impossible to stay with Jacob, the good boy, the Likable Kid who is close to his parents. Who has a vintage collection of baseball cards, including Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford. Who will end up as a leading litigator in a prominent Jewish law firm—which is to say, a top firm in New York. Who offers me an amazing Tiffany solitaire at the Rainbow Room. He is gorgeous in a tux, and I wear the diamond for a short while, pondering normalcy, safety. My mother draws the relieved conclusion from this that her willful daughter’s life is settled; she is ecstatic and starts buying me pots and pans that I, too, can clatter in the morning.

There were, however, things on my mind beyond domestic closure. All these years, I had been frustrated not to be going to Yale University, where my high school had put me forward as the top candidate. My grade point average had been something like 99.9 (nines repeating into infinity). My SAT’s were perfect (Soloveitchik had taught me nothing if not how to study). Yale, thrillingly, had just begun opening its doors to women. I would have been one of the first pioneers to break into that hallowed men’s world.

My father, I thought, would be thrilled by this opportunity. Wasn’t he his daughter’s biggest booster? Surprisingly, he had begged me to stay in New York. This meant that I would go to Barnard College (its brother, Columbia, unlike Yale, did not yet accept women). I would not go away to New Haven and prove myself equal to its deliciously intimidating traditions and/or decadent, entitled poseurs. I would not be a Jew among Wasps, a woman among men. I would not even leave home.

My incredulous high school headmaster had called my father. No one had ever passed up an opportunity to study in Cambridge or New Haven before. And the school wanted to keep its “spot” at Yale—at least one student a year.

“Mr. Taitz. We are convinced that your daughter’s talents and ambitions would be best served by Yale University. Please strongly consider sending her there. This opportunity will change the course of her life.”

“Yes. I will think about it,” my father said.

After a day or so, he called me into the kitchen to talk.

“This Yale they talk about is a wonderful school, I am sure,” he said, over a glass of tea. “World-famous, they tell me.”

“Yes—and they’ve just started letting girls in—”

“And you, my talented little girlie, would be very successful if you went there. There is nothing I want more for you than to succeed in the world. But the Barnard College is also very good.”

“It’s so much easier to get into!”

“Maybe so. But it has something Yale does not have.”

“What?”

“It is close to home. I don’t want you to go far from me.”

That was the problem. I wanted to break free.

“I have never asked you anything like this before, and this might surprise you. I’m not a beggar, and I don’t like to impose on you. But you are the light of my life, and I want to see you as much as I can before I die.”

You’re dying? I thought, alarmed. It was true that besides the terrifying acromegaly that had changed his body, he had also had bleeding ulcers throughout the past years. Ironically, the intense use of aspirin during his painful years, in which his head had ached and his joints had creaked and grown, had caused much of his stomach to be destroyed. A few years earlier, much of it had been removed—months, they said, before internal bleeding would have killed him. Now, touching his fragile stomach, eyes shining, he continued.

“You know I am not so healthy now, I feel weaker every year. I don’t know how many more years God will be good enough to grant me. So it is my deepest wish that you stay longer in New York. You have time to go away later. Please, Sonia, will you do as I ask of you?”

Of course, I had to say “yes.” How could I add to the pain of a man who had lost his father to the Cossacks, his watch stores and prize Harley to the Communists, his mother to the Nazis—a man who had suffered with his wife, his son, the English language, acromegaly, and bleeding ulcers?

By senior year, however, I was determined to get away, and to Yale itself if at all possible. My college advisor told me that my academics would be perfect for law school there, or at Harvard. She’d gripped my arm with go-get-’em fervor. So I had places to go and things to do, the special things that lucky, smart people in America do. I pictured arrival at Yale Law as the opening of golden gates into a sanctum sanctorum.

Now, I preferred the uniqueness of “Sonia” to any Susie or Sherri or Sandy. I loved my black hair, and I wore as much black to match it as possible. I wanted to expand, to break out of normal categories. I wanted to know the secrets of those who were extraordinary. I was in love with the ideas of existentialism, art, decadence, the French, Bertolucci, Rimsky-Korsakov. I loved the Russian nonhero Oblomov, who never got out of bed, the tortured Raskolnikov, and the simple, almost sardonic Candide, whom nothing on this earth really pleases.

I am sorry to say that my breakup with Jacob crushed him for a time. This once-happy person had truly loved me. He had never caused me a moment’s pain, and I repaid him with rejection and wanderlust. I saw people like him, and marriages to people like him, as unworthy of my true intricacy. What a snob I was, always wanting to go to a place beyond mere contentment, to be “special.” It seems so silly now, so very Third Reich of me, to divide the world into what was extraordinary (and to be breathlessly chased) and what was ordinary (and to be discarded).

Jacob called me, begging me to explain why it was over.

I told him that I loved him, but wanted something more out of life. I was, after all, still only twenty years old.

“What more do you want, Sonia? What?”

I didn’t have the words then, but now I think I was looking for a long, played-out opera in an exotic setting with strict (maybe impossible) academic and social challenges. There, and there alone, my pain would evolve into a transcendent aria in the last act. It would be followed by applause (which I could feel, like Helen Keller, with my whole body), the love of multitudes, the wash of cleansing tears. Not to mention the healing sex that would follow a moment like that, on a ripped-down velvet curtain. And the illustrious career that would perpetuate my blissful immunity from the thorns of life.

Yes, Jacob was better off without a nut like me, but he didn’t know that yet.

He was crying, and I was listening on the other end of the line. Suddenly, his mother grabbed and held the phone. They seemed to be wrestling, her fist on the mouthpiece, and I could hear muffled screams:

“ARE YOU STILL TALKING TO THAT BITCH? HANG UP!!”

Jacob was, of course, stronger than his mother. He grabbed the phone back from her and told me one last thing.

“I could have made you happy,” he said, his voice low and threatening. “But now, now you’ll never know.”

Miles to Go

J
ACOB DID MAKE ME HAPPY, and much after him has been unhappy, but happiness was not what I was looking for. Happiness, I thought, was for losers and Lincoln Continental owners. My recess friend of long ago, Bunny Milcher, whose parents’ greatest dream was to winter in Miami, had wanted to be “average and happy.” Not me.

In my high school yearbook, we had all been asked to offer a quote, or a fragment of poetry, to go with our photograph. I had chosen a passage from Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The lines, which mesmerized me, were:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep ...

What miles? What promises? As my mother said about the runners up the hill—why do they run? What do they want? Had we been able to discuss it, she would have wondered:
Why
does Helen Keller have to go to Radcliffe? Why does she get onstage and talk like a deaf person, tapping her feet like a horse that knows the numbers? Why can’t she just stay put and stop doing
meshugeneh kuntzen
(crazy tricks)?

She wondered the same about me. Why did I run? What did I want? I was her only daughter, meant to be her best friend. Why was I so strange? Whenever I did something that was not to her liking—and breaking it off with Jake was not to her liking—she would say, “You didn’t get that from
me.”
Meaning: your crazy, insatiable, promises-to-keep-and-miles-to-go personality—I don’t like it.

Finding myself a Catholic boyfriend after the perfect Jacob was undoubtedly something Gita would have not have liked, had I ever told her. But it seemed a natural and necessary step in my road away from ease and familiarity. It seemed a direct consequence of my father’s bravado and success with the threatening, larger world. I found my first real challenge right next door to me in our senior dorm at Columbia University.

Brendan Boyle O’Neill is my first romantic Radcliffe. He is often drunk, the worst thing that my mother had ever warned me about. (“Jews are not
shickers.”)
When drunk, he calls me his “impossible Hebraic bitch”—“Watch, they’ll call you a dirty Jew!” she had also cautioned—which only makes me laugh. What a nice adventure to see that some “goyim” really
do
drink a lot, and that when they do, they
do
talk, almost licentiously, about your Jewishness! What a relief, to cross these boundaries, to break these taboos and confront these fears!