The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (11 page)

“OW! HEY! STOP! OWWWWW!”

“Oy Shimon! Herr opp!” My mother would cry, which would make my father even wilder. He hated tears; they added to his rage.

“THIS! WILL! TEACH! YOU! TO ANSWER ME LIKE THAT!!”

“Watch his head! Pass opp zein kopp!”

“AN! ANIMAL! YOU! HAVE! TO! BEAT!”

“Ushtaks, Shimon!” Now she spoke Lithuanian to him. Stop!

And then he would finally stop, exhausted.

With loud theatrical sobbing, my brother crumpled on the linoleum.

“I think you broke my head, you baldy!”

“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”

“Nothing.”

It was simply impossible for my poor father to be dominated, or imagine the challenge of domination, by anyone, of any size, anymore. And his son was made of the same determined cloth. As for me, I picked up right away that it was best never to contradict my father. Not openly. I could never decide if my brother was brave or stubborn for challenging his unstoppable, windmill-fisted father.

My mother found my supposed immunity annoying. “Why don’t you ever hit
her?”
I once heard her say, after her boy had been beaten down and quieted.

“Is she too special to hit, your precious Sonia?”

Progression in my mother’s preference for my brother (who, like her, suffered from her husband’s wrath). Progression in her steadfast resistance to me and my supposed charms. Here is my deepest loss, a life increasingly lacking in my mother’s good will, in which all my successes became her failures, and fueled a subtle, seemingly perverse resistance to both my father and me. I seemed to represent a challenge to her: all the books she did not read, all the insights she did not understand, all the messages to me that my father never gave her.

“Let
her
be in the kitchen,
you
need to study,” he’d say to me, of my mother.

That was fine with me, but all my mother wanted was a daughter with her in the kitchen, particularly when her mother died and left her alone. Liba had been hospitalized for pneumonia, caught, my mother said, when she’d picked me up from school on a wintry day. One night in the hospital, the nurse didn’t come when Liba had rung for her. Needing to go to the bathroom, she had climbed out of her bed, over the iron railing, fallen, and broken her hip. Not long after, an embolism in her lung had killed her. My mother was left, as she saw it, alone. Her husband was no substitute for the mother she adored, her confidante, her best friend. And I, perhaps the cause of her greatest loss (she had saved her mother from the Nazis but not from me), was meager comfort.

When I played the piano, a flashy, precocious version of my mother’s dimensional virtuosity, Simon had commented: “Gita, you play faster, maybe your pieces are a little harder. But Sonia, you put more feelings into your few notes than I have ever heard from your mother. You brought tears to my eyes.” And this was no metaphor; he would actually wipe his eyes. It was really unfair—she was the one who had studied all her life, who, even now, enjoyed those lessons with Mrs. Ruskin. I didn’t even really know my scales, and hated practicing.

Later, my mother would make sure she weighed in on the matter.

“Oh, you’re so smart,” she’d say by the time I was ten. “Such a talent. I really admire you.” Young as I was, I was aware of the bitterness. It came from a side of her that hated to be shown up by another woman, and her daughter, at that. Though she loved me, I felt she truly did not like me. It frightened me that any strength I had seemed to weaken her. Even strengths that I really didn’t have, like knowing who I was outside the world of praise.

My Hellen Keller Fixation

A
NOTHER RIFT between my mother and me arose be cause of the most famous blind and deaf person in the world. One Sunday, as she often did, my mother took my brother and me to the movies. Usually the films were light and fluffy Hollywood fare, but this time, as the lights went out, there was no Doris and no Rock. Instead, the screen illuminated in somber black and white and the words
THE MIRACLE WORKER

Suddenly, with no warning, I was lost in the world that came to life before me. Sitting in the darkness, I met the tragic child, cursed in her crib to be different. No one understood Helen Keller, no one knew her. Treated like an animal, in pain and wailing, lost in a world of unreferenced pain. Kicking. Trying to escape. Until the teacher came and released all her beauty. Until someone finally freed her from her jail.

When the lights rose, I could not move from my seat. My brother and my mother were already standing in the aisle, ready to move on and out to the delicatessen nearby. Then they noticed me, sitting in a daze. I begged my mother to stay and wait with me for the next showing. Sometimes, if a movie was really good, we did that. If I had had my way, I would have sat in that dark theater all day, waiting for the lights of the story to unfold, waiting for Helen’s inner light to be revealed. But my mother had found the movie disturbing. Worse, still, was my reaction to it. She hated when I was intense like my father. She hated when I was weird and fixated and dramatic about something she could not or would not feel.

Even so, I could not shake the spell of
The Miracle Worker;
I took the movie home with me, and it went wherever I went.

“WATER!” I screamed, pouring showers from the faucets in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and running from one to the other, splashing my hands and face.

Not
vasser,
as in Yiddish. “Water.”

“Bist du ganz meshugeh?” Are you completely crazy? What had she done to deserve a daughter like this?

“I’m Helen Keller!” I replied. I even loved the name. The pain of her private “hell” was embedded in the first name.
Keller
meant
cellar
in Yiddish and German. That is where her soul had been stuck, in fear and in hiding.

“God forbid you should be a Helen Keller!” my mother screamed.

From that day on, my mother forbade me from talking about my idol and multiply disabled doppelganger. She did not know, however, that my school had a Scholastic book on which the movie had been based. Helen herself (what a prodigy) had written her own memoir, which I took out of the library and renewed and renewed and renewed.

From her book, I learned that Helen Keller had, despite her misfortunes (or maybe because of them), resolved to go to Radcliffe, then the sister school to Harvard. This was what she deemed to be the hardest, toughest, and most demanding school in the world. Helen would prove herself. Just to show them. It was not enough for her to walk and talk and do everything “normal” people did. Normal was not part of the equation for Helen. She was no Bunny Milcher who went to Miami in the winter, whose mother wore magenta lipstick and blue mascara, who wanted to be “average and happy.” She was great; she wanted to be abnormal and different and special. Like my father and maybe like me.

I also learned that Helen, having graduated from Radcliffe with honors, had gone on tours, speaking (in her way) to audiences worldwide. These audiences loved her inordinately. This woman was extraordinary. She had been deaf and blind and treated like an animal. But once released . . . so special. All they could do was wildly applaud.

And Helen Keller would say (this brought tears to my eyes):

“I can hear your applause through my feet.”

Which only made them applaud all the more, and ecstatically stomp their feet to broaden her private smile.

My father let me talk to him about Helen Keller when my mother was not around. He was there when I had nightmares; he was the one who got up in the night. I had woken from one of my bad dreams about being asphyxiated (the tonsillectomy had led to years of such dread). As he sat by my side, Simon explained that the operation had not been a punishment, but a vital step in my ultimate betterment.

“It hurt for a while, yes, you had to suffer. But now you are no longer sick all winter. Your body is more strong.”

“Yes,” I said, “I understand. You have to have some bad thing happen for a good thing to happen.”

“Like working hard for good grades,” he offered. “The lazy one thinks he did enough, but the strong one studies all night, as I have seen you do. As the Torah says, ‘Those who plant with tears shall reap with joy.’”

I thought this a good opportunity to turn the conversation over to my heroine, Helen Keller. “I actually have this theory,” I said. “It’s called ‘God compensates and balances everything. ”’

“Yes, good, tell me more,” said my father, sounding like my teachers at school. My father knew what being “special” was; he knew that he himself was special, that despite all his troubles God always took extra care of him. At the eleventh hour, perhaps, but that was His way with the Jewish people, was it not?

“You know who Helen Keller is, Daddy?”

“The whole world knows this person,” said my father. By that time, we subscribed to
Time
and
Life
and
Look
magazines. Even my father was beginning to know what most Americans knew about the people in the firmament of fame.

“Helen Keller got sick when she was little, you know, very sick, and no
spritz
could help, and then became blind and deaf. What could be worse?”

Before he could answer—for of course he’d have a ready, Holocaust-based answer to “What could be worse?” (for example: “It’s worse to see your child shot before you and hear his cries!”)—I said:

“But! On the other hand, God gave her all the brains, the soul, the charm, and the energy.”

“Who—to Helen? You know what? I think He gave the same to you!”

Now he was talking.

“Thanks, Daddy. Do you really think so?”

“You know what I think. I think you are very, very special. Our Father in Heaven gave you so much.”

“But I mean, about Helen Keller, that no matter how much trouble there is in your life, there is a wonderful, beautiful answer inside of you.”

“They say that blind people’s other senses get more sharp,” he noted. He was also reading his
Reader’s Digest.

“So maybe sad people could get more, more deeply happy in their way, Daddy. They have the power to be as happy as they had been sad before, right?”

He understood what I meant. We both felt the depth that came from our tragic history, and the release, or relief, that survival implied.

“So when Helen Keller finished Radcliffe, it was better than anyone else finishing Radcliffe. Look how far she had come. She wasn’t just some smart rich girl who had it made, whose mother and grandmother had studied there, or who had a rich American father.”

“And so the world clapped for her more than anyone else.”

“Yes, they applauded her more than anyone else. So loud that, instead of just hearing it, she could FEEL it with her whole entire body.”

Then my father wrapped me tight and warm in my blankets, and I fell into a safe and hopeful sleep.

Lucky Number 13

T
HE YEAR a child becomes a teenager is always going to be memorable, but this passage is indelibly marked on the mind of a Jewish child. My brother, at thirteen, was now considered a man according to the Jewish law. Tall and slim, Manny was now a magnet for the opposite sex. At his Bar Mitzvah, he stood smiling as the photographer lined up all the girls from his class, as well as the Riverdale girls, daughters of my parents’ friends. They leaned toward him, swooning from the left and from the right, as my brother stood, cool as Hugh Hefner, at the center. During Passover, only a month earlier, I had been surprised by the radical changes in Manny. Our parents had taken us to a hotel for the seders for the first time, and I had looked forward to exploring the “game room” with him. I had heard all about pinball machines and couldn’t wait to try one.

Imagine my shock to find my brother utterly uninterested in “hanging out” with me, and instead, calmly leaning against a wall as females surrounded him. My brother was holding court! I overheard him whisper something about his “kid sister,” and felt nothing but shame and loss as a pretty girl with long hair giggled beside him. This night was, sadly, different from all the other nights before.

I was, at this time, at the peak of physical cluelessness. At the Bar Mitzvah, my mother and I wore matching yellow dresses. Gita, with her English-rose complexion and green eyes, looked lovely in a sleeveless lemon gown with a sequin bodice and swirling chiffon skirt. My own awkward variant on her dress, besides washing out my sallow complexion, featured a nincompoop’s bow in the back, which I cunningly matched by clipping yellow velveteen bows into my teased (and optimistically “flipped”) hair. When the friendly photographer asked me for “that million-dollar smile,” unfortunately, I obeyed. Buckteeth, knock-knees, lacquered black pompadour and velveteen bow-clips—this is why that picture has been in storage for years. King Ahasuerus Beauty Contest-ready I was not.

Still, from this point, life became thrilling. That same year, we moved to a nicer apartment, in a better neighborhood within the Heights. Now, we lived right near Fort Tryon Park, from whose high promenades we could see the forest green Palisades across the Hudson. The buildings were bigger, cleaner, brighter; their bricks were red and white instead of brown; the glass on their doorways, Art Deco; the living rooms elegantly “sunken,” with two steps and a wrought iron railing.

German Jews actually lived in my new building—quietly prosperous scions of families like Schiff and Warburg! You could walk right by the venerable Breuer’s Yeshiva, stark and forbidding, to which the dignified Jews from Berlin and Vienna sent their children. On our Shabbat
shpatziers,
they would tip their hats to my father and mother. The bakeries up here carried Sacher torte and Linzer tarts, the “appetizing” stores featured the rarest Aufschnitt—cold cuts with peas, cold cuts with aspic gelee. Real German wurst (yet Glatt Kosher). Maybe we never moved to the suburbs and got the dog, but I was wildly happy to be part of this haute bourgeoisie.