The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (17 page)

I help out: “His name?
Bernard
is his name.”

Brendan laughs again. It’s such a bad name for him. Bernard. Bernie. But my mother smiles her approval. She can see me married to a Bernard, maybe even this Bernard, this happy laugher.

“So, Bernard,” she confides to him, “the butcher had a problem today, he can only deliver before six o’clock, so I ran early out of the store, and—”

Brendan hands her a delicate stemmed glass full of Sabra.

“Bernard, you should have some, too,” I point out.

“Well, I hate to drink too much—I just thought
you
wanted some.”

“No—
you
did!” I pour him a glassful, full to the rim to punish him for those laughs.

“So now, again, a real L’chaim,” my mother says, taking a small bird sip and waiting until Brendan does the same.

“It’s good, no?”

“Uh, oh, yes,” says Brendan.

My mother gives me her glass. “Here, Sonialeh, finish, for me it’s too much. And your last name?” she continues, now to Brendan, as she bustles away into her bedroom to change out of her work clothes.

“My—my last name?” he repeats.

The house is so small she could probably hear us if we whispered, so I mime “Don’t say anything!” to Brendan. I can Judaize his name. I will
kasher
him like meat is made kosher, by putting sea salt into it so all the blood and wildness runs out. Just give me a minute. O’Neill. O’Neill. No, I can’t. Most names, you could add “witz” or “berg,” or even “insky” or “itsky”—but O’Neill is an insurmountable challenge.

“It’s actually O’Neill.” I call out boldly. “Like the Irish name.”

“Oh,” she says, returning, popping shut the last snap of her daisy-patterned housedress. “A lot of people say I look Irish.”

That’s true. With her green eyes, cherry cheeks and auburn hair, Gita could pass for a colleen, and it flatters her (in the way that my own Jewish looks do not). The Irish, in fact, are among the non-Jews she least fears. They are a people who have struggled, like the Jews; like the Jews, they have made an art form of their suffering. And she thinks they are good-looking, which they are.

“Yes, well, Brend-
Bernard’s
father is from Ireland. But he met a nice Jewish girl here in New York, and guess what, he converted.”

“And they raised you Jewish, Bernie?”

“I’m as kosher as a Hebrew National hot dog,” says Brendan, whom I could have kicked.

“Not to mention the knish,” he adds, piling it on. “Which I like with mustard.”

My mother is more warmed up by the minute.

“And do you like the Sabra?” she says,

“The wh—”

“Look, you didn’t drink anything. I guess you have your mother’s genes. We Jews, we’re really not drinkers.”

My mother truly liked Brendan and was actually a bit forlorn when we parted ways. I was headed, after all, to law school after college. I had places to go, things to do, and miles to go before I slept. And Brendan’s constant state of arch drunkenness really began to annoy me.

Omega and Alpha

A
S THE SONG at the ’64 World’s Fair had declared:

“There’s a Great! Big! Beautiful! Tomorrow!”

I had long seen that Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow on the horizon. It now involved my becoming a powerful being of irrelevant gender. ATTORNEY AT LAW, the sign would now say, gold-shaded black letters on a wooden square, like my father’s OMEGA sign.

My father had always wanted me to be successful, and to him (as to my college advisor), the Juris Doctor degree represented the apex of American vision. How many presidents and heads of industry had been lawyers? How many senators and CEOs and “partners”? What immigrant’s child would say no to a salary of $100,000, rising to a possible million or more at the end of seven years? And how much power did those numbers imply? As long as I succeeded, my parents’ life-long struggles would have been meaningful. They had been kicked around their whole lives, but now their child would wear the “brass buttons”—my father’s phrase for those in power. I could go up to all oppressors, shove my nose in their faces, and say, with authority:

“Hey buddy, now stop picking on my folks, it’s enough already. Check out Rule #5485, subsection 719. It’s about time to stop being mean. Or do you want me to sue you? Because I could. I am, after all, an attorney at law.”

That I was a woman about to say “Hey, buddy,” etc. did not matter in the least—my father was feminist when it came to me, to a fault. “Any cow can have a baby,” he had once said. Now feminism seemed to be agreeing. Merely to procreate, to sit home and lactate? We can do more than that. We can accomplish things, both at home (boy-girl twins, delivered vaginally and sans drugs) and in the “real” world (corner office would be good). We can have it all! Better to go to law school, then, and tough it out like a real man. Or tougher, like an alpha woman in a man’s world.

With my transcript, as my advisor had said, I could anticipate being admitted to Harvard or Yale. Yale, to which I had longed to go before, and now to enter its most competitive bastion ... irresistible. And Harvard Law, the stuff of legend (mostly unpleasant, but of course that only attracted me): the place in which, in one famous film, a dour professor asks his poor students to look left and right—only one will survive. How concentration-campish! I apply to both and am accepted to both. A primal moment of “Yes.” I’ve won the American lottery In my first real “selection,” I have made the fateful cut.

I remember doing an ecstatic victory dance in my room. I jump up and down like a winner on a game show; I do the twist, the pony, and the swim. I guess a part of me had always wanted those “brass buttons.” Now I would be among the rule-makers (not just the rule-maker’s favorite). I would be safe, and I would make others safe, leading them out of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Poland.

But why is it that, when I visit the Harvard Law campus, all my fellow overachievers seem on the verge of a breakdown? There is talk of first-years attempting suicide, of students tearing pages out of library books so that others can’t study from them and “ruin the curve.” One student, a tall, storky girl, whispers fiercely to me as I pass, “Save yourself! Don’t come here!”

Yale Law seems mellower, and it is smaller—only 150 people in my year, half of them women. “Seventy-five women from all of America,” I think, as if all of America is applying, en masse, to beef up its credentials. The few students I talk to seem breezy—off to play tennis doubles, or to attend some graduate lecture on Kant and the categorical imperative. At least, that is how it appears to me on my first visit to the legendary, longed-for New Haven, Connecticut.

“It’s the school of Athens,” I reassure myself, alluding to the vanished world in which scholars promenaded and thought deep thoughts, philosopher-kings all. Leaping forward a few centuries, I continue to fantasize: “It’s the Renaissance in Florence. I could go there and write, read French romantic poetry and Russian novels. I’m sure that’s what everyone does at a place like this.” I look forward to evenings discussing decadence or existentialism with my ultra-clever new law buddies, followed by an evening with a Kama Sutra expert with a brain.

“It’s probably the best school in the United States of America,” I tell my father upon acceptance. He cannot be more proud, and makes the following speech: “I kept you back in New York City for your college, but now you must go forward towards your future.”

OK, I nod, thinking that it’s about time. And Yale isn’t that far away.

He isn’t finished.

“I have always worked hard, like a dog. Day and night, I drove myself, and I got sick, and sometimes the sweat would pour from me, and still I kept going. Do you know why? Of course you know, I have always told you. So that you could accomplish anything you wanted. What you learn in your head, no one can ever take from you. No one could pay for me to go to school, but I will always support your goals, even if I have to keep on working forever so you could reach your potential and become a real somebody. This is my privilege and my joy.

“So go now, my Karaputzi,” he says, ruffling my hair. “Go to your success.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

We were often, apparently, on the same page in the manual for upwardly striving, dream-seeking immigrants. I had my hubris, and he his innocent belief that there was a life-long prize at the end of the finish line. All I had to do was get there and collect my reward. A modern story of redemption.

The problem was, I soon came to realize, what did American “redemption” mean? The alien new language I heard when I enrolled on campus immediately disturbed me: Big bucks. Arugula. Humidors. Souffle. Brooks Brothers. Shrimp cocktail. Chablis. Clerkships. Six figures. High-powered. Antitrust. No trust. Get it in writing, in triplicate form.

And the courses: Contracts, Torts, Evidence. “Business Units.”

With a flip of my stomach, I quickly realized that I did not want any of this business. I hated what it stood for. The law itself, and its rigidities, were foreign to me. I had had my taste of culture, art for art’s sake, passion and intellectual searching. Was this to be the end of my brief expansion from the veal box? Was it all now to be bills of lading and temporary injunctions? Was this my reward for studying like a lunatic for the last fifteen years? Membership in some corny golf club where the men wore bright green pants and discussed train accidents and “preferred” shares?

In class, I entertained myself by daydreaming about the personal, supposedly irrelevant, part of each law case. If the “fact pattern” was about the apples that fell into Mr. Jones’s yard from Mrs. Smith’s tree, I wanted to know what kind of apples. Tasty or rotten? Mealy or crisp? McIntosh (my mother’s favorite)? Were Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith young and virile? Having an affair, I suppose? And why not? Life was short and boring. I felt a kind of perverse pride when my first-year contracts professor, the redoubtable Grant Gilmore, wrote on my paper: “Full of brilliance, nonsense, and mistake.” I loved the distinction between mere mistake and total nonsense. He understood my mind as well as anyone. I was once thought to be brilliant, the law was nonsense, and my coming here, of all places, had been a big mistake.

Here we were, stuck in torts when it was autumn outside and real apples were ripening, heavy-falling; you could fill a basket with them. Latin phrases, pouring into our heads like wet cement into molds, also intrigued me, if only in their creative misuse.
Res ipsa loquitur
(the thing speaks for itself). What thing? The thing that rises when a pretty girl goes by? The heart that beats faster? These things speak for themselves, but who among these scribbling note-takers and nitpickers is listening?
Habeas corpus
(you have the body). Yes, I
did
have the body, and it was young and passionate, so what was it doing in this dusty Gothic classroom?

What were these cases, this Latin, this game? How did law manage to ruin the world, replacing truth and beauty with a poorly fitting grid? How did language itself suddenly become so limited, cold, and formal? Was all that preceded this profession merely a juvenile stage, a suggestively inspiring course in college, a romantic folly, to be discarded for less childish things at the appropriate age? I did not want to be left behind on the failure train. When college ended, I had fears of going back to Washington Heights, my mother’s onion-potato kitchen and my own set of pans. I didn’t want to be sent to the wrong line—the death line, then heaped in a pile. I wanted to strive, to win. But what was this prize, and why was it so horribly wrong for me?

I had never fallen down before. I had fought the acknowledgment of sadness all my life, and here it was, an enveloping shroud. My familiar, the savage god who cornered me. Now, unable to enjoy my torts or my tarts, I tumble down a well. It is almost luxurious, an Alice-fall where everything becomes possible after you topple in. I let go of my end of the bargain of survival.

A covenant, I thought, had been made with me, as it had been with Israel. Be good, be true, be special—and you will get to the Promised Land.

But that was not going to be possible, not here.

This was where my own journey began. My father, like my mother, knew little about me and what I needed. Immigrants’ children did not usually become writers, thinkers, and artists; that life was unpredictable. Success could never be guaranteed. So they went to law school/med school/ business school and made their parents proud. Now that I was at the top and had looked at the view, I saw the wrong land. My parents, who had never surrendered to despair, would have been ashamed of me—if they had sensed anything about my feelings.

Couldn’t I go back down the mountain and start again, start at the place where I was a free child, not tied to a Bubbe, not darkened by six million murders? I wanted paintings, sixty-four colors, avant-garde theater, English literature. I wanted orchestras and arias; I wanted to read rapaciously and write my own bold words. I wanted truth and beauty; I wanted textured Old Europe and its ivory keys and golden mantle of culture. More than anything, I wanted to participate, and be loved, in my own true identity.

I should have listened to my mother, who loved flowers and fresh, ripe tomatoes and her little apartment that gave her joy. She is the one who, whenever I told her how tough the professors were, how pressured the world I had entered, would answer, simply:

“Let them
plotz.”
(Explode.) How wise she was.

She would have been happy if I had simply wanted to stay with her a few hours every day, and make some wonderful soup, redolent with dill and bay leaves. Or eat a
shtickl
pound cake, drink a glass of tea with honey. We could have enjoyed the little things together, flowers (plastic maybe, silk if we were lucky, but
flowers.),
pushed and pulled our wagons up and down the avenues hunting for the best and cheapest apples and tomatoes and cantaloupe. But at that that point, chicken soup, honeyed tea, and apples were the last things on my hubris-warped mind. I didn’t like law, but I would not come home.