The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (19 page)

Bring him to me.

Here, my hormones averred, was my own alien king. Here was my challenge. He was my prey, and I his. I determined to find my personal Don Juan.

I thought the man was a professional actor. He seemed older than much of the cast—with his dark kohled, shadowy eyes and decadent manner, he seemed to be at least thirty. I asked student amateurs I knew if they had seen the play or heard of its star performer. I searched all the directories to find his address—Oxford, the nearby town of Reading, even London and its suburbs. I could not find this name—an unusual name, though English.

And then, one day in college, I heard the porter at the lodge call out.

“Mr. Deards! Mr. Deards—if you please!”

When I turned, I saw a fleeting figure, flying by on his bicycle.

I asked the porter if the person he had called, the one who’d flown by, had indeed been the man I was looking for.

“Yes, Miss.”

“Paul Deards, the—the actor?’

“Dunno about that, Miss. He lives here in St. Catherine’s College, is all I know, and he’s got a package from his mum.”

A package from his mum? For Mr. Deards? Here?

“More often than not, it’s biscuits. They’ll keep, I expect.”

Was I supposed to believe that the man of my dreams was a biscuit-eating student at my own college? The boys around here were thin and tiny, with amazingly spotty skin. Many actually had white-taped glasses and wore pen-holders, and they weren’t in Halloween costume dressed as “nerds.”

“Which staircase?” Each staircase led to a bunch of rooms.

“Staircase Seven.”

That was
my
staircase!

“Which room?”

At this point, I really expected this Alice in Wonderland dream to continue with his saying,
“Your
room, Miss, check under the pillow!”

But, in fact, it was almost as good. Don Juan lived right below me.

I was already on top of him, I exulted internally!

Later that day, I knocked on his door.

A tall, gangly, and somewhat spotty blonde boy with lanky, flat hair stood there. He looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old.

“Uh, I’m actually looking for Paul—Paul Deards?”

He stared at me somewhat coldly.

I repeated my sentence, and he said, “What about?”

Peering into the dorm room, I saw a variety of English types: the guy who sat in the corner, on the floor, intensely trying to play guitar chords, with a few straggly hairs growing out of his chin; the one with the really short bell-bottoms (they called them “flares”) ending at his calf and revealing droopy gray socks; and the wizardy one with brown teeth and incredibly thin legs crossed at both knee and ankle. On one wall was a Snoopy poster; on the other, a tiny kitten swept up in a ladle over a bowl of chicken noodle soup, with the motto “Hang in There.”

“I
could
be in the wrong place,” I muttered, deflated by the creepy dreariness.

“Well, why are you looking for that bloke?” said Paul, finally

“Because I think he is the best actor ever. Did you see him in—”

“Oh, yeh?” he interrupted, and yanked me into the room.

A few days later, he talked to me again. After supper, I saw him mount his bicycle, about to run off. He saw me and stopped.

“Hey! Care to come with me?”

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, I do this Suicide Center volunteering bit. Trying to keep the world going ’round, you know.”

“I
do
know,” I say, thrilled that he is open to the world of pain and sorrow.

“Would you like to have a look at the place? It’s usually quite empty. Come along then, you can keep me company.”

Not long after, at the Hotline, we are drinking hot cocoa and he is reciting poetry that he has written, odd William Blakean lines that mesmerize me. And I am telling him my stories, too.

I tell him about the Holocaust, which, strangely enough, I have almost never talked about before. I tell him everything, because, after all, I am at the Suicide Hotline, the very crossroads of the word
pain.
And the signs—includ- ing a big one on the entry door—say “We Can Carry Your Load With You.”

“That is so sad,” Paul says, his eyes welling.

I stare into his wet blue eyes with my own wet browny-green eyes.

“Would you like to sit on my lap?” he adds helpfully.

I am stunned; this seems unprofessional, but ...

Oh, yes.

Then a kiss. I’m surprised at how shaky he is. After all, he is an Englishman, and a Wasp. I really never understood that Wasps could be so nervous, and I never knew they could feel so ...

More, please.

And that is how it begins.

When his next part is cast, I attend his performances not as a guest but as an insider. It is
The Tempest,
and he is Caliban.

Paul chooses to play this role in green, even painting his face and limbs the color of moss. The production takes place at night. He appears with a swoosh—Caliban, the primal man, leaping from a tree and into the river, then onto the stage. He shakes himself off like a dog and humps the ground as he roars:

“I shall people all the world with Calibans!”

Can I come too?

After the play, we kiss and hug, and his green body paint comes off on me. I think of Billy, the kid I loved at four, and his primordial mud. I feel connected to Shakespeare, to art, to passion, and to the pulse of the earth.

Master of English Letters

D
URING THIS TIME, with me in England, and my brother in Los Angeles, my father loses his store in what is now Lincoln Center. “Taitz Jewelers” has been condemned by the greed of a landlord, who raises the rent higher than my parents—or any other small business—can ever afford.

My father has my mother write a special letter to me. He is uncomfortable with writing in English.

Darling Sonia’le!

Please do not worry. We are in big trouble, only you can help. Daddy wants you to write a letter to the important people, maybe newspapers, the Times, so everyone knows that we are being chased out of our store, no one does nothing we are worried. Please you are so smart help us find a way so we can earn our living we have worked so hard all our lives we don’t deserve this.

Your Loving Parents (Gita and Simon)

I call them immediately, seeking more information. My father can only repeat an idée fixe: if they can save vanishing species (his example is the crocodile), why not the old watchmakers, the skilled craftsmen and their handmade world? Inside his request is the familiar paradigm—I am about to be annihilated. I am not your father, but your child and your responsibility. It is your duty to save me. And only you, Sonia Judith Taitz (carrier of at least three dead people, and now two live ones) can do it.

So I use my words and write a letter about the Holocaust, about watchmakers and other dwindling craftsmen, and about vanishing species. I send it to various newspapers, but there is no response at all from anyone.

“They never stopped the trains to Dachau,” my father tells me, over the phone lines from New York to Europe. “They never came. The world never cared. The British turned even Jews back to Poland,” he reminds me, as I stand in Britain and talk to him. “You have to keep going. You have to care. Write something more.”

I do care, but it is hard to have my words used, over and over, for someone else’s purpose, and not my own. (This was also a problem at law school.) I want, for example, to write a letter to someone, anyone, seeking peace from the chore of being my parents’ alarm system and conduit to an impossible, unconquerable world. I cannot defy my father, however, and continue to send the perpetual SOS. Finally, one Spanish magazine does a feature on Simon Taitz,
“orologico”
and the vanishing
“crocodilios.”

Only then does Simon rest, for he had been shown the respect he had deserved from a time so long past it had preceded my existence.

I remember once being chased through the house and slapped for not greeting him at the door when he came home late at night. And then apologizing, weeping, until he forgave me, usually after a silence of several days.

I remember the last time I had tried to defy him. I had come home from camp happy, tanned, proud of myself. The word
camp
had transformed itself from my parents’ connotation (“when I almost died in the camp”) or from the oddball Camp Betar, to a communal joy-pot of adolescent fun amid the green smells of nature, so foreign to me in my urban veal box. I had worn some boy’s “ID bracelet,” a heavy chain-link encircling my slender wrist, the engraved name of my suitor falling casually down my hand. These IDs were status symbols among us girls, and wearing one had made me feel proud and female.

Whenever I arrived back from eight weeks of summer to our small apartment in the gray bleak Heights, I’d be sad for about a week, missing the freedoms and smells of youth and pleasure, reacclimatizing myself to the claustrophobia, the incessant demands, and the suppressed rage.

And sometimes, not suppressed.

Looking back, it was foolish to say what I said. But I never stopped trying to communicate with both my parents, bring them along on my developmental trips, share my growing acculturation. And the ID bracelet, a sign of my being a real American teenager now, had given me new courage.

“Daddy,” I said, “when I was at camp I learned something new. I learned that I’m really too old for you to hit me now.”

There was, perhaps, a second of silence, and then—WHAM!

He thumped me a good one. As with all other episodes of his literally heavy-handed rage, I fell to the floor,
thwack,
like a bug shot dead by a spray of Raid.

My father continued hitting me as I stayed there, half crumpled, guarding my face, with which I’d done much sweet kissing over the summer. He never stopped, even when I got the lesson. Actually, I could never fully get his lessons in ultimate submission. He stopped only when his wrath had fully abated, his forty days of torrents to drown out the world. Finally, I lay on the floor and he was finished. I could hear my mother’s ineffectual weeping, noticing that, unlike the times when my brother was hit, she had not screamed out for my father to stop. But although she was not crying hard, she was crying more than I was.

I was not crying this time. This time, I realized, I would write about my experience.

I went to my room, ripped a piece of paper out of a small, spine-coiled notebook, and wrote the words:

“I hate you, you fascist piece of
chara.” Chara
was a daring curse word, all things considered. It was the Arab word for “shit.”

I took the paper in my hand and slowly walked to our bathroom. Piece by piece, I ripped my midget-opus, ceremoniously freeing my passions to the acceptance of the sea, its conduit our toilet. Like openmouthed communion, the oval of water accepted my offering. My body, my blood, my passions.

And though the words reached no living heart then, they do now, and I can add to them: “But at the same time, Daddy, I love you. If only words could take your pain away, as sometimes they do mine.”

In the end, of course, my father lost his store in Lincoln Center. The big, neon script banner, “Taitz” in pink, “Jewelers” in turquoise, was extinguished, the cooling wires lowered to the ground. But, just as inevitably, he didn’t give up. After a short time, Simon and my mother found and rented a jeweler’s “booth” in the National Jewelry Exchange on Forty-seventh Street, commonly known as the Diamond District. These booths consisted of little counters, scarcely separated, behind which diamond cutters, setters, and polishers, wholesale gemologists, gold engravers, and other jewelry specialists noisily plied their trade. My father was one of the few master watchmakers; he was nearly lost in that bustling exchange.

Simon brought his workbench and tools; Gita brought her velveteen trays of pearls and engagement solitaires. He nailed his precious OMEGA sign to the wall behind him, as well as a functional black laminate square with white letters spelling out “Taitz Jewelers,” and they started up again.

The Jewelry Exchange was really a block-long avenue of old-world Jews, many of them Hasidic survivors of the Holocaust. While immigrants themselves, and traditional in their religious practice, my parents were not Hasidim, most of whom had come from Poland and Hungary. The Lithuanian strand of Jewry had always been more geared toward learning and rationality; there was no special costume of black frock coat and trousers, no earlocks, no beards, no rebbe to whom one came to ask all questions of life. There was intellectual independence and more than a touch of practical modernity. Furthermore, the Yiddish voices that surrounded my parents at the Jewelry Exchange were accented differently from their own classic version. It was like listening to English spoken in a thick Southern accent.

Unlike my father’s little store, moreover, this open arcade was vast and cacophonous. Thousands of showcases glittered as you entered the building, a dizzying kaleidoscope. Fluorescent lights from both under and over the counters highlighted the diamonds, magnifying them into a glacial, dazzling world of snow-white. At the same time, the sound of thousands of voices, selling, buying, questioning, and bargaining, was an assault on the ears. Hands gestured, and hands were shaken; golden necklaces were draped on an endless chain of customers, reflected in hundreds of gleaming mirrors.

My parents’ booth was all the way in the back, on the right-hand wall. Tucked in there, I felt they were safe from the sensual assault of this crazy crystal palace. But at first, my father hated everything about the exchange, even his place in it.

“It’s a madhouse here; I can’t make myself think!”

“But at least you have your spot here in the back, where it’s a little quieter,” I’d say on my visits to New York, trying to console him.