The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (23 page)

And so, we are all together. We travel, celebrate, share
simchas,
birthdays and holidays. We are joyful, we parents, children, and grandchildren, for the next ten years.

The Great Bully

I
T MUST HAVE been especially hard for my father to actually have to die. He had survived so many near-deaths—not just the Nazis but the Communists just before them, not just the Germans but the Lithuanians alongside, and the Cossacks, before, who had murdered his father. On some level, amid all the bloodshed and violence, he must have felt oddly immortal.

Here, in America, where he became more and more devout year by year, he continued to put his faith in God, the Father who’d saved him, who would always be there. He had had the bravery to start life over, have a family, build a watch and jewelry business. And though he had been robbed a few times, he had done well overall. He felt safe in the world, contented with the fact that he had succeeded in sending both children to graduate school, not once, but twice (I with my law and MPhil degrees; my brother with law and business degrees). He even had a “nest egg” that he was saving up for us and our children. All of it was locked behind the impenetrable doors of the Jewelry Exchange vault.

And then, in his eightieth year, he was robbed again.

The safe, somehow, was blasted wide open and emptied of everything—the best of his pocket watches included. This was like losing a museum full of irreplaceable art. Like losing a village of people, or a family.

But all he said was, “I will start over again. I will find new watches and I will fix them and sell them.” He was always determined to move forward. And in doing so, fate allowed him to do another great deed in his life.

One day, weeks after the robbery, a man came in with one of Simon’s own stolen pocket watches. Unknowingly, he tried to sell it to the watchmaker himself, who knew its face as well as his own. Once she realized the man was a thief, my mother opened her mouth and screamed. Soon everyone began shouting out the verbal alarm of the Jewelry Exchange in the presence of danger.

“Chap zem!”

The words are Yiddish for “Catch them!” Immediately, all the corridors were blocked by fellow jewelers. Within minutes, the man with the stolen watches was caught. Surrounded by angry men, the thief was dragged back to my father’s corner counter. Security guards ran over, guns drawn. A crowd gathered as Simon was asked what he wanted to do with this gonif, this thief.

The trapped man began to weep, begging in Yiddish. He told my father that if he was questioned by the authorities, whether he talked or not, he’d be a dead man on the street.

“Ich vil zein a gehargete mensch!!”

The thief pleaded: His fencing ring was large and vicious; he was only a pawn, one of many; he would be murdered for getting caught.

Simon let him go.

“I felt sorry for this unfortunate person,” he said later to his friends and colleagues. “I couldn’t be responsible for his death. Nothing is worth that, not even the watches.”

To the security guards, he said, in English, “I am not so sure that he was the bad man. I think I made a mistake.”

Thus my father finds himself at eighty, still getting up at dawn and riding the subway downtown from 190th Street to Fifty-ninth, then transferring trains to get to Forty-seventh. Simon does not mind—work is all he knows—but intermittently, he complains about little aches and pains, particularly in his back.

And just as quickly, he dismisses them.

“I guess I’m not a youngster anymore.”

When I was a little girl visiting my parents at the store, everyone used to think Simon was my grandfather.

“Aren’t you good to help your grandpa out!”

The first time I heard this (I must have been seven or eight), I was shocked, but soon I got used to it. I even began making what I thought of as a witticism; I’d answer, “Oh, he’s just like a father to me.”

No one ever laughed at that. It occurs to me now that I’d implied that my real father was dead. He wasn’t. He only looked as though he were a few months away from croaking. Simon’s nearly bald head, the barrel-chest, the exaggerated, hyper-masculine features—all these turned him into an old man by the time of my birth—when he was only forty. Now, forty years later, he looks no worse to me, still natty in his starched white shirt and charcoal suit, with a tie that always had some trace of cherry-red in it. He loved red; to him it represented bravery and vigor, the very stuff of life.

Soon after, however, my father’s final death sentence arrives. He is diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, metastasized to the bone. The cancer is inoperable and incurable. Simon had never smoked. He must have gotten it after so many years of exposure to benzene, with which he wiped the inner workings of his timepieces. He had by now worked at his trade for more than sixty-five years.

When I used to tell him that benzene was a potent carcinogen, he’d laugh, and say: “I grew up with it. I used to wash my hands in it. I breathed it day and night.” He had taken benzene into the bedroom with him, where he had a little workbench. He had even worked there on Sundays. My mother, I realized, had also been exposed.

Now, Simon visits a well-known oncologist. With hope in his eyes, he sees Hebrew writing on the wall, an expensively framed doctor’s credo of the great biblical scholar and physician Maimonides. He feels reassured. The educated Jewish doctor will save him.

“Well, Dr. Highman,” he says, jovially. “Can you help me out?”

The doctor takes his time answering. I immediately dislike him. It is a cold day in autumn. My parents are wearing coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. The doctor asks my father and mother to sit, but allows me to stand in the corner holding everything. He gives none of us eye contact. Instead, he stares into his computer screen, as though he could find an answer there. He plays with a rollerball mouse, rolling, rolling.

My father’s question—“Can you help me out?”—reverberates in my heart.

He had often asked me that, when he wanted me to read something to him, explain a passage in the paper, or a word, or when he had asked me to “write a letter” for him, to a landlord, to the government, to a client.

And now, very patiently, he is asking for help.

God, he said, had always helped him. He repeated this every year, at Passover, reading with emphasis from the traditional Haggadah.

“In every generation, a man is obliged to see himself
as if he himself came
out of Egypt.”

And, he’d say, “I do see myself that way. I
did
come out of Egypt.”

And when he’d read the passage “up until now your tender mercies have helped us, and may you never desert us, forever,” he’d stop, and savor the words. He seemed to believe that God could be counted on forever.

How could he, of all people, believe that?

Still, he did. Maybe the fact that he survived a death camp caused him to believe that he could survive anything.

In the doctor’s office, as the specialist continues rolling his ball in what seems a desultory way, my father sits and waits for his verdict.

Finally, I fill the silence.

“Of
course
he can help you! There is always some way to help,” I say pointedly. Like being kind enough to look a patient in the eye. Like not acting as though sickness and death were embarrassing, untoward. Why on earth did this constipated creep go into oncology?

Eventually, Dr. Highman looks up from his computer and says, blandly, “There are many treatments available. I could hardly list them all.”

I can feel my father relax at the thought that the situation will be dealt with, with action. That it will be met, and wrestled with.

“I will take any treatment,” he says, as though he were a volunteer. “Even if I lose my beautiful hair.” Being bald, he often joked about “his beautiful hair.”

The doctor doesn’t smile. He stands up and, indicating that the meeting is over, walks past us to open the door and step outside to freedom.

“So there is hope?” my father persists, as the doctor races down the corridor. Turning his head around, he throws these words over his back: “My secretary will set you up with a schedule.”

“Of course there is hope,” I insist, handing out the coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. After all, we all believed not only in disasters, but in miracles. Furthermore, being overeducated, I know I will spend as long as it takes to get my father out of his death sentence. Surely there is something on the Internet.

Unfortunately, there is, and so I become an expert on incurable cancers and the many—surprisingly unknown—“cures” that are amazingly offered, at a high price. Some I remember include coffee enemas, special “greens,” chemicals, crystals, vitamins, and muds. In one mad episode, I contact a “specialist” who sells the cartilage of goat tracheas, crushed into little pills, each costing about ten dollars.

To get my hands on these, I drive into the remote countryside and literally pass the “doctor’s” Dobermans to get to his barn, I mean “laboratory.” Grabbing the unlabeled bottles of goat gizzard, I run back to the car, tearing back to the city to give my father his cure. Just to make sure, I also begin ordering rare soups from the Orient, freeze-dried and containing an ambitious assortment of odd fungi. As if this were not enough (it isn’t; the cancer spreads from lung, to bone, to brain), I buy an assortment of New Age tapes to help my poor father relax, as well as “realize” himself. He listens to them with puzzlement, putting one on pause to ask,

“Do I really have to listen to this
dreck?”

I tell him that he does not.

In the midst of all this, my husband falls ill with an intestinal blockage requiring immediate, life-saving surgery. In the hospital, he nearly dies three times—once from the blockage itself, once from the fever of unknown origin that succeeds the massive, lengthy abdominal operation, and once from that fever invading his heart and nearly stopping it.

While Paul slowly recuperates, I tell my father about his ordeal. I want his concern, and I want him to feel as though his strength can still support me. Now that Paul is out of danger, I narrate everything that has been happening to him, me, and our three small children. Echoes of my namesake’s early widowhood, with three young ones, have haunted me, and I am relieved we have survived this near-disaster.

My children had been scared when their father had first gone into the hospital. In order to reassure them, Paul and I made a movie on our video cam, one in which he smiled and said he was feeling much better and that his tummy was much better and his intestines were now capable of passing gas.

They loved that detail.

Then I shot a close-up of some horrible yellowish hospital pudding, and Paul, pinching his nose shut in the background, said, “Yech!! I have to eat ten bowls of this before they let me out.”

Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe had laughed at the challenge. Each day until Paul came home, they asked if he had “finished the pudding.” It was a game to them, and they passed through this trauma unscathed. The last thing I would ever do, after the childhood I had had, was to frighten them unnecessarily, or burden them with possibilities they could not begin to fathom. But the truth was, my children (aged seven, five, and three) had almost lost their father.

“Paul almost died, Daddy,” I say, over the phone. “I think he’ll be okay now.”

But my father, who will never recover, does not seem the least bit interested.

All he says is, “That is good,” and then changes the subject to something in the news. A few hours later, he calls me back, and says:

“Please forgive me. I don’t know why I spoke so strangely. Maybe I didn’t hear somehow, or didn’t understand what you said. Please send your husband, your wonderful husband, Paul, my love and my blessings.”

Eventually, in perhaps a replay of my early childhood, Simon reverts to boundless fury. I recognize the sudden-cuckoo rage I saw when he was hitting my brother or belittling my mother, a rage that, over the years, had largely cooled down.

In the hospice we find for him, his madness is met by brusque impatience. When he threatens the staff and shouts, they give him large, unconscionable doses of Haldol, a potent antipsychotic. The pills are so toxic to his frail body that they knock him into a stupor. Ultimately, he develops tardive dyskinesia, an irreversible tremor in the limbs. My father’s hands shake so that he cannot feed himself, and the staff, avoiding him, rarely steps into the room to see if he is fed. When I am there to watch him, I see that not only do his hands tremble but his face as well. I try to squeeze the juice of an orange into his mouth, but most of it lands on his hospital gown.

Hospice is meant for the dying only; my father’s placement there means no more hospital and no more hope. His oncologist, after ravaging him with nonstop chemotherapy and radiation to the brain, is through with him. Simon will never see him again, nor any other vestige of his previous life. Friends and colleagues—people who used to travel the world to give him their rare watches for repair—all are reluctant to visit him in the final station of the terminally ill. My mother, who must work at closing their business, cannot handle the screams, not his and those of his fellow emaciated prisoners. Each visit to this hospice ravages her nervous system.

One day, as I reach my father’s bedside, he grips my arm with ferocious strength and won’t let go. Pulling me toward him, he tells me that during the night, a German forced him into leather restraints, both arms and legs, and yelled at him to behave and shut his mouth.

“Like a real fine Nazi,” he says, his mouth tasting the sarcastic bitterness of each word. “This is worse here than any death camp.”

I’m not sure whether his story is true or whether his brain tumor has grown exponentially. I check with the desk, and an apathetic administrator tells me that, yes, there often is a young, tall German man on duty at night.

“Oh, yeah,” she acknowledges, chuckling. “Horst can be a little heavy-handed at times. But you know, these dying people, they go crazy at night, they get the terrors.”