The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (25 page)

Right now, all I can do is try to make his poor departing soul feel better.

“You were my hero,” I say, weeping over him, hugging his thin body. “You’ve overcome so much. Thank you for everything. Thank you for giving me your strength.”

Manny waits until I am standing up again, until I am upright and wiping my eyes.

“You want to hear something amazing?”

“Okay,” I say, sniffling. My hand is still touching my father, as though to keep him in the conversation. One of my brother’s hands is touching him, too. If only the right electricity could pass through his two children, my father could come alive again. But we are there; we are alive, and between us, we have given him five grandchildren.

“I was talking to Daddy when you were out of the room. I told him I was sorry for disappointing him. I asked him to forgive me for, I don’t know, being such a tough, challenging kid to raise. You were always more what he wanted.”

“You asked him to forgive
you?”

I thought about all the times my father had struck this boy, this child, my brother. If there was one thing death was good for, it was for enlarging people’s emotional capacities.

“And Daddy started waving his hand, back and forth, as though to say, ‘Nothing to forgive.’”

“Both his hands? Like fixing watches?”

“Just one hand, like saying, ‘Don’t worry.’”

He demonstrated the gesture.

“Wow.”

“And then he opened his eyes really wide. He looked at me, almost like a kid seeing the world for the first time. Remember, his father was killed when he was just a baby. He didn’t know how to be a father, really, a father to a son.”

I nodded.

“We looked into each other’s eyes,” continued my brother, “and there was nothing but love there. And then he took my hand and kissed it, three times. He said to me, ‘I love you.’”

And then, my brother continued, almost unable to say the words.

“I actually felt Daddy’s soul leave his body and rise up. It was a feeling you get when someone you love steps into the room. You don’t have to look. You know they’re there. You feel them with you.”

My father hadn’t left his son behind. In the last seconds of the last hour, he had stepped in and healed him.

I was glad Simon Taitz had died with a salved heart, salving a heart.

Women’s Studies

H
ER HUSBAND of forty-five years is gone, a man she not only lived with, but worked with every day. A man whose lunches (broiled fish, plum tomato, Golden Delicious) she packed into brown paper bags, and whose Nes-café she poured into a tartan thermos. Gita, now in her late seventies, lives alone in Washington Heights. She still climbs the hills up and down the neighborhood on Sundays, shopping for fruits and vegetables from little greengrocers. She still buys fresh, seeded rye from the bakery, sliced for her by a large chrome machine, and wrapped in a wax paper bag. She still buys Linzer tarts and
babkas,
housed in white square boxes tied with peppermint-striped strings.

When my family comes over to see her, she runs down the hallway to greet us, leaving her door wide open. She wears her apron, smiling, beaming, still capable of real joy. If anything, having grandchildren has released a certain grudging part of her. She loves my children without reservation, without self-preservation. As we approach, we all smell her cooking—chicken soup, chopped liver, matzoh balls. She is ecstatic, running into and out of the kitchen, carrying dishes and watching us eat.

But most of the time she is alone, and many of her friends are old or have moved to Florida. Not only the Riverdale set is gone, but also the loyalists of Washington Heights, who spend more and more months of the year walking the boardwalks and taking in the sun. Though my family lives in Manhattan, it takes a long subway ride or expensive taxi for her to come see us. As they grow, too, our children increasingly have activities of their own on Sundays. Even when Gita comes over (bringing me magazines and bags of cooked food), they are often out playing sports or seeing friends.

“Mom,” my brother says, “you need to live closer to your
einiklach.”
He uses the Yiddish word for grandchildren. But she knows that although she and her mother traveled side by side, arm in arm, through their lives, she will not suddenly have the same intense relationship with me. She is reluctant to leave the few old friends she still has in the Heights, women who understand her, whom she sits next to in shul even as their population dwindles and is replaced by loud, new immigrants from Russia.

My brother is worried. He thinks the neighborhood is too dangerous for a “little old lady.” He and his family live in a beautiful house in Beverly Hills. Lemon trees blossom in his garden. He drives a serious car with a quiet engine. Manny has heard, over the years, about drug deals in the Heights, muggings, old people thrown to the ground and robbed at gunpoint at the entrance to the subway or in their own lobbies. He hears rumblings from those who have left, mutterings about the changing flavor of the neighborhood—striped convertibles now playing salsa at glass-shaking, deafening levels, horns that blare “La Cucaracha” as they pass. In the park where the few remaining survivors take their Sabbath stroll, extended families set up tables, radios, grills. They roast whole pigs and drink party-colored sodas. They dance in the open air.

This neighborhood, though, and this apartment, have been the core of Gita’s life for decades, and it is dear and familiar to her. Hers has never been an upscale life, and neither she nor my father ever cared about their supposed lack of status. Indeed, they liked not showing their money; they liked economizing so that there was money in the bank for a rainy day. They liked having enough money to offer all their grandchildren a Jewish education, as they did, or to feed the hungry, as they did.

Even now, my mother likes knowing that poor immigrants come here for sanctuary; she understands them, with their close ties to lost worlds. She understands the Spanish-speaking grandmas who wear plastic combs in her hair, the little girls who wear swirly polyester dresses and ruffled socks. She loves seeing the big families, all together (she would love to have such a big family, with daughters who never felt they needed to outdo their families with academics or fancy-shmancy jobs in sterile offices). These are her people. She, too, loves to dance, and they, too, know how to choose a good melon in the fruit store. She and they both cover their good sofas with plastic, and love fake flowers (they never die!). And which Jewish woman of a certain age has not been moved by Latin rhythms? Along with her Chopin and her Rachmaninoff, my mother also tinkered around on the piano with passionate melodies like “Besame Mucho,” which had always been big in the Borscht Belt.

Still, she listens when Manny begs her, for his sake, to move to a better location. Her older child, this tall and prosperous son, is now the “man of the family,” and she transfers her obedience from my father to him, saying she will do as he asks. He buys her a new place near me, more than a hundred blocks to the south of her former home. It even has a terrace, just like the old place did.

“She’s going to love being so much closer to you and the grandkids,” he assures me. I have my worries. I cannot replace her lost mother, I cannot replace her lost country, I cannot replace her lost husband, and I cannot replace her neighborhood, Washington Heights, that vanishing echo of a lost Jewish world. After having children, I understand her better. I can finally grasp the value of a good bowl of soup, a sleeping child under a blanket, the warmth of tradition. I can understand the need to take time to drink tea and eat a buttered onion roll.

But now the deed is done, and Gita has been transferred to the Upper West Side. She and I sit in a pastry store on Seventy-second Street, the heart of her new locale. Yes, it is a kosher pastry store, and the Upper West Side, in parts, is something of a shtetl in itself, full as it is of synagogues and Orthodox families promenading in Riverside Park. But many of the mothers have gotten MBA’s along with their Mrs’s. They and their husbands are doctors and lawyers, not watchmakers, pearl-stringers, and bakers. They have nannies and maids to take care of their kids, and no one here even tries to speak a good and proper Yiddish.

I myself have forgotten most of the words. While I understand my mother, I can no longer converse with her in our “mother language.” Down here, it is even hard to find
The Forward,
the Yiddish paper that she and my father have read since they arrived in America. You can occasionally find it only in its new, abridged English translation.

In the pastry shop, Gita and I share an “almond horn,” a marzipan-like confection that ends in a crescent of thick chocolate. She drinks a weak tea with milk, and I have a cappuccino. (“This is what you drink? So strong? No wonder you are always nervous!”) A woman steps over and interrupts our snack. She is fortyish, American, bright and friendly. She wears a new, expensive perfume, and her hair has artful highlights.

“Hi, Mrs. Taitz! You’re the jewelry store lady, right? I was your customer! I bought opera-length pearls from you, for my mother!”

“Oh, yeh?” my mother takes another sip from her tea. “You look familiar, maybe.”

“So!” the woman continues. “What are you doing here? Do you live around here? It’s nice, right?”

“Yes, now I do, for a few weeks only.”

“Where did you live before?”

“Oh,” she sighs, “I lived always in Washington Heights, near the Fort Tryon Park, the Cloisters. But I guess it was a ghetto, like people told me.” The word
ghetto
hurts my ears. It is a horrible word for a place she once loved, from which she was uprooted. This move has driven her back into the European past before the American past, and back into her first upheaval. It is the beginning of my mother’s going backward.

A few months later, on the children’s school break, she travels with us to Barbados. There, under the tropical sun, my mother talks about Nazis and death camps to anyone who will listen—waiters serving fresh mango with mint sprigs, glamorous guests sprawling on chaises, children running to the water slides. She has never avoided telling her stories to us, but now she seems pressed to tell them to as many strangers as possible. It is as though she is running out of time to change the world. To warn it, to wound it. To mark it forever, as she has been marked.

“Would you like some dessert, Madam?” a server might say.

“No, no, I ate good, not like in the camps where we got thin soup so many people starved.”

I am perplexed by her inability to relax on the sand, enjoying the blue skies and the Caribbean Sea. I think about my entire life in the shadow of these jarring comments, this indelible, warped perspective. What I don’t realize is that a tumor is slowly growing in her brain. As with my father’s late rages, which stemmed from a brain metastasis, normal and abnormal are so hard to tell apart.

When we return from Barbados, my mother brightens. Now that my father is gone, she tells me, and she doesn’t have to cook or clean, wash his shirts, or run errands at the Exchange, she will take courses in women’s studies at a nearby college. She asks me, as she and my father so often did, to help her with the paperwork.

“Take a pen,” she says, “and let’s write something.”

We sit with our heads together and I fill in the information that the college requires. I ask her which courses she wants to take.

“Give me the ones that explain what it means to be a woman.”

“Oh, Mommy, you know better than anyone.”

At this point, I am also a mother with children—and I wish I could do it half as well as she did. I am only beginning to appreciate what it takes to keep a warm family together, clean and fed.

“No, Sonialeh, I need to learn more. I want to know things like you do. I want to be smart like you.”

She says it now without irony, her admiration unmarred by envy or resentment, stroking my free hand as I fill in the forms. With my father gone, we are no longer rivals, but sisters.

“I’m sorry I tore up Paul’s letters to you,” she tells me another day. “You were about to marry Dan, and I wanted you to be happy, and—and I made a mistake and I hurt you. You married the wrong person and had to get a divorce and even a
get,”
she says, referring to the Orthodox Jewish divorce that required three bearded rabbis to stare down at me with great disapproval.

“My poor Sonialeh, I injured you,” she concludes humbly.

“It’s okay. I’m happy now.”

“You had four years between your first marriage and your second. I cost you so much time.”

She had always been sad to have lost years in the war, always thinking she had married “late.” By the time I married Paul, I was thirty-one.

“It was so long ago. Everything is good now. Who knows what would have happened otherwise? And now we have Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe.”

A few weeks later, on a Sunday, she forgets to call me. Sunday—the day she always visited her grandchildren, arms laden with food and toys. That’s all it takes, and I know something is wrong with her. Remorsefully, I think about how often I’d scolded her because the cheap toys, bought on a sidewalk, would break, or because I was cooking organic mashed yams or some other dreary supermom concoction, and she was giving my thrilled children potato chips, cola, and lollipops.

Now, all that, I fear, is over. The peppy, sometimes peppery grandma we knew is gone. For the first time in her life, my industrious mother has started sleeping during the day. When I call to ask when she is coming over, she says she is a little tired, and lets the phone clatter down.

When I call her, the next day, she says, apologetically:

“I think there is something a little wrong with me.”

We go to the hospital where my father’s tumor was discovered, and wait on the same floor, deep in the basement, for tests. We are there for hours, in a cold limbo with glossy, gray-painted walls and floors, evoking the feeling of hopelessness. By the end of the day, we have the death sentence: My mother has a glioblastoma multiforme. A deadly and incurable brain cancer, large as a lemon and inoperable. Of course, my “research” soon informs me that some have had the operation, and that it has bought them more time. I track down the best neurosurgeon in the hospital and tell him that Ms. Taitz is a concert-level pianist who survived the Holocaust. I tell him that her grandchildren need her. Surprisingly, my words cause him to rush to her room.