The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (5 page)

“Oy, ah zeeseh kind!” Oh, a sweet child!

She had a crystal dish of wrapped hard candies on her coffee table and urged me to take as many as I wanted. Some were amazing—hard on the outside, jelly on the inside. A surprise—love and even deeper love. The old lady watched me as I took the candies, smiling into my eyes. That dish was magical; there was never a time that it was not full of sweets, arranged on a circle of crystal that stood high up on a cobalt blue pedestal.

I played the part for her, the grateful tyke who takes a treat, making myself more lovable to fit snugly into Mrs. Schroodel’s pure heart. In her eyes, I was a precious child, adored in herself, someone’s “baby” and “kitten.” I had it in me to climb up and sit on Mrs. Schroodel’s lap, to cuddle there, and keep her company, like a faithful pet. As it was I sucked her candies and saved the wrappers, with their pretty pictures of cherries and peaches.

There was another shtetl to which many survivors moved when they could. This was a place called Riverdale, in the Bronx, an enclave far more suburban than my little enclave in Washington Heights. This was a huge step up. Before my brother and I were born, my parents and most of their friends had lived in tenements on the Lower East Side. My mother often remembered how her cousin, also named Gita, would carry her children up the narrow stairs to her fourth-floor walk-up.

“One on each hip, she would schlep.”

She brought this up regularly, not merely to reminisce, but because this Gita, like most of my mother’s circle, had begun to change gradually, rejecting my mother and her old-fashioned ways. As they became more and more successful at their makeshift trades (one collected “junk”; another, “scrap metal”), they grew more and more prosperous. These “modern” friends no longer talked about the Holocaust. They smoked Parliaments with recessed filters. They dyed their hair “ash” or “champagne” blonde. They bought Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals and shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue (which, due to their accents, they amusingly pronounced “Seks”). They played bridge and gin rummy. They boasted of eating “Shrimp Cocktail” and “Clams Casino,” wondering why on earth my parents didn’t.

“Why don’t you eat this? It’s so good!”

“Why
do
you eat this—your grandpa was a rabbi!” my mother, who knew, would reply tartly.

We often traveled to Riverdale to celebrate one of the children’s birthdays. Those children were so lucky, even if they were happy and thus (by my father’s logic) so ignorant. I found it hard to think of our family as their superiors. Someone would have to pick us up in their car. We would sit like “sardines,” as my mother lightheartedly described it (I’d be on someone’s lap), as we left the city and headed out. Once there, we would crunch across a graveled, circular driveway and see the split-level where my mother’s friend and former bridesmaid, another Sonia, lived with her successful husband, a manufacturer of hot-dog casings. Their house was one of the first beautiful things I had ever seen in real life. And Jews lived there—even Holocaust survivors. My heart would burst with longing for the tableau that opened before us as we spilled out of the backseat.

Sprinklers whispered on the lawn and from among them Sonia’s daughter would emerge. Marlene was a beautiful tall girl, about my age, with long, wavy hair like Ava Gardner, and a rare, dimpled sweetness. She had a dog, a German shepherd called Thunder, who was kept in the garage (they had a garage!). As the parents drank cocktails, lounging on cushioned chaises in the backyard, the children were taken by a maid down to a carpeted, wood-paneled basement decorated with pink and while balloons. Our little cone hats were pink, too, with silver tassels, which seemed impossibly glamorous to me.

This was where heaven was on the map, but we had to leave after only a few hours. On our crushed drive back, the shameful ride of schnorrers, as I saw it, of poor beggars without the sense to have a Lincoln Continental, a split-level, or
even a dog,
I would grow dark and sulky. Marlene’s father worked with
winners,
and yet he’d figured out how to live here in America! What was wrong with my parents?

My parents were the only ones of their gang to continue to actually worship God as they had before the war. They stayed observant, insular and simple. My father kept working hard in his store, wearing his wash-and-wear, short-sleeved shirts, eating his lunch out of a brown paper bag (often reused; my mother may have been one of the world’s first recyclers). My mother continued to wear housedresses and aprons. As her friends moved on to credit cards at Bonwit’s and Bendel’s, she kept shopping at Alexander’s and John’s Bargain Store, pulling endless wads of bills out of her capacious beige brassieres.

I wanted nothing more than to move to Riverdale and be rich, untroubled, secular, and superficial (my vision of the perfect American life), but my mean parents would have none of it.

“What you have is better than a big house or a stupid piece of
traif
(unkosher food) that gives them so much pleasure,” my father would say privately. “These people, they’ve lost their sense of honor, abandoning traditions that have been kept for thousands of years all over the world.” What he meant by “what we have” was something about values.

This was just like when I’d ask him if I was beautiful, and he’d say:

“What you have is more important than looks.”

I knew what
that
meant.

“Oy, I could vomit,” my mother would interject, “even thinking of eating such a crawling shrimp that is such a treat for them!”

“You have something far more precious: knowledge and tradition, and all the talents God gave you,” my father would continue in his theme of “higher things.”

I saw the point, but what I really wanted was a room with a canopy bed, a big dog, and a swing set.

“Can’t I just have the dog?” I’d ask my mother, as she cut my hair into its standard pageboy.

“Of course! Your grandma and I are looking now for houses. Daddy says he wants a two-family, so we can have income. As soon as we find the right house, you can have a dog.”

Your Doris, My Elizabeth

B
ESIDES THE BIBLE, there were few books in my house, short of the
Golden Book Encyclopedia,
a paperback dictionary, and later, a fascinating, importantly bound series of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
To allay my boredom, I was given dimes and allowed to run outside to the corner store and buy small “Golden Books” (from which I would scissor out pictures of dogs, sticking them into my treasure bag).

Then I discovered comic books. I enjoyed
Casper the Friendly Ghost,
who lived as a disembodied spirit, and his similarly afflicted friend, Wendy. Their plight was poignant, and familiar to me—they just wanted to make friends, and yet because they were different (having experienced death), everybody shunned them, like racist anti-Semites. The bigoted people’s fear, of course, was misguided—Casper and Wendy could have been great assets to the community, had they only been included. They might have made a huge contribution to science, like Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine.

At the age of nine, I began to favor
Archie
comics, due to the fascinating dating chronicles within. By sheer coincidence, these took place in
Riverdale,
where, besides the backyards and garages I already knew and envied, there was never anything to do but go on dates. I assumed this was what my parents’ friends’ lucky children would do, in time. All I could do was read, envy, and analyze. The rules of love and sex became as vital to me—and as open to analysis—as those of the Torah.

Betty and Veronica, who vied endlessly for Archie’s love, had identical faces as drawn. Both had big eyes and great, fringed black lashes. Each had an upturned nose, and a glossy, full mouth. Each had a curvy, figure-eight body. The only real difference was that one had blonde hair; the other, black—and with that came the primal characteristics. Betty was nice and sweet and normal. Veronica was rich and cruel and sexy. The Hair Wars, begun by my mother’s random comment about blondes, fanned by the Clairol company (and, before it, the Third Reich), could continue apace.

Studying old movies, I’d see that brunettes were the vamps, the bad girls, the femme fatales. I kept my eye on Sophia Loren, Natalie Wood, and an exciting pitch-black she-devil Schwarzkopf named Elizabeth Taylor. I began to see the world as bouncy Betties and vampy Veronicas. Who would rule Riverdale—perhaps the entire world? Blackies or blondies?

My mother, for her part, was a committed fan of certifiably “light” Doris Day (originally called Doris Mary Ann Von Kappelhoff, of German ancestry). She worshipped this blonde on Sundays. From an early age, my mother had taken my brother and me to the movies on weekends. Sometimes we stood on the world’s longest line for the certified blockbusters at the Radio City Music Hall, but more often, she would whisk us around the corner to the RKO Coliseum for the latest Doris Day adventure. For two hours, my mother would experience vicarious bliss. On celluloid, Von Kappelhoff’s life seemed clean, bright, and untroubled. Her platinum hair and flat blue eyes rendered her as impermeable as a new Formica countertop, not to mention her matching ensembles in the colors of sherbet, including many cute hats and matching handbags.

Though I would probably rather have seen
Bambi
or
The Absent-Minded Professor,
these neat parables seeped deeply into my budding female subconscious. James Garner, hmm? He really did seem to complete the picture, a playful, ha-ha-hearty hunk of human gonadotropin, putting the lady straight. The themes were brutal, reductive, sexy: a woman, however brisk, efficient, and head-tossing, needs something she doesn’t even want to know she needs. She needs some caveman to grab her hair, screw up her movements, and set the robotics deliciously a-jangle. I got that, in some primordial way. When, at the ending of most of Doris’s films, the man would carry her off kicking, I would feel strangely thrilled. The titles, too, begged for innuendo:
The Thrill of It All, That Touch of Mink
.

After the movies, my mother would wait until just a bit after the lights came on, and then, snapping into the present, would take us out to the kosher delicatessen. We’d eat crispy grilled hot dogs with sauerkraut, and thick, salty potato knishes, washed down with Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda. It was blissful until the moment when we all thought, “Why did I eat that?” And then, the blessed belching:

“A grepsele aroys, a gezunt aroyn.”

A little burp goes out, and health comes in.

Later, I’d mull over the charms of Doris Day (who I am sure never
grepsed
), wondering why my mother loved her so much. She seemed ordinary to me, like a dental assistant. It was really the contrast between her predictable primness and the clog-clearing male energy that made these movies buzz. That, and her many ways of being indignant. “Hoo!” she’d say, about these menfolk, blowing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “The nerve!” She liked the drama of it, I concluded; I did, too.

Soon, I began to study my mother’s movie magazines, periodicals with names like
Modern Screen
and
Hollywood Confidential.
I was possessed by these confidences, these insights into the mind. It was a way out of the gloomy gray and into the realms of Technicolor—an alternate reality. Through the stars my mother and I saw on the screen, to the learned commentaries we read in those deeply earnest periodicals, we shared a female world of passionate wonder.

The movie magazines were different from the ubiquitous gossip rags of today, with fewer pictures and far more story. Reverential in tone, the articles were accompanied by studio publicity shots, lit up in a way that evoked a poignant quest for the holy and the healing. Each page was packed with detailed, almost obsessive, analyses of the motives, needs, and hungers of its celestial characters, unironically known as the “stars.” There were pages and pages of textual explanations for every kind of passionate aberration, usually delivered in the first person: “Why I need to be with Rex.” “My painful childhood secret.” Painful childhood secret? I flipped pages rapidly, learning to speed-read.

These stars had extraordinary needs and passions; often they had been wounded in their early years, and now could not get enough love (or anything else) to heal them. Judy Garland had once been given the terrible name Frances Gumm, and her mother had been cruel to her in other ways as well. Due to the lack of early mother love, she had a sadness in her even when she sang, which made her voice sound as though she were crying. Marilyn Monroe, too, had been unloved. In the end, she had died of loneliness, since no one really understood how soft and sensitive she was. They just used her talents and beauty to make themselves feel better. Even these celestial beings suffered “secret agonies” and “unlawful desires.” This all made so much sense to me. (Due to Jewish history, my life was full of agony; due to the Torah, my desires would often qualify as unlawful.) I wrapped the stars’ secret agonies and unlawful desires around me like a warm, familial hug. It was delicious to go below the obvious first layer of things.

Here—before ever picking up a novel or seeing a play—I learned my first lessons in character and plot: “The Man Who Makes Marilyn Forget the Hard Times”; “Sophia: ‘A Baby Would Complete Me.’” From these precious periodicals, I extended my limited English glossary: “torrid,” “madly,” “estrangement,” “attempted suicide,” “bombshell.” “Raven-haired temptress” was an adjectival phrase that especially drew black-haired me. Such creatures were always dark and mysterious; they knew how to come out of a shadow and light up a smoke—preferably at the end of an elegant holder.

In these periodicals, moreover, the Hair Wars were openly reported, scored, and analyzed. My mother, for example, favored Debbie Reynolds, a sunny, perky blonde. Debbie was “unsinkable,” a Doris and Betty-like good and spunky girl next door. When she lost her cheating husband to Elizabeth Taylor, it was obviously because Elizabeth was a “raven-haired temptress.” Liz and Eddie married at Grossinger’s Country Club, in the Borscht Belt, the summer refuge in the Catskill Mountains where Jews annually went in search of fresh air. I was proud to be associated with such drama. My sultry idol had even converted to the laws of Abraham and his wife and helpmeet, Sarah.