The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (7 page)

My mother and I could hardly see them from our aerie near the brass chandeliers. During most of the service, in fact, the women talked amongst themselves, picking up important information about one another’s children, their struggles and beaming accomplishments. I loved to listen to the gossip, sniffing my mother’s Arpege off her silk scarves, playing with her rings and her bracelets (often borrowed from the store’s showcases). My mother would happily slip off these treasures, shining them on her embroidered handkerchiefs and putting them on my own hands and wrists. The women’s service was in its way as restorative as the men’s. It was cozy to sniff our perfumes and jingle our charms, cozy to hear words of satisfaction whispered in Yiddish behind hard-working hands, now at leisure.

My father prayed with a deep intention, which the Orthodox call
kavanah.
It was the same deep intensity that he gave to the fixing of watches, but in prayer he appealed to the single and limitless heart of God. As he sang along with the congregation to the old melodies, Simon’s voice soared. He had always had an operatic skill, and though untrained, his voice could carry a heartbreaking vibrato. If anything, subtle new depths in its timbre gave it a richer, more prophetic sound as he rose to the bimah and chanted the Torah’s verses to the notes of ancient cantillation. The holy, hopeful words rose to the heights of our little sanctuary, trailing into the women’s section, vibrating off the brass chandeliers that hung from the ceiling, sailing into my ears.

A big “shhhhh” would travel through the congregation—and even our homey ring of chatter would become still. And then we’d hear a massive voice, disembodied, echoing through the congregation and somehow transforming it. So serious, the words, the voice, the source, and that collective, reverberative hush. I’d almost be relieved when it was over, and my father would return to the world as he always was, standing near me to take his little paper cup of wine as other men clapped him on the back to congratulate him or solemnly shook his hand.

“Yesher koach” they would say. Extra strength, or More power to you.

It did not matter then that his speaking voice was a shade too deep, or his fingers too thick. From his early childhood, Simon had had no father, but God was his father, and he had sung to him. And the men had surrounded him and blessed his strength, even after the pituitary tumor that had almost felled him.

My father never complained about his malady, or his appearance. He would laugh about his looks, which I found charming and heroic:

“I wonder if I am the handsomest man in New York now,” he’d say, or, less facetiously, “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I used to be quite a nice-looking fellow.” He kept a picture on the dresser from years past; he had looked like an old-fashioned movie star before I ever got to know him.

His massive hands, about which people sometimes remarked, were still gentle and deft. His eyes, which had almost been blinded by the growing pituitary bearing down on the optic nerve, saw deeply, and radiated innocence, honesty, and wisdom. They were still handsome, set off by his dark, expressive eyebrows.

I loved my father through and through. In his absence, I felt unknown and unseen. Even when he sang in the synagogue, I was removed from him, exiled in the women’s section, apart. But there were times when my father entered my world, took his loupe out, shed the prayer shawl, and pulled me toward him. My joy was boundless—I had been “selected.” Only then, chosen, did I feel fully alive.

It was my father who would make my bland food palatable. On special occasions, he would make me neat, yummy omelets, the way I liked them—the eggs anything but soft and runny. He would cut thin slices of potatoes and make crisp fries for me, slice cucumbers and lay them down in sandwiches with thick brown bread and butter. He was deft with a knife, and could slice potato finely, pare an apple peel into one long circle, drop M&M’s into my farina bowl without my noticing, one by one, making them appear to pop out of the gray sludge, a bit of sweet hope and color.

He would also tuck me in at night, tight, like a mummy, which I loved—the covers tucked even under me, so that I felt snug and safe. Then he would call me by a pet name: Karaputzi. He told me it was a Slavic slang word meaning “cute little child.” I liked the sound of it. When I was sick with the croup, it was he who would stay with me all night, leading me from my bed into a bathroom steaming with vapors from the shower, waving the mist toward my mouth. At moments like this, as when he fixed watches, he was infinitely patient—and I felt loved.

If I awoke in the middle of the night and called out for him: “I’m scared of this darkness, Daddy,” he would say, “Read the bedtime Sh’ma.” The Sh’ma is the prayer all Jews know, attesting to the oneness of God. “Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.” These words may have comforted me, but more comforting was the man who tucked me in again, assuring me that I was safe in the world, no matter what had happened in the past, or what time it now was.

Still, it was hard for me to sustain that feeling of safety when the real world was so fragmented, not just Jews and non-Jews but my father’s doting love for his Karaputzi, and the more conditional appreciation he felt for my “specialness.” It was possible to please him, and it was also possible to deeply disappoint him.

“God has given you something extra,” he’d say, “and these gifts have been there from the moment you were born. I could see them from the moment I first saw you. You are going to be a great lady.”

These words were like an official coronation, with the accompanying sense of responsibility. I was required to do my share, under my father’s watchful approval. He would witness my deeds and affirm my extra-chosenness. Heavy is the head that wears the crown that a wounded, moody father imposes on his child. And such tributes, focused on a scrawny, black-haired daughter, would cause my mother to tighten her lips and show me her rare cold side. It didn’t help when, during a marital argument, her husband would drag me into it and draw a virtual bull’s-eye on me:

“Gita! What took me ten hours to explain to you—and I still don’t think you will ever understand it—this little girl, this
klayne maydel,
she understood it in the very first minute!”

It probably also didn’t help that these praiseful words made me beam, like the desperate, foolish child I was.

He even liked my dark hair, which came from his dark, intense side of the family. The original Sonia Taitz had been beautiful, he told me, with black hair and deep, blue-green eyes. When I’d wish for blondeness, he’d remind me that I had a special beauty, an ancient Jewish charm. He comforted me with tales of dark, exotic beauties such as Queen Esther, who, long ago in Persia, had won a beauty contest, married a king, and saved her people. He assured me that dark eyes and hair were rare and desirable. In Lithuania, he told me, as in Poland or Russia, any peasant could produce a crop of illiterate towheads with dumb pale eyes that understood nothing.

So, like my paternal grandmother, I was a Snow White in coloring, and my mother was already showing a slight tendency toward the stepmother side. Who could blame her? It wasn’t some magic mirror saying that I was the fairest of them all—it was my father, her own husband, her man.

Piano and Potatoes

M
y MOTHER’S EYES were spring-green, cat-green, her round cheeks pink as a Dresden doll’s, her nose dotted with small freckles. While my father had an ageless old man’s demeanor (not only Yul Brynner, but Zorba, or the later Picasso), Gita remained dewy, fragrant, and unlined throughout her life. Her favorite color scheme, and it suited her, was “flowers”—any color, all colors. They blossomed on her sheets, in her dresses, in vases all over the house, on the towels and paper napkins. Her hands were soft, but there was ready power and capability in them from her years of practicing the piano. She had lived in the pretty Lithuanian town of Kovno, practicing her Bach inventions and Hanon exercises and arpeggios in a stately redbrick home overlooking the river. Her duplex had large French windows opening out onto the treetops, and on the ground floor of this building, which he owned, was her father’s little department store, right across from the university.

Chopin was my mother’s most beloved composer, and although she was seemingly not fiery herself, his notes flew out of her body and transformed her, and everything around her, into a magic tapestry of passions, tears, dashed hopes, and soaring emotional resurrection. In Europe, my mother had practiced and given recitals on concert grand pianos; in Washington Heights, she played on a carved mahogany upright with creamy ivory keys. At four, I began pressing down on those keys, my mother’s fingers on top of mine. Later, my mother found me a teacher from Juilliard who had been trained by the legendary Madame Rosina Lhévinne (of the Moscow Conservatory). After a short audition, Mrs. Ruskin said I was promising, but I shied away from the piano and rarely practiced, and thus never arrived beyond the “Für Elise” and sonatina stage. I preferred a subsidiary role, taking solace from the world my mother could create out of sound.

Each week, my mother would drag me to this teacher, who lived beside the Hudson River in a poorer neighborhood about twenty blocks south of our own. Mrs. Ruskin’s life was music. She had raised her son to become a concert pianist, and her small apartment was filled with grand pianos. One, with silent keys, fascinated me especially.

“That’s so that her boy could even practice during the night,” my mother whispered to me. “Even I never had such a thing back in Europe.”

During my lessons, my poor, devoted teacher made brilliant notations all over my music sheets or demonstrated concepts like the diminuendo with her capable hands. I focused mostly on the fact that she shaved her arms, leaving a rough stubble that I could feel when she slid her arms under mine to give me the sense of an arpeggio sweep. While Mrs. Ruskin would scribble endless tips in my spiraled workbook, I took the opportunity to daydream, my mouth watering from the hamburgers that Mr. Ruskin always seemed to be frying.

My mother, meanwhile, sat just to my left, on a wooden adjustable stool like mine, enraptured by the lesson. After my hour was over, she would stay with Mrs. Ruskin as I escaped to the living room to better inhale hamburger smells or play a muted chord on her son’s silent practice piano. From there, I would hear my mother’s music emerge from the lesson room, rich and strong. Sometimes her notes were followed by a pause, a conversation, Mrs. Ruskin’s suggested phrasing, and then the improvement, coming from my mother’s own powerful hands—and making all the difference. Her melodies could soar without the use of crescendo; they could get right into you and make you forget this world. It never occurred to me then to mourn my mother’s lost career as a performer. I never let her guide my practice on the piano back home, which I balked and avoided. My increasingly detailed assignments, including the awful Hanon exercises, became more and more tedious to me.

Instead, I waited for the times when my mother would make her own music come to life. I sat below her, watching her delicate, small feet on the pedals create gorgeous diapasons of weeping notes that soared and reverberated until the world disappeared and all that existed was the world’s one great soul, yearning. Safe under the keyboard of the heavy old Knabe, I felt my eyes fill with welcome tears. I felt rich, full, and satisfied, surrounded with jewel-like tones that matched my glistening, teary, rainbowized world, sounds that never ended but were sustained by her pedaling. There was no place I felt happier as a child than by the feet of my soft, pretty, and talented mother, the quintessence of all that was fruitful and giving and female. I felt all of the best of Europe there, the fairy-tale palaces, the delicate cakes I had sampled at the bakery, with names like Linzer, and Sacher, Black Forest and Napoleon. Something in the old wood of this piano, something in the yellow Schirmer book of Chopin, something in the language of music itself hinted at these lost but not forgotten worlds.

My mother’s hands smelled of Camay soap, and the cameo etched into the bars looked like her, as did the bonneted, bonny lady on the Sun-Maid raisin box, joyous in her native vineyard. In the kitchen, however, Gita took on the savory soul of onions, potatoes, bay leaves, and dill. She would sit at the round table with her mother, humming as she pared, peeled, and chopped. Sometimes, she would take a heavy, metal meat grinder and send beef out in curling pink ribbons, which she formed into her
klops
and her
galuptzie.
From early morning, pots would clang as she dragged them out, a cacophony of metal, from under and over the sink.

On weekends, my mother would cook enough for an entire week, boiling chickens and chopping liver, hacking iceberg lettuce and tomatoes into sturdy wedges. She would make great vats of chicken soup, of which she jarred large portions for her housebound neighbor Mrs. Shroodel. My grandmother might be shelling peas alongside, and if I went into the kitchen, one or the other of them would offer me some
arbeslach.

“Vilst du doch essen?” So, do you want to eat?

I was a mouth to be fed for the both of them. If I said “no,” they often looked stricken, and one or the other might say:

“Someone’s life could have been saved from such good food.”

“But she doesn’t eat it.” They often talked like this, to each other, over my head, about me. Shelling the peas, shaking their heads, philosophical, disappointed.

“Spoiled.”

They saw that my father thought I was special, perhaps too special to be part of the kitchen crew. They saw how he favored and selected me, the little dark latecomer, over my older brother and them.

“You give her something so good, and she turns her face from it.”

When they talked about saving lives from starvation, they were not referring to the proverbial, oft-imagined, starving children in India or Africa. They meant real people, people they knew and remembered, perhaps even my own dying blood relatives. They had seen children like me starving during the war. The least I could do was be grateful.