The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  There were, however, things on my mind beyond domestic closure. All these years, I had been frustrated not to be going to Yale University, where my high school had put me forward as the top candidate. My grade point average had been something like 99.9 (nines repeating into infinity). My SAT’s were perfect (Soloveitchik had taught me nothing if not how to study). Yale, thrillingly, had just begun opening its doors to women. I would have been one of the first pioneers to break into that hallowed men’s world.

  My father, I thought, would be thrilled by this opportunity. Wasn’t he his daughter’s biggest booster? Surprisingly, he had begged me to stay in New York. This meant that I would go to Barnard College (its brother, Columbia, unlike Yale, did not yet accept women). I would not go away to New Haven and prove myself equal to its deliciously intimidating traditions and/or decadent, entitled poseurs. I would not be a Jew among Wasps, a woman among men. I would not even leave home.

  My incredulous high school headmaster had called my father. No one had ever passed up an opportunity to study in Cambridge or New Haven before. And the school wanted to keep its “spot” at Yale—at least one student a year.

  “Mr. Taitz. We are convinced that your daughter’s talents and ambitions would be best served by Yale University. Please strongly consider sending her there. This opportunity will change the course of her life.”

  “Yes. I will think about it,” my father said.

  After a day or so, he called me into the kitchen to talk.

  “This Yale they talk about is a wonderful school, I am sure,” he said, over a glass of tea. “World-famous, they tell me.”

  “Yes—and they’ve just started letting girls in—”

  “And you, my talented little girlie, would be very successful if you went there. There is nothing I want more for you than to succeed in the world. But the Barnard College is also very good.”

  “It’s so much easier to get into!”

  “Maybe so. But it has something Yale does not have.”

  “What?”

  “It is close to home. I don’t want you to go far from me.”

  That was the problem. I wanted to break free.

  “I have never asked you anything like this before, and this might surprise you. I’m not a beggar, and I don’t like to impose on you. But you are the light of my life, and I want to see you as much as I can before I die.”

  You’re dying? I thought, alarmed. It was true that besides the terrifying acromegaly that had changed his body, he had also had bleeding ulcers throughout the past years. Ironically, the intense use of aspirin during his painful years, in which his head had ached and his joints had creaked and grown, had caused much of his stomach to be destroyed. A few years earlier, much of it had been removed—months, they said, before internal bleeding would have killed him. Now, touching his fragile stomach, eyes shining, he continued.

  “You know I am not so healthy now, I feel weaker every year. I don’t know how many more years God will be good enough to grant me. So it is my deepest wish that you stay longer in New York. You have time to go away later. Please, Sonia, will you do as I ask of you?”

  Of course, I had to say “yes.” How could I add to the pain of a man who had lost his father to the Cossacks, his watch stores and prize Harley to the Communists, his mother to the Nazis—a man who had suffered with his wife, his son, the English language, acromegaly, and bleeding ulcers?

  By senior year, however, I was determined to get away, and to Yale itself if at all possible. My college advisor told me that my academics would be perfect for law school there, or at Harvard. She’d gripped my arm with go-get-’em fervor. So I had places to go and things to do, the special things that lucky, smart people in America do. I pictured arrival at Yale Law as the opening of golden gates into a sanctum sanctorum.

  Now, I preferred the uniqueness of “Sonia” to any Susie or Sherri or Sandy. I loved my black hair, and I wore as much black to match it as possible. I wanted to expand, to break out of normal categories. I wanted to know the secrets of those who were extraordinary. I was in love with the ideas of existentialism, art, decadence, the French, Bertolucci, Rimsky-Korsakov. I loved the Russian nonhero Oblomov, who never got out of bed, the tortured Raskolnikov, and the simple, almost sardonic Candide, whom nothing on this earth really pleases.

  I am sorry to say that my breakup with Jacob crushed him for a time. This once-happy person had truly loved me. He had never caused me a moment’s pain, and I repaid him with rejection and wanderlust. I saw people like him, and marriages to people like him, as unworthy of my true intricacy. What a snob I was, always wanting to go to a place beyond mere contentment, to be “special.” It seems so silly now, so very Third Reich of me, to divide the world into what was extraordinary (and to be breathlessly chased) and what was ordinary (and to be discarded).

  Jacob called me, begging me to explain why it was over.

  I told him that I loved him, but wanted something more out of life. I was, after all, still only twenty years old.

  “What more do you want, Sonia? What?”

  I didn’t have the words then, but now I think I was looking for a long, played-out opera in an exotic setting with strict (maybe impossible) academic and social challenges. There, and there alone, my pain would evolve into a transcendent aria in the last act. It would be followed by applause (which I could feel, like Helen Keller, with my whole body), the love of multitudes, the wash of cleansing tears. Not to mention the healing sex that would follow a moment like that, on a ripped-down velvet curtain. And the illustrious career that would perpetuate my blissful immunity from the thorns of life.

  Yes, Jacob was better off without a nut like me, but he didn’t know that yet.

  He was crying, and I was listening on the other end of the line. Suddenly, his mother grabbed and held the phone. They seemed to be wrestling, her fist on the mouthpiece, and I could hear muffled screams:

  “ARE YOU STILL TALKING TO THAT BITCH? HANG UP!!”

  Jacob was, of course, stronger than his mother. He grabbed the phone back from her and told me one last thing.

  “I could have made you happy,” he said, his voice low and threatening. “But now, now you’ll never know.”

  Miles to Go

  JACOB DID MAKE ME HAPPY, and much after him has been unhappy, but happiness was not what I was looking for. Happiness, I thought, was for losers and Lincoln Continental owners. My recess friend of long ago, Bunny Milcher, whose parents’ greatest dream was to winter in Miami, had wanted to be “average and happy.” Not me.

  In my high school yearbook, we had all been asked to offer a quote, or a fragment of poetry, to go with our photograph. I had chosen a passage from Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The lines, which mesmerized me, were:

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep ...

  What miles? What promises? As my mother said about the runners up the hill—why do they run? What do they want? Had we been able to discuss it, she would have wondered: Why does Helen Keller have to go to Radcliffe? Why does she get onstage and talk like a deaf person, tapping her feet like a horse that knows the numbers? Why can’t she just stay put and stop doing meshugeneh kuntzen (crazy tricks)?

  She wondered the same about me. Why did I run? What did I want? I was her only daughter, meant to be her best friend. Why was I so strange? Whenever I did something that was not to her liking—and breaking it off with Jake was not to her liking—she would say, “You didn’t get that from me.” Meaning: your crazy, insatiable, promises-to-keep-and-miles-to-go personality—I don’t like it.

  Finding myself a Catholic boyfriend after the perfect Jacob was undoubtedly something Gita would have not have liked, had I ever told her. But it seemed a natural and necessary step in my road away from ease and familiarity. It seemed a direct consequence of my father’s bravado and success with the threatening, larger world. I found my first real challen
ge right next door to me in our senior dorm at Columbia University.

  Brendan Boyle O’Neill is my first romantic Radcliffe. He is often drunk, the worst thing that my mother had ever warned me about. (“Jews are not shickers.”) When drunk, he calls me his “impossible Hebraic bitch”—“Watch, they’ll call you a dirty Jew!” she had also cautioned—which only makes me laugh. What a nice adventure to see that some “goyim” really do drink a lot, and that when they do, they do talk, almost licentiously, about your Jewishness! What a relief, to cross these boundaries, to break these taboos and confront these fears!

  And this Irish boy is somehow familiar and familial to me. Brendan’s hair is black, like mine, his face pale like mine, and his cheeks and lips are flushed with blood. His dorm room is black and red, and he is passion and precision, Jesuitical exactitude and keening violins. Brendan has eyebrows like Jack Nicholson’s and a mouth like a wicked Cupid. He is hot and hostile, languid and passionate. There is no understanding him; he is an almost untamable creature. He is a grown-up Billy, my playground tormentor, the one who shoved dirt into my impossible Hebraic mouth.

  Brendan’s desire for me temporarily, fleetingly, alters him, and the game changes me, too. I develop—and have never lost—a love of the lovely failure, a nostalgie de la boue. I think of dying for him, dropping off my Jewish perfection pedestal and into a state of luscious entropy.

  He is a classics scholar, a boy from an elite Catholic prep school right across the street from my own East Side Jewish one. At Columbia he reads Greek and Roman, he quotes Ovid and Sophocles. I appreciate his learnedness; yeshiva made me a linguist and a textual analyst, too. He is intricate, a Dionysian Talmudist. We meet at the Metropolitan Museum, among the orange and black urns commemorating eternal strength and beauty. He is a black and orange urn to me, emblem of a timeless passion.

  Brendan tells me that he knows he will die young, strong, and beautiful. I am mesmerized. He kisses me after he says this, and I don’t want the kiss to end. I want to keep it alive, I want to keep him alive. The fact that our breaths must part inflames me. Despite my courtesanal façade, he is the first man I actually desire. Now I understand the dark, lustful feelings I have long (and calculatedly) inspired in others. Now there is no calculation; now there is instinct and wildness—all new to me, and soon as necessary as air. Also new to me is the pain that such feelings can cause, a new pain that makes the divide between the sexes seem as unbridgeable (and as necessary for me to bridge) as that between one people and another.

  When Brendan is drunk, he talks like a genius, slowly, with slurred but at the same time carefully pronounced words that thrill me (my father has never been drunk, nor has Jacob). His mother punished him harshly throughout his childhood—he is often in a deep, untouchable state of apartness. She often put him in the closet where he sobbed and then was still.

  So bring him to me, the big healer.

  That is my motto. My heart is a tuning fork to those who have been hurt. The tired, the lonely, the hungry, the poor. Bring them to me, and I will tame these wounded creatures. Journey to my shores, welcome to my tent of love and surrender. Look how they rest their lunatic-lover-poet heads on my breasts. Look how they don’t want to roam anymore, or bite anyone. I am a danger-tamer.

  Frighteningly, Brendan wants to see my apartment up in Washington Heights. I suppose in some ways I am as exotic to him as he is to me. I try to talk him out of it, sure that a view of our humble abode of chicken fat and Fiddler albums will not add to the turn-on package I have so carefully created. But no.

  The deep, sonorous tones of the Westminster chimes within my parents’ apartment, which sound every fifteen minutes, have made a lasting impression on him. Whenever I have gone home for holidays and the occasional Sabbath dinner, I’ve called Brendan, and although I can no longer really hear this deep-voiced clock, although I am inured to its ceaseless accounting of the hours, Brendan has become enchanted by the sounds, particularly when we talk at midnight, which is often when we talk. After the usual, long introduction to the full hour, the Westminster chimes toll heavily, twelve times. Each tone reverberates over and over, overlapping the previous one, lingering to the next. It is a languid, continuous river of time:

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  God, it does take forever when you notice it.

  “Brendan?” I say, in the night.

  “Shhh ...”

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  Bong...

  “Brendan?”

  Bong......................

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you should come over here.”

  “Why? Are your parents that old-fashioned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they hate me because I am a goy?” he says, and I can hear him smile, enjoying the full flavor of this Jewish word, so absurd and “ethnic” to him.

  “No, but they would mind if they knew we were together.”

  Both my parents have lectured me since childhood about how much I need to restore and perpetuate our ravaged people. They want me to marry a Jewish man and have lots of Jewish children to restore the lost six million. They have told me stories about parents who have refused to attend their children’s weddings to non Jews. The scene in Fiddler in which one daughter marries a non-Jew and is banished is not entirely dated. To traditional, war-torn parents, these renegade children are almost as bad as the pogroms or Hitler. The choices they make reduce and destroy the Jewish people. They are, in short, traitors deserving excommunication.

  Every time I have heard these moral tales, a part of me has discounted them. I know that with the Orthodox, the mother’s religion determines that of the child. Any child of mine would thus be Jewish, no matter whom I married. By marrying “out,” I could even add an ally to the poor, beleaguered tribe, drawing into its circle an invulnerable man who would be my husband and my children’s father. This is my private survival algorithm: Jew plus non-Jew equals safety. And not just safety in numbers. Real safety. I always imagine a blue-eyed hero, rushing in to turn back the clock and save the lost.

  Not that Brendan personifies any kind of practical plan. I’m dipping my toe into the waters of the exogamous, and the waters happen, in this case, to be part of a maelstrom. Now he wants to charge into my world before I’m ready.

  “Could I come over when they’re not there?”

  “I guess,” I hesitate, thinking of the tiny two-bedroom with the plastic on the couch, and the sofa bed that was my brother’s small domain. Manny is now independent; he is in law school and has his own place, but Brendan knows he exists and will ask, like everyone else, where his room is.

  “What is it? You sound sad.”

  “Me? No, it’s fine.” I’m also thinking about the knickknacks and doodads from our first trip to Israel and my parents’ subsequent trips there. There are big wooden plaques on the wall, three-dimensional folk carvings of people carrying grape-bunches on their shoulders. There are circular metallic plates, which contain, within them, the Hebrew words: Chai (life) and Bracha (blessing). There are olivewood coasters and knife sets, prominently displayed in the living room, as though they were treasures instead of ubiquitous tourist kitsch. To my parents, these mementos are priceless; they speak of life and art and industry in the Holy Land. But what will they look like to a classics scholar who frequents not only the Metropolitan Museum but also the Frick?

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I say; I never let anyone know how sad or difficult anything is, or how freakish my lot. It’s fine, come right in, I’m perfectly happy taking on the weight of the world as well as normal people’s opinions on that weight and how I take it on.

  Will Brendan meet my now totally bald father, with the weird, large-featured face and deep voice, wearing a sleeveless undershirt (the better to reveal his frightening arms and shoul
ders) and a belted pair of trousers? Will he greet my damp-faced, round-cheeked mother in her housedress, wearing pink kid shlurkes on her feet as she spreads the dust around with a lint cloth or boils up some exhausted white chicken?

  Despite my misgivings, which of course I can’t express, we agree to come over after classes on a weekday.

  So in we walk, just as the clock tolls five. Brendan, slim-hipped and cool in jeans and a black T-shirt, heads straight over to the breakfront, which covers most of one wall in the living room. How could he not? When you enter the apartment, it’s half of what you see. The other half, on the opposite wall, is that plastic-smothered sofa. This day I notice that even the plastic is, if this is possible, worse-looking than ever—it is yellowed and cracking.

  Brendan looks surprised by what he sees. He must realize that the stately sounds he has heard for months never emerged from a huge, strong grandfather clock, but from a mantel clock atop a walnut wall unit. It’s something like hearing deafening croaks from the side of a body of water. Sure that you’ve found a proud, frightening, and perhaps primeval life-form, you search for the source of the sound—and it’s only a wee bullfrog, lonely, calling for a mate.

  “This is the clock that makes all the chimes?”

  “Yep.”

  “You know, the deep tolling sounds—”

  “Yep. I know the sounds. This is it.”