The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  “Do you like Rodney Harrington?” I’d ask about the tawny-haired all-American boy of the miniseries.

  Her feet would nod, “yes, yes.”

  “Do you like the girl, Allison?” she’d ask my feet, referring to the frail blonde heroine of the program.

  “Mm hmm,” my feet would say.

  “Ask me if I like Betty!” I’d urge. Betty was the dark-haired bad girl; she was the one with the past.

  “Do you like the spicy girl, Betty?”

  Here my heels would kick the mattress with vigor, and my mother would laugh. It was spicy people who kept us rapt. Then the commercial would end, and we’d watch again, our feet still.

  Gita played this “footsie” game happily, throughout my childhood. Inside the socks, her feet were like stuffed toys to me, hand puppets, pets, and friends.

  On Sundays she’d put on Speedo socks when she’d come to my house, taking off her hose and her heels to clean up the children’s toys, or rush to a high chair and take over a feeding. She was Speedo, and running to help was her essence, rushing to visit us, rushing to her own door to stand in the hallway when we all came to visit Grandma and Grandpa in Washington Heights. Running errands for my father at the Jewelry Exchange. Ready to grab another dish from the stove and race it to the table. Always ready. She was the one who was tamid muchan, not me. She was the true warrior, tireless and willing.

  On her last day, she is mellow, smiling.

  I can see love in her eyes, and I take a chance.

  “Who did you really love more? Manny?”

  “Yes, he was a boy, and I had lost my father and my two little brothers,” she says easily. “And he was always close to me.”

  Then she adds, “But sometimes, you, more than anyone.”

  This is even better than my father, who loved me most when I succeeded. The love she holds for me is there, even though I have failed her in every way.

  She is so sweet as a dying person; she is so sweet even as she lies dead. So different from my father, who raged until the end, who took dying as a personal and undeserved final insult.

  Gita is teaching me something about life that until then, despite all the diplomas, I had not learned. Becoming a mother has brought me close to the secret of her wisdom. Watching her fade, as love burns constant in her heart, brings me even closer. She is a woman, with a woman’s modest and forgiving heart. If my father’s main question to me was “What did you accomplish?,” hers was, “What can I do for you?” or, “Isn’t this a joy, sitting here with our glass of tea?” She could always admire a red-and-green McIntosh apple as she wheeled her little shopping cart up and down the streets of upper Broadway, Washington Heights, New York. She was a connoisseur of good produce, and she shared all her bounty.

  “A prune danish like this, you can’t get in heaven,” my mother would say, unwrapping the white wax parcel and biting into bliss. “Take a bite,” she’d offer. “Nem doch!” (So take!) “Oy, is it good.”

  Gita found so much in this world to be good. She loved flowers: pansies and carnations, babies’ breath and forget-me-nots. She loved them whether real or silk or plastic, in patterns on her wallpaper, on tablecloths and duvets and housedresses and frocks. Her last bedspread, which Manny has bought her, is a gorgeous blaze of golden sunflowers. It gives her great joy, and she comments on it often.

  For the most part, until the end, he is away in California, where he works as a lawyer and real estate developer. I am with her every day. Spooning raspberry ices into her mouth is the last thing I do for my mother. They are the last thing she tastes on this earth. I am glad they are sweet. Soon after, Gita falls into a deep sleep, snoring lightly and unevenly. A visiting nurse has been there for the last few hours, watching game shows in the living room. I go out and ask her to check if my mother is all right. She isn’t. The nurse tells me that her blood pressure has gone really low—one precursor of death.

  How can she die? I argue, pointlessly. Her tumor has shrunk! She’s enjoying her day—what’s the rush?

  But she can. Gita lies back, a pretty princess with a heart that is hardly beating at all. My little girl, my mother, free of all her worries, work, and sorrows, floats among a field of yellow flowers.

  In the ambulance, I lean over her and give her secret chest compressions. (I was always ready for this, learning CPR at the Red Cross on the day my father turned sixty.)

  When Gita was first diagnosed, my practical brother asked her to sign a legal document called a DNR. DO NOT RESCUCITATE. He was still reeling from the horrors of my father’s lingering cancer death, not long before. “If I ever look like that,” he says, “like a living corpse with my mind half gone, please shoot me.” I completely understood.

  Nonetheless, I am now thinking—DO RESCUCITATE!!

  If a desert can bloom, if exiles can return, if an entire people can rise up from ashes and sand, so can she. So can my little Gita. I want her even as she is—she is still our Bubbe, our soft hands, our onions and bay leaves, our story.

  But she dies. There is a smile on her face in death, a radiant smile. She looks alive, not like my father, who looked shrunken and dead for weeks in the hospice. She actually looks young and healthy. Her Speedo socks are bright and white on her pretty, small feet. I remember how I used to put my hands on them, lightly, when she’d play the piano, going up and down with them as she pressed on the pedals below.

  The hospital lets me stay with her as long as I want, and I stay for hours.

  At her funeral, I cry as I have never cried before. I cry for her sad life, and I cry for her sweet girlishness, and her cuteness, and her socks, and the endless chicken soup and kitchen pan bustling . . .

  I cry that we were never close enough. That I never learned to cook her recipes—yes, the boiled chicken and the strange cabbage galuptzie and the mattress cake. The latter was a pound cake, thick as a tire (you could bend it and not break it) into which my mother spooned canned apricots in a rhythmic pattern that resembled the buttons on an old-fashioned mattress. I never learned to make that cake, chopped liver, flanken, or matzoh balls. All I can do is order in, and I blame feminism for that, for my contempt for her thankless domestic sacrifices. I am thanking her now as my children and I begin to try her old recipes.

  They praise Mother Theresa for devoting her life to others, so why not Gita Taitz? The soup for housebound Mrs. Schroodel, the packages of warm clothes for relatives stuck in Siberia, the fish sandwiches in onion rolls for my father, and the spaghetti and ketchup for my brother and me. The hems she sewed, putting a thread in my mouth for good luck as her needle flew. Her housework, mopping the floor of her tiny kitchen, hauling a vacuum around our thick, brownish-gold carpeting. The beds she made, layer upon layer of flower-patterned sheets, blankets and duvets of cozy polyester batting.

  My mother, whether or not she understood me, would have died for me. When the Nazis put her mother on the “death” line, my mother ran over to her side and somehow got her out. She could have been shot, but she didn’t care. Had God asked her to take her child to a mountain and sacrifice her, Gita Taitz, unlike Abraham, would not have obeyed. She would have said, “Take me instead.” She would have run up the mountain and laid herself down on the altar for me, as she once did for her mother. That is what a real mother can do.

  And here is her last gift to a difficult child:

  “Du hast nicht keine shlechte bein ... ”

  You don’t have a mean bone.

  These final words are beautiful, and they will have to suffice me for the rest of my life. Coming from her, they mean more than Yale and Oxford put together. Like my dream of the magic mirror in Romper Room, Gita finally sees me through the glass. And I see her through mine. Even in her death, she is sweet, without specialness, or seeking specialness. She is mother, fragrant, giving.

  I am not only the watchmaker’s daughter; I am hers.

  Acknowledgements

  I’D LIKE TO THANK my parents, Simon and Gita Taitz, to whom this book is a l
ove letter and tribute. I’d also like to thank my big brother, Emanuel, who not only urged me to have my say but reminded me that when our father faced obstacles, he’d gather the will to “walk through walls.” With Emanuel’s encouragement, I have “walked through walls” to bring this memoir to light, and would have given up trying long before had my brother not kept me brave. His gift to the world of two wonderful daughters, Jennifer and Michelle, is also a source of great joy to me, as it was to our parents.

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude, again, to Ellie McGrath, my wonderful, gracious publisher, and her husband, Paul Witteman (the “Wit” of McWitty); Abby Kagan, for her beautiful design and enormous heart; and Jenny Carrow, for the striking cover, which reflects compassion and inspired understanding. Lynn Auld Schwarz, you are the most precious friend, reader, and supporter; I am also grateful to Debra Berman, Wendy Durica, Jan Olofsen, Bonni-Dara Michaels, Kelly Kaminski, Susan Weinstein, Tamar Yellin, Alyssa Quint, Geraldine Baum, Professor Henry Feingold, and Tammy Williams, gorgeous, gracious, and good.

  Dearest John Patrick Shanley: You took me under your wing, let me hoist your Oscar, poured me Sauternes (in Washington Heights, no less), and shared your agent with me. I’m not forgetting that.

  Jacques Sebisaho: Your life as a survivor of African genocide, the good works you do, and the beauty and health of your wife, Mimy Mudekeraza, and children—all are an inspiration to me.

  Thank you to Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times, for first putting me into the spotlight, and to Lucinda Blumenfeld, for keeping me there.

  Denise Shannon, I owe you a great debt for your unshakable belief in this book. I hope I’ve made you proud.

  Lastly, to Paul and to our children, Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe, with thanks for sorrows divided and joys multiplied.

  About the Author

  SONIA TAITZ is an essayist, playwright, and the critically acclaimed author of In the King’s Arms and Mothering Heights. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Observer, O: The Oprah Magazine, More, and Psychology Today, where she is a columnist on family trauma. She has been cited on ABC’s Nightline, in a PBS special on love, and in countless quotation anthologies.

  Sonia Taitz earned a JD from Yale Law School; she has served as Law Guardian for foster children and an ER advocate for victims of rape and domestic violence. She also holds an MPhil in nineteenth-century English literature from Oxford University, where she was awarded the Lord Bullock Prize for her fiction. She lives in New York City.

  Memory is by its nature imperfect, but with that caveat, all the events recounted in this memoir are true to the best of my recollection and recreative powers. In a few cases, most of them involving my own romantic history, names have been changed to protect the privacy of those concerned.

  Copyright © 2012 by Sonia Taitz

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, address McWitty Press, 110 Riverside Drive,

  New York, NY 10024.

  www.mcwittypress.com

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012947484

  eISBN : 978-0-975-56189-8

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Sonia Taitz

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Man Who Fixed Time

  Naming Ceremony

  Arpeggios and Arpège

  Running Like a Crazy

  Eine Kleine Schwarzkopf

  My Shtetl, Washington Heights

  Your Doris, My Elizabeth

  La Vie en Rose

  The Almost Blind Watchmaker

  Piano and Potatoes

  Veal in Love

  Operation Blue-Violet

  Modern/Orthodox

  Beauty Queen

  A Lament for Esau

  My Hellen Keller Fixation

  Lucky Number 13

  A Small Celebrity

  Always Ready

  Redemption Song

  The Making of a Courtesan

  Miles to Go

  Omega and Alpha

  Escapes, West and East

  The Vow

  Master of English Letters

  The Jewess at Last

  Dan Greenleaf, Esquire

  Reparations and Repairs

  Lovely, Dark and Deep

  The Great Bully

  Please Send Help at Once

  Real Lamed-Vavniks

  Women’s Studies

  A Life

  Speedo

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page