The Hormone Factory (21 page)

It also allowed us to honor our existing commitment to Levine, giving him (in my opinion, much too great) a say in various
aspects of the business: hiring and firing, product launch, quality control, publicity materials and advertising campaigns, as well as third-party agreements. No matter how much Levine’s need to crack the whip rankled with me—his thirst for power invariably reminded me of the proclivities of his identically mustachioed countryman—I could not afford, in these uncertain times, to alienate him even more than I already had with my tomfoolery. We were still in the process of renegotiating Levine’s contract; the old one was about to expire, and we were bogged down in haggling over his excessively stringent demands. For the time being, therefore, he had an equal stake in the British firm. Even with all my gloomy forebodings about the situation in Europe, however, I could not have predicted back then that his role in Farmacom would shortly be curtailed. I had no problem picturing that piece of fascist gallows-scum next door as our soon-to-be dictator, but the notion that I’d ever be rid of Levine’s tyranny wasn’t even a pipe dream yet, let alone a reality I could count on.

• • •

In October 1938, our annus horribilis, Rivka coldly informed me that Rosie had been delivered of a daughter. The young mother had named her Chana. That name, Hebrew for “mercy,” moved me more than I dared to admit. The baby appeared to have weathered the attempts on her life while still inside the womb and had come through with flying colors. She seemed healthy, and Rosie, according to Rivka’s curt report, was philosophical about the unsavory way she’d been saddled with an offspring, and did not seem to hold it against the baby. Mother and child were to remain at the Amsterdam shelter for the first couple of months, and once Rosie was used to motherhood, she would
be moved into a place of her own. Rivka saw to it that she had everything she needed. I’d have liked to visit her but was explicitly forbidden to contact her, and besides, exacerbating Rivka’s ire was the last thing in the world I wanted.

Babies don’t give a damn about the circumstances of their birth. I wished I could have told my youngest offspring just to stay inside that warm womb of Rivka’s for the time being; he’d never get a better deal outside. But my innocent boy was deaf to my quiet plea to postpone his arrival in these glacial times. On a freezing cold day in December, one month after Kristallnacht, when the brownshirted murderers across the border had given the world a foretaste of what they had in store for our people, I received a phone call from Marieke, our housekeeper, informing me that my wife was in labor and had just been driven to the hospital in the city. Rivka had not sent for me, but my loyal Marieke thought it unfair to keep me in the dark about the baby’s imminent arrival. I raced over to the clinic, which happened to be located not far from the prison where my brother had been serving his sentence for the past nine months. Since I wasn’t any different from any other father sitting around waiting helplessly for his child to be born, I was asked to sit outside the delivery room. Never is the true uselessness of the male species more evident than when our wives are in labor, huffing and puffing, screaming, raving, bellowing, and bearing down. Giving birth is a cruel, excruciating ordeal that just goes on and on until the exhausted mother is finally dilated enough to spew the baby out into the world—a rude ending to the kid’s peaceful sojourn deep inside that warm body. Maybe all our male philandering can be traced back to this: that we’re made to feel so utterly dispensable at the one moment of human existence that really counts.

I took a seat on a metal chair in the maternity clinic’s icy corridor, cringing at every scream that reached my ears from behind the closed door. From time to time the door would open to let out a nurse who would push me back down onto my chair with a reassuring gesture and explain that my wife was having a hard time, and that it was a difficult labor, which was why it was taking her a long time to dilate—quite surprising, actually, in light of the fact that she’d had four previous straightforward deliveries—but that I should on no account be worried and just stay calm and wait. I waited but was far from calm. For, unlike the nurse, I did have an inkling as to why this birth was so much harder than the previous ones. I was sure it was Rivka’s apprehension that was making it difficult for her to open up, which had been a breeze for her with the girls. But how to explain that to the nurse? And anyway, what difference did it make? So I waited, racked with fear that my wife would not survive this arduous labor, and yet pumped with the secret hope that, in spite of Rivka’s apprehension, the child would be a boy.

I sat there until deep in the night. At one point there had been a shift change, when the obstetrician going off duty had tried to assuage me with some more evasive reassurances before hurrying home. I must even have nodded off for a bit on my rickety chair, because when I was startled awake, I saw that an hour had gone by. It was close to six a.m. and a drizzly day was dawning when the delivery room door swung open and an exhausted-looking nurse walked over to me.

“Congratulations,” she said, smiling, “you are the father of a healthy boy.”

I felt a rush of joy before anxiety about what the announcement had left out took over.

“And how is my wife?” I asked.

“She is very tired,” said the nurse, “but that’s no surprise; it was an unusually tough delivery and has left her quite drained. So drained that she didn’t have it in her to take the child in her arms after it was born. But that’s bound to change once she’s had a good rest,” she concluded. She said she’d let me go in briefly, even though my wife had indicated she wanted to be left alone. “But,” she said, nodding kindly, “that’s not unusual, and then they’re only too delighted to show off the baby to the papa. Go ahead, go have a look, but don’t stay long.”

I knew perfectly well that Rivka’s despair at having given birth to a boy wouldn’t change to delight when she saw me, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing with my own two eyes how she was, and to have a glimpse of my first son.

She was lying prone on the metal hospital bed, the crib at her side. Her face was averted from the bassinet, and when I entered she did not react. Approaching the bed cautiously, I whispered her name, placing a tentative hand on her hair. She shook her head free.

“You’ve had a hard time of it, haven’t you, my love,” I said carefully, “but I hear you were a trooper.”

Slowly she turned her face toward me, opening her eyes. “Don’t take advantage of the situation, Mordechai,” she said, sounding terse and weary. Her eyes filled with tears, which she swabbed away angrily. “Have a look at your son and then go, leave me alone. Tell the girls not to come yet.”

A sob escaped her, and she turned her back to show that as far as she was concerned the conversation was closed.

“What about a name?” I asked. “We haven’t discussed it yet, but he needs a name, I need a name for his birth certificate.”

“I’ll let you know in three days,” she said, indicating she couldn’t bear my presence any longer with a wave of her hand.

I glanced at my vulnerable, unnamed son, who, after such an arduous journey, had to do without his mother’s love in these first hours of life. I stroked his soft little face, sniffed the distinctive smell of a newborn, pressed a kiss on his forehead, and left the room with a heavy tread.

35 …

Two days later Ruth had permission from her mother to visit her new little brother, and on returning home she gave her sisters and me an enthusiastic report, saying what a cute little fellow he was, that she’d been allowed to hold him in her arms, and that he’d refused to let go of her pinkie. She also informed me that Rivka had said my son’s name was Ezra.

Although religion played no part in our lives, we had given all the children Jewish first names. We had no wish to hide who we were, and the more the hatred and bigotry intensified, the more important it seemed to stand up for our right to exist in the choice of names for our children. To name a child is to give it its identity and set it on a certain path in life. In the name Rivka had chosen for my son, it wasn’t hard to read her wish that he be guided not by his father and his foul behavior, but by that righteous priest of old.

Seven days later I was allowed to go pick up Rivka and my son. We were greeted at the door by the girls, who had planned a lavish welcome for their mother and their little brother. The front door was decorated with a large cardboard stork carrying a blue baby bundle in its beak; the crib in the nursery was beautifully made up with a sheet the older girls had embroidered; a
tray of baby-blue sugar treats was set out in the living room, and a long garland of their cheerful, colorful drawings spanned the lofty hallway. Their excitement over their mother’s homecoming and the addition of a little boy to their mostly female household was boundless; their enthusiasm seemed to make Rivka relax a bit. In the car she had been silent, aloof and preoccupied, holding the baby a little away from her body, as if trying to avoid physical contact with the little fellow. Feeling her daughters’ elation, watching the girls smothering their brother with kisses and caresses, her face softened somewhat, and she had to agree with the girls when they declared that this was the sweetest, cutest, loveliest little baby the world had ever seen.

Thanks to the hospital nursing staff’s persistence and cajoling, Rivka had in the end overcome her initial resistance to breast-feeding, and her milk had come in. She’d resigned herself to nursing him, since she felt she should not deprive her son of breast milk. But after a few weeks the kid developed an unnaturally voracious appetite. He clamped onto his mother’s breast with aggressive force, biting her nipples until they were bruised and sore. And it was that very fierceness, that hunger for love, that only pushed her away further, so that I had no choice in the end but to hire Alie Mosterd from packaging to provide him with purchased breast milk—motherly warmth for a price.

• • •

My secret hope that Rivka’s coldness toward me would thaw once she had had her baby was dashed. If in that last month of 1938 or during the next year she had shown some understanding, if she had been willing to give me one more chance, had trusted me again, I might have found the strength to change. Like a snake sloughing off its skin to rid itself of parasites, I might very well
have been able to shed my bad habits to be reborn a virtuous man. I imagined that with my wife at my side, supported and encouraged by her love, I might have done it. But then our company would in all probability not have grown into the thriving multinational it is today. Putting empathy and altruism above all other considerations won’t make you come out on top; for a business to be truly lucrative, there needs to be at least a little skullduggery. For Rivka, I’d have been prepared to give up my dream of building a major company; it would have been worth it. Her silent hostility, however, the constant unspoken recriminations goosing my sense of shame and guilt, were just too much to bear.

As the world prepared itself for the greatest cataclysm of all time, I began to let go of my wounded ego. When it finally became clear I would never win back my wife’s love—the second-greatest blow in my otherwise sensationally successful life; the first, of course, was the symbolic mark of Cain on my forehead—I proceeded to shrug off those distressing feelings, the unbearable hurt. From that moment on, my conscience ceased to bother me—I put a lid on it and sealed it shut.

It is only now—after the rust has eaten through my self-protective armor and reduced it to dust—that those unbearable feelings have flared up again, just like the electrical fire that once very nearly reduced our new lab to ashes. Thanks to the quick intervention of our in-house firefighting team, we were spared that calamity. But here, inside my cocoon of decrepitude, there is no one to put out the blaze.

36 …

This evening the young thing turned on the television for me. Very softly, so that it won’t disturb Mizie, who’s out cold one floor down after taking a strong sleeping pill. She is determined to shield me from any direct confrontation with my poor martyred son. Is she worried the excitement will deal me the deathblow I so dearly desire?

But the sound is up just high enough for me to hear the voice of my blood, my dearest spawn, the ravenous whiz kid, as he tries to deflect the questions of the foreign journalists, the hungry European gentlemen of the press who can smell a good, lucrative story here, a story that will keep them on the air for days, weeks even, who swarm around him as he walks from the car to the courthouse. He’s holding his head high, his eyes are tired, his face drawn, but proud as ever, his bearing resolute.

The upshot is that he is to be released on bail, set at a million dollars. Provided he surrenders his passport, to prevent him from fleeing the country. So, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet like some lab animal awaiting a lethal injection, he is now permitted to hole up in his apartment and spend his days looking out at the Hudson River or down at the pack of paparazzi bloodhounds stationed outside his building. How I’d like to call
him on the phone, to give him some encouragement, to support him as a father should, and tell him to steel himself, to be a man at this critical moment—his Waterloo, with the vultures circling, intent on getting rid of him and sending the whole business down the tubes. My son, at the very pinnacle of his career; my son, a driven man, a dynamo bursting with ambition who clawed his way to the top step by step, until, at the crowning point of his career, he was made chief executive officer of the giant multinational that began as a precarious little division of our meatpacking factories. Don’t let him hang his head, he has to fight back; a sturdy anvil does not fear the hammer. Let those lawyers of his—they must be costing him an arm and a leg—get the alleged victim to withdraw her complaint. How hard can that be? The papers say the charges are a jumble of inconsistencies. It had to be entrapment, some clever plot cooked up by those cannibals who if we don’t watch out are going to gobble up all our life’s work.