The Hormone Factory (29 page)

• • •

There was one aspect of the war I did miss afterward: the dissipation and loose morals of wartime London. That was a time
when we were like moths around the flame, when respectability went flying out the window, when everybody seemed to be on the make, when lust became a communal sport and I suddenly wasn’t the only one driven by those uncontrollable urges. Since everything might be wiped out in the German Blitz at any moment, the debauchery brooked no delay. People threw caution to the wind and cavorted unashamedly everywhere you could think of—in beds, on carpets, on kitchen floors, on lawns, in toilet stalls, in doorways, in broom closets, and in taxis; you name it.

It wasn’t long before that wild promiscuity was squelched by the priggishness of the nineteen-fifties. Just as the Jews had had to go underground during the Spanish Inquisition, so free love just seemed to fizzle out, and many a sexy nympho suddenly turned into an uptight mademoiselle, queen of decorum, prissy paragon of virtue; the lady-is-a-tramp resurrected as the primmest of vestal virgins. Suddenly their voluptuous bodies became impregnable fortresses, their saucy behavior hidden beneath strict corsets of propriety. A dramatic turnabout, occurring just when I was finally no longer tied down by the marriage vows I’d never wholly embraced in the first place. Ever since my divorce from Rivka had gone through, I was spending more and more of my time at conferences, universities, receptions, corporate headquarters, embassies, and in hotel lobbies, where it was important to be assured of some company, some arm candy, some tasty piece of ass. I refused to pay for it, ever. Not because I’m cheap, mind, but because I consider myself too good a catch. After fat Bertha, who probably came closest to what you might call a whore, I swore never again to get involved with any hussy interested in being with me only to make a buck. I was still a good-looking fellow, and well-endowed young women fortunately tend to go for
guys like me, even if we’re a bit older. As long as you’re a winner, and they smell the sweet sweat of success on you.

• • •

I kept my distance from the factory girls; I had learned my lesson, but even in the new puritan atmosphere there were plenty of attractive, available women. I found them at conferences and conventions, on business trips, and at the many parties to which I was invited. There were the secretaries of various colleagues who enjoyed my attentions, or the medical technicians only too glad to be wined and dined in fancy restaurants and to be spoiled with delicacies. If I invited them to come up to my hotel suite for a nightcap after an elaborate dinner, I was nearly always taken up on the offer. Some felt honored to be asked into the luxurious private lair of the legendary Mordechai de Paauw. Others might hesitate, but they usually caved in the end; after all, they had allowed themselves to be shamelessly pampered, and since in the fifties it was assumed that you got nothing for free, if a girl said yes to an expensive dinner, she couldn’t exactly turn down what came next.

My need for such one-night stands began to lessen when, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, I met Diane Drabble in New York. She was one of the rare female chemists at the time and worked in our U.S. lab. She was an intelligent, fine-looking woman and had nothing in common with the prim little misses mincing through the fifties in their coy wasp-waisted dresses, their nylons and garter belts, the immaculate white collars, the veiled little hats, the silk gloves, the clicking stiletto heels and prissy pocketbook in which, in a kind of courtship ritual, they were constantly fumbling to pull out a powder compact, a lipstick, an embroidered handkerchief or chrome cigarette case.

Diane was one tough broad, accustomed to being the only female among men. Having apparently decided to become one of the guys, she had succeeded admirably. She could drink anyone under the table, told the dirtiest jokes, and laughed at them louder than anyone else. She wore her hair cropped short and was usually dressed in tight pants and a form-fitting turtleneck that showed off her curves to perfection. People who jump to superficial conclusions would call her butch—big mistake. She was blessed with a fiery sensuality and exercised it with unblushing abandon. Besides Rivka, she was probably the woman I was fondest of in all my life. I once blurted out that she was a female version of myself, since we both suffered from the kind of libido that’s so insistent it can’t stand delay; often we’d start tearing our clothes off and fall on each other half-dressed in the most unlikely places.

“Me, a version of you?” she grinned, giving my balls a friendly squeeze. “What a sexist monkey you are, Motke. I’d say, instead, that you are a male version of me …” Pulling me by the hair, she pushed me back onto the bed for another round.

She was a fanatic researcher; if she was on to something, she could spend day and night at the lab without eating, keeping herself going with short naps, which she took curled up on a blanket under a lab bench, only to return to work refreshed and ready for action. She was one of a group of biochemists who’d discovered a potent new compound that turned out to be effective in combating tuberculosis. That invention, and the speed with which we were able to rush the resulting drug to market, meant that by the end of the fifties the TB sanatoria began running out of patients and could be put to other uses.

If Diane permitted herself a lunch break, she’d go to her favorite dining spot, Horn & Hardart, a dirt-cheap automat,
where after choosing an item from one of the chrome self-serve compartments, she’d gobble down her Salisbury steak in the company of longshoremen and textile workers. At night she liked to hang out in one of the jazz clubs in the Village and listen to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, or Dizzy Gillespie, sipping whiskey at the bar while waiting for one of the little front-row tables to open up so she could watch the stars from up close and egg them on with encouraging wisecracks. Sometimes I’d find her at the Savoy Ballroom, a Harlem dive, working up a sweat boogying until deep into the night, one of the only white faces in a sea of black dancers. She’d be back in the lab early the next day with no visible ill effects from alcohol or lack of sleep, intent on her work once more. Diane Drabble was vivacious proof positive that a scientist didn’t have to be dull or insipid. And she was one of those rare women who indulge wholeheartedly in all forms of sexual pleasure; she wasn’t shy about initiating sex, and was indefatigable, unembarrassed, and quite uninterested in commitment or getting tied down. That was another thing we had in common.

For several years we saw each other regularly, but only when I happened to be in New York for my work. She refused to make any arrangements ahead of time, and never wanted to know when I was going to be in the Big Apple.

“Surprise me,” she said, “because if it gets routine, it’ll become a drag, and then, I’m warning you, we’re through.”

So I would catch her unawares at her lab, or show up late at night in the Five Spot or one of the other clubs she liked to frequent, sneaking up on her from behind, grabbing her tits, squeezing her tight, and mouthing something lascivious in her ear. Our encounters usually ended up in her tousled bed on the top floor of a tenement building. She was stubborn in her
refusal to come back with me to my posh hotel room, because she claimed that the swanky atmosphere would ruin her mood.

“In a bogus setting like that, what’s authentic and true becomes vulgar and sleazy.” So went one of her pet peeves. “I love being a shameless tramp, but I don’t want to be looked down on by people who put on airs thinking they’re better than everyone else just because they’re rich. How you, Motke, with your magnificently depraved ways, can stand such a phony world is beyond me.”

The truth was that I did come from that world, the one she loathed from the very bottom of her heart. Being with her allowed me to escape, however briefly, a life where status and outward appearances were the only things that counted, and to dip my toe in the liberated waters of her bohemian world—short detours into a life governed by a wholly different set of rules. A life where I was an outsider, where nothing was expected of me except to provide my Drabble with the sexual satisfaction she craved, and where I could indulge myself to my heart’s content. I would not admit it to anyone, but I couldn’t wait for the moment when I could throw myself on Diane Drabble, my wild gypsy temptress, again.

47 …

Rivka and Diane were the real women in my life. All the others were just extras, walk-ons who did give my life some color and pizzazz, but were otherwise interchangeable and expendable. Mizie? Ah well, you could call her my caretaker in old age, and in that sense she does mean more to me, I suppose, than some chick who just happened to cross my path.

The women I truly loved were Diane and Rivka—well, the younger version, anyway, the feisty, happy-go-lucky girl who was such a good sport about following me out to the provincial boondocks. But that Rivka was gone for good; the disastrous events of 1938 and the long war years that followed had turned her into—I can’t put it any other way—a bitter old sourpuss.

Rivka blamed the Dutch for delivering her family and friends to the henchmen, and she was only too happy never to have to return to our hick town. I left her and the kids well taken care of; she lacked for nothing financially. The only contact I had with my ex in those postwar years was over the phone, when there were important money matters to be decided. At first I did make an effort to see my girls whenever I was in London, but their mother was always coming up with reasons why it was
inconvenient. My invitations to have my daughters come and spend their vacations with me were likewise rejected again and again, until one day Rivka told me point-blank that I should stop bothering them. It seemed my daughters wanted nothing to do with me, and from then on Rivka wouldn’t stand for them to be left alone with me.

“But why not?” I’d asked her, astonished. “Why can’t my daughters be with me?” There was such a long silence that for an instant I thought the connection had been broken. Then it dawned on me what her silence meant to suggest.

“Rosie was younger than Rachel is now …” she snapped. “I don’t think we need to go into it any further.” She hung up.

Rivka had poisoned our daughters against me. I didn’t know what to do about it and just hoped that one day they would grow curious about their dad. As the years went by, I was sometimes asked to attend events where a parent’s presence is indispensable, such as graduations and, later, weddings. Then I would play the role of father to the girls whom I was forbidden to see otherwise; none of them ever made any attempt to get to know me better.

Only Ezra, my youngest, was left to me, and the bond I was able to build with him made up for a lot. When he was eight years old, his uncaring mother sent him to an exclusive boarding school, as is the custom in England, freeing up her time so that she was able to obtain a degree; eventually she worked her way up to become the head of an international antipoverty organization. The life she thus made for herself went counter to anything that could possibly smack of her marriage to the worst capitalist on earth. Except for the generous alimony, naturally, which she continued to accept for the rest of her life with neither a squeak of protest nor a token of gratitude.

Ezra spent most of his vacations with me. I took him along on business trips all over Europe, and he drank it all in with an avidity I loved to see—the fast life of airplanes and limousines, of having the red carpet rolled out for us everywhere we went. He loved staying in fancy hotels, where the staff indulged his every whim. His toddler tantrums had been redirected into buoyant energy and an almost irrepressible curiosity. He’d cruise the corridors of Farmacom, peppering everyone he met with questions, and loved to visit the lab animals in their pens. There he’d pet the monkeys, dogs, and rabbits, explaining to each animal in detail what had been done to it to make it cringe, shaking and whimpering, in a corner of its cage, and then he’d insist on giving the researchers his observations, whether they wanted to hear them or not. Sometimes they’d let him peer through the microscopes or assist the technicians with simple experiments. He was adept at attracting attention and charmed people with his curiosity and his bluster, his quick mind and intelligent questions; he was a real joker too, which made him a hit everywhere he went.

At night, his energy all used up, he would allow old Marieke to mollycoddle him. Before being sent up to bed, he liked to climb onto her lap as if she were his granny and snuggle his head against her chest, his restless hands playing with her lace collar as she read to him from books that were still kept in the dismantled children’s bedrooms, silent remnants of a forgotten life.

I think I must have spoiled him rotten. I loved seeing his rapturous delight, the raucous cries of joy, the dancing around the room and exuberant hugs smothering me half to death that greeted every gift—every Erector Set he received, every bike, every watch, every ski vacation, and, later on, the cars and houses. The enthusiasm of that boy filled me with warmth; it was worth every penny.

Ezra hardly ever mentioned his mother, whom he seldom saw, and when he did refer to her, it was with some bitterness. He never asked me about our failed marriage or about the time when we’d still lived together as a family, which he barely remembered.

48 …

One fine day—it was sometime in 1958—I flew to New York for a working visit to our U.S. subsidiary to discuss with the executive team several new developments, including the discovery of a new category of pharmaceuticals to alleviate psychological complaints. Levine had been the one to come up with the name “soul hormones” for our discoveries after observing time and again that these substances affected not only the patient’s physical condition, but the psychological as well. Our firm’s newest offshoot, therefore, would focus on the human soul; specifically, on a remedy that had originated in the Himalayan mountains, where for centuries the inhabitants had been using the roots of a certain shrub as an antidote for snakebites. It was found that this “snakeroot” not only lowered high blood pressure, but also had a salutary effect on patients with mental disorders. At roughly the same time, a new synthetic compound was developed that was capable of calming down frenzied mental patients, while at another lab, certain antihistamines were found to be effective against depression. Taken together, these developments demanded a quick response in what came to be called the psycho-pharmaceutical field. It was to pay off for us in a big way.