The Watch

The Chicago in which I wanted to participate was a worker's town. It was, and, in my memory, is, the various districts and the jobs that I did there: factories out in Cicero or down in Blue Island, the Inland Steel plant in East Chicago, Yellow Cab Unit 13 on Halsted.

I grew up on Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson, and I felt, following what I took to be their lead, that the bourgeoisie was not the fit subject of literature.

So the jobs paid my rent and showed me something of life, and they were irrefutable evidenceof my escape from the literarily unworthy middle class.

For not only was I a son of the middle class, I was, and perhaps I still am, the ne plus ultra of that breed: a Nice Jewish Boy.

And, as that Nice Jewish Boy, I went to college.

I went to college in the East, at a countercultural institution, a year-round camp, really, where I and those of my class griped about the war and took ourselves seriously.

The college was in the very lovely midst of nowhere in New England. It was ten miles from the nearest town, and those who either did not possess an auto or have a good friend with an autowere under a de facto house arrest on the college grounds.

I did not have an auto. My father was a child of immigrants and born right off the boat. He had sent his first-born (continued on page 178)The watch(continued from page143) son, in effect, to finishing school, and it never would have occurred to him to compound this enormity by supplying that son with the sybaritic indulgence of a car.

Nor would it have occurred to me to expect the same. However, I had been told, from what seems to me to have been my earliest youth, that on my graduation from college, I would be given aconvertible.

It was not any car that I would receive, it was The Convertible. How it got started, I don'tknow. But my grandmother said it and my father said it, and I looked forward to it as a fixed point in my life.

Was it a bribe, was it to be a reward? I don't know. It was an out-of-character assurance onmy father's part, for he was capable of generosity and, indeed, on occasion, of real lavishness. But both, in my memory, were much more likely to stem from impulse than from a thought-out plan.

However, he had promised it, and not only had the family heard it but we joked about it. It became, it seemed, part of our family phrase book, e.g.: "Study hard, or you won't get to college, and then you know what you aren't going to get."

So much that I forgot about it. It was nothing to long for, or even, truly, to anticipate. One event would bring about the other, as retirement, the agreed-upon pension. It was not a subject for anticipation, or even, on receipt, for gratitude, but the correct conclusion of an agreement.

It was my final year at college. Graduation was to come in May, and in the preceding November I would turn 21.

In three and a half years at college I had learned not a damned thing. I had no skills or demonstrable talents.

Upon graduation I would be out in the world with no money, no prospects, no plan. Not only did I not care, I had given the matter no thought at all, and I believe I assumed that some happy force would intervene and allow me to spend the rest of my life in school. Just before the Thanksgiving break my father called. He told me he was looking forward to my return to Chicago for the holiday.

Now, this was news to me, as we had not discussed my going to Chicago, and I'd made plans tospend the long weekend with friends in the East.

But, no, he said, the holiday fell two days before my birthday, and it was important to him that I be back home.

I tried to beg off, and he persevered. He pressed me to come home and told me that it was essential, as he had something for me. He was sending me a ticket and I had to come.

Well. There it was. It was the convertible. My father had remembered his promise and was calling to tell me that he was about to make good his pledge.

I left the phone booth smiling and quite touched. And I told my friends I would be flying to Chicago, but I would be driving back. I flew to O'Hare, took a bus downtown and took a city bus to the North Side.

On the plane and on the bus I rehearsed both my gratitude and my surprise. Surprise, I knew, was difficult to counterfeit, and this troubled me. I would hate to disappoint my father, or to give him less than what he might consider his just due for the award of a magnificent gift.

But, no, I thought, no. The moment boded well to sweep us up in sentiment free of hypocrisy on either of our parts.

For was he not the child of immigrants? And was he not raised in poverty, in the Depression, by his mother, my beloved grandmother? Had we not heard countless times, my sister and I, of their poverty and our ingratitude?

And here before us was a ceremony of abundance--a ceremony, finally, of manhood. It was my 21st birthday, I was graduating from college.

I got off the Broadway bus and walked down the side street, rehearsing all the while, and there, across from his building, was the car.

No. I had doubted. I realized that as I saw the car. No, I would admit it. To my shame. I'd doubted him. How could I have doubted? What other reason would he have had for his insistence, his almost pleading, that I come back home? Of course it was the car, and I was ashamed I had doubted him. I looked at the car from across the street.

It was a Volkswagen convertible. It was a tricked-out model called the Super Beetle. It had, I remember, outsized bubble skirts and wheels, and it was painted with broad racing stripes. I chuckled. I'm not sure what sort of vehicle I'd expected--perhaps I'd thought he'd take me shopping down on Western Avenue and we'd be buyers together at the horse fair. I don't know what I expected from him, but when I saw that Beetle, I was moved. It was, I thought, a choice both touching and naive. It seemed that he had tried to put himself in the place of his son. It was as if he'd thought, What sort of car would the youth of today desire?

And there was his answer, across the street. I thought, No, that's not my style, and then reproached myself. And I was worthy of reproach. For the gift was magnificent and, with the gift, his effort to understand me--that was the gift, the magnificent gift. Rather than insist that I be like him, he'd tried to make himself like me. And if my chums thought that the car was somewhat obvious, well, they could go to hell. For I was not some kid in the schoolyard who could be embarrassed by his parents, I was a man and in possession of a valuable possession. The car could take me to work and it could take me from one city to the next. And finally, my father had given it to me.

As I walked close to it, I saw the error of my momentary reluctance to appreciate its decoration.

It was truly beautiful. That such a car would not have been my first choice spoke not to the defects of the car but of my taste.

I try to remember the colors, and I seem to remember a metallic black, with stripes of yellow and orange.

I remember the new-car sticker on the window, and I remember thinking that my dad must have expected me to go into the building by the other door or he wouldn't have left the gift out here so prominently. Or did he mean me to observe it? That was my question as I rode the elevator up.

He met me at the door. There was the table, laid out for a party, in the living room beyond.

Did he look wary? No. I wondered whether to say which route I had taken home, but, no, if he'd wanted to test me, he would ask. No. It was clear that I wasn't supposed to have seen the car.

But why would he have chanced my viewing it? Well, I thought, it's obvious. They'd delivered the car from the showroom, and he'd carefully, as he did all things, instructed them on where it should be parked, and the car salesman had failed him. I saw that this could present a problem.

If we came out of the building on the side opposite from where the car was parked--if we began what he would refer to as a simple walk and could not find the car (which, after all, would not be parked where he'd directed it should be), would it be my place to reveal I had seen it?

No. For he'd be angry, then, at the car salesman. It would be wiser to be ignorant and not to be part of that confluence that spoiled his surprise.

But I could steer our progress back into the building by the other door. Aha. Yes. That is what I'd do. There was another possibility: that we would leave the building by the door near the car, and that he'd come across it in the unexpected place and be caught off guard.

But that need not be feared, as, if I stayed oblivious to his confusion for the scantest second, he would realize that the surprise would in no way be mitigated by the car's location.

He would improvise and say, "Look here!" And that he'd doubtless have words with the car dealership later was not my responsibility. We sat down to dinner. My father, my stepmother, my half siblings and several aunts.

After the meal, my father made a speech about my becoming a man. He told the table how he'd, in effect, demanded my return as he had something to give me. Then he reached into the lapel pocket of his jacket, draped over the back of his chair, and brought out a small case.

Yes, I thought, this is as it should be. There's the key.

Some further words were said. I took the case and fought down an impulse to confess that I knew what it contained, etc., thus finessing the question of whether or not to feign surprise. No, I thanked him and opened the case. Inside there was a watch.

I looked at the watch and at the case beneath the watch, where the key would be found. There was no key. I understood that this gift would be in two parts, that this was the element of the trip which was the surprise.

I'd underestimated my father. How could I have thought that he would let an opportunity for patriarchal drama drift by unexploited?

No mention had been made of the car. It was possible, though unlikely, that I'd forgotten that the car was owing to me. But in any case, and even if, as was most likely, I had returned to Chicago expecting the car, such hopes would indeed be dashed before they would be realized. He would make me the present of the watch, and then the party would go on, and at some point he'd say, "Oh, by the way," and draw my attention to the key, secreted in the lining of the watch case, or he'd suggest we go for a walk.

Once again, he would keep control. Well, that was as it should be, I thought. And a brand-new car--a car of any sort--was not the sort of present that should be given or accepted lightly. If he chose to present the gift in his own way, it came, I did see, not primarily from desire for control but from a sense on his part of drama, which is to say, of what was fitting. I thought that was fine.

That I had accidentally discovered the real present parked outside was to my advantage. It allowed me to feign, no, not to feign, to feel true gratitude for the watch he had given me. For, in truth, it was magnificent.

It was an Illinois pocket watch. In a gold hunter case. The case was covered with scrollwork and, in a small crest, it had my initials.

The back of the case had a small diamond set in it. There was a quite heavy gold chain. And, in all, it was a superb and an obviously quite expensive present. I thanked him for it. He explained that it was a railroad watch; that is, a watch that was made to the stringent standards called for by the railroads in the past century.

The railroads, in the days before the radio, relied exclusively on the accuracy of the railroaders' watches to ensure safety. Yes. I understood. I admired the watch at length and tried it in various pockets and said that, had I known, I would have worn a vest.

As the party wound down, I excused myself from the table and took the watch and the case into a back room, where I pried up the lining of the case to find the key.

But there was no key and there was, of course, no car, and, to one not emotionally involved, the presence of a convertible with a new-car sticker on the street would not be worthy of note.

•

I pawned the watch many times, and once I sold it outright to the pawnbroker under the el on Van Buren Street.

He was a man who knew my father, and several years after I'd sold it, I ran into him and he asked if I'd like my watch back. I asked why such a fine watch had lain unsold in his store, and he said that he'd never put it out, he'd kept it for me, as he thought someday I'd like it back.

So I redeemed it for what I had sold it for. I wore it now and then, over the years, with a tuxedo. But most of the time it stayed in a box in my desk.

I had it appraised at one point and found it was, as it looked, quite valuable. Over the years I thought of selling it but never did. I had another fantasy. I thought, or felt, perhaps, that the watch was in fact a token in code from my father, and that the token could be redeemed after his death.

I thought that, after his death, at the reading of his will, it would be shown that he'd never forgotten the convertible and that the watch was only a test; that if I would present the watch to his executors--my continued possession of it a sign I had never broken faith with him--I would receive a fitting legacy.

My father died a year ago, may he rest in peace.

Like him I have turned, I'm afraid, into something of a patriarch and something of a burgher. Like him I am, I think, overly fond of the few difficulties I enjoyed on my travels toward substantiality. Like him I will, doubtless, subject my children, in some degree, to my personality and my affection for my youth.

I still have the watch, which I still don't like. And several years ago I bought myself a convertible, which, I think, I never drive without enjoyment.

"The gift was magnificent, and his effort to understand me--that was the gift, the magnificent gift."