The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  • • •

  As I said before, we were a terrific team at first. Once we had the licenses in hand, we decided to approach Bayer, already a huge pharma concern. And, impressed by Levine’s reputation, despite the fact that Farmacom consisted of just one laboratory in Amsterdam and a space on the top floor of the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. plant, they did give us a hearing. Genius as he was at manipulating protein, Levine likewise knew how to play our opponents by giving them just enough information to whet their appetites. Their arrogance, however, won out over their greed. They were convinced they didn’t need our piddling little company to market the coveted drug in Germany; they thought they could do it without us. A serious mistake, which they soon came to regret. For the Bayer directors were to discover to their dismay that Levine and I had already set up a German subsidiary, which held the exclusive rights to insulin in Germany.

  Levine’s way of exciting interest for his products was no different from the way he had worked his spell on me in Die Port van Cleve. He knew how to arouse people’s greed to such an extent that they felt they just had to take their chances with him, come what may. Once he’d reeled them in, it was my turn to strike with hard-nosed negotiating tactics, and to hammer out a lucrative deal for bulk sales of the insulin. This team effort was the commercial foundation upon which we built our empire.

  12 …

  It took some time for Rivka to feel at home in these godforsaken boonies. It was quite a change for her, from her life as a schoolgirl growing up among the intellectual and cultural elite of the big city to the unrefined rusticity of our depressing backwater, with its dirt roads and the stench of poverty seeping out of every hovel, the hardened face of the woman on the street corner with her meager array of fruits and vegetables displayed on a ragged mat, the slurred voice of the man who’d spent his miserable weekly wages on drink and was stumbling home to his slum without any food to offer his starving brood, or the gangs of delinquents staging raids on local farmers not much better off than they were.

  My blithe coed appeared to have no problem saying goodbye to her carefree school days and soon cheerfully slipped into the role of young mother and wife of one of this hick town’s leading citizens. She energetically took charge of our home next to the factory, an elegant villa equipped with all modern conveniences, and took obvious pleasure in overseeing the small army of maids and other servants who had been running the household. After my father’s and mother’s passing, I had remained in my parental home, leaving the decor exactly as it was, and had also kept on the servants, headed by Marieke, the trusty housekeeper. Marieke, who had started out in service as a shy young thing, had grown into the sturdy, energetic commander in chief of my bachelor household. The moment my young bride stepped over the threshold, Marieke took to her hook, line, and sinker, and did her very best to answer her every whim. Rivka’s arrival on the scene brought with it considerable changes to our plodding daily routine. When she first walked into the house, she’d exclaimed, “How vulgar! What tasteless schlock!”

  I’d stared at her, taken aback. I had never met anyone who wasn’t suitably impressed by these elegant interiors, and her blunt criticism hurt me more than I liked to admit. At the same time I admired her candor. Rivka was a girl who didn’t mince words.

  “If you want me to be happy here,” she said, running her hand over her slightly swollen belly, “you’ll have to let me do a little remodeling.”

  And so it came to pass. My parents’ pride, their castle, proud embodiment of their newly acquired wealth, their victory over poverty, was completely dismantled. The murals disappeared under stark geometrical wallpaper patterns, the ceilings were replastered after being stripped of their ornamental medallions and cornices, and almost all of the neoclassical furniture was replaced, so that for the first several months after the renovations I felt like a stranger in my own home. My indefatigable wife introduced our backwater to the latest in modernist style. With tables, sofas, lamps, chairs, and coatracks by artisans and famous designers like Piet Kramer and H. J. Winkelman, our entire house was turned into a model interior of the Amsterdam School. It led to quite a bit of eyebrow raising, which bothered Rivka not a bit.

  The birth of our first child, Ruth, affected me more than I had expected. Children had never much interested me, but to my surprise, I was fascinated to see Rivka’s body swell and to feel the life kicking inside her belly. It was with anxious anticipation that I awaited the baby’s birth, and watching my daughter grow, and in quick succession a second and then a third little girl, gave me more pleasure than I had ever thought possible. That fatherhood could produce such strong feelings of connection, that it would awaken the protective instinct in me, was something I’d never expected.

  Rivka did sometimes miss the excitement of the city. The solution she found to her homesickness was to invite lots of guests to come and stay. She made sure our spacious, comfortable home was always ready to accommodate her university friends from Amsterdam, who were only too happy to be invited to spend time in such modern, elegant surroundings out in the countryside (to them an exotic locale), next to the ever-bustling factory.

  Rivka organized musical performances, readings, and theatrical soirees, and with the help of our cook prepared exquisite spreads for her dinner parties. Aaron was often one of the guests. He tended to stay in the background, slumped in his chair with an alcoholic beverage in one hand, observing the proceedings. I never caught him showing even the slightest interest in any of Rivka’s many girlfriends.

  Hard to understand; I often had trouble controlling myself. What an effort it took to keep my hands off all those smart, well-spoken, shapely girls! But I restrained myself, because there’s a limit; I knew seducing my wife’s girlfriends was wrong. If only because it was just asking for trouble.

  13 …

  In addition to the complex problems we dealt with daily involving the insulin production and further hormonal research and production, it was important to drum up public support for our endeavors. The employment opportunities our meatpacking plant provided had made us well liked by the locals. But the growing range of drugs Farmacom was beginning to market had to be handled with caution in this Roman Catholic hinterland. For that reason, I actively sought to improve our relations with the local notables, and one of the most important players among these was, of course, the new parish priest.

  I invited the man to my office for a meeting. The curate was a reedy, brittle-looking person. He was young, but his face was ageless; he had sparse, limp, and already receding ash-blond hair, a fuzzy little beard that hardly deserved to be called such, and an oily voice so soft that it was hard to believe that in church his sermons could be heard by the whole congregation. He spoke carefully, as if his every word might arouse the wrath of God. He had been sent to our town straight from the seminary, and he told me how much he enjoyed being the shepherd of his flock. When I asked him which aspect of his wide-ranging job he found most interesting, he replied, “The contact I have with the people in my parish, both young and old; that is a great blessing to me. They have so many problems, and it gives me great satisfaction to lend them a sympathetic ear, and to help them accept their heavy lot.”

  That’s exactly the sort of platitude you’d expect from a priest, and it’s why I can’t stand the Church. If there’s one thing I’ve refused to do all my life, it’s to accept things as they are. I am not some lame believer who meekly bows his head and accepts the fate allotted to him from on high; far from it. I like to grab fate by the horns the way a butcher reaches for a slaughtered steer, and turn it to work in my favor. But it was important to have a good relationship with a cleric venerated by the majority of my workforce, in light of the fact that our company was planning to produce increasing numbers of drugs that might appear to fly in the face of Our Lord’s commandments. Besides, I’m never averse to buttering people up if I have nothing to lose by it.

  “Father, would you mind describing to me the nature of the
ir struggle? I suspect that a great many folks around here find themselves in straitened circumstances on account of having too many mouths to feed and insufficient means to take care of them; isn’t that the main problem?”

  The black-frocked prelate looked at me pensively, as if weighing my interest. A mirthless smile split his face from ear to ear. He took a sip of the watery tea that Agnes had been instructed to make weak on account of his “delicate stomach,” and then he spoke. “Indeed, for many folks poverty is a tribulation, a terrible cross to bear. But it has always been so, has it not? No, the issue of greater concern to them right now is a more recent development: the fact that so many young people now troop off to work in the factories. Many of the parents are fearful about the young girls in particular—they are being exposed to crude behavior and harassment at work, which they are often powerless to resist.”

  I nodded gravely.

  “I understand,” he continued, “that in your factory the men and the women do have separate changing rooms, and that the sexes are kept apart wherever possible on the shop floor and in the canteen, yet it appears that there are still a great many instances where the young girls are forced to put up with certain improprieties, which, innocent and inexperienced as they are, they are often incapable of rebuffing. Worse, some of them may take the indecencies to which they are subjected for well-meaning attentions, which in turn may tempt them to indulge in unbecoming conduct, with all the tragic consequences that may entail.”

  Even though our region had seen industrial development for well over half a century, it seemed that industry was still regarded as an intruder liable to jeopardize the area’s once-pristine innocence. People do like to place the past on a romantic pedestal, like some treasured Christmas ornament, conveniently forgetting the hanky-panky and fornication that has always been rife in the open fields or the hayloft. Who hasn’t heard the raunchy stories about rolls in the hay? They just go to show that barns aren’t only for housing the livestock and their fodder.

  “We take every aspect of our workers’ safety extremely seriously,” I replied, “and do all we can to save the young girls from themselves, as well as guard them from the boorish behavior of the male personnel. But surely the parents must accept some of the responsibility too? And the Church, naturally. You yourself just acknowledged that we have tried to keep the sexes apart wherever possible. What more can we do? After all, this is a commercial enterprise, not a finishing school.”

  “We do what we can, of course,” said the priest, slowly tapping the tips of his emaciated fingers together, “but in this case we need everyone to step in. In my parish, we offer informational sessions; we get women of unimpeachable repute to prepare the girls for their future housewifely duties, instructing them in the arts of housekeeping, cooking, and virtuous conduct. It would be to your credit if your company could assume some similar role in educating your workers. There are other firms in our country—not yet very many, I’ll admit—that have shouldered that responsibility. It would benefit not only your employees but your own interests as well, since it would do a lot for your firm’s general success and reputation. All in all, I know the people around here would very much appreciate that sort of initiative.”

  I didn’t think much of the idea, but promised the padre I’d mention it to the other directors, and that I would keep him apprised of our decision.

  When I told Rivka that night about it, she was immediately enthusiastic. My young wife had the knack of befriending folks from all walks of life, even out here in this class-conscious rural society. I had noticed this propensity of hers that first night in my Lancia, when she’d been so chummy with Frank; she always managed to win people over. In the beginning I found it quite charming; later on, her coziness with my factory girls very nearly destroyed me.

  My energetic young bride wasn’t prepared to cut herself off from the outside world and stay home like some broody mother hen. Her vivacious, free-spirited nature—the quality that had so attracted me when we first met—proved to be the very essence of her makeup. I was away a great deal, of course, mostly on business, though there was also the occasional extramarital fling. Rivka didn’t seem to mind very much. She wasn’t the type to sit around moping, waiting for me to come home. On the contrary; a women’s-libber before the concept even existed, that was my Rivka.

  The priest’s suggestion found a receptive ear with her, and she immediately set out to organize instructive evenings for my workers. I doubt that my bride was the one the cleric had in mind to carry out his plan, not being of unimpeachable virtue herself (he, like everyone else, had kept a careful tab of the number of months we’d been married before her delivery). And besides, she wasn’t even Catholic. An unbeliever and a Jewess, could it be any less suitable?

  Rivka wasn’t conscious of class or racial segregation. In the circles of the Amsterdam intelligentsia to which she belonged, what counted was schooling, intellect, and a sense of humor, and although most of her friends and her parents’ acquaintances were Jewish, background wasn’t considered relevant. It may have been guilelessness, a willful ignorance of the class system that reigned in these parts, or perhaps simply her gut instinct that led her to hitch the right ladies in our firm to her reformation wagon, but whatever it was, she managed, to my surprise, to assemble a motley crew of all denominations—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, the uneducated factory rats who streamed into our plant every day in their shabby coveralls and threadbare aprons. There was particular focus on the young girls, who were instructed in a lighthearted way in the kinds of things a young woman ought to know. The subjects included how to prepare healthy meals with little cash, and the rudimentary hygiene these future housewives should try to maintain, even if they had to do so in drafty, ramshackle huts barely a step up from the peat shacks of the past, places with neither plumbing nor fresh air. There was also some mention, without getting too explicit, of ways a girl might ward off a hot-blooded beau, provided that was what she wanted. It should come as no surprise that these instructions, doled out by my enthusiastic darling, weren’t taken all too seriously. Most of the shiksas were smart enough to count to nine, and there were few people in the factory unaware that our first child must have been conceived sometime before our low-key wedding. But that fact only made them more inclined to accept my Rivka.

  During a dinner at our house, Rivka enthusiastically told some of her former schoolmates about the teaching sessions, and a plan was soon hatched not only to educate my employees, but to organize cultural activities for them as well. These cultivated alumnae loved the theater, and one of Rivka’s complaints was that she hadn’t been able to get there very often since her marriage. At school they’d had an inspirational classics teacher who had challenged himself to make his students see that the language of the ancient Greeks could inspire the young people of today. Rivka had often described in colorful detail how they had staged The Twelve Labors of Hercules. It had been one of the high points of her school days. (Actually, the story of Hercules has always intrigued me, especially the way it begins: Alcmene gives birth to twins with two different fathers. It was just a myth, of course, for the idea that two eggs could be simultaneously fertilized by two different men was implausible even in ancient Greece. Still, I considered it to be the best explanation yet for the fact that Aaron and I had turned out so very different in every respect.)

  As the company around our dining room table grew jollier and jollier—I have always prided myself on being a generous host—it was agreed that some of them would devote one evening a week to helping Rivka mount a production starring factory employees. No Hercules for them, of course; that wouldn’t have gone over very well with these former peasants. It would have to be a revue, lavishly produced, and all the local yokels, even workers from rival factories, were to be invited. It would definitely be a novelty in this district, a pioneering endeavor in what’s now known as sociocultural work, and it was at first roundly mocked by outsiders. Some of my co-industrialists even accused u
s of harboring socialist sympathies, but I didn’t see the harm in it, frankly. On the contrary, I had a notion that Rivka and her Amsterdam friends were building goodwill for our firm.

  In the late spring of 1930, a large audience gathered in the converted workmen’s canteen to watch the first and only performance of Tittle-Tattle. It was a cabaret show: Marius and his Mice, Toontje and his Carboys, Belinda the Mystic, and Karl the Butcher-Knife Juggler. Toby from export turned out to be a gifted comedian and trumpet player, lab technician Maria played the singing saw, Has and Hanneke twirled around the stage, and Rosie pulled a test rabbit out of a top hat that looked suspiciously like one that belonged to me. Felix the foreman, assisted by a group of lab workers, staged an elaborate goat-circus act; Saartje gleefully declaimed some comic verse, and for the finale, Rivka and her friends had rounded up the would-be performers without special talents into a chorus: the Song-Singers, who didn’t even sound all that out of tune. The show was a great success, and it started a long tradition of theatricals at our plant.