The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  The Dauphine rattled on. “Work is the only thing that can save Rafaël. It is imperative that he be free to immerse himself in his research and in the business once again, so as not to succumb to his terrible guilt over having allowed their deportation to happen. Over not having been able to prevent it. If there’s even a crumb of humanity left inside you, Motke, then with all my heart I beg of you to change your mind and let him decide for himself when is the right time to stop. By kicking him out this way you are robbing him of his last scrap of dignity and integrity, and to Rafaël, that is the most important thing there is, and the only thing remaining to him now.”

  Ah yes, Levine and his confounded sense of integrity; as if that hadn’t thrown a wrench in the works often enough! As if there didn’t come a time for every man to step aside. I tried pointing out to the Dauphine that most people, when they grow old, find it difficult to say goodbye to a career that has been a lifelong fulfillment, but later laugh at themselves for their initial reluctance and are only too happy to enjoy the freedom of their retirement. And didn’t my offer give the Levines the opportunity to look after their orphaned grandchildren?

  The Dauphine gave me a withering look. “Judas,” she snarled at me. “You are no better than the traitor Judas. Remorse, Motke, often comes too late. If this does turn out to be the death of him, it will be on your conscience. Never forget that.”

  Then she turned and marched out of the room.

  Over the course of my life, as all the kvetching about my supposed hardheartedness grew louder, my sensitivity to it lessened. Just as I had been learning to steel myself against emotional hurt, I became increasingly adept at shrugging off the spiteful accusations. Most people aren’t able to see beyond their own reality, their own perspective. Rafaël was no exception. I was prepared to give him an honorable send-off with a generous payout, a pocket full of company shares, and a grand retirement party. But Rafaël and the Dauphine remained stubbornly stuck in their rancor, and I held fast to my decision.

  A few weeks later I received a lengthy epistle from some pricey lawyer in which Rafaël’s demands were laid out. These included, among other things, over fifty percent of all company assets. A rather ugly legal tussle ensued, but before it ever made it into court, news reached me of Rafaël’s sudden death. He had been on vacation, staying in a Swiss hotel somewhere in the Alps, trying to regain his strength after the years of deprivation. One day, sitting in the lounge, he was startled by a loud noise. An automobile had missed the hairpin bend in front of the hotel and had crashed into the steep rock face. Levine, still a medical doctor through and through, had jumped up to help. As he raced outside faster than was advisable in his precarious condition, he’d had a massive heart attack and keeled over, dead on the spot. The colossus was slain performing his cherished calling: saving human lives. At least he went out with his boots on—a blessed Tommy Cooper death, one might say.

  His passing was world news. Elaborate obituaries appeared in every established newspaper around the globe, unanimously commemorating him as one of the most important scientists of the century, a congenial fellow, and a great inspiration to younger talents. Most of the articles also mentioned his significant role in our company. Fortunately, our recent dispute had not yet become public; the court case was still at a preliminary stage, and the matter could now be put to rest, thank God.

  • • •

  On the death announcement, scribbled in the Dauphine’s handwriting, I read the following:

  Judas Iscariot, you will understand that your attendance at the funeral is not required. You are the one who broke his heart.

  After five years of chaos and war, Rafaël was the first person we knew to receive a proper burial. The fact that my presence at his send-off was unwelcome hurt my feelings more than I liked to admit. I posted a death notice in the newspapers on behalf of Farmacom, and arranged with the finance department a—to my mind—very generous widow’s pension for the Dauphine in the form of cash and shares; I later heard she found it most inadequate.

  A month after his death a memorial service was organized for him at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. That time I did go and pay my respects, was haughtily ignored by the Dauphine and her remaining offspring, and sat through the ceremony in one of the back rows. There, listening to the tributes and musical interludes, I was suddenly overcome with appreciation and gratitude. I remembered the early years of our inspiring collaboration, when we had stimulated each other and worked side by side to launch the business—the innovative partnership that had given birth to the prize venture it was today.

  Of course, he should have been granted a few more peaceful years with his Dauphine, but I can’t deny that I did feel a certain measure of relief when I realized that with his death, all the head-butting, the incessant stream of rebukes about all my alleged transgressions, had finally come to an end. His passing gave me free rein to run Farmacom the way I chose to. I was the royal merchant, an honorary professor at the University of Utrecht, the prince consort’s bosom buddy, an indisputable captain of industry, and a leading light in postwar Holland’s economy. Not bad for a kid who never finished high school.

  The death of Rafaël Levine, the Prussian fossil from Amsterdam, underscored the fact that a new era was at hand.

  45 …

  With a conspiratorial wink, the young thing has turned on the television for me, with the sound down so as not to wake Cerberus-Mizie from her beauty sleep.

  Tonight the poor abused slut has shown up for a press conference. There she stands, the sacrificial lamb, the pathetic victim, claiming that my Ezra forced her to submit to his filthy fumbling in his New York office just hours before the board was to announce its dastardly bid to take the company public. Our company, in which my son is chief executive officer. He has a veto, and was surely planning to use it to stop this IPO. And rightly so: Ezra represents the firm’s history, he stands for over seventy years of a family firm stoutly rooted in the Netherlands’ sandy soil, watered by my own blood, sweat, and tears, eventually sprouting into the huge multinational it is today. Could this have happened if I hadn’t been prepared to make so many sacrifices, breaking out of my comfort zone time and time again? Would the business have become such an international success story if I hadn’t felt fine from the start about getting my hands dirty? If I hadn’t always put the firm first, might Aaron and Levine not have lived longer? Did I not sacrifice my marriage to Rivka to it? Isn’t my life a bit like the story of the patriarch Abraham, who climbed the mountain with his son Isaac, prepared to cast his dearest child onto the pyre in his zeal to obey a higher power?

  Those are questions you tend not to ask yourself as long as you’re whirling through the maelstrom of life. It’s only now that they come to me, here in my metal cage, flashing like lightning bolts through my fevered brain. My mind is on fire, as Abraham’s must have been when he was climbing that mountain with a heavy tread. He must have asked himself why he was being made to commit such an unspeakable act. But when you’re in the thick of it, it doesn’t seem possible to do otherwise. You see only what’s in front of you, like a blinkered horse on a treadmill.

  I wish I didn’t have to deal with those questions, and I don’t want to be a witness to my son’s downfall; the fact that he got caught in this trap means he’ll soon be given the old heave-ho. A CEO accused of rape is no longer able to serve the interests of his company. What they’re out to do, in fact, is hijack our life’s work and toss it into the greedy maw of the money-grubbers on the U.S. Stock Exchange. They’re not doing it for the good of the firm; no, there’s no reason other than the needs of the pitiless shareholders, the vultures of the modern age, who don’t care a fig about any company they’re invested in, but are just out to make a quick buck, even if it’s at the expense of an entire business, an entire country, a continent. Farmacom will be fodder for those deadbeats, the slick operators in their expensive Italian suits who’ll put the whole place up for sale in a heartbeat. What do those thieves know about
the importance of research, of the interdependence of science and commerce, of the countless sacrifices that were made just so they could fatten their portfolios?

  Is it a coincidence that it is now, in these final hours before the crucial vote, that my Ezra gets booked by a posse of grim-looking cops, all on account of this sleazy tart’s allegation that he raped her when she came to clean his office? Ha—just look at her standing there in a respectable little dress; it hurts my eyes, and not just because of the blinding camera flashes of the paparazzi, the hacks who will milk this scandal for all it’s worth. Just as sewer rats splashing through the muck ingest the plague’s deadly germs, so the press hounds slake their thirst on the obscene slander of this she-wolf in her prim and proper sheep’s clothing.

  You can’t fool me: the little trollop the whole circus is focused on, that pious little saint, isn’t a hair better than that other hayseed I once had to deal with, fat Bertha.

  Is Ezra upset he can’t come and see me? Is he as sick as I am about the fact that I can’t just pick up the phone and call him? I’d so very much like one last opportunity to talk to him, to strategize how to deal with this sneak attack! I long so terribly for my son that it makes me scream. It comes out sounding like the raspy croak of a frog at sundown. The pain of losing our family business is just unbearable. Enough! For God’s sake let me get back to a time when life was all triumphs and accolades.

  46 …

  If you want to be a winner in the struggle for success, you must always know for certain what others dare only guess.

  That advertising slogan of the postwar period became my motto. Those years of reconstruction were, in a sense, reminiscent of Farmacom’s earliest days. Despite the rapidly growing political tensions between East and West, the world was bubbling with energy, and the survivors were chomping at the bit to set the Continent back on its feet as quickly as possible and get to work on creating a new society.

  We certainly did our fair share, restructuring the De Paauw–Farmacom Co. by setting up a central board as the chief operating body, at the head of which I, as chairman, ruled the roost. For, as they say, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Not even a year went by before we were able to open new factories in Scotland and Belgium; the next year it was Sweden.

  We seized any opportunity we could get to capitalize on the needs of a convalescent Continent. We added the recently developed insecticide DDT to our industrial output, and it turned out to be a golden goose, for lice were rampant throughout Europe, a downright plague. During the war years those itchy, irritating little parasites had infested the camps with their foul pestilence, attacking the already weakened prisoners with lethal diseases like the dreaded typhoid. Even when the war was over it took years for hygienic conditions to improve. Many concentration camps in the East were still crowded with refugees, the homeless and the displaced. Conditions in those warehouses of human misery remained alarmingly unsanitary.

  One of our colleagues had read about the wonder chemical DDT, which had famously stopped the 1943 Naples typhoid outbreak in its tracks. That epidemic had been brought under control within three weeks, and thousands of lives were spared. As Europe began getting back on its feet, I decided we should jump on the bandwagon and market the stuff under our own trademark. It would cultivate goodwill and help us get name recognition, besides bringing in a tidy profit to boot. We began distributing the chemical in powder form in late 1945, and by the following year the demand for DDT was such that it had overtaken even insulin, heretofore our most reliable cash cow. My hunch was proved right: even without our grand mastermind, Rafaël Levine, at the helm, Farmacom was chugging full speed ahead.

  Not long after the success of DDT, we began manufacturing vitamin A and vitamin B12 from liver extract, and had another hit on our hands. With four outside partners, we signed a licensing deal for cortisone drugs derived from the adrenal glands, which proved to have a spectacular effect on rheumatoid arthritis; we also made the switch to synthetic production of estradiol, a female hormone, which freed us from the enormously laborintensive and smelly job of distilling the stuff from horse urine. No longer at the mercy of the local farmers’ foolish superstitions, we were now able to manufacture the chemical version year-round, not just during the short window when pregnant mares produced enough of the stuff.

  Our business was booming; we were forging new partnerships and making acquisitions all around the world. Clinching our success was the most famous product of all, the mother lode of pharmaceuticals: the birth-control pill. The Pill was made from lynestrenol, the most important steroid our firm ever developed. Some other, more tentative brands of the Pill had already come on the market in Belgium and America, but we were the first to mass-produce it on a larger scale. It wasn’t until many months after we’d begun manufacturing it, however, that we discovered how strong its effects could be—that even just handling the stuff was enough to cause distinct physical changes. Slowly, in dribs and drabs, we started hearing from stammering male employees, blushing furiously and hanging their heads, that they seemed to be growing female breasts, and as if that weren’t bad enough, their male parts weren’t working properly either. Shame had kept many of them from coming forward for far too long, aggravating the problem considerably.

  Ah yes, the Pill—the hostility it aroused was not just because our men were suddenly turning into ladies. It was the clergy, those pricks, the pastors and priests in this backward and Godfearing region, who were stirring up the workers against a drug that freed women from the fear of pregnancy. But did I ever have the last laugh! We wound up sending the euphemistic “menstruation-regulating drug” to a number of the convents in the area. There the pills were packaged and readied for shipment by the industrious Catholic nuns, in blissful ignorance of the blasphemous nature of the product they were so efficiently handling.

  • • •

  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.