Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  I set aside the postcards and took out his military letters. Sam had gone to enlist right away, but the army was taking too long to get new units organized, so he joined the National Guard upstate, figuring once they deployed, his age wouldn’t hold him back. He wrote from basic training to tell me how easy it was. Not that the exercises and the drills weren’t hard—they had one sergeant who made them run until they vomited. It was just that it all came back to him: the rules, the orders, the discipline. Everyone sleeping and showering and eating together. It’s like the Home was basic for the military, he scrawled. He knew all the training was important and he excelled at it, but he chafed at being garrisoned. It was the summer of 1943 before their unit finally mustered up for the ground war in Europe. We better not win this thing before I get my chance to fight.

  He needn’t have worried. The conflict dragged on in a way no one had expected. Soldiers were coming home, not in victory but on stretchers. Wounded veterans began showing up in my hospital. It was like the Infirmary all over again except the boys were bigger, their bloody noses and scraped knees now shrapnel wounds or severed limbs. And those were the lucky ones. I tried not to think about the men left behind, killed on some battlefield or too wounded to survive the voyage home. Once he was overseas, Sam wrote when he could, each stained page containing the fewest sentences necessary to assure me he was safe, there being no words for what he was really seeing. Despite his reassurances, every long stretch between letters tempted me to imagine him among the dead.

  After victory in Europe, I worried Sam might be sent to the Pacific, but there was enough of a mess to mop up in Germany and Austria to keep him out of that until it was all over. When Sam’s division shipped home in ’46, he got assigned to an army barracks up on Amsterdam Avenue, where they were housing soldiers in a big old building that looked like a castle. I thought, after the war, that Sam would settle down in New York, give us a chance to become reacquainted. It turned out, though, he had more leaving to do.

  It had been awhile since one of Sam’s letters had arrived from Israel. I kept them all in order. The very earliest ones, bearing the stamp of Palestine, had been delivered promptly. Then there was the heart-stopping gap, months and months in 1948 when nothing arrived and all the news was terrible—fighting, bombings, sieges. That first envelope with a stamp all in Hebrew dropped me to my knees in relief. Even after the post became reliable, Sam’s correspondence was spotty. On the rare occasions that a blue airmail envelope arrived, I drew out the time until I opened it, running my fingers over paper that felt dry as the desert. Cutting open the edges, I inhaled the captured scent, imagining orange groves and palm trees. The paper folded flat felt gritty; sometimes I’d find grains of sand in the creases. Sam now had so much to say that he filled every available space with his scrawl. I struggled to follow his talk of the fighting and of politics, but I savored his descriptions of the country: the sparse beauty of the dry hills, the night sky over the desert, the sparkling expanse of the Galilee. When he recounted his struggle to learn Hebrew, I wrote back, teasing, that he should have paid better attention at the Home studying for his bar mitzvah. It’s not about religion, he replied. It’s so we speak our own language, the only language that’s even been ours alone.

  After the Armistice Agreements, he left the permanent army and joined a kibbutz, became one of its leaders from the way he talked about it, though he claimed no one person was in charge. Instead of skirmishes and negotiations, his letters became devoted to irrigation schemes and housing plans. Then came a letter that took me by surprise, though I should have expected it eventually. Sam was getting married. He’d met his wife, Judith, on the kibbutz. She was a young refugee who’d spent the war hiding in a cellar only to emerge into a Europe purged of our people. I wrote back with congratulations, sent as a gift for the newlyweds a box full of seed packets, varieties of tomato and cucumber that thrive in heat.

  A year later, instead of a blue airmail letter, a small cardboard box arrived. In it, a roll of film was carefully sealed into its canister with electrician’s tape. I had it developed at the camera shop. Apparently the roll had been in the camera for a long time—the pictures told the story of an entire year. I opened the envelope of photographs again that night and dealt them out on the floor in front of the open trunk, fingering their scalloped edges.

  There was Sam, smiling broadly, his gray eyes squinting against the sun. The beautiful woman with a wash of freckles across her nose must have been Judith. In one image they were beside blue water in what seemed to be their underwear, though I supposed it must be bathing suits. In the next, they had scarves around their necks and shovels in their hands, pointing proudly to a row of saplings. In one picture, Judith wore a printed dress and held some wildflowers while Sam, in uniform, faced her. Their wedding picture. Every time I looked at it, my eyes stung. Why hadn’t I been there? That I didn’t have money or time for the journey seemed a meager excuse, even if they had thought to invite me.

  I shuffled through unpeopled pictures of gardens and fences and cinder block dwellings, their prominence in each frame telling of Sam’s pride. Then the picture of Judith turned to the side to show her pregnancy. He hadn’t written they were expecting—that photograph had been my first inkling. The last pictures on the roll were of an infant. I couldn’t tell if I had a niece or a nephew until I saw the baby crying in Sam’s arms, the rabbi hovering over him for the bris.

  I stuffed the pictures back into the envelope and abandoned myself to a good cry, stretched out on the rug, my head pillowed on my folded arms. God knows I needed to let the tears out, and that picture of my nephew brought them on every time. What good did it do me to finally have a family if they were half a world away? Sometimes I thought Sam was being deliberately cruel, dangling from a distance the only child in the world who could have filled that place in my heart. I’d assumed the baby was named after our father, imagined my nephew as Harold or Hershel or Hillel, until a letter, dated before the film was sent, arrived a few days after. He’s a true sabra, Sam wrote, born a Jew in a Jewish state. We named him Ayal. I had been surprised until Sam’s words rang in my memory. “Our father left us, Rachel. We don’t owe him a thing.” Not even, apparently, the memory of a name.

  Wrung out, I put everything back in the drawer, slid the drawer into its place, closed the trunk. Needing some air, I stepped out onto the balcony. The sky was as dark as it gets while the boardwalk and the rides were still lit up. The hot air carried notes of carnival music from the carousel. Who knows what was happening on the beach or in those shadowy places under the boardwalk. Men who met each other secretly, women who gave themselves up to their lovers, boys like that awful Marc Grossman looking to ruin some poor girl. Entire trajectories of lives were being set in motion, like balls across a billiards table.

  I used to think it was the terrible accident that felled my mother and drove my father away that had set my life along its course. Now, though, I saw it was Dr. Solomon who’d made the breaking shot. If she hadn’t used me for her experiment, I would have arrived at the Orphaned Hebrews Home whole and undamaged, pretty enough that Sam wouldn’t have felt ashamed to look at me. If I’d been a normal girl, Marc Grossman wouldn’t have been goaded into hurting me, Sam wouldn’t have had to come to my defense, and Mr. Grossman wouldn’t have given him the beating that forced him to run away. Without all that anger he carried, Sam might not have even gone to war, and if not, then neither would he have felt compelled to fight for Israel. He would have met some other girl, had different children. I’d have had nieces and nephews who grew up here where I could know them, build sand castles with them at the beach, cat’s cradle with them when I babysat, shower them with the love I would have given my own children.

  I could see now that it was hopeless. My mind would never stop running along these crazy tracks. I took a sleeping pill and surrendered myself to my empty bed. I felt again for the acorn in my breast, hoping against hope that Dr. Feldman would test it and find the cells
benign, reassure me it was only a cyst. Now that I understood how my fate depended on Mildred Solomon, it seemed not only my life that hung in the balance, but hers as well.

  Chapter Thirteen

  RACHEL WATCHED THE SKY LIGHTEN THROUGH THE soaring windows of Pennsylvania Station. She thought she’d be nervous, scared even, to be out on her own. But during her solitary wait for the subway, the enormity of what she was doing overwhelmed her anxiety. As she passed between the limestone columns of the station and emerged into the vaulted waiting hall, she felt she was leaving behind her identity as an orphan of the Home. She wrote herself a new history in which she was a nursing student going out to Colorado to join her family in Leadville. For practice, she told this story to the ticket agent when he rolled up his window.

  “Colorado?” He looked her over, adding up the bell-shaped hat, the plain dress, the cardboard case. Definitely not first class. He snorted. “Well, Pennsylvania Rail’ll get you as far as Chicago, but from there you’ll have to buy a ticket to Denver from another carrier. Try Burlington and Quincy, they’re out of Union Station. Once you get to Denver, you’ll ask about Leadville, they’ll at least have a mail train out there. The Broadway Limited and the Pennsylvania Limited, they’re both first-class trains, get you to Chicago in less than twenty-four hours. You got the money for that?”

  “I’ve got fifty dollars for the whole trip.” She’d thought it was a fortune, but the ticket agent frowned.

  “I can’t get you past Chicago on a Limited for that.” A practiced observer of strangers, he tried to figure the girl’s age, but something about her face threw him off. He looked over her shoulder—no one else on line yet. His thermos of coffee, still hot, put him in a generous mood. “Let me see what I got.” He checked the fare tables and the timetables and the passenger lists.

  “Okay, I can put you on the Western Express. It’s a local, all coach, departs at noon and gets into Chicago tomorrow night. Should leave you enough for the Burlington ticket. Now, you ever ride a train before?” Rachel shook her head no. Eyebrows, he realized. She didn’t have any, or lashes either. What could account for that? He leaned through the ticket window. “Here’s what you do. There’s no dining car or nothing on this train. On a lot of the platforms somebody’ll be selling sandwiches, but they’ll gouge you for sure. You go out this morning and get some food to take on with you, enough for the whole trip. There’s drinking water on board, so don’t worry about that. Then when you get on, you tell the conductor I said to put you by a nice family. I wouldn’t want no sister of mine next to some strange man all night.”

  By the time the agent got her ticket together, a couple of people were waiting behind Rachel. She thanked him quickly. “You watch yourself,” he said, then lifted his head. “Next!”

  Rachel went down Eighth Avenue until she found a grocer’s. She bought rolls, pears, a wedge of cheese, peanuts in a paper bag, some peppermints. On her way back to the station she got a pretzel from the newsstand for her breakfast. She wasn’t worried about anyone from the Home noticing she was gone. Vic and Mrs. Berger might wonder what she was up to when she didn’t turn up in Reception at visiting hour, but since it was against the rules for Home children to mix with new admissions during quarantine, what could they say? And tomorrow would be Labor Day; even if someone did miss her, with all the commotion of the marching band playing in the parade this year and the counselors run off their feet herding the children down Broadway to watch, there’d be no time to report a runaway. It would probably be Tuesday before her absence was finally noticed. Until then, Nurse Dreyer would think Rachel was in the F5 dorm, and Naomi would assume she’d gone back to the Infirmary.

  A tingle shot through Rachel’s body at the memory of what she had done with Naomi. It hadn’t felt strange or wrong. It had felt like the most natural thing in the world. Then the shame of having stolen from her friend turned the tingle into nausea. Whatever it was they had done, it didn’t follow the pattern of anything Rachel had been taught in school or read in a book. She thought of the girls crowding around her at the Purim Dance after Vic had kissed her, their excited congratulations. That’s what girls were supposed to want: to marry boys, to become mothers. Not to kiss each other. Rachel shook the memory of Naomi from her mind.

  In the station’s lobby, Rachel checked the board and the clock, noting the time until the Western Express was due to depart. Settling herself on one of the oak benches, she yawned. She tucked the case under her feet, wedged herself into a corner of the bench, and looked across at the ticket agent. He caught her eye over the shoulder of the customer he was serving and gave her a wink. Content she’d be watched over, Rachel dozed, lulled by the rising din of the station.

  It turned out she didn’t need to say anything to the conductor. When he saw she was alone, he placed her in a compartment with a group of women, teachers returning at the last possible moment to Fort Wayne after spending the summer on Long Island. The train clicked and rocked out of Manhattan, under the Hudson, across New Jersey, through Pennsylvania. Towns and meadows and woods and pastures and farms and streams washed across the window like a motion picture, except in color. The teachers invited Rachel to join their game of cards, but she said no, thank you, preferring the scenery. In the long evening light of summer, Rachel watched the window picture show until darkness dimmed the screen. Confronted with her reflection in the dark glass, Rachel relished the notion that no one in the world knew where she was. The freedom was intoxicating, like living inside a secret.

  Made sleepy by the swaying train, the women finally stretched their legs across the space between the facing seats, fitting their feet between each other’s hips. The next day, the Western Express made its halting way across Ohio and Indiana until the teachers tumbled out at Fort Wayne. By the time the train pulled into Chicago’s Union Station, Rachel had stopped measuring the passing hours by which bell would be ringing back at the Home. The conductor told her there was a coach car on the Overland Express to Denver, and she climbed the stairs from platform to mezzanine, anxious to get a ticket.

  Rachel had barely taken in the barrel ceiling and stone columns when two boys came chasing each other through the station. The smaller one was running full out to stay ahead, skidding across the marble floor and careening around a statue. The older boy caught at his jacket, and the little one, twisting to get away, ran into a column right in front of Rachel, his head bouncing back from the force. Blood started to drain from the boy’s nose. He let out a howl that sent the older one scurrying. Rachel scooped him onto her lap and settled on a bench, tilting his head up in the crook of her arm. She pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand while fishing out her handkerchief with the other.

  “Now, now, it’s not so bad as all that,” she murmured as the boy coughed and cried. “Was that your brother chasing you?”

  The boy looked up at her and nodded, tears mixing with the blood that drizzled across his face to puddle in his ear. Rachel wiped his cheek, then held the handkerchief under his nose. “Just breathe through your mouth, it’ll stop in a minute. Relax, now, relax. It’s all right,” she said, mimicking Nurse Dreyer’s soothing tone.

  “My brother’s always chasing me. I hate him,” the boy whimpered. His breath smelled of iron.

  “Can you imagine if you had a hundred brothers, how many bloody noses that would add up to?”

  He frowned. “No one has a hundred brothers.”

  Rachel lifted the handkerchief. The bleeding had stopped, but she kept up the pressure on the bridge of his nose. “I had a thousand brothers and sisters.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Really?”

  Rachel checked to see if the blood was still flowing. It wasn’t.

  “How about you, is that your only brother?”

  He was draped across her lap, his head heavy on her arm. “No, I have a baby brother, too, and a sister. But I’ll never chase my baby brother like Henry chases me.”

  “Of course you won’t. What’s your name?”

>   “Simon. What’s yours?”

  “Rachel.”

  Henry was being dragged toward them by an imposing man in a top hat and evening jacket.

  “Father, Henry chased me!” Simon tried to sit up, but Rachel held him.

  “You have to keep your head back for a while longer or your nose’ll start bleeding again.”

  “Yes, Simon, do as the lady says.” The man’s eyes swept over the young woman cradling his son. “Are you a nurse, miss?”

  Rachel nodded, the lie she’d told the ticket agent and the teachers sounding truer with each retelling. “A nursing student. I was doing my apprenticeship at an orphanage in New York. Now I’m going to Colorado to care for my father. He went out west last year for the cure, but my mother wrote that he’s taken a turn for the worse and she needs me there.”

  “You’ve certainly taken good care of Simon. What do you have to say to your brother, Henry?”

  “I’m sorry, Simon.”

  “Now go back to your mother.” The boy walked away, breaking into a run as soon as his father wasn’t looking. The man sat on the bench beside Rachel and placed his hand on Simon’s forehead. “All better, son? Ready to try sitting up?”

  “Oh, not yet, it’s best not to rush these things,” she said.

  “Rachel has a thousand brothers and sisters, Father!”

  “Is that so, miss?”

  “At the orphanage, they liked the children to think of each other as siblings. I got in the habit of seeing them all as my younger brothers and sisters.” She smiled, liking the way that sounded.

  “And you’re going to Denver?”