An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  I wonder what he would think if I asked him a question like that. He doesn’t look like he ever thinks of things like that so it might mean that he does.

  Here’s Danny Ginsberg’s brand new THEORY OF OP-POSITES: I am the opposite inside of what I seem to be outside!

  Out of the difference I create the real me!

  When he drove away I couldn’t stop myself from taking a chance and waving to him, but he didn’t see me from his rear view mirror. My heart is pounding now just like it was then.

  The other boys are working on their secret room in the basement now but they didn’t invite me to come.

  Remember to look up: his address and phone number.

  TUESDAY

  They’re having movies in the dining room now so I’m in my bed writing with the lights on instead of by flashlight. When I hear noises I jump so that tells me how frightened I really am, but nobody misses me downstairs or cares.

  When he knows, will he care?

  I was there before the stores opened but he never came. I waited until 12:30 and followed the same route he took yesterday. I wish I had the courage to ask somebody he spoke to about him and when he might be coming back.

  I got back here early but I didn’t want to see anybody or go to Dr. Fogel’s Hebrew class so I went to sleep. Somebody was touching my combination lock while I was gone and trying to read what I write.

  A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO WHOEVER MAY BE READING THIS: DANNY THE ORPHAN SAYS, “ALL ORPHANS ARE LIARS.”

  Because I’m an orphan my statement must be a lie. But if it’s a lie then all orphans could not be liars. But if all orphans are not liars and I’m an orphan, then All Orphans Are Liars is a true statement. But it cannot be true because I am an orphan.

  That’s called an antinomy.

  A COROLLARY: THE TRUTH IS THAT EVERYTHING I WRITE IN MY DIARY IS A LIE!

  WEDNESDAY

  Today I stayed here and asked if I could work in the office and Mr. Gitelman let me. They let me do anything I want here because they’re grateful to have me in comparison with the others. Mr. Gitelman said he’d be in the maintenance shed working but he winked at me and he knew that I knew that he and Mr. Levine and George and Ernie would be playing cards.

  I locked the door and looked him up.

  His file is very thick, but even though nobody would ever know the difference I didn’t remove anything or copy out anything. I like to read about what he was like when he was a boy before he got to my age. All the reports say he would have been a Leader others looked up to even if he wasn’t such an athlete. When he was my age he was only an inch taller than me.

  I went through the letters on Mr. Gitelman’s desk and found out that the rumor about closing the Home is true. There was a letter from the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies to Mr. Gitelman giving the reason: There aren’t enough Jewish orphans anymore because of the new abortion laws!

  I remembered not to feel guilty about spying and this is what I imagined: If I was on an airplane and it was hijacked and if the hijackers asked all the Jews to stand up, I wouldn’t do it. If they murdered all the Jews in front of my eyes and if the FBI came and killed the hijackers in a shoot-out and if I walked off the plane by myself I still wouldn’t feel guilty!

  Today Larry Silverberg came up to me and said I could come visit their clubhouse but that they voted not to give me a key. I told him what I knew about the Home closing and he smiled and squeezed my shoulder muscle, next to my neck, so that it hurt until I almost screamed. He whispered that they were making plans already. He said that if Mr. Gitelman found out they would know who the rat was.

  What will Dr. Fogel do if the Home closes? Where will he go? From the photos he’s been here since before Charlie or his group. The 1st photo of Dr. Fogel is from 1932 but he might have been here before that. Even though his face was softer then it looks the same as now, with his skin being full of folds like a bulldog’s. 1935 is the 1st year with him in the pictures with the football teams.

  THURSDAY

  I worked in Mr. Gitelman’s office again in the morning. I told him he could have the day off and he laughed to hear a sentence like that from a boy like me. I’m a mystery to him.

  I typed out names and addresses I need and I tried some letters, giving the reasons I’m being transferred. I liked writing about myself. I made up different life stories for myself and I thought: I could make up my whole life’s story before it happens and present it to Charlie and he could see how beautifully our life would turn out together!

  At 11 o’clock Larry and Marty came into the office carrying Steve between them and screaming that he was having a heart attack. I telephoned to the shed and told Mr. Gitelman that Steve was having another fit and he came and took care of things.

  Mr. Gitelman and I stood in the hallway together after looking at the photos of former orphans which go all the way down the corridor. There are photos from as far back as 1904. There are photos of all the Home’s football, baseball and basketball teams. There are photos of members of the Board of Directors and officers of the Maccabee Clubs and Bar Kochba Clubs and the Thespian Society, and there are signed photos of great Jewish athletes sending their best wishes to us. There are 5 locked glass cases with trophies and cups and medals.

  Above the exit to the courtyard is a sign which says

  BENNY LEONARD HAS DONE MORE TO CONQUER ANTI-SEMITISM THAN A THOUSAND TEXTBOOKS!

  Mr. Gitelman saw me staring at photos of former orphans and this is what I said to him then: “They don’t make orphans like they used to.”

  He laughed so hard he was almost crying, but I didn’t smile.

  Mr. Gitelman calls us an Army of Defectives.

  Mr. Levine calls us retards and retreads.

  Even though we don’t have enough boys to have teams anymore, on the 1st day of the school year each of us is required to choose a famous Jewish athlete after whom we’re supposed to model ourselves. It’s something they’ve been doing here for over 40 years. Mr. Levine the gym teacher calls it a tradition. Dr. Fogel laughs at him!

  These are the athletes I have chosen since I’m here: Johnny Kling, Herman Barron, Dolly Stark, Jackie “Kid” Berg. This year Mr. Levine told me to be Moe Berg, the major league catcher who could speak 6 languages and was on a radio program called “Information Please.”

  People think I’m smarter than I am just because I don’t say so much out loud.

  After Mr. Gitelman left I decided that my favorite photo of Charlie is the small one where he has his arms around the shoulders of 2 other boys. They’re in the country with their shirts off and 2 other boys are sitting on the grass in front of them. Next to the boys is an elderly man in a suit. He’s very handsome, with skin that shines, and he’s wearing a straw hat and holding a football under one arm. Under the photo it says, “Uncle Sol and His Boys. Spring Valley, 1947.”

  What I think Charlie was thinking when the photo was taken: He wishes he could know all the people in history who will ever be seeing him in this photo of this single moment! When I think of the photo now I see light coming from his eyes.

  In the photo of him with the football team when he was 12 years old he didn’t have any scar on his bottom lip. Then when he was 13 years old you can see a new scar running sideways even though the photo of his face in the picture is as small as a dime. Then the next year the scar is almost gone. But in the photo I like best, when he’s smiling, it makes the scar show again!

  I saw a page in LIFE magazine of a man who took a photo with his daughter and himself in front of his house, standing in the exact same position every year for about 40 years from the time she was a little girl until he was an old man and she had grown children of her own.

  After supper it was my turn to work in the kitchen. I like to watch the trays of glasses go through the suds machine. I like the noise of pots and silverware, and I like to be inside the steam. I laid out all the leftover bread on trays and covered the trays with damp towels. I filled the salt shakers and sugar bowls a
nd ketchup containers. I sorted silverware and stacked dishes.

  At supper I counted. There are 14 of us left now, and counting the Puerto Ricans who work in the kitchen and clean the buildings there are 19 staff members.

  *

  The courtyard, with connected two-story buildings on three sides and a brick wall and wide iron gate on the fourth, was a rectangle of dirt, 230 feet wide and 160 feet long. A boy stood on top of the brick wall that was beside the gate and, in the dull yellow light that came from the lampposts beyond the Home, he gestured frantically to somebody on the street below. Suddenly—Danny felt his heart stop—the boy turned and leapt from the wall, rolled in the dust, then scampered to the iron gate and pulled it open.

  Three boys came through the entrance, carrying a large stuffed sofa, upside down, above their heads. “Turn around,” Steve said. Danny turned and faced the building from which he’d come. All lights were out. Steve tied a handkerchief around Danny’s eyes and, one hand on his shoulder, Danny followed him across the courtyard and into one of the unused buildings. He heard the other boys grunt and curse as they bumped the sofa down the metal staircase ahead of him. They passed through two rooms, then went down a second staircase and along a dirt-floored corridor before they stopped. Another door opened.

  When the blindfold was removed, Danny saw eleven boys sitting on the floor, in a circle. They were all dressed in street clothes, and, the only one in pajamas and slippers, Danny could not keep from shivering.

  Larry Silverberg put an arm around his shoulder and told him they expected to come across a good electric heater in the next few days. He told Danny they had invited him down because they thought he might be able to help them with strategy. Larry gestured to the room. “Not bad, huh?”

  Danny said nothing. He looked around at the calendars and posters on the walls—naked girls with large breasts, horses pulling sleighs through snow-covered landscapes, sailboats dipping in peaceful waters—and he tried to smile back at Larry. The walls were paneled in a golden-colored wood, and there was a double porcelain sink built into one wall, with glass-doored cabinets above and below it. A large pink water-stained mattress took up about a third of the floor space. There were wooden chairs, three stand-up lamps, the sofa he had seen in the courtyard, an oval Formica table, and cartons of paperback books and comics.

  As always, the others said nothing to Danny, and he said nothing to them. Larry sat at one end of the circle and talked about making plans. He announced that Danny had heard from Mr. Gitelman that the Home was definitely going to close and that all of them would be separated and shipped out to different institutions. He told Danny to tell them that what he said was true and Danny nodded, but he did not move toward the circle.

  While Larry talked about battle plans and defenses and assignments, Danny tried to see pictures of Charlie in his head, but instead he saw a supermarket in Charlie’s neighborhood, where he had stopped two days before, and he saw himself in one of the antitheft mirrors on the ceiling, watching an old Jewish man stuff cans of food into his coat pocket. Danny had looked away at once—had felt, somehow, as if he had done something wrong. When he was in supermarkets, he played a game he called “shopping for Jews”—he tried to guess which customers were Jews by how they looked and what they bought. Women and men who bought no meat were Jews. Those who turned cans around in their hands, looking for a Kosher , were Jews.…

  Two boys rolled around on the mattress, punching and cursing, and Larry yanked one of them by the hair. He glanced at Danny and talked about how the Jews had been outnumbered one hundred to one by the Arabs and had defeated them because they were smarter. He talked about recruiting the Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood to help them when the time came in exchange for letting the Puerto Ricans sneak into the clubhouse as a place to take their girl friends in the winter.

  “But I thought we got this place ready so we could hold out here when the spies attack us!” Steve yelled.

  Larry slapped him on the side of the head.

  “Burn the jerk, Larry!” a boy yelled, offering a cigarette. “C’mon, let’s burn the jerk!”

  Then—Danny had not even seen them shift from their positions—Larry was punching and shouting and grabbing, trying to get the boys back under control. Three of them held Steve down on the mattress, threatening to burn his bared stomach with a lit cigarette. Two boys slouched around the room, their right arms swinging limply from their sides, mimicking Dr. Fogel. Two of the younger boys were on top of each other on the new couch, moaning and giggling, a calendar of a naked girl between them. Danny backed to the door and waited. “I didn’t want you to see them like this,” Larry said to him. “It always ends up this way.”

  He wrapped a beer-soaked handkerchief around Danny’s eyes and Danny squirmed slightly, but stopped the instant Larry put pressure on the back of his neck.

  When they were outside in the courtyard Larry spoke to him again. “You’re a real smart boy,” he said. “You tell me what you would do if you were me, okay? You think about that.”

  They walked across the courtyard, then up the stairs, and the stone steps were colder under Danny’s feet than the dirt had been outside. Marty stood guard at the hallway window outside the dormitory. “Nothing to report,” he said.

  “You think about what I said and give me a good answer tomorrow,” Larry whispered to Danny.

  Danny went into the dormitory and got into his bed. There were pillows and rolled-up bundles of clothes under the blankets in the other beds, but it didn’t really matter, he knew. The night watchman, an elderly black man who worked full-time at the Post Office during the day, spent his shift sleeping in Mr. Gitelman’s office. Danny waited awhile. Then, when he was warm again, he tiptoed to the other end of the room, out into the corridor, and unlocked his metal locker. He sat on the stone floor and wrote by flashlight.

  *

  Continued:

  I just got back from seeing their secret clubhouse. I’m not sure exactly where it is because they blindfolded me to take me there, but it’s a room that was probably once used for special meetings of trustees or alumni, with beautiful wood walls and sinks and cabinets and counters for serving drinks.

  Larry Silverberg wants me to help him plan what to do to stop the Home from sending us away but I couldn‘t say anything to him!

  All the others didn’t have the patience to make plans with him and they went crazy the way they always do, wrestling and imitating boys and girls making love to each other. They have beer and wine hidden in their room.

  What I kept telling myself: I can‘t get involved in their plan because it will get in the way of mine!

  I just kept saying nothing and trying to show nothing in my face and that kept Larry from getting angry with me. I’m the only boy here he’s never really tried to hurt but I have to remember not to trust anyone, whether it’s him or Mr. Gitelman or even Dr. Fogel!

  I hear some of them coming back across the courtyard now, trying to keep their voices low. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

  FRIDAY

  In the morning Mr. Gitelman asked me why I didn‘t go out to public school since I was the only boy from the Home with the right to go and I told him that a group of Puerto Rican boys there had threatened to beat me up because I was a Jew.

  I didn’t have to say anything else. Mr. Gitelman’s children are in private schools. He used to be a public school teacher.

  But this is what really happens: When I go to the school they leave me alone. I’m in all the special classes and the teachers always give me a lot of attention, but what I like to do most is just sit in the school library and memorize things. Most people leave me alone most of the time. When groups of blacks go through the subways and gang up on people they never choose me. I can look at you in a way that doesn’t make you feel anything.

  They can take me out of the school or send me away from the Home or change teachers on me or transfer me to a different school, but they can’t take away the words I have inside me!
When you have enough facts and know when to use them people believe you’re strong. That’s why the boys don’t bother Dr. Fogel the way they do the other teachers who come here, even though he’s an old man who’s smaller than I am, and has a right hand and arm which are no good.

  I went to his class in the afternoon and there were 3 other boys there. Dr. Fogel sat in the front with his head on his good hand, resting his eyes. I chanted the Haftorah for my Bar Mitzvah and he listened without saying if I was good or bad.

  Then he sent the other boys away and asked me if I wanted to chant the Maftir also on my Bar Mitzvah day. The Maftir is the portion from the Torah that comes just before the Haftorah. I said yes.

  I followed him from the room and across the courtyard. Larry Silverberg was sitting with his back against a wall, carving a pointed stick, and he waved to me. We walked down 3 steps and Dr. Fogel went into the Shul. The room is small and the only time we ever use it anymore is when one of us is Bar Mitzvahed.

  My Haftorah is from Ezekiel and it lists the sins of the Children of Israel and how they murdered and committed adultery and incest and did not observe the Sabbath.

  Why I believe Dr. Fogel likes it: because of what Ezekiel makes God say about his own hand.

  This is what it says: “Thou has greedily gained of thy neighbors by oppression and has forgotten Me, saith the Lord God. Behold, therefore I have smitten My hand at the dishonest gain which thou hast made and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee.”

  I helped Dr. Fogel take a Torah from the Ark. He took off the velvet cover and rolled the scroll from one side to the other until he found my portion.

  A question I thought of that I didn’t ask: If God believes He is the only God why is He always jealous of other Gods who don’t exist?

  Dr. Fogel unlocked the door next to the Ark and we went into a small dark room called the GENIZAH. The smell there was beautiful, from the dust and old leather. Dr. Fogel explained to me that old prayer books, because they contain the name of God, can never be destroyed. When a Torah is too mutilated to be used anymore it’s buried in the ground like a man, wrapped in a Talis.