An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  When he saw the crumpled newspaper inside the glove compartment, he exhaled with relief and told himself that he was even luckier than the policeman had imagined. Charlie unwrapped the newspaper. His fingers were trembling. He glanced up, into the rear-view mirror, but saw no cars approaching.

  He held the silver tsumin box on his lap, just below the steering wheel. The bells tinkled gently. The metal felt icecold. Charlie looked into the side-view mirror, then lowered his head, opened the door, and inhaled. The fragrance of spices made him salivate. If what had just happened was crazy, he told himself, then having taken the tsumin box was even crazier. Could he even remember the reasons he’d given himself? How honest had he been with himself when he’d promised that he was only taking it for a few days, to show to a dealer in the city so he could get one like it for Danny? He’d had only a week—but why hadn’t he taken care of it during that week?

  He felt moisture along the insides of his thighs. It wouldn’t be safe to drive, he knew. He needed food, warmth, time. He sniffed the spices again, crumpled the newspaper around the box and placed it back in the glove compartment. He told himself to lock the glove compartment. When he stepped out of the car he locked all the doors and went around the car a second time, double-checking.

  Charlie entered the apartment building and walked to the second floor. Lillian opened the door. She was in a sheer pale blue nightgown, a coffee mug in her hand.

  “Sandy’s still here,” she said.

  She gave him her cheek to kiss, but he put both arms around her and pressed his mouth against her neck. “Hey—” she said. “What gives?”

  Sandy stood behind her mother, schoolbooks in her arms. “Oh,” she said. “It’s just you.”

  “Hi sweetie,” he said, and he went to her. She let him kiss her on the lips.

  “I have to meet my friend Jennifer before school, to get the history assignment,” she said, and left the apartment.

  Lillian sipped her coffee and smiled at him. “Okay,” she said. “Come on—” She walked down the hallway to her bedroom. “Once she goes she won’t come back.”

  “I didn’t come for that,” Charlie said. “I was in the neighborhood, is all. I needed to be with somebody, to get warm.”

  Lillian didn’t seem to hear what he was saying. She laughed at his words. He followed her. “I don’t have much time,” Lillian said. “I have to be at work by nine—don’t let me fall asleep after, all right?”

  When he entered the bedroom she was already under the covers. The Venetian blinds were drawn. “Something crazy happened just before,” he said. “Remember the boy who was at Murray’s funeral—the one from the Home who was staying with me?”

  She turned her back to him. He took his shoes off. “My name is Danny Ginsberg and I come from the Home,” she recited, and shuddered. “He gave me the willies, being there. He reminded me of your mother—”

  Charlie got under the covers, but he was afraid to touch her. “You never met my mother.”

  “You used to tell me how beautiful she was. You once showed me a picture of her when she was young—from before she was married.”

  “Do you want to know what happened this morning?”

  He saw her hand reach out and turn the alarm clock, on the night table, toward her. “If you make it quick, sweetie. I really—”

  “We don’t have to do this,” he said. “We could have coffee and just talk.”

  “Make up your mind.” She turned to him, her eyes mildly angry. “You told me you needed to get warm, didn’t you? What is it you’re trying to do to me?”

  She ran her forefinger down the middle of his face, between his eyes, down his nose, across his lips, to his chin. “You look tired,” she said. “You work too hard, don’t you think? You should relax a little bit more. We’d be glad to go places with you if you’d give us notice. Now that you’re a rich man…”

  She laughed and slid toward him. She was still wearing her nightgown. She put one arm over his shoulder and he shivered. “Hey,” she said. “You’re really in a state, aren’t you?” She reached down. “You’re not even—”

  He turned over, on his side, away from her, and she pressed against him from behind, her arms around his chest, “I’m sorry,” he said. “I went back to the Home and found it was closed and I climbed over the wall—then this crazy cop found me there and threatened to kill me. I told him I was looking for Danny. I forgot to mention that—that the boy ran away and I was worried about him. So I came here. I had breakfast over on 18th Avenue and realized I wasn’t in such hot shape.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, her fingers playing with the curls on his chest. “You like it best this way, don’t you—when I hold you from behind? Tell me the truth.”

  He nodded.

  “I know,” she said. “You like me to talk to you like this too, don’t you?”

  He nodded again.

  “We never talked much before we were married, but now that I’m heading for middle age and grandchildren—now you like me to tell you everything that’s happening, don’t you?”

  “Please…” he said.

  “I wish I had the time,” she said. “I’ll probably be the youngest grandmother in the neighborhood.” She pulled away. “It’s getting toward eight already and I have to put makeup on and get dressed and get to work. Can you come back tonight? We could talk then.” She stroked him with her fingertip, just below the navel. “I like you down here. You’re nice and flat.” She licked his shoulders. “It sounds like you were the crazy one, if you ask me—what’s a cop supposed to think, finding a big guy like you in a closed-up building?”

  “Okay,” Charlie said. “Just hold me then.”

  “You always get big more quickly this way, don’t you, but listen, hey—” she whispered in his ear. “I don’t mind even a little bit. I like it too. I like you and I like being able to say what I want to you and I like that you need me and just come barging in, like this morning.”

  She had both hands between his thighs, spreading them. He felt his muscles contract, involuntarily. She ran her tongue down his spine and he didn’t know how to tell her that this wasn’t really what he had come for. “I took something from Murray’s house,” he said. “It’s in the car, locked up.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, then stopped, briefly. “I’m so sorry about that, Charlie. I really am. I know how you loved him.”

  When she was dressed, he offered to drive her into the city, but she said she preferred the subway. It would give her time to rest, without talking.

  Charlie drove through Brooklyn, down Flatbush Avenue and across the Manhattan Bridge. He’d wanted to tell Lillian about Sol, but there hadn’t been time. Lillian had always liked Sol. He drove to the office of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and spoke to several people before he found somebody who had information about the Home.

  Charlie sat in the man’s small office and explained that he had grown up in the Home and had taken an interest in one of the boys now there. The man found a folder and told Charlie that all of the remaining nine boys had been transferred to other facilities, but that there was no listing for any boy named Daniel Ginsberg. He showed Charlie a small photo of each boy, in case Charlie had the wrong name, but Danny’s face did not appear among them. Perhaps, Charlie suggested, Danny had been transferred somewhere else just before the Home had closed.

  The man looked through more folders. “Here’s a complete roster of all the boys who were there during its final eighteen months, with the disposition of each case. There’s a small snapshot of each boy, and fingerprints.” He passed one sheet to Charlie. “There’s a Greenburg here—Martin Green-burg—but I find no Ginsberg.”

  Charlie looked at all the pictures. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “When was the last time you saw him there, Mr. Sapistein?”

  Charlie scratched his head and acknowledged that he might have been mistaken. It had been a while. Things got away from him sometimes. The man did not show tha
t he was in any way suspicious of Charlie’s inquiry, but Charlie warned himself to be careful, to keep from saying anything about Danny having stayed with him. “It’s funny, though,” Charlie said, standing to leave. “I mean, that the place is closed—that there won’t be any more Jewish orphans.”

  “It must be,” the man said, and he stood also. “And there’s one bad effect in all this too—I mean the black market in Jewish babies.”

  Charlie felt nothing.

  “It’s soared out of sight. This is off the record, of course, but I’ve been told that Jewish parents without children are willing to pay up to fifty thousand dollars to obtain a certified Jewish baby these days. And even then they can never really be one hundred percent sure.” He walked around his desk and opened the door for Charlie. “I feel sorry for them.” Charlie saw the gold-framed photographs on the man’s desk, of wife and three children—two sons, one daughter.

  “I have a daughter,” Charlie said. “I was divorced, but I still see her. She’s a big girl now.”

  The man smiled. “If we can be of any further help, just call on us. I have your address and phone number should anything come across my desk.”

  Charlie left the building and was a block away before he realized that he had forgotten to ask about what had been done with all the records and photographs and trophies and medals. He wished he could have seen his own file—to see information on what he’d been like, according to others, when he’d been a boy.

  He walked toward Grand Central Station, along 42nd Street. He imagined that most other people had a similar curiosity about the past—not about themselves, perhaps, but about the childhoods of their parents and grandparents. You could never ask older people—Sol or Mittleman or Dr. Fogel—to talk about their own boyhoods, though. You had to wait on older people. They told you stories about themselves when they were ready to tell them.

  Charlie wondered if Danny had been in touch with Dr. Fogel. He wondered how Dr. Fogel was filling his days, without the Home. He imagined himself in Dr. Fogel’s living room, telling Dr. Fogel and Danny about Sol’s new life. He saw himself saying that when he thought of Sol now he thought of a story Max had read to him, from the newspaper, about a man who went around the country, from town to town, placing an ad in each local paper. The ad gave a post office box number and said, simply, Last Chance to Send in Your Dollar! The man had averaged between three and four hundred dollars a town before he’d been stopped. Max had tacked the item to the corkboard beside his desk. Charlie wanted to remember to give the story to Sol, the next time Sol telephoned.

  When he entered his car, Charlie checked the glove compartment. The tsumin box was there. In truth, he reasoned, the absence of any records concerning Danny helped to explain things. He figured that the boy had reached the Home a day or two after it had been closed. There was no mystery to it, really. Gitelman and the others had decided, simply, that the easiest way to close the Home’s books at the end-to balance things—was to eliminate the boy’s records. If they had admitted he was missing there would have been too many problems—with the police, the FBI, the Federation….

  But how, he wondered, had Danny reacted when he’d arrived, with his sack and books, and had seen the gates closed? Had he realized that no records of his life existed? And if Gitelman and the others had actually destroyed information, how, in his future life, would Danny ever be able to prove he really existed?

  Charlie smiled: it was a problem that would have delighted the boy! Endangered species was right, and Charlie imagined himself meeting Danny and surprising him with the information that he had, alas, become extinct.

  Back in Brooklyn, Charlie collected rents. He mentioned Danny to each person he visited, asking if they’d seen him during the previous few weeks. Nobody had. If they did meet him, he asked them to tell the boy to telephone New Jersey collect, that there was an important message for him.

  After lunch he drove to the Grand Army Plaza library. Danny had once told him how much he’d liked the place. Charlie had not been there since he had visited it with a class from the Home, over twenty years before. He walked inside and felt, in the immense hollow of the lobby, comforted. The large squares of wood paneling, which rose on top of one another to the full height of the building—perhaps one hundred and twenty feet—seemed warm and inviting. Maybe, he thought, after my fortieth birthday I’ll move back to Brooklyn, to this neighborhood.

  He walked from room to room but did not find Danny. He sat in the reference room for a while and enjoyed the quiet. Three old men were reading newspapers and passing them around to one another. He dozed briefly, and when he awoke the men were still there and he realized suddenly that he could, in fact, find pictures of himself as a boy without having to return to the Federation office.

  He took his coat off and sat at a desk for over an hour, looking through 20- and 25-year-old copies of The Brooklyn Eagle. A woman brought the large yearly volumes to him, one at a time. He saw photos of himself in uniform, playing football and baseball and basketball. He saw his name in artides and in scoring columns and in lineups of All-Star and All-City teams. He was amazed, from the pictures, at how little he had changed. He had lost no hair, he had put on almost no weight, and only his mouth and chin looked a trifle older. But even there, the yellowish quality of the paper and the darkness of the photos made him seem slightly more tired than he had actually been at the time.

  He looked up often, hoping to see Danny, so that he could show him the articles about himself—about how good he had once been, how important to the life of the Home. The others had all changed so much in comparison to himself. They had all aged so quickly! He wished he could bring them down sometime, in a group, to look through the papers together.

  When he decided to stop he realized for the first time that he had had no trouble reading any of the newspaper columns. He put his fingertips against his wrist, looked at a wall clock, and counted twenty-seven beats in fifteen seconds.

  He left the library but did not go to his car. Instead he walked along Eastern Parkway and went down into the subway. He wanted to go downtown, to one of his banks, and he knew how bad the parking situation there would be. He only had to ride three stops.

  In the subway, he wondered why, really, he wanted to look at the newspapers with the other guys. They would only try to relive their youth as if those days and games had been the high points of their lives. What Charlie thought he wanted to do was something different—to show them how far they’d come—to make them feel how they’d grown and changed.

  Murray would have disputed him; he would have shown Charlie other reasons for his pleasure. He would have talked about Charlie’s need, always, to be in the center of things and in control. He would have said that Charlie had gone to the library and looked through the papers because he’d been feeling low and had wanted to raise his self-image by summoning up a time in which he’d been like a king, with others worshiping him. The desire, then, to take everybody back with him to that time would have become, in Mur ray’s theory, Charlie’s act of aggression—the proof of his resentment at the actual progress others had made, while Charlie really felt, deep down, that he had made none. Unmarried, without a son, and without—oh how Murray would have loved to go into the meaning of that part of it!—the visible signs of aging, Charlie really doubted everything about his life, especially those things others envied in him.

  Charlie heard the questions Murray would have asked: Why can’t you simply enjoy one of your experiences by yourself? Why the compulsion to bring the rest of us in always? Do you feel incomplete without us? Do you believe you’re responsible for us not still living together? And Murray would have finished with the question he always asked—Why must you feel guilty toward us? But Charlie realized that he now had an answer which would have left Murray speechless—Because it was my block that killed you.

  He shook his head and told himself he was crazy, imagining a dialogue like that. It only led—he laughed to himself at the words—to a d
ead end. The train stopped, and over the public address system the conductor announced that there would be a delay of a few minutes. Through the dusty windows Charlie saw that another train was stopped parallel to the one he was in, and in it, two Puerto Rican boys were dancing. One of the boys did a running cartwheel and a split. A third boy—not Puerto Rican—walked around with a beret in his palm, trying to collect money. The boys moved to the next car, out of sight, and Charlie wondered if they had parents, and if not, where they stayed at night when winter came.

  When the other train seemed to be moving away from Charlie, backward, he knew it was his train that was moving forward. He got out at Nevins Street, went to his bank, opened his safe-deposit box, and removed several long-term savings certificates. From his safe-deposit box he took a mint Lifesaver, sucked on it, and smiled, imagining Danny with him, discovering that he kept a roll of Lifesavers there.

  He took the certificates to a bank officer and told him that he wanted to transform them so that the account, to a total of $25,000, would be a joint one, payable in the event of death to either survivor. Charlie’s name would remain as one of the owners. The man checked through forms and asked for the name and address of the co-depositor. “Daniel Ginsberg,” Charlie said. “Same address as me.”

  But Charlie could not give the man the other information about Danny, and he took two cards for Danny to fill out and sign. The bank was already closed, so that a guard unlocked the front door to let Charlie out. Charlie stared at the man’s gun. In the street he looked both ways, expecting, for a moment, to see Sol. Would Sol have congratulated him?

  There had been a time—before he’d gone to work with Mittleman—when he had often daydreamed about the reading of Sol’s last will and testament. He had wondered if Sol had left his money directly to the Home, or whether he had named individual boys. Charlie had once believed—if Sol had left him enough money—that he would have taken up Sol’s work, spending his life traveling around the country and visiting his boys. He had imagined himself taking an interest in the boys still in the Home, and he had seen himself discovering a great young athlete and training him to break all of his own records.