An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  He saw Charlie sitting on a tree stump, his head in his hands, snow resting like a fine net on his black curls, and then he saw his own body rise from its mound of snow, shake the flakes away, and he heard himself shout: “Surprise!”

  *

  Each error I make leads me closer to the truth, for I know better the things I cannot do! I could not stay with Charlie without any definite arrangement, but I did not have to leave him the way I did. That was an error. But once I left him and forced him to make a decision I could not simply return and say I made a mistake because that would have made him think I was too weak a person for him to want to live with permanently!

  The question now is how can we continue to live together if he’ll have me if my official identity has been destroyed? I have to know how old I really am! I have to be Bar Mitzvahed because of what I believe about being Jewish!

  I can’t live in fear from day to day that at any moment I can be taken away from him.

  What I’m doing about it: I’m narrowing my “options.” I can’t stay with Charlie for the above reasons and I can’t stay with Anita because he would know and because they might think I was trying to come between them if they have plans, and I can’t stay on Dr. Fogel’s land because of the people who come there and because I might become ill, and I can’t stay with Dr. Fogel because I don’t know where he is. I have $13 left and some change but I can’t go to a YMHA because they might demand identification even if they believe the age I give them.

  A question: How normal do I really want to be?

  *

  Danny looked up and saw, through the window, a tall boy in a green silk shirt and black silk pants striding along, no more than five feet away. The boy wore a wide-brimmed white hat, had a silver toothpick in his mouth, and was surrounded by a circle of Puerto Rican teenagers, who kept pace with him. Around the boy’s neck, on a heavy chain, was an enormous silver Star of David, with what looked like a diamond in its center. Danny exhaled in awe and looked into the boy’s face: it was Larry Silverberg!

  He saw Larry look toward the cafeteria—right at him—but he didn’t know if Larry could see more than his own reflection. Danny found himself rising from his chair and waving at Larry to come in, but Larry was already gone.

  Should he follow him? Danny sat and tried to know what the right thing to do was. He didn’t trust his feelings. His head filled with questions. Why was Larry wearing a Jewish star? Had he changed? How had he been released from jail so soon? Where was he living? Danny wondered, for an instant, if Larry had in some way been sent to lead him to safety, but as soon as he thought such a thought, he laughed to himself: why would God bother to joke with him in such a way?

  He saw himself inviting Larry to sit at the table with him in the cafeteria, and he heard them talking to each other. Larry would slap Danny’s back and say something like “Fancy meeting you here!” and Danny would tell him how good he looked.

  “So tell me, Danny,” he heard Larry say, fingering his Jewish star and sighing, “how’ve you been?”

  “Not bad,” Danny would reply. “And yourself?”

  “Can’t complain,” Larry would say.

  Danny saw Larry inviting him home, so that they could live together. He heard them reminiscing about the Home, and he heard Larry praising him for having run away.

  *

  Just a moment ago, while I was wondering where I would spend the night, LARRY SILVERBERG walked by right outside the window, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch him and I wondered for an instant if he had been sent as my Deliverance!

  I saw so many things at the same time!

  I saw us talking about old times at the Home like Charlie and Murray and Irving, and I heard Larry asking me if I remembered the time they let a boy stay with us for a few days before they realized he was in the wrong place and should have been sent to a different place, with other Mongolian children. The boy was Jewish. Samstag was his name but I remembered his nose was so pushed in like an Irishman’s that we called him O’Hara.

  This is what I heard Larry say to me: I wouldn’t want to be like that. If I had a kid born like that I’d flush him down the toilet first thing and tell them they couldn’t do nothing to me without the evidence. You see people walking in the streets sometimes with idiot kids who are 50 years old and what good does it do for anybody?

  What surprised me: He wore an enormous Jewish star on his chest with a sparkling diamond in its center. He said that O’Hara had bad blood and tried to kill Heshy with a pair of pliers by pulling his teeth from his head but that he caught him and beat him up. I told him I never heard the whole story.

  I imagined us living together and me helping him in his work. This is what I made up that he does: He sells welfare documents and social security cards. He caters to a Puerto Rican trade and he told me he could get passports and draft cards and driver’s licenses and he said he would get me a new birth certificate in the name of Charles Fogelstein but I said I wanted my real birth certificate in the name of Daniel Ginsberg, so I can know when my Bar Mitzvah is.

  He said he couldn’t get real birth certificates.

  I was too confused when he passed by in front of me to do anything except stand and wave at him when he was almost gone from sight. But he didn’t see me, or if he saw me he didn’t recognize me from the Home. He wore a white hat like a cowboy.

  I feel very relieved that I didn’t see him because if I went to live with him, what would my life turn out to be like? Also: Why did he wear the Jewish Star? What happened to him after he left the Home and was in jail? Was he the only Jew there? Did they do to him what he did to others, or worse things?

  This is what worries me about the way my mind works sometimes: that I can see myself living with him and becoming his slave! He would make love to me the way he did to the boys at the Home and I would be too weak to stop him and too grateful to run away!

  This is what he would say to me: Let’s face it, Danny, who ever gave a shit about us, right? So if we don’t give a shit about each other where will we end up?

  This would be my answer: Dead!

  Can I put living with another orphan I knew from the Home on my list of solutions that won’t work even though I didn’t think of it before, and then cross it off my list the way Charlie does?

  If Larry did see me but didn’t show it because of the boys who walked in a circle around him, will he come back later to find me? What will he want of me? If he comes back later to try to find me, how will I refuse him without being able to tell him where I’m living and what I’m doing?

  *

  Danny glanced up and found himself looking into the eyes of a policeman, two tables away. Even though the policeman was sitting down, Danny could tell at once that he was the same height as Charlie. The policeman wore his blue winter coat, open, and his hat. A slender pink scar that ran diagonally from the man’s lip to his chin was moist and seemed to shimmer. Danny felt his own right hand move, wanting to touch the delicate line. The policeman glanced at an old man who was snoring, and he winked at Danny. Danny nodded, smiled, and told himself to move slowly so as not to arouse suspicion.

  Being in a Jewish cafeteria and wearing a yamulka helped him, he knew. With all the Negroes and Puerto Ricans and winos in the neighborhood, why would the policeman be interested in him? Danny tried to look at the policeman in a way that would make him feel nothing. The policeman was eating a sandwich and drinking from a cup of coffee. Danny did not want to have to answer any questions. He closed his notebook and watched the policeman bite a chunk from a pickle.

  So that he would appear not to be panicking, or fleeing, Danny opened his notebook again.

  *

  A policeman is looking at me now from another table and I’m writing so he’ll think I’m doing some kind of homework or special studying. None of the old men talk to him. He’s Charlie’s age and size but his eyes are bloodshot and they look like Larry Silverberg’s eyes will look like in 20 years.

  Larr
y Silverberg wants to go to Israel and be a machine gunner in the Israeli Air Force so he can fly low in planes and see the faces on Arabs when he strafes them.

  Was the diamond real and if he said it was would he let me bring it to Mr. Plaut to check? If we sold it how long could we live on the money?

  Rabbi Akiba said that suffering is good for it can lead to repentance and repentance can lead to God.

  Value equals the present worth of future benefits.

  To memorize: the Song of Solomon. One passage I remember: “His locks are curled and black as a raven.”

  What Dr. Fogel would believe: That when it said God chose the people of Israel it meant He chose us for Suffering, if we must suffer to serve him.

  What Danny Ginsberg believes: That doesn’t make it easier to believe in God and in being a member of His Chosen People when you think of the 6 million who died the way they did!

  What this makes me think: How small my own suffering is.

  What Charlie would say if I said that: Everything helps, if you want to let it.

  I want to come to him and say to him: Now I’m a man!

  Was he ever Bar Mitzvahed? He never said. Could he memorize enough Hebrew when he was 13, and did he do the Haftorah or just the blessings before the Haftorah, or nothing?

  What I just realized: In the Epilogue that Daniel Ginsberg wrote on his last full day on Dr. Fogel’s land, he left out what happened to Sol!

  The answer is he died and nobody knew who he was or who to telephone. He had no family and no permanent address and no money and nothing in his wallet said he was Jewish so they buried him in a public grave in a small town in Ohio where no Jews live and none of his boys ever learned of his death.

  Did I imagine that or did Charlie?

  The policeman is eating a piece of noodle pudding now. I’m looking at him and thinking that if I had to I would say something to him like this: “I like the pieces with raisins in them best, don’t you? I like any kind of pudding if it has lots of soft raisins in it.”

  I would be telling the truth if I said that and that way he would not see things in my eyes that I’m hiding.

  *

  Danny dipped his fingertips in his glass of water and said his prayers silently, his lips moving so that the policeman would see what he was doing. Then he stood, picked up his sack, and walked from the cafeteria. The policeman did not seem to pay attention.

  When Danny arrived at the synagogue he was surprised, for a moment, to see teenage boys playing basketball in its schoolyard. They wore yamulkas that were pinned to their hair with bobby pins and he could see the fringes of their tsitsis flapping from under their shirts.

  He felt better. Beyond the players, where there was an indentation in the building, he saw two couples, back to back, necking. Both girls had their hands in the boys’ hair, below their yamulkas. Danny smiled. A small boy, smaller than Danny, sat under the basket next to the fence, a cigarette dangling from the center of his mouth. He waved slightly to Danny, with two fingers, as if he knew him.

  It seemed impossible to Danny—miraculous—that all these boys, boys who had never tasted pork or lobster or bacon in their lives, boys who had never eaten milk with meat, boys who had never worked or traveled by car or written or telephoned on the Sabbath, boys who prayed three times a day and recited blessings each time they ate or washed or went to the bathroom—that all of them should look like normal American boys. It made him see how much of a dreamworld he had, until now, been living in—how foolishly, in his imagination, his life had been led. It was as if, he thought to himself, everything that had happened to him until his return to Brooklyn had been the dream, and his real life were about to begin.

  He walked toward the boy who had waved to him and stopped when he was standing above him. He slipped his fingers through the wires of the fence.

  “Shalom,” Danny said.

  The boy rolled his eyes.

  “My name is Danny.”

  “I got nexts,” the boy said, without looking at him.

  “It’s all right,” Danny said. “I mean, I don’t really know how to play….”

  The boy said nothing. Danny watched a player drive for the basket, grunt, stop suddenly, and leap high in the air banking a shot off the metal backboard. “Match that shit!” the player yelled to the boy who had been guarding him. He fixed his yamulka with his right hand, to keep it from falling. “You match that and I’ll eat crud.”

  Danny laughed, but the boy below him only sucked in on his cigarette. “I’m Jewish,” Danny said.

  “Big fucking deal,” the boy said, and got up and walked away, toward the two couples who were necking. He tapped one of the boys on the shoulder and the boy let go of the girl and stepped aside. The boy Danny had been speaking to, six inches shorter than the girl, flipped his cigarette to the side, put his arms around the girl’s waist, and she bent down and pressed her lips against his.

  Danny entered the synagogue. The lobby was dark and odorless. The sanctuary was empty and Danny stood at the back, imagining himself on the bimah chanting his Haftorah. He had never actually prayed in a real synagogue, with other Jewish men. The sanctuary was dark, with blackened wood benches, a set of wine-red velvet drapes covering the Holy Ark, and small stained-glass windows set into the walls at the sides, near the ceiling. Directly above Danny’s head there was a balcony, with a curtain in front of the first row, and Danny assumed that the women sat there, so that the men would not see them while they prayed.

  Danny walked along dark corridors, looking for the rabbi’s study. He saw a lighted room in front of him, with one woman sitting in it. His decision was made.

  “I’d like to see the rabbi,” he said.

  The woman looked up from her typing. “I’m sorry, darling, but he’s at a funeral—is there something I can do for you?”

  Danny tried again: “Can I wait for him? Can I see him later today?”

  The woman rolled the page up in her typewriter, erased something, then looked at Danny again. “You’re not from our Yeshiva, are you? I don’t recognize you.”

  “No,” Danny said. He spoke quickly. “I’m not from your Yeshiva, but I’m Jewish—I’m Jewish and I want to be Bar Mitzvahed.”

  “Well, that’s very nice, dear, but you should be Bar Mitzvahed in your own shul.”

  “I don’t have a shul,” Danny said. “I’m an orphan.”

  The woman sighed, as if she had been through the experience a thousand times before. “I really don’t see what we can do for you, then.” She brushed her erasures from the page. “You know, we get many parents with children like yourself who are unaffiliated with any synagogue and who reach Bar Mitzvah age and suddenly discover they’re

  Jewish. But what do you expect us to do? We’re not your local supermarket, you know, that you come to us when you need something and forget about us when you don’t. Believe me, darling, being Jewish should be a full-time occupation.”

  She began typing again.

  “I want to see the rabbi,” Danny said. “Please give me an appointment.”

  “Well. Today he’s at a funeral, tomorrow he has a meeting in the city, and then it’s Shabbos, isn’t it?” She glanced at a desk calendar. “I really don’t see when—but why am I even looking?” She glared at Danny and suddenly he saw Mrs. Mittleman’s face. He closed his eyes to make the image go away. “I’m really very busy, and I’m sorry, but I believe I’ve given you enough time….”

  “But you’re not listening to me,” Danny said. “I told you I don’t have parents. I’m an orphan. The Torah says…” He felt dizzy from the heat inside the building, and he found that he could not look into the woman’s eyes. “I just remembered something…” he began.

  “You seem like such a nice boy. I’d like to help you, believe me, but my hands are tied, don’t you see?”

  He looked at her hands and saw bright red nailpolish. “I just remembered why it is I came to your shul and not another.”

  “Yes?”

>   “I know Dr. Fogel. He taught me my Haftorah and Maftir at the Maimonides Home for Jewish Boys. But they closed the Home.”

  The woman smiled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Who didn’t know Dr. Fogel? We’re all so sorry he moved away. Such a happy man!” Her smile vanished. “I’ve listened to everything you said.”

  “Then you’ll let me see the rabbi?”

  She took his hand in hers. “Don’t you think I’d like to help you if I could? But what you’re asking I don’t have to give. We’re booked up solid for almost two years ahead with Bar Mitzvahs, and we’re still growing.” She sighed. “When I first came here we didn’t even have a Yeshiva, and now we have over four hundred students in the elementary school alone. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

  “I want to see the rabbi.”

  “But how would we fit you in, darling? Can we ask one of our regular members to have his son share his Bar Mitzvah with a stranger—?”

  Danny thought of the passages he knew, from the Torah, about honoring the stranger and caring for the widowed and orphaned, but he saw no point in sharing them with her. He thought his head was clear. He was eliminating another option. He spoke firmly: “I’m asking you for the last time and giving you your last chance—will you please let me see the rabbi?”

  She pushed her chair back and reached for the telephone. “You’re doing what, young man?”

  “The sin will be on your hands then,” he said, and, to his delight, he saw her look at her hands. He turned and walked away.

  “Wait!” she called, and he stopped, saw that she had picked up the telephone receiver and had begun dialing. Her face was pale. “I’ll telephone the rabbi for you,” she said. Danny smiled—she didn’t fool him. He kept walking. She called after him: “What did you say your name was, darling? Just give me your name—!”