The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  PRAISE

  For The Orphan’s Daughter

  “Jan Cherubin writes with tenderness and force and humor. Her spellbinding debut novel, The Orphan’s Daughter, swept me away.”

  –E. Jean Carroll, author of What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal

  “Jan Cherubin’s touch is both assured and nuanced; her story is full of vivid details and wry observations. The Orphan’s Daughter is a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it.”

  –Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

  “The Orphan’s Daughter is beautifully specific, evocative, and emotionally charged.”

  –Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Disturbances in the Field and Truthtelling

  “The Orphan’s Daughter is both sharp and moving, which isn’t easy to pull off. The narrator, Joanna Aronson, is convincingly troubled and likable. And her father is a flat-out great character, not like anyone I’ve read about before but immediately recognizable and plausibly individual.”

  –David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me and Jernigan

  MORE

  From The Sager Group

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  Lifeboat No. 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss, and Surviving the Titanic

  The Stories We Tell: Classic True Tales by America’s Greatest Women Journalists

  New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists

  Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism

  Janet’s World: The Inside Story of Washington Post Pulitzer Fabulist Janet Cooke

  High Tolerance: A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder . . . and Marijuana

  For more information, please see www.TheSagerGroup.net.

  This is a work of fiction. Many of the details, places, characters, and events were inspired by real life. None of it really happened; none of the people really exist. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

  The Orphan’s Daughter

  Copyright © 2020 Jan Cherubin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Cover Designed by Siori Kitajima, SF AppWorks LLC

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBNs:

  Paperback

  978-1-950154-15-9

  eBook

  978-1-950154-16-6

  Published by The Sager Group LLC

  www.TheSagerGroup.net

  The Hebrew National Orphan Home, 1919-1958.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  About The Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  I broke into the house I grew up in to steal back my childhood. It was easy. The dog chomped on a greasy bone while I took what I came for. Eventually my stepmother noticed a manuscript missing, figured out where the hell the dog got that lamb bone, and swore out a warrant for my arrest.

  Relatives were spilling onto Aunt Shirley’s front porch, plates piled with bagels and lox like any Jewish family back from the cemetery, when sirens came wailing and two black-and-whites screeched to a halt at the curb. At first I didn’t catch on. I was talking to Liz Stone. I was always relieved to see Liz—we’d been friends since we were eight—and I wondered out loud who the cops were after. Liz said, “you,” and we both laughed. Red lights lit my grandmother’s face, then cast it in shadow, then lit it red again. Uncle Harry’s mouth fell open and his cigar dropped out.

  The cops couldn’t possibly want me. I was a white girl in Baltimore. I used to wave when the police drove by, like most suburban children in the sixties. I was no longer a kid, but I was barely out of my twenties and I still saw myself as obedient, dutiful, adoring—in short, a daughter. It was true that I was finally coming out of the shell I hadn’t even known I was in. And I did trespass and enter the house. But c’mon—two, then three police cars?

  The service at the cemetery before the brunch had gone along as planned, for the most part. Friends and family gathered on a beautiful fall day for the unveiling of the headstone on my father’s grave. The unveiling ceremony was supposed to end a period of mourning, but while the designated amount of time had passed—the funeral was in February and it was now October—it still came as a shock when my sister Susan and I peeled the gauze cover off the stone and saw our father’s name etched in granite. Clyde Aronson, dead at 69. Every step I took into the future without him was a blow. I thought the old rabbis must have been onto something with their ritual, though, because that day in the cemetery I felt something new along with loss. I felt a sense of my own worth. I felt it when we chanted prayers in Hebrew under the trees in their autumn beauty, and I felt it when my father’s schoolteacher buddy Shep Levine recited Yeats. There were tears, and there was laughter of course, and then a line of cars leaving the cemetery gates full of my famished relatives hurrying to the brunch.

  Aunt Vivian trotted across Aunt Shirley’s porch and threw her arms around me. “Oh, Joanna, I loved your father so much. He was my favorite brother. Don’t tell the other two.” She squeezed so hard my glasses dug into the side of my nose, but for once I didn’t want her to let go. “Where’s Brenda?” she asked, before releasing me. “I didn’t see her at the cemetery.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “No one knows,” said my mother.

  Brenda was my father’s second wife, my stepmother, and it was Brenda who arranged for the unveiling with help from my mother’s family. My parents stayed friends after their divorce, and since Brenda Aronson (née McLean) was naturally unfamiliar with the Jewish ritual, my mother’s sister, Aunt Shirley, volunteered to make the food and Aunt Shirley’s husband, Uncle Lou, a member of the temple’s burial society, met with Brenda to plan the ceremony. Brenda was in charge, though. She was the one who picked the stone and set the date for October 25th, 1987. Why wouldn’t she come, then? Yes, we w
ere fighting over the will, and I took the manuscript and some other things from the house, but I thought she had calmed down about that already.

  Brenda was pleasant and harmless, Uncle Lou said, and I would have said the same thing, once. She was always a little odd, but in ways that could be attributed to shyness, or just the awkward nature of the stepmother relationship. I used to feel grudging sympathy for her. She had to know my parents were still in love with each other. When Susan and I were growing up, our parents spoke often about their epic love affair, drawing a tight circle around them even as they were trading insults and hurling dishes. So I knew how it felt to be left out. But then my father got sick, and Brenda and I took care of him together. You learned a lot about a person under those circumstances. I stopped feeling sorry for poor Brenda and started to think of her as the bad part of my father. The damaged part he excised and finally put outside of himself.

  My glasses were crooked after Aunt Vivian’s embrace, one lens resting higher than the other, so I took them off and applied cautious pressure to the red plastic temples, then put them back on. I had a small face, dark hair, big features. I turned to my mother and pushed the glasses up on my nose. “That’s better,” she said. We were close now, my mother and I. Once Susan and I grew into adults, my mother wanted our friendship.

  “Here, sit down, Joanna,” my mother said, scraping her chair over the concrete and making a space for me next to the pink porch railing.

  “So what’s the story?” Aunt Vivian said. “Why isn’t she here?”

  “I told you, it’s a big mystery,” my mother said. Then she put her mouth around a forkful of apple cake topped with vanilla ice cream. Brenda’s absence gave my mother an appetite. My mother swallowed and licked her lips.

  I could hear my father. “Ice cream used to taste better,” he was saying. Even before he died, he was always talking to me in my head. I could see us sitting at the kitchen table on Cedar Drive eating Neapolitan supermarket ice cream out of smooth ceramic bowls.

  “You think everything you used to get in New York was better,” I said.

  “No. That’s not it,” my father said. He took a spoonful and swirled the ice cream in his mouth. “In the old days, when I was little, it was creamier.”

  I tried to imagine him little, a small boy on the steps of a vast brick asylum I had seen in a photograph. “What about Breyers?”

  “Nah. No-oo. I’m talking creamy.”

  “Häagen Daz?” I said.

  “Nah,” my father said. “I’m talking about ice cream they made fresh in the back of a candy store. Forget it, kiddo. Doesn’t exist anymore.”

  I wanted to know how my father got ice cream from a candy store when he had grown up in an institution. But he was no longer around to ask. He used to talk about how great the orphanage was—they rode horses, he had hundreds of friends—but even a child could tell he was hiding something. I excused myself and went inside to find Liz. The house was filled with people. Unveilings were typically small affairs, but my father had the kind of big personality that was sorely missed, and he drew a crowd. Whether you loved him or hated him, his death left a hole in the world. He’d been a high school English teacher, and I recognized two of his former students at the buffet table talking to Shep Levine and another teacher. My father’s old girlfriend Darleen and her husband were there, and most of my father’s family from New York, as well as my mother’s entire family, including her brother Nat who hadn’t spoken to my father in years. My sister Susan’s husband Larry was there, and my boyfriend Fred who had flown in from L.A. Everyone was there but Brenda.

  Laughter rang out from the kitchen over the groan of the oven door. I found Liz in the dining room cornered by my father’s brothers. “It’s Joanna’s fault,” Uncle Alvin was saying, his voice like wet gravel. “Brenda’s upset. That’s why she isn’t here.”

  “Joanna’s fault?” said Liz. She caught my eye and I came over.

  “My fault?” I said. “Listen, I only took what belonged to me.”

  “Not what she says,” said Uncle Harry. He had the same gravel voice as Uncle Alvin. My father had the voice, too. All three brothers spoke like they were gargling with rocks.

  When my father was seven and Uncle Harry was five, they were the ones sent away and put in the orphanage. Now Uncle Harry was unsure of how to show his loyalty to his big brother—by standing with Brenda, or with my mother and me. He chewed solemnly on a piece of bagel, cheeks full, meaty lower lip in a pout. He had a tough guy’s baby face—a face frozen at five years old.

  “C’mon. Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” said Uncle Alvin. “You got those Cuban cigars with you?”

  “Fred,” said Uncle Harry, “c’mon out to the porch with us and try a nice cigar from Havana. Hand-rolled.”

  Fred looked at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Smoke their cigars. They’re mad at me, not you.”

  Almost everyone was outside, either on the front porch or in the backyard. The day was warm with a dazzling blue sky. The screen door clapped shut behind Fred. A few of us stayed inside, Aunt Vivian huddled by the coffee urn with Cousin Mitzi. “Joanna, what was that poem the teacher recited?” Mitzi said. She came toward Liz and me with a plastic cup full of coffee snapped into one of those brown plastic holders.

  “‘The Wild Swans At Coole,’” I said. “‘The trees are in their autumn beauty, the woodland paths are dry.’ My father liked Yeats.”

  “What does it mean?” Mitzi asked.

  I thought about it. I stared out the window at my mother on the porch laughing at something my uncles were saying, and I tried to think of a short answer. There was a flurry of activity outside. The sound of a car door slamming, Fred rushing down the steps to the street, and my mother jumping up from her chair, hurrying inside.

  Aunt Vivian grabbed my mother’s arm when she came in. “Evie, we were just asking about that poem at the cemetery.”

  My mother nodded, trance-like. “Joanna,” she whispered hoarsely. All of the color had drained out of her face. Even her lips were pale.

  “What’s the matter, Ma?”

  Her eyes widened. “There’s a cop outside,” she said.

  “What’s a cop doing here?” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  Sirens, merely background noise seconds ago, wailed louder, then cut off on a whoop. Brakes screeched. Another car door croaked open. Susan brushed past us and into the den where her husband was watching a football game with Shep.

  I still didn’t get it. It had to be a joke. “Looking for me?” I said.

  Red lights danced on Aunt Shirley’s walls. My mother’s hand tightened on my wrist. She yanked me away from the window. I’d never seen her like this. She spoke through gritted teeth: “Why else would the police be here?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Who else would they be coming for?”

  My heart started banging on the offbeat. Brenda sent the cops after me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was invulnerable, protected not just by privilege, but specifically the new feeling of self-worth I’d never had before. Susan always felt it, like a sixth sense. But for me, that kind of entitlement was a novelty. I was not wanted. My father had to have a boy, and I had been his last shot. Only at the end of his life, he discovered a girl was just as good. He could talk to me, about more than ice cream. We could share the life of the mind. He could do that with a daughter, how shocking it was to learn. In those last dying months, with icicles dripping from the overhang and a blanket of snow out the window behind our easy chairs, he reached for my hand and held it. “Would you like me to leave you my books and papers?” he asked. It turned out I was his rightful heir all along.

  Liz skidded into the foyer and pressed her face to the screen door. “Fred’s yelling something about a warrant. He wants to see the warrant. Way to go, Fred,” Liz said.

  “Your boyfriend’s all riled up,” said Mitzi.

  I heard clanking, scrapi
ng. Handcuffs, dress shoes clomping on concrete. I didn’t have much time. I had to make a move. Shep bolted out of the den and grabbed me in a bear hug. The light had gone out of his eyes. He turned my body toward the kitchen.

  “Out the back door?” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Shep. “Through the kitchen into the backyard, climb on top of the retaining wall, then up the hill and onto the neighbor’s property.” He released me and gave me a push. “Walk fast, but don’t run. Cut between the houses to the other side. Go. Go. Hurry.”

  CHAPTER 2

  When I was little, I used to watch my father reading and smoking at his spot on the end of the sofa. He’d clear his throat and tap the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table without looking away from his book. I’d stand there and stare at him. I was trying to bore through his skull to see inside his head. Using all my powers of imagination, I entered his mind and wandered around in the darkness until the trees parted and I came upon a little orphan boy peering at me from behind an iron fence. My father reached out and tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. He looked up. “What do you want, you stupid kid? Get out of here.”

  He died in winter. I got annoyed with Brenda at the shiva. It really bothered me when she leaned over the funeral candle in the tall blue jar with the Star of David and lit her cigarette off the flame.

  We sat shiva only one night, and then I flew back to the West Coast with Fred. He was a screenwriter and had a deadline. Leaving right away was a mistake. I should have stayed and helped Brenda clean out the house, but I couldn’t bear another minute with her. So I fled with Fred to our rented bungalow in Venice, California, where the light was clear and hard as glass. I walked along the sand and let the ocean lap at my ankles. White stucco everywhere. I missed the seasons. “Are you kidding?” Fred said. “You really want to go back to the cold?”

  “I can’t remember anything without seasons,” I said. I couldn’t place myself—was I wearing a winter coat, were the dogwoods in bloom, was it one of those hot summer nights? Fred shrugged. He was happy living in a desert. I watered the lemon tree. The light was as clear as glass, but I was still in a fog. I felt numb and cut off. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I’d had a job as a copy editor at a little newspaper, but I quit to take care of my father. It was a crappy job anyway. The editor-in-chief hired me as a favor to Fred. I’d find something better.