by Jan Cherubin
But she wouldn’t see my mother Friday night because the very next day my mother told me to run down to Shulevitz’s candy store to the public telephone, and hurry! The taxi took Mama to the lying-in hospital. We stayed with Grandma Aronson for one week (and one week only) while my mother was confined. Uncle Moe kept his feet out of my face and let me count out the poker chips. Mama named the baby Gertrude.
Weeks passed. People in the neighborhood got used to the new baby and bored with the topic of my father’s disappearance. My mother registered with the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish agency for abandoned immigrant women, and to my great shame, she ran my father’s picture in the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Gallery of Missing Husbands,” a weekly feature, and that was that. Neighbors stopped bringing over strange-smelling casseroles, and relatives avoided us.
My mother surprised both grandmas and went out and found herself a job. The manager at Kohl’s department store hired her to stand behind a counter and sell cosmetics for $11 a week. Grandma Cohen (Mama’s mother) said a woman had to be good-looking to get this job. I thought my mother was pretty, even with the space she had between her two front teeth, but I worried other people might think the gap looked cheap. They might think, why didn’t this woman get her teeth fixed? The little gap thrilled me, though. My mother would smile, or just part her lips, and there would be about her, immediately, an air of mischief. The space was a sign my mother was open. I could run into her arms whenever I wanted and she would enfold me.
Unfortunately, the Kohl’s paycheck wasn’t big enough to feed all of us, and there was still the problem of where she would put us while she was selling lipstick. My mother was like the old woman who lived in a shoe.
So my mother, Harry, and I set off on another journey, this time far into the countryside by subway and bus to Getty Square in Yonkers. I pleaded with Mama to let us visit Snug House where the Bakelite scientists lived, but she said there wasn’t time. Yonkers was an odd place, I thought, made of tenements and brownstones as if a piece of the Bronx had been sliced off and plopped down in the middle of nowhere. If I were to build a town starting from scratch there would be spacious houses and buildings on a green surrounded by trees the way it was in England. I knew about this from reading. No time, Mama said, no lollygagging, and we hopped onto a trolley to Nepperhan. This was a village more to my liking. But again, there wasn’t time to explore, for we were to embark on the final leg of the journey by foot. All three of us were tired and dawdling when my mother’s hat blew off and pin-wheeled down the dirt road. She went after it and a farm truck swerved just in time, clattering away in a cloud of dust.
“Got it!” she called, plucking the hat in mid-spin along a stand of goldenrod.
I cheered and that’s when I noticed Harry was gone.
“You’re gonna get yourself killed!” Mama shrieked. Harry was kneeling in the middle of the road collecting apples that had fallen off the truck. He crossed back to us grinning with fruit dropping from his elbows. My mother didn’t even yell at him for running into the road like a stupid idiot. I scowled. Harry was brave all right, but he was reckless. He used poor judgment. He was irresponsible. I was hungry, though, so I kept my trap shut.
My mother put the suitcase down in a clearing. The yellow Bakelite handle fell on its hinges with a clack and she sat on it.
“Here, Brother,” said Harry, handing me an apple. That’s what Harry called me. Never Clyde or anything else. Only when he said brother, it came out “brudder,” which was part-baby talk and part-Yiddish.
We ate the apples greedily, juice running down our chins, my mother dabbing at her mouth with a handkerchief while Harry and I used our shirtsleeves. We threw our cores in the grass.
“OK, enough sitting,” said my mother, although she was the only one sitting. “Let’s get there already.”
We began again. The road grew darker with woods on either side of us. After a while, we came to a mailbox at the end of a lane leading to a house visible through a break in the trees. Smoke puffed from the chimney. I thought I saw a figure move behind a window. I had the strange idea it was my father. He had the same waistcoat and collar on, standing behind a boy I’d never seen before. Even from that distance, I could swear I saw him leaning over and cutting the boy’s roast beef. “Look! Look, it’s Papa!” I said. Mama said I was meshuggenah and I should stop hocking her a chynik. Harry lingered in front of the mailbox and cranked up the red tin flag. “I don’t want to go to a new school,” he said.
I pounded the flag back down. “Don’t touch that,” I said. “It’s a sign for the postman.”
“I don’t care,” said Harry. “I don’t want to go to a new school. I want to go to my old school.”
“You don’t have an old school,” I said. “You’ve never been to school. You can’t even read.”
“Yes, I can so read,” said Harry. He took off his cap and wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of a chubby hand.
“No, you can’t,” I said.
My mother had gone on ahead and now she came back to get us, to hurry us along.
Harry put his cap back on firmly. “I want to go to Brudder’s school,” he said. “Whatever school Brudder’s going to, that’s where I wanna go.”
“Perfect,” said my mother. “Because Clyde is going to the new school.”
“How much longer?” I said.
“Another mile,” said my mother. “Maybe less.”
We walked along the road.
“What time do we come home?” said Harry.
“You don’t come home, boychik,” my mother said. “I told you. You sleep there. It’s a boarding school.”
“I don’t want to sleep there,” Harry said. “I want to sleep at home with you.” Tears spilled out of his eyes.
My heart started beating faster. “Stop crying, Harry,” I said. “Be a man.”
“I don’t wanna be a man,” said Harry. He stamped his foot.
I didn’t know why, maybe it was the way Harry said it, or the sight of his knobby knees in those short pants, but I burst out laughing. Soon my mother was giggling, and then laughing full- out. She touched a gloved knuckle to the corner of her eye.
Harry turned red; he hated being made fun of. But then he started up, too, and the three of us stood on the side of the road bent over in fits of laughter.
After a while, we regained our composure and continued past a gasoline station, a meadow full of wildflowers, and a brick warehouse, another sliced-off hunk of the Bronx deposited in a tangle of brambles, and then the road rose up a hill so high it seemed to drop off a cliff.
“Race you,” said Harry.
Harry may have been a daredevil, but I was fast. I made it to the top first. “You gotta see this. Quick,” I called. I ran back and took the suitcase from my mother and helped her up to the precipice. The three of us gazed out upon a valley under a domed sky. Fluffy clouds floated in an expanse of blue. To the east, the Bronx River Parkway snaked along, mirroring the movement of the river beside it, until both the river and the road reached the point at which the sky met the earth.
“The horizon,” my mother said.
A few Model T Fords crawled along the white roadway. To the west, meadows and forests unspoiled by progress stretched lazily toward low hills. I had the urge to break free, to run down into the valley and go on alone. I put the suitcase on the ground and stretched my arms out like wings. I wanted to fly, I wanted to soar above everyone but I felt guilty for wanting it because I was excited about leaving home and going to the new school, and I was ashamed of harboring such a peculiar feeling. Truthfully, I was tired of the responsibility at home. I loved the baby, but no matter how much I played with Gertie she wanted more. I worried about Mama. I felt that I alone was aware, unlike my brothers and sisters, of every penny my mother spent, and the price of milk and bread and meat, and when the rent was due and how my mother had to deny herself pretty things, and she loved pretty things. I hated the whispering Mrs. Shulevitz was unable to
suppress when I wandered into the candy store, oy fatherless, and even worse, the pity on the faces of my cousins, especially Fat Ellis and Mitzi, who regarded me with exaggerated concern.
Sometimes in the afternoons when the others were napping, I lay on the bed and read the comic strips in the newspaper, Gasoline Alley and Krazy Kat, and if Harry wasn’t snoring so loud I couldn’t think, I read real books like The Swiss Family Robinson and Tom Brown’s School Days, Treasure Island and Gulliver’s Travels. The books were difficult; I was only seven. But when the story was good I stuck with it, and I was able to get away from trouble and enter other worlds. Both my grandmothers said I shouldn’t read so much, no wonder I had to wear glasses at such a young age. And eventually I did get tired. Then I’d put down the book and lay my glasses on top, and put my hands behind my head and stare at the ceiling. I’d think back to that hot, hazy Saturday in July and imagine convincing my father not to take us out for ice cream, but instead to stay home with me, and work on the model aeroplane we had started, and later walk over to the park as we had planned, for swimming lessons. I wanted to travel back in time and make everything right. But I could only do it in my mind. When I thought of my father actually coming home now, it felt wrong. There would be no way to be normal again, and since I couldn’t go backward and change anything, I wanted to go away somewhere and start fresh in a place where no one knew me. There would be no pity from Mrs. Shulevitz or my cousins or anyone, an island somewhere, some place where I could eat the fruit off the trees, like Fritz in The Swiss Family Robinson, and there might be other people my age, maybe even a girl my age. When my mother told me the new school was in the countryside and I would live there, it was a boarding school like the ones for rich English boys, like Tom Brown at Rugby School, I had the oddest reaction. My mother pleaded with me to forgive her for sending me away, and I felt so terribly sad, I did, because I couldn’t possibly lose my mother; not her, too. But then, how to explain the excitement, the thrill I got imagining the future, what was that? So I hid the feeling. I’d wait until everyone was asleep, and then, just as I could go back to the past in my mind, I would travel into the future. My mind would leave my body and walk ahead of me like a scout, laying out in moving pictures what was to come. I didn’t want to part with my mother, though. Maybe I could take her with me. When my father left and she said “Clyde, you’re the man of the house now,” I felt pride, but also a weight on my shoulders. It was the weight of the cast iron pots on the stove, and the heavy black stove itself, the weight of Alvin climbing on my back, and Gertie in my arms, and Vivian and Harry pulling on my shirttails, and now the burden was lifting. I was floating like a glider over the fields and meadows of Westchester and the winding dirt lane on the way to the village of Tuckahoe and the new school.
The three of us walked down into the valley together. I struggled with the suitcase, which was suddenly heavy. I was getting hungry again, and my clothes were hot.
“What the heck is that?” said Harry.
My mother slowed and stopped. An enormous red brick building rose out of the treetops.
“That’s it,” I said.
“Yeah. That must be it,” said my mother.
We came to a swanky tree-lined driveway curving around to a marble portico with marble steps and pillars on either side of double glass doors. My mother hesitated.
“Mama?” I said.
“It’s so big,” she said.
The massive building was U-shaped with the bottom of the U facing the road and two wings extending back for a city block. I looked up and held onto my cap to take it all in. Above the portico, bronze letters a foot high stretched across the marble lintel spelling out the name of the institution.
“Mama!” I said sharply.
“What is it?” my mother said.
“The sign,” I hissed. My heart banged against my ribs. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My mother lowered her eyes.
“What does the sign say?” said Harry.
My hands balled into fists and I swung at the air, but my arms only twisted around my body helplessly like a tetherball twists around a pole.
“Brudder! What does it say? Read me the sign,” Harry demanded.
I unclenched my fists and let my fingers go limp. “Hebrew National Orphan Home,” I said. “Satisfied, stupid?”
“Like the salami?” said Harry.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just like the salami.”
All the excitement I felt, it was all a lie. A boarding school for rich kids. Ha. What a dope I was. I swallowed the saliva pooling in my mouth. Gradually, my heart slowed to its normal rhythm, an achingly dull rhythm pumping me full of sorrow.
“It’s a school,” my mother said. “I swear to you. Inside that groys building, believe it or not, there’s a New York City school, P.S. 403, Bronx Annex,” she said. “It has its own shul too, and a gymnasium and a marching band.” she said. “Swings and a playground. Horses! Horses, Clyde,” she said, and forced a smile.
I blinked at the little gap between her teeth. I would have to use logic on her. “Orphans don’t have mothers,” I said. “We don’t belong here.”
“It’s only until I make enough money,” she said. “Then I’ll bring you back to the Bronx.”
“Why should I believe you?” I said.
My mother squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her lips together. I took a few steps backward. I’d run away. That’s what I’d do after all. I turned and started walking toward Tuckahoe Road. I crossed the gravel driveway onto the sloping lawn and kept moving farther and farther away. It was easy. Nothing mattered anymore. When I looked back, my mother was kneeling in the driveway with Harry’s face buried in her jacket. She was covering his head with kisses. I panicked. She’s kneeling on gravel, I thought. What an idiot! Her stockings. They’ll rip. They’ll snag and run and she’ll bend her knee and the rip will get bigger, and she can’t afford another pair of stockings. Not right now. She’ll have to mend them and she’s terrible at mending. I’d seen the result—lumpy caterpillars crawling up her legs. “Mama, stand up!” I yelled. But she wasn’t paying attention and stayed crouched, she and Harry dwarfed by the gigantic building. “Your stockings!” I shouted. But she didn’t hear. I hurried back across the lawn, stumbled over the curb, and came up the driveway. I pried Harry’s fingers out of the crook of my mother’s arm, grabbed his wrist and pulled him away from her. She stood up brushing gravel from her skirt.
“C’mon, Harry,” I said. “Be a man.”
Harry slipped his hand into mine and I led him toward the portico. Boys who had been hanging out on the porch scrambled inside to spread the word about the new inmates approaching.
CHAPTER 8
On Cedar Drive, I woke in my sweaty tank top and shorts, legs tangled in the sheets on the sofa, still walking down Tuckahoe Road in my mind with my grandmother who was holding the very suitcase with the yellow handle that I had stowed under the coffee table. Brenda was banging around in the kitchen clanging pots, probably gloating at being awake earlier than I was. I had stayed up late reading, but hadn’t gotten very far because I kept stopping to study the orphanage photos in the black album and to blow my nose from crying. I’d finish it all when I got home. Now I was impatient to get working on the den and the attic. First, though, I wanted to put the suitcase in the trunk of the car. I fumbled for my glasses, and reached under the coffee table, but the suitcase was gone, with the manuscript and Picture Booke inside.
“Where’s the stuff I was looking at? Where’s the suitcase?”
Brenda had her back to me at the stove frying eggs. “I put it away,” she said.
“I wasn’t finished with it.”
“You can look at it later.” She turned around. “Want some breakfast?”
“No thanks.” I tugged on my tank top to smooth the wrinkles. Brenda was wearing shorts and a tank top, too, and her skin glowed under a sheen of sweat. She usually dressed conservatively—slacks instead of jeans, suits for work. But it was another
blistering day. I wasn’t used to seeing this much of her exposed and I noticed she was a bigger woman than I had thought. Not that she was fat or tall—her body was medium in every way—but she was solid. There was strength in her thighs, in her plumped arms and freckled shoulders. A peculiar worry flitted through my mind. I thought if I had to move her the way you move a piece of furniture, she wouldn’t budge.
I turned away and slipped quietly down the hall to the back of the house. I definitely shouldn’t be doing this alone, I thought. “I can’t leave my kids,” my sister had said when I asked. “Besides, I don’t want any of that junk.” And then my mother, in her unnervingly reasonable therapist’s voice: “It would be inappropriate for me to go through the boxes, since your father left the house to Brenda.” Thanks, Ma. Thanks, Susan. I went straight to the den to search the closet—no suitcase—and then I tried my father’s bedroom. Not there either, but as I left his room I slid a gilt-framed picture off its nail. In the photograph, my chubby-cheeked father at about age three is standing on the steps of a brownstone in a sailor suit, his little hands balled into fists—not defensively as far as I could tell, but eagerly. This was the only photograph of him taken before my grandfather deserted the family, and I was glad that someone had seen fit to capture an image of my father undamaged. I peeked into Brenda’s room hesitantly, but there was no need to even cross the threshold. The suitcase was right by the door! I brought it into the living room along with the picture, and shoved the boxy frame into my daypack, shoved my feet into my Keds and fished my car keys out of the small zipper compartment in the pack. The sooner I locked these things in my car the better. I slung the pack over my shoulder, and reached for the Indian table. I hadn’t remembered it being so light. I always imagined my parents’ Armenian poet friend in a crowd of colorful saris awkwardly lugging a piece of furniture, but the wood was almost weightless, so I lofted the table one-handed, gripped the suitcase by its Bakelite handle with my other hand, and headed out so fast I almost crashed into the obstacle blocking my path. It was Brenda, sturdy as a credenza, barring the door.
