by Jan Cherubin
Brenda didn’t raise me of course—she was only twelve years older than I was—but I called her my stepmother because I thought the word captured the fake attachment, and later, the menace in the relationship. Brenda was my stepmother but I hardly knew her. She came from a Catholic family, one of six kids. Her father died when she was young. She worked in the accounting office at Hutzler’s department store. She and her mother didn’t get along. I hadn’t wanted to know more. I hadn’t wanted her to exist. Even grown children wished their divorced parents would get back together, some did anyway, and considering my loyalty to the past, it was natural that I was one of those who wished it. My father complained about Brenda off and on, giving hope to the fantasy of my parents’ reconciliation. He said living with Brenda was difficult. She suffered from depression and spent whole weekends in bed; she had no friends. He liked being needed, though. He liked people dependent on him. Not Susan or me. Never us. We got kicked out of the nest, such as it was, unceremoniously. But in his romantic relationships, he liked being in control of his women, that’s why he picked them so young. (He plucked my mother when she was sixteen.)
Married life wasn’t easy for my father, but it wasn’t easy for Brenda, either. He was tyrannical, although also kind-hearted. About two years into their marriage, my father told Uncle Harry about the days and days Brenda spent with her head under the covers. Uncle Harry counseled my father to get the locks changed while Brenda was at work, pack her clothes and leave her bags in the driveway. Of course, my father didn’t, couldn’t. Uncle Harry would have. He’d been married and divorced eight times. My father couldn’t leave no matter what (my mother was the one who left) and Uncle Harry couldn’t stay. So Brenda and my father struggled along, and after four years as husband and wife, he woke up one October morning transformed into something monstrous—not exactly Kafka’s giant cockroach, but something huge and troubling possessed him– a giant throbbing headache of unknown etiology. It was a hideous metamorphosis. The throbbing was excruciating and relentless. He underwent all kinds of tests and x-rays, tried all kinds of painkillers, but nothing helped, nobody knew what was wrong with him, and Brenda decided he was faking.
My father liked to put on an act, for sure, especially for his students, but he wasn’t a faker. A provocateur, yes. But always himself. I knew he wasn’t faking. And yet, I was the least likely candidate to enter the scene and right things. I had a job in far-away California, I was known for being personally irresponsible (sloppy, absentminded, burdened by unopened bills and unsent thank-you notes) and to top it off, he and I were awkward with each other. Whenever I got close, he pushed me away. I knew certain things about him. Not from his childhood, but from my own. He didn’t like that. Things that happened when I was a teenager. I could tell he thought I was judging him—either harshly or too well. If he caught me staring at him, he got mad. Whenever he called California, he wouldn’t even say hello. I’d pick up the phone and I’d hear, “Yeah?”
“Yeah?” I’d say.
Silence. Then he’d say something like: “I made this great soup. You want the recipe?”
“Yeah.”
He’d give me the recipe and we’d hang up.
We’d had a good time the last time I visited, in September, just before he got the headache. We drove to Annapolis with Hoffman. He was happy I liked his dog. I thought the visit might be a turning point. But more likely, the next time I saw him, he’d just push me away again. He’d say something dismissive. No one could get too close. Not Harry, not Shep Levine, who occupied his own happy center of the universe. Maybe my mother, once. Maybe our friend Johnny Dolan, once. But Johnny was dead and gone.
When I heard my father’s headache wasn’t going away, I called Baltimore and Brenda answered. She said he was better. “No, I’m not!” he shouted in the background. “Don’t believe her.” He grabbed the phone.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You sound bad,” I said. “I’ll come home if you want.”
“Yes, Joanna. Please. Come home.”
I was stunned he wanted me, even after that nice day in September with his dog. I was thirty and I still got on his nerves. What are you standing there for? Go to bed. Don’t you know how to peel a potato? Is that the only book you’ve read in the last six months? Don’t you know how to beat an egg? You want air in there, stupid. Lift it, lift it, faster. Haven’t you ever swept a floor? Leverage! You make a fulcrum with your thumb and forefinger.
There was more. Deep down, he didn’t trust me. We had Lake George between us, miles of cold black water. The first stop on a camping trip when I was fourteen. We hadn’t spoken about Lake George since that summer sixteen years ago.
No. He couldn’t possibly want me. Susan was the better choice. She wasn’t afraid of him. She was good at taking charge, cheerfully bossy. Susan never stood there and stared at him like a weirdo. She offered her casual affection, and lived a few hours away with Larry and their kids in New Jersey. But of course, Susan had those little girls to take care of, and besides, she said she didn’t want to step on Brenda’s toes. “Brenda’s the wife,” Susan said, and my mother agreed. “Let Brenda deal with him.” When we first heard about the headache, all three of us chuckled meanly about how we were lucky Brenda was there to play nurse, letting us off the hook. But something wasn’t right. It struck me how alone he was. So I went back to Baltimore in early December to see my father for what I thought would be a week.
“You better be prepared,” my mother said on the way to Cedar Drive from the airport. She glanced at me, then back at the road, the worried glance of the initiated to the innocent.
Hoffman barked from the side yard, but there was none of the usual fanfare at my arrival, no act, no put-on Yiddish accent: “Mine daughter, all the vay from California she comes, to see her poor daddy.” None of that shit. He sat at the dining-room table holding his head as if it were a delicate piece of china. “Close that door. I don’t feel good,” he said. “You heard?”
I put down my bag and came around the table to give him a hug. He shooed me away with his cigarette. “You heard? I don’t feel so good.” He was camped out surrounded by an ashtray heaped with butts, matches from the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, a crumpled package of Benson & Hedges, a copy of An Illustrated History of the English Garden, and a plate of odd, assorted food: a slice of rare roast-beef wrapped around a glob of cream cheese with a crescent bite torn out; a soft-boiled egg, the puddled yolk glistening; and a mound of apple sauce plowed into furrows with the tines of his fork. Brenda sat across the table staring at his plate. She turned to me as if I had broken her reverie. “Oh, hello there.”
My mother kept her coat on, her purse hanging from her shoulder and a clump of keys in her hand the way she always did whenever she came over to Cedar Drive. Except when she and her boyfriend Marty Geller were invited for dinner.
“Are you going or staying?” I asked.
My father perked up. He kept his head in his hands and moved his eyes until he settled on my mother. “Well?”
“I’ll stay for a little while,” my mother said.
“Then put your purse down,” I said. “Put your keys down.” She kept jangling her mass of jailer’s keys, some of which actually locked people up at the state mental hospital where she was a social worker, a midlife career. “You’re making me nervous,” I said. I didn’t want her to leave.
My father jumped up, tapping into a hidden energy reserve, as anxious to keep my mother there as I was. “I’m losing weight, Evie, whaddaya think?” He unbuckled his belt and held his jeans out from his waist. I’ll let you know when I get down to 127.”
My mother laughed as if this were some hilarious joke. My father managed a small laugh, too. “That’s how much Clyde weighed when I met him in 1942,” she told Brenda.
“That’s the emis,” said my father. “She got so mad when her sister introduced us and I mispronounced her name. ‘Not Evy! My name isn’t short for Evelyn. It’s Ee-vie with a long “e.”<
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“Evie is the diminutive of Eve!” my father and mother said in unison.
“She was so cute,” my father said, “in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sixteen years old.”
“He was so skinny he had to hammer extra holes in his belt,” my mother said.
“That was before I enlisted in the army and got three squares a day.” He started to buckle the belt he was wearing now. “I’d never seen so much food. First day of chow I go up to the sergeant and I say, ‘Who am I supposed to share this with?’ I thought they made a mistake.”
“They fed you in the orphanage, though,” I said.
“They fed us. But I still went to bed hungry.” My father shot me an angry look.
CHAPTER 9
Tuckahoe
The social worker at the Hebrew National Orphan Home told my mother to go. “No!” we cried. “Mama, don’t leave us! Please don’t leave us!” But Miss Claire Beaufort said the sooner you get out of here, Mrs. Aronson, the better, so Mama turned around and walked out. “Mama, come back!”
Miss Beaufort had a flapper hairdo and looked fun, like someone who would be nice to children. “You boys belong in Company E,” she said, a peculiar smile flickering at the corners of her mouth. Her jazzy style was a hoax.
Just then the office door swung open, prodded by a cane, and in walked a tall man wearing a uniform from the Great War.
“Follow the Colonel upstairs. He’ll show you where to unpack,” Miss Beaufort said. The smile flickered.
“Are we in the army?” said Harry.
“No talking, boy,” said the Colonel, pointing the cane at my little brother. The man lowered his stick after a few seconds and leaned on it. I was eye level with his jodhpurs, right where they bloomed at his hips. Fear sloshed in my guts, but I put on a brave act for Harry.
“Just watch the other boys, do what they do,” Miss Beaufort said brightly.
“Forward march!” The Colonel straightened his pith helmet and led us out of the office and into the hallway. Shrapnel, I thought, must be the reason for the cane. “Hup, two, three, four.” I thought he was joking the way Slow Uncle Archie joked when we played war. The Colonel raised the cane and held it like a baton. “Close your mouth, boy. Step lively.”
Along the darkened corridor, the odor of boiling tar and oily beef tallow. My nostrils flared and a tear rolled down my cheek. A couple of bull-necked fellows crossed our path and dashed up a flight of steps. I stared after them. Even with fear in my belly, I was spellbound by examples of what I might grow into. Not here, though. I wasn’t going to grow up here. “Face front!” the Colonel snapped. He seemed upset by the older boys walking around on their own, and waited until they were gone before we climbed to the third floor, knees high. Halfway up the creaking staircase, the Colonel made us go ahead of him, and he made a quick motion with the cane, like a golf putt. I watched the rubber tip catch Harry on the seat of his pants and lift him up, then bring him down onto the step again. I gasped and the cane’s rubber tip nudged into the seam of my own trousers, poked into my backside. I was deeply offended. I swiped the seat of my pants but couldn’t get rid of the odd feeling. Harry was quietly crying. I wanted to kick the Colonel in the shins. I wanted to bite him. In the office, my mother had said if we were good, she’d bring us home on Visiting Day if she could save enough money by then. And so I was good and I did not kick or bite the Colonel.
At the entrance to Company E, fresh fear spilled into my heart when I saw the whiteness. Everything like a hospital. White walls, white window frames, white blankets, white-iron beds in rows. The Colonel put two older inmates in charge of us, monitors they were called.
“No talking number 271, that’s you, boy,” said Shorty Lapidus, not short, but lanky with pimples. I didn’t like a kid calling me boy. Beiderman, built like a weight lifter, hit me in the stomach with a package. It was all happening so fast. I tore open the brown paper. Sheets, underwear, and pajamas, each item embroidered with 271. There was no way back.
“Look out, 87.” Shorty sent a package sailing toward Harry. It hit him right in the smacker and fell on the floor. “Pick it up, moron,” Shorty Lapidus said.
People kept shouting at us. Beiderman demonstrated how to make a bed with hospital corners. “Taut! Taut!” he screamed, although we were standing right next to him. More shouts rang out, but these were the good kind—the joyful shouts of children running through the doorway laughing, shoving, cussing—and this scared the shit out of me the most. All kids around my age, seven, eight, nine, with a few as young as Harry. I didn’t know what expression to put on my face. They called to each other. Blocky, Cheesie, Skelly, Hirsh. The walls of my throat swelled. I blinked and swallowed.
Harry rushed up the aisle. “Brudder, my bed can bounce a nickel!”
“Good going,” I said.
“Listen up. Somebody’s gotta go downstairs and get Shmecky,” said Beiderman. “You, Hoffman, and take the rookie with you. Not 87. The taller one,” he said. I followed Hoffman down the hall toward a back staircase. He was thin like me, and he wore glasses same as me, and he didn’t seem weak or shy like other children with glasses, just as I wasn’t in normal circumstances. I listened to the sound of our footsteps along the quiet corridor away from the rowdy dorm, and then our weight creaking the wooden stairs and I felt an unexpected rush of feeling for this boy, Hoffman. I asked his given name: Jesse. He didn’t ask mine and without a word took a flying leap landing neatly on the plank floor. Show off.
“This here’s the kitchen,” he said. “One of them. We got two. One for milk, one for meat.”
I tried to see into the high-ceilinged room but billows of steam obscured the view. “A whole kitchen for milk?” I said. We each wiped the fog off our glasses with our shirttails.
“Gotta. We’re Orthodox,” Jesse said. “All the Homeboys, 381 of us. That means you, too.”
“We are? I am?” My throat closed again, this time for being included.
“Calm down, kid,” Jesse Hoffman said. “We don’t hafta grow payes or wear fur hats.”
“What do we hafta do?”
“You’ll see. C’mon, we gotta go get Shmecky,” he said. I followed Jesse into the wood-paneled lobby decorated with portraits of old men, and in the center of the foyer, a dark gleaming staircase. “Genuine mahogany,” Jesse noted. “And that there’s Justice Aaron J. Levy. Says so on the pitcher frame. New York Supreme Court. He’s our patron.”
I didn’t ask what a patron was, only followed behind Jesse who stopped to look out the double glass doors onto the portico. A little boy was sitting outside on the steps. He had a suitcase by his feet.
“What’s he doing out there?” I said.
“That’s Shmuel Hefter. Shmecky. His mother was supposed to take him home, but it looks like she ain’t coming. C’mon Shmecky,” he said, opening the door. “You better go back to the dormitory and unpack.”
When do we eat, I wanted to know, and why aren’t we allowed to talk except at certain times and how was I to know when I was allowed to talk if there was no logic as to why? I thought I could ask Jesse Hoffman, but after getting Shmecky, he made a point of ignoring me. I didn’t want to make friends anyway. I didn’t want their orphan stink on me. I vowed to keep myself apart. Aside from something to eat, I wanted only one thing: my mother.
Harry and I were separated most of the time, as our beds were at either end of the dormitory. We were issued caps and told to stand in line according to size, in my case behind a boy named Albert Shack. Shorty Lapidus said I’d stand behind Al Shack the rest of my life unless one of us had a growth spurt, and I spoke up and said, “no, not the rest of my life, just a week because my mother’s coming to get me and my brother on Visiting Day,” to which everyone laughed uproariously. This sent the Colonel into a rage. Eyes bulging, he charged down the line and whacked each one of us on the legs with his cane. “Now march to supper,” the Colonel said.
I soothed myself with thoughts of chicken falling off the bone, hot past
rami on rye, brisket with gravy, fresh Kaiser rolls. We marched along the kitchen corridor toward a dishwater smell and even that had me licking my lips like a dog. I followed Al Shack greedily into what I assumed was the dining room, but instead we landed on wooden benches facing a podium behind which a man with a long white beard muttered and swayed. My heart sank. How many hours had it been since we’d eaten the apples by the side of the road? The rabbi droned on in Hebrew. Hunger gnawed at me and the droning and the gnawing merged until I felt I had swallowed the rabbi and he was gnawing on my stomach from the inside. A smack to the back of my head pitched me forward. “Sit up, boy.”
“Don’t move a muscle-ussel until the Colonel gives the signal-ignal.” Instructions echoed from a megaphone in the dining room and still no food. “No talking-awking! If you breathe a word during supper-upper, you will all get demerits-errits!”
“Aw go to hell Piggy Rosenthal, you fat fuck.” A curse out of nowhere directed at Supervisor Arthur Rosenthal and randomly ignored. The Colonel sliced the air with his cane—the signal. Three hundred and eighty-one chairs scraped the floor in unison. Still no food and more bruchas—prayers, lots of prayers. Finally a bowl passed around our table of eight, but in such a way that it reached me last. One lousy wrinkled kreplach left in a watery puddle. I gulped it down and glanced across the table at Jesse Hoffman’s plate of dumplings and vegetables. He looked away. Next to him, Stanley Hirsh popped carrots into his mouth like a machine.
“What are you lookin’ at, ya mope?” said Stanley.
I shook my head just slightly to indicate I wasn’t looking at anything.
Lights out, privacy at last under the stiff covers, belly empty and aching. I closed my eyes and saw my mother walking along a ridge, silhouetted against the night sky. She was carrying the suitcase. I knew that was wrong. The suitcase was right under the bed.
