The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  “Brudder, wake up.”

  “Harry, what are you doing? Go back to sleep. We’ll get in trouble.”

  “Brudder.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I shat my pants.”

  Only a dim nightlight in the washroom. “Take off your pajama bottoms and hurry up before somebody comes.” I saw his little pecker and I wanted to cry.

  “Now what?” said Harry.

  “Go into the stall and really wipe yourself. Get up in there.”

  He cleaned his ass with paper while I scrubbed the soiled pajamas with tallow soap in one of the sinks in the long row, shit crumbs falling on the dingy floor. I did like Mama did, rubbed one part of the cloth against another, then rinsed.

  “These better dry by the morning,” I said, holding up the dripping mess. “Here. Hang ‘em over your bed frame.”

  Harry sniffed the bundle. “Smells pretty good now,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, delicious,” I said. We laughed so hard we had to hold each other up, and all without making a sound.

  Back in bed that first night, I was denied even the comfort of sleep. I bobbed alone on a dark sea, the hours passing like slow ships that never stopped to pick me up. When I get out of here, I thought, I’ll find my father wherever he is and I’ll kill him. No I won’t, I thought. I’ll run to him. Lights pulsed in the corners of my eyes and flames licked the bed frame. The Colonel came creeping past with a lantern, his shadow stretching across the ceiling. I threw the covers over my head in terror. When I peeked out to see what was happening, no one was there. The only light came from the moon glowing as round as a face through a high window. Tears slid out of my eyes and wet the collar of my pajamas.

  “UP! UP! Everybody up. Up and at ‘em!”

  Bang! Clank! Clank! The Colonel whacked his cane against the radiator. Morning at the Hebrew National Orphan Home. Watch the other boys, do what they do. Jump out of the covers, stand at the foot of your bed shivering.

  “Rise and shine!” Beiderman called. “Up and greet the day.”

  Clink-clank, clink-clank. The Colonel in full uniform banging his cane on the railings of each white-iron footboard that lacked a boy standing in front of it. He was like a kid dragging a stick along a picket fence, except he was furious. “Get up! Get up!” he snarled. His eyes bulged like boiled raisins. The deep sleepers roused and each shot to the foot of his bed.

  “Colonel, sir, all accounted for but 246,” said Shorty Lapidus. “The brat won’t budge.”

  The Colonel threw his cane at the lump in the covers. “UP! UP! UP!” the Colonel screamed. The cane bounced. A wave of fear swept over me and shuddered up and down the row of inmates.

  “UP! Do you hear me?” The Colonel swooped in and overturned the mattress, tossing the boy onto the floor between the beds—a space that was precisely eighteen inches wide according to Company E regulations.

  After breakfast, where I got more or less the same amount of oatmeal as the other boys at the table, we swept the dormitory passing the broom from one bed to the next.

  “Leverage! Use leverage,” screamed Beiderman.

  What was leverage?

  “Numbskull!” shouted Shorty Lapidus. “Make a fulcrum out of your thumb and forefinger and slide it through.”

  Chick Scheiner, a boy with a red crew-cut and freckles, showed me how. I swept under the bed and created a dust pile just like the other boys’ dust piles. Chick smiled—he even had freckles on his lips. I didn’t smile back. No orphan stink on me.

  “OK, pass it on,” said Shorty.

  The broom went to Skelly Schwartz and then Manny Bergman and down the line. I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment, which I resented.

  The others played baseball after school. I stood in the weeds looking back across the field at the brick asylum looming over the grounds. I dreamed of Sunday. What if something happened, something beyond my mother’s control, and she couldn’t come? How would I get the message? There was no candy store with a telephone. Harry and I would have to wait on the steps with Shmecky until darkness settled on the playground, and one by one, the yellow lights came on in the building.

  “Brudder. Wake up.”

  “What is it now?”

  “I’m hungry,” Harry said.

  “I am, too. Try not to think about it.”

  “Can I sleep with you, Brudder?”

  “We’re not allowed.”

  “I’m scared.”

  I leaned on an elbow and scanned the dormitory. There were others doubling up. “Awright, c’mon.” Harry climbed in, and soon he was snoring softly. His little body radiated welcome heat. I lay awake for a while longer. The week was a corridor, I thought. All we had to do was walk to the end and Harry and I would reach Sunday. It was easy. No thinking necessary. They told us to march and we marched, pray and we prayed, piss and we pissed. Hup two three four, up the stairs to P.S. 403, the grammar school right inside the big building just as my mother had said. No talking, knees high, march to school, march to Hebrew class, march to shul, march to supper, and gradually the days of the week would fall away. I wrapped an arm around Harry, snuggled against his warm back, and fell asleep.

  On Sunday morning, Visiting Day, the scene was mayhem. I couldn’t believe it. The guys were acting like a bunch of girls getting ready for a dance. They shined their shoes, put on their best clothes, slicked down their hair if it wasn’t already shaved off. Harry and I watched carefully and did what they did, like Miss Beaufort said. We made ourselves look as lovable as possible. When we were done, we stormed the main portico along with the other inmates vying for a seat on the steps and hanging off the balustrades. A fight broke out, but quickly dissolved. All eyes were on Tuckahoe Road. You would have thought President Coolidge’s motorcade was due, or the Yankees for a ticker-tape parade. I kept my eyes wide open, but I still couldn’t pinpoint when the first vague blurs took shape. They appeared out of the mist, figures from our dreams, apparitions in worn-out coats streaming through the pedestrian gate. Some walked up the terraced lawn and some chose the curving driveway. Deserted women, widowers, bachelor uncles, and grandmothers clutching paper sacks of fruit and halvah.

  “There she is!” I said.

  Harry started jumping up and down.

  “Naw. It’s not her,” I said, my voice hollow. Harry punched me in the arm. I watched the others on the portico find their people and peel off. I didn’t own a wristwatch but we’d come onto the steps at one o’clock and I estimated fifteen minutes had passed. Then twenty. Then half past. The crowd on the steps thinned. Shmecky kicked his suitcase and hummed to himself. I had planned to bring our suitcase down, too, so Harry and I could leave immediately, not even have to go back into the building, but then I thought better of it. The suitcase was all packed, though. There was room to sit now, but I didn’t want to. I leaned against one of the marble columns. I hadn’t seen Jesse Hoffman all day. It annoyed me how I was always wondering where Jesse was. He didn’t give a crap where I was. I watched Harry play a game with Chick Scheiner’s little brother Pinchus that involved bumping up and down the steps on their backsides. Then Chick and Pinky walked off with a man in a felt hat who must have been their father. I wondered if my own father knew where I was. Did he know about Visiting Day?

  There were five of us left on the steps. They let us walk around on Sundays like normal kids so I went back inside past the portrait of Justice Levy and down to the office to get a look at the clock. It was nearly two. I lingered in the lobby by the glass doors. Harry bumped down the steps past Shmecky and a few others, heads hanging under the weight of their disappointment. Then I noticed a woman walking up the driveway in short quick strides just the way my mother walked, scrape-tap, scrape-tap, with her hat cocked just the way my mother wore her hat, only my mother didn’t own a gray cloche hat with a blue band. Harry ran toward the woman anyway and she was running toward him and my heart went wild. I pushed open the door and rushed down the steps and followed Harry into my mother’s
arms.

  “You smell like cream soda,” I said. It was sickening. The hat, too. I hated it. She laughed and kissed me on both cheeks, and my forehead, and one ear.

  “It’s Kohl’s vanilla scent,” she said. “Forty percent off. Cream soda. You’re so funny, Clyde. For the hat, too, they give the employee discount.”

  If she had the money to buy a hat and vanilla perfume, even with the discount, maybe she had made enough money to bring us home. I started to feel better, but I knew enough to wait for the right moment to ask about it. We spread our blanket between two tall trees. My mother apologized for our small picnic and not bringing Vivian, Alvin, and Gertrude to make a big happy party, but I was glad she came alone. She promised to bring the others next time, and I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing Gertie since she was so little I expected she changed from day to day and then I thought, wait a minute. Next time? I stood on the edge of the blanket squinting at my mother, stunned by her presence, as if I had conjured her, and meanwhile trying to understand the words “next time.”

  “Miss Beaufort’s mean,” said Harry.

  “Miss Beaufort? What does she do?” said my mother.

  “Nuttin’,” said Harry. “Only she’s not nice like you, Mama.”

  My mother’s face lit up with the compliment. Her eyes brightened and she smiled a mischievous gap-toothed smile and I fell onto my knees and put my arms around her neck. She grabbed Harry and pulled him down, too, and we were a laughing pile of arms and legs. “Next time” was probably just a slip of the tongue. After a while, she sat up. Her hat had fallen off and she put it back on. She asked me if it looked all right. I said it did. She glanced at the building. “Are you getting enough to eat?” she asked. Harry shook his head no. “Here, take.” She pulled two sandwiches from the brown bag.

  “We already had lunch in the dining room,” I said, though we never got enough to eat.

  “Gimme,” said Harry. “I’m hungry.”

  She took a banana from the bag, and a honey cake baked into a pleated wrapper.

  “Does this salami have meat in it?” Harry said.

  My mother laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Harry said. “You put butter on the bread! Louis the Long Beard might see!”

  “He’s the mashgiach,” I said. “He blesses chickens kosher and waits for us to break the rules. We have two kitchens, one for meat and one for milk.”

  “Oy vey,” said my mother. “Don’t tell anybody. But you want treyf today, you can have treyf.“ A Dr. Brown’s Cel-Rey Tonic appeared out of her purse, along with a bottle opener. “Listen, Clyde, before I forget. Slow Uncle Archie wants to visit but he works Sundays, a night watchman.”

  “If he’s a night watchman then he can come in the daytime,” said Harry.

  “Yeah, he’s called a night watchman,” my mother said. “But it means whenever nobody’s there, daytime too, then your Uncle Archie protects the place.”

  “Does he have a gun?” said Harry.

  “No, he doesn’t have a gun,” my mother said.

  “Then how does he keep the robbers away?”

  “I don’t know, boychik. He runs and gets a policeman. Listen to me. I’m trying to tell you, Uncle Archie wants to come and visit on a weekday. Like a Monday or Tuesday. But he’s not allowed. So he wants to know when you go outside to play?”

  The rule was strictly enforced. No visitors except Sundays. I told my mother the longest we had to play outside was between regular school and Hebrew school from three to four o’clock. She said we should watch and maybe we would see Slow Uncle Archie.

  “Well, listen my little boychiks,” my mother said, “Miss Beaufort tells me I should visit every two weeks instead of every week. Less upsetting, she says. So I’ll do what the social worker tells me.”

  I pulled away. “You mean you’re not taking us home?”

  “I can’t. Not yet. Soon, though,” she said.

  I wanted to hit her but I let her hold me, and I kept my face pressed to the warm crescent of cream-soda skin above her collar. I should have known. She wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of putting us here only to take us back in a week. No wonder the fellows laughed so hard the Colonel beat our legs. I knuckled away the wet streaks on my face and hardened my heart.

  When I had finished the salami sandwich, a buttery slice of honey cake, and half a banana, I peeled the bark off a stick, and made a sword. I was a swashbuckler wandering among blankets and benches littered with destitute and neglected children. Jesse Hoffman said if we weren’t full-fledged orphans, then that’s what we were—destitute, neglected, or both. Jesse knew all there was to know about the H. We weren’t exactly friends, but like every know-it-all, Hoffman enjoyed dispensing information when he was in the mood. He said the HNOH was started in 1912 by a Romanian Jewish secret society called the Bessarabian Verband. Back then it was down on the Lower Eastside in a tenement on St. Mark’s Place. When the tenement got too crowded, the Verband went looking for a place in the country with fresh air, and found the future Home building squatting in a field on Tuckahoe Road up in Yonkers. It had been the German Oddfellows Home, a place for German orphans and also German old folks.

  Jesse Hoffman knew everything, including when there would be meat for supper or just potatoes, which of the supervisors were decent and which would beat you for no good reason, and when Colonel Anderson would make us drop our drawers and strike our bare asses with his cane or when he’d do it over our breeches. Some porters and kitchen staff were drifters, Jesse said, just passing through. Some were hobos tired of riding the rails, ex-convicts willing to work for room and board. He said Colonel Anderson hadn’t injured his leg in the war, but his head.

  “The cane’s for his head?” I said.

  “Shell shock,” said Jesse.

  I glanced back at my mother and Harry still sitting on the blanket breaking off pieces of honey cake. I swiped at a bee with my sword. The same murmuring came from every bench and blanket dotting the terraced lawn. Do they give you enough to eat? The same whispered imploring questions. Are you warm enough? Do you sleep all right? And then it was five o’clock, and the relatives got up and walked out the way they had come in, vanished out the gates in their shabby coats, my mother, too, and there was no more of her soft talk or caresses.

  Was it so bad? Yes and no. You get used to anything. Beatings, marching, the aching loneliness, no one to care for you day after day, no mama to tuck you in at night, no kisses, starved for love. There were sweet bits, though. Friends, of course, never in short supply, some who would lay down their lives for you, no shit. That was big. I learned to appreciate smaller things, too. The warmth of the sun after a freezing dawn, stolen apples, stolen eggs, a piece of meat mistakenly left on a platter, candy when we could get it. How we worshipped candy. Slobbered over it, slurped it down, were sick from it. Orphan smack, we had to have it, drowned our sorrows in Mars bars and Goo Goo Clusters, Walnettos and Chuckles and Neccos, an occasional Charlotte Russe handed out by the Ladies Auxiliaries of White Plains or Bronxville. We got benefits, for sure, things a poor kid couldn’t get living with relatives. Every Wednesday night in the old gym we saw movies, for instance. Of course we froze our asses off sitting on the concrete floor with the cold seeping into our bones, but it was worth it unless we got stuck behind one of the columns holding up the sagging ceiling and blocking the title cards. This was before talkies. We saw “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” with Lon Chaney, “Sherlock Holmes” with John Barrymore, “The Prisoner of Zenda” with Ramon Navarro, all kinds of stuff. In summer, we reveled in the woods and splashed in the B. A. creek or lolled on its banks. The initials B. A. stood for bare ass, because who the hell had a bathing suit? We built our creek pond in an idyllic spot just beyond the Home property on the grounds of the Grassy Sprain Golf Club. The club groundskeepers were always tearing down the dam, and we were always building it back up, restoring our Bare Ass Swimming Hole, or as we called it, the Bare Ass Hole. Of course, the supervisors beat us when we
were caught trespassing but it was worth it. Frankly, they were terrified of us having free time and so we were urged to participate in every legitimate activity, go out for every sport. Eventually, I stopped resisting. I joined the archery club, the aero club, and later, the radio club, the Oracle newspaper staff, the photography club. I learned to paint in the art room. I was a drummer in the band. I grew vegetables on the farm gang, collected eggs, cared for the horses—Playboy, Joe, Sally the mare.

  Sometimes seniors from the dramatics club came downstairs to Company E at bedtime and retold the plot of a movie, or read to us. I wanted to do that when I got older, tell stories to the younger kids. I thought I’d be back with my mother in the Bronx by then, but I’d visit and read to the little kids for charity. Not long after I arrived, a senior named Artie Klein started reading David Copperfield to Company E. We were at the part where David Copperfield’s cruel stepfather sends Davey away to boarding school. Chick held the flashlight over Artie’s shoulder and Artie read: “The rest of the half-year is a jumble in my recollection of the daily strife and struggle of our lives; of the waning summer and the changing season; of the frosty mornings when we were rung out of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the dark nights when we were rung into bed again; of the evening schoolroom dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which was nothing but a great shivering-machine; of the alternation of boiled beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton; of clods of bread-and-butter, of canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, and a dirty atmosphere of ink, surrounding all.”

  The room stayed hushed for moments after Artie closed the book and put out the flashlight.

  “Who wrote that?” a little voice called out in the dark. It was Shmecky.

  “Charles Dickens,” said Artie.

  “Is he in Company A or B?”

  “Neither.”

  “C or D?”

  “Dickens never lived at the H,” said Artie.

  “Then how did he know so much about it?” said Shmecky.