The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  “Gimme my nickel,” the squeaky voice said.

  “When I’m good and ready.”

  “You swore!”

  “You rat me out,” said Shorty, “you know where I’m gonna stick your frickin’ nickel?”

  They walked out of the barn like it was nothing. I was trembling and my face burned with shame once again. Why? I hadn’t done anything. It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to be seen, not by them or near them. I counted to sixty. One-twenty. One-eighty. Two-forty. Three hundred and I slipped out like a burglar, ducked behind a stand of trees, made a looping detour through the chicken coops, and finally, because I had nowhere else to go, I trudged up the steps of the big brick building smack into a fat white stomach in a stiff shirt.

  “Son, why aren’t you upstairs?” Without the megaphone, Piggy Rosenthal’s voice was kind and gentle. I told him I was new and I’d gotten lost. I didn’t mention the barn. He said he’d heard I was new and he patted my hair and asked if I understood what happened to boys who were tardy. No, I said, I didn’t know what happened. He nodded in sympathy and then slapped me across the face. I was so shocked, I didn’t cry. “Next time I’ll do it with my fist,” he said.

  Upstairs, Shorty was already in the center aisle of Company E blowing on his whistle. Had he seen me at all? I was no snitch. I wouldn’t rat out the creep. I stood in line and took a pee and washed up and brushed my teeth. Then I walked the plank floor back to my bed.

  “Wrecking crew! Wrecking crew!” Not again. Get him! Who? Aronson! Get Clyde Aronson! Do you know what happens to boys who are tardy? Had Shorty seen see me in the barn? You know where I’m gonna stick your frickin nickel? “Wrecking crew!” Don’t break my glasses. Not my glasses! I threw up an elbow and blocked my face.

  Harry ran toward me yelling, “Brudder! Brudder!”

  “Stay back, Harry,” I warned.

  I woke up smelling my mother’s cold cream. Nurse Flanagan leaning in with an ice pack. Soft bosom in white cotton.

  “The ‘H’ ain’t so terrible,” Jesse Hoffman said.

  “Where am I? Why are you here?” I said.

  “Who do you think hauled you in?”

  I smiled. Jesse handed over my wire-rimmed spectacles. They’d survived in one piece.

  “Look, I made it through this shithole so far,” Hoffman said. “You will too. I’m leaving, though.”

  “You’re leaving?” I immediately regretted the plaintive tone in my voice.

  “It’s my birthday next month,” Jesse said.

  “So?” I said angrily. I felt the loss too keenly.

  “Tell him, Flanny. See, all boys turning nine in 1924 leave Company E and move up to Company D on the first day of 1925.”

  “That’s right,” said Nurse Flanagan. “That’s how it works.”

  So Jesse was only going to the other wing, moving to another dormitory and not really leaving at all, just as I must have known I wasn’t leaving anytime soon. I bit the corners of my mouth to try to keep from smiling too much. A million beatings were nothing compared to the possibility of friendship.

  CHAPTER 16

  The four of us huddled at the end of the hospital corridor staring out the window at the cars glinting in the parking lot and then beyond to the racetrack and grandstand, waiting for Nurse Debbie to finish changing the sheets. “You’re probably right,” I said. “They probably both shat their pants.”

  “Of course I’m right,” said Aunt Vivian. “My mother used to tell me things.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “What some of those boys did to each other.”

  “Never mind that,” said Uncle Harry. “My sister doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Uncle Alvin continued to stare out the window. “I hate hospitals,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yeah, I’m hungry,” said Aunt Gladys.

  Aunt Vivian looked down at the purse hanging from the crook of her arm and gaping open. She snapped it shut. “You know, I hate to tell you this,” she said.

  “What? What is it you hate to tell us?” said Uncle Alvin, scorn raking his voice.

  “I hate to tell you,” Aunt Vivian said, “but Clyde looks like a man who’s dying of cancer.”

  Uncle Harry reached out and steadied himself against the wall. I felt like I’d been hit with a plank and clutched my stomach. No, no, it’s TB! But I knew my aunt, like most pathological liars, was brutally honest. Uncle Harry’s face reddened with rage. “You don’t know!” he said. “All these fancy doctors can’t figure out what he’s got! But my sister, Vivian, she knows.”

  “I was a nurse for twenty years,” Aunt Vivian said. “I know what a cancer patient looks like.”

  “C’mon. Let’s go eat,” said Uncle Alvin.

  They invited me to dinner. “You go,” I said. “I’m fine here.” I watched them walk out through the lobby doors, shoulders hunched in their winter coats. It was dark already. A blast of cold air and then the doors sealed shut. I thought when the time came, I would find Ye Olde Picture Booke and give it to Uncle Harry. I went back upstairs.

  “I’m glad they’re gone,” my father said. “Too much. You know what I mean?”

  “I’ll go too if you want—you can sleep.”

  “You? You’re a saint. You stay.”

  “I’m not a saint,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

  I made the blue chair recline and I stretched out and we both closed our eyes. I was thinking about the mentors Uncle Harry said they had at the Home. My father was always saying he didn’t believe in coddling. He didn’t have a father to help him, so why should he help me? But the truth was, as Harry described it, my father had lots of help. Day and night, my father admitted. Teachers, big brothers. He felt like he was alone, though. He thought his shitty father was what he needed, and no one else would do.

  In high school, I made friends with a girl named Eloise Sandler, who asked my father for help with an English paper. I was surprised he agreed so eagerly since he wasn’t available to me. If I didn’t grasp a concept or had difficulty with a book I was dismissed with such dispatch. “You’re a phony,” he’d say, meaning not as serious a student as I pretended to be. Would I have been more serious if he had tutored me in writing or gone over my book reports? If he had shared his own writing? Even sharing his lesson plans for classes at City would have been interesting. He must have been afraid I’d reveal my utter stupidity, or possibly that he would fall short in some way. I could see Eloise and my father at the table across the hall from where I sat waiting in the big gold armchair in the living room. They leaned over Eloise’s typewritten pages tête à tête, concentrating on her words. When Eloise finally went home, I asked why he didn’t help with my English assignments. You never asked, he said. Now I wondered if it had something to do with Lake George. If the camping trip hadn’t happened would we have talked about poetry? Would we have trusted one another? Maybe, but probably not. Boys are smarter. There are no great women chess players. Susan was lucky. She wasn’t interested in chess. She wasn’t a phony, according to him. She was proud to be a girl.

  Now though, he wanted only me and I was elated. I came to the hospital early and stayed until eight or nine at night, as if it were my job. He had visitors, but for hours every day it was just the two of us. I began to think of my other job—the one at the newspaper—as pointless. Certainly not a matter of life or death. When I got to Sinai in the morning he was usually in pain, his face gray, the Demerol worn off, his green hat limp on the pillow. I suffered with him. It didn’t seem like a choice.

  “My father needs a shot!” I demanded at the nurse’s station. “Room 605!”

  A woman in a white Nurse Ratched hat, not Debbie, raised her eyebrows and continued shuffling papers behind the high counter. “We’ll get to him,” she said.

  “But you waited too long. He’s in pain again.”

  “Miss, we have other patients besides your father.”

  I went b
ack to his room.

  “Where’d you go just now?” he said. “Where were you?”

  “I went to find a nurse to get you a shot.”

  “You looking out for me, baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  People gave me advice. Take a break, call a friend, go shopping, buy yourself something. No one seemed to understand I was exactly where I wanted to be. I had my father’s undivided attention. In the quiet of the white room, he was all mine. I thought of bringing up the camping trip. We might speak about it as adults, wade into the lake water always lapping at the edge of consciousness. But during the long quiet days, I didn’t bring up any of that. Not Lake George or Nola Swenson. If only he would go on living, so that I might talk to him when I was ready.

  How strange looking back, that he spent so much time in the hospital with no treatment, just waiting for scans. He could have gone home, but he stayed for the Demerol. They let you do that sort of thing then. He slept and I finished Time and Again. The descriptions of old New York were beautiful, but the dreamlike pace made me sleepy and I was glad to start Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s writing was so matter of fact. Right away, the novel spoke to me, an orphan’s tale told by a bold girl. I thought it was unfortunate I hadn’t read it in childhood. He woke in pain and I closed the book and again went chasing down nurses for a shot. He slept some more and I was restless, so I took the elevator to the fourth floor and visited the newborns in the maternity ward. I wanted a baby, but I wanted to be something first. I went down to the lobby and called Fred. I felt better talking to him until I heard the clackety clack of his keyboard. We hung up and I went to the cafeteria and ate a vanilla Dixie cup with a wooden spoon. Ice cream was the only hospital food I could stand. No boiled cabbage smell. Cold, frozen.

  Most nights I spent at my mother’s. She made dinner, or we went out. These interludes in the real world were supposed to renew my spirits, but I had no appetite and only wanted to go to bed so I could wake up in the morning and rush back to my charge. My mother was worried I wasn’t eating and dragged me out to a favorite Chinese place.

  “Brenda’s been harassing him about his will,” my mother said as soon as we ordered. “She wants more money.”

  “When did he say this?” I said.

  “The other day when you went out to get cigarettes. He was upset. ‘Brenda said terrible things to me. Terrible!’ he cries to me.”

  “He said that to me, too. She calls him a junkie.”

  “Yeah, not that. This time it sounded more like she threatened him.”

  “Threatened to do what?”

  “He wouldn’t say. Maybe she threatened to kill herself again. I don’t know. Maybe she threatened to kill him. Give him an overdose. Who knows?”

  “It’s strange,” I said. “I mean, how much could a high school teacher have in his will?”

  “Not much,” my mother said. “The house is the big thing. She’s getting that. But she wants more.”

  “Is there more?”

  The waiter brought the won ton soup and the broth was soothing and I got my appetite back. I slurped up a dumpling and bit into the little pouch of ground pork and I felt good for a few minutes.

  “There’s the credit union account we started in 1953,” my mother said. “You know I didn’t take my half when I left. I should have, but I didn’t, I guess because we never touched that money. I figured it would sit there and he’d keep my name as beneficiary.”

  “Oh. So you think Brenda’s bugging him about that?” I said.

  “Yeah. You know, when they were first married and he told us he wanted to leave her the house, I was furious. I don’t know if you remember that. We had a fight about it. I said he should leave the house to his children. He got mad and we didn’t talk for a while so I wrote him a letter. I told him I didn’t want to be unkind. It was just that we spent thirty years together, and bought the house on Cedar Drive new and we had children together and raised them there. I must have made ten thousand meals in that kitchen and cleaned up twenty thousand more, and it was hard for me to see my house go to a stranger.”

  “Did he write back?”

  “He called me at work. He said my letter made him cry. Then he says, what do you think the kids would do with the house? I said, they’d sell it, but so would Brenda.”

  “He should have taken your advice,” I said.

  “The thing is, I started to agree with him,” my mother said. “Brenda’s entitled not to be kicked out of her home. And I’m entitled to the money we saved together.”

  He was waiting for me in the morning, sitting up in bed with his hat at a jaunty angle. I lowered the safety rail and he grabbed onto my arm with all his weight, which wasn’t much at that point, and swung his flannel-covered legs over the side and I put on his slippers and helped him walk to the blue recliner chair. He smelled smoky in a good way, like caramelized sugar. I pulled the small chair close to him and sat down and gave him the milkshake I’d made in the cafeteria by violently mashing the contents of two chocolate Dixie cups in a glass of chocolate milk. But like the milkshakes I got at the deli, he couldn’t drink it. He tried. He took a wincing sip and passed it back.

  “How has Brenda been treating you?” I said.

  “She says terrible things to me,” my father said.

  “Like what?”

  “Terrible things. Never mind what.”

  I could not get him to talk. Nurse Debbie came in, gave him a shot and tidied up, and while she was there, I felt comforted and supported in a way I wasn’t used to. I thought maybe I’d like to live in the hospital too, high on Demerol with Debbie taking care of me. She seemed to sense what I was feeling and lingered in the room, filled the water pitcher, threw away some paper cups. Just as she was about to roll her cart out the door, she stopped and asked if my father and I had always been close. I stammered. “Yes . . . no . . . I’m not sure. Sort of.” I felt embarrassed not knowing.

  He was certainly around all the time when I was growing up. He was in the kitchen making supper. He was in the tent by the lake. I saw him every day, but like I said, he didn’t see me. Now, at Sinai, I basked in the sweet burn of his attention, an intense feeling that I remembered having one other time, in 1969, the summer I turned fourteen. It was after the camping trip and the moment was brief, the length of a car ride from the swimming club to Cedar Drive. It was the end of summer. School was going to start soon. I hadn’t said a word to my father in two weeks. He begged me to speak to him. We were at the pool. “Will you ever forgive me?” he said. I ran out the gate in the chain-link fence and down the street. He came looking for me in his car. “I’m sorry,” he said. He gave me a striped beach towel. “Will you ever speak to me again?”

  I took the towel and wrapped myself in it and sat beside him on the front seat. We drove over the railroad tracks and he cleared his throat and blinked several times behind his glasses.

  “It’s hard having a father,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess it must be,” he said.

  “I mean, it’s hard having you for a father.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I always knew it was hard not having a father. But I never thought about how it might be hard having a father.” He was staring out the windshield. He wasn’t the kind of person who kept looking at you when he was driving. He drove fast but always with his eyes on the road. Only at the red light, then he turned and faced me, and what I saw was that no one else had it as bad as he did. But at least he was looking at me, he was listening to me. I felt the burn in my chest, the ache. There I was. Someone who had a difficult father. The car bumped over the railroad tracks, we passed the billy goat tied to a post out in front of the little train store, we drove down the road, we raked leaves in autumn, he unzipped Nola’s sleeping bag, we shoveled snow in winter, planted flowers in spring, didn’t speak, picked beans in summer in clover among the bees.

  Now we sat knee to knee, the colorless day stretched before us, listening to nothing but the muffled footsteps of nurse
s coming down the hall and the faint pong of the elevator bell.

  CHAPTER 17

  The day finally came for the MRI. I thought it was preposterous, having to drag my father out of a warm hospital bed and into his cold Camaro to drive all the way out Reisterstown Road. But Heidenheimer didn’t think me having to drive him was such a big deal. “Mr. Aronson isn’t hooked up to anything,” the doctor said. I was still anxious about taking him. No one seemed to understand how serious his situation was. If anything, he should have been choppered in the way they do it in the movies, greeted by a team of experts ducking from the wash of the helicopter blades.

  My father felt the way I did—it was preposterous. The day of the appointment, he refused to change out of his pajamas. He wanted to keep the flannel comfort layer next to his skin, so he put his jeans on over the red-and-white pajama bottoms with the peppermint stripes sticking out of his pant legs. Then the red tartan bathrobe Susan bought him, which hung down past the hem of his overcoat. Topped off with the green knit hat. We thought the whole trip was crazy. He wasn’t supposed to leave the hospital until they fixed what was wrong with him.