The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  “You bet. Beer, too.”

  I hadn’t been outside the gates since Passover. I wanted to see the world again. Maybe if I went traveling with the band, I’d have a better chance of finding my father. He might be in the crowd on the sidelines at the Yonkers Fireman’s Parade. He might see me marching along beating a drum.

  I picked up my chicken and resumed flicking. “All right,” I said, trying not to sound grateful. “I’ll join the band.”

  Since the HNOH was founded on the Lower East Side, its grammar school, PS 403, continued to be part of the New York City school system even after the H moved to Westchester County beyond the city limits. Except for the fact that PS 403 was located inside an orphanage, it was strictly a public school, not parochial. Hebrew classes were taught separately in the shul by the Home rabbis. I preferred regular school. I liked all of the subjects—English, arithmetic, history, geography—and I greatly appreciated the safety and sanctity of the PS 403 classrooms where the teachers ruled, and not the Colonel. After lunch, we played baseball. The guys knew me now. They knew I could run the bases, and I wasn’t a terrible hitter. One afternoon I was daydreaming in the outfield, inhaling the heady smell of burning leaves when a formation of honking geese came flying so low I could see their mouths moving. I gazed up in astonishment only vaguely conscious that a ball might sail my way, when Harry appeared and brought me out of the trance.

  “What are you, crazy?” I yelled. “Get out of here. There’s a game going on.”

  “C’mon to the fence,” Harry said. “Slow Uncle Archie’s got Walnettos.”

  I threw down my glove. The boys hollered at me but I followed Harry away from the ball field past the cottages and toward the line of golden maples bordering the western edge of the Home’s twenty acres. It was a strange sight, my uncle in an ill-fitting suit on the other side of the orphanage fence, his long arms stretched through the pickets, flailing around reaching for me.

  “Get over here Clyde my boy. Give your uncle a hug.”

  Harry’s face was scrunched up chewing on a nutty caramel Walnetto. Drool slobbered down his chin. Paper wrappers were strewn on the ground.

  “Careful, Harry,” I said. “You’ll take out a tooth.”

  “Hey, Clyde, what time is it when you go to the dentist?” said Uncle Archie.

  “I don’t know,” I said, annoyed. Sometimes I thought I was the grown-up and my uncle was the child, I really did.

  “Two-thirty,” said Uncle Archie. “Get it, Clyde? Tooth hurty.”

  I came closer and let Slow Uncle Archie grab me by the shirt. We hugged with the iron fence between us. I wanted to save the Walnetto and savor it in private, but I was afraid some hooligan might swipe it meantime, so I unwrapped the candy and bit into the caramel and nuts. Sugary saliva pooled in my mouth and waves of pleasure turned my body slack. I leaned on the fence for support.

  “I miss you kids,” Uncle Archie said. He paced on his side of the grass. “You know, if it was up to me . . .”

  “I love Walnettos,” said Harry.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Whoever came or didn’t come on the official designated Visiting Day, the farther away in the week we got from it the better we felt. Most relatives followed the every-other-week rule, and I found that I liked certain things about the weeks when my mother wasn’t coming, and neither of my two grandmothers. I could relax, not have to hope for anything. I used to feel sorry for the full orphans who had nobody, but Visiting Day was the worst for kids with relatives who said they’d come and never did. We had plenty of kids like that, not just Shmecky. I came to the conclusion Hoffman’s power had something to do with his not having to wait for anybody to show up. Ever. That was freedom. Jesse was left once, when he was too young to remember it. Whereas guys like me were left every other Sunday.

  Weeks passed and leaves fell, allowing us to see more of the world through the bare tree limbs. I thought the winter landscape on Tuckahoe Road was beautiful, a picture by Currier & Ives, unlike winter in the Bronx with frozen dog turds on the sidewalk. But the country was brutal in its own way. The cold was colder. Winter descended on us with a chill I couldn’t get rid of. That cold, cold smell of the dark night David Copperfield talked about—that was the smell of an institution not getting the proper amount of coal. Frosty mornings rung out of bed. That was us. Shmecky was right. Dickens sure knew the H. There were holes in the roof of the big building and warped sashes on those cracked dormitory windows. In the mornings, condensation dripped into puddles on the windowsill and sometimes great hunks of ice formed on our bed frames and the supervisors came with pickaxes to chop it from our beds before we could even begin to make hospital corners. I heard more keenly than I did in the city. The north wind blasted down from the Adirondacks across the plains of Westchester whistling through the trees. Branches creaked, hickory nuts hit the roof, coyotes howled at the moon, and little boys cried out after wetting the bed. I felt everything harder and more deeply, because there was more space to feel it. Not just more space in the landscape, but more space inside myself, which was loneliness, but also freedom.

  Pussy Alice had another litter of kittens and not enough teats. Carl Grimm, the second chef, who did not seem like a hobo or an ex-con but more like a teacher or a scientist, brought a glass of milk from the kitchen and an eyedropper from Nurse Flanagan and sat on the ground in his white chef’s uniform. He held the runt, a gray fluff ball, in the crook of his arm and fed her milk with the eyedropper. Then Mr. Grimm let me try. The little puss was so sweet. She sucked the milk from the eyedropper with kissing sounds.

  “Is it wrong to feed her if she was supposed to die?” I said. I’d read about natural selection.

  “Maybe I’m a softie,” said Mr. Grimm. “But I believe in helping those who need a hand and I believe Mr. Darwin does, too. What about you, Clyde? What do you think?”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Mr. Grimm had to go back to work. He stood and collected the empty milk glass and the eyedropper. He was covered in straw and animal hair. He brushed himself off but the sticks and fur clung to him. “Let’s hope there’s not a scold around to notice,” Mr. Grimm said. He smiled like we were in on it together. I liked that about Mr. Grimm. He slipped a white chef’s hat from his pocket and put it on his head at a jaunty angle. He wasn’t one of them. He was one of us.

  Jesse Hoffman and a few others packed their bags and moved up to Company D. They were juniors now. I missed having Hoffman in the dorm, but I still had Chick Scheiner. At least Chick was easygoing, whereas Jesse was a smart aleck. He couldn’t help it—Jesse was ahead of everyone, clever, inventive, hilarious. In fact, I thought, Jesse was a lot like me. Chick was the opposite, even-tempered, never conceited. He had a great laugh. He’d throw back his red head and roar, and sometimes he slapped his knee like a country bumpkin, and when Chick laughed like that at one of my jokes I felt like a million bucks.

  Chick, Jesse, Harry, Manny Bergman, and I sat on the library stoop carving our names into the soapstone. It was Friday and we were shooting the shit while the staff bustled around the kitchen yard getting ready for the Sabbath. Some seniors, whose names were already carved into the steps and indelibly inked with years of dirt, loitered around the porch giving instructions on how to hold a penknife, and other sage advice.

  “Just wait until tomorrow,” said Young Connie. “You’re going to be so sorry the Colonel retired the pommel horse.”

  “Wasn’t the Colonel who did away with it,” said Jesse. “It was Mr. Laudenbacher. The Superintendant.”

  “All the same,” said Young Connie. “You’ll be beggin’ for the pommel horse.”

  “Baloney,” said Harry.

  “You don’t know what you’re in for,” said Young Connie. He ran a finger over the letters cut into the fourth riser: Young Connie Schreiber, 1922. “Frickin’ detention,” he said.

  “So tell us.”

  “Try standing still for one, maybe two hours,” said Jesse solemnly. He’d ha
d detention once since he moved up.

  “Big deal. I can stand still,” I said.

  “With your arms out?” said Jesse.

  “I can do that,” said Chick.

  “Oh, yeah, smartie? How about holding a pillow?” Young Connie said.

  “A pillow? Geez, that’s nuttin’,” said Manny Bergman.

  “A pilla’s a bag a’ feathers is all,” Chick said.

  “Weighs nuttin,” said Harry.

  “Light as a feather,” I said.

  “Yeah? How about a shoe?” Young Connie said.

  “A shoe? I don’t know about a shoe.”

  The Sabbath, Shabbos, the day of rest, the holy day, was for some cockeyed reason considered the correct day to mete out punishments based on demerits collected over the week. Company E had accumulated a fair amount for talking at meals, tardiness, marching out of step, and fighting. Instead of going downstairs to the gym to drop our trousers after shul as usual, we were told to go to our dorm and line up in a column down the center aisle.

  Superintendant Laudenbacher was a good man, but misguided. Standing for two hours without moving a muscle was the worst torture of all. I’d have given my right arm to march in a circle, not to mention submit to the wrecking crew. I’d have gladly bent over the pommel horse if it meant I could shift my weight. When Manny thought nobody was looking he scratched his head and Beiderman socked him in the mouth so hard he went down. Two seniors carted Bergman off to Nurse Flanagan. Then the Colonel ordered us to hold our arms out. Boom, another kid down without even being punched—he fainted—which was lucky for him because he was carried off to Flanny as well. I wondered why everyone didn’t fake fainting, but there must have been a reason. I didn’t think I’d be able to hold my arms up any longer when the monitors grabbed the pillows off our beds and placed them onto our outstretched hands. For ten seconds my pillow was a marshmallow. On the eleventh second, a sack of potatoes. Get this thing off me, I screamed in my head. I cried but my eyes were dry. I pretended I was a rock. A rock can’t move. The tears flowed backward into my skull.

  People on the outside, they didn’t know about standing detention. On Saturday afternoons in spring and summer after several hours of shul and punishment, we marched two miles into Bronxville where we were treated to first-run movies at the Palace Theater. Townspeople on the street stopped in their tracks and shopkeepers in their aprons came outside to marvel at the parallel lines of well-behaved Hebrew orphans in knickerbockers and newsboy caps marching in lockstep.

  Around Christmas, Harry grew sullen. He was angry. For days he didn’t speak to me. I had turned nine back in April and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t not turn nine. I waited for months and now January 1st was fast approaching, time to advance to the junior dorm. Harry had friends but he was attached to me. He didn’t want to be left behind. There would be no more doubling up in bed once I moved into Company D.

  On New Year’s Eve we pinched ourselves to stay awake. Cheesie was lookout. He had a sixth sense and got his name from calling “Cheese it!” whenever he spotted coppers. We scrambled back under the covers and faked sleeping when the Colonel made his rounds. Then just before midnight, a crowd of freshmen sneaked around the corner to the east wing into the junior dorm where many of us (me included) would move the next day. The seniors came down from the fourth floor with pots and pans and soup kettles, spoons, ladles, and spatulas pilfered from either the meat kitchen or the milk kitchen. Pious Pussy Friedman would have squealed if we used both. At the stroke of twelve we threw open the windows and leaned into the bitter night glittering with stars and banged our kettles, clanged our frying pans. Jesse produced a rousing drum roll, a paradiddle, and a ratatatat—boom, crack, clickety boom—and the rest of us rattled and clinked and cheered. Three hundred and eighty-one orphans hanging out the windows shouting with glee: Happy New Year! Happy 1926!

  CHAPTER 26

  My mother and I had our squabbles, but spending short periods of time with her during the winter of my father’s illness was mostly therapeutic. It was liberating to get away from Brenda, and my mother’s place on Charles Street was so clean and free of clutter I felt a kind of lightness there, the way I felt in hotel rooms. Her apartment was so unlike the house on Cedar Drive where even the dust accumulated meaning. I’d look under the bed and swear those were the same dust balls I saw in 1959 when my mother lifted the hem of the quilt to show Susan that our missing grandfather wasn’t hiding there. “See? Nothing!” my mother said, calming Susan’s fears. In her uncluttered apartment, we could look back more objectively. Not much, but a little more.

  “It was my fault,” my mother said with a faraway look in her eyes. “What we started in Ireland.”

  I encouraged her to talk about herself. I wanted to know her, but I was searching for myself between the lines. “Did you come home a changed woman?” I asked. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Did it change me? I suppose, in a way.”

  I thought it was sad how Susan and I lost our accents in a matter of months, carelessly discarding the Irish inflection like a sweater on a hot day. No one thought to record our voices.

  “Your father and I were closer when we got back,” my mother said. “We’d been through a lot together. We had experiences no one else had. So things were better, at least for a while.”

  I remembered family coziness when we returned—unexpected after the Caitlyn drama. Laughter, joking all the time, half the jokes in Yiddish, summer thunderstorms, rain pattering on the gravel roof, winters sledding down the backyard hill, even my mother occasionally belly-whomping on our Flexible Flyer. Dinner at 6 o’clock on the dot, my father was adamant. I liked the forced togetherness of those dinners at home in America—at least when I was little, not so much when I was older—but in elementary school the feeling I got with the four of us squeezed around the kitchen table in the yellow light was better than sleep or food or a movie.

  The room was so small we didn’t have to stand up to get pickles or ice. My father tipped his chair back and swung the refrigerator door open from his seat. He had a sweet tooth so we drank orange soda or grape soda or Coke. If there was none, he put pineapple jelly in a glass of seltzer. “This is the way we made soda at the Home,” he said, and stirred up the mixture, furiously beating the spoon against the glass. After a few seconds the jelly settled at the bottom in a glob.

  We told stories and whenever one of us tried to locate an event from the past, we asked the others was it “before Ireland or after Ireland?” I thought we would always divide time that way, but the “after” part kept growing and the “before” part stayed the same, until Ireland was no longer a useful marker.

  But stirring the jelly soda around the table we were still tethered to that time and to each other and my father stirred and stirred but he couldn’t get the jelly to dissolve. He drank it anyway. “Delicious,” he said. My mother took a sip. “Delicious.” “You making fun of me?” he said.

  They shared a private smile, and she stretched out of her chair to get her cigarettes on the counter. She wore a tight sweater and a slim wool skirt with two kick pleats in the back. My father put his hand on her rear end. “She’s making fun of me,” he said. She seemed to like his hand there, pushing back into his palm rather than moving away from him. “Not me. I’m not doing anything,” she said. She finally turned her body out of his grasp, settled into her chair, lit a cigarette, and inhaled.

  “Kid. You,” my father said, pointing at Susan. “You ever go to bed hungry?”

  My mother lifted her chin and blew smoke at the yellow walls.

  Susan smiled at him adoringly. “No, Daddy.”

  “No is right. I didn’t have a daddy to bring me bubblegum. Steak, shrimp these kids eat.”

  “Tell us the rest of the Shmecky story,” Susan said. “Tell us. We’re old enough.”

  “Shmuel was his real name, though. Shmecky was a nickname. . . .”

  “We know! We know!”

&nbs
p; “All right, I’ll tell you the rest of the story. You listening to your daddy? So Shmuel, or Shmecky if you want, waits for his mama every Sunday rain or shine. And she never comes, right? Until one day she does come. She shows up at the H—the H was short for the Home.”

  “We know!”

  “You know? OK, so Shmecky’s mother shows up at the H and she takes him back to Brooklyn with her. Nice story, right? But that isn’t the end of it. Two weeks go by, and then, lo and behold, who’s back at the Hebrew National Orphan Home but Shmuel Hefter. ‘What’s the matter, Shmecky?’ we said. ‘What’re you doing back in this shithole?’ Which it wasn’t, by the way. But that’s how we talked. And Shmecky says, ‘I forgot my Yiddish while I was at the H. And my mama doesn’t speak English.’ Poor Shmecky, for two weeks he and his mother sat across the kitchen table in Flatbush with nothing to say. He managed, though, with the few Yiddish words he remembered, to beg her to take him back to the orphanage. And so she did.”

  “That’s sad,” Susan said.

  “Sad? Yeah,” my father said. “But you know what? He survived. Kids get over all kinds of shit. Look at me, for instance.”

  My mother laughed on cue and I glanced up. White dotted lines were darting past the window above the sink. “Look!” I said. “It’s snowing!”

  My father shouted like a little kid. “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”

  We both jumped up and got our coats and clambered into the carport, Susan and my mother close behind. The four of us stood at the top of the driveway, an entirely white Cedar Drive spread before us. “It’s a veritable winter wonderland,” he said. We all laughed. He said it every time it snowed, clapping his hands together in delight, a sound that echoed in the cold. We listened to the shush of tires over on Patterson Avenue and after that nothing but the kind of quiet you feel after someone has read a poem.

  “It was my fault. But he wasn’t blameless,” my mother said. “Your father wanted his freedom, too. He was confused, though. He was jealous of my affairs, and complained because I wasn’t jealous enough of his! I quoted his precious Sartre—’jealousy, like all passions, is an enemy of freedom.’ But he saw it as proof I didn’t love him. He couldn’t deny, though, that I knew him better than anyone. I knew him and accepted him as he was. How’s that for true love? Of course, with him it was never enough. And then the sixties exploded and he went wild.”