The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  My father came into the kitchen. “I’m making chicken soup,” he announced.

  I couldn’t believe it. He was up, walking around like a normal person. I laughed with joy. “Look at you!” He was already chopping parsley, working the cleaver vigorously with a seesaw motion. I was so excited I called my mother. “He’s making chicken soup!” I exclaimed.

  “You’re kidding?” She laughed with joy, too. He must be getting better. She had to hang up though, off to meet Susan’s plane from Newark. I could hardly wait for them to come. I hadn’t realized how lonely I was. They were taking forever. I leaned with my palms on the windowsill and watched the pink sky darken and finally my mother’s car pulling up to the curb. Susan was somber coming across the lawn. In the dusky light I could see her holding back as if the house had a magnetic field around it repelling her. But then she came in through the kitchen and I went in. My father dropped the big spoon he was using to taste the soup and spun around.

  “My Susan!” He grabbed her and they hugged.

  Her face was transformed, no longer a trace of holding back. They pulled apart so they could look at each other and she was smiling her wide movie-star smile and laughing like ice clinking, saying his name in the clear, certain voice of an eight-year-old. “Daddy! Daddy! How are you?” Susan filled the shadowy kitchen with sunlight.

  “I’m not so good, baby. You heard? But today I’m good. You brought me luck.”

  I thought my sister would spell me for a while and I’d get some extra nights at my mother’s. But when Susan saw me gathering my things to leave, a scowl furrowed her brow. “What? You’re not staying here? C’mon, Joanna. You’re kidding. Aren’t you?” I was surprised by the fear in her voice. “I mean . . . I just . . . I feel funny around Brenda,” she said. I put down my bag. I knew how much someone’s mere presence (or absence) could mean. “All right. I’ll stay.” Susan was relieved. I was annoyed, but secretly relieved, too. If I stayed away too long, I might risk my claim to sainthood.

  Since there was only the sofa, no longer a bed in the spare room, just Brenda’s sewing machine, the two of us slept in the living room head to foot. In the morning my legs hurt from being bent against Susan’s ass and the backs of her knees.

  “She hides his cigarettes,” I said. I was sitting at the kitchen table while Susan cleaned up the breakfast dishes. “She gives him Benson & Hedges Lights and then he cries about it. He can’t stand Lights. They’re sick, both of them. Her more. Sick in the head.”

  “Well, he shouldn’t be smoking, should he?” said Susan. She gave me a look before scraping a few bread crusts into the garbage. It was pleasant watching someone else do the cleaning up for a change.

  “She’s mean,” I said. “She humiliates him. She puts a pee pad on his chair. He’s not incontinent! He thinks it’s all because she’s a shiksa.”

  “Ha!” said Susan. “As if Mom’s all touchy feely.”

  “That’s exactly what I said.”

  “At least we had one parent who was warm and loving when we were growing up,” Susan said. She glided a dish towel down one curved side of a metal bowl and up the other side. I wasn’t sure who she was talking about at first. “I always knew Daddy loved me just for being me,” she said.

  I was quiet, tracing circles on the table with my finger.

  “What?” Susan said. She finished drying a ladle and a whisk and clanked them into a drawer.

  “Nothing,” I said. I was thinking, did my father love me for being myself? I didn’t remember feeling unloved. But I didn’t remember the warm and caring father Susan described either.

  She reached up to put away a stack of plates. “Mom can be so judgmental. Whereas Daddy . . .” she said, coming down on her heels, “Daddy thinks whatever I do, I’m the cat’s meow.”

  The cat’s meow. How strange that her experience was so alien to mine. Even stranger, I hadn’t known it until then. I’d never thought about how my father made my sister feel. I knew her relationship with him was less complicated than mine, but I hadn’t realized it was distinctly better. If I ever felt loved just for being myself, it was by my mother, although in her offhand manner. The love I got from my father was about him—I made you, you belong to me. I certainly didn’t feel that he loved me for being myself.

  “It’s different for me,” I said. “He was weird with me. He wanted me to be a boy. He used to hit me.”

  “He hit me too.”

  “Not as much as he hit me.”

  “You just don’t remember when it was me,” Susan said.

  “Remember when we were little and he took off his belt?” I said.

  “Yeah, as a joke, though,” said Susan.

  If we kept talking after our mother kissed us goodnight and turned out the lights, he’d storm down the hall, his terrifying voice booming: “If you don’t close your eyes and go to sleep, I’m getting out the strap!” Naturally, we erupted in fearful whispers and excited giggles, so as promised, he unbuckled his belt and pulled the leather strap through the loops with a flourish, while we shrieked in not quite fake terror. What would it feel like to be beaten with a leather belt? I shuddered on my bed hugging my pillow and squeezed my eyes shut waiting for the blows to strike. Was I strong enough to withstand it? I thought I was. Would he hold the belt by the buckle, or would he dangle the buckle and strike with its metal edge? I braced for the first blow, but it never came. He didn’t mete out punishment. He struck only in the heat of passion, usually when he thought I was mocking him, and then only with his hand.

  “Look,” Susan said, eager to get back to practical matters. “All I’m saying is, let Brenda do what she’s supposed to do. She’s his wife. Then you can go home to Fred where you belong.”

  “Don’t worry about Fred. He looks out for himself very nicely,” I said.

  “Really? Larry can’t stand it when I go away even for two days.”

  “Fred wouldn’t shorten one of his trips for me, why should I go rushing back to him?”

  “Whoa, that’s harsh,” Susan said.

  “Fred’s not the sweetheart everyone thinks he is. Anyway, Daddy’s the one who needs me.”

  “Like Daddy’s a sweetheart to you?”

  “Listen, Susan, you remember the thing Uncle Harry said? You know, put Brenda’s suitcase in the driveway, change the locks on the doors?”

  “Yeah. I was there when Uncle Harry said it. Daddy didn’t have the heart to do it, though.”

  “I know, but maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe it’s exactly what we should do. What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” Susan said. “I think Uncle Harry is nuts and so are you. Lock Brenda out and there won’t be anybody to take care of Daddy.”

  “He’s going to get better, Susan. And when he does, I don’t want her here to spoil it.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Brenda made crab cakes and I made a cheese soufflé we hoped would slide down my father’s throat now that he was feeling better thanks to Susan, his good luck charm. But he couldn’t swallow any of it. He was exhausted from making the soup the day before. His luck seemed to be petering out. He claimed he liked watching us eat, though.

  “Too bad Clyde can’t enjoy these delicious crab cakes,” Brenda said. It was always unsettling to see Brenda in my mother’s seat, stiffly presiding over the table, with my father’s wild splatter painting on the wall behind her. “He probably won’t touch the soufflé Joanna worked so hard on either. All he eats are soft boiled eggs that look like snot.”

  Susan shot me a sympathetic look. Finally.

  “Brenda,” I said. “Please.”

  “If eggs are the only food he can eat,” Susan said, “why would you want to make them sound disgusting?”

  Brenda sniffed. “He’s the one who wants them cooked that way.”

  I couldn’t tell if my father was listening. He had his head in his hands, a cigarette poking out between his fingers. He cleared his throat, pushed his chair back and got up, shuffled into the living room and
slunk into his recliner.

  “Daddy? You OK?” I asked.

  He shooed me away. “Eat your crab cakes. Enjoy your dinner.”

  We did as he said and finished the meal. Brenda finished the wine, and Susan and I did the dishes and then got into our nightgowns and sat with my father in the living room. We turned on the TV so we could watch everybody in Times Square. I knew it was corny, but I loved New Year’s Eve— the nostalgia, the sentimentality—and I didn’t want to be left out of it. The year was turning for me, too, even if I didn’t have much to celebrate. The dressed-up smiling people inside the Waldorf Astoria looked the same as always, although it was Dick Clark hosting and no longer Guy Lombardo. Outside in Times Square the people were rosy-cheeked, an excited mob, girls sitting on guys’ shoulders, everybody grinning in ski hats and mufflers, the way it was every year.

  My father seemed almost comfortable stretched out in the recliner. We turned down the TV so we could talk and he lay with his eyes closed and then surprised us by joining in the conversation now and then.

  “Supposed to be a big storm tomorrow night,” he said. “You’ll be OK, Susan. Be cleared away by the day you leave. Very high tides, too. Because the moon is passing almost directly between the sun and the earth. Makes a gravitational tug like they’ve never seen before. A rare alignment, they say. Very rare. Syzygy, it’s called.”

  “Yeah. It was in the New York Times,” I said.

  “I could read yesterday,” he said. “Today, no.”

  “Just what we need on top of everything else,” Susan said. “Snow.”

  “Hey, remember that winter we were snowed in?” my father said.

  “Yeah,” said Susan. “And you and Leon Greene had to walk to Woodmoor?”

  “Leon and I, and two other fathers on the block, Lefty and Abe Lubin next door.”

  “Not Lefty,” I said. “Lucky. You always call him Lefty.”

  “Lucky, is it? OK, Lucky. A band of us went to get supplies. No one could get his car out, and Mary needed formula for the third kid, what was her name?”

  “Amy Beth,” said Susan. “See, Joanna. You say I don’t remember anything. But I remember that kid’s name and I remember that snowstorm. You were too little.”

  “Those were happy years,” my father said. “My happiest.”

  “Really?” Susan said. “Of all the things you did in your life?”

  “By far. Are you kidding? The years you two were in elementary school, sure.” He looked at us candidly with his wide-open eye and smiled to himself. “You came home with all kinds of things you made. Drawings, projects. You would sing and dance for us, put on shows.”

  “But you did so many more exciting things,” I said. “What about the army?”

  “The army? Are you crazy?”

  “What about teaching at City?” I said.

  “City, yeah. That was going on at the same time, all good. But watching you grow up on Cedar Drive? The most important experience in life. Right, Susan? Tell her. Just wait until you and Fred get married and have kids.”

  “You know what? I do remember that snowstorm,” I said. “I wasn’t too young. I remember Daddy pulling us down the middle of the street on the sled. And Tom’s father pulling him.”

  “Yeah, Abe. Nice guy. It was ‘58,” my father said. “The great blizzard of 1958.”

  “I used to love this book they had in the Campfield school library. Snowbound with Betsy,” I said. “I can still smell the pages, that library smell. Betsy’s friends were forced to sleep over because of a storm and they made popcorn and the grownups had to be nice about it because they were stuck. Like we’re stuck here, in our pajamas together. We wouldn’t be all cozy like this if you weren’t sick.”

  “I’d be in New York at a party,” said Susan with a laugh.

  “You’d be at your New Year’s parties, I’d be at mine,” said my father. “The orphanage was like that. Snowbound on Tuckahoe Road, like your book,” he said.

  Brenda appeared in a new red bathrobe she’d gotten for Christmas, a gold zipper up the front with a gold ring. She was glowing. She bent down and kissed my father. Then she climbed onto his outstretched body in the recliner, and lay face down on him. Any other time Susan and I might have cringed, but this time we were thrilled. If they were affectionate with each other, we could relax about leaving him alone with her. This was the way a wife should be to her sick husband. Brenda’s face was turned away from us. My father rested his chin on the top of her head.

  “Nice,” Susan said. She gave him the OK sign. I gave him thumbs up. My father pointed down at Brenda’s prone body. “Drunk,” he said.

  Around midnight, we turned up the TV. “The mayor has cued the Big Apple,” Dick Clark announced. It was the first year they were going to drop a lit-up apple instead of a ball. “In a few moments, three-thousand pounds of confetti will descend upon us.” He counted down. The apple plunged. “It’s 1987!” Dick Clark shouted. “Hooray!” the crowd cheered. They rattled their noisemakers. Dancing couples sang with the band. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,” their voices rose, “and never brought to mind . . . “

  I opened the heavy front door, held the glass storm door ajar and leaned into the cold midnight. Firecrackers whined and popped, and horns honked in the distance. I feared the coming year.

  CHAPTER 33

  He said those were happy times, so it must have been true, the years I was in elementary school, the years before the summer of love, before Nola Swenson. I remembered happiness, the feeling I had walking home from school on a windy day in March, coming around the corner holding onto a crayon drawing that was fluttering in the breeze. Were we ever a normal family, though? Dinner on the table at six o’clock. That was normal. He was a hardworking man, a homeowner, patriotic, a veteran, a breadwinner who wanted most of all to be able to support his family. He didn’t want to be like his father. He would not abandon his children. He gave up his dreams in exchange for a schoolteacher’s paycheck. It was only in Belfast that he ever felt like a real success. There he was not just a breadwinner, but a Fulbright winner. Imagine, Clyde and Evie Aronson invited to ship launchings, the Queen Mother’s garden party! He was interviewed on ITV and gave a lecture at Queens College on the Beat Poets.

  Susan and I thought he was God. When we returned to the US, he continued his subscription to the London Observer to keep up with the news overseas. One day when the lilacs were blooming against the shingled house, he called us to the dining room table. “Susan! Joanna! Get over here!” I was drawn to the window, distracted by the pale purple flowers and the birds twittering in the bushes. “Pay attention!” he said. He flipped open the Observer magazine to the centerfold with a photo spread of four musicians from Liverpool, a place I was familiar with because the ferry from Belfast to England docked there. “You see these guys?” my father said. “You’re going to be screaming for them in a few months.” It was 1963, a year before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. We looked at my father like he was daft. He was God, but we didn’t actually believe he could see into the future. “No, we won’t! You don’t know that about us.” We smirked and walked away. But my father could see into the future.

  Big changes were coming. We learned for ourselves in 1965 when we drove to California to visit Uncle Harry, singing in the car the whole way: “See the USA, in your Chevrolet, America’s the greatest land of all!” In LA, girls wore bell-bottom pants like sailors, a fashion that wouldn’t reach Baltimore for two more years. Uncle Harry flashed hundred-dollar bills, paid for my mother to get her hair done like a Hollywood starlet, and treated us to prime rib and lobster. He’d been out of prison only a year, after being sent away for embezzlement. The word was dazzling and I thought his crime must have something to do with jewels.

  Back at home we started the school year and my father, not flashy like his brothers, remained an earnest, dedicated teacher. Unlike Harry and Alvin, he paid his taxes. But he was no patsy, no rube. He became a leader in the teacher�
��s union, a position my mother surely envied. It was important work. There was a movement going on in the schools to abolish the college prep program at City College High School. The A-Course, as it was called, attracted bright boys, my father said, and gave the high school its prestige.

  I noted that, as usual, boys got the best of everything. The words “bright” and “girls” were never even paired together. Before Brown v. the Board of Education, the bright boys at City were white boys only. Even after the landmark case, progress was slow. My father believed the A-Course program would light the way, encouraging integration by casting a wide geographical net, since City offered more than a standard neighborhood school. Most teachers were as desperate to save the program as he was, and this pitted them against some of the black leaders in the community who believed the A-Course was elitist and designed to exclude minorities. My father acknowledged that he’d never know what it was like to be black, but he chafed at being called elitist. “You don’t know hungry like I know hungry,” he’d tell his students.

  When he practiced the speech he was to give to the school board commission, tears came to his eyes. He loved his school and he was certain his was the enlightened view. He stood before us in the living room. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I implore you. Keep the A-Course for the aspiring young boys of the poor families of this generation. Give them the opportunities that City College High School was able to offer the disadvantaged minorities of the past.”

  “Hear, hear,” my mother said.

  “Don’t reduce City College to the status of a neighborhood school, which given the present pattern of racial residence, must in a few short years become once again a segregated high school, completing the cycle begun in 1954 and thus effectively repealing the decision of the Supreme Court. Ladies and Gentleman, I urge you with all my heart to act now, to prevent a catastrophe that we will live to regret.”

  My mother and Susan applauded. I cheered and whistled.

  But the board said no. The A-course was racist, they said. The program was scrapped. A year later, in 1967, the membership of the teachers’ union went on strike demanding a voice in policy-making, as well as higher salaries. My father led his students singing City’s fight song, conducting with his cigarette baton from the back of a paddy wagon just before it carried him and Shep Levine, Bob Moskowitz, and several others to the city jail for picketing the school. They were defying a court injunction forbidding a strike. By 1968, barely two years after the A-Course program was scrapped, City was a segregated school again—all black instead of all white, but segregated just as my father predicted. With the A-Course gone, the eighteen rules of grammar went out the window. It was considered elitist. Shakespeare, too. The dedicated faculty was demoralized.