by Jan Cherubin
“How are my boys doing?” she asked with a big smile, clapping her hands in fake delight. “Have you said your prayers today?” Apparently she was unaware of the Great Potato Rebellion of 1931.
Mr. Laudenbacher’s door swung open. “Hello, Claire,” he said. “You want to know if your boys prayed today? Why don’t you ask your boys if they’ve eaten today?”
Later in the week, Mr. Laudenbacher met with the board, and they fired the head supervisor. We couldn’t believe it. The head supervisor was Colonel Tom Anderson. The goddamn Colonel! Axed. A little late, I thought. But still, he packed his bags and he was gone. We kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t. Instead, things got a little better.
Even Shmuel Hefter was swept up in our good fortune. Some months after the triumph of the Potato Rebellion, a group of inmates watched from the portico as Shmecky clutched his tattered suitcase and walked out the gate with his mother.
At this point I had moved up to the fourth floor in Company B where we had even less supervision than Company C. Chick, Skelly, and I usually woke around four-thirty in the morning, dressed, made our beds, and walked east into the dawn and the pale pink sky at the edge of the world, then up over the aqueduct where our horses were pastured. We stabled Playboy, Joe, and Sally during the day and turned them out overnight in spring and summer. We’d ride them back to the barn, water them, and harness Playboy or Joe for the plow, and hitch Sally to the wagon, then pick up the garbage from the kitchen yard and deliver it to the dump. In winter we’d hitch up the snowplow to the team, clouds of steam puffing out of their big horse nostrils, plow the roads, then drive around to the boiler room yard and collect the boiler ashes to spread on the service road for traction on the ice. Or if there was no snow, we’d take the ashes to the dump, then pick up a load of coal and deliver it to the cottages. Whatever the season, we’d have to rush back, wash up, lay tefillen, and get down to the shul for morning prayers. I didn’t relish getting up early, and barn duty was a lot of extra work, but I took pride in it, and there were rewards. On summer weekends after supper, Chick, Skelly, and I walked up the aqueduct carrying bridles to our horses and raced each other on the trail and around the Grassy Sprain reservoir.
One hot August day after picking pole beans in the blazing sun, when the heat finally broke, I took Playboy out alone as I sometimes liked to, and rode along the trail, galloped into the pasture, then tore around the reservoir and off into the fields. I rode bareback and shirtless and I had such a feeling of freedom. Riding along on my horse with the wind caressing my chest, I started to laugh remembering how my mother bragged about certain equestrian activities at my private boarding school. She wasn’t telling tales as it turned out. I coaxed Playboy and we raced toward the woods, and I was laughing at nothing except the wonderfulness of being alive.
CHAPTER 44
More visitors started coming to the hospital. We must have both understood it was to say goodbye, although we didn’t speak that way, we didn’t speak of death, not since that one night at Sinai. No results were back yet from the esophagus biopsy, but all of us knew, as Aunt Vivian knew months ago, it was over. Shep continued to visit often, my father’s most devoted friend. Darleen came to rub Lubriderm on his shoulders. Fred sweetly brought Mozart and Puccini CDs, my father’s favorites, and a Walkman, but my father could listen only for seconds. Uncle Alvin and Aunt Gladys dragged bags of deli sandwiches down the antiseptic hallway. Liz Stone came hesitantly at first and then got down on one knee and hugged him in his chair. He asked me to get them each a Coke, not from the machine, from the cafeteria in paper cups with crushed ice. The walk back to the room was slow with the soda crashing in the cups like surf. They looked up when I came in. He was asking about Nola Swenson. She was divorced, Liz said. She had a kid and taught yoga in Boulder. She changed her name to Supritha.
“Was it my fault?” my father said. “Supritha?”
“I don’t think so, Clyde,” said Liz. “Nola had plenty of other demons.”
Back in 1971, he confided in me when Nola broke his heart. How sick was that? But I knew her. If he talked about Nola to me, she came to life.
The big sky was streaked pink on Route 29. I was riding shotgun with my long hair blowing out the window when he said out of the blue, “I loved her, you know.”
“Why are you using the past tense?” I said.
He smiled a closed, pained smile. “Some kid who rides a Harley Davidson. She’s going away with him.”
I was sixteen, almost seventeen by then. If I were younger, I might have been overjoyed at the news. I might have believed Nola Swenson riding away on the back of a chopper meant my parents were going to live happily ever after, and that I would go back to being as confident as I was when I was seven. But I knew better. We would keep moving forward.
“I’m sorry you’re sad.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “What is, is. You understand me. You’re a chip off the old block.”
Susan came to the hospital and once again I was awed by her buoyant presence. She wore her hair in a ponytail, which alone seemed amazing, since I had my hair chopped off like Joan of Arc. The swinging ponytail was full of a girlishness I knew my father would warm to. He’d approve of her painted nails and designer handbag too, signs of a healthy materialism. She was thriving. They spoke brightly about her flight, how he didn’t understand people who flew at night, he only traveled in the daytime because you could see the whole country spread out beneath you, and how he remembered when everyone, not just children, would stop in their tracks and crane their necks to look up at an airplane.
Later in the ladies’ room, I told Susan she cheered him up and Susan said plainly, seemingly without resentment, “No, I did not. He only wants you now.”
Susan was focused on Larry and her kids anyway. “She’s rejected her family of origin,” my mother-the-therapist said. It was a surprise. They expected me to be the one who bolted. When we were growing up, Susan, being the oldest, was closer to our parents. She and I didn’t play together as much as I wanted since she didn’t like games or the outdoors. She preferred our parents’ company, and was fiercely protective of her superior position in the family. Our friendship was shaky, never more so than when we were teenagers. I was a freak, she was a sorority girl and not cool in my hippie universe. We clung to each other in small ways, though. When I started high school and Susan was already in twelfth grade, we agreed to share a locker because the school was overcrowded. We were opposites, but we had the same weird family—a father who went “out,” a commie mother, and a grandfather who disappeared under the bed. On the metal shelf in the locker, I leaned my algebra book against her Spanish book. She was once the confident big sister who said go back to sleep, everything will be fine in the morning. But in the parking lot at Hopkins, Susan crumpled and I had to hold her up.
The year we shared the locker was the year of Nola. The year of “out” and our parents’ separate vacations. They slammed doors, shouted obscenities, and sometimes broke down in giggling fits. On weekends, my father disappeared. For the first half-hour after his car squealed away, I felt the air knocked out of me. Then I’d notice how happy I was with him gone.
One Monday he came home with a big white box that had a hole cut in the top. A pink nose pressed against the opening. He’d brought us a kitten! An adorable gray kitten with white socks. I knew where it came from the second it climbed out of the box, and I was determined not to love it. I did not tell Susan about the gray cats slinking along the partition at Nola’s apartment. My father wouldn’t let us name the kitten. It was up to him. He called it Larkin for the poet. My father was God and named everything. But he turned out to be the one who didn’t love the cat. When Larkin passed him its body slunk to the ground. He refused to have the cat neutered. “He’s my only boy,” he said. “I’m not cutting off his balls.” Larkin prowled the neighborhood until dawn while boys threw pebbles at my window. I kept expecting my father to go “out” and not return. For five years
nothing like that happened, and then it was my mother who left.
Somewhere in England
15 April 1944
Dear Evie,
I’m glad you’re helping out at these canteens and dancing with our boys. Sometimes, when you kiss a lonely boy goodnight, you should think of me, and that I’m lonely too. Sitting in the movies with my arm around a girl, my thoughts are always of you. I’m keeping my hand in at this business of lovemaking so that when I get back to you I won’t be stale at that sort of thing.
Yours forever and always,
Clyde
Uncle Harry flew in from the West Coast and got a room at the Sheraton across the street from Hopkins. He brought twenty-four bags of Pecan Sandies. My father mouthed to me, “He’s a nut.” But he and Harry happily planned a trip together for September, prattling on about driving Uncle Harry’s classic 1932 Buick across Australia. Uncle Harry didn’t think he could live without his big brother and scrambled to give my father reasons to hang on, things to look forward to, and ways to look back. For the last, he tracked down an old friend from the Home and got him on the phone.
“Holy shit,” my father said. He glanced at Uncle Harry. “Hoffman, you son of a gun.” I perked up. I’d seen photos of Jesse Hoffman in Ye Olde Picture Booke. The conversation sounded awkward at first, at least from my father’s end. There was shame in dying, the greatest failure of all. But my father rallied. “You know what I remember? Well, what else do I have to do? So I’m lying here remembering how I got up really early one morning. I’m walking to the farm thinking I’m the only person alive, feeling pretty fucking pleased about it, and then I hear a racket. Who is it, but Hoffman. You were up even earlier than I was, sitting in the middle of the potato field banging on a drum. . . . I know, man. Only way to practice without waking up the whole damn place.”
“Tympanist with the Cleveland Symphony,” my father said when he put the phone down. “A big shot. A few years ago I see an interview in the paper, says he learned to play the drums in Yonkers. Doesn’t mention the HNOH. Not a word about the orphanage, not a word about being Jewish. Where does he come from, they ask him, and he says he’s ‘of German extraction.’ Homeboy doesn’t want to know from his past. Can’t blame him, I guess. The kid made something of himself.”
CHAPTER 45
Tuckahoe
Even after the Great Potato Rebellion the boys at the H were still beaten for insubordination. We still had detention. But the frequency, the severity, the gross injustice, and a certain relish on the faces of the supervisors disappeared with the Colonel. Meanwhile, we stayed hungry. Hungrier than ever. I was twelve when the stock market crashed, thirteen when the banks closed, fourteen when 20,000 war veterans descended on the US Capitol demanding their bonus pay. The tabloids called them the Veterans’ Bonus Army. My mother wrote the American Legion; they suggested she have my father declared dead so she could receive his benefits, should the Veterans’ Bonus Army succeed. Unfortunately, Herbert Hoover suggested General MacArthur set fire to the veterans’ camp, which MacArthur took literally, burning the place to the ground.
Any hope we Homeboys had that the fortunes of our deserted mothers and widower fathers were going to change for the better turned to Okie dust during the Depression. We read the newspapers with increasing interest and spent a great deal of time hanging out in the Oracle offices arguing the nuances of left-wing politics and writing our editorials. Although we were forbidden to attend rallies by the rabbis, we were always on the lookout for action. During a senior outing in Brooklyn, we came upon an anti-communist demonstration in Prospect Park that we razzed considerably.
I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, but I had mixed feelings about joining the Party. I wanted to redistribute the wealth into my own pocket for a while. After that, I’d save the rest of the world. At that time, my plan was to finish school, get a job, and join the bourgeoisie. My mother could quit working at Kohl’s. I’d come home with a fat paycheck, buy her fancy dresses, diamonds, and furs. I’d take her out for steak. Not once, but regularly, we’d go out for steak dinners.
That was my plan, but I had plenty of time until graduation. I was in no rush. My life had gotten pretty easy on the inside. As a senior inmate, I had no monitors in charge of me any longer. I was managing editor of the paper (Jesse was editor) with my own joint in the suite of Oracle offices on the ground floor next to the gym with my own desk and cabinets, my sanctum sanctorum, where I could do whatever I wanted in privacy. That was where I wrote the news stories and editorials for the Oracle. But also, Harry and I built a ham radio in there, and on occasion Jesse and I got drunk in my joint on homemade hooch—before Prohibition was repealed, and after. Privately, I scribbled at my desk, mostly poetry, some serious, some doggerel. I’d taken a picture with the newspaper’s Brownie camera of Louis Longbeard wagging his finger at us one day after a trip into Manhattan. The photograph inspired some rhyming couplets and that’s what got me started on my Picture Booke.
The Sermon At the Gates
Upon his pulpit at the HNOH gates
Louis Longbeard rants and prates
“In hell’s hot fires you’ll get burned
Yea! All ye prodigals returned.
Back from New York carousing you come
Laughing, gay, and sot with rum.
Fresh out of wicked old New York,
Bellies full of Armour’s pork.
A hundred rabbis here have taught you.
A thousand siddurs we have bought you.
With praying bees and fasting bouts
You still remain a bunch of louts.
By this white beard that floats upon the breeze,
If you commit such sins as these
And with the devil cast your lot
A million prayers will help you not.”
And ranting thusly onward, Louie
Is greeted with loud cries of Phooey
As off we trot in joyful glee
A score of sinful orphans we.
My buddies liked my verse well enough, so I went into Yonkers and bought a photo album at the Five and Dime, and since the pages were black, a bottle of white ink for the fountain pen the Loving Mothers Auxiliary gave each of us for our bar mitzvah and that, astonishingly, I hadn’t yet lost, and I used the white ink for the captions.
I didn’t always get the best grades in school—some of the teachers hated me because they thought I thought I was smarter than they were, which I did think, and this led them to predict I would come to no good, joining the prophesies of Louis Longbeard and Miss Claire Beaufort. I was a smart aleck, a wisenheimer. And yet, also thin-skinned. Not a good combination, Hoffman frequently pointed out. I had been known to get into shouting matches with my elders when challenged or mocked.
Hot-headed, yes, but no one could refute my talents after I won a countywide essay contest and got to read my paper over the radio. My essay was all about what the New Deal meant to us destitute and neglected children. I thought it was possible I might receive a letter from my father telling how he’d been listening to WCOH, and just imagine his surprise when my name was announced and he heard my voice and what I’d written, and how proud he was, and how if I’d allow it, he’d like to get to know me. Aw, fuck. What a load of crap. But I did win the contest.
Meanwhile, I’d been hearing from Vivian that it was getting tougher for Mama making ends meet with Alvin growing out of his clothes every other week and hungry all the time and somebody else who preferred to remain nameless coveting dresses and dainty shoes for dance parties if she was to have any chance of hunting down and trapping a Rockefeller. I kept thinking about the months’ worth of paychecks I could be earning going down the drain while I sat in a classroom arguing with dim-witted teachers. I made up my mind to quit school, go home to my mother after all these years, and support my family like a man.
“Now class, what scene in the story would you say is the denouement?” asked Miss Campbell, head of the English department at Roosevelt H
igh.
I raised my hand. “It’s pronounced day-new-mawh,” I said. “I’m pretty sure,” I added, although I was positive. “Not dayna-mint.”
Miss Campbell curled her lip. “How would you know?” she said. “You’re from the Home, aren’t you?”
“Lemme see! Lemme see!” The guys couldn’t get enough of my Olde Picture Booke. I was leaving the H, and this was their last chance. Al Shack grabbed the album away and they took turns reading the captions, and honestly, I couldn’t say I minded. Their laughter was like heroin shot into a vein. Pure bliss. Jesse had the book and he was reading my tribute to Carl Grimm, smiling ear-to-ear and nodding—the response I treasured most from the friend I treasured most: I get it. I feel the same way.
Carl Grimm, second chef, bon vivant, and great friend to us.
In the background is his cottage, shared with Charlie and Hymie
Wherein upon a score of joyful occasions
We caroused in rowdy revelry drinking deep and eating full
Until, the dawn approaching,
We’d file back to our beds, the shouted imprecations
Of awakened orphans mingling with our woeful groans
To render horrid welcome to the morning sun.
Mr. Grimm’s great generosity in frequent dispensing
Of ’tween meal snacks
From the full larders of the underground storerooms,
His picturesque unfolding to us monastical orphans
Of the joys and glamour of the world awaiting,
His full appreciation of all things creative and artistic,
His sensitive nature that knows not what hate,
Nor animosity means—for all these things,
We will miss him most when we leave. —August, 1934
Jesse liked the one about himself as well:
Jesse Hoffman, my boon companion and a partner upon many an enterprise. He leads a sorry life for he would be a tympanist and must practice upon drums calling forth the wrath of Louis of the Long Beard and Eddie the night watchman who would chop meat and sleep respectively.
