Orphan #8

by Kim van Alkemade

  I hung my head, stunned. Sam was leaving me behind, again. My idea of us being a family was a childish fantasy I’d clung to because my brother was the only person in all the world who really, truly, belonged to me. I may have been living like a married woman, but not a single piece of paper existed to attest that she and I were family. No matter how often we swore our allegiance to one another, she could never be more than my friend, my roommate.

  Sam was leaving, but at least this time he was telling me where he was going, and why. He talked about the United Nations and the politics of partition with such passion, I knew there was no use arguing with him. Instead I tried to memorize the way his eyelashes fluttered in the sunlight and how his ears wiggled slightly as he talked. I knew it would be a very long time until I saw him again. Thinking back on it that night, as I looked down at the dark city street below Mildred Solomon’s window, it occurred to me I might not live long enough to ever visit my brother, to ever meet my sister-in-law, to ever see my only nephew.

  “How about you?” Sam asked, taking my hand. “What’s next for you?”

  I took a deep breath. I’d regretted the things I left unsaid when he went to war, had promised myself if I had another chance I’d tell my brother the truth about myself. He flinched when I used the word lesbian, but I didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding. My heart was pounding so hard I felt dizzy. I was afraid he’d be ashamed of what I was, the way he was ashamed of how I looked. I was afraid he’d think this, too, was somehow his fault, the result of his failure to protect me. It took him awhile to meet my eyes, but when he did, he said, “Who am I to judge, as long as you’re happy.”

  I hadn’t realized how heavy the unspoken words had been until they were lifted from me. “I am happy, Sam, I promise.”

  “There’s something I should have said to you a long time ago, too. I’m sorry, Rachel, about Uncle Max. I shouldn’t have left you with him. I just didn’t know how else to take care of you.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Sam. I don’t. Well, I did at first, but not anymore. We were supposed to have parents to take care of us, but we didn’t. It wasn’t our fault. Anyway, I managed to take care of myself, didn’t I? Just promise me you’ll do the same and try to stay safe.”

  “I’m not going to Palestine to be safe, Rachel. I’m going to fight.” Sam squeezed my hand before letting it go to light another cigarette. “I’ll be fighting for both of us, for all of us. No Jew will ever be truly safe until we have a homeland.” It seemed to me Sam was right about that. Without a state, our people were as vulnerable as orphans without a home.

  “Liberating that camp changed me, Rachel. We weren’t prepared for what it was like, no one could’ve been. I remember thinking they never would have gotten me in there without a fight.”

  “That’s just it, though, isn’t it? Everyone who fought back had already been killed.” I’ve heard people say they can’t understand how the Nazis managed it, the murder of millions, but it didn’t start with cattle cars and gas chambers. They began it all by reviving the medieval idea of sorting and separating Jews. We were demonized, dehumanized, ghettoized, all before being transported to the camps, the crematoriums out of sight until the last stretch of track. At every step along the way, the ones like Sam who stepped out of line were cut down, an example made of their resistance.

  “I guess you’re right.” Sam took a deep drag of his cigarette, smoke seeping out of his nose. “The other guys, they were all wondering, what was it about the Jews that the Germans would do this to them? The further we got into that camp, the more we saw, the Jewish soldiers in our division started looking to me, you know, because I was older, like they were waiting to see what I was going to do about all this. You know what I did? I grabbed one of those Nazis out of the pen where we’d rounded them up. I dragged him out into the mud and put him on his knees. And I said—I wanted to scream, but I said it real quiet, almost a whisper, so he actually tilted his head up to hear me—I said, Ich bin Jude. And then I shot him.” Sam dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out under the toe of his boot. “After that, the guys went crazy, started executing Nazis all over the place until some officer showed up and put a stop to it.”

  What I feared, while Sam was at war, was that he would be killed, not that he would become a killer. I wasn’t troubled by the thought of him shooting an enemy in battle. That was something he had to do to save himself or his men, to win the war. But what he’d just described was murder, wasn’t it? Yet I wasn’t appalled by his confession. To Sam, that killing was justified by the horrors surrounding him. I was thinking, though, of Sam’s Nazi prisoner, on his knees in the mud. If he had looked around at the piles of rotting bodies and become conscious of the monstrous magnitude of his deeds, wouldn’t he have welcomed the quick sting of a bullet over a lifetime of guilt and shame? To me, Sam’s shot sounded not like an assassination, but a mercy.

  “Smells like rust, all that blood,” Sam said. “That’s what you can’t wash off. Not the blood itself, but the smell of it.”

  “I know what it smells like. I’m a nurse, remember?” I looked down at my fingers, folded in my lap. “You’re not the only one who’s ever gotten blood on their hands.”

  Sam pulled one knee up on the bench and turned to face me. “Since I saw those camps, all I keep thinking is, that could have been me, you know? Me and you. If we’d been living in Germany or Poland or wherever the hell our people came from, that would have been us. It made me feel like more of a Jew than the Home ever did. Back then, it was all Hebrew this and Hebrew that, marching bands and baseball teams, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about God, either, or the Torah. It’s about survival.” There was a defiance in Sam’s eyes I recognized from the night he refused to apologize to the superintendent, a brightness that made the steel glint. If we had been in Europe, me and Sam, he’d have fought to the death before allowing himself to be herded onto one of those trains. That left the people like me. Was it possible the rest of us, like orphans in an institution, were so used to doing as we were told we made it easier than it should have been to round us up?

  We said our good-byes, pretending they weren’t forever. I watched Sam disappear through the old oak doors as the Castle swallowed him up. For what he was planning, an official discharge made no difference. He soon shed his American uniform and boarded a ship bound for the Mediterranean. Since that day, all I had of him fit in the glove drawer of an old steamer trunk: the postcards I’d saved, the letters he’d sent, that one roll of film.

  In the dark behind me, Mildred Solomon groaned in her sleep. She had said there was no comparison between her work at the Infant Home and those terrible experiments in the camps, and she was right, of course she was. But did the children on Dr. Mengele’s table feel any differently than I did on hers? No matter her motives, the way she used us was the same. No wonder she couldn’t apologize. It would destroy a person, wouldn’t it, to admit to doing that kind of harm?

  I should have gone ahead and given her a full dose. I had no reason to allow Mildred Solomon to rise again to consciousness. I knew now she’d never give me what I wanted. There would be no apology, no remorse. I should have emptied the syringe and left her sleeping while I walked out of this room and into the bright hallway, shutting the past behind me.

  Except it was impossible for me to leave the past behind. It was multiplying inside me, the tumor generating new cells by the minute. After my operation, if I woke up to find my breasts lopped off, black thread knotted across my chest, it would be as if Dr. Solomon herself had wielded the knife.

  I kept my back to her, looked out the window at streetlamps, lit windows, occasional headlights. Above, the city’s glow turned the black sky gray. The lights made me realize it was indifference, not darkness, that made the night dangerous. Deeds committed in the city’s small hours were not so much hidden from view as ignored, as if the few of us awake in the dead of night had all agreed to turn away our eyes. It was like the people in t
hose villages downwind of the death camps. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t smell the smoke; they just pretended not to know what was happening. It occurred to me there was nothing I couldn’t get away with between midnight and dawn.

  If I couldn’t get the contrition I yearned for, why not exact justice instead, like my brother had done? Mildred Solomon would be dead soon enough, no matter what I did or didn’t do. Why not transform the inevitable into something intentional? Why should I leave her to die, alone and ignored, a few days or weeks from now, when her death tonight, witnessed, could mean so much more? For once, I could stand up for myself, an adult now instead of a child, my weapon a needle of morphine instead of a pistol. I could do it now, before the old woman awoke. In the middle of this indifferent night, no one would notice if I took a woman’s life.

  Suddenly dizzy, I clutched at the windowsill to keep myself from falling backward into the room. The idea pulsed through my arteries, throbbing in my neck. I saw now that withholding Mildred Solomon’s morphine could be elevated from a selfish act to a noble endeavor. What a perfect opera it would make! The curtain rises on a child strapped down and chloroformed like an animal, then falls on an old woman put down like a dog past petting.

  Somewhere in my sleep-deprived brain were all the reasons why killing Mildred Solomon would never bring me peace, but I was too exhausted to know them. I took the vial of morphine from my pocket and weighed it in my hand. It would be so simple to fill the syringe and press the plunger. There was nothing to stop me. Down the hall, Lucia was surely asleep over her lap of yarn. In the morning, the day nurse who found a terminal patient passed away during the night would think nothing of pulling up the sheet to cover the body. There would be no questions, no inquiry, no autopsy. No one would know.

  Not even Mildred Solomon.

  I backed away from the window. It wouldn’t be worth doing if Dr. Solomon didn’t know. I wanted to see the realization in her eyes, wanted the doctor to know what her good little girl, her bravest patient, was about to do. I had been her material to do with as she pleased. Now I was the one in control. If she couldn’t feel remorse for what she’d done to me, then at least she’d know, before she died, how it felt to have your life in someone else’s hands.

  Groping along the wall, I found the switch and turned on the light. I blinked against the sudden brightness. Rinsing a cloth in the sink, I touched it to the old woman’s face.

  “Time to wake up, Dr. Solomon.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  RACHEL WENT IN TO THE RELIEF SOCIETY DRIPPING WET from a thunderstorm that slowed the streetcars and made her late. She was excited to tell Mary what she had learned from Mrs. Hong, to talk over her thoughts about Sparrow and Jade. Because of the rain, the patients were all inside instead of out on the porches. Their ragged breathing and harsh coughs echoed through the hallways.

  Rachel went into Mary’s room. The bed was empty, the mattress rolled up, twisted wires exposed. At first she thought Mary must have been moved. Then the truth became apparent. She sat on the iron rail of the bed, too stunned to cry. The head nurse saw her there. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I didn’t mean for you to find out like this. Mary’s fever spiked yesterday. Her heart just couldn’t take it. I know you cared about her, but we have another patient waiting to come in from the tents. Would you disinfect the bed for me?” Silently, Rachel nodded. The nurse placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “It comes with the job. We never get used to it, but we do learn to bear it.”

  Rachel washed down the bed with bleach, puzzling out the mystery of how a person could be alive one minute and gone the next. She’d seen it happen, when her mother died. That was a moment she could still recall, the shift in her mother’s eyes from seeing to not-seeing. She would have hated to witness that change in Mary, but still she wished she’d been with her at the end. It broke Rachel’s heart that Mary had died alone, so far from her family and friends. The Hospital for Consumptive Hebrews would notify Mary’s parents, she supposed. There was a graveyard nearby, burial expenses covered by the charity, but it was up to the families to send money for a headstone. From what Mary had told her, Rachel doubted the grave would ever bear her name. With the help of another nurse, she put a fresh mattress on the frame. Before Rachel’s shift was over, a woman who spoke no English was tucked up in Mary’s bed. Agitated and breathless, she called out in Yiddish, the guttural sounds spattering her lips with sputum.

  In the darkness of evening, Rachel let the streetcar carry her down Colfax Avenue. She was so lost in her thoughts she missed the Abramses’ house and had to walk back from the next stop. Opening the door, she found the dining room lit with candles and full of voices—she’d forgotten it was Shabbat. “Come, sit with us, Rachel,” they beckoned, but she shook her head and slunk upstairs to the Ivy Room. When Mrs. Abrams came to check on her, she found Rachel staring out the rain-streaked window.

  “I heard about Mary. I’m so sorry, dear. Did you know she wanted you to have all of her lovely things? Usually they would have been donated back to the hospital, but Dr. Abrams had the interns bring her steamer trunk home for you. I’ll ask them to carry it up before they leave.” She paused. “You know, I invite the interns as much for you as for them. I thought you might take a liking to one of them. Such fine young men. It’s how Althea met David, after all. And they’re not old like your uncle! Has there been anyone you liked?”

  Rachel shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to her to notice them.

  Mrs. Abrams recommended a hot bath. Rachel took the suggestion, sinking under the water to muffle the sounds of conversation drifting upstairs. Afterward Rachel returned to her room to find the trunk standing on end in the middle of the floor. Nearly her height, it looked larger here than it had in the hospital. She undid the clasps and pulled the handles. It opened like a book on its spine. On one side was a neat stack of shut drawers, each with a tiny glass knob; on the other, a curtain behind which the dresses hung. Rachel parted the curtain, as she had done before at Mary’s instruction, and slid her hands through the familiar inventory. She felt fine wool and stiff linen, satin and silk. Beneath the dresses were the shoes, four pairs all in their places. Rachel leaned in and inhaled a smell from before the tuberculosis and the hospital: scented powder and polished leather.

  Rachel pulled off her orphanage nightgown, intending to try on the dresses and shoes, one after another, as she knew Mary would have wanted her to. Then she realized such dresses weren’t meant to be dropped over a naked torso, that the shoes would scratch her bare feet. She sat down on the floor and began pulling open drawers, looking for a camisole and stockings. The smallest drawer on top held hairpins and combs, a few rings, a string of false pearls. Next were gloves and handkerchiefs, then underwear. She found camisoles with the slips and silk scarves. The stockings were below that. Rachel wondered what was left for the bottom drawer. Pinching the glass knob, she pulled it open.

  Letters, photographs, ribbon. A diary closed with a locked hasp. A china doll with a broken arm. An unfinished embroidery still on its hoop, threaded needle poked into the stretched fabric. A seashell.

  Rachel handled Mary’s things like found treasure, respecting the locked diary, listening to the shell, cradling the broken doll. She shuffled through the photographs, recognizing Mary as a child astride a spotted pony; as a girl posed with her mother in a circle of flowers; as a debutante, escorted by her father, his tuxedo a dark contrast to her shimmering gown. There was a photograph of Mary and another girl, arm in arm on a path beneath trees. There they were again at the shore, their tangled legs dissolved in the surf. And again, hand in hand on a porch swing, feet lifted, heads tossed back with laughter.

  This must have been the friend Mary mentioned. Her particular friend. The girl was pretty enough, though not nearly as lovely as Mary. Rachel held the photograph closer. Whereas the camera brought out the shape of Mary’s features, the other girl seemed indistinct, her jawline and hairline and nose blurring together. But her eyes, they were what kept her fr
om being plain. Expressive and wide, the eyes were always fixed on Mary’s face. The way she looked at Mary was something Rachel recognized. It was the way Naomi had looked at her, that last night at the Home.

  Rachel rarely allowed herself to think of that night, the way Naomi had touched her, how they had kissed. Remembering made her heart twitchy, her stomach queasy with guilt. To distract herself, Rachel replaced the photographs in the drawer, took out the bundle of letters, untied the ribbon.

  They were all written to Mary, the varying addresses charting her movements: at home from boarding school for holidays, care of the White Star Line during a trip abroad, and finally to the sanitarium in the Catskills. The return addresses changed, too, but the name was always the same. Sheila Wharton. There were none of Mary’s letters to Sheila—the letters Sheila’s mother found and burned before forbidding her to see Mary again.

  Rachel shivered. She pulled the eiderdown quilt from the bed and wrapped it around her naked body. Kneeling in front of the gaping trunk, she drew a letter from its envelope. Mary had said Sheila’s mother thought their friendship was unnatural. It was the same word the monitor had used to warn her about Naomi, but Rachel couldn’t quite believe that Mary and her friend had done the things she and Naomi had done. If they had, Rachel was sure they would never have written about it. She didn’t even know what words they might have used.

  Rachel unfolded the first letter. The paper smelled like flowers. She glanced over the page of perfect script, searching for a phrase a mother might object to. When I lick my lips, I can still taste you. The words swam before Rachel’s eyes. She had to blink, hard, to bring the swooping lines back into focus. She pinned the paper to the floor and began again from the beginning.

  It was midnight before Rachel carefully folded away all the letters, tied them back up, shut them in the drawer. She closed the trunk and did the clasps then shoved it into a corner of the room, scratching the floor. Crawling into bed, she switched off the light. Sheila had written to Mary about love and kisses, about the kinds of things Rachel and Naomi had done and more, things Rachel had never even thought of. These thoughts now monopolized her mind’s eye, like a movie projected on the inside of her eyelids.