The Orange Tree

by Martin Ganzglass

  A Peace Corps Writers Book

  An imprint of Peace Corps Worldwide.

  FIRST PEACE CORPS WRITERS EDITION, MARCH 2011

  The Orange Tree, Copyright © 2011 by Martin R. Ganzglass

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America

  by Peace Corps Writers of Oakland, California, a component

  of PeaceCorpsWorldwide.org. No part of this book may

  be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

  without written permission except in the case of brief

  quotations contained in critical articles or reviews.

  For more information, contact peacecorpsworldwide@gmail.com

  Peace Corps Writers and Peace Corps Writers colophon

  are trademarks of PeaceCorpsWorldwide.org

  ISBN 978-1-935925-03-3

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-935925-09-5

  For the women of my family, past,

  present and future.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  She fled New London in late September, followed by the FBI. They must not get her nephew, her only sister’s only son. Lord of the Universe, she prayed. Give me the strength to lead them away from him.

  Mitch glanced at his aunt, hunched down in the passenger seat. Barely five feet tall, she had never weighed more than ninety pounds as a younger woman. Now, at age 84, with the curve in her spine more pronounced, her bird like frame seemed more shrunken. The seat belt cut across her frail body at neck level.

  The entrance to I-95 was just ahead. Then, an eight-hour drive to DC. Probably longer with Aunt Helen. He wished his sister were with him, helping to take their aunt to the nursing home. Judy was nine years older than him and had always been better with Aunt Helen. She was a special ed teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina and hadn’t been able to get away. The social worker in New London had insisted that their aunt must be moved immediately.

  He was doing almost 45 mph on the access ramp when she released the seat belt and opened the door. “Aunt Helen,” he screamed, grabbing her thin, bony wrist. He swerved the Ford Taurus wagon on to the right shoulder. The driver of the car behind him shot past and gave him the finger.

  “Aunt Helen,” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you? You could’ve killed yourself?” She stared back at him unrepentantly. He walked around the wagon to her side, slid the seat belt over her thin shoulders and snapped it in place. He got back in and hit the child lock button.

  “I know you don’t want to leave. We’re going to Washington where we live. Eleanor and I and the kids. To a nice place where they can take care of you. It’s a Jewish place. You’ll like it.” He could see he wasn’t getting through to her. Her eyes were fierce looking, like a hawk with a broken wing, trapped and defiant, but also strangely unfocused. He hadn’t noticed this distant gaze the last time they had visited her in April. Maybe she had cataracts.

  He eased the car back on the ramp. “Is your vision ok, Aunt Helen?”

  “Didn’t you see the bread truck?” she said sharply. Why was he asking about her eyesight? They were in danger. He was in danger. Her only nephew.

  “What bread truck? Where?”

  “When we left my apartment,” she explained. “It was in front of the manager’s office. The man who said goodbye to me.” She had to be patient with him. He would understand after a while. He had always been a bright child. Both of Lillian’s children were intelligent, of course. Why hadn’t Lillian visited? Now that she thought about it, Lillian hadn’t been to see her for years. Where was she?

  “They watch me all the time.”

  “Who is watching you, Aunt Helen? The truck was delivering bread to your building’s cafeteria.” The social worker had told him most tenants at the New London Public Housing project ate at least one daily meal in the first floor dining room. It was cheap and communal. His aunt, for the past few months, had stayed in her apartment. When she ventured out, she got into shouting matches. These incidents had escalated into physical attacks. Once, she had spat on someone. Recently, she had grabbed another tenant’s walker, causing him to fall down.

  “The FBI. They know the manager. He spies for them. They’ re following us in the bread truck.”

  “Aunt Helen. Why would the FBI watch you?” he said with exasperation. This is Alice in Wonderland, he thought. She tries to jump out of a moving car and he’s listening to her explain why it is a normal thing to do. Better to humor her. “You’re my favorite aunt. I wouldn’t let them harm you. Look, there’s no bread truck. We must have left them behind.” He merged onto the highway.

  “I know why they want me,” she said obstinately. “They’re waiting up ahead.”

  ‘Ok, maybe you’re right”, he conceded. “You look out for the FBI and I’ll drive. Sing out when you see them and I can either outrace them or we’ll shoot it out. They won’t dare follow us all the way to Washington. ”

  A shoot out, she thought. Where did he keep the gun? Maybe he would give it to her and she could use it while he drove. She had never fired a pistol before. She was confident she would know how when the time came.

  The FBI had been after her for years. Over her naturalization papers. Her birthday was wrong and she had sworn the statement was true. And her income taxes. Lillian’s husband, Henry, did her taxes. For her hat shop in New London. He hadn’t done them in a while. Maybe the FBI had caught him. No, she thought. She would have heard from Lillian. It was all so confusing.

  The sun felt good through the windshield. She leaned against the window, letting it warm her. The monotonous sounds of the highway flowed around her. It had been a long time since she had ridden in a car. She felt herself entering a calmer, more stable world. She would meet Lillian and Mother when she slept. She always did.

  Mitch relaxed a little after his aunt had fallen asleep. Much as he would have liked to, he didn’t turn on the radio. He smiled to himself, listening to her sporadic snoring. He made good time in the light traffic on the Connecticut Turnpike, swung across on the Merritt and on to I 84 outside of Danbury. The fall foliage was beautiful. He guessed it was about three weeks ahead of Washington. It would be faster to avoid New York City and cut across the Tappan Zee Bridge and down the Palisades Parkway, although he knew there were speed traps on the Parkway. Particularly in New York State.

  He had taken personal leave Friday from his job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It had been a miserable, long drive up in a pouring rain that had drenched the east coast from Baltimore to Boston. He stayed in a Best Western just outside New London, for $89, which included a lousy, cold breakfast, in a cramped room off the lobby, filled with a few families, their noisy preschoolers, and the TV volume on the morning news turned up too loud. He felt dull and tired early Saturday morning, when he met Delores, the social worker for the project’s residents, before going up to Aunt Helen’s apartment. Delores had already told his aunt that he was coming to move her to Washington.

  Aunt Helen opened the door, looking bewildered and at the same time angry at being di
sturbed. Her face brightened when she saw him.

  “Mitchell. What a pleasant surprise. If I had only known you were coming, I would have gone shopping.” She smiled up at him.

  She reached up and hugged him hard. She was dressed in a loose, wrinkled, black skirt, higher on one hip than the other, with Kleenex protruding from the waist band, a white knit sweater with a quarter sized, reddish food stain on the front below her neck and flat heeled shoes too big for her feet. He kissed the top of her head and smelled her white hair, soft and salty, the faint acrid odor of her skin and a slight whiff of pine soap on her cheeks. He released her and took her hands in his. Her long boney fingers were cold. There was a desperate strength to her grasp.

  “Come in, darling, come in,” she said, ignoring Delores standing to one side of the door who whispered to Mitch “I reminded her yesterday you were coming.”

  He followed his aunt into the one bedroom apartment. It was a jumble of confusion, mute testimony to his aunt’s mental deterioration. Dirty pots, which looked like they had not been cooked in for weeks, sat on top of the gas burners. Unwashed dishes and utensils lay strewn on counters everywhere. Open boxes of cereal, rice, pasta, cans of cheap, cocktail fruit with grey mold around the rims, a few brown rotting apples, crumbled pieces of bread and broken crackers. A clean glass bowl with two fresh oranges, stood incongruously in the middle of a small breakfast table, surrounded by oval, food stained, plastic brown place mats.

  The musty smelling living room was a cluttered collage of things a normal person would not collect or would have thrown out on a weekly, if not daily, basis. The worn wooden floor was littered with old newspapers and magazines, some in stacks, others randomly thrown about. The one easy chair, his aunt’s repository for unopened mail, was filled up to the armrests. Mustard, ketchup, sugar, salt and pepper packets from McDonalds, Burger King and Popeye’s, cascaded in small mountains around the base of an old brass lamp on the cheap wood side table. The shelves of the two black bookcases were home to sheets, pillowcases, napkins and clothing, with a few heavy books stacked on top, as if she were expecting a tornado to tear through the room.

  Her bedroom had only two pieces of furniture, a low cot, covered by a garish, faded floral green bed spread, and a four drawer plain pinewood dresser, with a cinder block in place of the missing front left leg. Dozens of used envelopes were scattered across the top of her dresser, some filled with rubber bands, red in one, brown in another, some with paper clips, again organized by color; others with string, or cancelled stamps carefully ripped off the letters they had paid for, or tissues, clean and neatly flattened to fit the envelope. He stared at the envelopes, astounded by the order of their contents, amidst the disorder of the apartment. A familiar black tin of Barton’s Almond Kisses, with the distinctive green and pink trim and the line drawings of French sidewalk scenes, caught his eye. He opened it, knowing he would not find the candies that had gummed up his teeth as a child. It was filled with plastic cocktail forks, toothpicks and wooden spears usually stuck in pigs in a blanket.

  The bathtub, with its dirty rim and peeling caulk, was a storage place for old checks, bank statements and hundreds of pennies. To hide from “them” Aunt Helen had said, following them into the bathroom and motioning with her head toward Delores.

  Unlike the tub, the sink looked like it was used regularly, as did the frayed, thin, faded yellow face towel dangling from a rusty hook screwed into the wallboard.

  He and Delores worked until mid Saturday afternoon sorting through the chaos of her apartment. They packed her shoes and clothing in an old cheap suitcase with rusting hinges. The few other possessions she had wanted to take with her all fit in a large cardboard carton Delores had obtained from the maintenance man. A leather bound photo album covered with dust, a grim, lonely painting of a solitary wolf looking down on an isolated, snow covered farm house at night, a few books, an old ledger she had insisted on keeping, a shoebox full of costume jewelry, a knitted oval throw rug, and two tarnished silver candle sticks. Aunt Helen had burrowed into a cabinet in the kitchen and produced a jar of silver polish and a rag, which she put into a paper bag. “To clean Mother’s candle sticks,” she said, when Mitch looked at her questioningly. Outside of that single foray, Aunt Helen sat quietly perched on the kitchen stool he had cleared of unopened sample boxes of cleaners and detergents, a few sponges and rectangular pieces of cardboard, all the same size, and neatly tied together with a frayed piece of string.

  Delores confirmed what she had told him during their telephone conversation three weeks ago, although it was obvious to Mitch now. It was dangerous for his aunt’s own health to continue to live alone. She was a risk to others as well. The Project Manager and the neighbors were afraid that Ms. Plonsker would leave the gas on and blow up the building.

  After that call, he talked it over with his sister. Judy and he agreed their aunt should be in a Jewish environment. It made no sense to place Aunt Helen in a nursing home in New London since neither of them would be able to visit frequently. Judy had checked and there were no vacancies in any of the Jewish nursing homes in the Charlotte area. Mitch had called the Bethesda Hebrew Home for the Elderly, a place he drove by often on weekends. They had an opening. The Home was fifteen minutes away from where they lived. He discussed it with his wife and they had concluded it was the only practical solution. Eleanor thought it would also be good for their children, Amy, who was almost thirteen, and Joshua, who had just turned ten. They would get to know their great Aunt Helen better. However, he and Ell had assumed a level of mental competence that obviously wasn’t there.

  Mitch looked across at Aunt Helen, slumped down in her navy blue winter coat, dandruff dotting the collar. Underneath her full head of white hair, the prominent veins of her forehead, pulsed like rivulets through the landscape of her translucent skin. Her upper lip overlapped the lower one, pushed out by her dentures, giving her a fragile but slightly mischevieous elfin appearance.

  He remembered when he was a young boy growing up in The Bronx, and Aunt Helen visited his parents. She rode the train down from New London, early Sunday mornings, took the subway from Penn Station to Kingsbridge Road and walked from the Grand Concourse to their apartment. But first, she stopped at Sutter’s Bakery to buy a cake and cookies, making sure the assortment included his favorite, the buttery round ones with a dark chocolate dab in the middle. Next, she went to the Hebrew National delicatessen for cold cuts, pickles and fresh rye bread. She would arrive at his parents’ third floor apartment, laden down with the food, her business records for his father to look at, a hat box with something new for his mother to try on, and of course pennies for him to scrutinize for old dates or interesting mint markings.

  That had been more than 45 years ago. Aunt Helen’s hat shop had long since gone, a victim of the downtown blight which had shuttered the stores on New London’s Main Street. But first, his mother had died. He remembered Aunt Helen at his mom’s bedside in their apartment. The radiation and chemo could no longer contain the cancer inside her. Aunt Helen had desperately kept her sister awake, as if by the sheer force of her presence she could stave off the Angel of Death. When mom lapsed into her final coma, Aunt Helen screamed for God to take her instead. But God had not bent to Aunt Helen’s iron will. Pop died several years later, after first remarrying, a weakness that Aunt Helen, having lived alone all of her life, could neither understand nor forgive.

  Over the years, since his father’s death, he and Eleanor visited his aunt briefly during the summers when they took their vacations with the kids in eastern Canada or New England. They stopped either on the way up or back. She would regale Amy and Josh with stories of attending the launchings of nuclear submarines at the Electric Boat Company, or how Admiral Hyman Rickover had publicly reprimanded a sub commander for breaking mandatory radio silence to notify the officers’ wives when the sub would arrive at home port. The wives had been on the New London naval dock, wearing new hats bought at Helen’s shop, when Admiral Rickover
had helicoptered in, unannounced. No matter how many times she told that story, she always ended it with, “They hated Admiral Rickover because he was Jewish.”

  He was abruptly jarred out of his memories by the flashing red light in his rear view mirror. Damn, he wondered. How long had the New York State cop been behind him? He pulled off on to the shoulder and watched as the State Trooper reported his license plate. He fumbled in his billfold for his license and registration. The documents stuck to the plastic, frustrating his efforts to have them ready before the cop got to the car.

  “Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?” the officer asked, glancing first at Aunt Helen, who was still asleep, and then around the inside of the wagon, before looking at Mitch’s license.

  “No sir. I don’t. I’m moving my aunt from New London down to Washington. I was thinking about how she visited me when I was a kid. I guess I forgot to check my speed.” He spoke rapidly, something he did when he was nervous.

  She heard a deep male voice, disturbing her time with Mother and Lillian. It wasn’t the building manager. He had a whiney tone. She thought it sounded like one of them. Authoritative. Commanding. She forced herself out of her dream to confront the danger. It was the FBI. They were here. She opened her eyes, saw the shape of a man in uniform, wearing dark sunglasses, at her nephew’s window.

  “Shoot him, Mitchell,” she screamed. “Get the gun and shoot him. It’s one of them.”

  Frantically, he tried to shush Aunt Helen, but it was too late. The trooper was backing away from the Taurus, his pistol in his hand.

  “Okay, Mister. Out of the car. Keep your hands above your head. Move it.”

  Chapter Two

  Amina’s divorce became final three years, one month and seven days after Earl Jackson walked out on her and their daughter, Mariam. He had left on October 6th after 9/11, but said the terrorists’ attack had nothing to do with it. He said he was tired of her practicing Islam, although she was not observant; tired of her calling her brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, although she called when he was not around, which was often; and tired of her Somali music, although she always listened to it with headphones on. He had a long list of the things he said he was tired of. But she knew he was tired of her.