An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  The room was absolutely still. Charlie heard Dr. Fogel speak again. “We will now open the door so that Elijah may come in and join us. Let the stranger and the homeless—let all those who are hungry and poor—let the widowed and the orphaned—let them enter also!”

  Charlie saw the back of his own head as he turned to face the doorway. A group of boys raced to it, fighting with each other for the honor, and when they had shoved it open, there was Sol, a big grin on his face. The boys all gasped—and then they cheered. Dr. Fogel began chanting the prayer, looked up, and stopped. Sol stepped into the room, laughing and waving. Charlie remembered how his own heart had leapt, how he had run from his chair and tried to get through the pack of boys surrounding Sol. “It’s Elijah! It’s Elijah!” they had all screamed, and Charlie had joined with them.

  When Sol had reached the head table, and was shaking hands with the other men, Dr. Fogel was gone.

  Charlie wondered what Dr. Fogel would do when the Home closed. He smiled to himself, thinking of telling Murray that he’d take him in also, and let Fogel and Sol fight it out for the leadership of his new Home! He heard Murray lecturing him about trying to turn everything into a joke, but he knew, at the same time, that he was really worried about Sol. Did Murray know that? Did Murray understand that taking Danny in was more than a crazy scheme? Charlie admitted that, like Sol, he liked being the center of attention, he liked thinking of people laughing and repeating stories of things he’d done. The story of Sol coming through the door had become a Home legend within days, and, at his own Seders, Murray would now tell the story to his children every year. But Charlie also believed in the things he did and the schemes he thought up.

  He reached across the back of the front car seat with his right hand and patted Danny’s head. He answered the boy’s question and told him that it was true, Dr. Fogel had really been the coach, and he added that he had been the best coach because he’d never played himself and didn’t know how to. He told Danny that if he’d learned one thing in all his years at the Home it had been the thing Dr. Fogel had taught him—that desire is everything. Dr. Fogel had wanted to know how to do something he would never be able to do.

  Danny shrugged and said that Charlie was a great athlete and now he was a coach too, and Charlie was surprised—pleased—by the boy’s sharpness. “Sure,” he said, “I was a natural—but it’s what made me work even harder, don’t you see? I can never know what it’s like to desire things I already have.”

  Danny laughed. “Everything is upside down sometimes, isn’t it?”

  They drove in silence on dark winding roads where the houses were set far back, behind walls or trees or hedges. Charlie was glad to see the boy more relaxed than he’d been in Murray’s house. He listened to the boy tell him that Dr. Fogel had given him a book, and that he tried to memorize something from the book every day. Danny recited something in Hebrew, but Charlie didn’t pay attention. “I can remember when it used to be romantic to be an orphan,” he said. “I got a lot of mileage with girls when I was younger, being an orphan.” He looked at Danny. “But who gives a shit about orphans anymore, right?”

  Danny nodded. “We’re an endangered species,” he said.

  “A what?” Charlie asked, but before Danny could repeat himself, Charlie was laughing and telling Danny that he’d have to remember the line for Murray.

  Danny saw a sign in the front window, a red neon light: Mittleman Realty. “I think I’m very hungry,” he said. He looked down at his legs, at the cloth sack on his lap. “But—but I’m not sure I can get out of the car.”

  Charlie was trying to make the boy understand. “Don’t get me wrong about what I said before,” he said. “Don’t think I’m one of those guys who’ll keep going forever, never satisfied. I have a plan, right? When I get to forty, I stop—whether I’ve made my bundle or not.”

  “And then?” Danny asked.

  “Then—? Then I’ll become a rabbi.”

  Danny felt his heart jerk. “Really?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Charlie said, and he laughed in a way that made Danny feel uncomfortable. He got out of the car and walked around to Danny’s side. When he reached in for him, Danny shook his head sideways, leaned on the seat, pushed himself up, and stepped out. His legs were cold.

  “I didn’t have to say it—that I felt as if I couldn’t move, did I?” Danny asked.

  They walked up the front steps and into the house. A woman called and asked if it was Charlie and he called back that it was and that he had someone with him.

  “Rabbi Akiba started out from home when he was forty,” Danny said. “And he didn’t even know how to read and write. When he returned to his village six years later he was already the most famous scholar in the land of Israel.”

  Charlie patted Danny on the shoulder. “I had him in mind,” he said.

  Charlie embraced Mrs. Mittleman. “How’s my sweetheart tonight?” he asked.

  Danny watched the woman’s eyes, over Charlie’s shoulder. They were slate gray, and they stared at him coldly. “I’m Danny Ginsberg,” he said. “I telephoned you two days ago.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Mittleman said, stepping away from Charlie. “I would have thought you were older—on the telephone your voice was much older—but come. Max is already showing his movies. You’ll enjoy them. Are you hungry?” She smiled. “You must be.”

  She left them. Charlie hung his jacket in the hall closet and spoke to Danny, softly. “It goes against what most people think, my living here, but it’s the very thing people resist too much. Just relax with her if she seems jealous. She likes to think of me as her only child, if you know what I mean. That’s desire too, right? They never had a son, I never had parents. We fill one another’s needs. It’s what lets things work out.”

  Danny took his jacket off but held on to his sack. “How much will you tell her?” he asked.

  He followed Charlie through a dark room where there were desks and file cabinets. The neon light flashed red on the inside walls. “Like with you,” Charlie went on. “I mean, my wanting you to stay with me. We know the reasons, right? So why fight them?”

  “Sometimes you don’t answer my questions.”

  “Come on now,” Charlie said, taking Danny and pressing him to his side. “What are you so scared of? Let’s put it this way—I always wanted a kid brother and you probably wanted an older one like me, right?”

  They were in the living room and Mrs. Mittleman stood in front of them, blocking images on a movie screen, plates in her hands. “I don’t think so,” Danny said to Charlie. “Not really.”

  “We’ll work on it then.”

  Mrs. Mittleman led Danny to a metal folding chair and he sat. She set up a TV tray in front of him and put a sandwich and a glass of milk on it. “This will hold you while the chicken warms,” she said.

  Mr. Mittleman, sitting on a three-legged stool next to a movie projector, grunted slightly, acknowledging Charlie’s presence. Charlie sat on the couch, his arm along the back, Mrs. Mittleman’s head resting on his arm. He balanced a plate on his lap. Danny bit into his sandwich and looked at Mr. Mittleman. He was a thin man with a large round head. He wore a jacket, a white shirt, and a tie, and he was smoking a cigar. Without looking at any of them, and without removing the cigar from his mouth, he spoke to Charlie. “Here’s a new one—what’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?”

  “I give up,” Charlie said. “What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?”

  Mr. Mittleman’s voice was even and dry, and his lips did not seem to move when he spoke. “When you put a pizza in the oven, it doesn’t scream.”

  Nobody laughed.

  “Danny’s going to be staying here with me for a while,” Charlie said to Mrs. Mittleman. “If that’s okay with you—”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “It’s my house too,” Mr. Mittleman said. “I pay the bills and tell the jokes.”

  On the screen, in black and white, a boy and girl
were in a bathtub together, the boy spilling water on the girl’s head. “Max has home movies of his whole family,” Charlie explained to Danny. “It’s his hobby. He has films going way back—”

  “To 1933, the year we were married,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  The film fluttered. Mr. Mittleman rested his hand lightly on the reel, the sprockets caught, and a man was wrapping the boy in a towel. Then the boy was being tossed up and down toward the ceiling.

  “Danny’s from the Home,” Charlie said. “Where I grew up.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mittleman said. “I know.”

  Mr. Mittleman looked toward Danny for the first time. “You know something?” he said. “He looks like an orphan.” Then his eyes were on the screen again. “But Shirley will fatten him up.”

  Danny dug his fingers into the side of his sack and he could feel the ridges of the tephillin boxes. He tried to concentrate on a passage from the Pirkay Avos that he had memorized, about love. He was aware that Charlie was telling the Mittlemans about Murray’s news and that Mr. Mittleman was telling a story about a Jewish man who had tried every form of birth control and had ten hungry children. The doctor recommended orange juice. “‘Before or after?’ the husband asked. ‘Instead of,’ the doctor said.”

  Charlie was saying that he was happy for Murray and Anita. He said that Murray seemed cold about things, because of his theories, but that it wasn’t so. Mr. Mittleman, on the screen, twenty pounds heavier and twenty or thirty years younger, puffed smoke into the camera. “I was once a young man,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  “I like Murray and Anita,” Mrs. Mittleman said. “I think their family has a beautiful image.”

  “My wife thought the Kennedy family had a beautiful image,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  Charlie asked Mrs. Mittleman if he’d ever told her that even before he’d come to live with them, he’d often seen movies in his head. Danny smiled.

  “If his brother had lived to become President I don’t think his image would have been as good as John’s, do you?” Mrs. Mittleman asked. “He was too emotional.”

  Charlie looked at the film, in color now, of a boy jumping up and down in a wading pool. Mrs. Mittleman and her brother Oscar and Oscar’s wife sat in wicker chairs watching, and Charlie realized that he had, again, been seeing pictures of Sol. Sol was with Jerry the waiter, who worked in the Catskills in the summer and spent his winters in Florida, and Charlie saw them sitting in a box together at Hialeah racetrack. “They’re thinking of closing the Home,” Charlie said. “But we’ll see what we can do. Danny and I are going to work on it.”

  “It’s the new abortion laws,” Danny stated. “They can’t find enough orphans anymore—especially Jewish orphans.”

  “There must be an angle for us there, Max, don’t you think?” Charlie said. “I mean, in getting into the adoption business. If there’s a shortage of something there’s money to be made, right?”

  “We knew people who were in the business,” Mrs. Mittleman said. “As a matter of fact, we were once offered a good black-market baby but—”

  “Shush,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  “Jewish parents want Jewish kids, right?” Charlie said. “So if we—”

  “It’s not funny,” Mr. Mittleman said. “We shouldn’t make jokes with the boy sitting here.”

  Charlie looked at the screen more intently, trying to see himself as a boy. He remembered Adoption Day, when they’d all act as crazy as they could, so nobody would take them. He had always appeared with different color socks, his pants inside out, his fly open. Murray would stuff food in his mouth at breakfast and save it there until it was time—and then let it drool out. Charlie laughed, seeing Irving, slowly unbuckling his belt in front of some of the “buyers,” as they’d called them, to show he was a genuine Jewish boy.

  “We used to act nuts on Adoption Day,” he said aloud. “We didn’t want to leave one another. Nobody ever took any of us home, from our group.”

  “There are only twelve boys left, without me,” Danny said. “We haven’t had a new boy for over two years.”

  Mr. Mittleman turned to Danny. “Tell me,” he said. “Just from looking at me, how much money would you say I’m worth?”

  “The very young kids got taken fast,” Charlie went on, “but once you got past five or six you were safe.”

  “Poor boys,” Mrs. Mittleman said.

  Charlie shook his head and smiled at Danny. “No,” he said. “That’s where you’re wrong. We loved it there. You know what Murray always says—the Home ruined all of us for life in the world. We had everything we needed back there, is his theory—all the things families don’t give to people anymore.”

  “I’m not worth anything,” Mr. Mittleman said to Danny.

  A small girl ran across the screen, chasing bubbles. “Don’t believe everything Max tells you,” Charlie said to Danny.

  Danny smiled. I wish Charlie was the father of Murray’s children, he thought.

  On the screen the camera zoomed in on Oscar’s father. He was sitting on a wooden chair, sideways, showing no interest in his grandson. Danny recognized him as having the face of the young man who had thrown the boy toward the ceiling. He was very old and he wore round silver sunglasses and a khaki windbreaker. The collar was turned up and buttoned across his throat. On one side of his neck there was a bulge of skin—a goiter like a hand grenade—and Danny gagged on his milk, felt some of it come through his nose.

  “He looks like death,” Mrs. Mittleman said. “I asked you not to take his picture.” She handed Danny another napkin and left the room.

  “Here’s your answer,” Mr. Mittleman said. “I’m not worth anything until I sell.”

  Charlie imagined a movie about the Home, with Sol going around the country to see all his old boys. The movie could tell the story of his last trip. Charlie saw Sol calling each of his boys, but they all gave excuses. There would be flashbacks to the boys when they’d been kids at the Home, and when they’d been starting out in life with their families and jobs and Sol had helped them.

  Charlie imagined the film playing in theaters, with the proceeds going to save the Home. There could be a kid in the movie with a camera who turned out to be the guy who decided to make the movie about the Home in order to raise the funds to save it. But Jerry the waiter would be the only one who would agree to see Sol. The flashbacks and cross-country scenes and scenes of the Home could alternate with the nine races at Hialeah, and at the end of the ninth race—Charlie leaned forward—when Sol and Jerry were laughing at what a good time they’d had, and in the middle of a big crowd pressing to the payoff windows, Sol would be struck down with a heart attack.

  “What?” Charlie said, aloud, and he stood. The camera was moving up and away and Charlie couldn’t find Sol’s face in the crowd. He stood next to Danny and touched the boy’s hair, lightly.

  “The boy thinks you’re special,” Mr. Mittleman said. “You shouldn’t disappoint him.”

  The lights were on and Danny felt dizzy. He remembered how good he had felt on the hill a few hours before, when things were beginning. “I told you to come have your chicken,” Mrs. Mittleman said. “It’s warm.” Mr. Mittleman unhooked the screen, then put the projector away in a closet and told Charlie he was going back to work. When he was gone Mrs. Mittleman sighed and said he’d be up all night. She asked Charlie what she should do about him.

  When Danny opened his eyes he heard ringing and smelled smoke. He thought of Larry and the other boys puffing cigarettes in their secret hideout. The inside of his mouth was dry from the chicken. Mr. Mittleman sat at a desk across the room, looking directly at him.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  Charlie was on the telephone, telling a man that he knew what a big step it was to buy a house. “But let me put it this way,” he said. “If I came up to you in the street and handed you a five-thousand-dollar bill, would you tell me you needed time to think it over?”

  Danny rested in a corner of the easy
chair. His back was damp from perspiration. The last thing he remembered hearing was a discussion between Mr. Mittleman and Charlie about a piece of property. Charlie had asked Danny to pay attention—to memorize Mittleman’s words.

  Mr. Mittleman picked up the phone on his desk. “Abe, this is Max. Listen to my boy Charlie. He’s giving you the deal of a lifetime.”

  Mr. Mittleman hung up. Danny stared at a wall of photos—houses, with prices, tacked to corkboard. He went over the things Mr. Mittleman had explained.

  Charlie was listening, then smiling. He told the man to come in the next day and settle the details with Mr. Mittleman.

  “I don’t know why we bother with the houses,” Mr. Mittleman said when Charlie had hung up. “They take up so much time, and for what? It’s all cats and dogs.”

  Charlie looked at Danny. “You feel okay?” he asked.

  “I’m all right,” Danny said, and found that he was saying something he’d been half thinking when he awoke. “I wish you were still married.”

  “Me too,” Charlie said.

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Mittleman said to Danny. “Tell me, when you grow up, what do you want to be—a Jewish mother?”

  “Lay off,” Charlie said. “He’s had a long day, coming all the way from the city to find me.”

  Mr. Mittleman shrugged. Danny stared at the photo of John and Jacqueline Kennedy on the desk. “In all our years of marriage,” Mr. Mittleman said, “the most important thing that ever happened to us was John F. Kennedy’s death.”

  “Come on,” Charlie said, starting to pull Danny from the chair. “We’ll get you to sleep.”

  Danny pushed Charlie away. “I’m okay. Leave me alone.”

  “It was an experience we could share,” Mr. Mittleman said. “We made a scrapbook together.”

  “You look so tired,” Charlie said to Danny.

  Danny glared at Mr. Mittleman. “High borrowing reduces cash flow,” he recited. “Depreciation not only develops a cash flow which is not taxable but it helps develop losses to offset other income. The important thing is to enhance proceeds and postpone taxes. Rabbi Akiba said, ‘The more flesh, the more worms. The more possessions, the more worry….”’