An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  I told him that my mother was very beautiful too, with sandy-blond hair like mine and hazel eyes and that after my father died people told me she wasn’t the same as she was before and that a doctor told her it’s better if we don’t see each other very often. I said she had a lot of money and lived in an enormous old house with a lookout room on the roof like a crow’s nest on a ship from where you can see for miles and miles.

  Neither of us remembered our fathers.

  He took me to the building where Sol lived with his brother. Sol’s brother died a long time ago and was a bachelor too. It was only 2 stories high and I was surprised that it was so plain. It had fire escapes on the front side and big red brick stoops where you could sit on either side of the door. Charlie said Sol was gone so much he only needed it as a place to sleep in and store his things. I asked him where Sol lived now and Charlie said that was why he was worried. He doesn’t know! He spoke to the super of the building and the super took us down to the basement and showed us a bin with Sol’s trunks and dressers in it, but Sol’s apartment was rented to somebody else.

  Charlie told me the story of how when he was a young boy he snuck out of the Home 1 time after Sol brought them back from a game and followed Sol all the way to this house. He said he remembered seeing Sol on the street, teasing young children who were riding tricycles in a group by not letting them get by him. He could tell the children loved to have Sol tease them. He said the children went into Sol’s apartment and he watched through the window while Sol gave them graham crackers and milk. He said he was surprised the place was so small and didn’t have any decorations on the walls.

  He laughed, remembering how angry Sol was when he spotted him peering in over the windowsill. He remembered feeling that Sol would have whipped him with a strap if he could have! Sol’s brother took Charlie back to the Home in a taxi and they never mentioned the incident again.

  Charlie said he would have another surprise trip for me in a few days!

  Here are some other things Charlie does: He takes listings on new houses. He calls banks and insurance companies and mortgage brokers to get money for himself and other people. In the evenings he shows houses and telephones people. He doesn’t have a realtor’s license because he’s afraid to take the test, so Mrs. Mittleman does all his paper work.

  In the mornings sometimes we go over the birth and obituary columns in the local papers. People with more children need bigger homes. Widows and widowers want to move to smaller homes.

  In the afternoon he coaches the team. They play 6 man football in a league with 7 other private schools and they’ve won the championship every year since Charlie was coach.

  Every night Mr. Mittleman shows his movies and they talk business after.

  I like to drive into the city with Charlie when the light is just beginning before most people wake up. The city looks beautiful from the bridge. What I think about is how they get enough food into it every day, day after day, to feed 8 million people plus commuters.

  I said this to Charlie this morning and he told me he thinks about the exact same thing sometimes and that his conclusion is that it proves the city isn’t dying the way people say it is. He said if he still had his own family he would bring his children up in the city.

  Do you think about your daughter a lot? I asked.

  No, he said.

  But don’t you think about how she keeps changing and you’re not there to see the changes?

  He said he still sees her sometimes if he’s in her neighborhood and that he used to wonder about himself because he didn’t miss her, but he says he stopped wondering a few years ago. He sends money to his ex-wife every month and he’ll pay for college if Sandy goes there.

  The only thing I think about sometimes, he said, is that after she gets away from home and gets married and has a family, that maybe then we’ll be able to be pretty good friends. He asked me if I thought that sounded funny and I said it didn’t. He said he sees the scene in his head sometimes, of him visiting her and her husband and her children and of them having nice evenings together.

  Coming home he told me that Dr. Fogel used to make fun of him and ask him when he was going to learn to read. Who do you think you are—Rabbi Akiba? Dr. Fogel would say. He used to send him out of the classroom and tell him to return when he was 40 years old.

  What I imagined Dr. Fogel saying to him at the Home yesterday if Charlie walked into his classroom: GO HOME. YOU’RE 17 MONTHS EARLY!

  Charlie said a boy at the Home told him Dr. Fogel hasn’t been there for 4 weeks!

  I see Charlie yawning. A good place to stop. The end of a good day!

  THURSDAY

  Today we went to lunch for the 2nd time with the man from the city about Charlie’s big project. The man didn’t like me being with them but Charlie told him not to worry, that I was an orphan and didn’t understand things. The man looked at me and I gave him my blank look and then they talked business.

  What they’re going to do: Charlie has an option on residential land which will be rezoned so they can build a factory. He’ll sell the land to the city for an Industrial Renewal Project in a Model Cities Area. Then he’ll take the profits from the land and put it into the building at special low interest rates and the result will be what Charlie calls “a windfall.”

  Afterward Charlie told me that when it’s over the workers could go back on welfare or unemployment and the building could be used for something else or it could be torn down and they could start again. He said that the economy would collapse without projects like this.

  A question: Am I writing this only for myself or so that Charlie will find it and want to read it? Whenever he sees me writing he asks me what I’m making up for my storybook today!

  After supper tonight we watched movies of Mrs. Mittleman and her brother Oscar and his wife and some friends taken during World War II. They were in the country where they each had rooms in a house and shared a big kitchen, and they were playing games on a Saturday night like musical chairs and break the balloon and steal the baloney and they looked like they were having a wonderful time. “Grown people don’t play games like that anymore,” Mr. Mittleman said.

  When Charlie came into the room just before, I recited for him what Maimonides said about buying friendship and he said, That makes sense. I asked him why but he didn’t answer me.

  I have 2 books on my lap under my notebook: PIRKAY AVOS and a book Mr. Mittleman gave me called REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT STRATEGY. We’ll see how smart you are, he said. In a month I’m giving a test.

  *

  When Charlie opened his eyes Danny was standing next to the bed, his tephillin boxes in his hands. He asked Charlie to tell him if he was putting them on the right way. “How would I know?” Charlie said. “Ask Murray. Religion is his department.”

  “But you’re a Jew too,” Danny said.

  “Sure,” Charlie replied. “But that doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it, does it? If I do or if I don’t I’m still a Jew, right?” He turned away, sat up, and began putting on his socks. “So until I get to forty, leave me be….”

  Danny did not move away and—while Charlie dressed and Danny put on his tephillin—Charlie tried not to show how pleased he was by the defiant look in the boy’s eyes.

  “Tell me this,” Charlie said, when Danny was done. “Why do you care so much about being a Jew?”

  “Because I am a Jew,” Danny replied.

  Charlie sighed. “But that’s the point,” he said. “If you do a little or a lot, you’re still a Jew, so why do you care so much? It’s not natural.”

  Charlie waited, but the boy said nothing. Charlie saw that Danny didn’t realize he was being playful with him. “You weren’t even brought up in an Orthodox Home,” Charlie went on. “I bet you never even went to shul with your father or saw him put on tephillin in the mornings—am I right?”

  Then Danny smiled. “Desire is everything,” he said.

  Charlie laughed and brushed the boy’s hair
. “You have me there,” he said.

  At breakfast Mrs. Mittleman read to them from a brochure about the John F. Kennedy Peace Forest in Israel, to which she was sending a contribution. The trees would be planted on the same slopes where two thousand years before Bar Kochba had fought his last battle against the legions of Rome. Charlie remembered hearing the story of Bar Kochba from Dr. Fogel. Mrs. Mittleman told him that her dream in life would be to go to Israel someday and visit the forest with her husband.

  Charlie winked at Danny. “Good luck,” he said.

  Mrs. Mittleman bent over and kissed Charlie on the forehead. “But he’s very good to me in his way,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t know everything.”

  Driving into the city, and thinking of what Danny had said to him, Charlie told Danny that the thing he’d always wanted in the world was the thing he could never have. He said he knew it was silly, but it was what he wanted: to stand with his father in his own home for his son’s bris, and to imagine himself while the mohel was performing the circumcision as being at his own grandson’s bris with his son imagining the same thing he had imagined a generation before. He said he saw it all, except for his own face. “Sometimes I try to see how many groups of three I can keep straight in my head at once, and how many hundreds of years backward and forward I can go, in equal amounts-do you follow?”

  Danny seemed slightly puzzled. “I think you’d make a good rabbi,” he said. “People look up to you.”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, smiling. “The rabbi gets the fees, right?—But it’s the mohel who gets the tips.”

  Charlie parked the car on Bedford Avenue, not far from Brooklyn College, in a section of expensive private homes. He pointed to a house that looked like a Mexican villa to Danny, with a tile roof, wooden trellises over the porch, and stucco walls. “This is the house I told you about,” Charlie said. “It’s the surprise—”

  Danny tried to keep himself from believing anything at all. He got out of the car and walked up the steps, behind Charlie. “Don’t be scared,” Charlie said, and, one hand on Danny’s arm, he rang the bell. When the door opened and Danny saw Dr. Fogel standing there, he gasped and pulled away from Charlie, angry that Charlie had caught him by surprise.

  Dr. Fogel was wearing a yamulka, and instead of his old brown suit, a bright orange and blue sportshirt. His skin, where he had just shaved, seemed to shine as if it had been pulled tight over his cheeks and jaws, and his eyes showed Danny how happy he was to see them. “I was expecting you,” he said. “Please. Come in.”

  Danny followed him through the doorway and Dr. Fogel asked them both to go back and kiss the mezuzah on the doorpost. He gave them yamulkas to wear, but he did not speak harshly.

  They sat in Dr. Fogel’s living room, around a glass table through which Danny looked at gleaming chrome legs. The living room was large, with wall-to-wall green carpeting and lustrous mahogany furniture. One wall was totally covered with books, and a ladder was leaning against the books, for getting to the high shelves. The opposite wall was, from one end to the other, a mirror, and Dr. Fogel sat in front of it, facing them.

  Danny waited for Dr. Fogel to say something about their both having been away from the Home, but he only smiled and took a cigarette from a silver box. He had never seen Dr. Fogel smoke before, and once Dr. Fogel let the smoke drift upward from his mouth, he seemed even more relaxed than he had been. “Well,” he said. “I was wondering what had become of you, Chaim. I’ve thought about you often through the years.”

  Charlie stiffened when Dr. Fogel called him by his Hebrew name. “I think about you too,” he said.

  “I’m glad to see you looking so well,” Dr. Fogel said.

  “I’m a coach,” Charlie said, as if he were answering questions. “I coach football. The headmaster of the school I coach for is Murray Mendelsohn—do you remember him?”

  Danny saw how dazed Charlie seemed and he wanted to take him by the hand and run from the house with him. He stared into Charlie’s face, hoping Charlie would look his way. “The last I heard was when he had a heart attack,” Dr. Fogel said. “Mr. Gitelman told me. He’s all right now, I take it.”

  Charlie nodded. “I’m not married anymore,” he said. “My daughter’s sixteen. I’m in the real estate business….”

  Dr. Fogel smiled at Charlie in a way that scared Danny. He seemed so relaxed, leaning back into a big plush, cream-colored couch, that Danny thought that perhaps he was a different Dr. Fogel. “You were the best player I ever had,” Dr. Fogel said. “But you knew that. I never had a boy with as much natural talent as you had.”

  “I still can’t read,” Charlie said.

  Dr. Fogel closed his eyes and laughed. “I remember the joke you always used to make,” he said, “about waiting until you were forty years old, like the great Rabbi Akiba.”

  “No,” Charlie said, shaking his head. “You were the one who said that.”

  “Was I?” Dr. Fogel asked, but he waved Charlie’s objections away with his good hand. “Would you like a drink—?”

  “I don’t have the time,” Charlie said, looking at his watch. “Danny and I have to be back at our school in time for practice.”

  Dr. Fogel looked at Danny, and then spoke to Charlie. “You came because of my land, didn’t you?” he said. “That’s what you said on the phone.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie said.

  “Well,” Dr. Fogel said, smiling. “I’ll tell you this-you’re a person I could do business with, yes? I’ve been waiting a long time for somebody like you. Come.”

  They walked from the living room, down a hallway whose walls were covered with paintings in large gold frames. Charlie held Danny back for a second, and whispered to him that if he bought Dr. Fogel’s land, Danny would be entitled to a commission. Charlie called it a finder’s fee. “Stop making jokes out of everything,” Danny hissed back, but Charlie walked away from him.

  They entered a large room paneled in dark-grained wood and filled with modern office equipment. There were file cabinets, swivel chairs, large desk lamps, electronic calculators, an electric typewriter, leather-bound books on real estate and investment, and an enormous oak rolltop desk, with dozens of compartments. The only item in the office that would have told anyone the home belonged to a Jew was a small black and white framed photo of an old synagogue, on the wall next to the light switch. A father and son, in long black winter coats, stood on the bottom step. There was snow on the ground. Danny thought of the secret hideout in the cellar of the Home.

  Dr. Fogel unrolled surveyor’s maps on his desk, and, his eyes bright with happiness, he showed them to Charlie and he talked. There were two parcels of land—a smaller one of approximately thirteen hundred acres, on the North Shore of Long Island just above the Suffolk County border, and a larger one of approximately eighteen hundred acres in Rockland County, New York, near Suffern. Danny thought of Dr. Fogel in the shul, unrolling the Torah scrolls, and he remembered what he’d said to him about dying. Danny sat in one of the chairs and swiveled from side to side.

  Dr. Fogel was pointing out the areas where cabins had been, and areas where his father had planned to enlarge the settlements. No cabins had ever been built on the Long Island parcel. Charlie and Dr. Fogel talked about access routes and drainage and water tables and zoning laws, and Danny saw that Charlie was becoming more and more relaxed. Charlie was proud that he could show Dr. Fogel he understood how to read surveyor’s maps.

  Even while he seemed happy and relaxed, though, Danny imagined that inside his head he was counting his money. Danny remembered the story Charlie had told him about the bread war in the dining room. He thought of trying to warn Charlie about Dr. Fogel, but how could he? He felt, swaying from side to side and hearing the sounds of their words, extraordinarily calm even when the worst thought came into his head—that he was secretly glad to feel so helpless because he now wanted Charlie to be disappointed!

  Danny followed them back into the living room; when they were sit
ting around the table, Dr. Fogel said that he had one question to ask Charlie and that if Charlie answered it correctly the money part of their transaction would be no trouble.

  If my mind contains caverns, boxes, webs, mazes, corridors, and tunnels, Danny wondered, then what does Charlie’s mind contain?

  “It’s only this,” Dr. Fogel said to Charlie. “But tell me your true opinion. Do you think Israel is a land of the past or of the future?”

  Danny gasped. “The future,” Charlie said, quickly.

  Dr. Fogel clucked inside his mouth. “I’m very sorry then,” he said, standing. “You’re wrong. Our discussion is over, yes? I’m sorry….”

  “What do you mean—over?” Charlie said. His face was red. “Just like that? That’s all?”

  Dr. Fogel turned to Danny. “I had thought you would have been a better influence on your friend.”

  “You leave the kid alone,” Charlie said. “You just lay off and speak with me.” He stepped toward Dr. Fogel and raised his hands, as if he were going to lift the tiny man and shake him. “I don’t get it,” he said. He forced himself to speak more calmly. “I mean, you haven’t even given me a chance to come up with an offer. It’s not fair, your leading me along like that and then closing the door in my face.…”

  “It’s my land,” Dr. Fogel said.

  “Okay,” Charlie said, sighing. “If you want to play games I can play too, right? Ask me another question then. I’ll do better.”

  Dr. Fogel chuckled. “I like your attitude, Chaim. I always did. So I will give you another chance, yes? Answer me this question—do you put on tephillin every morning?”

  “No.”

  “Do you observe the Sabbath?”

  “No.”

  “Are you kosher?”

  “No.”

  “See?” Dr. Fogel said. “You would do well in Israel. You should think of going there to live—what do you need with my land and my father’s land here in America?”

  Charlie turned to Danny and rolled his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ve had enough for one day.”