An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  “I was worried at first, to tell the truth,” Sol had told Charlie. “Imagine—a man my age, taking his first job! I was like a nervous rookie before his first major-league tryout, and believe me there were many nights I wanted to call you to get some good advice! But I didn’t. I decided to see it through on my own. And the thing that enabled me to do it, and to succeed—I was their top man this winter in unit sales!—was my desire to see the look in your eyes today when I would tell you all about it….”

  Charlie had been so stunned that he’d been unable to say anything to Sol for a long time, and he saw now that this had pleased Sol most of all. He saw Sol smiling at him from the mirror in the hotel room, while Sol attached his collar to his shirt. He heard Sol telling him about his plans for the future, about how he was thinking of branching out and selling land in Arizona and Nevada….

  A breeze, coming through the car, brushed the hairs on the backs of Charlie’s hands, and he remembered, in class, being ashamed of the hair there because Dr. Fogel had remarked on it and had likened him to Esau and Murray to Jacob. He had had no tongue for arguing then, though what he had believed then still seemed to him a true question—if God had wanted Jacob to have his father Isaac’s blessing, why had he let Esau be born into the world first? Wasn’t He all-powerful?

  He saw Murray, a sheet draped across his shoulders, a staff in his hand—dressed up as Jacob for a play—with cotton glued to the backs of his hands.

  The idea of adopting Danny was crazy—yet it had been, he realized, just as crazy to have let the boy stay with him. Danny had been right to call his hand; how long could it have gone on, on a temporary basis?

  The wonder of it was that while it had been happening—while the boy had been with him—it had all seemed so normal. So normal, in fact, that nobody—neither Max nor Shirley nor Murray nor Irving nor Lillian—had ever said anything to him that indicated they thought it was strange. Or had they been making allowances? Had they been indulging him?

  Charlie arrived at the Home a few minutes before seven o’clock and found the gate padlocked. A large wooden sign was wired to the iron bars, stating that the Home had been closed, that all inquiries should be made at the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and that trespassers would be prosecuted.

  Charlie blinked, reread the notice without difficulty, and wondered if the place had been closed before or after Danny had returned to it. He tried to think the question through logically, but instead he found himself thinking of the photos on the walls. What had happened to them? And what had happened to the records in the main office? Where were the trophies and medals?

  He walked around the block once but saw no lights on inside the buildings. Several windows were already broken, and the amount of dust on others suggested that the Home had, in fact, been shut up for some time before Danny had run away from him. If so, he wondered what had gone through the boy’s mind when he had arrived and seen the sign on the gate.

  Or had he known it was closed even while he was writing his farewell note?

  Charlie stood in front of the gate again, his eyes on the Home’s bronze plaque. The words mirrored backward, unintelligibly, despite the fact that he knew what they were without looking at them. If the boy were truly intent on having Charlie find him, Charlie reasoned that he would have found some way to let him know, so he could follow. If, that is, he’d had a choice. It was possible, Charlie realized, that the closing and the move had come too swiftly, even for Danny.

  Or had the boy imagined the moment Charlie was now living in? Had Danny known Charlie would come, if only to talk, and had he wanted Charlie to go through what he was now going through?

  The street was deserted—no people, no cars, no animals, no sounds. In his eagerness to start out and avoid any conversation with Max or Shirley, he’d had no breakfast, and now he felt mildly faint.

  There was another possibility, and Charlie had been aware of it from the first moment, that Danny was being true to his word, that he was there, within the walls, somewhere inside the deserted building, waiting.

  Charlie rubbed his hands together for warmth, then walked along the street, away from the gates. He stopped when he came to the spot he remembered. The wall was as it had been twenty years before when they had used it to sneak back in at night, after hours. Three feet above the ground a brass water-main attachment, for two firehoses, stuck out from the wall. Charlie put his right foot on it, reached up, and slid his hands into two openings, where bricks had been chipped away. His fingers went in, to the knuckles. He stood on the hose connection with both feet, then lifted his right foot again, placed it upon a rounded stone that protruded a half foot from the wall surface, put his hands on top of the wall, and hoisted himself so that his stomach lay across the top edge. He stretched his right hand across, grabbed metal piping, and pulled. He avoided the cut glass, which ran all along the four-foot-thick wall in a line several inches wide. Two of his fingers bled slightly. Charlie sucked the blood, and, standing, he looked down into the courtyard.

  He saw no lights, no movement. His breathing was even. The line of glass, along the wall in both directions, did not glitter. Charlie squatted and touched the dull green and blue glass pieces; their edges were, mostly, rounded. Was Danny looking at him from one of the windows? Charlie smiled. He believed he could feel what the boy might be feeling at this moment, seeing himself—Charlie Sapistein—standing on the wall, and Charlie saw that he was somewhat frightened and, to his surprise, very happy. He jumped, landed on his toes, felt his body vibrate in the hard dust from the impact-but his balance was good and he did not fall.

  He looked up, to the spot where he’d been standing. He remembered Murray, angry about some regulation, leading a parade of boys around the block, seven times, outside the walls, and blowing a bugle at the end. The walls had not fallen. It was a story he told himself to remember to share with Danny.

  The stillness unsettled him; he imagined, for an instant, that he was seeing the place before any boys had ever lived in it. The courtyard seemed small, as it always did to him the few times he’d been back. Murray had claimed that this was so not only because it would always seem impossible that so much—so many ball games and conversations and years—had once filled it, and not only because a child’s view inevitably made things larger than life, but because one generally regretted what one had become.

  Charlie didn’t agree. He believed it was better to be an adult than a child, and it pleased him to find the courtyard smaller than his memory made it.

  He opened a door and called into the corridor: “Danny!” There was no answer. “Hey, Danny!” he called again, cupping his hands around his mouth. “It’s me—Charlie. Talk to me—okay? Come on—”

  The walls were bare, the corridor empty. Charlie walked a few feet, his heels clacking on the wood floor. He looked behind, but saw nobody. He opened the door to Mr. Gitelman’s office but it was empty. Had the records been transferred—or destroyed? He had never thought about it before, but now that he was here, and had asked the question, he decided that he wanted information about himself, from the years before he’d come to the Home. He wanted to know about his real father. His mother had kept photos of Charlie’s father in a cigar box, he recalled, but he couldn’t remember anything about them. The photos were gone by the time-when he was married—he’d realized he was interested in them.

  “Hey Danny!” he called again. There was no answer and, despite the length of the corridor, no echo. Charlie saw rusty marks on the floor, where the trophy cases had once stood. The gray walls were broken into whitish rectangles and squares, as if spray-painted, from where the photos had been. He walked to the end of the corridor, went through a swinging door, and called to Danny again. He thought he could hear the sound of his own brain, whirring and clicking like a movie camera, but it was Danny he saw using the camera, filming him as he walked through the Home, and in his head he saw himself from behind, walking down the corridor he’d just come from.

  He we
nt back into the courtyard, drew fresh air. “Hey Danny!” he called, toward the second story, where the dormitories were. “Come on down!”

  He felt better. Outside, his mind worked the way he wanted it to; he made a note in his head to call the Federation and ask if the buildings and grounds were for sale. He could sweet-talk somebody there into selling the place to a former orphan-made-good. He’d talk to the man from the city. Maybe he could sell it for the city to use as some kind of manpower training station. The facilities were perfect.

  He crossed to the opposite side of the courtyard and opened one door after another, calling Danny’s name. He saw himself laughing with Danny when he would point out how things were upside down again; how just when he was getting set to retire from the real estate business, Sol was starting out.…

  He smiled. Maybe the boy was in the shul, he thought, practicing for his Bar Mitzvah. Charlie walked down the steps and opened the door. The wooden ark was in front of the room, as it had always been, but the velvet curtains that had covered it were gone. Charlie slid open the doors to the ark, to see if the Torahs were still there. They were not. He touched the combination lock on the door to the Genizah, then spun it around, listening to the clicks.

  “Stay right where you are, put your hands over your head slowly, and press your body flat against the door.”

  Charlie turned, saw a policeman in blue winter coat standing in the entranceway to the shul, a gun in his hand. “Hey-!” Charlie said.

  He heard the gun click. “Do as I say and you won’t be hurt. Stay where you are, put your hands over your head, and press your body flat against the door.”

  Charlie heard his heart pumping, glanced down and saw his jacket move above it. He swallowed. “I was looking for somebody,” he said. “A boy.”

  Charlie felt the barrel of the gun in the small of his back. His palms were already moist, against the door. The policeman frisked him, along the legs and calves and thighs, around his torso, under his arms. “Now turn around.”

  Charlie turned and stared into the policeman’s eyes. They were tired, rimmed in purple. The two men were the same height. A slender pink scar ran diagonally from the man’s lip to his chin. He pressed his gun against Charlie’s stomach and, automatically, Charlie flexed his muscles there. The policeman jabbed him, hard. “Don’t move,” he said. He reached inside Charlie’s parka, patted Charlie along the chest, then checked each of Charlie’s pockets. “Lie down,” he said. “On your face.”

  “Hey, come on—” Charlie said. “What is this-?”

  The policeman held Charlie’s wallet in one hand, but he did not look inside. “Do as I say.”

  Charlie got down on his knees, then lay face down. “Cheek against the floor.” Charlie saw the dust shift from under his head. He looked sideways, at the open ark.

  “You Charlie Sapistein?” the policeman asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You realize that I could do whatever I want to you, don’t you? I could tell you that you’re free to go and shoot you in the back. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  Charlie’s nose itched, but he was afraid to touch it with his hand.

  “Answer me,” the policeman said.

  “I realize it,” Charlie said.

  “Tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “I told you—I was looking for somebody—one of the or phans. Christ!” Charlie could not see the man’s face. Although it was not so, he imagined that the policeman was black, and that he had thick lips. He knew how black cops treated black kids, when they had the chance. “I used to live here is what the story is—you could look it up. Telephone New York, to the place that owns the buildings—they could look it up for you. My name is Charlie Sapistein and I grew up here, is all.”

  “But you said you were looking for somebody.”

  Charlie saw himself looking down at Murray’s face in the grass and he remembered how Irving had had to tell him what to do. If he was no longer a hero—if he had lost the ability to always do the right things in times of crisis—did that mean that he would come to desire things more? He drew in breath, between his teeth, and tried to concentrate on getting free. “Okay, okay. It’s the truth-a boy named Danny Ginsberg—you could tell them to look him up too. I knew him and I wanted to visit him.”

  “But you saw the sign. I saw you read the sign.”

  Charlie thought of telling the man he couldn’t read, but he was afraid to say the words aloud. Where would they lead? “I thought he might have been hiding here. He ran away from the Home.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Hey look,” Charlie said. “This is crazy—I mean, you see I didn’t take anything if you’ve been following me. You see who I am from my wallet. You can search my car. You can telephone people and they’ll tell you my story is true. Come on—what gives?”

  “Why were you looking for the boy?”

  “Because I miss him.”

  The policeman laughed. “That’s a very good answer.”

  Charlie saw his opening. “Look—could I ask you a question, Officer,” he said. “I mean, are you Jewish?”

  The policeman laughed again, heavily.

  “There are black Jews,” Charlie said, before he could stop himself. “When I was a kid here I once met an orphan who was a black Jew—we played against him in a football game. They wouldn’t let him transfer to our Home, though.” The policeman was still laughing. “Maybe he wasn’t really Jewish,” Charlie offered. “Maybe he just thought he was.”

  “You’re a pretty funny man,” the policeman said, “but you should be more careful. Why should I believe that a grown man such as yourself with over three hundred dollars in his wallet would climb a ten-foot wall in order to search for a boy when there’s no sign that anybody has been in these buildings for weeks?”

  “No reason,” Charlie said.

  “We have to be very careful,” the policeman said. “Our trust is sacred, right?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, and he knew what he had to say.

  “What motive would a man such as myself have for doing something to a man such as yourself, except duty?”

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie said, and felt no shame. “I really am.”

  “I know you are,” the man said. Then, more softly: “Were you really an orphan?”

  “I was an orphan.”

  “That’s in your favor. When I was a kid I always wanted to be an orphan. My grandmother lived across the street from a Catholic orphanage and when I visited her they’d fight with one another to invite me in and show me how they lived. They’d get very excited when a stranger like me would come by and they could show me things.”

  Charlie tried the standard gambit. “Look,” he said, “if there’s some kind of fine I have to pay—I don’t know much about how these things work—but can’t I just pay it now and we’ll be done?”

  The man laughed. “Are you kidding? With your looks you could be setting me up. Your money could be marked. I’m not interested in taking you in, for trespass or bribery.”

  Charlie sneezed, his mucus spraying dust. “Shit!” he said.

  “Leave your hands where they are.” The policeman was silent for several seconds, then spoke again: “Okay. I believe you, that you were an orphan. In my work, you see, I have to read people’s faces. I meet a lot of interesting people. You’d be surprised. My hobby is having conversations with interesting people from different walks of Life.”

  Charlie said nothing.

  “I want you to count to sixty, and then you can get up and leave. I’ll be watching you. But if I ever see you here again you won’t be as lucky. Is that understood?”

  “It’s understood.”

  “A man your age shouldn’t be doing things like this. With your looks and your build you should have learned to stay away from young boys.”

  “Hey-!” Charlie called, without thought.

  The policeman’s heel struck him hard, near the end of his spine. Charlie bit hi
s tongue to keep from crying out. “I told you to be careful. I’m your size, Mr. Sapistein. The next time you consider doing something foolish, remember what I could have done to you and didn’t. That’s how easily it can all end, don’t you see? You’ll find your wallet outside the door. You don’t know my name, do you?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ll remember our conversation for a long time, even if we never see each other again, won’t you.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “You’re a very lucky man, in my opinion. You can start counting to sixty, slowly.”

  Charlie did as he was told, then stood up. He reached under his shirt with his fingers to see if the policeman had, on his back, drawn blood. He had not. Charlie took his handkerchief out and wiped the sweat from his face. He saw blood on the handkerchief. He stepped outside, picked up his wallet, and counted his money. It was all there. He took off his wristwatch and, using the silvered back for a mirror, saw that the left side of his face was scratched, from where he had rubbed the skin against the floor. He remembered when he’d been assigned to flannel the floors of all the dormitories, meeting rooms, and game rooms.

  He walked across the courtyard, then scaled the wall and jumped down, onto the street side. The sidewalk was hard and he stumbled forward, let himself roll slightly, football-style, on his shoulder. His back did not hurt, though he knew he was bruised there. He tried not to think of anything or anyone, and he tried not to allow himself to recognize the measure of his anger. He opened the door to his car, got in and drove away, his heart beating as rapidly as it did when he finished wind sprints, and he didn’t stop the car until he had driven twenty-five blocks. Then he pulled to the curb, in front of a diner, looked all around, and reached across.