by Jan Cherubin
It was raining, as it was so often that December. I brought the car around while he waited in the lobby in a wheelchair. He knew he looked pathetic, especially in that loony outfit, so whenever someone in a white coat walked by, he mugged and called out “Help me! Help me, doctor!”
“I’m sure they didn’t think that was funny,” I said when my father recounted this in the car. “I wasn’t kidding,” he said. I drove us west on Northern Parkway, a wide road with white pavement that turned a melancholy cola color in the rain, and then north on the potholed blacktop of Reisterstown Road. The radio played to the beat of the windshield wipers. I am a poor boy too pa rum pa pum pum. I turned up the volume a little bit. Both of us were suckers for Christmas songs. We passed the old Ameche’s Drive-in, the bowling alley, Sol Levinson & Sons Funeral Home, and the Plaza. Cars hissed by in the opposite direction, tires spraying. Miller’s Delicatessen, Amy Joy Donuts, the Howard Johnson’s where Susan and I had been waitresses. People passing, children laughing, over the beltway, and left into a mini mall in a wooded lot. He stayed in the car while I checked in at Copeland Imaging.
“It’s outside,” the receptionist said.
“What is?”
“The MRI.” She spoke with a thick Baltimore accent. M-R-Ah.
“But it’s raining,” I said.
She laughed in a good-natured way. “It’s in the trailer.”
Oh. The thing I saw in the parking lot and thought was a bookmobile.
He struggled getting out of the Camaro’s bucket seat, grabbing onto my shoulders. “That’s how new the MRI is,” he said, as we linked arms and slowly made our way to the trailer, dirty puddle water splattering our legs. “So cutting edge the machine isn’t even unpacked. Still in the box.”
I was grateful for his positive spin on the crappy situation. It was 1986 and we thought the technology was awesome. I gave him the umbrella to hold and I went up three portable stairs. A technician opened the trailer door a crack. She didn’t have to come out from behind her desk to do this. She said to wait in the parking lot. Was everyone nuts? Couldn’t she see his pajamas sticking out of his pant legs and mopping up the puddles? She shut the door on me and I backed down the steps. I took the umbrella and held it over us until it was my father’s turn to go in. When they were finished with him, we drove back to the hospital and he changed out of his wet clothes and got back into bed.
That was the point at which I started to take what I needed. Not from him, but from the nurses. I pushed through staff-only doors and carried off supplies – extra blankets, gowns, stacks of foil-covered juice cups, a shower chair, a foam egg crate for the bed, towels, washcloths, body lotion. We were stocking up to wait some more, this time for the results. Then it would be the next test, and the next. I lingered in the hall until the nurse’s station was unmanned and slipped behind the high counter to search for my father’s loose-leaf binder. Every patient got a shiny blue one like a seventh grader. I found his, flipped it open and read the notes. White disheveled male, 69, headache of unknown etiology.
CHAPTER 18
Tuckahoe
I was pretty sure David Copperfield, and even Oliver Twist, did not suffer the torture we Homeboys did. They never had to march along the perimeter of the gym in silence behind Al Shack, around and around. My legs ached. Knees high, everybody! But my legs ached! Hour after hour. I would have preferred a beating from the wrecking crew, no bull. Forced marching in endless circles was a far worse discipline than it appeared to the outside world, and therefore regularly employed by the Hebrew National Orphan Home staff. Some evenings, though, for no apparent reason, instead of a forced march we got to roller skate around the same gym. The first time, confused by the abrupt change in policy, I hesitated before the mad dash to grab a pair of skates, but not for long. The speed was exhilarating, the freedom, the chaos and shrieks of joy were only intensified by the capriciousness of the supervisors’ decree. Afterward, Chick and Jesse and a few others from Company E went out onto the library steps to cool off, so I followed and Harry followed me. Shorty Lapidus perched on the metal banister. He hung around the younger kids even when he wasn’t on monitor duty, unlike the other seniors.
“Got candy on you, shit for brains?” Shorty said. “Sunday loot of any kind?”
I shook my head no. Pussy Alice the barn cat rubbed against my leg. I turned my back on Shorty and thought of something to say to Jesse. “Say, why aren’t you ever down on the lawn having a picnic?”
“On Visiting Day?” Jesse said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m a full orphan.”
“So then you’re not destitute and neglected?”
“Guess not,” said Jesse. “No one to neglect me.”
I knelt down and stroked the cat.
“Hoffman was born at the Foundling Hospital,” Chick said.
“Hey asshole,” said Shorty. “Don’t feed Pussy Alice. She’s a mouser.”
“I’m not feeding her.”
“Why else would she hang around a crumb like you? Even your ma don’t want you.” Shorty took a piece of gravel out of his pocket and turned it over in his hand.
“Don’t talk about my mother like that,” I said. I discovered I wasn’t afraid of Shorty anymore. Without his wrecking crew, he was a coward.
“I’ve heard of fathers leaving their kids here, but not mothers,” he said.
This stopped me. I was pretty sure he was wrong, but a worm of doubt crept into my head. Maybe Harry and I were the only ones with a healthy, living mother who left them here. “So what?” I said.
“So I’m getting out of this shithole, that’s what,” said Shorty, fingering the gravel.
“Yeah?”
“Soon as my father finds a wife.” He leaned back, flicked his wrist and sent the stone spinning toward the playground. “Pop can’t stay home taking care of kids like a woman.”
“Where’s your mother?” I said.
“She’s dead, moron. I wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Your pa dead?” said Shorty.
“No,” I said, not quick enough to lie. “He disappeared.”
“That’s some trick,” Shorty said. “Houdini, is he?” He laughed his old geezer cackle. “Left your ma high and dry.”
“Yeah? Well, guess what?” said Harry. “Our mother gets a discount at Kohl’s.”
Shorty cackled long and hard. “Did you fellas hear the pissant?” He slapped his knee. Then he cornered Harry on the porch. “She get a discount on her army boots, too?”
I put myself between them and stomped on Shorty’s foot with all my weight. I might have heard a bone crack. He started hollering and lunged at me, but the other fellas held him off, and Shorty limped whimpering to Nurse Flanagan. That was the beginning of my true friendship with Jesse and Chick—the kind without pity.
Every other day there was another initiation to endure, some cockamamie way I’d have to prove myself. Beiderman insisted the new kids go on a tour of the building—it was more important than a bar mitzvah, he said. We told him we’d already seen every corner of the shithole by now and Beiderman said, “Oh yeah? I think not.” He sent five of us rookies into the cobwebbed basement and corralled us into a dark room under the stairs already crowded with junk. Harry tripped over me and I landed on my ass on top of a piece of furniture. Beiderman switched on the light and there I was perched on a coffin. The room was crammed with them. Stacks of coffins. “In case you little shits don’t follow the rules,” Beiderman said.
Later, back in Company E, Jesse said Beiderman was full of it. The coffins weren’t for us, they were left over from those German Oddfellows. They needed a shitload because the old folks usually moved out of the Oddfellows Home feet first. Not only that, the place was sold to us, Jesse said, because a German Oddfellow supervisor and a couple of Oddfellow porters went to jail for murdering inmates. The old people were causing a nuisance, shitting themselves and refusing to die. That’s why the supervisor did it,
according to a porter interviewed by the New York Times. It was all in the paper, except for the shitting part. Jesse embellished that. He found the clipping in the Oracle newspaper office. “Chloroformed,” Jesse said, “Eight of ‘em in their beds.”
“Holy cow,” I said. “Murdered somewhere in this building.”
“Did they kill the little kids, too?” Harry asked. “Or just the old people?”
“Hard to say,” said Jesse. “Nobody notices when an orphan goes missing.”
“Guess not,” said Harry. “Not full orphans anyway.”
I’d notice if Jesse went missing, I thought.
Next day, chicken soup for lunch and Company E ordered NOT to go outside afterward like usual. The supervisors instructed boys five to nine years old to go downstairs to the gym. “Roller skating!” Harry called out. He started running toward the equipment table. Jesse grabbed him by the shirttail and pulled him back. No skaters careened around poles. Instead, a single line of boys snaked from the gym entrance where we were standing, clear across to the far end where a gymnastics pommel horse was set up against the back wall, and next to that a music stand, and next to that Colonel Anderson. We waited our turn.
“Irving’s the cause of this,” Chick said.
“Irving?”
“Irving Weiss. The tardy kid,” Jesse said.
“See, if a moax don’t follow the rules, then we all get demerits,” Chick said. “That’s why the Homeboys called out the wrecking crew. Revenge on Weiss.”
“I was tardy, too.”
“No, you weren’t,” Jesse said. “We hadn’t even finished washing up when Shorty called the wrecking crew on you. He must of had his own reasons. Know why?”
“Dunno,” I said. “What’s demerits?”
Jesse reached the front of the line. “Drop your trousers, boy,” said the Colonel. “Drawers, too. Bend over.”
Hoffman unbuttoned his pants and pulled down his drawers. He looked over his shoulder before grabbing hold of the pommels. “This here,” he said, “is demerits.” The cane whipped through the air with a hissing sound and whacked against his bare butt cheeks. Hiss and whack, red welts rising on Jesse Hoffman’s flesh. Hiss and whack. I could see his balls trembling. A boy with more dignity than anyone I would ever meet. Streaks on his face. Hot burning tears of pride.
“Pull up your pants, Hoffman. What are you waiting for? Next!”
The cold air lapped at my ass.
Where’s Harry? I can’t find Harry. I ran to the barn. I ran to the auto shed. I ran to the ball field. To the main building flying down the stairs to the gym. No Harry. Upstairs, casing the freshman dorm and the freshman washroom, the junior dorm and the junior washroom and the showers and toilet stalls, up and down looking for feet. I found feet, only how the hell did I know who was in there taking a crap, reading a comic book or God knows what, when we all had the same shoes, but I didn’t stop to think, I had a hunch. I backed up, hauled off and kicked open the stall door. Both of them were facing me—Shorty Lapidus on the can with his drawers around his ankles, my brother sitting on Shorty’s disgusting lap.
Shorty was wrong, of course. Other healthy mothers dropped their kids at the HNOH, and other guys had disappeared fathers, too, fathers whose pictures also appeared in the Gallery of Missing Husbands, or a father in prison, or even a set of living parents too poor to feed their children, or maybe some kid had a mother who jumped in front of a subway train like Shorty’s mother did.
Before the movie in the gym Wednesday, new inmates were sent to the barbershop on the ground floor. It was odd having everything under one roof, never going outside the gates and into the world. I wondered what Vivian and Alvin were doing. Was Gertie talking yet? I hadn’t known I cared about my hair until the barber buzzed it off. He said it was for health reasons, which I knew meant lice, which I told him I didn’t have and he said don’t worry, my hair would grow back. Harry seemed to take it better. Neither one of us could stop rubbing his head against the grain to feel the prickly stubble. When we entered the gym there was a chorus of “Baldies! Baldies!” along with whistles and whoops.
“Baldyhead!” Chick continued to taunt. “Baldyhead!”
“You have the same haircut as I have,” I said, noting his red bristles.
“Yeah, no kidding,” said Chick. “Welcome to the ‘H.’”
“You wanna know something, Harry?” I said.
“Yeah, what?”
“Everybody else in here, Harry, and I mean everybody, has something to be ashamed of, not just us.”
“What have we got to be ashamed of?” Harry said.
Just before Christmas it snowed. The timing meant nothing, because Christmas itself meant nothing to a Hebrew Homeboy. Nothing except a more colorful version of the warmth and bounty we were excluded from every other day of the year. Only now it was visible, glittering beyond our gates. Nevertheless, it so happened on Christmas Eve morning we woke to a snowdrift piled in the corner of Company E, the snowflakes sifted through a crack in the window blown in all night by a shrieking wind. In joyful pandemonium we built an indoor snowman and had a rousing snowball fight before the monitors broke it up. Harry and I doubled up for a few weeks, and so did most of the others, or we would have frozen to death. No doubt some of the doubling up was not by mutual consent, but warmth was warmth. We survived and first chance we got went scavenging the barn, the woods, the basement, the boiler room, the boiler yard, and the kitchen yard for barrel staves and lumber scraps and metal trays—whatever we could find and use for sleds. Boys of all ages belly-whomped down twenty acres of hills and dales, Chick and I piled on one barrel stave, and just before the big oak tree swerved to the left, or else we would have crashed.
CHAPTER 19
Instead of waiting around for Dr. Heidenheimer to give us the MRI results, I took the elevator down to nuclear medicine in the basement to find out for myself. The radiologist on duty must have been bored, because he agreed to show me the MRI film that Copeland Imaging had sent to Sinai Hospital. When I returned to the sixth floor, I saw Heidenheimer leaning on the high counter at the nurses’ station going through a blue binder. He looked up. “We got the report,” he said. I pretended I didn’t know. I let Heidenheimer tell me about the mass they found. He used the same wording as the radiologist had downstairs. “There’s a mass between the cheekbone and the maxillary sinus.” Heidenheimer seemed less concerned, though, than the radiologist who had stroked the coarse hairs on his chin repeatedly as he spoke to me, as if to soothe himself and ward off my grief and terror. There was no need. I was calm. Relieved, in a way. It turned out my father wasn’t a crybaby. It wasn’t nothing. At last, he would get treatment. Finally, the time had come to cut out the massive headache and give it a name.
As I pretended to hear the news for the first time, I noted that Heidenheimer didn’t mention the second shadow the radiologist had pointed to on the light box and identified as a brain lesion (assuring me brain abnormalities resulted from many conditions, including meningitis, a complication of TB). I thought it was odd that Heidenheimer omitted the brain lesion, so I had to tell him about it myself and reveal that I’d gone around him and had already been down to see the radiologist.
“No, they’re wrong,” Heidenheimer said. “What they think is a brain lesion is just a reflection from the other mass, like a double image.” He grabbed a fountain pen and sketched a few blobs on a scrap of paper and showed it to me. A blob with a mirror-image blob. Doctors, in my limited experience, assumed non-doctors were idiots who needed stick figure drawings to understand basic concepts. I believed Heidenheimer at first—I didn’t need his crude illustration. I may not have wanted the pain to be a phantom, but I certainly didn’t want my father to have a lesion on his brain. The thing between his cheekbone and maxillary sinus was enough.
“I’ll give your dad the results on evening rounds,” the doctor said.
“It could still be tuberculosis, though, right?” I said.
“Yes,” Heide
nheimer said. “TB is still a possibility.”
“That’s good,” I said, a little surprised both Heidenheimer and the radiologist were keen on the TB theory. I bit my lip to keep from smiling. I didn’t want him to see how encouraged I was, afraid he might take it back. “So when do you go in there and do the biopsy?”
“Hold, on,” Heidenheimer said. “Not so fast. First, I want a consultation with an Ear, Nose and Throat man.” He scratched his head, then brought his hand down to scratch his wrist and slide his watch higher to peek at the time.
A chill prickled my neck and I shuddered. He was entitled to check his watch. He had other cases to see to. But I detected something more, a subtle shift in his attitude. The realization blew through me like a ghostly draft. I hugged my cardigan tighter. Dr. Heidenheimer didn’t want a patient like my father. He was trying to get rid of him. That was why he lied about the double image. Surely, radiologists knew how to read MRIs better than anyone else. They dealt with blobs and mirror images on film day after day. But Heidenheimer disregarded the radiologists’ report about the brain lesion because Heidenheimer was a neurologist—a brain man. If the brain were involved, Heidenheimer would have to take care of my father, a disheveled and difficult man who looked like he was dying of cancer. If just the sinus were involved, Heidenheimer could pass off the patient to an ENT doctor. I was starting to see what was going on. He was not going to help us. No one, not Dr. Cromwell or Dr. Heidenheimer, not Brenda, not my mother or sister, wanted to open the door even a crack and have to deal with the giant insect on his back.
CHAPTER 20
Liz Stone met me in the hospital cafeteria. Seeing her was like taking the cure at Baden-Baden or getting a blood transfusion or something. I was so grateful she came, and then absurdly happy when she wanted to have the same thing I was having—my usual lunch of coffee and a vanilla Dixie cup.