The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  I had only one friend, Hazel, who wore shabby jumpers and smelled like milk. “Hazel has no teeth,” I told my mother.

  “Her baby teeth fell out?” my mother said.

  “Her wee teeth, and the big ones, too. She hasn’t any teeth at all,” I said.

  “She must be from a poor family,” said my mother. “Possibly Hazel ate too much candy and never went to a dentist.”

  “It’s sweets, not candy,” I said.

  “Sweets, then,” my mother said.

  I didn’t want a poor friend with old clothes and no teeth. But no one else would play with me in the cement yard because I was a foreigner. Even though the primary school was built on the edge of the park with woods and a pond, and a little bridge over the Knock River, our playground was a prison yard out of Dickens. My mother said it was the Scotch Presbyterian influence and that was why at the park they tied up the swings on Sundays. I wanted to be friends with a girl called Polly Williams, who had teeth and wore bright clothes, especially a dress I liked made of dotted Swiss.

  I thought about Polly Williams every night in bed and every day at my desk with its inkwell from another time. At last, I found my opportunity. Polly was absent from school and Mrs. Graham asked if there was anyone who lived near her who might give her the work she missed. She lived on Orange Avenue, Mrs. Graham said. My hand shot up. Orange Avenue had to be near Orangefield Gardens. The teacher handed over the workbook to take to Polly. On the way home from school, I had to beg Susan to search the street signs with me to find Orange Avenue. We passed Orangefield Green, Orange Grove, Orangefield Lane, and Orange Parade. When we got home, my mother said she wasn’t sure where the girl Polly’s street was with everything Orange this and Orange that.

  “But I have to go there,” I said. “You have to find it.”

  “Wait until Daddy comes home,” my mother said. She had been downtown all day with Nora Trimble and let the fire die and now she was sitting in the kitchen in her yellow leather car coat with the electric oven turned on and the oven door wide open. “You’re bugging me,” she said.

  “In America, Daddy came home early,” Susan said.

  I waited for my father and Susan was angry because I had held her up searching for the street and now Pamela next door had gone to the shops without her. Children in Belfast roamed the city freely. We rode the red double-decker buses, ran errands, and went to the baths (an indoor swimming pool with a balcony) unaccompanied. Susan slapped me and I hit her back. “Stop it! Stop it!” my mother screamed. When my father got home, he said he had a meeting and he had to go out again.

  “Please,” I said. “I have to give Polly Williams the homework. I promised the teacher. Can you take me? Please. I’ll get in trouble. She’ll beat me with a cane.”

  “The Colonel used a cane,” my mother said. “In the orphanage. Right, Clyde?”

  “Never mind that,” my father said. “I survived. They’ll survive, too.”

  I followed my father into the parlor. “I’ve got something for you two. You’re gonna love it,” he said. He took a record out of his briefcase and put it on the record player. “All the kids in America are listening to this.”

  “C’mon, let’s twist again, like we did last summer,” Chubby Checker sang.

  Susan started swiveling around to the music. “I know how to twist,” she said.

  “Me too,” my mother said. “C’mon Joanna. Pretend you’re drying yourself with a towel and stamping out a cigarette with your foot at the same time.” My mother held out her arms and moved her hips and put out the imaginary cigarette with her square-toed high-heeled shoe, and I imitated her.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Susan said.

  I stopped dancing and leaned back against the windowsill. “Daddy, please,” I said. “Let’s go. You have to take me. I’ll get in trouble. I swear, they’ll beat me with a ruler. Get out your map.”

  “Who is Polly, anyway?” said Susan.

  “The pretty girl in my class,” I said. “I told you. The one with the white dress and the wee red velvet dots.”

  “All right, I’ll take you after dinner,” my father said.

  I thought the meal would never end. My father smoked a cigarette with his coffee. I watched the ash getting longer and longer. It was late. “Pep your cigarette,” I said. He flicked the ash into the ashtray, took a last drag, then squashed the cigarette in the ashtray and lit another one. Polly would never get the homework and it would be my fault. My mother told my father a joke in Yiddish and he laughed his almost noiseless laugh, his shoulders moving up and down. He stubbed out the second cigarette and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. “C’mon. What are you waiting for?”

  We got into our little Renault that we pronounced with the “l” and the “t.” It turned out Orange Avenue was far away, over on the other side of the school. We drove silently through the night.

  I stood at the door. Polly didn’t even come downstairs to see me. Her mother took the homework absentmindedly, staring out at my father in the idling car.

  “So, you delivered the homework?” my father said.

  “Aye.”

  He saw that Polly had no use for me. I had caused trouble for him, and for Susan, for nothing. My father swung the car around and down a hill. He had an errand, too, he said. We parked on a street with trees and he took me up to Caitlyn’s flat, his student teacher. She stooped down in front of me like my mother when she tied the strings on my parka.

  “Aren’t you a bonny wee one?” Caitlyn said. She had pale skin and a brown bouffant hairdo. I wondered if she would give me chocolate. The Irish were keen on chocolate. “What solemn eyes,” said Caitlyn.

  “You should see the older one,” my father said. “A shayna maidel. That’s Yiddish. You wanna know something? I’ll tell you something. Yiddish is a lot like Gaelic.” He laughed and so did Caitlyn. “Go ahead. Say something in Gaelic,” my father said.

  “Tha gràdh agad orm,” said Caitlyn.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “You love me,” she said. “In Irish.”

  “I love you?” I said.

  Caitlyn clapped her hands and laughed. “No. You love me,” she said.

  “Lost tribe of Israel,” my father said. “The Irish.”

  She didn’t offer chocolate and then we left.

  “Porcelain, her skin. Did you see that?” my father said in the car.

  “What’s porcelain?”

  “You know what porcelain is. Sinks are made of porcelain, and toilets.”

  “She has skin like a toilet?”

  “Not like a toilet, stupid. White, smooth, flawless.”

  We drove down the Grand Parade past the butcher, the baker, and the sweets shop. I had trouble getting to sleep that night. I thought of Polly upstairs in her dotted Swiss dress knowing I was there and not coming down to see me. The bed creaked in the next room. I could hear them talking through the wall.

  “You started it with that Jim what’s his name,” my father said.

  “That was nothing,” my mother said.

  “You were the one who wanted this,” my father said.

  My mother sighed. “You weren’t supposed to fall in love,” she said.

  He stayed late at Belfast Tech two nights a week and on those nights I lay awake next to Susan with our wardrobe looming in the darkness until I heard the Renault chugging around the bend toward No. 19.

  My sister was unhappy. She missed the USA. My mother didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to hear the screaming, so I went outside and kicked a wiffle ball around the front garden.

  “I can’t believe you let them hit me! What kind of mother are you?” Susan cried. Flashes of color moved behind the window glass.

  “We went to the headmaster. What more can we do?”

  Susan wailed. “I wanna go home!”

  “Stop it!” my mother shouted.

  “Please, take me home! Please!”

  Tommy from up the street stopped his bike
in front of our house. “Get your cheeky sister out here,” Tommy said.

  “What would I be wanting that for?” I said.

  “Go back to America, you raving lunatics,” he said. His clothes were gray like Hazel’s.

  “Why is your sister crying?” said Roberta from across the street.

  “Susan doesn’t like Belfast,” I said. I threw the wiffle ball in the air and caught it.

  “Why not?” said Tommy.

  “She hates pudding,” I said.

  “Hates pudding? You’re daft.” Tommy rode off. He skidded to a halt in front of Martin, who was kicking stones in the street.

  “Martin, Yank says her sister hates pudding.”

  “We’ll have to put an end to that,” said Martin.

  “What do you mean?” I said. I moved inside our gate.

  Roberta skipped off to the shops with a string bag. Martin bent down, gathered the stones he was kicking and stuffed them into his pocket. I ran into the house. “The kids can hear you crying!”

  “Shut your gob, you little brat. Do you think I care?” my sister said. She brushed her tears away.

  “They’re throwing rocks,” I said.

  “They are not,” said Susan.

  Clank.

  “Oh shit,” my mother said.

  Stones clattered against the windowpane.

  “You dare-tee Jews!”

  My sister gasped.

  “How do they know we’re Jewish?” I said.

  My mother gave me an impatient look. “Where the hell is your father when we need him?”

  I raced to the kitchen. A crowd had gathered mugging at the side window. Martin made a hocking noise. A glob of phlegm hit the pane, then slid down to the sill.

  “Dare-tee Jews! Dare-tee Jews!” the crowd chanted.

  “That does it! Now we have to go home!” Susan said.

  I was afraid. Not of the rowdy children, but afraid that Susan would have us sent back to America and spoil our adventure. My mother had a brilliant solution. She went outside holding her yellow car coat closed around her hand-knit jumper, and invited the neighbor kids to lunch on Saturday for American hamburgers.

  “I don’t want those disgusting tinkers in here!” Susan said. “They spit on our window! They’re anti-Semitic.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “They hate Jews,” said Susan.

  “And Catholics,” I said.

  “Everyone loves hamburgers,” my mother said.

  Everyone did love the hamburgers. On Saturday, we had seven kids squeezed around our kitchen table. My mother was pleased with her diplomacy.

  “There’s a place in America called Burger Chef,” I said. “Sorry, Ma, but their hamburgers are even better than yours.”

  “Don’t be disrespecting your mam,” said Tommy.

  “Aye,” said Martin. “There are no better hamburgers than these here.”

  As luck would have it, our adventure was not cut short. We stayed as planned until the end of June. In the weeks leading up to our departure, I lay in bed listening for my father’s car and I tried to picture home. Our bedspreads were blue in America and the walls of our room were pink. Girls wore cotton shorts and sleeveless blouses.

  “What are you going to do?” my mother asked. “Stay here?”

  Did my parents think Susan and I couldn’t hear them? That we were always asleep? Did they really believe we weren’t conscious yet, not thinking human beings? We were upstairs and they were downstairs, but the walls were thin and their voices carried. I sat up in bed.

  “Stay here? In Belfast?” my father said. “I’m not staying here!”

  “You don’t want to leave Caitlyn. What then?”

  “I’m not staying here. It’s not for me. Anyway, everyone’s trying to get out. Both sides.”

  He meant the Catholics and the Protestants.

  “So you’re coming home with us?” my mother said.

  “That’s right,” said my father. The poker clanked and scraped the hearth. My father stirring the coals. “But I want to bring her back.”

  “Bring her back?” my mother said. Her voice rose. “What does that mean, bring her back?”

  “To Baltimore,” he said.

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “Susan,” I whispered to the next bed.

  “Put the pillow over your head,” Susan said.

  “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

  “Go to sleep. They’ll be fine in the morning.”

  There was another clank and rattle, the poker returning to its place. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She won’t do it.”

  “Bring her back like a souvenir?” my mother said, not hearing him.

  “Bitch.”

  That word was just for girls, meant to cut them. The t-part in the middle stabbed my heart. The ch-part froze it. I looked over at Susan. She was sleeping.

  “Bitch? Me?” my mother said. “The open-minded idiot who started this whole thing?”

  “That’s right!” my father shouted. “You started it. You don’t care about me. You’re not even sad. You don’t love me.”

  “I love you so much look at what I accept! But it’s never enough!”

  They didn’t speak for a while after that but I couldn’t sleep. I was scared of the wardrobe in our room. My mother said I should remember it was just a place where we kept our clothes, but it loomed in the darkness. My father started talking again, but quieter: “She broke it off with me,” he said.

  “Caitlyn?” my mother said.

  “Who else?” he said angrily. The poker clanked again. I strained to hear. There was a loud crash and I jumped out of bed in fright, but a dull thud stopped me in my tracks. I listened. The sofa creaked and groaned under a shifting weight. I heard a gasp, and a strangled breath and a cry, and I ran down the stairs. I did not think about what I would do when I got to the sitting room. I wasn’t concerned with how I would stop a fight between two adults twice my size, one wielding a poker, or that I might be punished for getting out of bed. I was frightened, something bad was happening, that was all I knew, and so I ran to offer comfort to the people who were supposed to comfort me. I stopped short at the doorway not sure at first what I was seeing on the sofa—whose body was whose, what was happening, who had cried out and why. Coals glowed red in the fireplace. The telly was tuned to a news program with the sound off. My father was partly on top of my mother with one leg draped around the bottom part of her body possessively. Above the waist, though, she was in possession, cradling him in her arms. Her lips were pressed to his forehead tenderly. His glasses were off, he lay with his cheek against her breast. He was the one who was crying.

  “Caitlyn doesn’t want to see me anymore,” he said.

  My mother held him and kissed his tears away. “Poor boy,” she said. “Poor boy.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Tuckahoe

  “The Colonel hits us,” said Harry. “With his cane.”

  Mama cut a piece of halvah for me. It was Sunday and Jesse Hoffman was sharing our picnic. Jesse mugged and Gertie giggled.

  “Clyde, is this true? They use a cane?”

  “Not all the time,” I said.

  My mother laughed.

  I stared at her in disbelief and glanced nervously at Jesse. Maybe it was better having no family at all, no one to laugh at you at the oddest times, no one to disgrace you. I had to lash my right arm to my side to keep from striking her. “Why are you laughing?” I asked coldly.

  “It’s you, Clyde,” my mother said. “You’ve been like this since the day you were born.”

  “Like what?”

  “They hit you, but not all the time. Aynzen gut. You find the good in anything. You’d drop your frankfurter and tell me it tasted better with a little dirt.”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” I said.

  “It’s a good character trait,” my mother said.

  My blood cooled a little as I watched Jesse roll down the grassy hill with Ge
rtie. Hoffman had nobody. Nobody. I shrugged. “Isn’t everyone like that?” I said. I assumed all people found the good in things so they could tolerate the way life was.

  “Oh, no,” said my mother. “If only.”

  Jesse held Gertie’s hand as she toddled back to the blanket.

  “It’s not just the Colonel,” said Harry. “The seniors hit us, too. The monitors.”

  “Clyde? Jesse? Is this true?”

  “Will you take us home if it’s true?” I said.

  “I’ll speak to Miss Beaufort, that’s what I’ll do.” My mother stood up suddenly and brushed off her dress. She kept batting at the pleats.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “Don’t say anything.” I glanced at Jesse, but I couldn’t read his face. He merely looked thoughtful.

  “Harry, shut up, awright?” I said. “You don’t wanna be a stoolie.”

  “I ain’t no stoolie,” Harry said.

  “It’ll be worse for us if you complain,” I said.

  My mother sank back onto the blanket. “So many boys they have to keep in line,” she said, mainly to herself.

  As time went on, and it became more and more evident that Harry and I were not going home, at least not anytime soon, I haltingly adjusted my view of the future. One day, Jesse and I were sitting on overturned buckets in the boiler-room yard flicking chickens when he suggested I join the marching band. First we held the birds by their hideous pipe-cleaner feet and dunked them into a pot of scalding water so the feathers came off easy.

  “Don’t we do enough marching around here already?” I said.

  “This is different. The music carries you along.” Jesse rapped on his thighs with his palms. “You can be a drummer like me.”

  “I don’t know.” Joining the band seemed like a real commitment. Something for the full orphans, not for somebody who might conceivably leave at any moment.

  “The band gets to travel,” said Jesse.

  “Where to?”

  “All over. Mount Vernon, Valhalla, Hartsdale, Scarsdale, White Plains, Hastings on Hudson, Croton on Hudson. The Yonkers Fireman’s Parade. We get food. Sometimes ham sandwiches from the yokels who don’t know any better.”

  “They give Hebrew orphans ham sandwiches in White Plains?” I said. I threw down my bird and wiped the feathers off my hands and onto my trousers.