The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  He grew a mustache and bushy ringlets. This isn’t my era, my mother conceded, and continued to get her hair teased and sprayed at the beauty parlor. She had done it all before, the rallies and protests and passionate intensity, and what had it got her? My father was surrounded by students, infected by their youth. It went to his head. He wanted to be one of them. I took her place, marching at his side to end the war in Vietnam.

  For my fourteenth birthday, my parents gave me “The Sixties Songbook for Keyboard,” and our friend Johnny Dolan gave me a purple bikini. I learned “Golden Slumbers.” My father stood behind me at the piano while I played and we sang together: Once there was a way to get back homeward. My voice was high and thin. Once there was a way to get back home. His voice was so deep the walls trembled.

  CHAPTER 27

  Tuckahoe

  Rain pattered steadily on the slate roof of a Saturday afternoon as I made my way down the shadowy corridor to the library to sit at a wooden table and read in the lamplight, a pleasure we were allowed on inclement weekends. Jesse caught up with me. “You’re gonna be approached,” he said. “I just got word. You’ll be asked to do something, some feat of bravery. Whatever it is, do it. After that, you’ll be left alone. But if you chicken out, they’ll make your life hell. Got it?”

  “What is it? What do I have to do?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, Clyde, you’ve got to have chutzpah. You’re a junior now. You gotta have balls.”

  I scowled at my friend. “I will. I do,” I said. He disappeared into the shadows again.

  That night I lay awake mulling it over. My white-iron headboard was up against the wall under a drafty window and another bed was up against my footboard with Skelly Schwartz in it, two rows deep on either side of the center aisle. Manny Bergman on my right, Chick in front of me to the left of Skelly. A lot more snoring and plenty of farting in the junior dorm. A hundred-and-thirty boys, some whose balls hadn’t even dropped, others with great hairy balls and putrid body odor and feet that stank like Limberger cheese. I mulled it over. A feat of bravery. They might dare me to swim across the B. A. Creek. The guys knew I didn’t know how to swim. I might have to shimmy up the flagpole or sleep in a coffin in the basement. A rite of passage, Jesse said. Shit. Shorty Lapidus in the barn. Shit, piss, and corruption. The clank of his belt buckle rang in my ears like he was standing right next to me. His cackle sent a shiver down my spine. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Or was I just imagining it? Shit. “Shove over, Aronson.”

  CHAPTER 28

  At the Hot Shoppes on the New York State Thruway, Nola ordered tea. She fished out the Lipton’s teabag and wrapped the string around the bowl of the teaspoon squeezing the teabag like a tourniquet, dribbling the soaked-up liquid back into her cup.

  “Hey, that’s very clever,” my father said. “I’ll have to try that.”

  Liz and I exchanged a look. Not daring to roll our eyes, we barely fluttered our eyelids. Under the table she nudged my knee with hers. Nola bit her lip with her two big childish front teeth and watched the drips falling from the teabag. I tried to unravel the puzzle of her good looks. Everyone had eyes, a nose and mouth. Why couldn’t I stop staring at Nola? Was it her high forehead? No, because sometimes that was ugly. It was everything combined, the sheen on her silky blonde hair curving to the shape of her skull, deep-set eyes, cornflower blue, that were not too close together or too far apart. It was the high cheekbones, although not the blueblood kind, hers were high and broad like a farm girl’s, and the summer tan on skin that appeared to have no pores, those dazzling teeth and a smile like a branding iron.

  We pulled into the Lake George campground at dusk. My father blamed Liz’s sister for the descending darkness, for driving like a snail when it was Mandy’s turn at the wheel. “I drove over the speed limit!” Mandy yelled back. “You said we could get to Lake George before dark and you were wrong!” Now a storm was gathering. We tried to jam the tent poles into the lakeshore but they wouldn’t stay upright in the sand, so we had to throw our stuff back into the car and trudge into the woods until we found a spot where the ground was firm and level among a few scrubby pine trees. Nola brought the car around to our new site. My father yelled instructions for putting up the tent over the roar of the wind and I wished I were brave enough to talk back to him like Mandy. I’d tell him he was a stupid, stupid man. If I had been the one who mapped out the itinerary and we ended up trying to pitch a tent in the dark, boy, would I have been told off. You stupid, stupid girl.

  “Pretty fucking stupid,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What did you say, kid?”

  We were at the trunk unloading supplies when it started to rain, fat drops plunking on our heads slowly at first, and then faster. I grabbed the Coleman lantern from Liz, while she carried a sleeping bag under each arm, and we ran for cover. The five of us crammed into the tent (made to sleep four) just as the drops merged into sheets of rain lashing the canvas. We laughed with relief.

  “Are we lucky?” my father said. “Is that great planning or what?”

  “Yeah, great planning,” I said. I turned to show Liz my smirk.

  “Are you two conspiring against me?” my father said.

  “They’re just counting their blessings, Clyde,” Mandy said.

  My father slept against one side of the tent, then came Nola, then me, Liz, and Mandy against the other side. The tent reeked of mildew even after being draped over our bushes in the sun, and pebbles poked through the canvas floor and into my back. I shifted and squirmed until I found a smooth patch of ground and fell asleep for a while, but I woke to a rustling sound. The rain had stopped. It was dead quiet for a few seconds and then the rustling picked up again. Fuck. Black bears lived in the Adirondacks. I was scared and moved closer to Liz, but I was not as scared as I might have been or should have been because I figured even if it was a bear my father would know what to do. He wasn’t afraid of anything. It probably wasn’t a bear, though. All kinds of smaller critters lived in these woods, I told myself—raccoons, badgers. I put the folded up T-shirt I was using for a pillow over my head, and tried to go back to sleep, but the rustling intensified, and I was losing my nerve. I was about to wake up my father when I realized with a jolt that the rustling was coming from inside the tent—the shrill rubbing of nylon against nylon. Then a girl’s giggle and my father’s hoarse whisper. The growl of a sleeping-bag zipper.

  Oh, please God, no. Not this. I moved away from them like an inchworm in my mummy bag pressing against Liz, hiding my face in her Herbal Essence hair. Liz didn’t wake up, nor did I try to wake her up. I pretended I was asleep too. More rustling and the tent zipper, zhrip, zhrip, and my father and Nola climbing out. Zhrip, zhrip closing us up again. Branches snapped under their feet. The car door croaked open. They would do it in the Torino. At least not in here. Liz and Mandy slept. Still, I didn’t wake them. I wanted Johnny. I wanted Johnny to hold me.

  In the morning, I expected my father to expend a lot of effort in my direction, making nice and sweet-talking to me, but I was mistaken. He despised my stricken face, my rubbery arms and legs, my bloody heart wrapped in rags.

  “Don’t just stand there. Help out. You think you’re here to get waited on?”

  I kneeled on the dew-soaked ground to gather the felled tent poles and slid them clanging like bells into their nylon bag. Then I started stuffing my sleeping bag into its own bag, punching the fiber-filled nylon to the bottom. I positioned the sack between my knees and punched and punched. The sun was out but the morning air was chilly. Nola wore my father’s tweed jacket with elbow patches and laughed when the too-long sleeves flopped around.

  We drove into town and I was bleeding, doubled over in pain. “I got my period,” I whispered to Liz. She fished a Darvon out of her purse and I went to the public ladies’ room with the pill and a tampon in my back pocket. I gulped the Darvon with water cupped in my hands at the filthy sink and walked back to the car. They were waiting for me. They wanted to
stroll around the town.

  “I’ll stay here,” I said. “I can lie on the backseat.”

  “You be OK, baby?” my father said.

  I looked away. “Yes, go.”

  The Darvon was useless. I lay with my knees drawn up and rocked in agony. Nothing helped, not lying on my side or on my back with the soles of my feet against the window, not on my stomach with one arm raking the dirty floor, nothing, until I pushed open the door, lurched into a patch of weeds and threw up. I felt only halfway better after that, but enough to fall into a fitful sleep with my cheek pressed to the cigarette-stinking vinyl seat.

  For nine days and nights we pretended it wasn’t happening. I didn’t say a word to Liz or Mandy until the last rest stop on I-95 before the Baltimore beltway. Nola went out to wait in the car and we were left in the ladies’ room. Of course Liz and Mandy knew. We’d all known since the first night. My own silence for all that time mystified me.

  “What happened on the trip? Why are you so upset?” my mother asked.

  “He was mean to me, yelling at me the whole way.”

  My father came into the kitchen.

  “Why were you picking on Joanna?” my mother asked.

  “Obnoxious teenager,” my father said. “Snotty kid. I can’t trust her. That Liz Stone, too. Disrespectful. They were terrible, terrible. I was stuck with them for ten days.”

  I was stunned by his brazen lies. I didn’t expect or even want him to confess to my mother. I wanted to protect both of them, as always. But I couldn’t understand what he gained by turning on me.

  Johnny came over the night after we got back and I asked him to go for a walk. I was relieved to get out of the house. We went slowly around the block twice and on the second loop stopped at the corner three houses before mine to sit on the curb side by side. I cried into his V-neck sweater. He agreed I should say nothing to my mother. She would find out on her own, he said. He held me against his chest stroking my hair, my cheek, smoothing the nap of my eyebrow. “He didn’t think you knew,” Johnny said.

  “I’m not stupid,” I said through my tears. Johnny kissed them away. He slipped his hand under my blouse and I closed my eyes. I felt his fingertips brushing my nipple, touching the shape of one breast, the budding warmth, then shivers. I didn’t wear a bra. He liked to come into my room when I was doing my homework. He kissed me. Johnny complicated everything. His tongue was hot and gentle, and I felt better.

  CHAPTER 29

  Tuckahoe

  A week passed with no one asking me to shimmy up the flagpole or sleep in a coffin. Nothing happening except me looking over my shoulder every time I lined up to piss and brush my teeth or marched to class, or trudged up to the farm to muck out the stalls, until finally I was approached, just like Jesse said.

  “Hey, Aronson.” A column of sunlight slanted into the barn between the slatted timbers. Stanley Hirsh stood at the entrance illuminated, his meaty fists on his hips.

  “What?”

  “I got a proposition for you and Chick Scheiner. A way for you saps to make some dough.”

  I dropped my shovel and stepped out of the stall. This was it.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Charlie the porter. He has a job.”

  “A feat of bravery?”

  “Huh?” said Hirsh. “Listen, Aronson, you up for it?”

  “What is it?”

  “Whatever it is?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “Go see Charlie when you’re done here.”

  My heart raced. I prayed the swimming hole was frozen, and I prayed for Shorty’s death. I saw Chick. “Wait up.” We headed down to the cottage that Charlie the porter shared with Carl Grimm and Hymie the handyman.

  “Aronson. Scheiner. Been waitin’ on youse.” Charlie handed each of us a gunnysack. “Go to the barn. Collect as many kittens as fit. Bring ‘em back to me.”

  Kittens? I looked past Charlie to see if Mr. Grimm was inside the house. I wondered what he would think. Whatever it is, Jesse had said.

  On the way up to the barn we passed Harry and Pinky coming from the opposite direction.

  “Hey small fry, where you headed?” said Chick.

  “Candy store,” said Harry.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “Where’d you get that nickel?”

  “I found it.”

  “Better not be from Shorty Lapidus.”

  “I told you,” said Harry. “I found it.”

  “You better have found it. Now scram, the both of youse. Go get your candy.”

  We had a job to do. Here kitty, kitty. Alice’s new litter, and others. Her grandchildren. Great grandchildren. She’d been around a while. I plucked a kitten clinging to Chick’s pant leg and dropped the cat into my sack. Big old Pussy Alice lay on her side and licked her paws. A gray fuzz ball slept next to her. The runt. Whatever it is, do it. I peered into my bag. I had four or five already. Chick had the same. It was enough. I let the fuzz ball sleep.

  Charlie the porter tied the sacks shut with twine. “Take the path down to the creek over toward the aqueduct side. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah, we know.” We stood in the driveway.

  “You put the sack in the water, you hold it under.”

  “What?”

  “It ain’t frozen over. I seen it.”

  “But the kittens . . . They’ll drown,” said Chick.

  “That’s the idea.”

  Chick and I kicked at the gravel. We were only nine, going on ten.

  “We got too many on the grounds here. It’s a threat to the public health.”

  We shrugged and stared at our feet.

  “Far worse starving to death,” said Charlie.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Then go. Get on with it.”

  We passed through the orchard where each tree was just a bundle of dead sticks that implausibly would bloom into thousands of sweet-smelling white blossoms in a month or two and we clambered down to the gully, half-muddy, half-frozen and reached the gurgling, babbling, splish-splashing creek. A pink nose pressed against the opening of the burlap neck I held in my fist. I hardened my heart and plunged my sack into the icy water. Chick did the same. We held them under, felt their fragile shoulders under our thumbs, a haunch, an ear, forced down to the bottom. Our hands turned blue. The whitewater noise of the Sprain Brook drowned out the mewling cries.

  In the spring, a team of us rebuilt the dam and reinstated the Bare Ass Swimming Hole, a task I relished and that did not require knowing how to swim. We had to engineer the whole thing on the sly, of course, since we were trespassing and the Grassy Sprain golf club members complained we were trampling on their turf. On top of that, we were forbidden to work on Saturdays. Beating children on the Sabbath was fine, apparently, but building our own Garden of Eden offended God. Supervisors and monitors occasionally traipsed through the woods to catch us in the act, so we had Cheesie as lookout. The job required days of labor. We hiked to the spot after synagogue and after classes. A bucket brigade formed for dredging mud. Slimy rocks were dug up from along the stream bed and passed from man to man until the dam wall was neatly assembled by seniors waist deep and then chest high in the cold creek creating a mighty wall of stones, logs, twigs, and mud trapping the water to a depth of five feet so we could jump in, maybe even dive. Well, so they could dive. I could wade up to my neck and I loved making things and listened closely to the older guys as they discussed the mechanics of dam building. During the week we talked of nothing else. At night, surrounded by the sighing inhale and exhale of sleeping friends, I lay in bed thinking about the task ahead, each step in the process, and what a paradise the place would be when we were done. These thoughts while lying awake were some of the most peaceful in my life. We cheered when the water rose. I spent many summer afternoons lazing on Bare Beach under the weeping willows.

  Chick and I joined the farm gang because we both liked animals, especially horses. The barn
didn’t interest Harry or Jesse. Most kids hated the farm detail when it came up in chore rotation. They preferred peeling potatoes, scrubbing enormous soup kettles or even scrubbing the washroom floor. Harry couldn’t believe I chose weeding in the hot sun, much less shoveling horseshit. His horse was strictly an iron charger. He hung around the auto shed watching older inmates build a motorcycle engine from scratch, learning from their grease-monkey talk. To each his own. Weeding allowed time to think with no one interrupting my thoughts. No one bothered us on the farm. The supervisors hardly ever came up there. Chick and I brushed down Joe, Playboy, and Sally the mare, then watched how the older guys harnessed the horses and hitched up the plow. Each of us learned what we wanted from the older guys. Not just dirty jokes. I admired the seniors most of all when they fearlessly, it seemed to me, left the grounds of the Home and our exclusive (orphans only) public school, and went off to Roosevelt High where they were supposed to blend in with the normal kids who wore sporty clothes and glowed with good health. But we didn’t blend in. Kids from the Home were easy to spot, the smell of poverty and death clung stubbornly to our faded hand-me-downs.

  High school was a few years away for me. I tried not to worry about it. Chick and I filled the water buckets and feed buckets. I felt at ease in the barn and outside in the fields. It was a chance to be away from the regimentation, away from the Colonel, the cane, the rabbi, the pommel horse, the supervisor, the monitor. Farm work was hard, but a chance to be free.

  Sometimes I talked to Playboy when I was alone. I told him about the Colonel and we shook our heads and snorted about human nature. Who was Tom Anderson? Where did he come from? Was he ever a little boy? The other supervisors I understood, but the Colonel had a blank stare. No matter how often he struck, either spontaneously, or after much planning and marking off on rosters, I was taken by surprise. Even in his military uniform, even with his weapon at the ready posing as a crutch, still, I never expected swift action from the Colonel because he appeared indifferent. Even when his eyes popped like boiled raisins he seemed vague and distracted, which I learned was a particular kind of evil.