The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  The wind blew cold, leaves rattled and fell. We raked them into piles and climbed into the trees and jumped onto the crispy heaps, then lit a bonfire in the fallow field and threw mickeys into the flames. Those who had gloves pulled the hot potatoes out when they were done, and we tossed them from hand to hand, poked the jackets open with a stick and let the steam pour out. Always too hungry to wait, we burned our mouths.

  I couldn’t picture my father’s face anymore, but I could smell him, the toasty aroma of his ironed shirts like a mickey plucked from the flames. Up the hill on the farm, we could see down to Tuckahoe Road, and sometimes we stopped what we were doing to stare as roadsters sped around the curves to the Grassy Sprain Golf and Country Club. Why did I imagine my father there, hopping out of a Packard or a Marmon Speedster? He wouldn’t have been allowed in. He was a Jew like me. We tossed our mickeys from hand to hand.

  He was somewhere, though, out in the world with the twenties roaring, flappers flapping, and swells flashing their C-notes, all while the roof leaked on the Oddfellows Orphan Home, and the wind shrieked through the cracks in the windowpanes, and the cold seeped into our bones and stayed there until April.

  CHAPTER 30

  “It’s in a difficult place,” said Dr. Heidenheimer. “For a biopsy, you’d have to go up through a nostril, or in through the soft palate.” No one at Sinai was skilled enough to get to it. Maybe there was somebody at Johns Hopkins, he said. He wanted my father gone from his hospital altogether, it seemed. I told the doctor I was surprised that just a biopsy could be so complicated. Meanwhile, I wondered to myself if I had said the right thing the other night when my father asked if he was going to die. In the silvery light of his room with the blue recliner pushed up to his bed, I sat and considered the two issues he had brought up. Not life and death, but trust and truth. He said he trusted me, of all people. He was depending on me, yet as a child, I could hardly trust or depend on him. Unfair as it was, though, I accepted the responsibility. Why such devotion, Liz wanted to know, and she wasn’t the only one. Maybe it was just that in other ways, he and I were alike.

  He said he wanted the truth. He could handle it. Clyde Aronson wouldn’t be played for a fool. He was a thinker and a poet, or at least a poetry teacher, and poetry was obsessed with death. He wasn’t afraid of the subject. He kept a copy of Philip Larkin’s poem “Next, Please,” taped to the inside of the Camaro’s trunk lid, a reminder that a ship with a black sail was coming for him, a ship with no bounty, only a huge and birdless silence in its wake, and he had better hurry up and live. I thought about answering his question by boldly telling him Aunt Vivian said he looked like a man who was dying of cancer. Or I could describe the evasive, guilty look on Heidenheimer’s face. Or I could tell the honest truth, which was “I don’t know.” But I didn’t think the truth my father wanted was a cold assessment of his situation, despite the bleak poetry. If he wanted something cold, he could ask Brenda.

  “You’re going to get well,” I said. I would fight for him and he would live, at least for a few years. We’d find out what this was and zap it, or cut it out, or both. “You’re going to get better.” He blinked his one eye, concentrating on my words. “I’m going to make sure of it,” I said. I wasn’t shining him on. I sensed he was asking for more than a medical opinion. He was asking that the wolf be kept from the door long enough to make this into something we did and not something that was done to us.

  CHAPTER 31

  Baltimore was a small city. You could be in a high-rise overlooking the harbor and fifteen minutes later, deep in the countryside. Sidewalks in every direction ended at the woods. I was searching for a pharmacy that carried controlled substances. I parked in front of a drugstore on the edge of a dead cornfield bordered by bare-limbed oaks and scruffy loblolly pines. I need methadone, I told the pharmacist. He went to get it, and left me alone with the Dobermann snarling behind the counter.

  My father was about to be sent home from Sinai, to wait for an appointment with a Johns Hopkins surgeon. First, though, he had to be weaned off Demerol injections and onto the tiny methadone tablets used to detox heroin addicts. The process would take days. I brought the pills back to the hospital and Nurse Debbie coaxed my father. “Come on, Mr. Aronson. Be a good boy and swallow.” Christmas came and went, and finally, he was discharged. He was happy about it, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to go home to a place with no Debbie and no Demerol, where the sheets weren’t changed every day, where Hoffman, who missed his master as he used to be, whined and swished his hairy tail. Home to dirty dishes in the sink. Home to Brenda.

  Brenda wasn’t happy to see either one of us and went around muttering curses under her breath. Goddamn Aronsons. Son of a bitch. Goddamn junkie. I couldn’t bear the weekends when Brenda was in the house all day long.

  To be fair, this was not how Brenda had imagined married life. She was forty on her wedding day and my father was sixty-five—but he was a young sixty-five. He had a string of ex-girlfriends and adoring students, drove a muscle car, kneaded his own pasta dough, and mowed his own lawn. She fed off his vitality.

  “You look like an old man in a nursing home slumped in that chair,” Brenda said.

  He begged her to rent a hospital bed since it hurt to lie down flat, but she refused to have the ugly contraption in her house. She complained that his three humidifiers were ruining the furniture. Goddamn humidifiers. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t swallow. She shut off the steam when he wasn’t looking. He resorted to sucking on Wintergreen Tic Tacs and spit the bleached nubs into crumpled tissues he left in his pockets.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about Brenda. We were obviously at cross-purposes. I was obsessed with saving my father’s life. She wanted to get rid of her houseguests (mainly me) and have her life back to normal. I understood wanting that. But she wasn’t facing reality. She may have thought I was a weakling, but she wasn’t as strong as she pretended. She lacked the moral fortitude required for extreme circumstances. Even Nurse Debbie had asked, as she phrased it, why on God’s green earth did your father marry Brenda?

  People were always asking me that question. Relatives, friends. They were all mystified. The first I heard of the marriage proposal, I couldn’t believe it either. Fred and I were living in New York and my parents stopped to see us on their way to a wedding in Connecticut. When he sprung it on us, I thought he was joking. My parents had been divorced very recently after years of separation, but they were both going to this wedding so it made sense to drive up together. My father came into our apartment yelling, “Where’s my pastrami?”

  He was nicer once he’d had a few bites of his sandwich. We sat at the table by the open windows just below the sidewalk and watched the bottom half of people walking by. A balmy April breeze drifted in. “Ah, New York,” my father said. “My town.”

  “No place like it,” my mother said.

  “You wanna know something, Joanna?” my father said.

  “Yeah, sure I wanna know something.”

  “You make good coffee.”

  I beamed in the glow of his approval. “I make it strong. That’s the secret.”

  “Tell your mother. Hers is lousy.”

  “I beg your pardon,” my mother said, trying to make a joke of being offended. But I could see the insult stung.

  “Be nice,” I said. “Her coffee isn’t lousy.” I chafed when he played us against each other.

  “Why do you think I left him?” my mother said. “He’s never satisfied.”

  “There! She admitted it. You heard her, Fred. She’s the one who left me. I never left anybody.”

  “You didn’t have to,” my mother said. “You made it impossible to stay.”

  “Bullshit. If I’m so impossible why are women waiting in line for me? And they want marriage.” He conducted an invisible orchestra drawing the syllable beats in the air. “Mahr-eee-ahge.”

  “I believe it,” my mother said. “I see the women down at the club. They don’t know what they�
�re in for, though.”

  “You’re kidding,” Fred said. “You two belong to the same singles club?”

  “I see her down there, across the room, dancing with those salesmen,” my father said. He and my mother traded smiles.

  “By the way, are you still going out with what’s-her-name?” my mother said.

  “Who?” said my father. He took a bite of a prune Danish.

  “You know. What’s her name?”

  He kept eating without saying anything. He sipped some coffee. Finally he said, “You mean Brenda McLean?”

  “Yeah, Brenda. Who did you think I meant?”

  He brushed the crumbs from his mustache. “We broke up,” he said.

  “Really?” my mother said. “I didn’t know you were going steady.”

  “You guys think it’s funny. It’s not. That Brenda kept giving me ultimatums.”

  “What kind of ultimatums?” my mother asked.

  “If I don’t marry her, she won’t see me anymore. Stuff like that.”

  “So that’s why she broke up with you? Because you wouldn’t marry her?” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s complicated,” my father said.

  “Well, I’m glad you told Brenda no,” I said.

  “Yeah, but that Brenda, she’s keeping at it with the ultimatums,” my father said.

  “I don’t get it,” my mother said. “How can Brenda be giving ultimatums if you already broke up? In that case, she gave her ultimatum and it backfired. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re right,” my father said. “But it’s not that simple. She’s all fucked up. She gave me a different ultimatum this time. This time, if I don’t marry her, she’ll kill herself.”

  “Oh, no. You’re not going to fall for that, Clyde?”

  “I don’t know. She loves me. She’d rather die than live without me. But you wouldn’t understand that, Evie.”

  “Oh, I understand it. It’s called emotional blackmail.” My mother got up and went over to the sofa. She took one of my father’s cigarettes from the pack on the coffee table and lit it. “That’s not love,” she said. “Jesus, Clyde.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” my father said. He reached over and ate the last piece of my mother’s pastry.

  “Hey, that was mine!” she said, and came back to the table.

  “But I didn’t get any cherry!” he said. “What’s the matter? Am I an orphan or something?”

  My mother laughed. They never ceased laughing at each other’s tired jokes.

  Now Brenda was striding into the living room on Cedar Drive, cranking the drapes open with the pulley making a familiar sound: reek-shh, reek-shh.

  “Hey!” my father yelped from his chair. “The light hurts my eyes.”

  “It’s depressing in here,” Brenda said. “I hate having the curtains drawn in broad daylight, it’s so goddamned depressing.” Reek-shh. Reek-shh. She opened the drapes wider and wider.

  I stayed out of it. It was depressing. But for fuck’s sake, the light hurt his eyes. What was so hard to understand? I folded my sheets and blankets without looking at my father or Brenda, and went to take a shower. As soon as the hot spray hit my back, I was lulled into a trance. I wanted to stay in my private watery chamber forever, the door locked against my father and Brenda, but we only had one bathroom and I was, as always, condemned to be considerate of others. While getting dressed, I noticed a vial on the sink next to the shaving cream. I picked it up and read the label without even thinking about Brenda’s need for privacy. I was no saint, in spite of what my father said. I probably wasn’t even all that considerate, in ways I couldn’t see. It was Lithium. So she was manic-depressive or bipolar, or whatever they were calling extreme mood swings these days. I’d heard about her weekends under the covers, but I hadn’t heard anything about the manic part. I should have felt more sympathy for Brenda after the discovery, but I didn’t. I hesitated leaving the steamy bathroom and entering the dry hallway, the stale Benson & Hedges air. In the living room, the drapes were now three-quarters of the way closed, a compromise. Brenda was leaning over my father. She kissed him.

  “I’m taking Hoffman to Sudbrook for a run,” she said.

  My father reached out from his chair and grabbed Brenda around the hips. She held her arms airplane-style to keep her balance. She was laughing. I wondered how they came to the compromise on the curtains. She slipped from my father’s grasp and opened the closet to get her coat. Hoffman went so wild with excitement she had trouble fastening his leash. Sudbrook was my old junior high. I would have liked to take the dog there and run around. But I was planning to sleep at my mother’s and I’d have a break then. The door clapped shut and the glass storm door clattered behind it. I turned the humidifiers on when I heard Brenda’s Mazda chug away.

  “My head hurts,” my father said.

  The methadone wasn’t working at 5 milligrams, so I called Heidenheimer’s office, but it was Saturday and the answering service took a message. I doubled his dose anyway, and brought him the extra pill with an inch of Coke in a paper cup. He napped intermittently in his chair while I read Jane Eyre. The refrigerator hummed and shuddered and then went off. It was quiet now, except for the soft gurgling of the humidifiers. I was getting close to the end of the book. Jane’s awful, pious cousin wants to marry her, but Jane doesn’t want to because then, she says, “I would be forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low.” I underlined the phrase and thought about how often I turned down the fire of my nature so as not to disturb Fred. I felt a pang of guilt for marking up the book and dog-earing the page, but not enough to go looking for a bookmark. For once, the fire of my nature said to fuck it and stop worrying about everything.

  “Will you be OK here with Brenda tonight?” I said when my father opened his eye. It was Saturday. I was desperate to get away. Brenda would be home all day on Sunday, so I wouldn’t be needed. If I went to my mother’s, I could sleep as late as I wanted. “She takes good care of you, doesn’t she? She rubs Lanacane on your forehead, right?”

  “She’s OK, but she’s a shiksa.”

  I laughed. “That’s the problem? You’re kidding. That isn’t fair.”

  “Not fair to Brenda?” he said.

  “Not fair to shiksas.”

  “It’s fair,” my father said. “They don’t know how to take care of someone the way a Jewish wife would.”

  “Oh, c’mon Daddy. You mean a Jewish wife like Mom? The least doting mother in the neighborhood?”

  “Some other Jewish wife then,” he said.

  He was trying to be funny. The hippie teacher taking the old-country view. He wanted to provoke, but the effect was sometimes just shutting down the conversation. I wanted to talk to him seriously about Brenda’s motivation. I wanted to talk to him about bigger things, too. Jewishness and prejudices. He was more open and expansive when he was young, judging from his letters to my mother. I wished I had known him then. He said in his letters to her that he was a hardened realist, but more often, it seemed to me, he was passionate and earnest.

  Somewhere in England

  30 May 1945

  Dearest Evie,

  How are you, darling? I’m sorry I spoiled your happiness over VE Day. I’m also sorry you called me cynical and other unkind words. I hate it when we quarrel. That is why I wanted to tell you about a more optimistic feeling I just had about the world and our future together. I was thinking back to a Home reunion I went to in 1938 and how I stood up and made a resolution protesting some action of the Hitler state, and the religious elements in our alumni group fought against my resolution because they said it wasn’t good for the Jews to call too much attention to their plight. Spain was going down into the mud of fascism in those days.

  And then, just now, seven years later, I looked through the window of my hut, out across the rows of buildings, the machine shops and the bomb dumps and the petrol tanks and all the tremendous installation of this great airfield to the landing field to the rows of giant bomb
ers and I thought well, once we Jews were alone, but look what has been arrayed against our enemy and what has beaten him into the ground as we were once beaten. The American war machine is a great and mighty thing and for whatever mixed reasons, it lined up alongside the revolutionaries. And that is no mean accomplishment for some people who were once trampled by policemen’s horses, run down by New York City’s finest, just so the German-American Bund could hold their meeting in Madison Square Garden. You know what I’m talking about, darling.

  Well, I am going to quit now and light a stinking cigar and lie on my cot and think about the beautiful spirit-satisfying world of you. Write to me, darling Evie. Tell me you love me.

  Yours forever,

  Clyde

  CHAPTER 32

  By Tuesday, in time for Susan’s visit, he was feeling better. She was flying down from New Jersey and would spend New Year’s with us, and then come to the appointment at Hopkins. All morning I tidied up, emptying the dishwasher, dumping out ashtrays heaped with butts, rinsing the three humidifiers and refilling them, adding salt to the two that required salt, throwing away the paper cups scattered around the house each with an inch of barely touched Carnation Instant Breakfast. “Survival” my father called it, but he couldn’t drink it. Brenda had been grocery shopping the night before and bought fresh flowers. All because Susan was coming. I was glad. I needed my sister’s support.