The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  My father smiled. “You know when I’m happy? When I’m alone at night with my books, a hunk of candy, a smoke, thinking about what I’m going to have for breakfast.”

  “Exactly. Didn’t you tell me you can’t wait until Brenda goes home and you have the house to yourself?”

  “You hungry? I’ll make us something to eat,” he said. He pressed the sharp fangs of the weeder pole deeper into the ground next to him and leaned on it to help himself out of the lawn chair. “Listen, kid, your mother had plenty of chances. That wedding we went to up in Connecticut, for instance.”

  “When you danced in my living room.”

  “We had a chance then,” he said. I followed him across the soft grass and over the cinderblock path I helped him build years ago. “At that hotel up there. How about some tomatoes right off the vine, a little olive oil, the finest extra virgin? A nice piece of bread.” I followed him into the kitchen. “You know your mother was the great love of my life. She always will be.”

  Somewhere in England

  28 Dec 1944

  Darling Evie,

  I just finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the full book, not the abridged version the army had at first. It was great. Would you call it a proletarian novel? I’ll tell you why I’m in doubt. Most books about the poor are somber, almost morbid, and leave you feeling badly. Maybe that’s what they’re meant to do. But this one was different. I never laughed so much, especially about Flittman and his feud with the horse, and Sissy and her lovers. The characters were so real, they made me feel alive too. A lot of the novel was parallel to my own experience. You said you felt that way as well. Francie was so precious, I fell in love with her, and she became you, so I didn’t leave her when I finished the book. Because you were Francie, and you are all the girls in all the books I ever read.

  All my love,

  Clyde

  My mother was distraught, frantic, miserable. “What did he say?”

  “He said it was too late.”

  “He’s going to marry her,” she said. “Goddamnit! I never thought he’d do it.” She opened up the linen closet where she kept a few bottles of liquor on a shelf among the neatly folded sheets and towels, and she brought out a jug of Gallo burgundy and poured us each a glass. “You know, we missed a chance to get back together,” she said. “I was ready. I might have done it.”

  “He told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “About Connecticut.”

  “We stayed in that little hotel together. It was a little white hotel with black shutters.”

  “Yeah. In the same room, he said.”

  “I guess we were trying to save money. There were two beds. He was in his and I was in mine and he said, ‘get in here and show me how much you still love me.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t see why I should have to go to him. I lay there waiting.” My mother toyed with the stem of her wine glass. “I wanted him to come over to me.” She looked up. “Why? What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted you to come over to him.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Tuckahoe

  “Slow Uncle Archie’s here? On Saturday? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I’m saying so,” said Harry.

  We ran holding onto our caps toward our uncle behind the fence, his suit pockets bulging with Walnettos.

  “I came to tell you, your mama can’t visit tomorrow,” Uncle Archie said.

  Oh, no, I thought. Here it comes. The beginning of the end. I’d heard the stories. Like a clock, my mother said. First, it’s every week, then every other week. Then they come once a month. Then it’s once in a while. We’d all seen the kids waiting for relatives who promised they’d be there on Visiting Day and never showed up. Always something getting in the way. Work, maybe, Sunday inventory, or no carfare, or any kind of excuse they can make up because who wants to schlep all the way up to Yonkers and back. Why did they put us away in the first place? To make their lives easier. I’d heard Miss Beaufort’s smug reproach when she left her office door open: “If it’s so hard to leave your boy here, Mrs. Levy, Mr. Chaim Pipik, Mrs. Rosenbaum, Mr. Shlongstein, then why don’t you just keep ‘em at home with you? Huh?” The supervisors hated Visiting Day. They discouraged visitors. They didn’t want us complaining to outsiders. They didn’t want us getting used to mollycoddling, coming back inside on Sunday nights all soft. Like a clock, my mother said. Every other Sunday. Rain or shine. What was her excuse now?

  “She’s sitting shiva,” said Uncle Archie.

  “What?” I said.

  “The baby died.”

  “What baby?”

  “Your little sister.”

  “Gertie’s not a baby anymore.” Archie was so dumb.

  “Who died?” said Harry.

  “A baby,” I said.

  “What baby?” said Harry.

  “Gertie,” said Uncle Archie.

  “What are you talking about? Speak English! Gertie’s two and a half,” I said. “She walks, she talks. She comes here and we roll down the hill together. Right, Harry? This hill we’re standing on.”

  Uncle Archie started bawling. Even a child knew more than he did. “Gertie,” Uncle Archie cried. “Poor little kid. She caught a cold at the nursery and died.”

  I reached between the iron pickets and grabbed the lapels of his cheap suit and shook him. What are you talking about Archibald? Are you fucking crazy? Sitting shiva for who, you numskull? I let him go, and I darted away. He’d probably get us in trouble for coming up here on the Sabbath. His arms flailed between the fence posts trying to grab me. It was so easy to dodge him, I had to laugh. He looked ridiculous. His pants rode too high on his waist and a teardrop was caught on the mole on his cheek and wouldn’t fall off. Fall off, you stupid freaking teardrop! I sneered at Uncle Archie, but he didn’t change his story. I came close, taunting him. Why were his lips always wet? I came dangerously close, until he grabbed me and pulled me against the wrought iron with one arm, grabbing Harry with his other arm. With my face pressed against his jacket I could smell the lavender water Grandma Cohen sprinkled on the handkerchief she placed in the pocket over Slow Uncle Archie’s heart. “No,” I said. I sobbed and he held me tighter until the iron bars were digging into my ribs. “Poor little kid,” he said. “Caught a cold.”

  CHAPTER 40

  We were delusional, out of our minds with excitement because of a biopsy. Hooray. Diagnostic surgery. You would have thought we were going to Disneyland. It was action, though. Something, finally. We were all dying for something. Brenda was encouraged by how well the operation went, and Dr. Geest peered into my father’s mouth and admired his stitches, such delicate handiwork. “He’ll have a nosebleed, that’ll be the worst of it,” the doctor said. I asked, absurdly in retrospect, if it looked like tuberculosis.

  Even in his compromised state my father dictated the mood, propped on an elbow on the gurney ride from recovery back to his room singing loud enough to draw attention: “Que sera, sera! Whatever will be will be!”

  “Is it TB?”

  “We can’t tell anything so far,” Dr. Geest said. “The cells we got in the frozen section are undifferentiated.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we can’t tell what they are.”

  The final pathology report from the lab would take a few days, or even a week. They had to fix the tissue in paraffin, slice it up and put the paraffin slices on slides, stain the tissue molecules with dye, search for tumor markers and so on.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you Dr. Geest?” my father said.

  He said yes, nothing more, but he didn’t leave. Dr. Geest stayed in the room in his green scrubs that were too big for him. He floated inside them like a boy dressed in his father’s clothes. He looked lost. He looked like Johnny Dolan come back in a dream.

  The next morning when I got to the Meyer building, my father’s room was empty. His bed was made so taut you could bounce
a nickel on it. The ninth floor was deserted. I searched the halls, glancing into doorways at horizontal legs and feet, until I found two nurses behind a desk, a young one eating a bagel, and an older one with a koala bear clamped onto her stethoscope.

  “Do you know where Mr. Aronson is? Room 949?”

  “He’s down in Oncology,” the young one said, peering at me over the top of her bagel.

  “Oncology?” I said. “You mean the tumor was malignant? You mean he has cancer?”

  The nurse shrugged. Her mouth was full.

  I was trembling. The older nurse gave me an odd look. How could they be so insensitive? He was alone—he was hearing the news alone. I sped to the elevator, jabbed at the down button, stamped my feet in the plunging car, sprang out when the doors opened on the ground floor. I rushed through the carpeted corridors into the glass breezeway, past the cafeteria and the odor of burnt pizza, into the main hall, past the busy glass doors, the mauve blur of Admissions and the burst of color at the flower shop to another bank of elevators and down again, below deck.

  No one in Radiation Oncology knew where he was. I drummed my fingers on the information counter and waited, idly flipping open one of the blue vinyl binders laying there, surprised to see a brightly colored Polaroid fastened to the first page. It was a photograph of a starvation victim with a chicken neck, the head too wide for the skeletal body. The patient had one bloody nostril and just below it, the thick hairs of his mustache were sticky with bright red blood. He’ll have a nosebleed, that’ll be the worst of it. I held the photograph up to the light and stared in horror and disbelief at the starving man who appeared to have lost a fistfight. I was confused. It didn’t make sense. Who took this picture? When? What were the circumstances? I shut the binder and continued my search down a narrow hall and around a corner where my path was blocked by an abandoned wheelchair. It turned out the wheelchair wasn’t empty and I knew immediately—by the way the man was slumped in it, and his hat was perched and his bathrobe tied—the Polaroid had been taken only minutes ago. The hallway had banisters like a ship’s corridor and I grabbed onto one and clung to it. The nurses upstairs weren’t being cruel. They had no idea someone could be so delusional they could look at my father and not know he had cancer.

  He was assigned an oncologist, Anton Jelinek, who didn’t know for sure without the final pathology report, but said that Mr. Aronson most likely had a primary head-and-neck tumor—a nasopharyngeal carcinoma that was probably squamous cell cancer, and the result of smoking. Jelinek was not absolutely certain, however, because the cells were undifferentiated, which he explained when I asked, simply meant that the cells were difficult to tell apart and identify. My father was having so much pain and had lost his appetite because the head-and-neck tumor was pressing on his cranial nerves. The third cranial nerve caused the headache, the sixth cranial nerve affected his eye, and the ninth cranial nerve would give him gum and jaw pain as the tumor grew. This kind of cancer was treated with surgery and radiation, but Jelinek warned that the surgery was often disfiguring. I’d seen a woman in the Meyer day room. Half her face was scooped out and she had a Frankenstein scar, but she was alive. I said if the tumor was growing wouldn’t it be a good idea to zap it with radiation while we waited for a surgery date, and Jelinek said the tissue couldn’t be radiated until after surgery and Geest would not go ahead with surgery until the final pathology report. In other words, still no treatment. My father was discharged. I took him home with his pajamas in a paper bag.

  Such scraps we ended up accepting with gratitude. They gave us a name. It was something. With a name, we were a little less helpless. Now instead of “goddamn Aronsons,” Brenda went around the house muttering “nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” and I muttered along with her. We listed the cranial nerves together and recited which parts of the face were affected—like a catechism for her, an incantation for me. Brenda and I got along fairly well during that time, and my father no longer bullied me as he had back in December. Now I knew how to make his tea. He did snap sometimes. I asked if he remembered those Christmases before Uncle Seymour died when we drove up to Scarsdale and he growled: “Whaddaya think I do all day?” But he only meant—yes, of course I do, what else is there, the past is all there is—and he softened, and we talked about how great it was that Aunt Adele was gentile and provided us with a Christmas tree and presents for a few years when I was little, the whole schmear, except we had pastrami around the poker table instead of ham.

  “They’re rich,” my father would say.

  “Do they live in a mansion?” Susan would say.

  “Yes,” my father said.

  We came out of the Lincoln Tunnel to horns honking. My father rolled down his window. “This is my town!” he called to passersby, absurdly considering we were hicks with Maryland license plates. We laughed merrily at his antics. To us, New York and my father were synonymous. We could have gotten off the turnpike at the George Washington Bridge, but he had to drive through the city. “MY town!” he said. By the time we got to Westchester, night would have fallen, and windows blazed like fire through the winter trees.

  “There,” my father said. “Up ahead. If you go down that road, you get to the orphanage.”

  “Where? Where?”

  “There.” A dark and winding road, a vanishing point. Deep in the woods, Christmas lights glowed.

  “Can we go there?” I said.

  “Torn down,” my father said. It wasn’t long before we pulled into Uncle Seymour’s driveway.

  “If this is a mansion, why aren’t there pillars?” Susan said.

  “They’re rich, I tell you, rich,” my father said.

  My mother dealt the cards around the table. “Seven card stud. Deuces wild.”

  “How much you get paid at that grammar school in Baldymore?” said Uncle Seymour.

  “Never mind,” my father said. “You see me asking for handouts?”

  “Ooh,” said Uncle Alvin. “The professor has a conscience.”

  “Pair of eights bets,” said my father’s cousin, Fat Ellis.

  “What’re you crazy?” said Aunt Sadie. “Pair of kings! Mitzi’s got a deuce showing.”

  “I see you don’t mind eating my pastrami,” said Uncle Seymour.

  “My brother Harry never comes, never brings his kids here,” Aunt Vivian whispered to my mother, “because he’s still mad at Seymour and Adele for not taking in the two little boys.”

  “What little boys?” my mother said.

  “Harry and Clyde! My brothers! Who do you think?” said Aunt Vivian.

  “Harry’s at sleep-away, that’s why he’s not here,” my mother said. She took a bite of her corned beef sandwich.

  “Yeah, Harry took money from his partner,” said Aunt Vivian. “But even when he’s not in jail, he never comes. Did you know the Home wouldn’t let them out for Gertie’s funeral? But Alvin and I went to the cemetery with Mama, the three of us in a taxi, Mama with the coffin on her lap.”

  “What’s past is past,” said Uncle Alvin. “You talking or you playing?”

  For a whole week the adults played and the children played until one night we drove home, our presents locked in the trunk, my mother asleep in the front seat, Susan curled next to me. My father kept his eyes on the road and I looked out at passing towns and lights in distant houses. I was glad he and I were the only ones awake, although he seemed unaware of me behind him in the dark quiet of the moving car.

  We were realists who knew in order to survive we had to be fabulists, so we lived on hope and imagination. Days passed. It was frustrating to wait so long for the final pathology report, but we were confident when the report came in, the thing squatting between his cheekbone and maxillary sinus would be removed at last, and with it his pain and misery. I decided this was a good time to take a break, before the big surgery. I would be needed more during what was bound to be a grueling recovery. So I flew back to LA to rest up. How could I have left him? I did, though.

  While I was awa
y, Brenda was asked if she wanted the oncologist, Dr. Jelinek, to manage my father’s case, or would she prefer their family doctor? Brenda chose the latter. That was Cromwell, the sarcastic hand-holder who was incurious about my father’s symptoms and unmoved by his suffering. I was angry. My mother appealed to me to be more sympathetic to Brenda. Brenda had a relationship with Dr. Cromwell. She could reach him on the phone easily and he knew my father’s history. I wished I could have supported Brenda’s decision, I really did. But on top of everything I loathed about Cromwell, he didn’t have privileges at Johns Hopkins.

  “What’s so great about Hopkins?” Brenda said. “A lot of good they’ve done.”

  I reminded her Hopkins was where my father’s tissue now sat in a lab under a microscope, and where his surgeon practiced. What I thought didn’t matter, though. The doctors wanted to deal with one family member only, whoever was next of kin. That was Brenda. I was thousands of miles away. She was in charge again.

  At first I couldn’t get used to being away, not knowing what was going on minute to minute. I wasn’t sure I would last for two long weeks in LA. Then I got I got used to the freedom. I rode my bike down to Hermosa Beach to visit a friend a couple of times, and I started writing again. I was sitting at the desk in the bedroom noodling with a short story about a freaky Greyhound bus trip to nowhere, when I got a call from an old boss in New York. She had started working at GQ magazine and wanted me to do a story on the differences between dating in LA and dating in New York. Fred pointed out the obvious—that I wasn’t dating, so how would I know? Well, gee, I could interview single friends. And right away I had some ideas. Like how at parties in LA people asked, “What do you drive?” Fred said everyone had heard that before, and maybe the assignment was a lot to take on while caring for my father, so I called the editor and said I would pass. I trusted Fred so much then. “You’re better off working on your short story,” he said.

  “Do you really think the Greyhound story is good?” I said. We were in the den, Fred’s office. I struggled to pull out his rolling desk chair—it was difficult with him still in it—but I moved it far enough so I had room to climb onto his lap. He put his arms around me. I was relieved. GQ was intimidating. The assignment came at the wrong time.