The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  Harry didn’t sit with us on the porch, although it was his last day, too. He was nearby, tinkering with the Indian Scout motorcycle he bought for ten bucks. Somehow he managed to scrounge up the dough. As soon as he heard I was dropping out of school, he bailed, too. From the steps I watched as he kept climbing on the bike in the driveway and revving it up whenever he felt he had to divert attention away from me. Chick called him over to look at a snapshot someone had taken of Harry and me that I’d included in the album but Harry declined the invitation, revved his motor and took his iron charger for a spin around the circular drive.

  I mixed in a few shots I’d taken one Passover of my sister Vivian posing coyly on the roof at 166th Street that elicited close inspection and some wolf whistles, and a few of my mother in a hat and white gloves. There were snapshots of the B. A. swimming hole, of course. I looked out at Harry in the driveway. We had waited ten years for this moment. We were finally going home, yet here I was dragging my feet, feeling I could linger on this stoop with my friends forever. On the last page of the Picture Booke, I had placed an interior shot of my Oracle office with this caption:

  My joint: the gathering place for the intelligentsia and social leaders of our time. Thither we cracked jokes, or sat listening to an opera, or argued the merits of Jean Harlow’s figure, or in hushed whispers planned a raid upon an icebox. Thither we developed pictures, and thither we made footlights and radios and spotlights and airplanes. We repaired us bicycles, we sold candy, we wrote editorials. Thither in winter we stored us sleds, in summer we loaded knapsacks.

  Aye verily, a Garden of Eden. I closed the album. It was time to go. The joys and glamour of the wider world awaited.

  CHAPTER 46

  Mama went ahead and had my father declared dead, so that in 1936 when the Veterans Bonus bill finally passed, she collected $125, a dollar for every day my father served during the Great War. Harry came home from the butcher shop with T-bone steaks and oh boy, did we celebrate. After our steak dinner, we turned on the radio and I pulled my mother out of her chair and waltzed her around the kitchen. Then Alvin tuned in a swing station playing something called “Bugle Call Rag,” and he and Vivian started jitterbugging, clattering on the linoleum like they were hopping over hot coals. We hooted and clapped, and then my mother and I started hoofing it up. She was pretty damn good, but seeing each other with limbs all herky-jerky had us laughing our sides off. We were breathless and fanning ourselves so we all went up to the roof to get some air. We could see for miles up there, from the East River to the Harlem River to the Hudson. I had a smoke leaning on my elbows on the ledge and perused the neighborhood, the bushy Bronx treetops black in the night, and farther away, The Daughters of Jacob old age home with its lime-green copper cupola glowing in the moonlight.

  “When I was little, I used to pretend that building was a palace,” Alvin said.

  “Daughters of Jacob?” said Mama. “Such an imagination!”

  “The summer residence of the archduke and duchess,” I said.

  “Of Morrisania,” said Vivian.

  We laughed, my mother’s bright trill the loudest. Her face was rosy from dancing, and her crimped pin curls were coming loose. I thought she looked beautiful with her hair disheveled. The next day, she complained that her cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

  The bonus money didn’t last long. But we cobbled together a living. I had a stockroom job at Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue, and Harry brought home a dollar every now and then. Still, my mother felt she couldn’t afford to quit her job at Kohl’s. I figured out (and wished I had realized sooner) my mother preferred working. Taka. No kidding. She liked getting dressed and going out into the world. Even combining paychecks, though, sometimes we were short by the end of the month and hid when the landlord came knocking. My mother would not ask Rich Uncle Seymour for handouts, not anymore. The family had been tough on her all those years, and now she could stand up to them. A working woman needed a new hat once in a while. She’d put us in the Home, she had to, but we came out good.

  I was seeing a girl from the neighborhood, which cost me plenty, and I stewed about the impossibility of advancing from the stockroom in any way except via the freight elevator. My solution? I started reading Marx and Engels again. More Freud. Oscar Wilde, whose wit I admired as a fellow outcast. Dos Passos and Steinbeck, George Orwell. For a second, I had actually believed I could get ahead because I was willing to work hard at shitty jobs. The rich, it turned out, weren’t indifferent to our struggle. They were actively interested in keeping their diamonds and furs from the likes of me. There was no question we poor suckers had to find a way to control the means of production. I switched from strolling up Fifth Avenue yearning for the baubles in the shop windows to marching down Fifth Avenue shouting at the top of my lungs: “Wages up, prices down, make New York a union town!” Demanding that the bastards “Free Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys!” Chick Scheiner, Albert and Artie Shack, and I marched on May Day right alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn calling for women’s rights. Occasionally Jesse Hoffman joined us with a snare drum hanging around his neck on a leather strap, rat-a-tat-tat, and we’d joke about this penchant we had for marching whenever we got together. But none of us saw much of Jesse anymore. Not since the Ladies Auxiliaries of Yonkers and White Plains raised the funds to send him to Julliard. That was the irony. Guys like Chick and me left school to support our families, whereas full orphans like Jesse had the freedom to go to college.

  When autumn came around and Uncle Seymour’s carnival was off-season, he folded up his tent and returned to New York to run bingo at the Elks Lodge on the Grand Concourse. He convinced me to quit working for the capitalists like some sap and likewise to quit fighting them, which was just beating my head against a wall, he said. Instead, I should become a capitalist myself. I left Elizabeth Arden and Uncle Seymour put Harry and me to work shilling. We had to memorize the numbers on a particular bingo card given to a little old lady who happened to be on the payroll. To mix it up, sometimes I played the card, or Harry, and one of our cousins would memorize the numbers and call them out. I couldn’t stomach the scam, though. Setting up the folding chairs, that was fine. But separating decent people from their last few coins, I wasn’t sure about that. The rubes actually believed they had a chance to win, and win big.

  “You ain’t cheating nobody,” Uncle Seymour insisted. “It’s the price of a night out.”

  “Under false pretenses,” I said.

  He shrugged, called me an idealist.

  Harry enjoyed stealing a dollar for a living, but he wasn’t reliable. He’d tell us he was going for a spin around the block on his Indian Scout and come back two weeks later. Just like the old man, we all said. It was Alvin who was the perfect shill, with his good looks and easygoing manner, and absent my heavy conscience. That kid was only twelve but already taller than I was, and passed for eighteen, even with his baby face. I got myself some honest work at a brewery in Brooklyn on the assembly line, and caught up on Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents during the long commute. In the evenings, I sat with the family out on the tenement stoop in the warm weather, and around the kitchen table in the winter, talking with my mother, playing poker at one grandma’s or another on Friday nights. Harry and I operated our ham radio. I flew kites on the roof with Alvin. It was sweet, after all those years away, but it wasn’t much of a life for a young man. I had to admit, wanderlust tugged at my heart. I started hearing about guys going west with Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps—outdoor work, adventure, travel—but I simply wasn’t going to leave my mother. Then, thanks again to FDR, I found a gig with the Works Project Administration, and got plenty of fresh air without ever leaving New York—building LaGuardia Airport, a WPA job that utilized the expert ditch digging skills I had acquired during the Great Potato Rebellion.

  Prosperity was slow to come back to the Bronx in the thirties, but our domestic troubles were nothing compared w
ith the news from Europe, which was downright terrifying. On Sundays, I started marching on Fifth Avenue with the American League Against War and Fascism. Like most Jewish boys who leaned left, I was itching to go to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, where, in addition to trench digging, I could use my potato lobbing skills. But again, I stayed close to my mama and supported my family. By the summer of 1938, we were paying our bills on time. In fact, Vivian was so well-fed her head swelled and she skipped a grade in school. A regular genius, said my mother, forgetting that was my domain. Alvin wasn’t so crazy about school, but he was making pretty good dough in the afternoons working for Uncle Seymour.

  When Vivian got accepted into nursing school, we had another celebratory supper, this time chicken over rice, a recipe I concocted myself. Harry tuned in the same swing station he’d found for our bonus bill party to put us in the mood, and Alvin and Vivian clattered around the kitchen again. But we couldn’t recapture the feeling.

  “I don’t have the energy I used to,” my mother said when I asked her to dance.

  She encouraged the four of us to go downstairs to the candy store for malteds, her treat, but I stayed with her, gave her a chair to put her feet on and made coffee.

  “If you’re so tired, maybe you should take time off work,” I said. “Relax, sleep late. Spend all morning reading the paper in bed.”

  She smiled. “That’s what you like,” she said. “Not me. I can’t lie in bed. But, now that you mention it, I am going to take some time off work.”

  “No kidding?” I said. I sat down and stirred two sugars into her coffee and two into mine and spooned a little cream off the top of the milk bottle into each cup.

  “So listen, Clyde, sweetheart. I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve got to go into the hospital for some tests, nothing serious.”

  “What? What tests?” I said.

  My mother held up her palms and shrugged comically. “You wanted I should have a rest.”

  I didn’t appreciate the act. “What tests?”

  “It’s nothing. Female stuff. Did you put sugar?”

  “I put sugar. You saw me put sugar. What female stuff?”

  “Vivian went with me to the doctor.”

  “She didn’t mention anything,” I said.

  My mother quietly picked crumbs from the table one by one, and brushed them from her fingertips into the saucer. She looked up at me. “A daughter deals with these things. And Vivian’s going to be a nurse. She’ll take care of me.” Mama leaned forward and swept back a lock of my hair falling into my eyes. “But you, Clyde. I’m counting on you to take care of everyone when I’m gone.”

  “What are you talking about gone?” I said.

  “In the hospital.”

  “Sure, I’ll look after everyone when you’re in the hospital.”

  “Such a mensch, my Clyde. But I wonder who’s going to take care of you?”

  “Don’t be silly.” I took a good long drag on my cigarette and blew smoke at the familiar black stove on its pudgy legs. “I’m twenty-one. I can take care of myself.”

  “What I wouldn’t give to be able to look after you always,” she said, “and make up for the past.”

  I very gently put out my cigarette so I could light it again later, then took her small hand in mine. My mother’s skin was soft somehow, as if she hadn’t washed a single dish or scrubbed a diaper in her life. “I never blamed you,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “You never did.”

  We were quiet. A chair scraped across the floor above us. A truck rumbled by in the street. I let go of her hand and stirred my coffee. I didn’t trust doctors. I figured they were always looking for business.

  “You’re my first-born. No one can ever take your place in my heart.” Her shoulders dropped and she settled deeper into her chair. I sensed her relief at finally having told me about the tests. “Those were happy days,” she said.

  “When?” I said. “What happy days?”

  “When you were a baby. When your father got back from the war. He was doing well as a garment salesman then, before the insurance job. Your father was a good-looking man, you know that, and he liked clothes. That’s where a lot of the money went. He always wanted me to dress you in the sailor suit he bought.”

  “My father bought me a sailor suit?”

  “Sure. You remember the picture on the Armory steps.” She smiled to herself.

  “That picture? I never thought about who bought me those clothes.”

  “He spoiled you, when he was home.”

  “Why did he leave us then?”

  She drew in a breath. I thought she was bracing herself, preparing to tell me the answer to the big mystery, but she just sighed. “I don’t know, Clyde.”

  At Mount Hebron Cemetery the men said kaddish and my aunts poked around in the weeds with their pointy-toed shoes looking for Gertie’s stone. My mother’s grave was supposed to be next to the baby’s, they said, but we couldn’t find the marker. Vivian got on her knees and clawed at the ground. She was crying, her nose was dripping, her fingernails ripping away the trumpet creepers, pulling up clods of clover until she found it: Gertrude Aronson, August 17, 1924–March 19, 1927. And so beside Gertie, my mother, as they say, was laid to rest.

  CHAPTER 47

  He was stoned. They jacked up the morphine. Uncle Harry, Darleen, Shep, and I were standing around his bed in the darkened hospital room. His voice was so weak he had to scribble notes on a legal pad. He handed the pad to Darleen. “I’m happy,” she read, a catch in her voice. “I’m so happy.”

  “Why are you happy?” I asked.

  “Because you’re all here,” he said.

  Just then Dr. Geest and Macomber the intern appeared in the doorway. No official business, they came to hang out.

  “Tell them about the trip,” my father said.

  “When Clyde gets better,” said Uncle Harry, “we’re driving across Australia—the whole continent—in my 1932 Buick. Original, not restored.”

  “Now listen,” my father said, his voice suddenly strong. “On September 3, 1987, the rest of you will wake up in the morning and you’ll open the New York Times and there you will see a photograph of the car with my brother Harry and me standing in front of it, and you, Macomber. You’ll be there as team doctor. The caption will read: ‘Transcontinental Australian Trip.’ Come closer. Joanna, make room for them. I’m King Arthur and you doctors are my knights of the round table,” he said. I made a space and Geest stood next to me. Surely he and Macomber had better things to do, but they stayed in the trippy room.

  “Love is what it’s all about,” my father said, losing volume again. “I’m experiencing love in inordinate proportions.” He had a request. I was summoned. He whispered into my ear. “Hum it. Please, do that for me. All of you.”

  Any other time, I might have balked. “He wants us to hum ‘Chariots of Fire,’” I said, with just a slight wince. I went back to my place next Geest, who put his arm around me and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. I was startled. He let go and I looked up at the surgeon and saw the muscles in his throat moving. He was humming. Uncle Harry and Darleen were humming. Macomber hummed and I hummed, and soon all of us were pounding out the notes to “Chariots of Fire,” running on the beach kicking up foam. My father led the choir tracing balletic loops in the air. His face was radiant.

  If during the nights he conducted the opera of his deathbed with grace and humor, during the days he was bitter and withdrawn. In the dreamy wee hours it was easy to be King Arthur, to create a world without end. In the harsh light of day, though, the ugly apparatus of defeat was all too visible—the gawky IV pole and plastic tubing, the machinery of the feed pump, the glare of winter through a crack in the curtains.

  I requested more morphine for the daytime. Why should he have to suffer, whether it was physical or mental? But he didn’t want to be out of it, he said. So the staff experimented with the dosage and found a midpoint where he was alert and relatively pain free, at least
for a few hours a day. Then we would talk, or just lie there quietly, each in our beds. I lit a cigarette and he smoked. Amazingly, the staff continued to allow it.

  This was my last chance to confront him. I knew one day the surreal hours would end. But I didn’t know what to say, or what I’d gain from revisiting the painful past. Would I feel better or worse if he acknowledged his reckless disregard for my well-being? It was all so touchy. Everything came down to sex. I sometimes thought of what happened with Nola and him and Johnny and me as incest by proxy. The notion came into my head unbidden and shocked me. The last taboo, even by proxy, touched a third rail. In the end, though, sex wasn’t the point. Sex was just the titillation that obscured the point. The point being I never went to my father for help because, as much as I hated to admit it, I was afraid of him.

  Brenda was right. He had me under his thumb. I couldn’t stand up to him. For years I thought I was fine, because I didn’t cut myself or shoplift or starve myself or get pregnant or shoot up dope or flunk out of school. Everything was OK because I managed on my own. I didn’t want to burden my parents, so I didn’t ask for anything and I got nothing. After the camping trip, the castle gate slammed shut and that was it for him. My mother was dealing with her own pain and rejection. So I decided what was happening with Johnny was all good, and my father and Nola in the woods was no big deal. No repercussions. Kids get over all kinds of shit. For years I believed that. But I was wrong. I never got over any of it.

  I didn’t flunk out of school, but I stopped trying. I cared about only one thing. Johnny coming into my room, my body thrumming with excitement. I would never know the eighteen rules of grammar or how to lay out a newspaper. I would never be a chess grandmaster or a great chef. I did not understand what other people seemed to grasp easily. My father had no expectations, except that I find a husband. He thought it was funny to put on the Yiddish accent and tell Susan and me to “find yourselves a guy, you shouldn’t be alone.” His career advice was “be a teacher like me when you grow up, you get summers off.” I figured I’d have to teach the lower grades. I wouldn’t be smart enough to teach high school. When I tried to think of what I was good at, all I could come up with was one suspended moment in time when I excelled. It happened at sleep-away camp the summer I was thirteen. The camp put on a cabaret at the end of the season, and since I wasn’t good at singing or dancing, I was assigned, along with some other talentless campers, to make the place cards we called Cab cards to go on the banquet table. I got to work drawing a caricature of a every girl in our bunk along with a poem for each card, and the cartoons and words came out of my pen with such ease I felt I had been put under a spell. I was able to capture a likeness with a few strokes, and I instantly made up clever, telling rhymes. The other girls working on the cards abandoned what they were doing and just watched, although I hardly noticed, I was so absorbed. There was no gap that day between what I imagined and what I got down on paper. It was pure joy. Ever since, when considering what I might do with my life, I’ve thought, well, I can make Cab cards. But of course, it was a joke. No Cab card makers were listed in the help wanted ads. My father must have seen that I was lost, unable to develop, let alone claim a place in the world, but he provided no direction. On the rare occasions when I asked for guidance he offered the usual refrain: “I didn’t have a father to help me.”