The Orphan's Daughter

by Jan Cherubin

  “Yeah, it’s a catastrophe all right,” my mother said. “But let’s not equate it with the Holocaust.”

  “You guys were much better on paper, that’s all.”

  “It’s funny,” my mother said, “we were probably never closer, I mean soul-to-soul, than we were during the three years we were apart.”

  London

  1 May 1945

  My own darling sweetheart,

  I am not overcome with a great feeling of optimism at the outcome of the war. But we shall have accomplished certain things. We shall have turned back the “wave of the future,” which almost engulfed us and carried us back to a darker age. The material creations of modern man can indeed become a Frankenstein and destroy its creator. Witness the robot bomb, the rocket shell that rises 60 miles in the air and comes down without being seen or heard to destroy whole communities, or the scientific elimination of peoples by means of the gas chamber and incinerator. Truly we have beaten down a monster, a dark, degenerate foulness which lies buried in all people, in us no less than in those fascist beasts who brought it to the surface in their own people. With passionate emotion I can wish the death of all Germans, but with cold reason I can see that this is not the solution. To simplify it, I should say that when all the world is made to enjoy the 4 freedoms we shall finally be done with war. But the world is not ready to accept world peace.

  Meanwhile, darling, my thoughts turn to you and our future together, although I’m beginning to feel like we’re Tchaikovsky and Madame Von Meck. They were strictly pen pals, you know, never getting together in the flesh. It was the same for George Bernard Shaw and the actress Ellen Terry, mocked because their affair was all on paper. Until you’re in my arms again, I’ll think of Shaw’s retort: “Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge and abiding love.”

  Love always,

  Clyde

  “Too bad you didn’t know your father then, Joanna. He . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was reading to herself.

  I would have liked knowing the twenty-something who imagined himself as Tchaikovsky, who wanted to achieve glory, truth, and beauty, who had the potential to be a great father. We failed each other, all of us, me just for being born. Less than a year after he returned from the war my mother left him for eight months. He was devastated. He seemed to have chosen my mother for how easily she was able to hurt him. It was many years later when she left for good, but even then she stayed entangled in his life, much like his own mother who left him not once, and not forever, but again and again.

  Among the letters she tossed on the coffee table, a rare artifact—a single sheet from her to him that slipped from the pages of a longer letter and refused to be lost, as all of her other letters were lost. My mother never had a chance to find out who she was. He plucked her at sixteen, before she was fully formed, and she was robbed of childhood, as he was robbed, as I was, each in our own way. Only Susan remained unscathed.

  1837 North Avenue

  Baltimore, Maryland

  November 9, 1945

  My darling Clyde,

  What do I want now that the war is over? That’s quite a question, Aronson. But I’ll try to answer it. Besides wanting you, and I suppose children at some point, I want to give something to the world. And for having given, I want to belong to it.

  Always and forever,

  Evie

  “How can you blame me after everything that’s happened? Isn’t that what I heard?” my mother said. “You blame me for this catastrophe?”

  “In part. You always play the innocent.”

  “That’s not true. I take responsibility for a lot.”

  “You just proved my point.”

  “Don’t take your anger at Brenda out on me,” my mother said.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, we have to stick together. But when I look back sometimes I can’t believe how oblivious you were.”

  “I’m not oblivious. Don’t insult me. You’re just upset, so you’re giving me a hard time.”

  “Right. You’re not oblivious. So how could you let him do that to me?”

  “Let who? What?”

  “Johnny. Let Johnny.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “God, Ma, I was thirteen, fourteen.”

  “Jesus, you weren’t that young.”

  “Yes I was.”

  “Out of nowhere, you’re bringing this up?”

  “Not out of nowhere. Not for me it isn’t.”

  “You really want to talk about this now?”

  “How could you?”

  “I told you,” my mother said. “I didn’t know it was happening.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  Inside the house it was the same. A portrait of the four of us still hanging on the wall. The same sofa by the window where I lay with the curtains open when Johnny delicately took off my glasses and kissed my eyelids, my hair. I could hear the melody of children’s voices in the street. He must have heard it, too. I thought I was lucky to be taught so gently by an older man. I didn’t have to deal with pimply boys groping blindly. And I was lucky, in that way. I didn’t know mine was an old story. I thought lying there with my tanned knees apart granted me access to the world of boys and men, but the opposite was true. I should have been outside playing, laughing and calling to my friends, joining the concord of their voices. I hadn’t read Nabokov’s Lolita yet, but I felt myself slipping under, losing something irrevocable, vaguely conscious that “the hopelessly poignant thing was the absence of my voice from that concord.”

  My mother folded up the open letters and put them back into their envelopes, and then put them in order according to the postmarked dates. “I’ll give Brenda the money if you want me to,” she said. “I know how much the stuff in the house means to you.”

  “No. I don’t want you to. That’s extortion. I’m not caving in to her blackmail just because he did.” My big, important father turned out to be as weak as those pathetic fathers in fairy tales—powerless to protect their children from the wicked stepmother. I was his Emile Zola, he said, his champion, but he was unable to be mine.

  “If I keep the money, how will you get his books and papers?” my mother said.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to get my stuff somehow, you better believe it.”

  “You know Joanna, if we don’t turn over the check to Brenda, or at least half of it, you’ll be breaking the promise you made to your father.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I have no problem breaking the promise,” I said. “Just don’t think I’m doing it on your behalf. I’m not. I’m going to break the promise I made to my father because he was wrong to ask for it.”

  CHAPTER 53

  There was no point staying in Baltimore. Brenda and I were at a standoff. The executor told both of us his hands were tied. So I went back to California, presumably to look for work since I’d given up the copy editor job to take care of my father. When I got to LA, though, I found out that I didn’t know what sort of work I wanted to do anymore. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I kept seeing a garbage truck on a slow rumble down Cedar Drive, Brenda waiting at the curb with an armload of cap guns and Shirley Temple dolls. I was stuck. I couldn’t move forward, it seemed, until I got the chance to sort through the past. I tried to think of a way out of my predicament—or really, a way inside was what I needed—but I came up with nothing. Instead I started drinking wine out of a beer mug. I paced the patio in frustration wishing I smoked. Then one day while watering the lemon tree, I had a brilliant idea. “Fred!” I called into the den. He was watching a Yankees game. “I’ll write her a check,” I said.

  He put the TV on mute. “You’re going to give Brenda the money?”

  “I’ll go see her and give her the whole $20,000. I’ll just hand it over, and she’ll hand over my stuff and I’ll drive away with everything in the car, straight to the bank, where I’ll stop payment on the check.”

  Fre
d laughed. “You’re a genius, Jo. Ever heard of check fraud? Ask your uncles. I’m sure Harry and Alvin can show you how to kite a check.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said. “But this is the first time I ever realized how handy a thing like that could be.”

  I crossed fraud off my list, and since I still wasn’t giving in to Brenda’s blackmail, there was nothing left except to find a good lawyer of my own. I called Anne Brighton, someone I knew from college who practiced law in Maryland. The most obvious action, Anne Brighton said, was to make a claim against the estate, but since my father’s will clearly stated Brenda got the house and “all its contents” that path wasn’t viable for me. Instead, I could file a replevin suit, which was an action that claimed the right to have personal property returned from the possession of someone with less right to hold it than the plaintiff. It was an old term dating back to the thirteenth century. I liked the sound of it. I’d have the chance to stand up for myself in court. But again, Anne said those suits were hard to win.

  “So possession really is nine-tenths of the law? It isn’t just a schoolyard taunt?” I said.

  “Correct,” said Anne. “But even more dicey is the fact that filing a replevin suit is a tip-off. Right now, your stepmother is hanging onto the stuff to use as a bargaining chip. She wants the money, right? As soon as she hears about a viable lawsuit, though, and the possibility of a judge ordering her to hand over certain items with no compensation, there’s nothing to keep her from throwing away the things you want.”

  Brenda would do it, too. The replevin suit could mean losing everything and cutting off all other avenues of recourse. A replevin suit had to be a last resort. I asked Anne if there were other options to try first. She said it depended on what I wanted. “What’s your goal?” she asked.

  My goal. What did I want? The manuscript, most of all. Ye Olde Picture Booke. His letters, his poetry, my drawings, the rose quartz giraffe from Aunt Adele. And something harder to name—the things I didn’t know existed, the things I wasn’t even looking for. I wouldn’t have said this to literal-minded Anne Brighton, but my goal, when I really thought about it, was to steal back my childhood, so I could have it and then be able to move on. “I have to get into the house,” I said.

  “OK then. Here’s an option where you wouldn’t risk losing property,” Anne said, “because unlike the replevin suit, this remedy doesn’t announce itself. It involves a different kind of risk, though. Rather than risking your belongings, you’d be putting yourself in jeopardy.”

  I was on the portable phone looking out the window at the solitary mop top of a palm tree way up in the blue, blue Venice sky, listing in the breeze. I’d made a surprising discovery when my father was sick. I’d always thought of myself as fearful, end of story. But I learned I could be brave. A skateboard clacked over the sidewalk joints somewhere down the street. “That’s all right, Anne,” I said. “I’ll put myself in jeopardy. Just tell me what the remedy is.”

  “I’m talking about self-help,” Anne said. “You help yourself to what you want.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I break in.” The palm tree swayed, and the skater came into view, his wheels clicking and grinding. It was the kid next door. He balanced his weight on one end of the board and the other end flipped up.

  “Break in?” Anne said, all innocence. “Well, no. I wouldn’t tell you to break the law. But maybe you know of a time when the maid, I mean, the house cleaner is there?”

  “I don’t think Brenda has a house cleaner.”

  “Well then, someone who comes over regularly, who could let you in?”

  “I don’t know of anyone who comes over regularly. Not anymore.”

  “There must be someone. Think about it.”

  I hung up and went to tell Fred.

  “Who is she, this Anne Brighton?” he said.

  “Friend from college.”

  “And this friend from college who you’ve never even mentioned before, she’s suggesting you do what?”

  “I steal.”

  For the next several days, I spitballed ways of getting into the house—I’d disguise myself as a Mary Kay lady or a dogwalker or the Fuller Brush man. I tried to think of somebody, anybody, who might visit Brenda and allow me to tag along. Then my mother remembered Darleen’s husband Travis did yard work for Brenda. He trimmed the hedges, my mother said, and also did some handyman stuff and so he had access to the inside of the house. “The handyman stuff Daddy used to do,” my mother said. We were both quiet for a moment thinking of him.

  Travis seemed like a great idea until I considered exactly what I’d be asking. He had an arrangement with Brenda based on trust. I thought it over. I had no problem betraying Brenda. I could even betray my dead father and break the promise I made to him. But I didn’t feel right asking Travis to betray Brenda. Shedding my good girl role was a tricky process. There ought to have been a simple con I could live with, but I was stuck. I couldn’t come up with a seamless way of getting past Brenda. I kept remembering how she threw herself between me and the door, how undeterred she seemed at the prospect of violence. I was seething over the injustice of it all, my belongings held hostage after everything I’d done for my father. I couldn’t let Brenda throw away the manuscript! It was the story of his childhood. I never wanted anything so badly, and yet at every turn I hit a brick wall.

  What was my goal? Anne Brighton asked. How much easier that question had to be for her—at the top of her class in law school, hired by a big DC firm, handed a fat paycheck and respect along with it. I bet Anne was motivated in school by something other than sex. From Johnny onward, I cared about nothing else. In high school, college, and later in New York, sex was all I was interested in. I had no ambition because anything I was good at (cartoons and amusing stories) had no value. There were so many guys, I lost count, the only goal to conquer this one or that. I got tired of it, eventually. I got so tired I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to. My mother’s apartment with Marty wandering around in his shorty bathrobe was not home. Cedar Drive with Darleen, and later Brenda, was not home. Then I met Fred, and Fred was home.

  What was my goal? Did I have to grow up and move away from home, away from Fred, in order to fulfill my promise? In order to conquer my fears? Fred was so gentle and soft-spoken, I didn’t realize how he subverted what little ambition I had. I should have taken the GQ assignment, obviously. How many other opportunities had I missed, trusting Fred’s advice over the years? I’d have to figure out my next step. Could I stay with him and still change my life? I’d have to consult with the bold seven-year-old who crossed the tarmac at Friendship Airport with clear eyes, ready to take her place in the world of boys and men, of composers and chess players, of doers, actors, creators. Too bad that seven-year-old girl grew up only to let others steal the spotlight. No more, I thought. I refused to be held back any longer by anyone else’s agenda or limitations.

  The wind picked up and the skinny palm tree seemed like it might snap in half. Instead, it bowed in a graceful arc, remarkably resilient. I was a throwaway person, my father said. I shrugged off my own importance. A throwaway person who was nevertheless intent on Brenda not throwing anything away.

  One day, the brick wall I kept ramming my head against started to buckle. It turned out all I had needed was a deadline. It came in the form of a letter from from the executor warning about the six-month statute of limitations for claims made against the estate of Clyde Aronson. Time was running out. “Please understand that I do not wish to encourage litigation,” the executor wrote. “But I wanted you to be aware of this issue of limitations.” If I wanted to take legal action against the estate, I should know that August 16, 1987, was the last date I could file. If I tried self-help and failed, I wanted the option of filing a replevin suit. Which meant I had to try and help myself before August 16th. No more Hamlet-like paralysis. I was going to act without worrying about any promises except those I made to myself. I never got the chance to lock Brenda out of the
house. Now I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her lock me out. And since Brenda didn’t have a house cleaner I could barge in on, that meant I’d have to break and enter.

  The legal deadline was motivation to make a timetable, and the simple act of purchasing a plane ticket set the wheels in motion, turning thought into deed. Fred had a script in production so I had to find some other accomplice, preferably someone bigger and stronger than me, which meant almost anybody. Liz Stone suggested this kid we knew in elementary school, Barry Lerner. I had no idea she was in touch with Barry. “We had a thing a couple of years ago,” Liz said. “No big deal. The point is Barry’s a drug dealer. He has a gun.” Are you nuts? I said. But soon I was taken with the gun idea—as a deterrent, of course. I could see Brenda walking in and physically threatening me. Barry Lerner the drug dealer would point his gun at Brenda and she’d have to back off. It was a sign of how obsessed I was, that I thought a gun was a good idea. Fred said I was out of my mind.

  “The only way this is going to get done is if I’m out of my mind,” I said.

  “Fine, OK, but stay away from this creep Barry Lerner, whoever he is,” said Fred.

  “Don’t worry, I never slept with the guy. Liz did, though.”

  “No guns, Joanna.”

  Who was Fred to tell me what to do? But he was right about the gun. So I came up with an alternative. Shep Levine. He’d seen how awful Brenda was firsthand. He was perfect—middle-aged and responsible, but with a sense of adventure. He didn’t hesitate. “Just tell me when,” said Shep.

  I started getting excited. I felt happy for the first time since my father died. I was manic. The more I thought about self-help the more it seemed like the most important thing I would ever do. I was going to break into the house I grew up in and kidnap myself. I was going to break down the castle gate and get back homeward. I sang out: She came in through the bathroom window, protected by a silver spoon. Well, no silver spoon for me. And I couldn’t count on Brenda leaving the windows unlocked, could I? So I’d have to bring tools. I’d have to get a crowbar somewhere. I could buy one at the hardware store probably, or some place like K-Mart. You didn’t need a permit for a crowbar, as far as I knew. I decided not to mention the crowbar to Fred. I lay awake worrying about it. What if I was caught with a crowbar? Or the K-Mart receipt? What if Shep was caught with a crowbar? I decided I would have to call Darleen’s husband Travis after all. I wasn’t going to ask Travis to take stuff out of the house or to be on the premises when I made the score. But maybe after repairing something for Brenda, he could forget to lock the door behind him.