An Orphan's Tale Read online

  An Orphan’s Tale

  Jay Neugeboren

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1976 by Jay Neugeboren

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  A section of this book was first published, in slightly different form, in Moment magazine.

  The author is grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for a fellowship given to him while he was writing this novel.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-39-5

  eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  for Peter Spackman and Donald Hutter

  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes.

  —DEUTERONOMY. VI. 5–9

  What have I in common with the Jews, when I have scarcely anything in common with myself….

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  I

  The Home

  One

  Every year, just before the World Series began, Sol would leave his apartment in Brooklyn and go around the country by train to visit his old boys. He would arrange his trip so that he would arrive in Los Angeles in time for the Rose Bowl, and Charlie remembered, when he had been a boy at the Home, how he and Murray had followed the cross-country trip by tacking the postcards Sol sent them to a large wall map of the United States.

  But where was Sol now? For two days and nights, using the list of names and telephone numbers Murray had given him, Charlie had been unable to find a trace of him. His failure only intensified his desire to go through with his plan—to buy the house for the two of them—but what he feared was that, just when he would get in touch with Sol and present the idea to him, the house would be sold out from under him.

  In Mr. Plaut’s jewelry store Charlie telephoned again, charging the long-distance call to his office phone, and when a woman answered, he explained that he had been trying to reach her husband for two days, that he had been given their number by Murray Mendelsohn, that he was trying to get in touch with Sol, and that—like her husband—he too had grown up in the Home. She replied that they had returned late the night before from a family camping trip to the Grand Tetons and that she knew nothing of Sol’s whereabouts. He had not stayed with them for at least five years. She was certain, though, that her husband would want to reminisce with Charlie about Sol. Could she have his number?

  “Forget it,” Charlie said, and hung up.

  He stood in front of the store window, his back to the jeweler, watching the children play inside the schoolyard across the street. He wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t discover Sol’s whereabouts. In fact, he knew that his instinct about buying the small house had been connected somehow to his instinct about Sol’s trips—to his sense that, except for Murray and one or two others, there were fewer and fewer boys who would take him in.

  If he couldn’t find Sol, he knew he would have to let the house go. He didn’t want a whole house for himself. Who would take care of it? He looked across the street at the children and he tried to see himself as he was when he had been a boy, but he couldn’t. He never could. He could see the faces of the others—Murray and Slats and Morty and Irving and Herman and Louie and Jerry and Stan—but he could never see his own, not even when he imagined photographs of himself. He saw Sol’s face instead, and Sol was smiling at him. Sol was younger and wore a soft tan-and-gray-checked, tailor-made suit; he was standing in the courtyard of the Home waiting to take Charlie out for the day with some of the others. They were going to a restaurant and a Dodger game at Ebbets Field. Sol knew the reporters, the owners of the restaurants, the players….

  He had been Sol’s favorite, though. He knew that. When he had told Murray about his idea, Murray had told him he was nuts, but Charlie tried not to care about what Murray said. Why shouldn’t he and Sol live together if they wanted to? Charlie had thought of explaining his reasons to Murray—of trying to make him see that he wanted to do it not in order to pay Sol back, but because, simply, when he had come to the small two-bedroom house in the middle of the night, he had seen himself and Sol living in it together and enjoying it.

  But how would Murray ever understand a thing like that? Murray always wanted reasons for things, and while Charlie could name the things he and Sol shared, what made him want to do it was, quite simply, that it was the kind of thing people told you you couldn’t do. It was the kind of thing Murray called impossible.

  I have dreams and needs too, Charlie thought, and he smiled, remembering the astonishment in Murray’s eyes when he had used the same words in Murray’s study two nights before. He checked his list, tried another number, but received no answer.

  In the schoolyard the children were all packed to one side now, their faces pressed against the wire fence. They jeered and shouted as a group of boys walked past them along the sidewalk, struggling with an enormous king-size mattress. They carried it over their heads, their necks and backs bent, one boy at each corner, one fat boy in the middle where it sagged. A tall boy walked ahead of them carrying a long stick with nails in it, and he shook it at the children inside the schoolyard. They screeched back in Spanish.

  Charlie turned to Mr. Plaut. “But listen,” he said, “I was remembering just before when Murray held me by the ankles once, upside down into a sewer—that was down the street from the Home where they used to have a firehouse. You still live near there, right? I don’t know what’s there now. I haven’t been back for years.”

  “Empty lots.”

  Charlie laughed. “I get pictures like that in my head sometimes, of myself as a boy, but do you know what?” he said. “I can never see my own face.” He walked to the back of the store and sat down next to Mr. Plaut. Short and thin, with a smooth round head, Mr. Plaut worked a pair of silver tweezers inside the back of a small gold watch. His white shirt billowed lightly around his arms and shoulders. “I remember that Murray was holding me that way so I could get a hardball that had fallen in. I can see the sewer cover, the hole, the ball, even Murray’s hands on my ankles—but I can’t see my own face, or what it looked like down in there. Maybe it’s because it was so dark. Tell me what you think.”

  “I think it’s the first Monday of the month and you want your envelope, yes?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said. “But you can tell me what you think also.”

  Mr. Plaut removed the magnifying lens from his left eye and handed Charlie an envelope. “What do I think?” he said. “I think you’re a good boy and that you should have a nicer job than working for Max Mittleman. I’ve told you before.”

  Charlie laughed again, easily, and patted Mr. Plaut on the back. “Don’t worry about me, all right?” he said, standing. “I have a plan. This isn’t forever.”

  They stood at the front door. “Max and I used to be good friends,” Mr. Plaut said. “He was very good to me when I first came to America from Antwerp….”

  “I know the s
tory by heart,” Charlie said, and he stepped from the store onto the sidewalk.

  Mr. Plaut had one hand cupped over his right ear, as if to protect himself from street noise. His bald head was freckled with sunspots. He held on to Charlie’s wrist with his small soft fingers, but said nothing. Charlie told him that he’d tell him more about his plan the next time he saw him, if things worked out, and Mr. Plaut released him.

  Charlie crossed the street and walked beside the empty schoolyard, running his fingers along the cold metal fencing. He looked up and, squinting, saw a Puerto Rican boy and girl sitting on the edge of the roof, kissing. A second boy—waiting his turn, Charlie imagined—sat several feet away from them, his feet dangling over the edge of the four-story building. He was tossing stones down into the schoolyard.

  In the street, despite his irritation at not being able to reach Sol, Charlie felt good. The truth, which he didn’t ask Mr. Plaut or anyone else to believe, was that he enjoyed his work. He enjoyed being away from Mittleman and the office; he enjoyed being in the city and walking in the old neighborhood; he enjoyed the pictures and sounds that would fill his head when he went on his rounds; and—most of all-he enjoyed handling the money.

  He touched his inside jacket pocket, where the envelopes bulged. Behind him, a young boy with straight sandy-colored hair was staring into Mr. Plaut’s window. Charlie wondered where the boys with the mattress were. At the corner, in front of the BMT subway entrance, he pictured them trying to bend and fold it so they could lug it down the steps and through the turnstile.

  He walked along the street, going from store to store, and then from apartment building to apartment building, and the boy followed him, a half-block behind. Charlie didn’t look back.

  In the apartments of building superintendents he tried numbers from Murray’s list, but without success. He called Mr. Mittleman at the office in New Jersey, and Mr. Mittleman told him that the house had not yet been sold. Mr. Mittleman didn’t ask him why he wanted the house for himself. Charlie imagined that he thought it was purely for the bargain. It wasn’t too often that you could take over somebody’s mortgage at such a low rate. But the guy needed the cash and Charlie had it.

  “I’d get up in the middle of the night to take a listing,” Charlie had said to Mr. Mittleman.

  “It is the middle of the night,” Mr. Mittleman had replied.

  Charlie sat in the basement apartment, listening to the 70-year-old superintendent tell him about his 91-year-old mother, who lived with him. For the first time in years, she had not been sitting on the stoop when Charlie had come to the building. “The sun’s no good for her eyes,” the superintendent said. “She got big cataracts and got to stay in the dark now.”

  “I’m thinking of buying a small house for myself,” Charlie said.

  The superintendent circled horses’ names in The Morning Telegraph and, in his head, Charlie saw the other guy, in New Jersey, pacing the small living room, one cigarette in his mouth, one between his fingers. The man was exceptionally small and wiry, like a jockey, and when he wasn’t smoking or talking, he ground his teeth against one another and cracked his knuckles. Charlie had seen his chance at once and had explained to him how long, given the high interest rates, he might have to wait for a buyer. And then—especially if it was FHA or GI—how much longer he might have to wait until the buyer could get a new mortgage approved.

  The man said he’d paid twenty-four thousand for the house and was asking forty. He had bought it six years before at 6% percent interest. Charlie said that he might be able to offer to buy the house himself in a day or so—he could give him the difference in cash and take over the mortgage. They could close the deal within a week. The man said he’d take thirty-eight—he needed fourteen in cash—and Charlie said he’d let him know within a day. But he had been unable to get the guy to give him an exclusive listing, and, short of buying the house outright before he’d spoken with Sol, he had no way of keeping Mittleman—or some other realtor—from finding a customer.

  He was confident that Sol would like the idea, but he couldn’t take the chance alone. He didn’t want to tie up that much cash—and the monthly payments—in a house. It wasn’t the kind of investment he believed in. He heard Mr. Mittleman’s voice, telling him that property ate three meals a day: principal for breakfast, interest for lunch, and taxes for supper.

  He finished his rounds by early afternoon and walked back to his car, which he’d parked behind the school. He drew fresh air in through his nostrils. His pockets were full. He got into his car, and, driving toward the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, he thought of his money, expanding endlessly, and he wondered how much Sol had left.

  Mrs. Mittleman had packed a corned beef sandwich for him, and Charlie ate it as he drove, to save time. He smiled, thinking of the loaves of unbaked bread in the bakery at the Home. When he thought of his money he always thought of those loaves—he saw the pale oblongs of dough rising under damp cloths near the ovens. He remembered how much, as a boy, he’d looked forward to being on night shift—had even volunteered for it—just so he could have the chance to lift the corners of the cloths every half-hour and see the difference. His money grew that way.

  He smiled, remembering once again the time, almost twenty-five years ago, when he and Irving, working the night shift, had plotted their famous adventure. It had taken them nearly two months just to save enough money from their weekly allowance of twenty cents—they had forgone snacks in the nearby luncheonette—to buy a bottle of cheap wine for the baker. Irving had been the salesman, convincing the old man that they were skilled enough to do the work by themselves and that when it was all done the director himself would praise him for having taken the initiative in designating responsibility.

  While the old man had been drinking and sleeping on a stool behind the ovens, Charlie and Irving had twisted and carved the dough into the shapes of penises and vaginas and breasts and they had watched all night long—peeking under the cloths and into the ovens—as their creations swelled to magical proportions. When the breads were done, they had packed them into baskets and had delivered the baskets to the dining room tables, covering them with cloth napkins. Then, too excited to return to the dormitory for their usual two-hour nap before reveille sounded, they had waited on a bench, side by side, saying nothing.

  When the three hundred boys tumbled into the dining room for breakfast that morning and discovered the breads, the place had gone wild. Charlie could still see Irving, standing on a table in the middle of the room and biting off huge chunks of bread as the others cheered him on. He saw Jerry and Herman leading a parade of bread-eaters across the tabletops—loaves in hands, like scepters—chanting: “Some like it hot… Some like it cold… Some like it in their mouths nine days old!”

  By the time the director and the counselors arrived, the boys had divided themselves into two camps and, with tables turned on their sides for barricades, they were flinging chunks of bread and pitchers of milk and juice across the room at each other. He and Irving had been banned from all evening activities for three months, he recalled, and their allowances had been docked for six months, but neither of them had ever really minded.

  It was a story, Murray announced at the time, that would probably be passed down in the Home from one generation of boys to the next. He’d been right about that, and Charlie already had the item on his list: tell Murray about KC + 2; three of the guys he’d telephoned—including one in Kansas City he’d never met—had wanted to talk about it on the phone during the past two nights.

  When Sol first heard the story, Charlie recalled, he’d agreed with Murray, but he had refused to intervene and ask the director to lift the punishments. “Character,” he said then—and in his head Charlie saw Sol wink at him—“develops from loyalty to a cause. That’s what your Uncle Sol believes.”

  *

  MONDAY

  Today I saw him. I recognized him from his pictures and I was glad he wasn’t looking my way when I realized who he was b
ecause I must have been gaping. His hair is still black and curly and it crawls down the back of his neck and into his collar. I thought of Samson and how he went blind and I smiled.

  This is what I thought: Now that I see him before me I know that everything will be all right and that I’ll be able to get out of here.

  Once he turned and smiled at me and when he did I stared into a store window and I don’t think he was really paying any special attention to me. I think he likes to smile at everybody.

  When I first awoke this morning before the others I had the feeling that something would happen today that would change my life. I dressed quietly, checked the lock on my locker and I didn’t put my shoes on until I was outside the dormitory. I went to the neighborhood where I lived until I was 7. I always go there when I want things to happen.

  But what made him come on the same day?

  A question: If I had the same feeling last week and had come then, would I have met him today or would he have been there last week also?

  He looks the same as in his pictures, only older. He’s 20 years older than when he left. When I came back I looked at his pictures on the walls. There are more pictures of him than of anybody else.

  This is what I’ll do tomorrow: Leave before breakfast again and try to see him before the stores open. But if it rains I’ll stay here and rest and read and memorize things.

  What will he do when I tell him where I come from? How will he look at me?

  I know he’ll be surprised at how much I know about him. When he walks on the street people turn to notice him. I had to hurry just to keep up with him and while he was inside stores and houses and I was outside waiting, this is what I thought about: Can anyone ever really know what goes on inside another person? If you talked to somebody you loved forever and he talked back to you forever, would you ever be able to tell one another everything you thought and felt, or would each new thing you told and heard change what you were up to that point so you could never finish?