An Orphan's Tale (26 page)

After lunch he drove to the Grand Army Plaza library. Danny had once told him how much he'd liked the place. Charlie had not been there since he had visited it with a class from the Home, over twenty years before. He walked inside and felt, in the immense hollow of the lobby, comforted. The large squares of wood paneling, which rose on top of one another to the full height of the building—perhaps one hundred and twenty feet—seemed warm and inviting. Maybe, he thought, after my fortieth birthday I'll move back to Brooklyn, to this neighborhood.

He walked from room to room but did not find Danny. He sat in the reference room for a while and enjoyed the quiet. Three old men were reading newspapers and passing them around to one another. He dozed briefly, and when he awoke the men were still there and he realized suddenly that he could, in fact, find pictures of himself as a boy without having to return to the Federation office.

He took his coat off and sat at a desk for over an hour, looking through 20- and 25-year-old copies of
The Brooklyn Eagle
. A woman brought the large yearly volumes to him, one at a time. He saw photos of himself in uniform, playing football and baseball and basketball. He saw his name in artides and in scoring columns and in lineups of All-Star and All-City teams. He was amazed, from the pictures, at how little he had changed. He had lost no hair, he had put on almost no weight, and only his mouth and chin looked a trifle older. But even there, the yellowish quality of the paper and the darkness of the photos made him seem slightly more tired than he had actually been at the time.

He looked up often, hoping to see Danny, so that he could show him the articles about himself—about how good he had once been, how important to the life of the Home. The others had all changed so much in comparison to himself. They had all aged so quickly! He wished he could bring them down sometime, in a group, to look through the papers together.

When he decided to stop he realized for the first time that he had had no trouble reading any of the newspaper columns. He put his fingertips against his wrist, looked at a wall clock, and counted twenty-seven beats in fifteen seconds.

He left the library but did not go to his car. Instead he walked along Eastern Parkway and went down into the subway. He wanted to go downtown, to one of his banks, and he knew how bad the parking situation there would be. He only had to ride three stops.

In the subway, he wondered why, really, he wanted to look at the newspapers with the other guys. They would only try to relive their youth as if those days and games had been the high points of their lives. What Charlie thought he wanted to do was something different—to show them how far they'd come—to make them feel how they'd grown and changed.

Murray would have disputed him; he would have shown Charlie other reasons for his pleasure. He would have talked about Charlie's need, always, to be in the center of things and in control. He would have said that Charlie had gone to the library and looked through the papers because he'd been feeling low and had wanted to raise his self-image by summoning up a time in which he'd been like a king, with others worshiping him. The desire, then, to take everybody back with him to that time would have become, in Mur ray's theory, Charlie's act of aggression—the proof of his resentment at the actual progress others had made, while Charlie really felt, deep down, that he had made none. Unmarried, without a son, and without—oh how Murray would have loved to go into the meaning of that part of it!—the visible signs of aging, Charlie really doubted everything about his life, especially those things others envied in him.

Charlie heard the questions Murray would have asked: Why can't you simply enjoy one of your experiences by yourself? Why the compulsion to bring the rest of us in always? Do you feel incomplete without us? Do you believe you're responsible for us not still living together? And Murray would have finished with the question he always asked—Why must you feel guilty toward us? But Charlie realized that he now had an answer which would have left Murray speechless—Because it was my block that killed you.

He shook his head and told himself he was crazy, imagining a dialogue like that. It only led—he laughed to himself at the words—to a dead end. The train stopped, and over the public address system the conductor announced that there would be a delay of a few minutes. Through the dusty windows Charlie saw that another train was stopped parallel to the one he was in, and in it, two Puerto Rican boys were dancing. One of the boys did a running cartwheel and a split. A third boy—not Puerto Rican—walked around with a beret in his palm, trying to collect money. The boys moved to the next car, out of sight, and Charlie wondered if they had parents, and if not, where they stayed at night when winter came.

When the other train seemed to be moving away from Charlie, backward, he knew it was his train that was moving forward. He got out at Nevins Street, went to his bank, opened his safe-deposit box, and removed several long-term savings certificates. From his safe-deposit box he took a mint Lifesaver, sucked on it, and smiled, imagining Danny with him, discovering that he kept a roll of Lifesavers there.

He took the certificates to a bank officer and told him that he wanted to transform them so that the account, to a total of $25,000, would be a joint one, payable in the event of death to either survivor. Charlie's name would remain as one of the owners. The man checked through forms and asked for the name and address of the co-depositor. “Daniel Ginsberg,” Charlie said. “Same address as me.”

But Charlie could not give the man the other information about Danny, and he took two cards for Danny to fill out and sign. The bank was already closed, so that a guard unlocked the front door to let Charlie out. Charlie stared at the man's gun. In the street he looked both ways, expecting, for a moment, to see Sol. Would Sol have congratulated him?

There had been a time—before he'd gone to work with Mittleman—when he had often daydreamed about the reading of Sol's last will and testament. He had wondered if Sol had left his money directly to the Home, or whether he had named individual boys. Charlie had once believed—if Sol had left him enough money—that he would have taken up Sol's work, spending his life traveling around the country and visiting his boys. He had imagined himself taking an interest in the boys still in the Home, and he had seen himself discovering a great young athlete and training him to break all of his own records.

Charlie saw that the car window was shattered, and he wasn't surprised. Without Danny, he said to himself, his luck was gone.

He opened the glove compartment and saw that the
tsumin
box had been taken. He drove off. If they didn't melt it down, the police would be able to trace it easily enough, it was such an unusual item, but how would he explain having had it in his car? And what if Anita notified the New Jersey police and they sent a routine inquiry over the bridge? Charlie knew of several shops that specialized in Jewish ritual items, and one—on Mott Street—that dealt especially in silver and antiques.

He met with the man from the city and listened to him talk about timetables on the factory construction. When the man asked him where his boy was, Charlie thought,
Maybe it's Danny who's following me! Maybe he took the box
.

He walked around the neighborhood in which he'd been born and thought again how amazing it was—each store and building in the city was actually owned by somebody, and once a month each tenant had to pay rent to the owner. He had once thought that apartment building owners were the kings in real estate, but Max had taught him otherwise. Max rarely bought an old apartment house, unless it could be knocked down and a new one built. Land might increase in value, but there was no depreciation on land.

In their declining years, Max had taught him, apartment houses were dumps of garbage: depreciation was nil, potential for proceeds of sale low, everything in need of repair and replacement. Cash flow was high and disappeared into maintenance.

Charlie came to the building in which he'd been born, an aged red-brick structure six stories high, with fire escapes on the street side. He did not know which rooms inside the building had belonged to his mother and father. He knew none of the tenants in the building.

He drove to Ocean Parkway, to Irving's building. A moving van was parked in front. Inside the building the elevator door was open and the elevator itself was submerged halfway below floor level. Two men stood on top of the elevator cab, steadying an enormous purple couch on its end. They worked the elevator by its pulleys.

He sat in Irving's living room and told him the truth about his search for Danny, about the Home being closed, about the policeman, and about Danny's name not being listed in the records of the Home. Irving assured Charlie that he had in fact seen Danny—at the game, at the funeral, and at Anita's house. “He was strange, I thought,” Irving said. “He made me uncomfortable, and I usually like bright kids.”

Irving's wife pressed Charlie to stay for dinner, and when she did he realized that he had completely forgotten about football practice at the school. He had been in the subway at the time it would have started. He walked to the door and Irving stood with him, his arm in Charlie's. He urged Charlie to call him more often—every day if he wanted to.

They walked down the stairs into the lobby, their arms linked. Charlie asked Irving to call Anita and tell her he'd forgotten about practice but that she shouldn't worry about him. Charlie told Irving that he shouldn't worry either.

“I never do,” Irving said. “Murray was the one I always worried about. You'll live to be a hundred—everybody knows that.”

“Me and you,” Charlie said.

Irving patted his stomach. “I eat too much.”

Charlie got into his car and Irving talked to him across the shattered window, without commenting on it. Irving laughed. “In all the books I teach it's usually the son who goes off in search of a father, but with you things are opposite, aren't they?” He made Charlie roll the broken window down and he reached in and took Charlie's right hand in both of his. “You're all right, Charlie. No matter what happened, we all love you, do you understand?”

Charlie drove off and watched Irving, like a small child, lift an arm and wave good-bye by wiggling his fingers.

When Charlie arrived at Dr. Fogel's house the streetlights were already on, though the sky was not yet black. A sign was planted in the lawn, stating that the house was for sale. There was an envelope scotch-taped to the door, with his name on it.

The note was printed, in block letters:

Going home, on the New Jersey side of the bridge, under the bright lights of a gas station, Charlie saw two beautiful girls standing next to suitcases, hitchhiking. They seemed to be about Sandy's age. He slowed down, and the one closer to him smiled at him with such openness that he felt himself grow hard at once. He pulled to the side of the road, they waved at him with delight, picked up their suitcases, and then he panicked, pressed down full on the accelerator, and drove away.

He had, slowing for them, he realized, been imagining them in his car, one with her thigh pressed against him, the other breathing on his neck from behind. The one next to him would have held the gun against his ribs. His shirt was drenched in sweat. In his imagination he saw the girls making him drive to a motel where they would have registered together, and where, having taken his money, they would have ordered him to strip off his clothes. Hey listen, he heard himself say. You got the wrong guy. I was for women's liberation before there were women.

He parked on the side of the road and closed his eyes. He considered going back and picking them up—to prove to himself how insane his thoughts were. They were probably as sweet as they looked, heading back for their prep schools or colleges after a weekend in the city visiting friends.

In his rear-view mirror he saw a spinning red flasher moving upon him quickly. He sat up straight, wiped his face with his handkerchief. The red flasher went by—a tow truck hauling a smashed-up Cadillac. He moved his car back into traffic. There was no point in going back just to prove to himself that he could. They'd have been picked up by now anyway, he knew.

When Charlie entered the house, Mr. and Mrs. Mittleman were sitting in the living room, watching home movies. He walked through, to the kitchen, to fix himself supper, but Mrs. Mittleman made him sit in the living room while she prepared a plate for him. She told him that he looked very hungry.

On the screen in front of him he saw himself walking toward himself, growing larger. Danny was walking beside him. The boy looked younger than Charlie had remembered him being. Charlie's head and shoulders now filled most of the screen. “I decided, with the boy here, that I should try to capture some of our life together on film,” Mr. Mittleman said. “Since we're like a family.”

The images on the screen were blurred. Then, in color, Charlie saw himself and Danny in the park, tossing a football to one another.

Mr. Mittleman spoke to Charlie, his cigar between his teeth. “I thought you'd like to have a print of this so I made an extra one for later on,” he said, “so you can remember what things were like now when you two were young and happy together.”

WEDNESDAY

I saw him again today for the 1st time in 40 days. He walked by me 3 times and didn't see me. He walked 3 steps ahead of Dr. Fogel, knocking branches aside. Dr. Fogel looked very happy. He kept stopping and closing his eyes and breathing in the fresh air through his nostrils. He looked younger than he did since I remember him.