“HEY, YOU!”
I had almost reached the lobby. I heard Mr. Meltzer pounding after me. The suitcase was slowing me down. I dropped it and sprinted for the door.
The carving! My treasure box! I wheeled and dashed back. But before I got to the suitcase, Mr. Meltzer grabbed me. I struggled to reach it. If I could get it, I’d swing it into him. I’d knock him over and run.
“Stay still, you brat,” he panted.
I fought harder, but he held on. I couldn’t get away.
“Now come.” He walked me to my shoes and waited while I put them on. Then he walked me to the suitcase. “Pick it up.” He held my shoulders and eased me down to it without letting go for a second.
He marched me back up the corridor to a door at the end. It opened onto an ordinary wooden staircase, not marble like the one in the lobby. We climbed up to the top floor, the third. It was slightly warmer up here, but the echoing silence was the same, and so was the ugly gray-green paint job on the walls.
Mr. Meltzer stopped in front of a door and opened it while holding on to me. Inside was a nurse’s office with a scale and a cot and the nurse’s desk, which had a telephone on it. The nurse said hello and smiled like there was something to smile about. She weighed me, listened to my heart, and looked in my ears. When she riffled through my hair for lice, she said, “I wish I had curls like yours.” She asked me if I’d had the mumps, measles, chicken pox. I told her no, but I’d had hoof-and-mouth disease when I was eight. She laughed, which surprised me. Mr. Meltzer didn’t, which didn’t.
She asked me if I had any brothers or sisters. I told her my brother had died in the same accident that killed Papa.
When she finished examining me, she told me not to put my clothes back on. “How old are you? Nine?”
I said I was fourteen. Mr. Meltzer said I was eleven.
“Small for your age.” She went to a closet and came back carrying a pile of clothes and a pair of low boots. “A new wardrobe.”
“I like the clothes I came in with.”
“Put on the uniform.” Mr. Meltzer folded my old things and put them in my suitcase.
“We all wear uniforms here,” the nurse said.
Yeah, but her uniform showed she was a nurse. Mine would show I was an orphan.
The yellowy-white shirt was too big. I wondered if the kid who’d had it before me was still alive.
The tie had gray-green and purple stripes. The gray knickers were too big. I had to buckle the belt on the last hole to keep them up. The gray jacket was too big and it had no pockets. The knickers and the jacket were stiff enough for a coat of armor. Scratchy too. The heels of the white socks came up to my ankles. Only the shoes fit.
“Orphans may come and orphans may go,” the nurse said, “but their clothing lasts forever.”
Mr. Meltzer picked up my suitcase and we left the nurse’s office. In the hall, he said he was going to take me to meet Superintendent Bloom, who was in charge of the whole orphanage. “Call him sir. He’s not as nice as I am.”
Back downstairs, Mr. Meltzer knocked on the first door to the right of the lobby.
“Come in,” a rumbly voice called.
It was warm in his office. Not hot. Just right.
Mr. Bloom was huge. His chest and head loomed over his desk like the Hebrew Home for Boys loomed over Broadway. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Scraping against the wall on the way, he walked around to my side of his desk and bent down to inspect me through thick spectacles. He smiled, showing a million teeth.
He looked up at Mr. Meltzer, who was leaning against the door so I couldn’t get out. “What’s his name?”
He could have asked me. Didn’t he think I knew my own name?
“Dave Caros,” Mr. Meltzer said.
“Dave, you have my sympathy for your loss.”
What did I lose? Oh. Papa.
“But no loss comes without gain. I like my boys to think of me as their papa.” Mr. Bloom’s smile disappeared. “A stern papa, because all good fathers are stern.”
I’d never think of this gorilla as my papa.
“Look around this office,” Mr. Bloom went on. “Take a good look.”
I looked. The room was oak-paneled. A telephone hung on the wall to the left of the desk. An electric log glowed in the fireplace on the opposite wall. A knickknack case stood next to the fireplace. It was very fine, like something Papa could have made. The door had small glass panes separated by wooden latticing.
“That’s enough,” Mr. Bloom said. “You don’t want to be in this office again. Only bad boys see this office twice, and you’re not a bad boy, are you?”
I was supposed to say something. “I’m a good boy.”
“You’re not a bad boy?” he repeated, frowning. His glasses slipped sideways on his greasy nose.
I already told him I wasn’t.
He reached behind him for the yardstick on his desk. What had I done? I turned to Mr. Meltzer, but he was looking at his shoes.
He must be deaf. I spoke louder. “I’m a good boy.”
He raised the yardstick.
Then I remembered. “Sir, I’m a good boy, sir.” Some papa.
“Glad to hear it.” He put the yardstick down. “Welcome to the Home.”
We left the office and I felt cold again. Mr. Meltzer took me to the end of the hall and around the corner. He opened the third door on our right. A roomful of boys dressed like me turned their heads to stare. The teacher said, “Another one!”
Mr. Meltzer pulled me to a desk toward the back. I sat, keeping my eyes on my suitcase.
“New boy. Name’s Dave Caros.” Mr. Meltzer turned to leave.
“My suitcase . . .” I said, starting to stand.
“It’ll be under your bed.” He left.
It better be.
The boy on my left was bouncing up and down in his seat. His right hand jerked from the inkwell to his notebook and back again. His left hand drummed on the side of the desk, while both his knees pumped up and down. I leaned over and looked in the notebook. He was drawing violins. The page was full of ink blotches and smudges and, in between, violins.
“New boy,” the teacher called. He was short and almost bald—just a few gray hairs held in place with pomade. “I’m Mr. Gluck. Supplies are in your desk.” He went to a map of North America that was tacked to the wall next to the blackboard. “Stand up and show us what a scholar you are.”
I stood. The boy on my other side started coughing.
“What state is this?” Mr. Gluck tapped the map with his pointer.
“New Jersey.”
That cough sounded bad. If I had a cough like that, Papa would have made me inhale steam, and he would have rubbed Vicks on my chest, and he would have kept Gideon away from me, and he would have worried.
“What is the capital of New Jersey?”
I had no idea. I didn’t say anything.
“Dave is a thinker,” Mr. Gluck said. “We’ll wait while he thinks.”
No one laughed or even paid attention. The boy next to me stopped coughing gradually.
“Jersey City?”
Mr. Gluck groaned. “They give me complete idiots. It’s a task for a wizard, not a teacher.” He walked to a spot two rows in front of me where a pair of twins whispered across the aisle to each other. Holding one of them by the ear, Mr. Gluck returned to the front of the room and went on with his speech about what dopes we were. The twin with the captured ear crossed his eyes and tried to touch his nose with his tongue.
I wasn’t about to stand for hours, waiting for the teacher to give me permission to sit. I sat and opened my desk. Inside were a notebook, a bottle of ink, a pen, a pencil, and three textbooks. Gideon would have pulled out the textbooks and started memorizing them. I took the notebook and the pen and ink. I wanted to try drawing violins and see if there was something special about doing it.
A boy in the first row raised his hand. When Mr. Gluck called on him, he said, “I need the toilet.”
Mr. Gluck nodded and pointed at the boy next to the one who said he had to go. “Louis, you’re monitor.”
They left the room. Facing away from Mr. Gluck, they were both grinning.
I started to draw, but the jumpy kid turned to me and whispered, “I’m Mike, buddy.” He held out his hand to shake. The hand was speckled with ink, and some of it was still wet.
So what? I shook. “I’m Dave.”
“Welcome to the HHB.”
I guess I looked puzzled.
“HHB. Hebrew Home for Boys. HHB. Hell Hole for Brats.”