MIKE WENT BACK to drawing violins. I began to draw too, but the boy who had been coughing stuck out his hand for me to shake.
“I’m Alfie, buddy,” he whispered. His cheeks were flushed, like he had a fever. The cough and the fever—consumption.
I shook. “Hi.”
The boy behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m Eli, buddy,” he said. “It’s Trenton.” He held his hand out too.
I shook it. “What’s Trenton?”
He grinned. “The capital of New Jersey. But Mr. Cluck won’t ever teach it.”
Mr. Cluck. That was a good one.
The boy on Eli’s right wanted to shake too. His name was Harvey, buddy. The boy on Eli’s left was Joey, buddy. In front of me were Ira, buddy, Danny, buddy, and Reuben, buddy. Maybe I should stay at the orphanage, I thought. Kids sure were friendly here, and they sure liked to call people buddy.
Mr. Cluck was still droning on about how hard he worked trying to teach us. I began to count the boys in the room. I got up to thirty-two with one row to go when a bell rang. Mr. Cluck let go of the twin’s ear and dismissed us. The two boys who’d gone to the toilet had never come back.
I left with Mike, Harvey, Eli, and Alfie. I hoped it was lunchtime. I was starving.
“Did you meet Mr. Doom yet?” Mike asked, scratching his neck with one hand and slapping his thigh with the other.
“Who?”
“The superintendent. Mr. Bloom—Mr. Doom.”
“Not my doom. I can take care of myself.” He could be Doom or he could be Death, it didn’t matter.
Mike laughed. He had a kind of choking laugh, like the laugh was stuck in his throat. “Buddy, you better hope so.”
Alfie started coughing again. Harvey pounded him on the back.
Eli said, “You’ll give him a backache on top of a cough.”
Couldn’t they tell Alfie had consumption? This time next year he’d probably be dead, like my friend Morty, who died during the summer after third grade.
Alfie waved his hands in front of his face. He was smaller and skinnier than me. His ears were enormous and stuck out from his head like cup handles. They were flushed too, like his face.
“You’re supposed to pound a buddy when he coughs, buddy.” Harvey had a hoarse voice. He was my height, but blocky-looking, like someone had carved him out with a wide chisel and hadn’t bothered to finish him off with sandpaper.
Eli was tall and skinny. He had wires on his teeth. I’d never seen anything like it. Were they supposed to keep his teeth from falling out?
Mike was hard to see because he was always moving. He had straight brown hair that flew around his head and a long narrow nose.
We turned into the stairwell at the end of the corridor and started downstairs to the basement.
Harvey said, “So, Dave, buddy, are you a half or a whole?”
“Do I look like half of anything?”
“He means, is one of your parents dead or both?” Mike was hopping down the stairs backwards.
I didn’t get it. “Some kids still have a mama or a papa? What are they doing here?”
Mike missed a step and almost crashed down the stairs.
“My mama’s coming for me soon, buddy,” Harvey said. “She’s just in a jam right now. So both of yours are dead. You’re a whole.”
“Three-quarters. My stepmother gave me up.”
“Three-quarters!” Mike said. “I like that. I’m three-quarters too then, because my grandfather’s alive.”
“There’s no such thing as three-quarters, buddy,” Harvey said. “You’re both wholes.”
“Who are you to decide?” I said.
“I’m me, buddy, and I’m telling you there’s no such thing as a three-quarter orphan.”
“Oh, yeah?” I could beat him up.
“Fight later,” Eli said. “Not here.”
Mike opened the door to the basement. Inside, long tables and benches were set up, with pipes overhead and pillars separating the rows of tables. The noise of a million boys yelling rang off the pipes and the low ceiling. A few grown-ups stood around. Mr. Meltzer was there, but I didn’t see Mr. Doom.
We sat at an empty table. I wound up on a bench between Mike and Eli, across from the twins from our class. Harvey was at the end of the bench, with a lot of elevens between us, which was good. Each twin reached across the table to shake my hand. They shouted that their names were Jeff and Fred. Except for Fred’s chipped front tooth, they looked exactly alike—red hair, freckles, dark-blue eyes.
Women started coming through a swinging door a few yards away. Each of them carried a huge, steaming pan. I smelled something like burnt rubber.
A bunch of older boys came to our table, and one sat next to each of us elevens. We had to scoot over to make room for them. Harvey got pushed off the bench. He didn’t tell these big guys that he was one himself and they should shove over. He just went to another table. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
“Hi,” I yelled to the boy next to me. I stuck out my hand. “I’m Dave, buddy.”
He didn’t shake. “You’re new,” he said. He was almost as tall as Mr. Meltzer, and more solid. He was bigger than the other older boys by a good three inches in every direction.
“That’s Moe,” Mike said. “He’s not your buddy. He’s your bully.” He pointed to the boy on his left. “He’s mine. Lucky you. You got the biggest, scariest bully in the HHB.”
“So what?” I could outrun him, anyway.
Mike shook his head and shrugged twice. “You’ll see.”
Eli added, poking his head around his bully, “And when you see, buddy, don’t do anything stupid.”
He had no business bossing me around. Him and Harvey.
A woman came to our table with one of the pans.
“That’s the coffin,” Mike said, pointing at it.
She lowered it to serve us, and I saw what was inside. Stew, noodles, and a greenish-brownish vegetable. The portion spooned onto my plate was small. I started eating. The meat was gristly. The vegetable was burnt weeds.
Next to me, Moe reached under his shirt and pulled out a rabbit’s foot on a string. He kissed the foot. Then he picked up his fork.
It went the wrong way, to my plate instead of his, and he started eating my food. The bully next to Mike was eating Mike’s lunch. For a second I just stared, and in that second half my meal was gone. We ate the rest together. The only time Moe left my food alone was when a grown-up walked by.
When my plate was clean, Moe started on his own. I moved my fork to his plate too. Fair is fair. When my fork touched Moe’s plate, I saw Fred nudge his brother to watch.
“Don’t.” Moe moved my hand away from his food. Then he put his hand down on mine and ground my palm into the tabletop. I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Under the table I kicked him as hard as I could. He didn’t seem to notice. When he let go of me, my hand felt numb. Then it stung and ached. I looked at my palm. Lines from the wood grain were pressed into my skin, and I had a splinter.
I wasn’t hungry anymore. I gathered a big gob of saliva in my mouth and spat onto Moe’s food.
“You can spit all you want,” he said with a mouth full of food. His shoulders heaved. He was laughing. “I’ll eat your spit too.”
I wanted to kill him and Mike’s bully and Eli’s and Fred’s and Jeff’s and all the rest of them.
“HHB, buddy,” Mike said. “Happy House of Bullies.”
A lady came with a basket filled with rolls. She put one on my plate and one on Moe’s. As she passed by, a roll tumbled out of the basket. At least ten hands reached, and our bench almost went over. Moe got the roll.
“You brought me luck,” he told me, grabbing the piece of my roll that I hadn’t stuffed in my mouth yet. Then he stood up and signaled to the other bullies at our table. They all followed him out of the dining hall.
I turned to Mike. “Why does he kiss the rabbit’s foot?”
Mike did his choking laugh again. “He’s superstitious. He won’t step on a crack. He goes through doors sideways. When we have prayers, he stands on his left foot.”
That was good to know. He was scared of something.
In the afternoon, Mr. Cluck started teaching us how to divide fractions, which I already knew. But when Alfie couldn’t answer a question, he went back to his speech about what good-for-nothings we were.
I started thinking about what it would be like to live here if I stayed. I’d have to find a way to stop the bullies from taking my food. I couldn’t starve. Not while Gideon was eating roast chicken and noodle pie in Chicago.
The door opened. Everybody got quiet.
It was Mr. Meltzer holding a handful of letters. “Feldman,” he barked. “Karp, Silver . . .”
Mike jumped up, dropping his pen and his notebook on the floor. He rushed to the front of the room without bothering to pick them up.
“ . . . Zweben, Belsky, Pincus . . .”
All over the room, boys hurried to get their mail.
“. . . Elishowitz, Caros, Jacobson . . .”
Did he really say my name? Who would write to me? I just got here. I stood. I was going to feel ridiculous when I got up there if he hadn’t said my name, if I’d only imagined it.
He handed me a letter. The address was in Gideon’s handwriting. I shoved it into my knickers pocket. I didn’t care what it said, unless it said he hadn’t gone to Chicago. I pulled it out. The postmark was Chicago. I put it away again.
Mike hunched over his letter. When he finished reading, he lifted the top of his desk and dropped it in. He drummed on the desktop, then opened it again and pushed the letter in deeper.
Mr. Cluck never got back to the lesson on fractions. Except for five minutes when he gave us homework, he spent the rest of the afternoon talking about how hard it was to teach us. I don’t think anybody listened, even though the horsing around had stopped. A few kids kept unfolding their letters to reread them. But most kids seemed gloomy whether or not they’d gotten any mail. One boy put his head down on the desk, and another one stared at the floor and cried.
At supper Moe and his henchmen sat with us again. After Moe kissed his rabbit’s foot, he started on my food. He got less than at lunch, though. I loaded my fork, dumped the food into my mouth, swallowed without chewing, and dug back in. I got more that way, and I didn’t have to taste what I was eating.
When I finished, I looked around. Everyone ate the same way I had. HHB table manners. Shovel manners.
A minute or two after my last swallow, I had to go to the toilet. The delicious food had made me sick. I hoped there was a toilet down here. Mike pointed, and I ran.
It was far away, halfway across the basement. They should have built it closer if they were going to serve food like this.
When I unbuttoned my knickers, Gideon’s letter fell on the floor. I left it there while I used the toilet. Afterwards, I sat down on the toilet seat and opened the letter.
Dear Dave,
We reached Chicago on Friday, and on Saturday a letter came from Aunt Sarah. She wrote that Ida had said she was going to take you to the Hebrew Home for Boys. That’s how I know where you are. Aunt Sarah says it’s a decent place, where you’ll get a good education.
That was a laugh.
Papa would want you to study hard for your future. I hope you won’t let your mischief get in the way.
Try and stop me.
Uncle Jack and I are boarders in a house owned by a lady named Mrs. Roth. It’s clean, and the food is all right. Tomorrow, I start school. I hope it’s as good as yours and that some of my schoolmates are interested in more than stickball.
That’s all Gideon thought I was interested in. And that’s why he was glad to leave me behind.
I guess you wanted me to tell Uncle Jack that I wouldn’t go to Chicago without you, but what good would it do for both of us to be in an orphanage? I’m not the kind of brother who could beat up bullies for you, so you’re just as well off without me.
Better off. I was better off without him.
Uncle Jack’s headaches are very bad. I keep telling him that you would be as quiet as I am. I hope he’ll change his mind soon and send for you. If he does, you can’t bounce balls or snap your fingers or yell or do anything noisy.
I knew that. I could be quiet.
Please write and tell me what the orphanage is like and what you’re studying. I’ll write again soon. No matter what you think, I still care about you.
Yours truly,
Gideon
I tore the letter into tiny pieces and flushed it away.