CHAPTER 23

Tuckahoe

We were permitted to go back to the Bronx for the eight days of Passover—but no longer. If your family could afford to keep you more than eight days, they could afford to keep you forever. So said Miss Claire Beaufort, the social worker. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. Would my mother change her mind and decide to keep us forever? She came to Yonkers to pick us up and clung to us but we pulled away. We stood on the trolley, and wouldn’t sit on her lap on the bus or train either. On the walk from the subway station, I noticed girls everywhere. Girls on the Grand Concourse and across 166th Street, on Sherman Avenue and Morris Avenue. I didn’t often see girls. Vivian on Visiting Day didn’t count. Then before I knew it, we were on College Avenue, my own block where I used to play stoopball and ringolevio, yet I felt awkward. Was the Bronx home or was The Home home? After a couple of days, I figured it out. I decided the city was like a big noisy family at the poker table having an argument, and the country (when the supervisors left us alone) was like hanging out with your friends not needing to talk, just kicking stones. I wondered where I would live when I grew up, how would I choose, city or country, and if I would always have a divided heart.

“Everything they have there at the HNOH,” said Mama at the seder table. “Horses, they ride. Like a boarding school.”

“Is that right?” said Aunt Adele. She was Rich Uncle Seymour’s gentile wife. I liked her. She knew games and rhymes.

“We don’t ride them,” I said. “They’re dray horses. They pull the plow.”

“I want to live at the HNOH,” said Alvin. Everyone laughed.

Gertie was talking. “Kwai! Kwai!” she called, reaching her arms out. She couldn’t pronounce the “l” or “d” in Clyde. Vivian dragged Gertie around like a doll but Gertie wanted me. “Kwai, hold you,” she said, mixing up her pronouns.

My mother told me to go help Aunt Sadie and Grandma, so I gave Gertie back to Vivian and went into the kitchen.

“You always defend Ruth,” Aunt Sadie was saying to Grandma Cohen.

Ruth was my mother. I didn’t like Aunt Sadie talking behind Mama’s back.

“I don’t take sides,” said Grandma Cohen. “Have some pity for your sister.”

“Pity? She has two boys stuck in an orphanage, while she’s riding around in taxi cabs like Lady Astor!”

“Sha. The children,” said Grandma Cohen.

“Who does that? I ask you?” Aunt Sadie said.

Aunt Adele cleared the soup plates and carried them in. “Does what?” she said.

“She always defends Ruth,” said Aunt Sadie.

“Ruth is my daughter,” said Grandma Cohen. “Hand me the seltzer in the icebox.”

“I’m your daughter, too,” Aunt Sadie said.

“So I defend you, too,” said Grandma Cohen.

Aunt Sadie found the seltzer bottle and rattled the icebox shut. “New hats she buys,” Aunt Sadie said. The kitchen was small and wherever I turned perfumed bosoms cushioned me in flowery prints.

“It wouldn’t hurt you should buy something new,” said Grandma. “Maybe a man should look at you.“

“Here, Clyde, take the seltzer, put it on the table.”

When we visited the Aronson side of the family, my father wasn’t even mentioned. I’d been thinking lately how I used to put the things I did with my father in the category of last year. Last summer, my father and I built a balsa wood model of a Curtis Jenny biplane, or last summer he was supposed to take me swimming, or last Christmas, my father came home with a box of Christmas-tree lollipops given out by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and my mother laughed about bringing treyf into the house, but she let us eat them. This year, though, when I thought about what happened last year, I realized none of it had anything to do with my father. Most of it didn’t even happen in the Bronx, or with my mother, either. Last year happened on Tuckahoe Road. Last year I was already in the orphanage. My father had disappeared. I couldn’t pretend anymore. He wasn’t coming back. This would keep getting more and more true.

For eight days, my mother tucked us into bed and kissed us good night. She smelled like Nurse Flanagan. At the end of the week, Harry and I were returned to the orphanage.