CHAPTER 25

Tuckahoe

“The Colonel hits us,” said Harry. “With his cane.”

Mama cut a piece of halvah for me. It was Sunday and Jesse Hoffman was sharing our picnic. Jesse mugged and Gertie giggled.

“Clyde, is this true? They use a cane?”

“Not all the time,” I said.

My mother laughed.

I stared at her in disbelief and glanced nervously at Jesse. Maybe it was better having no family at all, no one to laugh at you at the oddest times, no one to disgrace you. I had to lash my right arm to my side to keep from striking her. “Why are you laughing?” I asked coldly.

“It’s you, Clyde,” my mother said. “You’ve been like this since the day you were born.”

“Like what?”

“They hit you, but not all the time. Aynzen gut. You find the good in anything. You’d drop your frankfurter and tell me it tasted better with a little dirt.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” I said.

“It’s a good character trait,” my mother said.

My blood cooled a little as I watched Jesse roll down the grassy hill with Gertie. Hoffman had nobody. Nobody. I shrugged. “Isn’t everyone like that?” I said. I assumed all people found the good in things so they could tolerate the way life was.

“Oh, no,” said my mother. “If only.”

Jesse held Gertie’s hand as she toddled back to the blanket.

“It’s not just the Colonel,” said Harry. “The seniors hit us, too. The monitors.”

“Clyde? Jesse? Is this true?”

“Will you take us home if it’s true?” I said.

“I’ll speak to Miss Beaufort, that’s what I’ll do.” My mother stood up suddenly and brushed off her dress. She kept batting at the pleats.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Don’t say anything.” I glanced at Jesse, but I couldn’t read his face. He merely looked thoughtful.

“Harry, shut up, awright?” I said. “You don’t wanna be a stoolie.”

“I ain’t no stoolie,” Harry said.

“It’ll be worse for us if you complain,” I said.

My mother sank back onto the blanket. “So many boys they have to keep in line,” she said, mainly to herself.

As time went on, and it became more and more evident that Harry and I were not going home, at least not anytime soon, I haltingly adjusted my view of the future. One day, Jesse and I were sitting on overturned buckets in the boiler-room yard flicking chickens when he suggested I join the marching band. First we held the birds by their hideous pipe-cleaner feet and dunked them into a pot of scalding water so the feathers came off easy.

“Don’t we do enough marching around here already?” I said.

“This is different. The music carries you along.” Jesse rapped on his thighs with his palms. “You can be a drummer like me.”

“I don’t know.” Joining the band seemed like a real commitment. Something for the full orphans, not for somebody who might conceivably leave at any moment.

“The band gets to travel,” said Jesse.

“Where to?”

“All over. Mount Vernon, Valhalla, Hartsdale, Scarsdale, White Plains, Hastings on Hudson, Croton on Hudson. The Yonkers Fireman’s Parade. We get food. Sometimes ham sandwiches from the yokels who don’t know any better.”

“They give Hebrew orphans ham sandwiches in White Plains?” I said. I threw down my bird and wiped the feathers off my hands and onto my trousers.

“You bet. Beer, too.”

I hadn’t been outside the gates since Passover. I wanted to see the world again. Maybe if I went traveling with the band, I’d have a better chance of finding my father. He might be in the crowd on the sidelines at the Yonkers Fireman’s Parade. He might see me marching along beating a drum.

I picked up my chicken and resumed flicking. “All right,” I said, trying not to sound grateful. “I’ll join the band.”

Since the HNOH was founded on the Lower East Side, its grammar school, PS 403, continued to be part of the New York City school system even after the H moved to Westchester County beyond the city limits. Except for the fact that PS 403 was located inside an orphanage, it was strictly a public school, not parochial. Hebrew classes were taught separately in the shul by the Home rabbis. I preferred regular school. I liked all of the subjects—English, arithmetic, history, geography—and I greatly appreciated the safety and sanctity of the PS 403 classrooms where the teachers ruled, and not the Colonel. After lunch, we played baseball. The guys knew me now. They knew I could run the bases, and I wasn’t a terrible hitter. One afternoon I was daydreaming in the outfield, inhaling the heady smell of burning leaves when a formation of honking geese came flying so low I could see their mouths moving. I gazed up in astonishment only vaguely conscious that a ball might sail my way, when Harry appeared and brought me out of the trance.

“What are you, crazy?” I yelled. “Get out of here. There’s a game going on.”

“C’mon to the fence,” Harry said. “Slow Uncle Archie’s got Walnettos.”

I threw down my glove. The boys hollered at me but I followed Harry away from the ball field past the cottages and toward the line of golden maples bordering the western edge of the Home’s twenty acres. It was a strange sight, my uncle in an ill-fitting suit on the other side of the orphanage fence, his long arms stretched through the pickets, flailing around reaching for me.

“Get over here Clyde my boy. Give your uncle a hug.”

Harry’s face was scrunched up chewing on a nutty caramel Walnetto. Drool slobbered down his chin. Paper wrappers were strewn on the ground.

“Careful, Harry,” I said. “You’ll take out a tooth.”

“Hey, Clyde, what time is it when you go to the dentist?” said Uncle Archie.

“I don’t know,” I said, annoyed. Sometimes I thought I was the grown-up and my uncle was the child, I really did.

“Two-thirty,” said Uncle Archie. “Get it, Clyde? Tooth hurty.”

I came closer and let Slow Uncle Archie grab me by the shirt. We hugged with the iron fence between us. I wanted to save the Walnetto and savor it in private, but I was afraid some hooligan might swipe it meantime, so I unwrapped the candy and bit into the caramel and nuts. Sugary saliva pooled in my mouth and waves of pleasure turned my body slack. I leaned on the fence for support.

“I miss you kids,” Uncle Archie said. He paced on his side of the grass. “You know, if it was up to me . . .”

“I love Walnettos,” said Harry.

“Me, too,” I said.

Whoever came or didn’t come on the official designated Visiting Day, the farther away in the week we got from it the better we felt. Most relatives followed the every-other-week rule, and I found that I liked certain things about the weeks when my mother wasn’t coming, and neither of my two grandmothers. I could relax, not have to hope for anything. I used to feel sorry for the full orphans who had nobody, but Visiting Day was the worst for kids with relatives who said they’d come and never did. We had plenty of kids like that, not just Shmecky. I came to the conclusion Hoffman’s power had something to do with his not having to wait for anybody to show up. Ever. That was freedom. Jesse was left once, when he was too young to remember it. Whereas guys like me were left every other Sunday.

Weeks passed and leaves fell, allowing us to see more of the world through the bare tree limbs. I thought the winter landscape on Tuckahoe Road was beautiful, a picture by Currier & Ives, unlike winter in the Bronx with frozen dog turds on the sidewalk. But the country was brutal in its own way. The cold was colder. Winter descended on us with a chill I couldn’t get rid of. That cold, cold smell of the dark night David Copperfield talked about—that was the smell of an institution not getting the proper amount of coal. Frosty mornings rung out of bed. That was us. Shmecky was right. Dickens sure knew the H. There were holes in the roof of the big building and warped sashes on those cracked dormitory windows. In the mornings, condensation dripped into puddles on the windowsill and sometimes great hunks of ice formed on our bed frames and the supervisors came with pickaxes to chop it from our beds before we could even begin to make hospital corners. I heard more keenly than I did in the city. The north wind blasted down from the Adirondacks across the plains of Westchester whistling through the trees. Branches creaked, hickory nuts hit the roof, coyotes howled at the moon, and little boys cried out after wetting the bed. I felt everything harder and more deeply, because there was more space to feel it. Not just more space in the landscape, but more space inside myself, which was loneliness, but also freedom.

Pussy Alice had another litter of kittens and not enough teats. Carl Grimm, the second chef, who did not seem like a hobo or an ex-con but more like a teacher or a scientist, brought a glass of milk from the kitchen and an eyedropper from Nurse Flanagan and sat on the ground in his white chef’s uniform. He held the runt, a gray fluff ball, in the crook of his arm and fed her milk with the eyedropper. Then Mr. Grimm let me try. The little puss was so sweet. She sucked the milk from the eyedropper with kissing sounds.

“Is it wrong to feed her if she was supposed to die?” I said. I’d read about natural selection.

“Maybe I’m a softie,” said Mr. Grimm. “But I believe in helping those who need a hand and I believe Mr. Darwin does, too. What about you, Clyde? What do you think?”

“Me, too,” I said.

Mr. Grimm had to go back to work. He stood and collected the empty milk glass and the eyedropper. He was covered in straw and animal hair. He brushed himself off but the sticks and fur clung to him. “Let’s hope there’s not a scold around to notice,” Mr. Grimm said. He smiled like we were in on it together. I liked that about Mr. Grimm. He slipped a white chef’s hat from his pocket and put it on his head at a jaunty angle. He wasn’t one of them. He was one of us.

Jesse Hoffman and a few others packed their bags and moved up to Company D. They were juniors now. I missed having Hoffman in the dorm, but I still had Chick Scheiner. At least Chick was easygoing, whereas Jesse was a smart aleck. He couldn’t help it—Jesse was ahead of everyone, clever, inventive, hilarious. In fact, I thought, Jesse was a lot like me. Chick was the opposite, even-tempered, never conceited. He had a great laugh. He’d throw back his red head and roar, and sometimes he slapped his knee like a country bumpkin, and when Chick laughed like that at one of my jokes I felt like a million bucks.

Chick, Jesse, Harry, Manny Bergman, and I sat on the library stoop carving our names into the soapstone. It was Friday and we were shooting the shit while the staff bustled around the kitchen yard getting ready for the Sabbath. Some seniors, whose names were already carved into the steps and indelibly inked with years of dirt, loitered around the porch giving instructions on how to hold a penknife, and other sage advice.

“Just wait until tomorrow,” said Young Connie. “You’re going to be so sorry the Colonel retired the pommel horse.”

“Wasn’t the Colonel who did away with it,” said Jesse. “It was Mr. Laudenbacher. The Superintendant.”

“All the same,” said Young Connie. “You’ll be beggin’ for the pommel horse.”

“Baloney,” said Harry.

“You don’t know what you’re in for,” said Young Connie. He ran a finger over the letters cut into the fourth riser: Young Connie Schreiber, 1922. “Frickin’ detention,” he said.

“So tell us.”

“Try standing still for one, maybe two hours,” said Jesse solemnly. He’d had detention once since he moved up.

“Big deal. I can stand still,” I said.

“With your arms out?” said Jesse.

“I can do that,” said Chick.

“Oh, yeah, smartie? How about holding a pillow?” Young Connie said.

“A pillow? Geez, that’s nuttin’,” said Manny Bergman.

“A pilla’s a bag a’ feathers is all,” Chick said.

“Weighs nuttin,” said Harry.

“Light as a feather,” I said.

“Yeah? How about a shoe?” Young Connie said.

“A shoe? I don’t know about a shoe.”

The Sabbath, Shabbos, the day of rest, the holy day, was for some cockeyed reason considered the correct day to mete out punishments based on demerits collected over the week. Company E had accumulated a fair amount for talking at meals, tardiness, marching out of step, and fighting. Instead of going downstairs to the gym to drop our trousers after shul as usual, we were told to go to our dorm and line up in a column down the center aisle.

Superintendant Laudenbacher was a good man, but misguided. Standing for two hours without moving a muscle was the worst torture of all. I’d have given my right arm to march in a circle, not to mention submit to the wrecking crew. I’d have gladly bent over the pommel horse if it meant I could shift my weight. When Manny thought nobody was looking he scratched his head and Beiderman socked him in the mouth so hard he went down. Two seniors carted Bergman off to Nurse Flanagan. Then the Colonel ordered us to hold our arms out. Boom, another kid down without even being punched—he fainted—which was lucky for him because he was carried off to Flanny as well. I wondered why everyone didn’t fake fainting, but there must have been a reason. I didn’t think I’d be able to hold my arms up any longer when the monitors grabbed the pillows off our beds and placed them onto our outstretched hands. For ten seconds my pillow was a marshmallow. On the eleventh second, a sack of potatoes. Get this thing off me, I screamed in my head. I cried but my eyes were dry. I pretended I was a rock. A rock can’t move. The tears flowed backward into my skull.

People on the outside, they didn’t know about standing detention. On Saturday afternoons in spring and summer after several hours of shul and punishment, we marched two miles into Bronxville where we were treated to first-run movies at the Palace Theater. Townspeople on the street stopped in their tracks and shopkeepers in their aprons came outside to marvel at the parallel lines of well-behaved Hebrew orphans in knickerbockers and newsboy caps marching in lockstep.

Around Christmas, Harry grew sullen. He was angry. For days he didn’t speak to me. I had turned nine back in April and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t not turn nine. I waited for months and now January 1st was fast approaching, time to advance to the junior dorm. Harry had friends but he was attached to me. He didn’t want to be left behind. There would be no more doubling up in bed once I moved into Company D.

On New Year’s Eve we pinched ourselves to stay awake. Cheesie was lookout. He had a sixth sense and got his name from calling “Cheese it!” whenever he spotted coppers. We scrambled back under the covers and faked sleeping when the Colonel made his rounds. Then just before midnight, a crowd of freshmen sneaked around the corner to the east wing into the junior dorm where many of us (me included) would move the next day. The seniors came down from the fourth floor with pots and pans and soup kettles, spoons, ladles, and spatulas pilfered from either the meat kitchen or the milk kitchen. Pious Pussy Friedman would have squealed if we used both. At the stroke of twelve we threw open the windows and leaned into the bitter night glittering with stars and banged our kettles, clanged our frying pans. Jesse produced a rousing drum roll, a paradiddle, and a ratatatat—boom, crack, clickety boom—and the rest of us rattled and clinked and cheered. Three hundred and eighty-one orphans hanging out the windows shouting with glee: Happy New Year! Happy 1926!