An Orphan's Tale (6 page)

He moved to his left, along the ridge where he had been sitting; the sun, molten orange, was now below the tree line and he could see more easily. The shadows on the playing field were longer, the colors, in the afterlight of the bright sun, more intense. The green of the lawns was more profound, more lush, and the trees seemed larger. The glass windows of the school buildings, without any reflections, were black, and he could now see beyond the buildings themselves to what looked like formal gardens: hedgerows, mazes, clusters of color among the green rows, geometric shapes along borders. There were flashes of reds and yellows along trellises, and more delicate pinks and purples and blues within the rows. He realized that he knew nothing about trees and flowers, not even their names.

The students seemed to have such easy ways with one another! He watched them shout and wave, touch briefly, and then move off. He imagined this: that the girls were, as they ran across the field chasing one another, swimming in clear green water. Their motions were fluid. He was unaware of their shrieks. The sunlight, coming through the trees at a low slanting angle now, tempered the driving bull-like movements of the boys. Their drills were mechanical, yet graceful. The football spiraled through the air soundlessly. He had never, he felt, seen any scene that was so peaceful—as if, he thought, the boys and girls were
about
to do things. As if, really, they were not even there and what he was seeing was an empty field, and images that they were watching with him—images that they would, when they played on the field itself, imitate with perfection.

He thought of a story he knew about a king, Frederick II, who ruled Italy in the thirteenth century, and who had wanted to know what language was the true language of mankind. He had therefore placed a group of newborn infants in a room together in the remote part of his castle and raised them so that they were clothed, fed, and nurtured without ever hearing the sound of an adult voice. His philosophers observed them. In this way the king believed he would discover what the true universal language of man was.

There were women who fondled and kissed and played with and loved the children, and the children seemed normal in all ways: they ate, they crawled, they cried, they laughed, they walked, they played-all without ever hearing the sound of a human voice.

Then, one morning, when the servants opened the door they found that the children had, during the night, all died. The oldest child was not yet four and the youngest just past three. The king grieved, for he had loved the children.

It was a story, Danny thought, that would have appealed to Dr. Fogel.

He saw the girls running together, their hockey sticks in the air, toward the buildings. The boys lined up in rows and were racing in groups, as hard as they could, toward the far sideline. They ran with their helmets off and they swallowed air in giant gulps. Boys in blazers collected the balls and equipment.

Danny felt hungry. He had not eaten since nine that morning, when he had had two Hershey bars and a Coke. He felt his stomach flutter, and he hurried down the hill, digging his heels into the sod for balance. His palms were moist and his throat dry. His thighs quivered slightly, as if his pores were about to open and allow the sweat to rush out over his skin. Under his arms, the soft hairs were already drenched.

He breathed slowly and deeply and walked to the man with the megaphone and clipboard. In their uniforms, with shoulder pads and hip pads under the red jerseys and blue pants, the players seemed monstrous to him. Their faces, framed above the red and blue bulges of fabric, seemed absurdly young. Some of them were his own age, though most seemed older.

When he spoke, his voice was stronger than he had expected it to be. He had planned to recite the Home's motto first, so that he would be able to see Charlie's eyes sparkle with illumination, but now that he was in the midst of the actual situation he found that he felt so totally disconnected that he could recover only by speaking to the point.

“My name is Danny Ginsberg,” he said, “and I come from the Home. I came here to tell you that it's going to close soon. You have to save it.”

“What?”

Charlie turned, the megaphone moving sideways in an are, and he looked down into the boy's face.
“Next—ready—go—!”
he yelled to the last row of boys, and they sprinted across the field, helmets cradled under arms or swinging by their sides. “Move your fat sissy ass, Hills!” he called, and, winking at Danny, he started out across the field himself. He caught up to the players before they were halfway to the other side, and he whacked the clipboard against their rear ends, one after the other. Then he veered to the left and yelled for all the boys to follow him.

They ran around the field three times, and Danny, inside the circle, turned slowly to watch their progress. Charlie drifted among the runners, now taking the lead, now dropping back to force stragglers toward the front of the group. On their fourth time around he led them through the goalposts and yelled to them to sprint to the building. Danny felt cold, watching them.

Charlie trotted to him, smiling, then leaned over, hands on thighs, chest heaving, and he thought, if I make it to forty, I'll make it to fifty. He pressed his hand against his chest, on his blue nylon windbreaker, and he felt his heart pumping hard and fast. The tones were strong. He touched his fingertips to his wrist and watched the second hand move on his watch. Seventeen months to go.

“Come on,” he said, impatiently. “Tell me again. Talk to me. Talk to me—”

Danny shivered. He watched the sweat pour off Charlie's face, and he saw, where Charlie had been pressing his hand against his chest, a moist dark handprint. Danny stared.

“Come on,” Charlie said again, sucking in air and taking his pulse a second time. His rate was dropping fast. He noticed the boy's hazel eyes. “Come on. Talk to me—”

“My name is Danny Ginsberg and I come from the Home. I came here to tell you that it's going to close soon. You have to save it.”

“Haven't we met somewhere before?” Charlie asked, and laughed at the line. He put his arm around the boy's shoulders. “Listen, Danny—that's what you said your name was, right?—you eat steak and drink lots of milk and work with the weights and then try us again next year, okay?”

“But I'm from the
Home!”
Danny cried, and he pulled away. “I saw you in the city—in Brooklyn—and I recognized you from your photos. I'll prove it—I'll give you facts.”

Charlie squatted, so that he was just below the boy's eye level. The boy's hair, with slanting rays of light filtering through from behind, seemed to float just above his head in golden puffs. In his head, Charlie was making lists of things to do for the evening and for the next day. “Listen,” he said, laughing at himself. “Do you know what I do some times?-If I finish something that wasn't on a list I made, I write the thing down anyway just so I can cross it out.” He clapped Danny on the shoulder. “What do you make of that?”

“You're not listening to me,” Danny said. “I saw you in the city. I come from there—from the Home—and I need a place to stay.
Please
. Would you let me stay with you for a while?”

Charlie brushed a picture of Sol from his head. “Let you
what?”

“I can prove things,” Danny said. “Dr. Fogel was the coach. The laundry room used to be behind the boiler room in the West Wing. Dr. Fogel gave out nipples if you acted like—”

“Hold on, hold on—” Charlie bent down again, let his clipboard and megaphone drop, and took the boy's hands in his own. “You mean you came from there
today?”

He watched the boy nod, and he saw the tears in the boy's eyes.

“And you told me that they're going to close it and that you ran away to come stay with me, right?”

The boy nodded his head again, but did not speak.

“Christ!”
Charlie said, and then Danny saw the light in Charlie's eyes that he had dreamt of seeing.

Charlie shook his head, half laughing, half helpless. “What do you make of that?—I mean, what do you make of it?”

“I won't be a bother,” Danny said. “I have some money. I could help you learn to read. I—”

“You know about that, huh?” Charlie ran his tongue along his lower gums, searching for something sweet. He let go of the boy's hands and stood. He heard screaming and cursing from inside the building, and in his head he could see the boys snapping towels at one another and grabbing balls. “I mean, you have to see that this interferes with my life, right?”

“Yes,” Danny said, and he could see the sentence that he'd memorized, as if the words were hanging in front of him: “But this is what I figured out that made me come—if they close the Home, then when you die and I die there'll be no living memory of what we were like when we were boys.”

Charlie blinked. “How old did you say you were?” he asked.

“I'll be thirteen soon.” Danny showed Charlie his green sack. “I have my
talis
and
tephillin
with me. Dr. Fogel taught me how to put them on.”

“And what you're looking for,” Charlie said, amused at the words that had occurred to him, “is a home away from the Home, right?”

Danny nodded, and, as Charlie smiled, he saw the slender white scar appear on Charlie's lower lip. Charlie put his arm around the boy's shoulders. “We'll try to work something out, all right? Here—” He handed him the clipboard and used one of Sol's lines: “Do something for your country. Carry this.”

They walked across the lawn, in silence. Charlie liked these autumn evenings, after a good workout. He needed the silence to fill up on. He held the door open, so that Danny passed inside, under his arm. “But listen,” he said, “why'd you pick me?”

Danny shrugged. “I liked the way you looked in the pictures on the walls there….” The lights were off in the corridor, and the change, from the daylight, made it seem black, with spots flickering in a funnel shape toward the far end. “And then when I saw you in the street last week I just…” Danny stopped. “I don't know. It seemed right.”

“I want you to meet Murray—Murray Mendelsohn. I'll shower first and then we'll see if he's still in his office. He's from the Home too—you knew that, didn't you? He got me the job here—he's the headmaster.”

“I saw his pictures on the walls,” Danny said. “But I never looked him up. I didn't know he was here.”

“He'll be glad to meet you,” Charlie said. They walked down the hallway. The sound of Charlie's cleats, metal on tile, was like rain; the only light came from the windows to classrooms. Charlie said that Murray took a great interest in the Home—in its history, in what happened to all the boys. He told Danny that Murray had once organized an alumni association.

Inside an enormous gymnasium Danny saw braided climbing ropes, with mats underneath. He thought of Dr. Fogel, and when he did he knew why—he could see coils of rope on the sea-blown deck of the ship Dr. Fogel's father had come on. He followed Charlie into the locker room. All the players were gone.

Charlie started to undress, and Danny sat on a bench in front of the lockers, the clipboard on his lap, waiting. Danny looked down at the diagrams of football plays—circles and X's and arrows and broken lines. “The truth is,” Charlie said, “you said the right things to get what you wanted from me and that's something I like in people. It's a quality I look for.”

As they drove up the driveway, the car lights illuminating two rows of rhododendrons that led to the garage, two small lights moved toward them, from the left. Danny thought he was hearing the sound of subway trains. The lights continued toward them, growing larger, up a slope, then onto a level even with the driveway.

Danny got out of the car and stood by Charlie's side. He smelled wood smoke, sweet and pungent. In the open doorway of an enormous white house he saw faces of children, one above the other. The two lights, from the left, were almost upon them and they blinded him momentarily, so that he looked away, surprised to find himself frightened.

The machine—orange and black, with wide grooved wheels—stopped a few feet in front of them. The grinding and chugging noises were gone. Danny looked at the stars, through the leaves of the high trees that surrounded them, and he found himself wishing that the lawnmower were a tractor, the house a barracks, and the stars those looking down on a border settlement in Israel. There, he felt, sharing danger among Jewish boys and girls who had grown up with one another, away from their real parents, he would never need to have explanations ready for anybody.

Murray walked toward them, through an opening in the rhododendrons. He wore a blue blazer with the red and white school emblem on its left breast pocket, and he was smoking a pipe. Danny recognized the face from the photos—a series of circles, pinched together in the middle of a round, pockmarked face. Small rimless glasses magnified a pair of small round eyes. He was only an inch or two taller than Danny, if that, and despite the round lips and bulbous nose he was very thin.

Charlie was saying something about interrupting Murray in his oblivion and Murray was shaking Charlie's hand and telling him how glad he was that he'd come by. He told Charlie that he had good news. Charlie said he would have time for one drink, and when he glanced at Danny, Danny put his hand forward, believing Murray wanted to shake it.

“My name is Danny Ginsberg and I come from the Home,” he said. “I recognize you from your pictures.”

Murray did not take Danny's hand. He was touching the steering wheel of his mower and joking about it. He said his mower was the only thing his wife was jealous of. “It's the free time, I suppose, that she'd like to have with me for doing nothing. Anita is gifted that way,” he said to Charlie. “She's not like you and me. She can enjoy doing nothing.”