Orphan #8 (21 page)

Only Nurse Dreyer attended to Benny, assiduously following the disinfection protocols set out by the attending doctor. Between visits to the boy, however, Gladys leafed through the pages of
Look
magazine and sipped tea in her apartment while Rachel circulated among the children. During the night, if one of them called out, Gladys stayed in bed, listening for Rachel to get up in her place.

“I don’t know how I’d survive isolation without you, Rachel,” she said one day over lunch in her cozy kitchenette. “You’ve taken a real interest in the Infirmary. Have you thought about becoming a nurse? You could start a course in the fall. I’d be glad to put in a word for you with the Scholarship Committee.” Rachel hadn’t thought about what came after the Home, but she liked the
idea. Nurse Dreyer lent her an old copy of Emerson’s
Essentials of Medicine,
which she read eagerly. Even if she didn’t completely understand it, she enjoyed the pages dense with anatomical terms and diagnostic descriptions, illustrated by simple drawings of various systems and organs. She worked through the glossary letter by letter,
abscess
to
xanthin
. In bed at night, she’d run her finger down a column in the index and choose a disease to read about: bilious fever, creeping pneumonia, hookworm, mumps, palsy, typhoid. Bacillus tuberculosis, at twenty-six pages, put her to sleep for a week.

In addition to daily supplies and meals and piles of library books to keep the children occupied, the dumb waiter delivered a substantial package of schoolwork for Rachel, including all her texts and lessons. Tucked into the pages of Tennyson’s poems, Rachel found a note from Naomi.

Hi Rachel, Sorry you’re stuck in isolation! I got worried they’d nab me, too, for visiting you in the Infirmary. It could have been fun, though, if we were both there together! I hear you’re practically running the place. Did you know Nurse Dreyer had a boyfriend? He actually showed up asking about her, but when he heard the word polio you better believe he hightailed it out of here. Doubt she’ll ever see that one again. Amelia even says to say hi, but I think she’s just rubbing it in that you’re stuck up there. Everyone hopes you don’t catch it, though, that’s for sure. I’m still waiting to hear if I’ll get a counselor position, then I can live here while I go to Teachers College at Columbia. That’s what Bernstein’s doing. Not Teachers College, of course, he’s going to City to be a lawyer. I wish the Scholarship Committee would back girls for that. I’d be good at arguing cases, don’t you think? But teaching’s better than secretarial school, that’s for sure, and anyway, only boys can go to City. All the F6 girls are trying to catch Bernstein’s eye, I can tell you. Amelia practically trips over herself every time he walks by, but she’s not his type. He’d make a good catch, though, don’t you think? I’ll write more later, take care of yourself! Your friend, Naomi

Rachel had never had a confidante before, and the connection warmed her. Naomi addressed her as an equal in a way she never could have in the F5 dorm. That night, she read the note again. Naomi wrote about Bernstein with such admiration, Rachel wondered if she was among those girls trying to catch his eye. The idea of Bernstein and Naomi seemed so natural, she wondered why it made her jealous.

T
HE ISOLATION PERIOD
ended in May. Benny was left with a slight limp—enough to keep him off the baseball team but not so severe as to attract attention. Thanks to Nurse Dreyer’s precautions, tests confirmed that none of the other children had contracted polio. But Gladys had come to depend on Rachel so much, she asked Mr. Grossman to let her stay on as an assistant until the end of the summer. They’d count it as an apprenticeship, she argued, to strengthen her case for the Scholarship Committee. Mr. Grossman agreed, provided Rachel completed her schoolwork and passed her exams. Rachel had gotten used to the autonomy of the Infirmary and welcomed the idea of staying through the summer instead of
going to camp. The habit of visiting Mrs. Berger and Vic had fallen away with Sam’s leaving, replaced, now that isolation was over, by Sunday afternoons with Naomi in Nurse Dreyer’s apartment. Rachel had come to believe their friendship had nothing to do with Sam’s bribes.

On Rachel’s fifteenth birthday in August, Gladys had slices of pound cake and stewed peaches brought up to the Infirmary for the occasion, and Naomi presented Rachel with a card made from folded construction paper decorated with pictures cut out of a magazine. Naomi could hardly wait to finish singing happy birthday before she burst out with the good news. “You’re looking at the new counselor for F1. Ma Stember’s finally leaving, to get married, can you believe it? I’m even moving into the counselor’s room.”

“Congratulations, Naomi.”

“Listen, I’m going to Coney Island to visit my aunt and uncle next Sunday, to tell them all about getting the counselor job. Why don’t you come with me?”

“What a nice idea,” Gladys said. “Get some color back in your cheeks.” Rachel raised a hesitant hand to her scalp. “I’ll lend you my cloche hat, it’ll cover you right up.” Gladys got up and lifted the hat, a new and prized possession, out of its round box and placed it on Rachel’s head. The bell-shaped felt covered her scalp, curving prettily from her brow to the nape of her neck. Stylish women were wearing their hair so short, such hats revealed little more than a fringe above a bare neck. On Rachel, the look was perfect.

“You’re like from a magazine,” Naomi said. “Come see.” They gathered around a mirror. Rachel hardly recognized herself. Her
transformation was so stunning, Naomi and Gladys were both at a loss for words.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Rachel asked, meeting Nurse Dreyer’s eyes in the mirror.

“Of course not, dear. I know you’ll take care of it.”

“And everyone wears bathing caps on the beach,” Naomi said.

“All right, then, I’ll go with you.” Rachel’s smile made her even prettier. The image startled her, and she turned away from the mirror.

The subway ride to Coney Island was the longest Rachel had ever taken. On the way, Naomi told Rachel about her Uncle Jacob. He was her father’s older brother; the two of them had taken passage together from Kraków to New York. Naomi’s father was Jacob’s apprentice, but Jacob was too busy establishing their woodworking business to find himself a wife, so the younger brother married first. They all lived together in an apartment above the workshop. “I used to sweep up the shavings. I remember I had a collection of the nicest ones.”

“Do you remember your mother?” Rachel asked.

Naomi shrugged. “I remember how I felt when I was with her, and I know what she looked like, but I don’t know if that’s from my memory or from the pictures at my uncle’s house. I was only six when they died of influenza.” Naomi finished her story, telling Rachel that she was left with no one but her uncle. “Uncle Jacob was a single man back then, and my father died just when he took on a big order for the carousel. He didn’t have much choice except to take me to the Home. He told me I’d have more fun, with so many children to play with.” Naomi and Rachel sat beside each other in silence. Neither had to say that any child would choose a
family of their own, no matter how shattered, over the rigors and routines of the Home.

At the Stillwell Avenue station, families and couples surged toward the boardwalk. Naomi took Rachel’s elbow and steered her down Mermaid Avenue, the hot sidewalks emptying as they left behind the beaches and amusements.

“There it is.” Naomi pointed to a brick building that looked like a stable. Rachel didn’t understand how this could be anyone’s home, but Naomi led the way up an exterior staircase to a second-story door painted glossy blue.

A bearded man with gnarled hands opened it to her knock. “Naomi, dear, come in.” They embraced and kissed.

“Uncle Jacob, this is my friend Rachel, from the Home.”

Rachel, too, was kissed, Jacob’s whiskers tickling her cheek. “Welcome. Estelle, they’re here!” he called over his shoulder. He stepped back to usher Rachel into the sitting room of a tidy apartment. She could see through to a small kitchen from which Estelle emerged to join them.

“Naomi, darling, how are you?” Estelle, whose hair was piled up in braids on top of her head, shared Jacob’s Polish accent. To Rachel they seemed to be from another century. The apartment’s furnishings—table, chairs, chifforobe—were all ornately carved and brightly painted. Instead of radiators, there was a woodstove with a black chimney pipe. The walls were decorated with framed pictures of temples and castles. Rachel thought they were drawn to look like lace, but as she stepped closer to the pictures, she saw the images were made of paper cut out to show every detail of crenulated rooflines and leaded windows.

“You like that?” Estelle asked, coming to stand next to Rachel.
“That one I did, but over here is one Jacob made.” She pulled Rachel toward a larger picture. Within the boundaries of the frame a whole city unfolded: cut paper trees and a cobblestone street, paper horses drawing a wagon, small houses with paper smoke rising from chimneys, and on a hill above the town a domed paper temple.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Rachel said.

“This one he made back in the Empire, before America. Now he doesn’t have time for the paper cutting, only the horses, always the horses. I don’t cut paper anymore, either. Now I am painting the horses. We will show you after we eat. Come now, Naomi, Jacob, come and sit.”

They pulled chairs up to the table, already set for lunch with decorated plates, to eat their brown bread and pickled onions and slices of smoked tongue. Naomi’s news about the counselor position elicited warm congratulations from her uncle and his wife. Jacob was much older than Estelle, but Rachel could see their fondness for each other, and for Naomi. It made Rachel think of those Sunday afternoons in Reception, when she and Vic and Sam would gather in the kitchen with Mrs. Berger. A deeper memory stirred, an image of a table set with cups and a jelly jar and a woman with eyes like black buttons pouring tea. Then came the image Rachel tried to avoid by never attempting to remember a time before the Home: a spreading red pool and rising white buttons. She shuddered.

“Someone walking on your grave?” Jacob asked.

Rachel paled. It was like he was reading her soul. Naomi saw her expression.

“He always says that when anyone shivers like you just did. It’s an old superstition. Don’t say such things, Uncle Jacob,” Naomi admonished him with a flick of her napkin.

“So, Naomi, we have some news for you,” Estelle said, smiling at Jacob.

Naomi brightened. “Are you going to make me an aunt finally?”

A troubled look passed between them and Naomi blushed, apologizing. Jacob took Estelle’s hand. He said, sadly, “That is a blessing maybe not for us. When Estelle came off the boat we were thinking the house would be crowded already with babies. Otherwise, we would have taken you out from the Home to live with us. I waited too long, I think, to send for my beautiful Estelle.”

“Don’t draw an evil eye to our troubles, Jacob,” Estelle whispered. She turned to Naomi. “Our news is we have for you something.” Estelle got up from the table, opened a small drawer in the chifforobe and pulled out an envelope. “For your high school graduation, and to help with the college.”

Naomi opened the envelope. There were five- and ten-dollar bills, worn soft but clean and ironed flat.

“Fifty dollars? Uncle Jacob, Aunt Estelle, it’s too much!” But they insisted, and Rachel could see this gift was both an investment in their niece’s future and an apology for her past. Naomi finally accepted, grateful. Even with room and board included with her position as a counselor, it would be a strain for her to pay tuition from her paltry earnings. She’d been about to go in front of the Scholarship Committee to beg her case. “Now I can walk into the bursar’s office after Labor Day and pay for all the classes in cash like a Rockefeller,” she said. This pleased her aunt
and uncle, and they finished their lunch amid happy chatter. As Estelle cleared away the dishes, Jacob showed Naomi how to hide the money under the insole of her shoe.

“You want to see the workshop before you go down to the beach?” Jacob asked. Rachel thought they’d go back outside, but instead he led them through the bedroom and out another door onto an interior balcony that overlooked a cavernous space. The smell of pine and turpentine rose to the rafters. Down below, Rachel saw the blocks of wood, the workbenches covered in tools, the jars of paint lining the walls on shelves, and everywhere the carousel horses. Horses with flaring nostrils, eyes rolled back and hooves beating the air. Docile horses with soft lips and broad backs. Fancy horses with braided manes and gleaming teeth.

“Since the carousel at Coney Island, horses is all I get orders for,” Jacob explained. “Not that I’m complaining!”

On the far wall above the big workshop doors was something different: a carved lion with a majestic mane and the uncanny eyes of a guardian spirit. Jacob saw Rachel staring at it.

“Ah, that was my test, to show I was finished being an apprentice. You should have heard Naomi’s father complaining! First we haul it on a cart to the train station. Then we sit with it in the baggage car all the way to Bremen. When we are hauling it up the gangplank to the ship, my brother wails, ‘What for do we have to carry a temple lion all the way to America?’ ‘When you finish your apprenticeship, you’ll understand,’ I told him.” Jacob paused to sigh. They’d gotten so busy so quickly in America, he never took the time to subject his brother to the same grueling training he had endured. He shook the regret from his head.

“That is not my first one! No, that lion is the third I carved.
The first one my master in Kraków he rejects. Such a lion is not worthy to guard the Torah, he says. My second one also is not good enough. So I carve until the blood from my fingers soaks into the wood. Then, with this one, my master says in Yiddish,
dos iz gute
. I mount it on the wall over our workshop, so we don’t forget where we come from.”

Rachel was entranced by the story. She had no idea where her people were from. Europe, she supposed, but what empire or country or village? If her parents had been born in New York, she and Sam would surely have been claimed by grandparents—unless they were dead, too. She envied Naomi her connection with family. Most children at the Home had some relative who visited them on a Sunday afternoon, bringing candy or coins. Many, like Vic, even had a living parent, and Mrs. Berger wasn’t the only widowed mother working at the orphanage. Sometimes it seemed to Rachel that the Home was like a big library, with children being checked in by relatives unable to care for them, then checked out when fortunes changed. She had decided long ago her father must have died, or he would have found a way to get her and Sam back, too.