The Orphan's Daughter: A Novel

By Jan Cherubin

Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2020

The Orphan’s Daughter is a novel about a woman who grows up in the shadow of her charismatic but troubled father, a man shaped by his boyhood in a Depression-era Jewish orphanage. The two life stories are woven together to form the fabric of this funny and suspenseful work of literary fiction.

Clyde Aronson survives the cruelties of the seemingly bucolic orphanage but is left scarred. Brilliant and self-destructive, a popular high-school teacher and a callous womanizer, he yearns for a son to replace the relationship lost when his father abandoned him. Instead, he fathers two daughters. He resents most the one who most resembles him: the younger, Joanna.

Joanna Aronson is thirty, alienated and living in Southern California when she learns of her father’s puzzling illness. She returns home to Baltimore to help care for him. In the process, the two reconcile; Joanna struggles to come to terms with her own difficult history. Clyde promises to leave Joanna his collected papers, including a secret manuscript written long ago about life in the orphanage.

After Clyde’s death, Joanna’s stepmother inherits the house and all of his possessions. She refuses Joanna any access. Determined, Joanna breaks into the house and steals the manuscript. The stepmother presses charges.
Though fictional, The Orphan’s Daughter is based upon the time, from 1924 to 1934, the author’s father spent in the Hebrew National Orphan Home in Yonkers, New York.

This evocative novel incorporates contemporary feminist themes, Jewish cultural history, and a nostalgic sense of place. By turns wrenching and delightfully humorous, The Orphan’s Daughter is a deft melding of history and psychological drama, a literary page-turner you won’t want to put down.

Praise for the Author

“Cherubin’s bittersweet tale is an epic and indelible char- acter study of Clyde from frightened cub to kvetching lion in winter, with overtones of King Lear. She writes in evocative prose that mixes astringent reality with glowing reverie. An alternately dark and luminous, wounded and affectionate portrait of a family in crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The Orphan’s Daughter is an emotionally charged novel about family dynamics and a daughter’s relationship with her troubled father. Jan Cherubin’s prose style is so achingly beautiful that you may find yourself revisiting the pages again and again.” —Book Genius Reviews

“The Orphan’s Daughter is poetic, engaging, and heartfelt. Life in the orphanage is searingly described, and other themes, including feminist issues and Jewish culture, are woven beautifully into the narrative. At once honest and humorous, Cherubin captures her characters with humanity and insight.” —Jewish Book Council

“Jan Cherubin writes with tenderness and force and humor. Her spellbinding debut novel, The Orphan’s Daughter, swept me away.” —E. Jean Carroll, author of What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal

“Jan Cherubin’s touch is both assured and nuanced; her story is full of vivid details and wry observations. The Orphan’s Daughter is a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading it.” —Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

“The Orphan’s Daughter is beautifully specific, evocative, and emotionally charged.” —Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Disturbances in the Field and Truthtelling

“The Orphan’s Daughter is both sharp and moving, which isn’t easy to pull off. The narrator, Joanna Aronson, is convincingly troubled and likable. And her father is a flat-out great character, not like anyone I’ve read about before but immediately recognizable and plausibly individual.” —David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me and Jernigan

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Jun 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950154166

Jan Cherubin

Jan Cherubin has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and is the recipient of several writing fellowships. Her journalism has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles, New York, The Forward, and others. The Orphan’s Daughter is her first novel.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Ibroke into the house I grew up in to steal back my childhood. It was easy. The dog chomped on a greasy bone while I took what I came for. Eventually my stepmother noticed a manuscript missing, figured out where the hell the dog got that lamb bone, and swore out a warrant for my arrest.

Relatives were spilling onto Aunt Shirley’s front porch, plates piled with bagels and lox like any Jewish family back from the cemetery, when sirens came wailing and two black-and-whites screeched to a halt at the curb. At first I didn’t catch on. I was talking to Liz Stone. I was always relieved to see Liz—we’d been friends since we were eight—and I wondered out loud who the cops were after. Liz said, you, and we both laughed. Red lights lit my grandmother’s face, then cast it in shadow, then lit it red again. Uncle Harry’s mouth fell open and his cigar dropped out.

The cops couldn’t possibly want me. I was a white girl in Baltimore. I used to wave when the police drove by, like most suburban children in the sixties. I was no longer a kid, but I was barely out of my twenties and I still saw myself as obedient, dutiful, adoring—in short, a daughter. It was true that I was finally coming out of the shell I hadn’t even known I was in. And I did trespass and enter the house. But c’mon—two, then three police cars?

The service at the cemetery before the brunch had gone along as planned, for the most part. Friends and family gathered on a beautiful fall day for the unveiling of the headstone on my father’s grave. The unveiling ceremony was supposed to end a period of mourning, but while the designated amount of time had passed—the funeral was in February and it was now October—it still came as a shock when my sister Susan and I peeled the gauze cover off the stone and saw our father’s name etched in granite. Clyde Aronson, dead at 69. Every step I took into the future without him was a blow. I thought the old rabbis must have been onto something with their ritual, though, because that day in the cemetery I felt something new along with loss. I felt a sense of my own worth. I felt it when we chanted prayers in Hebrew under the trees in their autumn beauty, and I felt it when my father’s schoolteacher buddy Shep Levine recited Yeats. There were tears, and there was laughter of course, and then a line of cars leaving the cemetery gates full of my famished relatives hurrying to the brunch.

Aunt Vivian trotted across Aunt Shirley’s porch and threw her arms around me. Oh, Joanna, I loved your father so much. He was my favorite brother. Don’t tell the other two. She squeezed so hard my glasses dug into the side of my nose, but for once I didn’t want her to let go. Where’s Brenda? she asked, before releasing me. I didn’t see her at the cemetery.

I don’t know, I said.

No one knows, said my mother.

Brenda was my father’s second wife, my stepmother, and it was Brenda who arranged for the unveiling with help from my mother’s family. My parents stayed friends after their divorce, and since Brenda Aronson (née McLean) was naturally unfamiliar with the Jewish ritual, my mother’s sister, Aunt Shirley, volunteered to make the food and Aunt Shirley’s husband, Uncle Lou, a member of the temple’s burial society, met with Brenda to plan the ceremony. Brenda was in charge, though. She was the one who picked the stone and set the date for October 25th, 1987. Why wouldn’t she come, then? Yes, we were fighting over the will, and I took the manuscript and some other things from the house, but I thought she had calmed down about that already.

Brenda was pleasant and harmless, Uncle Lou said, and I would have said the same thing, once. She was always a little odd, but in ways that could be attributed to shyness, or just the awkward nature of the stepmother relationship. I used to feel grudging sympathy for her. She had to know my parents were still in love with each other. When Susan and I were growing up, our parents spoke often about their epic love affair, drawing a tight circle around them even as they were trading insults and hurling dishes. So I knew how it felt to be left out. But then my father got sick, and Brenda and I took care of him together. You learned a lot about a person under those circumstances. I stopped feeling sorry for poor Brenda and started to think of her as the bad part of my father. The damaged part he excised and finally put outside of himself.

My glasses were crooked after Aunt Vivian’s embrace, one lens resting higher than the other, so I took them off and applied cautious pressure to the red plastic temples, then put them back on. I had a small face, dark hair, big features. I turned to my mother and pushed the glasses up on my nose. That’s better, she said. We were close now, my mother and I. Once Susan and I grew into adults, my mother wanted our friendship.

Here, sit down, Joanna, my mother said, scraping her chair over the concrete and making a space for me next to the pink porch railing.

So what’s the story? Aunt Vivian said. Why isn’t she here?

I told you, it’s a big mystery, my mother said. Then she put her mouth around a forkful of apple cake topped with vanilla ice cream. Brenda’s absence gave my mother an appetite. My mother swallowed and licked her lips.

I could hear my father. Ice cream used to taste better, he was saying. Even before he died, he was always talking to me in my head. I could see us sitting at the kitchen table on Cedar Drive eating Neapolitan supermarket ice cream out of smooth ceramic bowls.

You think everything you used to get in New York was better, I said.

No. That’s not it, my father said. He took a spoonful and swirled the ice cream in his mouth. In the old days, when I was little, it was creamier.

I tried to imagine him little, a small boy on the steps of a vast brick asylum I had seen in a photograph. What about Breyers?

Nah. No-oo. I’m talking creamy.

Häagen Daz? I said.

Nah, my father said. I’m talking about ice cream they made fresh in the back of a candy store. Forget it, kiddo. Doesn’t exist anymore.

I wanted to know how my father got ice cream from a candy store when he had grown up in an institution. But he was no longer around to ask. He used to talk about how great the orphanage was—they rode horses, he had hundreds of friends—but even a child could tell he was hiding something. I excused myself and went inside to find Liz. The house was filled with people. Unveilings were typically small affairs, but my father had the kind of big personality that was sorely missed, and he drew a crowd. Whether you loved him or hated him, his death left a hole in the world. He’d been a high school English teacher, and I recognized two of his former students at the buffet table talking to Shep Levine and another teacher. My father’s old girlfriend Darleen and her husband were there, and most of my father’s family from New York, as well as my mother’s entire family, including her brother Nat who hadn’t spoken to my father in years. My sister Susan’s husband Larry was there, and my boyfriend Fred who had flown in from L.A. Everyone was there but Brenda.

Laughter rang out from the kitchen over the groan of the oven door. I found Liz in the dining room cornered by my father’s brothers. It’s Joanna’s fault, Uncle Alvin was saying, his voice like wet gravel. Brenda’s upset. That’s why she isn’t here.

Joanna’s fault? said Liz. She caught my eye and I came over.

My fault? I said. Listen, I only took what belonged to me.

Not what she says, said Uncle Harry. He had the same gravel voice as Uncle Alvin. My father had the voice, too. All three brothers spoke like they were gargling with rocks.

When my father was seven and Uncle Harry was five, they were the ones sent away and put in the orphanage. Now Uncle Harry was unsure of how to show his loyalty to his big brother—by standing with Brenda, or with my mother and me. He chewed solemnly on a piece of bagel, cheeks full, meaty lower lip in a pout. He had a tough guy’s baby face—a face frozen at five years old.

C’mon. Let’s go outside and have a smoke, said Uncle Alvin. You got those Cuban cigars with you?

Fred, said Uncle Harry, c’mon out to the porch with us and try a nice cigar from Havana. Hand-rolled.

Fred looked at me.

Go ahead, I said. Smoke their cigars. They’re mad at me, not you.

Almost everyone was outside, either on the front porch or in the backyard. The day was warm with a dazzling blue sky. The screen door clapped shut behind Fred. A few of us stayed inside, Aunt Vivian huddled by the coffee urn with Cousin Mitzi. Joanna, what was that poem the teacher recited? Mitzi said. She came toward Liz and me with a plastic cup full of coffee snapped into one of those brown plastic holders.

‘The Wild Swans At Coole,’ I said. ‘The trees are in their autumn beauty, the woodland paths are dry.’ My father liked Yeats.

What does it mean? Mitzi asked.

I thought about it. I stared out the window at my mother on the porch laughing at something my uncles were saying, and I tried to think of a short answer. There was a flurry of activity outside. The sound of a car door slamming, Fred rushing down the steps to the street, and my mother jumping up from her chair, hurrying inside.

Aunt Vivian grabbed my mother’s arm when she came in. Evie, we were just asking about that poem at the cemetery.

My mother nodded, trance-like. Joanna, she whispered hoarsely. All of the color had drained out of her face. Even her lips were pale.

What’s the matter, Ma?

Her eyes widened. There’s a cop outside, she said.

What’s a cop doing here? I said.

Don’t be stupid, she said.

Sirens, merely background noise seconds ago, wailed louder, then cut off on a whoop. Brakes screeched. Another car door croaked open. Susan brushed past us and into the den where her husband was watching a football game with Shep.

I still didn’t get it. It had to be a joke. Looking for me? I said.

Red lights danced on Aunt Shirley’s walls. My mother’s hand tightened on my wrist. She yanked me away from the window. I’d never seen her like this. She spoke through gritted teeth: Why else would the police be here?

What do you mean? I said.

Who else would they be coming for?

My heart started banging on the offbeat. Brenda sent the cops after me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was invulnerable, protected not just by privilege, but specifically the new feeling of self-worth I’d never had before. Susan always felt it, like a sixth sense. But for me, that kind of entitlement was a novelty. I was not wanted. My father had to have a boy, and I had been his last shot. Only at the end of his life, he discovered a girl was just as good. He could talk to me, about more than ice cream. We could share the life of the mind. He could do that with a daughter, how shocking it was to learn. In those last dying months, with icicles dripping from the overhang and a blanket of snow out the window behind our easy chairs, he reached for my hand and held it. Would you like me to leave you my books and papers? he asked. It turned out I was his rightful heir all along.

Liz skidded into the foyer and pressed her face to the screen door. Fred’s yelling something about a warrant. He wants to see the warrant. Way to go, Fred, Liz said.

Your boyfriend’s all riled up, said Mitzi.

I heard clanking, scraping. Handcuffs, dress shoes clomping on concrete. I didn’t have much time. I had to make a move. Shep bolted out of the den and grabbed me in a bear hug. The light had gone out of his eyes. He turned my body toward the kitchen.

Out the back door? I said.

Exactly, said Shep. Through the kitchen into the backyard, climb on top of the retaining wall, then up the hill and onto the neighbor’s property. He released me and gave me a push. Walk fast, but don’t run. Cut between the houses to the other side. Go. Go. Hurry.

CHAPTER 2

When I was little, I used to watch my father reading and smoking at his spot on the end of the sofa. He’d clear his throat and tap the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table without looking away from his book. I’d stand there and stare at him. I was trying to bore through his skull to see inside his head. Using all my powers of imagination, I entered his mind and wandered around in the darkness until the trees parted and I came upon a little orphan boy peering at me from behind an iron fence. My father reached out and tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. He looked up. What do you want, you stupid kid? Get out of here.

He died in winter. I got annoyed with Brenda at the shiva. It really bothered me when she leaned over the funeral candle in the tall blue jar with the Star of David and lit her cigarette off the flame.

We sat shiva only one night, and then I flew back to the West Coast with Fred. He was a screenwriter and had a deadline. Leaving right away was a mistake. I should have stayed and helped Brenda clean out the house, but I couldn’t bear another minute with her. So I fled with Fred to our rented bungalow in Venice, California, where the light was clear and hard as glass. I walked along the sand and let the ocean lap at my ankles. White stucco everywhere. I missed the seasons. Are you kidding? Fred said. You really want to go back to the cold?

I can’t remember anything without seasons, I said. I couldn’t place myself—was I wearing a winter coat, were the dogwoods in bloom, was it one of those hot summer nights? Fred shrugged. He was happy living in a desert. I watered the lemon tree. The light was as clear as glass, but I was still in a fog. I felt numb and cut off. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do. I’d had a job as a copy editor at a little newspaper, but I quit to take care of my father. It was a crappy job anyway. The editor-in-chief hired me as a favor to Fred. I’d find something better.

But first, I’d have to turn around and go back East again and sort through the homemade birthday cards, mine to my father and his to me: How come you’re twenty-five, and I’m still alive? When you are fifty, will I still be nifty? He was supposed to be a writer, that was his promise, unfulfilled, and I felt sure that besides birthday rhymes there had to be a manuscript hidden somewhere. I was excited at the prospect of what I might find, but I stalled because of an irrational obsessive fear that the amount of stuff in the house was literally infinite. I was convinced if I started sorting through things I would never finish. It was a sorcerer’s apprentice job—the boxes would fill up as soon as I emptied them, while Brenda stood over me clicking her tongue, disgusted by my sentimentality.

He was a saver like me. The Eisenhower jacket from his army uniform still hung in the front hall closet. A felt hat lay above it on the top shelf and whenever I saw the hat, I thought how strange that men in the nineteen-fifties and even the early sixties regularly wore fedoras. No man left the house without his hat, as I remembered it. My father palmed his, thumb fitting into the right dent, fingers into the left dent, a ship’s prow above the black band. He placed it on his head and went out into the world. I watched with solemn eyes, aware I could not go out into the world like him, since I was a girl and could not wear that sort of hat.

To be fair, sometimes he took Susan and me with him, usually to the Forest Park Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The library, for us, was like church must have been for other people. The smell was heady—paper, ink, wood, and glue. I sat in the children’s section on a low mahogany bench worn down like a sucked candy. You borrowed that book last week, Susan said.

So what? I said. I like it.

My father disappeared into the stacks, a flash of crew cut and black glasses.

Put it back! Susan said.

No!

He reappeared studying a book gray with type and no pictures. The book was so thick if it were a sandwich I wouldn’t be able to put my mouth around it. Children, he said in his mock schoolmarm voice. Quiet. You’re in a library. He smiled to himself.

Outside, I climbed a mountain of broken pavement in front of the Forest Park Branch and stood on the precipice. In Baltimore, people said payment for pavement. We said balling for boiling. If you were Jewish, ants were called pussy ants. Your mother killed the pussy ants on the payment with a chynik of balling water. We got into the car and drove away from downtown, over the railroad tracks toward the suburbs, until we came to our street of ranch houses cut out of a swath in the woods. Our new block was as bland and bright as only the future can be.

Did you get anything for your wife? my mother said, waiting at the kitchen door.

"Doctor Zhivago," my father said. Should be good, my darling.

CHAPTER 3

In early June I finally got up the courage to face Brenda and I flew to Baltimore, rented a car, and drove to Cedar Drive. The weather was brutally hot and humid, and to top it off, cicadas were falling out of the sky. Red-eyed insects the size of dinner rolls rained down on the neighborhood like one of the plagues in the story of Passover. If I hadn’t known it was the return of the seventeen-year locust, right on schedule in the spring of 1987, I might have believed the scourge of prehistoric bugs was an omen warning me to stay away from the house.

I drove on heedless, down the hill past the elementary school to the stop sign, then left onto Cedar Drive. When I was a kid, my father liked to ride the bike to his friend Leon’s house around the corner to smoke and talk, and I would ride with him, straddling the blue bicycle’s back rack. Pedaling along at a leisurely pace, my father told me how great our block was. Baltimore was a second-rate town, New York was it, but our particular street in Baltimore was paradise. It’s like a postcard, he said, gazing up at the treetops. He took one hand off the handlebars, wobbling the bike, and swept the panorama. Look at it! If you didn’t know where it was, you would come here for a vacation.

He was always reinventing the world so we were at its center, and that made him irresistible. I bought everything he said. I believed Cedar Drive was the best place on earth and my father was the smartest man in the world. He tacked up a sign in the den advertising an Alfred Kazin book in block letters: NEW YORK JEW. That’s who he thought he was. He was a schoolteacher in Maryland, but to his family, friends, and students, he was as gutsy as Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. As smart as Albert Einstein. He even had Einstein’s bushy hair and mustache.

I drove the rental car around the curve in our street past identical shingled shoeboxes, one after another with their carports, white gravel roofs, and redbrick trim, and I started getting excited. It was probably a depressing sight to most people—such small houses and all the same—but I shared my father’s rosy view and noticed the generous lawns and mature trees left standing in the backyards by a developer who had some sense of decency, saving the street from complete suburban tackiness. Also, the houses across the street from ours were built on a creek with red clay banks and willow trees, and the low ranch houses seemed sunk into the ground like mud houses on a riverbank, towered over by hundred-foot pin oaks.

I turned into the driveway and parked behind Brenda’s Mazda. There was nothing to be afraid of, I told myself. The worst had already happened, my father had already died, and Brenda had to be glad I was coming to help, although I didn’t know how we were going to clean out all that stuff in a weekend. I wondered if the old suitcase with the yellow Bakelite handle was still buried in the back of the den closet. Maybe I’d find a clue of some kind. In spite of my father’s big personality, he was maddeningly difficult to know, and I needed clues, there had to be clues. When I tamped down my terror at the enormity of the task, I started to feel genuine excitement. I’d get to the bottom of all those papers, and then I would be granted access to what I had been barred from. The things he shared with his students and not with me—his writing, his thoughts.

Brenda was in the carport laughing, watching me get out of the car clawing at my clothes like a B-movie actress in a horror film. You’re scared of the cicadas, she said.

I’m not really, I said and (rather fearlessly, I thought) plucked off an armor-backed insect clinging to my hair like a barrette. The dog barked behind the side gate. He was pacing frantically, his tail swishing the mesh part of the fence. Hoffman! I called. He put his paws on the fence rail and I went over and hugged his shaggy neck. He wasn’t named after Dustin Hoffman as my sister sometimes said, but for a friend of my father’s from the Home. Brenda held the screen door open impatiently, so I let Hoffman lick my face and then I went in. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I was sorry I had come alone. This was the kitchen where my father’s vegetable soup used to simmer on the stove, where my mother made pancakes on Sunday mornings, where Susan and I stamped snow off our boots in winter and in summer stood dripping in our bathing suits. And where, once we were grown, my father greeted us when we came home, his arms open, a cigarette in his hand, and where (and everywhere) he would never greet us again.

The house was alive with him. His carpentry, his paintings, his garden. He loved our little place. He had wanted land, and he got land, a fraction of an acre. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was able to own a house. He was a realist who knew in order to survive he had to be a fabulist. He pretended he had a vast estate. He pretended money didn’t matter. He planted trees and flowers. He grew vegetables like he did on the orphanage farm gang. They had twenty acres at the H, he said. The H was short for the Home.

Some estate that was, my mother would say. They’d laugh.

He’d put his hand inside a burlap bag from the nursery. Horse manure, he said, pulling out a clump. He held it under my nose. Smell that. I love it. Cleanest shit there is. He liked to say shit in front of Susan and me, it made my mother laugh. They were communists. Now they were landowners. They didn’t believe in God.

C’mon, step lively. Help me out here.

I drew a gun out of my Lone Ranger double holster and pointed it at him. Stick ‘em up, I said.

Very funny, he said. Put that away. He handed over a trowel. You know what happened to us in the orphanage when we didn’t step lively?

The belt? Susan said. She sat in a lawn chair swinging her feet in Mary Janes, her dress spread around her like petals. My father went over and touched Susan’s golden hair. He was holding a cigarette, which made the gesture especially tender, the delicate care he had to take. He bent and kissed her head.

Not the belt, said my mother. The cane.

Tell the other one to put a shirt on, my father said.

She refuses, said my mother. She wants to be like you.

He pretended he didn’t mind not having a son. He had surrogate sons instead, his students at Baltimore City College High School. Like the orphanage, City was all boys. Hundreds of boys, plenty to choose from. His favorites were the ones who worked on the Collegian newspaper. He was the faculty adviser. He pretended, but he couldn’t pull it off. He wanted a real son like the boy he once was, the boy who had lost his father. I would have been happy if he got his wish. I saw right away boys were the main people. At the toy store, I asked for cap guns and race cars, not to please my father, but as the logical choice. Who didn’t like the pop sound and burnt smell of gunpowder? Or a miniature car that moved by itself? I roamed the neighborhood bare-chested, my holster slung over my shorts. Go ahead, walk around like that, my sister said. You have nothing to hide.

My mother lounged in a black strapless bathing suit like a Modigliani by our inflated baby pool and dreamed of Greenwich Village. She hadn’t wanted kids and waited impatiently for us to mature into adults alongside the scrawny saplings my father planted, roped to two-by-fours. We were a job for which my mother felt overqualified merely by being an adult, and we didn’t interest her much. She drank coffee and smoked Chesterfields with the other mothers in the neighborhood, pushed her carpet sweeper dreamily, or at times with enthusiasm while she listened to Oklahoma! on the hi-fi, and drove the sloping ‘49 Chevy she named Betsy to the Food Fair with us standing up in the back. She talked to us because she had no one else. There were things she couldn’t tell the women in the neighborhood. Her life used to have meaning. She said during the war (how she missed the war years!) she was in the leadership at the local Communist Party headquarters. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone. It was important work, she said, it was exciting, they were fighting fascism. She was going to change the world by making sure poor people got more money. It was a secret. Something stopped her, though. Something happened, and she never did change the world.

Sometimes we’d get into the Chevy and she would drive us backward into her history, past the Forest Park Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the old row house where we lived when I was born, and farther downtown until Liberty Heights became Pennsylvania Avenue. Black girls in pink curlers sat on the marble steps. My mother turned right and stopped in front of 1837 North Avenue. This is where I lived when your father walked into my life, she said. Your grandma took in boarders. The third-floor windows on the row house were broken. The first-floor windows were covered with plywood. It looked as if no girl ever lay on her bed reading poetry there, not a white girl or a black girl. My mother started the car and drove east a few blocks to the Young Communist League at No. 1019. It was just a house with a stone foundation and a sagging porch.

At bedtime she brought down the storybook from the shelf, but we begged her to tell us a true story instead, about hearing Paul Robeson sing in person, and how she cried when Franklin Roosevelt died. She told about the iceman and candy stores and streetcars for a nickel, and playing in Druid Hill Park, a place as mysterious as its name. My mother felt sorry for us growing up in the suburbs with no parks and nothing to walk to.

Didn’t she know we had the creek? At least I did. Susan was an inside child. I spent the summer with Tom from next door, squatting on flat rocks in the white water, poking under stones with sticks. We caught minnows, crayfish, and eels, and came running up the red clay bank to burst between the houses onto the hot asphalt when we heard the dinga-linga-ling of the Good Humor truck. How could my mother not know what it meant to me, the silver handle like a crank popping open that back freezer door?

My father never read to us or told stories at bedtime. I didn’t have a father to read to me, he said. So we didn’t get one. He told his stories around the kitchen table at suppertime instead and made it seem like regular conversation. Every one of us at the Home had a number, he said. We had to line up for clean underwear. My number was 271.

I was bewildered. It was impossible. I didn’t believe him. My father couldn’t be 271. He was number one, numero uno.

‘Line up!’ the supervisor said, and he threw us our clean underwear, and you better be in the right order or you’d get the wrong pair.

The Colonel made sure you were in the right order, my mother said.

Yeah, the Colonel, my father said. He held a cigarette between his fingers and flicked the filter end with his thumb. Susan and I had a word for it. Pep your cigarette, we’d say irritably, when we noticed the ash getting long. Forget about the Colonel, my father said. You wanna know something?

Yeah, I wanna know something, Susan said.

I’ll tell you something. We didn’t have it so bad. We had twenty acres to play on. Friends, did we have friends! And horses. My favorite was Playboy.

Was his shit clean? I asked.

You bet, my father said. Playboy’s shit was the cleanest of all the clean shit there is. Every other Sunday my mother came to visit.

Uncle Archie pushed Walnettos through the fence, my mother said.

But there were kids who didn’t have anybody come, said my father. Sundays were sad for them. He leaned forward and pepped his cigarette again. There was this one kid, Shmuel Hefter, shy kid. He’d pack his suitcase every Sunday because you know, these single parents were always telling their sons one day they’ll get enough money or a bigger apartment and bring them home. His little Yiddishe mama, she says to him: ‘Shmuel. . . .’ What are you laughing about? my father said. This is sad.

It’s the name, Daddy. Shmuel, Susan said. We doubled over giggling.

Actually, my father said, we called him Shmecky. That was his nickname.

Shmecky! That’s even worse. We laughed and laughed.

Anyway, the mama says to him before she puts him in, ‘soon as I get enough money, I’ll take you home.’ So every Sunday the poor kid packs his suitcase and sits out on the steps. All day he sits there and no one comes. Cries himself to sleep every Sunday night for years. Then one Sunday, lo and behold, Shmecky’s mother comes to get him. We can’t believe it. Off they go, Shmecky walking down Tuckahoe Road with his suitcase, holding onto his mother’s hand.

That’s a nice story, Susan said.

It’s not over yet, kid.

Aw Clyde, don’t tell them the rest. They’re too little, my mother said.

Tell us! Tell us!

Forget it, said my father. Who wants to go for a ride?

It was summer and through the open windows dishes clacked and silverware clinked in kitchens up and down the block as mothers cleaned up from dinner. Screen doors slammed and children ran into the street calling to each other.

C’mon, Jo, he said. Finish your dessert. Anybody else? You wanna go for a ride? Susan? Evie?

Maybe later, Susan said.

I’ve got this mess to clean up, my mother said.

My father took hold of the handlebars on Susan’s blue bicycle leaning against the rose trellis. He kicked up the kickstand, and got on. I straddled the back rack and we coasted down the driveway. The summer sky was radiant and the evening sun cast a golden glow over the lawns and sidewalks. The bike bumped into the gutter with a clatter and glided onto the smooth asphalt of Cedar Drive. I held onto my metal seat with both hands.

We have a great block, my father said as he pedaled along. He waved at some neighbors on the sidewalk. Hi ya, Lefty, he said to one of the men as we rode past.

It’s Lucky, I said.

Oh yeah, my father said. Lucky. We rode around the bend where we could see willow trees leaning over the creek between the houses. My father gazed up at the taller treetops. Look at it. It’s like a postcard, he said.

I think so, too, I said. I let go of the seat and put my arms around him and pressed my cheek against his back.

CHAPTER 4

Iwas lost in thought sitting across the table from Brenda when a cicada smacked against

Reviews for The Orphan's Daughter

[amylarchuk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Orphan’s Daughter, a first novel by Jan Cherubin, subtly illustrates a child, Joanna, who is obsessed with her father Clyde, feeling incomplete without his love and attention. As Joanna grows up, she begins to understand slowly, over time, that she was abused by this man she loves so obsessively. As the title indicates, the orphan Clyde is the center of this galaxy, and Joanna is merely the daughter, the satellite reflecting his brilliance.The story switches from Clyde’s deathbed, Clyde’s memoirs of his years in a Hebrew orphanage for boys, and Joanna’s fitful memories of her own childhood. Clyde has lived a long life. He is very sick, and most everyone realizes that his time has come. Joanna hysterically races cross-country to stay by his side, working night and day to care for him, desperate to keep him alive. Everyone else seems content to say goodbye to Clyde, his brothers and sisters, his ex-wife who is Joanna’s mother, Joanna’s sister Susan, the students he's mentored, and his current, much younger wife, who is anxious to be free of him. Joanna is unable to move on, and feels she is Clyde’s only hope, his savior, the only one who is not giving up on him.It’s painful to watch Joanna try, in Clyde’s last days, to become the favorite daughter, the friend, the confidant, and the child who still longs for her father’s love and wisdom. But this book is about family dysfunction, and the Aronson family is clearly developed in this interesting novel.