There she was, laughing down at me. So close, so close. I stood up and kissed her cheek. Her skin felt soft and smooth and nice. Then I backed away. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.
She went on laughing. “You’re it. I caught you, Dave Caros.”
I blurted, “I’m going to run away from the Home after I get my carving back. Do you know any place I could stay?”
She didn’t stop to think. “You could stay in our basement.” She nodded. “You really could. Mama never goes down there. I’d bring you food. I could bring pillows down to make you a . . .”
That was a friend! She could be an honorary buddy, except for being a girl.
I had a place to stay. Now all I needed was the carving.
“I could teach you what Miss Mulready teaches me. I could teach you to play jacks. And to do the Charleston better. And the Black Bottom. We could jump rope.”
Jacks and jumping rope were for girls, but I guessed I could do it.
“You could come upstairs when Mama’s not home.”
“Could I get out sometimes?” I asked.
“Sure. And you could meet Solly and go to rent parties . . . When are you coming?”
“Soon. As soon as I get Papa’s carving back.”
The door opened and Solly came out. He was out of breath, and the parrot was flapping its wings. “I climbed almost to the roof, looking for you. We’d better leave, or I’ll turn into a pumpkin and the nebbish won’t let you in.”
I smiled at him. It didn’t matter anymore that he wouldn’t let me stay with him. I liked him again. After all, he did go through trouble and expense to get me out of the HHB tonight.
Before we left, Irma Lee gave me the loaf of potato bread, which weighed at least ten pounds. It was big, but I could sneak it in under my jacket.
“Mr. Gruber,” she said after she gave me the bread, “are you going to bring Dave to any more parties?”
“Could be, Irmaleh. He’s a good groaner.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
We shook hands.
She whispered to me, “I’ll get everything ready. Hurry up and get your carving back.”
Chapter 26
IT WAS STILL dark out, and music still drifted from some of the windows on Seventh Avenue. When ever we heard a snatch of jazz music, Solly stopped to listen.
It would be swell, living in Irma Lee’s basement, having fun with her, and being a gonif with Solly. Plus getting enough to eat and not going to school. And then I thought, What about my buddies? What about Mr. Hillinger’s classes? I shook my head. I was leaving the HHB.
“So, Daveleh. Did you like being in high society?”
“Uh-huh. Are you going to any rent parties soon?” We turned the corner of 127th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue, where Saint Nicholas Park started.
“Almost every night I go. It’s my business.”
“Where will you be tomorrow? I mean, today.” It was morning already.
“I don’t know so far in advance.”
The same day was too far in advance? “When will you know?”
“Tonight.”
“So, nu?” I said. “Can I come with you?”
“When will you sleep, boychik? Me, I have all day to nap.”
I felt wide awake and ready for a game of stickball. “I’m not tired.”
“Daveleh, why don’t you stay safe and sound in your HHB?”
Safe and sound and cold and hungry. I didn’t answer.
Solly waited and then said, “Meaning you’ll do what you want, never mind what I say?” He sighed. “Better you should be with a responsible gonif. Listen, boychik. Tonight you’ll sleep. Tomorrow night you’ll meet me at the Tree of Hope.”
What was that? A speakeasy? “What is it?”
“It sounds biblical, doesn’t it, Daveleh?”
“Is it a real tree?”
“What else would it be? Musicians go there, and people looking for musicians hire them there. And I go there too.”
Oh. That’s how he found out about rent parties. “Where is it?”
“The Tree of Hope is on Seventh Avenue and a Hundred and Thirty-second Street. We passed it on the way to the party. You didn’t notice?”
I shook my head.
“Suppose I wait for you from twelve to one. Is that good?”
I nodded. “Thanks.” I wished I had a watch. I’d have to listen for the chimes.
“If you don’t come Monday, I’ll wait Tuesday. If a week goes by and no boychik, I’ll shlep to the HHB and shmeer the nebbish again. What’s a little money to a rich man like me?”
We were five minutes late getting back to the orphanage. Mr. Meltzer was mad till Solly gave him another shmeer, a quarter “for his trouble.” Then Mr. Meltzer smiled, which almost cracked his face into splinters.
As I followed Mr. Meltzer down the halls, I thought how bare and dead the Hollow Home for Boys was compared to Irma Lee’s jumping party.
But our room came alive as soon as the door shut behind Mr. Meltzer.
“I thought you were gone for good,” Mike said.
“Where would he go?” Harvey said.
Irma Lee’s basement. That’s where.
“Did somebody die?” Mike asked. “One of your relatives?”
“No. Nobody died.” I reached under my jacket. “Here.” I handed the bread to Mike, who almost dropped it. “It’s potato bread.”
“One bite, then pass it,” Eli said.
The bread went around twice. Meanwhile, I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed and put my drawing of Irma Lee inside. I wanted to ask Mr. Hillinger about it, but I didn’t want anybody else to see it.
“Where did you go?” one of the twins asked.
I told them. They didn’t know about Solly, so I started with him. Then I told them about the party. “A lot of famous people were there.”
“Like who?” Harvey said.
“Like Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois and a colored crook, Caspar Holstein.” I couldn’t remember the names of the others.
“Never heard of them,” Harvey said.
“Like the prince and princess of Sheba.” That shut him up. “And I got a place to stay when I leave.” I told them about it.
“You’d stay with the shvartzehs?” Harvey said.
“Sure.”
“How’re you going to get the carving?” Mike asked.
“I’ve thought about that,” Eli said.
We all looked at him.
“We have to spy on Mr. Doom to see if he ever leaves his office unlocked. We’ll take turns.”
They’d be taking a big risk to help me get out of here, to help me become an ex-buddy. Well, I might leave, but I’d be their buddy forever. “Thanks!”
Harvey said, “Good idea.”
“What about Mr. Cluck?” I asked.
Jeff laughed. “Remember when Alfie and Bernie went to the toilet at nine-thirty and didn’t come back till—”
“Till after lunch,” the other twin finished. “Mr. Cluck never noticed.”
“Mr. Doom will kill you if he catches you,” I said. I wished there was a way to take these guys with me when I left.
“Nobody’s going to catch me,” Harvey said. “Eli and I will go first. We’ll take breakfast.”
“Mr. Doom doesn’t get here till after breakfast,” I said. “Mr. Meltzer told me.”
“Then we’ll go right after breakfast.”
“Where will you watch from?” I asked. “They’ll notice if you look suspicious.”
“I’ll think of something,” Harvey said.
The bell rang to wake us up. Everybody rushed back to bed before Mr. Meltzer came in. But we talked about it more on the way to breakfast. Harvey kept insisting he wouldn’t look suspicious, but he wouldn’t explain why not.
“We could stand in a stairwell, open the door a crack, and look out,” I said. “Nobody in the hall would see us.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mike said, kicking the door to the basemen
t open, stubbing his toe, and hopping around.
“It’s lousy,” Harvey said. “Anybody on the stairs would see us.”
“What if we just walk up and down the front halls,” I said, “and act like we know where we’re going.”
“Boy, are you stupid,” Harvey said. “Then everybody would see us.”
I wanted to punch him in the nose.
“Dave’s right,” Eli said as we sat down at our table. “We walk along quickly like we’re running an errand, and then we turn at the end of the hall and go back again if nobody’s watching. If someone is watching, we go around a corner, walk along, act like we forgot something, and turn around.” Eli hit his forehead with the heel of his hand, like he just remembered something. “Like that.”
“But what if somebody stops us?” Mike asked.
Moe and his sidekick bullies took their places at our table.
“Then we say Mr. Cluck sent us to the library for a book.” Eli ignored the bullies. “We go around the corner as if we were going to the library, and then we come back again when the coast is clear.”
Harvey nodded. “That’s what I’d do.”
“Or, if we’re going the wrong way for the library,” Eli added, “we say Mr. Cluck told us to get Ed to fix something and we head for a stairwell.”
“What should we do if Mr. Doom leaves?” Fred asked.
That was a dumb question. “Come and get me,” I said.
“Uh-uh,” Eli said. “You should only get Dave if he leaves for a special onetime reason. If it looks like he’ll do it every day, just watch to see how long he’s gone.” He turned to me. “Then you’ll know how much time you have.”
He was right. The food came. Moe kissed his rabbit’s foot and started on my oatmeal. We stopped talking and started shoveling.
“I’ll watch Mr. Doom’s office first,” I said when I finished eating, “since it’s my carving. You and Eli can come after me.” Just saying the words made my heart skip. I didn’t want to go near Mr. Doom’s office.
Mike said he’d come with me. We were going to do it in twos, since that’s how Mr. Cluck sent us to the toilet.
“Who’ll do this afternoon?” Harvey asked. “You know I can’t do anything once Visiting Day starts.”
“We only need to see if Mr. Doom locks the door when he leaves his office before lunch,” Eli said. “We’ll do it. We might be able to get in then.”
Mr. Doom was all over the place while visitors were here. He shook hands, bragged about what a fine superintendent he was, and smiled his fake smile at everybody.
Harvey yelled, “I’m not robbing anybody’s office while my mama’s here.”
Our bullies looked startled. “Shh,” we all said.
“It’s not robbery,” I said. “He stole from me. And I’m the one who’s going into his office.”
“Today would be the day to do it,” Mike said, knocking his spoon off the table. “He couldn’t beat you too bad during Visiting Day, not with all the families here.”
“He won’t beat me,” I said. “Because he won’t catch me.”
Chapter 27
AFTER BREAKFAST, MIKE and I ducked into the toilet instead of going to Mr. Cluck’s classroom for Hebrew school. In the hall outside, feet thundered by.
Mike turned on all the faucets. “I hate Visiting Day.”
On Visiting Day, his aunt and grandpa always came, and Mike was always extra jumpy. But he’d never said anything about it before. He turned off the faucets. “Grandpa doesn’t even recognize me anymore. He took care of me till he started forgetting.” He flushed the toilets. “So then I had to come here.”
“He’d still take care of you if he could, wouldn’t he?” Not like Ida.
“Yeah.” He lifted a toilet seat and then let go of it. Blam!
The noise in the hall was dying down. “Shh. They’ll wonder what’s going on.”
“Sorry.”
“If nobody’s in the front hall,” I said, “I’m going to knock on Mr. Doom’s door. I want to see if he’s in there. Be ready to run.”
Mike swallowed. I saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “If he catches us, we can gang up on him.”
Yeah. Mosquitoes are small, but they bite.
And one swipe kills them.
I opened the door. A prefect was at the end of the hall, walking away from us. Nobody else. We stepped out, spies entering enemy territory.
We turned into the front hall. The hall and the lobby were empty. We crossed the lobby. My hands were icy. We stood in front of Mr. Doom’s office. I knocked. He rumbled, “Come in,” and we ran. The stairwell door at the end of the hall looked a million miles away.
We reached the door, and slipped in. I put my fingers over my lips for Mike to be quiet, and somehow he was.
Footsteps in the hall. I stopped breathing. They came closer. Stopped. Started again. Closer, closer. Maybe farther away. Definitely farther away. Silence.
Mike started to grin. I shook my head. He might still be out there. We waited. Mike wiggled his fingers in the air, action without noise. We waited.
Mike snapped his fingers, then remembered and stopped. Mr. Doom had to be gone by now. I started to inch the door open. I heard footsteps again. I froze. Mike froze, sort of.
The footsteps came closer. The door was open a sliver. I couldn’t close it without making noise. The footsteps got louder.
I could see most of the front hall through the sliver. Mr. Doom’s back came into view, walking away from us. He opened his door without using a key and went in. For all the good it did, the door had been unlocked the whole time he was in the hall.
Nothing happened after that. Mr. Doom stayed in his office. When Eli and Harvey came to take our place, we went to Mr. Cluck’s class. The chart with the Hebrew alphabet was on a stand at the front of the room, but Mr. Cluck was giving his usual lecture.
As soon as I sat down my eyes closed, and I slept till the bell rang. At lunch, the twins said they’d seen Mr. Doom come out of his office and lock it right before lunch. They couldn’t stop talking about their adventure.
“He locked his door. Then he walked right by us,” Jeff said.
“We just rushed by like—”
“Like we were taking a message to President Coolidge.”
“It was easy.”
“He didn’t even look at us.”
I’d never get the carving if his office was always locked when he wasn’t in it.
“You can’t tell anything from a weekend, Dave,” Eli said, seeing my face. “He could leave his door unlocked for hours on a weekday.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Mike said.
Visiting Day lunch was the best meal of the week. This Sunday, we had stew with actual pieces of meat in it, and they weren’t all gristle either. There were big chunks of potato and carrots too. Even with Moe taking his half, I felt like I had eaten.
After lunch, almost everybody went to the lobby to wait for their visitors. I went to our room along with Eli and a handful of other elevens who didn’t expect anybody. As we climbed the extra flight, we heard the kids downstairs, laughing and yelling.
We were supposed to spend the time writing letters. If we didn’t have any family to write to, we were supposed to study. I never wanted to study, so I always wrote a letter. If Mr. Meltzer came around that’s what he saw—me writing a letter. Sometimes I wrote to Ida. Sometimes I wrote to Gideon. If I needed to figure something out, I wrote to Papa. When Visiting Day ended, I flushed the letters to Gideon and Ida, but I saved the ones to Papa.
This time my letter was to Gideon. “We just came back from lunch,” I wrote.
The first course was chicken soup. When I was done I found the wishbone in the bottom of the bowl. My problem was I had nothing to wish for, it’s so nice here.
After the soup they brought out stew with big pieces of meat and potatoes, and there was as much bread as we wanted to soak up the gravy. For dessert we had chocolate cookies. No one is skinny at the HHB (H
eavenly Hotel for Boys).
I don’t remember if I ever told you about our library. It has thousands of books, and every day we have a choice of an hour playing stickball or an hour in the library. I hit two homers yesterday.
I looked up. A few boys came in with their families. The best real thing about the HHB—the buddies—wouldn’t interest Gideon.
The twins came in with an old lady who walked with a cane. Joey, who sat catty-cornered behind me in Mr. Cluck’s class, was with a man who had a bushy beard. Mike must have gone somewhere else with his aunt and grandpa. Harvey didn’t come in either. I had never seen his mother, and I was curious about her.
“Yesterday Mr. Gluck, our teacher, started teaching us about labor unions,” I wrote.
(Remember Mr. Gluck? In my last letter I told you he’s the best teacher in the whole orphanage.) Lots of kids asked questions, and Mr. Gluck answered all of them. I guess it was interesting. I didn’t listen much because I was thinking about stickball.
It would be exactly right for you here. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Uncle Jack will die and you’ll be able to
“. . . Such a good boy. Dave is smart . . .” It was Mr. Meltzer’s voice, but I didn’t know what Dave he was talking about.
I looked up. Solly, carrying a big brown paper bag and looking as rumpled as ever, puffed along behind Mr. Meltzer.
Chapter 28
“DAVE, WHY WEREN’T you downstairs waiting for your grandpa?” Mr. Meltzer sounded sickeningly friendly.
“It’s about time I came, isn’t it, boychik?” While Mr. Meltzer watched with a dopey grin, Solly put the bag down on my bed and held out his arms for a hug.
“Grandpa!”
Solly hugged me while thumping me on the back. It gave a rhythm to the hug. He smelled of soap and onions.
“So this is what an HHB looks like in the daytime.” He turned to Mr. Meltzer. “Tell me, mister, why is it always so cold in here? Icicles are forming on my nose.”
Mr. Meltzer looked embarrassed. “Uh . . . The furnace is old, and Mr. Bloom, the superintendent, believes the cold toughens the boys. You’ll have to take it up with him. Excuse me, I have to go. It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Gruber.”