Dave at Night

  “HEY, YOU!”

  I had almost reached the lobby. I heard Mr. Meltzer pounding after me. The suitcase was slowing me down. I dropped it and sprinted for the door.

  The carving! My treasure box! I wheeled and dashed back. But before I got to the suitcase, Mr. Meltzer grabbed me. I struggled to reach it. If I could get it, I’d swing it into him. I’d knock him over and run.

  “Stay still, you brat,” he panted.

  I fought harder, but he held on. I couldn’t get away.

  “Now come.” He walked me to my shoes and waited while I put them on. Then he walked me to the suitcase. “Pick it up.” He held my shoulders and eased me down to it without letting go for a second.

  He marched me back up the corridor to a door at the end. It opened onto an ordinary wooden staircase, not marble like the one in the lobby. We climbed up to the top floor, the third. It was slightly warmer up here, but the echoing silence was the same, and so was the ugly gray-green paint job on the walls.

  Mr. Meltzer stopped in front of a door and opened it while holding on to me. Inside was a nurse’s office with a scale and a cot and the nurse’s desk, which had a telephone on it. The nurse said hello and smiled like there was something to smile about. She weighed me, listened to my heart, and looked in my ears. When she riffled through my hair for lice, she said, “I wish I had curls like yours.” She asked me if I’d had the mumps, measles, chicken pox. I told her no, but I’d had hoof-and-mouth disease when I was eight. She laughed, which surprised me. Mr. Meltzer didn’t, which didn’t.

  She asked me if I had any brothers or sisters. I told her my brother had died in the same accident that killed Papa.

  When she finished examining me, she told me not to put my clothes back on. “How old are you? Nine?”

  I said I was fourteen. Mr. Meltzer said I was eleven.

  “Small for your age.” She went to a closet and came back carrying a pile of clothes and a pair of low boots. “A new wardrobe.”

  “I like the clothes I came in with.”

  “Put on the uniform.” Mr. Meltzer folded my old things and put them in my suitcase.

  “We all wear uniforms here,” the nurse said.

  Yeah, but her uniform showed she was a nurse. Mine would show I was an orphan.

  The yellowy-white shirt was too big. I wondered if the kid who’d had it before me was still alive.

  The tie had gray-green and purple stripes. The gray knickers were too big. I had to buckle the belt on the last hole to keep them up. The gray jacket was too big and it had no pockets. The knickers and the jacket were stiff enough for a coat of armor. Scratchy too. The heels of the white socks came up to my ankles. Only the shoes fit.

  “Orphans may come and orphans may go,” the nurse said, “but their clothing lasts forever.”

  Mr. Meltzer picked up my suitcase and we left the nurse’s office. In the hall, he said he was going to take me to meet Superintendent Bloom, who was in charge of the whole orphanage. “Call him sir. He’s not as nice as I am.”

  Back downstairs, Mr. Meltzer knocked on the first door to the right of the lobby.

  “Come in,” a rumbly voice called.

  It was warm in his office. Not hot. Just right.

  Mr. Bloom was huge. His chest and head loomed over his desk like the Hebrew Home for Boys loomed over Broadway. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Scraping against the wall on the way, he walked around to my side of his desk and bent down to inspect me through thick spectacles. He smiled, showing a million teeth.

  He looked up at Mr. Meltzer, who was leaning against the door so I couldn’t get out. “What’s his name?”

  He could have asked me. Didn’t he think I knew my own name?

  “Dave Caros,” Mr. Meltzer said.

  “Dave, you have my sympathy for your loss.”

  What did I lose? Oh. Papa.

  “But no loss comes without gain. I like my boys to think of me as their papa.” Mr. Bloom’s smile disappeared. “A stern papa, because all good fathers are stern.”

  I’d never think of this gorilla as my papa.

  “Look around this office,” Mr. Bloom went on. “Take a good look.”

  I looked. The room was oak-paneled. A telephone hung on the wall to the left of the desk. An electric log glowed in the fireplace on the opposite wall. A knickknack case stood next to the fireplace. It was very fine, like something Papa could have made. The door had small glass panes separated by wooden latticing.

  “That’s enough,” Mr. Bloom said. “You don’t want to be in this office again. Only bad boys see this office twice, and you’re not a bad boy, are you?”

  I was supposed to say something. “I’m a good boy.”

  “You’re not a bad boy?” he repeated, frowning. His glasses slipped sideways on his greasy nose.

  I already told him I wasn’t.

  He reached behind him for the yardstick on his desk. What had I done? I turned to Mr. Meltzer, but he was looking at his shoes.

  He must be deaf. I spoke louder. “I’m a good boy.”

  He raised the yardstick.

  Then I remembered. “Sir, I’m a good boy, sir.” Some papa.

  “Glad to hear it.” He put the yardstick down. “Welcome to the Home.”

  We left the office and I felt cold again. Mr. Meltzer took me to the end of the hall and around the corner. He opened the third door on our right. A roomful of boys dressed like me turned their heads to stare. The teacher said, “Another one!”

  Mr. Meltzer pulled me to a desk toward the back. I sat, keeping my eyes on my suitcase.

  “New boy. Name’s Dave Caros.” Mr. Meltzer turned to leave.

  “My suitcase . . .” I said, starting to stand.

  “It’ll be under your bed.” He left.

  It better be.

  The boy on my left was bouncing up and down in his seat. His right hand jerked from the inkwell to his notebook and back again. His left hand drummed on the side of the desk, while both his knees pumped up and down. I leaned over and looked in the notebook. He was drawing violins. The page was full of ink blotches and smudges and, in between, violins.

  “New boy,” the teacher called. He was short and almost bald—just a few gray hairs held in place with pomade. “I’m Mr. Gluck. Supplies are in your desk.” He went to a map of North America that was tacked to the wall next to the blackboard. “Stand up and show us what a scholar you are.”

  I stood. The boy on my other side started coughing.

  “What state is this?” Mr. Gluck tapped the map with his pointer.

  “New Jersey.”

  That cough sounded bad. If I had a cough like that, Papa would have made me inhale steam, and he would have rubbed Vicks on my chest, and he would have kept Gideon away from me, and he would have worried.

  “What is the capital of New Jersey?”

  I had no idea. I didn’t say anything.

  “Dave is a thinker,” Mr. Gluck said. “We’ll wait while he thinks.”

  No one laughed or even paid attention. The boy next to me stopped coughing gradually.

  “Jersey City?”

  Mr. Gluck groaned. “They give me complete idiots. It’s a task for a wizard, not a teacher.” He walked to a spot two rows in front of me where a pair of twins whispered across the aisle to each other. Holding one of them by the ear, Mr. Gluck returned to the front of the room and went on with his speech about what dopes we were. The twin with the captured ear crossed his eyes and tried to touch his nose with his tongue.

  I wasn’t about to stand for hours, waiting for the teacher to give me permission to sit. I sat and opened my desk. Inside were a notebook, a bottle of ink, a pen, a pencil, and three textbooks. Gideon would have pulled out the textbooks and started memorizing them. I took the notebook and the pen and ink. I wanted to try drawing violins and see if there was something special about doing it.

  A boy in the first row raised his hand. When Mr. Gluck called on him, he said, “I need the toilet.”


  Mr. Gluck nodded and pointed at the boy next to the one who said he had to go. “Louis, you’re monitor.”

  They left the room. Facing away from Mr. Gluck, they were both grinning.

  I started to draw, but the jumpy kid turned to me and whispered, “I’m Mike, buddy.” He held out his hand to shake. The hand was speckled with ink, and some of it was still wet.

  So what? I shook. “I’m Dave.”

  “Welcome to the HHB.”

  I guess I looked puzzled.

  “HHB. Hebrew Home for Boys. HHB. Hell Hole for Brats.”

  Chapter 6

  MIKE WENT BACK to drawing violins. I began to draw too, but the boy who had been coughing stuck out his hand for me to shake.

  “I’m Alfie, buddy,” he whispered. His cheeks were flushed, like he had a fever. The cough and the fever—consumption.

  I shook. “Hi.”

  The boy behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m Eli, buddy,” he said. “It’s Trenton.” He held his hand out too.

  I shook it. “What’s Trenton?”

  He grinned. “The capital of New Jersey. But Mr. Cluck won’t ever teach it.”

  Mr. Cluck. That was a good one.

  The boy on Eli’s right wanted to shake too. His name was Harvey, buddy. The boy on Eli’s left was Joey, buddy. In front of me were Ira, buddy, Danny, buddy, and Reuben, buddy. Maybe I should stay at the orphanage, I thought. Kids sure were friendly here, and they sure liked to call people buddy.

  Mr. Cluck was still droning on about how hard he worked trying to teach us. I began to count the boys in the room. I got up to thirty-two with one row to go when a bell rang. Mr. Cluck let go of the twin’s ear and dismissed us. The two boys who’d gone to the toilet had never come back.

  I left with Mike, Harvey, Eli, and Alfie. I hoped it was lunchtime. I was starving.

  “Did you meet Mr. Doom yet?” Mike asked, scratching his neck with one hand and slapping his thigh with the other.

  “Who?”

  “The superintendent. Mr. Bloom—Mr. Doom.”

  “Not my doom. I can take care of myself.” He could be Doom or he could be Death, it didn’t matter.

  Mike laughed. He had a kind of choking laugh, like the laugh was stuck in his throat. “Buddy, you better hope so.”

  Alfie started coughing again. Harvey pounded him on the back.

  Eli said, “You’ll give him a backache on top of a cough.”

  Couldn’t they tell Alfie had consumption? This time next year he’d probably be dead, like my friend Morty, who died during the summer after third grade.

  Alfie waved his hands in front of his face. He was smaller and skinnier than me. His ears were enormous and stuck out from his head like cup handles. They were flushed too, like his face.

  “You’re supposed to pound a buddy when he coughs, buddy.” Harvey had a hoarse voice. He was my height, but blocky-looking, like someone had carved him out with a wide chisel and hadn’t bothered to finish him off with sandpaper.

  Eli was tall and skinny. He had wires on his teeth. I’d never seen anything like it. Were they supposed to keep his teeth from falling out?

  Mike was hard to see because he was always moving. He had straight brown hair that flew around his head and a long narrow nose.

  We turned into the stairwell at the end of the corridor and started downstairs to the basement.

  Harvey said, “So, Dave, buddy, are you a half or a whole?”

  “Do I look like half of anything?”

  “He means, is one of your parents dead or both?” Mike was hopping down the stairs backwards.

  I didn’t get it. “Some kids still have a mama or a papa? What are they doing here?”

  Mike missed a step and almost crashed down the stairs.

  “My mama’s coming for me soon, buddy,” Harvey said. “She’s just in a jam right now. So both of yours are dead. You’re a whole.”

  “Three-quarters. My stepmother gave me up.”

  “Three-quarters!” Mike said. “I like that. I’m three-quarters too then, because my grandfather’s alive.”

  “There’s no such thing as three-quarters, buddy,” Harvey said. “You’re both wholes.”

  “Who are you to decide?” I said.

  “I’m me, buddy, and I’m telling you there’s no such thing as a three-quarter orphan.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I could beat him up.

  “Fight later,” Eli said. “Not here.”

  Mike opened the door to the basement. Inside, long tables and benches were set up, with pipes overhead and pillars separating the rows of tables. The noise of a million boys yelling rang off the pipes and the low ceiling. A few grown-ups stood around. Mr. Meltzer was there, but I didn’t see Mr. Doom.

  We sat at an empty table. I wound up on a bench between Mike and Eli, across from the twins from our class. Harvey was at the end of the bench, with a lot of elevens between us, which was good. Each twin reached across the table to shake my hand. They shouted that their names were Jeff and Fred. Except for Fred’s chipped front tooth, they looked exactly alike—red hair, freckles, dark-blue eyes.

  Women started coming through a swinging door a few yards away. Each of them carried a huge, steaming pan. I smelled something like burnt rubber.

  A bunch of older boys came to our table, and one sat next to each of us elevens. We had to scoot over to make room for them. Harvey got pushed off the bench. He didn’t tell these big guys that he was one himself and they should shove over. He just went to another table. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  “Hi,” I yelled to the boy next to me. I stuck out my hand. “I’m Dave, buddy.”

  He didn’t shake. “You’re new,” he said. He was almost as tall as Mr. Meltzer, and more solid. He was bigger than the other older boys by a good three inches in every direction.

  “That’s Moe,” Mike said. “He’s not your buddy. He’s your bully.” He pointed to the boy on his left. “He’s mine. Lucky you. You got the biggest, scariest bully in the HHB.”

  “So what?” I could outrun him, anyway.

  Mike shook his head and shrugged twice. “You’ll see.”

  Eli added, poking his head around his bully, “And when you see, buddy, don’t do anything stupid.”

  He had no business bossing me around. Him and Harvey.

  A woman came to our table with one of the pans.

  “That’s the coffin,” Mike said, pointing at it.

  She lowered it to serve us, and I saw what was inside. Stew, noodles, and a greenish-brownish vegetable. The portion spooned onto my plate was small. I started eating. The meat was gristly. The vegetable was burnt weeds.

  Next to me, Moe reached under his shirt and pulled out a rabbit’s foot on a string. He kissed the foot. Then he picked up his fork.

  It went the wrong way, to my plate instead of his, and he started eating my food. The bully next to Mike was eating Mike’s lunch. For a second I just stared, and in that second half my meal was gone. We ate the rest together. The only time Moe left my food alone was when a grown-up walked by.

  When my plate was clean, Moe started on his own. I moved my fork to his plate too. Fair is fair. When my fork touched Moe’s plate, I saw Fred nudge his brother to watch.

  “Don’t.” Moe moved my hand away from his food. Then he put his hand down on mine and ground my palm into the tabletop. I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Under the table I kicked him as hard as I could. He didn’t seem to notice. When he let go of me, my hand felt numb. Then it stung and ached. I looked at my palm. Lines from the wood grain were pressed into my skin, and I had a splinter.

  I wasn’t hungry anymore. I gathered a big gob of saliva in my mouth and spat onto Moe’s food.

  “You can spit all you want,” he said with a mouth full of food. His shoulders heaved. He was laughing. “I’ll eat your spit too.”

  I wanted to kill him and Mike’s bully and Eli’s and Fred’s and Jeff’s and all the rest of them.

  “HHB, buddy,
” Mike said. “Happy House of Bullies.”

  A lady came with a basket filled with rolls. She put one on my plate and one on Moe’s. As she passed by, a roll tumbled out of the basket. At least ten hands reached, and our bench almost went over. Moe got the roll.

  “You brought me luck,” he told me, grabbing the piece of my roll that I hadn’t stuffed in my mouth yet. Then he stood up and signaled to the other bullies at our table. They all followed him out of the dining hall.

  I turned to Mike. “Why does he kiss the rabbit’s foot?”

  Mike did his choking laugh again. “He’s superstitious. He won’t step on a crack. He goes through doors sideways. When we have prayers, he stands on his left foot.”

  That was good to know. He was scared of something.

  In the afternoon, Mr. Cluck started teaching us how to divide fractions, which I already knew. But when Alfie couldn’t answer a question, he went back to his speech about what good-for-nothings we were.

  I started thinking about what it would be like to live here if I stayed. I’d have to find a way to stop the bullies from taking my food. I couldn’t starve. Not while Gideon was eating roast chicken and noodle pie in Chicago.

  The door opened. Everybody got quiet.

  It was Mr. Meltzer holding a handful of letters. “Feldman,” he barked. “Karp, Silver . . .”

  Mike jumped up, dropping his pen and his notebook on the floor. He rushed to the front of the room without bothering to pick them up.

  “ . . . Zweben, Belsky, Pincus . . .”

  All over the room, boys hurried to get their mail.

  “. . . Elishowitz, Caros, Jacobson . . .”

  Did he really say my name? Who would write to me? I just got here. I stood. I was going to feel ridiculous when I got up there if he hadn’t said my name, if I’d only imagined it.

  He handed me a letter. The address was in Gideon’s handwriting. I shoved it into my knickers pocket. I didn’t care what it said, unless it said he hadn’t gone to Chicago. I pulled it out. The postmark was Chicago. I put it away again.

  Mike hunched over his letter. When he finished reading, he lifted the top of his desk and dropped it in. He drummed on the desktop, then opened it again and pushed the letter in deeper.