An Orphan's Tale by Jay Neugeboren Page A

Charlie calls “a windfall.”
    Afterward Charlie told me that when it’s over the workers could go back on welfare or unemployment and the building could be used for something else or it could be torn down and they could start again. He said that the economy would collapse without projects like this.
    A question: Am I writing this only for myself or so that Charlie will find it and want to read it? Whenever he sees me writing he asks me what I’m making up for my storybook today!
    After supper tonight we watched movies of Mrs. Mittleman and her brother Oscar and his wife and some friends taken during World War II. They were in the country where they each had rooms in a house and shared a big kitchen, and they were playing games on a Saturday night like musical chairs and break the balloon and steal the baloney and they looked like they were having a wonderful time. “Grown people don’t play games like that anymore,” Mr. Mittleman said.
    When Charlie came into the room just before, I recited for him what Maimonides said about buying friendship and he said, That makes sense. I asked him why but he didn’t answer me.
    I have 2 books on my lap under my notebook: PIRKAY AVOS and a book Mr. Mittleman gave me called REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT STRATEGY. We’ll see how smart you are, he said. In a month I’m giving a test.
    *
    When Charlie opened his eyes Danny was standing next to the bed, his tephillin boxes in his hands. He asked Charlie to tell him if he was putting them on the right way. “How would I know?” Charlie said. “Ask Murray. Religion is his department.”
    â€œBut you’re a Jew too,” Danny said.
    â€œSure,” Charlie replied. “But that doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it, does it? If I do or if I don’t I’m still a Jew, right?” He turned away, sat up, and began putting on his socks. “So until I get to forty, leave me be….”
    Danny did not move away and—while Charlie dressed and Danny put on his tephillin —Charlie tried not to show how pleased he was by the defiant look in the boy’s eyes.
    â€œTell me this,” Charlie said, when Danny was done. “Why do you care so much about being a Jew?”
    â€œBecause I am a Jew,” Danny replied.
    Charlie sighed. “But that’s the point,” he said. “If you do a little or a lot, you’re still a Jew, so why do you care so much? It’s not natural.”
    Charlie waited, but the boy said nothing. Charlie saw that Danny didn’t realize he was being playful with him. “You weren’t even brought up in an Orthodox Home,” Charlie went on. “I bet you never even went to shul with your father or saw him put on tephillin in the mornings—am I right?”
    Then Danny smiled. “Desire is everything,” he said.
    Charlie laughed and brushed the boy’s hair. “You have me there,” he said.
    At breakfast Mrs. Mittleman read to them from a brochure about the John F. Kennedy Peace Forest in Israel, to which she was sending a contribution. The trees would be planted on the same slopes where two thousand years before Bar Kochba had fought his last battle against the legions of Rome. Charlie remembered hearing the story of Bar Kochba from Dr. Fogel. Mrs. Mittleman told him that her dream in life would be to go to Israel someday and visit the forest with her husband.
    Charlie winked at Danny. “Good luck,” he said.
    Mrs. Mittleman bent over and kissed Charlie on the forehead. “But he’s very good to me in his way,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t know everything.”
    Driving into the city, and thinking of what Danny had said to him, Charlie told Danny that the thing he’d always wanted in the world was the thing he could never have. He said he knew it was silly, but it was what he wanted: to stand with his father in his own home for his son’s