The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2022

172 The Meadow St. Dominick’s Orphanage, 1945-1950 Lenny DellaRocca He says he saw peacocks this morning in the cemetery. Then he told me about the nun who took him into a closet with a wire hair brush, and that his father had come to visit twice in five years. Children wore new shoes, he says, but changed back into shoes stuffed with newspaper after visitors went home. There were German prisoners at a camp across the field standing outside all day. They were singing. Once, he was made to sit on the stoop for three months for smiling at Jenny. He counted ants. When he ran away they found him sleeping under the George Washington bridge. All the kids learned to read each other’s eyes in the mess hall. Talk, he said, and they were dragged from the table, brought upstairs to the bald Marine who made them bend over a chair. And every time the girls came outside he looked at Jenny, and she looked at him from the other side of the fence.

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