The Tin Horse: A Novel (11 page)

“Not this early, Charlotte.” Papa’s tense undertone said that he was afraid she was going to make us look ridiculous. “You’ll just be standing on the playground in the heat. Why don’t I read to the girls for a little while?”

“Yes, all right.” Carefully smoothing her suit, Mama sat on the sofa and automatically reached for the sewing basket next to it. But she didn’t take any work out of the basket; she just sat and stroked the fabric of her jacket.

Even Papa got infected by our delirium. Reading from
The Secret Garden
, he sometimes read the same line twice or skipped a word. Every so often he glanced at Mama and said, “Don’t you want to take off your jacket for now? Or your hat?”

“I’m fine,” Mama said, although her face looked red and sweaty.

At long, long last, we were on our way to Breed Street Elementary School two blocks from our house. Mama had Barbara and me walk on either side of her, holding her hands. Her hand in mine trembled a little. I felt the same trembling inside me. I was alert and happy and scared at the same time. And I noticed a heavy, flowery smell—Mrs. Kalman’s perfume, infusing Mama’s suit and heightened by the warmth of her body under the sun, which was already brutal at eight-thirty.

Even after delaying our departure, we were among the first to arrive at the school. An older boy, maybe ten years old and looking very important, stood at the entrance to the playground and asked Mama what class we were in. “Both of ’em in kindergarten?” he said. “You sure?”

“They’re twins,” Mama said.

He scrutinized us. “No, they’re not.”

“Fraternal twins, not identical,” Mama said, her voice asking permission in our first encounter with the school’s authority, albeit in the person of a ten-year-old child.

“Huh, never heard of that,” the boy said, but he pointed us toward the kindergarten table, one of half a dozen tables set up outside.

Mama looked around at the other mothers on the playground. A few had dressed nicely, but no one looked as nice as Mama, and many of the women wore the same dresses in which they’d probably clean their houses when they returned home. “Old country,” Mama sniffed, regaining her courage.

A pretty blond lady who looked barely older than a teenager stood behind the kindergarten table. Our teacher? I hoped so!

“What a beautiful ensemble,” the lady said when she saw Mama.

Mama beamed, then introduced us. “Barbara Inez Greenstein and Elaine Rose Greenstein.”

The blond lady leaned forward a little and talked directly to Barbara in a voice like bells. “Barbara, your teacher is Miss Madenwald, in room eleven. I’m Miss Powell, I’m a student teacher, and I work with Miss Madenwald. We’re going to have such a lot of fun.” Then she spoke to me. “Elaine, you’re in Miss Carr’s class. That’s in room twelve.”

Miss Powell’s smile traveled to whoever stood behind us, but Mama didn’t move.

“They’re both in the kindergarten,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” Miss Powell said. “Some of the older children are inside, Mrs. Greenstein. They’ll help you find the rooms.”

“They’re twins, the same age, five,” Mama said. “They’re both in the kindergarten class.”

“Oh, yes.” Miss Powell smiled, understanding now. She explained slowly, as if Mama were the kindergartner, “We have two kindergarten classes. One teacher is Miss Madenwald, and the other is Miss Carr.”

“Why put sisters in different classes?” Mama set her jaw the way she did when she challenged a sum at the market. But her accent got stronger, and sweat beaded her face.

“We always put twins in different classes. It helps them make friends with other children.” I noticed now that Miss Powell was sweating, too. I followed her nervous gaze down the line of children and parents that had formed behind us—and spotted Danny,
my
boy from Aunt Sonya’s party! But I just glanced at him, because the argument between Mama and Miss Powell required all of my attention.

“I know my daughters. They should be together,” Mama said.

“Mama, I’ll be fine,” Barbara chirped, smiling at—allying herself with—Miss Powell. Why not? She had the teacher with the musical name, Miss Madenwald, as well as pretty Miss Powell. Who knew what my teacher, named like an automobile, would be like?

More than that, all of my life so far had been lived as “we” and “us” and “you girls.” In every mental picture I had created of school and classroom, Barbara and I were there together. It wasn’t that I was afraid of walking into a classroom without Barbara at my side; I simply couldn’t conceive it. My personal geography needed to change to allow kindergarten to mean Barbara and me both being at Breed Street Elementary School but in different rooms, with different teachers and classmates. As if I needed to reconstruct the world as I knew it in the few minutes between being on the playground and entering my class.

“Can you remember, Barbara, you’re in room eleven?” Miss Powell addressed Barbara, ignoring the stubborn immigrant who was ruining her first hour of being a student teacher. “And your sister is in room twelve?”

“Yes, Miss Powell. Eleven and twelve. Come on, Mama.”

Mama let Barbara lead her inside, but not because she had conceded to the wisdom of American pedagogy concerning twins.

“Why not tell you to put your legs in one class and your arms in another?” she fumed. “And how am I supposed to meet my children’s teacher if it’s two different people?”

“Here’s my room, Mama,” Barbara said, pointing out a sign that had a big
11
in red crayon, with designs of flowers and animals, in front of the doorway. Papa had drilled us on our numbers up to twenty.

“No, it’s not,” said Mama, and pulled us across the hall to a similarly decorated sign with a green
12
. “Here, you’re going to be in this class.”

“Can’t we both be in Miss Madenwald’s class?” I said.

“With that Miss Powell who doesn’t know anything?” Mama led us inside room twelve.

“Hello, children.” Miss Carr had a pleasant round face. But I was already in love with Miss Powell and Miss Madenwald.

“Elaine Rose Greenstein, ma’am,” I mumbled when she asked my name.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Elaine,” Miss Carr said, then turned to Barbara.

“Barbara Inez Greenstein, ma’am.”

“You came to bring your sister to her class, how nice,” she said to Barbara.

“Miss Carr, I’m Mrs. Greenstein.” Mama extended her hand in its beautiful if sweat-damp silk glove. As Miss Carr shook her hand, Mama announced, “I want both of my girls to be in your class.”

Miss Carr, clearly more experienced than Miss Powell in dealing with parents, didn’t argue with Mama. She simply directed us to the school office to talk to the principal, Mr. Berryhill.

Mr. Berryhill wouldn’t be available for a few minutes, said the lady who spoke to Mama from behind a chest-high counter in the large, busy office. She told us to wait in wooden chairs lined up with military precision along one wall. None of us—not Mama or Barbara or me—had ever heard of being “sent to the principal’s office,” but a few minutes in those chairs, catching pitying or condescending looks from people who came in for one thing or another, and we were squirming.

“Mama, I don’t mind not being with Elaine,” Barbara said. “I just want to go to my class.”

“Me too,” I lied.

“We’re going to talk to this Mr. Berryhill.” Mama fanned herself with her pocketbook. Her face no longer looked red but pale. Conceding a little to the heat, she took off her hat, but then she took out her smart new compact and peeked at herself in the mirror. “My hair,” she murmured. Her sweat-drenched bob clung to her head. She jammed her hat back on.

A bell rang. All three of us tensed and then drooped, ashamed. Our first day of school had started, and we were late for class.

A few minutes later, a gangly man with salt-and-pepper hair strode out from behind the counter. “Mrs. Greenstein?” He extended his right hand. “Delighted to meet you. Delighted!”

Mr. Berryhill had a husky smoker’s voice and the brightest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He ushered us into his office—and transformed our seemingly relentless march toward greater humiliations into a treasured experience that Mama would recount for years.

“
He was like the rebbe in my town,” Mama told Aunt Pearl later. “You could tell he understood things that you never even thought about. And the books in his office! Like the rebbe’s study, books everywhere
.”

The principal didn’t even say the word
twins
at first. He spoke to Mama about the importance of parents being involved in their children’s education and nodded at her in her smart suit as if to say he knew that a person who had taken so much care on her daughters’ first day of school must be an exemplary parent. By the time he explained that it was school policy to separate twins, Mama was already saying what a fine idea that was, and she’d considered the possibility all along but worried that we’d be afraid.

“You’ll be surprised,” he said. “Am I correct that one of your daughters is quieter than the other, and stays more in the background?”

“Yes, my Elaine.”

I stared at the floor, ashamed for not being louder, but I could feel Mr. Berryhill looking at me, and when I glanced up, his blue eyes twinkled.

“You wait and see,” he said. “Elaine is going to blossom.”

I felt myself blossoming right at that moment, and even more when
Mama took me to my classroom with a note Mr. Berryhill had written to excuse my being late. “You met Mr. Berryhill!” my teacher said.

I blossomed all morning, quietly, like the first shoots coming up in our garden. My happiness brimmed over when school let out at noon and I saw Danny—barefoot, his tousled black hair uncombed, just as when we’d met in my nest among the stacks of wood. “Danny!” I exclaimed, full of my new boldness, and ran toward him.

He started to look toward me. Then someone else called him, and he hurried in the other direction. I followed him—to Barbara.

“This is Danny Berlov. He’s in my class,” my sister said possessively.

But Barbara didn’t need to lay claim to him. Danny had already chosen. He was hers.

D
ANNY BERLOV WAS POOR AND HAD NO MOTHER. EVERYONE KNEW
that. Danny’s father taught Yiddish classes at the Yiddische Folkschule on Soto Street and tutored religious boys in Hebrew, and what kind of living was that? He and Danny lived in two rented rooms that had a sink but no tub; on Friday afternoons, they went to the Monte Carlo Baths.

Danny’s family hadn’t always been poor, though. His grandfather was the richest man in …

Whatever he said, his accent, which had nearly vanished now that we were in the first grade, suddenly thickened.

“Where?” I said.

“Vilna. It’s in Lithuania.”

“Oh.” I had never heard of Lithuania, but I understood it was one of those places that people’s parents or grandparents had come from, like Romania. I also sensed that if I challenged Danny, he might clam up.

And I was thrilled to have Danny to myself. He often came over to play
with Barbara and me, but on this particular rainy February afternoon, Barbara was confined to bed with a cold. Even better, with the drizzle keeping Danny and me inside, Mama gave me permission to use the Zenith radio. Bought a month earlier with Papa’s 1928 New Year’s bonus and some money from Zayde, the Zenith in its handsome walnut console was a magical addition to our house. I made a show of turning the radio on and finding a station playing beautiful piano music.

That was when Danny mentioned his rich grandfather.

“Josef Berlov, his name was.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a fur trader. He had the biggest house in Vilna. With a Zenith radio in every room.”

THAT WAS ALL DANNY
said the first time. Gradually, though, the story gained detail and luster, and it became not just the tale of the Berlov family’s former riches but the tragic explanation for Danny’s absent mother.

Being a fur trader, I learned, meant that Josef Berlov traveled around the countryside buying the skins of minks, sables, and rabbits from people who trapped them, and he sold the skins to furriers in the city, who made them into coats. Even though the trappers were Christians, they liked and respected Josef because he could beat any man at arm wrestling, and he was always fair in business with them. They loved his horse, too, a fast brown stallion named Star. Danny’s father, Gershon, sometimes went with his father if he didn’t have to be in school. He had his own horse, a pinto named Frisky because he was hard to ride, except Gershon could always calm him down.

The trappers liked Josef so much they saved their best skins for him. That was what made him rich. He supplied finer skins than any other trader, and the furriers paid him whatever he asked. In fact, they made just a few coats every year using only skins that he brought them, instead of mixing them with inferior skins. These 100 percent Berlov coats were very special and expensive. If someone died and hadn’t put in writing who was supposed to get his Berlov coat, the family argued over it for years.

One day a messenger arrived at Josef’s house from the king of Vilna. The king wanted to have a Berlov sable coat made, and he insisted on picking each individual skin himself. Josef and Gershon, who was now a young man, carried four big bundles of sable skins to the palace. The palace was very grand, with door handles made of gold, and the room where they were taken to meet the king was bigger than most people’s entire houses.