The Tin Horse: A Novel (33 page)

“
What
is your problem?” he said.

“Never do that to me again.”

“Do what? Remind you that you’re Jewish? Or expect you to act like a human being?”

I knew I should leave them alone, but I couldn’t move.

“Don’t you make yourself sick, being so self-righteous?” Barbara snapped.

“Don’t
you
notice anything beyond your own selfish little world?”

“Selfish? Why, because the people I know care about art, instead of going on and on about how everyone hates the Jews? If the world stopped hating the Jews, would they have anything left to talk about?”

“They?”
Danny echoed, staring at her with horror. “
They?
When are you going to get it through your vain head that it’s not just your cousin Ivan that people hate? It’s
you
.”

“Ivan’s repulsive. If the Jews in Europe are like him, no wonder people hate them.”

Danny’s hand flew up, and I was scared he was going to hit her. But he just gestured toward her chest. “What’s in there? Do you even have a heart?”

Then he walked away.

“Well.” Barbara glanced at me and gave a tight little laugh.

“Barbara, are you all right?”

“Dammit, would you stop looking at me like I just said ‘Heil Hitler’?”

“I know you didn’t mean it.” Surely she had only wanted to hurt him. She couldn’t have meant the hateful things she’d said.

She sighed. “You don’t get it. I’m not good like you and Danny. Come on, let’s get some punch.”

“You’re right, Danny is self-righteous,” I said as I followed her to the refreshments table.

“Don’t you see, the kind of girl Danny wants me to be, I’m never going to be like that. It would kill me.” She gave me a smile I couldn’t read. Mocking? Despairing? “You can have him,” she said.

“I don’t
want
him!” But I protested to the air. Barbara had plunged into the crowd around the punch bowl.

Didn’t she know that I had long ago outgrown my childhood infatuation with Danny? I wished I could make her understand, but if I brought up the infatuation, I risked exposing too much.

And there was no chance to talk to her about anything. In the days after her fight with Danny, she made herself as inaccessible as Greta Garbo in
Grand Hotel
—“I want to be alone!” At home, she laughed too much, with brittle gaiety, and seemed to live on nothing but heavily sugared tea. “Dieting,” she said when Mama noticed how little she was eating. And in our room at night, where we often whispered after Audrey had fallen asleep, she got into bed, turned to the wall, and closed her eyes while Audrey was still putting on her nightgown.

At school, she and Danny maintained an icy distance. If they happened to cross paths, their faces hardened, and they made a great show of turning away. And Danny extended his avoidance of Barbara to me. Anytime I approached him, he was rushing off on crucial Habonim business, self-important and swaggering—his grief and wounded pride so jagged, I was amazed people didn’t scatter as he walked by, to avoid being raked.

Our classmates buzzed about the mysterious rupture between one of our golden couples. Apparently neither Barbara nor Danny confided in anyone, because even their close friends quizzed me about what had happened. I said nothing about the argument, and I agreed with everyone that the passion of their rift was so intense, it would surely lead to a passionate reconciliation. I didn’t even tell the Plain Brains—with whom I could cast a bemused eye at the
Romeo and Juliet
playing out at Roosevelt High School—what I really felt.

Barbara and Danny were both deeply upset, I had no doubt of that. But I sensed that something irrevocable had changed between them.
Do you have a heart?
—Danny hadn’t just asked, he had accused her. At first I wondered with horror if he could be right. And in that case, had Barbara ever loved him? Was my sister capable of loving anyone? Then one night about a week after their fight, Mama came into our room when we were getting ready for bed. In a whisper—Audrey was asleep in the top bunk—Mama asked Barbara if something had happened between her and Danny.

“We split up,” Barbara said coolly.

“Oh,
mein kind
.” Mama came close and put a hand on Barbara’s cheek. “You and Danny, you’ve been sweet on each other since you were kids.”

“Puppy love,” Barbara said, but there was a catch in her voice.

“What happened?” Mama said in the caressing voice she used when we’d fallen and gotten hurt.

“Nothing.”

Crooning, Mama reached out and stroked Barbara’s hair. For a moment Barbara leaned toward her, as if she were going to melt into Mama’s arms and dissolve in sobs. Then she shook off Mama’s comforting hand.

“Nothing happened,” she said harshly.

Rebuffed, Mama flipped from tenderness to suspicion. She reached toward Barbara’s stomach. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“Mama!” Barbara jumped away. “There’s no way I could be pregnant.”

“You and Danny, you never—”

“You don’t believe me?” Barbara yanked up her slip and exposed her flat, dance-toned stomach.

“For shame!” Mama slapped Barbara’s face so hard that she staggered.
“A shandeh un a charpeh,”
she muttered as she stormed out of our room.
A shame and a disgrace
.

Barbara let her slip fall and stood trembling. I put my arm around her.

“That was horrible of her,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I really got to her, didn’t I?” She let out a snort of laughter—a jagged sound, painful to hear. “D’you want to smoke?”

I glanced toward Audrey, who was lying so still that I was sure she was feigning sleep. We threw on robes, went out to the back porch, and lit cigarettes.

“Are you really all right?” I said. “About Danny?”

She blew a smoke ring. “He and I should have broken up ages ago. I guess neither of us had the guts to be the first to say it. Now that it’s happened, tell you the truth, I’m relieved.”

I had just seen her trembling, though, a hurt child ready to weep in her mother’s embrace. I think she
did
love Danny and was devastated at losing him. But what had she told me moments after their fight? That trying to be the girl Danny wanted would kill her. I’d heard her statement
as hyperbole, a response to the drama of the moment. Now I began to feel she had hit on a profound truth. I had seen Barbara as the one in control, dangling Danny on a string all the while she didn’t even fake an interest in Zionism and made no effort to include him in her life in Hollywood. Now it struck me that one reason Danny had persisted in dangling was that he simply refused to see her for who she was. To fulfill whatever fantasy he’d spun about her, she would have to extinguish something in herself. And along with her genuine misery, I sensed a visceral joy, the ecstasy of an animal tearing full tilt toward the woods after escaping a trap.

The next week, Barbara started eating again. And the dramatic cold shoulder she’d been giving Danny lost conviction and became a weary shrug. The steam went out of his response to her as well. Soon he started asking out some of the girls who’d always buzzed around him. And Barbara stopped splitting her social life between Boyle Heights and Hollywood and spent most Friday and Saturday evenings with her Hollywood friends.

The other person whose life changed in the wake of Barbara and Danny’s breakup was Ivan. I don’t know if he had any idea of his role as a subject of their argument, but he stayed out of Barbara’s way afterward and pretty much avoided me, too. He even stopped seeing as much of Danny. Ivan was making his own friends, guys he’d met in his English class, he said. He went out with them several nights a week and always came in late—Pearl complained that he barely kept his eyes open at work. I got up to use the toilet one night at two in the morning and found him passed out on the sofa, stinking of booze and cigarettes. I prodded him awake, not wanting Mama or Papa to find him like that in the morning. The moment he was half conscious, his hand flew to his pocket, and bills spilled out, not just ones but some fives and tens.

“Ivan, what is that?” I said as he grabbed at the money and stuffed it back into his pocket.

“None of your business.” That particular English phrase, he’d learned to speak with scarcely any accent.

“I’m not going to tell on you. It’s just you might not know what’s legal in America and what isn’t. Where did you get that money?”

“Casino.”

“Are
you
gambling?” How could he have turned his meager wages into so much money?

He shook his head. “I am good at mathematics. I help. You not tell?”

“I—”

He grabbed my hand and squeezed hard. “You don’t tell.”

“All right.” As long as he was telling the truth about the casino—and somehow I believed him—then he wasn’t engaged in some major criminal activity. And between Zayde’s bookmaking and Mama’s prowess at cards, gambling was practically a family business.

This happened in mid-October. A week later, Ivan quit working for Aunt Pearl and moved out of our house. He’d gotten a job on a gambling boat, one that was fitted up as a nightclub and anchored off Long Beach just past U.S. territorial waters, and a coworker offered him a room in an apartment in San Pedro. Mama fretted that she hadn’t made her nephew feel at home, and what would her brothers and sisters say? On the other hand, wasn’t the point of sponsoring Ivan that he should become able to make his own way, and who would have believed it would happen so quickly? That was America! Mama made him promise to come for every holiday, and he departed with kisses all around—even one from Barbara, who was thrilled to get rid of him and regain our two-sister bedroom, a sentiment I shared.

BY NOVEMBER, EVERYTHING HAD
settled down, except that Danny still avoided me.

Herschel Grynszpan changed that.

Herschel Grynszpan was exactly my age, seventeen. If his parents had moved to Los Angeles when they left their native Poland, he might have gone to Roosevelt High with me. Instead, his family settled in Hanover, Germany, and when conditions there got bad, they sent him to live with relatives in Paris. In late October, the Germans expelled his family, along with seventeen thousand other Polish-born Jews. But the Poles refused to admit them, and they were stranded in a village on the border.

On November 7, 1938, Herschel bought a gun, went to the German
embassy in Paris, and shot and wounded a Nazi official. Two days later, the official died. And the Germans took revenge. Unlike the scratchy, brutal word
Reich, Kristallnacht
sounded like something out of a fairy tale.
Kristallnacht
shimmered; it carried the hush of snow mounded on pine boughs that I’d seen in movies.
Kristallnacht
did shimmer, I suppose, the “night of broken glass” hurling glittering shards all over Germany and Austria as vandals attacked more than two hundred synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops.

In Boyle Heights, dozens of organizations joined forces and planned a rally to take place that Sunday. I heard that Danny was asked to speak at the rally as a representative of the youth groups, and two days later—I suppose after wrestling with the task on his own—he asked me to help write his speech. Of course I said yes; this was far more important than any petty hurt I felt because he’d barely spoken to me for weeks.

On Friday, we met after school in Eddie Chafkin’s small office in the rear of the store; files for Eddie’s and Danny’s Zionist activities occupied a quarter of the pristinely organized shelves. Both of us were so upset about
Kristallnacht
that there was no constraint between us, no sign of the months-long break in our friendship. We quickly fell back into our usual wrangling over words and ideas. Danny, fists clenched as if he couldn’t wait to pick up a gun himself, called Herschel Grynszpan a hero. I admired Herschel’s bravery; still, he was an assassin. And since Danny would be speaking in a public forum, I wanted him to speak for the rule of law.

“What rule of law, when the laws are made by Nazis?” he demanded.

“Herschel took a life.”

“What if he’d assassinated Hitler? Would you be against that?”

“Don’t you think your speech should be about what the Germans did on
Kristallnacht
? And the need to help people emigrate?”

We fought for half an hour, forcing ourselves to a consensus only because Danny couldn’t stay away from work any longer.

A week later, we returned to Eddie’s office because Germany had retaliated further, banning all Jewish students from German schools, and we wanted to write a letter to the Los Angeles newspapers. But the urgency immediately following
Kristallnacht
had passed; this time it felt as if we were meeting for the first time since I’d witnessed his argument with
Barbara, and we were ill at ease. We drafted the letter with little of our usual bickering. In fifteen minutes, Danny stood up to return to work.

“Thanks, Elaine,” he said.

“Sure.” I turned to Eddie’s typewriter and rolled in a sheet of Habonim letterhead.

Danny cleared his throat. “Really, thank you. I don’t always say … that is, I hope you know how much I appreciate …”

This was a Danny I hadn’t seen before, bashful and tongue-tied.

“I’m happy to do it. Not
happy
, that’s not the right word,” I said, afflicted with my own self-consciousness. “But this is important.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You’re a … a good person.” He started out the door, but turned back.

“What?”

“Well, I guess …” His eyes flicking away from mine, he blurted out, “I wanted to say, I realized that for me to really care about a girl, she has to be a person I respect.”

He dashed out of the room.

If Danny was trying to say he cared about me, he was too late, I thought as I attacked the typewriter keys. He’d had his chance, and he’d put me through the humiliation of being his girl on the side. But what did it matter what Danny wanted? Even if I’d once been in love with him, I’d been a kid then. To echo Barbara, it was nothing but puppy love.

Damn! I’d shifted my left hand one key over and mistyped an entire line. I ripped out the paper and started fresh. When I finished the letters—to the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Herald
, and the
Herald-Express
, as well as the Boyle Heights newspaper—I left them on the desk and hurried through the store, hoping Danny would be busy with a customer and I could just wave goodbye.