The Tin Horse: A Novel (35 page)

“Wise up, Elaine,” Danny said. “The rest of the world doesn’t give a
rat’s ass what Hitler does to the Jews. How much more of Europe do you think they’ll let him take?”

This was in March, and Germany had just occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia, expanding beyond the Sudetenland region that France and England had signed away the previous fall.

As the spring progressed and our class moved closer to graduation, growing talk of war magnified the restlessness everyone felt as we perched on the edge of our lives beyond high school. Good news, such as college acceptances—including mine to USC, with a full scholarship—or someone landing a job, provoked a frantic gaiety. Especially when it involved the boys’ future plans.

At our graduation in June, I looked at my male classmates in their caps and gowns and couldn’t help picturing them, even the smallest and gentlest boys, wearing uniforms and carrying guns.

But not yet. First we all had to go to work.

For me, work simply meant more of what I’d done since I was twelve: helping at Uncle Leo’s bookstore. I still had to unpack and shelve books and run to the drugstore for Leo’s bromo, as I’d done from the beginning. I was no longer the only schlepper, however; Leo had given his son, Stan, who was now fifteen, a part-time summer job so he could learn the business “from the ground up.” And over the years Leo had come to trust me to wait on customers, search for rare books, and place orders. I had a pleasant voice—the “radio voice” for which both Barbara and I were praised—and I handled routine telephone contacts. The one difference, now that I had a high school diploma, was that Leo gave me a ten-cents-an-hour raise.

Graduation led to big changes, however, in Danny’s and Barbara’s lives.

A week after we graduated, Danny quit working at Chafkin’s. He’d found a job that paid much better and fed, at least a little, his hunger to fight Hitler, at a factory in Long Beach that built ships for the United States Navy—ships on which he hoped to fight as soon as America got into the war. It was the kind of place that didn’t hire a lot of Jews, but the job required lifting and carrying, and Danny said the boss was a good guy who
didn’t care what kind of name Berlov was; he just looked at Danny’s strong shoulders and back and hired him. Not everyone at the shipyard was so tolerant. Once a week, it seemed, Danny got into a fight with a coworker over some anti-Semitic remark. The first time I saw his face after a fight, I kissed every bruise. But I came to suspect that he looked for fights—broadcasting that he was Jewish, taking offense at the needling we’d all learned to ignore, and then hanging around after work where he’d be sure to run into the offender.

“You want me to be a good little Jewish boy?” he said when I questioned him.

“A lot of these people aren’t evil, they’re just ignorant. They’ll get used to seeing you every day, and if you joke with them sometimes—”

“Elaine, you work in a goddamn bookstore. You have no idea.”

He was right that I didn’t understand the rough male world of a shipyard. On the other hand, I had worked in Hollywood since I was twelve, and this was his first job outside Boyle Heights. But nothing I said changed the swagger that had come into his step, the sense that Danny was already at war.

Barbara, too, found work that paid well, though we were forbidden to tell anyone about it. Through a friend from her dance school, she landed a job singing and dancing in the chorus at the Trocadero on Sunset Strip. An elegant, classy club, it boasted a movie-star clientele, she emphasized when she broke the news to Mama and Papa.

“No, it’s not respectable,” Papa said.

“Papa, it’s like in the pictures, Ginger Rogers.” Barbara had brought him his evening whiskey and told Mama to relax on the sofa and let her finish cooking dinner. She had asked me to be there for moral support.

“Any girl can show her legs in a nightclub,” Papa said. “A girl lucky enough to graduate from high school … You get an office job.”

“There aren’t any office jobs. Look!” She held out the page of last Sunday’s
Los Angeles Times
with the “Help Wanted—Female” ads, a paltry two columns of listings. I had suggested she use the ads to bolster her argument, though I had my own misgivings about the Trocadero job. For one thing, she was underage, something Papa clearly didn’t realize. She must have gotten a fake ID.

“What about this?” he said. “ ‘Receptionists, operators. Positions open now.’ ”

“It says they want people with experience.”

“Here, this is made for you. ‘Women who can talk clearly, desiring to become radio announcers.’ ”

“Papa, it’s a school. They just want you to pay them to train you, but then where are the jobs? … At the Trocadero, they’re very careful about the girls in the chorus. There’s even a chaperone to make sure no one bothers us.”

Papa shook his head. “A nightclub, it’s not a place for a decent girl to work. Why don’t you talk to your aunt Pearl? She might need someone to answer the phone. Or—”

“Is Aunt Pearl going to provide employment for every person in this family?”

Barbara had gone too far. Papa’s face flushed and his jaw set.

“No daughter who lives under my roof is dancing at a nightclub,” he said.

“Fine!” Barbara shot back.

I held my breath. Was she threatening to move out? If it wasn’t respectable to dance at a nightclub, living on her own would be a scandal.

“You said there’s a chaperone?” Mama broke in.

We all stared at her. She repeated her question.

“Yes, to make sure no one bothers us,” Barbara said. “And they send you home in a taxi.”

“They pay the fare?” Mama asked. “They don’t take it out of your wages?”

Barbara nodded.

“Then here are the rules. You come straight home after work—Elaine, I expect you to tell me if she doesn’t. You don’t date any man you meet at this nightclub. You
never
take a drink there. Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

Papa cleared his throat. “Charlotte, what do you plan to tell people when they ask what our daughter is doing?”

Barbara had anticipated that question. “What if you say I’m a receptionist at a hospital and I have to work the evening shift?”

“I was on the stage once, you know. With the
fusgeyers
in Romania.” Mama looked wistful. And I thought of the part of the story she hadn’t told, the secret I’d heard from Mollie: that Mama had tried out for a Yiddish theater troupe in Los Angeles.

If Mama saw her own unfulfilled dreams in the nightclub job, that didn’t mean she cut Barbara any slack. The first week Barbara worked at the Trocadero, Mama or Papa waited up for her every night, to make sure she came straight home and to see the taxi themselves. I knew the nightclub wasn’t paying for the taxi. But Barbara told me the job paid so well that she could afford it.

Even after Mama and Papa relaxed their vigilance, she didn’t push her luck. She returned home from the Trocadero as promptly and soberly as if she really did work at a hospital—well, as far as I knew, since I developed the ability to go on sleeping when she tiptoed into our room in the wee hours. As the summer went on, she and I almost never saw each other awake. When I quietly dressed in the morning, she sprawled unconscious in a tumble of sweat, stale cigarettes, and Shalimar cologne. I didn’t smell alcohol, though. She may have had a drink or two, but there was nothing that hinted at wild parties after hours.

Our paths might have crossed between the time my job ended (when I had a day shift) and hers began, but she went out hours before she had to report at the club. She was taking dance or singing classes, she said, or making the rounds of film studios. She showed me the photos she’d had taken, glossy head shots, to leave at the studios. There were two different photos. In one, she projected a youthful wholesomeness “for ingenue roles.” The other was a glamour shot with a teasing half smile that reminded me of Paulette Goddard. “Weren’t those expensive?” I asked. She replied that a friend—whose name, Alan Yardley, was printed with an ornate stamp on the back of the photographs—had done them for almost nothing, as a favor. Certainly that wasn’t impossible. Nor did it mean anything that she’d never before mentioned Alan Yardley; had I heard her talk about anyone she’d met at the Trocadero? Maybe it was only that we’d gone so abruptly from living in tandem for eighteen years to barely seeing each other that made me uneasy, that made me sense she had a secret life.

Not that I devoted much thought to Barbara. I was immersed in
my
life, scared and excited about entering USC in September, avidly following the news from Europe … and intoxicated by love. The thrill was sexual, of course. Things I had once said no to—when I was just fifteen, and when I was Danny’s second choice—I craved now. His hands and lips on my breasts. His fingers slipping beneath the edge of my panties and inside me, the first time a man ever touched me there. And my hand in his trousers, until he groaned and twisted away. Touching and kissing were as far as we went. He carried a rubber in his wallet—all the boys did—and he sometimes asked wouldn’t I, please? But he didn’t pressure me. For one thing, we were in constant danger of being caught, whether we were outdoors in a park or on the sofa in my house with my parents sleeping across the hall. And for all our ardor, neither of us lost sight of what we wanted to do with our lives. If I got pregnant, it would ruin everything—for both of us, since Danny would do the right thing and marry me. Of course, we wanted to get married someday—we didn’t discuss it, but it was understood—but first I had to go to college, and Danny had to make his way in the world. (Another thing we didn’t discuss: I hoped that by the time we were ready for marriage, he’d have come to his senses and decided to live in America, not Palestine.)

The most exciting time, we didn’t touch at all. We were in the living room late one night in July, necking on the sofa, and Danny sat back and said, “Let me look at you.”

“All right,” I said, lying in my disarray of opened blouse and unhooked brassiere. I wasn’t wearing a slip; it was too hot.

“No, let me
see
you.” Gently, he edged my blouse toward my shoulder.

I sat up. Moved to the end of the sofa. Took off my blouse but not my bra. Danny had seen my breasts, of course, pushing aside my clothes as we clung together, but this was different. My shoulders hunched forward protectively.

“Please?” he said.

I slipped off my bra. Glad that, a few feet away from him, I was too nearsighted to see his face clearly.

This was all he’d asked for, I knew. But a strange boldness seized me, and I walked into a pool of moonlight coming through the window. I stepped out of my skirt. My panties. I stood before Danny naked.

Neither of us spoke for a minute. Then he said, “Elaine Greenstein, I will always love you.”

“Danny Berlov, I will always love you,” I responded.

I returned to the sofa and put my skirt and blouse back on, though I didn’t bother with underwear. But I reached for my glasses. “Your turn,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to look at you.”

“Your parents.”

“You weren’t worried about them when you asked me. Scared?” I dared him. Though I held my breath for a moment, alert for any stirring from my sleeping family.

He walked into the patch of light and shed his clothes. I had stroked him to climax, but always with my hand in his trousers, and I stared first, greedily, at the mystery of his penis—which dangled limply, because he was nervous. What excited me most, I discovered, was what I already knew, the body so familiar to me from beach outings that I could have sketched it from memory: the torso and limbs sculpted by weight lifting and toughened by his job. The firm jaw and spill of black hair over one eye.

Naked in the moonlight, Danny was so beautiful that tears filled my eyes.

I waited until he scrambled back into his clothes, then went over and kissed him lightly. He pressed against me, but I said no. The moment was so perfect, I wanted to preserve it forever.

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine
, I read in “Song of Songs,” one of the poems I devoured. And I wrote poems; sitting under the fig tree in the yard or riding the streetcar to and from work, the words spilled out of me.
I
was poetry, able to be myself, nothing hidden, and be loved. I even sang when no one was around, “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” and “Over the Rainbow” (
The Wizard of Oz
had just come out).

Had anyone ever been as shiny and full of promise as I was in the summer of 1939? Things I had yearned for all my life were no longer vague dreams but what I woke to every morning. I was going to college. The boy I had loved from the moment I saw him loved me. I was so dazzled by my
own happiness that any concerns I had about Barbara were mere flickers next to the delirious glow that enveloped me.

Then one night in August, something made me jerk awake. It was the sound of Barbara weeping. She lay on her stomach, her face mashed into the pillow, but she was crying too hard to muffle the sound.

“Barbara, what is it?” Sitting beside her, I rubbed her back through the scratchy sequins of her costume. She wasn’t supposed to wear the costumes home. “Did something happen at work?”

She said something, but her words were lost in choking sobs.

“Do you want some water?”

She nodded.

I ran into the kitchen and filled a glass, and she sat up and gulped it like a thirsty child. Then she leaped to her feet. “Get me out of this thing! Now!” She turned, and I unzipped her costume, essentially a tight sequined bathing suit. She shed it as if she were fighting to brush cobwebs from her skin, then grabbed her nightgown and slipped it on.

“Cigarette?” I said.

She grimaced. “I breathe so much cigarette and cigar smoke every night, I have smoke in my lungs instead of oxygen. Glamour job, huh?”

“Is that what’s wrong? The job?”

“Uh … yeah, the job. Sore feet, sore back, and every night I’ve gotta fight off these pigs who …” Her cool cynicism crumbled. “Pigs who …”

“Barbara, what is it?” I put my arm around her. “Did someone hurt you?”