The Tin Horse: A Novel (27 page)

“I’m sorry, honey, it must have been scary for you.” I opened my arms to her. As cross as I’d been, she still nestled into my embrace. I wasn’t a
completely
terrible sister.

“Will Zayde be okay?” Audrey snuffled.

“He’ll be fine.” I rubbed Audrey’s back and gave in to my own tears. When I was little, Zayde used to cuddle me in his lap and tickle me. He
blew wet raspberries on my belly, and I shrieked in delight. Once I got too old to sit in his lap, we challenged each other to games of gin rummy and traded jokes we’d heard on the radio. Most of the adults in my life—Mama, Papa, my teachers, Uncle Leo at the bookstore—expected me to act responsible. But Zayde
played
with me.

Audrey and I were both crying when Barbara got home. What with having to deliver the upsetting news about Zayde, there was absolutely no danger that Barbara would take one look at me and
know
what I’d been up to with her boyfriend.

I never again felt so worried that my guilt would be written all over my face.

Not that I intended to repeat my act of treachery! Especially not after Zayde died the next morning. It wasn’t that I felt I’d
caused
Zayde’s death by kissing my sister’s boyfriend at the very time he fell ill; whenever that idea crept into my mind, I chided myself for being as superstitious as Mama. But I was no longer the kid who’d necked with Danny. Though only a few days had passed, I was no longer a child. In fact, Barbara and I were considered old enough to attend Zayde’s funeral, which took place, following Jewish custom, the day after he died.

At the service, held in the Home of Peace cemetery just east of Boyle Heights, I held myself straight even though I felt dizzy from sadness and from having to wear my navy wool, my best dark skirt, under the August sun. Looking at Zayde’s coffin (a fancy, expensive one; it was Pearl who insisted) and at the grave with freshly dug soil mounded beside it, I was grateful for Barbara, standing so close that we leaned together, gripping each other’s hands. Because I’d studied Yiddish, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, I could sound out the words on a card given me by the rabbi, and for the first time I said kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.

I balked, though, after the coffin was lowered and I saw what was happening. There’d been a shovel stuck in the damp earth, and people were walking up and placing a shovelful of earth right in the grave—Papa first, then Sonya, then Pearl, and everyone else was lining up to take a turn. I glanced at Barbara; she looked as stunned as I felt. “I’m not doing that,” she whispered.

“Me neither,” I said, and we hung back.

“Girls.” I turned toward the gentle, Yiddish-thick voice—Mr. Berlov. “This is to help your
zayde
’s soul know it’s time to return to God.”

He soothed us forward. Through a blur of tears, I took the shovel, scooped up a clod of soil, and dropped it on the coffin. I handed the shovel to Barbara. She did the same and then ran crying—into Danny’s embrace.

OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL
months, Danny, as always, urged me to attend Habonim meetings, but he gave no sign that our kisses lingered in his imaginative life, the way they stubbornly did in mine. I said I was too busy to go to the meetings. It wasn’t a lie. That fall we had entered Theodore Roosevelt High School, and I had a new set of teachers to impress, the crucial ones who would have the most say about whether I grasped the brass ring of a college scholarship.

Then in November, Habonim, along with several other youth groups, presented a talk I didn’t want to miss, by a professor who had fled Nazi Germany and now taught at UCLA. Many people, not just members of the youth groups but adults, were going to the program being held in the meeting hall at the Yiddische Folkschule. Papa planned to go, and I thought Barbara might be interested, too.

I mentioned it while she and I were doing the dinner dishes that evening.

“Go sit in a boring lecture after I had to sit in school all day?” She plunged the soup kettle into the sink, splashing greasy dishwater. I jumped back—I’d already changed into a clean blouse for the talk.

“It’s really important to Danny,” I ventured.

I couldn’t help being curious about whether Barbara and Danny fought over his love for Zionism and her disdain for it. Did she encourage his involvement in Habonim even though she had no interest, like asking a boy about his favorite sports team? Was the subject off-limits between them? Though I couldn’t imagine Danny saying nothing about his passion in life. Ah, but maybe he and Barbara didn’t waste time on conversation when they were together. Certainly that was Mama’s fear; she hovered like a hawk whenever Danny came in with Barbara after a date, and she often issued the warning that pubescent girls seem to provoke in adults
the world over: “Boys only want one thing.” She also muttered darkly that women in our family were so fertile, barely a touch of a finger could cause a pregnancy. She had sat down with Barbara and me and, with unusually explicit language, made sure we understood exactly where babies came from and what we should never let any boy do to us.

As much as Danny might enjoy necking, however (and as skilled as he was at doing it, I thought with a shiver), he also loved to talk and argue, and he had always sparred with Barbara. When I was older, I would have said Danny used argument as a form of foreplay. So, did they argue about Zionism? I was hardly going to ask. I rarely talked about Danny with Barbara, or Barbara with him. Dangerous territory. As it proved this time.

“Is that why
you’re
going? Because it’s important to Danny?” She gave me a mocking smile, and I felt ripped open, my impossible love for Danny Berlov naked and pathetic like a newborn bird fallen from its nest.
Did she know?
Danny would never have told her; some other boy, a boy who was compulsively honest, might have felt a need to confess, but not Danny. Barbara must have just been referring to the torch I’d always carried for him; that was bad enough, a humiliation that made me squirm.

“Don’t you care what’s happening in Germany?” I lashed back. A crude defense, and she laughed.

“Oh, Elaine. You’re going to spend two hours listening to a lecture, and you think you deserve a medal?”

“It’s better than spending two hours giggling with your friends and trying out new hairstyles.”

“What does it matter if I care? You’re the serious one, the smart one.” Her voice went raw, but for just an instant; then the mocking tone returned. “Say hi to Danny for me.”

YOU
’
RE THE SERIOUS ONE
, the smart one.
Maybe it was just a dig, a reminder that
she
was the pretty, popular sister, the one Danny loved. Yet there’d been a crack in her voice, I was sure of it. As I sat in the packed hall, waiting for the talk to begin, I wondered if I’d received a glimpse of what Barbara suffered by being constantly compared to me. Though how
smart could I be, if in my resentment at being not-Barbara, I’d never imagined it might be hard for her to be not-Elaine?

It hit me that, of my two most important childhood companions, I had made an effort not to drift apart from Danny. And I
knew
Danny: I understood what he cared about and could easily fall into a conversation with him. When it came to Barbara, on the other hand, I guess I’d figured it was enough to live under the same roof and share a room. But it was my sister who’d become a mystery to me. We rarely talked about anything bigger than “Did you see my hairbrush?” And the occasional times when our conversation went beyond the mundane, how often did I belittle her—as, I realized with dismay, I had done just an hour earlier? Barbara didn’t get the grades I did, but that hardly meant she was stupid. As the speaker walked to the podium, I promised myself I was going to get closer to Barbara; I would make a real effort to find out what she thought about life and the world, and I’d take her ideas seriously.

Then the talk began, and I was riveted. The professor, Dr. Blum, wasn’t the gaunt, hollow-eyed refugee I’d expected but a portly man with a rather pedantic speaking style. His ordinariness made what he said more awful. He spoke about losing his university post with no protest from Christian colleagues he’d known for years, having his children barred from sports facilities, and being stripped of citizenship and even forbidden to fly the German flag by the Nuremburg Laws. And there was the constant fear of physical violence, but how could you complain when the attackers wore government uniforms?

The story had a familiar ugliness. Many people in Boyle Heights were immigrants who had experienced similar injustices. But those things had happened in eastern Europe and Russia, not in “civilized” Germany! And there was a relentless pettiness to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. A relatively minor law that chilled me was a ban on the use of Jewish names to spell something to a telephone operator—you couldn’t, for instance, say “A as in Abraham”—a rule that burrowed so deeply into the minutiae of daily life, it was as if the Nazis wanted the Jews, and I suppose all Germans, to be aware of them from the moment they woke in the morning to when they lost themselves in sleep at night.

Soon I was dabbing at tears; so were many people around me.

Following the speech, the first people who asked questions were leaders of the youth groups that had sponsored the talk; they were in seats of honor onstage. Mike Palikow, a senior who was the president of Habonim, asked Dr. Blum about pressuring the British to allow more Jews to enter Palestine.

“Is this a Zionist organization?” The professor looked startled.

“My group is,” Mike said.

“Well,” Dr. Blum said, “I hope all of you here will pressure
your
government to allow more people to enter America. I’m sure you’re aware that the United States has a strict quota for immigrants from Germany, but did you know it is not even accepting half that number?”

Danny leaped to his feet in the front row and shouted, “How can you say that and then not support a Jewish state in Palestine?”

People shushed him, and Mike Palikow said, “Danny! We’re not taking questions from the audience yet.”

Dr. Blum smiled. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, young man. I don’t happen to be a Zionist. Next question, please?”

Danny persisted, his voice hoarse with emotion, “You got into America because you had friends who guaranteed you a job. What about all the people who don’t have important friends?”

Several people called out, “Show some respect!” and a burly boy—Dave Medved, a star of the high school football team—ran over and locked an arm around Danny’s shoulders.

As he was muscled out of the hall, Danny kept yelling, “There’s only one place where Jews can be safe—Palestine!”

On the stage, Mike Palikow began to apologize, but the professor said, “It’s good to see a young man who stands up for what he believes. And good to be in a country where such a thing is permitted.”

After a dozen more questions, posed with extreme politeness, the formal presentation ended, and there were refreshments. Dr. Blum particularly asked to talk to the ardent young Zionist, but apparently Danny hadn’t lingered outside the hall. Someone even ran over to the Berlovs’ rooming house but couldn’t find him there, either.

I had a hunch where he might have gone. I went upstairs to his father’s
classroom in the Yiddische Folkschule. Gershon Berlov had set up a corner for Danny when he was little, with a few toys and a blanket where he could nap; he used to play there quietly while his father taught.

The room was dark except in
his
corner, where a cigarette glowed.

“Danny.” I inched toward him, feeling my way past desks as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“Elaine?”

“Yeah. He wants to talk to you.”

“That pompous
yekke
?”

“That’s not fair.” In our neighborhood of mainly eastern European immigrants,
yekke
was a slur, a term for German-born Jews who looked down their noses at us in both the Old World and the New. In Europe, the
yekkes
prided themselves on their urban, cultured ways, compared to Russian or Polish Jews who lived like peasants in
shtetls
. People who came to America from those
shtetls
at the turn of century discovered that
yekkes
had arrived decades earlier. They had established fine banks and department stores and carved out a place in America’s gentile society—and they offered charity but cringed at being associated with their crude eastern “cousins.”

“Cigarette?” he said.

“Thanks.” I sat on the floor next to him and took the cigarette he offered. “Aren’t you going to talk to him?”

“What, and apologize?”

“I don’t think that’s what he wants. He said he liked seeing a young person stand up for something.”

“Did he? Well, I’m not going to go back there.” Danny lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first. “What about everyone else? Are they all saying I’m a
putz
?”

“No one’s even talking about you.”

“Elaine Greenstein, if
you
lie to me, I won’t believe anyone for the rest of my life.”

“Some people thought you were rude.”

“Dave Medved told me I was a
putz
.”

“He did?”

“A little
putz
.” He started laughing, a kid’s release-of-tension giggle.

I laughed, too. And then I was crying, I didn’t know why—the distressing
things I’d heard in the talk, the still-fresh loss of Zayde, my being alone with Danny in the dark?

“Elaine, are you okay?”

“Fine.” I shook with tears.

He wrapped his arms around me, in a way that started out as a comforting gesture between friends. Then the embrace became something else. I tried to shrug away, I swear I did. I pictured myself getting up and leaving. Virtuous, a good sister. I pictured the scene with that good Elaine as if it were a movie—detailed but two-dimensional, distant—while Danny kissed my teary cheeks and a shivering started inside me.

I tilted my face toward his, my mouth.

MY SEASON OF DUPLICITY
began in earnest that night. For the first time I practiced the adult art of splitting myself into two Elaines, one who betrayed her sister and the other who—and this was the art—
genuinely
made nice with her. I had decided, on the night of the talk, to reach out to Barbara, to be not just a sister to her but a friend; and I did. We both did.