The Tin Horse A Novel

The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg




I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.… She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.



RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Big Sleep





We tell ourselves stories in order to live.



JOAN DIDION, The White Album





“ELAINE, WHAT’S THIS? POETRY?” HE SHOOTS A GLANCE AT ME, HIS face so young, so eager. Then his eyes return to the folder he’s opened on the dining room table.

“Let me see it,” I say, but he begins reading aloud.

“ ‘Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart—’ ”

“Josh!” I reach out my hand and give him what my kids call the Acid Regard … even as I feel, against my back, the trunk of the fig tree in our yard in Boyle Heights; feel for a moment, stirring in my bones, the impossibly tender eighteen-year-old self who wrote those words.

“Sure, okay, if you want to look at them first.” He hands over the folder but adds, “These belong in the archive.” He’s well named, Joshua; didn’t he make the walls come tumbling down?

I thought it was a godsend when the library at the University of Southern California asked me to donate my papers to their special collections. I’d been considering moving to a senior apartment at Rancho Mañana, or, as I can’t help calling it, the Ranch of No Tomorrow, and I dreaded having to sort through all the papers and books accumulated during more than half a century of living in my house in Santa Monica. USC volunteered the assistance of a Ph.D. student in library and information science, an archivist, and I jumped at the offer.

I did have a twinge of misgiving. It’s one thing to expose my professional life to strangers, but USC doesn’t just want material from my legal career; they’re interested in my personal papers, things from my childhood and family. Well, I figured the library science student would be a docile young woman who wouldn’t put up a fight if I chose to keep something private, someone with whom the process of excavating my past would be a sort of surgical procedure: clean and impersonal. I of all people—after a lifetime devoted to fighting prejudice—fell into such hasty stereotyping. And I’m paying for it. My not-at-all-docile archivist, Josh, sees every scrap of paper as a potential gold mine, and if his abrasive curiosity pokes an old pain or anger, he’s delighted; my annoyance doesn’t intimidate him, it just makes him push harder.

Not that I can hold Josh responsible for the nostalgia that ambushed me as I opened a box of my kids’ childhood drawings, or the stab of grief when I came upon letters I’d exchanged with Paul—dead four years as of last month—when he was in the army in World War II. And now my teenage poetry. I suppose it’s just as well that Josh isn’t a sensitive, bookish type who’d try to comfort me every time some piece of my past touches a nerve. I prefer sparring to sympathy.

“Is that everything from my office?” I ask briskly. That’s who I am, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, a brisk, no-bullshit woman, not a girlish poet whom every memento leaves undone.

“Let me check.” He jumps up. He’s quick and efficient—thank goodness, since I did decide on the senior apartment. I put my house on the market, and I’m moving to Rancho Mañana in mid-December, just six weeks away.

As soon as he’s left the room and I’m alone, I peek at the first poem. “Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart. I have no such art of concealment. The flower of my love …” Could I ever have been so young and vulnerable? Where did that girl go? I can look back at the Elaine who wrote her first idealistic letter to a newspaper at eleven and draw a line to the crusading attorney I became. The seeds were there, even if it does astonish me that the quiet, reflective girl I was learned to be such a fighter—what did the Los Angeles Times call me, “the city’s go-to progressive attorney for decades, from the McCarthy witch hunts to the civil rights, anti–Viet Nam War, and women’s movements”?

But the gentle poet who once lived in me, what became of her? I can name the date I stopped writing poetry: September 12, 1939. I was eighteen. Whether or not I kept writing, however, what happened to that gentleness? Did I just outgrow it? Did I wall it off? I have a sense of something calling to me from those forgotten poems. But what nonsense! I chide myself. An old woman’s sentimentality. I close the folder and put it in the wicker basket of things I want to look over before releasing them to Josh for the archive. Not that I have any intention of giving him the poems. I plan to “misplace” them.

After the surprise of finding the poetry, I’m wary when Josh returns to the dining room carrying two department store boxes—though the boxes themselves set off no warning bell, no frisson of alarm.

“Where did those come from?” I ask.

“Closet shelf, way in the back. There’s a stack of ’em.”

“Maybe they’re things of Ronnie’s.” My office used to be my son’s room. I expect moth-eaten camp clothes or a comic-book collection.

“No, they’re full of papers.”

Josh puts the top box—it’s from Buffum’s—between us and lifts the lid, and now the memory stirs: of my younger sisters and me cleaning out our mother’s apartment after she died. That was more than thirty years ago, and what an ordeal it was. In the clean-lined apartment in West Los Angeles to which we moved Mama after Papa died, she had re-created the overstuffed claustrophobia of our house in Boyle Heights. Mama’s death, ten years after Papa’s (he’d had a stroke), was a shock. Still vigorous at seventy-six, she was out taking her daily walk, and a drunk driver ran her down. Going through her apartment in a blur of grief, Audrey, Harriet, and I came across two—four? a dozen?—boxes from now-defunct department stores in which Mama kept papers, and who knew what else. None of us could bear to go through them at the time.

I have no memory of doing it, but we must have thrown the boxes into my car, and somehow they ended up in my son’s closet.

“Hey, is this Hebrew?” Josh holds out a letter he’s unfolded and tries to hand me a pair of white gloves. It doesn’t matter how often I tell him I have the right to touch my own things; he brings a second pair of gloves every time.

I scan the Hebrew letters. “Yiddish. It must be from my mother’s family in Romania.”

“You can read Yiddish?”

I discover I still can.

“What’s it about?”

“Family news—somebody got married, somebody else had a child.” Typical of what we heard from our Romanian relatives in the 1920s. During the thirties, their letters became anguished pleas for us to get at least the young ones out. We succeeded with my cousin Ivan; my family sponsored him to come to Los Angeles. And after the war, two cousins made it to Palestine, and three others went to our relatives in Chicago. But the rest were gone.

“Well, these are definitely keepers.” An acquisitive gleam in his eyes, Josh holds a stack of letters, all neatly saved in their original envelopes. He reaches for one of the plastic bags he uses for items to place in the archive.

“Wait, I want to read them!” I doubt I’ll have time to do more than glance through the letters. But this is my family, my history. Mine and Harriet’s. Of the four of us, the Greenstein girls, she and I are the only ones left. I don’t know if Harriet ever learned any Yiddish, but I need to share the letters with her, to let her at least touch these things Mama cherished, before they become source material for someone’s dissertation.

“Sure, of course.” Josh slips the letters into the bag, labels it, and hands it to me. “Just keep them in here when you’re not reading them.”

Along with the letters, the box contains stray notes, receipts, and newspaper and magazine clippings that have no obvious reason for being saved. “Someone was a pack rat,” Josh says happily, but even he consigns much of the contents of the box to the recycling container at his side.

We move on to the second box, this one from May Company. It’s a treasure trove. Mama dedicated this box to us, her daughters. I discover report cards, school papers, crayon drawings. Here’s my letter of acceptance from USC, with the promise of a full scholarship. And here, neatly saved in a manila envelope, my articles from the school newspaper and the letters to editors I wrote with Danny, pleas for America to respond to the plight of Jews in Europe. Yes, of course, I tell Josh, I’ll give him the articles and letters after I’m done with them; and after I’ve shared the box with Harriet.

I keep digging and come upon a packet the size of a half sheet of paper, held together with a rubber band. When I pick up the packet, the rubber band crumbles, and out spill … oh, it’s the programs from Barbara’s dance recitals. There are a dozen or more, with artfully hand-lettered titles, printed on thick, good-quality paper.

I open one of the programs, and I’m sitting in the dark, watching my sister dance. Not just admiring her but feeling her movements in my body—though I could never have danced with her abandon and fire. I craved private moments, whereas Barbara came alive in the spotlight.

“Elaine,” Josh says, and I realize I’ve been miles—years—away. “Did you dance?”

“No. My sister Barbara.” My throat goes rough with the threat of unexpected tears.

“Ballet?”

“Modern,” I choke out.

“Did she ever do anything with it? Have a career?”

“She did what most of the women of my generation did. Got married, raised a family.” Lying, the words come more easily. Still, I have a sudden image of standing on the bank of the Los Angeles River during a storm, the water churning and my nerves alert for signs of a flash flood. Nonsense! I tell myself again.

He asks if he can take the programs for some kind of dance archive at USC, and I say fine—what would I do with them?

Then the box yields a fresh challenge to my equilibrium: Philip’s business card.

Josh whistles. “Wow! What did your mother have to do with a private detective?”

I mumble something about my having worked for Philip when I was in college. That spins Josh into fresh questions, and he mentions a name, someone I’ve never heard of, written on the back of the card. I blurt that I’ve come down with a splitting headache and rush him out the door. Then I stop fighting and let the flood come.

I’m expecting some kind of violence, that I’ll break into wild weeping or hurl a vase across the room. Instead, there’s a sense of surrender as I let myself be carried by the river of sorrow and rage and regret and love, the river of Barbara.





AT 11:52 P.M. ON MARCH 28, 1921, BARBARA WRIGGLED OUT OF Mama into the brightness of White Memorial Hospital on Boyle Avenue in Los Angeles. Seventeen minutes—but the next day—later, I swam after her. Did she shove me aside? Did I, suddenly shy of the world, hold back? But Barbara always arrived ahead of me. She balanced on a bicycle half an hour before I did, and everyone was so busy congratulating her, they didn’t notice when I climbed onto the bike we shared and wobbled to the corner. People always called us Barbara and Elaine, never Elaine and Barbara. And though I met Danny first, Barbara was his first love.

We were fraternal twins, not identical. Still, no one would have doubted that we were sisters. We both had thick, curly dark hair (hers slightly curlier and mine with redder highlights, of which I was vain), gold-flecked hazel eyes, and largish but thankfully straight noses. When we got into our teens, I shot up to five foot three, which was tall for our family; Barbara was an inch shorter. Our most obvious physical difference lay in the architecture of our faces. She had soft apple cheeks like Mama’s, while my face was narrow, with Papa’s deep-set eyes; long before I had to start wearing glasses at eleven, people rightly pegged me as the serious one. Did we grow into our faces, or did they express our natures from the beginning? Both of us spoke at a medium pitch and “so clear, like bells! You girls should go on the radio!” Papa, shamed by his parents’ and Mama’s accents, polished our articulation by having us declaim poems. While I kneaded my thoughts into sentences deliberately, Barbara never hesitated. And she could sing, with what matured into a throaty, torch-song voice, while I could barely croak out a tune.

We have the same smile in photographs, the same gap between our front teeth, inherited from Papa. A film, though, would have shown that she was quicker to smile. If one quality most described my sister, it was quickness, in every sense of the word. Barbara was spontaneous, eager, vital, warm, someone who constantly came up with games and mischief, making her a natural leader of the band of kids in our neighborhood. She was also impatient, impulsive, reckless, and hasty to judge. Mercurial, even cruel, a quick-change artist of affection who adored you one day and, worse than anger or hatred, forgot you existed the next.

And she could leave havoc in her wake, a talent I witnessed for the first time when she caused the stock market crash of 1929. Of course, I was old enough at that time—eight and a half—to understand that cataclysms in my family didn’t affect the entire world. Yet I always associated Black Tuesday with the storm that hit our house the same day because of what Barbara did to Zayde.

Zayde Dov, Papa’s father, lived with us. In fact, our house was the same one Zayde had moved into when Papa was seventeen. But Zayde wasn’t from Los Angeles. He had crossed the ocean to come to America. And before that, he’d had to cross a river. A trifling distance, to be sure, compared to the Atlantic that churned beneath him for two weeks, an ordeal that made him refuse to set foot in a boat ever again, not even the little rowboats in Hollenbeck Park. But crossing the river was harder. The first wrenching away from everything he knew and that knew him, a seventeen-year-old boy with his mama’s kugel still warm in his belly and the fresh damp of her tears wetting the scarf she’d knotted around his neck.

And Zayde’s river was no country trickle, but the mighty Dniester, which swept from the Carpathian Mountains past his village in the Ukraine to the Black Sea. Then there was the fact that he had to swim across the river on a March night—the water icy, the current at a gallop from melting Carpathian snow—so the dogs wouldn’t pick up his scent. The dogs and the men with them, men who carried cudgels and guns.

Zayde always paused at this point. And Barbara and I always demanded, breathless as if the dogs were after us, “Why were they chasing you?”

“Ah,” he’d say, taking a sip from his cup of tea, laced with whiskey. “A great crime I committed, girls.”

No matter how many times I heard the story, I could never erase the picture that jumped into my mind, of Zayde Dov in his house slippers vaulting onto a horse with the loot from a bank robbery, like the Wild West bandits I saw in the movies.

Until he continued, “I fell in love.”

The girl’s name was Agneta. She was the daughter of one of the farmers who came into town on market day, an event that over time, between Zayde’s storytelling and my imagination, became so real I almost felt as if I’d been there, as if I’d witnessed the scene that sealed Zayde’s fate. Market day in Zayde’s village was busy and noisy, what with the jostle of peasants selling what their farms produced and the Jewish villagers offering goods such as tea, salt, and lamp oil. The villagers also provided the services of craftsmen such as Berel the tinsmith, who was Zayde Dov’s father.

Berel, an enterprising man, had recently bought a grinding machine and branched into sharpening. And scissors, appropriately, proved the instrument of Dov’s estrangement—such a rich word, signifying both that you become a stranger to others and that everything around you, everything you see and hear, even what you smell, is alien. No more do your nostrils suck in the precise odors that emanate from this soil and vegetation, this method of cooking and of handling trash, the perfume, however foul, of home. If only Dov could have foreseen what he was about to lose, would he have acted differently the day Agneta came into the tinsmith’s shop wanting her scissors sharpened fine enough to cut the challis she’d just bought for a best dress?

It was nearly dusk, and Dov was tending the shop alone. He pumped the foot pedal to start the grinding wheel and held the blades of Agneta’s scissors against the stone. He was more aware at first of the work than of the pretty peasant customer.

“I liked using the grinder,” he told us. “It’s the one thing I was good at. My father said he’d never seen such a schlemiel at working tin.”

He tested the scissor blades with his finger, then ground them a bit more and buffed them with a clean rag until they gleamed in the thin light of a late January afternoon. “Perfect, see?” he said, and demonstrated by snipping a piece of paper and displaying the crisp edges. Agneta, who was shortsighted, leaned close to look, close enough that he smelled her: a scent of rough soap, the dried rosemary she’d carried in bunches to the market, and sixteen-year-old girl.

“Show me on this.” Plucking a parcel from the basket she carried over her arm, she unwrapped the brown paper and freed a corner of the fabric, a bright blue that matched her eyes; it was soft to his touch when he held it and aimed the scissors at it. “No, silly, not that much!” she cried, and snatched the wool from him, her fingers grazing his, her blue eyes teasing.

Emboldened, he handed her the scissors, their touch lasting perhaps two seconds this time. “You do it.”

Agneta folded the fabric back into the brown paper and reached behind her for the braid that fell halfway to her waist. Flourishing her rosemary-scented blond hair between them, she sliced a dozen strands from the end of her braid and held them out to Dov.

“You understand, girls? Agneta was a goy, a Christian. She thought she could say anything she wanted, because I was nobody, a Jew.”

Dov Grinshtayn didn’t believe in such distinctions, however. He intended to abolish them; everyone did at the socialist meetings he snuck off to. And he was a strong, good-looking boy, fonder of walking in the forest and (luckily, as it turned out) swimming in the river than spending all day shut up in the rabbi’s study hall. In a photograph taken in New York a few years later, his jaw is firm, his shoulders solid, and his eyes, under thick, wavy black hair … Even though the photo is slightly out of focus, you can see the challenge in his eyes. The kind of look I pictured him giving Agneta.

“Here,” she said when he just stood there instead of reaching for the lock of hair. “Take it.”

“Why would I want it?”

“To think of me.” She tossed her head, even as the disdained hair grew damp with sweat from her fingers.

“Why would I want to think of you?”

Her jest turned against her, Agneta’s smile lost its courage and became the sucked-in lips of a child fighting tears. And Dov experienced in one telescoped moment everything that was fine and everything that was mean in himself. “Ai, I felt sorry for upsetting her. But living in America, girls, you have no idea. Christian boys used to beat us up; they did it in plain sight of adults and got away with it. Sometimes mobs of Christians attacked all the Jews. It was called a pogrom. Every minute of your life, you were afraid.”

Given the perpetual anxiety of being at the mercy of the Christian peasants, Dov couldn’t help but savor his taste of power over one Christian girl … until tears brimmed in her eyes. Then his heart melted. Gravely he held out his hand. Agneta pressed the lock of hair into his palm. He twisted the hair into a triangle of paper and slipped it in his pocket.

They spoke now only of their transaction.

“Are they sharp enough?”

“Yes, they’re fine.”

“Shall I wrap them?”

But every word carried poetry in its arms.

“Agneta, what’s taking you so long, girl?” A man’s voice at the door, thick as if he’d just come from the tavern, and that was when Dov learned her name.

“Coming, Father,” she called.

“Wait. Take …,” Dov said, before he had any idea what to give her. “Here!” A pencil from his pocket, almost new and hardly chewed at all.

“Oh.” She looked at the pencil as if she didn’t know how to use one. Was she even literate, this girl who was going to hurl him into exile? She thrust the pencil into her basket and scurried out the door.

She came back two weeks later with a pot to mend, but the shop was busy, and he had to focus on the work under finicky Berel’s eye. Nervous, he burned his fingers with solder, but that hardly aroused his father’s suspicion, as it happened all the time.

He was luckier on the next market day. When he passed the stalls in the town square, on his way to deliver tin pails to the dairy, he spotted her and caught her eye. She slipped off and followed him. In a stand of beech trees, he and Agneta were alone at last.

“Did you kiss?” we asked. We went to the movies. We knew what happened when people were in love; not that we saw this kind of behavior between Mama and Papa!

“The ideas you girls have. Once, I kissed her.” But they didn’t dare linger and risk being seen. And she had important things to tell him: how to recognize her farm, at what time she came out to feed the chickens, and that she had a secret place in the woods at the edge of the farm, where no one else ever went.

Since their first meeting, Dov had saved bits of tin and wire, scraps left from trimming pots or punching holes in colanders. He’d snuck the leavings into his pocket, where he also kept the lock of Agneta’s hair. Once he had enough scraps, he devoted himself to tinsmithing as never before. His father was right, he had little talent. But despite his lack of skill, not long after he’d first kissed Agneta, he was ready. The next Shabbos, when he had the afternoon free, he walked by her farm three times. Each time, he continued a hundred yards past the house, then turned and—heart pounding, terrified that every one of her four brothers had seen him—passed again. At long last, Agneta came out carrying her bucket of chicken feed. She raced into the chicken house and a moment later, never glancing his way, hurried toward the woods. She stayed within the fence; Dov paralleled her on the road. Once they were out of sight of the house, he climbed over the fence to her … and gave her his gift, a tin menagerie.

“Oh!” Agneta clapped her hands. “Oh!” She marveled over the rooster with a flared comb, the curly-tailed lamb, and the horse. But she most adored the ungainly creature, a lion, that he’d done his best to copy from a drawing in a magazine. He had given it a mane by soldering thirty bits of wire to the massive head as if each wire were an individual hair. He kissed Agneta a few more times that day, and two weeks later when they met in the woods again.

Some dozen kisses were all they had (at least all Zayde admitted to) before the lion betrayed them. Agneta found the spiky-maned beast so strange and wonderful, she couldn’t resist showing it to her closest friends. Soon her brothers found out, and where could she have gotten tin animals but from the Jew tinsmith? Gnarled old Berel? Ridiculous. But didn’t Berel have an apprentice, a son? They grilled Agneta; I imagined her tears and blood from her fingers drenching the tin lion she wouldn’t let them rip from her grasp. Then they came after Dov.

Zayde’s family got warning barely in time for him to pack a small bag and for his mother to make a secret pocket in the lining of his coat and sew in three gold coins. The money seemed a fortune until he had to use one entire coin to bribe his way across the Austro-Hungarian border. Then came the train ticket to Rotterdam. With little money left, he shoveled coal to pay off his steamship passage. Two weeks of sweating and vomiting in the pits of hell, and he stumbled rubber-legged onto Castle Garden, the island at the tip of Manhattan where immigrants were processed then, sure of two things: he would never have anything more to do with boats, and he would never work tin again.

The first vow he had to break almost immediately, but just once, and briefly, to take the barge from Castle Garden to the mainland. The second one he kept for forty-five years, until Monday, October 28, 1929. And breaking it led to one of the times when the story of my family collided with history—the story of the whole world.

“I’m not a tinsmith, I’m an idea man,” Zayde would insist when Barbara and I begged for our own tin animals.

Our father had another way of describing him. “He’s a luftmensch,” he used to say to Mama in Yiddish, the language of secrets. We knew luft meant “air” and mensch was “man,” and at first we thought the word, and the fact that Papa half whispered it, meant Zayde was an airplane pilot; maybe he had flown missions that still couldn’t be talked about, even years after the Great War. Zayde had done so many things in America—sewing suspenders and then pants, having a garlic route, rolling cigars, even having his own cigar factory. And after the family moved to Los Angeles because our grandmother, who died before we were born, had consumption, Zayde built the West: he had an egg ranch that supplied eggs to half of Los Angeles, and he played his part in the housing boom by buying and selling furniture. “There’s always money to be made,” he said. Now he sold books, except that when we asked to visit his bookstore, the way we sometimes went to Uncle Leo’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, everyone shook their heads and acted mysterious. With Zayde having had so many different jobs, some of them hushed and secret, why couldn’t he have been a pilot, too?

It was Auntie Pearl, Papa’s youngest sister, who told us the truth. And Barbara who turned it into catastrophe.

Both of us adored Auntie Pearl, a flapper with bobbed brown hair, daring skirts that barely covered her plump knees, and merry eyes. Pearl sewed most of our clothes, and on that Monday in October 1929, Barbara and I had gone to her apartment after school so she could finish our navy winter skirts. I was standing on a box so Pearl could pin the hem of my skirt, when something about Charles Lindbergh came on the radio.

“Does Zayde know Mr. Lindbergh?” I said.

“Charles Lindbergh, the pilot?”

I nodded.

“What has your zayde been telling you?” Pearl laughed, but not in a happy way. She and Zayde hadn’t spoken for the past two years, not since a scandal so huge that even though the adults whispered, they couldn’t keep Barbara and me from hearing. Pearl’s husband, our uncle Gabriel Davidoff, had left her for another woman, a goy! A worse scandal followed. For a girl as young as Pearl, even a girl who’d been married, it wasn’t respectable to live on her own. But Pearl hadn’t moved back in with her family. Instead, she’d stayed in the apartment where she’d lived with Gabe and started a custom tailoring business. Zayde now refused to see her.

“Nothing,” I said, sorry I’d brought it up. We weren’t supposed to say anything about Zayde to Pearl, just as we had to pretend around him that a new skirt or jacket had been bought at the store.

But Barbara, who’d already had her navy skirt pinned, piped up, “Isn’t Zayde a luftmensch?”

This time Pearl’s laughter was genuine, booming so hard she dropped the pins and rocked back onto the floor. “A luftmensch! A luftmensch!”

“That’s what Papa says,” I said when she’d quieted down to a few chuckles.

“I’ll bet he does.” Pearl, who moved quickly and sharply even though she was a bit zaftig, gathered her legs under her and hopped up. “Barbara, honey, pick up those pins for me. And Elaine, hold still. Just a few more and we’re done.”

Pearl waited until she finished pinning my hem and I changed back into my old skirt (also navy, which Mama considered an appropriate color for young girls—and it had the advantage of not showing dirt). Then she told us to sit in her tiny living room, she and Barbara on the frayed gray love seat and I on the room’s one chair.

Pearl lit a cigarette, another of her scandalous habits. “Darlings, do you know what a luftmensch is?” she said.

“Isn’t it a pilot?” I said.

“Of an airplane? Whatever made you think … oh, of course, ‘air man,’ how clever of you. But a luftmensch doesn’t fly in the air. It’s a person who you can’t imagine how they make a living. It’s like they live on nothing but air. Someone who’s always got this big scheme or that big scheme, but the schemes never work out. A luftmensch …” She stared at the ash growing on the end of her cigarette, and her voice turned bitter; the harshness from my usually cheerful aunt upset me almost as much as what she said. “He borrows money from all the relatives to start a cigar factory that’s going to make them rich, but surprise, the man who promised to sell him tobacco at a huge discount takes the money and disappears. He brags about how he’s going to send his children to university, even his daughters, or that he’ll be the egg king of Los Angeles. The egg king! More like egg on his face … Oh, girls! I didn’t mean …”

I don’t know about Barbara, but I was crying, and Pearl must have suddenly realized she wasn’t recounting the litany of broken promises to her friends, adults who understood why Zayde might live on the air of dreams.

“It’s just that people like your zayde,” Pearl said, “they come to America and try different things. But it’s not easy. No matter what they heard about America in the old country, look outside—do you see any streets paved with gold?”

“Papa showed us the egg ranch!” Barbara said, focusing with an eight-year-old’s moral absolutism not on the nuances of immigrant hopes but on the black and white of whether we’d been lied to. “Uncle Leo took us on a drive into the San Fernando Valley, and Papa showed us where the ranch was.”

“Honey, of course we had the egg ranch. It’s not that Zayde—”

“Why don’t we have it anymore?” I demanded, suddenly seeing the holes that always gaped in Zayde’s stories. If his businesses were so successful, why did he keep abandoning them? If there was always money to be made, why weren’t we rich? Why, if we needed to go someplace by car, did we have to ask Uncle Leo—the bookstore-owning husband of Papa’s other sister, Sonya—to drive us? Why, as Mama never stopped complaining, did Papa break his back working for Mr. Fine at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, instead of having a business of his own like Leo did?

“Having a ranch with dozens of chickens,” Pearl said, “it’s not like people who have a little chicken coop behind their house. We didn’t know enough, or we were just unlucky. The chickens got sick and died.”

“What about the bookstore?” Barbara asked.

“The bookstore?”

“Where Zayde works now.”

“Gevult, what nonsense have they been filling your heads with?”

Pearl told us the truth gently, but she overestimated our maturity, our ability to balance the wrong done to us with understanding of the fragile pride that had motivated it. Barbara in particular heard what Zayde really did with the passion and violence of betrayal with which children experience any departure from their certainties about important adults in their lives.

“I’m going there,” Barbara said as soon as we left Pearl’s.

“We can’t, we aren’t supposed to,” I protested, even as I followed her to Brooklyn Avenue.

She charged down the street, which was busy with women shopping and newsboys screaming about problems with the stock market.

“Don’t you want to get buttermilk?” I grabbed her hand. Pearl had given us pennies, and we could treat ourselves to delicious paper cones of buttermilk at the dairy store.

Barbara stopped for a moment, turned, and thrust her face into mine. “I’m going. You can do what you want!”

It may sound as if I’m trying to avoid my share of guilt for what happened. Actually, I’m exposing my particular guilt at being a child who was cautious by nature. Everyone is fond of plucky children, kids who launch into adventures, even (within reason) kids who sass back. What about the girl who sits for a long time and watches other children going down the slide, whose legs quiver just from imagining how it will feel to stand at the top of that silver swoop into the unknown? I made up for it in time, I learned bravado—but back then I was my brash sister’s follower.

Barbara pushed through a nondescript door just past a dress shop—we kids all knew where these places of adult misdoing were located, just as we were aware of the bootleg schnapps Mr. Zakarin concocted in his tub—and ran up a dark, narrow flight of stairs. Then she paused at the threshold of a room. Standing a few steps behind her, I couldn’t see inside, I could only smell a fug of cigar smoke and hear what sounded like a radio.

“What can I do for you, sweetheart?” The man who spoke came over, and even though his words were friendly, he posed his thick, squat body in the door in a way that made Barbara take a step backward.

“Is Dov Greenstein here?” she said.

The man looked relieved. “You looking for Dov? You’ve come to the wrong place. Say, I’ll get word to him that you want him, okay? You girls go on home now.”

“Where is he, then?” Barbara said.

“I told you, be good girls and go home.”

This man was clearly used to children who were more docile than Barbara. While she declared that we would try every place like this on Brooklyn Avenue, so he might as well tell her which one Zayde worked in, I escaped into the radio broadcast, a baritone voice crooning, “In the fifth, it’s Excelsior, Excelsior takes first at six to one. That’s a six-to-one win for Excelsior. The favorite, Patrician, has to settle for second this time around, and Irish Eyes, beautiful Irish Eyes, comes in third.”

Barbara got the man to tell her where Zayde worked, and we stormed down Brooklyn and up another tight stairway with what sounded like the same radio broadcast playing at the top. We didn’t hesitate in the doorway this time but burst into a low-ceilinged room that smelled like a combination of cigars and my school classroom. The classroom smell came from a big chalkboard, where a man with a mustache stood writing in a hand that would have gotten an A from my teacher. Excelsior, I read in his perfect script, and Irish Eyes, as I took everything in with a time-slowed-down clarity: the radio perched on a filing cabinet, a tree hung with coats and hats, a droopy-eyed man sitting at a table strewn with dozens of what I recognized as the racing forms sold by the newsboy outside the ice cream parlor. Another messy table abutted the first at a weird angle, as if someone had just shoved both tables into the room and wherever they landed, they stayed.

There was a third table, but it was lined up squarely with a corner of the room, and its dozens of papers were stacked as neatly as Zayde kept his room at home.

He didn’t notice us. Chewing on a pencil, he stared at a piece of paper on the table with the kind of intense concentration he brought to our games of gin rummy. I expected Barbara to say something, but she must have exhausted her first wind simply getting us here.

I broke the silence. “Zayde!”

He jumped up so fast his chair fell over. “Girls! Is everything all right at home? Is someone sick?”

Barbara found her voice. “Why did you tell us you worked in a bookstore?”

“Is someone sick?” he repeated, although he was quickly realizing we hadn’t been sent here because of a family emergency. That this was the emergency. “Who told you to come here? This isn’t a place for children.”

“You said you worked in a bookstore, not a bookie joint!” Barbara accused.

“Oy, you thought …” Laughing—shifting his strategy with the quickness any immigrant learns if he wants to survive—Zayde walked around the table toward us. “You don’t think I work here? That’s a good one, isn’t it, Mr. Melansky?”

“A good one.” The droopy-eyed man guffawed. “That’s rich, that’s a good one.”

“I just come by when I have a little extra time and give my friend Mr. Melansky a hand.”

“That’s the ticket, ha ha,” Mr. Melansky chimed in.

“But …,” Barbara sputtered. Zayde’s initial defensiveness hadn’t rattled her; it was the same way we reacted when accused of anything. But now he’d outflanked her.

“Barbara, Elaine, say hello to Mr. Melansky,” he said. “And Mr. Freitag,” he added, nodding toward the man who’d kept writing on the chalkboard through all of this—he couldn’t stop, since race results were still coming in over the radio.

“How do you do?” we said, temporarily cowed by the rules hammered into us by our parents and teachers: Be polite to grown-ups. Never make a scene.

“Girls, why don’t you get yourself a treat?” Zayde reached into his pocket, took out a fat roll of bills, and peeled one off for us. The bills were all ones; I’d seen him roll them at the kitchen table when he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to go out and build the West. Still, to us, a dollar was a fortune.

I looked at the characteristically tidy table where he’d been sitting, lit by a small lamp I remembered from our living room, and my legs shook the way they had the time I finally climbed to the top of the slide and stared down that shimmering Niagara, so bright with reflected sun it made me dizzy. There was also a calm, however, an elegant beauty, in holding the solid physical evidence against his mere words of denial. Later I thought of that vertiginous moment as the first time I reasoned like an attorney.

“Zayde, it’s not true,” I murmured, more sad than angry.

“What?” He crouched, hands on his thighs, to look me in the eye (he was sixty-two then, but vigorous and surprisingly limber). His eyes, hazel like mine, warned—begged?—me not to go further. Or was he asking me to free him from this deception?

Whatever he wanted, I couldn’t turn back. I was standing at the top of the slide, the kid behind me on the ladder pressing into my calves. The only thing I could do was force my wobbly legs onto that terrifying cataract and let go.

“You don’t work in a bookstore,” I said. “You work here.”

“A little respect your zayde deserves!” Mr. Melansky huffed, but Zayde held up his hand.

“Why don’t I walk you girls home?” he said. Without a word to the other men, he put his gray felt homburg on his head and guided us to the door. His hand on my shoulder trembled, but in the street he had a chuckle in his voice.

“Since when do eight-year-old girls know about Melansky’s?” he said.

“All the kids know,” I said. “Don’t they, Barbara?” My sister was too quiet.

“You kids, you’re so smart. Your mama and papa and me, we thought, a bookie shop, a bookshop, see? Almost the same English. We thought, not until you’re a little older. So smart! You want ice creams from Currie’s?”

“Yes, please.” I accepted the peace offering, even better than a cone of buttermilk.

“Better you shouldn’t have been there, though,” he said. “How about you don’t mention it to your mama and papa?”

“What about your egg ranch?” Barbara said, too sweetly.

“In the valley?”

“I want chocolate,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Barbara always gets strawberry.”

She said at the same time, “You supplied eggs to half of Los Angeles, isn’t that what you told us?”

“Who have you been talking to? One of your aunts?”

“The chickens died!”

“Sweetheart, keep your voice down.” Zayde glanced uneasily at the women milling around the fish barrels outside Rosen’s.

“And what about the cigar factory?”

He yanked us into a doorway between Rosen’s and the next store. “Barbara! What did I just tell you?”

“Lies!” she spat back. “You told us lies.”

Sweat beaded on Zayde’s brow and he leaned against the wall.

“Barbara, stop it,” I pleaded.

“No, it’s fine,” Zayde sighed, and wiped his face with his handkerchief. “It’s America, people can speak freely. And any accused person has the right to answer charges made against him. The egg ranch, you want to see where it was? You want I should ask your uncle Leo to take us there?”

“But you didn’t supply eggs to half of Los Angeles,” she persisted.

“When Harry was there we did a good business.”

A hush always fell at the mention of Zayde’s firstborn son, who died in the Great War. But not this time.

“Agneta’s hair,” she said. “Where is it?”

“What?” Zayde said.

“The hair she gave you. I want to see it.”

“You think I kept a few hairs from a kid I knew when I was seventeen?”

“Then how do I know any of it is true?”

“Are you calling your zayde a liar?”

Even Barbara hadn’t said that; she had only said he told lies. It was a crucial distinction for us, and the irreversibility of that word, liar, stopped her in her tracks. For a moment.

“What were the tin animals you made for her?” she asked.

“What, you don’t remember?” He wiped his face with his handkerchief again.

Rooster, lamb, horse, lion. Did I say it or only think it?

“Make them for us,” Barbara said.

“Didn’t I tell you, when I stepped off the boat onto America, I promised myself I would never work tin again?”

“The only thing I’ve ever seen you do with tin is open a can of vegetables.”

Zayde’s face went white. “Go home,” he said.

Barbara, her face as stunned as Zayde’s, turned and ran.

“Zayde!” I cried.

“Go home!”

I pretended to leave, but I hid among the fish and pickle barrels outside Rosen’s. When Zayde started down the street, taking big, fast strides, I trotted a little behind him. I felt as if the harm Barbara had done was mine to repair, or at least—since I had no idea how to fix this damage—not to abandon. He went into Elster’s Hardware; I lurked a few doors away. Ten minutes later, he emerged carrying a brown paper sack and went straight home.

I lagged a few minutes behind. When I entered the house, I could hear Zayde talking to Mama in the kitchen, too low for me to know what they were saying. Then the voices stopped. A minute later I peeked in. Mama asked about my day at school. Zayde wasn’t there. He must have gone into his bedroom off the kitchen. I sat at the table and read my latest library book, Treasure Island, so I could keep watch. His door remained closed.

He didn’t come out for dinner. He hadn’t been able to resist having a corned beef sandwich at Canter’s on his way home; that’s what he’d told Mama. She might have started in on Barbara and me, picking at our dinners in guilty silence, but she and Papa were preoccupied with the stock market. Their investments, although modest, represented almost all of their savings.

Barbara and I barely spoke as we got ready for bed. I don’t know what was going through her mind, but I was shocked by what had happened—and heartsick at having hurt the one person in our house who adored me. Mama might cuddle me one moment and slap me the next, and Papa tended to be stern. But everything I did had delighted Zayde.

Sometime during the night, I woke up feeling scared. I crept into the inky unfamiliarity of the house in the middle of night, from our bedroom into the hallway, where I felt my way by touching the wall, then through the living room and into the kitchen. A light came from under Zayde’s door, and I heard rustles of some kind of activity going on. I lingered outside his door for a few minutes, but I was afraid to disturb him.

In the morning, Papa found Zayde asleep in his chair, slumped over the small table in his room. On the table were metalworking tools, scraps of solder, remnants of the tin cans he had cut for materials, and three crude but recognizable tin animals: a rooster, a lamb, and a horse.

Zayde woke up when Papa came into his room. He rose and started stuffing his belongings into a potato sack; he was moving to Aunt Sonya and Uncle Leo’s, he announced. Sonya was always after him to live in her house, so much nicer and bigger than ours, but he’d said Sonya kvetched so much, she would make his ears fall off. Papa kept asking him what was wrong. All he said was, “A man deserves respect.”

He was already gone when Barbara and I came into the kitchen for breakfast. Papa brought out the tin animals and asked what was going on. “Nothing,” we both replied.

Barbara waited until Papa left the room. Then she asked Mama, “Could I have the horse?”

Mama eyed her suspiciously but said, “Yes, all right. Elaine, what about you?”

“I want the rooster.” I would have liked the lion, but that was the one animal Zayde hadn’t made. Maybe he fell asleep before he got to it, but I suspected that treasure was for Agneta alone.

Terrified of discovery, I waited until Barbara and I were a full block away from home, on our way to school, before I pounced on her.

“Look what you did!” I said, distressed by everything that had happened and frantic to push the blame onto her.

She tossed her head. “What I did?”

“You accused him of lying about Agneta.”

“Well, you didn’t say you believed him. You didn’t say anything.”

These distinctions of culpability meant nothing to Papa, of course, when he found out everything from Pearl. He rarely hit us, but that night he spanked Barbara and me so hard that we wept. Then he stood over us while we wrote letters of apology to Zayde. I meant every word I wrote. And in spite of my misery over hurting him and getting punished, I was deeply relieved that his story about Agneta, at least, was true. I think Barbara felt that way, too, because she cherished the tin horse. She kept it on her side of the dresser we shared and got furious if she thought anyone had moved it an inch.

Our letters, along with Aunt Sonya’s carping and her mediocre cooking, persuaded Zayde to move back to our house two weeks later. But everything had changed by then.

The day after Barbara goaded Zayde into breaking his vow never to work tin again had swelled into a national uproar: Black Tuesday, the collapse of the stock market. Men on Wall Street jumped out of windows, and people all over the country—including us—lost their savings. Somehow, in my imagination, my sister had precipitated that disaster. Mingled with my horror was awe at Barbara’s power.