The Tin Horse A Novel

FOR MONTHS AFTER WE MET AUNT PEARL’S BOYFRIEND, SWEET-VOICED Alberto Rivas, Barbara and I spun elaborate fantasies about their wedding. We imagined every detail of our roles—and our outfits—for the grand event, and we privately referred to Pearl’s beau as Uncle Bert.

The first time I’d met Bert, I was shocked that Pearl was dating a Mexican. It was enough of a scandal when the son or daughter of one of our Jewish neighbors married a Christian; there were religious families that sat shiva as if the person had died.

But my initial shock soon switched to admiration for the modern American woman who was my aunt. Like the forthright movie heroines for whom she designed costumes, Pearl wasn’t going to be bound by musty, undemocratic conventions. She would follow her heart. As for Uncle Bert, he was charming and funny and handsome, and I adored it when he sang.

Clearly, however, the other adults in my family weren’t as open-minded as Pearl. Bert came to our house with her only a handful of times and never again with the giddy joy of that first night, when he’d borne Audrey safely home after the earthquake. Papa in particular, for all that he preached American acceptance for people of all races and backgrounds, always acted tense and cold when Bert was around.

Barbara and I had enough sense to keep our mouths shut. But one day when Pearl and Bert had joined us for a picnic, Audrey blurted out, “When are you getting married?”

“Audrey!” Mama gasped.

Bert winked at Audrey. “I’m waiting for you to grow up so I can marry you.”

“Audrey, come with me,” Papa said.

“But—”

“Now!” Papa grabbed her hand to lead her away for a private talk. And he glared at Bert with so much anger it shocked me.

At least Papa was willing to speak to Bert. Zayde had refused to shake his hand, even after he’d rescued Audrey. Barbara and I eventually concluded it was Zayde’s opposition that kept Pearl from marrying Bert. It was one thing for her to defy Zayde by living on her own after her divorce, but she must have felt she couldn’t get married again without his blessing. And as time passed with no hint of an engagement, we had let the subject drop.

But now, four years later, Zayde was gone, his absence a rip in my awareness that cruelly occurred again and again—when I caught an astringent, vinegary whiff from the pickle barrels at Canter’s and had an impulse to buy a kosher dill and take it to Zayde at Melansky’s. Or I heard a great joke on the radio and started repeating it to myself, and only then realized I had lost my audience. Sometimes, I was so certain I heard his voice in the next room I had to go look and prove to myself that he wasn’t there.

The one consolation was that Pearl was at last free to marry Bert. Not that she had said anything about it. But wasn’t she planning to buy her own house in Boyle Heights?

“A whole house, for one person!” I heard Mama say to Papa.

“She could afford a house in Hollywood or Westwood if she wanted to live there,” Papa said.

In fact, Pearl was doing so well designing clothes for the movies that she no longer worked out of her apartment but rented an entire floor of a building in the garment district. She employed half a dozen people and had set aside a room for Papa’s business of supplying shoes to go with her costumes. She had even bought a car and learned to drive! She needed the car, a Plymouth sedan, to carry samples and so forth. But those were all requirements for her business. Why would Pearl want to buy a house, except to live in it with Bert? Barbara and I concurred, and we happily resumed our fantasizing about Pearl’s wedding.

“Will they make some kind of announcement?” Barbara said one evening when we were on our way to Pearl’s apartment. This was just after we’d entered our junior year in high school, and we were going to Pearl’s to choose fabric for new dresses; Pearl still did some sewing for the family at home, often using remnants from the outfits she made for movie stars. “Or will she just start wearing a ring and wave her hands until we notice?”

“Waving her hands won’t get any special attention.” I laughed. “She does that all the time.”

“What if she stre-e-etches?” Mimicking our dance teacher, Miss Helen, at her most dramatic, Barbara thrust her arms above her head and skipped down the street. “Come on!” she called, and I danced beside her, my self-consciousness mixed with the thrill of acting like an uninhibited, madcap girl.

We tumbled into Pearl’s apartment giggling and sweaty, and when she asked why we were in such good moods, it spilled out.

“We’re planning your engagement,” I said.

“Who am I supposed to be getting engaged to?” Her laughter had an edge, but I’d gone too far to stop.

“Bert, who else?”

“Darlings, I’m not going to marry Bert. Would you like Coca-Colas? I’ve got Coca-Colas for you. Unless you’d rather have tea, but you’re probably too hot—”

“Coke, please,” Barbara interrupted Pearl’s choppy, strangely nervous chatter. And then added, “Why not?”

“You, too, Elaine, Coca-Cola?” Pearl said.

“Yes, please.”

Pearl bustled into her small kitchen. We followed, hovering in the doorway. I felt a little the way I had dancing down the street, simultaneously wishing I hadn’t started and wild to plunge ahead.

“It’s not because he’s Mexican, is it?” I said. “I think that’s terrible, that anyone would object to—”

“Just let me get your drinks first, all right?” Pearl poured two bottles of Coke into glasses and handed them to us. Then she said, “Don’t you think if Bert and I wanted to get married, we would have done that by now?”

“But you couldn’t,” Barbara said.

“Someone told you about that?”

“We figured it out,” Barbara said.

“Well, then you know nothing’s changed.” She strode to the table, where she had stacked half a dozen bolts of fabric. “Careful with your drinks. Take a look at this beautiful challis. It’s from the new Myrna Loy film.” She started to unroll a bolt of sea-green fabric.

“But now that Zayde’s gone …,” I said, my need to understand stronger than my fear of annoying Pearl.

“Zayde? What are you talking about?”

“You couldn’t get married because of Zayde,” I said. “Because Zayde didn’t like Bert. But now you can.”

“Oh.” Pearl stopped unrolling the challis. “That’s what you figured out?”

“Isn’t it—” I started, but she held up one hand and stood still for a moment, her eyes closed. Pearl did that sometimes in the middle of a conversation if she needed to collect her thoughts.

Opening her eyes, Pearl said, “Your parents would kill me. But you’re not children anymore. And better, I guess, that you hear this from me. All right, sit.”

As always, when Pearl was about to enlighten us regarding the adult world, she sat on her love seat—which, thanks to her prosperity, she’d had recovered with rich rose brocade upholstery—and lit a cigarette. I sat next to her, and Barbara took the chair.

“You’re right, I can’t marry Bert, but it’s not because of Zayde. Darlings …” Pearl glanced from one of us to the other, meeting our eyes. “Bert is married already. He has a wife in Mexico.”

“Won’t she give him a divorce?” Barbara adopted the cool, sophisticated tone of movies in which things like this took place, while my mind reeled. An avid reader and movie-goer, I knew such things happened. But they happened to Anna Karenina or Jean Harlow, not to my aunt Pearl.

“In Mexico, in his village, people don’t get divorced,” Pearl said. “And I wouldn’t want him to divorce her.”

“Do they have children? … I don’t mind,” Barbara said.

Ah, but didn’t I know what it was like to be desperately in love with a man who belonged to someone else?

“Four children,” Pearl said.

I let out a small sob.

“I’m sorry, darling.” Pearl said. “You didn’t know your auntie Pearl was such a terrible person.”

Now I was crying too hard to speak. All the rationalizations I’d made about free love crumpled, and I saw the tawdriness of everything I’d been doing—betraying Barbara and, even worse, being so pathetically in love with Danny Berlov that I was willing to be his girl on the side. No stranger to self-criticism, I knew how it felt to be embarrassed or ashamed over something I’d done, but this was the first time I truly loathed myself.

Pearl hugged me and stroked my hair, at first apologizing—and, as I kept weeping, asking “Elaine, what is it? Is something else the matter?”

I found my voice then; I would have died before I let her suspect I had my own reason for tears. “It’s just sad that you can’t get married.”

“Oh, no, it’s not. Really,” Pearl said. “I’m an idiot, I should have explained better. I don’t want to marry Bert.”

“But you love him,” Barbara said.

“Love.” Pearl sighed. “The two of you, sixteen years old, you should listen to all the love songs they play on the radio and think you’re in heaven when a boy takes you in his arms on the dance floor. Just know that when you get older, it will be different. Bert is a very sweet man. But darlings, I don’t want to be any man’s wife.”

“You married Uncle Gabe,” Barbara said.

“And I found out that not every woman likes being married. To have a man telling you what to do, even what to think! Keeping you awake all night with his snoring. Sulking if you don’t make your kugel with the exact number of raisins his mother put in hers.”

Despite the cloud of misery that surrounded me, I was captivated by this revolutionary idea. I realized I had seen plenty of examples of unmarried women who, as far as I could tell, led fulfilling lives—Pearl, Mollie, many of my teachers. But no one had ever stated it outright: not every woman likes being married. And although Mollie always remained my model for activism, it was Pearl I would think of when the feminist movement came along.

My mind also buzzed with the reverberations of snoring, which forced me to consider what else went on when a man and woman shared a bed. Barbara and I had figured Pearl and Bert “did it,” but it was different when I’d expected them to get married. Suddenly, things I had observed between Pearl and Bert—the clingy sweater she’d worn the night of the earthquake, the intimate looks he gave her as his baritone caressed the lyrics of a song—became a peek at the scary-thrilling mystery of grown-up sexual desire.

“What if a husband wouldn’t allow me to work?” Pearl was saying. “Or he tried to take over my business and run it himself?”

“Bert wouldn’t do that,” Barbara said.

“Oh, chiquitas,” Pearl said; it was what Bert called us sometimes. “You never really know a man until you let him put a ring on your finger. Then he thinks he owns you. I’m happy with my life the way it is.… But what’s this nonsense your meshuganah aunt is filling your heads with?” She kissed Barbara’s cheek, then mine. “So, do you want new dresses to wear to dances, so the boys will flock around you?”

Was Pearl only saying she didn’t want to marry Bert so we wouldn’t feel sorry for her? I wondered, as she unrolled challis and crêpe de chine. But Pearl did seem happy—invigorated by her thriving business, excited at the prospect of buying a house. Actually, sinful Aunt Pearl seemed like the happiest of all the adults I knew, a conundrum I chewed on for days.

IT’S TOO SIMPLE TO say that finding out about Pearl changed my life or Barbara’s. It was more that the choices each of us made not long afterward reflected who we already were.

For me, hearing Pearl’s revelation set off my first struggle with adult moral ambiguity. Carrying on an affair with a married man—that was the province of bad women, home-wreckers. (Now I understood Papa’s and Zayde’s coldness toward Bert.) Yet Pearl was one of the people I loved and admired most in the world. She was kind, principled, straightforward; although she didn’t volunteer unpleasant truths, she leveled with Barbara and me whenever we asked. Look at the way she’d told us about Bert, making no excuses. And in her not wanting to marry, there was a freedom of thought that dazzled me.

Not that her choices lacked consequences. After that conversation, I felt a pang whenever I saw her cuddle my youngest sister, Harriet, and coo about her delicious baby smell.

“I’m not a baby!” Harriet protested. “I’m four!”

“Well, you still smell scrumptious!” Pearl burrowed her nose into Harriet’s belly, making her gurgle with laughter. Even if Pearl had no desire to be a wife, I suspected she would have loved being a mother. But she seemed clear-eyed about what she’d given up and, as she had said, genuinely happy with her life as it was.

Yes, Pearl was dating a married man, but his wife was far away in Mexico. And she was seeing him openly, willing to face censure. Not like me—sneaking around, cheating on my own sister!

A few days later Danny whispered, after our history class, that he wanted to see me. And I said no.

He caught up with me after school. I was hurrying to catch the streetcar to get to my job at Leo’s bookstore.

“What’s wrong?” Danny said.

“I just don’t want to.…”

“You mean this week?”

“I mean not ever. There’s my streetcar.”

“Elaine, wait. Can’t we talk about this?”

The streetcar, one of the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Street Railway, pulled up. “I have to go.”

To my amazement, Danny got on the car after me and dropped a precious nickel into the fare box.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Don’t you have to work?”

“Eddie won’t mind if I’m a little late.”

The car was crowded, and we couldn’t sit together at first. But at the next stop, my seatmate got off, and Danny slid in beside me.

“Did something happen?” he said.

“No.”

“Is it something I did?” He looked at me as if I held his happiness in my hands. No one had ever looked at me that way, and to see that yearning in Danny’s eyes! I felt a dizzying sense of power … and an urge to spare him any pain.

But I took a deep breath and said, “I just don’t feel right.”

“Can we still get together sometimes and talk? There’s no one else I can talk to the way I can with you.”

“We can talk.”

He flashed me a rakish Errol Flynn smile. “If that’s really all you want to do.”

“We can talk,” I said, weakening again at the intimacy, the smell of him, as he leaned close to me.

“Good, I’m really glad. Guess I’d better get to work … Uh, Barbara didn’t say anything, did she?”

Of course, that was why Danny had jumped on the streetcar after me and why he’d looked heartsick—his fear of upsetting my sister!

“Do you and Barbara kiss?” I demanded.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said softly, his eyes flicking toward the woman on the seat ahead of us.

“Do you kiss?” I whispered.

“What do you think?”

“French-kiss?”

“Elaine, are you nuts?”

The woman in front of us giggled. We were already downtown and almost to the car barn at Fifth and Olive, where I would transfer to the streetcar to Hollywood.

“Let’s get off, okay?” I said.

“Fine!”

“You tell him, sister!” the woman called out as we left.

Somehow the constraint of being on the Yellow Car had made it easier to talk. On the street, I stared at Danny for a moment, then started walking fast.

“Do I let you do things she won’t do?” I said. “Is that why you keep wanting to see me?”

“I thought you liked—”

“Maybe I should ask her.”

“No!” He grabbed my hand. “If it matters so much, I do more with her. Elaine, please, look at me?”

I let him pull me out of the pedestrian traffic, under the awning of a music store.

“Danny, you have Barbara,” I said. “What do you want with me?” I had wondered all along, but hadn’t dared to ask.

He gave a bark of laughter—except it came out like a strangled sob. “Have Barbara? No one will ever have Barbara.” Then he quickly made himself into Errol Flynn again. “You don’t want to see me, suit yourself. It was just … it’s not like you have anyone special, and you’re a good kid. Guess I felt sorry for you.”

“Felt sorry for me? I hate you!” I yelled as he sauntered away.

THE FIRE OF ANGER carried me, head high, through work that afternoon and school the next day. Too soon, however, my fury lost its all-consuming force, its ability to incinerate every other emotion. I crashed into misery. Around people, I managed to impersonate the Elaine Greenstein everyone knew, a girl who was smart and serious but no more or less happy than any other Boyle Heights sixteen-year-old. But, alone in my bedroom, I wept.

Again and again, I relived that moment just before Danny strode off. Not when he said he was sorry for me, I knew he was lashing out then because he was hurt. But I kept remembering the uncertainty he’d revealed about Barbara. That, I understood wretchedly, was what Danny really wanted with me: it wasn’t the thrill of having more than one girl nor his genuine attraction to me, though I suppose both those things were part of it. But more than anything else, Danny saw me as insurance, a rough replica of Barbara in his back pocket because he couldn’t count on the real thing.

It was as if he had intuited something in Barbara that became more and more apparent during our junior year. That September she started attending the Lester Horton dance school in Hollywood; Miss Helen had recommended her for a scholarship. Taking the scholarship meant she’d had to stop running her children’s playgroup, and at first Papa balked and said we couldn’t afford to lose her income. Mama, however, went on a campaign to ensure that Barbara could go to the dance school. She discovered a dozen new places to pare household expenses. After years of insisting we didn’t need charity, she applied for the free milk available for needy families. And she continually repeated the word scholarship—which Papa revered, even if the scholarship was to a dance school. For weeks that fall he started conversations with, “Did you know Barbara was awarded a scholarship?”

Barbara now went to the Horton studio most days after school and didn’t come home until eight or nine. She spent every Saturday there, too, and often stayed in Hollywood and spent Saturday evenings with friends from her dance class. Her conversation bubbled with new names: Lester, of course, and Bella, the star dancer who taught some of her classes, and her fellow students. Most of all, she mentioned Oscar, who played piano to accompany the classes, although Oscar rarely played the keys, she said; instead, he plucked the strings inside the piano or drummed rhythms on its body. He offered singing lessons, too, and Barbara reported excitedly that he considered her “a natural talent.”

The night of the dance studio’s Christmas party, she didn’t get in until after midnight. I woke up when she stumbled, trying to undress in the dark.

“Oops,” she said with a giggle.

I switched on the light.

“Ow!” She shielded her eyes. “Could you just light a candle?”

I lit a candle and turned out the light. “Are you drunk?”

“Not really. Well, a little. Oscar made gin rickeys.”

“Barbara, are you going out with Oscar?”

“It was just a party.” With efficient, graceful motions, she shed her dress and dropped it on the floor.

“How old is he?”

“Want a ciggie?” She fished a pack of Chesterfields out of her dance bag. Even though I smoked on dates or at parties, I had never actually bought my own pack of cigarettes. Or smoked at home.

“In here?”

“Why not?” Still, she threw open the window.

We lit our cigarettes from the candle flame, and I emptied our tin of bobby pins to use as an ashtray. Barbara, clearly tipsy, lounged unselfconsciously in her slip and said things she might otherwise have kept to herself.

“Oh, Elaine,” she sighed. “He has the most exquisite hands. Musician’s hands.”

“Oscar?”

“Umm.” She took a slow, luxurious inhale.

“Isn’t he in his twenties?”

“God, it isn’t like high school, where it’s a huge deal for a sophomore to date a senior. We’re artists working together.”

“Does Danny know?”

“About Oscar’s hands?” she teased.

“You know what I mean.”

“Danny Berlov doesn’t own me. No man is ever going to own me.”

The words may have been borrowed from Pearl, but the sentiment, I came to understand, was pure Barbara. She continued to date Danny officially—the dates announced to Mama and Papa and Danny picking her up at the house—while she saw Oscar under the pretext of socializing with her dance-class friends. That lasted for a month or so. Then Oscar disappeared from her conversation, to be replaced by a dancer named Ted.

I had no idea if Danny was aware of the other boys—the men, really—in Barbara’s life. Though I did my best to avoid him, there were times I couldn’t help seeing him—for instance, if Mama invited him and his father to Shabbos dinner. I was at the table sometimes when Barbara gushed about her new friends, her classes, rehearsals for a student show. As for Danny … for all that he’d molded himself into a muscular, take-charge young Zionist, I kept seeing the barefoot kid I’d met when we were five, a boy who lied to cover up his shame over his absent mother and feckless father.

Love! In my mind, the word took on Pearl’s weary tone. I loved—well, I used to love—Danny. Danny loved Barbara. And Barbara … Poor Danny, his real rival wasn’t Oscar or Ted, it was something he could never compete with. Barbara loved freedom. Not that any of us—Danny or Barbara or me—could have articulated it at the time, but Danny felt it keenly. “No one will ever have Barbara,” he’d half sobbed—and as the world of Hollywood and the dance studio became more and more her world, I saw that he was right.

Although part of me vengefully relished Danny’s distress, I did feel sorry for him. And one Saturday in February 1938 I stopped hating him. Actually, my hatred had long since faded. My private tears had stopped a few weeks after our fight in September. And in November I’d gone to the homecoming dance with Fred Nieman, who’d grown enough during the previous year that he now looked like a short young man instead of a child; he even needed to shave. Fred didn’t become my boyfriend, but he was a regular date. Eventually it was simply habit that made me go cold when Danny was around.

On the Saturday afternoon when I buried the hatchet, I got home after working at the bookstore and found Danny scrambling on his hands and knees on the living room floor; Harriet sat astride his back, kicking his sides and whooping, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” He often played with Harriet when he’d come by for Barbara, but had to wait because she was late getting home from the dance studio. I mumbled hello, planning to pass by and go to my room, but then Danny looked up with an expression so forlorn that instead I laughed and said, “Harriet, give the poor horsey a rest.” I plucked her off his back and distracted her with some hard candies I had in my pocket. Danny asked me how things were going, and for the first time in months I did more than choke out a few polite words to him. By this time, I’d been promoted from just running errands at the bookstore to waiting on customers, and I told him about a bizarre woman who’d come in that day: she was six feet tall, wore a sort of magician’s robe, and was looking for books about the worship of cats.

“You mean lions?” he said.

“No, house cats.”

“A lion, I could understand.”

“I want a kitty!” Harriet piped up.

“The ancient Egyptians worshipped them,” I told Danny.

“No wonder their civilization died.”

It was a silly, awkward conversation, but after that he and I were able to talk again. And we had very serious things to discuss.

HITLER’S FLURRY OF ANTI-JEWISH laws had appeared to culminate in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, as if his madness really had burned itself out; or at least, as if ordinary, decent Germans had decided enough was enough. But in 1938, there was a fresh eruption of hatred.

The first signs of this new wave of insanity occurred at the end of 1937, not in Germany but in Romania, where the leader of the vicious anti-Semitic political party became prime minister. Within a few months, Romania shut down all Jewish-owned newspapers and fired every Jew who had a government position. Those two actions alone cost nine of our relatives their jobs. The terrible news led to the first long-distance telephone call Mama ever received, from Uncle Meyr in Chicago. Not one of their relatives had obtained permission to immigrate, and the Chicago relatives planned to hire lawyers, both in Chicago and in Romania; could Mama get a lawyer in Los Angeles? Desperate, Mama asked Aunt Pearl for help. Pearl had already guaranteed a job at her dress company for Ivan, the nephew whom Mama and Papa had applied to sponsor. Now Pearl gave Mama some of the money she’d put aside for a house. Mama never breathed a word about it to Papa; he would have been furious and ashamed that she’d begged his sister for funds he couldn’t provide. I knew about it only because Mama asked me to go with her to speak to the Los Angeles lawyer and to draft several letters.

Events in Romania slipped beneath most people’s notice. However, the whole world paid attention when Germany annexed Austria that March. Germany immediately imposed its anti-Semitic laws on the Austrian Jews. Then, as if having fresh victims had inspired them, the Nazis spat out new punishments for the crime of being born Jewish. In April, Jews had to register all property held inside the Reich—the word alone felt harsh and cruel in my throat. Then Jewish-owned businesses had to be identified, a task performed with gusto by jeering Hitler Youths who painted the word Jude along with rude pictures on shopwindows. At that point, President Roosevelt himself decided to admit more immigrants from Germany and Austria. Still, we kept hearing about Jews desperate to flee who had nowhere to go.

Danny devoured the news. He’d become president of Habonim, and he spoke wherever he could, at Habonim meetings and school and community forums, to alert people to the need for a refuge for European Jews. I didn’t just attend the meetings but also wrote announcements to publicize them. And I helped Danny write articles for the Habonim newsletter and the school paper, even letters to the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. The newspapers liked to air “the youth perspective,” and several of our letters got published. Working together on a letter or an article, we hammered out the language in heated debates. I found his approach too inflammatory—“If you call people ‘spineless,’ they’re not going to listen to anything else you have to say!”—and he said I was “just being a good little Jewish girl and not making waves.”

I still disagreed with him about Zionism, but that became a quibble next to my urgency to act and the gift Danny revealed for moving people to action. A natural storyteller, he spoke about the big political events happening in Europe in terms of small, heartbreaking stories gleaned from people in Boyle Heights who had family members there. Just as he’d beguiled me with his tales when we were children, he could move his audiences to tears and persuade them to write letters to Congress or hand out leaflets on the street. I put my energy into Habonim because Danny made it the most dynamic youth group trying to do something, though it didn’t matter to me if the refugees went to Palestine or America or Rhodesia or Cuba—any country that was willing to crack open its doors.

Danny was also an unwavering optimist. Whenever I got discouraged, he convinced me that if we kept raising our voices, someone had to listen. He turned out to be right. That June, America opened its doors to Ivan Avramescu, my cousin from Romania.

Or, as Barbara called him, the Rat.