The Tin Horse A Novel

“ELAINE! ELAINE, COME HERE!”

The urgency in Mama’s voice sent me flying into the kitchen. She was gripping a piece of paper, her eyes wide and hands trembling.

“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”

She handed me the paper. It was a telegram … oh my God, it was a telegram from the Hebrew Immigration Society. Ivan had been approved to immigrate! And we needed to wire his boat fare.

“Oh, Mama!”

Mama sang out words I had only heard from religious people: “Baruch Ha-Shem!” which I knew meant “Praise God.” She caught my hand, and we whooped and danced, weeping with joy, until she sank into a chair, flushed and panting.

Still breathless, she said, “I’ll call your father and tell him to go to the bank and arrange for the money.” She’d been setting aside a little money every month in an Ivan fund.

“How soon is he coming?” I asked.

“Well.” Mama chewed her lip, the way she did calculating sums in her head at the market. “He’ll want to leave right away. But he’ll have to get to a port first and then to New York, I suppose. Then take a train. Still, he might get here as soon as next month.” Suddenly, her face clouded. “Oy! Where are we going to put him?”

I had to leave for work—school had let out a week earlier, and I was on my summer schedule at the bookstore. That evening, over a celebration dinner, I heard the plan Mama had come up with to accommodate Ivan.

“Barbara and Elaine,” she said, “you’ll move in with your sisters”—Barbara and I both let out yelps of indignation—“and Ivan will have your room.”

“Four of us in one room?” I groaned. “That’s impossible.”

“Do you know how many of us slept in one bed when I was a girl?” Mama said.

“Can’t he sleep on the sofa?” Barbara said.

“The sofa!” Mama slammed her hand on the table. “Do you have any idea what your cousin has been through? What is wrong with you girls, begrudging him a bed? And look at you, barely touching this pot roast. A person would think you weren’t happy!” She took a bite of pot roast, her glare compelling me to do the same.

Papa stayed out of the discussion, but it turned out he wasn’t deaf to our pleas. The next morning, he proposed another idea: Audrey would join Barbara and me in our bedroom off the kitchen, and Ivan could share a room with Harriet. She was just five, after all, barely more than a baby.

Ivan arrived three weeks later, on a Wednesday in mid-July. All of us went to the Santa Fe Station (magnificent Union Station wouldn’t open until the next year) to meet his train. Harriet was so thrilled about her new roommate, she couldn’t stop bouncing on the platform. I envied her unambiguous delight. My genuine gladness was nonetheless tinged by resentment over all the changes that had occurred a few days earlier: I’d had to jam my clothes into a single dresser drawer to make space for Audrey, and a looming bunk bed had displaced the sweet little cot (as I now saw it) in which I’d slept ever since I shared the room with Mollie. Priding myself on being grown-up, I uncomplainingly took the lower bunk when Audrey demanded the top, but then I had to switch with her four times because she kept changing her mind. And there was nonstop bickering as Audrey, Barbara, and I blundered through the awkward choreography of making room for one another to dress, lay hands on our possessions … and breathe.

Still, I joined Harriet in jumping up and down when Ivan stepped off the train. Yes, it’s him! He resembled the boy in the photo we’d been sent, and his head jerked up when Mama called his name. Mama ran toward him. I started to follow, but Barbara plucked at my sleeve.

“Look at those clothes! And he’s dirty,” she whispered.

“He’s been traveling for days. Weeks,” I said, touched by the small, frightened-looking boy enveloped in Mama’s embrace. Ivan was supposed to be nineteen, but he was short and scrawny—and undeniably foreign with his too-big, formal suit and heavily brilliantined hair.

Mama pointed us out, and he smiled.

“Ugh, he’s got pointy teeth,” Barbara muttered. “He looks like a rat.”

“Barbara, cut it out!” I said, and hurried to embrace our cousin.

If I had seen Ivan as boyish and frightened, however, I reconsidered when he met my eyes with a sharp gaze. And I knew enough Yiddish to understand him when we emerged from the train station and walked toward the Yellow Car stop, and he asked, “Where is your automobile?”

“Oh, we don’t need an automobile,” Mama said. “In Los Angeles, the streetcar and the bus go everywhere.”

“All Americans have automobiles.” His alert dark eyes shifted from side to side, as if he suspected us of hiding a Buick someplace.

He was clearly dismayed, too, by the smallness of our house and by having to share a bedroom with Harriet. Still, he smiled when Harriet chattered away at him; he had a sister just her age, he said in a mix of Yiddish and a little halting English. And no wonder he acted wary, after all he’d been through. At dinner, Mama loaded his plate with brisket, noodle kugel, and vegetables, and plied him with questions about the family. Ivan’s father, a typesetter, had lost his job when the government closed down the Jewish-owned newspapers. The family moved to a smaller apartment, and his father eked out a living from jobs he got here and there, but the strain ruined his health; he suffered severe headaches, and on some days he couldn’t get out of bed. Ivan, who’d been a promising student of mathematics, had had to leave school and help support the family. Even so, his parents had insisted he go to America when he had the opportunity. It was too dangerous to stay in Romania, where Ivan had even been beaten by Iron Guard thugs.

“Those animals!” Mama cried. “Did they hurt you?”

“Just my wrist.” He held up his left arm. His wrist was slightly crooked; it must have healed badly after being broken.

Tears came to my eyes, and Mama couldn’t bear it—she ran from the table sobbing.

“I’m sorry to upset her,” Ivan said. “For us … Such things happened to everyone, you know, many boys my age.”

“Enough of the Old World,” Papa said. “You’re in America now. It’s time to look ahead.” He announced magnanimously that Ivan should take the rest of the week to settle in; he didn’t have to start his job at Aunt Pearl’s factory until the following Monday.

“I don’t understand,” Ivan said.

Papa repeated what he’d said, speaking slowly—assuming, I suppose, that Ivan hadn’t followed his Yiddish with its Ukrainian and American inflections.

“But I don’t really have to work there, do I?” Ivan said. “A dress factory?”

“My sister’s factory,” Papa said. “She was kind enough to—”

“I can’t sew!”

“You said in your application—”

“One says whatever the authorities want to hear.” Ivan’s mouth twisted in a half laugh, humorless and world-weary. An expression that said he found us impossibly naive.

“Well,” Papa said, “I’m sure my sister will find something for you to do. And you’ll take night classes, learn English. No reason you can’t look for another job then.”

Later I translated the conversation for Barbara, who hadn’t taken Mr. Berlov’s Yiddish classes with me.

“He’s a rat, you’ll see,” she said.

Barbara loathed Ivan’s heh-heh laugh and darting eyes and the way Mama catered to him. And she chafed at Mama’s and Papa’s insistence that we take our cousin, who was glaringly foreign even in the American clothes Mama bought him, with us to social events.

“How can you be so mean?” I scolded her.

“Elaine, you don’t like him, either. You just won’t admit it.”

I wish I could have said that Ivan was a gentle soul whom I defended naturally, out of true affection. Certainly there were times when my heart melted toward him, like the night Mama cooked a Jewish-Romanian stew, and at the first mouthful he sighed and looked as vulnerable as a child; or when he hoisted Harriet on his shoulders, as he must have done with his own baby sister. And maybe if I had grown up with a brother, I wouldn’t have minded that he—and Mama—took it for granted that his new sisters would make his bed and clean up the mess he left in the bathroom after he shaved. But there was something sneaky about Ivan. Aunt Pearl, for instance, hadn’t cared that he wasn’t the skilled tailor she’d been promised; there was plenty of lifting, carrying, and cleaning he could help with. But she had to ask Papa to speak to him because if she didn’t keep an eye on him, he handled dresses with filthy hands or crammed bolts of fabric onto shelves instead of folding them neatly. She’d caught him playing solitaire when he was supposed to be working and even smoking cigarettes he’d taken from her desk. And when I saw him displaying his crooked wrist to a girl at a party, I remembered a letter Mama had received five or six years earlier—hadn’t Ivan broken his wrist playing soccer?

Even if he’d made up the story about being beaten by the Iron Guards, though, did that blot out the essential truth that he had suffered in Romania? And he had to be miserable now, a boy only two years older than I torn from his family, a top student forced to work at a menial job, someone who spoke three languages—Yiddish, Romanian, and French—constantly feeling stupid because he didn’t know English. I tried to befriend him, but my Yiddish proved inadequate for anything beyond a stilted conversation. And it wasn’t Ivan’s fault, but his presence made our family dinners tense and constrained. Mama often spoke Yiddish to him privately, but Papa decreed that we use English at the table to augment the classes Ivan had started attending two nights a week. Our dinner conversations often sounded like classroom drills, and there were awkward patches when no one spoke, and I heard myself chewing every mouthful. Only Harriet, who seemed impervious to the rest of the family’s moods, gaily prattled to Ivan, not caring if he understood her, and he regarded her with real warmth.

Other than Harriet, the one person with whom my cousin seemed at ease was Danny. Danny had been so eager to meet our real-life victim of European anti-Semitism that he came by the day after Ivan arrived, embracing him and greeting him with a flood of Yiddish (Danny’s first language, which he and his father still spoke at home). Of course, he invited Ivan to speak at Habonim, with Danny translating. But he didn’t just use Ivan to promote the cause. A real friendship developed between them. Speaking to Danny in Yiddish, Ivan actually laughed, not the tepid heh-heh that drove Barbara nuts but a big, relaxed laugh that made me wonder how he might act if he weren’t burdened by being the recipient of our charity.

Years later, when I would see Ivan in Las Vegas, getting by, I assumed, on small-scale finagling, I’d think of the life he might have had. I’d wonder if he could have been a mathematician or a business whiz, if his life could ever have been as big as that laugh. And I would promise myself I’d go to see him more often. (He rarely came to visit us in L.A., he claimed he had too much business to attend to.) But I didn’t. I knew that the qualities in Ivan that made Barbara’s skin crawl—and which, I admit, I found distasteful—were survival skills that came from his being born in a rotten place at a horrific time. Still, by the time he was living with us, he seemed furtive and calculating as if by nature. When Barbara called him “the Rat,” I felt, guiltily, that the name was apt.

“The Rat” was how Barbara continued to refer to Ivan, in spite—actually, because—of Danny’s liking for him. She fumed that she couldn’t go to a party anymore without Danny wanting to spend half the night yammering with her creepy cousin. And if she finally got Danny to dance with her, then Ivan mortified her by asking some girl to dance—if you could call his odd shamble dancing—and sometimes misinterpreting the girl’s ordinary American friendliness and putting such a mash on her that she had to shove him away.

Danny pleaded Ivan’s case. And he got furious one time when Barbara was supposed to bring Ivan with her to a movie but she came to the theater alone, saying that Ivan had stayed home with a headache; and then he found out she’d crept out the back door to avoid Ivan.

I got the feeling Barbara and Danny were arguing a lot. She came home early from several of their dates, tight-lipped and cross. And she spent even more time than before at the Hollywood dance studio.

Barbara did her best to keep her life at the dance studio separate from Boyle Heights. She never invited dance-school friends to our house, and when she went to their parties, she didn’t ask Danny to come as her date. But her two worlds inevitably collided when she performed. That September, a few weeks after we entered our senior year of high school, she danced at the studio in a program of solos by advanced students. Our whole family went; Mama, Papa, Audrey, and Harriet piled into Pearl’s Plymouth, while I went with Ivan and, of course, Danny by streetcar.

Barbara’s dance was electrifying. To a soft tropical drumbeat (her onetime boyfriend Oscar played congas), she prowled the stage with a lazy, sensual stalk that nonetheless carried a sense of danger; she made me think of a panther leisurely closing in on its prey. The drumbeat built, and she pivoted sharply and sprang, arms and legs slashing—I could almost see claws. When she finished, I clapped so hard my hands stung.

Afterward, there was a reception with punch and cookies. Standing in a cluster of her dance friends, Barbara was flushed with the afterglow of performing. She shot a dazzling smile toward us—Danny, Ivan, and me—when we approached her. The smile must have given Ivan courage, because he went up and kissed her on the cheek.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” he said in accented but clear English.

“Oh. Thanks,” she murmured, then quickly turned away.

“Who’s that, Babs?” one of her fellow students asked.

“Um, just … Aren’t you just perishing of thirst? Let’s get some punch.”

“It’s her cousin,” Danny said loudly. “He’s a Jewish refugee from Romania.”

“Really?” The girl turned toward Ivan, clearly fascinated. “Would you like some punch?” she said, making a gesture of drinking.

“Sure. Okay.”

She took Ivan’s hand and led him toward the table. The other girls followed, vying for Ivan’s attention.

That left Barbara and Danny—and me—in a tight little eddy in one corner of the room, the reception noisily swirling around us.

“Happy?” she said to Danny. Her low voice carried an aura of threat that made me think of her slinking across the stage, getting ready to pounce.

“What is your problem?” he said.

“Never do that to me again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he walked away.

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

“Barbara, are you all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We split up,” Barbara said coolly.

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

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

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

“Nothing.”

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

“Nothing happened,” she said harshly.

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

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

“You and Danny, you never—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Casino.”

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

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

“I—”

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

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

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

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

Herschel Grynszpan changed that.

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

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

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

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

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

“Herschel took a life.”

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Elaine,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

He dashed out of the room.

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

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

But he was stocking shelves, and he called out, “Wait!”

“I’ve got to get home,” I said.

“Have you seen The Lady Vanishes?”

“The Hitchcock movie?”

“Want to go on Friday?”

“I …” I went mute, aware of Eddie Chafkin, who wasn’t even pretending not to eavesdrop.

“Friday, then? Good.”

What an idiot I was! I’d seen The Lady Vanishes two weeks ago when it first came out—I could have just said that. But the Berlovs didn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call Danny that night and set things straight. I’d tell him the next day at school.

In bed that night, I kept going hot and then cold, pushing off my blankets and a minute later piling them back on. For me to really care about a girl, she has to be a person I respect. Wasn’t it what I used to dream, that Danny needed to get Barbara out of his system, but his truest connection was with me? And look where that dream got me! I thought, throwing off the covers. Sneaking around in Chafkin’s storeroom. This wasn’t sneaking, though. He’d asked me on a real date. Shivering, I grabbed for the blankets again.

In the morning, I ached all over and lurched to the breakfast table. I must have looked awful, because even Harriet asked if I was sick. Mama placed her blissfully cool hands on my face and ordered me back to bed. She even called the doctor.

I’d caught an influenza that was going around, the doctor said when he came by that afternoon. This flu wasn’t severe, he assured Mama. Still, just the word influenza, to someone who’d lived through the 1918 epidemic, struck terror. Mama muttered kaynehora against the evil eye that had spotted a foolish girl who called too much attention to herself by getting so many A’s in school, and she prayed that the forces of darkness wouldn’t notice her other daughters. She moved Barbara out of our room onto the sofa and banished everyone, even Papa, from visiting me.

Only Mama entered my sickroom—Mama at her most tender, bearing chicken broth and hot milk with honey; propping me up, her arm around my shoulders, and coaxing me to sip. She gave me sponge baths and Bayer aspirin for my fever and held me, crooning in Yiddish, when I shook with chills. Sick as I was, I basked in Mama’s coddling and in the feverish lassitude that made me feel like a small animal, all my awareness telescoped into my body with no room to think about anything else.

I slept for most of two days. Then, around the time my fever broke, Audrey, Harriet, and Papa all got sick, and Mama had to take care of them. Still weak but no longer consumed by illness, I longed for distraction. I was thrilled when Barbara snuck into the room.

“Look what I found.” She held out a book.

It was a book of poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, a pristine brand-new copy like the ones I got to handle at Uncle Leo’s bookstore but couldn’t afford for myself.

“Barbara, thank you!”

“Oh, it’s not from me. I found it by the front door.” She smiled. “Guess he was afraid of running into me.”

There was a note stuck between the pages. Dear Elaine, When I said The Lady Vanishes, I didn’t mean you! Get well soon. Lucy said you’d like this book. Sincerely, Danny.

“Danny never gave me any books.” Barbara’s tone was teasing, but I searched her eyes for signs of hurt.

“Do you mind?”

“When do you ever see me sit still long enough to read anything?” She picked up a brush and coaxed it through my fever-matted hair. “Yecch, bet you can’t wait to have a shampoo.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Darling, I don’t mind at all.”

Her nonchalance might have concealed deep pain. Nevertheless, I heard condescension, the noblesse oblige of the naturally attractive toward those of us who have to work to be loved. Just like Danny! I thought, regarding his gift with loathing and for a full day refusing to touch it.

But my boredom became unbearable, and a new book was too tempting to resist. And reading poems about a West Virginia mining disaster, even if Danny had given them to me, didn’t weaken my determination to resist him.

When I returned to school after two weeks of convalescence, he asked me to the big New Year’s Eve party, a youth dance at the Workmen’s Circle hall. I should have made it clear then that I didn’t want to date him, but I was still shaky from being sick; that was the excuse I gave myself. Instead, I hedged and said I didn’t know if I’d be feeling well enough by New Year’s Eve to go out. I hoped another boy would invite me to the party—you didn’t have to have a date to attend, but who wanted to walk into a New Year’s Eve dance with her girlfriends? No one else asked me, though, and I decided to stay home.

Ah, but then New Year’s Eve arrived, and everyone was going out. Barbara had a party in Hollywood, although she told Mama and Papa she was going to the Workmen’s Circle dance. The rest of the family was spending the evening at Sonya and Leo’s. I’d die before I tagged along to the family party, the gawky daughter who at seventeen didn’t have big plans of her own. But why did I have to spend New Year’s Eve by myself just to avoid Danny?

And how could I pass up the chance to wear my first evening gown, a Hanukkah gift from Pearl made out of coppery brown silk? The gown had a bias-cut bodice, a nipped-in waist, and a skirt that draped snugly over my hips. When Pearl was fitting the dress, I worried that it was too sophisticated for me. She said a girl who was almost eighteen deserved a grown-up dress and that the color would pick up the gold flecks in my hazel eyes. And it did!

I went to meet Lucy and Jane at Jane’s house. Our fourth Plain Brain, Ann, had a boyfriend—Bill Adelman, the class math whiz—and she was going to the party with him. We fussed with one another’s hair and makeup, spritzed on Jane’s mother’s Chanel No. 5, and passed around a bottle of Scotch that Lucy had gotten from her older brother. It was cheap Scotch, raw in my throat, but the buzz—and the swish of my copper silk dress against my thighs—made me feel daring and adult as we walked to the dance.

In the cloakroom, Lucy and I took off our glasses and slipped them into our bags; Jane promised to watch out in case either of us started to stumble into a punch bowl.

I walked into the hall, dazzled for a moment by the noise of the band and the hubbub of people, all of them fuzzy to my nearsighted eyes. Instantly, as if he had been watching for me, Danny was at my side.

“You made it! You look …” He took a step back and really looked at me. “Wow! You look beautiful.”

He held out his hand and led me onto the dance floor.

I had danced with Danny before, at parties where everyone partnered everyone else. But this time, on the final night of 1938 … it wasn’t just that he held me closer. Dancing together that evening felt more intimate than our long-ago necking sessions, as if some psychic distance had melted between us. When a song ended, he kept his arms around me and whispered things into my hair. “Elaine, you’re so beautiful.… What a fool I’ve been.” He ran his hand down my back, the glide of silk and the warmth of his palm becoming a single delicious sensation, as if he were caressing my bare skin.

I didn’t let him take possession of me for the evening. Not at first. I’d have a dance or two with Danny, then return to a cluster of girls, making ourselves available to the stag line. But as he kept asking me to dance, as we talked between dances with our faces nearly touching—and at midnight, when he gave me a long kiss in front of everyone—I didn’t feel like second best. I felt like the one he had always been waiting for.





“NOT DANNY BERLOV AGAIN!” MAMA MOANED WHEN DANNY RESUMED coming by the house, this time for me.

“What’s the matter with Danny?” I said.

“With a father who never has two dimes to rub together, and the son’s a meshuganah dreamer who wants to go farm in Palestine—what’s he going to make of himself?”

“You never said that when Barbara was going with him.”

“I never worried that Barbara was going to marry him. But you … you’d go to the ends of the earth for that boy.”

“Well, I’m not going to go farm in Palestine!” I retorted, annoyed by her pitying look—and because she understood Barbara so well, but she was so wrong about me. How could she look at me and still see the timid little girl who used to follow her sister’s lead? Had she really not noticed what a determined young woman I’d become?

I felt a similar frustration when I was “talked to” by Aunt Pearl, who warned me about the pain I might be inflicting on Barbara and the danger that Danny was dating me because I was Barbara’s sister. Didn’t she see that Danny had chosen me for myself? Didn’t anyone see me?

Actually, one person in my family acted delighted for me—Barbara. I had screwed up my courage on New Year’s Day and told her that Danny and I had spent much of the previous night’s dance together; I wanted her to hear it from me rather than through the school gossip mill. “Lainie, I always knew,” she said, and gave me a hug. My nerve went only so far. I didn’t ask what she’d always known; I didn’t want to find out if she was aware of our clandestine meetings … which would remain in my mind as the lousiest thing I ever did. In the 1970s, I occasionally found myself at a party where someone would insist on playing a pop psychology game. One question was invariably “What is your deepest secret?” Those trysts with my sister’s boyfriend always leaped to mind, and I never mentioned them.

But whatever she knew or didn’t, Barbara quickly adjusted to the new state of affairs. And so did Danny. One evening in February, she happened to be at home when he came to pick me up for a movie. The two of them chatted casually, with no hint of still-wounded feelings between them.

As for the rest of our world, once people got over the surprise that Danny was dating “the other Greenstein twin,” everyone agreed there was a rightness to Danny and me, as if we’d been destined for each other—bashert. The intellectual intensity that already existed between us, our passionate engagement with ideas, ignited now that we were going together. Collaborating on articles and letters to newspapers, we debated more heatedly than ever. And with our high school graduation coming up in June, we had fervent arguments about what we planned to do with our lives. Danny and I had radically different ideas about our futures because we had radically different visions of the world and our place in it.

For me, college was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the prize that had dangled in front of me for years. At last I was actually filling out applications to UCLA and USC … and even beginning to look beyond college and consider what I wanted to do with a college degree. Mollie had said I could be a lawyer, and in her letters, she kept telling me that I was “born with a legal mind.” Well, why not? I dreamed of going to law school and fighting for working people in the courts. I broached the idea to Papa, but he frowned and said it was one thing for a family to invest in a son entering a profession like medicine or the law, but teaching was a fine, respectable job for an educated young woman. The ideas Mollie put in my head! Even my favorite teacher, Miss Linscott, said, “For a Boyle Heights girl to go into teaching, that’s something to be very proud of.”

Danny, however, was all for my becoming a lawyer—and, in a larger sense, doing something that mattered. His quarrel with my ambitions, like mine with his, came back to our debates about Zionism. All of my visions of the future took place in America: I couldn’t imagine being a lawyer anywhere else, couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Danny burned to go to Palestine and fight for a Jewish state; he simply burned to fight, so much so that he saw no point in making any plans for a life in Los Angeles.

“Don’t you want to take Eddie up on his offer?” I asked him. Eddie Chafkin had proposed that if Danny studied business at Los Angeles City College, Eddie would arrange his work hours to accommodate the class schedule; on top of that, he’d give Danny management responsibilities and raise his salary. “He’ll pay you to go to school.”

“So I can be a shopkeeper?” Danny paced in front of the bench where I sat in Hollenbeck Park. His need for action was visceral, like the need with which his hands pushed under my clothes when we were alone.

“So you can learn how to run a business. Don’t you think Palestine needs people who know how to run things? At least fill out the application for City College.”

“What’s the point? There’s going to be a war.”

“You sound like you want a war.”

“I want someone to stand up to Hitler.”

“But you heard what he said—Vernichtung.” The hideous word meant “extermination.” Hitler had announced in January that if war broke out, Vernichtung would be the fate of all the Jews in Europe.

“Don’t you think he’s going to do that anyway?”

Of course I didn’t think that. What sane mind, in 1939, could have imagined the machine-like design and screaming evil of the Nazis’ Vernichtung?

“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?”

“Oh.” She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed.

“Did someone hurt you?” I said again, when her tears had quieted.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise! Not Mama or Papa. And not Danny.”

“I promise.”

She took a deep breath. “Guy sends me a note at the club—he’s a producer, and I should come see him in his office at Warner Brothers. I’m a big girl, I know—if he wants to kiss me, cop a little feel, I don’t care as long as he puts me in a picture.… I’m shocking you, aren’t I?”

“No.” Yes.

“He … he … Shit, I’m so stupid! I’m so …” Under my arm, I felt her shudder. “I knew just to tease him, okay, not to let him lay a finger on me unless he promised me a part. But he did promise. He showed me a contract with my name on it! He signed it, and he had me come to his side of the desk to sign my name. And then he unzipped his pants. He made me … he … in my mouth …” Then she shrugged away from me, and her voice went hard. “Big deal, you do that with Danny, right? An old man’s smelly pecker, you just need a bottle of Listerine after. But he said he was going to contact me about a film, and he didn’t. Then I found out he’s not a producer at Warner Brothers, he’s some kind of accountant there. Stupid, stupid! Tonight, I saw him at the club. I asked to talk to him, and he said we could talk in his car. A*shole was just trying to get another blow job. I almost said yes, so I could bite off his little hairy prick!

“Well?” she said after a moment. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Ah …” I wouldn’t have been surprised if no sound came out of my mouth, if I were in the limbo of a dream. It wasn’t just that I was appalled by the nasty thing the man had done to her. I was appalled by her! She had walked into his office expecting something like this; she’d gone along with it. If the man had turned out to be a real producer, would she have felt it was all worth it?

“Elaine! Here.” She lit a cigarette in her mouth and passed it to me. “Shit, I should never have told you.”

I stared at the girl next to me and couldn’t believe she’d grown up with me in the house on Breed Street. Someone had replaced my sister with a streetwise chippie.

But she wasn’t streetwise. For all her veneer of toughness, Barbara was only eighteen. I found my voice.

“He’s a monster.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s a man.”

“Can you do anything?”

“Like what? Call the guy’s wife and tell him what a jerk she’s married to? She probably already knows. Or maybe I should complain to Jack Warner?” She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know why I got so upset. I bet every girl I work with could tell the same story.”

“What if you get a different job?”

“Doing what?”

“What about dancing in Mr. Horton’s company?”

“Some people in this family need to make a real living. It’s okay. I just needed a shoulder to cry on. Thanks … Hey, I’m beat. I have to get some sleep.”

“Barbara, are you sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing hurt but my pride.” She turned away from me, burrowed under the covers.

She was sleeping when I left the next morning. I waited up for her when she got home from work that night, but she didn’t want to talk. I suspected she regretted having revealed so much, and I didn’t push. But I worried about her after that. I feared that her tendency to leap without looking might get her into a worse situation than what happened with the phony producer, something dangerous.

On top of my concern for her, one more thing lingered from our conversation. I kept hearing her say, Big deal, you do that with Danny. But Danny and I had never done that. Had he done it with Barbara? I fantasized about trying. When we necked and I was holding his penis, I could slide down his body and put my mouth where my hand had been. But I didn’t have the nerve. And he didn’t ask.

Then something else screamed into my awareness. War.

On August 23, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. That night after dinner, Danny and I sat at Canter’s with several friends: my pal Ann and her boyfriend, Bill; Burt Weber, who was one of Danny’s cronies from Habonim; and a recent addition to our group, Paul Resnick.

Paul had graduated from Roosevelt High two years ahead of us and joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the leftist Americans who had fought with the Republicans in Spain. He’d come home in April, after the Republicans were defeated, and he was about to enter USC like me. Paul made no secret of his membership in the Communist Party nor of his disdain for Zionism, and he and Danny, both natural scrappers, argued over their competing ideals with the gusto of men on a football field. The two of them gravitated toward each other, and now whenever Danny and I got together with friends, the group usually included Paul—wiry, sandy-haired, his ironic smile a reminder that he, alone among us, had broken free of the cocoon of Boyle Heights and lived. He had fired a gun at other men, and their bullets and grenades had whizzed past him. He had guzzled vino from the bottle and sung partisan songs; he sang some for us, in a surprisingly sweet baritone. There were women, too. He only alluded to them when I was present, but clearly Paul had crossed the chasm that the rest of us trembled on the brink of. He’d had sex.

I jumped into Paul and Danny’s debates, though I lacked their true-believer faith—I didn’t think any ism could save the world. But I enjoyed the sparring. And I was determined to hold my own around Paul, because he rattled me. I couldn’t stand the way Danny and the other boys became wide-eyed kids whenever Paul told war stories. To be fair, Paul didn’t paint a glorified picture of his life as a soldier; still, all the boys listened as if they were sitting in the National Theater watching a war movie, and they couldn’t wait to experience the thrill of battle themselves.

What disturbed me even more about Paul was the shiver in the way he looked at me. And the shiver I felt in return. Even when I was dating other boys, no one but Danny could just meet my eyes and spark that kind of sexual awareness, as if his gaze were a caress. Paul became the second man to evoke that response. Perhaps because of his greater sexual experience, I think he knew he had the power to unsettle me, which made me determined not to show it. It felt like a contest: he’d win if I wavered, but if I gave no sign of the fluttering he provoked in me, then it was my victory. In retrospect, my sense of being in a constant state of subtle combat with Paul made me fling myself into spats with him—as I did on the night of the nonaggression pact.

Danny lit into Paul first. “What do you think of your comrade Joe Stalin now?”

“I think Stalin understands how devastating war can be. He knows it’s not some kids’ game.” Paul’s challenging gaze lingered on me, and I felt embarrassed that I’d ordered a Coke; he was drinking black coffee.

Refusing to let him intimidate me, I glared back. “What about the Communists’ high ideals? Aren’t you dedicated to fighting Fascism? There’s no worse Fascist than Hitler.”

“No, there’s not. But why should the Soviet people go fight Hitler when the capitalist countries are sitting on their fat rumps?”

“What if France and England declare war?” Burt said.

“France and England sat back and said, ‘Take Austria. Take Czechoslovakia.’ They said to Franco, ‘Take Spain.’ ”

“But what if they do?” Burt said.

“Then I’m on the next ship to England to join up,” Danny said. “Anyone with me?”

Danny had said it before—all of the boys talked about fighting for England or France, whichever country had the guts to say no to Hitler first—but in that moment it became real. There was going to be a war, and Danny was going to fight in it. I grasped my Coke glass, clung to the slippery cold of the condensation on the side.

“I’ll go!” Burt said.

“I will, too,” Bill chimed in, but Ann turned to him sternly.

“You’re going to do the world a lot more good as a physicist than as a soldier,” she said. Bill had a scholarship to Princeton. (Yes, he ended up working at Los Alamos.)

A moment of fidgety silence followed.

“What about you, Paul?” I said. “You got Danny and Burt to decide to join the British army. Are you going to go with them?”

“I’ll join up when the U.S. gets into it.”

“So when Danny and Burt are fighting Hitler,” I said witheringly, “I guess you’ll be going to football games at USC.”

“Elaine!” Danny said, and everyone looked at me open-mouthed. “Paul just spent two years fighting. And no one is forcing me to do anything. I decided this on my own.”

Within a few weeks, Danny got his wish. He was going off to war.

On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. France and Britain declared war two days later, and Danny started trying to raise the money to get to England. Then on September 10, Canada got into the fray, and all he needed to do was travel up the coast to the nearest Canadian city, Vancouver. That was a Sunday. The next morning, Danny quit his job and bought a train ticket. Burt did, too. They were leaving on Wednesday at 7:45 a.m.

I longed to spend every remaining minute with Danny, but I had just started at USC, and even students from wealthy families—much less a scholarship girl from Boyle Heights—didn’t dare cut classes the first week of freshman year. And when I did have a chance to see him, the flurry of leave-takings meant we were always in a crowd of people. Even on his last night … I planned to stay up all night with him and see him off at Union Station the next morning, but our entire group of friends would be present; the all-night farewell party was taking place at Burt’s home.

When I got off the streetcar from USC that Tuesday afternoon, I didn’t go home. Instead I walked to the rooming house where he and his father lived—the territory Mama had declared off-limits because it was too easy for us to be alone. Finding Danny alone that afternoon was what I hoped for … and feared. I had made a decision: I wanted to make love with him before he left.

Clammy with nerves, I entered the rooming house and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Approaching Danny’s door, I heard him laugh—not the hearty laugh he’d have in a group of friends but a low, intimate chuckle I associated with our times alone. Another voice laughed with him. A girl?

I knocked. The laughter abruptly stopped.

“Danny?” I called. “Danny, it’s me.”

“Elaine! Just a sec.”

There were scrambling sounds. And a giggle. Definitely a girl.

I tried the door. It was unlocked.

Danny, his face flushed and hair damp with sweat, was fumbling with the zipper of his pants. Behind him, equally sweaty and tucking in her partly buttoned blouse, stood Barbara.

Their mouths were moving. But I couldn’t hear anything except the roaring in my own head. Danny started toward me. I ran.

“Elaine, wait!” he called.

I don’t know if he came after me. I kept going, the streets of Boyle Heights a blur of speed and heat and tears. I had no idea where I was running until I got there—Aunt Pearl’s, the small, neat two-bedroom house she’d bought that spring in an older neighborhood a few blocks from Danny’s.

Once I was at Pearl’s, I hesitated, catching my breath by the azalea bushes on either side of the steps. Could I bear to tell anyone what had happened? Did I know what had happened?

“Elaine.” Pearl was standing in the doorway. “What is it?”

I stood speechless, my stomach churning.

She hurried down the steps to me. “Darling, you must be so upset about Danny leaving.”

The heady fragrance of the flowers made me think of standing in Danny’s doorway, smelling scents I hadn’t consciously identified but now gave names to. Shalimar. Sex.

I threw up on the azaleas.