The Tin Horse A Novel

DANNY BERLOV WAS POOR AND HAD NO MOTHER. EVERYONE KNEW that. Danny’s father taught Yiddish classes at the Yiddische Folkschule on Soto Street and tutored religious boys in Hebrew, and what kind of living was that? He and Danny lived in two rented rooms that had a sink but no tub; on Friday afternoons, they went to the Monte Carlo Baths.

Danny’s family hadn’t always been poor, though. His grandfather was the richest man in …

Whatever he said, his accent, which had nearly vanished now that we were in the first grade, suddenly thickened.

“Where?” I said.

“Vilna. It’s in Lithuania.”

“Oh.” I had never heard of Lithuania, but I understood it was one of those places that people’s parents or grandparents had come from, like Romania. I also sensed that if I challenged Danny, he might clam up.

And I was thrilled to have Danny to myself. He often came over to play with Barbara and me, but on this particular rainy February afternoon, Barbara was confined to bed with a cold. Even better, with the drizzle keeping Danny and me inside, Mama gave me permission to use the Zenith radio. Bought a month earlier with Papa’s 1928 New Year’s bonus and some money from Zayde, the Zenith in its handsome walnut console was a magical addition to our house. I made a show of turning the radio on and finding a station playing beautiful piano music.

That was when Danny mentioned his rich grandfather.

“Josef Berlov, his name was.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a fur trader. He had the biggest house in Vilna. With a Zenith radio in every room.”

THAT WAS ALL DANNY said the first time. Gradually, though, the story gained detail and luster, and it became not just the tale of the Berlov family’s former riches but the tragic explanation for Danny’s absent mother.

Being a fur trader, I learned, meant that Josef Berlov traveled around the countryside buying the skins of minks, sables, and rabbits from people who trapped them, and he sold the skins to furriers in the city, who made them into coats. Even though the trappers were Christians, they liked and respected Josef because he could beat any man at arm wrestling, and he was always fair in business with them. They loved his horse, too, a fast brown stallion named Star. Danny’s father, Gershon, sometimes went with his father if he didn’t have to be in school. He had his own horse, a pinto named Frisky because he was hard to ride, except Gershon could always calm him down.

The trappers liked Josef so much they saved their best skins for him. That was what made him rich. He supplied finer skins than any other trader, and the furriers paid him whatever he asked. In fact, they made just a few coats every year using only skins that he brought them, instead of mixing them with inferior skins. These 100 percent Berlov coats were very special and expensive. If someone died and hadn’t put in writing who was supposed to get his Berlov coat, the family argued over it for years.

One day a messenger arrived at Josef’s house from the king of Vilna. The king wanted to have a Berlov sable coat made, and he insisted on picking each individual skin himself. Josef and Gershon, who was now a young man, carried four big bundles of sable skins to the palace. The palace was very grand, with door handles made of gold, and the room where they were taken to meet the king was bigger than most people’s entire houses.

Josef, who had the gift of being at ease everywhere, from the simple huts of the trappers to palaces, smiled and said hello to the king. Gershon wasn’t nervous, either. But then a girl ran into the huge room, laughing—the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Stunned by her beauty, Gershon dropped his bundles. Sable skins spilled over the floor. He had to get on his knees to gather them up, his face burning as the girl laughed more. But it wasn’t a mean laugh; she was just a merry girl. She was also wise and kind. Quickly she knelt on the floor beside him and helped him pick up the furs. “Beautiful,” she said, holding a piece of lustrous sable up to her cheek. Then she met Gershon’s eyes.

The girl was the king’s daughter, Princess Verena; the sable coat was being made for her. A king’s daughter and a Jewish boy? Even if he was the son of the richest man in Vilna, it was impossible. Ah, but impossible or not, they fell in love. When Gershon came to deliver Verena’s coat, she jumped onto Frisky with him, and they fled into the woods. The trappers, who loved Gershon and knew of the princess’s kindness, protected their secret. They lived in a tiny cottage, and for a year they were very happy. That was when Danny was born. But that winter Verena fell ill. The cold was terrible, and Gershon wrapped her sable coat around her. Still, she couldn’t stop shivering. He added his own coat and his body, but Verena turned to ice in his arms.

Gershon moved to America because it was a country that didn’t have kings or queens and therefore held no danger that he would meet a princess who might remind him of his lost love. He decided to live in Los Angeles so that he would never lose his and Verena’s son to the cold. And he could no longer bear the touch of fur or of any heavy, rich fabric. That was why he wore only simple cotton shirts and threadbare pants now, instead of the fine clothes he could afford.

——

BY THE TIME I was nine or ten, I had heard Danny’s story multiple times. And I’d noticed it wasn’t always the same. Sometimes Princess Verena ran away from the palace on her own horse. Sometimes the king threw Gershon’s father in prison and the family lost all its money. In some tellings, one of the trappers, an evil man whom nobody liked, betrayed them, and they had to run away from the king’s soldiers, and that was when Danny’s mother died of the cold.

It hadn’t escaped me that the plot sounded just like a fairy tale or that the Lithuanian horses had names straight out of cowboy movies. And I heard Mama whisper to Pearl in Yiddish, “You know, the wife just took off one day.”

I had also gotten to know the story’s hero, Gershon Berlov. Mama took to inviting him and Danny to our Friday night dinners and beach outings, at first out of sympathy for Barbara’s and my motherless playmate and soon out of fondness for the Yiddish teacher, with whom she and Zayde could relax into the mamaloschen, the mother tongue. “Poor Mr. Berlov,” Mama referred to him with a sigh, and not only because he was raising Danny on his own. Among Boyle Heights’ up-and-coming merchants and manufacturers, Mr. Berlov was a shtetl Jew, shuffling down the street, his shoulders hunched and his suit shiny with wear. If only I could say he made up for his lack of worldliness by being a born teacher, one of those people who blazed to life like a searchlight heralding a movie premiere the moment he entered a classroom. But his classes at the Yiddische Folkschule—which I insisted on attending, despite Papa’s objections to studying the language of superstition and poverty when we were privileged to speak the tongue of Shakespeare—ricocheted between boredom and the chaos that erupted when one kid’s naughtiness infected a few others, and with unstoppable momentum we all spun out of control.

Danny, however, did shine like a beacon, like the king’s son hidden in a rude woodcutter’s hut, clothed in rags, who grows up unable to disguise his inherent nobility. Even as I saw holes in his story, I didn’t challenge him because I recognized the truth of Danny Berlov as deposed royalty.

And I lived in a world of tales about the old country, a mythic place that gave rise to stories whose details might flicker and shift, but always there was a core of truth. Look at Zayde and Agneta! Zayde really had made those tin animals. I saw beneath the surface fantasy in Danny’s stories to their emotional authenticity—as Barbara, with her quickness to judge, couldn’t have done. That was another reason I didn’t question Danny: because he told his story to me alone. It was our secret, a continuation of the bond we’d formed the first day we met, between the stacks of wood down the street from Sonya’s. The rough pine had long since become the Eppermans’ house, but now Danny and I talked in a corner of the school playground or in my house if no one was in earshot. Or we went for long walks at Ocean Park, which on summer weekends became “Boyle Heights on the sea.”

Our walks drove Barbara wild. “Where were you? I looked all over,” she accused us when we reappeared after one walk at the family encampment of chairs and beach umbrellas.

Danny grinned. “We were wearing invisibility capes.”

“You were gone for an hour. You need to tell someone if you’re going to be gone for an hour at the beach.” She glanced toward the umbrellas, hoping for adult support.

We had a different adult contingent every time, depending on whether Papa had the day off from work, and if Aunt Pearl or Zayde—though never, after Pearl’s divorce, both of them together—joined us. The two constants were Mama and Mr. Berlov, who turned out to be a surprisingly enthusiastic beach-goer. Taking off his shoes and socks and rolling his trouser legs, he would sit in a sagging yellow canvas chair and chat with Mama or Zayde in Yiddish, or just lean back blissfully and stretch his thin, hairy toes into the sun, as if he could never get warm enough—perhaps remembering that winter when Princess Verena died.

“Yeah, I can tell how worried they were,” Danny teased, glancing at the only adult present, Mr. Berlov, who lounged with his eyes closed and drew contentedly on a cigarette. Mama was off splashing with Audrey at the water’s edge, and Papa was swimming his mile.

“Well, what about Elaine?” Barbara jerked her chin toward me. “She’s my sister. What if she drowned?”

“Does Elaine look drowned? Do you think she’s a ghost?”

“I don’t know. Elaine, are you a ghost?”

“Um …” I’d just taken a big bite of a peach, and the juice dribbled down my chin.

“Ghosts don’t eat peaches,” Danny said.

“Really? The last time you were in heaven, Danny Berlov, what did they eat?”

“Ghosts eat …” Danny’s eyes gleamed. “Worms!” We were ten years old, after all. “They get big plates of fat, juicy worms, and they eat ’em when they’re still alive and wiggling.”

“You eat worms!” Barbara cried, and took off toward the water, Danny sprinting after her.

I ran, too, laughing wildly as if I were the rowdiest, most fun-loving member of this happy trio. Instead of the outsider.

Why did I feel excluded, after having spent an hour with Danny by myself? Bantering was the special thing Danny did with my sister. They bickered over everything, from what they thought of their teachers to what candy bar was best, Hershey’s (his choice) or Milky Way (hers), or their favorite movies—she liked Westerns, and he preferred gangster movies. Still, no matter how passionately Danny fought with Barbara, wasn’t I the sister to whom he confided his tragic stories? And he never minded my being around when they argued; if anything, both of them liked having an audience. Whereas Danny told me about Gershon and Princess Verena only in private.

By that time, too, I had emerged from Barbara’s shadow and claimed my own place in the world. If she was quick on her feet, able to fire off a retort to any insult, school had revealed me to have a quick mind. I was a child for whom the clumps of letters in our first-grade reader had leaped from the page and proclaimed themselves as cat, father, or run. Numbers, too, obligingly added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided themselves under my pencil. Even in Mr. Berlov’s run-amok classes at the Folkschule, I learned enough Yiddish to understand when adults whispered in it, a skill I kept to myself.

Just as Barbara had her own set of friends, vivacious girls who took after-school dramatics classes, I gravitated to girls like Lucy Meringoff, with whom I competed amicably for the top grades in our class. Lucy and I knew every cranny of the Benjamin Franklin Library; the librarians greeted us by name whenever we mounted the white marble steps into the library for fresh armloads of books. Novels, poetry, history, biography—I loved them all for their enticing, sideways-printed spines, for the way they unfolded in my hands to reveal lives and events and language. I enjoyed the graceful type, even the whiff of mold on older volumes. As the principal had predicted on my first day of school, I had blossomed into myself—intellectually curious and praised not only for rote learning but for what my teachers called comprehension. No wonder Danny trusted me with his most tender secrets.

Oh, but Barbara was fun. No one else generated excitement the way she did, coming up with adventures and convincing everyone to go along. She started our neighborhood games and even got the adults to fall in with some of her plans. For instance, the year we were ten, she wanted to camp out on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena on New Year’s Eve so we’d have front-row seats for the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. She persuaded Papa, Aunt Pearl, and even Mr. Berlov to go. Mama, who stayed at home with Audrey, bundled us up in our warmest jackets and made us take every blanket from the house. For the first time, I stayed awake until midnight, drinking cocoa and telling ghost stories with Barbara and Danny, and the next day, the flower-covered floats in the Rose Parade were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

Even when it was just Barbara and me, I never got bored. And I sometimes got in trouble, like when we took Mama’s just-washed sheets from the line and built a fort in the yard. Once, though I protested all the way, I trotted after her to stand on the bank of the Los Angeles River when it surged with water during the rainy season. I couldn’t stop thinking about Micky Altschul, the Boyle Heights legend who’d been swept away by the river in flood. Still, seeing the river in its glory as La Reina de la Puebla de Los Angeles was terrifying and thrilling. Barbara let out a yell of excitement, and I yelled, too, trying to outroar the river. It was worth the slaps we got when Mama somehow found out. On my own, I might have been a tediously good child, scolded only for spending too much time with my nose in books—and perhaps a tedious, line-toeing adult. Would I have become such a rabble-rouser if Barbara hadn’t brought out the mischief in me?

But Barbara didn’t just have a gift for mischief. My sister could be dangerous.

One afternoon in November 1932, not long after Roosevelt was elected president—we were eleven, and in the sixth grade—we went with Danny to Chafkin’s grocery store. Barbara and I had a shopping list from Mama, and Mrs. Chafkin helped us find what we needed. After she figured out what everything cost, she took the strip of cardboard with our family’s name on it from the collection of such strips hanging behind the counter and wrote down the amount to add to the total Mama and Papa would pay at the end of the month.

“There you go, girls.” Mrs. Chafkin handed us the groceries and two pieces of bubble gum. She gave Danny a piece of gum, too, but ignored the items he’d placed on the counter—two cans of soup, a five-pound sack of potatoes, and a pint of milk.

“I want to get these,” Danny said.

Mrs. Chafkin had seemed a little nervous when she was helping Barbara and me. Now discomfort streamed from her, though all she did was call out, “Eddie?”

Eddie was Mrs. Chafkin’s energetic son, who had come into the business after graduating from high school a few years earlier. (Eddie Chafkin would eventually build a supermarket empire and become Los Angeles’s leading promoter of Israel Bonds.) He hurried out from the back office.

“Danny Berlov,” Mrs. Chafkin whispered, as if her voice had gotten trapped in her throat.

Eddie Chafkin glanced at the groceries on the counter. “Danny, have you got money to pay for these?”

None of us ever carried more than a nickel or two. “Put it on my father’s tab,” Danny said.

“Your father needs to come talk to us about his bill.” Eddie took out the strip of cardboard with Gershon Berlov written on it and pointed to a black X next to the name.

“My father, he always forgets!” Danny laughed, but his cheeks flamed. “I’ll tell him, and I’ll just get this for tonight.” He pushed one can of soup toward Eddie, who stood with his arms crossed. Everyone knew that, as well as being named for a dead ancestor whose Hebrew name was something like Efraim or Eliezer, Eddie Chafkin’s parents had also named him for King Edward VII of England, and he always acted hoity-toity.

“That’s not enough for dinner,” Mrs. Chafkin said. “How about a few potatoes, too?” She took three potatoes from the sack Danny had placed on the counter and put them and the can of soup in a bag. Then she added the milk, too. “You’ll need this for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“Ma!” I heard Eddie say as we went out the door.

Taut with shame, Danny mumbled that he had to get home. He hugged the small sack of groceries to his chest and ran.

“I hate Eddie Chafkin,” Barbara muttered.

“Me too.”

Of course, we understood what had just happened. Everyone was being hurt by the Depression, which had started with the stock market crash three years earlier and kept getting worse and worse. The Great Depression, as it was already being called, was a cataclysm in the larger world from which the adults were powerless to insulate us. All over Boyle Heights, people we knew—family friends, the fathers of classmates—had lost their jobs. Walking down the street, I’d seen neighbors with everything they owned—clothes, pots and pans, family pictures, whatever furniture they hadn’t already pawned—put out on the curbside, the people hovering beside their possessions, some weeping, some holding their spines so straight they seemed about to crack. And it was never a surprise to walk into our kitchen and see a man with shabby clothes and downcast eyes eating the soup and bread Mama had given him when he knocked at the door and asked if she had anything to spare.

At least we had some soup to give them. Although Papa had had to take a salary cut, and lately Mama seemed tense all the time, some people still bought shoes, and Papa hadn’t lost his job. But poor Mr. Berlov … who could afford the luxury of his Yiddish classes? He tried to come up with other ways to earn money, but he didn’t have an enterprising personality, not like the Soy Bread Man, who walked downtown every morning and bought a dozen loaves of soy bread, then walked back to sell them in the neighborhood … and attracted everyone’s attention because, when he came down the street selling the bread, he walked backward.

I knew there were relief agencies where Mr. Berlov could ask for help. Or he and Danny could eat at a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen! On trips downtown, I’d seen people lined up on the sidewalk for soup—often with their heads tucked into their collars, as if they were trying to hide their faces in case anyone they knew came by. I couldn’t bear the idea of Danny—with the shame he’d always suffered, even before the Depression, on account of his father’s poverty—having to stand in a soup line. I had to help him. But what could I possibly do?

That night I saw Papa sitting in his armchair after dinner, reading the East Side Journal, the local weekly newspaper. Papa especially enjoyed the letters people wrote to the editor of the paper; sometimes he’d read them out loud, and he’d comment to Barbara and me, “A letter to the editor, that’s how an American speaks up!”

I took a pad of paper into the bedroom and started to write. I saw a terrible thing today. A boy … But I crossed that out, because I didn’t want to point so obviously to Danny. A person who lives in Boyle Heights tried to buy food for his family, but a grocer said his family couldn’t get credit anymore. As I would do one day in legal briefs, I laid the groundwork for my position by acknowledging the arguments that could be made against it: Grocers couldn’t afford to just give things away. And there was help available for anyone who was in danger of starving. But sometimes people need just a little help. What if the relief agency gave money to grocery stores? The grocers know which customers are having a hard time, and they could use the money to help them, without anyone having to ask.

I carefully copied the letter with my fountain pen onto a sheet of good writing paper and signed it the way we did in school when we wrote letters to, say, thank a fireman or a nurse who came to speak to our class: Elaine Greenstein, Mrs. Villier’s sixth-grade class, Breed Street Elementary School. I put it in an envelope and addressed it to the East Side Journal. When Mama wasn’t looking, I took a stamp from the drawer in the kitchen where she kept them.

I mailed the letter the next morning. That was on Friday, and the newspaper didn’t come out until the following Wednesday. In the meanwhile, Barbara came up with her own strategy to help Danny.

On Monday, she and I went to Chafkin’s after school with Mama’s grocery list. “You go get everything,” she told me. While Mrs. Chafkin helped me collect the items for Mama, Barbara roamed in another part of the store, and she hung back as Mrs. Chafkin totaled up what I’d bought.

Excitement and secrecy and wildness zinged off of her, and the second we were out of sight of the store windows, I grabbed her arm.

“What is it?” I said.

“You’ll see.” She jerked away and kept walking, fast.

“What did you do?”

“You’ll see,” she repeated.

I’d thought we were going straight home, but instead she turned down Soto Street. To the rooming house where Danny lived.

I had barely seen him since the incident at Chafkin’s the week before. That wasn’t unusual—Danny had a gang of boys he hung out with, just as Barbara and I had our own girlfriends—but even when I’d waved to him on the playground, he’d pretended not to see me.

“What do you want?” he challenged when he answered Barbara’s knock. He stood in the doorway, not asking us in.

“Is your father home?” Barbara whispered.

“No. Why?”

“Can we come in?”

He shrugged.

Barbara went over to the small wooden table that Danny and his father used for eating and as a writing desk. She folded back the flap of her school knapsack. “Look!” She took out several cans, a stick of butter, a bag of rice—about a dozen things in all—and placed them on the table.

“So?” Danny said.

“Barbara, where did you get that?” I said, thinking for a moment that she must have raided our own pantry before we’d left for school that day.

“Where do you think? Chafkin’s,” she answered. Then she said to Danny, “It’s for you.”

“We don’t need you to buy us food.”

“I didn’t buy it.”

Her words hung in the air.

“You stole it?” Danny and I spoke at the same time, with, I sensed, similar shock at this act, which every Boyle Heights kid understood on a small scale—swiping a piece of bubble gum—but which we had never encountered at this magnitude.

Then my disbelief turned into fear, and Danny’s became anger.

“You stole this while we were in the store?” My knees wobbled with the inevitability that we’d be caught and held equally guilty.

“We don’t need you to steal for us, either!” Danny snatched up the cans and shoved them back into her knapsack.

“Fine, take it back, then,” Barbara challenged him.

“They’ll think I stole it.”

“Then you’ll have to eat it, won’t you?”

“I’ll take it back,” I threw out, but it was impossible. Either I’d be branded as the thief or I’d have to tell on Barbara.

“I don’t care what you do with it.” Barbara raked us both with a scornful glance and made her exit, slamming the door.

Danny surveyed the booty still on the table. Butter. Half a dozen eggs. Two cans of tuna fish, his favorite food.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was doing it,” I said.

“You were right there, and you didn’t have any idea?” But another quality entered his voice: admiration. For Barbara stealing! I thought of telling him about my letter then, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

“How was I supposed to know she was stealing?” I’d figured she was up to something, but my imagination for transgression was so limited, all I could think was that she was getting back at Eddie Chafkin by sticking chewed-up gum someplace or jumbling items on the shelves, putting a box of cereal with the canned peaches.

“Was Eddie around?”

“Just Mrs. Chafkin.”

“Guess that’d be easier. Still.” He rolled his eyes. “Your sister’s nuts! Well, you take this.”

“I can’t. Mama …”

“I guess it’s stupid for it to go to waste.” He picked up the stolen items from the table and started putting them away.

In just two days, the East Side Journal would come out with my letter in it. Then Danny would really have something to admire.

On Wednesday I put on my nicest school outfit, a navy jumper and crisp white blouse. The East Side Journal got delivered (by Mr. Berlov; it was one of his ways to earn a little money) sometime during the morning, so it should be at our house when we came home for lunch.

Novice author that I was, it never crossed my mind that the newspaper might not publish my letter. But as a matter of fact, they did. I saw my letter in print when we returned to our classroom after the morning recess. Mrs. Villiers picked up a newspaper—the East Side Journal!—from her desk. Mrs. Villiers was one of my favorite teachers, a feathery woman of about forty who had been widowed in the Great War. She loved to quote famous sayings and always kept a pencil tucked into her blond chignon in case she was seized with the inspiration to write a poem.

“Look, children!” she said. “See how mighty the pen is!”

She had me come to the front of the room, and I saw that my letter occupied the place of honor at the top of all the letters to the editor, beneath a giant headline: “FDR, Listen! Boyle Heights Sixth-Grader Offers Relief Policy.” Mrs. Villiers asked me to read my letter out loud. I had to push my glasses, new that fall, up my suddenly sweaty nose, and my legs got so tense from excitement I could barely feel them under me. Yet my voice rang out, thanks to Papa’s elocution lessons and an unexpected stage presence, perhaps inherited from the fusgeyers on Mama’s side. When I finished reading, Mrs. Villiers clapped, and everyone applauded with her. Then she cut out my letter and pinned it up on the wall. Mr. Roosevelt might invite me to Washington to give him advice when he took office as president, she said.

When school let out for lunch, I galloped out to the playground, certain that everyone knew about my fame—as if “Boyle Heights Sixth-Grader” were emblazoned on a banner that streamed out above my head. But my schoolmates hurried home the way they always did, the bold kids scuffling and shouting and the timid, gawky ones yearning toward a brief return to their real lives in which they were their mamas’ treasures instead of the dull, easily bullied children they impersonated at school.

I told Barbara my news on our way home.

“You wrote a letter saying Chafkin’s should give free food to … people we know?” She glanced at Audrey, whose six-year-old legs trotted to keep up with us.

“I didn’t say any names. And it’s not free food, it’s money the government would give to the grocery stores, and then they …” My plan, so elegant in writing, sounded ridiculously complicated when I tried to explain it. “You’ll see. Mama will have the paper at home.”

“Did you print or do handwriting?” Audrey asked, focused on the mechanics she was just learning in first grade.

I groaned.

“Why didn’t you write to the relief agency?” Barbara said. “Or the mayor?” She wasn’t being obtuse to deflate me. The idea of writing to a newspaper was as foreign to her as stealing from Chafkin’s—which I’d gotten her to promise never to do again—was to me.

Barbara may have failed to be impressed, but Papa appreciated the momentousness of this event. He’d gotten Mr. Fine to give him time off during the busy lunch hour, and he was waiting on the porch. As soon as I came into sight, he ran out and swept me into his arms. “Did you see the East Side Journal? And you didn’t make one spelling error!” In the house, one East Side Journal lay open to my letter on the kitchen table, and another dozen copies sat pristine and untouched on the sideboard.

Mama, too, was all smiles and said she’d make anything I wanted for dinner that night.

“Meatballs!” I said.

Once Barbara saw my name printed in the newspaper, she joined in the fuss, showing the genuine pleasure in each other’s triumphs that coexisted with our perpetual rivalry. On our way back to school after lunch, she carried an East Side Journal to show her class.

Everyone must have heard about my letter in their classes that afternoon, because I was the center of attention when school let out. The only person who acted oblivious to my exalted status was the one on whose behalf I’d attained it—Danny, who was waiting with Barbara in our usual spot at the edge of the playground. The one concession he made to my fame was to notice all the people looking my way.

“I have something to show you, but not with people staring at us,” he said.

He had an air of suppressed excitement, and Barbara didn’t balk at missing her after-school dramatics class. She and I went with Danny to the playground across the Red Car trolley tracks. He waited until we’d sat down on a bench, then made a show of reaching into his satchel. Was he going to pull out an East Side Journal?

“For you!” With a flourish, he handed Barbara two Milky Way bars. “And you.” Another flourish, and he produced two Snickers for me. Last came a Hershey’s bar for himself.

Candy bars, costing a nickel each, were rare treats during the Depression—far too great a luxury for a boy whose father couldn’t afford a bag of potatoes. Barbara was always the one who challenged Danny, and I expected her to say something, but she had already peeled the wrapper from her Milky Way and was chewing her first bite.

“Danny, where did you get these?” I said.

“Chafkin’s. Pollack’s.” The two local grocery stores.

“How did you get them?”

“Bought ’em. Snickers is still your favorite, isn’t it? Did I get the wrong kind?”

“I love Snickers.” I started to unwrap one. “It’s just …” I had never before questioned Danny’s versions of events. “No, you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” he said through a mouthful of chocolate.

“You didn’t buy five candy bars.”

Danny hesitated and glanced at Barbara. She was taking tiny bites to savor her Milky Way.

“So?” he said.

“So, you could get caught!” The grocers kept the candy bars right at the counter, under their noses.

“Don’t you want it?”

“Danny, since when is stealing the only way to get what you want? Didn’t you see my letter in the newspaper?”

His face went cold. “The letter where you said my father can’t pay his grocery bills?”

“I didn’t say anything about your father.”

“I can take care of myself. You want the Snickers or not?”

Barbara poked my arm. “Elaine, don’t be such a stick.”

“Of course I want it.” I tore the wrapper off my Snickers and took a big bite.

“How’d you do it?” Barbara asked with the respect of one thief for another.

As Danny explained how he had pocketed the candy bars while the grocers helped him with small legitimate purchases, I devoured my Snickers.

The candy bar barely touched the ravenous emptiness gaping inside me. The sense of exclusion I had long felt around Barbara and Danny was no longer a mystery. Now I glimpsed the chasm that isolated me on one side while they stood, laughing, on the other. I played by the rules; I would eventually come to understand the rules inside and out, and fight to turn them to my—and my clients’—purposes. But believing in the value of rules was in my nature, just as Barbara and Danny were both natural outlaws.

That night at dinner, I stuffed myself with meatballs, as well as two pieces of the chocolate cake Mama had baked for the celebration.

BETWEEN ALL THE SUGAR and the excitement, the next day at school I felt sick. Mrs. Villiers put her cool hand on my forehead, then sent me home.

“Mama?” I called when I walked in the door.

She didn’t answer. She must have been out. I was a little disappointed, but I had already been fussed over as much in the previous twenty-four hours as I usually was in months, and I was eleven, old enough to take an aspirin without any help and put myself to bed.

I pushed open the kitchen door to get a glass of water and saw … I didn’t know what I was seeing. This was surely our kitchen: I recognized the green linoleum floor and primrose-flowered curtains, and the oak table standing in the middle of the room. A woman stood on the other side of the table; she had her back to me and didn’t notice when I came in, but she was wearing Mama’s blue housedress. And I recognized the black cast-iron soup pot and the smell of boiled onions. But …

Instead of being on the stove, the soup pot sat on a low stool.

The woman straddled the steaming pot, her legs wide and her knees slightly bent, as if she were going to sit on it.

And she was sobbing and talking out loud in Yiddish.

I stood frozen in the doorway. I hadn’t thought I was very ill, but now I felt dizzy and my scalp exploded in sweat.

“Please, God, I can’t do it this time,” she said. “I know I don’t talk to you as often as I should. Maybe you didn’t hear I live in America now? Even here, a woman doesn’t have much choice about getting married, all right. But you think I’m still in Tecuci, where the women have baby after baby—”

Tecuci was Mama’s village in Romania. This woman talking to God was my mother.

“Mama?” I said.

She sprang up—and kicked the pot over. Steaming onions and water spilled onto the floor, onto her legs and bare feet.

“Ai!” Screaming, she ran toward the doorway. Toward me, shrieking, “What are you doing here?”

She shoved me aside, knocking my head into the swinging door. Once she’d escaped the kitchen and the scalding liquid, she staggered to a chair, moaning. “God in heaven, my feet!”

“Mama, should I call the doctor? Or Papa? Why don’t I call Papa?”

“Elaine, no!”

“Please, can I do anything? I’ll get you some Vaseline.”

“Vaseline, yes. What did you mean, sneaking up on me like that?”

Weeping, I ran to the powder room. When I came back with the Vaseline, the rage had drained out of Mama. Her face was pale, and she whimpered when I applied the Vaseline to her feet and ankles and put gauze over it.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call the doctor?” I asked.

“I just need to sit here and rest a little.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t … Yes, could you clean up? In the kitchen?”

“Is it soup? Should I save what didn’t spill?”

“Soup? You think like they say about old bubbes, I flavor my soup by pissing in it?” She started to laugh, but wildly. She must have seen she was scaring me, because she stopped and caressed my cheek. “Darling, it’s not soup. Throw it out. And please?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell anyone. This will be our secret, all right?”

I mopped the floor twice. Still, the house stank of onions for days. And Mama limped on her burned feet; she accounted for her injuries and the smell by saying she had knocked a pot off the stove.

Barbara had another explanation for the mystifying scene I’d witnessed. (Of course I told Barbara. I didn’t breathe a word to anyone else, as I’d promised Mama. But sharing the story with my twin sister didn’t count as telling; it was like trying to make sense in my own mind of what I’d seen.)

“You sit over a pot of boiled onions if you don’t want to have a baby,” Barbara said.

“What? That’s stupid.”

“That’s what Sari Lubow’s aunt said. Sari told me once she heard her mother and her aunt talking about it. Her aunt said it was old-country meshugas.”

Barbara was my source of information about such things; she picked up every whisper about the facts of life the way I absorbed subjects in school.

A few weeks later, though, Papa announced that this year, instead of getting Hanukkah gelt, we were receiving a truly wonderful gift: a new baby was growing in Mama’s tummy. So maybe Barbara had it backward and squatting over onions was what you did when you wanted a baby? Either way, I knew just enough about human reproduction to be certain Sari’s aunt was right: the onions were meshugas.

And Mama didn’t want another baby. “I can’t do it this time,” she had cried to God. Maybe I’d misunderstood her Yiddish? But despite, no, because of my confusion about the pot of onions, I felt certain of what I’d heard her say, the words burned into me by the very strangeness of that moment when I stood in the kitchen doorway and couldn’t recognize my own mother. She had said, too, that women in America had little choice about getting married. Did that mean she didn’t love Papa?

With all that on my mind, I was less upset than I might have been when Danny got caught shoplifting at Chafkin’s, just before New Year’s. Besides, even Eddie Chafkin felt sorry for the Berlovs, so the punishment Eddie devised was relatively mild: Danny just had to do ten hours of work at the store, sweeping and helping in the stockroom, to atone for his crime.

What did upset me was that Danny stopped telling me his stories. Maybe it was because of his embarrassment over my letter or because I, his unquestioning listener, had confronted him over the stolen candy bars. Maybe getting caught stealing was too great a collision with reality.

I suppose the stories would have stopped, anyway. We turned twelve that spring, too old for childhood fantasies.

When we went to the beach the next summer, rather than taking walks with me, Danny got obsessed with the muscle men. He spent every minute hanging out where they lifted weights and ran errands for them, and the men took him under their wing and got him started on bodybuilding.

I lost Princess Verena. And I gained a new sister, Harriet.