“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 lun
gs 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. Asshole 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 mome
nt 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.
The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 27