The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,110

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