The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,139

few months later … What’s the matter?”

“I’m thinking what an idiot I was. I liked Alan Yardley.”

“Why?”

“I suppose because he was good at feeding me a line, and I was naive enough to believe him.”

To my surprise, Philip said, “You’re smarter than that. Tell me what you liked about him.” He listened intently when I explained about Yardley’s gentleness and said that his quietly beautiful photographs made me feel as if the earth possessed a deep, inherent order that would outlast all of the chaos that humans unleashed upon it.

He wouldn’t be able to follow up right away, Philip said, but he sometimes got jobs that took him out Yardley’s way, and he’d drop in on the photographer then.

A few weeks later, I got another assignment and another dinner, though no new information. Philip had a job coming up, however, that would take him to Palm Springs, and he should be able to make a side trip to Twentynine Palms to talk to Yardley.

That dinner took place during the first week in December.

On that Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All of Los Angeles, all of the country, went into turmoil. On Monday the United States declared war on Japan; declarations of war against Germany and Italy followed three days later. Many of the boys I knew enlisted immediately; there were long lines outside every recruiting center.

Paul resisted the rush to war. Like a number of my male classmates, he planned to wait until the end of the semester, which was just six weeks away; there’d still be plenty of war left to fight, he said. I understood that after fighting in Spain, Paul had no boyish illusions of glory, and he hardly needed to prove his courage; that was one of the things I loved about him, that he was an adult, a man. And the thought of him going to war and risking his life filled me with anguish. Yet I had caught war fever, too; how could I not? Every time another Boyle Heights boy enlisted or a former classmate strode across campus in his uniform, I felt a thrill of pride. I was filled with urgency to act now, not to schedule the war after exams. I never said any of this to Paul, because I understood that he was acting rationally while the rest of us danced to a primal drumbeat, but his coolheadedness enraged me. I was furious at myself, too: how dared I judge him when no one expected me to put on a uniform and be willing to die?

Constantly on edge, I woke up every morning tense and snarly after disturbing dreams, and I threw inflammatory adjectives into papers I wrote. At least when school was in session, I could sit in my private funk in classes. Over Christmas break, I worked full-time at the bookstore, and I had to act pleasant all day.

With so much craziness going on, it wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that I saw Philip again. We got off on the wrong foot from the start. He was carrying a large, flat parcel wrapped in white paper under his arm—had he gotten me a Christmas gift? I didn’t have anything for him, but was I supposed to? It was one of those awkward moments when I felt as clueless about American culture as a greenhorn just off the boat. Then he made it worse. We were walking from his car to the steak place, and he said, “Do you know him?”

“Who?”

“That Jew.” He nodded toward Rosen’s Jewelers, where an olive-skinned man with wavy hair about the color of mine lounged in the doorway. Wearing no coat despite the chilly evening, the man looked as if he worked in the store and had stepped out to take a break. Perhaps he was Rosen himself.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

It was nothing, a stray comment from a man who’d asked me about Boyle Heights as if it were on another planet. But I suppose it made me even testier than I was already, quicker to take offense.

In the restaurant, after we got our drinks, he said, “You’d make a good cop.”

“Is that a compliment?” I shot back.

“Take it easy, sugar.”

“Well, you don’t have the highest opinion of cops.”

“A good cop, was what I said. Would you like to hear why? Or would you prefer to take that steak knife and stick it through me?”

“Sorry. It’s … everything.” I took a sip of my drink and