The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,7

see any streets paved with gold?”

“Papa showed us the egg ranch!” Barbara said, focusing with an eight-year-old’s moral absolutism not on the nuances of immigrant hopes but on the black and white of whether we’d been lied to. “Uncle Leo took us on a drive into the San Fernando Valley, and Papa showed us where the ranch was.”

“Honey, of course we had the egg ranch. It’s not that Zayde—”

“Why don’t we have it anymore?” I demanded, suddenly seeing the holes that always gaped in Zayde’s stories. If his businesses were so successful, why did he keep abandoning them? If there was always money to be made, why weren’t we rich? Why, if we needed to go someplace by car, did we have to ask Uncle Leo—the bookstore-owning husband of Papa’s other sister, Sonya—to drive us? Why, as Mama never stopped complaining, did Papa break his back working for Mr. Fine at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, instead of having a business of his own like Leo did?

“Having a ranch with dozens of chickens,” Pearl said, “it’s not like people who have a little chicken coop behind their house. We didn’t know enough, or we were just unlucky. The chickens got sick and died.”

“What about the bookstore?” Barbara asked.

“The bookstore?”

“Where Zayde works now.”

“Gevult, what nonsense have they been filling your heads with?”

Pearl told us the truth gently, but she overestimated our maturity, our ability to balance the wrong done to us with understanding of the fragile pride that had motivated it. Barbara in particular heard what Zayde really did with the passion and violence of betrayal with which children experience any departure from their certainties about important adults in their lives.

“I’m going there,” Barbara said as soon as we left Pearl’s.

“We can’t, we aren’t supposed to,” I protested, even as I followed her to Brooklyn Avenue.

She charged down the street, which was busy with women shopping and newsboys screaming about problems with the stock market.

“Don’t you want to get buttermilk?” I grabbed her hand. Pearl had given us pennies, and we could treat ourselves to delicious paper cones of buttermilk at the dairy store.

Barbara stopped for a moment, turned, and thrust her face into mine. “I’m going. You can do what you want!”

It may sound as if I’m trying to avoid my share of guilt for what happened. Actually, I’m exposing my particular guilt at being a child who was cautious by nature. Everyone is fond of plucky children, kids who launch into adventures, even (within reason) kids who sass back. What about the girl who sits for a long time and watches other children going down the slide, whose legs quiver just from imagining how it will feel to stand at the top of that silver swoop into the unknown? I made up for it in time, I learned bravado—but back then I was my brash sister’s follower.

Barbara pushed through a nondescript door just past a dress shop—we kids all knew where these places of adult misdoing were located, just as we were aware of the bootleg schnapps Mr. Zakarin concocted in his tub—and ran up a dark, narrow flight of stairs. Then she paused at the threshold of a room. Standing a few steps behind her, I couldn’t see inside, I could only smell a fug of cigar smoke and hear what sounded like a radio.

“What can I do for you, sweetheart?” The man who spoke came over, and even though his words were friendly, he posed his thick, squat body in the door in a way that made Barbara take a step backward.

“Is Dov Greenstein here?” she said.

The man looked relieved. “You looking for Dov? You’ve come to the wrong place. Say, I’ll get word to him that you want him, okay? You girls go on home now.”

“Where is he, then?” Barbara said.

“I told you, be good girls and go home.”

This man was clearly used to children who were more docile than Barbara. While she declared that we would try every place like this on Brooklyn Avenue, so he might as well tell her which one Zayde worked in, I escaped into the radio broadcast, a baritone voice crooning, “In the fifth, it’s Excelsior, Excelsior takes first at six to one. That’s a six-to-one win for Excelsior. The favorite, Patrician, has to settle for second this time around, and Irish Eyes, beautiful Irish Eyes, comes in third.”

Barbara got the man to tell her where Zayde worked, and we stormed down Brooklyn and up another tight stairway with what