The Tin Horse: A Novel (24 page)

“She didn’t mean it. Poor thing, the letter was covered with splotches from her tears. And in the next letter I got from her, a few months later, she said she and Bill had just gotten married.”

“Did she try out for the play?” I asked.

“Funny, I guess she never said. But don’t ask her. Like I said, this is between you and me. Okay?”

I nodded.

I spent the rest of the day hiding with Mollie at the beauty salon. In the early evening a union man came and drove her to her rally, then gave me a ride home.

OVER THE NEXT FEW
weeks, my cousin Mollie made history. She gained recognition for the Los Angeles dressmakers’ union and settled the strike. Then she was gone, sent by the union to the next city where working people needed her help.

The more I thought about what she’d told me, the surer I felt that Mama
had
tried out for the play, that she defied Papa just as she’d defied her parents by running away. And perhaps, if she’d still been the twelve-year-old who’d enchanted audiences in Romania—if she had retained any of the innocent hope that moved people to tears—she might have gotten a starring role and had a very different life. First the Yiddish theater, then the moving pictures that were beginning to be made in Los Angeles. But she hadn’t been that hopeful girl anymore. And I understood why.

I thought I understood why Mama had changed so much … and why she would never whisper a word of how she had really come to America. I
saw that what I had heard as an adventure tale, about her traveling with the
fusgeyers
, was in fact a love story. Mama’s real theme was the great love of her life, between her and her adoring brother Meyr. How could she ever tell that story, if she had to admit that Meyr hadn’t sent for her and that he’d let his wife work her like a domestic servant?

Beneath the anger that simmered perpetually in my mother, I saw the cruel disappointment. My heart broke for her. And at the same time, I wanted to repudiate her. I wanted never to be thwarted and chronically angry like she was.

I promised myself … it wasn’t that I wanted to become exactly like Mollie. But I wanted to occupy Mollie’s world, that spacious realm in which people didn’t just worry about “me and mine” and who said what at the fish store today; instead, they passionately discussed ideas and fought for better lives for everyone. Decades later, I would encounter the Hebrew term
tikkun olam
, “repairing the world”—working for social justice, speaking out not only when your rights are stepped on but when anyone is denied justice. Mollie, whatever her flaws, had dedicated herself to the impossible, magnificent task of repairing the world, and she was leading the most meaningful life of anyone I had ever met. The kind of life I vowed to live.

A
H, THANKSGIVING!

I wake up on Thanksgiving morning feeling … not terrific, that would be too much to ask for just two weeks after my car accident. But for the first time since the accident, I’d dare to call myself “energetic”—and looking forward to my favorite holiday.

I put on a sweat suit, pop
Tai Chi for Osteoporosis
into the DVD player in the den, and do my morning exercise. I’m still creaky and moving gingerly, but between my regular tai chi and water aerobics, I was in good shape for an eighty-five-year-old prior to the accident, and my doctor says I’m making “an A-plus recovery.” I quoted the doctor to Ronnie and Harriet when I pushed to host Thanksgiving dinner here, as we’d planned. They didn’t really try to talk me out of it. This will be our last Thanksgiving in the Santa Monica house, and they want it, too.

Thanksgiving is the one holiday that never held any traps for me. Not like Rosh HaShanah or Passover or Purim, which stirred up a maelstrom
of feelings, my parents’—and later, Paul’s and my—pleasure in the traditions and special foods coexisting with discomfort at old-country religiosity. And there was a sense of otherness about the Jewish holidays, of being separate from mainstream America, that brought up a complicated mix of pride and alienation. And fear: both Zayde and my mother had experienced pogroms in their shtetls, and when my kids were young in the 1950s, we were only a decade away from the Holocaust.

As for the holidays celebrated by mainstream America, Christmas especially became inescapable—and hugely tempting—when my generation settled outside Boyle Heights. Every December, most of the houses on our block in Santa Monica were festooned with twinkling lights, and the choir and orchestra at the kids’ school gave a concert filled with glorious carols and Handel. One year, Paul and I gave in to the kids’ pleading and got a tree—of course, emphasizing that our family didn’t believe in Jesus, calling the tree a Hanukkah bush, and topping it with a silver Star of David. It was Papa, whom I’d seen as my assimilated parent, who refused to set foot in our house as long as the tree occupied the living room. (We moved it into the den.)

Thanksgiving, however, is celebrated by everyone fortunate enough to live in America. And we were happily, without a whiff of ambivalence, Americans.

Once I’ve done my tai chi, I prepare my contribution to our Thanksgiving feast, pumpkin pies. I’m nowhere near the cook Mama was, but pumpkin pie is easy as long as you use pre-made crust; it’s hardly fair, but you get rave reviews for doing nothing but following the directions on a can of pumpkin and providing plenty of whipped cream.

The pies are baking and I’m eating cornflakes and reading the
Los Angeles Times
when Ronnie arrives. It’s not even nine, but coming early to help was the condition he set, in our negotiation about having Thanksgiving here.

“Coffee!” He makes a beeline for the coffeepot, this six-footer who mysteriously emerged from Paul’s and my compact family lines.

I may be the only one who calls him Ronnie, now that Paul’s gone, but I still look at him—a gangly fifty-one-year-old whose fringe of hair, surrounding a bald spot, is more salt than pepper—and see the relentlessly
logical boy who could outlast
me
in an argument. A born lawyer, as Cousin Mollie used to call me. Ronnie’s mind works like mine, as if all the cogs and connections were built from the same materials and set of instructions. My easy child. (Carol won’t be here. She’s coming down from Oregon in two weeks to help me with the move.)

Over coffee, I ask him about his work. We’re still talking, debating strategy for one of his cases, when Harriet comes over at ten. And then it’s not too early, and there’s plenty to do.

Ronnie gets the turkey, a twenty-five-pounder, into the oven, and then he, Harriet, and I figure out where to put extra tables and chairs. We’re having a real gathering of the clan, twenty-two people, to bid farewell to the Santa Monica house, whose large dining room and yard made it the primary site for family events, even several weddings in the backyard. The yard is beautiful, still. I took out tension by gardening. Oh, I’m going to miss the garden, especially the fig tree, grown from a cutting I took from the tree behind our house in Boyle Heights.

By one, starting time for the touch football game at a nearby park, nearly everyone has arrived. Ronnie’s wife, Melissa, insists on holding down the fort, staying in the house to baste the turkey and welcome any later arrivals, and I join the trek to the park two blocks away. Younger, fitter family members have brought lawn chairs and set them up for the spectators. I sit next to Harriet—and debate, as I have for the past two weeks, whether to tell her what I’ve found out about Barbara.

But what
have
I found out, really? Only that some hotel detective in Colorado Springs thought she might be a blonde named Kay Devereaux. I’ve done a bit of investigating since Josh dropped that bombshell, and I’ve discovered just one thing I’m sure of: the threatening reach of the Internet into every corner of our lives is overrated. For example, you can get online records of marriage licenses issued in Colorado Springs
if
the marriage occurred after 1981; otherwise, as I learned the old-fashioned way by making a phone call, you have to go to the county clerk’s office and search microfilm—and there’d be acres of it, since I have no date for her marriage. Not to mention that I have no idea if she even stayed in Colorado Springs or got married there.

I’ve considered taking Josh up on his offer to help me search. Or hiring
a detective, someone based in Colorado. But how far do I want to pursue this? Say I did find her, might I regret it? And the greater likelihood is that I’d invest time, money, and emotional energy, yet come up empty-handed. All over again. There’s so little to go on—only her name and the fact that she worked at the Broadmoor Hotel in … I don’t even know that, because Carl Logan didn’t date his letter. But it must have been in the early 1940s, during the time—or not long afterward—that Philip was looking for her. And then … did Mama and Papa write her a letter? But why didn’t Papa jump on the first train to Colorado Springs? And why didn’t they tell me? Did they imagine they were protecting me? I had a right to know!

“Earth to Lainie,” Harriet says.

“Yeah.” I turn to my sister, who’s wearing a Day-Glo lime green jacket and a Dodgers baseball cap.

“Are you doing okay with all of this? The move?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m thankful. For all of this. For them.” I nod my head toward our progeny scrapping and yelling over the football. “And for you. What about you, what are you thankful for?”

“The same. And I’m grateful that you only drove into a cactus when you … um, got it into your head to drive to Barstow.” The look in Harriet’s eye reminds me of Mama in those moments when I suspected she could see through me.

“Know what else I’m thankful for?” I say. “That we don’t have to play football anymore.”

“Nobody forced you to play.”

“Ha! First I had to because all the Kennedy women played.” Our Thanksgiving touch football tradition began in 1960, a few weeks after JFK was elected. Not that Paul and I were naive enough to mistake Kennedy for a real progressive, but who could resist the sense of hope, the youthful energy of those rollicking, tousle-haired Boston Irish Democrats? “Then it was because of the women’s movement, having to set an example for our kids.”

“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

“Much.”

“Good. Look, there’s something I’ve been thinking about since the day
we went through those papers and books. But I didn’t want to bring it up right after your accident …”

“What is it?”

“About Barbara.”

“Barbara?” Did I say something out loud a moment ago? Or can my Wise Woman sister simply read my mind?

“You were asking, what if we could find her now. And I wondered, did you ever mourn for her?”

“Of course I did! The day she left, I cried my eyes out. At Pearl’s.” Even as I say it, though, I realize my mistake. It’s true, I sobbed at Pearl’s—the memory of my tears drenching the love seat is so strong, I can almost feel damp brocade under my cheek. But that happened the day before Barbara left. And my tears weren’t for her.

“I mean grieving,” Harriet says. “Acknowledging the loss. Saying goodbye.”

“Like sitting shiva? I couldn’t do that unless I knew she was dead.” And I happen to know, because I’ve checked the Social Security Death Index, that there’s no death record for a Kay Devereaux who’d be anywhere near the right age.

I have to tell Harriet! She has a right to know, too.

“Not sitting shiva,” she says. “But what about creating some kind of ritual? We could do it together. Maybe on a trip to Rancho La Puerta this spring?”

“Definitely yes on the trip to Rancho La Puerta.” We used to do an annual sister trip to the spa just south of the border, she, Audrey, and I, but we’ve gone less often since Audrey died (like Zayde and Papa, she had a stroke) six years ago.

“And think about doing a ritual?”

“Sure, I’ll think about it.”

I won’t bring up what I’ve found now, during a holiday celebration. But sometime this weekend …

Still, it’s one thing to have been told at the time, when there were decisions to make and things to do. All these years later, what do I achieve by sharing this news with Harriet except to torment her, too, with the
suspicion that Mama and Papa lied about something that caused us such anguish? Our family tragedy, the loss that, she’s right, we never mourned. Did we ever even call it a “loss,” did we use that word? At first, when we found Barbara’s note and couldn’t locate her, she had simply “left.” Over the following weeks and months, she’d “run away.”

Her leaving wasn’t like a death, unconditional. Clean. Marked by ceremonies brilliant in their power to tighten the screws on your anguish and push you into the physical release of weeping.
Now
you walk to the edge of the grave, jab a shovel into the damp, freshly dug earth, and drop the earth on the casket.
Now
you retreat from ordinary life for seven days, not going out and covering the mirrors.
Now
, when the seven days are over, the rabbi takes you on a walk around the block to symbolize your return to life.

Shiva or not, I’ve long been reconciled to Barbara being gone; I accepted it years ago. And yet, on this sunny Thanksgiving afternoon, as I wonder if I might have known where she was, might at least have known
that
she was, if it hadn’t been kept from me … I feel the hole her disappearance left in my life as if the ground has ruptured and swallowed my children.