The Tin Horse: A Novel (37 page)

“But it’s called the OKay now?”

“She changed the name after the movie came out in the late fifties.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
? Great marketing decision.”

Here she is, in the ranch brochure, though the word
brochure
doesn’t do justice to a catalogue offering everything from river rafting to cattle drives to courses with naturalists to spa services; anyway, she’s perched astride a monstrous horse with the ease of someone born with a saddle attached to her butt. The ranch is run these days by her son, George Applegate Jr. Also photographed on horseback, he’s a bit paunchy but powerful, with a craggy Robert Mitchum face set off by thick silver hair. George junior looks like every dude’s fantasy—and like no one in my family.

As for Kay, even the earliest of these photos was taken nearly ten years after Barbara left, and the images are blotchy, probably copied from microfiche. The clearest photos—and the only ones in color—are from the rodeo anniversary spread and the ranch brochure, and in those Kay is in her late seventies or eighties. Her hair determinedly blond and her face a good-humored truce between plumpness and the leathery skin of years spent outdoors, she resembles … not Mama or me as we aged, or my other sisters. She looks more like the good ol’ gal who was governor of Texas.

I pick up the magnifying glass.

“It’s got to be her!” Josh sounds like a kid insisting there’s a Santa Claus.

I respond cautiously, “She’s the right height.” In group shots, everyone else towers over Kay. I wish I could make out her eye color. Or find one photo where, instead of her perpetual Mona Lisa smile, she’s got her mouth open, and I could look for a gap between her front teeth, a trait Papa bequeathed to all four of us.

“The right height and the right age,” he urges. “And her voice sounds like yours.”

“Her voice? Is there something online?” In spite of my determination to examine the facts calmly, I feel a surge of excitement.

“Well, actually …,” he says, uncharacteristically tentative, “I talked to her. On the phone.”

“You called her? What the hell were you thinking?” What was
I
thinking, trusting a twenty-four-year-old kid with something this delicate?

“I only called because—”

“Did you think this was some kind of game?”

“Of course not.” He reddens as if I’d slapped him. Good! “Elaine, just listen, please. I called because of the librarian. None of the newspaper archives are online, so I had to call and request everything. The librarian got suspicious about some guy from L.A. asking for everything they had on ‘Miz Kay.’ So I came up with a cover story. I said I was researching a documentary about women who were in the USO in World War II. And then I started thinking, seems like Cody’s so small, what if she says something to Miz Kay? I figured it’d be less suspicious if I called her myself.”

“What did you say?” All the weeks of carefully following every step of Kay Devereaux’s trail … how much damage has he done?

“That I’m just doing preliminary research, but was she available if I wanted to come out there and film an interview? Really, that’s all.” He risks a smile. “And don’t you need to know if she’s at her ranch or spending the winter in Florida? Aren’t you going to contact her?”

“I …” All of the times I’ve rehearsed in my mind what I’d say if I could talk to Barbara again—but it was the way I might fantasize a chat with Eleanor Roosevelt or Cleopatra. And I imagined talking to
Barbara
as she existed in my memory … not to the formidable reality of Kay Devereaux Cochran Applegate Farris Thorne.

If Kay Devereaux Applegate Farris Thorne
is
Barbara. I need to really examine the material Josh brought me, weigh the evidence.
Is her voice really like mine? Or is that just what Josh wanted to hear?

After he leaves, I go one by one through the newspaper articles; in neat chronological order, they let me follow Kay’s rise as a rodeo entertainer. But much more than that, they offer a window into her life. Every landmark
is there—marriages, divorces, births. She has three children: a daughter, Dana Cochran, born in 1949, and two sons, Timothy Cochran, born in 1952, and George Applegate Jr., born in 1957.

And Kay didn’t just get into the paper because of the rodeo; quite a few articles concern her business dealings. Along with running a successful dude ranch, she opened the area’s first multiplex cinema in the mid-1980s—a controversial move, since it raised fears that the multiplex would threaten a beloved 1930s movie palace. But Kay cherished the grand old theater as much as anyone, she told a reporter; in fact, she had loved going to the movies in such theaters when she was growing up. Where was that? the reporter asked. “All over,” she said evasively (to my mind). “My folks moved a lot.”

And maybe it was to make up for her evasiveness—she was, after all, trying to smooth ruffled feathers in the town—but then she opened up and said, “We used to call the movie theater the Polly Seed Opera House, because people brought sunflower seeds for snacks. By the end of the movie, you’d have hulls all over the floor.”

I read it again. And a third time. Boyle Heights can’t be the only place where people munched on sunflower seeds at the movies, I warn myself. Still, the Polly Seed Opera House! I dive into the rest of the articles, no longer reading carefully; now I’m skimming for clues. I come across obituaries for three of her four husbands, including the latest, Thorne; so she’s alone now, like I am. I see nothing else that shouts “Barbara” to me. But I’m too excited to concentrate; my eyes are jumping over the pages. I’ll give the articles a close read later. Right now my apartment feels far too small to contain me. I grab my jacket, purse. Hesitate for a breath, remembering what happened the last time I took out my agitation by driving. But nothing else will satisfy the urge to be in motion.

There’s just one thing I have to do first. I call my sister—Harriet—and invite her over for dinner tonight. This news belongs to her, too.

Then I jump in the Jag. I don’t care where I go; I just need to drive.

HARRIET COMES BY AT
seven-thirty, after seeing her last therapy client of the day.

“Yum, shrimp pad thai,” she says, lifting the lid off one of the containers of the takeout I picked up.

“And the other one’s chicken curry. Cabernet okay?” Better to let her settle in a bit before I break the news. And I wouldn’t mind having a glass of wine first. Okay, a second glass. I started on the cab before Harriet arrived, as I read the rest of the articles—and careened between gratitude that Barbara has had a good life and bitterness that if she was doing so well, then there’s no excuse for her not getting in touch with us.

“Cab’s perfect.” Harriet spoons generous portions of rice, shrimp, and chicken onto her plate and sighs with contentment at her first bite.

Harriet might be described in English by the soulless, clinical term
overweight
, but really she’s
zaftig
, the Yiddish far truer to my youngest sister’s sexy plumpness and appetite for experience. A
zaftig
gal chomps off as big a bite of life as she can get her jaws around and chews with gusto. I’ve been thinking of Harriet, but I realize I could be describing Kay; she certainly looks like a woman who wouldn’t pass up a succulent prime rib or a slice of chocolate cake.

I, on the other hand, am one of those boring women who count calories. Except for the negligible calories in wine. When I refill my glass a third time, Harriet gives me a sharp look.

“You said we had to talk,” she says. “What’s up?”

She’s as impatient with beating around the bush as I am. But I’ve had the chance to absorb all this in bits and pieces over two months, and I try to ease in.

“Remember those boxes of papers I came across, from Mama’s apartment? Well, I found this in one of them.” I take Philip’s card from the top of the documents I’ve stacked on the chair next to me.

She stares at the card for a moment. “Philip Marlowe … would he have come to the house to see Mama when I was six or seven? A big man—muscular big, not fat?”

“That sounds like him.”

“And he was a detective!” Harriet spears a shrimp. “Funny the ideas kids get. I remember thinking he was some kind of doctor. Mama shooed me out of the house so she could talk to him in private. A detective! Was Mama in some kind of trouble? And who was Kay Devereaux?”

I had hoped that seeing the card would prepare her a little. But she was so young, and clearly she was told nothing about what Philip was doing for our family.

“Harriet.” My tone makes her put down her fork and meet my eyes. “What if Kay Devereaux was Barbara?”

“Our sister Barbara?” she says dubiously.

I nod.

“Lainie, it’s just a card.”

“It’s only the first thing I found.”

I launch into the story, showing her the “evidence” in the order in which I found it: Philip’s case file, the photo of Colorado Springs entertainers who joined the USO, articles about Kay Devereaux’s marriage in Berlin and her life in Wyoming. Harriet skims the various documents and throws out an occasional request for clarification, but she doesn’t react, not even to the reference to the Polly Seed Opera House. It’s as if her mind were a quiet pool receiving everything I say with barely a ripple. Her calm is a bit unnerving. On the other hand, I recognize what Harriet is doing: she’s falling back on her professional identity, in which she feels confident and in control. She’s hearing me out as if I were a patient in therapy … just as I’m presenting my case the way I would in court.

She continues acting the therapist after I finish, her gaze compassionate and her voice soothing. “I know how much you’ve wanted to find her. Seeing that card and then the detective’s file, you must have felt it had to mean something.”

“I did find her.” I start to spread the newspaper clippings over the table, amid our plates and takeout cartons.

“Wait a second!” She holds up her hand. “You don’t have to convince me that you tracked down this woman Kay from Colorado Springs. But if she’d turned out to be Barbara, Mama and Papa would have told us.”

“That’s what I thought at first, too. But the Polly Seed Opera House?”

“Back in the twenties and thirties, that was probably a nickname for movie theaters all over the country. Come on. Do you really see Barbara ending up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere?”

“Look what she made of her life! She figured out a way, living in the back of beyond, to be a star!” I argue, even as doubt trickles into me. The
comment about the Polly Seed Opera House is the only “proof” I’ve found. The remainder of the articles yielded no other ahas.

“Lainie.” She takes my hands. “I can only imagine what it must mean to you to think you’ve found her—your twin sister.”

“You sound like you
don’t
want to find her!” I throw out, bristling at the possibility that I’m being blinded by my desire … not just to find Barbara but to claim for her the successful, colorful narrative in the articles about Kay. The woman posed on the back of a powerful horse like she owns the world, that’s who I want Barbara to be.

Harriet reaches for the nearly empty bottle of Cabernet. “Share the rest?”

“It’s all yours.”

She pours the wine, takes a sip. “Most of
my
memories of Barbara are about her leaving and the impact it had on everyone else. Before that … Every so often, this glamorous older girl who smelled fantastic—I remember this wonderful perfume—”

“Shalimar.”

“Every so often she noticed me, and this cloud of Shalimar swooped down and kissed me or sang me a song. But she wasn’t around a lot. Wasn’t she always going to Hollywood for something?”

“Dance classes. The Horton School. She had a scholarship. Harriet, you have to remember that!” I say when she looks vague. It’s not just that Barbara’s scholarship and her success at the dance school were family triumphs. But the eagerness with which she ran to Hollywood, her hunger for a life outside Boyle Heights, were iconic parts of our family story—the kind of events you look back on when you’re trying to understand what happened later.

“That’s my point,” Harriet says. “I had nothing like your connection with her. I told you when you brought this up earlier, I was ambivalent about the idea of finding her. And I was only thinking then about how fraught it would be to try to contact her. But this! If finding her means I have to accept that this detective tracked her down and told Mama and Papa, and they never told us … Jesus!” She gets up and paces, as if she’d like to walk away from all of this. “You’re asking me to trade the old, dull pain of being abandoned by a sister I barely knew for the pain of feeling so
betrayed by Mama and Papa I want to go to the cemetery and scream at their graves. I hate it that after all these years, Barbara could poison my memory of them. Now,
that
sounds like the Barbara I remember, poisoning everything.”

Her rage, I feel it, too. Yet in spite of it, every time I look at the photos of Kay in her Western regalia and think
Barbara
, my heart lifts.

“So you do think it could be her?” I venture.

Harriet’s gaze goes inward, a look so like Pearl’s fierce concentration that for a moment it’s my aunt in the room with me.

“You have some pictures of Barbara, don’t you?” she says. “Say, from when you were in high school?”

My photo albums are actually organized; Carol put them in order when she helped me unpack last month. I find the right album, while Harriet brings a bright standing lamp over next to the table. She gets out her reading glasses—I give her the magnifying glass, too—and she starts to look back and forth between photos of Barbara and shots of Kay Devereaux. Forcing myself to give her some space, I go into the kitchen and make a pot of decaf. And I bought one of those giant brownies they sell these days; I cut it into four normal-sized pieces and put them on a plate. Then, having run out of distractions, I hover—I can’t help myself—as Harriet scrutinizes photos under the magnifying glass.

Looking over her shoulder, I see Kay in her thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond, and I remind myself that these same photos didn’t convince me this afternoon. But now it’s not just that I glimpse Barbara in the curve of Kay’s cheeks or the assertiveness of her stance; rather, it’s the kind of primal recognition that happens on parents’ day at summer camp, when you scan the crowd of kids and zoom in on
your
son,
your
daughter. What if I had kept my discovery of Kay to myself? I wonder. Might it have been enough simply to
believe
I knew who and where Barbara was, a last filament of connection far too delicate to expose to a cooler mind like Harriet’s?