The Tin Horse: A Novel (44 page)

“He wanted to be an
artist
,” Philip sneered. “You must have scared him. Sounds like he ran a 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 stopped glaring at him.

“Phew! I can see why Alan Yardley repented of his evil ways and went off to have visions in the desert.”

I had no idea what his cryptic comment meant, but the important news was that he knew something about Yardley. “Did you see him?”

“Yup. You were on the money about him. He’s okay.”

“What did he say about Barbara?”

“As you suspected, she went to Yardley after you caught her with the boyfriend. Seems she felt safe with him. Good instincts, like you. They did, as he so delicately put it, another modeling session; she wanted the money. Then he and his wife put her up that night at their house. Maybe I’m getting all schoolgirlish and gullible, but I think he was on the level, no hanky-panky.”

I nodded. “I’ve met his wife.”

“Next day, he drove her to her bank downtown and then to the train station in Riverside.”

“Why all the way out there?” Riverside was a good fifty miles from Los Angeles. If she was going to get on a train anyway, why not catch it in the city?

“Apparently she was worried that your family might show her picture around the train stations. She didn’t want anyone coming after her.”

Even though I’d accepted by now that Barbara had been planning her escape, it stunned me to understand how thoroughly she’d anticipated our moves and preemptively foiled them. Had she been that desperate to get away?

“Eat your steak,” Philip said. “It’s good for you.”

I’d barely noticed that a steaming T-bone had been placed in front of me. I dutifully ate a couple of bites.

“I suppose Yardley lied about helping her leave because he’d promised her?” I said.

He nodded. “Can’t say I hold his former profession in high regard, but I’d say he was a man of his word.”

“Then why did he tell you now?”

“Funny thing,” he said with a wolfish grin. “I’m told I’m the kind of fellow people can’t stop themselves from confiding in. And by this time, who at the Riverside train station is going to remember her?”

“Did your persuasive powers extend to getting him to divulge where she went?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know or wouldn’t say?”

He chuckled. “I should have brought you with me. You got him to quit taking dirty pictures and dedicate his life to art. Maybe you could have—”

“
What
are you talking about?”

“It was that visit from you that made him decide to get out of the smut business.” He raised an amused eyebrow, and my volatile, touchy mood returned.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I wouldn’t do that. According to Yardley, meeting you changed his life. Taking a hard look at what he did through your eyes. In fact, he asked me to give you this. To thank you.”

He handed me the parcel he’d brought into the restaurant. I unwrapped it. It was one of Yardley’s desert photographs: sand, scrub, and sky exquisitely etched in black and white.

“Does he think that makes what he did all right? I don’t want it,” I said, even as I imagined how beautiful the photograph would be on my wall, and something in me felt glad that Yardley was living in the desert he loved. But I was wretched that night, on the verge of either tears or rage, and I chose rage.

“Well, it doesn’t really go with my décor,” Philip said. “Keep it, anyway. It might be worth something one day. So Yardley’s story was, your sister told him she was going to stick a pin in a train schedule and decide that way.”

“How could he let her do that? She was only eighteen.”

“He figured she had enough money—and enough moxie—to take care of herself.”

“If we got the schedule of trains that left Riverside that afternoon—”

“Elaine.” He regarded me with what looked infuriatingly like pity. I wanted to slap him. “You figured it out for yourself. She’d been planning
her getaway for a long time. She did work that she may have found demeaning so she could save up the money to leave. She went to the trouble of catching a train in another city so she couldn’t be followed. Sweetheart, look, for some people, it’s not enough to leave the family nest. Some people—for reasons they probably can’t explain themselves—feel like they’re running for their lives.”

“People in my family
did
run for their lives!” I said. “My grandfather was being chased by men who wanted to kill him. My mother, if she hadn’t gotten out of Romania … do you know what’s happening there now?”

“I think I have some general idea.”

“No, you don’t! You have
no
idea.”

Later, I understood that I reacted so strongly because what he’d just said and the new evidence he’d brought me suggested something I refused to
think
: that Barbara had eagerly, happily, severed everything that connected her to us. To me. It made me feel blotted out of existence. Not just who I was now, but the dual identity I’d had from the moment of my birth seventeen minutes after hers: Barbara-and-Elaine, “we.”

“Where are you going to look next?” I asked, my eyes daring him to suggest giving up the search.

“I think I’ll go get chummy with a few chorus girls. Chorus girls seem to appreciate my charm.” He gave me such a woeful grin, I had to laugh.

I had another drink, and we settled into the flirting and bantering of our previous dinners.

The flirting didn’t mean anything. Philip inhabited a different Los Angeles than I did, a city where people carried guns and had their first drink of the day before lunch, a place where the most ordinary conversations crackled with sexual innuendo. He flirted with me as instinctively, as insignificantly, as he breathed. I knew that.

But I was in a reckless mood. The war, the tension I’d been feeling with Paul, and now having to imagine Barbara running for her life—running from me. When Philip was driving me home after dinner, I pressed close to him and kissed him.

“Well,” he said. He turned onto a side street and pulled the car over to a curb.

He kissed me back. For a moment. Then he gently pushed me away.

“Can we go to your apartment?” I said. Despite the cocktails I’d had, I wasn’t drunk. I wanted to live in his Los Angeles, if only for that evening.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re not that kind of girl. You’d hate yourself in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Then
I’d
hate myself in the morning.”

“Liar,” I teased. My fingers darted to his crotch, confirmed that he was hard.

He grabbed my wrist so tightly I yelped. “Cut it out. Go sit over there.” He directed me to the edge of the seat, next to the window.

In silence, he drove me home.

Philip was right. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I felt guilty for even thinking of cheating on Paul. And I dreaded seeing the detective the next time. Should I pretend nothing had happened? Apologize for acting like an idiot and blame it on too many drinks? I decided to take my cue from him; he had surely weathered awkward situations like this one. But weeks passed, and I didn’t hear from him. Finally, in late January, I called and reached him at his office. In a terse, uncomfortable conversation—had he been embarrassed, too?—he said he’d struck out with the chorus girls, and I could consider our trade completed.

I said goodbye to Barbara then. What else could I do? I was saying so many goodbyes in 1942. Paul enlisted in the army. All of the boys were going to war.

A
N IMMENSITY OF SNOW COVERS THE PLAINS STRETCHING TO THE
horizon on either side of the highway. The road itself looks clear, but the woman who rented us the Explorer at the Cody airport warned us about black ice.

“Highway surface’ll look fine, but there’s a coat of transparent ice on it,” she said. “Gotta keep testing your traction.”

The warning came too late. I’m out of control already: I’ve been lurching and careening as I booked flights and hotel rooms for Josh and me, aired out my wool coat, bought snow boots, and duplicated family photographs to bring. It’s all happened in just the past week since Josh brought me the information about Kay Thorne. I told myself I had to act quickly to get this trip in during Josh’s winter break … as if I were somehow orchestrating this headlong rush. In truth, it’s like falling down a flight of stairs.

I did that once; it must have been thirty years ago. One minute I was starting down the stairs from the bedroom, carrying a stack of files and thinking about the case I was working on; the next I was hurtling at a remarkable velocity yet with enough time to marvel at how fast a
130-pound woman could travel—and at my utter inability, despite kicking out at the railings, to stop. When I landed finally at the foot of the staircase, I lay still for a minute, amid a flurry of escaped papers, and scanned my body for anything that hurt so much I shouldn’t try to get up on my own. I was lucky. I suffered nothing worse than two broken toes. Later I could summon a distinct picture of taking the first steps onto the stairs, and I vividly, with a sort of detached curiosity, remembered the fall itself. What I couldn’t retrieve was the instant when my feet went out from under me.