The Tin Horse: A Novel (47 page)

“C
AN I
?”
I REACH FOR THE HORSE. MY HAND IS SHAKING, AND TEARS
well in my eyes.

Jen looks confused, but she takes off the necklace and hands it to me.

Barbara jumps in. “It reminds Elaine of when we were in the USO together. The horse was my good-luck charm.… Brings it all back, doesn’t it, Elaine?”

I’m weeping as I clutch the horse, feeling the surprisingly smooth edges—did Zayde make it that way, or did Barbara hold it so often she wore it smooth? She took the horse when she left. She
treasured
it.

I feel her hand on my knee. She’s pulled her chair around so she’s facing me. “Have some cocoa. Drink.” Gently she takes the tin horse from my fingers and holds out the cup.

The cocoa is delicious, as promised—and well laced: I can taste the Scotch behind the chocolate. I glance around for Jen, but she must have slipped out of the room.

“How could you let us go?” I implore, finally giving voice to the question
I have asked her in my imagination so many times. “How could you bear to live the rest of your life apart from us?”

She takes a swig of cocoa, then says, “I don’t think I can make you understand.
I
don’t understand why I do most things; I just do them. I’m sorry I hurt you. Really. And I did miss you. Sometimes in Europe during the war, I felt so lonely, and I’d get out an aerogram and write ‘Dear Elaine’ or ‘Dear Mama.’ But I never finished any of those letters—and don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you. I’m not like you. I don’t take things apart. I just put one foot in front of the other. One day at a time.”

One more cliché, and I’ll throw my cocoa in her face. Could she really have cut us off with so little thought or regret? I understand that she isn’t reflective by nature; she operated on instinct. But she wasn’t just instinctual, she was secretive; I remember how opaque she became once she started leading a separate life in Hollywood. And now she’s had a lifetime of keeping secrets—she’s a pro. Still, I’m determined to get behind the barricade of platitudes.

“In Europe, when you didn’t finish those aerograms, you were just in your twenties,” I say. “But what about later? Why didn’t you let us know when you got married?”

She reaches for a cinnamon roll. “If we don’t do justice to these, I’ll never be able to explain it to Lynn. I’ll have to feed them to the dogs.”

“Fine.” I pick up a pastry and bring it to my mouth.

“Good, yes?”

The prizewinning pastry dances in my mouth, warm yeasty dough and sugar and cinnamon. But I persist. “When you had your first child, didn’t you want Mama to know she had a grandchild?”

“Bet you were one hell of a lawyer,” she grumbles. “What is it they say these days? ‘It’s complicated’? I met Rich, my first husband, when I was in Berlin, and I told him the same thing I was telling everyone—that my folks were dead, and I didn’t have any other family. By the time it got serious, I knew him well enough to know that if he found out I’d lied to him, he’d never let me forget it.” She gives a tight smile. “Richard Cochran turned out to be one mean, jealous bastard. Handsome, though.”

“But you divorced him. What about after that?”

She heaves a dramatic sigh. “Look, by the time I threw Rich out, everyone
knew me as a girl who had no family. Even my own kids! And why would I want to tell anyone … That’s just it. What would I have told them—who I
really
was? It’s like I said, Barbara was the lie; trying to be her was killing me.”

“Would you have told Rich if your last name were Jones instead of Greenstein?”

“It was sixty years ago. And
my
last name was Devereaux.”

“You don’t just stop being Jewish, like canceling a magazine subscription.”

“Would that satisfy you, Lainie? Would you feel like you got what you came here for if I said the reason I didn’t contact you was that I didn’t want anyone to know I was Jewish?”

Would it?
In that story, this wild place under its endless sky becomes a bunker in which my gutsy sister hid from a world that scared her. Hid from herself. And me? She said it:
I
was the brave one.

“Not,” she says, “that I think anyone in their right mind would be Jewish if they had a choice about it. I was in Berlin for a year after the war. Everywhere, you’d see the DPs, the people who’d been in concentration camps.” She shudders. “But it wasn’t that. It was the family, Boyle Heights, that claustrophobic little world. Lainie, it was different for you. People always expected you to go to college and make something of yourself. Know what I heard from everyone—Mama, Papa, my teachers, even Pearl? That the best I could hope for was to marry a good provider. Look at this!” She gestures toward the window and the ranch beyond. “I haven’t done too badly. If I’d stayed in Boyle Heights, sure, I might have married some doctor and had a life of PTA and charity lunches and a house in the Valley … and I would have gone out of my mind.”

A song from a musical tinkles in my mind:
You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?
Did she have to get out in order to imagine herself? The thought brings a glimmer of understanding. But only a glimmer. I recognize that there are terrible impulses, even the will to murder, lurking in the crevices of my own psyche. But what she did … I remember Danny pointing at her chest and crying, “What’s in there? Do you have a heart?”

“You felt trapped, and you had to get away, all right,” I say. “But didn’t
you have a shred of compassion for us? At the very least, you could have written and let us know you’d landed on your feet, that you hadn’t gotten murdered in some alley …”

“What are you talking about?” she says, indignant. “You knew that.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Elaine, come on! A couple of years after I left—it was the spring after Pearl Harbor—somehow you found out my name and where I worked in Colorado Springs.… Why are you shaking your head? Mama wrote to me there.”

As on the day I found Barbara’s dance programs, I feel as if I were standing beside the Los Angeles River in the rain, but this time the flash flood roars from the mountains and smashes into me. Mama and Papa
did
know, and they kept it from me. This is what I’ve suspected for some time; it shouldn’t come as a huge shock. But hearing her confirm it … It reminds me of when Paul died. No matter that I’d heard the terminal diagnosis months earlier and watched him gradually slip away, or that the home hospice staff had walked me through what was going to happen. Still, the actual moment when I heard his death rattle and then the agonized breathing stopped, I refused to accept it. I kept talking to him, touching his cheek,
willing
him to flutter his eyelids. What Barbara’s telling me can’t be true.

“Elaine, what’s wrong?” Barbara says.

“They never told me.”

“What, about Mama writing to me?” Her voice goes thin.

“About anything! About your new name or that they’d found out where you were.”

“But you’re here,” Barbara insists. “How else could you track me down?”

As I’m telling her about finding Philip’s card, her face crumples. “Excuse me,” she says, and does her best to hustle out of the room; but her arthritic limbs slow her down, and as she goes through the door, I hear a sob.

I get up, too, and pace, looking out the window at her glorious view and trying again to comprehend my parents’ silence, sifting the information I’ve just heard into the speculations that have obsessed me for the past two months.

So it was true, as I’d thought, that Mama wrote a letter to the woman Philip had found. And then? No matter what explanation I come up with—that she and Papa couldn’t be sure the woman was Barbara, or Barbara wrote a reply so hateful that Mama couldn’t even bear to keep the letter—nothing makes me understand how they could deny us the comfort of thinking they’d found her. What did Harriet say when I told her? That she felt so betrayed she wanted to go to the cemetery and scream at Mama’s and Papa’s graves. That’s how I feel now.

Fifteen minutes have passed, and I’m about to find my way back to the living room, when Barbara returns. She looks like she’s put on fresh mascara, but her eyes are red and puffy, and she says ruefully, “Aren’t we a couple of sob sisters?” Then she takes a deep breath. “You really didn’t know. Mama didn’t tell you.”

“No.”

“Jesus. Mama said, but I never believed she meant it. After I got her letter, I kept thinking Papa was going to show up on the next train. And you, Elaine—I was sure I’d get a letter from you. Unless you hated me so much you never wanted to see me again. You had plenty of reason to feel that way.”

“Are you saying you wanted to hear from me?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I …” She picks at the crumbs of cinnamon roll on her plate. “Mama reamed me, and I figured it was nothing compared to what I’d get from you.”

“Would you have written back?”

She thinks about it, then says, “I’d like to tell you yes, but how can I put myself in the state of mind I was in back then? Getting Mama’s letter threw me for such a loop, and everything was crazy then—the war, and I’d signed up for the USO. What I remember, the one thing I can swear is true, is that after I heard from her, every day I looked for a letter from you. I’d go to the office in the hotel where they sorted the mail.…” Her eyes go distant, as if she’s seeing it. “I never, ever believed Mama would keep her promise. Elaine, I am so sorry.”

I struggle to take it in, hugging myself … as if I could contain the tumult inside me. All of the years when I feared I had meant nothing to her, that she had coldly blotted me out as if I’d never existed.… After nearly a
lifetime, that story about Barbara—and the hurt and anger I felt because of it—became one of my deepest truths. To imagine her as a twenty-one-year-old kid waiting for my letter and fearing the same thing about me.…

I take her hands. “I’m sorry, too. Over the years, I did look for you. I hired detectives.” Then something she said tweaks my awareness. “What … promise?”

“Mama said—this was in her letter—that she was the only one who knew about me, and she promised not to tell anyone else.”

“It’s not true!” It can’t be. Thinking that Mama and Papa had decided not to tell us was already devastating. But for Mama alone to offer concealment to Barbara like a gift …

“Lainie.” She holds my gaze. “Like I said, I couldn’t believe it, either.”

“She said that? She actually said ‘I promise’?”

“Well. First she reamed me for being a horrible daughter, and she loaded on the guilt—saying not a day went by when she didn’t weep over leaving her family, and the one thing she wanted most in the world was to see her mother’s face one more time.”

That
sounds like Mama. Whatever else she’d said, Barbara must have twisted it.

“But after all that,” Barbara continues, “she said if it was what I wanted, she promised—she used that word—to let me live my own life.”

I have a flash—so vivid that it brings back the feel of Mama’s sweaty hand clutching mine—of our first day of school, the vertiginous moment when I grasped that Barbara and I would be in different classrooms. My disorientation wasn’t just because I had to change my mental image of school and create a new one in which my twin and I were separated for the first time in our lives. Radiating out from that image were the streets around the school, then all of Boyle Heights, and from there Los Angeles, America, and the world. My entire internal landscape fractured, and I had to reconstruct it, though it was never again so reliable and whole. And
that
world had been only five years in the making.

“Why would she promise that?” I say.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

But it’s not. There was always an uncanny connection between Mama
and Barbara, as if they heard the same restless music in their heads. “What’s
your
guess?”

She throws up her hands, a gesture that, even crabbed by arthritis, is so deeply familiar that the woman sitting before me could be Mama or Pearl or Harriet—or me. If she had stayed, our common vocabulary of gestures, the visceral traces of our entwined history, would have emerged every time we saw each other, and they might have faded into a background hum. Now each one brings a trumpet fanfare of recognition.

“When you got the letter, you must have had some idea,” I say.

“I guess … I thought about what happened to her before she married Papa. You know, when she got kicked out of the place where she was living and felt like she’d run out of places to go. I guess I thought maybe she understood how trapped I’d felt.”

“I
don’t
know. What do you mean, she got kicked out?” Mama had told Barbara about running away from her family in Romania. What else did she confess?

“You never heard this?”

I shake my head.

“I guess Mama only told me because she could see I was headed for trouble—this was when I was sixteen or seventeen—and she was trying to get me to shape up.”

The story Barbara tells begins like the one I know. Mama moved to Los Angeles with a family from Chicago, the … we grope a bit but come up with the Tarnows. She lived with them in Boyle Heights and got a job at a dress factory. The Tarnows knew Zayde because they had come from the same village in Ukraine; they arranged for Mama to meet Papa, which led to her taking his English class, and that led to Papa proposing.

After that, however, Barbara enters new territory. And I revisit another sensation I remember—the breathless excitement of hearing a secret from my sister. Excitement and apprehension, because uncovering the secret could be like peeling a bandage from a wound.

“It’s not that Mama didn’t care for Papa. She did,” Barbara says. “But it was the way everything happened, meeting him because the Tarnows knew Zayde, and when Papa proposed, they knew all about it because he’d
asked Mr. Tarnow’s permission, and they kept pressuring her to say yes. She used to go to the beach and just stare at the ocean. Remember, she did that when we were kids? Anyway, she sat there and thought—how did she put it?—that she’d crossed Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean and then the entire United States. And after all that, she was being pushed into an arranged marriage just like in her village. The only difference was that now she had no place left to go. And then …”