The Tin Horse: A Novel (8 page)

“The father? No, he didn’t.”

“Lainie, I’m sure of it. I feel like I know exactly where to find it.” She starts paging through the book.

“I’ll bet you a ticket to the symphony that I’m right.” Just thinking about the forsaken brothers and sisters sparks a whisper of the uneasiness the story caused me as a child.

“You’re on.” She slows her flipping. “Ha! I win.” She reads aloud, “ ‘He’—Andrew Boyle—‘finally arrived in New Orleans and there found his father, the cause of the family migration to America.’ ”

I reach for the book and read the sentence for myself. Just that one sentence? And not a word more? I skim the next several pages; the long-lost father no sooner enters the narrative than he disappears again.

“Where’s the rest of the story? Finding his father, it’s like something out of a myth. What was the father doing all that time? And how did it happen? Did they just run into each other on the street in New Orleans?”

“That’s, as they say, all he wrote,” Harriet replies. “That’s why it stuck with me. Kids in my class asked the same questions as you, and the teacher gave us some lame answer, like the author didn’t go into detail because it
was a private family matter. Then she gave me one of
those
looks. Everyone knew about Barbara—certainly all the teachers did. Another subject that took hours of therapy.”

I had escaped that burden, being branded as a girl whose sister had run away and never come back. In our neighborhood or among childhood friends, yes, people saw me and thought of Barbara being gone—just as, all the time I was growing up, they knew me as her twin, seeing her next to me even when I was alone. But I was already going to USC when she left, already spending most of my waking hours beyond the fishbowl of Boyle Heights.

“Even as a kid,” Harriet says, “I knew the real reason the grandson didn’t say anything about a joyous reunion. Because it wasn’t joyous. How could it be? No matter how happy they were the first minute they laid eyes on each other, how long would it take before Andrew looked his father in the eye and asked, ‘Why?’ And from the father’s perspective—think about it—having Andrew back in his life threatened his exercise of Americans’ most precious right.”

“The pursuit of happiness?”

“The right to reinvent ourselves … Which brings us back to your question. How would I feel if we could find Barbara now? Profoundly ambivalent, I think. Finding her might lead to a wonderful relationship for the time we have left. But that isn’t the only possible outcome.”

As I said, Harriet is a wise woman.

She’s not, however, infallible. After she leaves, I go back to her comment that after Barbara took off, everyone in the family shut down. It’s not true. We were all upset, of course, scared something terrible had happened to Barbara, and that was why we hadn’t heard a word. At the same time, we were hurt and angry to think
nothing
had happened, and in that case how could she lack the decency to let us know she was all right?

But
shutting down
, that’s a term from Harriet’s world of psychotherapy. And I never saw any point in spending time on a therapist’s couch dissecting my reaction to Barbara’s leaving. Any time, energy, or money I put into the mystery of my twin’s disappearance went toward hiring detectives to look for her—really hiring them, paying a generous fee, not like
the trade I did with Philip, who squeezed in the favor of looking for Barbara during spare moments between bread-and-butter jobs. I did it the first time about fifteen years after she left, when Paul and I had gotten on our feet financially; and again in the early 1980s, when my law firm started working with a detective who was a wizard at locating things in public records. Nothing ever panned out.

Did Barbara’s leaving “damage” me? Did something shut down in me … and never come back to life? I think of my youthful poetry—odes to the glories of nature, impassioned empathy for the suffering of the world, and of course love poems. Thank God the sweet girl who wrote those poems turned into a strong woman!

“It’s called growing up,” I say out loud as I straighten up the stuff Harriet and I looked through.

If I became not just strong but tough, was that because of Barbara? Or was it
my
nature, along with the fact that I went to law school and made it as an attorney at a time when not just the law but all of professional life was a men’s club? A pundit for a conservative rag once described me as “a brainy ballbuster who gets energized by outrage as if chronic anger were a steak dinner. Bring on the bromo.” Paul and I laughed so much over that one that I had it framed.

But it’s true that a tough cookie, a scrapper who didn’t run away from a fight—even, perhaps, an angry woman—was what I had to be in my working life. And if I didn’t just leave it at the office, if I was a scrapper at home, too, well, Paul dove into our spats with as much gusto as I did. We honed our ideas, our characters, by butting heads. Couples did that in our day, they gave each other edges. Maybe because it was harder to divorce, we didn’t tiptoe around each other, cordial and careful and dull.

I miss Paul!
Life is so quiet without him. If, early in our marriage, I ever wondered if I’d made the right choice, there was one crystalline moment when every doubt disappeared. Ronnie was six or seven, and he was having an asthma attack, heaving as he coughed phlegm into a pail. Paul and I knelt on either side of him, each of us with a hand on his back. Our eyes met over our son’s gasping body. In Paul’s gaze, I saw love, concern, a steadiness that told me this man would never, in any of the big things, let me down. But it was more than that. At the risk of sounding mystical, I felt
like I was getting a message from God: that I was one of those rare, favored people who had truly found her soul mate.

I did all right with Ronnie. But Carol … My sensitive firstborn was the daughter of the poet I once was. And I wish I had summoned some of that young poet’s softness for her. Maybe if I’d worked part-time when she was little … But I mentor young women attorneys; even now, the mommy track is no real option for any of them who wants to be taken seriously. And I loved working; I would have gone crazy at home. Like a lot of working moms today, I managed thanks to Mexican nannies. I was lucky—I found girls who were both affectionate and reliable. And the kids learned to speak fluent Spanish; Ronnie is now an attorney specializing in contracts between U.S. and Latin American companies. Yet there were times when I saw how naturally the nannies cuddled my children, how the kids flopped like puppies in their arms, and I wished …

But I’m hardly going to blame Barbara for my disappointments or roads not taken, any more than I’d give her credit for my triumphs. All of it is
life
. Eggs break in life, and if you’re smart, you make an omelette. Life gives you lemons; you make lemonade. Clichés, yes, because they’re deeply true. And it’s the way we lived our lives, not just Paul and I but our generation.

Look at Harriet, whose husband in the late 1960s started wearing love beads over his dental smock and then left her, with three young kids, for his twentysomething hygienist. She was devastated at first, naturally. Then she picked herself up, went back to college, and became a psychotherapist.

And Paul—he
did
have someone to blame, Joe McCarthy and his vicious Red-baiting cronies, for destroying his dream of being a history professor. He was studying for his Ph.D. at UCLA when the State of California demanded that all university faculty, even teaching assistants like Paul, sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath. Though he’d quit the Party by then, he refused to sign because the oath was an outrage. That put an end to UCLA. At first he found a job teaching history at a private high school, but his politics got him in trouble there, too. He ended up going into his father’s scrap metal business. Scrap metal was honest, he said; it required no ideological purity test. I was furious on his behalf; it was one reason I
jumped to take McCarthy cases. Paul, though, didn’t look back. He genuinely enjoyed the business, the salt-of-the-earth people he dealt with every day. He fulfilled his love for teaching, too, by starting a workers’ university, where he taught two evenings a week for the rest of his life. He’d come home electrified, continuing class debates with me as we drank a nightcap; ah, some of our best lovemaking took place on those nights.

I’ve divided the things from Mama’s boxes into several piles: mementos of Audrey to give to her kids, Boyle Heights items for the Jewish Historical Society, Papa’s poetry books for Carol.

I hesitate over the book by Andrew Boyle’s grandson. I’ll give it to the Jewish Historical Society, but do I want to read it first? Funny how I insisted to Harriet that the father never turned up. The story I heard when I was so young, the children’s plight so poignant that it had the truth of lived experience. I wonder what else I’ve been dead wrong about.

I drop the book into the pile for the Historical Society. It won’t tell me the one thing I really want to know: what
did
happen when Andrew asked, “Why?”

Not why she left in the first place, nor why she didn’t contact us for a year or two—those things I can understand, the desperation of a teenage runaway terrified someone would force her to return home. What I can’t fathom are the years and the decades after, when she lacked the compassion to let us know she was all right; lacked even the curiosity to find out what had happened to us
.

Better, perhaps, if Andrew Boyle had never found his father, because no answer could satisfy that question. No love could survive its being asked. Better to think his father was devoured by a bear in the Alaskan wilderness. Better if he had been!

A
FTER AUDREY WAS BORN, ON JUNE 12, 1926, PAPA CHANGED BACK
to the way he used to be before Mama got pregnant. Mama changed, too. But she became someone brand-new. Forceful, purposeful, an arrow whizzing toward one gleaming target—our first day of school, which she had circled in black ink on the calendar page for September, the day after Labor Day.

“Charlotte, it’s only kindergarten,” Aunt Sonya said. “They don’t learn anything. They just play.”

“And where does this just-playing take place?” Mama retorted.

“The elementary school.”

“See! The Breed Street Elementary School,” Mama said, as if that settled it.

“Yes, but kindergarten … Believe me, Charlotte, if you’d ever gone to school, you’d understand.” Sonya patted Mama’s hand.

Mama stood up abruptly. “Girls, we have to get home.” She didn’t even bother to wipe our fingers, sticky from the orange slices we’d been snacking on. And when we started walking, her legs pumped so fast, even as she carried Audrey, that we had to trot to keep up.

What had Sonya meant by that—
if you’d ever gone to school
? I wondered. Everyone went to school. We often walked by the middle and high schools that Aunt Sonya and Aunt Pearl had attended after Papa’s family moved to Boyle Heights; and Uncle Leo once drove us by the high school in the San Fernando Valley where Papa won the elocution prize. Mama had grown up in another country, Romania, but didn’t Romania have schools? Her apparent rage made me afraid to ask.

Mama’s anger didn’t stop Barbara, however. “Mama, didn’t you go to school?” she asked.

“Can your mama read?” Mama demanded as she charged down the street.

“Yes,” I said quickly. Barbara, to my relief, didn’t mention that if Mama picked up the
Los Angeles Times
, which Papa brought home at night, she often threw it down in disgust. I never saw her open any of Papa’s books, and she spent a long time perusing letters written in English from our cousin Mollie in Chicago. She had no problems, though, with letters in Yiddish from other relatives or with the signs, in both Yiddish and English, in shops. And Mama read to us from picture books. Still, only Papa read aloud from books with words all over the pages, like
Alice in Wonderland
or
Peter Pan
.

“Can I do sums?” Mama said.

“Yes,” I said. Sums, she could do in her head. She corrected shopkeepers if they tried to overcharge her, and they always ended up shaking their heads and saying, “You’re right, Mrs. Greenstein, to the penny.”

“So.” She stopped so suddenly that I kept walking for several steps and had to come back.

“You girls know I grew up in Romania?” Mama said. “And it was very bad for the Jews there?”

We had heard Mama’s stories of how the Romanians hated the Jews,
though Papa tried to stop her from telling them. “Don’t fill their heads with the idea that we’re less than anyone else. We’re Americans,” he’d say. “We’re not Jews?” Mama replied. Still, she usually told the stories when Papa wasn’t around.

I knew that Mama’s father, my other
zayde
whom I’d never met, used to own a tavern, but then the Romanian government made a law saying Jews couldn’t sell alcohol. They even sent soldiers to make Mama’s family, who lived at the tavern, leave. Mama did the strangest thing whenever she told that story. When she said “soldiers,” she spat. Not wet spit so it landed on anyone, but she made a sound—
ptui!
—so rude and shocking that if she’d said she had killed the soldiers by spitting at them, I would have believed her.