The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  “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.

  “Elaine?” Harriet says with alarm.

  “What?” I say as my eyes race over the football players, atavistically seeking my own first: Ronnie, his daughter Zoe, Carol’s son Dylan. Carol? In Oregon. And Brian in Argentina. They’re all accounted for. Safe.

  “Are you okay? You just moaned.”

  “That was a yawn.”

  Why put her through what I’m feeling now? As if I’d opened our family albums and every picture of Mama and Papa were corroded by acid?

  FORTUNATELY, THE BLEAKNESS DOESN’T stay with me. At dinner, I revel in my raucous family, seated at three tables that spill from the dining room into the den. There’s such a sad but sweet nostalgia when I catch, in the living, glimpses of the dead: Ronnie plunges a carving knife into the turkey with the same gleeful expression that used to come over Paul’s face when he carved. I’m reminded of Papa’s gravity in the serious eyes of Harriet’s youngest granddaughter. And all the tastes—Mama’s sweet potatoes, now made by Harriet; Audrey’s cranberry compote, the recipe passed to one of her sons. It’s as if I can look around the room, enjoy the feast, and relive every Thanksgiving dinner that’s taken place in this house … and before that, our Thanksgivings in Boyle Heights. Harriet and I are the only ones left from those days, the sole carriers of that history.

  But that’s not entirely true, I realize. Danny was there, too; Mama always invited him and his father. It’s the second time today I’ve thought of Danny, and he stays in my mind as everyone pushes back from the table with happy groans of satiation. I keep thinking about him during a game of charades, and when we decide we finally have enough room for dessert. My pies are a big hit, with reason; they’re scrumptious. As I said, you use pre-made crust and pile on the whipped cream, you can’t go wrong.

  Then, three and four and five at a time, they say goodbye, and they’re gone, leaving my house cleaner than when they arrived. Danny, however, lingers; multiple versions of Danny—the waif he was as a child, the muscular young man who built himself up lifting weights at Venice Beach, the soft-eyed Danny I saw in private moments.

  I check the international time zones. It’s already eleven here, so it shouldn’t be too early to call him.

  But I must have miscalculated. My call wakes him.

  “Ken,” he mumbles.

  “Danny, oh, I’m sorry, I thought it was nine in the morning there.” In Israel, where he went to live after World War II—though it was Palestine then. He put down his gun from fighting the Nazis and immediately picked up another to fight for a Jewish state.

  “I just sleep in some days. An old man’s prerogative.” His voice crisp, he’s gone from groggy to fully alert within seconds. The discipline of work that he still, even in retirement, refers to vaguely as “imports and exports.” I’m certain he was high up in the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad.

  “Aviva lets you sleep in?” I say.

  Danny’s wife chose her name, which is Hebrew for “spring,” when she immigrated to Palestine after surviving a concentration camp. Danny changed his name, too, from Berlov to Bar-Lev—“son of the heart.” He and Aviva met when they were doing a sabotage mission against the British for the Haganah, the underground. Aviva is a formidable woman, a life force, whom I profoundly admire. She is also, not to mince words, intrusive, a person who, when you’re enjoying your rye toast in the morning, will insist on slicing a cucumber and tomato for you, “an Israeli breakfast.” And then stand over you until you eat it all. Aviva is one of the reasons that although Paul and I took half a dozen trips to Israel, we stayed with Danny and Aviva only once.

  “Aviva …” He lets out a heavy sigh. “Is it that long since the last time we talked? Aviva has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Oh, Danny, I’m sorry.”

  “Americans, always with the ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Whatever hint of vulnerability crept in at the mention of Aviva’s illness, it’s gone now, replaced with combativeness—just like Danny as a kid, chin up against his father’s poverty. Do we ever really change? “Could be worse. She’s still at home. There’s a nurse who comes, and our daughter, you remember, Shuli? She’s just a few minutes away. Lainie, it’s great to hear from you. How are you? Staying healthy, I hope?”

  “I’m fine. I just had the whole family over for Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving, right. So what’s new with you?”

  “I’m moving. In two weeks.”

  “Mazel tov. You finally see there’s no place but Israel for a Jew to live? There’s an apartment by Shuli coming on the market. Owners are in a hurry to sell, they might offer some great incentives.”

  “Like armor plating for my car?”

  “Like a sense of pride in being a Jew and realpolitik about the fact that the Arabs do want to push us into the sea, no matter what their prettied-up representatives say to get foolish American liberals to sympathize with them.”

  This is why Danny and I don’t call each other often. He lives in a settlement on the West Bank, and you’d think, at our age, we’d be able to live with our political differences. For God’s sake, I can do that with my grandniece who became a Mormon and a Republican! With Danny, though, too many conversations over the years have deteriorated into my shouting about the destruction of Palestinian olive groves and his shouting about getting pushed into the sea; now it’s as if just hearing each other’s voices brings up all the old fights.

  But that’s not the discussion I want to have tonight.

  “Danny,” I say.

  “What is it?” He’s known me since we were five, and he picks up something in my voice. “Are you really all right?”

  “Did you …
Getting ready to move, I’m going through old papers. Old memories. Did you ever hear from Barbara?”

  “Oy, that’s ancient history. Why not let the past stay the past?”

  “Did you?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Did you try to find her?”

  “I was already gone when she left.” He joined the Canadian army in September 1939; he couldn’t wait to get into the war.

  “I meant later. You knew how to find people.”

  He chuckles but doesn’t bother to deny that he was a spy.

  “Not to get in touch with her,” I say. “Just to know what happened, if she was all right.”

  “First of all, you’re overestimating my capabilities. And I never had any doubt she was all right. All the stories I’ve heard from people who were forced to leave their homes and go to concentration camps, I wasn’t going to waste my time worrying about … to be blunt, a vain, selfish girl who left of her own free will.”

  He’s protesting a bit too much, but I have no idea if that means he actually did look for Barbara and won’t admit it, or if it’s because of what happened between him and me, wounds that penetrated deeply because we were so unguarded then, so young.

  If we had slept together, just once, would it have eased the prickliness between us, the edgy subtext that turns stray remarks into jabs? (Is that the real reason for our intense political battles?) One time we came close. What a disaster. It happened on the first trip Paul and I took to Israel. We were staying with Danny and Aviva, who at that time lived in a spacious if decrepit old house in Jerusalem. One afternoon I stayed behind with a headache while Paul and Aviva went on an outing with the kids, theirs and ours. I was lying on the sofa in the living room, the coolest place in the house, when Danny came home from work. He massaged the base of my skull, a surefire headache cure, he said. Then … I mean no disrespect to Paul when I say that purely in terms of technique, no one could kiss like Danny. Kissing, shedding clothes, hungrily touching places our hands remembered, we made our way to the screened back porch (rejecting by tacit agreement the beds we shared with our spouses). It wasn’t until we were lying together completely naked that I knew I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t that I was being noble or even that I feared getting caught. I saw it as a failure of imagination. Sleeping with Danny when I was married to Paul simply wasn’t in me.

  “I don’t mean to sound harsh,” he says. “But Barbara always had one foot out the door. Like your mother, I guess. Didn’t she run away, too? With the, what were they called? The immigrants from Romania?”

  “What do you mean, she ran away?” It must be just a figure of speech. There’s no way Danny could actually know.

  “What does anyone mean by ‘ran away’? She snuck off in the middle of the night. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. But how did you find out?”

  “I must have heard it from either you or Barbara.”

  But I didn’t tell a soul, not until after Mama died. I’m certain of that, because sharing the story for the first time—with Audrey and Harriet—was a big deal. I saved it for one of our trips to the spa in Mexico and waited until we were on our second bottle of Cabernet to bring it up. And it stunned both of my younger sisters, albeit in idiosyncratic ways: Audrey got upset at having been excluded from yet another family secret, while Harriet expressed delight at having a new image of Mama as a sort of fugitive.

  Barbara was the one person I was tempted to tell at the time. For the first few days after Mollie confided in me, I could barely keep from blurting out the story to her. But then time passed, and if I happened to think of the story, one of us was always on the way in or out, and it just didn’t seem to be the right time. And why feel any urgency, when I saw Barbara every day?

  Later I wondered whether it would have changed anything if I’d told Barbara about Mama. Barbara must have thought she was making such a bold move, doing something that forever set her apart from our humdrum lives. Yet all the time, she was unwittingly (or so I thought) playing out our mother’s drama of escape—unwittingly and far less spectacularly, compared to Mama setting out at twelve, on foot and penniless, for a country where she didn’t speak a word of the language. Had Barbara only known, I wondered, would she have found some other way to distinguish herself?

  But she did know.

  “Is something wrong?” Danny says.

  “No, not a thing … You remember Ronnie’s daughter, Zoe? She just started graduate school in oceanography at UC San Diego.”

  As Danny and I brag about our grandkids, I chew on the new mystery he’s given me. How did Barbara find out about Mama running away? Who told her? I suppose she might have heard the story from Mollie, as I did. Except Barbara wasn’t at all close to Mollie. What about Papa or Pearl? I could see Pearl confiding in Barbara. On the other hand, Pearl tended to reveal truths to both of us; hard to imagine her telling Barbara and not saying a word to me. There’s one more possibility—that Barbara’s source was Mama herself. And as I absorb what Danny said, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine Mama telling her favorite daughter that she’d run away, an act that had taken such courage. Surely, that was all she had confessed; Mama wouldn’t have abandoned the face-saving fiction she’d created and revealed the heartbreaking truth—that the brother she worshipped hadn’t sent for her. So why can’t I shake the feeling that she was willing to be that transparent … to Barbara?

  And now I’m no longer on the fence about looking for Barbara. I’m determined to find her, and not just to find out what happened to her. I want to know who she was, to understand the complicity between her and Mama, a complicity I always recognized but which went deeper than I had ever imagined.

  It’s midnight when I say goodbye to Danny, so rather than phoning Josh, I send him an email asking if he can do a data search for Kay Devereaux.

  His reply arrives moments later. Piece of cake.

  ONE OF DANNY’S JOBS AT CHAFKIN’S GROCERY WAS TO TAKE care of the signs around the entrance to the store and on the walls inside. He would tack up the latest advertising posters for Campbell’s soup or Maxwell House coffee or Palmolive soap, and he kept an eye on the cork-board just inside the door, where people were allowed to post notices; the board in the 1930s was covered with offers of rooms to let and men willing to take any kind of work and “Rosenthal china, perfect condition: must sell.” To keep the board tidy, Eddie Chafkin had a policy that no notice could stay up longer than two weeks, and Danny weeded out any whose time had expired.

  There were also two prominent places, right next to the message board and directly behind the counter where people would look when the bill was being totaled, that Eddie dedicated to a rotating collection of posters. These advertisements (really, they were works of art) featured such images as smiling, sunburned youths carrying hoes, or luscious, crimson-fleshed watermelons—the handsome young pioneers and bounteous harvests of a life spent farming in the promised land of Palestine.

  Eddie Chafkin was a Zionist, as everyone in Boyle Heights knew. And what a crackpot idea, most people agreed. You want palm trees and nice watermelons, open your eyes—you’re in Los Angeles.

  I doubt that it’s even possible to look back at that time and not see it through the lens of the Holocaust. And in 1947, I wept when the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel; everyone I knew was in tears. But in Boyle Heights in 1935, Zionists were seen as a fringe, even an anti-American organization.

  As Aunt Sonya said, “Hershel Chafkin gets himself from Kiev to Los Angeles, breaks his back pushing a cart and selling vegetables door-to-door, and finally the man saves enough to start his own store so that when he drops dead of angina at forty-eight he can leave his beloved son a good business … and Eddie wants to go be a farmer in Palestine?”

  I usually tuned out Sonya, who dripped scorn on virtually anyone of her acquaintance who wasn’t within hearing. But Papa, who prided himself on his objectivity, also got heated on the subject of Eddie’s Zionism. “The ‘Pr
omised Land,’ that’s the gift Eddie’s father gave him by letting him be born in America,” Papa said. “He should be grateful to be an American citizen. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Boyle Heights and saw those posters? What would he think, that Jews aren’t loyal Americans?” At least, Papa said, it was a relief that few people felt the way Eddie did; he’d heard that the Zionist Organization of America, to which Eddie belonged, had no more than fifty members in all of Los Angeles.

  All of the adults had an opinion, and all of them were negative. Mollie—who wrote to me from the various cities where the union sent her—considered Zionism a reactionary movement because it made Jewish workers identify as Jews rather than uniting with workers of all faiths.

  Zayde, too, despite occasional sentimental references to Eretz Yisrael, had no desire to actually go there.

  So I was stunned, one day in April of 1935, when Danny was complaining as usual about working for Eddie, and I mentioned the ridiculous Zionist posters—and Danny jumped down my throat.

  “What’s so ridiculous about a Jewish homeland?” he shot at me.

  “We have it a lot better here. In Palestine, it’s all swamps with malaria,” I said, parroting comments I’d heard for years.

  “What if you were in Germany?”

  “You think Eddie Chafkin’s a fool. How come you sound just like him?” I said, automatically bristling against Danny’s fourteen-year-old arrogance—and because I, at fourteen, bristled at everything. Either that, or I fought humiliating tears.

  And I didn’t know what to think about Germany. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor two years earlier, and he’d done crazy things, like firing Jewish government officials, boycotting Jewish businesses, even staging public burnings of books by Jewish authors. But that was just it: Hitler was crazy, and when the adults talked about him, the prevailing opinion was that the craziness would soon, like the bonfires of books, burn itself out.