“You mean lions?” he said.
“No, house cats.”
“A lion, I could understand.”
“I want a kitty!” Harriet piped up.
“The ancient Egyptians worshipped them,” I told Danny.
“No wonder their civilization died.”
It was a silly, awkward conversation, but after that he and I were able to talk again. And we had very serious things to discuss.
HITLER’S FLURRY OF ANTI-JEWISH laws had appeared to culminate in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, as if his madness really had burned itself out; or at least, as if ordinary, decent Germans had decided enough was enough. But in 1938, there was a fresh eruption of hatred.
The first signs of this new wave of insanity occurred at the end of 1937, not in Germany but in Romania, where the leader of the vicious anti-Semitic political party became prime minister. Within a few months, Romania shut down all Jewish-owned newspapers and fired every Jew who had a government position. Those two actions alone cost nine of our relatives their jobs. The terrible news led to the first long-distance telephone call Mama ever received, from Uncle Meyr in Chicago. Not one of their relatives had obtained permission to immigrate, and the Chicago relatives planned to hire lawyers, both in Chicago and in Romania; could Mama get a lawyer in Los Angeles? Desperate, Mama asked Aunt Pearl for help. Pearl had already guaranteed a job at her dress company for Ivan, the nephew whom Mama and Papa had applied to sponsor. Now Pearl gave Mama some of the money she’d put aside for a house. Mama never breathed a word about it to Papa; he would have been furious and ashamed that she’d begged his sister for funds he couldn’t provide. I knew about it only because Mama asked me to go with her to speak to the Los Angeles lawyer and to draft several letters.
Events in Romania slipped beneath most people’s notice. However, the whole world paid attention when Germany annexed Austria that March. Germany immediately imposed its anti-Semitic laws on the Austrian Jews. Then, as if having fresh victims had inspired them, the Nazis spat out new punishments for the crime of being born Jewish. In April, Jews had to register all property held inside the Reich—the word alone felt harsh and cruel in my throat. Then Jewish-owned businesses had to be identified, a task performed with gusto by jeering Hitler Youths who painted the word Jude along with rude pictures on shopwindows. At that point, President Roosevelt himself decided to admit more immigrants from Germany and Austria. Still, we kept hearing about Jews desperate to flee who had nowhere to go.
Danny devoured the news. He’d become president of Habonim, and he spoke wherever he could, at Habonim meetings and school and community forums, to alert people to the need for a refuge for European Jews. I didn’t just attend the meetings but also wrote announcements to publicize them. And I helped Danny write articles for the Habonim newsletter and the school paper, even letters to the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. The newspapers liked to air “the youth perspective,” and several of our letters got published. Working together on a letter or an article, we hammered out the language in heated debates. I found his approach too inflammatory—“If you call people ‘spineless,’ they’re not going to listen to anything else you have to say!”—and he said I was “just being a good little Jewish girl and not making waves.”
I still disagreed with him about Zionism, but that became a quibble next to my urgency to act and the gift Danny revealed for moving people to action. A natural storyteller, he spoke about the big political events happening in Europe in terms of small, heartbreaking stories gleaned from people in Boyle Heights who had family members there. Just as he’d beguiled me with his tales when we were children, he could move his audiences to tears and persuade them to write letters to Congress or hand out leaflets on the street. I put my energy into Habonim because Danny made it the most dynamic youth group trying to do something, though it didn’t matter to me if the refugees went to Palestine or America or Rhodesia or Cuba—any country that was willing to crack open its doors.
Danny was also an unwavering optimist. Whenever I got discouraged, he convinced me that if we kept raising our voices, someone had to listen. He turned out to be right. That June, America opened its doors to Ivan Avramescu, my cousin from Romania.
Or, as Barbara called him, the Rat.
I GET OUT OF THE POOL AFTER WATER AEROBICS, SHOWER, AND DRESS. And then, for the first time, instead of going home, I drive to Rancho Mañana. I moved here yesterday. I check in at the reception desk—a requirement that makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten—and assure the too-solicitous young woman that of course I know how to get to my own apartment.
But for a moment, after I take the west elevator to the third floor, walk down the hallway to the right, and open the door, I think I must have gotten confused and entered someone else’s unit, after all. The first thing I see, directly opposite the front door, is a depressing wall hanging, a blob of mustard and beige and brown. Strangely, however, right below the brown blob is a tomato-red and black love seat just like mine.
I hear Carol’s voice. “Hey, Mom.… Do you like it?”
“Oh, it’s beautiful. Gorgeous!” I sing out. Giving my inner art critic a swift kick, I go take a closer look at what’s obviously Carol’s handmade housewarming gift for me. “Ah, it’s—what are these, moths?”
“Dragonflies. You don’t like it, do you?”
“I do! I can’t believe you gave each one of them so much detail. It’s amazing. And the colors are so subtle.” As I examine the hanging, I actually do appreciate it; with extraordinary precision, Carol has woven several dozen swarming dragonflies, some of them no bigger than a fingertip. And there’s an extraordinary range of color—strands of gold, deep chocolate browns, delicate fawn beiges. So why, as genuine praise spills out of my mouth, does it sound less and less sincere?
Carol comes and stands beside me, twisting a fistful of her long hair, which is barely touched with gray; seen from the back, in her peasant blouse and jeans, my elfin daughter still looks sixteen. Between Carol and Ronnie, he got all of the genes for height. She’s always been tiny, so small-boned we used to laugh and say she looked like she could blow away; a joke, but sometimes my heart caught in my throat, and I feared she really might take off like a seedpod on a gust of wind. We enrolled her in gymnastics when she was little, because she had a perfect gymnast’s body and loved tumbling, but she turned out to have no taste for the drill or the competition.
“The colors are wrong. I knew it,” she says. “Darn, I got some bright blue yarn and tried doing something contemporary for you, but …” She sighs. “The yarn just didn’t speak to me.”
“Carol.” I give her a hug. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” I wish I could convince her. I wish I could have adored the hanging the moment I saw it.
More than anything, I wish Carol and I weren’t doomed to hurt and misunderstand each other. Still, neither of us has ever walked away. Even during the nightmare that was her adolescence, when my once-gentle girl embraced the 1960s trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, the one thing she didn’t do, ever, was run away. There were nights when I was up at three in the morning, watching for her to come home, but she always did. As if she were honoring an unspoken pact, that vanishing like Barbara was one pain she wouldn’t inflict on me. We have always stayed engaged, no matter how difficult it’s been.
“I made a salad for lunch,” she says. “Is that okay?”
“Perfect.” I push aside papers on my former kitchen table, which has become my dining room table; like much of my furniture, the dining room table didn’t fit here.
While we’re eating, the phone rings. I start to let the machine pick up, but it’s Josh, saying, “I’ve got something.”
I snatch up the phone. “Hold on,” I tell him, and retreat to the bedroom. “What is it?” I ask after I’ve closed the door.
“This thing just came in the mail. I can come by tonight and show you. I’m free by seven-thirty.”
“Seven-thirty’s fine.” Carol should have left for
the night by then. She’s staying at her son’s.
“Sure,” Josh says. “How do I get to this place? Rancho something, isn’t it?”
I give him directions, then return to the living/dining room and hang up the phone.
“What are you up to, Mom?” Carol says.
“Nothing.”
“Come on. I used to be the one who took the phone into the other room.”
“It was Josh. My archivist,” I say.
“Oh, right.”
“I need to meet with him tonight.”
“We were going to see a movie!”
“Oh, I forgot. I’ll call him back and reschedule.”
But Josh turns out to be busy tomorrow. I could see him later this week, I suppose. Impossible! I can’t wait for whatever he’s found out about Barbara. I tell Carol we’ll have to postpone and catch a flash of hurt in her eyes that has nothing to do with the movie. I consider letting her know what’s going on, even inviting her to stay for the meeting with Josh tonight. Just thinking of it, my gut clenches. Barbara was my twin sister. This is my search. I don’t want to have to listen to anyone else’s opinion about how—or, worse, whether—to proceed. And right now, with the fresh wound of finding out my parents knew about her and said nothing, Barbara occupies a place in me that feels fragile and naked, astonishingly so. I’m not ready to let anyone enter that room. Josh, all right, he was involved from the beginning. And he’s essentially a stranger, whom I’ve insisted on paying for his help. But no one else.
“Can we still have dinner?” Carol says. “The chicken teriyaki?”
She has decided that we, she and I together, will brave the Rancho Mañana dining room for the first time this evening; they’re doing chicken teriyaki, apparently a favorite. I feel a bit as if Carol’s walking me to my first day of school. And I am nervous about my first plunge into this tight little society of some 180 people, about half of whom I’ve crossed paths with at some time in my life
“Absolutely,” I say. “I wouldn’t enter the lions’ den without you.”
That afternoon, Carol focuses on the kitchen while I unpack my office. And I come across the folder of poems I’d planned to “lose.” I suppose Carol might appreciate getting the poems; and sharing them with her is a vulnerability (unlike the search for Barbara) that I’m willing to risk. I flip open the folder, see a poem about night-blooming jasmine “perfuming Breed Street’s dreams.” On the other hand, maybe Carol would look at the poems and feel the way I did when I saw her wall hanging—touched, yes, but also awkward and torn.
THE CHICKEN TERIYAKI AT dinner lives up to its reputation. Not that this keeps one of my tablemates, a tiny woman whose face is dwarfed by eyeglasses with huge red frames, from complaining with every bite and regaling us with blow-by-blow details of the chicken dishes she used to make. I’m going to ask to be assigned to a different table. Yes, we’re assigned, another kindergarten touch. What the hell, maybe I’ll just sit wherever I want, start an insurrection.
After dinner, Carol takes off, and suddenly, as if someone stuck a pin in me and all the air whooshed out, I’m exhausted. I want to go home! On leaden legs, I trudge back to my apartment. Amid the chaos of moving boxes, I can’t summon the energy to open a book or turn on the television but sit on the love seat under the mustard dragonflies.
The leaden feeling finally lifts when the receptionist calls and tells me Josh is here.
“Nice place,” he says when he comes in. And heads straight for Carol’s wall hanging. “Wow, what’s this?”
“My daughter made it.” My eyes are riveted on the envelope he’s carrying—so small, just an ordinary business envelope.
“Dragonflies?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Wow. It’s cool.”
I’m ready to rip the envelope out of his hand. “What did you find out?”
He takes a piece of letter-size paper from the envelope, spends an eternity unfolding it, and finally hands it to me. It’s a copy of a brief newspaper article with a group photograph of about a dozen young women and, standing behind them, several men. Someone has handwritten on the copy “March 9, 1942” and the headline reads: “Colorado Springs Entertainers Join USO Tour.” The article says that fifteen local singers, dancers, and musicians had signed on for one of the first European tours being organized by the United Service Organizations, a group formed to provide entertainment and recreation for U.S. servicemen.
“I got in touch with a librarian at the Colorado Springs library and invoked the mutual help code that binds librarians all over the world,” Josh says while I squint at the faces. “She tracked this down for me.”
Bad enough that the photo, which looks printed from microfiche, is blurry, but the women had struck a chorus line pose, standing at an angle with one hip jutting and an arm extended in a flourish. Not one of them jumps out at me. I check the caption, match the name Kay Devereaux to a girl with platinum-blond hair and a close-lipped smile. She’s one of the shorter girls; that would be right. But her face is turned sideways and it’s partly obscured by her curtain of hair.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” he says.
“I’m not sure.” I get up to grab the magnifying glass I keep near the telephone, then realize I no longer own the little stand that conveniently held the phone, directories, and various inordinately useful items; there was no room here. Shit!
Josh and I try blowing up the picture on my copier, experimenting with different settings. Kay’s face dissolves into pixels.
“What about after this tour?” I ask. “Didn’t the USO send her back to Colorado Springs?”
“The librarian checked the phone directories for the rest of the 1940s and didn’t find any listing for her. And the Broadmoor Hotel has a historian—the librarian put me in touch with her. There’s no record of Kay Devereaux working there again. The historian said some of these folks came back home after the one USO tour, but for a lot of them, Colorado Springs wasn’t home, anyway. Or they liked the touring life, the excitement of being at the front and all that, and they signed on for additional tours. Does that sound like your sister?”
Did it sound like Barbara, to dye her hair the color of Jean Harlow’s, leap into a dangerous situation, and run half a world away from Boyle Heights? I’m on pins and needles … even as I warn myself that this trail, if it is one, is more than half a century old.
“It’s possible,” I say.
“I’m thinking my next step is to check with the USO.”
“Good idea. Oh,” I add with a chill, “and check the military death records, too. If she got killed in a war zone, maybe they counted it as a combat death.” I had never thought of her being in the war. All of the worrying I did about Paul and the other boys risking their lives, and I never suspected she might be there, too. In my stories about where she’d gone and what happened to her … always, somewhere, she was alive. And I still existed in her inner world, just as she did in mine. Imagining her lying all these decades among fallen soldiers—I picture a mist-shrouded graveyard in Normandy—it’s as if part of my life were blotted out.
“Sure, I’ll take a look,” he says. “But didn’t you already check the Social Security Death Index, and she wasn’t there?”
“Right, of course,” I say, relieved.
So there’s a good chance Barbara is alive. Not Barbara but Kay, I caution myself. Still, I hear my own excitement in Josh’s voice when he says, “What are you going to do when you find her?” This is another reason I don’t want to tell my family: having them waiting on tenterhooks along with me would make the wait excruciating and the likely disappointment crushing. Josh, in contrast, just sees this search as an adventure. In fact, he shifts gears effortlessly from talking about Barbara to asking me to tell him about Philip Marlowe.
“Sure,” I say. “But I don’t have much to tell. Do you want a drink?” Thinking of Philip immediately brings up the association. “Scotch? Wine? Sprite?”
“Scotch is great.… Did you reall
y work for him?” he says when I bring our drinks.
“Yes, but just a handful of research jobs over a few months. It was in trade for his looking for Barbara.”
“What kind of research?”
“Nothing glamorous,” I say in response to his avid expression. “It was mostly library research. The most exciting case I remember, I went to city hall and looked at plats, those maps that show who owns property. Then I looked up the owners whose names were listed. Turned out a lot of the property was registered in the names of dead people; someone was doing a swindle.”
“Cool.”
“But my job ended when I handed over my research notes. As I said, there’s really very little to tell.”
“How’d you give him your notes? Did you go to his office?”
“No, he took me out for steaks. Bloody ones.” The memory makes me smile. “He always took me to this place in Hollywood. It looked like a dive, but they did the most amazing steaks. I think he worried that I didn’t eat enough red meat.”
“You dated him?”
“Good grief, no. I was just a kid.”
“You were in college, right? You must have been twenty, twenty-one?”
“I was a Jewish girl from Boyle Heights.”
“Was he anti-Semitic?”
The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 23