“Philip? No more than most people in those days.”
“Did he ever say anything?”
“What, like ‘Hitler’s got the right idea’? Of course not.” How to explain to this twenty-first-century kid, with his Vietnamese American girlfriend, how insular America was when I was his age? “There was a jeweler—Rosen’s or maybe Rosenberg’s—next to the steak place. One night, a man was standing in the doorway when we walked by, and Philip asked if I knew him. I said ‘Who?’ And he said, ‘That Jew.’ Was that anti-Semitic, referring to him as ‘that Jew’? Assuming any two Jews living in Los Angeles knew each other? What he said was just the way people thought in those days. There was no malice in it.”
“It didn’t bother you?”
“If I’d gotten up in arms over every innocuous comment, I would have been at war with the world.” Like Danny. “But who knows, maybe it did bother me, since I remember it after all these years.”
I’ve surprised myself. I don’t recall thinking any of that at the time. Or if I’d had a glimmer, I couldn’t have articulated it then. Philip’s remark might have stung for a second and then been forgotten as we entered the restaurant and were enveloped in the warmth and the enticing smells of meat and cigarettes.
But wasn’t that the night when everything he said got under my skin? Wasn’t that our last dinner, the night I made a fool of myself?
It occurs to me that there might have been another reason for the tension between us that night. What if he already knew, when he sat across from me at dinner, about Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs—and he kept it from me? I hope not. I’d prefer to think well of him, to believe he didn’t find out until later, when we no longer saw each other. Because after that night, he kept his distance. He didn’t ask me to work for him again.
CAROL STAYS THROUGH THE end of the week, unpacking every box and helping me plant cuttings from the yard in the community garden. She even hangs every picture. “Otherwise, they’ll still be in boxes six months from now. Believe me, I’ve done it,” my vagabond daughter says. She moves her hanging to a bedroom wall. It looks better there—my bedspread, curtains, and chair are in various shades of blue with daffodil-yellow accents. But how I wish I could have had Josh’s reaction the first time I saw it, that immediate visceral pleasure in response to something we instinctively perceive as beautiful.
At the last minute, when she’s saying goodbye, I give her the folder of poems I wrote when I was a teenager.
“A few of them are love poems to my high school boyfriend,” I warn her, already questioning the impulse that made me grab the poems and hand them to her.
But she says, “Thanks, Mom,” and then she gives me an enormous, open smile, the smile that caught at my heart when she was a little girl: how could anyone be so open and survive? It catches at my heart now, and I’m glad about the poems.
Then she’s gone, and I’m no longer “moving into Rancho Mañana.” I’m living here. I have no regrets. Being at Rancho Mañana has given me an environment without stairs, nursing staff in case I need them, and a community of people I can see without having to drive for an hour. And several of them are people I genuinely like. I’ve gotten my table assignment switched so I’m sitting with Ann Charney Adelman, a friend since our Plain Brains club in high school. Ann has one of the most nimble minds of anyone I know, and although I’m only required to buy fifteen dinners a month, most nights I go to the dining room to enjoy her company. I keep running into cronies from countless political causes; now they commandeer the wheelchair van to go to rallies. There are “activities,” too—bridge, mah-jongg, chair exercise, crafts, book groups, outings to theaters and the symphony, and Torah study. (Rancho Mañana is about 70 percent Jewish; I feel like I’m back in Boyle Heights. In fact, Ann isn’t the only childhood classmate here.)
With the holidays have come nonstop parties. For New Year’s Eve, last night, Rancho Mañana put on a soirée with a jazz trio hired for the occasion. Several musicians among my fellow residents, men who used to play professionally, sat in, and we had a rollicking time until nine, when we watched the ball drop at Times Square and welcomed the New Year on East Coast time with plastic flutes of passable champagne. That was followed by a party at Ann’s; a dozen of us kept going until it was really midnight, then broke out more champagne (good stuff this time).
This morning I’m paying for every sip. But it was worth it. Everything, really, has been worth it. Except for God’s latest, cruelest joke. To tantalize me with new “clues” about Barbara and then …
The USO’s records were destroyed in a fire in 1979.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said when Josh told me two weeks ago. “Burned records are a convenient complication in detective novels. Bad detective novels.” I kept it light, but I felt flattened.
“No kidding. On to plan B. She was a professional entertainer, so she might have had a career after the war. I’m going to try the performers’ unions and Variety, things like that.”
But he tried all the entertainment industry sources, with no results. Neither of us has any idea what to do next.
Sitting in front of the television on New Year’s Day, I nurse my hangover with black coffee and dry toast and watch the Rose Parade. Then the TV talks to me. Not “Hello, Elaine” or anything like that. But the navy band is marching across the screen playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and sparking all the ambivalence that the sight of marching servicemen stirs up in me—pride and patriotism from World War II, anger over the young people thrown into the Viet Nam and Iraq wars—and then, damned if I don’t feel there’s some kind of message for me.
I pick up the remote and silence the TV. I refuse to start receiving messages from home electronics. What’s next, a communication from my toaster oven? Then it hits me: Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that was a big deal during World War II.
I turn on the computer, see that the Stars and Stripes archives are online. And I find what I’m looking for. First there are a few articles that mention USO performances and a “chanteuse” named Kay Devereaux. Then comes this item from February 1946, datelined Berlin:
We bid adieu to the divine Kay Devereaux, who just got hitched to Air Force Lieutenant Richard Cochran. Lovely Kay not only serenaded the troops throughout the war, she stayed on and bolstered the morale of the occupation forces. Alas, she’s leaving us to return with her husband to his ranch in Cody, Wyoming.
In a fever, I look up Richard Cochran in Cody. Nothing. I can ask Josh to dig some more. But a ranch in Wyoming? Barbara thrived on nightlife and excitement. Yes, she loved Tom Mix movies, but that hardly meant she wanted to ride the range.
I get out the decades-old photo from the Colorado Springs newspaper and the magnifying glass (which I eventually located in a kitchen drawer). But the glass doesn’t help; what I need is something that would let me pin back the platinum hair that half obscures Kay Devereaux’s face.
Still, my own sister. Shouldn’t I know?
“ELAINE! ELAINE, COME HERE!”
The urgency in Mama’s voice sent me flying into the kitchen. She was gripping a piece of paper, her eyes wide and hands trembling.
“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”
She handed me the paper. It was a telegram … oh my God, it was a telegram from the Hebrew Immigration Society. Ivan had been approved to immigrate! And we needed to wire his boat fare.
“Oh, Mama!”
Mama sang out words I had only heard from religious people: “Baruch Ha-Shem!” which I knew meant “Praise God.” She caught my hand, and we whooped and danced, weeping with joy, until she sank into a chair, flushed and panting.
Still breathless, she said, “I’ll call your father and tell him to go to the bank and arrange for the money.” She’d been setting aside a little money every month in an Ivan fund.
“How soon is he coming?” I asked.
“Well.” Mama chewed her lip, the way she did calculating sums in her head at the market. “He’
ll want to leave right away. But he’ll have to get to a port first and then to New York, I suppose. Then take a train. Still, he might get here as soon as next month.” Suddenly, her face clouded. “Oy! Where are we going to put him?”
I had to leave for work—school had let out a week earlier, and I was on my summer schedule at the bookstore. That evening, over a celebration dinner, I heard the plan Mama had come up with to accommodate Ivan.
“Barbara and Elaine,” she said, “you’ll move in with your sisters”—Barbara and I both let out yelps of indignation—“and Ivan will have your room.”
“Four of us in one room?” I groaned. “That’s impossible.”
“Do you know how many of us slept in one bed when I was a girl?” Mama said.
“Can’t he sleep on the sofa?” Barbara said.
“The sofa!” Mama slammed her hand on the table. “Do you have any idea what your cousin has been through? What is wrong with you girls, begrudging him a bed? And look at you, barely touching this pot roast. A person would think you weren’t happy!” She took a bite of pot roast, her glare compelling me to do the same.
Papa stayed out of the discussion, but it turned out he wasn’t deaf to our pleas. The next morning, he proposed another idea: Audrey would join Barbara and me in our bedroom off the kitchen, and Ivan could share a room with Harriet. She was just five, after all, barely more than a baby.
Ivan arrived three weeks later, on a Wednesday in mid-July. All of us went to the Santa Fe Station (magnificent Union Station wouldn’t open until the next year) to meet his train. Harriet was so thrilled about her new roommate, she couldn’t stop bouncing on the platform. I envied her unambiguous delight. My genuine gladness was nonetheless tinged by resentment over all the changes that had occurred a few days earlier: I’d had to jam my clothes into a single dresser drawer to make space for Audrey, and a looming bunk bed had displaced the sweet little cot (as I now saw it) in which I’d slept ever since I shared the room with Mollie. Priding myself on being grown-up, I uncomplainingly took the lower bunk when Audrey demanded the top, but then I had to switch with her four times because she kept changing her mind. And there was nonstop bickering as Audrey, Barbara, and I blundered through the awkward choreography of making room for one another to dress, lay hands on our possessions … and breathe.
Still, I joined Harriet in jumping up and down when Ivan stepped off the train. Yes, it’s him! He resembled the boy in the photo we’d been sent, and his head jerked up when Mama called his name. Mama ran toward him. I started to follow, but Barbara plucked at my sleeve.
“Look at those clothes! And he’s dirty,” she whispered.
“He’s been traveling for days. Weeks,” I said, touched by the small, frightened-looking boy enveloped in Mama’s embrace. Ivan was supposed to be nineteen, but he was short and scrawny—and undeniably foreign with his too-big, formal suit and heavily brilliantined hair.
Mama pointed us out, and he smiled.
“Ugh, he’s got pointy teeth,” Barbara muttered. “He looks like a rat.”
“Barbara, cut it out!” I said, and hurried to embrace our cousin.
If I had seen Ivan as boyish and frightened, however, I reconsidered when he met my eyes with a sharp gaze. And I knew enough Yiddish to understand him when we emerged from the train station and walked toward the Yellow Car stop, and he asked, “Where is your automobile?”
“Oh, we don’t need an automobile,” Mama said. “In Los Angeles, the streetcar and the bus go everywhere.”
“All Americans have automobiles.” His alert dark eyes shifted from side to side, as if he suspected us of hiding a Buick someplace.
He was clearly dismayed, too, by the smallness of our house and by having to share a bedroom with Harriet. Still, he smiled when Harriet chattered away at him; he had a sister just her age, he said in a mix of Yiddish and a little halting English. And no wonder he acted wary, after all he’d been through. At dinner, Mama loaded his plate with brisket, noodle kugel, and vegetables, and plied him with questions about the family. Ivan’s father, a typesetter, had lost his job when the government closed down the Jewish-owned newspapers. The family moved to a smaller apartment, and his father eked out a living from jobs he got here and there, but the strain ruined his health; he suffered severe headaches, and on some days he couldn’t get out of bed. Ivan, who’d been a promising student of mathematics, had had to leave school and help support the family. Even so, his parents had insisted he go to America when he had the opportunity. It was too dangerous to stay in Romania, where Ivan had even been beaten by Iron Guard thugs.
“Those animals!” Mama cried. “Did they hurt you?”
“Just my wrist.” He held up his left arm. His wrist was slightly crooked; it must have healed badly after being broken.
Tears came to my eyes, and Mama couldn’t bear it—she ran from the table sobbing.
“I’m sorry to upset her,” Ivan said. “For us … Such things happened to everyone, you know, many boys my age.”
“Enough of the Old World,” Papa said. “You’re in America now. It’s time to look ahead.” He announced magnanimously that Ivan should take the rest of the week to settle in; he didn’t have to start his job at Aunt Pearl’s factory until the following Monday.
“I don’t understand,” Ivan said.
Papa repeated what he’d said, speaking slowly—assuming, I suppose, that Ivan hadn’t followed his Yiddish with its Ukrainian and American inflections.
“But I don’t really have to work there, do I?” Ivan said. “A dress factory?”
“My sister’s factory,” Papa said. “She was kind enough to—”
“I can’t sew!”
“You said in your application—”
“One says whatever the authorities want to hear.” Ivan’s mouth twisted in a half laugh, humorless and world-weary. An expression that said he found us impossibly naive.
“Well,” Papa said, “I’m sure my sister will find something for you to do. And you’ll take night classes, learn English. No reason you can’t look for another job then.”
Later I translated the conversation for Barbara, who hadn’t taken Mr. Berlov’s Yiddish classes with me.
“He’s a rat, you’ll see,” she said.
Barbara loathed Ivan’s heh-heh laugh and darting eyes and the way Mama catered to him. And she chafed at Mama’s and Papa’s insistence that we take our cousin, who was glaringly foreign even in the American clothes Mama bought him, with us to social events.
“How can you be so mean?” I scolded her.
“Elaine, you don’t like him, either. You just won’t admit it.”
I wish I could have said that Ivan was a gentle soul whom I defended naturally, out of true affection. Certainly there were times when my heart melted toward him, like the night Mama cooked a Jewish-Romanian stew, and at the first mouthful he sighed and looked as vulnerable as a child; or when he hoisted Harriet on his shoulders, as he must have done with his own baby sister. And maybe if I had grown up with a brother, I wouldn’t have minded that he—and Mama—took it for granted that his new sisters would make his bed and clean up the mess he left in the bathroom after he shaved. But there was something sneaky about Ivan. Aunt Pearl, for instance, hadn’t cared that he wasn’t the skilled tailor she’d been promised; there was plenty of lifting, carrying, and cleaning he could help with. But she had to ask Papa to speak to him because if she didn’t keep an eye on him, he handled dresses with filthy hands or crammed bolts of fabric onto shelves instead of folding them neatly. She’d caught him playing solitaire when he was supposed to be working and even smoking cigarettes he’d taken from her desk. And when I saw him displaying his crooked wrist to a girl at a party, I remembered a letter Mama had received five or six years earlier—hadn’t Ivan broken his wrist playing soccer?
Even if he’d made up the story about being beaten by the Iron Guards, though, did that blot out the essential truth that he had suffered in Romania? And he had to be miserable no
w, a boy only two years older than I torn from his family, a top student forced to work at a menial job, someone who spoke three languages—Yiddish, Romanian, and French—constantly feeling stupid because he didn’t know English. I tried to befriend him, but my Yiddish proved inadequate for anything beyond a stilted conversation. And it wasn’t Ivan’s fault, but his presence made our family dinners tense and constrained. Mama often spoke Yiddish to him privately, but Papa decreed that we use English at the table to augment the classes Ivan had started attending two nights a week. Our dinner conversations often sounded like classroom drills, and there were awkward patches when no one spoke, and I heard myself chewing every mouthful. Only Harriet, who seemed impervious to the rest of the family’s moods, gaily prattled to Ivan, not caring if he understood her, and he regarded her with real warmth.
Other than Harriet, the one person with whom my cousin seemed at ease was Danny. Danny had been so eager to meet our real-life victim of European anti-Semitism that he came by the day after Ivan arrived, embracing him and greeting him with a flood of Yiddish (Danny’s first language, which he and his father still spoke at home). Of course, he invited Ivan to speak at Habonim, with Danny translating. But he didn’t just use Ivan to promote the cause. A real friendship developed between them. Speaking to Danny in Yiddish, Ivan actually laughed, not the tepid heh-heh that drove Barbara nuts but a big, relaxed laugh that made me wonder how he might act if he weren’t burdened by being the recipient of our charity.
Years later, when I would see Ivan in Las Vegas, getting by, I assumed, on small-scale finagling, I’d think of the life he might have had. I’d wonder if he could have been a mathematician or a business whiz, if his life could ever have been as big as that laugh. And I would promise myself I’d go to see him more often. (He rarely came to visit us in L.A., he claimed he had too much business to attend to.) But I didn’t. I knew that the qualities in Ivan that made Barbara’s skin crawl—and which, I admit, I found distasteful—were survival skills that came from his being born in a rotten place at a horrific time. Still, by the time he was living with us, he seemed furtive and calculating as if by nature. When Barbara called him “the Rat,” I felt, guiltily, that the name was apt.
The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 24