The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  “Oh, Billy,” Pearl said, patting Papa’s hand. “If it wasn’t the job, it would’ve been something else. Nobody could have stopped Barbara from spreading her wings.”

  “Spreading her wings?” Mama, who was between phone calls, turned and glared at Pearl. “Is that the kind of advice you give my daughters, Pearl? To spread their wings?”

  “Of course not. Not like that.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t have children of your own, but if my daughters need advice, you send them to me.”

  “Please,” Papa said. “The last thing we need is to argue.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to take her side,” Mama said.

  Pearl stood. “Bill, if you want to write that note and get it to me first thing in the morning, I’ll take it to the bank,” she said, and stalked out.

  “Aunt Pearl!” I hurried after her onto the porch.

  “Elaine, if you have something on your mind, talk to your mother,” Pearl said loudly. Then she put her arms around me. “How are you doing? How’s school?” she whispered.

  “All right.”

  “Keeping up in your classes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you dare let your sister take that away from you.”

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT Papa said in his note, but he went out early the next morning with Pearl to take it to the bank. Mama planned to continue calling the families of Barbara’s friends. I offered to help, but if there was one thing on which Mama, Papa, and Pearl agreed, it was that nothing should disrupt my education.

  I had to force myself out the door to leave for school, pulling away from my family’s trouble as if it were a magnet sucking at me. Once I broke free, however, USC was a refuge. Everyone in Boyle Heights knew me as my parents’ daughter, one of “the Greenstein girls.” At USC I was simply another freshman. I didn’t come trailing my entire family.

  Was that how Barbara felt when she went to Hollywood?

  I wasn’t completely anonymous, of course. I ran into Paul on the quad. He had heard about Barbara and asked if there was anything he could do to help.

  “No, thanks,” I said, on guard for some knowing look or comment, since Paul, like all of Boyle Heights, must have heard that we’d suspected Barbara had run off with Danny—and how could Paul Resnick resist the chance to throw me off-balance? But in his warm voice and eyes, I sensed only concern.

  “I’m serious. Call me if I can help,” he said.

  My Friday classes ended at noon. On my way home from the streetcar stop, three people asked me if there was any word about Barbara; and when I opened the front door, I heard, “The college girl, here she is!”

  It was Aunt Sonya, planted on the sofa with her mending basket—though there was no sign of actual mending going on.

  “I came over the minute I got the kids off to school this morning,” Sonya told me. “Anything I can do. Though why your parents let her work in a place like that! Well, I guess they paid even better than anyone realized.”

  “What do you mean?” I hated to let Sonya bait me, but she clearly knew something.

  “Your father went to the bank this morning, and guess what? Your sister had a savings account there, but not anymore. First thing Wednesday morning, she went in and withdrew every penny. One hundred and thirty dollars! Can you imagine?”

  No, I couldn’t imagine. Barbara kept only two or three dollars from each of her paychecks, and she spent it on clothes and cosmetics and car fare. “How could she have so much money?”

  “Not from anything respectable,” Sonya said darkly.

  “You don’t know that,” Mama said, coming in from the kitchen. She was wearing her nicest housedress and a slash of lipstick, as if refusing to show any weakness in front of Sonya.

  “Charlotte, face facts,” Sonya said. “Has my brother ever managed to earn a hundred and thirty dollars in an entire month?”

  “Where is Papa?” I broke in.

  “The nightclub,” Mama said. “He made an appointment to see the manager. Pearl took the afternoon off and drove him. He wants to find out what was going on there.”

  “As if a man who runs a nightclub would admit anything!” Sonya sniffed. “And they’re gone two hours already. Didn’t I try to tell them, you don’t just walk in on a man like that and accuse him of—”

  “Well, Sonya!” Mama forced a smile onto her face. “It was very nice of you to come over, but I don’t want to keep you from cooking your Shabbos dinner.”

  “That’s all right. My girl is taking care of everything.” Sonya employed a Mexican American girl to help with the housework. “That much money, there has to be a man. What is it with the women in this family? Hasn’t anyone heard of saving yourself until you’re married?”

  “Sonya!”

  “Pearl with that schvartze,” Sonya continued. “And now Barbara—”

  “Sonya, shut the hell up!”

  Both Sonya and I turned toward Mama in shock. I couldn’t count how many times I had heard her say, If we didn’t need Elaine’s job at Leo’s bookstore, what I wouldn’t say to that woman. Now she had said it.

  “If I’m not welcome here …” Sonya made a show of stuffing the shirt she hadn’t touched back into her mending basket.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I need to start cooking dinner,” Mama said. “Elaine, don’t you have schoolwork?”

  Gratefully I followed Mama through the swinging door into the kitchen. I offered to help her with dinner, but she told me to go study.

  In my room, I contemplated my sister’s wealth—and her seeming willingness to use sex as currency. She’d gone to see the “producer” expecting something like what happened; what upset her was being cheated out of her part of the deal. Still, what would she have had to do for $130? It was a fortune.

  PAPA AND PEARL DIDN’T return until late in the day. By that time, Audrey and Harriet had come home from school; Mama had sent them to the Anshels’ next door. She hadn’t, however, succeeded in dislodging Sonya from the sofa. So the three of us—Mama, Sonya, and I—heard what had happened that afternoon. The nightclub manager had been quite willing to see them, Papa said; he even commiserated with them in Yiddish. And he showed them an account book with everything he had paid Barbara; it wasn’t a penny more than she’d turned in to Mama, plus the little bit she kept for herself. There was nothing that came close to explaining the money in her bank account.

  “But he told us that some of the girls make extra money by modeling,” Papa said.

  “Modeling?” Mama said. “In department stores?”

  “For photographers.” Papa stared at his hands. “You know, pinup pictures. Pretty girls in bathing suits.”

  “Gevult,” Sonya said. “There’s a man who has a bookstore a few blocks from Leo—Mr. Geiger, you must know him, Elaine. He has photographs of girls in a back room.”

  “Barbara would never do that!” I said.

  Not that I had seen any of the “specialty” items Arthur Gwynn Geiger was rumored to sell from his back room. (In the front of his shop, it was said, the same handsome volumes never moved from the shelves.) But Geiger occasionally came into Leo’s store—all of the Hollywood Boulevard book dealers knew one another—and I’d rarely felt such a visceral dislike for anyone as I did for the pudgy, affected, fortyish Geiger. His left eye was glass, his gaze cold and fishy, and he insisted on looking me in the eyes, bullying me to look back or else feel I was being rude. The idea of Barbara having any connection to Geiger made me cringe.

  “Of course she wouldn’t,” Pearl said, and glared at Sonya. (With Sonya present, Mama and Pearl had buried the hatchet from the night before and were a united front.) “All he said was that some girls modeled!”

  “That much money, whatever she was selling, it wasn’t apples on the street corner,” Sonya said.

  “As a matter of fact,” Papa said, “he gave us the names of three photographers.” He held up a sheet of cream-colored notepaper imprinted with the Trocadero letterhead, which bore some
writing in an expansive hand. “We went to see them—that’s why we were gone for so long. But none of them knew Barbara.”

  “Oh …” I caught my breath.

  Fortunately, Sonya spoke at the same time—“As if they’d admit anything to you!”—and my reaction went unnoticed.

  While they discussed what to do next, I debated whether to mention that I’d recognized the name of one of the photographers: Alan Yardley. He was the friend who’d done Barbara’s glossies for “almost nothing.” Did she pay for the glossies by modeling? And maybe she had done additional modeling for the money? The fact that Yardley denied knowing her suggested something unsavory had gone on. Certainly I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of Sonya. But why even tell Mama and Papa, when it would only upset them? The important thing now wasn’t how she’d come by her $130. What mattered was that she had money; she wasn’t on her own and penniless.

  I said nothing.

  The next morning, Saturday, Pearl came by in her car for Papa, and they set out for the train and bus stations. If Barbara had cleaned out her bank account, then she might have left Los Angeles, and they planned to show her graduation picture to the ticket agents and ask if anyone remembered selling her a ticket, and to where.

  I went to my job at the bookstore. On my lunch break, I took a walk and found myself drawn toward Geiger’s shop. I wondered if he sold photographs that were taken by Alan Yardley. I walked through the door. Geiger wasn’t there, but a hard-looking woman in a tight dress strode toward me as if to prevent me from going any further. “Sorry, wrong address,” I said, and left.

  If I could just see for myself if there were any pictures of her, I’d have a better idea what to do. But my brief foray into Geiger’s shop had made me realize there was no way I could ask to see his special stock. Paul, on the other hand … A college fellow could walk into Geiger’s and be welcomed, and Paul, worldly from having fought in Spain, could pull it off. He had invited me to call him, and he’d seemed sincere. But did I want to ask for Paul Resnick’s help? It would mean confiding in him that my sister might have posed for pinup shots. And what if he did find pictures of her at Geiger’s? Could I trust him?

  To my surprise, the answer that came to me was yes. I phoned Paul at his father’s scrap metal business. He came by the bookstore an hour later, and I explained what I had in mind.

  His visit to Geiger’s took twenty minutes. When he came back, he handed me a flat parcel, the dimensions of a four-by-six-inch photograph, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

  “You were right,” he said.

  “Thank you.” I was grateful not only for his help but for his lack of childish embarrassment. And although I felt wild to rush someplace private and rip the parcel open, I didn’t want Paul to leave right away. I found his presence steadying. “You asked if he had any photos by Alan Yardley?”

  “That Geiger’s a piece of slime, isn’t he? When I asked about Yardley, he said, ‘Obviously you’re a connoisseur.’ He said he’d just gotten the latest shots of her yesterday. I wondered if they were taken after she left home.”

  “The latest?” I glanced at the parcel, clutched in my clammy hand.

  “I got four different ones, I got the feeling they were from different modeling sessions.”

  “How will I know which is the latest?”

  He shook his head. “You’ll know.… Elaine, I hope this doesn’t sound like empty comfort, but I’ve seen a lot worse.”

  “Thanks. And thanks again for your help.”

  “Please, if there’s anything else, promise you’ll call?”

  After he left, I went into the bathroom and edged the string off the parcel. Paul had said he’d seen a lot worse, and I naively expected saucy shots in lingerie, even some nudity. She was wearing lingerie in one photo—a transparent peignoir that left nothing to the imagination as she faced the camera with a teasing smile. That was the tame one. In two others, she was completely naked, striking provocative poses, her face pouty and her back arched to push out her breasts.

  And Paul was right: there was no doubt which was the last shot. She sat on a bench, leaning back slightly. One leg was raised so that her foot was on the bench and slightly to the side. You could see everything. Her eyes looked empty, and she hadn’t pretended to smile. She knew no one was going to care about her face.

  These weren’t pinup shots. They were smut.

  I reeled with revulsion. And rage. I wanted to run to Geiger’s store and smash the windows, take a baseball bat to Geiger’s smug face, burn every filthy picture. Next I’d destroy Alan Yardley’s camera. And then I’d go after my rotten sister! In the first three pictures, she was flirting with the camera. Did she see “modeling” as a lark? She had to know her photos would be pawed, drooled on, and worse. Didn’t she care? Did she enjoy the idea?

  I heard Leo clearing his throat outside the bathroom door. I’d been in there for ten minutes. I flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink hard. My hands felt filthy. I scrubbed them under hot water, then washed them again after I’d remade the parcel of photographs and shoved it into my purse.

  I tried to get back to work, but I felt genuinely ill: queasy, wobbly. I told Leo I wasn’t well and left early. I couldn’t stop seeing that last photo in my mind. However Barbara had felt doing the other poses, sitting with her legs open was no lark. And despite her pretense of sophistication, she was only eighteen. Look how she’d fallen for the line the “producer” fed her. What kinds of people was she around now, and what lines were they giving her? Should I push Papa to go to the police? At least he needed to talk to Alan Yardley again. If, as Paul surmised, the last photograph was taken after Barbara had left, maybe Yardley knew where she was.

  But to make any of that happen, I’d have to tell Papa about the photographs. And it wouldn’t be enough to tell. He would insist on seeing them. Still, if Barbara was associating with men like Yardley and Geiger, did I have the right to keep her secrets? I was only eighteen. This was too big for me.

  I would tell no one but Papa, I decided. I just had to talk to him away from everyone else. That turned out to be easy. I walked into the house expecting the anxious hubbub that had greeted me every day since Barbara’s departure. But Papa was alone in the living room, sitting in his armchair reading a book. Mama was in bed with a headache, he said, and Pearl had taken Audrey and Harriet to a movie.

  Papa told me about the latest phase of the search. He and Pearl had gone to the train and bus stations, even the steamship lines, but they found no one who remembered selling a ticket to Barbara. Ticket agents worked different shifts, of course, and they planned to go back during the week and try again.

  “How are you doing?” He regarded me with surprising tenderness, and I fought tears.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Your first week of college, and we haven’t even talked about it. Tell me about your classes and professors.”

  As I answered Papa’s questions about USC, my fingers kept wandering to the dirty photographs of Barbara in my handbag.

  But I couldn’t let Papa see her like that. I decided to burn the photographs. Barbara would come home; at least she’d get in touch with us when it suited her. I would just have to wait until she felt ready.

  I couldn’t do that, either.

  ALAN YARDLEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO WAS ON A SIDE STREET off of Hollywood Boulevard. I went there after my classes on Monday. I was nervous, expecting the sliminess of Geiger’s shop. But instead, the tiny lobby, where a pleasant middle-aged Japanese American woman announced me over an intercom, looked like an art gallery; the pristine white walls held just half a dozen cleanly spaced photographs, harshly beautiful desert scenes.

  Yardley himself surprised me by being … the word that comes to mind is courtly. I’d figured he would keep me waiting, and I was prepared to stay there for hours, but he immediately opened the door to the studio and invited me in. And there was such gentleness to Alan Yardley. He was in his fifties, I guessed, a
nd he was slender and quite tall, over six feet, although he walked with a stoop, as if to keep people from being intimidated. And even though I jumped in the second I walked into his studio and accused him of lying to Papa, his gaze remained kind and a little sad.

  “You do know her! I have some of the pictures you took of her!” I said.

  “The pictures?” he said softly.

  “From Arthur Geiger’s store.”

  “Ah.” He regarded me with his sorrowful eyes. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t see any point in mentioning the pictures to your father. I thought it would only upset him. Does he know?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you thought that, too. You didn’t want to hurt him.”

  Ridiculously, I started to cry.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “Let me see if the tea is ready. I asked Harumi to fix some. Please do sit down.”

  He went out to the lobby, giving me a few minutes alone. I got control of myself, then looked around.

  An open area at the far end of the room was where Yardley staged photographs. The space currently held a stool draped in gray velvety fabric, and a rice paper screen provided a soft background. Two cameras mounted on tripods and several lights on poles faced the “stage.” Just behind the cameras, in the center of the studio, were a low table and two wooden chairs. On one side of the room, he kept various props: stools, chairs, platforms, drapes, and so on. The opposite side was a working area with a light table and more photographic equipment. And on the wall above the light table hung more of the austere desert photographs I’d seen in the lobby.

  Yet despite the accumulation of objects, the studio was surprisingly peaceful. Even as I anticipated a further confrontation with Yardley, something about the desert photographs made me feel calm.

  Yardley came back in carrying a tray with a white ceramic teapot, two handleless white cups, and a plate of almond cookies.

  “Joshua Tree National Monument,” he said, following my glance toward the desert scenes. “Have you ever been there?”