The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  “Your grandson?” she asks me. “He’s got Danny’s eyes.”

  “A friend. Barbara, I didn’t marry Danny.”

  “You’re kidding. Well, Jesus, Elaine, are you okay? You didn’t come here in the dead of winter because you’re dying of cancer or anything like that?”

  “I’m fine. I came now because I had no idea where you were until a week ago.” But I bite back the sharpness that entered my voice. I don’t want to get angry, not when this is going so well. “How about you? Are you all right?”

  “Can’t complain. Well, I can complain, and I do. But nothing’s seriously wrong.”

  “Hey!” Josh breaks in. “Mind if a California boy goes inside out of the cold?”

  The minute he says it, it hits me that my wool coat, fine for winter visits to my daughter in Oregon, feels no more protective than a paper hospital gown. I turn toward the house.

  Barbara doesn’t move. Maybe she can’t?

  “Do you need help?” I ask.

  “Elaine!” She fixes me with my own Acid Regard. “Wait. My family’s here. You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

  “For crying out loud. Barbara, I didn’t come here to expose you.”

  “Kay. My name is Kay.”

  “Fine!” What does it matter if she calls herself the Queen of Sheba? No one else has ever been able to jerk me around so completely or twist me into a tighter knot of helpless rage. Forget her voice and the gap between her teeth; now I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is my sister. “Are you going to at least let me use your bathroom? My bladder is screaming.”

  “Who do I tell them you are?”

  “How about,” Josh breaks in, “she’s an old friend of yours from the USO? And I’m using her as an advisor?”

  “I don’t suppose you brought a camera?” she asks him. “They’re expecting me to be a movie star.”

  “In the car. I’ll get it.”

  I go to the car with him and get my bag of family photos, and we catch up with her as she hobbles toward the house. “Arthritis has got to be God’s revenge against dancers,” she says.

  I refuse to feel sorry for her. Still, I offer my arm, and she takes it as we go to a side door. I follow her up four steps that have solid metal bars installed on either side.

  Then my sister opens the door to her home.

  We enter a mudroom. Two dogs launch themselves at us, a flurry of barks and eager tongues. I laugh and let them slobber on my hands.

  “You have dogs?” she says, surprised.

  “I used to. Spaniels. The last one died three years ago.” I’m unbuttoning my coat as fast as I can—I wasn’t kidding about my bladder—but my fingers are numb and the mudroom tight. Besides the three of us and the dogs, the walls bulge with parkas and fleece jackets hanging on hooks, and there are enough boots scattered on the floor to stock Fine & Son Fine Footwear.

  I struggle out of the coat at last. “Bathroom?”

  “Dana!” she calls. “This is my friend Elaine, from the USO. Show her where the bathroom is.”

  “Sure,” says a fiftysomething woman who’s been hovering just beyond the mudroom. Dana, the daughter. Despite my skepticism about the local rumor mill, Dana does look like a woman who’s dragged herself home after a messy divorce. Her skin is pasty, and her streaked hair shows an inch of gray roots.

  “Are you in the movie, too?” she asks as she leads me down a short corridor; but she says it like she doesn’t particularly care.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s great,” she mumbles.

  Dana waits for me, then leads me into a beamed living room and introduces me to George and his wife, Lynn. Kay—no, Barbara! I’ll call her what she wants, but I’m not going to censor the way I think about her—is nowhere in sight.

  “She went to change clothes for the film,” Josh says, sensing my anxiety. “She’ll be back in a minute.”

  “That’s what you think!” George has the tooth gap, and so does Dana; it must be one of those traits that bully any competing genes into submission. “You never tried to get my mom away from a mirror.”

  Along with his Robert Mitchum handsomeness, George has an easy, at-home-in-his-own-skin assurance that might even be able to persuade me to get on a horse. He ushers me to a somewhat threadbare but comfortable chair next to a hearth that, hallelujah, appears to hold an entire blazing tree. And it hits me where I’ve seen that visceral self-confidence before—in photos of Uncle Harry.

  Lynn, who manages to be both down-home and chic with cropped white-blond hair and turquoise stud earrings, matches her husband’s cowboy charm with a good innkeeper’s gift for chitchat. She throws Josh some questions about his film and me about my USO tours; I’m lucky that years in courtrooms taught me to think on my feet.

  Lynn’s filling the time while we wait for Barbara. As ten minutes pass and then fifteen, even George fidgets. They’ve probably got work they need to get back to. Surely I’m the only one who’s worried that Barbara will grab some diamonds from a safe, jump onto her snowmobile, and never be seen again.

  “Let me go finish making the cinnamon buns,” Lynn says. “And how about some cocoa? Or would you prefer coffee? Tea?”

  “Don’t pass up Lynn’s cocoa,” George says. “She’s the reason people say the OKay has the best grub of any dude ranch in the country.”

  “Cocoa sounds great,” I say.

  “How about you?” she asks Josh, and he nods.

  “I’ll take some, too, with real whipped cream on it, not that healthy crap,” Barbara says. She’s back, standing just inside the doorway. She’s changed into a black suede skirt and a fringed black vest over a red turtle-neck, along with black cowboy boots. Like Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley, and not just because of the outfit; it’s the way everyone deferentially turns toward her.

  “As if I’d dare try to keep you from clogging your arteries,” Lynn says fondly. “I’ll have Jen bring it in here when it’s ready.”

  “Not here!” Barbara says so vehemently that her family looks at her in alarm. She tosses her head, announces, “We’ll be in my office.”

  “Mom, don’t you think …,” Dana begins, then pauses. “We got the living room all ready for you to film here. The light, you know? And your office must be freezing.”

  Poor Dana, having to come back home to her ranch-matriarch mother and the Western power couple of George and Lynn. I wish I could be for her what Aunt Pearl was for me. I settle for shooting her a smile.

  “Josh can stay here and set up,” Barbara says. “Elaine and I have some private catching up to do.”

  I force myself to stand up; I’m loath to leave the fire. But Barbara and I do need to talk behind closed doors.

  Using an ornate cane, dark wood with silver filigree, she leads me to a newer wing of the house. We enter a spacious room with a desk at one end and three chairs grouped around a low table at the other. There’s a big picture window with a view of the mountains. It’s gorgeous. And so cold that frost coats the inside of the window. When I sit down, I let out a gasp; the chair seat is a block of ice.

  But she’s adjusting a thermostat on a photograph-covered wall, saying, “It’ll warm up fast.” Then she pulls up a chair next to me and leans close, searching my face. “It’s really you. I missed you.… No, I mean it. Tell me about yourself. Did you graduate college?”

  “Didn’t you ever look me up on the Internet or at the library? Weren’t you a little bit curious?”

  “I tried. But computers are a complete mystery to me. And I tried ‘Elaine Greenstein’ and ‘Elaine Berlov.’ What is your name?”

  “Resnick. I married Paul Resnick. Remember him?” I say. She looks blank as I continue, “He was a couple of years ahead of us at Roosevelt, and he fought in the Spanish Civil War.”

  “So, did you graduate?”

  “Yes, from college and law school.”

  “You did go to law school! And did you become Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  “I defended
some people against Joe McCarthy in the fifties. Later I did civil rights and antiwar cases. And women’s issues … I got a reputation as a ballbuster.”

  “No shit.” She chuckles. “I’ve heard that’s how a few people see me. But you really did all that?” She beams at me. “Lainie, you were always so brave.”

  “Me? You were the brave one. The way you threw yourself into things.”

  “I was just wild. And stupid … I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes?”

  “I gave up smoking in 1964, after the surgeon general’s report. And again in 1967. And for good in 1971. When Aunt Pearl got diagnosed with lung cancer.”

  “Oh.” A shadow crosses her face. Then she says, breezy again, “God, I adored Pearl. Did she ever marry the Mexican boyfriend? Or anyone?”

  “No. But she and Bert lived together after she moved out of Boyle Heights and got a house in Los Feliz. And he took care of her at the end. He was wonderful.”

  “That Pearl! I wasn’t as good at staying away from the altar.… I guess you already know that, don’t you?” she says tartly. “You could probably tell me things I don’t even know about myself.”

  We fall into the awkward silence of people who have too little to say to each other. Or too much.

  “This is a beautiful place,” I say.

  “We like it.… God, it’s been so long. So … Danny, did he get killed in the war?”

  “No. After the war, he moved to Israel—it was still Palestine then. He became some kind of high-up in the Mossad, Israeli intelligence. Not that he’ll ever admit it.”

  “He’s still alive, then? You stay in touch?”

  “We talk every few years. We argue about politics.”

  “Is that why you didn’t marry him? Because you didn’t want to live in Israel?”

  “I didn’t marry Danny because I grew up. And I fell in love with Paul! It had nothing to do with … anything else.” Ridiculous to get prickly more than half a century since I last faced her in Danny’s doorway, the air thick with sex and betrayal. I grab the bag next to me, change the subject. “I brought photographs.”

  “Oh, I’d love to see them.”

  I’ve brought several dozen pictures, snapshots from vacations and family gatherings as well as posed group photos at weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs. Going through them gives us a way to fill in the stutters in our conversation. I tell her she can keep any of the photos she likes, and she says no thanks. Still, she looks avidly at the pictures of people she knew as we aged. And I fill her in on our lives—and deaths.

  As she looks at the photos I brought, I scan the ones on her walls. Most of them are of people wearing Western clothes and straddling horses or standing next to them. But some pictures don’t have humans in them at all. Her family. Not us but horses! Suddenly I’m seething.

  Her eyes are on a shot from my wedding when she says, “Water under the bridge and all that, but I’m sorry about what happened … that day with Danny.”

  “Water under the bridge,” I echo, but then I explode. “Who gives a damn what you did with Danny? But how about your disappearing without a word? How about letting Mama and Papa die not knowing where you were, that you were alive!”

  “Would you have left me alone? Look at you—you have the nerve to do a background search on me, and a week after you find out where I am, here you are!”

  “Did you think they were going to jump on a plane to Cody, Wyoming? Mama and Papa, in the 1950s? Or that hordes of embarrassing Jewish relatives would book vacations at your dude ranch? Is that what you were so afraid of, that people would find out you’re Jewish?”

  “I’m not Jewish!”

  It’s so preposterous, I stare, openmouthed, as she jabs her cane into the floor and pushes herself to standing. “Elaine, you don’t get it. You think I’m living some kind of lie as Kay Thorne. But Barbara Greenstein was the lie. Trying to be her made me feel like I was suffocating.”

  Some people don’t just leave the family nest; they feel like they’re running for their lives. I jumped down Philip’s throat when he said that, and I jump down Barbara’s now, standing and shouting in her face, “That’s the best you can do, to explain why you broke Mama’s heart?”

  “Is that why you came all the way here, to tell me no explanation is good enough? Big surprise, Elaine. I was never good enough for you.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Shh!” She cocks her head toward the door.

  “Gram?” a girl’s voice calls from the hall.

  In the panicked glance that jumps between us, we could be eight years old, with Mama about to walk in on something we want to hide.

  “Gram, are you okay? I’ve got the cocoa.”

  “Fine!” Barbara bellows. “Just hang on a sec, Jen, okay?” She sits back down, painfully—I can almost hear the joints gnashing in her hips and knees—and shoves the photos we’ve spread over the table into a pile before she calls, “C’mon in.”

  “Cocoa train,” says the young woman, wheeling in a restaurant cart. A girl who has Dana’s rangy build, along with my family’s delicate features and dark curly hair, caught in a ponytail. I look for the tooth gap, but she gives only a slight, closed smile.

  “My granddaughter, Jen,” Barbara says. “And this is Elaine. A friend from the USO.”

  “Right, the technical advisor,” Jen says. In her watchfulness, I see myself.

  Jen transfers items from the cart to the table. There are two big cups of cocoa topped with whipped cream, a plate with half a dozen pastries, and individual plates, cutlery, and gingham napkins.

  “Be sure to try one of the cinnamon rolls,” Jen advises me. “Aunt Lynn won third place in the Pillsbury Bake-off with them—as we have to tell the guests six thousand times every summer. They really are fantastic, though.… Gram, I brought you a treat,” she adds in a half whisper. From a pocket of her bulky sweater, she pulls out a flask and tips a generous amount of something into Barbara’s cocoa.

  “That’s my girl,” Barbara says.

  It occurs to me that this may not be my sister’s first drink of the morning. Was that the reason for her family’s unease when we waited for her earlier? Well, so what if she drinks a bit? Here she is, living in her own home in a mountain paradise, eating her fond daughter-in-law’s cinnamon rolls. And I’ve got the Ranch of No Tomorrow’s teriyaki chicken.

  The bite of envy is visceral. And familiar and comforting. Like smelling my mother’s kitchen again or hearing Papa declaim poetry.

  “Scotch?” Jen asks me.

  “Please.” So Scotch is Barbara’s drink, as well as mine.

  When Jen leans toward me to doctor my cocoa, something gleams between the edges of her thick cardigan. Oh, can it be …

  “Can I see that? Your necklace?”

  Jen pulls out what she’s wearing on a cord around her neck. “I begged to have this for years, and Gram finally gave it to me when I graduated high school.”

  I barely hear her. I’m staring at the crudely fashioned tin horse. The model for the ranch’s emblem. The horse Zayde made.

  “CAN I?” I REACH FOR THE HORSE. MY HAND IS SHAKING, AND TEARS well in my eyes.

  Jen looks confused, but she takes off the necklace and hands it to me.

  Barbara jumps in. “It reminds Elaine of when we were in the USO together. The horse was my good-luck charm.… Brings it all back, doesn’t it, Elaine?”

  I’m weeping as I clutch the horse, feeling the surprisingly smooth edges—did Zayde make it that way, or did Barbara hold it so often she wore it smooth? She took the horse when she left. She treasured it.

  I feel her hand on my knee. She’s pulled her chair around so she’s facing me. “Have some cocoa. Drink.” Gently she takes the tin horse from my fingers and holds out the cup.

  The cocoa is delicious, as promised—and well laced: I can taste the Scotch behind the chocolate. I glance around for Jen, but she must have slipped out of the room.

  “How could you let us go?” I implor
e, finally giving voice to the question I have asked her in my imagination so many times. “How could you bear to live the rest of your life apart from us?”

  She takes a swig of cocoa, then says, “I don’t think I can make you understand. I don’t understand why I do most things; I just do them. I’m sorry I hurt you. Really. And I did miss you. Sometimes in Europe during the war, I felt so lonely, and I’d get out an aerogram and write ‘Dear Elaine’ or ‘Dear Mama.’ But I never finished any of those letters—and don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you. I’m not like you. I don’t take things apart. I just put one foot in front of the other. One day at a time.”

  One more cliché, and I’ll throw my cocoa in her face. Could she really have cut us off with so little thought or regret? I understand that she isn’t reflective by nature; she operated on instinct. But she wasn’t just instinctual, she was secretive; I remember how opaque she became once she started leading a separate life in Hollywood. And now she’s had a lifetime of keeping secrets—she’s a pro. Still, I’m determined to get behind the barricade of platitudes.

  “In Europe, when you didn’t finish those aerograms, you were just in your twenties,” I say. “But what about later? Why didn’t you let us know when you got married?”

  She reaches for a cinnamon roll. “If we don’t do justice to these, I’ll never be able to explain it to Lynn. I’ll have to feed them to the dogs.”

  “Fine.” I pick up a pastry and bring it to my mouth.

  “Good, yes?”

  The prizewinning pastry dances in my mouth, warm yeasty dough and sugar and cinnamon. But I persist. “When you had your first child, didn’t you want Mama to know she had a grandchild?”

  “Bet you were one hell of a lawyer,” she grumbles. “What is it they say these days? ‘It’s complicated’? I met Rich, my first husband, when I was in Berlin, and I told him the same thing I was telling everyone—that my folks were dead, and I didn’t have any other family. By the time it got serious, I knew him well enough to know that if he found out I’d lied to him, he’d never let me forget it.” She gives a tight smile. “Richard Cochran turned out to be one mean, jealous bastard. Handsome, though.”