The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  “But you divorced him. What about after that?”

  She heaves a dramatic sigh. “Look, by the time I threw Rich out, everyone knew me as a girl who had no family. Even my own kids! And why would I want to tell anyone … That’s just it. What would I have told them—who I really was? It’s like I said, Barbara was the lie; trying to be her was killing me.”

  “Would you have told Rich if your last name were Jones instead of Greenstein?”

  “It was sixty years ago. And my last name was Devereaux.”

  “You don’t just stop being Jewish, like canceling a magazine subscription.”

  “Would that satisfy you, Lainie? Would you feel like you got what you came here for if I said the reason I didn’t contact you was that I didn’t want anyone to know I was Jewish?”

  Would it? In that story, this wild place under its endless sky becomes a bunker in which my gutsy sister hid from a world that scared her. Hid from herself. And me? She said it: I was the brave one.

  “Not,” she says, “that I think anyone in their right mind would be Jewish if they had a choice about it. I was in Berlin for a year after the war. Everywhere, you’d see the DPs, the people who’d been in concentration camps.” She shudders. “But it wasn’t that. It was the family, Boyle Heights, that claustrophobic little world. Lainie, it was different for you. People always expected you to go to college and make something of yourself. Know what I heard from everyone—Mama, Papa, my teachers, even Pearl? That the best I could hope for was to marry a good provider. Look at this!” She gestures toward the window and the ranch beyond. “I haven’t done too badly. If I’d stayed in Boyle Heights, sure, I might have married some doctor and had a life of PTA and charity lunches and a house in the Valley … and I would have gone out of my mind.”

  A song from a musical tinkles in my mind: You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true? Did she have to get out in order to imagine herself? The thought brings a glimmer of understanding. But only a glimmer. I recognize that there are terrible impulses, even the will to murder, lurking in the crevices of my own psyche. But what she did … I remember Danny pointing at her chest and crying, “What’s in there? Do you have a heart?”

  “You felt trapped, and you had to get away, all right,” I say. “But didn’t you have a shred of compassion for us? At the very least, you could have written and let us know you’d landed on your feet, that you hadn’t gotten murdered in some alley …”

  “What are you talking about?” she says, indignant. “You knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Elaine, come on! A couple of years after I left—it was the spring after Pearl Harbor—somehow you found out my name and where I worked in Colorado Springs.… Why are you shaking your head? Mama wrote to me there.”

  As on the day I found Barbara’s dance programs, I feel as if I were standing beside the Los Angeles River in the rain, but this time the flash flood roars from the mountains and smashes into me. Mama and Papa did know, and they kept it from me. This is what I’ve suspected for some time; it shouldn’t come as a huge shock. But hearing her confirm it … It reminds me of when Paul died. No matter that I’d heard the terminal diagnosis months earlier and watched him gradually slip away, or that the home hospice staff had walked me through what was going to happen. Still, the actual moment when I heard his death rattle and then the agonized breathing stopped, I refused to accept it. I kept talking to him, touching his cheek, willing him to flutter his eyelids. What Barbara’s telling me can’t be true.

  “Elaine, what’s wrong?” Barbara says.

  “They never told me.”

  “What, about Mama writing to me?” Her voice goes thin.

  “About anything! About your new name or that they’d found out where you were.”

  “But you’re here,” Barbara insists. “How else could you track me down?”

  As I’m telling her about finding Philip’s card, her face crumples. “Excuse me,” she says, and does her best to hustle out of the room; but her arthritic limbs slow her down, and as she goes through the door, I hear a sob.

  I get up, too, and pace, looking out the window at her glorious view and trying again to comprehend my parents’ silence, sifting the information I’ve just heard into the speculations that have obsessed me for the past two months.

  So it was true, as I’d thought, that Mama wrote a letter to the woman Philip had found. And then? No matter what explanation I come up with—that she and Papa couldn’t be sure the woman was Barbara, or Barbara wrote a reply so hateful that Mama couldn’t even bear to keep the letter—nothing makes me understand how they could deny us the comfort of thinking they’d found her. What did Harriet say when I told her? That she felt so betrayed she wanted to go to the cemetery and scream at Mama’s and Papa’s graves. That’s how I feel now.

  Fifteen minutes have passed, and I’m about to find my way back to the living room, when Barbara returns. She looks like she’s put on fresh mascara, but her eyes are red and puffy, and she says ruefully, “Aren’t we a couple of sob sisters?” Then she takes a deep breath. “You really didn’t know. Mama didn’t tell you.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus. Mama said, but I never believed she meant it. After I got her letter, I kept thinking Papa was going to show up on the next train. And you, Elaine—I was sure I’d get a letter from you. Unless you hated me so much you never wanted to see me again. You had plenty of reason to feel that way.”

  “Are you saying you wanted to hear from me?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I …” She picks at the crumbs of cinnamon roll on her plate. “Mama reamed me, and I figured it was nothing compared to what I’d get from you.”

  “Would you have written back?”

  She thinks about it, then says, “I’d like to tell you yes, but how can I put myself in the state of mind I was in back then? Getting Mama’s letter threw me for such a loop, and everything was crazy then—the war, and I’d signed up for the USO. What I remember, the one thing I can swear is true, is that after I heard from her, every day I looked for a letter from you. I’d go to the office in the hotel where they sorted the mail.…” Her eyes go distant, as if she’s seeing it. “I never, ever believed Mama would keep her promise. Elaine, I am so sorry.”

  I struggle to take it in, hugging myself … as if I could contain the tumult inside me. All of the years when I feared I had meant nothing to her, that she had coldly blotted me out as if I’d never existed.… After nearly a lifetime, that story about Barbara—and the hurt and anger I felt because of it—became one of my deepest truths. To imagine her as a twenty-one-year-old kid waiting for my letter and fearing the same thing about me.…

  I take her hands. “I’m sorry, too. Over the years, I did look for you. I hired detectives.” Then something she said tweaks my awareness. “What … promise?”

  “Mama said—this was in her letter—that she was the only one who knew about me, and she promised not to tell anyone else.”

  “It’s not true!” It can’t be. Thinking that Mama and Papa had decided not to tell us was already devastating. But for Mama alone to offer concealment to Barbara like a gift …

  “Lainie.” She holds my gaze. “Like I said, I couldn’t believe it, either.”

  “She said that? She actually said ‘I promise’?”

  “Well. First she reamed me for being a horrible daughter, and she loaded on the guilt—saying not a day went by when she didn’t weep over leaving her family, and the one thing she wanted most in the world was to see her mother’s face one more time.”

  That sounds like Mama. Whatever else she’d said, Barbara must have twisted it.

  “But after all that,” Barbara continues, “she said if it was what I wanted, she promised—she used that word—to let me live my own life.”

  I have a flash—so vivid that it brings back the feel of Mama’s sweaty hand clutching mine—of our first day of school, the vertiginous moment when I gra
sped that Barbara and I would be in different classrooms. My disorientation wasn’t just because I had to change my mental image of school and create a new one in which my twin and I were separated for the first time in our lives. Radiating out from that image were the streets around the school, then all of Boyle Heights, and from there Los Angeles, America, and the world. My entire internal landscape fractured, and I had to reconstruct it, though it was never again so reliable and whole. And that world had been only five years in the making.

  “Why would she promise that?” I say.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  But it’s not. There was always an uncanny connection between Mama and Barbara, as if they heard the same restless music in their heads. “What’s your guess?”

  She throws up her hands, a gesture that, even crabbed by arthritis, is so deeply familiar that the woman sitting before me could be Mama or Pearl or Harriet—or me. If she had stayed, our common vocabulary of gestures, the visceral traces of our entwined history, would have emerged every time we saw each other, and they might have faded into a background hum. Now each one brings a trumpet fanfare of recognition.

  “When you got the letter, you must have had some idea,” I say.

  “I guess … I thought about what happened to her before she married Papa. You know, when she got kicked out of the place where she was living and felt like she’d run out of places to go. I guess I thought maybe she understood how trapped I’d felt.”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean, she got kicked out?” Mama had told Barbara about running away from her family in Romania. What else did she confess?

  “You never heard this?”

  I shake my head.

  “I guess Mama only told me because she could see I was headed for trouble—this was when I was sixteen or seventeen—and she was trying to get me to shape up.”

  The story Barbara tells begins like the one I know. Mama moved to Los Angeles with a family from Chicago, the … we grope a bit but come up with the Tarnows. She lived with them in Boyle Heights and got a job at a dress factory. The Tarnows knew Zayde because they had come from the same village in Ukraine; they arranged for Mama to meet Papa, which led to her taking his English class, and that led to Papa proposing.

  After that, however, Barbara enters new territory. And I revisit another sensation I remember—the breathless excitement of hearing a secret from my sister. Excitement and apprehension, because uncovering the secret could be like peeling a bandage from a wound.

  “It’s not that Mama didn’t care for Papa. She did,” Barbara says. “But it was the way everything happened, meeting him because the Tarnows knew Zayde, and when Papa proposed, they knew all about it because he’d asked Mr. Tarnow’s permission, and they kept pressuring her to say yes. She used to go to the beach and just stare at the ocean. Remember, she did that when we were kids? Anyway, she sat there and thought—how did she put it?—that she’d crossed Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean and then the entire United States. And after all that, she was being pushed into an arranged marriage just like in her village. The only difference was that now she had no place left to go. And then …”

  “What?” I say in response to her pregnant pause.

  “She met a man.”

  “Mama?” Though as I say it, I remember Mollie telling me, Your mama always had a way about her. “What man?”

  “The director of a Yiddish theater company. She auditioned for a play they were doing, and she got a small part.”

  That part of the story Mollie hadn’t told me; I wonder if she’d known.

  “I don’t know if she and this guy slept together,” Barbara says. “She was vague about the details. But I guess she was staying out till all hours and having a few drinks. So the Tarnows threw her out. Literally, they put all her things in a sack and put it on the street. She went to the jerk of a director, but he washed his hands of any responsibility for her. In a way, she was relieved—she wasn’t in love with him, he was just a smooth talker. At least, that’s what she said. But she had no place to go. The first night, she slept on the street.”

  “She told you this?” As the story begins to settle in, I can see my passionate, capricious, maddening mother tumbling into a romantic involvement, even a full-blown affair. What I can’t imagine is that she’d tell a soul. Yet she did. She was willing to reveal even that humiliation … to the daughter of her heart. The scald of hurt I feel—ridiculous after all these years—mortifies me, and I try to quell it. But the hurt, the sense of exclusion, has a life of its own, as if it’s racing along some of my earliest, most deeply grooved neural pathways.

  “Only because I was so wild,” Barbara says, as if she senses how I feel—old pathways for her, too. “Most of what she talked about was the trashy way I was behaving and how a girl who lost her reputation could never get it back. And how I had to stop expecting my life to be like the movies and grow up. She told me about her mistakes in the hope of scaring me shitless, so I’d start acting like a respectable girl. It’s just that the part of the story I paid attention to was the juicy stuff about her and this man. Naturally.” She shakes her head, gives a small laugh. “It’s so strange to talk about this after all these years. And with you.”

  “What happened—after she slept on the street?”

  “She stayed the next few nights with a friend, but the friend didn’t really have room. Then Mr. Tarnow came and had a talk with her. He told her if she said yes to Papa, they’d let her move back in until she got married. And then …” But she hesitates.

  “What?”

  “Phew! It’s crazy, but I got this chill, like Mama’s looking over my shoulder, knowing I’m about to spill her worst secret. As if it matters anymore. That night she went to the beach. She decided there was one place left that was even farther than California—she could walk into the ocean and drown.”

  Ocean Park at night is so clear in my memory I can smell the salt-tangy air as Barbara says, “She walked in with her clothes on until the water was almost to her neck. But then she got terrified of dying, and she had to struggle to get back to shore.”

  For a moment I’m there, feeling the water rising to my thighs and waist and chest, feeling the sodden pull of my clothes as I fight the suck of the waves. Poor Mama. I had thought, after the talk I’d had with Mollie, that I understood my mother’s thwarted dreams. But I had only glimpsed her desperation, and I ached for her.

  And poor Papa!

  “Did Papa know?” Did the awful knowledge that Mama had nearly drowned herself rather than marry him account for the perpetual strain between my parents, his sternness and her simmering anger?

  “She said he didn’t.”

  “But she told you,” I marvel again.

  “She was really worried about me. With reason.” She chuckles. And then gasps. “Holy crap! Holy, holy crap.”

  “What?”

  “I just now realized I did take what she said to heart. I just got a different moral from the story than she had in mind. She was trying to tell me not to be such a dreamer and to settle for what I could get. What I heard was that I should never run out of places to go. And always, always have money of my own. Damned if I didn’t live my whole life by what she told me.… Those pictures you brought. Can I see them again? I’d like to have one of Mama.”

  She chooses a shot of Mama and me, taken at Ronnie’s wedding. “Thanks, Mama. For everything,” she says, not hiding her tears. Then she swipes a hand over her eyes and announces, “Well, I guess we’ve got a movie to make.”

  She starts to haul herself to her feet, not bothering to hide the effort. I go over to help her, and she lets me. Then we’re standing face-to-face. She caresses my cheek. And we embrace.

  My arms around Barbara, I realize that what she yelled at me earlier is true: no explanation she can give is good enough. So she believed, at twenty-one, that I loathed her. But the lifetime of silence afterward—nothing can make that all right.

  Yet … It’s not that I f
orgive her. But forgiveness feels irrelevant. What matters is hearing her voice, holding her, looking out the window at the view she sees every day. It’s the physical reality, flesh and blood and bone, of this person with whom I spent the first nine months of my existence, the two of us pressed together in the chrysalis of Mama’s womb more closely, for longer, than we would ever touch anyone else.

  What matters is my grandniece wearing Zayde’s tin horse over her heart.

  “I love you,” I murmur.

  “Me too. Lainie, thank you for coming. It means a lot to me.”

  As we leave her office, I say, “Harriet and I are going to a spa in Mexico this spring. Want to come with us?”

  “Do they put you on a diet of watercress?”

  “Food’s fantastic. And we bring our own booze.”

  She shrugs. But doesn’t say no.

  DURING THE COUPLE OF hours we were talking, Josh filmed outdoor footage of the lodge and the mountains; Jen showed him where to get the best shots. And she helped him experiment with locations for the interview, sitting in various spots in the living room while he checked the light.

  “I’m your body double, Gram,” she quips.

  Barbara forces a smile, and I can see that she’s exhausted. I realize that I am too. I’m awash in fatigue.

  “Show time,” she says. And goes ahead with the “interview” like the trouper she is, faking it for the audience of Jen, who hovers, and anyone who might peek in.

  Josh asks her to sit at one end of the sofa and does a little preliminary shooting—fiddling with sound levels, he says, and letting her get comfortable in front of the camera. Not that the Sweetheart of the Rodeo suffers from stage fright. When he starts filming, she launches into her USO stories as smoothly as if she’s rehearsed them. In fact, all her stories have the polish of tales repeated dozens of times, delivered with professional timing.

  I want to pay attention, to get a window into at least a few of the missing years in my sister’s life. But I’ll be able to watch the video Josh is making, I can share it with Harriet when I get home.