The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  The Tin Horse is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Janice Steinberg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Steinberg, Janice

  The tin horse: a novel/by Janice Steinberg.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54028-7

  1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Reminiscing in old age—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Jewish fiction. 5. Boyle Heights (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title

  PS3619.T476195T56 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012020156

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder

  v3.1

  FOR JACK,

  MY BASHERT

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - Elaine

  Chapter 2 - Zayde the Pilot

  Chapter 3 - Boyle Heights

  Chapter 4 - Damage?

  Chapter 5 - Our First Day of School

  Chapter 6 - Danny the Prince

  Chapter 7 - Road Trip

  Chapter 8 - Uncle Harry’s Ghost and the Earthquake

  Chapter 9 - Cousin Mollie Changes the World

  Chapter 10 - Mama and the Fusgeyers: The Real Story

  Chapter 11 - Danny the Spy

  Chapter 12 - Love and Death

  Chapter 13 - A Free Woman

  Chapter 14 - Ranch of No Tomorrow

  Chapter 15 - Golden Door

  Chapter 16 - Bashert

  Chapter 17 - Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Chapter 18 - Gone

  Chapter 19 - An Intelligent Jewess

  Chapter 20 - Back Ice

  Chapter 21 - Tin Horse

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.… She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.

  RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Big Sleep

  We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

  JOAN DIDION, The White Album

  “ELAINE, WHAT’S THIS? POETRY?” HE SHOOTS A GLANCE AT ME, HIS face so young, so eager. Then his eyes return to the folder he’s opened on the dining room table.

  “Let me see it,” I say, but he begins reading aloud.

  “ ‘Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart—’ ”

  “Josh!” I reach out my hand and give him what my kids call the Acid Regard … even as I feel, against my back, the trunk of the fig tree in our yard in Boyle Heights; feel for a moment, stirring in my bones, the impossibly tender eighteen-year-old self who wrote those words.

  “Sure, okay, if you want to look at them first.” He hands over the folder but adds, “These belong in the archive.” He’s well named, Joshua; didn’t he make the walls come tumbling down?

  I thought it was a godsend when the library at the University of Southern California asked me to donate my papers to their special collections. I’d been considering moving to a senior apartment at Rancho Mañana, or, as I can’t help calling it, the Ranch of No Tomorrow, and I dreaded having to sort through all the papers and books accumulated during more than half a century of living in my house in Santa Monica. USC volunteered the assistance of a Ph.D. student in library and information science, an archivist, and I jumped at the offer.

  I did have a twinge of misgiving. It’s one thing to expose my professional life to strangers, but USC doesn’t just want material from my legal career; they’re interested in my personal papers, things from my childhood and family. Well, I figured the library science student would be a docile young woman who wouldn’t put up a fight if I chose to keep something private, someone with whom the process of excavating my past would be a sort of surgical procedure: clean and impersonal. I of all people—after a lifetime devoted to fighting prejudice—fell into such hasty stereotyping. And I’m paying for it. My not-at-all-docile archivist, Josh, sees every scrap of paper as a potential gold mine, and if his abrasive curiosity pokes an old pain or anger, he’s delighted; my annoyance doesn’t intimidate him, it just makes him push harder.

  Not that I can hold Josh responsible for the nostalgia that ambushed me as I opened a box of my kids’ childhood drawings, or the stab of grief when I came upon letters I’d exchanged with Paul—dead four years as of last month—when he was in the army in World War II. And now my teenage poetry. I suppose it’s just as well that Josh isn’t a sensitive, bookish type who’d try to comfort me every time some piece of my past touches a nerve. I prefer sparring to sympathy.

  “Is that everything from my office?” I ask briskly. That’s who I am, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, a brisk, no-bullshit woman, not a girlish poet whom every memento leaves undone.

  “Let me check.” He jumps up. He’s quick and efficient—thank goodness, since I did decide on the senior apartment. I put my house on the market, and I’m moving to Rancho Mañana in mid-December, just six weeks away.

  As soon as he’s left the room and I’m alone, I peek at the first poem. “Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart. I have no such art of concealment. The flower of my love …” Could I ever have been so young and vulnerable? Where did that girl go? I can look back at the Elaine who wrote her first idealistic letter to a newspaper at eleven and draw a line to the crusading attorney I became. The seeds were there, even if it does astonish me that the quiet, reflective girl I was learned to be such a fighter—what did the Los Angeles Times call me, “the city’s go-to progressive attorney for decades, from the McCarthy witch hunts to the civil rights, anti–Viet Nam War, and women’s movements”?

  But the gentle poet who once lived in me, what became of her? I can name the date I stopped writing poetry: September 12, 1939. I was eighteen. Whether or not I kept writing, however, what happened to that gentleness? Did I just outgrow it? Did I wall it off? I have a sense of something calling to me from those forgotten poems. But what nonsense! I chide myself. An old woman’s sentimentality. I close the folder and put it in the wicker basket of things I want to look over before releasing them to Josh for the archive. Not that I have any intention of giving him the poems. I plan to “misplace” them.

  After the surprise of finding the poetry, I’m wary when Josh returns to the dining room carrying two department store boxes—though the boxes themselves set off no warning bell, no frisson of alarm.

  “Where did those come from?” I ask.

  “Closet shelf, way in the back. There’s a stack of ’em.”

  “Maybe they’re things of Ronnie’s.” My office used to be my son’s room. I expect moth-eaten camp clothes or a comic-book collection.

  “No, they’re full of papers.”

  Josh puts the top box—it’s from Buffum’s—between us and lifts the lid, and now the memory stirs: of my younger sisters and me cleaning out our mother’s apartment after she died. That was more than thirty years ago, and what an ordeal it was. In the clean-lined apartment in West Los Angeles to which we moved Mama after Papa died, she had re-created the overstuffed claustrophobia of our house in Boyle Heights. Mama’s death, ten years after Papa’s (he’d had a stroke), was a shock. Still vigorous at seventy-
six, she was out taking her daily walk, and a drunk driver ran her down. Going through her apartment in a blur of grief, Audrey, Harriet, and I came across two—four? a dozen?—boxes from now-defunct department stores in which Mama kept papers, and who knew what else. None of us could bear to go through them at the time.

  I have no memory of doing it, but we must have thrown the boxes into my car, and somehow they ended up in my son’s closet.

  “Hey, is this Hebrew?” Josh holds out a letter he’s unfolded and tries to hand me a pair of white gloves. It doesn’t matter how often I tell him I have the right to touch my own things; he brings a second pair of gloves every time.

  I scan the Hebrew letters. “Yiddish. It must be from my mother’s family in Romania.”

  “You can read Yiddish?”

  I discover I still can.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Family news—somebody got married, somebody else had a child.” Typical of what we heard from our Romanian relatives in the 1920s. During the thirties, their letters became anguished pleas for us to get at least the young ones out. We succeeded with my cousin Ivan; my family sponsored him to come to Los Angeles. And after the war, two cousins made it to Palestine, and three others went to our relatives in Chicago. But the rest were gone.

  “Well, these are definitely keepers.” An acquisitive gleam in his eyes, Josh holds a stack of letters, all neatly saved in their original envelopes. He reaches for one of the plastic bags he uses for items to place in the archive.

  “Wait, I want to read them!” I doubt I’ll have time to do more than glance through the letters. But this is my family, my history. Mine and Harriet’s. Of the four of us, the Greenstein girls, she and I are the only ones left. I don’t know if Harriet ever learned any Yiddish, but I need to share the letters with her, to let her at least touch these things Mama cherished, before they become source material for someone’s dissertation.

  “Sure, of course.” Josh slips the letters into the bag, labels it, and hands it to me. “Just keep them in here when you’re not reading them.”

  Along with the letters, the box contains stray notes, receipts, and newspaper and magazine clippings that have no obvious reason for being saved. “Someone was a pack rat,” Josh says happily, but even he consigns much of the contents of the box to the recycling container at his side.

  We move on to the second box, this one from May Company. It’s a treasure trove. Mama dedicated this box to us, her daughters. I discover report cards, school papers, crayon drawings. Here’s my letter of acceptance from USC, with the promise of a full scholarship. And here, neatly saved in a manila envelope, my articles from the school newspaper and the letters to editors I wrote with Danny, pleas for America to respond to the plight of Jews in Europe. Yes, of course, I tell Josh, I’ll give him the articles and letters after I’m done with them; and after I’ve shared the box with Harriet.

  I keep digging and come upon a packet the size of a half sheet of paper, held together with a rubber band. When I pick up the packet, the rubber band crumbles, and out spill … oh, it’s the programs from Barbara’s dance recitals. There are a dozen or more, with artfully hand-lettered titles, printed on thick, good-quality paper.

  I open one of the programs, and I’m sitting in the dark, watching my sister dance. Not just admiring her but feeling her movements in my body—though I could never have danced with her abandon and fire. I craved private moments, whereas Barbara came alive in the spotlight.

  “Elaine,” Josh says, and I realize I’ve been miles—years—away. “Did you dance?”

  “No. My sister Barbara.” My throat goes rough with the threat of unexpected tears.

  “Ballet?”

  “Modern,” I choke out.

  “Did she ever do anything with it? Have a career?”

  “She did what most of the women of my generation did. Got married, raised a family.” Lying, the words come more easily. Still, I have a sudden image of standing on the bank of the Los Angeles River during a storm, the water churning and my nerves alert for signs of a flash flood. Nonsense! I tell myself again.

  He asks if he can take the programs for some kind of dance archive at USC, and I say fine—what would I do with them?

  Then the box yields a fresh challenge to my equilibrium: Philip’s business card.

  Josh whistles. “Wow! What did your mother have to do with a private detective?”

  I mumble something about my having worked for Philip when I was in college. That spins Josh into fresh questions, and he mentions a name, someone I’ve never heard of, written on the back of the card. I blurt that I’ve come down with a splitting headache and rush him out the door. Then I stop fighting and let the flood come.

  I’m expecting some kind of violence, that I’ll break into wild weeping or hurl a vase across the room. Instead, there’s a sense of surrender as I let myself be carried by the river of sorrow and rage and regret and love, the river of Barbara.

  AT 11:52 P.M. ON MARCH 28, 1921, BARBARA WRIGGLED OUT OF Mama into the brightness of White Memorial Hospital on Boyle Avenue in Los Angeles. Seventeen minutes—but the next day—later, I swam after her. Did she shove me aside? Did I, suddenly shy of the world, hold back? But Barbara always arrived ahead of me. She balanced on a bicycle half an hour before I did, and everyone was so busy congratulating her, they didn’t notice when I climbed onto the bike we shared and wobbled to the corner. People always called us Barbara and Elaine, never Elaine and Barbara. And though I met Danny first, Barbara was his first love.

  We were fraternal twins, not identical. Still, no one would have doubted that we were sisters. We both had thick, curly dark hair (hers slightly curlier and mine with redder highlights, of which I was vain), gold-flecked hazel eyes, and largish but thankfully straight noses. When we got into our teens, I shot up to five foot three, which was tall for our family; Barbara was an inch shorter. Our most obvious physical difference lay in the architecture of our faces. She had soft apple cheeks like Mama’s, while my face was narrow, with Papa’s deep-set eyes; long before I had to start wearing glasses at eleven, people rightly pegged me as the serious one. Did we grow into our faces, or did they express our natures from the beginning? Both of us spoke at a medium pitch and “so clear, like bells! You girls should go on the radio!” Papa, shamed by his parents’ and Mama’s accents, polished our articulation by having us declaim poems. While I kneaded my thoughts into sentences deliberately, Barbara never hesitated. And she could sing, with what matured into a throaty, torch-song voice, while I could barely croak out a tune.

  We have the same smile in photographs, the same gap between our front teeth, inherited from Papa. A film, though, would have shown that she was quicker to smile. If one quality most described my sister, it was quickness, in every sense of the word. Barbara was spontaneous, eager, vital, warm, someone who constantly came up with games and mischief, making her a natural leader of the band of kids in our neighborhood. She was also impatient, impulsive, reckless, and hasty to judge. Mercurial, even cruel, a quick-change artist of affection who adored you one day and, worse than anger or hatred, forgot you existed the next.

  And she could leave havoc in her wake, a talent I witnessed for the first time when she caused the stock market crash of 1929. Of course, I was old enough at that time—eight and a half—to understand that cataclysms in my family didn’t affect the entire world. Yet I always associated Black Tuesday with the storm that hit our house the same day because of what Barbara did to Zayde.

  Zayde Dov, Papa’s father, lived with us. In fact, our house was the same one Zayde had moved into when Papa was seventeen. But Zayde wasn’t from Los Angeles. He had crossed the ocean to come to America. And before that, he’d had to cross a river. A trifling distance, to be sure, compared to the Atlantic that churned beneath him for two weeks, an ordeal that made him refuse to set foot in a boat ever again, not even the little rowboats in Hollenbeck Park. But crossing the river was harder. The first wrenching away from everythin
g he knew and that knew him, a seventeen-year-old boy with his mama’s kugel still warm in his belly and the fresh damp of her tears wetting the scarf she’d knotted around his neck.

  And Zayde’s river was no country trickle, but the mighty Dniester, which swept from the Carpathian Mountains past his village in the Ukraine to the Black Sea. Then there was the fact that he had to swim across the river on a March night—the water icy, the current at a gallop from melting Carpathian snow—so the dogs wouldn’t pick up his scent. The dogs and the men with them, men who carried cudgels and guns.

  Zayde always paused at this point. And Barbara and I always demanded, breathless as if the dogs were after us, “Why were they chasing you?”

  “Ah,” he’d say, taking a sip from his cup of tea, laced with whiskey. “A great crime I committed, girls.”

  No matter how many times I heard the story, I could never erase the picture that jumped into my mind, of Zayde Dov in his house slippers vaulting onto a horse with the loot from a bank robbery, like the Wild West bandits I saw in the movies.

  Until he continued, “I fell in love.”

  The girl’s name was Agneta. She was the daughter of one of the farmers who came into town on market day, an event that over time, between Zayde’s storytelling and my imagination, became so real I almost felt as if I’d been there, as if I’d witnessed the scene that sealed Zayde’s fate. Market day in Zayde’s village was busy and noisy, what with the jostle of peasants selling what their farms produced and the Jewish villagers offering goods such as tea, salt, and lamp oil. The villagers also provided the services of craftsmen such as Berel the tinsmith, who was Zayde Dov’s father.

  Berel, an enterprising man, had recently bought a grinding machine and branched into sharpening. And scissors, appropriately, proved the instrument of Dov’s estrangement—such a rich word, signifying both that you become a stranger to others and that everything around you, everything you see and hear, even what you smell, is alien. No more do your nostrils suck in the precise odors that emanate from this soil and vegetation, this method of cooking and of handling trash, the perfume, however foul, of home. If only Dov could have foreseen what he was about to lose, would he have acted differently the day Agneta came into the tinsmith’s shop wanting her scissors sharpened fine enough to cut the challis she’d just bought for a best dress?