The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  “This is a party. You don’t wear just a blouse and skirt.”

  “It’s my middy blouse.”

  “I’m not bringing my daughter to a party at Sonya’s fancy new house in a blouse and skirt. Go put on your good dress.”

  “It’s my middy blouse!” Barbara stood with her legs planted.

  Mama lurched heavily across the room, a storm gathering on her face, and I tensed, sure that she was going to slap Barbara for sassing. Suddenly, though, her eyes went soft, as if her gaze were filled with honey, so warm and sweet I yearned for a taste of it. She shook her head and smiled at Barbara. “My headstrong girl.” She didn’t say another word about the middy blouse.

  THE HOUSEWARMING PARTY took place on a hot day, and all of the children—there were a dozen of us in those fecund times—were sent outside to the back. Anna, the daughter of Leo’s brother and the oldest of us at eleven, was told to keep us in the yard.

  Anna was a bit strange. She rarely looked straight at anyone, and if any attention came her way, her face scrunched like she was going to cry.

  “Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Barbara said.

  “Where?” One of the boys scanned the yard, which was no larger than ours.

  “We’re supposed to stay—” Anna tried. Even at twice our age, she was no match for Barbara.

  “You’re it.” Barbara pointed to a girl.

  “I don’t want to be it. You be it.”

  “I’ll be it next time.” Barbara flashed the girl a dazzling smile. “What’s your name?”

  “Judy. Promise you’ll be it next time?”

  “Promise.”

  Judy put her hands over her eyes and started counting.

  I glanced at Anna. She’d retreated to the side of the yard.

  “Five, six …,” Judy said.

  The other kids were scattering, a couple of the littlest crouching by the back steps but the rest running around the side of the house toward the street. I ran, too. Glimpsing a bigger girl, I followed her down the block toward the new construction. We’d been forbidden to play around the construction because we might step on stray nails, but I had to find a hiding place! Besides, the rule about nails made no sense. As the daughter of a salesman at the best shoe store on Brooklyn Avenue, I was never allowed to go barefoot, not even on a hot day like this.

  The bigger girl turned toward a house that was almost done, the stucco walls already constructed and framing set up for the porch. I made for a site two doors down that was still skeletal, just a slab and some wooden joists, with big stacks of two-by-fours over to the side. I squeezed between two piles of wood into a perfect hiding place, just the right size for a five-year-old. Judy would never find me here.

  The wood, warmed by the afternoon sun, smelled intoxicating. Zayde always talked about the forest outside his village, how beautiful it was, how cool on a hot day. I had never been to a forest, but, hunkered in the shade of the fragrant lumber, I imagined I was in Zayde’s woods. My feet felt hot and itchy, and I took off my Mary Janes and my socks; I couldn’t step on any nails if I was just sitting.

  The women had all baked for Sonya and Leo’s party, and I had three different kinds of cake in my stomach, all of them sweet and delicious and heavy. And it was such a warm, sleepy afternoon …

  “HEY! GIRL!”

  Startled awake, I started to jump up, but someone grabbed my shoulders to stop me.

  “Don’t, you make fall.” The boy’s accent was like Zayde’s, but his English wasn’t as good.

  I sat up, careful not to disturb the wood, and stared at the boy crouching next to me. About my age, he had cat eyes, their irises weirdly light compared to his olive skin and black hair.

  “What you do here?” he said.

  “I’m hiding.”

  Fear leaped into his eyes. “Why? Pogrom?”

  “No, silly. Hide-and-seek.” I’d heard the word pogrom from Zayde and Mama, and I knew it was a very bad thing. But it only happened in the old country. What a strange boy, to think of that. Was he one of Anna’s many cousins? Except he wasn’t wearing dress-up clothes, like all the other kids at the party. This boy’s thin shirt looked the way our clothes did when Mama said they’d gotten too old to mend and we should give them to the poor.

  I noticed a sack behind him. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” Suddenly furtive, he shifted his body so I couldn’t see the sack anymore. “You Elaine?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “They call. You don’t want they find you?”

  “Don’t you know how to play hide-and-seek? What’s your name?”

  “Danny.”

  “Do you live on this street?”

  He looked secretive again but then declared, “Going to. This house, here. My father builds. Big house.” Prouder and prouder, as if with each word, the house became more solid, his future life in it brighter. “You live over there?”

  “My aunt and uncle. They’re having a party.”

  “Ela-aine!” I heard from my hiding place. It was Barbara. Why was she looking for me, when Judy was it? And why the note of urgency? “Elaine, are you there?”

  “Over here,” I called in a whisper-shout. “Here! Here!” I crept to the edge of the stack of wood and waved. I couldn’t go out until I put on my shoes.

  “Everybody’s looking for you. Are you okay?” She came and stood at the end of my hiding place. And spotted Danny. “Who’s that?”

  I looked at him. He was staring openmouthed at Barbara, who sparkled in the bright sunlight in her middy blouse with its jaunty sailor collar.

  “Just a boy,” I said. Not wanting to share him. Thinking of him, already, as “my boy.”

  Someone yelled, “Barbara! Did you find her?” An adult voice.

  “She’s here,” Barbara called back. And said to me, “Hurry.”

  I scrambled out from my burrow. A woman screamed, “Thank God, she’s all right!” Then a pack of people rushed at me, and Papa hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe. He carried me back to Sonya and Leo’s, he and everyone else yelling at me.

  “Where were you?”

  “Didn’t you hear everyone looking for you?”

  “Look at your dress, filthy.”

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “Did you want to kill your poor mother?” a woman scolded, and when they brought me into the house, I was terrified I had done just that.

  Mama was lying back in a chair, her legs splayed and her arms limp over her huge belly. Aunt Sonya was fanning her with a magazine, but Mama didn’t move. Her face looked yellow-white like old candle wax.

  “Mama!” I howled, and ran to her. And then stopped, horrified by the puddle of water on the floor by the chair. Had Mama peed herself … like I was doing now, wet shame squirting down my legs even faster than the tears gushed from my eyes?

  “Lainie.” Mama opened her eyes and took my hand. I steeled myself for her fury, but something must have been terribly wrong. She smiled at me.

  Then she was gone, driven by Leo to the hospital.

  I hadn’t hurt Mama, Pearl assured me. Her water had broken, and it meant she was going to have her baby.

  But I didn’t stop crying until Barbara came and blew on my face to cool me down. When the adults weren’t looking, she took my hand and we snuck back to the house under construction to get my shoes. She acted like I’d done something bold and exciting, and I stopped feeling guilty and came to see that day as an adventure. For the first time, I saw a little something bold in myself.

  AFTER OUR BABY SISTER Audrey was born, we didn’t go as often to Aunt Sonya’s. Still, every Monday afternoon, when Sonya had “the girls” over to play cards, Mama carried Audrey, and we walked there. All of the women brought their children. They put the babies down in Sonya and Leo’s bedroom, and the rest of us played in the yard. By August, the house where I’d hidden was completed, and a family moved in. I walked by and watched for my boy, Danny, but I never saw him. He had appeared so fleet
ingly, with his cat eyes and his air of mystery, that I thought I might have dreamed him, except that when Barbara had taken me back to get my shoes, I saw that he’d left his sack; it held a few pieces of scrap wood and some nails, and I took one of the nails. I hid it in my treasure box, a gift from Aunt Pearl.

  I might have dreamed jolly Papa, too. Now, on the nights he came home for dinner, he gave us lessons again or sat in his chair, absorbed in the newspaper. Occasionally, if Barbara or I asked very, very nicely, without pestering, he took us for a walk, but he no longer called out to people or whistled. And he paid little attention to baby Audrey.

  He lost interest in the garden. Barbara and I kept on taking care of it, with Zayde’s help. We had green thumbs, Zayde said. He said we grew the best tomatoes and cucumbers in Los Angeles.

  I SIT FLOATING ON MEMORY AS THE AFTERNOON GIVES WAY TO DUSK. And then the pull of the past is done with me … or maybe it’s just my eighty-five-year-old bladder that insists on yanking me back to the present. After using the bathroom, I gather up Mama’s daughter memorabilia to share with Harriet.

  Everything except Philip’s card, one more piece of detritus that Mama saved simply because she couldn’t throw anything away. I pick up the card to drop it in with the recycling, but didn’t Josh say that something was written on the back?

  Kay Devereaux

  Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs

  The handwriting looks like Philip’s, but I’ve never heard of Kay Devereaux. I wonder why Philip gave the card to Mama. Maybe this Kay was a lead who didn’t pan out, a chorus-girl friend of Barbara’s; the name sounds like a stage name.

  And then a memory slams me: I see Barbara and me painting on our scarlet Coty lipstick—the precious tube we shared, hidden in the toe of a shoe—and making up movie star names for ourselves. Diane Hollister. Priscilla Camberwell. Nola Trent was my favorite, a no-nonsense type who’d had a brilliant New York theatrical career and only did films with clever repartee. Kay Devereaux is just the kind of name Barbara would have chosen. Could Philip have found her?

  I run for the phone, call information, and ask for Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs. Even as I recognize—and loathe—the prickly feeling surging through me. It’s the charge I felt the first year or two after she left, every time I raced for a ringing telephone or snatched up the mail, or we got a tip that someone in Hollywood or San Francisco or Tijuana had spotted her.

  We searched for her like crazy back then, no matter that in her note she’d said not to worry and that she was fine. As Aunt Sonya never tired of saying, an eighteen-year-old girl on her own—or worse, not on her own—how could she be fine? Look at the job she’d had, singing and dancing in the chorus at a Hollywood nightclub, her legs and everything on display and her silly head filled with dreams of breaking into the pictures. “A girl like that doesn’t have the best judgment, does she?” Sonya said again and again, until one day Mama screamed in her face.

  We talked to every one of her friends and ran personal ads in the newspapers in the biggest cities in California. Papa went to the police, too, but they didn’t do anything, not when they heard about the note and her job at the nightclub. We tried one more time when Philip offered to help, though by then she’d been gone for two years. (I didn’t lie to Josh. I did work for Philip, but it was a trade, a way for my family to pay him for looking for my sister.)

  Along with the prickle of hope, I got used to the crash that followed, when the mail contained no word from her, or the “Barbara” spotted working as a waitress in Newport Beach turned out to be a middle-aged Mexican woman, and the man who’d given us the tip had vanished with his twenty-dollar reward.

  Within a few months, even a hint of hope and I was already plummeting. The pattern became so fixed in my nervous system that it kicks in now, more than sixty-five years later, when I ask the recorded voice for Kay Devereaux. And of course, there’s no listing. She would have married and changed her name. Moved. Died.

  I could check the Internet. I jump up to go to my office.

  “Stop it!” I say it out loud and will myself to sit down.

  What the hell does it matter what happened to a woman named Kay Devereaux? That woman can’t be Barbara, because if she were, Mama and Papa would have told me.

  I pour myself a Scotch. It’s almost time for Jeopardy!. I should get myself some dinner and get settled in front of the television. But for just another moment, I’m drawn back to the May Company box; there are things I haven’t looked at yet, below Barbara’s dance programs and Philip’s card. I get to the bottom without finding anything else about the mysterious Kay—not that I was hunting for anything, of course not. But to think that the box sat for decades on the closet shelf and I never opened it.

  And Josh brought in just two department store boxes, but he said there were more. What other riches did my mother squirrel away? I go into my office. Josh left a chair just inside the closet. I hop up on it … and wobble. Oh, no! Gripping the back of the chair, I plant both feet on the ground. I can’t afford another broken leg like last year, or, kiss of death, a broken hip. That’s the main reason I’m moving to Rancho Mañana, so I won’t have to worry about stairs, and so in case anything does happen, my kids won’t have to put their lives on hold to take care of me. Carol did that when I broke my leg; she came down from Oregon for a month.

  I should put some food on top of the Scotch. The refrigerator yields half a turkey sandwich, left over from going out to lunch yesterday. I take the sandwich into the den, turn on the TV, and match wits against the contestants on Jeopardy!.

  Once I’ve eaten (and aced Final Jeopardy!), I brave the chair again. I find another three department store boxes, one so heavy it almost sends me tumbling. No wonder, the box is filled with books. “Papa!” I murmur. I can almost smell him as I lift out the poetry anthologies he had us recite from, and his beloved histories of Los Angeles, everything friable with decay. I open one of the poetry books, glimpse a title, and discover I can recite the poem by heart. I wonder if Harriet will be able to do that, too.

  She has to see this! I call and invite her to come over for lunch after our water aerobics class tomorrow.

  I LEARNED TO SWIM at Venice Beach—Papa taught me when I was little—and there’s still nothing I love more than to walk into the ocean, out to where the waves lap just above my waist, and then dive in. The exhilaration of that first cold immersion! The bubbly tickle of salt water on my skin and the blurry (without my glasses) vastness ahead of me. A whiff of the beach, and my nose still comes up like an eager dog’s. The first time I swam in a pool, when I was a student at USC, I felt claustrophobic and my skin itched for hours. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the unique pleasures of pool swimming—in particular, that the pool at the Westside Y, where Harriet and I take water aerobics twice a week, is blissfully warm.

  I don’t see Harriet in the locker room. My baby sister, twelve years my junior, has probably come early to swim laps. Sure enough, when I go out to the pool, I spot her cutting through the water, a zaftig seal in her fluorescent green suit and matching cap. I put on booties, ease into the water, and greet the half dozen other regulars who are already there. A few minutes later, Harriet swims to the shallow end and joins us, stripping off her swim cap and shaking out her long gray hair.

  Anytime I’ve attempted to go gray, the word schoolmarm immediately comes to mind. That’s why I get to the salon every six weeks for a feathery cut and to keep up my color, which has gotten lighter and lighter; it’s now a sort of cocker spaniel blond. On Harriet, though, wild gray locks suggest a free spirit who still puts marijuana in her brownies and has a diverting sex life. The look is perfect for her workshops, “Wise Woman: The Deep Knowing of Age.” Sounds like psychobabble, but Harriet really is a wise woman, and not only because she’s a respected psychotherapist; she sees beneath the surface of people and relationships and comes up with insights that amaze me. Not that she often exercises her skill on the family. Refraining from analyzing us is part o
f her wisdom.

  We prance—well, Harriet prances; I shuffle—in the pool for an hour to music than runs from big-band tunes to the kind of songs my grandkids listen to; then we take showers, dress, and meet back at my house.

  “Wow. You’re really doing this!” Harriet surveys the living room, which already feels bare, though all I’ve done so far is empty bookshelves. Every piece of furniture, however—except for the few things that will fit in the apartment at Rancho Mañana—has been assessed by a sweet but ruthless woman named Melissa who bluntly told me what’s worth placing in her consignment store and what’s so pathetically outdated I should just give it away.

  “Sure you don’t want to move in with me?” Harriet says.

  “I’m sure. But thanks!” I think of Harriet’s household—her forty-two-year-old son who moved back home after getting laid off and the not-much-older man with whom she does, in fact, have a diverting sex life—and experience a moment of profound gratitude that I can afford my own apartment at Rancho Mañana.

  Over lunch, I tell her about the boxes. Then I make tea and show her the gems I’ve found. I start with the daughter box, though I’m surprised, going through it with Harriet, to realize Mama saved far less ephemera of her life than of Barbara’s, Audrey’s, or mine. There are report cards and class pictures, but nothing more personal.

  But what really stuns me is when we turn to Papa’s books.

  “Remember Papa’s poetry lessons?” I say.

  “What poetry lessons?”

  “Didn’t he have you recite poems?” She looks blank, and I continue, “It wasn’t just because he wanted us to speak well. He loved to recite. Remember, he won a prize for elocution when he was in high school?”

  “Did he?”

  “Harriet! The story of Papa’s prize is a Greenstein legend.”

  She laughs. “They say—and I guess this proves it—that every sibling grows up in a different family. That if someone asked you or Audrey or me what it was like growing up, we’d have wildly different stories. It has to do with birth order, temperament.” She picks up the tag on the end of her teabag, starts shredding it. “And of course, most of my childhood was after Barbara left.”