The Tin Horse: A Novel (14 page)

BETWEEN ALL THE SUGAR
and the excitement, the next day at school I felt sick. Mrs. Villiers put her cool hand on my forehead, then sent me home.

“Mama?” I called when I walked in the door.

She didn’t answer. She must have been out. I was a little disappointed, but I had already been fussed over as much in the previous twenty-four hours as I usually was in months, and I was eleven, old enough to take an aspirin without any help and put myself to bed.

I pushed open the kitchen door to get a glass of water and saw … I didn’t know what I was seeing. This was surely our kitchen: I recognized
the green linoleum floor and primrose-flowered curtains, and the oak table standing in the middle of the room. A woman stood on the other side of the table; she had her back to me and didn’t notice when I came in, but she was wearing Mama’s blue housedress. And I recognized the black cast-iron soup pot and the smell of boiled onions. But …

Instead of being on the stove, the soup pot sat on a low stool
.

The woman straddled the steaming pot, her legs wide and her knees slightly bent, as if she were going to sit on it
.

And she was sobbing and talking out loud in Yiddish
.

I stood frozen in the doorway. I hadn’t thought I was very ill, but now I felt dizzy and my scalp exploded in sweat.

“Please, God, I can’t do it this time,” she said. “I know I don’t talk to you as often as I should. Maybe you didn’t hear I live in America now? Even here, a woman doesn’t have much choice about getting married, all right. But you think I’m still in Tecuci, where the women have baby after baby—”

Tecuci was Mama’s village in Romania. This woman talking to God
was
my mother.

“Mama?” I said.

She sprang up—and kicked the pot over. Steaming onions and water spilled onto the floor, onto her legs and bare feet.

“Ai!” Screaming, she ran toward the doorway. Toward me, shrieking, “What are you doing here?”

She shoved me aside, knocking my head into the swinging door. Once she’d escaped the kitchen and the scalding liquid, she staggered to a chair, moaning. “God in heaven, my feet!”

“Mama, should I call the doctor? Or Papa? Why don’t I call Papa?”

“Elaine, no!”

“Please, can I do anything? I’ll get you some Vaseline.”

“Vaseline, yes. What did you mean, sneaking up on me like that?”

Weeping, I ran to the powder room. When I came back with the Vaseline, the rage had drained out of Mama. Her face was pale, and she whimpered when I applied the Vaseline to her feet and ankles and put gauze over it.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call the doctor?” I asked.

“I just need to sit here and rest a little.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t … Yes, could you clean up? In the kitchen?”

“Is it soup? Should I save what didn’t spill?”

“Soup? You think like they say about old
bubbes
, I flavor my soup by pissing in it?” She started to laugh, but wildly. She must have seen she was scaring me, because she stopped and caressed my cheek. “Darling, it’s not soup. Throw it out. And please?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell anyone. This will be our secret, all right?”

I mopped the floor twice. Still, the house stank of onions for days. And Mama limped on her burned feet; she accounted for her injuries and the smell by saying she had knocked a pot off the stove.

Barbara had another explanation for the mystifying scene I’d witnessed. (Of course I told Barbara. I didn’t breathe a word to anyone else, as I’d promised Mama. But sharing the story with my twin sister didn’t count as
telling
; it was like trying to make sense in my own mind of what I’d seen.)

“You sit over a pot of boiled onions if you don’t want to have a baby,” Barbara said.

“What? That’s stupid.”

“That’s what Sari Lubow’s aunt said. Sari told me once she heard her mother and her aunt talking about it. Her aunt said it was old-country
meshugas
.”

Barbara was my source of information about such things; she picked up every whisper about the facts of life the way I absorbed subjects in school.

A few weeks later, though, Papa announced that this year, instead of getting Hanukkah
gelt
, we were receiving a truly wonderful gift: a new baby was growing in Mama’s tummy. So maybe Barbara had it backward and squatting over onions was what you did when you
wanted
a baby? Either way, I knew just enough about human reproduction to be certain Sari’s aunt was right: the onions were
meshugas
.

And Mama didn’t want another baby. “I can’t do it this time,” she had cried to God. Maybe I’d misunderstood her Yiddish? But despite, no,
because
of my confusion about the pot of onions, I felt certain of what I’d
heard her say, the words burned into me by the very strangeness of that moment when I stood in the kitchen doorway and couldn’t recognize my own mother. She had said, too, that women in America had little choice about getting married. Did that mean she didn’t love Papa?

With all that on my mind, I was less upset than I might have been when Danny got caught shoplifting at Chafkin’s, just before New Year’s. Besides, even Eddie Chafkin felt sorry for the Berlovs, so the punishment Eddie devised was relatively mild: Danny just had to do ten hours of work at the store, sweeping and helping in the stockroom, to atone for his crime.

What did upset me was that Danny stopped telling me his stories. Maybe it was because of his embarrassment over my letter or because I, his unquestioning listener, had confronted him over the stolen candy bars. Maybe getting caught stealing was too great a collision with reality.

I suppose the stories would have stopped, anyway. We turned twelve that spring, too old for childhood fantasies.

When we went to the beach the next summer, rather than taking walks with me, Danny got obsessed with the muscle men. He spent every minute hanging out where they lifted weights and ran errands for them, and the men took him under their wing and got him started on bodybuilding.

I lost Princess Verena. And I gained a new sister, Harriet.

I
’
M NOT GOING TO DRIVE ALL THE WAY TO COLORADO SPRINGS. OF
course I’m not, I assure myself as I head east on the 10 freeway. That
would
be insane, especially for an octogenarian in pink Keds who has to stop every hour to pee and can’t drive after dusk because her night vision is shot. I just couldn’t stay in my house one more minute, couldn’t bear the confinement of the walls. What does any true Californian do when she’s jumping out of her skin? She gets in the car and hits the freeway!

I’m still jumping out of my skin, but at least I’m moving. I didn’t own a car, didn’t even drive, until I was twenty-six, when Paul’s parents gave us a Plymouth as a wedding present. We drove the Plymouth on our honeymoon, four days at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and when we weren’t in bed or at the beach, Paul taught me how to drive on back roads lined with avocado groves. A born teacher, he was able to break down all of the actions an experienced driver does unconsciously. I learned well; I’ve always been a good driver. Sixty years of driving in L.A., and I’ve never had an accident.

But the one thing Paul never succeeded in getting across to me was
having a lighter foot on the gas pedal. From the moment I learned to release the clutch without stalling, I loved speed! As I get beyond the perpetual Los Angeles traffic, I push the car—a silver Jaguar sedan, my gift to myself for my eightieth birthday—past seventy-five.

I’ll drive as far as Victorville; it’s just eighty or ninety miles from L.A. I’ll treat myself to a date shake, the way Paul and I used to do when we drove to or from Las Vegas. Then I’ll turn around.

But no matter how fast I go, I can’t get away from what Josh told me earlier this afternoon.

“That card we found last week for the detective, Philip Marlowe,” he said the minute he walked in, so excited that the words spilled out of him. “I did a little research. He was quite a character.”

“He was rather well known back in the thirties and forties.”

“
Rather
well known? I found newspaper articles about some big cases he helped solve. This one reporter wrote about him a lot. He made your friend Marlowe sound like a tough guy around thugs but a knight in shining armor if he was helping someone small and powerless.” Josh shot me an oddly complicit look. “Turns out the reporter’s papers are in a private collection of L.A. history from the 1940s. I’d heard about the collection, and I’ve been curious about it, so I went and took a look.

“And … voilà!” He reached into his banker’s box and pulled out a nine-by-twelve envelope. “The reporter must have been friends with Marlowe, because he got all of his case files. I copied his file on your sister. At least I figured it was your sister—Barbara Greenstein, the one in the dance programs?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said curtly. For Josh, following the card to Philip and then Barbara was nothing but a librarian’s treasure hunt—a puzzle, a lark. But it was my life he was prying into, my hope that got kindled and, inevitably, dashed. Well, not this time. I already knew what was going to be in the file. I took the envelope and set it aside, then turned to the material I’d laid out on the table. “I promised you those letters to editors I wrote when I was a teenager.”

But Josh was like a cat bringing in a dead bird and wanting to show off its kill. “Funny you didn’t know Kay Devereaux was the name your sister used in Colorado Springs. When she worked at the hotel.”

Obviously Josh had misread something. Still, I opened the envelope and pulled out the file, a thin sheaf of no more than half a dozen pages. My eyes raced over the top sheet, notes from talking to my family: Barbara’s height, weight, date of birth, when and where we’d seen her last, the names of her friends, and so on. Continuing through the file, I could see how Philip followed those leads, though his actual notes were sketchy, a scatter of names or phrases he’d jotted for his own reference; I could piece them together because I’d already heard it all more than sixty years ago. Only one piece of information was new to me. Apparently it came from his interview with Alan Yardley: under Yardley’s name, he’d written
Trocadero
and three women’s names—women Barbara had worked with in the chorus?

“Fascinating, huh?” Josh said. “So can I ask you about Philip Marlowe sometime?”

I waved him off and dove into the rest of the file.

Performing in a nightclub is hardly the most stable profession, and it had clearly taken some digging to track down any of the showgirls; there was a page with multiple addresses and phone numbers under each woman’s name, most of them crossed through, as well as the names of half a dozen nightclubs. Finally, he had found at least one of the women, though it wasn’t clear which; he’d written “unhappy at home” and “heard Broadmoor Hotel, Colo. Springs, hiring.” I figured that was what the woman had told him about Barbara. “Unhappy at home” gave me a twinge, but I could hardly argue that ours was a harmonious family from which no one would have wished to escape.

Then I came to the last item in the file: a letter, messily written in pencil and badly spelled but on a half sheet of good rag paper with the Broadmoor Hotel letterhead.

“Devereaux” was spelled out carefully, as if he’d copied it a letter at a time. My hand started shaking, and the words juddered in front of my eyes.

“Is this it?” I asked Josh, my voice tight and tinny in my ears. “Did you copy the whole file?”

“Everything except three or four copies of a photo, it looked like her high school graduation picture … Elaine, are you all right?”

“I can’t meet with you this afternoon.”

“Sure. Okay.” He grabbed his banker’s box. “Your sister came home, didn’t she? After Philip Marlowe found her? You told me she got married and had kids.”

“I’ll see you next week, same time.” I nearly pushed him out the door.

Then I went back to the file and read it again as I paced from room to room. It wasn’t just that I felt too agitated to sit; with each change of location, each different set of furniture and fall of light, I hoped I’d be jogged toward some kind of clarity.

Carl Logan had it wrong, that was all. He hadn’t been sure himself:
She
might
be your girl
, he’d written. And what was he going on, even to say that much? Philip might have mailed him Barbara’s high school photo, we’d given him copies to show around, but she was eighteen in that photo! I have grandkids that age, and they all have the same shiny newness, their faces like just-minted pennies waiting for the stamp of experience. Logan could only have guessed he was seeing that high school girl in a bottle-blond chorine. And look at his letter, smudged and barely literate. Wasn’t a hotel dick the sleaziest character in any detective movie? I’d bet Logan had insisted on being paid for his information, and he figured he’d get more money if he said what Philip wanted to hear.