The Tin Horse: A Novel (39 page)

“Elaine.” To my horror, he dropped to one knee in front of me. “It’s a terrible time to do this, but I was planning to, tonight. And I’m not going to have another chance.”

“Danny, don’t,” I murmured, though I felt mesmerized as he took something out of his pocket and held it on the palm of his hand. A small box.

“Elaine, will you marry me?” He flipped the box open, and in the dark room I saw the shape of a ring.

“No!” If he was only proposing because of what he’d done, as a sort of grandstand apology—if he thought that would make me forgive him and fall into his arms—it was demeaning. And if he were telling the truth and he’d actually planned this, then how could he have betrayed me with Barbara?

“It’s my mother’s ring. I told you, I was planning to ask you. Tonight.”

“Danny, go!”

“Tell me you’ll think about it, at least?”

“Go!” I pushed him.

After he left, I sobbed in Pearl’s arms. And begged her again to let me move in with her. Just as Barbara had led sexually when she and Danny were going together, I suspected she was the one who had turned this afternoon’s goodbye kiss into something else. That hardly excused Danny, but my sister? I couldn’t bear spending one more night breathing the same air she breathed.

Barbara must have felt the same. The next day she was gone.

I DIDN
’
T KNOW ANYTHING
was wrong until I got home from USC the next afternoon. I was planning to eat dinner at home and then return to Pearl’s; she’d agreed to let me stay at least one more night.

I steeled myself as I turned onto our block, about to face Mama for the first time since my life had disintegrated—and anticipating an argument over my staying at Pearl’s. It was a fight for which I had no strength. After a wretched, sleepless night, I had forced myself through the day at school, fumbling if a professor asked me a question and fleeing to bathroom stalls for bouts of tears. The last thing I wanted on top of that was Mama grilling me about why my own home wasn’t good enough for me. But if I didn’t get it over with now, she’d storm over to Pearl’s.

“She’s here! She’s here!” called Harriet when I came up the porch steps.

Mama pounced on me before I’d taken three steps inside the door. She brandished a sheet from a notepad with a few lines written in black ink. “What do you know about this?”

“About what?” My frayed nerves crackled as I took in my whole family—everyone but Barbara—gathered in the living room. Mama, Audrey, and Harriet were all on their feet, Audrey with tears trickling down her face. Only Papa, sitting in his chair, looked calm, but he, too, stared at me expectantly.

“Charlotte, let her put her books down!” Papa said. Glaring at Mama, he continued, “Elaine, it’s a letter from your foolish sister, who should
never
have been allowed to work in a nightclub.”

“What nightclub?” Audrey whispered.

As I set my books on the end table, Mama explained that she’d peeked in on Barbara at noon, because Barbara always came into the kitchen for coffee by then. But the room was empty. “And I found this on her pillow!” She thrust the note at me.

“Why would she do this to me?” Mama moaned. “If you knew the chill that went through me when I found that letter! I know I’ll never see her again.”

“You’ll see her this very evening,” Papa replied. “We’ll go to that nightclub and talk some sense into her.”

“Is there a man?” Mama shot at me.

Besides mine?
“I’m sure she’s just moving in with a friend.” And I was. I felt no concern, not a flicker of twin-to-twin intuition that anything was wrong beyond my selfish sister pulling this melodramatic stunt and throwing the entire household into turmoil.

“Elaine,” Papa said, “do you know if there’s anything wrong? Some problem your sister is having that we should know about before we see her tonight?”

“She probably just wants to live on her own.”

“Live on her own?” Mama pinned me with one of those looks that made me feel transparent. “What happened between you and your sister?”

“Barbara and I hardly even see each other awake anymore.”

“On the same night, she leaves and you skip Danny’s going-away party and stay at your aunt Pearl’s,” Mama persisted.

“I was upset about Danny leaving. I needed to be someplace quiet.”

“You’re upset that he’s leaving, so you decide not to see him?”

“Charlotte,” Papa intervened. “Let’s have some dinner. Then you and I will go to this nightclub and talk a little sense into our daughter.”

“As if I could eat,” Mama said, still scrutinizing me.

She and I threw together some eggs and fried potatoes for a meal at
which Papa tried to pretend everything was normal, asking my sisters and me about school. Harriet went along with the fantasy; enjoying more attention than she usually got at the dinner table, she chattered about which of her classmates she liked best, who already knew how to read a little, who had a dog, and couldn’t we get a dog?

After dinner, Mama put on her best dress, a hunter-green silk with a draped bustline, one of Pearl’s creations, and she and Papa called a taxi, a luxury, to take them to the Trocadero.

I settled my sisters in front of the radio for
Amos ’n’ Andy
, then phoned Pearl to say I didn’t need her offer of a bed tonight because Barbara was staying with a friend. “No, nothing’s wrong,” I said.
At least, nothing that wasn’t already destroyed by my hateful sister
. I hoped Mama and Papa didn’t succeed in making her come home. Even better than moving in with Pearl would be to have the cozy room off the kitchen all to myself.

WHEN MAMA AND PAPA
returned, a little after ten, Papa had his arm around Mama, and she staggered as he guided her to a chair.

“Elaine, make your mother some tea,” he said.

“What happened? What did she say?”

Papa sighed. “Your sister wasn’t there. She quit her job last night. I’m sure she’s fine, but no one could tell us where she is.… You! Back to bed,” he ordered Audrey, who was crouching on the stairs.

“I’ll make the tea.” I hurried toward the kitchen, dying to have a few minutes to think.

“Forget the damn tea!” Mama had shaken off her stupor. Her voice was like a blow. “Elaine, come here and look at me.”

I did.

“What went on between you and Barbara yesterday?”

I’d thought I couldn’t hate Barbara any more than I already did. But she had left me to bare my humiliation to Mama and Papa while she was hiding out at a friend’s, having a good time … wasn’t she?
Though why did she quit her job?
I thought with my first stir of alarm. If she planned to live on her own, she needed the job more than ever.

“Elaine!” Mama said.

“I …” But there was no point in fudging; Mama had guessed it already. “I went over to Danny’s, and she was with him.”

“Doing what?”

“Necking.”

“Necking, that’s all?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Elaine!” Papa said firmly. “Did you and Barbara have a fight?”

“No, I just left.”

“And went straight to your aunt Pearl,” Mama sniffed. “Not to your own mother.”

“I just …”

To my relief, Papa stayed focused on the problem at hand. “Think, Elaine,” he said, “Where would she have gone? Who are her closest friends?”

I started with Barbara’s friends from the Diamonds. “Susie Graf. Alice Wexler—”

“Listen to the two of you!” Mama rolled her eyes. “Don’t you realize that now we know exactly where Barbara is?”

I stared at her. “Where?”

“Well,” Mama said, “I guess a person doesn’t have to have a college scholarship to be smart.”

“Charlotte!”

“Where else would she be,” Mama announced, “but on the train to Canada? With that good-for-nothing Danny Berlov.”

“No,” I said. “Danny wouldn’t have.…”

“Why not?” Mama pounced on my hesitation.

I had thought I had no secrets left, that no corner of my life remained private, but I couldn’t bear to expose the fact that Danny had proposed to me. “He’s enlisting in the army, it’s not like she can be with him,” I said. “He won’t even be staying in Canada. Maybe he’ll have a month of training, but then they’ll send him to England.”

“
You
would think of all that,” Mama said, “but would your sister? Would Danny Berlov?”

“Charlotte, that makes no sense,” Papa said in his let’s-be-reasonable voice. “Elaine’s right. Danny will be going into the Canadian army. And how could Barbara afford a train ticket to Canada? Or a place to stay after she gets there?”

Mama insisted, though, and Papa agreed to go to Western Union tomorrow and send a telegram to Barbara at the Vancouver train station.

“Don’t send it to Vancouver,” I broke in, despite my reluctance to say anything that would support Mama’s fantasy about Barbara being on the train. “The train doesn’t get there for another day and a half. Send it to the station in …” I’d gone over the timetable with Danny, a lifetime ago. Sacramento? No, the train had already left Sacramento. “Portland, that’s the next city where the train stops for an hour, and there’d be time to deliver a telegram.”

“Write to Danny Berlov, too,” Mama said. “Say we hold him responsible for our daughter’s safety … or for marrying her. What if that no-goodnik got her pregnant? And then he runs off to war and gets killed, and there she’ll be, alone with a baby, in Canada.”

She couldn’t be pregnant! They hadn’t gone that far, Danny had sworn to me.

While Papa gave in to Mama’s whim, he also asked me to make a list of Barbara’s friends for us to call and ask if she was staying with them.

“What if I go tomorrow and talk to some of them?” I suggested.

“Don’t you dare,” Mama said. “Start asking where she is, and you’ll get everyone in Boyle Heights gossiping that the Greensteins’ wild daughter has run off.”

“Elaine,” Papa said, “you go to the university and keep up with your classes. And I don’t see any point in contacting anyone right away. Let’s wait another day, and I’m sure she’ll come home on her own.”

“She’s on that train, you’ll see,” Mama declared. Then she came over and stroked my arm. “Oy, Elaine.”

“What?” I said, more wary of her sympathy than of her third degree. I could defend myself against Mama’s probing. But if she switched to her rare comforting mode, I feared I’d melt into an inconsolable three-year-old.

All she said, though, was, “Don’t waste any tears on Danny Berlov. You’re well rid of him.”

THAT NIGHT I MADE
the list Papa had asked for, starting with the girls in the Diamonds—though if Barbara really meant to hide, she would never go to anyone in Boyle Heights. I had met a number of her dance school friends, too, or heard her talk about them, and I added the names I could remember.

I also considered the Trocadero. They had let Mama go into the dressing room this evening and talk to the chorus girls, and they’d all claimed to know nothing about where Barbara might be. I wished I knew if she had a special friend there, a girl who might reveal something one-on-one—and to Barbara’s sister, a girl her own age—that she wouldn’t have told Mama. But Barbara and I had had so little contact all summer, I had no idea who her friends were.

Even as I prepared to look for Barbara in Los Angeles, though, I couldn’t help finding a crazy logic in Mama’s theory. Not that I thought she’d left
with
Danny, that the two of them had planned it—it was one thing for him to succumb to the temptation of the moment, but not even the Danny I currently reviled would run away with my sister scant hours after asking me to marry him. But Barbara must have panicked after I walked in on them, afraid of my anger and even more terrified I was going to tell Mama and Papa and she’d catch hell the minute she walked in the door. Desperate to get away, what if the first thing that popped into her mind was the one train she knew left the next morning? It was a rash act—an infuriating one—and just the kind of thing I could see my sister doing.

When I went to bed that night, I discovered that in addition to the note she’d left for Mama and Papa, there was a second note under my pillow.

I had an urge to rip the note into shreds in rage. Instead something made me slip it into the treasure box I’d gotten from Aunt Pearl as a child. Did I have some premonition that the note would be the last thing I heard from Barbara? What I remember feeling toward her was still-fresh anger and rage, along with a hint of worry—but no more than a hint. I was able to sleep that night. And the next day at school, I found I could focus on my studies. I even held my own with my economics professor, who quizzed us
with the bloodlust of a tiger tearing apart prey. Not even my anguish over Danny dimmed the glow I felt after I answered a tough question and the professor nodded as if he were making a mental note of me; it was the kind of recognition I experienced at the start of every school year, the moment when a new teacher identified Elaine Greenstein as one of the smart students—only this time it was happening not in the Boyle Heights public schools but at the University of Southern California.

Nevertheless, Barbara’s absence afflicted me with a need to do
something
. After my last class, I called home to see if there’d been any word from her. Not a thing, Audrey reported. So I went to Barbara’s dance school in Hollywood. I found four of her friends there. I told them she’d gone to stay with a friend but forgot to leave us the name, and did they know who it was? They said no but gave me the names and telephone numbers of a few other people to try.

I planned to make the calls as soon as I got home, but Mama wouldn’t hear of it. I’d blabbed about Barbara too much already, she fumed.

“Mama, none of those girls lives anywhere near Boyle Heights!”

“How do you know they don’t have relatives here?”

“We aren’t living in Jane Austen’s time. It’s not going to ruin our whole family if people know—”