The Tin Horse: A Novel (48 page)

“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 forgive 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.

Sitting next to the fire, physically and emotionally wrung out, my mind drifts to the story I’ve just heard and to the person I
can’t
forgive—Mama.

Never run out of places to go
. That was the unintended moral that Barbara took from Mama’s cautionary tale. But
was
it unintended, accidental? Or did Barbara hear exactly what Mama meant to tell her? Did Mama deliberately—though no doubt unconsciously—project her own yearning for escape onto Barbara and give her the strength to leave? And not just the strength but the resolve, as if she virtually pushed Barbara out the door?

Every person grows up in a different family, Harriet said. And I get it that my sisters and I each experienced a different version of Charlotte Avramescu Greenstein. Nevertheless, a Mama who refused to tell us Barbara was safe, a woman who chose Barbara’s—and, even more than that, her own—fantasy of freedom over relieving our anguish, is someone I don’t even recognize. That woman is a monster, condemning her other daughters to suffer and letting Papa keep going to the morgue to look at dead girls!

Condemning Barbara, too? I
would
have written to her. In fact,
I
might have taken the next train to Colorado Springs. And then? I can’t imagine her coming home with me—I understand how stifled she felt—a lifetime of estrangement, is that what she would have chosen?

The rage … it’s as if embers have leaped out of the fireplace and set me alight. My body is smoldering, my brittle hair a torch.

“Elaine?” Josh’s voice pierces my concentration. For a moment I wonder if I’ve actually burst into flame. But he’s just telling me they’ve finished filming. Apparently Barbara has called a halt to the interview.

“Gram, no way!” Jen is protesting. “You know, they have to film for hours to get five minutes they can use.”

“That’s plenty, isn’t it, Josh?” Barbara says.

“Your grandma’s a natural,” Josh tells Jen. “It’ll be fine. I’ll let you all know if the funding comes through for me to finish it.”

“Lynn’s got lunch for us,” Jen says. “I’ll go tell her we’re ready.”

“We just filled up on cinnamon rolls,” Barbara says. She’s drained and anxious to get rid of us. I’m every bit as anxious to go, to be alone with this fury. I’m afraid that if I try to speak, venom will shoot out of my mouth.

“It’s beef barley soup,” Jen says.

“They’ve got to get going if they want to get back to Cody before dark.”

But Jen is a girl who sticks to her guns. “They’ll have time. And I promised Josh a snowmobile ride.”

“Couldn’t you have done that earlier?” Barbara snaps.

“We could have if we’d known you two were going to be talking for hours!” Jen turns away for a minute, helping Josh pack his gear. Then, with a coaxing voice that takes me back seventy-five years, she says, “Come with us, Gram?”

Barbara rolls her eyes. “Elaine, do you mind hanging out for half an hour? You can have some soup.”

“I …” I look outside. The pale northern sunlight glitters on the snow. “I want to go snowmobiling, too.”

“Have you ever driven a snowmobile?”

“Sure,” I lie.

Jen finds me snow gear that more or less fits. I suit up like a chartreuse Michelin Man to match Barbara’s electric blue and listen impatiently
to Jen’s lesson on how to start, accelerate (by pressing a lever), stop, and turn.

Finally we’re moving. Slowly at first, making our way through trees, but then we hit an open field. “Take it easy,” Jen cautions, but Barbara shouts, “Yahoo!” and presses the accelerator. So do I, yelling at the top of my lungs.

Icy air smacks my face. Deeper than anger, I feel the sting of an ancient wound—my earliest, infant awareness of the intense bond between my mother and my sister, the magic circle from which I was excluded. That was the real twinship in our family, Mama’s and Barbara’s twin souls. And me standing at that bright window, gazing at my mercurial, sparkling mother and sister, longing to be let in.

Tears half blind my eyes. Still, I squeeze the accelerator, relishing the speed, the risk. I hear yells, and suddenly a stand of trees rises ahead of me. I’m shooting straight at them.

For one more split second, I hurtle toward the trees. Then a small jerk on the handlebars and I’m back in the open, slowing down and waving in response to the panicky shouts behind me. Is this how Mama felt when she walked out of the ocean in her sodden clothes? Shaken and exhilarated? And suddenly clear?

Jen races up to me on her snowmobile. “Are you all right?” She looks terrified.

“I’m fine. Sorry I gave you a scare.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’ve never driven one of these before, have you?”

“No, but I drive on the Los Angeles freeways. I figured, how hard could it be?”

“You and my grandmother! The two of you must have raised hell back in the day. Do you want to go back to the house? I’ll go with you.”

“Are you kidding? Now that I’ve finally figured out the controls? I’m fine. Really,” I say. And I am.

Snowcapped peaks rise ahead of me, Barbara’s mountain paradise. But what I’m seeing is the landscape of
my
life, the breathtaking vista in the photographs I brought with me—pictures of Mama and Papa holding my kids on their laps, lounging in my yard on a sunny afternoon, sipping drinks out of coconuts on a family vacation to Hawaii. Papa looks as if he
finds this last activity undignified but nonetheless delightful. And the smile he’s giving Mama … Did she keep Barbara’s secret even from him, or did she tell him? How can I know what went on in their private moments, what their story was, when I was so mistaken about my own?

My envy of Barbara’s bond with Mama took root when I was so young, it became part of my Elaine-ness. The pain of being left out was so intrinsic and unconscious I didn’t go back and revise the story, didn’t notice that I long ago stopped standing in the dark, my nose pressed to the window; I am inside, at the hearth. Barbara, it’s true, had an extraordinary connection to Mama, a moth-to-a-flame closeness, intense and ephemeral … and perilous. And I have had the life in those photographs, the bumpiness and mess and ordinary daily happiness of all those years with Mama, Papa, Audrey, Harriet, Pearl, Sonya.

In my favorite photo, taken by Ronnie when he got his first camera, Mama is just sitting, holding a cup of coffee, at my kitchen table. She was in her sixties then, her hair completely gray but her cheeks still softly rounded and her skin smooth, the blessing of being plump. It’s a candid shot; no one had moved a plate of toast crumbs from the table or straightened the day’s
Los Angeles Times
. Mama’s eyes are wide as if she’s been startled, but I can tell she’s exaggerating her surprise for Ronnie’s benefit, because she’s smiling at him with such love. Such astonishing love.

“Hey, slowpokes!” Barbara has circled back to us. “Come on, Elaine, want to race?”

We take off.

The dogs scamper behind us, barking their joy. Dogs are allowed at Rancho Mañana. I ought to get one.

I let out a whoop. She whoops back, the two of us tearing through the snapping cold. Flying, Barbara and me.

F
OR HELPING ME ENTER THE WORLD OF JEWISH BOYLE HEIGHTS IN
the 1920s and ’30s, I owe particular gratitude to author-historian Harriet Rochlin, who grew up in Boyle Heights—and who not only provided thorough, thoughtful responses to my questions but invited me to look through her personal archives. Thanks also to Elizabeth Fine Ginsburg, who told me about going from Boyle Heights to study dance at the Lester Horton studio; and to the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, where I spent hours exploring a treasure box of Boyle Heights oral histories. For information about train schedules—and for saving me from putting Elaine on the wrong streetcar—I’m grateful for the patient assistance of James Helt, librarian at the Erwin Welsch Memorial Research Library at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.