The Tin Horse: A Novel (7 page)

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?

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 of 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.”

I think of Philip’s card and the wild idea I had that I’d stumbled on Barbara’s new identity. “What if we could find her now, if she’s still alive?”

“Why, so we could confront her with the damage she did?” Harriet snaps.

Her ferocity stuns me. As does what she says next.

“I used to make movies in my mind, of Audrey being so anxious it was torture for her to get out the door to go to school, or Papa when he came back from the morgue—remember, he nagged the police so much that for a year or two they called him every time they found some poor, nameless girl dead in an alley? He’d walk in the door, and his face was gray, like
he
was dead. I’d fantasize about forcing her to watch them.… Shit! I thought I’d worked through this in therapy a few decades ago.”

“I had no idea it hit you that hard.”

“Elaine! She left when I was five, and after that everyone in the family … well, it created a few abandonment issues after everyone shut down in one way or another.”

“I didn’t mean … I just wish I’d known. I could have done something. I knew Audrey was having a lot of problems, but I thought of you as Little Mary Sunshine—you were cheerful no matter what.”

“I
was
cheerful. I’m cheerful by nature. Just like poor Audrey was always a bundle of nerves.”

Poor Audrey, indeed. Audrey struggled all her life with severe anxiety and eventually with a dependence on the Valium that used to be handed out like candy to jittery housewives. Still, even I know enough psychology to understand that while my family recognized Audrey’s fears and tried to soothe them—and acknowledged the particular distress I felt as Barbara’s twin—we shortchanged Harriet.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “For what it’s worth all these years later, I really am.”

She squeezes my hand. “Apology accepted. And I did work through a lot in therapy … But why did you ask about Barbara? Did you find something?”

“It’s just … going through all this stuff stirs up memories.” By this
time, I’ve Googled “Kay Devereaux” and gotten nothing. And I looked up the Broadmoor Hotel; it’s still there, a five-star resort whose website displays stately Italianate buildings with “purple mountain majesties” soaring behind them. The site offers the fascinating tidbit that the woman who composed “America the Beautiful” wrote it after visiting the area.

“Now, this book I remember.” She picks up one of Papa’s histories of Los Angeles, written by a grandson of Andrew Boyle. “We studied it in school.”

The Boyle book came out in the mid-1930s, when I was working at Uncle Leo’s bookstore, and I bought it at a discount for Papa’s birthday. I don’t recall actually reading the book, but I had already heard the exciting part of the story, about the founder of Boyle Heights, from Papa.

“It used to upset me,” I say, “hearing about Andrew Boyle’s father, who left his kids in Ireland and vanished.”

“Yeah, but Boyle found him eventually.”