The Tin Horse A Novel

I GET OUT OF THE POOL AFTER WATER AEROBICS, SHOWER, AND DRESS. And then, for the first time, instead of going home, I drive to Rancho Mañana. I moved here yesterday. I check in at the reception desk—a requirement that makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten—and assure the too-solicitous young woman that of course I know how to get to my own apartment.

But for a moment, after I take the west elevator to the third floor, walk down the hallway to the right, and open the door, I think I must have gotten confused and entered someone else’s unit, after all. The first thing I see, directly opposite the front door, is a depressing wall hanging, a blob of mustard and beige and brown. Strangely, however, right below the brown blob is a tomato-red and black love seat just like mine.

I hear Carol’s voice. “Hey, Mom.… Do you like it?”

“Oh, it’s beautiful. Gorgeous!” I sing out. Giving my inner art critic a swift kick, I go take a closer look at what’s obviously Carol’s handmade housewarming gift for me. “Ah, it’s—what are these, moths?”

“Dragonflies. You don’t like it, do you?”

“I do! I can’t believe you gave each one of them so much detail. It’s amazing. And the colors are so subtle.” As I examine the hanging, I actually do appreciate it; with extraordinary precision, Carol has woven several dozen swarming dragonflies, some of them no bigger than a fingertip. And there’s an extraordinary range of color—strands of gold, deep chocolate browns, delicate fawn beiges. So why, as genuine praise spills out of my mouth, does it sound less and less sincere?

Carol comes and stands beside me, twisting a fistful of her long hair, which is barely touched with gray; seen from the back, in her peasant blouse and jeans, my elfin daughter still looks sixteen. Between Carol and Ronnie, he got all of the genes for height. She’s always been tiny, so small-boned we used to laugh and say she looked like she could blow away; a joke, but sometimes my heart caught in my throat, and I feared she really might take off like a seedpod on a gust of wind. We enrolled her in gymnastics when she was little, because she had a perfect gymnast’s body and loved tumbling, but she turned out to have no taste for the drill or the competition.

“The colors are wrong. I knew it,” she says. “Darn, I got some bright blue yarn and tried doing something contemporary for you, but …” She sighs. “The yarn just didn’t speak to me.”

“Carol.” I give her a hug. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.” I wish I could convince her. I wish I could have adored the hanging the moment I saw it.

More than anything, I wish Carol and I weren’t doomed to hurt and misunderstand each other. Still, neither of us has ever walked away. Even during the nightmare that was her adolescence, when my once-gentle girl embraced the 1960s trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, the one thing she didn’t do, ever, was run away. There were nights when I was up at three in the morning, watching for her to come home, but she always did. As if she were honoring an unspoken pact, that vanishing like Barbara was one pain she wouldn’t inflict on me. We have always stayed engaged, no matter how difficult it’s been.

“I made a salad for lunch,” she says. “Is that okay?”

“Perfect.” I push aside papers on my former kitchen table, which has become my dining room table; like much of my furniture, the dining room table didn’t fit here.

While we’re eating, the phone rings. I start to let the machine pick up, but it’s Josh, saying, “I’ve got something.”

I snatch up the phone. “Hold on,” I tell him, and retreat to the bedroom. “What is it?” I ask after I’ve closed the door.

“This thing just came in the mail. I can come by tonight and show you. I’m free by seven-thirty.”

“Seven-thirty’s fine.” Carol should have left for the night by then. She’s staying at her son’s.

“Sure,” Josh says. “How do I get to this place? Rancho something, isn’t it?”

I give him directions, then return to the living/dining room and hang up the phone.

“What are you up to, Mom?” Carol says.

“Nothing.”

“Come on. I used to be the one who took the phone into the other room.”

“It was Josh. My archivist,” I say.

“Oh, right.”

“I need to meet with him tonight.”

“We were going to see a movie!”

“Oh, I forgot. I’ll call him back and reschedule.”

But Josh turns out to be busy tomorrow. I could see him later this week, I suppose. Impossible! I can’t wait for whatever he’s found out about Barbara. I tell Carol we’ll have to postpone and catch a flash of hurt in her eyes that has nothing to do with the movie. I consider letting her know what’s going on, even inviting her to stay for the meeting with Josh tonight. Just thinking of it, my gut clenches. Barbara was my twin sister. This is my search. I don’t want to have to listen to anyone else’s opinion about how—or, worse, whether—to proceed. And right now, with the fresh wound of finding out my parents knew about her and said nothing, Barbara occupies a place in me that feels fragile and naked, astonishingly so. I’m not ready to let anyone enter that room. Josh, all right, he was involved from the beginning. And he’s essentially a stranger, whom I’ve insisted on paying for his help. But no one else.

“Can we still have dinner?” Carol says. “The chicken teriyaki?”

She has decided that we, she and I together, will brave the Rancho Mañana dining room for the first time this evening; they’re doing chicken teriyaki, apparently a favorite. I feel a bit as if Carol’s walking me to my first day of school. And I am nervous about my first plunge into this tight little society of some 180 people, about half of whom I’ve crossed paths with at some time in my life

“Absolutely,” I say. “I wouldn’t enter the lions’ den without you.”

That afternoon, Carol focuses on the kitchen while I unpack my office. And I come across the folder of poems I’d planned to “lose.” I suppose Carol might appreciate getting the poems; and sharing them with her is a vulnerability (unlike the search for Barbara) that I’m willing to risk. I flip open the folder, see a poem about night-blooming jasmine “perfuming Breed Street’s dreams.” On the other hand, maybe Carol would look at the poems and feel the way I did when I saw her wall hanging—touched, yes, but also awkward and torn.

THE CHICKEN TERIYAKI AT dinner lives up to its reputation. Not that this keeps one of my tablemates, a tiny woman whose face is dwarfed by eyeglasses with huge red frames, from complaining with every bite and regaling us with blow-by-blow details of the chicken dishes she used to make. I’m going to ask to be assigned to a different table. Yes, we’re assigned, another kindergarten touch. What the hell, maybe I’ll just sit wherever I want, start an insurrection.

After dinner, Carol takes off, and suddenly, as if someone stuck a pin in me and all the air whooshed out, I’m exhausted. I want to go home! On leaden legs, I trudge back to my apartment. Amid the chaos of moving boxes, I can’t summon the energy to open a book or turn on the television but sit on the love seat under the mustard dragonflies.

The leaden feeling finally lifts when the receptionist calls and tells me Josh is here.

“Nice place,” he says when he comes in. And heads straight for Carol’s wall hanging. “Wow, what’s this?”

“My daughter made it.” My eyes are riveted on the envelope he’s carrying—so small, just an ordinary business envelope.

“Dragonflies?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Wow. It’s cool.”

I’m ready to rip the envelope out of his hand. “What did you find out?”

He takes a piece of letter-size paper from the envelope, spends an eternity unfolding it, and finally hands it to me. It’s a copy of a brief newspaper article with a group photograph of about a dozen young women and, standing behind them, several men. Someone has handwritten on the copy “March 9, 1942” and the headline reads: “Colorado Springs Entertainers Join USO Tour.” The article says that fifteen local singers, dancers, and musicians had signed on for one of the first European tours being organized by the United Service Organizations, a group formed to provide entertainment and recreation for U.S. servicemen.

“I got in touch with a librarian at the Colorado Springs library and invoked the mutual help code that binds librarians all over the world,” Josh says while I squint at the faces. “She tracked this down for me.”

Bad enough that the photo, which looks printed from microfiche, is blurry, but the women had struck a chorus line pose, standing at an angle with one hip jutting and an arm extended in a flourish. Not one of them jumps out at me. I check the caption, match the name Kay Devereaux to a girl with platinum-blond hair and a close-lipped smile. She’s one of the shorter girls; that would be right. But her face is turned sideways and it’s partly obscured by her curtain of hair.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” he says.

“I’m not sure.” I get up to grab the magnifying glass I keep near the telephone, then realize I no longer own the little stand that conveniently held the phone, directories, and various inordinately useful items; there was no room here. Shit!

Josh and I try blowing up the picture on my copier, experimenting with different settings. Kay’s face dissolves into pixels.

“What about after this tour?” I ask. “Didn’t the USO send her back to Colorado Springs?”

“The librarian checked the phone directories for the rest of the 1940s and didn’t find any listing for her. And the Broadmoor Hotel has a historian—the librarian put me in touch with her. There’s no record of Kay Devereaux working there again. The historian said some of these folks came back home after the one USO tour, but for a lot of them, Colorado Springs wasn’t home, anyway. Or they liked the touring life, the excitement of being at the front and all that, and they signed on for additional tours. Does that sound like your sister?”

Did it sound like Barbara, to dye her hair the color of Jean Harlow’s, leap into a dangerous situation, and run half a world away from Boyle Heights? I’m on pins and needles … even as I warn myself that this trail, if it is one, is more than half a century old.

“It’s possible,” I say.

“I’m thinking my next step is to check with the USO.”

“Good idea. Oh,” I add with a chill, “and check the military death records, too. If she got killed in a war zone, maybe they counted it as a combat death.” I had never thought of her being in the war. All of the worrying I did about Paul and the other boys risking their lives, and I never suspected she might be there, too. In my stories about where she’d gone and what happened to her … always, somewhere, she was alive. And I still existed in her inner world, just as she did in mine. Imagining her lying all these decades among fallen soldiers—I picture a mist-shrouded graveyard in Normandy—it’s as if part of my life were blotted out.

“Sure, I’ll take a look,” he says. “But didn’t you already check the Social Security Death Index, and she wasn’t there?”

“Right, of course,” I say, relieved.

So there’s a good chance Barbara is alive. Not Barbara but Kay, I caution myself. Still, I hear my own excitement in Josh’s voice when he says, “What are you going to do when you find her?” This is another reason I don’t want to tell my family: having them waiting on tenterhooks along with me would make the wait excruciating and the likely disappointment crushing. Josh, in contrast, just sees this search as an adventure. In fact, he shifts gears effortlessly from talking about Barbara to asking me to tell him about Philip Marlowe.

“Sure,” I say. “But I don’t have much to tell. Do you want a drink?” Thinking of Philip immediately brings up the association. “Scotch? Wine? Sprite?”

“Scotch is great.… Did you really work for him?” he says when I bring our drinks.

“Yes, but just a handful of research jobs over a few months. It was in trade for his looking for Barbara.”

“What kind of research?”

“Nothing glamorous,” I say in response to his avid expression. “It was mostly library research. The most exciting case I remember, I went to city hall and looked at plats, those maps that show who owns property. Then I looked up the owners whose names were listed. Turned out a lot of the property was registered in the names of dead people; someone was doing a swindle.”

“Cool.”

“But my job ended when I handed over my research notes. As I said, there’s really very little to tell.”

“How’d you give him your notes? Did you go to his office?”

“No, he took me out for steaks. Bloody ones.” The memory makes me smile. “He always took me to this place in Hollywood. It looked like a dive, but they did the most amazing steaks. I think he worried that I didn’t eat enough red meat.”

“You dated him?”

“Good grief, no. I was just a kid.”

“You were in college, right? You must have been twenty, twenty-one?”

“I was a Jewish girl from Boyle Heights.”

“Was he anti-Semitic?”

“Philip? No more than most people in those days.”

“Did he ever say anything?”

“What, like ‘Hitler’s got the right idea’? Of course not.” How to explain to this twenty-first-century kid, with his Vietnamese American girlfriend, how insular America was when I was his age? “There was a jeweler—Rosen’s or maybe Rosenberg’s—next to the steak place. One night, a man was standing in the doorway when we walked by, and Philip asked if I knew him. I said ‘Who?’ And he said, ‘That Jew.’ Was that anti-Semitic, referring to him as ‘that Jew’? Assuming any two Jews living in Los Angeles knew each other? What he said was just the way people thought in those days. There was no malice in it.”

“It didn’t bother you?”

“If I’d gotten up in arms over every innocuous comment, I would have been at war with the world.” Like Danny. “But who knows, maybe it did bother me, since I remember it after all these years.”

I’ve surprised myself. I don’t recall thinking any of that at the time. Or if I’d had a glimmer, I couldn’t have articulated it then. Philip’s remark might have stung for a second and then been forgotten as we entered the restaurant and were enveloped in the warmth and the enticing smells of meat and cigarettes.

But wasn’t that the night when everything he said got under my skin? Wasn’t that our last dinner, the night I made a fool of myself?

It occurs to me that there might have been another reason for the tension between us that night. What if he already knew, when he sat across from me at dinner, about Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs—and he kept it from me? I hope not. I’d prefer to think well of him, to believe he didn’t find out until later, when we no longer saw each other. Because after that night, he kept his distance. He didn’t ask me to work for him again.

CAROL STAYS THROUGH THE end of the week, unpacking every box and helping me plant cuttings from the yard in the community garden. She even hangs every picture. “Otherwise, they’ll still be in boxes six months from now. Believe me, I’ve done it,” my vagabond daughter says. She moves her hanging to a bedroom wall. It looks better there—my bedspread, curtains, and chair are in various shades of blue with daffodil-yellow accents. But how I wish I could have had Josh’s reaction the first time I saw it, that immediate visceral pleasure in response to something we instinctively perceive as beautiful.

At the last minute, when she’s saying goodbye, I give her the folder of poems I wrote when I was a teenager.

“A few of them are love poems to my high school boyfriend,” I warn her, already questioning the impulse that made me grab the poems and hand them to her.

But she says, “Thanks, Mom,” and then she gives me an enormous, open smile, the smile that caught at my heart when she was a little girl: how could anyone be so open and survive? It catches at my heart now, and I’m glad about the poems.

Then she’s gone, and I’m no longer “moving into Rancho Mañana.” I’m living here. I have no regrets. Being at Rancho Mañana has given me an environment without stairs, nursing staff in case I need them, and a community of people I can see without having to drive for an hour. And several of them are people I genuinely like. I’ve gotten my table assignment switched so I’m sitting with Ann Charney Adelman, a friend since our Plain Brains club in high school. Ann has one of the most nimble minds of anyone I know, and although I’m only required to buy fifteen dinners a month, most nights I go to the dining room to enjoy her company. I keep running into cronies from countless political causes; now they commandeer the wheelchair van to go to rallies. There are “activities,” too—bridge, mah-jongg, chair exercise, crafts, book groups, outings to theaters and the symphony, and Torah study. (Rancho Mañana is about 70 percent Jewish; I feel like I’m back in Boyle Heights. In fact, Ann isn’t the only childhood classmate here.)

With the holidays have come nonstop parties. For New Year’s Eve, last night, Rancho Mañana put on a soirée with a jazz trio hired for the occasion. Several musicians among my fellow residents, men who used to play professionally, sat in, and we had a rollicking time until nine, when we watched the ball drop at Times Square and welcomed the New Year on East Coast time with plastic flutes of passable champagne. That was followed by a party at Ann’s; a dozen of us kept going until it was really midnight, then broke out more champagne (good stuff this time).

This morning I’m paying for every sip. But it was worth it. Everything, really, has been worth it. Except for God’s latest, cruelest joke. To tantalize me with new “clues” about Barbara and then …

The USO’s records were destroyed in a fire in 1979.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said when Josh told me two weeks ago. “Burned records are a convenient complication in detective novels. Bad detective novels.” I kept it light, but I felt flattened.

“No kidding. On to plan B. She was a professional entertainer, so she might have had a career after the war. I’m going to try the performers’ unions and Variety, things like that.”

But he tried all the entertainment industry sources, with no results. Neither of us has any idea what to do next.

Sitting in front of the television on New Year’s Day, I nurse my hangover with black coffee and dry toast and watch the Rose Parade. Then the TV talks to me. Not “Hello, Elaine” or anything like that. But the navy band is marching across the screen playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and sparking all the ambivalence that the sight of marching servicemen stirs up in me—pride and patriotism from World War II, anger over the young people thrown into the Viet Nam and Iraq wars—and then, damned if I don’t feel there’s some kind of message for me.

I pick up the remote and silence the TV. I refuse to start receiving messages from home electronics. What’s next, a communication from my toaster oven? Then it hits me: Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that was a big deal during World War II.

I turn on the computer, see that the Stars and Stripes archives are online. And I find what I’m looking for. First there are a few articles that mention USO performances and a “chanteuse” named Kay Devereaux. Then comes this item from February 1946, datelined Berlin:

We bid adieu to the divine Kay Devereaux, who just got hitched to Air Force Lieutenant Richard Cochran. Lovely Kay not only serenaded the troops throughout the war, she stayed on and bolstered the morale of the occupation forces. Alas, she’s leaving us to return with her husband to his ranch in Cody, Wyoming.

In a fever, I look up Richard Cochran in Cody. Nothing. I can ask Josh to dig some more. But a ranch in Wyoming? Barbara thrived on nightlife and excitement. Yes, she loved Tom Mix movies, but that hardly meant she wanted to ride the range.

I get out the decades-old photo from the Colorado Springs newspaper and the magnifying glass (which I eventually located in a kitchen drawer). But the glass doesn’t help; what I need is something that would let me pin back the platinum hair that half obscures Kay Devereaux’s face.

Still, my own sister. Shouldn’t I know?