The Tin Horse A Novel

SHE WAS THE SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO, A BELOVED SONGBIRD and voice on the public address system for the Buffalo Bill Cody Stampede, an extravaganza that ran July 1 to 4 every year, and for the smaller, summer long Cody Nite Rodeo. At any rate, that’s what happened to Kay Devereaux Cochran—who later became Kay Applegate, then Kay Farris, and finally Kay Thorne—according to articles from the Cody, Wyoming, Enterprise that Josh has given me. The stories date from 1946—an announcement that Richard Cochran had brought his bride, described as “a USO star,” back to Cody—to 1999, when she was one of the “legends” featured in an issue of the paper dedicated to the Stampede’s eightieth anniversary.

That’s not all Josh has brought me. There’s also a glossy brochure for the OKay Ranch Adventure—Kay’s dude ranch.

“It was a regular ranch when she moved there with Cochran,” Josh explains while I search for my sister in photographs of a blond woman perpetually sporting fringed cowgirl garb. She’s generously built, voluptuous in the early shots and hefty over the years, but her teasing Mona Lisa smile suggests she has no doubt of her appeal to men. Four husbands—I guess she had proof of that.

“Five years later, they turned it into a dude ranch, the KayRich,” he says. “Must have been her idea, because she kept the ranch after they split up.”

“But it’s called the OKay now?”

“She changed the name after the movie came out in the late fifties. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Great marketing decision.”

Here she is, in the ranch brochure, though the word brochure doesn’t do justice to a catalogue offering everything from river rafting to cattle drives to courses with naturalists to spa services; anyway, she’s perched astride a monstrous horse with the ease of someone born with a saddle attached to her butt. The ranch is run these days by her son, George Applegate Jr. Also photographed on horseback, he’s a bit paunchy but powerful, with a craggy Robert Mitchum face set off by thick silver hair. George junior looks like every dude’s fantasy—and like no one in my family.

As for Kay, even the earliest of these photos was taken nearly ten years after Barbara left, and the images are blotchy, probably copied from microfiche. The clearest photos—and the only ones in color—are from the rodeo anniversary spread and the ranch brochure, and in those Kay is in her late seventies or eighties. Her hair determinedly blond and her face a good-humored truce between plumpness and the leathery skin of years spent outdoors, she resembles … not Mama or me as we aged, or my other sisters. She looks more like the good ol’ gal who was governor of Texas.

I pick up the magnifying glass.

“It’s got to be her!” Josh sounds like a kid insisting there’s a Santa Claus.

I respond cautiously, “She’s the right height.” In group shots, everyone else towers over Kay. I wish I could make out her eye color. Or find one photo where, instead of her perpetual Mona Lisa smile, she’s got her mouth open, and I could look for a gap between her front teeth, a trait Papa bequeathed to all four of us.

“The right height and the right age,” he urges. “And her voice sounds like yours.”

“Her voice? Is there something online?” In spite of my determination to examine the facts calmly, I feel a surge of excitement.

“Well, actually …,” he says, uncharacteristically tentative, “I talked to her. On the phone.”

“You called her? What the hell were you thinking?” What was I thinking, trusting a twenty-four-year-old kid with something this delicate?

“I only called because—”

“Did you think this was some kind of game?”

“Of course not.” He reddens as if I’d slapped him. Good! “Elaine, just listen, please. I called because of the librarian. None of the newspaper archives are online, so I had to call and request everything. The librarian got suspicious about some guy from L.A. asking for everything they had on ‘Miz Kay.’ So I came up with a cover story. I said I was researching a documentary about women who were in the USO in World War II. And then I started thinking, seems like Cody’s so small, what if she says something to Miz Kay? I figured it’d be less suspicious if I called her myself.”

“What did you say?” All the weeks of carefully following every step of Kay Devereaux’s trail … how much damage has he done?

“That I’m just doing preliminary research, but was she available if I wanted to come out there and film an interview? Really, that’s all.” He risks a smile. “And don’t you need to know if she’s at her ranch or spending the winter in Florida? Aren’t you going to contact her?”

“I …” All of the times I’ve rehearsed in my mind what I’d say if I could talk to Barbara again—but it was the way I might fantasize a chat with Eleanor Roosevelt or Cleopatra. And I imagined talking to Barbara as she existed in my memory … not to the formidable reality of Kay Devereaux Cochran Applegate Farris Thorne.

If Kay Devereaux Applegate Farris Thorne is Barbara. I need to really examine the material Josh brought me, weigh the evidence. Is her voice really like mine? Or is that just what Josh wanted to hear?

After he leaves, I go one by one through the newspaper articles; in neat chronological order, they let me follow Kay’s rise as a rodeo entertainer. But much more than that, they offer a window into her life. Every landmark is there—marriages, divorces, births. She has three children: a daughter, Dana Cochran, born in 1949, and two sons, Timothy Cochran, born in 1952, and George Applegate Jr., born in 1957.

And Kay didn’t just get into the paper because of the rodeo; quite a few articles concern her business dealings. Along with running a successful dude ranch, she opened the area’s first multiplex cinema in the mid-1980s—a controversial move, since it raised fears that the multiplex would threaten a beloved 1930s movie palace. But Kay cherished the grand old theater as much as anyone, she told a reporter; in fact, she had loved going to the movies in such theaters when she was growing up. Where was that? the reporter asked. “All over,” she said evasively (to my mind). “My folks moved a lot.”

And maybe it was to make up for her evasiveness—she was, after all, trying to smooth ruffled feathers in the town—but then she opened up and said, “We used to call the movie theater the Polly Seed Opera House, because people brought sunflower seeds for snacks. By the end of the movie, you’d have hulls all over the floor.”

I read it again. And a third time. Boyle Heights can’t be the only place where people munched on sunflower seeds at the movies, I warn myself. Still, the Polly Seed Opera House! I dive into the rest of the articles, no longer reading carefully; now I’m skimming for clues. I come across obituaries for three of her four husbands, including the latest, Thorne; so she’s alone now, like I am. I see nothing else that shouts “Barbara” to me. But I’m too excited to concentrate; my eyes are jumping over the pages. I’ll give the articles a close read later. Right now my apartment feels far too small to contain me. I grab my jacket, purse. Hesitate for a breath, remembering what happened the last time I took out my agitation by driving. But nothing else will satisfy the urge to be in motion.

There’s just one thing I have to do first. I call my sister—Harriet—and invite her over for dinner tonight. This news belongs to her, too.

Then I jump in the Jag. I don’t care where I go; I just need to drive.

HARRIET COMES BY AT seven-thirty, after seeing her last therapy client of the day.

“Yum, shrimp pad thai,” she says, lifting the lid off one of the containers of the takeout I picked up.

“And the other one’s chicken curry. Cabernet okay?” Better to let her settle in a bit before I break the news. And I wouldn’t mind having a glass of wine first. Okay, a second glass. I started on the cab before Harriet arrived, as I read the rest of the articles—and careened between gratitude that Barbara has had a good life and bitterness that if she was doing so well, then there’s no excuse for her not getting in touch with us.

“Cab’s perfect.” Harriet spoons generous portions of rice, shrimp, and chicken onto her plate and sighs with contentment at her first bite.

Harriet might be described in English by the soulless, clinical term overweight, but really she’s zaftig, the Yiddish far truer to my youngest sister’s sexy plumpness and appetite for experience. A zaftig gal chomps off as big a bite of life as she can get her jaws around and chews with gusto. I’ve been thinking of Harriet, but I realize I could be describing Kay; she certainly looks like a woman who wouldn’t pass up a succulent prime rib or a slice of chocolate cake.

I, on the other hand, am one of those boring women who count calories. Except for the negligible calories in wine. When I refill my glass a third time, Harriet gives me a sharp look.

“You said we had to talk,” she says. “What’s up?”

She’s as impatient with beating around the bush as I am. But I’ve had the chance to absorb all this in bits and pieces over two months, and I try to ease in.

“Remember those boxes of papers I came across, from Mama’s apartment? Well, I found this in one of them.” I take Philip’s card from the top of the documents I’ve stacked on the chair next to me.

She stares at the card for a moment. “Philip Marlowe … would he have come to the house to see Mama when I was six or seven? A big man—muscular big, not fat?”

“That sounds like him.”

“And he was a detective!” Harriet spears a shrimp. “Funny the ideas kids get. I remember thinking he was some kind of doctor. Mama shooed me out of the house so she could talk to him in private. A detective! Was Mama in some kind of trouble? And who was Kay Devereaux?”

I had hoped that seeing the card would prepare her a little. But she was so young, and clearly she was told nothing about what Philip was doing for our family.

“Harriet.” My tone makes her put down her fork and meet my eyes. “What if Kay Devereaux was Barbara?”

“Our sister Barbara?” she says dubiously.

I nod.

“Lainie, it’s just a card.”

“It’s only the first thing I found.”

I launch into the story, showing her the “evidence” in the order in which I found it: Philip’s case file, the photo of Colorado Springs entertainers who joined the USO, articles about Kay Devereaux’s marriage in Berlin and her life in Wyoming. Harriet skims the various documents and throws out an occasional request for clarification, but she doesn’t react, not even to the reference to the Polly Seed Opera House. It’s as if her mind were a quiet pool receiving everything I say with barely a ripple. Her calm is a bit unnerving. On the other hand, I recognize what Harriet is doing: she’s falling back on her professional identity, in which she feels confident and in control. She’s hearing me out as if I were a patient in therapy … just as I’m presenting my case the way I would in court.

She continues acting the therapist after I finish, her gaze compassionate and her voice soothing. “I know how much you’ve wanted to find her. Seeing that card and then the detective’s file, you must have felt it had to mean something.”

“I did find her.” I start to spread the newspaper clippings over the table, amid our plates and takeout cartons.

“Wait a second!” She holds up her hand. “You don’t have to convince me that you tracked down this woman Kay from Colorado Springs. But if she’d turned out to be Barbara, Mama and Papa would have told us.”

“That’s what I thought at first, too. But the Polly Seed Opera House?”

“Back in the twenties and thirties, that was probably a nickname for movie theaters all over the country. Come on. Do you really see Barbara ending up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere?”

“Look what she made of her life! She figured out a way, living in the back of beyond, to be a star!” I argue, even as doubt trickles into me. The comment about the Polly Seed Opera House is the only “proof” I’ve found. The remainder of the articles yielded no other ahas.

“Lainie.” She takes my hands. “I can only imagine what it must mean to you to think you’ve found her—your twin sister.”

“You sound like you don’t want to find her!” I throw out, bristling at the possibility that I’m being blinded by my desire … not just to find Barbara but to claim for her the successful, colorful narrative in the articles about Kay. The woman posed on the back of a powerful horse like she owns the world, that’s who I want Barbara to be.

Harriet reaches for the nearly empty bottle of Cabernet. “Share the rest?”

“It’s all yours.”

She pours the wine, takes a sip. “Most of my memories of Barbara are about her leaving and the impact it had on everyone else. Before that … Every so often, this glamorous older girl who smelled fantastic—I remember this wonderful perfume—”

“Shalimar.”

“Every so often she noticed me, and this cloud of Shalimar swooped down and kissed me or sang me a song. But she wasn’t around a lot. Wasn’t she always going to Hollywood for something?”

“Dance classes. The Horton School. She had a scholarship. Harriet, you have to remember that!” I say when she looks vague. It’s not just that Barbara’s scholarship and her success at the dance school were family triumphs. But the eagerness with which she ran to Hollywood, her hunger for a life outside Boyle Heights, were iconic parts of our family story—the kind of events you look back on when you’re trying to understand what happened later.

“That’s my point,” Harriet says. “I had nothing like your connection with her. I told you when you brought this up earlier, I was ambivalent about the idea of finding her. And I was only thinking then about how fraught it would be to try to contact her. But this! If finding her means I have to accept that this detective tracked her down and told Mama and Papa, and they never told us … Jesus!” She gets up and paces, as if she’d like to walk away from all of this. “You’re asking me to trade the old, dull pain of being abandoned by a sister I barely knew for the pain of feeling so betrayed by Mama and Papa I want to go to the cemetery and scream at their graves. I hate it that after all these years, Barbara could poison my memory of them. Now, that sounds like the Barbara I remember, poisoning everything.”

Her rage, I feel it, too. Yet in spite of it, every time I look at the photos of Kay in her Western regalia and think Barbara, my heart lifts.

“So you do think it could be her?” I venture.

Harriet’s gaze goes inward, a look so like Pearl’s fierce concentration that for a moment it’s my aunt in the room with me.

“You have some pictures of Barbara, don’t you?” she says. “Say, from when you were in high school?”

My photo albums are actually organized; Carol put them in order when she helped me unpack last month. I find the right album, while Harriet brings a bright standing lamp over next to the table. She gets out her reading glasses—I give her the magnifying glass, too—and she starts to look back and forth between photos of Barbara and shots of Kay Devereaux. Forcing myself to give her some space, I go into the kitchen and make a pot of decaf. And I bought one of those giant brownies they sell these days; I cut it into four normal-sized pieces and put them on a plate. Then, having run out of distractions, I hover—I can’t help myself—as Harriet scrutinizes photos under the magnifying glass.

Looking over her shoulder, I see Kay in her thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond, and I remind myself that these same photos didn’t convince me this afternoon. But now it’s not just that I glimpse Barbara in the curve of Kay’s cheeks or the assertiveness of her stance; rather, it’s the kind of primal recognition that happens on parents’ day at summer camp, when you scan the crowd of kids and zoom in on your son, your daughter. What if I had kept my discovery of Kay to myself? I wonder. Might it have been enough simply to believe I knew who and where Barbara was, a last filament of connection far too delicate to expose to a cooler mind like Harriet’s?

My God, was that why Mama and Papa said nothing? Because they couldn’t be sure, and they needed for Barbara to be Kay Devereaux, alive and well in Colorado Springs? And wouldn’t I at twenty have taken apart every “proof” Philip gave them, more intent on truth than on comfort?

Harriet spends nearly an hour examining photos, one hand holding the magnifying glass and the other tensely twisting her hair; she doesn’t even touch the brownies. Then at last she takes off her reading glasses, rubs her eyes.

“They say that twins have trouble forming attachments as adults,” she says. “It’s especially true of identical twins, but it can apply to fraternal twins, too. They’re always looking for the kind of closeness they had with the twin.”

“Are you saying … what, that I have a neurotic need to find her? That I haven’t been able get close to people because of her?”

“I wasn’t talking about you. Look at her. Four husbands.”

“Then you do think this is Barbara?”

“Yes. Maybe. No. All of the above.” She runs her hands through her tangled hair. Then she gives me a therapist look. “What happens when we call and Cowgirl Kay says, ‘Barbara who?’ ”

“She might not say that,” I reply, though again I think of the daunting reality of Kay Devereaux Cochran Applegate Farris Thorne.

“Oh, Elaine.”

“So do you think we shouldn’t contact her?”

“I just think we need to anticipate how she’s going to respond—and how we’ll feel. And I’d like to consider the option that you’ve achieved one of the best possible outcomes by solving the family mystery, and maybe we should leave it at that. But let’s not make any decisions now. How about if we both sleep on this and talk tomorrow, all right?”

“All right.”

“No decisions right away. Promise me.”

“Um,” I say noncommittally.

We embrace. I give her half the brownie to take home.

“Promise,” she says again as she leaves. As if she can see the idea that’s entered my mind.

It’s a crazy idea. She’s right about sleeping on all of this. But after she leaves, I’m too keyed up to go to bed. I turn on the television.

There’s a TV show on that I actually like, but after ten minutes, I realize I’m not following it. I take out a deck of cards; solitaire is a surefire way to distract myself.

I can’t do it. Really.

Still, I abandon the solitaire game and turn on the computer and swear out loud because it takes so long to boot up. I feel … impatient. Annoyed. Alive. As I print out flight schedules, I dance around the room, a fierce old woman’s dance.

Harriet with her “Barbara who?” got me thinking. There is no satisfactory way to contact Barbara, for the first time in more than half a century, over the phone. I have to be there, to see her face the moment I say, “It’s me. Elaine.”

Cody has an airport. From there, I’ll need to get to the OKay Ranch, which, according to the brochure, is thirty-seven miles out of town, twelve of them on a “scenic highway”—in the Rocky Mountains. In the middle of winter. It would be smart to wait until spring. That would give me time to plan my approach carefully, and I wouldn’t have to drive on mountain roads in January.

But what did Josh say after he drove me back from Barstow? Call me the next time you feel like taking a road trip.





PEARL PUT HER ARM AROUND ME WHILE I RETCHED OVER HER FLOWERS. Then she led me inside to the familiar site of our serious conversations, the love seat, which sat against a cream stucco wall in her Spanish-style home.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, hurrying into the kitchen. She returned a moment later with a glass of water, as well as a damp towel that she mopped over my face and arms.

And I sobbed out my story.

“He never stopped loving her, did he?” I wept.

“Shh, Elaine. Shh.”

“You knew! You warned me he might just be going with me because I was her sister.”

“But I was wrong. Anybody who’s seen you and Danny together wouldn’t doubt that he loves you. Danny and Barbara, I don’t know. There’s just something between them.”

“Sex?”

“Oy. Any eighteen-year-old boy, it’s sex. Elaine.” She searched my eyes. “You and Danny, have you …”

“I wanted to! Today. That’s why I …” And Barbara got there first.

Oh! I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I’d been focusing my hurt and anger on Danny. Now the sense of betrayal shifted to Barbara, and I was shattered. As if, compacted into that irredeemable moment when I opened Danny’s door and saw her, was the pain of her having been his first love; and so much deeper than that, it was the rivalry I’d felt all of my life as I competed with Barbara for Mama’s love … and again and again, Mama chose her. I let out a wail.

“Elaine! Elaine!” Pearl cried, but I raged around the room sobbing, pushing away her efforts to calm me. Why had I run away like a child? I wanted to be back at Danny’s, to pound my sister until my fists were bloody. At least Danny had a reason for betraying me: he had never gotten over her. But Barbara? I pictured her standing behind him, disheveled and flushed—triumphant? Was she deliberately trying to destroy me?

“Elaine!” Pearl grabbed my arm and thrust a glass of amber liquid at me. “Drink this.”

I took a gulp. Whiskey, nasty-tasting. I downed the whole shot and found my voice. “How could she? Does she hate me?”

“Darling, I don’t know why she … Here, sit.” She wrapped her arms around me. “I wish there was something I could say that would make this not hurt so much.”

Pearl held me as the afternoon softened into dusk. Between my spasms of tears, there were also quiet times when I simply floated, exhausted and empty.

During one of those calms, the phone rang. Pearl had ignored several calls earlier, but this time she asked if I’d be all right and went into the kitchen to get the phone.

“Your mother,” she said when she came back a few minutes later. “I said you were going to have dinner with me. All right? I was just going to make a salad and boil some potatoes.”

“Fine,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine forcing anything down my throat.

“She asked about the party tonight. I said you were upset about Danny leaving, and you didn’t think you were going to go.”

Oh, no, the party. But maybe the excuse Pearl had given Mama would work for my friends, too. Certainly Danny wouldn’t breathe a word of the real reason I was missing.

“Tonight do you want to stay here?” Pearl asked.

The question thrust me into the future, the eternity in which I had to sleep barely three feet from Barbara. Just thinking of it made my skin crawl.

“Aunt Pearl, please,” I begged, “can I move in with you?” She hesitated, and I pressed on. “I’ll tell them I need more quiet so I can study.”

Pearl sighed. “You and your sister are going to have to talk.”

“Please? I’ll pay you for room and board.”

“Lainie, I don’t know.… I’m going to go make dinner now, okay?”

She returned to the kitchen. And I huddled on the sofa, a girl whose problems a few hours earlier had been limited to the challenges of being a freshman at USC and Danny’s departure for war.

Unless I’d been living in a fool’s paradise. With a floaty clarity (I’d drunk the whiskey on an empty stomach), I considered the possibility that this wasn’t the first time Barbara had been at Danny’s. Hadn’t I wondered what she was up to, leaving the house every afternoon long before she had to be at work? Maybe her secret was that she was seeing Danny on the sly … the way I used to see him when he was her boyfriend, I thought, the guilt from that time flooding me. If Barbara had walked in on us in Chafkin’s storeroom, how would she have felt?

“It’s not the same!” I protested out loud. If God was trying to give me a taste of my own medicine, God had it wrong. Not that my behavior hadn’t been contemptible, but we’d been kids then. Now we were on the brink of our adult lives.

But they couldn’t have been seeing each other behind my back. Even if I believed Barbara was capable of something so lousy, Danny never would have hurt me like that. Would he? In the venomous whisper of doubt I heard the rationalizations he used to give for sneaking around with me, and I wondered if I had utterly misjudged his character, if instead of complicated, forgivable reasons for his behavior, he was simply a manipulator who liked playing one of us against the other. I would come to see Danny as a man who enjoyed subterfuge for its own sake. I don’t think he had become that man yet; it wouldn’t happen until the war. But that afternoon I glimpsed it, and it chilled me—or so I imagined when I looked back and dissected my failed first love. But that cool, rational exercise wouldn’t happen until years later.

That day at Pearl’s, I was like a wounded animal, burrowing into her love seat … and freezing into stillness when I heard someone walking up the porch steps. A voice called through the screen door, “Mrs. Davidoff?”

Danny.

“Mrs. Davidoff?” he called. “I’m looking for Elaine.”

It was dusk, the room in shadow. Hoping he couldn’t see me, I held my breath.

But Pearl came in from the kitchen. “Danny, wait just a minute,” she called.

I jumped up. Whispered, “No.”

Pearl put her hands on my shoulders. “I’ll send him away if you want me to. But you’re not going to have another chance. If you don’t see him and he goes and gets killed in the war, will you be able to forgive yourself?”

“I’d like to kill him myself! Now.”

“I know. And he deserves it.”

But Pearl was right. Everything that Danny had been to me, I couldn’t refuse to see him the night before he left for the war. “Let him in,” I said.

“Light?” She nodded toward the lamp.

“No!”

Pearl told Danny I was here and held open the door for him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled to Pearl.

Then he was inside. My bashert. He stood tentatively, facing me … in a way that reminded me of the glorious night when he’d stood naked before me. A roaring filled my head, and my legs dissolved. I sat down, willing myself not to faint.

“Danny, you take care of yourself, all right?” Pearl said. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see the look she gave him, but he seemed to shrink several inches.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then Pearl left the room. Left me alone with him.

He took a few steps toward me and fell to his knees. “Elaine, I’m sorry. I’m so, so—” He choked on a sob. I had never seen Danny cry, not even as a child. For an instant, my eyes welled up. That made me even more furious at him.

I slapped his face so hard my hand stung. “How could you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He took the slap, just kneeling there and weeping.

“How could you? With her?” I slapped him again, feeling a savage joy at hurting him.

“Elaine, please!” He grabbed my hands.

“Let go of me!”

“Please, I’m leaving tomorrow. Can’t we talk?”

“Let me go!”

He released me but scrambled to his feet, out of range of my slaps.

“Did you f*ck her?” I spat out. I had never spoken that word before. Saying it made me feel grown-up and mean.

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “No. I didn’t … make love with her. Elaine, I love you.”

“Have you been seeing her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you been seeing her in secret?” I studied his face, alert for any subtle shift in expression that would tell me I’d hit a nerve. But he looked stunned, and I believed him when he said no. Yet that didn’t dampen my rage.

“Please, the whole thing was crazy. It’s like I’m in some kind of fever, getting ready to leave. She came by to wish me luck, and she gave me a kiss goodbye, that was all, but then … you know.”

“Then what?”

“I feel terrible that I hurt—”

“Did she give you a blow job?” You do that with Danny, right? she’d said to me.

“Elaine, won’t you let me apologize?” Now he sounded angry. Had he thought shedding a few tears would fix everything? Did he think I was so hopelessly in love with him?

“Did she?” I said. “Don’t lie to me!”

“Okay, yes. But it was only—I’m being completely honest with you, okay?—it was because she used to, back when we were going together.”

“How come you never asked me to?” I demanded.

“To give me a … You’ve got to be kidding! I have too much respect for you. I didn’t ask her the first time, she just did it.… Look, I don’t blame you if you hate me right now. I deserve it. But I’m leaving tomorrow. Won’t you wish me luck?”

I hope you get killed! But just thinking that made me feel sick.

“Good luck,” I said.

“I love you.”

He paused, and I formed the response in my mind: I love you, too. I had felt that way until only hours ago. I had loved Danny with no reservations, nothing held back. As deeply as he’d hurt me, still in the balance between love and loathing, there were years of love. And this might be the last time I would ever see him, the last time I could tell him. Part of me ached to say those words. And part of me felt like saying them would twist a knife in my gut. I had clamped down on my tears, but now I wept.

“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.

Dear Mama and Papa,

Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I just need to make my own life. I love you.

Barbara

“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.

Lainie, I’m sorry. I love you.

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—”

“There’s no reason to go stir up trouble,” Mama grumbled. “We know where she is—on that train.”

The train was due to reach Portland at seven-forty, and that evening after dinner, Mama’s anticipation became so palpable that just sitting in the same room with her, I wanted to jump out of my skin. I retreated to my bedroom and opened Beowulf, which I had to read in Old English as well as in translation. But though I forced myself to stare at the book, all I could see was the train speeding closer and closer to Portland. At seven-thirty I gave up on studying and joined the rest of the family in the kitchen. They were gathered around the table, within grabbing distance of the wall-mounted telephone. Papa was playing a game of fish with Audrey and Harriet, and Mama was aimlessly straightening things in the cupboards.

At seven-forty we started stealing glances at the phone and the clock, and by eight we simply sat and stared at them. When the phone finally rang, at eight-fifteen, Papa lunged for it. “Barbara!” Mama exclaimed, hovering at his elbow. We all hovered, listening to his end of the conversation.

“Sol, how are you?” Papa said.

It was an ordinary call, and I started back toward the table. Then I heard Papa say, “Burt called you long-distance from the train station in Portland? That’s good.”

“Sol Weber,” Mama mouthed. Burt Weber’s father.

“She’s not missing, of course not,” I heard Papa say. “Just thoughtless. She went to spend a few nights with a friend and didn’t tell us who.… Just this crazy idea my wife had.” He frowned at Mama. “But of course, she’s at a friend’s.… No, we don’t need any help. Thank you for letting us know.”

Papa hung up and then told us what he’d heard from Burt Weber. Papa’s telegram, delivered when the train arrived in Portland, had made Danny so frantic that instead of just sending a telegram in reply, he had insisted that Burt call home (Danny’s father still had no phone of his own) and make it clear that Barbara wasn’t with Danny. And in case anything had given us the idea she might be on the train, Burt assured his father that he and Danny regularly stretched their legs during the long trip by walking up and down the entire length of the train, and they would both swear Barbara wasn’t there.

“Sol Weber!” Mama groaned. “He’s got a bigger mouth than the worst yenta. What did you say in that telegram to make Burt Weber get so upset?”

“Who was so sure she was on that train?” Papa snapped in retort.

“Papa?” Audrey said, her voice tight with anxiety. We had seen Mama and Papa argue, but not like this. Usually Mama nagged and Papa got coldly disapproving; he rarely raised his voice.

“What is it, Audrey?” Papa tried to smile at her.

“If Barbara’s not on the train, is that bad?”

“No, in fact, it’s very good news. It means that your foolish sister is here in Los Angeles, after all.”

“When is Barbara coming home?”

“Soon. Look what time it is. You and Harriet should be in bed.”

“What if we write to Mr. Keen?” Audrey persisted. She was referring to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, a show on the radio.

“Go to bed!” Mama said. “Now!”

Audrey’s eyes brimmed. Poor kid, she was nervous by nature, and with all our attention glued to Barbara, no one had attempted to ease the impact of the family crisis on her.

“Hey,” I said to her. “How about if you get ready for bed, and I’ll read to you from Nancy Drew?” I put my arm around her, took Harriet’s hand, and led them to their room.

Harriet was too young to fully understand what was happening, and she was too naturally cheerful to be distressed by family storms. (At least, that’s what I assumed at the time, observing my ever-smiling youngest sister.) Audrey, however, was visibly frantic. I did my best to respond patiently to the questions she flung at me: What kind of job did Barbara have, and why had it been a secret? Why had Mama and Papa thought Barbara had left with Danny? Wasn’t Danny my boyfriend? I was able to answer those questions, albeit in edited form. But what could I say when she asked, “Is Barbara all right? Why doesn’t she call? Did something bad happen to her?” How could I soothe her anxiety when my own was churning?

I hadn’t really believed Barbara was on the train, but Mama’s speculation had given me a narrative to set against her absence, a story in which she combed her hair, drank coffee, and sat safely watching through the window as California passed by and then Oregon. She must be hiding out with a friend in L.A.—that had always been the most likely explanation—and it made me want to shake her until her teeth rattled. But she’d been gone for two days now, without a word, and I was no longer just irritated, I was scared.

The news from Burt had affected Mama and Papa the same way. When I returned to the kitchen, Mama was no longer trying to keep Barbara’s absence a secret; instead, she was going down the list I’d made of Barbara’s friends and calling them. Between calls, she moaned that this was God’s judgment for the heartache she’d inflicted on her parents. Then she took a deep breath and called the next number on the list. And Papa … I’d never seen him so unnerved. Pacing and chain-smoking, my usually deliberative father careened between railing against his thoughtless daughter and worrying that she was in real peril. One minute he said we shouldn’t put ourselves through the aggravation of searching for her, since she was certain to waltz in tomorrow, blasé about the havoc she’d stirred up. In the next breath he wanted to call the police. “But why would the police get involved?” he said. “She’s eighteen, and she left a note, and look at where she worked … But that’s the point. A girl with a job like that, how is she going to have the good judgment to stay out of trouble? Elaine, what do you think?” He turned to me with imploring eyes. I started to stammer out a response, but he’d shifted back to cursing Barbara’s selfishness.

Since he was already on his feet pacing, Papa bolted into the living room when we heard someone at the front door. I was a few steps behind, and Mama quickly finished her latest phone call and followed, calling out, “Barbara!”

But it was Pearl, her face scrubbed of makeup and her hair in pin curls, as if she’d been getting ready for bed and rushed over. “I tried to phone, but your line was busy,” she said. “I got a call from Ruth Eder. What’s this about Barbara going to Vancouver with Danny?”

“Let’s sit.” Papa switched on a lamp and sat down heavily, as if he had just that moment turned old.

He got out Barbara’s note, which he’d been carrying neatly folded in his wallet, and told Pearl what had happened over the past two days. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Pearl exclaimed at one point, but she clearly wasn’t going to waste time being miffed.

When Papa had finished, she sat silently for a moment, her eyes closed in thought. Then she asked, “Does she have much money?”

Mama shook her head. “She gives most of her pay to me. Why?”

“I wondered if she could afford to get a hotel room for a night or two. Or even leave town. There are plenty of places to go, not just Vancouver.…”

Suddenly my map of where Barbara might be swelled from Los Angeles to the entire world, a universe in which she was lost forever. I choked back a sob.

But Mama was saying, “She has a little spending money, that’s all.”

“Well, she’s going to need any money she’s got,” Pearl said. “Why don’t we leave a message for her at her bank?”

“What bank?” Mama said. “Since when does she have a bank?”

“She asked me about opening a savings account—it must have been last winter. I told her I use Union Bank downtown, and I think she was going to go there.”

“You didn’t think you should tell us about this?” Mama said, ruffled as always that one of us had confided in Pearl. And her nerves were frayed; she’d just called eight or nine of Barbara’s friends, fighting to keep the panic out of her voice as one girl after another told her they had no idea where Barbara was.

“Charlotte, I assumed you knew,” Pearl said. “But I didn’t see it as something I needed to warn you about. I thought it was a fine idea, very responsible, for her to get a bank account.”

Mama bristled. “Isn’t that up to her parents to decide?”

“This note,” Papa broke in. “You’ll ask them to give it to her?”

“I’ll take it there first thing tomorrow and talk to my banker. He can alert the tellers and ask them to give it to her when she comes in.”

All of us went back into the kitchen so Papa could sit at the table to write. Mama resumed making phone calls, although it was ten-thirty by now. She woke several people up and had to endure their irritation, and she was no longer keeping the panic out of her voice.

Papa started several letters but kept crumpling them up. “I blame myself,” he sighed to Pearl. “I never should have let her take that job.”

“Oh, Billy,” Pearl said, patting Papa’s hand. “If it wasn’t the job, it would’ve been something else. Nobody could have stopped Barbara from spreading her wings.”

“Spreading her wings?” Mama, who was between phone calls, turned and glared at Pearl. “Is that the kind of advice you give my daughters, Pearl? To spread their wings?”

“Of course not. Not like that.”

“I’m sorry you don’t have children of your own, but if my daughters need advice, you send them to me.”

“Please,” Papa said. “The last thing we need is to argue.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to take her side,” Mama said.

Pearl stood. “Bill, if you want to write that note and get it to me first thing in the morning, I’ll take it to the bank,” she said, and stalked out.

“Aunt Pearl!” I hurried after her onto the porch.

“Elaine, if you have something on your mind, talk to your mother,” Pearl said loudly. Then she put her arms around me. “How are you doing? How’s school?” she whispered.

“All right.”

“Keeping up in your classes?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you dare let your sister take that away from you.”

I DON’T KNOW WHAT Papa said in his note, but he went out early the next morning with Pearl to take it to the bank. Mama planned to continue calling the families of Barbara’s friends. I offered to help, but if there was one thing on which Mama, Papa, and Pearl agreed, it was that nothing should disrupt my education.

I had to force myself out the door to leave for school, pulling away from my family’s trouble as if it were a magnet sucking at me. Once I broke free, however, USC was a refuge. Everyone in Boyle Heights knew me as my parents’ daughter, one of “the Greenstein girls.” At USC I was simply another freshman. I didn’t come trailing my entire family.

Was that how Barbara felt when she went to Hollywood?

I wasn’t completely anonymous, of course. I ran into Paul on the quad. He had heard about Barbara and asked if there was anything he could do to help.

“No, thanks,” I said, on guard for some knowing look or comment, since Paul, like all of Boyle Heights, must have heard that we’d suspected Barbara had run off with Danny—and how could Paul Resnick resist the chance to throw me off-balance? But in his warm voice and eyes, I sensed only concern.

“I’m serious. Call me if I can help,” he said.

My Friday classes ended at noon. On my way home from the streetcar stop, three people asked me if there was any word about Barbara; and when I opened the front door, I heard, “The college girl, here she is!”

It was Aunt Sonya, planted on the sofa with her mending basket—though there was no sign of actual mending going on.

“I came over the minute I got the kids off to school this morning,” Sonya told me. “Anything I can do. Though why your parents let her work in a place like that! Well, I guess they paid even better than anyone realized.”

“What do you mean?” I hated to let Sonya bait me, but she clearly knew something.

“Your father went to the bank this morning, and guess what? Your sister had a savings account there, but not anymore. First thing Wednesday morning, she went in and withdrew every penny. One hundred and thirty dollars! Can you imagine?”

No, I couldn’t imagine. Barbara kept only two or three dollars from each of her paychecks, and she spent it on clothes and cosmetics and car fare. “How could she have so much money?”

“Not from anything respectable,” Sonya said darkly.

“You don’t know that,” Mama said, coming in from the kitchen. She was wearing her nicest housedress and a slash of lipstick, as if refusing to show any weakness in front of Sonya.

“Charlotte, face facts,” Sonya said. “Has my brother ever managed to earn a hundred and thirty dollars in an entire month?”

“Where is Papa?” I broke in.

“The nightclub,” Mama said. “He made an appointment to see the manager. Pearl took the afternoon off and drove him. He wants to find out what was going on there.”

“As if a man who runs a nightclub would admit anything!” Sonya sniffed. “And they’re gone two hours already. Didn’t I try to tell them, you don’t just walk in on a man like that and accuse him of—”

“Well, Sonya!” Mama forced a smile onto her face. “It was very nice of you to come over, but I don’t want to keep you from cooking your Shabbos dinner.”

“That’s all right. My girl is taking care of everything.” Sonya employed a Mexican American girl to help with the housework. “That much money, there has to be a man. What is it with the women in this family? Hasn’t anyone heard of saving yourself until you’re married?”

“Sonya!”

“Pearl with that schvartze,” Sonya continued. “And now Barbara—”

“Sonya, shut the hell up!”

Both Sonya and I turned toward Mama in shock. I couldn’t count how many times I had heard her say, If we didn’t need Elaine’s job at Leo’s bookstore, what I wouldn’t say to that woman. Now she had said it.

“If I’m not welcome here …” Sonya made a show of stuffing the shirt she hadn’t touched back into her mending basket.

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to start cooking dinner,” Mama said. “Elaine, don’t you have schoolwork?”

Gratefully I followed Mama through the swinging door into the kitchen. I offered to help her with dinner, but she told me to go study.

In my room, I contemplated my sister’s wealth—and her seeming willingness to use sex as currency. She’d gone to see the “producer” expecting something like what happened; what upset her was being cheated out of her part of the deal. Still, what would she have had to do for $130? It was a fortune.

PAPA AND PEARL DIDN’T return until late in the day. By that time, Audrey and Harriet had come home from school; Mama had sent them to the Anshels’ next door. She hadn’t, however, succeeded in dislodging Sonya from the sofa. So the three of us—Mama, Sonya, and I—heard what had happened that afternoon. The nightclub manager had been quite willing to see them, Papa said; he even commiserated with them in Yiddish. And he showed them an account book with everything he had paid Barbara; it wasn’t a penny more than she’d turned in to Mama, plus the little bit she kept for herself. There was nothing that came close to explaining the money in her bank account.

“But he told us that some of the girls make extra money by modeling,” Papa said.

“Modeling?” Mama said. “In department stores?”

“For photographers.” Papa stared at his hands. “You know, pinup pictures. Pretty girls in bathing suits.”

“Gevult,” Sonya said. “There’s a man who has a bookstore a few blocks from Leo—Mr. Geiger, you must know him, Elaine. He has photographs of girls in a back room.”

“Barbara would never do that!” I said.

Not that I had seen any of the “specialty” items Arthur Gwynn Geiger was rumored to sell from his back room. (In the front of his shop, it was said, the same handsome volumes never moved from the shelves.) But Geiger occasionally came into Leo’s store—all of the Hollywood Boulevard book dealers knew one another—and I’d rarely felt such a visceral dislike for anyone as I did for the pudgy, affected, fortyish Geiger. His left eye was glass, his gaze cold and fishy, and he insisted on looking me in the eyes, bullying me to look back or else feel I was being rude. The idea of Barbara having any connection to Geiger made me cringe.

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Pearl said, and glared at Sonya. (With Sonya present, Mama and Pearl had buried the hatchet from the night before and were a united front.) “All he said was that some girls modeled!”

“That much money, whatever she was selling, it wasn’t apples on the street corner,” Sonya said.

“As a matter of fact,” Papa said, “he gave us the names of three photographers.” He held up a sheet of cream-colored notepaper imprinted with the Trocadero letterhead, which bore some writing in an expansive hand. “We went to see them—that’s why we were gone for so long. But none of them knew Barbara.”

“Oh …” I caught my breath.

Fortunately, Sonya spoke at the same time—“As if they’d admit anything to you!”—and my reaction went unnoticed.

While they discussed what to do next, I debated whether to mention that I’d recognized the name of one of the photographers: Alan Yardley. He was the friend who’d done Barbara’s glossies for “almost nothing.” Did she pay for the glossies by modeling? And maybe she had done additional modeling for the money? The fact that Yardley denied knowing her suggested something unsavory had gone on. Certainly I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of Sonya. But why even tell Mama and Papa, when it would only upset them? The important thing now wasn’t how she’d come by her $130. What mattered was that she had money; she wasn’t on her own and penniless.

I said nothing.

The next morning, Saturday, Pearl came by in her car for Papa, and they set out for the train and bus stations. If Barbara had cleaned out her bank account, then she might have left Los Angeles, and they planned to show her graduation picture to the ticket agents and ask if anyone remembered selling her a ticket, and to where.

I went to my job at the bookstore. On my lunch break, I took a walk and found myself drawn toward Geiger’s shop. I wondered if he sold photographs that were taken by Alan Yardley. I walked through the door. Geiger wasn’t there, but a hard-looking woman in a tight dress strode toward me as if to prevent me from going any further. “Sorry, wrong address,” I said, and left.

If I could just see for myself if there were any pictures of her, I’d have a better idea what to do. But my brief foray into Geiger’s shop had made me realize there was no way I could ask to see his special stock. Paul, on the other hand … A college fellow could walk into Geiger’s and be welcomed, and Paul, worldly from having fought in Spain, could pull it off. He had invited me to call him, and he’d seemed sincere. But did I want to ask for Paul Resnick’s help? It would mean confiding in him that my sister might have posed for pinup shots. And what if he did find pictures of her at Geiger’s? Could I trust him?

To my surprise, the answer that came to me was yes. I phoned Paul at his father’s scrap metal business. He came by the bookstore an hour later, and I explained what I had in mind.

His visit to Geiger’s took twenty minutes. When he came back, he handed me a flat parcel, the dimensions of a four-by-six-inch photograph, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

“You were right,” he said.

“Thank you.” I was grateful not only for his help but for his lack of childish embarrassment. And although I felt wild to rush someplace private and rip the parcel open, I didn’t want Paul to leave right away. I found his presence steadying. “You asked if he had any photos by Alan Yardley?”

“That Geiger’s a piece of slime, isn’t he? When I asked about Yardley, he said, ‘Obviously you’re a connoisseur.’ He said he’d just gotten the latest shots of her yesterday. I wondered if they were taken after she left home.”

“The latest?” I glanced at the parcel, clutched in my clammy hand.

“I got four different ones, I got the feeling they were from different modeling sessions.”

“How will I know which is the latest?”

He shook his head. “You’ll know.… Elaine, I hope this doesn’t sound like empty comfort, but I’ve seen a lot worse.”

“Thanks. And thanks again for your help.”

“Please, if there’s anything else, promise you’ll call?”

After he left, I went into the bathroom and edged the string off the parcel. Paul had said he’d seen a lot worse, and I naively expected saucy shots in lingerie, even some nudity. She was wearing lingerie in one photo—a transparent peignoir that left nothing to the imagination as she faced the camera with a teasing smile. That was the tame one. In two others, she was completely naked, striking provocative poses, her face pouty and her back arched to push out her breasts.

And Paul was right: there was no doubt which was the last shot. She sat on a bench, leaning back slightly. One leg was raised so that her foot was on the bench and slightly to the side. You could see everything. Her eyes looked empty, and she hadn’t pretended to smile. She knew no one was going to care about her face.

These weren’t pinup shots. They were smut.

I reeled with revulsion. And rage. I wanted to run to Geiger’s store and smash the windows, take a baseball bat to Geiger’s smug face, burn every filthy picture. Next I’d destroy Alan Yardley’s camera. And then I’d go after my rotten sister! In the first three pictures, she was flirting with the camera. Did she see “modeling” as a lark? She had to know her photos would be pawed, drooled on, and worse. Didn’t she care? Did she enjoy the idea?

I heard Leo clearing his throat outside the bathroom door. I’d been in there for ten minutes. I flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink hard. My hands felt filthy. I scrubbed them under hot water, then washed them again after I’d remade the parcel of photographs and shoved it into my purse.

I tried to get back to work, but I felt genuinely ill: queasy, wobbly. I told Leo I wasn’t well and left early. I couldn’t stop seeing that last photo in my mind. However Barbara had felt doing the other poses, sitting with her legs open was no lark. And despite her pretense of sophistication, she was only eighteen. Look how she’d fallen for the line the “producer” fed her. What kinds of people was she around now, and what lines were they giving her? Should I push Papa to go to the police? At least he needed to talk to Alan Yardley again. If, as Paul surmised, the last photograph was taken after Barbara had left, maybe Yardley knew where she was.

But to make any of that happen, I’d have to tell Papa about the photographs. And it wouldn’t be enough to tell. He would insist on seeing them. Still, if Barbara was associating with men like Yardley and Geiger, did I have the right to keep her secrets? I was only eighteen. This was too big for me.

I would tell no one but Papa, I decided. I just had to talk to him away from everyone else. That turned out to be easy. I walked into the house expecting the anxious hubbub that had greeted me every day since Barbara’s departure. But Papa was alone in the living room, sitting in his armchair reading a book. Mama was in bed with a headache, he said, and Pearl had taken Audrey and Harriet to a movie.

Papa told me about the latest phase of the search. He and Pearl had gone to the train and bus stations, even the steamship lines, but they found no one who remembered selling a ticket to Barbara. Ticket agents worked different shifts, of course, and they planned to go back during the week and try again.

“How are you doing?” He regarded me with surprising tenderness, and I fought tears.

“All right,” I said.

“Your first week of college, and we haven’t even talked about it. Tell me about your classes and professors.”

As I answered Papa’s questions about USC, my fingers kept wandering to the dirty photographs of Barbara in my handbag.

But I couldn’t let Papa see her like that. I decided to burn the photographs. Barbara would come home; at least she’d get in touch with us when it suited her. I would just have to wait until she felt ready.

I couldn’t do that, either.