The Tin Horse A Novel

ALAN YARDLEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO WAS ON A SIDE STREET off of Hollywood Boulevard. I went there after my classes on Monday. I was nervous, expecting the sliminess of Geiger’s shop. But instead, the tiny lobby, where a pleasant middle-aged Japanese American woman announced me over an intercom, looked like an art gallery; the pristine white walls held just half a dozen cleanly spaced photographs, harshly beautiful desert scenes.

Yardley himself surprised me by being … the word that comes to mind is courtly. I’d figured he would keep me waiting, and I was prepared to stay there for hours, but he immediately opened the door to the studio and invited me in. And there was such gentleness to Alan Yardley. He was in his fifties, I guessed, and he was slender and quite tall, over six feet, although he walked with a stoop, as if to keep people from being intimidated. And even though I jumped in the second I walked into his studio and accused him of lying to Papa, his gaze remained kind and a little sad.

“You do know her! I have some of the pictures you took of her!” I said.

“The pictures?” he said softly.

“From Arthur Geiger’s store.”

“Ah.” He regarded me with his sorrowful eyes. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t see any point in mentioning the pictures to your father. I thought it would only upset him. Does he know?”

I shook my head.

“So you thought that, too. You didn’t want to hurt him.”

Ridiculously, I started to cry.

“Oh, dear,” he said. “Let me see if the tea is ready. I asked Harumi to fix some. Please do sit down.”

He went out to the lobby, giving me a few minutes alone. I got control of myself, then looked around.

An open area at the far end of the room was where Yardley staged photographs. The space currently held a stool draped in gray velvety fabric, and a rice paper screen provided a soft background. Two cameras mounted on tripods and several lights on poles faced the “stage.” Just behind the cameras, in the center of the studio, were a low table and two wooden chairs. On one side of the room, he kept various props: stools, chairs, platforms, drapes, and so on. The opposite side was a working area with a light table and more photographic equipment. And on the wall above the light table hung more of the austere desert photographs I’d seen in the lobby.

Yet despite the accumulation of objects, the studio was surprisingly peaceful. Even as I anticipated a further confrontation with Yardley, something about the desert photographs made me feel calm.

Yardley came back in carrying a tray with a white ceramic teapot, two handleless white cups, and a plate of almond cookies.

“Joshua Tree National Monument,” he said, following my glance toward the desert scenes. “Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“The most beautiful place on earth. Sit, please,” he said as he placed the tray on the low table.

“All right.”

He poured the tea, a transparent golden liquid, nothing like the inky brew we drank at home.

“Sugar?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“It’s Japanese green tea. I wouldn’t recommend milk, but if you’d like some …” There was a small pitcher.

“It’s fine,” I said impatiently. As gracious as he seemed, I reminded myself that this was the man who had talked Barbara into exposing her vulva for his camera. “Mr. Yardley—”

“Alan.”

“When did you take the most recent picture?”

“The most recent …?”

“Where she’s on that bench.” I had spotted it among his props. “With her legs open.”

He sighed. “You saw that one? Hmm, I suppose a few weeks ago.”

“Arthur Geiger said he just got that one in his shop last weekend.”

Despite my combative tone, he responded evenly, “That sounds right. It takes a few weeks for me to develop the film, make the prints, and then get them to my customers. Please, why don’t you tell me what you want, and maybe I can help.”

“Did you take that picture last week, after she left home? Did you see her?”

“Oh, and you think I might have some idea where she is! I’m so sorry, no. This must all be a terrible shock for you. I knew Barbara wanted to live on her own, but I was surprised she left so abruptly—”

“How well did you know her?” What else had he talked her into?

“No, it’s nothing like that. I don’t get involved with the girls who model for me. Even if I were inclined to, and I’m not, Harumi would never allow it. My wife.” He nodded toward the lobby. “But the girls and I always drink tea and chat a bit first. And they usually talk about why they’re modeling, what they want to do with the money.”

“How much money is it?” I said, thinking of Barbara’s savings account.

“About thirty dollars a session. More if a girl gets a following.”

“Or if she opens her legs?”

“Ah, well. It’s a sordid little business, I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise. But I do treat the girls with respect. And men being the way they are, there happens to be an excellent market for this sort of thing. Spending a few hours posing lets the girls pay for singing or acting lessons. Or for college. And it lets me afford to do what I love.” He gestured toward the desert photos.

Yardley was just a smoother creep than Geiger, I cautioned myself. Still, it was easy to imagine Barbara feeling comfortable with him, confiding in him. His kindness felt genuine and not simply a facade to deflect me. But was he nonetheless trying to deflect me with his refined manners and delicate tea and breathtaking photographs? Was he hiding something about Barbara? And was there any way I could pierce the facade and get him to tell me?

“Mr. Yardley, if you could see how this is upsetting my mother, my whole family …,” I said. “If there’s any small thing you remember from talking with her …”

“I wish there was.”

“You said she wanted to live on her own. Did she give you any idea where she might go?”

“I suppose I thought she wanted to get an apartment with one or two girlfriends.”

“Anyone in particular? Did she mention any names?”

“Let me … No, I don’t recall any names.”

Everything he said was plausible: that he’d taken the last photo weeks ago, that Barbara had spoken only vaguely of her plans. But I kept feeling I was being outmaneuvered by a master. Yardley knew exactly how far I was able to go. At five-three and 120 pounds, I was hardly going to rough him up like a tough guy in the movies and force him to talk. Nor was I going to come back with Papa, because then I’d have to show Papa the photos. The police? But would they get involved? And if they did, would an investigation just drag Barbara and the rest of us through the mud?

“Did she ever talk about leaving Los Angeles?” I tried.

“Not that I remember.”

To have come this far, to have found out he’d taken dirty pictures of Barbara and confronted him, and to leave with nothing!

“Alan!” I slammed my teacup onto the table, was gratified by the knock of porcelain against wood. “You saw her last week, I know it! Where is she?”

Even during my outburst, his face remained quiet. (Years later, when my kids’ generation gravitated to yoga and Zen Buddhism, I’d wonder if he had studied some Eastern discipline.) But for the first time that afternoon, he spoke vehemently. “I swear to you, I don’t know where she is. If it’s any comfort, Barbara struck me as a girl who will always land on her feet. I wish I could help you. But I’ll make a promise, Elaine. Unless she’s left Los Angeles, I’m sure I’ll hear from her when she wants to model again. I’ll do everything I can to convince her to contact you.”

“And you’ll take more pictures of her?” I shot back.

He shrugged. “That’s her decision.”

Suddenly—I don’t know where it came from—I became a dragon. “Alan, my sister is eighteen. She’s underage. You’re not going to take more pictures of her. And the ones you’ve already taken, stop selling them.”

Or else? I could hear him think it. But he said, “All right.”

“The negatives, too?”

“The negatives, too. Would you like another cup of tea while I get them for you?” he said mildly, as if we’d simply been sitting, politely chatting, all along.

“No, thank you.”

He started going through file drawers. And I finally began to grasp how thoroughly Barbara had disappeared. In less than a day, she had quit her job, emptied her bank account—an account she must have built up over weeks or months by modeling—and then vanished. I had figured she’d taken off in an impulsive panic. But an impulsive act leaves loose ends, and if Barbara had left even one loose end, we hadn’t found it. Instead, it was as if she’d calculated in advance how to cover every track. My catching her with Danny had pushed her to leave when she did, but had she planned her escape all along?

Yardley handed me an envelope bulging with photos and negatives. “I can see why she was so proud of you,” he said. “You just started at USC, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to be a lawyer?”

“She told you all that?” I said, surprised to think that, as Barbara had sipped fragrant tea and talked to this gentle man who invited confidences, some of the confidences were about me.

“As I said, she was proud of you. And envious.”

“Of me?”

“You have such important things ahead of you. College, a career. I’m afraid your sister had found out her glamorous job meant having to slap away men’s hands and soak the bunions on her feet. And she was floundering, as lots of young people do. But having met you, I’d venture to say you know who you are and where you belong in the world.”

“That’s not true!” I protested, not only because I didn’t feel that way at all but to deny his attempt to define me.

“Yes, well, who am I to say?” He gave me a rueful smile. “I’m just a pornographer who likes to pretend he’s some kind of artist.”

PAUL HELPED ME BURN the negatives one night later that week at his father’s scrap metal lot. But nothing else ended so cleanly.

Papa went back to talk to ticket agents a few more times over the following weeks. And he, Mama, and Pearl, in various combinations, made the rounds of nightclubs; even $130 runs out eventually, and Barbara might have gotten another chorus line job. They started with the posh places, visiting all of them within the first two weeks. But gradually the clubs got seedier and the outings more sporadic. Papa went to the police, too, but, as he had feared, they weren’t going to mount a search for an eighteen-year-old girl who had worked in a nightclub and left home of her own free will.

How many ways can you look for someone who’s determined not to be found? And why keep looking for a girl who had plenty of money, wherever she’d gotten it, and was too heartless even to send a postcard and let her mother know she was still alive? But anytime one of us—Mama, Papa, Pearl, or I—ventured the opinion that we had exhausted the search and it was time to give up, someone suggested a new avenue to try. Papa spoke to the only private detective we knew of, Ned Shulman, who had an office on Soto, but he was offended by Shulman’s insinuating questions and what he had the gall to charge. Better to spend our money—well, Uncle Leo’s and Aunt Pearl’s money—on ads in the personal columns in Los Angeles and other cities in California, and on the reward offered for information.

We ran the ads for six months, and Papa checked out any responses that seemed promising; the responses trickled in for another year. Several times the police called, and Papa went to the morgue and viewed the body of an unidentified dead girl, a task from which he returned white-faced but forcing a smile, to let us know immediately that the girl wasn’t Barbara.

But time passed. People we ran into in Boyle Heights eventually stopped asking if we’d had any word. We went on. Well, all of us except Mama did.

The rest of us were fortunate to have lives outside the house, but Mama … at least she didn’t spend all day in her nightgown weeping, like a neighbor who’d had to go to a sanitarium. Mama got dressed in the morning. With help from Audrey, especially, she cooked and kept the house reasonably clean. (No wonder Audrey was the one who inherited Mama’s culinary skill.) She took part in conversations. Yet she stumbled through these things as if none of them—none of us—were real to her. One afternoon I was riding the streetcar to Leo’s bookstore, and I glimpsed her walking down Hollywood Boulevard, peering into shops and restaurants. Something told me not to approach her. But I mentioned it to Audrey later and found out that once or twice a week, Mama left home in the morning and didn’t come back for hours.

I still awoke every morning in the bed that had been Barbara’s (we had put away the cot) to the fresh awareness of my dual losses, Barbara and Danny. An ache. A moment, depending on my mood that morning, of sadness or worry or anger. But then I went out the door, took the streetcar to USC, and got immersed … not just in my classes but in a lively social world, a group that congregated at “our” table in the student union for passionate political discussions and got together on weekends to continue our debates, drink cheap wine, dance, and flirt. It was a society in which, to my pleased amazement, I felt deeply at home.

You know where you belong in the world, Alan Yardley had said. I hadn’t believed him then; how could I, in just my second week at USC, when everywhere I looked, I saw smartly dressed blond girls and beefy, football-playing boys, people who talked about fraternities and sororities and the cars their parents had bought them? It was alien territory in which I’d figured on being a perpetual outsider. But as the overwhelming newness subsided, I discovered quite a few of my classmates who took their studies as seriously as I did and cared what was happening in the world. It wasn’t just the bookish kids with Jewish surnames and glasses, either. A girl in my English class with a sweep of blond hair à la Veronica Lake urged me to come to a forum on the class struggle, and she became a friend.

And toward the end of my second month at USC, Hank Graham asked me out. Hank was the quarterback of the junior varsity football team and also the star of our economics class. He grasped concepts with astonishing quickness; a self-described conservative, he even had the confidence to challenge our New Dealer professor. Sometimes, on the way out of class, he argued with me—not in a bullying way but out of his engagement with ideas. When he invited me to a movie, at first I figured he was joking. He meant it, though. Not that he ever took me to one of his fraternity dances or a party with his friends. He was the first boy I’d gone out with who owned a car, and whether a date started at the movies or a concert (Hank introduced me to chamber music, which became a lifelong love), we ended up parking someplace like Mulholland Drive. He was a gentleman, cajoling but never forcing. At some point, though, I realized he saw me as a sexual adventure, a girl with the fabled licentiousness of the “exotic Jewess.” The idea amused me: Elaine Greenstein, someone’s sexual adventure? And to be fair, the adventure took place on both sides. Hank was the first boy I’d dated since Danny, and I took a fierce pleasure in necking with someone, anyone else; all the better that it was a boy I didn’t love. More than that: as if Barbara had carried the wildness for both of us, in her absence I discovered my own wild streak. Wherever she’d gone, was she now drawn to libraries? Did she pick up books and adore their smell?

Still, it disturbed me to be the Jewess whom Hank hid from his friends. At least, that was what I told myself when I started turning down Hank’s invitations. (I said I was busy, and he didn’t seem to mind.) But I think something much larger had shifted. I no longer felt a compulsion to get back at Danny.

At first, after that day when I’d caught him with Barbara, my anger and hurt burned as hot as my love. He sent me letters, pleas for forgiveness, daily that first month or so. Just seeing a letter from him made me want to scream. I refused to open the letters and told Mama to throw them away; and then sometimes, weeping and cursing, I’d fish one out of the garbage and read it in spite of myself. Then his unit left for England, and the letters dwindled to two or three a week. And though he still said in every letter how much he loved me and how sorry he was for hurting me, he also told me about being in England and about army life. I knew what was in those letters because I started to read them, even if I still didn’t write back. The moment when I’d opened the door to his room and seen him with Barbara hadn’t stopped haunting me; for years, one thing or another—seeing Mr. Berlov on the street, smelling Shalimar perfume, even hearing a low, intimate laugh—would thrust that memory into my consciousness, and I’d feel as if I’d been sick. But something had changed. I’d stopped thinking about any kind of future with Danny; I was able to read his letters with the part of me that saw him as one of my oldest friends and hoped for his safe return from the war.

Later I’d ask myself how, after loving Danny from childhood, I could so quickly let him go. Did I glimpse something in him that day that forever changed who he was for me? On the other hand, maybe everything would have been different if only he hadn’t been leaving the next day—if there’d been time for my rage to soften and for him to approach me in small steps, for us to do a subtle dance of apology and blame and eventual reconciliation.

And maybe none of that mattered. Over the years, I would see generations of high school romances in all their drama—and their evanescence. And I wondered if Danny and I had been outgrowing each other already, as we moved from high school into the world; and if that was why, the next spring, I was ready to fall in love with Paul.

Paul had been part of my life all along. We had two classes together, history and English, and we gravitated to the same group of campus left-wingers. I was grateful for the help he had given me after Barbara left—and for his discretion. Word got around Boyle Heights about her dancing at the Trocadero, but I never caught wind of any rumor about the girlie pictures. Seeing Paul around campus or at a party, I occasionally caught a hint of the shivery, caressing look he used to give me, but he no longer tried to unsettle me. I supposed he felt sorry for me, or embarrassed, since he’d seen the photos.

Then, one afternoon in May, we got on the same streetcar from campus at the end of the day and sat next to each other. And when we got off in Boyle Heights, he asked if I wanted to take a walk.

“I’ve got at least two hours of reading to do,” I said.

“It’s spring,” he said. “Smell.” We were standing beside a night-blooming jasmine, just unfurling its petals in the late afternoon and emitting an indolent perfume.

On the streetcar, we had discussed what the entire country was obsessing about: the war. The week before, Germany had launched simultaneous blitzkrieg invasions into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Holland and Luxembourg had already surrendered. Now France and Belgium were fighting for their lives—with help from the British Expeditionary Force, which included Danny and Burt’s unit from Canada.

On our walk, though, the war didn’t exist. It’s spring, Paul had said, and it was as if by announcing it, he made spring the central fact of the universe, more real than anything else. It was one of those perfect late afternoons in May, the sun pleasantly warm yet soft, a sun that kissed everything—the streets, buildings, Paul, and me—with golden light. Flowers bloomed riotously, the jasmine and also California poppies in orange, yellow, and crimson. Walking to Hollenbeck Park, I noticed my legs gliding in my hip joints with an animal joy I hadn’t experienced since I used to dance.

There was another kind of awareness, too, a return of the current I had once felt between us. But it was no longer a flicker, a could-this-be-sexual frisson. As if the current had gained force from months of lying dormant (months, Paul told me later, when he had held back, giving me time to get over Danny), it permeated that afternoon. It was present in the glances Paul and I gave each other, in the brilliant poppies, in the softness of the grass on my bare feet when I took my shoes off in the park. And the heady jasmine—whenever I remembered our first kiss, that afternoon in the park, the memory was drenched with the fragrance of jasmine.

I didn’t love Paul with the sweet abandon of my love for Danny. Thank God. A college woman now, I cringed to think of the girlish sweetness and naivete I had only recently escaped. That summer of 1940, Paul became the first and only man with whom I would ever make love. Still, I reserved parts of me he couldn’t enter, keeping him from getting too close through ironic remarks. He fought back avidly. How we thrived on our battles! Going with Paul—and, later, being married to him—had the kind of charge I used to envy between Danny and Barbara.

I wrote to Danny to tell him I was going with Paul; I felt I owed him that. He didn’t respond, but I didn’t know if that was because of my news or because he’d started a dangerous new job. I had heard through the Boyle Heights grapevine that following the evacuation from Dunkirk at the end of May, Danny, whose first languages were Polish and Yiddish, had volunteered to go behind enemy lines as a spy.

On September 12, 1940, exactly one year after the last time I’d seen Barbara, I was on edge all day. All of us were, privately, unable to bear mentioning it. Surely, wherever she’d gone and whatever filled her day, she was thinking of us. And her persistence in our thoughts, in our yearning, was so intense, I felt as if we could will her into physical presence, at the very least that we could summon her voice on the phone. Magical thinking. Of course, there was nothing. Then the day ended, and it was September 13, then September 14, and so on and on.

LIFE STUBBORNLY CONTINUED.

I completed my sophomore year at USC, making the dean’s list as I had the year before. Paul and I broke up after one of our spats exploded, and for those moments I loathed him—and loathed knowing I’d given him power to hurt me. But the fight also made me realize how much Paul meant to me. And by the time we got back together a week later, with fevered makeup sex, I couldn’t remember the specifics of the fight. (During our marriage, we used to joke that neither of us ever thought of divorce, but we often contemplated murder.)

The war spread. Germany attacked Yugoslavia, Greece, and even the Soviet Union, to the anguish of our leftist group. There was constant debate about whether the United States should get into the fight, and more Boyle Heights boys went to enlist in the Canadian army, two of them immediately after the terrible news that Burt Weber had been killed fighting in North Africa.

In my house, there were just five places at the dinner table; no one made a mistake and set six anymore. I knew from Audrey that Mama still went out a couple of days a week, and I assumed she was going to Hollywood, but she no longer acted as if she were sleepwalking; she seemed herself again.

I hated anniversaries, those false markers on the calendar that raised a flutter of anticipation I couldn’t suppress. The following March 28 was Barbara’s twentieth birthday, March 29 mine. I stayed out late both of those nights, refusing to wait at home for a letter or call that wasn’t going to come. And both nights I got drunk, which in my case didn’t involve dancing on tables; when I drank, I really did get “tight”—wound up, archly funny, and, according to Paul, sexy in a sort of dangerous way, as if I might have a switchblade concealed in my bra. When the next September 12 came along—two years—I did the same.

It was 1941. I was an adult, a junior at USC, and no longer a virgin. A boy I knew had died in battle. If there were times when I ached to share a story with Barbara or hear her laugh—if, alone in our bedroom, I opened the lid of my treasure box and held her note, or found a scarf she’d left behind and pressed it to my nose to catch a whiff of her—the next morning I was brisk and cool again: Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Bette Davis in anything.

I felt as if I were in a movie, delivering lines that surprised me with their sophisticated bite, the first time I spoke to Philip Marlowe. I guess he brought that out in me.

It happened that October at Leo’s bookstore. I was working alone that afternoon. An ominous sky and thunder growling in the foothills had discouraged paying customers, leaving just a handful of regulars, people who would read entire books as they stood in the aisle—and whom I trusted not to steal anything. It was enough to glance at them occasionally from the office, where I was studying for a pre-law class.

I looked up, alerted by the bell over the door, when Philip came in. I kept looking because he didn’t belong. Not because he was handsome in the rough-hewn style of movie thugs; we got customers who looked like that. But those men entered the store like every other book lover—even as their feet carried them forward, their eyes kept darting toward the shelves on either side, and after a few steps, they paused, enticed by a title or the look of a binding. This man headed straight toward me, and though he was polite as he elbowed his way down the narrow aisle, I sensed a contained violence in him that put me on alert and intrigued me.

He opened his wallet and flashed a star at me. Apart from chatting with the beat cops who stopped by the store, my only experiences with the police had involved helping Mollie hide from them and having them call Papa to look at girls in the morgue. I said nothing, collecting my thoughts. And I took off my glasses, distancing myself; though a moment later I realized it was the gesture I’d adopted as a teenager around boys. Well, the cop was good-looking; more than that, his eyes hinted at intelligence and humor.

He asked if I’d do him a favor.

“What kind of favor?” Whoever this cop was chasing, I figured I might be on their side.

But he wanted to know about Arthur Gwynn Geiger. And he asked as if he wanted something bad to happen to Geiger, which made me inclined to help him in any way I could. I hated Geiger for ruining Barbara, even though blaming him wasn’t rational. He had only sold the photos; I should have turned my wrath toward Alan Yardley for taking and peddling them, or the capitalist system for turning girls into commodities, or why not Barbara herself for being such a little fool? But no matter; it was Geiger who repelled me.

Still, I didn’t know what the cop wanted with Geiger. And was this man really a cop? Anyone could make up a badge with a star, and something about the man felt slightly off. Stalling as I debated whether to trust him, I parried his questions. And flirted a little. He parried back. I had never met a cop with such an agile mind. I’d been right about the intelligence in his eyes.

He asked for an 1860 edition of Ben-Hur with a specific erratum. I looked it up and saw that Ben-Hur hadn’t been published until 1880.

“There isn’t one,” I said.

“Right. The girl in Geiger’s store didn’t know that.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” I had seen the girl who worked for Geiger, a slithery sexpot; I questioned whether she even knew how to read.

Then the man told me he was a private detective, and the things that had seemed wrong about him fell into place. I gave him my impression of Geiger, not saying a word about Barbara, of course. And not mentioning Geiger’s business in smut—clearly he already knew about that.

Two days later, every bookseller on the boulevard buzzed with the news that Geiger had been shot. Murdered.

The next week, the detective returned to Leo’s bookstore. He introduced himself this time—Philip Marlowe—and asked if he could buy me dinner when I got off work.

“Did you shoot Arthur Geiger?” I asked. I would have cheered to hear about Geiger’s public disgrace or financial ruin. I wouldn’t have minded in the least if he’d been beaten to a bloody pulp. But murder …

“Didn’t you see the newspapers?” he said. “He was killed by a business associate. A falling-out among thieves.”

“Do you believe everything you read in the papers?”

He laughed. It was a good laugh, with nothing mean in it. When he finished laughing, he regarded me seriously. “I didn’t kill Geiger. But I killed another man. I was protecting someone. Maybe you wouldn’t see it that way, though, and you might not want to have dinner with me.”

I considered it. Not just his having killed someone but the dangerous, tantalizing spark I felt with him.

“On the other hand,” he drawled, “you might want to tell me what your beef was with Geiger, and if it’s settled now.”

How had he guessed I had my own reasons for hating Geiger? “Is this just an invitation for hamburgers?” I said. “Or will you buy me a steak?”

Dinner turned out to be steak, although it bore no resemblance to anything I knew as “steak”—the cheap cuts that Mama cooked on rare occasions and parceled out among us. At the dimly lit Hollywood dive to which Philip took me, the waiter placed a slab of porterhouse in front of me. It was the most mouthwatering meat I had ever tasted.

I hadn’t planned to say anything about Barbara. But I’d had a glass of Scotch, and the place was smoky and intimate, and Philip listened with such deep attention, his surprisingly gentle eyes offering understanding but not, thank God, pity. I ended up telling him everything over dinner that night, about the dirty photographs and Arthur Geiger and Yardley, whom I suspected of having lied to me, but how could I have forced him to talk? I even shared the awful moment in which I found Barbara with Danny. I’m sure that getting people to open up was one of Marlowe’s professional skills, but what really made me trust him was that he reminded me of Paul. He had the same essential … Goodness is an old-fashioned word, and it seems an odd choice for a man who’d just told me he had killed someone. But in Philip, as in Paul, I saw a good man—fair, generous, compassionate, a man of principle who would choose his battles wisely but, once he decided to fight, wouldn’t back down.

After I told him about Barbara, he made a proposal. He’d do a bit of sleuthing and see if he could find out anything about her. In exchange, would I help him with occasional library research, things like that?

I didn’t say yes right away. I’d gotten my hopes up too many times already, only to have them crushed. And after two years there seemed even less chance of success. But I decided it was wrong not to tell Mama and Papa about his offer. They insisted on meeting him. Mama, especially, adored him. In my mother’s living room, the muscular detective came across like a big, gentle dog, albeit one who was extremely well-spoken. He listened with respectful kindness when she talked about leaving her village as a girl and never seeing her parents again, and he asked for a second piece of her apple cake. And so our agreement began.

He called a few days later with my first “assignment”—going to the library and perusing the newspaper society pages for the past six months, looking for connections between a society matron and a handsome young man who I figured was a con artist. It was a tedious task that cured any illusions I might have about detective work being exciting. He had me give him the results over dinner, his treat at the dive with the fantastic steaks. He had news for me, too. He had gone to Alan Yardley’s studio in Hollywood but discovered Yardley had closed his business nearly two years ago; he’d moved to Twentynine Palms, near Joshua Tree National Monument, according to the dentist who had an office next door.

“He wanted to be an artist,” Philip sneered. “You must have scared him. Sounds like he ran a few months later … What’s the matter?”

“I’m thinking what an idiot I was. I liked Alan Yardley.”

“Why?”

“I suppose because he was good at feeding me a line, and I was naive enough to believe him.”

To my surprise, Philip said, “You’re smarter than that. Tell me what you liked about him.” He listened intently when I explained about Yardley’s gentleness and said that his quietly beautiful photographs made me feel as if the earth possessed a deep, inherent order that would outlast all of the chaos that humans unleashed upon it.

He wouldn’t be able to follow up right away, Philip said, but he sometimes got jobs that took him out Yardley’s way, and he’d drop in on the photographer then.

A few weeks later, I got another assignment and another dinner, though no new information. Philip had a job coming up, however, that would take him to Palm Springs, and he should be able to make a side trip to Twentynine Palms to talk to Yardley.

That dinner took place during the first week in December.

On that Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All of Los Angeles, all of the country, went into turmoil. On Monday the United States declared war on Japan; declarations of war against Germany and Italy followed three days later. Many of the boys I knew enlisted immediately; there were long lines outside every recruiting center.

Paul resisted the rush to war. Like a number of my male classmates, he planned to wait until the end of the semester, which was just six weeks away; there’d still be plenty of war left to fight, he said. I understood that after fighting in Spain, Paul had no boyish illusions of glory, and he hardly needed to prove his courage; that was one of the things I loved about him, that he was an adult, a man. And the thought of him going to war and risking his life filled me with anguish. Yet I had caught war fever, too; how could I not? Every time another Boyle Heights boy enlisted or a former classmate strode across campus in his uniform, I felt a thrill of pride. I was filled with urgency to act now, not to schedule the war after exams. I never said any of this to Paul, because I understood that he was acting rationally while the rest of us danced to a primal drumbeat, but his coolheadedness enraged me. I was furious at myself, too: how dared I judge him when no one expected me to put on a uniform and be willing to die?

Constantly on edge, I woke up every morning tense and snarly after disturbing dreams, and I threw inflammatory adjectives into papers I wrote. At least when school was in session, I could sit in my private funk in classes. Over Christmas break, I worked full-time at the bookstore, and I had to act pleasant all day.

With so much craziness going on, it wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that I saw Philip again. We got off on the wrong foot from the start. He was carrying a large, flat parcel wrapped in white paper under his arm—had he gotten me a Christmas gift? I didn’t have anything for him, but was I supposed to? It was one of those awkward moments when I felt as clueless about American culture as a greenhorn just off the boat. Then he made it worse. We were walking from his car to the steak place, and he said, “Do you know him?”

“Who?”

“That Jew.” He nodded toward Rosen’s Jewelers, where an olive-skinned man with wavy hair about the color of mine lounged in the doorway. Wearing no coat despite the chilly evening, the man looked as if he worked in the store and had stepped out to take a break. Perhaps he was Rosen himself.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

It was nothing, a stray comment from a man who’d asked me about Boyle Heights as if it were on another planet. But I suppose it made me even testier than I was already, quicker to take offense.

In the restaurant, after we got our drinks, he said, “You’d make a good cop.”

“Is that a compliment?” I shot back.

“Take it easy, sugar.”

“Well, you don’t have the highest opinion of cops.”

“A good cop, was what I said. Would you like to hear why? Or would you prefer to take that steak knife and stick it through me?”

“Sorry. It’s … everything.” I took a sip of my drink and stopped glaring at him.

“Phew! I can see why Alan Yardley repented of his evil ways and went off to have visions in the desert.”

I had no idea what his cryptic comment meant, but the important news was that he knew something about Yardley. “Did you see him?”

“Yup. You were on the money about him. He’s okay.”

“What did he say about Barbara?”

“As you suspected, she went to Yardley after you caught her with the boyfriend. Seems she felt safe with him. Good instincts, like you. They did, as he so delicately put it, another modeling session; she wanted the money. Then he and his wife put her up that night at their house. Maybe I’m getting all schoolgirlish and gullible, but I think he was on the level, no hanky-panky.”

I nodded. “I’ve met his wife.”

“Next day, he drove her to her bank downtown and then to the train station in Riverside.”

“Why all the way out there?” Riverside was a good fifty miles from Los Angeles. If she was going to get on a train anyway, why not catch it in the city?

“Apparently she was worried that your family might show her picture around the train stations. She didn’t want anyone coming after her.”

Even though I’d accepted by now that Barbara had been planning her escape, it stunned me to understand how thoroughly she’d anticipated our moves and preemptively foiled them. Had she been that desperate to get away?

“Eat your steak,” Philip said. “It’s good for you.”

I’d barely noticed that a steaming T-bone had been placed in front of me. I dutifully ate a couple of bites.

“I suppose Yardley lied about helping her leave because he’d promised her?” I said.

He nodded. “Can’t say I hold his former profession in high regard, but I’d say he was a man of his word.”

“Then why did he tell you now?”

“Funny thing,” he said with a wolfish grin. “I’m told I’m the kind of fellow people can’t stop themselves from confiding in. And by this time, who at the Riverside train station is going to remember her?”

“Did your persuasive powers extend to getting him to divulge where she went?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know or wouldn’t say?”

He chuckled. “I should have brought you with me. You got him to quit taking dirty pictures and dedicate his life to art. Maybe you could have—”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was that visit from you that made him decide to get out of the smut business.” He raised an amused eyebrow, and my volatile, touchy mood returned.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I wouldn’t do that. According to Yardley, meeting you changed his life. Taking a hard look at what he did through your eyes. In fact, he asked me to give you this. To thank you.”

He handed me the parcel he’d brought into the restaurant. I unwrapped it. It was one of Yardley’s desert photographs: sand, scrub, and sky exquisitely etched in black and white.

“Does he think that makes what he did all right? I don’t want it,” I said, even as I imagined how beautiful the photograph would be on my wall, and something in me felt glad that Yardley was living in the desert he loved. But I was wretched that night, on the verge of either tears or rage, and I chose rage.

“Well, it doesn’t really go with my décor,” Philip said. “Keep it, anyway. It might be worth something one day. So Yardley’s story was, your sister told him she was going to stick a pin in a train schedule and decide that way.”

“How could he let her do that? She was only eighteen.”

“He figured she had enough money—and enough moxie—to take care of herself.”

“If we got the schedule of trains that left Riverside that afternoon—”

“Elaine.” He regarded me with what looked infuriatingly like pity. I wanted to slap him. “You figured it out for yourself. She’d been planning her getaway for a long time. She did work that she may have found demeaning so she could save up the money to leave. She went to the trouble of catching a train in another city so she couldn’t be followed. Sweetheart, look, for some people, it’s not enough to leave the family nest. Some people—for reasons they probably can’t explain themselves—feel like they’re running for their lives.”

“People in my family did run for their lives!” I said. “My grandfather was being chased by men who wanted to kill him. My mother, if she hadn’t gotten out of Romania … do you know what’s happening there now?”

“I think I have some general idea.”

“No, you don’t! You have no idea.”

Later, I understood that I reacted so strongly because what he’d just said and the new evidence he’d brought me suggested something I refused to think: that Barbara had eagerly, happily, severed everything that connected her to us. To me. It made me feel blotted out of existence. Not just who I was now, but the dual identity I’d had from the moment of my birth seventeen minutes after hers: Barbara-and-Elaine, “we.”

“Where are you going to look next?” I asked, my eyes daring him to suggest giving up the search.

“I think I’ll go get chummy with a few chorus girls. Chorus girls seem to appreciate my charm.” He gave me such a woeful grin, I had to laugh.

I had another drink, and we settled into the flirting and bantering of our previous dinners.

The flirting didn’t mean anything. Philip inhabited a different Los Angeles than I did, a city where people carried guns and had their first drink of the day before lunch, a place where the most ordinary conversations crackled with sexual innuendo. He flirted with me as instinctively, as insignificantly, as he breathed. I knew that.

But I was in a reckless mood. The war, the tension I’d been feeling with Paul, and now having to imagine Barbara running for her life—running from me. When Philip was driving me home after dinner, I pressed close to him and kissed him.

“Well,” he said. He turned onto a side street and pulled the car over to a curb.

He kissed me back. For a moment. Then he gently pushed me away.

“Can we go to your apartment?” I said. Despite the cocktails I’d had, I wasn’t drunk. I wanted to live in his Los Angeles, if only for that evening.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re not that kind of girl. You’d hate yourself in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Then I’d hate myself in the morning.”

“Liar,” I teased. My fingers darted to his crotch, confirmed that he was hard.

He grabbed my wrist so tightly I yelped. “Cut it out. Go sit over there.” He directed me to the edge of the seat, next to the window.

In silence, he drove me home.

Philip was right. I wasn’t that kind of girl. I felt guilty for even thinking of cheating on Paul. And I dreaded seeing the detective the next time. Should I pretend nothing had happened? Apologize for acting like an idiot and blame it on too many drinks? I decided to take my cue from him; he had surely weathered awkward situations like this one. But weeks passed, and I didn’t hear from him. Finally, in late January, I called and reached him at his office. In a terse, uncomfortable conversation—had he been embarrassed, too?—he said he’d struck out with the chorus girls, and I could consider our trade completed.

I said goodbye to Barbara then. What else could I do? I was saying so many goodbyes in 1942. Paul enlisted in the army. All of the boys were going to war.





AN IMMENSITY OF SNOW COVERS THE PLAINS STRETCHING TO THE horizon on either side of the highway. The road itself looks clear, but the woman who rented us the Explorer at the Cody airport warned us about black ice.

“Highway surface’ll look fine, but there’s a coat of transparent ice on it,” she said. “Gotta keep testing your traction.”

The warning came too late. I’m out of control already: I’ve been lurching and careening as I booked flights and hotel rooms for Josh and me, aired out my wool coat, bought snow boots, and duplicated family photographs to bring. It’s all happened in just the past week since Josh brought me the information about Kay Thorne. I told myself I had to act quickly to get this trip in during Josh’s winter break … as if I were somehow orchestrating this headlong rush. In truth, it’s like falling down a flight of stairs.

I did that once; it must have been thirty years ago. One minute I was starting down the stairs from the bedroom, carrying a stack of files and thinking about the case I was working on; the next I was hurtling at a remarkable velocity yet with enough time to marvel at how fast a 130-pound woman could travel—and at my utter inability, despite kicking out at the railings, to stop. When I landed finally at the foot of the staircase, I lay still for a minute, amid a flurry of escaped papers, and scanned my body for anything that hurt so much I shouldn’t try to get up on my own. I was lucky. I suffered nothing worse than two broken toes. Later I could summon a distinct picture of taking the first steps onto the stairs, and I vividly, with a sort of detached curiosity, remembered the fall itself. What I couldn’t retrieve was the instant when my feet went out from under me.

Was it when I discovered the Kay Devereaux card?

Was it when Barbara left?

Or did the spill of events that brought me here begin long before, at some moment in our childhood when our eyes locked in perfect understanding, or we were laughing, and our two laughs, identical in pitch and rhythm, blended into a single voice?

Harriet, the one person in my family to whom I told the truth about this trip, tried to persuade me to let the news about Kay Thorne settle before I did anything; she offered to come with me if I still wanted to go this spring. But she didn’t insist that she needed to be there. And even if I were capable of waiting, when I imagined Harriet and me arriving at the OKay Ranch and approaching my twin sister for the first time in more than sixty-five years, I understood that this is something I need to do alone.

That is, with no one except my sidekick from the beginning of this quest, Josh—who’s driving the Explorer down the main street of Cody.

“This is it, right?” he says. “The Buffalo Bill Village?”

I look up and see the sign for the hotel I booked (which despite the picturesque name, is a Holiday Inn). Flying here took all day, half the time in the air and half waiting between flights in the Denver airport, so we’re staying in the hotel tonight and driving to Barbara’s ranch in the morning.

Josh unloads our gear, not just suitcases but a huge black case holding a professional video camera—unnecessary, and it was murder to get through security in Los Angeles. But he’s so delighted with his cover story, that he’s filming a documentary on World War II USO entertainers, he almost believes it himself. His enthusiasm has its value. He got on the phone to Kay Thorne right after I called him, and she eagerly agreed to be interviewed; she even invited him to stay at the ranch. I’m grateful he wasn’t so caught up in his fiction that he accepted.

Actually, Josh has turned out to be a good companion on this journey. He threw out a few questions in the Los Angeles airport this morning—how was I feeling about seeing my sister again and what did I plan to say to her?—but when I changed the subject, he took the hint and didn’t ask again.

I spend half an hour settling into my room, then meet Josh for dinner at the hotel restaurant. He relieves me of the effort of talking by nattering about the bars in town he’s scoped out to hit that night. After dinner, I go to my room and watch television for a while.

At eleven I take an Ambien, turn out the light. And remain stubbornly awake.

The lighted display on the clock says 11:42 the first time I peek.

Then 12:26.

And 2:10.

The room is stifling. I’ve already shut off the heat vents. In Los Angeles, I never turn on the heat at night; on cold nights, a warm quilt is enough. I get up and open a window to a blast of frigid air. I can see the dark outline of the mountains to the west. Where she is.

In that visible distance, is she asleep, or does she, too, remain awake? Fighting insomnia? Maybe she’s a night owl and stays up watching old movies on cable. Having a geography for her at last, a place on the map, makes her more real; she’s in color instead of black and white. Did she ever cast her mind to Los Angeles and imagine me? Or did I always occupy a far smaller place in her life than she did in mine? Perhaps no place at all? I’m about to learn the answer to that.

I don’t want to know.

I don’t want to risk finding out I mean nothing to her. Elaine? Sure, I remember. How ya doin’? Better if she’s furious at me for showing up, if she chases me off her ranch with a shotgun. Hate or fear, at least I matter.

What do you hope to get out of this? Harriet asked me. A reasonable question, and reason is my touchstone; I’m an attorney not only by training but in my deepest nature. And the answer? I want to glimpse the real woman behind the oh-so-public Kay of all the newspaper articles and the glossy dude ranch publicity, I told Harriet. I want to see for myself if she’s all right. To follow our family mystery all the way to its conclusion. To attempt some kind of reconciliation, even healing (though that’s Harriet’s word, not mine).

All of the answers I gave Harriet make sense. I could argue each one and convince a jury. Reason, however, has nothing to do with the force that sank its teeth into me, picked me up, and dropped me here—in Wyoming at three in the morning, fishtailing over a sweep of black ice.

Finally I fall into a sleep in which I clench my teeth so tightly that when I wake up at quarter to eight, I feel like I’ve taken a punch to the jaw.

“You okay?” Josh says when I meet him for breakfast.

“I will be after two cups of coffee.” I say; I hope. “How about you?”

He groans. “Country music, it always makes you feel like you’ve gotta have one more beer because of the girl who dumped you and you were so miserable you went and totaled a car, and the next day you lost your job … But hey, there’s nothing like a few beers to get people talking about one of their local legends.”

“Kay?”

“Miz Kay. First thing everyone said is that she’s an amazing businesswoman, one of the people who invented the modern version of the dude ranch. After some more beer, the story got really interesting. She’s got a reputation for being a ballbuster.”

“They used that word?” It’s what the right-wing pundit called me—“brainy ballbuster,” the slam I found so amusing that I cut out the column and had it framed. Does Barbara know she’s seen that way? How does she feel about it? I can ask her! My nerves zing with anticipation.

“ ‘Ballbuster,’ ‘tough as nails,’ and I recall something about ‘chewing up her husbands and spitting ’em out.’ Not that people saw that as a bad thing. They all respect Miz Kay. Except her own kids. She gets along fine with the son who runs the ranch—George junior, from her second husband. He and his wife live out there with her. But the son and daughter from her first marriage, that’s another story. The son fought in Vietnam and came home with a drug problem. He moved away years ago; story is he finally got himself clean, but he calls a couple times a year and asks for money.”

“How would anyone know that?”

“Good point. Could be that’s just what fits the legend. Anyway, people say she and her daughter, Dana, fought like cats and dogs when Dana was growing up. Dana got married and moved to Seattle years ago. But she had to move back to the ranch last year with her youngest kid. Messy divorce.”

So Barbara was a less than perfect mother. Like me. Like every woman.

The morning is clear and chilly. According to the display on the Explorer’s dash, it’s twenty-six degrees when we leave the hotel shortly after nine. As we head west, the temperature drops. We’re steadily climbing, even though the mountains are peaks in the distance, while we’re traversing a rolling prairie, a sprawling-to-forever space in which the meager signs of human industry—occasional fences, huddles of cattle—dwindle to specks against the snow.

And maybe this is all I need—to inhabit, briefly, this landscape she chose as her own, under a sky so vast that high, thin cirrus are mere thoughts of clouds. Maybe having come this far is enough.

Well, I’m no longer a child, quivering at the top of the slide. If I tell Josh to turn around now, no one will jeer at me for chickening out. I just wish I didn’t feel so much like that child, my spine turned to liquid, my hands and feet like remote outposts I don’t trust to obey my commands.

“Is this it?” Josh says as we approach an exit from the interstate onto a county road.

I check my written directions—unnecessarily, because I have them memorized. “Yes.”

Now we’re in the mountains. Josh has to slow to thirty miles an hour, sometimes twenty, to negotiate the curving two-lane road. And I settle into the limbo of being in transit, in which we will drive on this road forever; in which I haven’t backed down yet never actually have to confront her. I am content.

Too soon, though, I see a carved wood sign that bears the ranch emblem, a stylized outline of a horse, and announces that the turn for the OKay Ranch is a hundred yards ahead. The emblem is a bit crudely drawn, as if by a child, but the childlike quality is its charm; it sparks an instant sense of recognition. It makes me think of Saturday afternoon cowboy movies, and I’ll bet it has the same effect on potential customers planning their dude ranch vacation.

“Looks like we’ve hit the north forty,” Josh says.

A well-plowed entry road leads to an arched wooden gate with “OKay Ranch” and the distinctive horse emblem carved into the arch. Rustic but high-tech, the gate smoothly swings open after Josh announces himself over an intercom, and then closes behind us. The road makes a slight bend, and guests must get a thrill at their first view of the lodge, a graceful building made of whole logs and perched against the mountains.

“No wonder she’s a successful dude rancher,” Josh says, echoing my thought. My sister knows how to put on a show.

We come into the parking lot, large enough to hold perhaps fifty cars, though it’s empty today. The lodge is closed for the winter, and we’re supposed to continue to the family home a quarter mile on.

“Give me a minute,” I say as Josh consults our directions to figure out which of several side roads we need to take. I hate it that I feel so fuzzy. The rotten night. The altitude. My terror.

But I don’t have a minute. Zooming toward us, a snowmobile skims over the packed snow beside one of the side roads. It’s sixteen degrees outside, but the snowmobiler didn’t bother to wear a hat. Her blond curls fly, and I wonder if the granddaughter was dispatched to meet us.

She speeds into the parking lot and pulls up beside the driver’s side of the car. And I see that the face above the electric blue parka is as old as mine.

“Josh! Welcome,” she booms. Even with a touch of Western drawl, it’s my voice coming from her mouth.

Josh jumps out and goes to greet her, and she pumps his hand. Glancing past him at me, she does a double take, then shrugs. “Follow me to the house,” she says.

A tight U-turn, and she takes off in a spray of snow, a vigorous woman at home in this wild terrain. Zesty. Free. My sister.

It’s nothing like any of the lives I imagined for her. Yet as she tears ahead of us, I see the Barbara who shoplifted groceries for Danny, the girl who yelled for joy on the bank of the river after a heavy rain. The girl who could leave us forever and not look back? But that Barbara I’ve never understood; that’s the sister I want to shake until she gives me an answer. Ah, now I feel ready, my back straightening and senses on alert; it’s the rush I experienced when I entered a courtroom.

“You okay?” Josh says.

“Fine.”

The side road leads to a house that looks big enough to hold a family of ten. What must be an original log ranch house sits at the middle of the structure, surrounded by log and limestone additions. It has none of the architectural majesty of the lodge; this is a place where people live. She pulls into a big garage—it holds two trucks, a van, and three SUVs—and parks in a line of about a dozen snowmobiles.

Josh stops just outside the garage. And I get out of the car. Walk toward her.

Getting up from the snowmobile isn’t easy for her. She has to perform a series of negotiations to extricate herself from the low seat; then she braces herself on the snowmobile and accepts Josh’s arm to come to standing. She must be in pain, but there’s no sign of it when she turns and gives me her close-lipped smile.

“I didn’t know Josh was bringing anyone.” She extends her hand. “I’m Kay Thorne.”

I hear Harriet warning me that I’m chasing an illusion. Then Kay Thorne smiles, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. I take a deep breath.

“Barbara,” I say. “It’s me. Elaine.”

I have imagined this moment so many times. I’ve seen her recoil. Or look perplexed and pretend not to know me. Or weep with joy.

For a heartbeat, she is so still, she might have stopped breathing. Then she breaks into a belly laugh.

“Holy crap!” She looks me up and down. “Holy, holy crap! Lainie, you’re an old lady.”

“Seventeen minutes younger than you!” I pull her into a hug, and she hugs me back. My God, she still wears Shalimar! I can feel her body shaking. Or is the shaking mine?

I take half a step back but keep my hands on her shoulders.

She brushes my face. “Don’t cry. It’ll freeze.” She glances at Josh. “He’s not filming any USO documentary, is he?”

“No.”

“Hell of a bullshitter. It’s not nice to trick old ladies,” she teases him. Still a flirt. “Especially old ladies who are crack shots.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” He grins back.

“Your grandson?” she asks me. “He’s got Danny’s eyes.”

“A friend. Barbara, I didn’t marry Danny.”

“You’re kidding. Well, Jesus, Elaine, are you okay? You didn’t come here in the dead of winter because you’re dying of cancer or anything like that?”

“I’m fine. I came now because I had no idea where you were until a week ago.” But I bite back the sharpness that entered my voice. I don’t want to get angry, not when this is going so well. “How about you? Are you all right?”

“Can’t complain. Well, I can complain, and I do. But nothing’s seriously wrong.”

“Hey!” Josh breaks in. “Mind if a California boy goes inside out of the cold?”

The minute he says it, it hits me that my wool coat, fine for winter visits to my daughter in Oregon, feels no more protective than a paper hospital gown. I turn toward the house.

Barbara doesn’t move. Maybe she can’t?

“Do you need help?” I ask.

“Elaine!” She fixes me with my own Acid Regard. “Wait. My family’s here. You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

“For crying out loud. Barbara, I didn’t come here to expose you.”

“Kay. My name is Kay.”

“Fine!” What does it matter if she calls herself the Queen of Sheba? No one else has ever been able to jerk me around so completely or twist me into a tighter knot of helpless rage. Forget her voice and the gap between her teeth; now I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is my sister. “Are you going to at least let me use your bathroom? My bladder is screaming.”

“Who do I tell them you are?”

“How about,” Josh breaks in, “she’s an old friend of yours from the USO? And I’m using her as an advisor?”

“I don’t suppose you brought a camera?” she asks him. “They’re expecting me to be a movie star.”

“In the car. I’ll get it.”

I go to the car with him and get my bag of family photos, and we catch up with her as she hobbles toward the house. “Arthritis has got to be God’s revenge against dancers,” she says.

I refuse to feel sorry for her. Still, I offer my arm, and she takes it as we go to a side door. I follow her up four steps that have solid metal bars installed on either side.

Then my sister opens the door to her home.

We enter a mudroom. Two dogs launch themselves at us, a flurry of barks and eager tongues. I laugh and let them slobber on my hands.

“You have dogs?” she says, surprised.

“I used to. Spaniels. The last one died three years ago.” I’m unbuttoning my coat as fast as I can—I wasn’t kidding about my bladder—but my fingers are numb and the mudroom tight. Besides the three of us and the dogs, the walls bulge with parkas and fleece jackets hanging on hooks, and there are enough boots scattered on the floor to stock Fine & Son Fine Footwear.

I struggle out of the coat at last. “Bathroom?”

“Dana!” she calls. “This is my friend Elaine, from the USO. Show her where the bathroom is.”

“Sure,” says a fiftysomething woman who’s been hovering just beyond the mudroom. Dana, the daughter. Despite my skepticism about the local rumor mill, Dana does look like a woman who’s dragged herself home after a messy divorce. Her skin is pasty, and her streaked hair shows an inch of gray roots.

“Are you in the movie, too?” she asks as she leads me down a short corridor; but she says it like she doesn’t particularly care.

“Yes.”

“That’s great,” she mumbles.

Dana waits for me, then leads me into a beamed living room and introduces me to George and his wife, Lynn. Kay—no, Barbara! I’ll call her what she wants, but I’m not going to censor the way I think about her—is nowhere in sight.

“She went to change clothes for the film,” Josh says, sensing my anxiety. “She’ll be back in a minute.”

“That’s what you think!” George has the tooth gap, and so does Dana; it must be one of those traits that bully any competing genes into submission. “You never tried to get my mom away from a mirror.”

Along with his Robert Mitchum handsomeness, George has an easy, at-home-in-his-own-skin assurance that might even be able to persuade me to get on a horse. He ushers me to a somewhat threadbare but comfortable chair next to a hearth that, hallelujah, appears to hold an entire blazing tree. And it hits me where I’ve seen that visceral self-confidence before—in photos of Uncle Harry.

Lynn, who manages to be both down-home and chic with cropped white-blond hair and turquoise stud earrings, matches her husband’s cowboy charm with a good innkeeper’s gift for chitchat. She throws Josh some questions about his film and me about my USO tours; I’m lucky that years in courtrooms taught me to think on my feet.

Lynn’s filling the time while we wait for Barbara. As ten minutes pass and then fifteen, even George fidgets. They’ve probably got work they need to get back to. Surely I’m the only one who’s worried that Barbara will grab some diamonds from a safe, jump onto her snowmobile, and never be seen again.

“Let me go finish making the cinnamon buns,” Lynn says. “And how about some cocoa? Or would you prefer coffee? Tea?”

“Don’t pass up Lynn’s cocoa,” George says. “She’s the reason people say the OKay has the best grub of any dude ranch in the country.”

“Cocoa sounds great,” I say.

“How about you?” she asks Josh, and he nods.

“I’ll take some, too, with real whipped cream on it, not that healthy crap,” Barbara says. She’s back, standing just inside the doorway. She’s changed into a black suede skirt and a fringed black vest over a red turtle-neck, along with black cowboy boots. Like Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley, and not just because of the outfit; it’s the way everyone deferentially turns toward her.

“As if I’d dare try to keep you from clogging your arteries,” Lynn says fondly. “I’ll have Jen bring it in here when it’s ready.”

“Not here!” Barbara says so vehemently that her family looks at her in alarm. She tosses her head, announces, “We’ll be in my office.”

“Mom, don’t you think …,” Dana begins, then pauses. “We got the living room all ready for you to film here. The light, you know? And your office must be freezing.”

Poor Dana, having to come back home to her ranch-matriarch mother and the Western power couple of George and Lynn. I wish I could be for her what Aunt Pearl was for me. I settle for shooting her a smile.

“Josh can stay here and set up,” Barbara says. “Elaine and I have some private catching up to do.”

I force myself to stand up; I’m loath to leave the fire. But Barbara and I do need to talk behind closed doors.

Using an ornate cane, dark wood with silver filigree, she leads me to a newer wing of the house. We enter a spacious room with a desk at one end and three chairs grouped around a low table at the other. There’s a big picture window with a view of the mountains. It’s gorgeous. And so cold that frost coats the inside of the window. When I sit down, I let out a gasp; the chair seat is a block of ice.

But she’s adjusting a thermostat on a photograph-covered wall, saying, “It’ll warm up fast.” Then she pulls up a chair next to me and leans close, searching my face. “It’s really you. I missed you.… No, I mean it. Tell me about yourself. Did you graduate college?”

“Didn’t you ever look me up on the Internet or at the library? Weren’t you a little bit curious?”

“I tried. But computers are a complete mystery to me. And I tried ‘Elaine Greenstein’ and ‘Elaine Berlov.’ What is your name?”

“Resnick. I married Paul Resnick. Remember him?” I say. She looks blank as I continue, “He was a couple of years ahead of us at Roosevelt, and he fought in the Spanish Civil War.”

“So, did you graduate?”

“Yes, from college and law school.”

“You did go to law school! And did you become Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“I defended some people against Joe McCarthy in the fifties. Later I did civil rights and antiwar cases. And women’s issues … I got a reputation as a ballbuster.”

“No shit.” She chuckles. “I’ve heard that’s how a few people see me. But you really did all that?” She beams at me. “Lainie, you were always so brave.”

“Me? You were the brave one. The way you threw yourself into things.”

“I was just wild. And stupid … I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes?”

“I gave up smoking in 1964, after the surgeon general’s report. And again in 1967. And for good in 1971. When Aunt Pearl got diagnosed with lung cancer.”

“Oh.” A shadow crosses her face. Then she says, breezy again, “God, I adored Pearl. Did she ever marry the Mexican boyfriend? Or anyone?”

“No. But she and Bert lived together after she moved out of Boyle Heights and got a house in Los Feliz. And he took care of her at the end. He was wonderful.”

“That Pearl! I wasn’t as good at staying away from the altar.… I guess you already know that, don’t you?” she says tartly. “You could probably tell me things I don’t even know about myself.”

We fall into the awkward silence of people who have too little to say to each other. Or too much.

“This is a beautiful place,” I say.

“We like it.… God, it’s been so long. So … Danny, did he get killed in the war?”

“No. After the war, he moved to Israel—it was still Palestine then. He became some kind of high-up in the Mossad, Israeli intelligence. Not that he’ll ever admit it.”

“He’s still alive, then? You stay in touch?”

“We talk every few years. We argue about politics.”

“Is that why you didn’t marry him? Because you didn’t want to live in Israel?”

“I didn’t marry Danny because I grew up. And I fell in love with Paul! It had nothing to do with … anything else.” Ridiculous to get prickly more than half a century since I last faced her in Danny’s doorway, the air thick with sex and betrayal. I grab the bag next to me, change the subject. “I brought photographs.”

“Oh, I’d love to see them.”

I’ve brought several dozen pictures, snapshots from vacations and family gatherings as well as posed group photos at weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs. Going through them gives us a way to fill in the stutters in our conversation. I tell her she can keep any of the photos she likes, and she says no thanks. Still, she looks avidly at the pictures of people she knew as we aged. And I fill her in on our lives—and deaths.

As she looks at the photos I brought, I scan the ones on her walls. Most of them are of people wearing Western clothes and straddling horses or standing next to them. But some pictures don’t have humans in them at all. Her family. Not us but horses! Suddenly I’m seething.

Her eyes are on a shot from my wedding when she says, “Water under the bridge and all that, but I’m sorry about what happened … that day with Danny.”

“Water under the bridge,” I echo, but then I explode. “Who gives a damn what you did with Danny? But how about your disappearing without a word? How about letting Mama and Papa die not knowing where you were, that you were alive!”

“Would you have left me alone? Look at you—you have the nerve to do a background search on me, and a week after you find out where I am, here you are!”

“Did you think they were going to jump on a plane to Cody, Wyoming? Mama and Papa, in the 1950s? Or that hordes of embarrassing Jewish relatives would book vacations at your dude ranch? Is that what you were so afraid of, that people would find out you’re Jewish?”

“I’m not Jewish!”

It’s so preposterous, I stare, openmouthed, as she jabs her cane into the floor and pushes herself to standing. “Elaine, you don’t get it. You think I’m living some kind of lie as Kay Thorne. But Barbara Greenstein was the lie. Trying to be her made me feel like I was suffocating.”

Some people don’t just leave the family nest; they feel like they’re running for their lives. I jumped down Philip’s throat when he said that, and I jump down Barbara’s now, standing and shouting in her face, “That’s the best you can do, to explain why you broke Mama’s heart?”

“Is that why you came all the way here, to tell me no explanation is good enough? Big surprise, Elaine. I was never good enough for you.”

“That’s not—”

“Shh!” She cocks her head toward the door.

“Gram?” a girl’s voice calls from the hall.

In the panicked glance that jumps between us, we could be eight years old, with Mama about to walk in on something we want to hide.

“Gram, are you okay? I’ve got the cocoa.”

“Fine!” Barbara bellows. “Just hang on a sec, Jen, okay?” She sits back down, painfully—I can almost hear the joints gnashing in her hips and knees—and shoves the photos we’ve spread over the table into a pile before she calls, “C’mon in.”

“Cocoa train,” says the young woman, wheeling in a restaurant cart. A girl who has Dana’s rangy build, along with my family’s delicate features and dark curly hair, caught in a ponytail. I look for the tooth gap, but she gives only a slight, closed smile.

“My granddaughter, Jen,” Barbara says. “And this is Elaine. A friend from the USO.”

“Right, the technical advisor,” Jen says. In her watchfulness, I see myself.

Jen transfers items from the cart to the table. There are two big cups of cocoa topped with whipped cream, a plate with half a dozen pastries, and individual plates, cutlery, and gingham napkins.

“Be sure to try one of the cinnamon rolls,” Jen advises me. “Aunt Lynn won third place in the Pillsbury Bake-off with them—as we have to tell the guests six thousand times every summer. They really are fantastic, though.… Gram, I brought you a treat,” she adds in a half whisper. From a pocket of her bulky sweater, she pulls out a flask and tips a generous amount of something into Barbara’s cocoa.

“That’s my girl,” Barbara says.

It occurs to me that this may not be my sister’s first drink of the morning. Was that the reason for her family’s unease when we waited for her earlier? Well, so what if she drinks a bit? Here she is, living in her own home in a mountain paradise, eating her fond daughter-in-law’s cinnamon rolls. And I’ve got the Ranch of No Tomorrow’s teriyaki chicken.

The bite of envy is visceral. And familiar and comforting. Like smelling my mother’s kitchen again or hearing Papa declaim poetry.

“Scotch?” Jen asks me.

“Please.” So Scotch is Barbara’s drink, as well as mine.

When Jen leans toward me to doctor my cocoa, something gleams between the edges of her thick cardigan. Oh, can it be …

“Can I see that? Your necklace?”

Jen pulls out what she’s wearing on a cord around her neck. “I begged to have this for years, and Gram finally gave it to me when I graduated high school.”

I barely hear her. I’m staring at the crudely fashioned tin horse. The model for the ranch’s emblem. The horse Zayde made.