The Tin Horse A Novel

“CAN I?” I REACH FOR THE HORSE. MY HAND IS SHAKING, AND TEARS well in my eyes.

Jen looks confused, but she takes off the necklace and hands it to me.

Barbara jumps in. “It reminds Elaine of when we were in the USO together. The horse was my good-luck charm.… Brings it all back, doesn’t it, Elaine?”

I’m weeping as I clutch the horse, feeling the surprisingly smooth edges—did Zayde make it that way, or did Barbara hold it so often she wore it smooth? She took the horse when she left. She treasured it.

I feel her hand on my knee. She’s pulled her chair around so she’s facing me. “Have some cocoa. Drink.” Gently she takes the tin horse from my fingers and holds out the cup.

The cocoa is delicious, as promised—and well laced: I can taste the Scotch behind the chocolate. I glance around for Jen, but she must have slipped out of the room.

“How could you let us go?” I implore, finally giving voice to the question I have asked her in my imagination so many times. “How could you bear to live the rest of your life apart from us?”

She takes a swig of cocoa, then says, “I don’t think I can make you understand. I don’t understand why I do most things; I just do them. I’m sorry I hurt you. Really. And I did miss you. Sometimes in Europe during the war, I felt so lonely, and I’d get out an aerogram and write ‘Dear Elaine’ or ‘Dear Mama.’ But I never finished any of those letters—and don’t ask me why, I can’t tell you. I’m not like you. I don’t take things apart. I just put one foot in front of the other. One day at a time.”

One more cliché, and I’ll throw my cocoa in her face. Could she really have cut us off with so little thought or regret? I understand that she isn’t reflective by nature; she operated on instinct. But she wasn’t just instinctual, she was secretive; I remember how opaque she became once she started leading a separate life in Hollywood. And now she’s had a lifetime of keeping secrets—she’s a pro. Still, I’m determined to get behind the barricade of platitudes.

“In Europe, when you didn’t finish those aerograms, you were just in your twenties,” I say. “But what about later? Why didn’t you let us know when you got married?”

She reaches for a cinnamon roll. “If we don’t do justice to these, I’ll never be able to explain it to Lynn. I’ll have to feed them to the dogs.”

“Fine.” I pick up a pastry and bring it to my mouth.

“Good, yes?”

The prizewinning pastry dances in my mouth, warm yeasty dough and sugar and cinnamon. But I persist. “When you had your first child, didn’t you want Mama to know she had a grandchild?”

“Bet you were one hell of a lawyer,” she grumbles. “What is it they say these days? ‘It’s complicated’? I met Rich, my first husband, when I was in Berlin, and I told him the same thing I was telling everyone—that my folks were dead, and I didn’t have any other family. By the time it got serious, I knew him well enough to know that if he found out I’d lied to him, he’d never let me forget it.” She gives a tight smile. “Richard Cochran turned out to be one mean, jealous bastard. Handsome, though.”

“But you divorced him. What about after that?”

She heaves a dramatic sigh. “Look, by the time I threw Rich out, everyone knew me as a girl who had no family. Even my own kids! And why would I want to tell anyone … That’s just it. What would I have told them—who I really was? It’s like I said, Barbara was the lie; trying to be her was killing me.”

“Would you have told Rich if your last name were Jones instead of Greenstein?”

“It was sixty years ago. And my last name was Devereaux.”

“You don’t just stop being Jewish, like canceling a magazine subscription.”

“Would that satisfy you, Lainie? Would you feel like you got what you came here for if I said the reason I didn’t contact you was that I didn’t want anyone to know I was Jewish?”

Would it? In that story, this wild place under its endless sky becomes a bunker in which my gutsy sister hid from a world that scared her. Hid from herself. And me? She said it: I was the brave one.

“Not,” she says, “that I think anyone in their right mind would be Jewish if they had a choice about it. I was in Berlin for a year after the war. Everywhere, you’d see the DPs, the people who’d been in concentration camps.” She shudders. “But it wasn’t that. It was the family, Boyle Heights, that claustrophobic little world. Lainie, it was different for you. People always expected you to go to college and make something of yourself. Know what I heard from everyone—Mama, Papa, my teachers, even Pearl? That the best I could hope for was to marry a good provider. Look at this!” She gestures toward the window and the ranch beyond. “I haven’t done too badly. If I’d stayed in Boyle Heights, sure, I might have married some doctor and had a life of PTA and charity lunches and a house in the Valley … and I would have gone out of my mind.”

A song from a musical tinkles in my mind: You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true? Did she have to get out in order to imagine herself? The thought brings a glimmer of understanding. But only a glimmer. I recognize that there are terrible impulses, even the will to murder, lurking in the crevices of my own psyche. But what she did … I remember Danny pointing at her chest and crying, “What’s in there? Do you have a heart?”

“You felt trapped, and you had to get away, all right,” I say. “But didn’t you have a shred of compassion for us? At the very least, you could have written and let us know you’d landed on your feet, that you hadn’t gotten murdered in some alley …”

“What are you talking about?” she says, indignant. “You knew that.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Elaine, come on! A couple of years after I left—it was the spring after Pearl Harbor—somehow you found out my name and where I worked in Colorado Springs.… Why are you shaking your head? Mama wrote to me there.”

As on the day I found Barbara’s dance programs, I feel as if I were standing beside the Los Angeles River in the rain, but this time the flash flood roars from the mountains and smashes into me. Mama and Papa did know, and they kept it from me. This is what I’ve suspected for some time; it shouldn’t come as a huge shock. But hearing her confirm it … It reminds me of when Paul died. No matter that I’d heard the terminal diagnosis months earlier and watched him gradually slip away, or that the home hospice staff had walked me through what was going to happen. Still, the actual moment when I heard his death rattle and then the agonized breathing stopped, I refused to accept it. I kept talking to him, touching his cheek, willing him to flutter his eyelids. What Barbara’s telling me can’t be true.

“Elaine, what’s wrong?” Barbara says.

“They never told me.”

“What, about Mama writing to me?” Her voice goes thin.

“About anything! About your new name or that they’d found out where you were.”

“But you’re here,” Barbara insists. “How else could you track me down?”

As I’m telling her about finding Philip’s card, her face crumples. “Excuse me,” she says, and does her best to hustle out of the room; but her arthritic limbs slow her down, and as she goes through the door, I hear a sob.

I get up, too, and pace, looking out the window at her glorious view and trying again to comprehend my parents’ silence, sifting the information I’ve just heard into the speculations that have obsessed me for the past two months.

So it was true, as I’d thought, that Mama wrote a letter to the woman Philip had found. And then? No matter what explanation I come up with—that she and Papa couldn’t be sure the woman was Barbara, or Barbara wrote a reply so hateful that Mama couldn’t even bear to keep the letter—nothing makes me understand how they could deny us the comfort of thinking they’d found her. What did Harriet say when I told her? That she felt so betrayed she wanted to go to the cemetery and scream at Mama’s and Papa’s graves. That’s how I feel now.

Fifteen minutes have passed, and I’m about to find my way back to the living room, when Barbara returns. She looks like she’s put on fresh mascara, but her eyes are red and puffy, and she says ruefully, “Aren’t we a couple of sob sisters?” Then she takes a deep breath. “You really didn’t know. Mama didn’t tell you.”

“No.”

“Jesus. Mama said, but I never believed she meant it. After I got her letter, I kept thinking Papa was going to show up on the next train. And you, Elaine—I was sure I’d get a letter from you. Unless you hated me so much you never wanted to see me again. You had plenty of reason to feel that way.”

“Are you saying you wanted to hear from me?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I …” She picks at the crumbs of cinnamon roll on her plate. “Mama reamed me, and I figured it was nothing compared to what I’d get from you.”

“Would you have written back?”

She thinks about it, then says, “I’d like to tell you yes, but how can I put myself in the state of mind I was in back then? Getting Mama’s letter threw me for such a loop, and everything was crazy then—the war, and I’d signed up for the USO. What I remember, the one thing I can swear is true, is that after I heard from her, every day I looked for a letter from you. I’d go to the office in the hotel where they sorted the mail.…” Her eyes go distant, as if she’s seeing it. “I never, ever believed Mama would keep her promise. Elaine, I am so sorry.”

I struggle to take it in, hugging myself … as if I could contain the tumult inside me. All of the years when I feared I had meant nothing to her, that she had coldly blotted me out as if I’d never existed.… After nearly a lifetime, that story about Barbara—and the hurt and anger I felt because of it—became one of my deepest truths. To imagine her as a twenty-one-year-old kid waiting for my letter and fearing the same thing about me.…

I take her hands. “I’m sorry, too. Over the years, I did look for you. I hired detectives.” Then something she said tweaks my awareness. “What … promise?”

“Mama said—this was in her letter—that she was the only one who knew about me, and she promised not to tell anyone else.”

“It’s not true!” It can’t be. Thinking that Mama and Papa had decided not to tell us was already devastating. But for Mama alone to offer concealment to Barbara like a gift …

“Lainie.” She holds my gaze. “Like I said, I couldn’t believe it, either.”

“She said that? She actually said ‘I promise’?”

“Well. First she reamed me for being a horrible daughter, and she loaded on the guilt—saying not a day went by when she didn’t weep over leaving her family, and the one thing she wanted most in the world was to see her mother’s face one more time.”

That sounds like Mama. Whatever else she’d said, Barbara must have twisted it.

“But after all that,” Barbara continues, “she said if it was what I wanted, she promised—she used that word—to let me live my own life.”

I have a flash—so vivid that it brings back the feel of Mama’s sweaty hand clutching mine—of our first day of school, the vertiginous moment when I grasped that Barbara and I would be in different classrooms. My disorientation wasn’t just because I had to change my mental image of school and create a new one in which my twin and I were separated for the first time in our lives. Radiating out from that image were the streets around the school, then all of Boyle Heights, and from there Los Angeles, America, and the world. My entire internal landscape fractured, and I had to reconstruct it, though it was never again so reliable and whole. And that world had been only five years in the making.

“Why would she promise that?” I say.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

But it’s not. There was always an uncanny connection between Mama and Barbara, as if they heard the same restless music in their heads. “What’s your guess?”

She throws up her hands, a gesture that, even crabbed by arthritis, is so deeply familiar that the woman sitting before me could be Mama or Pearl or Harriet—or me. If she had stayed, our common vocabulary of gestures, the visceral traces of our entwined history, would have emerged every time we saw each other, and they might have faded into a background hum. Now each one brings a trumpet fanfare of recognition.

“When you got the letter, you must have had some idea,” I say.

“I guess … I thought about what happened to her before she married Papa. You know, when she got kicked out of the place where she was living and felt like she’d run out of places to go. I guess I thought maybe she understood how trapped I’d felt.”

“I don’t know. What do you mean, she got kicked out?” Mama had told Barbara about running away from her family in Romania. What else did she confess?

“You never heard this?”

I shake my head.

“I guess Mama only told me because she could see I was headed for trouble—this was when I was sixteen or seventeen—and she was trying to get me to shape up.”

The story Barbara tells begins like the one I know. Mama moved to Los Angeles with a family from Chicago, the … we grope a bit but come up with the Tarnows. She lived with them in Boyle Heights and got a job at a dress factory. The Tarnows knew Zayde because they had come from the same village in Ukraine; they arranged for Mama to meet Papa, which led to her taking his English class, and that led to Papa proposing.

After that, however, Barbara enters new territory. And I revisit another sensation I remember—the breathless excitement of hearing a secret from my sister. Excitement and apprehension, because uncovering the secret could be like peeling a bandage from a wound.

“It’s not that Mama didn’t care for Papa. She did,” Barbara says. “But it was the way everything happened, meeting him because the Tarnows knew Zayde, and when Papa proposed, they knew all about it because he’d asked Mr. Tarnow’s permission, and they kept pressuring her to say yes. She used to go to the beach and just stare at the ocean. Remember, she did that when we were kids? Anyway, she sat there and thought—how did she put it?—that she’d crossed Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean and then the entire United States. And after all that, she was being pushed into an arranged marriage just like in her village. The only difference was that now she had no place left to go. And then …”

“What?” I say in response to her pregnant pause.

“She met a man.”

“Mama?” Though as I say it, I remember Mollie telling me, Your mama always had a way about her. “What man?”

“The director of a Yiddish theater company. She auditioned for a play they were doing, and she got a small part.”

That part of the story Mollie hadn’t told me; I wonder if she’d known.

“I don’t know if she and this guy slept together,” Barbara says. “She was vague about the details. But I guess she was staying out till all hours and having a few drinks. So the Tarnows threw her out. Literally, they put all her things in a sack and put it on the street. She went to the jerk of a director, but he washed his hands of any responsibility for her. In a way, she was relieved—she wasn’t in love with him, he was just a smooth talker. At least, that’s what she said. But she had no place to go. The first night, she slept on the street.”

“She told you this?” As the story begins to settle in, I can see my passionate, capricious, maddening mother tumbling into a romantic involvement, even a full-blown affair. What I can’t imagine is that she’d tell a soul. Yet she did. She was willing to reveal even that humiliation … to the daughter of her heart. The scald of hurt I feel—ridiculous after all these years—mortifies me, and I try to quell it. But the hurt, the sense of exclusion, has a life of its own, as if it’s racing along some of my earliest, most deeply grooved neural pathways.

“Only because I was so wild,” Barbara says, as if she senses how I feel—old pathways for her, too. “Most of what she talked about was the trashy way I was behaving and how a girl who lost her reputation could never get it back. And how I had to stop expecting my life to be like the movies and grow up. She told me about her mistakes in the hope of scaring me shitless, so I’d start acting like a respectable girl. It’s just that the part of the story I paid attention to was the juicy stuff about her and this man. Naturally.” She shakes her head, gives a small laugh. “It’s so strange to talk about this after all these years. And with you.”

“What happened—after she slept on the street?”

“She stayed the next few nights with a friend, but the friend didn’t really have room. Then Mr. Tarnow came and had a talk with her. He told her if she said yes to Papa, they’d let her move back in until she got married. And then …” But she hesitates.

“What?”

“Phew! It’s crazy, but I got this chill, like Mama’s looking over my shoulder, knowing I’m about to spill her worst secret. As if it matters anymore. That night she went to the beach. She decided there was one place left that was even farther than California—she could walk into the ocean and drown.”

Ocean Park at night is so clear in my memory I can smell the salt-tangy air as Barbara says, “She walked in with her clothes on until the water was almost to her neck. But then she got terrified of dying, and she had to struggle to get back to shore.”

For a moment I’m there, feeling the water rising to my thighs and waist and chest, feeling the sodden pull of my clothes as I fight the suck of the waves. Poor Mama. I had thought, after the talk I’d had with Mollie, that I understood my mother’s thwarted dreams. But I had only glimpsed her desperation, and I ached for her.

And poor Papa!

“Did Papa know?” Did the awful knowledge that Mama had nearly drowned herself rather than marry him account for the perpetual strain between my parents, his sternness and her simmering anger?

“She said he didn’t.”

“But she told you,” I marvel again.

“She was really worried about me. With reason.” She chuckles. And then gasps. “Holy crap! Holy, holy crap.”

“What?”

“I just now realized I did take what she said to heart. I just got a different moral from the story than she had in mind. She was trying to tell me not to be such a dreamer and to settle for what I could get. What I heard was that I should never run out of places to go. And always, always have money of my own. Damned if I didn’t live my whole life by what she told me.… Those pictures you brought. Can I see them again? I’d like to have one of Mama.”

She chooses a shot of Mama and me, taken at Ronnie’s wedding. “Thanks, Mama. For everything,” she says, not hiding her tears. Then she swipes a hand over her eyes and announces, “Well, I guess we’ve got a movie to make.”

She starts to haul herself to her feet, not bothering to hide the effort. I go over to help her, and she lets me. Then we’re standing face-to-face. She caresses my cheek. And we embrace.

My arms around Barbara, I realize that what she yelled at me earlier is true: no explanation she can give is good enough. So she believed, at twenty-one, that I loathed her. But the lifetime of silence afterward—nothing can make that all right.

Yet … It’s not that I forgive her. But forgiveness feels irrelevant. What matters is hearing her voice, holding her, looking out the window at the view she sees every day. It’s the physical reality, flesh and blood and bone, of this person with whom I spent the first nine months of my existence, the two of us pressed together in the chrysalis of Mama’s womb more closely, for longer, than we would ever touch anyone else.

What matters is my grandniece wearing Zayde’s tin horse over her heart.

“I love you,” I murmur.

“Me too. Lainie, thank you for coming. It means a lot to me.”

As we leave her office, I say, “Harriet and I are going to a spa in Mexico this spring. Want to come with us?”

“Do they put you on a diet of watercress?”

“Food’s fantastic. And we bring our own booze.”

She shrugs. But doesn’t say no.

DURING THE COUPLE OF hours we were talking, Josh filmed outdoor footage of the lodge and the mountains; Jen showed him where to get the best shots. And she helped him experiment with locations for the interview, sitting in various spots in the living room while he checked the light.

“I’m your body double, Gram,” she quips.

Barbara forces a smile, and I can see that she’s exhausted. I realize that I am too. I’m awash in fatigue.

“Show time,” she says. And goes ahead with the “interview” like the trouper she is, faking it for the audience of Jen, who hovers, and anyone who might peek in.

Josh asks her to sit at one end of the sofa and does a little preliminary shooting—fiddling with sound levels, he says, and letting her get comfortable in front of the camera. Not that the Sweetheart of the Rodeo suffers from stage fright. When he starts filming, she launches into her USO stories as smoothly as if she’s rehearsed them. In fact, all her stories have the polish of tales repeated dozens of times, delivered with professional timing.

I want to pay attention, to get a window into at least a few of the missing years in my sister’s life. But I’ll be able to watch the video Josh is making, I can share it with Harriet when I get home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s beef barley soup,” Jen says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you ever driven a snowmobile?”

“Sure,” I lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m fine. Sorry I gave you a scare.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We take off.

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

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





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




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

The insights and encouragement of writer friends started with Abigail Padgett and Sara Lewis, who pushed me to write this story that kept knocking at my door. For deep, truly constructive feedback, kisses to the Flaming Tulips—Abigail Padgett, Anne Marie Welsh, Carolyn Marsden, Lillian Faderman, Oliva Espin, Robin Cruise, and Sheryl Tempchin—and to Ann Elwood and Mary Lou Locke. Another important reader was the person who made me fall in love with books: my mom, Harriet Steinberg.

It’s a rare joy for an author to find an insightful reader who engages deeply with her work. When I approached the publishing world, I had the great fortune of finding a dream team of such readers. My agent, Susan Golomb, was my first brilliant editor and has been my champion throughout the journey to publication. Elaine became as real and important to Kendra Harpster, my editor at Random House, as she was to me. More than that, Kendra expanded my vision of what the book could be; she saw what wasn’t yet on the page but was in Elaine’s heart and in her world. And Susan Kamil at Random House had an astonishing ability to zero in on big-picture issues. Thanks also to Eliza Rothstein at the Susan Golomb Literary Agency and Kaela Myers at Random House.

My husband, Jack Cassidy, lived the book with me from the beginning—touring Boyle Heights with me, listening as I talked through problems, celebrating every triumph, and keeping my spirits up the rest of the time. My gratitude to him is beyond measure.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR


JANICE STEINBERG is an award-winning arts journalist who has published more than four hundred articles in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dance Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is also the author of five mystery novels, including the Shamus Award–nominated Death in a City of Mystics. She has taught fiction writing at the University of California, San Diego, and dance criticism at San Diego State University. A native of Wisconsin, she received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, Irvine. She holds a blue belt in the Nia dance-fitness practice and teaches weekly classes. She lives in San Diego with her husband.