The Tin Horse A Novel

I SIT FLOATING ON MEMORY AS THE AFTERNOON GIVES WAY TO DUSK. And then the pull of the past is done with me … or maybe it’s just my eighty-five-year-old bladder that insists on yanking me back to the present. After using the bathroom, I gather up Mama’s daughter memorabilia to share with Harriet.

Everything except Philip’s card, one more piece of detritus that Mama saved simply because she couldn’t throw anything away. I pick up the card to drop it in with the recycling, but didn’t Josh say that something was written on the back?

Kay Devereaux

Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs



The handwriting looks like Philip’s, but I’ve never heard of Kay Devereaux. I wonder why Philip gave the card to Mama. Maybe this Kay was a lead who didn’t pan out, a chorus-girl friend of Barbara’s; the name sounds like a stage name.

And then a memory slams me: I see Barbara and me painting on our scarlet Coty lipstick—the precious tube we shared, hidden in the toe of a shoe—and making up movie star names for ourselves. Diane Hollister. Priscilla Camberwell. Nola Trent was my favorite, a no-nonsense type who’d had a brilliant New York theatrical career and only did films with clever repartee. Kay Devereaux is just the kind of name Barbara would have chosen. Could Philip have found her?

I run for the phone, call information, and ask for Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs. Even as I recognize—and loathe—the prickly feeling surging through me. It’s the charge I felt the first year or two after she left, every time I raced for a ringing telephone or snatched up the mail, or we got a tip that someone in Hollywood or San Francisco or Tijuana had spotted her.

We searched for her like crazy back then, no matter that in her note she’d said not to worry and that she was fine. As Aunt Sonya never tired of saying, an eighteen-year-old girl on her own—or worse, not on her own—how could she be fine? Look at the job she’d had, singing and dancing in the chorus at a Hollywood nightclub, her legs and everything on display and her silly head filled with dreams of breaking into the pictures. “A girl like that doesn’t have the best judgment, does she?” Sonya said again and again, until one day Mama screamed in her face.

We talked to every one of her friends and ran personal ads in the newspapers in the biggest cities in California. Papa went to the police, too, but they didn’t do anything, not when they heard about the note and her job at the nightclub. We tried one more time when Philip offered to help, though by then she’d been gone for two years. (I didn’t lie to Josh. I did work for Philip, but it was a trade, a way for my family to pay him for looking for my sister.)

Along with the prickle of hope, I got used to the crash that followed, when the mail contained no word from her, or the “Barbara” spotted working as a waitress in Newport Beach turned out to be a middle-aged Mexican woman, and the man who’d given us the tip had vanished with his twenty-dollar reward.

Within a few months, even a hint of hope and I was already plummeting. The pattern became so fixed in my nervous system that it kicks in now, more than sixty-five years later, when I ask the recorded voice for Kay Devereaux. And of course, there’s no listing. She would have married and changed her name. Moved. Died.

I could check the Internet. I jump up to go to my office.

“Stop it!” I say it out loud and will myself to sit down.

What the hell does it matter what happened to a woman named Kay Devereaux? That woman can’t be Barbara, because if she were, Mama and Papa would have told me.

I pour myself a Scotch. It’s almost time for Jeopardy!. I should get myself some dinner and get settled in front of the television. But for just another moment, I’m drawn back to the May Company box; there are things I haven’t looked at yet, below Barbara’s dance programs and Philip’s card. I get to the bottom without finding anything else about the mysterious Kay—not that I was hunting for anything, of course not. But to think that the box sat for decades on the closet shelf and I never opened it.

And Josh brought in just two department store boxes, but he said there were more. What other riches did my mother squirrel away? I go into my office. Josh left a chair just inside the closet. I hop up on it … and wobble. Oh, no! Gripping the back of the chair, I plant both feet on the ground. I can’t afford another broken leg like last year, or, kiss of death, a broken hip. That’s the main reason I’m moving to Rancho Mañana, so I won’t have to worry about stairs, and so in case anything does happen, my kids won’t have to put their lives on hold to take care of me. Carol did that when I broke my leg; she came down from Oregon for a month.

I should put some food on top of the Scotch. The refrigerator yields half a turkey sandwich, left over from going out to lunch yesterday. I take the sandwich into the den, turn on the TV, and match wits against the contestants on Jeopardy!.

Once I’ve eaten (and aced Final Jeopardy!), I brave the chair again. I find another three department store boxes, one so heavy it almost sends me tumbling. No wonder, the box is filled with books. “Papa!” I murmur. I can almost smell him as I lift out the poetry anthologies he had us recite from, and his beloved histories of Los Angeles, everything friable with decay. I open one of the poetry books, glimpse a title, and discover I can recite the poem by heart. I wonder if Harriet will be able to do that, too.

She has to see this! I call and invite her to come over for lunch after our water aerobics class tomorrow.

I LEARNED TO SWIM at Venice Beach—Papa taught me when I was little—and there’s still nothing I love more than to walk into the ocean, out to where the waves lap just above my waist, and then dive in. The exhilaration of that first cold immersion! The bubbly tickle of salt water on my skin and the blurry (without my glasses) vastness ahead of me. A whiff of the beach, and my nose still comes up like an eager dog’s. The first time I swam in a pool, when I was a student at USC, I felt claustrophobic and my skin itched for hours. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the unique pleasures of pool swimming—in particular, that the pool at the Westside Y, where Harriet and I take water aerobics twice a week, is blissfully warm.

I don’t see Harriet in the locker room. My baby sister, twelve years my junior, has probably come early to swim laps. Sure enough, when I go out to the pool, I spot her cutting through the water, a zaftig seal in her fluorescent green suit and matching cap. I put on booties, ease into the water, and greet the half dozen other regulars who are already there. A few minutes later, Harriet swims to the shallow end and joins us, stripping off her swim cap and shaking out her long gray hair.

Anytime I’ve attempted to go gray, the word schoolmarm immediately comes to mind. That’s why I get to the salon every six weeks for a feathery cut and to keep up my color, which has gotten lighter and lighter; it’s now a sort of cocker spaniel blond. On Harriet, though, wild gray locks suggest a free spirit who still puts marijuana in her brownies and has a diverting sex life. The look is perfect for her workshops, “Wise Woman: The Deep Knowing of Age.” Sounds like psychobabble, but Harriet really is a wise woman, and not only because she’s a respected psychotherapist; she sees beneath the surface of people and relationships and comes up with insights that amaze me. Not that she often exercises her skill on the family. Refraining from analyzing us is part of her wisdom.

We prance—well, Harriet prances; I shuffle—in the pool for an hour to music than runs from big-band tunes to the kind of songs my grandkids listen to; then we take showers, dress, and meet back at my house.

“Wow. You’re really doing this!” Harriet surveys the living room, which already feels bare, though all I’ve done so far is empty bookshelves. Every piece of furniture, however—except for the few things that will fit in the apartment at Rancho Mañana—has been assessed by a sweet but ruthless woman named Melissa who bluntly told me what’s worth placing in her consignment store and what’s so pathetically outdated I should just give it away.

“Sure you don’t want to move in with me?” Harriet says.

“I’m sure. But thanks!” I think of Harriet’s household—her forty-two-year-old son who moved back home after getting laid off and the not-much-older man with whom she does, in fact, have a diverting sex life—and experience a moment of profound gratitude that I can afford my own apartment at Rancho Mañana.

Over lunch, I tell her about the boxes. Then I make tea and show her the gems I’ve found. I start with the daughter box, though I’m surprised, going through it with Harriet, to realize Mama saved far less ephemera of her life than of Barbara’s, Audrey’s, or mine. There are report cards and class pictures, but nothing more personal.

But what really stuns me is when we turn to Papa’s books.

“Remember Papa’s poetry lessons?” I say.

“What poetry lessons?”

“Didn’t he have you recite poems?” She looks blank, and I continue, “It wasn’t just because he wanted us to speak well. He loved to recite. Remember, he won a prize for elocution when he was in high school?”

“Did he?”

“Harriet! The story of Papa’s prize is a Greenstein legend.”

She laughs. “They say—and I guess this proves it—that every sibling grows up in a different family. That if someone asked you or Audrey or me what it was like growing up, we’d have wildly different stories. It has to do with birth order, temperament.” She picks up the tag on the end of her teabag, starts shredding it. “And of course, most of my childhood was after Barbara left.”

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

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

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

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

“I had no idea it hit you that hard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, but Boyle found him eventually.”

“The father? No, he didn’t.”

“Lainie, I’m sure of it. I feel like I know exactly where to find it.” She starts paging through the book.

“I’ll bet you a ticket to the symphony that I’m right.” Just thinking about the forsaken brothers and sisters sparks a whisper of the uneasiness the story caused me as a child.

“You’re on.” She slows her flipping. “Ha! I win.” She reads aloud, “ ‘He’—Andrew Boyle—‘finally arrived in New Orleans and there found his father, the cause of the family migration to America.’ ”

I reach for the book and read the sentence for myself. Just that one sentence? And not a word more? I skim the next several pages; the long-lost father no sooner enters the narrative than he disappears again.

“Where’s the rest of the story? Finding his father, it’s like something out of a myth. What was the father doing all that time? And how did it happen? Did they just run into each other on the street in New Orleans?”

“That’s, as they say, all he wrote,” Harriet replies. “That’s why it stuck with me. Kids in my class asked the same questions as you, and the teacher gave us some lame answer, like the author didn’t go into detail because it was a private family matter. Then she gave me one of those looks. Everyone knew about Barbara—certainly all the teachers did. Another subject that took hours of therapy.”

I had escaped that burden, being branded as a girl whose sister had run away and never come back. In our neighborhood or among childhood friends, yes, people saw me and thought of Barbara being gone—just as, all the time I was growing up, they knew me as her twin, seeing her next to me even when I was alone. But I was already going to USC when she left, already spending most of my waking hours beyond the fishbowl of Boyle Heights.

“Even as a kid,” Harriet says, “I knew the real reason the grandson didn’t say anything about a joyous reunion. Because it wasn’t joyous. How could it be? No matter how happy they were the first minute they laid eyes on each other, how long would it take before Andrew looked his father in the eye and asked, ‘Why?’ And from the father’s perspective—think about it—having Andrew back in his life threatened his exercise of Americans’ most precious right.”

“The pursuit of happiness?”

“The right to reinvent ourselves … Which brings us back to your question. How would I feel if we could find Barbara now? Profoundly ambivalent, I think. Finding her might lead to a wonderful relationship for the time we have left. But that isn’t the only possible outcome.”

As I said, Harriet is a wise woman.

She’s not, however, infallible. After she leaves, I go back to her comment that after Barbara took off, everyone in the family shut down. It’s not true. We were all upset, of course, scared something terrible had happened to Barbara, and that was why we hadn’t heard a word. At the same time, we were hurt and angry to think nothing had happened, and in that case how could she lack the decency to let us know she was all right?

But shutting down, that’s a term from Harriet’s world of psychotherapy. And I never saw any point in spending time on a therapist’s couch dissecting my reaction to Barbara’s leaving. Any time, energy, or money I put into the mystery of my twin’s disappearance went toward hiring detectives to look for her—really hiring them, paying a generous fee, not like the trade I did with Philip, who squeezed in the favor of looking for Barbara during spare moments between bread-and-butter jobs. I did it the first time about fifteen years after she left, when Paul and I had gotten on our feet financially; and again in the early 1980s, when my law firm started working with a detective who was a wizard at locating things in public records. Nothing ever panned out.

Did Barbara’s leaving “damage” me? Did something shut down in me … and never come back to life? I think of my youthful poetry—odes to the glories of nature, impassioned empathy for the suffering of the world, and of course love poems. Thank God the sweet girl who wrote those poems turned into a strong woman!

“It’s called growing up,” I say out loud as I straighten up the stuff Harriet and I looked through.

If I became not just strong but tough, was that because of Barbara? Or was it my nature, along with the fact that I went to law school and made it as an attorney at a time when not just the law but all of professional life was a men’s club? A pundit for a conservative rag once described me as “a brainy ballbuster who gets energized by outrage as if chronic anger were a steak dinner. Bring on the bromo.” Paul and I laughed so much over that one that I had it framed.

But it’s true that a tough cookie, a scrapper who didn’t run away from a fight—even, perhaps, an angry woman—was what I had to be in my working life. And if I didn’t just leave it at the office, if I was a scrapper at home, too, well, Paul dove into our spats with as much gusto as I did. We honed our ideas, our characters, by butting heads. Couples did that in our day, they gave each other edges. Maybe because it was harder to divorce, we didn’t tiptoe around each other, cordial and careful and dull.

I miss Paul! Life is so quiet without him. If, early in our marriage, I ever wondered if I’d made the right choice, there was one crystalline moment when every doubt disappeared. Ronnie was six or seven, and he was having an asthma attack, heaving as he coughed phlegm into a pail. Paul and I knelt on either side of him, each of us with a hand on his back. Our eyes met over our son’s gasping body. In Paul’s gaze, I saw love, concern, a steadiness that told me this man would never, in any of the big things, let me down. But it was more than that. At the risk of sounding mystical, I felt like I was getting a message from God: that I was one of those rare, favored people who had truly found her soul mate.

I did all right with Ronnie. But Carol … My sensitive firstborn was the daughter of the poet I once was. And I wish I had summoned some of that young poet’s softness for her. Maybe if I’d worked part-time when she was little … But I mentor young women attorneys; even now, the mommy track is no real option for any of them who wants to be taken seriously. And I loved working; I would have gone crazy at home. Like a lot of working moms today, I managed thanks to Mexican nannies. I was lucky—I found girls who were both affectionate and reliable. And the kids learned to speak fluent Spanish; Ronnie is now an attorney specializing in contracts between U.S. and Latin American companies. Yet there were times when I saw how naturally the nannies cuddled my children, how the kids flopped like puppies in their arms, and I wished …

But I’m hardly going to blame Barbara for my disappointments or roads not taken, any more than I’d give her credit for my triumphs. All of it is life. Eggs break in life, and if you’re smart, you make an omelette. Life gives you lemons; you make lemonade. Clichés, yes, because they’re deeply true. And it’s the way we lived our lives, not just Paul and I but our generation.

Look at Harriet, whose husband in the late 1960s started wearing love beads over his dental smock and then left her, with three young kids, for his twentysomething hygienist. She was devastated at first, naturally. Then she picked herself up, went back to college, and became a psychotherapist.

And Paul—he did have someone to blame, Joe McCarthy and his vicious Red-baiting cronies, for destroying his dream of being a history professor. He was studying for his Ph.D. at UCLA when the State of California demanded that all university faculty, even teaching assistants like Paul, sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath. Though he’d quit the Party by then, he refused to sign because the oath was an outrage. That put an end to UCLA. At first he found a job teaching history at a private high school, but his politics got him in trouble there, too. He ended up going into his father’s scrap metal business. Scrap metal was honest, he said; it required no ideological purity test. I was furious on his behalf; it was one reason I jumped to take McCarthy cases. Paul, though, didn’t look back. He genuinely enjoyed the business, the salt-of-the-earth people he dealt with every day. He fulfilled his love for teaching, too, by starting a workers’ university, where he taught two evenings a week for the rest of his life. He’d come home electrified, continuing class debates with me as we drank a nightcap; ah, some of our best lovemaking took place on those nights.

I’ve divided the things from Mama’s boxes into several piles: mementos of Audrey to give to her kids, Boyle Heights items for the Jewish Historical Society, Papa’s poetry books for Carol.

I hesitate over the book by Andrew Boyle’s grandson. I’ll give it to the Jewish Historical Society, but do I want to read it first? Funny how I insisted to Harriet that the father never turned up. The story I heard when I was so young, the children’s plight so poignant that it had the truth of lived experience. I wonder what else I’ve been dead wrong about.

I drop the book into the pile for the Historical Society. It won’t tell me the one thing I really want to know: what did happen when Andrew asked, “Why?”

Not why she left in the first place, nor why she didn’t contact us for a year or two—those things I can understand, the desperation of a teenage runaway terrified someone would force her to return home. What I can’t fathom are the years and the decades after, when she lacked the compassion to let us know she was all right; lacked even the curiosity to find out what had happened to us.

Better, perhaps, if Andrew Boyle had never found his father, because no answer could satisfy that question. No love could survive its being asked. Better to think his father was devoured by a bear in the Alaskan wilderness. Better if he had been!