The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,134

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