The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,149
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