The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,150
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.