The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,151

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