The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,152
arranged marriage just like in her village. The only difference was that now she had no place left to go. And then …”
“What?” I say in response to her pregnant pause.
“She met a man.”
“Mama?” Though as I say it, I remember Mollie telling me, Your mama always had a way about her. “What man?”
“The director of a Yiddish theater company. She auditioned for a play they were doing, and she got a small part.”
That part of the story Mollie hadn’t told me; I wonder if she’d known.
“I don’t know if she and this guy slept together,” Barbara says. “She was vague about the details. But I guess she was staying out till all hours and having a few drinks. So the Tarnows threw her out. Literally, they put all her things in a sack and put it on the street. She went to the jerk of a director, but he washed his hands of any responsibility for her. In a way, she was relieved—she wasn’t in love with him, he was just a smooth talker. At least, that’s what she said. But she had no place to go. The first night, she slept on the street.”
“She told you this?” As the story begins to settle in, I can see my passionate, capricious, maddening mother tumbling into a romantic involvement, even a full-blown affair. What I can’t imagine is that she’d tell a soul. Yet she did. She was willing to reveal even that humiliation … to the daughter of her heart. The scald of hurt I feel—ridiculous after all these years—mortifies me, and I try to quell it. But the hurt, the sense of exclusion, has a life of its own, as if it’s racing along some of my earliest, most deeply grooved neural pathways.
“Only because I was so wild,” Barbara says, as if she senses how I feel—old pathways for her, too. “Most of what she talked about was the trashy way I was behaving and how a girl who lost her reputation could never get it back. And how I had to stop expecting my life to be like the movies and grow up. She told me about her mistakes in the hope of scaring me shitless, so I’d start acting like a respectable girl. It’s just that the part of the story I paid attention to was the juicy stuff about her and this man. Naturally.” She shakes her head, gives a small laugh. “It’s so strange to talk about this after all these years. And with you.”
“What happened—after she slept on the street?”
“She stayed the next few nights with a friend, but the friend didn’t really have room. Then Mr. Tarnow came and had a talk with her. He told her if she said yes to Papa, they’d let her move back in until she got married. And then …” But she hesitates.
“What?”
“Phew! It’s crazy, but I got this chill, like Mama’s looking over my shoulder, knowing I’m about to spill her worst secret. As if it matters anymore. That night she went to the beach. She decided there was one place left that was even farther than California—she could walk into the ocean and drown.”
Ocean Park at night is so clear in my memory I can smell the salt-tangy air as Barbara says, “She walked in with her clothes on until the water was almost to her neck. But then she got terrified of dying, and she had to struggle to get back to shore.”
For a moment I’m there, feeling the water rising to my thighs and waist and chest, feeling the sodden pull of my clothes as I fight the suck of the waves. Poor Mama. I had thought, after the talk I’d had with Mollie, that I understood my mother’s thwarted dreams. But I had only glimpsed her desperation, and I ached for her.
And poor Papa!
“Did Papa know?” Did the awful knowledge that Mama had nearly drowned herself rather than marry him account for the perpetual strain between my parents, his sternness and her simmering anger?
“She said he didn’t.”
“But she told you,” I marvel again.
“She was really worried about me. With reason.” She chuckles. And then gasps. “Holy crap! Holy, holy crap.”
“What?”
“I just now realized I did take what she said to heart. I just got a different moral from the story than she had in mind. She was trying to tell me not to be such a dreamer and to settle for what I could get. What I heard was that I