The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,23

Paul and I knelt on either side of him, each of us with a hand on his back. Our eyes met over our son’s gasping body. In Paul’s gaze, I saw love, concern, a steadiness that told me this man would never, in any of the big things, let me down. But it was more than that. At the risk of sounding mystical, I felt like I was getting a message from God: that I was one of those rare, favored people who had truly found her soul mate.

I did all right with Ronnie. But Carol … My sensitive firstborn was the daughter of the poet I once was. And I wish I had summoned some of that young poet’s softness for her. Maybe if I’d worked part-time when she was little … But I mentor young women attorneys; even now, the mommy track is no real option for any of them who wants to be taken seriously. And I loved working; I would have gone crazy at home. Like a lot of working moms today, I managed thanks to Mexican nannies. I was lucky—I found girls who were both affectionate and reliable. And the kids learned to speak fluent Spanish; Ronnie is now an attorney specializing in contracts between U.S. and Latin American companies. Yet there were times when I saw how naturally the nannies cuddled my children, how the kids flopped like puppies in their arms, and I wished …

But I’m hardly going to blame Barbara for my disappointments or roads not taken, any more than I’d give her credit for my triumphs. All of it is life. Eggs break in life, and if you’re smart, you make an omelette. Life gives you lemons; you make lemonade. Clichés, yes, because they’re deeply true. And it’s the way we lived our lives, not just Paul and I but our generation.

Look at Harriet, whose husband in the late 1960s started wearing love beads over his dental smock and then left her, with three young kids, for his twentysomething hygienist. She was devastated at first, naturally. Then she picked herself up, went back to college, and became a psychotherapist.

And Paul—he did have someone to blame, Joe McCarthy and his vicious Red-baiting cronies, for destroying his dream of being a history professor. He was studying for his Ph.D. at UCLA when the State of California demanded that all university faculty, even teaching assistants like Paul, sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath. Though he’d quit the Party by then, he refused to sign because the oath was an outrage. That put an end to UCLA. At first he found a job teaching history at a private high school, but his politics got him in trouble there, too. He ended up going into his father’s scrap metal business. Scrap metal was honest, he said; it required no ideological purity test. I was furious on his behalf; it was one reason I jumped to take McCarthy cases. Paul, though, didn’t look back. He genuinely enjoyed the business, the salt-of-the-earth people he dealt with every day. He fulfilled his love for teaching, too, by starting a workers’ university, where he taught two evenings a week for the rest of his life. He’d come home electrified, continuing class debates with me as we drank a nightcap; ah, some of our best lovemaking took place on those nights.

I’ve divided the things from Mama’s boxes into several piles: mementos of Audrey to give to her kids, Boyle Heights items for the Jewish Historical Society, Papa’s poetry books for Carol.

I hesitate over the book by Andrew Boyle’s grandson. I’ll give it to the Jewish Historical Society, but do I want to read it first? Funny how I insisted to Harriet that the father never turned up. The story I heard when I was so young, the children’s plight so poignant that it had the truth of lived experience. I wonder what else I’ve been dead wrong about.

I drop the book into the pile for the Historical Society. It won’t tell me the one thing I really want to know: what did happen when Andrew asked, “Why?”

Not why she left in the first place, nor why she didn’t contact us for a year or two—those things I can understand, the desperation of a teenage runaway terrified someone would force her to return home. What I can’t fathom are the years and the decades after, when she lacked the compassion to let us know she was all right; lacked even the curiosity to