The Tin Horse: A Novel

“E
LAINE, WHAT
’
S THIS
?
POETRY
?”
HE SHOOTS A GLANCE AT ME, HIS
face so young, so eager. Then his eyes return to the folder he’s opened on the dining room table.

“Let me see it,” I say, but he begins reading aloud.

“ ‘Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart—’ ”

“Josh!” I reach out my hand and give him what my kids call the Acid Regard … even as I feel, against my back, the trunk of the fig tree in our yard in Boyle Heights; feel for a moment, stirring in my bones, the impossibly tender eighteen-year-old self who wrote those words.

“Sure, okay, if you want to look at them first.” He hands over the folder but adds, “These belong in the archive.” He’s well named, Joshua; didn’t he make the walls come tumbling down?

I thought it was a godsend when the library at the University of Southern California asked me to donate my papers to their special collections. I’d been considering moving to a senior apartment at Rancho Mañana, or, as I can’t help calling it, the Ranch of No Tomorrow, and I dreaded having to sort through all the papers and books accumulated during more than half
a century of living in my house in Santa Monica. USC volunteered the assistance of a Ph.D. student in library and information science, an archivist, and I jumped at the offer.

I did have a twinge of misgiving. It’s one thing to expose my professional life to strangers, but USC doesn’t just want material from my legal career; they’re interested in my personal papers, things from my childhood and family. Well, I figured the library science student would be a docile young woman who wouldn’t put up a fight if I chose to keep something private, someone with whom the process of excavating my past would be a sort of surgical procedure: clean and impersonal. I of all people—after a lifetime devoted to fighting prejudice—fell into such hasty stereotyping. And I’m paying for it. My not-at-all-docile archivist, Josh, sees every scrap of paper as a potential gold mine, and if his abrasive curiosity pokes an old pain or anger, he’s delighted; my annoyance doesn’t intimidate him, it just makes him push harder.

Not that I can hold Josh responsible for the nostalgia that ambushed me as I opened a box of my kids’ childhood drawings, or the stab of grief when I came upon letters I’d exchanged with Paul—dead four years as of last month—when he was in the army in World War II. And now my teenage poetry. I suppose it’s just as well that Josh isn’t a sensitive, bookish type who’d try to comfort me every time some piece of my past touches a nerve. I prefer sparring to sympathy.

“Is that everything from my office?” I ask briskly. That’s who I am, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, a brisk, no-bullshit woman, not a girlish poet whom every memento leaves undone.

“Let me check.” He jumps up. He’s quick and efficient—thank goodness, since I did decide on the senior apartment. I put my house on the market, and I’m moving to Rancho Mañana in mid-December, just six weeks away.

As soon as he’s left the room and I’m alone, I peek at the first poem. “Each fig hides its flower deep within its heart. I have no such art of concealment. The flower of my love …” Could I ever have been so young and vulnerable? Where did that girl go? I can look back at the Elaine who wrote her first idealistic letter to a newspaper at eleven and draw a line to the crusading attorney I became. The seeds were there, even if it does astonish
me that the quiet, reflective girl I was learned to be such a fighter—what did the
Los Angeles Times
call me, “the city’s go-to progressive attorney for decades, from the McCarthy witch hunts to the civil rights, anti–Viet Nam War, and women’s movements”?

But the gentle poet who once lived in me, what became of her? I can name the date I stopped writing poetry: September 12, 1939. I was eighteen. Whether or not I kept writing, however, what happened to that gentleness? Did I just outgrow it? Did I wall it off? I have a sense of something calling to me from those forgotten poems. But what nonsense! I chide myself. An old woman’s sentimentality. I close the folder and put it in the wicker basket of things I want to look over before releasing them to Josh for the archive. Not that I have any intention of giving him the poems. I plan to “misplace” them.

After the surprise of finding the poetry, I’m wary when Josh returns to the dining room carrying two department store boxes—though the boxes themselves set off no warning bell, no frisson of alarm.

“Where did those come from?” I ask.

“Closet shelf, way in the back. There’s a stack of ’em.”

“Maybe they’re things of Ronnie’s.” My office used to be my son’s room. I expect moth-eaten camp clothes or a comic-book collection.

“No, they’re full of papers.”

Josh puts the top box—it’s from Buffum’s—between us and lifts the lid, and now the memory stirs: of my younger sisters and me cleaning out our mother’s apartment after she died. That was more than thirty years ago, and what an ordeal it was. In the clean-lined apartment in West Los Angeles to which we moved Mama after Papa died, she had re-created the overstuffed claustrophobia of our house in Boyle Heights. Mama’s death, ten years after Papa’s (he’d had a stroke), was a shock. Still vigorous at seventy-six, she was out taking her daily walk, and a drunk driver ran her down. Going through her apartment in a blur of grief, Audrey, Harriet, and I came across two—four? a dozen?—boxes from now-defunct department stores in which Mama kept papers, and who knew what else. None of us could bear to go through them at the time.

I have no memory of doing it, but we must have thrown the boxes into my car, and somehow they ended up in my son’s closet.

“Hey, is this Hebrew?” Josh holds out a letter he’s unfolded and tries to hand me a pair of white gloves. It doesn’t matter how often I tell him I have the right to touch my own things; he brings a second pair of gloves every time.

I scan the Hebrew letters. “Yiddish. It must be from my mother’s family in Romania.”

“You can read Yiddish?”

I discover I still can.

“What’s it about?”

“Family news—somebody got married, somebody else had a child.” Typical of what we heard from our Romanian relatives in the 1920s. During the thirties, their letters became anguished pleas for us to get at least the young ones out. We succeeded with my cousin Ivan; my family sponsored him to come to Los Angeles. And after the war, two cousins made it to Palestine, and three others went to our relatives in Chicago. But the rest were gone.

“Well, these are definitely keepers.” An acquisitive gleam in his eyes, Josh holds a stack of letters, all neatly saved in their original envelopes. He reaches for one of the plastic bags he uses for items to place in the archive.

“Wait, I want to read them!” I doubt I’ll have time to do more than glance through the letters. But this is my family, my history. Mine and Harriet’s. Of the four of us, the Greenstein girls, she and I are the only ones left. I don’t know if Harriet ever learned any Yiddish, but I need to share the letters with her, to let her at least touch these things Mama cherished, before they become source material for someone’s dissertation.

“Sure, of course.” Josh slips the letters into the bag, labels it, and hands it to me. “Just keep them in here when you’re not reading them.”

Along with the letters, the box contains stray notes, receipts, and newspaper and magazine clippings that have no obvious reason for being saved. “Someone was a pack rat,” Josh says happily, but even he consigns much of the contents of the box to the recycling container at his side.

We move on to the second box, this one from May Company. It’s a treasure trove. Mama dedicated this box to us, her daughters. I discover report cards, school papers, crayon drawings. Here’s my letter of acceptance
from USC, with the promise of a full scholarship. And here, neatly saved in a manila envelope, my articles from the school newspaper and the letters to editors I wrote with Danny, pleas for America to respond to the plight of Jews in Europe. Yes, of course, I tell Josh, I’ll give him the articles and letters after I’m done with them; and after I’ve shared the box with Harriet.

I keep digging and come upon a packet the size of a half sheet of paper, held together with a rubber band. When I pick up the packet, the rubber band crumbles, and out spill … oh, it’s the programs from Barbara’s dance recitals. There are a dozen or more, with artfully hand-lettered titles, printed on thick, good-quality paper.