The Tin Horse: A Novel (23 page)

“By herself?” I breathed.

“Didn’t I tell you your mama was clever and brave?”

Mollie must have adored her young aunt’s story and asked for it often, because she remembered it in such detail, she might have been there herself.

At that time, it was a decade since the first hopeful
fusgeyers
like Meyr had set out for America. Hundreds of
fusgeyers
had passed through Mama’s village since then, but they were no longer merry companies of youths embarking on an adventure. The later travelers were like this group, a bedraggled collection of some 150 men, women, and children. An initial contingent of young people entered the village singing, but the rest straggled; a family of eleven trudged in an hour after the first arrivals.

Mama observed the group’s disorganization with delight. It would be easy to lose herself among them.

The night before Mama ran away with the
fusgeyers
, she was so excited she didn’t sleep a wink. In the pitch-dark, not knowing if it was near daybreak or still the middle of the night, she slipped out of the bed she shared with two of her sisters, tiptoed into the kitchen and packed a bit of food—a half loaf of bread, some eggs, two jars of her mother’s delicious plum preserves (but only one to eat on the journey; the other was a gift for Meyr). She had offered to take the
fusgeyers
some provisions, so neither the missing food nor her absence would raise an immediate alarm. Finally, there was the note she’d written, telling her parents she loved them and that she was going to Meyr. She slipped the note under the challah cover, which was used only on Shabbos; that was two days away, and she calculated she’d be far enough by then that no one would force her to come home.

As she crept out the door, the first light of dawn burned the sky. Every rooster for miles around started crowing. Had they ever made such a racket?

“She used to tell me,” Mollie said, “she was sure the roosters were calling, ‘Catch Zipporah! The little bird is getting away.’ ”

Pursued by the roosters’ cries, Mama ran past the barn where the
fusgeyers
had slept and continued for two miles down the road they would take that morning. There she hid in a copse of trees, trembling with excitement and with the terror of getting caught.

Hadn’t Avner Papo called her lucky, though? She’d never felt very lucky, but maybe God had saved all her good fortune and poured it into this one morning, because every instinct she had, every small choice she made, saved her from being discovered. I came to see my mother’s luck that day as emblematic of her immigration to America. In the small details, she would succeed. It was the big things that would break her heart.

Soon the first
fusgeyers
came along, singing. She longed to join them. But these were the young people, their resilient bodies and spirits able to feel refreshed from eating a few crumbs of food and spending the night on a barn floor. Lively and sharp-eyed, the young people would notice in an
instant if she appeared out of nowhere. She hugged herself to keep from running to them, and remained hidden.

A second group followed ten minutes later. Still she bided her time. She waited until she saw a clump of people of all ages, the adults looking exhausted already and the children fussing. No one even blinked when she slipped out of the woods and became one of them.

When everyone stopped at midday to eat something and rest a bit, Mama approached one of the girls among the young people and offered to share her food. “Plum preserves! Manna from heaven,” the girl said. She and her friends ate quite a lot of the first jar of preserves, but the sacrifice was worth it, because they invited Mama to walk with them. And although these weren’t theatrical
fusgeyers
, the young people planned to put on a play about a young girl who worked for a cruel factory boss, and who better than Mama, the youngest among them, to play the innocent girl? (I’d heard from Mama about her theatrical triumph, how she brought audiences to tears.) Striding down the road with the young people that first afternoon, Mama was bursting with happiness.

When the
fusgeyers
reached the town where they were going to spend the night, her joy changed to fear. A leader of the Jewish community gave a speech welcoming the travelers—and surely he was going to announce that a girl had gone missing from Tecuci and ask everyone to look for her. She hid, but she was afraid they would find her just by hearing her pounding heart. It was all right, though; no one said a word about her.

“Wait,” I said. “Even if her parents didn’t find her note, they must have suspected she’d gone with the
fusgeyers
.”

“Of course they did. In fact, they sent a wire to Avner Papo, asking him to let them know if he found her, and would he look out for her? And when they heard she was there, they sent a little money, whatever they could spare.”

“But she was only twelve!” My age. If I ran away … I could
hear
Mama’s howl of anguish. And Papa would move heaven and earth until he found me. “Weren’t they worried something bad would happen to her? Why didn’t they try to make her come home?”

“Oy.” Mollie sighed. “In Romania, children younger than twelve are
still sent away from home to be apprentices and learn a trade. Right here in America, there are twelve-year-olds working in sweatshops. What did your mama’s parents have to offer her if she stayed? And they must have seen that her mind was made up. If they forced her to come home this time, she was going to leave with the next
fusgeyers
, or the ones after that. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, though all at once I felt upset about everything. I ached for Mama, the ignored seventh child of nine, whose leaving caused barely a ripple in her family. I
didn’t
understand—I refused to understand—Mollie’s calm explanation for why Mama’s parents let her go without a murmur. And to hear Mollie talk about her as if she were just another child in a sweatshop … in my mind, I heard Barbara railing against our cousin’s coldness. Yet none of that changed my desire to be the Elaine that Mollie saw in me, a girl who didn’t flinch from the truth.

This would hardly be my last experience of ambivalence, but it may have been the most wrenching. I had no conflicted feelings, though, about my hunger to hear the rest of the story.

I blinked back my tears and leaned forward. “Did Avner help her?”

“Ah.” Mollie’s eyes gleamed. “Avner fell in love with her.”

“With Mama?”

“Why not with your mama? She wasn’t a beauty, but she always had a way about her.… You haven’t touched your lunch.”

I hadn’t noticed that a sandwich and a glass of milk had appeared on a settee next to me. I took a bite of the sandwich. Inside dainty triangles of white bread were slices of chicken, a delicacy that my family ate only on Friday nights. I kept on eating, though I barely tasted anything.

Avner found Mama and took her under his wing, Mollie continued, and they walked with the
fusgeyers
until they crossed the Austro-Hungarian border. From there, they took a train (the tickets provided by a Jewish agency) to the port of Rotterdam. The pennies Mama had saved were nowhere near enough money for the ship, but Avner was hardly going to abandon her. Crossing the Atlantic, she returned the favor. She turned out to have the stomach of a born sailor, whereas poor Avner broke out in a clammy sweat when they’d barely left port. Mama held a bowl for him
when he vomited, coaxed him to eat bits of bread, and spooned soup into his mouth. After a week, he finally adjusted to the ship’s motion, and she helped him up to the deck for a little fresh air.

At last the ship arrived in America. In the city where Avner’s cousin lived, New York.

“Your brother is where?” Avner’s cousin asked her, dismayed at having to squeeze not one but two greenhorns into his tenement apartment. “Chicago? How are you going to get there?”

“I’ll walk!” Mama declared. She had crossed Romania on foot, hadn’t she?

“New York to Chicago, she thinks she’s gonna walk.” The cousin guffawed, and his whole family acted like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

“Your poor mama!” Mollie said. “She had no idea how big America was.”

“What about Avner falling in love with her?”

“Ah, I’m getting there.”

Once the cousin tired of bullying Mama, he sent a telegram to Meyr, asking him to wire her train fare. Two days later, Avner accompanied her to the train station and walked with her onto the platform to say goodbye.

Mama felt a lump in her throat, thinking of never again seeing Avner, who’d been kinder to her than anyone in her life. She told him she was going to miss him. He said he would miss her, too. Then, in a rush, he took her hand and said, “You’re too young now, you’re just a girl. But in three, four years, I could send for you.” She had no idea what he was talking about. Until he said, “Or I could come there. Chicago. For you to marry me. To be my wife.”

Heaven help her, she knew the look on her face was disgust. She loved Avner, but like a father; he was a grizzled old man! “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, trying to smile. To take the hurt out of his eyes.

Looking back, she would see that moment at the train station in New York, when she had hurt Avner Papo, as the moment her luck ran out.

At some point Mollie and I shifted from the lounge to another area of the salon, where we had manicures and she told me what happened when Mama came to Chicago.

Meyr—though he had stopped being Meyr Avramescu and was now Mike Abrams—met Mama’s train and brought her home to his wife, Ida. “About my mother,” Mollie said. “Some people have hard times, and it makes them care about everyone who has hard times. But some people get so they just want to protect the little bit they have. I was there when your mama walked through our door for the first time; I was so excited to meet her. But my mother, before she even said hello, she said, ‘You think in America, train tickets grow on trees?’ ”

Ida put Mama to work, helping cook and clean and look after her nieces and nephews (four of them when she arrived, and eventually Ida had two more); she had to pay back the train ticket and for the food she ate, the clothes she wore, and the little bit of heat in the apartment that warmed her body. School? There was no question of that. Even if Mike and Ida had been inclined to send her, twelve was too old to start school for someone who spoke no English.

“Didn’t Uncle Meyr—Uncle Mike—stand up for her?” I asked.

Mollie sighed. “Sometimes, sure. But he was at work all day. And the stockyards, it’s the kind of work that can kill a person’s spirit.” For the first time, it occurred to me that almost all of Mama’s stories about Meyr took place in Tecuci. Her Chicago stories were about Mollie.

There was a thudding sameness to Mama’s life in Chicago. At sixteen, she rebelled against four years of Ida’s yoke and traded the drudgery of housework for the drudgery of working in a dress factory on Maxwell Street. She still had little talent for sewing, but her sister Dora was a supervisor and got her the job. Though she had to hand Ida her pay envelope, at least Ida no longer monitored her every breath. But Ida and Mike had new plans for her.

A friend of Mike’s from work, Hy Slotkin, sometimes joined them for Shabbos dinner.

“Slotkin?” That name had fastened itself in my memory the day Mama locked Barbara in the closet.

There was nothing wrong with Hy Slotkin, Mama said, every time Mike or Ida said, “So, what’s wrong with Hy Slotkin?”—which they did often, because Hy had asked for Mama’s hand, and they wanted her to marry him. The truth was, Hy’s laugh set her nerves on edge. “We called
him ‘Hyena,’ ” Mollie said. And Hy was ugly, with beefy arms and a permanent sort of grimace from closing his nostrils to the stockyard smell.

Mama was determined to escape. But she couldn’t just take off the way she’d done at twelve; she no longer had that kind of daring. Then the Tarnows, from Mike and Ida’s building, decided to move to Los Angeles for Mrs. Tarnow’s rheumatism, and it was too much for a family with an ailing wife to pack up a household and get three small children across the country. They offered to pay Mama’s train fare and let her stay with them, in exchange for her help with the move.

I already knew much of what happened next because it was the story of how Mama met Papa. Moving to Los Angeles at seventeen, she lived with the Tarnows in Boyle Heights and got a job in a dress factory. The Tarnows had promised Mike that they would treat her as if she were their own daughter. They kept their ears open and heard of a fine young man, son of a fellow who came from Mr. Tarnow’s village in Ukraine—but American-born, with no accent! One thing led to another, and after a year, Papa dropped on his knee and asked Mama to marry him, an event that Mama, never much of a correspondent, reported in one of the rare letters she wrote to Mollie.

“But she didn’t say yes right away,” Mollie said.

“Did she have other … beaux?” I asked, getting used to the idea of Mama as a girl who’d “had a way about her.” First Avner Papo, then Hy Slotkin; maybe men all over Los Angeles had bombarded her with flowers and poems.

“No. It’s just, to be a wife and mother—it’s a wonderful thing, but a girl needs to live a little first. She went on hikes in the mountains just north of Los Angeles. She went to the beach with friends. She tried out for a theater troupe.”

“A theater troupe? Mama?”

“She wrote to me that some people in Boyle Heights were starting a Yiddish theater troupe. She’d been such a success with the
fusgeyers
, she decided to try out for their play. She and your papa—although they weren’t married yet—had a big fight over it. He couldn’t stand the idea of Yiddish theater in America. How could any intelligent person stomach a schmaltzy Yiddish drama when Americans spoke—”

“The tongue of Shakespeare.” It was what Papa had said when he objected to my taking Yiddish classes from Mr. Berlov.

“Exactly.” Mollie smiled. “She got so upset she told him she never wanted to see him again.”

“No!” I burst out, stunned to imagine a situation that had brought me so close to not-being. And stunned to see my mother as a girl who had hungrily wanted things for herself and had so bravely, even ruthlessly, pursued them.