The woman, who introduced herself as the strike captain, Norma, called over four picketers and sent each one to a different area of the garment district to look for Mollie. Then she turned to me.
“You’re going to be late for school,” she said.
“Can’t I stay? Until I’m sure Mollie’s all right?”
“I don’t—”
“I’ll march with you.” I picked up a picket sign one of the messengers had left behind.
“Just like Mollie!” Smiling, Norma threw up her hands. “You decide you want something, and there’s no way to stop you.”
I basked in her words. I was like Mollie! Had Mollie brought out something brand-new in me? Or had she recognized an Elaine who’d been there all along? I proudly shouldered a picket sign and fell in line with the women, who greeted me warmly when they heard I was Mollie’s cousin. And I became more aware of the men, who weren’t just big but mean-looking.
The men noticed me, too.
“A little young, chica, aren’t you?” one of them called out.
“Ignore them,” Norma said firmly, and started up a union song. It was part of Mollie’s morning repertory, and I joined in.
Fifteen minutes later, one of the messengers came back. Mollie was waiting for me, she said, and she led me to a car parked on a side street. The only person I saw in the car was the driver, a fox-faced man like Stu Malkin, but before I could panic, Mollie bobbed up from the backseat and waved.
She opened the rear door. “Get in. Quick … No, not on the seat.”
I squeezed with her onto the floor in the rear of the car.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” she said.
I explained.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and told the driver, Ed, to take her to an address in Hollywood.
Once we’d left the garment district, Mollie said we could move off the floor onto the seats. She and Ed speculated about whether Malkin was a policeman or a process server who wanted to hand Mollie an injunction; either way, whoever had sent him must be trying to keep Mollie from speaking at a big rally scheduled for that evening, so she needed to hide for the rest of the day.
She didn’t act worried. In fact, she was jolly, as if this were a good joke. She said no cop or process server would find her where Ed was taking her. “And after that, young lady, he’s going to drive you straight to school.”
“Please, can’t I stay with you?” I begged, though I knew what the answer would be.
But, to my amazement, Mollie laughed and said, “Well, why not? I guess you’re getting an education today, aren’t you?”
When we got into Hollywood, she surprised me even more.
“Have you ever had a manicure?” she said.
MOLLIE HAD FIGURED OUT A HIDING PLACE WHERE NO POLICEMAN would think to look for her: a posh Hollywood beauty salon. A man in a uniform with gold braid said, “Good day, ladies,” and held open the door for us. Inside, a deep rose Persian rug led to a white reception desk with carved designs decorated on the edges with gold paint.
“Hello, I’m Anne Simmons,” Mollie said to the blond receptionist. I stifled a gasp, realizing just in time that of course Mollie couldn’t give her real name if she was in hiding. Mollie said she was treating herself and her cousin to a day of beauty treatments, and could she speak to the manager, because we wanted “the works.”
The receptionist relayed our message on a telephone, and the manager, Mrs. Barregas, bustled out to greet us. Everything about Mrs. Barregas was dramatic and artificial—jet-black hair piled high on her head, bright red lips and fingernails, and the affected way she said, “Miss Simmons, enchanted.” Mollie asked if there was a telephone she could use, and Mrs. Barregas ushered us to her tiny private office, decorated in unfussy black and white, at the back of the salon.
She closed the office door, then said in a perfectly normal voice, “Is there a problem? Laura, is she all right?”
Mollie assured her that Laura—Mrs. Barregas’s cousin, who was a local union organizer—was fine, and Mrs. Barregas left us alone to use the telephone. I assumed Mollie wanted to check in with strike headquarters. I hadn’t considered the obvious.
“Do you want to call your mother?” Mollie said. “Or should I?”
For the first time, in that day of hurrying to warn Mollie and huddling on the floor of the car to escape her pursuer, my legs turned to jelly. “You, please.”
Mollie started by telling Mama that I was with her and I was safe, then that I had saved the day by coming to warn her. Mama got so loud then that I could hear her from the receiver at Mollie’s ear. But no one was more persuasive than Mollie. In five minutes, she got Mama to agree to let me spend the day with her.
Mollie’s charm wouldn’t, I knew, spare me from punishment later on. But I didn’t care. I was having an adventure with Mollie and even helping the union, albeit in a different way than I could have imagined. Trading my blouse for a pink-and-white striped cape, I entered a pink-wallpapered room for a “Hollywood facial,” which involved reclining in a plush chair while expert fingers massaged creams into my face.
After Mollie and I both had facials, Mrs. Barregas showed us to a pink-upholstered settee in a spacious lounge to wait for our hair appointments—and, as Mollie remarked with a chuckle, to feel like ladies of leisure with no cares in the world beyond making ourselves gorgeous. Mrs. Barregas brought over two beautiful stemmed glasses. Mine held orange juice, while Mollie got a cocktail of orange juice and champagne.
Three other women occupied the lounge, one lying on a chaise with a mask over her eyes and the other two chatting and eating doughnuts. The doughnuts came from a doily-covered platter and were apparently provided for any of the customers.
“Good, there’s one chocolate left!” Mollie reached for one with chocolate frosting, put it on a plate, and offered it to me.
“No, you have it,” I said, and took a glazed buttermilk instead.
“Elaine.” Mollie made sure I met her eyes. “Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. How about if we split the chocolate?” She broke the doughnut in half.
“I like the buttermilk,” I protested.
“Really? Better than chocolate?”
Under her gaze, I admitted, “No, but I do like buttermilk.”
“Fine. We’ll split both of them.” Mollie broke the second doughnut, then patted my hand. “You take everything so seriously, Elaine. Like your mama when she was your age. But your mama, poor thing, she had no choice. She got put to work cleaning our house the day she walked in the door. If she’d wanted the shame of being a maid, she used to say, she could have stayed home in … It was just an expression,” she said, noticing my stunned face. “Some translation from Yiddish.”
“I thought Mama loved living with your family,” I said through a mouthful of chocolate doughnut. “She always says the day Uncle Meyr sent for her was the happiest day of her life.”
Mollie looked confused, but just for a moment. Then she smiled brightly and said, “Yes, that’s right. She and I, we had such good times.… How’s the doughnut?”
“Delicious.” I could tell she regretted having said anything about Mama and that she’d prefer I let the subject drop. But hadn’t she just told me to ask for what I wanted? “Why did Mama say that, about being a maid?”
“You know.” Mollie shrugged. “Everyone who came from Europe expected life in America to be wonderful the second they stepped off the boat. They didn’t expect to have to work in sweatshops. That’s how the garment workers’ unions got started, by immigrants who expected more.”
It was hardly unusual for Mollie to bring up the union, but I sensed something evasive in her reply. During the next phase of the day of beauty, which was devoted to washing, cutting, and styling my hair, I thought about what she’d said … and became aware of gaps in what I’d heard from Mama about her life in Chicago, contradictions I hadn’t noticed, I suppose, because when I first heard the story, I was barely older than a baby. Mama was
just twelve when she’d come to Chicago—my age! So why hadn’t she gone to school, instead of being put to work helping Aunt Ida? And all the time she was growing up in Romania, the one thing she’d dreamed of was to go to Uncle Meyr in Chicago. Why, when she finally got there, did she stay for only a few years? Why leave Meyr and move to California?
Mrs. Barregas appeared when the stylist finished giving me a marcel wave. “Look at you,” she said. “A real young lady.” She handed me my glasses. My hair was soft and wavy instead of bushy. But beneath my tamed curls, my mind roiled. Had everything I’d heard from Mama been a lie?
Mrs. Barregas escorted me back to the lounge, bustling now that it was midday. Half a dozen women talked, laughed, and ate; the doily-covered platter now held a stack of sandwiches. Mollie was already there, sporting her own marcelled hairdo and lunching on a sandwich and a cup of coffee. She had found a seat in the lounge’s one quiet corner, where two chairs were partially secluded by a potted palm. I launched myself at her, but I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to begin.
Fortunately, Mollie knew what was on my mind. After she’d admired my hair, she said, “What has your mama told you about how she came to America?”
“That Uncle Meyr came first? With the fusgeyers?” Surely Mama hadn’t made up the fusgeyers! My heart sank at the thought of having to relinquish the most enchanting of my family’s stories.
But thank goodness, Mollie said, “That’s right.”
“Then,” I continued, “didn’t Uncle Meyr help some of his brothers and sisters come over—first Uncle Nathan and Uncle Victor and Aunt Dora? And when Mama was twelve, he sent for her?”
Mollie took a sip of coffee from a cup as delicate as our Rosenthal china. “This is your mama’s story to tell, so I don’t really have the right to speak for her,” she said. “On the other hand, she might be afraid of setting a bad example, or she might not want to say anything bad about my parents. Not everyone is willing to look at the truth squarely, like I do—and I think you feel that way, too.”
She cast me an inquisitive glance, and I nodded so vigorously my marcelled hair shook.
“So this is just between you and me, all right?” she said.
“I promise.” Secrets with Mollie, it’s what I had dreamed of. Still, the prospect of hearing this secret—something Mama had deliberately hidden?—both excited me and stirred up a sense of dread.
“Your uncles and your aunt Dora were already grown up when they came to America, so they could look out for themselves,” Mollie began. “But your mama—my father wanted to send for her, but my mother put her foot down. She said your mama was still a child, and we already had enough children in the house.”
“He didn’t send for her?” I said, absorbing the idea that the happiest day of Mama’s life was something that never happened. But if that were true, and Meyr didn’t send for Mama … “Then how did she get to America?”
“Ah.” Mollie smiled. “She was very brave and very clever.”
WHAT MOLLIE TOLD ME began much like the story I knew. Uncle Meyr had promised Mama he’d send for her when she was twelve. And not long after Mama’s twelfth birthday, she heard that Avner Papo from her village was leaving with a band of fusgeyers, and she begged to go with him. There were two crucial differences, however. Meyr didn’t send for her. Nor did Avner Papo agree to take her with him. So she went, anyway.
“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 the
re, 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.
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