The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  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.

  “She didn’t mean it. Poor thing, the letter was covered with splotches from her tears. And in the next letter I got from her, a few months later, she said she and Bill had just gotten married.”

  “Did she try out for the play?” I asked.

  “Funny, I guess she never said. But don’t ask her. Like I said, this is between you and me. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  I spent the rest of the day hiding with Mollie at the beauty salon. In the early evening a union man came and drove her to her rally, then gave me a ride home.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW weeks, my cousin Mollie made history. She gained recognition for the Los Angeles dressmakers’ unio
n and settled the strike. Then she was gone, sent by the union to the next city where working people needed her help.

  The more I thought about what she’d told me, the surer I felt that Mama had tried out for the play, that she defied Papa just as she’d defied her parents by running away. And perhaps, if she’d still been the twelve-year-old who’d enchanted audiences in Romania—if she had retained any of the innocent hope that moved people to tears—she might have gotten a starring role and had a very different life. First the Yiddish theater, then the moving pictures that were beginning to be made in Los Angeles. But she hadn’t been that hopeful girl anymore. And I understood why.

  I thought I understood why Mama had changed so much … and why she would never whisper a word of how she had really come to America. I saw that what I had heard as an adventure tale, about her traveling with the fusgeyers, was in fact a love story. Mama’s real theme was the great love of her life, between her and her adoring brother Meyr. How could she ever tell that story, if she had to admit that Meyr hadn’t sent for her and that he’d let his wife work her like a domestic servant?

  Beneath the anger that simmered perpetually in my mother, I saw the cruel disappointment. My heart broke for her. And at the same time, I wanted to repudiate her. I wanted never to be thwarted and chronically angry like she was.

  I promised myself … it wasn’t that I wanted to become exactly like Mollie. But I wanted to occupy Mollie’s world, that spacious realm in which people didn’t just worry about “me and mine” and who said what at the fish store today; instead, they passionately discussed ideas and fought for better lives for everyone. Decades later, I would encounter the Hebrew term tikkun olam, “repairing the world”—working for social justice, speaking out not only when your rights are stepped on but when anyone is denied justice. Mollie, whatever her flaws, had dedicated herself to the impossible, magnificent task of repairing the world, and she was leading the most meaningful life of anyone I had ever met. The kind of life I vowed to live.

  AH, THANKSGIVING!

  I wake up on Thanksgiving morning feeling … not terrific, that would be too much to ask for just two weeks after my car accident. But for the first time since the accident, I’d dare to call myself “energetic”—and looking forward to my favorite holiday.

  I put on a sweat suit, pop Tai Chi for Osteoporosis into the DVD player in the den, and do my morning exercise. I’m still creaky and moving gingerly, but between my regular tai chi and water aerobics, I was in good shape for an eighty-five-year-old prior to the accident, and my doctor says I’m making “an A-plus recovery.” I quoted the doctor to Ronnie and Harriet when I pushed to host Thanksgiving dinner here, as we’d planned. They didn’t really try to talk me out of it. This will be our last Thanksgiving in the Santa Monica house, and they want it, too.

  Thanksgiving is the one holiday that never held any traps for me. Not like Rosh HaShanah or Passover or Purim, which stirred up a maelstrom of feelings, my parents’—and later, Paul’s and my—pleasure in the traditions and special foods coexisting with discomfort at old-country religiosity. And there was a sense of otherness about the Jewish holidays, of being separate from mainstream America, that brought up a complicated mix of pride and alienation. And fear: both Zayde and my mother had experienced pogroms in their shtetls, and when my kids were young in the 1950s, we were only a decade away from the Holocaust.

  As for the holidays celebrated by mainstream America, Christmas especially became inescapable—and hugely tempting—when my generation settled outside Boyle Heights. Every December, most of the houses on our block in Santa Monica were festooned with twinkling lights, and the choir and orchestra at the kids’ school gave a concert filled with glorious carols and Handel. One year, Paul and I gave in to the kids’ pleading and got a tree—of course, emphasizing that our family didn’t believe in Jesus, calling the tree a Hanukkah bush, and topping it with a silver Star of David. It was Papa, whom I’d seen as my assimilated parent, who refused to set foot in our house as long as the tree occupied the living room. (We moved it into the den.)

  Thanksgiving, however, is celebrated by everyone fortunate enough to live in America. And we were happily, without a whiff of ambivalence, Americans.

  Once I’ve done my tai chi, I prepare my contribution to our Thanksgiving feast, pumpkin pies. I’m nowhere near the cook Mama was, but pumpkin pie is easy as long as you use pre-made crust; it’s hardly fair, but you get rave reviews for doing nothing but following the directions on a can of pumpkin and providing plenty of whipped cream.

  The pies are baking and I’m eating cornflakes and reading the Los Angeles Times when Ronnie arrives. It’s not even nine, but coming early to help was the condition he set, in our negotiation about having Thanksgiving here.

  “Coffee!” He makes a beeline for the coffeepot, this six-footer who mysteriously emerged from Paul’s and my compact family lines.

  I may be the only one who calls him Ronnie, now that Paul’s gone, but I still look at him—a gangly fifty-one-year-old whose fringe of hair, surrounding a bald spot, is more salt than pepper—and see the relentlessly logical boy who could outlast me in an argument. A born lawyer, as Cousin Mollie used to call me. Ronnie’s mind works like mine, as if all the cogs and connections were built from the same materials and set of instructions. My easy child. (Carol won’t be here. She’s coming down from Oregon in two weeks to help me with the move.)

  Over coffee, I ask him about his work. We’re still talking, debating strategy for one of his cases, when Harriet comes over at ten. And then it’s not too early, and there’s plenty to do.

  Ronnie gets the turkey, a twenty-five-pounder, into the oven, and then he, Harriet, and I figure out where to put extra tables and chairs. We’re having a real gathering of the clan, twenty-two people, to bid farewell to the Santa Monica house, whose large dining room and yard made it the primary site for family events, even several weddings in the backyard. The yard is beautiful, still. I took out tension by gardening. Oh, I’m going to miss the garden, especially the fig tree, grown from a cutting I took from the tree behind our house in Boyle Heights.

  By one, starting time for the touch football game at a nearby park, nearly everyone has arrived. Ronnie’s wife, Melissa, insists on holding down the fort, staying in the house to baste the turkey and welcome any later arrivals, and I join the trek to the park two blocks away. Younger, fitter family members have brought lawn chairs and set them up for the spectators. I sit next to Harriet—and debate, as I have for the past two weeks, whether to tell her what I’ve found out about Barbara.

  But what have I found out, really? Only that some hotel detective in Colorado Springs thought she might be a blonde named Kay Devereaux. I’ve done a bit of investigating since Josh dropped that bombshell, and I’ve discovered just one thing I’m sure of: the threatening reach of the Internet into every corner of our lives is overrated. For example, you can get online records of marriage licenses issued in Colorado Springs if the marriage occurred after 1981; otherwise, as I learned the old-fashioned way by making a phone call, you have to go to the county clerk’s office and search microfilm—and there’d be acres of it, since I have no date for her marriage. Not to mention that I have no idea if she even stayed in Colorado Springs or got married there.

  I’ve considered taking Josh up on his offer to help me search. Or hiring a detective, someone based in Colorado. But how far do I want to pursue this? Say I did find her, might I regret it? And the greater likelihood is that I’d invest time, money, and emotional energy, yet come up empty-handed. All over again. There’s so little to go on—only her name and the fact that she worked at the Broadmoor Hotel in … I don’t even know that, because Carl Logan didn’t date his letter. But it must have been in the early 1940s, during the time—or not long afterward—that Philip was looking for her. And then … did Mama and Papa write her a letter? But why didn’t Papa jump on the first train to Colorado Springs? And why didn’t they tell me? Did they imagine they were p
rotecting me? I had a right to know!

  “Earth to Lainie,” Harriet says.

  “Yeah.” I turn to my sister, who’s wearing a Day-Glo lime green jacket and a Dodgers baseball cap.

  “Are you doing okay with all of this? The move?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m thankful. For all of this. For them.” I nod my head toward our progeny scrapping and yelling over the football. “And for you. What about you, what are you thankful for?”

  “The same. And I’m grateful that you only drove into a cactus when you … um, got it into your head to drive to Barstow.” The look in Harriet’s eye reminds me of Mama in those moments when I suspected she could see through me.

  “Know what else I’m thankful for?” I say. “That we don’t have to play football anymore.”

  “Nobody forced you to play.”

  “Ha! First I had to because all the Kennedy women played.” Our Thanksgiving touch football tradition began in 1960, a few weeks after JFK was elected. Not that Paul and I were naive enough to mistake Kennedy for a real progressive, but who could resist the sense of hope, the youthful energy of those rollicking, tousle-haired Boston Irish Democrats? “Then it was because of the women’s movement, having to set an example for our kids.”

  “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

  “Much.”

  “Good. Look, there’s something I’ve been thinking about since the day we went through those papers and books. But I didn’t want to bring it up right after your accident …”

  “What is it?”

  “About Barbara.”

  “Barbara?” Did I say something out loud a moment ago? Or can my Wise Woman sister simply read my mind?

  “You were asking, what if we could find her now. And I wondered, did you ever mourn for her?”

  “Of course I did! The day she left, I cried my eyes out. At Pearl’s.” Even as I say it, though, I realize my mistake. It’s true, I sobbed at Pearl’s—the memory of my tears drenching the love seat is so strong, I can almost feel damp brocade under my cheek. But that happened the day before Barbara left. And my tears weren’t for her.