The Tin Horse: A Novel (19 page)

Back inside the house, we turned on the radio and heard that the earthquake had been centered in Long Beach, a terrible thing for the people there but a relief for us, since Long Beach was twenty miles away. Papa, with Bert’s help, swept up the broken glass—almost all of the good crystal wineglasses, as well as several pieces of Rosenthal china. Barbara and I reset the table with everyday glasses, and the Anshels joined us for dinner, too, celebrating that all of us had come through the earthquake with little damage and that Audrey was safe.

Everyone was awkward at first around Bert, and no one breathed a word about Zayde having left for Sonya’s. But by the time Papa opened a second—then a third!—bottle of wine, we were having the liveliest Shabbos in Greenstein family history. After dinner, the adults’ cigarette smoke swirled deliciously. And Bert held Audrey on his lap and sang beautiful Mexican songs.

Papa sang along. I had no idea that he knew songs in Spanish. He dropped out during some of the verses but joined in enthusiastically whenever Bert got to a chorus:

I’d learned that song, “Cielito Lindo,” at school. “Canto y no llores” meant “sing and don’t cry.” I wondered if that was what Papa was doing, after losing his job and then having the terrible fight with Zayde. Did he wish he could take back what he’d said about Uncle Harry (whose photos hung askew; we had not begun restoring the house to its pre-earthquake order)? But I thought Papa looked defiant, even proud. As upsetting as the fight had been, he had finally stood up against … not even Zayde; what Papa had to fight was the ghost of Uncle Harry. And what an unfair fight,
Papa forever in the shadow of a golden boy killed on a French battlefield at twenty. Papa, whose imperfect adult life, with its inevitable disappointments and missed opportunities and sheer rotten luck, could never measure up to the youthful promise, the gleaming possibility, that was and always would be Harry.

T
HE 1933 LONG BEACH EARTHQUAKE KILLED 120 PEOPLE AND CAUSED
$50 million in damage. And the rifts that opened in my family that night never closed.

Zayde had moved to Sonya’s once before, after Barbara goaded him to make the tin animals, but he’d returned just two weeks later, complaining that Sonya chased after him with the Hoover anytime he walked on her fancy carpet, and the only subject Leo ever talked about was his dyspepsia—and no wonder, with Sonya’s cooking. This time was different. Zayde didn’t come back. Not that he broke with Papa completely, the way he’d done with Pearl. He still came over and ate dinner with us one or two nights a week, and we saw him at family gatherings. But it wasn’t the same as having Zayde living with us. I don’t know if Harriet, born that June, ever heard his stories.

And it’s lucky I’d paid attention when Zayde took care of the fig tree in the yard. A few days after he left, I noticed the leaves beginning to wilt, and I hurried to water the tree, thinking at the time that I didn’t want Zayde to come home to a dying tree. But as his absence dragged on, I became the tender of the fig tree.

Other things changed as well. Audrey had acted giddy and heroic on the night of the earthquake, laughing as she told everyone how, seconds after she turned down Aunt Pearl’s street, all of the buildings shook, cars jumped crazily in the road, and she got thrown to the ground. “See!” She displayed her palms and knees, where Mama had washed the abraded skin and put on Mercurochrome and bandages. But for months afterward, Audrey had nightmares and wet her bed, as if she were a child of two and not seven. She was always sensitive, quick to tears, and now little things sent her into tantrums; she’d start with a sort of singing whine and build to a scream.

Papa spent a lot of time with her. He felt guilty for not having realized she was missing. And he was home a great deal; he couldn’t find any work for two months after he got laid off from Fine’s, and at first, when he did start to work again, it was only occasional jobs arranged through Pearl, purchasing shoes to go with costumes she designed for the movies. This would eventually grow into a moderately successful business that included, for big historical pictures, researching the shoes of earlier times and having a factory make dozens of pairs at a time.

Papa’s success, however, still lay some years in the future. The summer after he lost his job, Barbara and I went to work. Barbara, who’d always had a knack for organizing our neighborhood gang of kids, started a summer playgroup for half a dozen children whose mothers worked or could afford a dollar fifty a week to get the kids out of their hair. My job was at Uncle Leo’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, which sounded perfect for a reader like me—except that, instead of reading any books, I was given tasks that Leo considered appropriate for a twelve-year-old poor relation, like dusting shelves and running to the drugstore for his bicarb. Danny was working, too, at Chafkin’s grocery store. While doing his restitution for stealing, he’d impressed Eddie Chafkin by taking the job seriously; and once he paid off his debt, Eddie offered to hire him. Danny made fun of
Eddie’s puffed-up manner and his constant schemes for squeezing a few more pennies out of the store. Yet he seemed to feel proud to be associated with his employer’s energy and enterprise, qualities so lacking in his father.

Our jobs didn’t end when we entered Hollenbeck Junior High School the next fall; we just switched to after-school and weekend hours. Overnight, it seemed, my childhood pals and I had become workers.
And isn’t that the finest thing a person can be!
Cousin Mollie said.

Cousin Mollie Abrams came to stay with us in September when the union sent her to Los Angeles to organize the garment workers. She was the silver lining in the cloud of bad things that happened that year.

Even though Mollie was our cousin, the oldest daughter of Mama’s brother Meyr, she was only five years younger than Mama, and the two of them had been like sisters when Mama lived with Meyr’s family in Chicago.

“Mollie taught me English from her schoolbooks,” Mama had told us many times.

“Mollie used to sneak her mother’s cologne on hot days, and we’d rub each other’s feet with it. We had the best-smelling feet in Chicago.”

“Such beautiful English Mollie spoke. She was going to get a high school diploma and get a nice job, something in an office.”

It didn’t turn out that way. Meyr hurt his back and could no longer handle his job in the stockyards. Nothing else paid as well, and Mollie had to leave school at fifteen and work in a dress factory. Not that Mollie Abrams was the kind of girl who’d waste any time moaning that life had let her down! In the factory, her intelligence—along with a gift for rousing a crowd, no doubt inherited from Meyr with his
fusgeyer
theatricals—
did
help her get ahead. Before she was twenty, she became president of the union at her factory. Then she caught the eyes of the leaders of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and they asked her to help them … in Los Angeles. Cousin Mollie was coming to stay with us!

She was going to have the room off the kitchen that had been Zayde’s—and either Barbara or I would share the room with her! But we had only a week’s notice that she was coming. That gave me very little
time to be excessively good and prove to Mama that I deserved the honor of rooming with our guest. Fortunately for me, the way Mama made her choice was neither rational nor fair.

It had to do with my being Audrey’s chief tormentor, habitually mean to the sister immediately below me in the pecking order; Barbara, in contrast, treated Audrey like an innocuous pet, a canary or a gerbil on which she might lavish attention one day and then ignore for weeks. I was the one who pinched Audrey, made fun of her, and found her existence a frequent source of annoyance. True, I’d promised God that if He brought Audrey back safely after the earthquake, I’d never tease her again. But God never visited our secular household to hold me to my vow. And even though I felt sorry about the rough time Audrey was having, it was miserable for me, too, to wake up on a hot morning to the stink of her pee soaking the cot next to the bed Barbara and I shared. Worse, I would come home after being Uncle Leo’s slave all day and riding back on the hot bus, and there was Papa on his knees like a horsey, with Audrey giggling on his back. I’d worked hard for my place as Papa’s favorite through my diligence at his lessons and in school. For Audrey, he was willing to be a playmate.

All of that frustration went into the shove I gave Audrey when we were fixing Zayde’s room for its new inhabitant.

The room off the kitchen had sat empty ever since Zayde left in March. At first we didn’t touch the room because we expected Zayde to return. Once it became clear that his departure was permanent, Barbara and I begged to move there, but Mama and Papa were preoccupied with the new baby and with money worries; and the room needed a few repairs that no one ever got around to. The delay ultimately became part of the silver lining. Instead of the slapdash way we would have fixed up the room for Barbara and me, we were making it
beautiful
 … for Cousin Mollie.

Papa, Barbara, and I painted the walls with fresh white paint. Mama made new curtains out of crisp fabric with a pattern of pink and blue flowers, and hemmed a square of the same fabric to drape over the orange crate that served as a bedside table. On Saturday night—just two days to Mollie!—Papa was hanging the pretty mirror edged with Mexican tile that Mama had insisted we buy, while Barbara oiled the wooden bed frame and
dresser, and Audrey and I, on our knees, scrubbed every inch of the wooden floor. Mama, holding baby Harriet, stood in the doorway to supervise. That was a lot of people crowded into a small room, and Audrey kept getting in my way. Plus, she barely touched her brush to the floor, and I was desperate to do my job the best, so Mama would pick me to room with Mollie.

When Audrey bumped into me for the fifth time, I butted my hip into her.

“Ela-aine!” She crumpled to the floor, emitting the ominous whine that preceded her tantrums.

“Audrey, don’t you dare,” Mama said. Then she turned to me. I expected to be screamed at or slapped. Instead, Mama knocked me over with what she said. “That settles it. Elaine, you’re moving in here with Mollie.”

“What?” Barbara gasped. “How come
she
gets rewarded?”

“Not one more word. Barbara, you’re able to get along with Audrey. Elaine can’t. All I want is a little peace in this house.”

“It’s not fair!” Barbara wailed.

She was right. But my twinge of guilt was nothing compared to the delirious happiness that flooded through me. I went at the floor with vigor, as if energetic cleaning would speed the arrival of my cousin—who was so important that the union was sending her to Los Angeles on an airplane.

WE SOMETIMES MET PEOPLE
at the railroad station, but I didn’t know anyone who had traveled by airplane. Mollie’s flight was scheduled to land at Glendale Airport on Monday evening, and we all went there to welcome her. Papa recruited Uncle Leo to drive his car, in which my family fit, but just barely, and we planned that most of us would ride back with Leo while Mama and Mollie would take a taxi.

Mollie’s flight was supposed to arrive at seven-thirty. We got to the airport by seven and stationed ourselves along the chain-link fence that separated the waiting area from where the planes took off and landed. But seven-thirty came, with no plane from Chicago; then seven forty-five, eight o’clock, and, to Mama’s growing consternation, eight-fifteen. “Chicago’s always late,” said a man whose nonchalant tone reminded me of
movies where people dressed for dinner and sipped cocktails. The man had taken dozens of plane trips himself, he said. “Air currents over the Rockies, you can’t predict.”

Papa took advantage of the wait to give us a lesson on aviation. A plane could fly, he said, because the propeller—“See, the part that’s spinning so fast?”—pulled it forward. If the pilot pointed the nose up, the propeller pulled up the plane. A man apologized for interrupting but informed us that what really made flight possible was the shape of the wings and something about a vacuum over them. None of us said much after that, except for Uncle Leo grumbling that he’d had to rush dinner and couldn’t digest properly, and hadn’t he told Papa that no one arrived at the airport as early as seven to meet a seven-thirty plane?

Mama kept staring at the sky, as if she could will Mollie’s plane to appear. And it didn’t matter if they announced that the next flight landing was from Denver or San Francisco—she hungrily scrutinized every woman who walked down the metal staircase. Only when the last person had left the plane did she pull back, an impression of chain links on her forehead.

For me, every minute at the airport was like breathing the freshest, sweetest air that had ever entered my lungs. Whenever a flight approached, I joined Mama against the fence, watching the airplane transform from high, distant pinpricks of light to a screaming, diving monster—my heart pounded in terror that it would smash into a million pieces. I sighed in relief when each plane touched down safely and juddered to a halt. At night, there were more flights landing than taking off, but it was even more astonishing to see a plane bump over the ground like an ungainly bus and suddenly rise into the air like a swan.
Vacuum
, I told myself; but how could a word I associated with Aunt Sonya’s Hoover describe this miracle?