The Tin Horse: A Novel (22 page)

Stu Malkin frowned and scratched his head. “That’s what, fifty factories? A hundred? They’re having a lot of trouble at Anjac, aren’t they? Or Paramount? Or Kaybel?”

Mollie had mentioned the Paramount Dress Company. It was on the tip of my tongue, but then it hit me … if Stu Malkin were really with the union, shouldn’t he have known there were eighty dress factories? And that Mollie always left before six?

I didn’t answer him.

“Well, hey, thanks anyway, Elaine. You’re a peach.” He handed me a silver dollar. It was too much money, and then I knew: I had almost given Mollie away.

But what if I
did
give her away? Had I shown something on my face when Malkin, if that was really his name, said “Paramount”? He’d hurried over to a brown car and driven off quickly. Was he going to the Paramount Dress Company? Would he find Mollie there? And then what would he do to her? I had to warn her.

I kept walking normally until the minute his car turned the corner. Then I ran to the streetcar stop on Brooklyn Avenue.

Wild with fear, I caught the streetcar going downtown. Once my initial panic subsided, I realized I had no idea where to find Mollie. Instead of jumping on the streetcar like a silly goose, I should have run home and called strike headquarters; the phone number was on a card pinned up next to our telephone. Too late now, we had already crossed the gully that marked the Los Angeles River (dry this time of year).

Downtown, I transferred to the streetcar to the garment district. At Ninth Street, I spotted a picket line of about twenty women half a block away. I got off the streetcar and ran to them. No Mollie! But the minute I said her name, a brisk young woman came over and asked if she could help.

As I explained about needing to warn Mollie, I took in the women
marching up and down on the sidewalk—and, standing between them and the grimy factory building, a line of half a dozen burly men.

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.

M
OLLIE 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.