The Tin Horse: A Novel (32 page)

She handed me the paper. It was a telegram … oh my God, it was a telegram from the Hebrew Immigration Society. Ivan had been approved to immigrate! And we needed to wire his boat fare.

“Oh, Mama!”

Mama sang out words I had only heard from religious people:
“Baruch Ha-Shem!”
which I knew meant “Praise God.” She caught my hand, and we whooped and danced, weeping with joy, until she sank into a chair, flushed and panting.

Still breathless, she said, “I’ll call your father and tell him to go to the bank and arrange for the money.” She’d been setting aside a little money every month in an Ivan fund.

“How soon is he coming?” I asked.

“Well.” Mama chewed her lip, the way she did calculating sums in her
head at the market. “He’ll want to leave right away. But he’ll have to get to a port first and then to New York, I suppose. Then take a train. Still, he might get here as soon as next month.” Suddenly, her face clouded. “Oy! Where are we going to put him?”

I had to leave for work—school had let out a week earlier, and I was on my summer schedule at the bookstore. That evening, over a celebration dinner, I heard the plan Mama had come up with to accommodate Ivan.

“Barbara and Elaine,” she said, “you’ll move in with your sisters”—Barbara and I both let out yelps of indignation—“and Ivan will have your room.”

“Four of us in one room?” I groaned. “That’s impossible.”

“Do you know how many of us slept in one
bed
when I was a girl?” Mama said.

“Can’t he sleep on the sofa?” Barbara said.

“The sofa!” Mama slammed her hand on the table. “Do you have any idea what your cousin has been through? What is wrong with you girls, begrudging him a bed? And look at you, barely touching this pot roast. A person would think you weren’t happy!” She took a bite of pot roast, her glare compelling me to do the same.

Papa stayed out of the discussion, but it turned out he wasn’t deaf to our pleas. The next morning, he proposed another idea: Audrey would join Barbara and me in our bedroom off the kitchen, and Ivan could share a room with Harriet. She was just five, after all, barely more than a baby.

Ivan arrived three weeks later, on a Wednesday in mid-July. All of us went to the Santa Fe Station (magnificent Union Station wouldn’t open until the next year) to meet his train. Harriet was so thrilled about her new roommate, she couldn’t stop bouncing on the platform. I envied her unambiguous delight. My genuine gladness was nonetheless tinged by resentment over all the changes that had occurred a few days earlier: I’d had to jam my clothes into a single dresser drawer to make space for Audrey, and a looming bunk bed had displaced the sweet little cot (as I now saw it) in which I’d slept ever since I shared the room with Mollie. Priding myself on being grown-up, I uncomplainingly took the lower bunk when Audrey demanded the top, but then I had to switch with her four times because she kept changing her mind. And there was nonstop bickering as Audrey,
Barbara, and I blundered through the awkward choreography of making room for one another to dress, lay hands on our possessions … and
breathe
.

Still, I joined Harriet in jumping up and down when Ivan stepped off the train.
Yes, it’s him!
He resembled the boy in the photo we’d been sent, and his head jerked up when Mama called his name. Mama ran toward him. I started to follow, but Barbara plucked at my sleeve.

“Look at those clothes! And he’s dirty,” she whispered.

“He’s been traveling for days. Weeks,” I said, touched by the small, frightened-looking boy enveloped in Mama’s embrace. Ivan was supposed to be nineteen, but he was short and scrawny—and undeniably foreign with his too-big, formal suit and heavily brilliantined hair.

Mama pointed us out, and he smiled.

“Ugh, he’s got pointy teeth,” Barbara muttered. “He looks like a rat.”

“Barbara, cut it out!” I said, and hurried to embrace our cousin.

If I had seen Ivan as boyish and frightened, however, I reconsidered when he met my eyes with a sharp gaze. And I knew enough Yiddish to understand him when we emerged from the train station and walked toward the Yellow Car stop, and he asked, “Where is your automobile?”

“Oh, we don’t need an automobile,” Mama said. “In Los Angeles, the streetcar and the bus go everywhere.”

“All Americans have automobiles.” His alert dark eyes shifted from side to side, as if he suspected us of hiding a Buick someplace.

He was clearly dismayed, too, by the smallness of our house and by having to share a bedroom with Harriet. Still, he smiled when Harriet chattered away at him; he had a sister just her age, he said in a mix of Yiddish and a little halting English. And no wonder he acted wary, after all he’d been through. At dinner, Mama loaded his plate with brisket, noodle kugel, and vegetables, and plied him with questions about the family. Ivan’s father, a typesetter, had lost his job when the government closed down the Jewish-owned newspapers. The family moved to a smaller apartment, and his father eked out a living from jobs he got here and there, but the strain ruined his health; he suffered severe headaches, and on some days he couldn’t get out of bed. Ivan, who’d been a promising student of mathematics, had had to leave school and help support the family. Even so, his parents had insisted he go to America when he had the opportunity.
It was too dangerous to stay in Romania, where Ivan had even been beaten by Iron Guard thugs.

“Those animals!” Mama cried. “Did they hurt you?”

“Just my wrist.” He held up his left arm. His wrist was slightly crooked; it must have healed badly after being broken.

Tears came to my eyes, and Mama couldn’t bear it—she ran from the table sobbing.

“I’m sorry to upset her,” Ivan said. “For us … Such things happened to everyone, you know, many boys my age.”

“Enough of the Old World,” Papa said. “You’re in America now. It’s time to look ahead.” He announced magnanimously that Ivan should take the rest of the week to settle in; he didn’t have to start his job at Aunt Pearl’s factory until the following Monday.

“I don’t understand,” Ivan said.

Papa repeated what he’d said, speaking slowly—assuming, I suppose, that Ivan hadn’t followed his Yiddish with its Ukrainian and American inflections.

“But I don’t really have to work there, do I?” Ivan said. “A
dress factory
?”

“My sister’s factory,” Papa said. “She was kind enough to—”

“I can’t sew!”

“You said in your application—”

“One says whatever the authorities want to hear.” Ivan’s mouth twisted in a half laugh, humorless and world-weary. An expression that said he found us impossibly naive.

“Well,” Papa said, “I’m sure my sister will find something for you to do. And you’ll take night classes, learn English. No reason you can’t look for another job then.”

Later I translated the conversation for Barbara, who hadn’t taken Mr. Berlov’s Yiddish classes with me.

“He’s a rat, you’ll see,” she said.

Barbara loathed Ivan’s
heh-heh
laugh and darting eyes and the way Mama catered to him. And she chafed at Mama’s and Papa’s insistence that we take our cousin, who was glaringly foreign even in the American clothes Mama bought him, with us to social events.

“How can you be so mean?” I scolded her.

“Elaine, you don’t like him, either. You just won’t admit it.”

I wish I could have said that Ivan was a gentle soul whom I defended naturally, out of true affection. Certainly there were times when my heart melted toward him, like the night Mama cooked a Jewish-Romanian stew, and at the first mouthful he sighed and looked as vulnerable as a child; or when he hoisted Harriet on his shoulders, as he must have done with his own baby sister. And maybe if I had grown up with a brother, I wouldn’t have minded that he—and Mama—took it for granted that his new sisters would make his bed and clean up the mess he left in the bathroom after he shaved. But there
was
something sneaky about Ivan. Aunt Pearl, for instance, hadn’t cared that he wasn’t the skilled tailor she’d been promised; there was plenty of lifting, carrying, and cleaning he could help with. But she had to ask Papa to speak to him because if she didn’t keep an eye on him, he handled dresses with filthy hands or crammed bolts of fabric onto shelves instead of folding them neatly. She’d caught him playing solitaire when he was supposed to be working and even smoking cigarettes he’d taken from her desk. And when I saw him displaying his crooked wrist to a girl at a party, I remembered a letter Mama had received five or six years earlier—hadn’t Ivan broken his wrist playing soccer?

Even if he’d made up the story about being beaten by the Iron Guards, though, did that blot out the essential truth that he had suffered in Romania? And he had to be miserable now, a boy only two years older than I torn from his family, a top student forced to work at a menial job, someone who spoke three languages—Yiddish, Romanian, and French—constantly feeling stupid because he didn’t know English. I tried to befriend him, but my Yiddish proved inadequate for anything beyond a stilted conversation. And it wasn’t Ivan’s fault, but his presence made our family dinners tense and constrained. Mama often spoke Yiddish to him privately, but Papa decreed that we use English at the table to augment the classes Ivan had started attending two nights a week. Our dinner conversations often sounded like classroom drills, and there were awkward patches when no one spoke, and I heard myself chewing every mouthful. Only Harriet, who seemed impervious to the rest of the family’s moods, gaily prattled to Ivan, not caring if he understood her, and he regarded her with real warmth.

Other than Harriet, the one person with whom my cousin seemed at ease was Danny. Danny had been so eager to meet our real-life victim of European anti-Semitism that he came by the day after Ivan arrived, embracing him and greeting him with a flood of Yiddish (Danny’s first language, which he and his father still spoke at home). Of course, he invited Ivan to speak at Habonim, with Danny translating. But he didn’t just use Ivan to promote the cause. A real friendship developed between them. Speaking to Danny in Yiddish, Ivan actually laughed, not the tepid
heh-heh
that drove Barbara nuts but a big, relaxed laugh that made me wonder how he might act if he weren’t burdened by being the recipient of our charity.

Years later, when I would see Ivan in Las Vegas, getting by, I assumed, on small-scale finagling, I’d think of the life he might have had. I’d wonder if he could have been a mathematician or a business whiz, if his life could ever have been as big as that laugh. And I would promise myself I’d go to see him more often. (He rarely came to visit us in L.A., he claimed he had too much business to attend to.) But I didn’t. I knew that the qualities in Ivan that made Barbara’s skin crawl—and which, I admit, I found distasteful—were survival skills that came from his being born in a rotten place at a horrific time. Still, by the time he was living with us, he seemed furtive and calculating as if by nature. When Barbara called him “the Rat,” I felt, guiltily, that the name was apt.

“The Rat” was how Barbara continued to refer to Ivan, in spite—actually, because—of Danny’s liking for him. She fumed that she couldn’t go to a party anymore without Danny wanting to spend half the night yammering with her creepy cousin. And if she finally got Danny to dance with her, then Ivan mortified her by asking some girl to dance—if you could call his odd shamble
dancing
—and sometimes misinterpreting the girl’s ordinary American friendliness and putting such a mash on her that she had to shove him away.

Danny pleaded Ivan’s case. And he got furious one time when Barbara was supposed to bring Ivan with her to a movie but she came to the theater alone, saying that Ivan had stayed home with a headache; and then he found out she’d crept out the back door to avoid Ivan.

I got the feeling Barbara and Danny were arguing a lot. She came
home early from several of their dates, tight-lipped and cross. And she spent even more time than before at the Hollywood dance studio.

Barbara did her best to keep her life at the dance studio separate from Boyle Heights. She never invited dance-school friends to our house, and when she went to their parties, she didn’t ask Danny to come as her date. But her two worlds inevitably collided when she performed. That September, a few weeks after we entered our senior year of high school, she danced at the studio in a program of solos by advanced students. Our whole family went; Mama, Papa, Audrey, and Harriet piled into Pearl’s Plymouth, while I went with Ivan and, of course, Danny by streetcar.

Barbara’s dance was electrifying. To a soft tropical drumbeat (her onetime boyfriend Oscar played congas), she prowled the stage with a lazy, sensual stalk that nonetheless carried a sense of danger; she made me think of a panther leisurely closing in on its prey. The drumbeat built, and she pivoted sharply and sprang, arms and legs slashing—I could almost see claws. When she finished, I clapped so hard my hands stung.

Afterward, there was a reception with punch and cookies. Standing in a cluster of her dance friends, Barbara was flushed with the afterglow of performing. She shot a dazzling smile toward us—Danny, Ivan, and me—when we approached her. The smile must have given Ivan courage, because he went up and kissed her on the cheek.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!” he said in accented but clear English.

“Oh. Thanks,” she murmured, then quickly turned away.

“Who’s that, Babs?” one of her fellow students asked.

“Um, just … Aren’t you just perishing of thirst? Let’s get some punch.”

“It’s her cousin,” Danny said loudly. “He’s a Jewish refugee from Romania.”

“Really?” The girl turned toward Ivan, clearly fascinated. “Would you like some punch?” she said, making a gesture of drinking.

“Sure. Okay.”

She took Ivan’s hand and led him toward the table. The other girls followed, vying for Ivan’s attention.

That left Barbara and Danny—and me—in a tight little eddy in one corner of the room, the reception noisily swirling around us.

“Happy?” she said to Danny. Her low voice carried an aura of threat
that made me think of her slinking across the stage, getting ready to pounce.