The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  “Your brother was a hero. Show some respect.”

  “Know what he hated most of all? He hated getting dragged into your crazy schemes. He was afraid he was going to be stuck doing that for the rest of his life.”

  “Crazy? Who doesn’t eat eggs?”

  “Please, Pa, he doesn’t mean it,” Mama said.

  “Why do you think I had to go to work for Fine?” Papa said. “Because there was nothing left after that.”

  “Under this roof, I won’t stay one more night,” Zayde boomed.

  “Harry couldn’t wait to get away!”

  “Not one night.” Zayde skirted the table and pushed through the swinging door, toward his room.

  “Bill, how could you?” Mama exclaimed.

  Papa looked at his watch. “Girls, it’s ten to six,” he said firmly. “We have guests arriving soon. Is the food ready?”

  “That’s all right, I’ll finish it,” Mama said, but she didn’t leave the room right away; she stood frozen, staring at Papa.

  Barbara and I pretended to arrange things on the table; I was blinking my eyes, trying not to cry, and she squeezed my hand to calm me down.

  Papa said to Mama, “How could I say it? Or how could I have not said it all these years?”

  “You and your father—and poor Harry, dead all these years already—that’s your business. But what are we going to do without your father’s income? I’m going to go talk to him.” Then Mama went into the kitchen.

  Papa sank into the sofa. He looked dazed, the way he had one day when he’d swum his mile even though he was getting over the flu and he emerged from the ocean white-faced, his teeth chattering.

  I looked at the elegantly set table and imagined the china and crystal stacked on the curb after we’d been evicted.

  As if they had absorbed my fear, all of the beautiful things on the table trembled. But it wasn’t just the table. The floor was lurching. Lights flickered. The whole house made terrible, deep grinding noises, overlaid by the shrill, ominous tinkling of crystal.

  Barbara and I grabbed each other, screaming, “Earthquake!” Papa threw himself on top of us and pulled us to the shuddering floor as glass shattered around us.

  Then it stopped.

  For a few seconds, the stillness felt as strange as the shaking.

  “Girls, are you all right?” Papa sat up and scanned our bodies for injuries.

  We were whimpering like babies, but we hadn’t been hurt. Not like Papa, who was bleeding from cuts on his head and arms! But he said he was all right. He told us to go outside—carefully, there was broken glass all over the floor—and wait in front of the house. Then he ran into the kitchen, yelling for Mama and Zayde.

  Barbara and I tiptoed through the room, which had gone crazily askew. A table with knickknacks had toppled over, and all of the furniture, even the big, heavy sofa, had lurched into slightly different places. Outside, our wooden porch looked all right, but the three concrete steps were cracked, and a big chunk had broken off the middle step. Testing the ground each time I put a foot down, I picked my way over the broken steps and out to the sidewalk.

  Neighbors were spilling outside, too, everyone dazed and eyeing their houses as if fearing what fresh revenge they might take for our living in them so heedlessly, with so little gratitude for their constant effort to squeeze joists and nails and boards together against the forces of chaos. Except for the porch steps and some broken windows, our house looked unharmed, but the porch roof had collapsed at the Lischers’, three doors down. There was a horrid blaring sound—the horn of a car, one of several that sat askew in the middle of the street, with no drivers in sight.

  “Is anyone hurt? Your mother, with the baby?” It was Mrs. Anshel.

  What baby? I thought dully, wondering if she meant her baby, Sharon. But Sharon was right there in her arms. Then I understood she was talking about Mama’s pregnancy.

  “Papa’s getting everyone else,” I said.

  “Tell him he needs to shut off the main gas line.… Barbara, Elaine, are you listening? Just come get me when your father comes out.”

  Mrs. Anshel turned out to be one of those people who get invigorated by a crisis. Wearing the navy and white dress and silver clip earrings she’d put on to come to dinner at our house, she bustled over to the Yamotos’, two doors away. She told them about turning off the gas line—now I understood what she was talking about—and Mr. Yamoto went to take care of it. She mentioned the blaring car horn, and the two sons, Teddy and Woodrow, went and lifted the hood of the offending car.

  Papa, Mama, and Zayde came around from the back of the house. Papa and Zayde supported Mama, who held a kitchen towel to her forehead.

  “Mama!” we cried, running to her.

  “I’m fine, girls. Something fell in the kitchen, that’s all,” she said, but she walked heavily and her eyes barely flicked over us.

  But then, as if strength had flooded into her, she charged past us to the street. “Audrey? Where’s Audrey?”

  Barbara and I looked at each other, as if that would magically make Audrey appear. Together, we looked at the house. Audrey’s face wasn’t in any of the windows.

  “Didn’t she come out?” Papa asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “You said ‘the girls’ were out front. ‘The girls,’ you said!” Mama screamed at Papa.

  He was already sprinting back into the house. Zayde was two steps behind him, and then Barbara and me, but, even holding her baby, Mrs. Anshel managed to plant herself ahead of both of us. “What are you girls thinking?” she said. “Take care of your mother.”

  Mama’s face was ashen, except for the bloody gash on her head—no longer covered by the dish towel, which dangled in her hand. Mrs. Anshel led her to sit in one of the abandoned cars and told me to press the towel against the wound on Mama’s head. I used it to dab at Mama’s tears as well, while my own tears streamed and soaked the collar of my blouse.

  The Yamoto boys had silenced the car horn, and we could hear Papa and Zayde calling for Audrey. No one answered.

  “Barbara. Elaine.” Mrs. Anshel made sure we were looking at her. “This is important. Was Audrey with you when the earthquake happened?”

  “No,” we said together.

  “Where did you see her last?”

  “Living room,” I said. “But she was going into the kitchen.” I glanced at Barbara.

  “How was I supposed to notice?” she said. “I had to fix the dinner.”

  “Oh, was your mama not feeling well?”

  “Yes,” we answered quickly, both of us immediately understanding that we couldn’t reveal what had really happened.

  “Hmm.” Mrs. Anshel clearly sensed there was more to the story. “Well, does Audrey have a hiding place? Someplace she’d go if she was upset?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, as miserable as Audrey when Mama had snapped at her about the candlesticks.

  Papa and Zayde returned, alone. Now Papa took over questioning Barbara and me, while Mrs. Anshel went to organize a search party. Were we absolutely certain we hadn’t seen Audrey after the earthquake? Papa asked. What about before the earthquake? Did she go outside?

  Yearning to help in some way, I mentioned the need to shut off the gas line. Papa asked Zayde to do it. Then he instructed Barbara and me to stay with Mama, and he joined the search.

  Why wasn’t Audrey in the house? Had she run outside in distress after I could have helped her but didn’t? I asked myself miserably as, all up and down the street, people called her name. And then … had she been crushed under a falling building? Had someone taken advantage of the confusion of the earthquake and kidnapped her, like the Lindbergh baby last year? What could I promise God, if He brought her back safely? Of course I would never ever tease her again. But I needed to offer something bigger. What about helping my family, since Papa had lost his job? Some children, even as young as I was, had left school to go to work.

  Then I heard a woman cry out, “Here she is! T
he little Greenstein girl!”

  “Look, they found her!” someone else exclaimed.

  I followed the pointing fingers and swiveling heads toward the end of the block, and saw … it was Audrey! She rode on the shoulders of a handsome Mexican man. And wasn’t that Auntie Pearl at their side?

  Mama let out a cry and staggered toward them. Applauding and cheering, the crowd parted to let her through. The Mexican man gently lowered Audrey from his shoulders, and Mama swooped to embrace her.

  “I found her on the street outside my apartment,” Pearl said. “I tried to telephone you, but the line was down.”

  Now Mama was scolding Audrey but at the same time hugging her and stroking her hair and weeping, while the rest of us surrounded them, chattering and smiling, a happy family again.

  “Bill? Charlotte?” Pearl said after the first few delirious minutes of relief that Audrey was safe. “Papa?” she added tremulously.

  Pearl looked … not just pretty, but like women in the movies. Wearing a clingy green sweater and high heels, and with red lipstick on her mouth, my aunt was sexy. She placed her hand on the arm of the Mexican man who had carried Audrey; and who hadn’t, like the other helpful neighbors, drifted away. “I’d like you to meet Alberto Rivas,” she said.

  “Bert,” the man said with a smile. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Greenstein.” He held out his hand to Zayde.

  Zayde gave Pearl a long, cold look and walked away.

  Papa, however, grasped Bert Rivas’s outstretched hand. “Thank you for bringing back our daughter.” As if to emphasize how different he was from Zayde, he added, “Please, stay and have dinner with us.”

  “Bill, you don’t have to,” Pearl said quickly.

  “He brought Audrey back safe and sound. It’s the least we can do.”

  Bert glanced at Pearl. She nodded, and he accepted Papa’s invitation. Even then, I kept telling myself he must be one of Pearl’s neighbors; it was a bit odd that he lived near Pearl instead of in the Mexican part of Boyle Heights, but a certain amount of mixing went on, like the Yamotos living on our block instead of in the Japanese area. And while the idea of Bert being Pearl’s neighbor was odd, it wasn’t impossible, not like the other idea that gradually forced its way into my mind: that Pearl had put on her sexy sweater for Bert Rivas. That this Mexican man was my aunt Pearl’s boyfriend.

  “I couldn’t help it,” I heard Pearl tell Papa as we picked our way over the broken porch steps. “The important thing was to get her home. What if there was another earthquake, or we had to get past buildings that were destroyed? It would have been crazy to bring her back by myself.”

  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:

  Ay, ay, ay, ay,

  Canto y no llores.

  Porque cantando se alegran,

  Cielito lindo, los corazones.

  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.

  THE 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. Overni
ght, 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.