The Tin Horse: A Novel Read online

  There was a third table, but it was lined up squarely with a corner of the room, and its dozens of papers were stacked as neatly as Zayde kept his room at home.

  He didn’t notice us. Chewing on a pencil, he stared at a piece of paper on the table with the kind of intense concentration he brought to our games of gin rummy. I expected Barbara to say something, but she must have exhausted her first wind simply getting us here.

  I broke the silence. “Zayde!”

  He jumped up so fast his chair fell over. “Girls! Is everything all right at home? Is someone sick?”

  Barbara found her voice. “Why did you tell us you worked in a bookstore?”

  “Is someone sick?” he repeated, although he was quickly realizing we hadn’t been sent here because of a family emergency. That this was the emergency. “Who told you to come here? This isn’t a place for children.”

  “You said you worked in a bookstore, not a bookie joint!” Barbara accused.

  “Oy, you thought …” Laughing—shifting his strategy with the quickness any immigrant learns if he wants to survive—Zayde walked around the table toward us. “You don’t think I work here? That’s a good one, isn’t it, Mr. Melansky?”

  “A good one.” The droopy-eyed man guffawed. “That’s rich, that’s a good one.”

  “I just come by when I have a little extra time and give my friend Mr. Melansky a hand.”

  “That’s the ticket, ha ha,” Mr. Melansky chimed in.

  “But …,” Barbara sputtered. Zayde’s initial defensiveness hadn’t rattled her; it was the same way we reacted when accused of anything. But now he’d outflanked her.

  “Barbara, Elaine, say hello to Mr. Melansky,” he said. “And Mr. Freitag,” he added, nodding toward the man who’d kept writing on the chalkboard through all of this—he couldn’t stop, since race results were still coming in over the radio.

  “How do you do?” we said, temporarily cowed by the rules hammered into us by our parents and teachers: Be polite to grown-ups. Never make a scene.

  “Girls, why don’t you get yourself a treat?” Zayde reached into his pocket, took out a fat roll of bills, and peeled one off for us. The bills were all ones; I’d seen him roll them at the kitchen table when he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to go out and build the West. Still, to us, a dollar was a fortune.

  I looked at the characteristically tidy table where he’d been sitting, lit by a small lamp I remembered from our living room, and my legs shook the way they had the time I finally climbed to the top of the slide and stared down that shimmering Niagara, so bright with reflected sun it made me dizzy. There was also a calm, however, an elegant beauty, in holding the solid physical evidence against his mere words of denial. Later I thought of that vertiginous moment as the first time I reasoned like an attorney.

  “Zayde, it’s not true,” I murmured, more sad than angry.

  “What?” He crouched, hands on his thighs, to look me in the eye (he was sixty-two then, but vigorous and surprisingly limber). His eyes, hazel like mine, warned—begged?—me not to go further. Or was he asking me to free him from this deception?

  Whatever he wanted, I couldn’t turn back. I was standing at the top of the slide, the kid behind me on the ladder pressing into my calves. The only thing I could do was force my wobbly legs onto that terrifying cataract and let go.

  “You don’t work in a bookstore,” I said. “You work here.”

  “A little respect your zayde deserves!” Mr. Melansky huffed, but Zayde held up his hand.

  “Why don’t I walk you girls home?” he said. Without a word to the other men, he put his gray felt homburg on his head and guided us to the door. His hand on my shoulder trembled, but in the street he had a chuckle in his voice.

  “Since when do eight-year-old girls know about Melansky’s?” he said.

  “All the kids know,” I said. “Don’t they, Barbara?” My sister was too quiet.

  “You kids, you’re so smart. Your mama and papa and me, we thought, a bookie shop, a bookshop, see? Almost the same English. We thought, not until you’re a little older. So smart! You want ice creams from Currie’s?”

  “Yes, please.” I accepted the peace offering, even better than a cone of buttermilk.

  “Better you shouldn’t have been there, though,” he said. “How about you don’t mention it to your mama and papa?”

  “What about your egg ranch?” Barbara said, too sweetly.

  “In the valley?”

  “I want chocolate,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Barbara always gets strawberry.”

  She said at the same time, “You supplied eggs to half of Los Angeles, isn’t that what you told us?”

  “Who have you been talking to? One of your aunts?”

  “The chickens died!”

  “Sweetheart, keep your voice down.” Zayde glanced uneasily at the women milling around the fish barrels outside Rosen’s.

  “And what about the cigar factory?”

  He yanked us into a doorway between Rosen’s and the next store. “Barbara! What did I just tell you?”

  “Lies!” she spat back. “You told us lies.”

  Sweat beaded on Zayde’s brow and he leaned against the wall.

  “Barbara, stop it,” I pleaded.

  “No, it’s fine,” Zayde sighed, and wiped his face with his handkerchief. “It’s America, people can speak freely. And any accused person has the right to answer charges made against him. The egg ranch, you want to see where it was? You want I should ask your uncle Leo to take us there?”

  “But you didn’t supply eggs to half of Los Angeles,” she persisted.

  “When Harry was there we did a good business.”

  A hush always fell at the mention of Zayde’s firstborn son, who died in the Great War. But not this time.

  “Agneta’s hair,” she said. “Where is it?”

  “What?” Zayde said.

  “The hair she gave you. I want to see it.”

  “You think I kept a few hairs from a kid I knew when I was seventeen?”

  “Then how do I know any of it is true?”

  “Are you calling your zayde a liar?”

  Even Barbara hadn’t said that; she had only said he told lies. It was a crucial distinction for us, and the irreversibility of that word, liar, stopped her in her tracks. For a moment.

  “What were the tin animals you made for her?” she asked.

  “What, you don’t remember?” He wiped his face with his handkerchief again.

  Rooster, lamb, horse, lion. Did I say it or only think it?

  “Make them for us,” Barbara said.

  “Didn’t I tell you, when I stepped off the boat onto America, I promised myself I would never work tin again?”

  “The only thing I’ve ever seen you do with tin is open a can of vegetables.”

  Zayde’s face went white. “Go home,” he said.

  Barbara, her face as stunned as Zayde’s, turned and ran.

  “Zayde!” I cried.

  “Go home!”

  I pretended to leave, but I hid among the fish and pickle barrels outside Rosen’s. When Zayde started down the street, taking big, fast strides, I trotted a little behind him. I felt as if the harm Barbara had done was mine to repair, or at least—since I had no idea how to fix this damage—not to abandon. He went into Elster’s Hardware; I lurked a few doors away. Ten minutes later, he emerged carrying a brown paper sack and went straight home.

  I lagged a few minutes behind. When I entered the house, I could hear Zayde talking to Mama in the kitchen, too low for me to know what they were saying. Then the voices stopped. A minute later I peeked in. Mama asked about my day at school. Zayde wasn’t there. He must have gone into his bedroom off the kitchen. I sat at the table and read my latest library book, Treasure Island, so I could keep watch. His door remained closed.

  He didn’t come out for dinner. He hadn’t been able to resist having a corned beef sandwich at Canter’s on his way home; that’s
what he’d told Mama. She might have started in on Barbara and me, picking at our dinners in guilty silence, but she and Papa were preoccupied with the stock market. Their investments, although modest, represented almost all of their savings.

  Barbara and I barely spoke as we got ready for bed. I don’t know what was going through her mind, but I was shocked by what had happened—and heartsick at having hurt the one person in our house who adored me. Mama might cuddle me one moment and slap me the next, and Papa tended to be stern. But everything I did had delighted Zayde.

  Sometime during the night, I woke up feeling scared. I crept into the inky unfamiliarity of the house in the middle of night, from our bedroom into the hallway, where I felt my way by touching the wall, then through the living room and into the kitchen. A light came from under Zayde’s door, and I heard rustles of some kind of activity going on. I lingered outside his door for a few minutes, but I was afraid to disturb him.

  In the morning, Papa found Zayde asleep in his chair, slumped over the small table in his room. On the table were metalworking tools, scraps of solder, remnants of the tin cans he had cut for materials, and three crude but recognizable tin animals: a rooster, a lamb, and a horse.

  Zayde woke up when Papa came into his room. He rose and started stuffing his belongings into a potato sack; he was moving to Aunt Sonya and Uncle Leo’s, he announced. Sonya was always after him to live in her house, so much nicer and bigger than ours, but he’d said Sonya kvetched so much, she would make his ears fall off. Papa kept asking him what was wrong. All he said was, “A man deserves respect.”

  He was already gone when Barbara and I came into the kitchen for breakfast. Papa brought out the tin animals and asked what was going on. “Nothing,” we both replied.

  Barbara waited until Papa left the room. Then she asked Mama, “Could I have the horse?”

  Mama eyed her suspiciously but said, “Yes, all right. Elaine, what about you?”

  “I want the rooster.” I would have liked the lion, but that was the one animal Zayde hadn’t made. Maybe he fell asleep before he got to it, but I suspected that treasure was for Agneta alone.

  Terrified of discovery, I waited until Barbara and I were a full block away from home, on our way to school, before I pounced on her.

  “Look what you did!” I said, distressed by everything that had happened and frantic to push the blame onto her.

  She tossed her head. “What I did?”

  “You accused him of lying about Agneta.”

  “Well, you didn’t say you believed him. You didn’t say anything.”

  These distinctions of culpability meant nothing to Papa, of course, when he found out everything from Pearl. He rarely hit us, but that night he spanked Barbara and me so hard that we wept. Then he stood over us while we wrote letters of apology to Zayde. I meant every word I wrote. And in spite of my misery over hurting him and getting punished, I was deeply relieved that his story about Agneta, at least, was true. I think Barbara felt that way, too, because she cherished the tin horse. She kept it on her side of the dresser we shared and got furious if she thought anyone had moved it an inch.

  Our letters, along with Aunt Sonya’s carping and her mediocre cooking, persuaded Zayde to move back to our house two weeks later. But everything had changed by then.

  The day after Barbara goaded Zayde into breaking his vow never to work tin again had swelled into a national uproar: Black Tuesday, the collapse of the stock market. Men on Wall Street jumped out of windows, and people all over the country—including us—lost their savings. Somehow, in my imagination, my sister had precipitated that disaster. Mingled with my horror was awe at Barbara’s power.

  BOYLE HEIGHTS SITS ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE LOS ANGELES RIVER. That means nothing anymore, since the river’s course was fixed in concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers, a project that began when I was in high school and was completed around 1960. My granddaughter once asked about the concrete ditch we were driving over, and her older brother informed her, “That’s where they film car chases.”

  The river once meant a great deal, however. In fact, as Papa used to tell us, the river ruled Los Angeles.

  “Where do you live, girls? What’s the name of your city?” he would begin one of our history lessons.

  “El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles,” we learned to answer.

  “What language is that? What does it mean?”

  “Spanish. It means ‘the Town of the Queen of the Angels.’ ”

  “And what was the queen of the Town of the Queen of the Angels? Why did they put the center of Los Angeles twenty miles inland, instead of on the ocean?”

  “Because of the river?”

  “That’s right.”

  Papa’s lessons took place erratically. Fine & Son Fine Footwear stayed open most nights until nine, and Papa often had to work in the evening. “Mr. Julius Fine gets to go home and eat with his family!” Mama fumed as she put our dinner on the table at six and shoved a plate for Papa into the oven. (The son in the store’s name didn’t yet work there. He was barely older than Barbara and me.) On nights when Papa wasn’t working, though, he spent half an hour after dinner instructing us in history, poetry recitation, or mathematics, depending on his mood.

  Zayde told his stories to remember who he was and where he’d come from. Papa taught us who he expected us to be: American girls. Yet in Papa’s lessons, too, I glimpsed his younger self: winner of the first prize in elocution in his tenth-grade class, his last year of school before his older brother, Harry, joined the army, and he had to take Harry’s place at the egg ranch. Papa almost sang his story about the river, which came from the speech he had written for the elocution competition. Though there were many words I didn’t understand, I didn’t dare interrupt him.

  “The river was the true reina, the queen, of El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles,” Papa said. “She brought water to the settlers’ vineyards and orchards through irrigation ditches called zanjas that fanned out from the great Zanja Madre, the Mother Ditch. The river created woodlands with sycamore, live oak, cottonwood, and wild roses. And there were turtledoves and quail. Can you imagine, girls? That was right here in Boyle Heights.

  “The river can also be an angry queen,” Papa said. “During the dry months, she can’t even maintain a permanent channel, but in the rainy season, she covers a huge floodplain. You know never to go near the river when it’s been raining, even if it’s not raining that day? You know about Micky Altschul?”

  We were only babies when it happened, but every child in Boyle Heights had heard of Micky Altschul, who went to play with a paper boat in the river the day after a big storm. It was a clear day in the city, but it was still raining hard in the mountains, where the river started. Water flooded down from the mountains and swept Micky away. His body was found halfway to San Pedro.

  In the olden days, Papa said, the river divided Los Angeles into two very different cities. A prosperous white Los Angeles flourished on the west side of the river; to the east, everyone was Mexican or Indian, and all of them were poor. The division was so extreme that not even one white person lived east of the river until the 1850s, when an Irish immigrant bought a vineyard on the river’s east bank. The Irishman also bought the hilly land beyond the vineyard, and he built his house there and lived among the Mexicans and Indians.

  “What was the Irishman’s name, girls?” Papa asked.

  “Andrew Boyle.”

  We learned that Andrew Boyle was only fourteen when he and his seven brothers and sisters sailed to America in 1832. Motherless children, they had come in search of their father; he had left Ireland after his wife’s death and vanished into the New World.

  “How could he vanish?” I asked. “Did something happen to him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The point of the story is Andrew Boyle coming to America. So Andrew and his family—”

  “Why didn’t he send them a letter?”

  “Maybe he went someplace on the frontier, like Alas
ka, that didn’t have mail service.” Papa frowned, and I knew I should stop, but hearing about the vanished father touched a primal fear of abandonment. A fear and a premonition?

  “Did he get killed by Indians?” I said. “Or eaten by a bear?”

  “Enough, Elaine! And Barbara, pay attention!”

  The Boyle children spent two years on the East Coast looking for their father, then moved to Texas, Papa said. (I bit my lip to keep from asking if they’d left some way for their father to find them, like children dropping bread crumbs in a fairy tale.) Andrew joined the U.S. Army to fight in the Texas Revolution, and his life almost ended then. His company was losing in battle and surrendered in exchange for the Mexican general’s promise to spare the men. But the general lied. Once the Americans surrendered, the general had them all shot. All except one: Andrew Boyle. The general had at one time stayed in the town where Boyle’s family lived; they’d treated him kindly, and he’d told them he would help Andrew if he ever had the chance. That promise he kept. He let Andrew go.

  “You see, girls,” Papa said, “Andrew Boyle survived because his family was kind to Mexicans. And later he chose to live with Mexicans and Indians as his neighbors. Remember, I showed you his house on Boyle Avenue? That’s why, in Boyle Heights, we have so many different kinds of people and we all get along.”

  The real story, I learned when I got older, was far less pretty than what I’d heard from Papa. Andrew Boyle may indeed have been a paragon of tolerance, as Papa said. But after Boyle died, his son-in-law literally gave away plots of land to attract “desirable” neighbors. At first the plan succeeded, and the son-in-law’s friends built the grand Victorian mansions around Hollenbeck Park (named for one of the friends). But Boyle Heights was still on the wrong side of the river. Eventually it filled up with cheap little wood and stucco houses and with undesirable people like us—and our Mexican, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, and black neighbors. Papa wouldn’t have told children such an ambiguous tale, of course. And whether it reflected Andrew Boyle’s populist spirit or was simply a happy accident, Papa was right that our involuntary League of Nations formed a surprisingly harmonious community. When I was growing up, Boyle Heights was home to people from fifty different ethnic groups. And we didn’t dissolve into some kind of treacly melting pot; each of the largest groups—the Mexicans, the Japanese, and especially the Jews, who were over half of Boyle Heights’ residents then—had its own neighborhood.