The Tin Horse: A Novel Page 7

  One of the first of these bold pioneers was Meyr Avramescu, a strapping nineteen-year-old with a big, sweet laugh. Meyr was loved more than any young man has ever been loved by his baby sister, Zipporah—“That was my name, girls. It’s Hebrew for ‘bird.’ ” From the moment his finger wiggled over her cradle in the final year of the nineteenth century, Mama was captivated by her big brother. And he doted on her. He, the golden firstborn son, could have chosen any of his eight siblings to favor, but it was little Zipporah, the seventh child for whom no one else had time, who captured his heart. “From the moment I could crawl, I followed him everywhere. And he used to pick me up and throw me in the air. ‘My little bird’s flying!’ he’d say.” Mama laughed, and her eyes shone. I laughed, too, as if I were the one being tossed in the air. I loved hearing the fusgeyer story not only because it was exciting, but for the thrill of seeing Mama transform into a lighthearted girl whose soul brimmed with love.

  Zipporah was three when Meyr joined a group of fusgeyers in their village, Tecuci. She didn’t understand what it meant, but she loved the excitement when he got ready for an outing and the songs he sang when he came home. He played the accordion, and when he practiced for the group’s theatricals, she clapped her hands and danced.

  One Saturday night in the late spring, the whole village had a big party, and the fusgeyers entertained. Meyr played a special song, “for my little bird,” and beckoned her to join him on the stage of nailed-together boards. She danced, and everyone cheered.

  The next morning, Meyr hugged her so tight she could barely breathe. “I’ll write to you, little bird,” he said. “Every week. And I’ll send for you, I promise.” Why was he crying? He picked up his satchel and strode off, like he always did when the fusgeyers took their hikes. But everyone was weeping and acting strange. And Meyr didn’t come home that night.

  “Where’s Meyr?” she demanded.

  “Off to America,” she was told.

  That meant no more than hearing her brother had gone to the next village. But after two days passed and still he hadn’t returned, she stopped eating for a week.

  True to his word, Meyr wrote to her weekly; there was always a special note for her in the envelope with a letter to the rest of the family. At first one of her older siblings read his letters aloud to her and penned her reply. Soon she was able to correspond with him herself. Now she understood what he had meant about sending for her, and her heart fastened on America just as she had grabbed Meyr’s finger above her cradle and not wanted to let go.

  “He promised to send for me when I was twelve,” she told us. “And he said I should learn to sew, that skilled seamstresses did well in America.”

  An older sister, Dora, was apprenticed to a dressmaker and sewed beautifully. Zipporah begged for lessons, but no matter how many times Dora explained or placed her hands on Zipporah’s to guide them, her stitches sprawled crooked and ugly. “Oy, Zippi, a girl with no skills ends up a housemaid,” Dora declared in exasperation—though she took it back immediately, stunned by her own meanness; the shame of being sent out to domestic service marked both a girl and her family as failures.

  Zipporah tossed her head. What was the story the rabbi in their village told? About Rabbi Zusya saying that when he got to heaven, they weren’t going to ask, “Why weren’t you Moses?” No, they’d ask, “Why weren’t you Zusya?” Zipporah Avramescu clearly wasn’t meant to be a seamstress. God intended her to be … why not an actress? Because didn’t the whole village applaud when she danced with Meyr? And what better talent for a fusgeyer, since new groups kept setting out for America? Dora and two of their brothers emigrated when she was eight. They tried to persuade the rest of the family to come, since some groups, less jolly than Meyr’s, now included whole families. How could they leave, her parents protested, when they’d just gotten back on their feet with a cafe after the government had taken their tavern, and Zipporah’s grandmother and her brother Shlomo were ill, and … the arguments went on for hours. Zipporah cajoled and wept and raged to be allowed to go with Dora and her brothers on her own, but she was too young, her parents said.

  As it turned out, Mama’s skill, the one that paved her way to America, lay in neither needlework nor theater. Instead, it was the art she had first exercised in her cradle, when Meyr adored her, and it flowered in her family’s cafe. It was her ability to charm older men. This gift, like her infant winsomeness, she possessed in all innocence. How could a scrawny child, wielding a birch-twig broom taller than she, inveigle the pennies that were invariably slipped into her pocket? She wasn’t a cheeky child, either, a bold girl who got herself noticed by talking back or joking. Why, when she couldn’t even be seen—her arms plunged into dishwater in the kitchen—would Avner Papo the housepainter ask to have the little girl come stand behind his chair when he played cards? And she must be the one to fetch him a bowl of her mother’s stew or a glass of the home-brewed schnapps they sold, illegally—“the Romanians even made a law against Jews doing that!”

  Other than an occasional wink, Avner Papo barely acknowledged Zipporah’s presence. But he claimed she brought him luck. And he was lucky; he often won. He always gave her some of his winnings, too. Of course, she had to turn the money over to her parents; why else would they let her waste her time standing behind Avner’s chair when there were carrots and turnips to peel and dishes to wash? Once Avner realized what was happening, though, he always gave her an extra penny just for herself. She put all the pennies in a little purse Dora had sewn for her; they were her savings for America, to add to the money Meyr would send her when he was ready.

  Meyr lived in a city called Chicago. He married a Jewish girl whose family came from Poland, and they had one, then two, and soon four children—he sent a photograph when each new baby was born. Now that Meyr was a busy husband and father, his letters came only once a month or even two months apart. Still, he had sent money to help his parents start their cafe, and even though Dora and their brothers paid their own way, Meyr helped them get settled once they got to Chicago.

  Zipporah lived for her twelfth birthday. And she died a little when, even after her beloved Meyr sent the money for her steamship ticket, her parents insisted she was too young to travel on her own. And they needed her in the cafe. “I cried and cried. But I kept taking long walks in the hills because when I had my chance to be a fusgeyer, I was going to be ready!”

  One day a few months later, Avner the housepainter came into the tavern and announced, “This will be my last card game here.”

  “What? You’re sick? You’re dying?” someone asked—“I remember it was Reuven, the barrel maker. He always drank too much and his friends had to carry him home.”

  Avner just grinned.

  “Has the rabbi turned you into a pious man? No more cards? Not even any schnapps?” Zipporah’s father winked as he filled a glass for Avner.

  “I’m going to America!” Avner said.

  The broom crashed from Zipporah’s hands. Her legs dissolved to jelly and could barely hold her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” her father demanded.

  She snatched up the broom. Then she swept again and again by the table where Avner talked about his American cousins who were going to help him get started and the opportunities in pharmacy, which was Avner’s real profession. He had become a painter after the Romanian government passed a law saying Jews couldn’t own or manage pharmacies; he’d decided that painting houses was a better day’s work than making money for the Christian who had taken over his business.

  Fusgeyers from another village were going to pass through Tecuci in two days, Avner said. A friend of his was in the group, and he planned to join them.

  In all of the hours Zipporah had stood silently behind Avner, bringing him luck at cards, she’d come to know every wart and freckle on the housepainter’s thick, strong neck. She had scrutinized his dandruff-dusted shoulders and his shirt collars, soiled because he had no wife to scrub them—Avner’s wife had died giving
birth to their only child, a girl who was already dead when the midwife pried her from her mother. That had happened ten years ago, and no one had washed Avner’s shirts properly since.

  Another thing Zipporah had learned about Avner Papo was that he was kind, and not in the show-offy way of some people, who made a fuss so everyone would notice their good deed. Avner was kind in his heart. If Pinchas, who was simple, was doing some small job in the cafe and someone made fun of him, Avner interrupted by telling a joke, so as not to shame either Pinchas or the man who had mocked him. Once Zipporah was crying behind the cafe after a beating from her mother. She looked up, and Avner was there. “He didn’t say a word about me crying. He just reached toward my ear, and there was a penny in his hand!”

  Avner asked Zipporah’s father if she could stand by his chair for his “last card game in Tecuci,” a phrase that brought groans from his friends … and set Zipporah’s nerves on fire. She stood patiently while the men played cards, containing herself until Avner heaved himself up from his chair and lumbered to the outhouse. Then she slipped outside and danced from one foot to the other beside the outhouse, waiting for him to emerge. Everyone had been buying him drinks, and he staggered and didn’t hear at first when she said, “Reb Avner! Reb Avner!”

  She pulled at his sleeve. “Reb Avner!”

  “Wha—?” He wiped a hand over his eyes, as if brushing a cobweb away. Then he recognized her and smiled. He leaned forward, hands on his thighs, to bring his face close to hers. “What can I do for you, my luck-giving friend?”

  “Take me to America!”

  Zipporah had scarcely ever spoken to Avner, only to tell him in a near whisper what kind of soup her mother had made that day or thank him for a penny. Now all of her longing, all the fierce wanting forbidden to girls in the shtetl—why want when you can never have?—slammed into those four words.

  Avner reared back as if she’d shoved him.

  “Take me!” she repeated.

  “But how can … Your parents …”

  As Avner groped for words, she rushed on, “My brother’s there, you remember, my brother Meyr? He sent for me to live with him. All you have to do is take me with the fusgeyers and on the ship.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t. But here, to remember me …” He reached into his pocket for a penny.

  “Reb Avner!” She grabbed his arm to make him look at her again, and fixed all the force of her soul into her gaze. “I’ll bring you luck.”

  “ ‘I’ll bring you luck’—that’s what I said to him,” Mama told us, all those years later. “He scratched his head, the way he did in a card game when he was figuring out how to play a difficult hand. Every clock in the village stopped ticking, I was sure of it. And I felt so light-headed, my feet must have left the ground. And then he said …” She paused.

  “He said, ‘Do you have money?’ ” Barbara and I chorused.

  “And for a moment, I was so excited, I didn’t even understand what he was saying. As if he was already speaking English!”

  AVNER PAPO DIDN’T JUST bring Mama to America. He bestowed on her a talent that lay hidden … until the summer before our first day of school.

  With both Papa and Zayde working, Mama didn’t need to have a job. A lucky thing, she said, since there was nothing she could really do. Before marrying Papa, she’d worked in a dress factory, but, true to her early attempts, she was never a good seamstress. And “it takes a different kind of man than your papa to start his own business where I could keep the books, for instance, or help with the customers.” Whenever she said that, Papa winced. He wanted to open a business someday, and he and Mama and Zayde often talked about it, but he never felt he had enough money—though Zayde said it wasn’t money Papa lacked but chutzpah, a word I heard so often that I was surprised to find out it wasn’t English but Yiddish. It meant “courage, nerve.”

  Thanks to the hours spent behind Avner’s chair, however, Mama did have one surprising way to earn money, a skill that she unveiled in the service of our debut at Breed Street Elementary School.

  She was a genius at playing cards. No matter what the game—bridge, hearts, poker, gin rummy—she seemed to have a magic power to see straight through the backs of the cards and know what was in everyone’s hand. And she strategized her own play as if she could picture the final trick in a game before she even laid down the first card. She’d always played cards socially, either with Papa and other couples in the evening or with a group of ladies in the afternoon. But she’d hidden her brilliance, like a hustler who fumbles through a few games, then swoops in for the kill. Except that Mama had groomed her marks over years of adequate but unexceptional playing. It made her devastating.

  I got the first hint of Mama’s virtuosity one afternoon at Sonya’s in late June. She, Sonya, and two other ladies were having their Monday afternoon hearts game, while the children (all of us except the napping infants) played in the yard. Suddenly, louder than our shouting in a game of Red Rover, came shrieks from our mothers. We tore into the house like the small animals we were, quivering with worry at the sign of adult distress. But the women were laughing. And Sonya, Mrs. Litmann, and Mrs. Zinser were all looking at Mama.

  “How did you do that?” Mrs. Litmann said.

  “Do what?” Mama replied, with a smile that didn’t show her teeth.

  “Charlotte, you look like the cat that ate the cream,” said Mrs. Zinser.

  Did Sonya have a cat? Why hadn’t she let us play with it? My eyes darted around the room looking for a hiding kitty.

  “Shooting the moon once, all right,” said Mrs. Litmann. “But four times?”

  Ah, I knew they weren’t talking about the moon in the sky, but the game of hearts. Likewise, there was no cat at Sonya’s.

  “You’re going to think my sister-in-law is some kind of cardsharp.” Sonya glanced uneasily at Mrs. Litmann, one of her new neighbors whose husband owned a men’s clothing store.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mama said. “It’s just my lucky day.”

  “I’ll say,” Mrs. Zinser grumbled. She took her wallet out of her handbag. “How much do I owe you?”

  Mama made almost two dollars that day, and she gave a nickel to both Barbara and me.

  But Mama owed her success to more than luck. That Saturday night she and Papa played bridge with several other couples, and the next morning Papa couldn’t stop talking about how brilliantly they’d played. “That five-clubs bid, I never thought we’d make that. And when Arnie had all those high spades, but you kept trumping him. The look on his face! Guess how much we won, girls?”

  “Two dollars?” I said.

  “Two dollars and seventy-five cents.” He started to hand us quarters, but Mama stopped him.

  “A nickel each is plenty. That’s the school fund,” she said.

  After a few more afternoons and evenings like that, Mama started carrying a special purse, the very one made by her sister Dora, inside her handbag just for her winnings. She even got Zayde to invite her to games with his poker cronies, which Papa thought not quite nice. In fact, once Mama’s “luck” became a streak, Papa didn’t think any of it was nice. “These are supposed to be social games. You keep taking everyone’s money, no one’s going to invite us to play,” he said.

  Mama laughed. “They want to see if they can beat me.”

  “You need money for nice school outfits for the girls?” Papa persisted. “A few dresses for five-year-olds, how much can it cost?”

  “More than Julius Fine pays you!”

  Papa raised his newspaper and pretended to read it, rather than repeat that familiar argument.

  Mama’s skill did enhance her social standing. Mrs. Litmann played hearts with Sonya on Monday afternoons and bridge with a different group on Thursdays. One of the Thursday ladies moved, and Mrs. Litmann invited Mama to that group, which even included a doctor’s wife who drove to Boyle Heights from Hollywood in her own shiny yellow car. The minute Sonya heard that Mama was invited to the Thursday group, she wa
s so upset she put Stan in his stroller and walked to our house in the midday July heat.

  “You’ve got to get a telephone, Charlotte!” Sonya fanned her red face and gulped the cold lemonade Mama had poured for her.

  “What is it, Sonya?”

  “You ought to be able to afford one, all the money you’re taking from my friends at cards.”

  “What do I need a telephone for? To call Canter’s and have them send me corned beef without the fat trimmed off?”

  “Charlotte, I just moved to a new house. I’m just getting to know my neighbors. I’m asking you. Stop with the cards.”

  “I will,” Mama said. “As soon as I get what we need for school.”

  “Your darling girls, I love them like they were my own. Why don’t you let me treat them to some school outfits?”

  Mama stood. “Sorry to rush you out, Sonya. I have so much cleaning to do this afternoon.”

  “A few blouses and skirts,” Sonya said, and echoed Papa. “How much can that cost?”

  Actually, Barbara’s and my school clothes weren’t expensive, nor were the fancy extras Mama bought us—hair ribbons and ruffled ankle socks, as well as sweaters and jackets for cooler weather. How much did it take to look well turned out when our new Mary Janes, bought at a discount at Fine & Son Fine Footwear, already elevated us above some of our classmates, who would come to school barefoot?

  Mama’s project, however, was to outfit “us” for the first day of school. Not just Barbara and me, but Mama herself.

  In early August, when Mama’s take added up to twenty-seven dollars, with still more card parties to come, she bought some plum-colored silk shantung and took it to Mrs. Kalman, the dressmaker that Sonya’s neighbors swore by. (A year later and she would have gone to Aunt Pearl, but Pearl was still married at that time and was a housewife; she hadn’t yet started her dressmaking business.) Mama huddled over pictures in fashion magazines with Mrs. Kalman, a thin woman whose mouth was permanently pursed from holding pins between her lips; she would have seemed withered except for the delicious flowery perfume she wore. Barbara and I could still sniff Mrs. Kalman’s fragrance in each other’s hair for hours after we’d gone there; and it scented Mama’s suit when she brought it home. Appropriately for a school outfit, Mama had gotten a “smart suit.” Mrs. Kalman called it that, and Mama echoed her proudly during the weeks of measuring, fitting, making a white silk charmeuse blouse, and purchasing accessories—calfskin pumps with the fashionable new spike heel from Fine’s, a calfskin pocketbook, silk hose, and tan silk gloves. Naturally, the ensemble would include a new hat as well. Aunt Pearl was going to help Mama choose one, and whenever they talked about it, they whispered and giggled like Barbara and me.