The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,63
the oldest of six children, Mollie had learned to be quiet. She slept with her alarm clock under her pillow and turned it off before the ring penetrated my sleep. She was extremely tidy as well. Other than her scents—a flowery toilet water and the nasty but tantalizingly adult smell of cigarettes—she left little sign that I even had a roommate. Alone at night for the first time in my life, I drew her brush through my hair and put a few drops of her toilet water on my wrists. I wished resentfully that I were a Mexican dressmaker. Then she’d be interested in me.
I wasn’t the only one who felt slighted. Mama complained that Mollie might just as well have stayed in Chicago, for all the time she spent with us. “Your union is supposed to fight for better conditions for workers. Can’t they give you one night off to see your family?” she said as Mollie prepared to head off to yet another meeting instead of having dinner with us.
Mollie embraced Mama. “Char, darling, with the union just getting off the ground here, we can’t let up.” She gave Mama a kiss, then left.
“Twenty-eight years old, and she’s married to that union,” Mama muttered.
On Friday night, Mollie called to say she couldn’t have Shabbos dinner with us because she was being interviewed on a radio station. “What does she think this is, a hotel?” Mama said, and went to bed with a headache. Later, I awakened to voices from the kitchen. Mollie had finally come home, and Mama was weeping and talking to her in Yiddish.
Mollie took Mama out for lunch the next day, and on Sunday, though she spent the day visiting workers in their homes, she came back in the evening and joined us for a leisurely dinner. At first the dinner wasn’t what I’d hoped for. All of us were greedy for our guest’s attention, and the important things I wanted to tell her—that I was writing a report about Jane Addams, from Mollie’s own city of Chicago, and that I’d been chosen to be an editor of the school newsletter—got drowned out by everyone else. Audrey recited a stupid poem. Zayde, who’d joined us that evening, boasted about the radical meetings he used to attend in his village. Barbara talked about her playgroup and answered Mollie’s questions about the jobs held by the children’s mothers and what kind of working conditions they had.
Then Papa cleared his throat loudly. “Mollie, may I ask you a few questions?” he said. “About your union organizing?”
“Absolutely,” Mollie replied, at the same time that Mama said, “Bill,” with a warning look. Papa had been grumbling that some of the garment factory owners were our neighbors, small businessmen who were having a rough time in the Depression just like everyone else.
“I voted for FDR,” Papa said, “and I want you to understand, I’m all for unions at a big company like General Motors or in the coal mines. But why target the garment factories? You’re talking about small businessmen, Jerry Bachman, for instance.”
“You go to school with Greta Bachman, don’t you, girls?” Mama said. “Mollie, would you care for a bit more kugel?”
“Thanks, Char. I’ve missed your kugel,” Mollie said, but her focus stayed on Papa. “I met Jerry Bachman just the other day,” she said.
“Sid Lewis is another one,” Papa said. “He started out working in a factory in New York.”
“Sid?” Zayde broke in. “A penny-pincher. Minute somebody becomes a boss, they forget where they came from,” he said, smoothly sloughing off his admiration for anyone with the chutzpah to start a business.
Papa said, “You can’t tell me Sid doesn’t have sympathy for the people who work for him. He and Jerry, they’d pay their employees more if they could.”
“Bill, I’m sorry to have to tell you,” Mollie said, “but your friend Bachman is one of the worst offenders. He pays some women less than a dollar a week. Minimum wage for women in California is sixteen dollars, you know.”
“Barbara, help me clear the table, and we’ll bring out dessert,” Mama said, again trying to defuse their disagreement.
But I didn’t want them to stop. Unlike almost every other discussion I’d witnessed around our dinner table—about people we knew, alive or dead, or the minutiae of our days—Mollie and Papa were arguing about ideas! And Mollie was standing up for what she believed with no fear or apology. Not that Mama didn’t hold her own in fights with Papa, but