The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,70

a few years? Why leave Meyr and move to California?

Mrs. Barregas appeared when the stylist finished giving me a marcel wave. “Look at you,” she said. “A real young lady.” She handed me my glasses. My hair was soft and wavy instead of bushy. But beneath my tamed curls, my mind roiled. Had everything I’d heard from Mama been a lie?

Mrs. Barregas escorted me back to the lounge, bustling now that it was midday. Half a dozen women talked, laughed, and ate; the doily-covered platter now held a stack of sandwiches. Mollie was already there, sporting her own marcelled hairdo and lunching on a sandwich and a cup of coffee. She had found a seat in the lounge’s one quiet corner, where two chairs were partially secluded by a potted palm. I launched myself at her, but I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to begin.

Fortunately, Mollie knew what was on my mind. After she’d admired my hair, she said, “What has your mama told you about how she came to America?”

“That Uncle Meyr came first? With the fusgeyers?” Surely Mama hadn’t made up the fusgeyers! My heart sank at the thought of having to relinquish the most enchanting of my family’s stories.

But thank goodness, Mollie said, “That’s right.”

“Then,” I continued, “didn’t Uncle Meyr help some of his brothers and sisters come over—first Uncle Nathan and Uncle Victor and Aunt Dora? And when Mama was twelve, he sent for her?”

Mollie took a sip of coffee from a cup as delicate as our Rosenthal china. “This is your mama’s story to tell, so I don’t really have the right to speak for her,” she said. “On the other hand, she might be afraid of setting a bad example, or she might not want to say anything bad about my parents. Not everyone is willing to look at the truth squarely, like I do—and I think you feel that way, too.”

She cast me an inquisitive glance, and I nodded so vigorously my marcelled hair shook.

“So this is just between you and me, all right?” she said.

“I promise.” Secrets with Mollie, it’s what I had dreamed of. Still, the prospect of hearing this secret—something Mama had deliberately hidden?—both excited me and stirred up a sense of dread.

“Your uncles and your aunt Dora were already grown up when they came to America, so they could look out for themselves,” Mollie began. “But your mama—my father wanted to send for her, but my mother put her foot down. She said your mama was still a child, and we already had enough children in the house.”

“He didn’t send for her?” I said, absorbing the idea that the happiest day of Mama’s life was something that never happened. But if that were true, and Meyr didn’t send for Mama … “Then how did she get to America?”

“Ah.” Mollie smiled. “She was very brave and very clever.”

WHAT MOLLIE TOLD ME began much like the story I knew. Uncle Meyr had promised Mama he’d send for her when she was twelve. And not long after Mama’s twelfth birthday, she heard that Avner Papo from her village was leaving with a band of fusgeyers, and she begged to go with him. There were two crucial differences, however. Meyr didn’t send for her. Nor did Avner Papo agree to take her with him. So she went, anyway.

“By herself?” I breathed.

“Didn’t I tell you your mama was clever and brave?”

Mollie must have adored her young aunt’s story and asked for it often, because she remembered it in such detail, she might have been there herself.

At that time, it was a decade since the first hopeful fusgeyers like Meyr had set out for America. Hundreds of fusgeyers had passed through Mama’s village since then, but they were no longer merry companies of youths embarking on an adventure. The later travelers were like this group, a bedraggled collection of some 150 men, women, and children. An initial contingent of young people entered the village singing, but the rest straggled; a family of eleven trudged in an hour after the first arrivals.

Mama observed the group’s disorganization with delight. It would be easy to lose herself among them.

The night before Mama ran away with the fusgeyers, she was so excited she didn’t sleep a wink. In the pitch-dark, not knowing if it was near daybreak or still the middle of the night, she slipped out of the bed she shared with two of her sisters, tiptoed into the kitchen and packed a bit of