The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,72
What did your mama’s parents have to offer her if she stayed? And they must have seen that her mind was made up. If they forced her to come home this time, she was going to leave with the next fusgeyers, or the ones after that. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, though all at once I felt upset about everything. I ached for Mama, the ignored seventh child of nine, whose leaving caused barely a ripple in her family. I didn’t understand—I refused to understand—Mollie’s calm explanation for why Mama’s parents let her go without a murmur. And to hear Mollie talk about her as if she were just another child in a sweatshop … in my mind, I heard Barbara railing against our cousin’s coldness. Yet none of that changed my desire to be the Elaine that Mollie saw in me, a girl who didn’t flinch from the truth.
This would hardly be my last experience of ambivalence, but it may have been the most wrenching. I had no conflicted feelings, though, about my hunger to hear the rest of the story.
I blinked back my tears and leaned forward. “Did Avner help her?”
“Ah.” Mollie’s eyes gleamed. “Avner fell in love with her.”
“With Mama?”
“Why not with your mama? She wasn’t a beauty, but she always had a way about her.… You haven’t touched your lunch.”
I hadn’t noticed that a sandwich and a glass of milk had appeared on a settee next to me. I took a bite of the sandwich. Inside dainty triangles of white bread were slices of chicken, a delicacy that my family ate only on Friday nights. I kept on eating, though I barely tasted anything.
Avner found Mama and took her under his wing, Mollie continued, and they walked with the fusgeyers until they crossed the Austro-Hungarian border. From there, they took a train (the tickets provided by a Jewish agency) to the port of Rotterdam. The pennies Mama had saved were nowhere near enough money for the ship, but Avner was hardly going to abandon her. Crossing the Atlantic, she returned the favor. She turned out to have the stomach of a born sailor, whereas poor Avner broke out in a clammy sweat when they’d barely left port. Mama held a bowl for him when he vomited, coaxed him to eat bits of bread, and spooned soup into his mouth. After a week, he finally adjusted to the ship’s motion, and she helped him up to the deck for a little fresh air.
At last the ship arrived in America. In the city where Avner’s cousin lived, New York.
“Your brother is where?” Avner’s cousin asked her, dismayed at having to squeeze not one but two greenhorns into his tenement apartment. “Chicago? How are you going to get there?”
“I’ll walk!” Mama declared. She had crossed Romania on foot, hadn’t she?
“New York to Chicago, she thinks she’s gonna walk.” The cousin guffawed, and his whole family acted like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
“Your poor mama!” Mollie said. “She had no idea how big America was.”
“What about Avner falling in love with her?”
“Ah, I’m getting there.”
Once the cousin tired of bullying Mama, he sent a telegram to Meyr, asking him to wire her train fare. Two days later, Avner accompanied her to the train station and walked with her onto the platform to say goodbye.
Mama felt a lump in her throat, thinking of never again seeing Avner, who’d been kinder to her than anyone in her life. She told him she was going to miss him. He said he would miss her, too. Then, in a rush, he took her hand and said, “You’re too young now, you’re just a girl. But in three, four years, I could send for you.” She had no idea what he was talking about. Until he said, “Or I could come there. Chicago. For you to marry me. To be my wife.”
Heaven help her, she knew the look on her face was disgust. She loved Avner, but like a father; he was a grizzled old man! “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, trying to smile. To take the hurt out of his eyes.
Looking back, she would see that moment at the train station in New York, when she had hurt Avner Papo, as the moment her luck ran out.
At some point Mollie and I shifted from the lounge to another area of the salon, where we had manicures and she told me what happened when Mama came to Chicago.