The Ruby Slippers (17 page)

‘Are you ever coming upstairs?’ Grace’s voice cuts down shrill from above, shaking him from the story. With a sigh, he folds the sheets again, slips them back into a sheaf and into the envelope, then throws it in the case. He fastens the clasps, takes it round to the other side of the counter and pushes it to the back of the shelf below. It is his business, his secret; he has never really told Grace about his past before America, not the full horrible reality of it and how there was no innocence ever after. She would never truly understand because, even though she had grown a little sharp and cynical over the years, she had always held the belief in her heart, and still did, that there was good in the world to hold onto.

H
ARRISON
comes out of Finn’s place mad as hell. The last time he saw his dealer he was all smiles and high-fives. This time the guy had a bug up his ass, haggling over every grain, mumbling at him for off-loading small change and only too glad to see him out the door. He was feeling cool and mellow before he went in there, but now he feels mean and restless. It is only the thought of maybe running into her – Rain – that makes him feel anywhere near good. He has kept an eye out for her on his night-time walkabouts, and has come across one or two people at the night kitchen who knew her, but had no idea when she was due, and others who did not know her from Eve.

Tonight, approaching the stand, he is more hopeful. It’s a week exactly since that weird night. Aunt Crystal always used to do shifts every seventh day, so her turn must be coming round. The night kitchen is busy and four or five guys are there with two dogs growling at each other and having to be held apart. At the counter is a married couple from the Tabernacle – weird how you can tell them, both pint-sized and dressed like for church. The woman flips things on the griddle, while the man splits burger buns. Harrison strolls over: ‘Excuse me, but I was hoping to see a young lady who works here sometimes.’ Smiles fixed, unspeaking, they gaze back at him. ‘Her name is Rain.’ They glance at each other, then turn their stares on him. ‘Do you know her? Does she work here still?’ There is a pause before the woman volunteers, very correctly: ‘Rain is our daughter. She’s studying at the moment and really has no time to be out.’

‘Oh . . . does that mean she —?’

‘And might I enquire who is asking?’

‘Um, my name is Harrison. My great aunt is Crystal Parry.’

The woman’s face looks blank a moment, then, as it comes to her, her face spreads to a smile: ‘Oh, my goodness – Crystal Parry!’ And then to her husband: ‘You know Crystal Parry?’

‘Crystal? Course I know her,’ he replies gruffly. The woman points suddenly in Harrison’s face: ‘I remember you! You came to Tabernacle sometimes . . . Well how are you? Harrington, isn’t it? Gosh you’ve grown! You shoulda said who you was.’

‘We thought you musta been some kinda . . .’ growls the father, and Harrison suddenly sees how he must seem to them – 1.30 a.m. in a place like this – it doesn’t make him look like the boy next door; he’d better make it sound good: ‘No, well, I was just – I, uh, come down to offer her a hand. Last time I seen her she was all on her own.’

‘That was a mix-up. It shouldn’a happened,’ mutters the mother, firing a resentful glance at her man.

‘So you saying Rain is staying in these days?’

Here the father sees fit to bring the conversation to a halt, raising his hands and declaring: ‘That’s about it. You wanna see her, Sunday’s the day. You know the place.’

■ ♦ ■

Yes, it’s a relief to be ordinary again, doing ordinary things. All those days taken off seemed necessary at the time, but James wonders now if it didn’t just drive him deeper into his own loneliness. What with the funeral itself and the soul-searching and the crying and the sending of thank-you letters to those who sent their condolences – sentences composed with care, all reasonable and elegant but never speaking to his own aching self. Not to mention the chaos: the forgetting of the names of days, the abandonment of routines, of waking, wrecked in one day’s noon and prowling sleepless in the dawn of the next. And if that wasn’t enough, the restless searching for a way to remember his beloved, which had led nowhere and still was not resolved. At least he had the common sense to let it go for now.

And so, all this behind him, James goes back to work. The way things have been, it’s not so terrible to get up at a fixed early hour, to choose clothes to wear, already pressed and hung. To take breakfast – eggs, toast, coffee – allowing time and space to digest and gather things together and hear the national news, which fell away for all those months and lost all meaning. So now, to walk along the teeming street with unknown others, breathing in the spring air; to descend into the subway in common purpose; to hop on a train and give up a seat and hang on a strap – these unremarkable articles of existence adding up to affirmations. And then, as the carriage rattles in the tunnel, to gaze upon so many different faces, the permutations of race, age and experience written on them, the thoughts and feelings of separate beings turning in the orbit of every head, and to entertain never-to-be-answered questions: where did this person come from; where would that one be going? And what desires might be in this one’s heart? To be possessed of such ordinary curiosity, that in itself is good.

But as James pushes open the heavy door of the East Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, of which he is director, he comes face to face with his own hollow visage in the glass. Foreboding fills him, chasing away his sense of ease. For these two weeks, how did they manage without him? And why now should they need him back? And as for circumstances, will their show of sympathy be real, or will it mask resentments, dark, complicated emotions? James knows himself to be insecure, a child in need of pulling itself together, but at the end of the day, his anxieties are real. He lets go of the door, straightens himself and steps in, walks past the empty reading desks awaiting opening time, past the racks containing the day’s papers, so shining fresh he smells the ink. Looking across, he can see Jack waving at him from the top of a ladder set against the high shelves at the back. And there at the counter, unpacking new books, is Marcia, his deputy and loyal friend, who gushes, ‘James. Oh, darling James!’ She comes around and plants a kiss and all is well. He takes comfort and later on takes coffee with her and all the other workers, with cookies set by for the occasion, shared between smiles and consolations. But as always there is the feeling that such delicate strands of harmony can be unpicked and easy lightness be outweighed. The library, like the city, is prone to forces prowling and sometimes slinking in at the wrong door. Even in this place of quiet reflection, chaos can enter and order be undone.

The first wave arrives at nine: those who rise early and are well into their ordered day: the respectable unemployed, the unjustly redundant and the retired – first-come to be first-served by quick-fire internet connection and newsprint hot off the press. Then, around ten, arrive the later birds, the more relaxed about their plight: self-styled students, researchers and inventors, those who once had solid purpose, but who now live in hope against a tide of hopelessness. Come eleven comes the third wave, the feckless and the dispossessed, there to surf for scandal, pore over sports pages and travel features – ‘Fifty Best Bars’ and ‘Beaches to Die For’ – crumpled columns idly thumbed by those who have never sipped at cocktails and haven’t seen the sea in years.

A woman staggers in, fat and ragged and smelling of drink. Eleven in the morning and she is already smashed beyond reason. James groans out loud – this person is notorious for being disruptive, for singing at the top of her voice. He watches as she flops across a chair at the back of the reading section. He prays that she will just go to sleep; at least the snoring would be tolerable. But sure enough, within five minutes of coming in the door, the woman is top-billing at the Carnegie, opening up with ‘Private Dancer’ – this sung not so bad, but raw and fractured and all the more pathetic because she’s singing for an adoring audience in another place and time. Straight off, this sets the regulars bristling. James sends Marcia over to reason with her, knowing she will not answer to a man. Nor on this day will she listen to anyone. By the time she has moved on to the next song in her repertoire – ‘I Will Always Love You’ – reasoning has given way to warning, and she is told to ‘stop the racket or else’, which of course meets with increased defiance. As the woman unleashes ‘Jolene’ upon the long-suffering library community, James has no option but to call the police, though done with a sigh, because he knows that it will take up to two hours for them to arrive. It’s a long time for his readers to be made to suffer, her sad outpourings somehow tapping the despair that lurks in every human psyche. And even then there will be remonstrations with the officers, a refusal to go quietly, followed by lavish abuse for him and his staff, before finally they can remove her from the place. By lunchtime, he and his team will be worn down, and if there are other incidents, as is the way of it, by closing time they will all be on their knees, not so much undone by honest toil but by the daily infections of other people’s pain.

James does not notice one more black youth sitting among the rows. Harrison arrived at ten forty-two, placing himself somewhere between the inventive and the indigent. But in truth he has not set foot in a library since he was in high school all of two years ago, and even then he wouldn’t enter such a space unless they made him, and he never knowingly took down a book from the shelf. He is there when the drunk woman wanders in and starts her pathetic singing, but he doesn’t give a damn. For today Harrison is on a mission: to find out all about the objects of desire that have consumed his thoughts since he saved the grocer’s life. There has been time to take stock: no one has come after him, not police nor anyone else, which surely means he’s off the hook. The more time between that weird night and now, the less likely anyone will be to pin it on him. Harrison has even spied on him in the past two days, strutting around in all the usual places and doing all the usual things. How could the old man know how close he was to death, or if he was in the cold store five minutes or five hours? How would he raise the evidence, except for a broken pane of glass, which he himself knocked out, and his own wild slashes on a hunk of meat?

Now it’s all about the shoes. All is not lost. If what they said that night was true, he can make the situation work even better for him. He hits the keys: ‘ruby slippers’. First thing he sees: 2,160,000 results. The next thing to catch his eye: ‘ruby slippers stolen’. This gives him the real jitters. Paranoid, he checks over his shoulder, but seeing that all attention in the room is directed towards the wailing drunk, Harrison turns back to the screen. Clicking the link, he discovers that in 2005 the slippers were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Arizona – insured value $1,500,000!

But it’s a mystery: how could there be two pairs if the stinky woman came by hers seventy years ago? He reads on to find that at least twelve pairs were made: four known still to exist – one in the Smithsonian. This is big stuff – a cool million and a half to be sure! Getting even more into it, Harrison uncovers all kinds of crazy stuff about the shoes: replicas for sale all over the net; some cheap, some at crazy prices! And theatre companies, cookbooks, jewellery – every kind of website you can think of, going on about how these shoes are magic and mean all kinds of shit to countless people. Most of it, as far as he can see, is put up by crazies – gays especially, who he hates. They all seem to be obsessed and have some kind of kinky thing going on about Judy Garland, who is the big ‘gay icon’, or so the writing says.

He looks up and sees it’s gone twelve. An hour and a half he’s spent wading through this stuff and never did nothing like it in his life – ain’t he the scholar! The trashed woman is still there, and he can see the library staff whispering together and looking at their watches. He falls back into his own thoughts:
The Wizard of Oz
– something happy and sad about it at the same time. He remembers first seeing it when he was six. He kind of liked it – the funny characters, the wicked witch and the songs – but never was over the moon. It always comes around at Christmas and Great Aunt Crystal always tries to catch it. Nothing but sentimental, Uncle Henry used to say, but she never cared and tried to get him to snuggle up and watch it with her anyways, which always gave him a good excuse to leave the house.

As Harrison walks out the library entrance, two cops come striding up the steps in his direction. He holds his breath, but they don’t give him a second glance as he slips by.

■ ♦ ■

Five days in a row, Michael Marcinkus goes to the apartment of Rosa Petraidis and sifts, shovels and carries, clearing the chaos that is outside him and within. He is Hercules in his labours, he is God making the world. And on the sixth day he meets a man there and pays him to take away the heaps of sacks and the worst of the furniture and the foul mattress from her bed. And he is left to take up mop and bucket and change the plug on the ancient Hoover and bring it screaming to life, taking away the last of the sins.

On the seventh day he stands in a room with a couch to sit on and a rug on the floor, and on the mantelpiece a clock whose hands move at least to give an approximation of the time. In the sleeping area is a bed, although wanting a mattress for the time being, but the wardrobe is back where it should be and a table is in the kitchen-space, with cooker and cupboards containing pots and pans and essentials. A person could live here; they could live with dignity.

He calls at the hospital on the way home, and stands blank at the foot of her bed, until at last the words come: ‘Rosa. It’s me, Michael. Listen, don’t take it hard, but we went to the apartment, Rosa – just to clean, you understand, and sort out some things. And, well, there was things in there, a lot of it that was frankly unsanitary. It was a hell of a mess – you realize that? It was bad, Rosa, and, well, you just can’t keep a place like that . . . Anyhow, some of it I had to throw, but only what was too far gone . . .’ He drones on, feeling small, confined in spirit, afraid there is nothing in him worthy of saying, that his emptiness is no better than hers and that all his foolishness is somehow visible to the woman-corpse-alien lying on the bed in front of him. ‘I tell you, Rosa, we can make it nice and clean and cosy. It’s a fine apartment under all that and we can make it really nice. Maybe Grace and me, we could come round for tea and bring you something nice from the deli.’