The Ruby Slippers (24 page)

‘No, it’s just . . . I mean, do you find anything strange about him, anything weird?’

‘Beyond the fact that he’s painfully shy, no. Why, what did he ever do to you?’

‘No, it’s not that he ever did anything, he just . . . Well, he turned up one time at the hospital, with flowers for Paolo, and I could’ve sworn they never even knew each other.’

‘He must’ve done if he turned up there. What did he say?’

‘He said he knew Paolo – both of us from Woody’s Bar, where we always used to go, but I don’t remember ever seeing him there.’

‘People go to bars. Flowers, you say? Well, isn’t that really rather touching?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. It’s just I find him a little strange – creepy even. And that’s the other thing; it’s infuriating, he reminds me like hell of someone, but I just can’t put my finger on who. Does he do that to you?’

‘Not me. It’ll come to you.’

After this James feels a little ashamed of himself for being so mean-spirited towards Jack. By noon the sun’s rays are filtering, glorious, through the high windows, and he begins to feel lifted up on fine sensations. He will call Siobhan on Friday; he will surely keep to that. And he will call her at other times, when she least expects it and when he can most bring sunshine into her life. Then maybe Corinne will relent a little and grow more trusting. And he can hire a car and take his little girl on trips, driving out to the coast or up on winding roads to the hills. So taken up with this lovely prospect is James that all physical sensation runs out of him and he sits there, suspended, scissors in hand, until Marcia appears, leaning over him and muttering in his ear, ‘Sorry, James, we have a situation . . .’

‘Mmm . . .?’

‘A spitter.’

James surfaces from his dream of sea and sunshine. He looks up, baffled, then gets up and follows as she leads him over to the iron spiral stairway, up to the top gallery and along the balcony to the outsized art books. He can hear someone wheezing and hacking. At a table punctuating the walkway sits a dishevelled man, not old but made ancient by matted hair and layers of clothing darkened by dirt. In front of him is a huge hand-bound book, displaying over two pages Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp’. But it is another printed spread that takes James’s attention. Lying open on the floor is a library copy of the
Washington Times
and on it are pools of saliva and phlegm made by the man who, obligingly, as the result of his latest coughing fit, hawks up another mouthful and heartily deposits it onto the paper. ‘Disgusting!’ hisses Marcia, and quivers close to retching. The man shrugs, as if to say, what else can you do?

‘Excuse me, sir . . . You can’t do that. That’s library property!’ James feels absurd and childish saying this, and the man just shrugs again. James surveys the appalling mess.

‘OK. Call the police,’ he says sharply and makes for the stair. Marcia scurries along after him, but halts as James suddenly stops in his tracks and turns to stare again at the spitting man.

‘What?’ she asks of the shuttered expression on his face. ‘What . . .?’

Something inside James has stalled, something snapped. He will not do this; he will not call the police and wait two hours; he will not stand by and be a passive observer of his own unravelling. Marcia watches goggle-eyed as he strides back and positions himself behind the spitting man, then leans over and says, quiet and controlled: ‘Listen, creep, get the hell out of my library or I am personally going to throw you over that rail!’

The man turns his head to see James glaring at him. ‘Fuck off!’ he says disdainfully, and slumps back down again. Marcia watches, disbelieving, as James moves in on the man, pushes aside the table, grabs his collar, yanks him to his feet and, not even giving him a chance to react, drags him to the rail, ready and apparently able, in his shaking fury, to pitch the man over his shoulder. ‘No, no, no,’ the man whimpers. Every pair of eyes in the library is looking up now. ‘Please!’

‘Ready?’ asks James, drawing strength from nowhere.

‘Please . . . No . . .’

James desists – lets the iron go out of his arms, and the man pulls his coat straight, rushes to the stairway and stumbles down in a riot of clanking. All heads are turned as he scurries to the door and out. Marcia is flabbergasted: ‘My God . . . You wouldn’t really have thrown him over?’

‘I don’t know,’ James confesses in all honesty. Marcia watches, dazed, as he gathers himself, suddenly aware of where he is and who he is, the wildness going out of him and meekness returning. He shifts the table back into place, stoops to gather up the soiled paper. ‘Let me do that,’ she offers.

‘No, no. I’ll do it,’ he insists.

Jack comes clambering up the staircase. ‘Wow!’ he says, surveying James in undisguised awe. Then, as James bends down to clear the mess, gingerly taking hold of the paper, intending to fold it over, a headline catches his eye: R
UBY SLIPPERS FOUND IN
E
AST
H
ARLEM
. G
ROCER STRIKES GOLD
.

Everything changes.

M
ICHAEL
leans over the counter towards the reporter woman. Lucky for her she has a nice face and good manners, otherwise he would have lost it with her by now. ‘OK,’ he says with lowered voice, ‘so you want the whole story. How it happened? How I felt when I made the amazing discovery?’

‘Well, yes, exactly that.’

He thinks about it, drums his fingers, comes to his decision. Time to say it like it is: ‘I never wanted no publicity. This all came from members of my family. I had nothing to do with it.’

‘But . . . it was you who discovered the slippers.’ The reporter had not expected so hostile a reception from the man who had made the lucky find, and she has no idea that her turning up like this had almost sent him into cardiac arrest. ‘OK, Mr Marcinkus,’ she continues, ‘all I want to know is your personal take on it. I would’ve thought you’d be only too happy.’

‘Happy I am not!’ On a slip from the cash register he writes down Karl and Jenny’s details and gives it to her. ‘They gave you the story in the first place, they can tell you whatever they like. Now excuse me, I have customers to serve.’

‘Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you,’ she says, heavy on the irony and halfway out the door. He stands there, his brain boiling in his head. How could they do this to him, knowing he was so opposed, and expect him to play along? Unbelievable! He looks down at the copy of the
News
she has left on the counter: G
ROCER
S
TRIKES
G
OLD
. How could they cook up all this nonsense and put it out as truth? As soon as there is a lull, he runs behind the counter and calls Jenny. No niceties, nothing – he hits her with it the moment she picks up the phone: ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?’

‘Sorry, Poppa, but there was no point in asking you.’

He can barely listen – the brass neck of her: ‘No point? No point? What about decency, trust, honesty? That is the point.’

‘We knew you would object, whatever.’

‘Damn right I would object. This is bad. It’s criminal! It could send us all to jail.’

‘Really? The way I see it, there’s only one person could make that happen and that person is you, and I don’t think you’re up for that, are you, Poppa?’ He falls silent, and she puts an end to things: ‘See? There was no point. You would never have agreed. Just cool off and take it easy. It’ll all work out in the end. Goodbye, Poppa.’

■ ♦ ■

James sits in the sun outside Woody’s Bar. It’s the first time since Paolo died that he has come here after work, but with the weather so warm and giving lately, it’s a real pleasure to sit drinking a cold beer among people of goodwill, many of whom remember Paolo with affection. In between chatting to people about things in the news – the crazy Koreans and the doomed Republicans – James muses over his day. Since his stand against the spitting menace, he has, like it or not, acquired a certain new status somewhere between blue-eyed boy and masked avenger. How strange it has been: readers in the library coming up to congratulate him, staff jumping to that bit quicker whenever he asks for a task to be done or a humdrum procedure to be followed. But at the same time his heroics are the source of embarrassment. He is a librarian, a harmless drudge, a custodian of books on dusty shelves, not of Metropolis City. He has no idea what came over him, except that he got tired of being always on the receiving end and had felt ashamed ever since Siobhan told him bluntly to stop being a pussy. All the same, he must admit it feels great to be kind of a people’s hero, and he mulls over in his mind whether he will tell Shibby about it all later when he calls, but decides against it. God knows it’s not something to boast about. Strictly speaking, it was breaking the law, and if the man wanted he could press charges for assault.

While James is talking to a guy who’s keen to tell him about his incredible log cabin in the Adirondack, Jack walks by, goes into the bar and comes out two minutes later, beer in hand. ‘James, how are you? What a day, eh?’ And in no time he is in with James and his pals, telling the tale of James’s unbelievable act of valour. But James is less interested in the praise being heaped on him than the fact that Jack is so uncharacteristically talkative and at ease with himself – the effect, maybe, of drink on a warm day. When the back-slapping has run its course, Jack produces a newspaper and opens it under James’s nose. There again is the article about the ruby slippers. It prompts all manner of excitement, and soon there are any number of opinions being offered up, apropos the shoes and what they represent, from the philosophical – ‘Well, there are many layers of meaning in that film, after all’ – to the reverential – ‘Just look at Judy in that scene: if ever there was truth and beauty in a song, that was it.’ Amazing, incredible and fabulous are the adjectives of the afternoon and they only keep flowing when James casually remarks that he happens to know the grocer who has them. When he lets slip also that, although it had never really been his cup of tea,
The Wizard of Oz
had always been one of Paolo’s favourites, Jack is seized by a sudden inspiration. ‘That’s it!’ he exclaims, bringing about a charged silence.

‘That’s what?’ says James.

‘It’s the answer! For Paolo – the thing to remember him by.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asks James.

‘But you said yourself, it was his favourite. I mean, if I was looking and something like this came up, especially as you know the guy . . . I mean, to me that would be like a sign!’

And before James knows it, there are speculations going on left, right and centre, about how exactly one might strive to acquire so rare and valuable a prize. When one bright spark strikes up with the thought that it doesn’t have to be one individual buying one thing but many clubbing together, there is an immediate response: ‘Well, I would give a few bucks!’

‘It’s perfect, the perfect idea!’

Jack takes this as a cue to borrow a pen, tear a strip off the paper and rush around the establishment, coming back in five minutes with thirty signed-up names, which he thrusts into James’s hands. ‘Wow!’ enthuses James, inwardly not at all convinced. ‘Maybe there is something in it.’

■ ♦ ■

Michael spends what seems like the whole afternoon on the phone telling other reporters to go away, and fobbing them off with Jenny’s number. By four o’clock he feels even more tainted by the whole charade and even more to blame for Aunt Rosa, as if he personally had bulldozed her into the ground for death to claim her. And although all the increase in human traffic is good for trade at least, he knows it won’t last; at the end of the day he’ll still be sending Benjy home and dragging himself upstairs to the cold, lonely apartment, where there will be no meal waiting and the place shouting at him somehow in its emptiness.

It is, then, something of a relief when at about six o’clock, things having gone quieter, in walks James of all people, who he hasn’t seen in weeks. But instead of coming over, James keeps apart, taking up a basket and setting off down the rows, netting items here and there. It’s only when Benjy heads off to the basement that the old man takes his cue to come plodding over and make conversation: ‘So, James, how you doing?’

‘Ah, not too bad. May I have some of the Parma ham, please? A half pound . . . And some of the artichoke hearts.’ So, the guy is not much for talking – understandable, considering. For the moment Michael refrains from engaging James in conversation, directing all his care and attention to the spooning of artichokes, the snug fitting of lid to pot. James smiles vacantly as Michael slides the items across the countertop. But now, James takes up an unexpected tack: ‘Listen, you’ve probably had enough of this, but I read in the
Voice
about the ruby slippers.’

‘Goodness me; not again.’

‘I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me.’

‘No, no, it’s just been such a long day.’ And, finding in James someone who has always shown a genuine interest in him and his life, Michael confides in James about the hard time he’s been having. He omits the gritty details about his scheming family and his own questionable part in the affair, but one way or another he and James fall into a deep and meaningful exchange on the subject of the slippers, which seems to allow the two men to safely express their brightest dreams and deepest fears. James explains to Michael, in a muddled but sincere kind of way, how he has friends to whom the slippers mean much, and how, as a New Yorker of Irish extraction, he is European at heart and would love to hear more about Michael’s personal story. And so, seeing as the man in front of him has always been a good customer and a kind person, Michael lets down his guard and begins to tell James the tale of his desperate days in the old world, and how a movie once flickered and danced on a white sheet, dispelling darkness and savagery, and became special to him.

It is peculiar, this intense exchange between two very different men that stops and starts, in between Michael dashing over to serve customers as they arrive and leave. Benjy the shop boy, meanwhile, fills the shelves and mops the floor around them, as Michael rambles on and James stands rapt. By the time Michael reaches the end, describing how he finally lined up among the proud new Americans at Ellis Island, an hour has gone by and Benjy has long since checked out. At last, the story comes back from then to now, and James, freed from its spell, expresses his gratitude: ‘That is a fabulous story. Thank you.’