The Ruby Slippers (39 page)

She remembers it too when Grampa came round the other time and was mad, all shouting like she never saw before. She went and stood behind the couch and put her fingers in her ears. Her dad was drinking beer and watching TV, but then he got mad too and went red and stood up, looking down at Grampa. And then Grampa was riding on her daddy’s back, just like playing pig-a-back. She saw they were having fun together, which was nice and happy because Grampa and Karl, her dad, didn’t always be friendly. She thought it was a game, like silly old Grampa and silly old Daddy. Then Daddy started to make a noise like a bear – all rough and grunty out of his throat – and Grandma came running out of the kitchen and hit Grampa around the head with a frypan. And she was full of laughing until mommy got to screaming. Then she started screaming, too, because her mommy always knew what to do, but now she didn’t, and that’s what made it all so terrible.

After, when Grandma came and lived with them and Grampa didn’t, she asked her mommy if he was dead, but she said he wasn’t. And one day Mommy said, ‘Listen, honey, how would you like to come with me and see the ruby slippers?’ They walked all the way to the subway and sat up on the seats and everything fell away behind her and the train was full of people – all in lines and floppy like her cuddly toys with their eyes drooping down. When the train kept going she stopped staring at the people and just sat on Mommy’s knee watching the shapes and shadows flying by and feeling small. But they were like giants going up the elevators and into the square and everything was up in the sky – lights and pictures flicking over like pages in a storybook. And they had gone around a high golden corner just when she was getting tired, and came near the big building which her mother called the ‘sail room’, and she sucked her thumb at the bigness of it all. On the outside it was like a grey castle, and as soon as they went in, it was all ‘gorgeous’ – that’s what Mommy said. They walked over squidgy carpets and she could feel the lights hot on her head, and they came into a great big humungous room where the walls and the carpets sucked all the talking out of everybody and the ruby slippers were up in a great big seashell thing. It was a bit like Santa’s Grotto. She saw the shoes shining red, light spreading everywhere from them, and that was how she found out that the slippers were very, very special.

And Sylvie recalls the day Daddy said him and Mommy was going to the ‘sail room’ again, but she couldn’t go. Auntie Suzy was being babysitter, but then Daddy came back and Mommy wasn’t with him. He whispered to Auntie Suzy and her eyes opened wide like something terrible had happened, so she asked if Mommy was OK, but Daddy laughed and said, ‘Oh she’s fine, honey,’ but then made a smile on his face like an egg all cracked, so she knew something was wrong. Suppertime, Mommy still wasn’t home, so she sat around, picking at her food and moaning when Daddy took her to bed. Then when she woke up in the middle of the night, there was Mommy, and she felt happy again and decided not to make a ‘song and dance’ next time her mommy shouted at her or wasn’t very nice, because it was much better than her not being there at all.

And of course she was there the day Grampa was in his new suit and they went to the Sunrise, which her mommy told her wasn’t theirs any more. But when they got there, Grampa sat down drinking coffee, leaning back, young and happy like it was all still his. Then the door went
ding
so loud everybody turned to look who had come in. And it was the nice man with the sparkly face, the James man she remembered from before, and a pretty girl with orange curls flopping out of a blue hat. Her name was Ssh-bom and she had a lollipop just for her. Later James brought out the slippers, like magic, and put them on the counter, and they were so pretty, but not like when they were in the ‘sail room’, so she wasn’t afraid to touch them. And they all stood around them and stared, and then Momma came over and said, ‘Look at you all standing there dreaming.’ And they started talking again and forgot she was there. So she reached up to the box and took one slipper, then the other, and put her foot into it – it would be so nice. Then Ssh-bom looked down pink and lovely and saw her and said, ‘Sweetie, you shall go to the ball.’ And all of them turned their eyes on her and smiled and she felt so happy, like lights came on all around her and inside, making her all glowing like the angel on the Christmas tree.

And the next time Mommy and her went round to see the ‘old deers’ – that’s what Mommy and Daddy called them now – Grampa lifted her right up, up in the sky, just like he used to, and said, ‘You want to play with the ruby slippers, Little Sylvie? You can, any time you come to see us. They are yours now. Yours. Yours. Yours.’

O
F
course, you might think of going there, to find the place where all of this happened. And you could just as easily do so, any day of the week: simply follow your feet all the way down to the intersection of 99
^th
and 2
^nd
. There you would expect to come across the perfectly preserved Sunrise Deli and Grocery Store, kept just so since its heyday in the Twenties. But disappointment would await you, because the place is no longer there. Marty, the nice kind Italian American who was so at home in Michael Marcinkus’s deli, was also very good at business and never missed a trick. Long before he ever met Michael, he had known that the city planners had ideas for a neighbourhood development, and he knew people in property who thought often and much about this and had a gleam in their eye.

And for this reason, only a year after Michael had sold the lease to him, Marty received an offer to sell out and make a tidy sum, for which he was neither guilty nor apologetic. Money follows a man like this and, unlike Michael, a man like this never lost sleep over the making of it. The people who bought the lease from Marty also bought up the whole shambling block attached to the deli, and knocked it down and rebuilt the whole damn shebang.

On the corner where the Sunrise once stood is now a fried chicken outlet – not quite the real deal, but the owners managed to combine the letters K, F and C in the title and put up signs in orange and yellow. People were happy to stand in line and buy fast food from the place, which is open to this day, seven days in every week, so you could always drop in there if you were so inclined, as a kind of consolation once you had found the deli gone.

Michael and Grace, however, are not gone – either in the ground or in the head. They took an apartment, quiet and comfortable and at ground level, because both their sets of legs are going, as they discover whenever they walk out, which is less and less often these days. Their place is just around the corner from Karl and Jenny’s in Brooklyn. (Karl lived to tell and retell to his own glory the tale of the crazy auction of the crazy shoes, his actions finally forgiven, though never quite forgotten.)

And neither was Barrell the dog forgotten. He was happy that summer in his house in the side alley. He loved being surprised by the different tasty morsels that would arrive in his bowl one day after the next. He enjoyed being walked twice a day, sometimes by Michael, sometimes by Benjy, and he made it through the fall, quite warm and comfortable in his cardboard kennel. But winter was a different thing, and the Sunrise was situated where the chill wind came down uninterrupted from the East River and could creep into your bones, which was never good if you were old and past your prime. In that respect it was a good thing that Barrell never had to endure the elements, and that other workings of time took their course instead. It was Sylvie who found him in mid-November, around about the time of her birthday. Grampa had sent her running round to the alley to see him, and as soon as she had come near to Barrell’s house, she knew something was wrong, because by now they loved each other so well that the moment she came around the corner, he would always come padding out.

This was, for Sylvie, her first intimation of the cycle of things. Barrell’s time had come. As for the ruby slippers, they never went into a display case, nor into the river; they did not find a home in the New York Public Library or the City Museum, though they would, all the same, have commanded a respectable price. No, at this very moment the slippers are sitting pretty on a shelf in Michael’s new living room. They are there behind his head whenever he and Grace watch TV, which is more and more these days, and in his vision whenever they sit and slowly take their meals together.

Michael remembers how Sylvie came and played with the shoes whenever Jenny brought her to see him and Grace in the new apartment; he recalls fondly how she would walk fine and high in them, and would throw a pink fluffy scarf over her shoulder to trail behind, which of course made everyone hug her and love her all the more. It gives him pleasure to think how, now that Sylvie has grown out of these things, others will follow. He receives comfort from the knowledge that, from time to time and generation to generation, there will be children to put the shoes on and experience the sensations that are somehow imprinted in them, there to be awakened and enjoyed anew.

Every now and then, Michael looks up at the ruby slippers and thinks how they meant so much to him when he was younger and how it is a wonder that once he was
that
but now is
this
. He thinks about Rosa, his mother, the remarkable woman who started it all when she placed these same shoes on the feet of a great star. It helps each year that goes by, his thoughts softening a little to an acceptance of who she was and who he is. Simply to feel better about things, little by little, over time. A shift here, a small step there.

And that surely approximates to happiness.