The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,8

sounded like the same radio broadcast playing at the top. We didn’t hesitate in the doorway this time but burst into a low-ceilinged room that smelled like a combination of cigars and my school classroom. The classroom smell came from a big chalkboard, where a man with a mustache stood writing in a hand that would have gotten an A from my teacher. Excelsior, I read in his perfect script, and Irish Eyes, as I took everything in with a time-slowed-down clarity: the radio perched on a filing cabinet, a tree hung with coats and hats, a droopy-eyed man sitting at a table strewn with dozens of what I recognized as the racing forms sold by the newsboy outside the ice cream parlor. Another messy table abutted the first at a weird angle, as if someone had just shoved both tables into the room and wherever they landed, they stayed.

There was a third table, but it was lined up squarely with a corner of the room, and its dozens of papers were stacked as neatly as Zayde kept his room at home.

He didn’t notice us. Chewing on a pencil, he stared at a piece of paper on the table with the kind of intense concentration he brought to our games of gin rummy. I expected Barbara to say something, but she must have exhausted her first wind simply getting us here.

I broke the silence. “Zayde!”

He jumped up so fast his chair fell over. “Girls! Is everything all right at home? Is someone sick?”

Barbara found her voice. “Why did you tell us you worked in a bookstore?”

“Is someone sick?” he repeated, although he was quickly realizing we hadn’t been sent here because of a family emergency. That this was the emergency. “Who told you to come here? This isn’t a place for children.”

“You said you worked in a bookstore, not a bookie joint!” Barbara accused.

“Oy, you thought …” Laughing—shifting his strategy with the quickness any immigrant learns if he wants to survive—Zayde walked around the table toward us. “You don’t think I work here? That’s a good one, isn’t it, Mr. Melansky?”

“A good one.” The droopy-eyed man guffawed. “That’s rich, that’s a good one.”

“I just come by when I have a little extra time and give my friend Mr. Melansky a hand.”

“That’s the ticket, ha ha,” Mr. Melansky chimed in.

“But …,” Barbara sputtered. Zayde’s initial defensiveness hadn’t rattled her; it was the same way we reacted when accused of anything. But now he’d outflanked her.

“Barbara, Elaine, say hello to Mr. Melansky,” he said. “And Mr. Freitag,” he added, nodding toward the man who’d kept writing on the chalkboard through all of this—he couldn’t stop, since race results were still coming in over the radio.

“How do you do?” we said, temporarily cowed by the rules hammered into us by our parents and teachers: Be polite to grown-ups. Never make a scene.

“Girls, why don’t you get yourself a treat?” Zayde reached into his pocket, took out a fat roll of bills, and peeled one off for us. The bills were all ones; I’d seen him roll them at the kitchen table when he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to go out and build the West. Still, to us, a dollar was a fortune.

I looked at the characteristically tidy table where he’d been sitting, lit by a small lamp I remembered from our living room, and my legs shook the way they had the time I finally climbed to the top of the slide and stared down that shimmering Niagara, so bright with reflected sun it made me dizzy. There was also a calm, however, an elegant beauty, in holding the solid physical evidence against his mere words of denial. Later I thought of that vertiginous moment as the first time I reasoned like an attorney.

“Zayde, it’s not true,” I murmured, more sad than angry.

“What?” He crouched, hands on his thighs, to look me in the eye (he was sixty-two then, but vigorous and surprisingly limber). His eyes, hazel like mine, warned—begged?—me not to go further. Or was he asking me to free him from this deception?

Whatever he wanted, I couldn’t turn back. I was standing at the top of the slide, the kid behind me on the ladder pressing into my calves. The only thing I could do was force my wobbly legs onto that terrifying cataract and let go.

“You don’t work in a bookstore,” I said. “You work here.”

“A little respect your zayde deserves!” Mr. Melansky huffed, but Zayde held up