The Golem glanced at her, startled by her thoughts. As a coquette of eighteen, Anna had believed that a life without love wasn’t worth living. That woman was gone now, all romantic notions burned away in the Bowery’s crucible—and yet she was still, in some ineffable manner, the same Anna. I wish that everyone could know you like I do, she wanted to say, or maybe, I’m glad we’re friends again—but she held back. The night at the dance hall still lay between them, along with Anna’s wariness and her own guilt. Perhaps they’d never be close enough for true friendship, but the Golem had resolved to be whatever Anna needed.
“Anna,” she said, “may I buy that bicycle for Toby this summer, for his birthday? You can tell him you found it on sale.”
Anna glanced at her, startled, then shook her head ruefully. “I swear, I can’t have a stray thought around you. You’re not my charity-box, Chava. The ice was enough.”
“Please, Anna. I can afford it far more easily than you, and if it would make him happy . . .”
“All right, if you insist. But that’s it. I don’t want him thinking I can make whatever he wants appear out of thin air. So no surprises, please.”
“No surprises,” the Golem agreed, and felt a little better.
“I’d better put supper on,” Anna said. “Next month?”
“Next month.”
On the playground, Toby swung himself upright on the crossbar, grinning with giddiness as the blood drained from his head. He looked around, scanning the path below. There: his mother, in her hat with the faded rosettes, and the tall lady beside her, whom he knew only as Missus Chava.
Missus Chava was a puzzling figure in young Toby’s life. His mother had told him that they’d worked together at Radzin’s Bakery—but that was strange in itself, because his mother was a laundress, not a baker, and her few friends were all laundresses too, women whose hair was stiff with starch and who couldn’t laugh without coughing. And they only ever saw Missus Chava at Seward Park, where the two women walked their somber loops around the playground, their heads bent together like a couple of rabbis. If Toby tried to overhear, his mother would tell him to run off and play, her cheery voice lined with steel. It was the same tone she used whenever he asked about his missing father. What was his name? What did he look like? When you’re older, boychik. Now go outside and play.
Toby loved his mother deeply; he was a little afraid of her, too. He feared her darker moods, her angers and sadnesses, the way she’d come home from the laundry and sit on the sofa and stare at nothing. He feared the pain in her eyes when he woke from his nightmare of the old man’s wicked grin, the dreadful paralysis. He’d burst out of bed, desperate for movement, and she’d try to catch him in her arms, saying, Tell me, sweetheart, I can’t help if you don’t tell me! But it felt important that he keep the nightmare to himself; if he told his mother about the old man, maybe he would come for her, too. So Toby could only struggle free of her and go dashing up to the roof, to run in circles until he’d shaken the terror loose.
His secret and his mother’s secret, his nightmare and his missing father. They felt linked somehow, the facets of a mystery too large to grasp.
He watched from his perch as the two women parted, his mother approaching the playground, Missus Chava turning toward the park exit. He scrutinized Missus Chava as she receded, the only solitary woman in a sea of mothers and children. Whoever Missus Chava was, it seemed clear that she was a part of the mystery, too—for what could they possibly be talking about every month, except for everything he wasn’t supposed to know?
As he watched, Missus Chava stopped suddenly, and turned as though hearing her name called. A small thrill ran through Toby as their eyes met across the expanse of the park.
“Toby!”
Startled, he looked down. It was his mother, her arms folded in impatience.
“Toby, I called your name twice. Don’t make me wait, please, it’s supper-time.”
He shimmied down the swing-set and took her hand, and they returned to their dim apartment. And he did not think about Missus Chava again until his birthday, when he woke from his nightmare, already scrambling off his pallet in panic—and nearly collided with the bicycle that waited by the door, balanced patiently on its kickstand.
The panic fell away in his shock. He reached out and ran a hand along it: the glinting metal frame, the leather seat, the rubber handgrips. Too big for him, but that hardly mattered; he was tall for his age and growing fast. A bicycle, a Schwinn, the real thing. His.
His mother, already dressed for work, smiled at him from the sofa. “After supper,” she told him, “we’ll take it down to the alley and give it a try.”
He didn’t ask where it had come from. Even at his age, he wouldn’t have believed any story she might tell about finding one on sale, or a kindly shop owner who’d made an exception for a boy’s birthday. He merely expanded the mystery to include the bicycle, trusting that someday—when he was old enough, when he’d learned enough—he’d understand how it all fit together.
That night Anna walked homeward on aching feet, debating what to buy at the butcher’s for Toby’s birthday supper—brisket ends maybe; she could hardly afford them, but he loved them so . . . Had she made a mistake, she wondered, in allowing the Golem to buy him the bicycle? God forbid he should think she’d stolen it . . .
Sunk in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the startled squawks on the sidewalk ahead, or the wobbling shape that had caused them, until suddenly the disturbance was upon her: a small boy teetering atop a too-large
