World's Fair Read online

  I understood the reach of his life. I understood him as living by nature as a sojourner. He went forth and returned. He covered ground. His urges and instincts even on his one day off pointed away from home.

  He rarely kept his word to return in time for dinner or to bring me something. My mother could not abide his broken promises. She was forever calling him to account. I saw that this did no good. By way of compensation he brought me things when I least expected them. A surprise surprised. It was a kind of teaching.

  TWO

  My mother ran our home and our lives with a kind of tactless administration that often left a child with bruised feelings, though an indelible understanding of right and wrong. As an infant I was bathed with brisk, competent hands and as a boy fed, clothed and taken through unpleasant events with strong admonitions to behave myself. I was not to express dissent. I was to stop the nonsense.

  She was a vigorous buxom woman in her late thirties. A strong will beamed in her clear blue eyes. There was no mistaking her meaning—she was forthright and direct. She construed the world in vivid judgments. She felt strongly that even little boys bore responsibility for their actions. For example, they could be lazy, selfish, up to no good. Or they could be decent, kind, truthful, honest. However they were, so would their fate be decided.

  All about in the air were the childhood diseases—whooping cough, scarlet fever, and, most dreaded of all, infantile paralysis. She believed children were at risk to the extent that their parents lacked common sense. “I saw that Mrs. Goodman at the Daitch Dairy,” she said coming in from her shopping one day. “Poor woman, I don’t envy her. Her daughter wears a brace on her leg and will for the rest of her life. She cried telling me this. But she let the child swim in public pools on the hottest days of the summer, so what else could she expect?”

  Her stories dazzled me. Their purpose was instruction. Their theme was vigilance.

  In the mornings, with my father and brother Donald out of the house, my mother threw open the windows, she plumped up pillows and quilts and laid them across the windowsills in the sun. She washed dishes and put clothes to soak in the laundry tub. She swept and ran the Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Everything she did was a declarative act. Her mastery of our realm was worth my study.

  My mother wanted to move up in the world. She measured what we had and who we were against the fortunes and pretensions of our neighbors. That my brother and I were properly clothed; that my father was self-employed; that we paid the rent on time, the telephone bill, the electric light bill: these were the elements of a composition she wanted the world to understand as the quality of our family.

  When she was ready to do her marketing, she changed into a belted dress and shiny black shoes and put on a straw hat whose brim she turned up on one side. A little ribbon ran around the crown. She applied red lipstick and went off with her pocketbook tucked under her arm.

  At the end of an afternoon she sometimes rested on the sofa for a few minutes and read the newspaper. In contrast to my father, who held the paper open at arm’s length at the breakfast table, my mother, reclining, held the paper at the spine with one hand and slapped the pages left and right with the back of the other.

  “I don’t trust that doctor,” she said of the physician attending the Dionne quintuplets. “He likes the limelight too much.”

  In the evenings, after dinner, with everything quieted down, she sat in the living room and read a novel from the rental library while she waited for my father to come home. I sometimes watched her when she didn’t know it. After a while she would close the book in her lap, her legs would be tucked under her, and she would stare at the floor. She worried a lot about my little grandmother, who was sickly and had spells. But I think she worried mostly about my father.

  My father was not a reliable associate, I was to gather. Too many things he said would come to pass did not. He was always late, somehow he would suppose he could get somewhere or accomplish something in less time than it actually took him. He created suspense. He was full of errant enthusiasms and was easily diverted by them. He had, besides, various schemes for making money that he did not readily confide to my mother. She seemed most of the time to be aroused to a state of worry regarding his activities.

  When he was late my father was evasive, which seemed to justify her anger. He had a weakness for cards, I heard my mother tell her best friend, Mae. He liked to gamble and could not afford to.

  I understood that my father seemed to elude my mother’s ideas for him. He did not comport himself appropriately, given the hard times we were living in. I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

  The conflict between my parents was probably the major chronic circumstance of my life. They were never at peace. They were a marriage of two irreducibly opposed natures. Their differences created a kind of magnetic field for me in which I swung this way or that according to the direction of the current. My brother seemed to be more like my mother in his love of rules and a disposition for the proper doing of things. I, a quieter, more passive, daydreaming sort of child, understood my father with some sympathy, I feel now—some recognition of a free soul tethered, by a generous improvidence not terribly or shrewdly mindful of itself, to the imperial soul of an attractive woman.

  My mother’s one indulgence was to play the piano, which she did with authority, as she did everything. She had paid for her own lessons as a girl by working as an accompanist for silent movies. She was very good. What I liked, when she sat down to play, was that her rigorous thought was suspended. Her expression softened and her blue eyes shone. She sat with her back very straight, like a queen, her arms outstretched, and she filled the house with beautiful music that I thought of as waterfalls or rainbows. She could sight-read any score placed before her. When Donald brought home a new lesson from the Bronx House Music School, he would ask her to play it through just to hear how it was supposed to sound.

  Donald was up to “Für Elise,” by Beethoven. He had already mastered Schumann’s “The Wild Horseman.”

  I expected someday to take piano lessons too. In the meantime I toyed with the keys, experimented with sounds, with the moods and feelings I could produce in myself by arranging my fingers on several keys at once and hammering away.

  Under the glass counter near the cash register in my father’s store downtown were shelves of toy instruments for children. I had one of every kind. I tooted a penny whistle, I blew a Hohner Brothers Marine Band harmonica, I got sounds from an ocarina, known also as a sweet potato because of its shape.

  The easiest thing to play was a kazoo, not an instrument at all, but an oval tin tube with a piece of waxed paper screwed taut in a hatch halfway down its length. The paper vibrated as you hummed into the kazoo, and “Voilà,” as my father said, you were a musician.

  I liked to march down the hall all the way from my room at the back of the house to the front door while playing the kazoo with one hand and waving a flag with the other.

  THREE

  We lived at 1650 Eastburn Avenue. We occupied the ground floor, and our landlords, the Segals, the second or top floor. To distinguish our way of living from that of the families who tenanted the apartment houses prevalent in the Bronx, we called ours a “private house.” It was of red brick and had a flat roof. A stoop of eight white granite steps led down from the glass-pane doors to the street. To one side of the stoop, under the windows of our front parlor, was a little square of earth contained on three sides by a privet hedge. Here I built roads and dwellings—a whole city, in fact—for
a society of small brown ants, whose reluctance to inhabit it never discouraged me.

  I remember the light on Eastburn Avenue. It was a warm and brilliant bath that bleached the brick houses of red and of yellow ocher, the ruled sidewalks, the curbstones of blue Belgian block, into a peaceful and forbearing composition.

  I imagined houses as superior beings who talked silently to each other.

  At noon the sun shone from the top of my favorite toy, a Railway Express truck like the ones that occasionally made deliveries in the neighborhood. My truck was dark green, with solid matching green wheels and tires of hard rubber, and red frontier-style Railway Express lettering on the sides. The two rear doors unbolted and swung open exactly in the manner of the real ones. The steering wheel, which actually worked, was mounted at the correct angle, an undeviatingly horizontal on an absolutely vertical shaft. The sound of the motor, an electric whine, I supplied myself. I liked to push my truck over the cracks in the sidewalk and the obstacles of pebbles and sticks.

  The sun baked the sidewalk so that it felt good on the knees and the palms of one’s hands.

  Across the street was a six-story apartment house, and two more private houses like ours, with droopy, heavy-leaved trees in front; up at the corner of Mt. Eden Avenue, the south end of the block, was the tile-roofed red brick mansion of Mrs. Silver, the widow of Judge Silver, a state Supreme Court Justice. My mother had told me that. This mansion was on a raised lawn behind a retaining wall of round stones cemented together. I never saw Mrs. Silver up close, but my mother assured me she was a fine woman who did not think she was better than anyone else.

  I could see past the corner of Mt. Eden Avenue to the plane trees of the Oval, a small park with benches circling the garden beds of tulips, where the mothers and children gathered in the afternoons. A string of such ovals bisected the width of Mt. Eden Avenue all the way up the hill west, to the Grand Concourse.

  On the far side of the Oval was the beginning of Claremont Park, or the big park, as we called it; from my vantage point it was a great swatch of forest where the land went green.

  If I turned in the other direction, I saw the north end of the block, 173rd Street. Here there was no greenery, but another apartment house whose entrance was around the corner, and, across the street, the enormous schoolyard with its chain link fence of P.S. 70. This was Donald’s school and I would go there too.

  Everything we needed was close by. Beyond P.S. 70 was 174th, where all the stores were. I had been born in a small lying-in hospital at the corners of Mt. Eden and Morris avenues, just a block west. The Mt. Eden Center, the temple where my old grandma went on Friday nights to pray, was also on Morris Avenue.

  Most of these buildings and parks and houses were not more than ten or fifteen years old. It was a new neighborhood. I think the light was so clear and broad because of all the open space that allowed the sun to come down evenly. There were no big buildings or narrow alleys to make sharp angles and deep shadows and block out the blue of the sky, as was the case downtown in Manhattan, at my father’s store.

  In the street I preferred my own company to whatever miserable wretch of a child wanted to pit his ideas and requirements for me against my own. Alone, I could be happy. I assumed everyone’s will was stronger than mine. This attitude may have come of my situation as a severely younger brother.

  Because I was eight years younger than Donald I was something of a novelty among his friends—like a puppy or a kitten. I grew up being instructed, led about and mauled by older children. There were great numbers of them. As an infant I had held on to the sides of my carriage in terror as one or another of these louts pushed me along the street as fast as he could. They would have contests, a sort of Eastburn Avenue Olympics in occupied baby-carriage racing. Their tender ministrations poked ice cream pops into my face, or, in winter, pulled my hat down over my eyes so that I would not suffer from the cold. They were not cruel, merely dangerously boisterous. Their names were Seymour, Bernie, Harold, Stanley, Harvey, Irwin, and so on. In my mind they are like a chorus of noisemakers. Not faces or voices I recall, but horns, bladders, ratchets, and wheezing party favors that someone blows into your face.

  In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself to be.

  But I did have a companion of sorts, the family dog, Pinky. My father had brought her home without warning. We had named her for the color of the inside of her pointed ears. She was a long-haired dog, a sort of terrier, white, with a thin snout and dark bright eyes. She was smart, she seemed to understand words. She had a good trick, which was to drink water from the fountain in the Oval: she stood on her hind legs and held the pedestal basin with her front paws.

  But when my mother put Pinky out with me, she tied her leash to a root branch of the privet. This was because the dog was totally untrained and ran away whenever she had the opportunity. And she was fleet. My mother was not fond of her. My father was. Donald, of course, loved her. I loved her but could not control her. If I held her leash, she pulled me all over the place until I fell. She got away from me almost every time. I didn’t like that.

  As I played in front of the house Pinky sat and watched me or barked at passing cars and lunged against her restraint. This particular morning we both heard a roar from the north end of the block. The dog barked furiously. Around the corner came the Sanitation Department water wagon. An enormous cylindrical tank was mounted on the flatbed of a Mack truck. The entire equipage was painted khaki, suggesting perhaps its origins during the World War. As it turned into our street two fanlike jets of water shot out of the nozzles suspended under the tank. Oh what a sight! An iridescent rainbow moved like a phantom light through the air, disintegrating as millions of liquid drops of sun and forming an instant torrent in the gutters at the curbstones. The water wagon rolled by with a fearsome roar and hiss. I ran along the sidewalk to feel the driest edges of the great spray. Behind me Pinky was barking and rearing against her collar. Then, from one moment to the next, the nozzles shut off, the truck went into another gear and turned the corner at Mt. Eden Avenue, and was gone from sight. But the air was cool and fresh. The street was black and shining. In the raging course of water flowing swiftly along the curb I tossed a Good Humor ice cream stick. Other children had appeared and dropped in their sticks and twigs. We followed our boats back down the block as they turned and twisted in the current, followed them down the gentle incline of Eastburn Avenue to their doom, a waterfall pouring into the sewer grate at the corner of 173rd Street.

  I could count on seeing the water wagon in warm weather every couple of weeks. Less frequent appearances were made by the coal trucks. They came in early autumn, usually, while the temperature was high.

  These trucks were of great interest to me. They were so heavy, so massive, especially when loaded with their mountains of coal, that only a clanking chain drive could turn their wheels. They were like rolling houses. One day a delivery was made to 1650. The coal truck backed up to the curb, parking almost at right angles to the sidewalk. It was the lawless arrogance of the mighty. The driver jumped out, bare to the waist, heavily muscled, like the truck. He was whiter in the chest than in the arms and he had a red bandanna around his neck. I recognized him as brother to the men who held the jackhammers and swung the picks and axes in the street-repair gangs. He disdained even to hear the barking dog. He threw a lever and the truck bed rose, tilting back on its hydraulic lifts so slowly, and with such grinding protest, as to transform itself in my mind into a screeching rearing dinosaur. When and only when the loaded bed stood at a dangerously slanted angle, almost at the vertical, did he bring it to a stop and throw open the sluice gate at the back: the great smoking avalanche of black stone poured itself onto the sidewalk.

  Now, I had anticipated the event by untying Pinky and moving back with her to see things from a distance. There was a garage next to our house with a double set of folding
doors. It belonged to the adjoining private house whose entrance was around the corner on Mt. Eden Avenue. It was set farther back than our front steps and so made a kind of playing area. I had looped Pinky’s leash to the broken handle of one of the doors. The great tumbling slide so terrified her that she snapped her leash and ran off.

  I did not realize this. I was too intent on watching the driver, who now climbed into the truck, straddling the side of the bed with a flaunted animal daring, and with a long-handled broom pushed the lingering chunks of coal out the chute. When this was done, he leaped nimbly to the ground, brought the truck bed back to the horizontal with a resounding clang, and drove away, sprinkling a thin trail of coal in the street behind him.

  I contemplated the pyramid of slag in front of my house, in wonder for the weight of it, with some increased sense of the hierarchy of being, how the mass of it had been manipulated to do human bidding. I felt its substance keenly. I felt through my feet the earth as gravity.

  I waited for the coming up from the alley with his shovel and wheelbarrow of Smith, our black janitor, who inhabited the basement.

  He appeared. He didn’t seem to notice me, which I counted as my good fortune.

  Smith was a huge man, bigger and more muscular than the coal-truck operator. His slow gliding walk and slow speech, as resonantly basso as the voice at the bottom of a cavern, was to me consistent with the size of him. He wore overalls in winter or summer. He smelled of coal dust and ashes and whiskey. His hair was grey. His skin was black with a rich purple tone, he had raised scars on his face, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was now, as always, regally, imperially angry.

  Piece by piece, he was going to move the coal to the coal bin.