World's Fair Read online

  My father in his early forties was vigorous, ambitious, and struggling to make a go of things. He lived zestfully the code of the insider. He sold radios, Victrolas, sheet music. The stock of records in his store was vast, thousands of shellac records in brown paper sleeves and great heavy albums of operas and symphonies, European recordings as well as American, classical, jazz, swing. He even carried the records of obscure black folk-singers from the South. He really knew his business, and some of the artists on labels he carried came into his store to buy the records from him. He was always very proud of knowing and dealing with famous musicians. “Stokowski came into the store today,” he would tell us when he got home. Or, “Rubinstein’s secretary called and gave me an order worth fifty dollars.” I understood the value of the inside position. On those exciting Saturdays when I went downtown with Donald to my father’s store, I saw how the people came in, I saw how he controlled what they bought by his advice and counsel, I was proud of him. He wore a blue pin-striped suit and vest and a red tie. His skin was pink and his brown eyes bright and alert. I didn’t like his partner, though, Lester, a tall, unctuously hearty man with blond hair combed in a pompadour. He was in charge of the radio section. Lester had discovered that a certain percentage of customers could be counted on to bring radios in for repair that had nothing wrong with them. The residential hotels in the neighborhood were equipped with direct current. Usually the plug had been inserted in the power outlet the wrong way; by simply reversing the prongs of the plug, Lester could get the radio to work. Instead, he told the customer that the repairs would take several days; he would dust the innards, polish the cabinet, and write up a bill, having fixed a radio that was in perfect working order. “Oh, by the way,” he would say as the customer was leaving with his radio, “just reverse the plug if nothing happens when you turn it on. It works fine now.” My father had a kind of aesthetic appreciation for his partner’s larceny. He said he held Lester down to reasonable amounts so that no one customer was stung for very much. But he told us of this practice expecting us to appreciate its humor. It was in the nature of being in the know, on the inside.

  He took great pleasure from a book he brought home, an anthology of mistakes made by schoolboys on their exams and in their compositions. The mistakes were called “boners” and he read them to us. The chief animals of Australia are the kangaroo, larkspur, boomerang, and peccadillo. Medieval cathedrals are supported by flying buttocks. Shakespeare lived at Windsor with his merry wives. The two most important rivers of Scotland are the Firth and the Forth. In Pittsburgh they manufacture iron and steal. Four animals belonging to the cat family are the father cat, the mother cat, and two kittens. Acrimony, sometimes called holy, is another name for marriage…. Some of these made everyone laugh, some of them just my father laughed at. It was under his guidance that I would send away for my first Little Blue Books at five cents each, from the E. Haldeman Julius Company in Girard, Kansas: Ventriloquism Self-Taught and Tales of Hypnotism and Revenge. He was teaching me the available recourses in a universe run by humorless women. He himself had a mother he loved and must contend with, just as I did. My grandmother Gussie up on the Concourse had strong opinions and liked to control things. My grandfather Isaac was a bookish, peace-loving man with an intellect, like my father. So there was some cosmic scheme behind my father’s puns and limericks and love of language games, a representation of the moral universe grounded in the archetypal male and female relation. Where had it come from? It was a peasant vision, a thing of funny papers and dialect jokes. It cut across all borders. It had come from the old country. In the street I heard from children its darker vulgar representations: A wife is something you screw on the bed and it does all the housework.

  ROSE

  Things went along smoothly for a while. My mother was an enormous help and comfort. Every day at lunch I’d wrap up my baby and put him in his carriage and go to my mother’s house for lunch. I loved my parents. My brother, my older brother, Harry, was staying with them temporarily while looking for a job. So it was like old times for me, my family right around the corner. My mother was a dear sweet woman, so quiet, a very religious woman. She was one of the original members of the synagogue and the Sisterhood, she was there when they laid the first brick. I was close to her and I was happy taking care of my tiny child and making a nice home for my husband. He was making good money then. He worked for a man named Markel in the record business. That is how he got into it. Markel was some sort of jobber or distributor of phonographs and phonograph parts. This was a very good business in the 1920’s—before radios, before anything else. People bought those old phonographs with big horns and they bought records to play on them and to dance to, and it was the first home entertainment besides playing your own music. Windup Victrolas first, then electric ones. It was a revelation to people accustomed to hearing music only at the concert hall. So that was the business. I didn’t like Markel, he had shady ways, I had worked for him myself for a while as secretary and bookkeeper. Dave had gotten me the job. But then I saw what Markel was like and I left. He used to order things from the manufacturers, Victor, Edison, all of them, and then he wouldn’t pay his bills. The office was a loft in the East Twenties. He had a whole floor with his office and the stockroom, and there was a fire escape at the window behind his desk. People in those days sent the sheriff around when they couldn’t collect money due them. When he heard the sheriff coming up the stairs, this terrible man Markel would run down the fire escape. Your father was out selling all over the city. And so I was left to deal with the problem. I didn’t like that. That’s when I quit and found work with Sigmund Unterberg, and then through him with the Jewish Welfare Board. Now I think Markel was a bad influence on your father. True, he taught him a good business. But what else did he teach him? It was at this time, I think, that your father got interested in gambling, in card playing, and I think that was Markel’s doing. Dave had a zest for adventure, he always dreamed of a big killing. It made him vulnerable. As fine as he was, as refined and cultured—and he loved good music, he loved opera—he indulged in bad things. And I never knew what was happening, he never told me anything, he gave me an allowance and that was that.

  At any rate Dave’s younger sister, Molly, had her baby prematurely after she and her husband, Phil, the cabdriver, had separated. So there was Molly with this sickly little baby and what was her mother Gussie’s response? She wouldn’t have anything to do with her. And her fancy older sister, Frances, up in Westchester had washed her hands of her. The thing about Molly was that she was the rebel in the family, the black sheep. She never finished high school, she went with riffraff, and she married someone beneath her. Phil was a decent fellow but not too smart. He spoke badly. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Molly after marrying him had taken up with another man. Bob, I think his name was. So it was a terrible mess. Molly begged to come and stay with us. She had no place to go. I went to the hospital to see her and she wept so. I liked Molly. She was the only one in that family besides Papa, besides Grandpa, that I felt comfortable with. She did not put on airs, she did not give me the feeling that I was not as good as she was. So I said to her come stay with us. And Dave agreed.

  Now, we only had a three-room apartment at that time on Weeks Avenue. So it was quite a sacrifice. It was a light, large, airy apartment, but there was only one bedroom. So Molly slept in the bed with me and Dave slept on the couch. I had not expected her to stay long. I thought she would make some arrangement, put her life together, and after a week or two she would be gone. But that was not to be. She stayed for months. I had a girl in to help me clean and wash Donald’s diapers. Donald was maybe a year old then. But the girl would not wash Molly’s baby’s diapers. So I had to do that myself, for this little infant girl, Irma. And where was Molly? She was out running around. This Bob kept coming to the house and taking her out on dates. Her husband, Phil, would come at night and start raising hell and shouting. The neighbors complained. It was the scandal
of the whole house. I was going out of my mind. Your father had come to like having Molly in the house. He said to his mother one day, “Mama, I was thinking of increasing Rose’s allowance.” He asked his mother about everything. And there I was, taking care of Molly and her child, paying for everything out of the ordinary family budget, and the old lady said—I heard her right in the next room, we had gone there for a visit—“No, it’s enough, she has enough, it’s quite sufficient.” Can you imagine? That terrible woman? I am taking care of her own daughter, she and her other daughter have done nothing, and she says that? Dave belonged to them. He never consulted me, he told me nothing. His mother was his consultant.

  As you can imagine, I was very unhappy. My life was not good. I was not sleeping with my husband, it was very upsetting. There was no privacy. I tried to get Molly to leave, but he would stop me—it was as if he wanted her there. He wouldn’t even talk about it. I think it was during this time that he began to look around for other women. At lunchtime I would take my baby boy and run to my mother’s and cry. “Mama,” I said, “I want to leave him. I can’t go on. I can’t live this way. I’m so unhappy I want to kill myself.” And my mother would soothe me, and hug me and caress me, but she was very old-fashioned and most conservative in her ways. “You are a married woman,” she would say. “You must make the best of things. You must take care of your child and keep a home for your husband. No matter what.”

  So I went back. If not for my mother I would have left and gotten a divorce, but I could not disobey her, I wouldn’t think of it. But finally I did do something. One day this boyfriend of Molly’s who had caused all the trouble came around when she was out and I spoke to him. Bob. I didn’t dislike him. And I said to him, “Listen, Bob, you’re a nice enough young man. You’re getting yourself into such a mess here. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to come calling on a woman who is married, who has just had a baby, a woman whose mother has thrown her out, and whose sister won’t have anything to do with her because of this? And here she is living with me, my husband has given up his bed so that she can stay here. Do you think that’s fair? You’re too nice a young man to get mixed up in a mess like this.”

  Well, that little talking to must have had some effect. I don’t know quite what happened, but one day Phil rang the bell and took Molly and her baby and her bags and baggage away with him. And Bob was gone and Molly and Phil were back living together. And I had my husband back. But it was not easy to forget. What would happen next time? If it was not Molly with her shenanigans, what would it be? I had this family on my back. They controlled my husband, he belonged to them; whenever there was a conflict he was on their side. I counted for nothing. When you were born, and with two children we needed more space, that’s when I met Mrs. Segal and we moved to the private house on Eastburn Avenue. And now Dave was doing well. He felt confident enough to go into business on his own and he was making a go of it. He sold sound boxes and then took the record concession at Vim’s, a sporting goods and appliance store, part of a chain. It was on Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. He had the balcony at the back, overlooking the main store. He paid Vim’s a percentage of his profits. We had money, we bought some furniture, it was 1931, ’32, and everywhere people were out of work, but somehow, in the heart of New York, there was still life. Then when you were an infant, about a year old, my father died suddenly, and my poor mother came to live with us. This was the last straw for her. She prayed in her room, her health declined. And her mind was affected, my poor sweet mama.

  ELEVEN

  Death was on my mind, I thought about it, brooded about it, and studied its representations. I had an old book of nursery rhymes that I hadn’t looked at in a while. The letters were large, the drawings tinted in pale orange and pale green. The children and other beings in nursery rhymes were peculiar, ethereal, they inhabited nations, worlds, with which I was not familiar. Their characters were a source of uneasy imaginings. Little Miss Muffet: I would not call any girl of my acquaintance Miss anything; this one was so prissy and girlgood as to be insufferable, fully deserving her fate. I did not like Humpty Dumpty, who lacked all manly definition and was so irrevocably fragile. Georgie Porgie, Jack Horner, Jack and Jill, all seemed to me unnatural abstractions of child existence; there was some menacing propaganda latent in their circumstances but I couldn’t quite work out what it was. It was a strange planet they lived on, some place of enormous fearful loneliness and punishment. Or it was as if they were dead but continued to be alive. Whatever happened to them kept happening over and over, good or bad, and I perceived a true moral in this repetition of fate, this recurring inevitable conclusion to the flaws in their beings. They suffered humiliation, damage, and shame, all forms of death or the feeling of death. They were like my dreams—birds flew out of pies, children ran with kings and queens, sheep, those most docile and slow-moving of animals, ran away, whereas the sheep in the Farm exhibit in Claremont Park in the spring didn’t even move when you touched them. No human, animal or egg acted quite right in these stories. My final unalterable judgment was that nursery rhymes were for babies and I would not suffer hearing them again.

  There was another kind of damage and death in the front-hall bookcase, in a set of art folios bound in flexible covers tied with colored string. Each folio had several color reproductions of the work of a great artist. I was very interested in bodies, and bodies were what these paintings showed: plump flying infants holding bows and arrows or trumpets; and naked moonfaced ladies with long blond hair and small breasts, not at all like my mother’s; and scraggly bearded men almost naked and looking very pale with their eyes rolled up in their heads and their arms stretched out on wooden posts and with nails in their hands and feet. Or the same bearded, very pale, sad-faced men lying in the arms of several women who wore long veils and layers of gauzy dress and were crying, and with more of those flying babies hovering in the air above them. There were pictures of clouds with old grandfathers sitting in them with their arms extended and rays of sun shooting from their fingers, or of those scraggly bearded men again, there seemed to be an awful lot of them, they were like brothers in the same family, or members of a tribe, this time riding into little stone villages on the backs of donkeys whose eyes and facial expressions were as mournful and weary as their riders’. I wanted to paint but found the crayons I had for my use could not produce the lines and shapes or even gradations of color that I saw in those strange paintings. All pictures seemed to tell a story if you looked long enough, but these were truly mysterious events. They seemed to describe death. These pale, unhealthy-looking yellowish men with the nails in them and their eyes rolled up sometimes died in the desert, sometimes in grand palaces, they were either the fathers of those flying babies or the husbands of the crying women, it was hard to tell. They had been punished and killed but I didn’t know why or by whom. How many there had been! I felt slightly queasy when I put the pictures back in the covers, I felt I had seen something I shouldn’t have. They conveyed to me, whatever their intent, a kind of mental coercion which I felt as the mildest of nauseas, the slightest intimation of a need to rest.

  In bed with a cold, I called loudly to my mother to bring me some orange juice. I heard her rustling about. Slam of refrigerator door. Footsteps coming down the hall. I threw myself half off the bed, my head back, my eyes staring wide, tongue extended and hands dragging on the floor. Screech. A shattering of glass. I sat up and laughed. Eventually, after sitting down on my bed to catch her breath and recover, she laughed too. “What a terrible thing to do,” she said. My mother had been trained in death and disaster. She was vulnerable. She had lost two older sisters and her father. She had grieved and mourned three times, an experience I could only wonder about. She looked at Grandma every day with frowns of concern. Her blue eyes went dark. She played the piano, when she had time, almost as a form of prayer. Big chords, dashing arpeggios. My mother sat regally at the piano. Her arms reached wide.

  One morning, after my breakfast of oatme
al and milk and toast and jelly, I took Grandma her tea. Carrying the glass and saucer carefully with two hands, I walked slowly down the hall to her room, next to mine, at the back of the house. In the saucer beside the glass were two white cubes of sugar—the same size Donald marked with a fountain pen to make homemade dice for one of his games. I tapped on her door; I waited for her to call “Come ahead” in Jewish so that I could push open the door with my foot and set the tea on the stand beside her bed. Grandma was interesting to me at these morning meetings. In bed she would not yet have dressed her hair—it lay in long grey braids on her pillows. She looked like a girl. Her light blue eyes were rested, and in the sun coming in the window the thin, fair skin of her face was quite smooth and you could see a little freckle here and there. She did not fear being poisoned in the morning. I enjoyed her approval. I basked in her love. In the back of my mind was also the idea of building up some reservoir of good feeling so that if she became unhappy during the day and started cursing and screaming, she would look at me and remember how she had loved me earlier and take it easy on me.

  I thought now I heard her call to come in. I pushed open the door and saw immediately that something was wrong. “Grandma?” I said. I whispered, “Grandma?” She was lying in bed on her back with the blanket pulled up to her chin and her hands clutching the blanket’s edge. She emitted a strange sound—like marbles spilling on the floor. Clumps of the blanket were gathered under her fingers. She was very yellow. The sound stopped. Her eyes were neither closed nor open—as if the lids were between sleep and awakeness. Her chin looked collapsed somehow, the mouth was slack. Now I felt the overall stillness of her, a declared inanimateness, the monumental event of death recorded here for me as another kind of life, a superseding condition with more visible torment than I could have imagined was possible. I put the tea down on the bureau far from her bed. I ran down the hall to the kitchen, where my mother and father were having breakfast. I thought Grandma was behind me and coming to get me. My parents saw me in the doorway and I said, “I think Grandma has died.” I had not yet in my brief life been thought of as a reliable witness of anything. My parents exchanged glances as if looking for each other’s assurance that what I had said could not possibly be true. But they knew something of her precarious health, and the edge of despair on which she lived and often tottered. My father pushed his chair back and hurried to the back of the house; my mother stared at me and put her hand to her cheek.