World's Fair (14 page)

Passover was the giant of the Jewish holidays and had much to say for it. The story was good and the food was good. Technically it lasted eight days, but the fuss was made for only one. It came along in the spring, but with that peculiarity of Jewish holidays of being very casual about the date of its arrival. I noticed when adults talked about Passover they said either that
it was late or that it was early, but never that it was on time. This year it was late. My mother bought flowers for it, tulips and daffodils. Passover involved getting dressed up and taking an enormous journey with packages and flowers.

W
e were most of the day getting ready. Early in the afternoon, an unusual time for me to be so clean and well groomed, we set off—Donald, my mother and I—walking east on 173rd Street over the Topping Avenue hill, and descending by degrees to the valley of Webster Avenue. This was the East Bronx of mythological dangers; surrounded by my family I was not concerned, although it would have been better still were my father with us. But he was required to work most of the day and would be meeting us later.

We boarded a red-and-yellow streetcar with rush seats, all occupied. It was the W car, headed north. It went clanging up Webster, a wide thoroughfare of gas stations, warehouses, lumberyards and auto repair shops. The farther north we rode, the longer the stretch between stops. One by one we found seats. My mother, sitting first, kept all the bundles on her lap. At 180th Street the car swung sharply right, the wheels screeching loudly and all the passengers tilting in unison. At this point, Donald began a sharp lookout. He was our navigator. We rode to the stop under an elevated station that he had been waiting for, and got off to transfer to another trolley, the A car. Now the Bronx flattened out in blocks of empty lots, with schools in the middle of dirt fields, and spired churches, and even an occasional wooden house with its own yard. Finally, after a turn or two, we broke into the peaceful suburban avenues of Mt. Vernon. Here the car ride was smooth and we were practically the only passengers. We sat together. I liked the brown wood decks of streetcars, the walls and window frames and ceilings were of wood too; it must feel like this in a bunkhouse or a riverboat, I
thought. And it all rested on steel carriages. It appealed to me that fast or slow, barreling along or creaking around corners, the trolley car could go only as directed by the tracks; it was all planned, all the motorman could do was crank up the power and the flanged wheels had dutifully to go the way they were led. Of course, occasionally the motorman stopped the car, got off and, with a crowbar, moved the track switch one way or another, but the principle held.

The air was cool. The streets were not of cobblestone but of smooth cream-colored seamless paving. Green parks and fields were on either side of us. Then near the end of the line, the conductor already walking down the aisle and yanking the seat backs forward for the return trip, the car reached a certain corner in Pelham Manor, where, to my mind, began the quietest, most elegant block in the world. And here we disembarked, and made our way along the beautifully named Montcalm Terrace, after a general in the French and Indian War. This was where Aunt Frances lived, on a street of raised lawns and grand homes. Her house had a sharply raked tile roof, and casement windows, and dark wood beams impressed in the grey stucco siding.

A
unt Frances greeted us with a smile at the door. Behind her was her full-time maid, Clara, a tall, angular black woman who wore a white uniform with matching white shoes. Clara took our coats and bundles. To our surprise and delight, my habitually late father was already there. He had come up from Grand Central Station on the New York Central. “You’re late,” he said. “What took you so long!” And everyone laughed. Then the master of this house appeared, Uncle Ephraim, horse-faced, very proper, a bit pompous, in fact—a portly man who spoke always as if delivering a speech. He gazed down at me, with critical intelligence coming like sparks of light off his eyeglasses. He had enormous teeth. “And how is Edgar?” he said. I could
tell he felt superior to his wife’s family. He had a patronizing air. On the second night of Passover they would have a seder for his family; the two families never met. And it was true, we were a raucous crowd. Uncle Ephraim conducted the seder down at the end of the table. Beside him sat my atheist grandfather, who was equally proper about the form of the thing. Together they prayed and directed the sacramental moments for us all, while we, our attention wandering, talked and whispered, Donald and my cousin Irma trying to step on each other’s feet under the table, and my father getting into a political argument with Uncle Phil the cabdriver, who did not believe the cabdrivers should be unionized. Uncle Phil wore not the ceremonial black skull cap supplied by the house but the same felt hat with the front brim turned up in which he drove his cab. Irreverent Aunt Molly kept up a patter of remarks that made us laugh. She always looked disheveled, even in holiday clothes, with wisps of her hair not quite tucked in, face florid, bosom crooked, dress sticking to her from its own static. “Where do you suppose the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are having
their
seder tonight,” she said. Even my grandmother Gussie laughed, who was pious and God-fearing and tried to shush everyone before she laughed again. When things got too noisy, Uncle Ephraim, without looking up, slapped the table with his open palm, and for perhaps thirty seconds everyone was chastened until someone broke out in the giggles, usually me, because of the funny faces Aunt Molly was making to get me to do just that.

And here we were all of us sitting around the long table in the dining room, a room where you only ate, imagine that, and even the animosity between my mother and grandmother was suspended as the sweet holiday wine, sipped at the requisite times in the ceremony, began to bring color to people’s faces. The candlelight shone in everyone’s eyes. There was a splendid chandelier of many crystal lights. I was asked to open the front door for Elijah, the prophet, for whom a place setting was laid and wineglass filled. It was a heavy wooden door, with a cathedral arch and black cast-iron fixtures. I peeked into the darkness of Montcalm Terrace to make sure Elijah was not there. I pictured
him as one of the old bearded men who came to the door with terrible stories and a collection box in his hand. I was relieved that he hadn’t come. The night sky was filled with millions of shining stars.

My brother was prevailed upon to ask the four questions the youngest male asks at the seder. He protested, was overruled and, scowling, turned to me and said, “This is the last time I do this, next year you better know how.” He felt demeaned—a student at Townsend Harris High School asking why this night was different from all other nights. The answers in Hebrew to the four questions seemed, not only to me but to most everyone at the table, interminable. “Listen to them down there,” Molly said of Grandpa and Uncle Ephraim. “The Jews are the only people in the world who give you a history course before they let you eat.” Finally the big moment arrived—the actual dinner. Aunt Frances rang a little bell and a moment later Clara appeared from the kitchen and began to serve. I had nibbled at the bitter herbs and barely sniffed at the hard-boiled egg in salt water. Now my time had come. The chicken soup with
knaydl
, how good that was! The fish I passed over. That was my father’s joke that made everyone laugh: “No thank you, Aunt Frances. I’ll pass over that.” Then roast lamb, baked potatoes, I even ate the string beans. Honey cake and watered wine for dessert. Then, after a brief reprise of the impenetrable ceremony, the time for singing, at which point everyone with great gusto, as much in gratitude for the finish of this exhausting event as in praise of God, sang the traditional songs as loudly as possible. The song I liked best was one of those add-on songs, like “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.” This song described a father buying a kid, meaning a goat. Then a cat devoured the kid, then a dog came and bit the cat, a staff came and smote the dog, and a fire came and burned the staff and then water came and extinguished the fire, then the ox came and drank the water, and finally, by the last verse you got the whole causal sequence—the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had put out the fire, which had burned the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten
the cat, which had eaten the kid, which my father had bought for two coins—one only kid, one only kid. I had no idea what any of this meant and I didn’t want to ask for fear of being answered, but it pleased me very much.

When the time came to leave, Aunt Frances stood talking to my mother about her poor mother, and then the two women hugged. Uncle Ephraim had a gold toothpick that he kept on a fob. He held up a hand to cover his mouth while he picked his teeth. We all piled into Uncle Phil’s De Soto taxi, which had jump seats. It was crowded but we fit. I sat on my father’s lap and fell asleep as we went back down to the Bronx. First Phil dropped off the old folks. Then he drove us to our door. My father carried me up the front steps, I half asleep in his arms, the cool night air of spring blowing gently around my ears like an echo of the Passover songs in my mind.

THIRTEEN

S
chool was just a half block from my house, across the corner of 173rd Street, but my whole life changed once I began there. I was six—no longer a child. I wore a white shirt with a red tie. In the morning my time was as important as anyone else’s. I had to be turned out at a certain hour just like my brother and father; I ran home for lunch at twelve and back at twelve-forty-five, and when I got home from school in the afternoon I had just a few hours before I’d have to start thinking about homework. I enjoyed the seriousness of my calling. Reading came to me effortlessly. I had in a subliterate way been making sense from books for some time. The moment I began competently to read was imperceptible to me. Numbers were more difficult.

My teacher Mrs. Kalish asked me on my first day in her class if I was Donald’s brother. He had been a brilliant student, she said, her favorite student at the time. This sort of comparison would eventually disturb me. Now I smiled with pride at the identification. I was a confident scholar. School held no terrors. I did not once vomit in the classroom. The janitor had a surefire system for dealing with such disasters. He appeared with his pail of ammoniated water and his mop, and a shovel and a garbage can and a bag of sawdust. He would spill the sawdust on the offensive pool, shovel it up, and then mop the whole thing with
ammonia and drive the smell away. Why did children vomit so much at P.S. 70? Bathroom accidents were oddly less frequent, perhaps because the rules about going to the bathroom were fairly relaxed.

The materials of school interested me, the stiff colored paper, the jars of white paste, the sticks of chalk, the erasers larger than bars of brown soap that had to be taken outside and pounded against each other to get the dust out. To be chosen to do that, to be authorized to leave the classroom and go out in the closed yard in the sun, all alone, was an honor. Another honor was to be designated monitor of the window shades, which needed adjustment all during the day as the sun went across the sky and the light shone in our eyes or in the teacher’s. Honors seemed to fall my way in school without my having to do much to get them. I was liked by the other children and they elected me class president, although neither I nor they had very much idea what the class president was supposed to do. Yet I enjoyed being president. The stair monitor had more power, but that was all right.

In the spelling bees I was the best of the boy students and invariably wound up the last of my kind to face three or four of the girls on the other side of the room. Girls were devilishly good at spelling. I might defeat almost all of them, but just as I was the boy champion, Diane Blumberg led the girls, and inevitably, when the showdown came between me and Diane, she would win. She was good at math too, and taller than I was, with fat little squirrel cheeks and a mouth perpetually primed in contemptuous judgment. Diane Blumberg was in all ways smug and insufferable.

A watercolor portrait of President Roosevelt hung above the blackboard in the front of the room. On the window ledges were various things we did for Nature, one of the best of subjects—bulbs growing in pots, or a frog in a terrarium. We had a bowl of turtles, who sunned themselves on stones, and for one or two days in spring an Easter rabbit donated by one of the mothers. Abraham Lincoln was shown on a poster and over his figure was printed the Gettysburg Address. In the long closet with sliding
doors at the side of the room, on rainy days steam seemed to come from our rubber slickers and galoshes. I loved anything that got me out of the classroom. We would in two-by-twos trek downstairs to the big auditorium for the weekly movie, never something as good as we’d expect to find at the real movies, but something old and tame, like
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
or
Tom Sawyer
. After each reel the lights would come on and we would be noisy and throw spitballs at one another—the discipline was less exacting at these times. The best breaks in the routine were the fire drills, because then we could march outside and stay there for mysterious endless amounts of time, the whole school standing quietly in ranks in the breeze, all the apartment buildings of the neighborhood surrounding our yard, while seemingly secret and troubled school administrative self-examination took place. On mornings of fire drills lunchtime always came quickly.