World's Fair (21 page)

But Arnold’s mother said no one was allowed on the roof, so I gave up thinking about it. When I woke up the next morning I had all but forgotten about the
Hindenburg
. I went to school. It was a warm clear day. I walked home after school with my friend Meg. Then I played stoopball. I flipped bubble gum cards. The leaves were pale green on the hedges. Harry, the fruit and vegetable man, pulled up along the curb with his wagon. He called out to the windows. He tethered the reins to the big brake on the side of the wagon. Harry had a wrench for opening fire hydrants. He opened the fire hydrant in the middle of our block
and filled a pail with water and put the pail on the street in front of his horse. The horse drank. The wooden poles that connected him to the wagon dipped toward the ground. For good measure a leather harness was chained from its braces to the front of the wagon. The leather went around the horse’s hocks and up over its back. The harness itself looked enormously heavy, like a big leather tire around its neck. The wagon had spoked wheels rimmed in steel. Leaf springs sprouted from the axles. All the fruits and greens were wet. Harry had sprayed them with a hose to make them clean and shining. I could smell the wet greens. He twisted off the green stalks of a bunch of carrots for a lady and fed the greens to his horse.

I went to the small park, the Oval, in the middle of Mt. Eden Avenue. Here, as it happened, one had a clear view of a good deal of sky. I don’t remember doing much of anything. Perhaps I bought a Bungalow Bar. Perhaps I was looking for Meg, who sometimes came to the Oval with her mother. Over the roofs of the private houses that bordered the north side of Mt. Eden Avenue, across the street from the park, the nose of the great silver
Hindenburg
appeared. My mouth dropped open. She sailed incredibly over the housetops, and came right toward me, just a few hundred feet in the air, and kept coming and kept coming and still no sight of the tail of her. She was tilted toward me as if she were an enormous animal leaping from the sky in monumental slow motion. Some sort of line lagged under her, like a halyard, under the cupola. Then, as I blinked she was visible in her entirety, tacking off some degrees to the east, and I saw her in all her silver-skinned length; the ribbed planes of her cylindrical balloon, thick in the middle, narrowed at each end, reflected the sunlight, flaring sunlight in striations, as if a deck of cards were being shuffled. I heard her now, the propellers alongside her cupola whirring like fans in the sky. She did not make the harsh raspy snarl of an airplane, but seemed to whisper. She was indeed a ship, a real ship in the sky, she moved like an airship. The enormity of her was out of scale with everything, out of scale with the houses and the cars on the street and the people now shouting and pointing and looking up; she was like a scoop
of sky come down to earth, or a floating building, or a populated cloud. I could see little people in the cabin, they were looking out the window and I waved at them. The
Hindenburg
was headed over Claremont Park now, toward Morris Avenue. I was not supposed to go there alone. I looked both ways and ran across the street, and up the stone steps into the park. Cars had stopped in the street and drivers had gotten out to see. Everyone was looking at her. I ran through the park following the
Hindenburg
, she was going so slowly, so grandly, I felt I could keep up with her without trouble. I saw her through the trees. I saw the length of her passing through an opening of blue sky between the trees. I waved at the people in the cupola, which was the size of a railroad car. She was going over treetops. I ran into a grass meadow to get an unobstructed sight of her, but now I realized she was going faster than I thought, she seemed to drift in the wind, I heard a rising pitch of her engines, she was changing course, she was over the street, over the trees, and slipping behind the apartment-house roofs of Morris Avenue. I waved and called. I wanted her back. I had been laughing all the while, and now, as the tail of her disappeared, she was gulped up by the city as if she had been sucked out of the sky. I ran as far as the park wall, smiling and red-faced and breathless, unable to believe my good fortune that I had seen the mighty
Hindenburg
.

I hurried home to tell my mother. When Donald came home he said he had seen the ship too. He had still been in school for some special exam and had looked out the window and seen her. Everyone taking the test and the teacher, too, had run to the windows. “We should get a model of the
Hindenburg,”
he said. “We should save up and get it.”

And then in the evening she crashed. We did not hear the radio broadcast describing this, it was the hour for
The Answer Man
and
I Love a Mystery
. But then a news bulletin came on. At the mooring tower in Lakehurst, New Jersey, she had caught fire. She collapsed, the steel twisting and curling up like paper. I could not imagine something the size of a flying ocean liner going up that way. Many people had died. They fell out of the sky in flames. I didn’t understand how it could happen. “You
see,” Donald said patiently, “airships are really lighter-than-air ships. They couldn’t fly unless the gas inside the balloon weighed less than air. You see that, don’t you?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“The gas they use is hydrogen, because its density is so much less than the density of air. On the other hand, it’s a very volatile gas, which means it ignites easily. That’s what happened. Maybe someone lit a cigarette. I don’t know, it might even have been static electricity.” I was impressed with his explanation. So was my mother. She beamed at him. He was taking chemistry at Townsend Harris. He had a chemistry set in a wooden box—not a toy but a real set, with vials of powdered chemicals stoppered with corks and their scientific names on the labels, and beakers and test tubes, and rubber hoses and clamps and measuring spoons, and a little scale with two dishes.

I did not think of the dead people, I thought only of the fall of the
Hindenburg
. My mother had said she was a German ship, sent over by Hitler for his own glory, and that if those people had to die she hoped they were Nazis. But none of that mattered to me. All I could think of was that the ship had fallen out of the sky. They were not supposed ever to touch land, they were tethered to tall towers, they were sky creatures; and this one had fallen in flames to the ground. I could not get the picture of that out of my mind. In the Saturday cartoons, one, about Popeye, showed Popeye’s ship sinking. He swam away and the ship stuck its nose up in the air and went straight down, like a knife, making a funny
glub glub
sound and sending up a stream of bubbles. But a real ship going down, I knew, was a terrible sight, like a great animal fallen; she would lie on her side, or maybe turn upside down, and go under by degrees, faster and faster, creating a terrible whirlpool in the sea as she went. My father had told me he had once seen newsreels of an ocean liner foundered on a beach in Jersey. She lay in flames on her side. Even on water ships could burn. Everything around me was going up and down, up and down. Joe Louis hit Jim Braddock and Braddock went down. I had seen paintings in books of knights fallen from their horses, or horses fallen, and in
King Kong
there was the
terrible shaking of the earth by the falling of the great dinosaurs in battle. And, of course, Kong himself had fallen. Just recently I had seen an old man in the street suddenly drop to his knees for no reason at all, and then topple to one side and sit on the sidewalk leaning back on one elbow, and I had found that terrifying. In bed, trying to sleep, I imagined my father stumbling and crashing to the ground, and I cried out.

EIGHTEEN

O
f course I fell all the time, but that was different. I lived in proximity to the pavement, in front of my house I knew the topography of the stoop and the cement sidewalk, and the cracks in the sidewalk and the chips in the grey blocks of the curb. I had a best friend now, Bertram, who lived a block away on Morris Avenue and took clarinet lessons. He was short, and tubby. I directed our games. Pretend I’m this. Pretend you’re that. Pretend I say this and you do that. The latest serial in the movies was
Zorro
, a kind of Lone Ranger in black with a black horse, and in our games I was Zorro and Bertram was everyone else in the cast. I was more agile than he, and therefore the hero. We had laths we had found in the ash can which we used for swords. Bertram, in our duels, represented many soldiers or a whole posse, and I’d no sooner stab one of them and see him fall, than another would pop up and challenge me. I leaped up on the stoop, I raced past him down the brick stoop and jumped to the ground. I fell and dueled with Bertram while on my back. He danced around me. Our game was a long-running serial and took us down the alley and into the backyard. Here, as Zorro, I now had the daring to climb the stone wall patched with cement that divided my yard from the back of the apartment house on the other side of it. The wall held up a rotting wooden fence that tilted over it and impeded passage. The cement was cracked
and crumbling. Colonies of brown ants lived in the holes. My friend couldn’t quite handle this wall. I raced along my dangerous parapet and he ran alongside, below me, in the yard. Loyally, he huffed and puffed. He could never win these adventures because I was always Zorro. He died and died again. He might, during our dueling, touch me with the end of his sword and say he’d gotten me, but I always insisted it was a flesh wound even if his sword hit me square in the middle of the chest. He’d try to argue but I’d draw him back into the duel, lifting my sword, nicking him and dancing backward with a merry laugh. He’d start to chase me and we’d be back in it. Truly we were not playing. It was understood life was cheap. People fought. Blood flowed. Honor and justice were at stake. We went on with it hour after hour. The invention was endless. I told him what to say, then I answered. We replayed the scenes when I thought of something better. The dirt and grit of crushed stone was embedded in the flesh of our palms. Our eyes glistened from exertion, our cheeks were red. Once or twice a day Bertram cried real tears and I was close to them. When we reached some grim exhausted end to all this, with someone’s mother calling, dusk sending a chill down our sweated backs, we emptied our pockets of the things we had collected in the course of the day’s adventures—clothesline, flinty chips of rock, empty cigarette packages, ice cream sticks—and went each to our home.

After the last day of school Bertram and I had all day to fight it out. But then his mother took him away for the summer to a cottage in the Catskills. Donald left for his job at the Paramount Hotel. My father was away at work most days and nights, and so my mother and I were each other’s companion a good deal of the time. Once, I reflected, our house had been full and something was always going on. Now there were just the two of us and it was not much fun.

My mother sat at the window of the sun parlor and looked out. I understood it was not something she preferred to do. It was what she did. She sat there, with her arms on the windowsill. Sometimes she drank a cup of coffee, sometimes a cup of tea. She was not so strict with me. I could stay out after supper. The
exact hour of my bedtime was not now of the utmost importance to her, perhaps because I didn’t have school in the morning and could sleep late, perhaps because she had other things on her mind. I took advantage of the situation readily enough. I listened to programs that would have been unthinkable during the school term:
Gang Busters
, the crime-story show written by Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, which came on at ten o’clock;
The Kraft Music Hall
with Bing Crosby and Bob Burns, and even
Jimmy Fidler’s Hollywood Gossip
at ten-thirty. Adding these to my regular shows, which I had won from hard and protracted negotiations—
Easy Aces
, and the
Chase and Sanborn Hour
with Charlie McCarthy, and
The Royal Gelatin Hour
with Rudy Vallee, and the
Green Hornet
, of course, and
Jack Benny
, and
Eddie Cantor, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights
, plus all my afternoon adventure shows—I pretty much had free rein with the airways. Listening to a full day’s radio programs exhausted me, but it was a nervous sort of exhaustion, lacking real physical discharge, and my limbs hurt and my mind clamored. Bed at night was a stale place, the pillow grew clammy despite my plumping it and turning it so that I could feel its cold side. I reheard bits and pieces of the radio programs in my mind. I concentrated on the serials. I analyzed how they achieved the realistic sounds of horse hooves at a gallop, airplanes in dogfights, chairs breaking over people’s heads, creaking ropes at quayside in mysterious Oriental ports, and so forth. Mostly I imagined the geography I had been taught, the backgrounds of these programs being barely indicated by a descriptive line, or a remark in the story or a trace of a sound effect, but which shone in my mind in colorful detail. There was a West, there was a vast deep sky to fly, there was the Orient, there was Europe, and dangerous seas between. Occasionally I realized that the pillow under my head was one of the very malefactors who populated these exotic realms; somehow he had gotten to the Bronx. I wrestled him, punched him, grunting and grinding my teeth in appropriate fashion; sometimes it looked as if he had me, but with my last bit of strength I flung him from me up into the air, and took him out with one beautiful sock as he came down.