World's Fair (22 page)

Oddly, on those rare evenings when my father was home some discipline was reinforced. He felt most of the shows I liked were trash. “You’d be better off reading a book,” he said, although he knew I read books all the time. He himself listened to the news commentators, like H.V. Kaltenborn, although I couldn’t see why he did, they irritated him so. He turned them off in anger when he could no longer stand what was being said, but he always tuned in again the next time.

The only program the whole family could agree on was
Information Please
, the quiz show in which the questions were really hard and the board of experts who answered them were really learned. The joy of the show was in hearing questions asked the answer to which no one could possibly know, and then hearing one or another of those fellows answer in a shot, and make it all sound simple. Each of them had fields of expertise the others did not, and altogether it was pretty hard to trip them up. If you did, if the question that you sent in
did
stump the experts, you were awarded a set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. We all sat and listened to this program. Sometimes, if the subject was music or politics or history, my father guessed the answer before the experts did.

I loved it when the three of us all did something together. If my mother and father were fighting, our going out and doing something was the way they called a truce. Everyone could be angry and not talking, and I would nag each of them in turn until I got them up and out, my father going along with what he pretended was my mother’s idea, and my mother pretending it was my father’s. But it was mine. I’d get them to the movies this way. Going to an air-cooled movie on a hot evening was a necessity. It didn’t even matter to me what the films were, my mother seemed to like love stories and musicals, my father dramas. I would sit through Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing to each other just to be cool and just to know that in the dark on either side of me sat my parents and that they might actually talk to each other afterwards on the way home. Most times they did, but sometimes even the evening out wouldn’t do any good; I would have heard my mother laughing during the movie, but
when we came out she still wouldn’t talk to my father. Sometimes my father fell asleep during the movie, sometimes when he was restless he went out for a while. He knew how to leave the movie house and go have a soda or smoke a cigar and then get back into the theater without paying another admission. I myself would never try that.

His business was not good and this seemed to make him quieter and more serious. He did not bring home surprises as often.

M
y one reliable friend this summer was the little girl Meg, whose family, like ours, had no vacation planned. I played potsy with her in the Oval if I had previously checked to see no boys I knew were in sight. This was a girl’s game of hopping around in numbered boxes and it was quite easy. You threw your skate key or something into a particular box you had to reach, and if it stayed in, you hopped and jumped your way over to it, picked it up while standing on one foot, reversed your direction without touching a line, and hopped your way back. Certain boxes had to be avoided if the other person had previously claimed them. Sometimes it got complicated. My mother thought Meg a sweet child, that’s what she called her, a sweet child, although she was critical of her name.

“What kind of name is that,” she said.

“It’s short for Margaret,” I said. “But everyone calls her Meg.”

“Well, that’s no name for a girl, that’s a scullery maid’s name. I fault the mother.”

She did not look approvingly on Meg’s mother. I couldn’t understand why. The woman had always been nice to me, she was a pretty woman, slender, with short reddish-blond hair and a nice smile. She seemed always to be listening to a pleasant song inside her head. Her name was Norma. I knew this because
this is how Meg addressed her, it was very unusual not calling your mother Mother, but Norma did not seem to mind. She had a good way of making a cold chocolate drink, she took a spoonful or two of cocoa, and added milk and sugar; then she crushed some ice cubes in a dish cloth with a hammer; then she poured the ice cubes into an Orphan Annie Ovaltine Shake-up Mug, which was a cup with a domed lid; and she shook it up till it was cold and served it with the crushed ice. “I’d make a good bartender,” she said. She did nice things like that.

They were not particularly well off, this family. They lived in a tenement house without an elevator, on the fifth floor, a long walk up. The stairs were dark, the hallways were tiled in little six-sided tiles, like a bathroom. Their apartment was small, but very light, since it overlooked Claremont Park at Monroe Avenue. In the basement of the building was a little grocery store with a window that looked up at the front sidewalk. In that store you saw people’s legs as they went by, as if they were chopped off in the middle. I sometimes went there for my mother.

Meg did not have her own room. There was only one bedroom, so she either slept in her mother’s bed or in the living room on the sofa. Things were broken down in the living room, the sofa’s springs were coming out the bottom, and a standing lamp with one of those upside-down glass shades to direct the light to the ceiling had a piece of the shade missing as if chomped out by something that ate glass. It was not a clean house by my mother’s standards. The bedroom was overpacked with things, bureaus piled with folded clothes and perfume bottles, boxes stacked in the corners, newspapers and junk everywhere. It was just those two rooms and a kitchen. On the kitchen ceiling was a wooden rack with clothesline strung up on it; you let it down like a shade by means of a rope attached to the wall, and you dried your clothes that way. So pink silk underwear always hung from the kitchen ceiling. There were roaches in the bathroom, and a red rubber hot-water bottle and a trailing enema tube hung from the shower rod over the bathtub. There was a bathroom tray for a cat, although Meg told me their cat had fallen out the window and died. I remember this apartment
so clearly because I spent so much time there, especially on rainy days. It was interesting to me that from the mess of this house both Meg and her mother could come out looking so clean and nicely dressed, as they always did. Meg’s white summer one-strap shoes were always newly polished. She had very many of the latest toys and games. Of course, they would be of more interest to girls; she had several dolls, for example, including a Shirley Temple model complete with different outfits to dress her in. These were contained in a miniature trunk, just like the trunks people took with them on ocean voyages. Inside, on hangers, were a Shirley Temple nursing uniform with a red-and-blue cape of satin, a horseback-riding outfit with riding boots, coats, sundresses, shorts, and so on. Meg loved Shirley Temple. I myself could not abide her, but said nothing. I had seen Shirley Temple in just one movie—I knew that kind of spoiled girl. Buttery, overly cute, a teacher’s pet, a real showoff. Meg herself was not like that or I wouldn’t have been her friend. She was a serious, thoughtful child, very quiet and trusting. She never got mad and never left the game no matter how badly it was going for her. We were playing in the park one day and it began to rain. I went to her house and called my mother to let her know where I was. “You’re up there?” my mother said. “You come right home.” “But it’s raining,” I said. “It’s letting up,” she said. “This minute!”

When I got home I was angry. My mother said I was not to go into that house ever again and I said I would if I wanted to. She called me a foolish child. “But what’s wrong?” I said over and over. “I will not discuss it,” she said. I had to reason this out for myself. I knew she liked Meg and never put up an objection when she came to our house. So it had to do with her house. Or her mother. In the mysterious way of our family conversation, whenever something was not quite right I was left in the dark about it, although smartly feeling its consequences. When my mother was angry at my father, I could never exactly pin down her reasons. It was like that. I would learn more by listening to them argue at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Now I eavesdropped on a phone conversation my mother had
that evening with her friend Mae. Our phone was in the front of the house, and I was in the kitchen having supper. I heard just one phrase:
ten cents a dance
. I don’t know how, but I knew my mother was talking about Norma. I didn’t know what she meant, exactly, but it was such a weighted comment, delivered in her tone of moral authority, part disgust, part sarcasm, that I immediately decided it was unjust. I resolved to continue to go to Meg’s house. I was not willing in this case to accept the humiliation of being told what to do. My mother had a way of telling you what to do that left you with no honor. Once I showed her an advertisement on the back cover of a comic book, it was for an air rifle that shot BB’s. I wanted it and proposed to save up for it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Stop bothering me with such nonsense.”

But the episode did suggest to me something I had not been prepared before to recognize. When I went upstairs to Meg’s I always hoped Norma would be there. I had to acknowledge that to myself now, and with a weird feeling in the chest, some breathable excitement, as if I had done something terribly wrong although I didn’t know what it was. When the mother wasn’t home, or when she went out while I was there, I was disappointed. The visit became less interesting. She always smiled when she saw me. She had large eyes, widely spaced, and a wide mouth. She was very kind. Sometimes she joined us in our games. She would sit on the floor with us, and we three would have a good time.

NINETEEN

W
e received our first letter from the Paramount Hotel in the mountains. “Dear Mom, Dad, and Edgar,” wrote my brother in his orderly way, assigning to each the places we had in his mind. I admired Donald’s handwriting. He wrote in ink on unlined paper, and there were no blots and the lines were straight. One of my bad subjects in school was penmanship, and so I studied his letter and copied it out. I could hear his voice as I read, he was very good at explaining things—and I heard him now explaining how things were at the Paramount Hotel so that we would understand. He told us he was working hard and enjoying it. Some of the guests had requested tunes other than the ones the Cavaliers knew how to play—that was the biggest problem. People were getting tired of hearing the same songs every night. Could my father send up sheet music for a list of songs that was attached to the letter as quickly as possible? He would try to find time to rehearse, although it would be difficult because the management wanted them down by the lake during the day. Anyway the food was good, and he was getting a nice tan. It was a characteristic of the mountains that no matter how hot the day was the evenings were cool. My parents laughed over the letter, although I didn’t find anything particularly funny in it. My father said he would mail up some sheet music immediately, before the Cavaliers heard the gong.
This was a reference to the
Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour
, a radio program. Aspiring musicians were contestants on the program, and if they were no good, Major Bowes would ring a bell to stop their performance. It made you laugh even though it could not have been funny to whoever it was who might have been rehearsing for weeks to be heard on the radio and hoping to win a professional contract from the appearance. But it was funny. People played glasses of water each filled to a different height to make a different note; they played big ripsaws by bending the blade and stroking it with a violin bow; they played spoons, and even made music by tapping their teeth and slapping the sides of their face while their mouth was open. They always got the gong. One-man bands, my favorite, always got the gong. But I thought some of them were amazing—strumming guitars while blowing on harmonicas held on neck braces, or cornets affixed to their chairs, and beating bass drums with their feet, and playing organ chords with their elbows, and hitting cymbals with sticks taped to their foreheads. It was not real music they produced, these one-man bands, but something else, a mechanical not-quite-in-tune-music, like calliopes or music boxes; whenever I had the chance to listen to a one-man band I did.

My father explained to me that in the old days of vaudeville on the Lower East Side there was a fiddler named Romanoff who was famous for playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” while holding the violin behind his back. “The immigrants loved Romanoff, they thought he was the best violinist in the world because he could play the fiddle behind his back,” my father said. “Not even the great Heifetz could do that. Not even Fritz Kreisler.” He looked at me with a big smile on his face, his eyebrows poised while waiting for me to get the point. I understood what he was saying, but I still liked one-man bands.

A more serious matter arose regarding my brother when our former landlady, Mrs. Segal, came by to visit. As it happened, Mrs. Segal and her husband had gone to the Paramount Hotel for a week’s vacation and had been delighted to find Donald there. “But you wouldn’t believe the hovels they have those boys
in,” she said. “Shacks, with mattresses on the floor, like dirt farmers. No running water, they have to use the outside shower beside the boathouse.”