World's Fair (26 page)

There were many different kinds of phonographs as well, and one or two units that combined radios and record players, although these were very expensive. A glass cabinet held packets of steel needles and books on musical subjects, including
The Victor Book of the Opera
. We had that at home. The walls were lined with shelves filled with record albums, and in the listening booths there were standing ashtrays and record players built into the counters with electric pickup arms, the kind you didn’t have to wind, and soundproofing panels on the side walls and ceiling. I liked the way the doors to these booths clicked shut.

Downstairs all the musical instruments shone in their cabinets, golden saxophones and black clarinets, and silver trumpets, and accordions with gleaming ivory and black keys. There was even a card with batons of different sizes with tapered cork tips. A set of drums sat on a pedestal lit with special spotlights. Uncle Willy let me sit up behind this rig and play for a minute
or two, but with the brushes only, so that nobody would be disturbed. Of course, there were no customers down here, so it didn’t matter that much. And when I went upstairs just one or two people were on the premises, one in a listening booth, the other studying the rack of sheet music. Lester stood behind the radio counter, his arms folded, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. My father awaited customers at the classical music counter. Behind him was a whole wall of record albums of symphonies and operas and concertos. Their bindings were dark green. He stood with his hands flat on the glass countertop, he was dressed in his blue serge suit with the vest and his dark red tie, he looked impressive to me standing there leaning slightly forward, attentive to the occasion and awaiting for whoever it was would come in needing assistance.

We had not yet been to the World’s Fair, but all around were signs that it was going on. Kazoos and ocarinas in their cards had World’s Fair emblems. Next door was a souvenir shop where Trylon and Perisphere pins were on sale, and banners with pictures of them painted on the cloth. The Trylon was a sky-scraping obelisk; the Perisphere was a great globe. They stood side by side at the Fair, and together they represented the World of Tomorrow, which was the Fair’s theme. Almost every day in the newspaper was a picture of Mayor La Guardia welcoming some dignitary or movie star to Flushing Meadow, the site of the Fair. I did not pester my parents, I knew we would go eventually. Everyone was very busy. Besides, the truth was I had misgivings about it, it seemed so vast, such an enormous place, with so many things going on simultaneously, shows and exhibits and people from foreign countries, that I did not know where I wanted to go first. It was difficult to visualize. I was not even there yet but had fallen into the habit when I thought about the World’s Fair of worrying that I would miss the best things. I didn’t know why I felt that way.

My father had predicted the Fair would be good for business. He explained that people were coming to see it from all over the country. They would have to stay in hotels, they would have to have dinner, they would spend money going to Radio City and
they would pass the shop and see records and electrolas they wanted and they would come in and buy something. People on trips always set aside money to buy things. Besides, in his store they could find things you couldn’t find anywhere else. He was very optimistic.

Nevertheless, as the year moved into the winter, and the year 1940 began, the Fair closed for the season and business had not been what he had hoped.

A
t home in the evenings earlier now, my father was in the habit of listening to all the news commentators to find out what was going on in Europe. I knew, even before it was discussed in my class during current events, that a terrible war had begun—Hitler and Mussolini against England and France. He listened to every one of those news commentators; they didn’t just read the news bulletins, but analyzed them too. Then my father analyzed their analyses. His new theory was that you had to listen to them all to figure out what the truth was. He liked Gabriel Heatter and Walter Winchell because they were antifascist. He detested Fulton Lewis and Boake Carter and H. V. Kaltenborn because they were against the New Deal and against unions and made comments verging on fascist, America First sympathies. He hated Father Coughlin, who said the Jewish bankers were to blame for everything. I grew to recognize the voices of these men and the products that sponsored them. Gabriel Heatter talked about gingivitis, which was a fancy name for bleeding gums; he passionately described the advantages of Forhan’s toothpaste for this condition in the same fervent tones with which he described democracy’s battle against fascism. If you didn’t listen carefully, you might think that fascism and bleeding gums were the same thing.

My father sat in a chair near the radio and the newspapers opened in his lap to news stories with maps about the very same
events being discussed by the commentators. He bought most of the papers—the
Times
, the
Herald Tribune
, the
Post
, the
World-Telegram
, even the
Daily Worker
. He would not read the Hearst papers.

In the movies on Saturday afternoons, after the cartoons, the Fox Movietone newsreels showed scenes from the war in Europe: big cannon muzzles afire in the night, German dive-bombers with angled wings coming out of the clouds. You saw the bombs falling. You saw burning buildings in London. You saw people swinging bottles of champagne against the sides of ships and diplomats getting out of cars and walking hurriedly up the steps of palaces for meetings. The war was talked about everywhere and shown in pictures. I liked to draw, I had made up my own comic-book stories and drawn them and colored them with crayon. I had a hero modeled after Smilin’ Jack, the comic-strip pilot. I called my man Daring Dave. He had a moustache and wore a leather helmet with goggles and a lumber jacket and he had flown racing planes—like Smilin’ Jack. I loved to draw these planes, snub-nosed daring little machines with checkerboard designs on their wings and ailerons. I drew them trailing exhaust in the sky so you could see what looping maneuvers they were capable of. They flew around courses measured by pylons. They flew over hangars decorated with wind socks. I wasn’t sure exactly how something as vast and immeasurable as air could be used for a closed race course but I trusted that it could. I drew all sorts of those racing planes, some with cylindrical engine cowlings, some with enclosed cowlings pointed like index fingers. I drew cockpits that were open to the wind and cockpits that were enclosed with Plexiglas covers, but whatever the plane, whatever the design, I always put those streamlined wheel covers on them that were like raindrops coming along the window sideways in a windy rain. I liked streamlining, I liked those Chrysler cars that looked like beetles because their wheels were almost completely covered over and all their surface was rounded to get through the wind more easily, and for the same reason I liked those rear tapered airplane wheel covers. But now that World War Two had come to Europe I
decided to get Dave into a fighter plane. I put him into a Spitfire flying over London for the Royal Air Force. The English insignia was a bull’s-eye colored red, white and blue. I liked the colors but wondered if it wasn’t a mistake to paint brightly colored targets on the wings and fuselage of your planes for the enemy to shoot at. I showed Nazi Messerschmitts going down in smoke.

I did not think the war was anything but far away. I did not feel personally threatened. But my mother talked about the war with worried references to Donald. He had graduated from Townsend Harris High School under a rapid advance program and now, age seventeen, he was enrolled at City College. My mother was afraid Donald would draw a low number in the Selective Service registration and be drafted into the Army and taken off to fight in Europe. This seemed to me an outlandish worry, inasmuch as America wasn’t even in the war. I could not quite make the connections adults around me were making. One day I saw a headline in my father’s copy of the
Post:
WAR CLOUDS, it read. The article went on to speculate about how and when the United States might have to become involved in the war against Hitler.

In the same Madison Square Garden where I had seen the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus with that family that rode bicycles on high wires and the little clown who swept the spotlight at his feet, the American Nazis, called the Bund, had held a rally. They had put up a flag with a swastika next to an American flag, and marched in their brown shirts and with belts like Texas Rangers going from their shoulders down slantwise to their waists. They gave the fascist salute. There were thousands of them. Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin had spoken to them and they shouted and screamed just as the Germans did when Hitler spoke to them. “They are everywhere, this rabble,” my father said one night at dinner. “Two of them came into the store today and I kicked them out. Can you imagine the temerity—coming into my store in their uniforms to try to sell me a subscription to their magazine?”

Donald told us about one of the boys who had been in his junior class at Townsend Harris. His name was Sigmund Miller.
He lived in Yorkville, the German neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he was a fascist. “Considering that the school was almost one hundred percent Jewish, he was pretty brave about it,” Donald said. Sigmund Miller would explain in class discussions why he was for Hitler. He got beat up repeatedly after school. But Donald was telling this because of what happened subsequently. Donald and Bernie and Irwin and Harold Epstein and Stan Mazey all went together to high school every morning. They met at the corner and walked across the Concourse and down Mt. Eden Avenue to the Jerome Avenue El. One morning on the train a man was reading the
Daily News
. Sigmund Miller’s picture was on the front page. He had murdered his girlfriend. He had made a suicide pact with her, but after he killed her he had not been able to keep his part of the bargain. “Excuse me,” Stan Mazey said to the man reading the paper, and yanked it right out of his hands. “I think a friend of ours just killed someone.”

“Why would they want to commit suicide, your friend and this girl?” I asked at the dinner table.

Donald looked at my mother. “She was pregnant,” he said.

My mother said, “I don’t think this is appropriate conversation for dinnertime.”

I was offended. “You think I don’t know what pregnant means?” I said to her. “I can assure you, I know exactly what it means!” Then I was doubly offended because everyone laughed, as if I had said something funny.

TWENTY-TWO

I
t was winter now and the sky grew dark early in the afternoon. My father came home from work in the darkness with the cold blowing off him like the breath of his coat and hat. Donald came home each night with his books under his arm, his nose red and his eyes glittering with the cold. Even now I had pains where my scar was—lesions, the doctors called them. I played out of doors very little. I was not supposed to exert myself. My scar was long and I examined it every day. It was a thick raised welt slanting from my side down toward my testicles. At the top of the scar and at the bottom were depressions, dips in the skin, where the drains had been placed. These were the tenderest spots of all, and when I touched them I could feel my insides cringe. So people who went out into the world of German war, fearless of the Nazis on the dark streets of New York, had my admiration. I had changed physically since the operation; I had been a lean wiry little boy, very well coordinated, I was never a fast runner but I could throw gracefully and catch and get some fair hits in punchball or stickball. All that was gone. I was shaped like a pear, I was overweight from all those weeks in bed, and physically shy of my own movements. I was always afraid of tearing something, I did not like to jump around or leap down from the wall in the backyard as I had once done in my Zorro games with my friend Bertram; it was as if I still had stitches in me, I could
sometimes feel them, and the terrible awful feeling when they had been removed, I could feel them as they had been snipped by the doctor and I could feel the gut string pulling through my flesh. I had nothing to counteract my tendency to fat. If I wasn’t afraid to run around, my mother was afraid for me. She had very quickly gone grey at the temples. She looked at me worriedly and fed me as if I were still convalescing even though I had long since gone back to school. I ate lots of junket desserts and lots of eggs and slices of buttered bread and thick soups of chicken stock and beef with potatoes and cabbage and vegetables of all sorts. I drank lots of milk, it came now homogenized, which meant you didn’t have to shake the bottle to distribute the cream evenly. I had to eat hot cereal in the morning, Cream of Wheat or oatmeal, even though I preferred Post Toasties or Kix. And since I didn’t move around very much, my whole being was changed, I had grown taller and bulkier, I still had a sunny smile and a handsome countenance, but also a double chin. I tried to compensate for this by combing my hair in a way Donald combed his, with a pompadour in the front. Mine didn’t stay up for very long, I was never allowed to let my hair grow long enough to make it really work. Donald as a college freshman grew his hair longer and combed it carefully each morning and in the evening too when he came home from school. In fact, when he didn’t have anything else to do, Donald went to the mirror to comb his hair, running the comb through it, and propping it and patting it with his other hand till it was the way he wanted it. He was these days dignified and soft-spoken and serious, as befitted a college student. He no longer wore knickers, he wore long trousers pleated and with slightly pegged cuffs. He wore a chain from his belt to his side pocket. Outside the house he affected a straight briar pipe, which he clenched in his teeth on one side of his mouth. He never smoked it, that I knew, he just clenched it. Our relationship was changing. At seventeen he now hovered at about twice my age, and took on the coloration of a father rather than an older brother. He showered every day. He offered me less instruction because our interests no longer coincided, but appeared more and more in my
eyes as a model to be emulated and studied. In the evening, when he got home, he listened to the fifteen-minute sports broadcast of Stan Lomax, who with great thoroughness rattled off all the minutiae of collegiate sports with heartening references to the New York city colleges and institutions that were disdained by the other sports news authorities. Stan Lomax dealt with the football fortunes of Brooklyn and City colleges with the same judicious objectivity as he mentioned the University of Michigan or the Minnesota Gophers or the Duke Blue Devils. Donald liked that. He had the fervent pride of the assimilationist, as we all did. Listening with him, I envisioned gothic campuses of idyllic rusticity, as if the sports scores were stories being told. Elegant young football players with names like Tommy Harmon strolled across tree-lined quadrangles in their slacks and argyle sweaters and two-toned shoes with pretty coeds in pleated skirts and angora sweaters by their sides. In their conversation they quietly admitted to having scored the winning touchdown. There were no books and no lectures in these visions of mine. What was essential to them was that same dusk of winter, that late afternoon of cold hard air and leaves spinning down from the plane trees of the Bronx streets, produced by the clouds of World War Two. I liked in my house circles of lamplight surrounded by rings of darkness that grew in depth the farther out they went. I liked the shelter of a desk lamp, feeling toward it Bomba the Jungle Boy’s affection for his campfire in the roars of the dark surrounding night.