World's Fair (17 page)

At my urging we sat in the first car so I could stand at the window at the front end of the car right next to the motorman’s cab. The train clattered through the black tunnel. The stanchions flashed by. The train headlamps cast light on the rails ahead that looked to me like two continuously shooting stars. Up ahead the next station came into view as a box of light. Closer and closer it came and suddenly the white tiles of the new station blazed forth, everything was bathed in brilliance, and we were grinding to a halt but still whizzing past the people waiting on the lighted platform. The engineer knew where to stop according to the number of cars in the train. In Manhattan at 125th Street, we became an express all the way down to Fifty-ninth. This was the best part of the trip, passing the lighted stations from the middle track, the lights rippling by, the train going so fast it rocked from side to side, banging against its own wheel carriages.

“Hello, young man,” my father said when we walked into the store. Several customers were at the racks of sheet music, two were talking to Uncle Willy in the back. Lester waved at my mother. He was selling someone a radio. My father was unpacking
a carton of ukuleles behind the counter near the front door. “We’re having a run on these,” he said. I sat down behind the counter to try one for myself. They were not serious instruments, I knew, because they were sold up here rather than in the back, where the horns and banjos and drums were. I asked my father where Donald was, because on Saturdays Donald worked at the store.

“He’s out on a delivery,” my father said.

My mother said to my father we were hoping he would take us to lunch. “That is entirely possible,” he said. He was waiting for some calls. There was a man at Carnegie Hall he might have to meet. “Wait awhile and we’ll see,” he said. He did not like to be pinned down. He answered the phone and went to the back to check on some stock. Up and down the walls behind the counter were rows and rows of record albums, with dark green spines and gilt lettering, thick, heavy albums of operas, symphonies, which I hesitated to withdraw because I didn’t want to break anything. Lester had sold a small radio. He saw the customer off and came to the cash register and counted several bills carefully; then he rang open the register and put all the bills inside. Then he removed a bill and put it in his pocket and closed the register. He found my mother looking at him and smiled. He adjusted his tie and patted his hair. Clearly he knew he was handsome. He took his hat from a hook behind the counter. “Tell Dave I had to go out. I’ll be back in a while.”

My mother had been reading some sheet music. “Did you see what Lester did?” she said to me. I had not known how to tune the ukulele properly, I could not peg the strings taut. Other people came into the store. My father moved around constantly, he was on the go. Every time the door opened the street noise flowed in as if cars and buses and thousands of pedestrians were about to come into the store. As suddenly as it had started, the sound stopped. I felt safe behind the counter. “I’m hungry,” I said to my mother.

“We’re waiting for your father,” she said. This was a very familiar situation. He had said neither yes nor no.

When my mother spoke up he said, “You run ahead and get a table and I’ll be there shortly.”

“While we cool our heels?” my mother said. “Not this time.” We sat and waited. Somehow my father needed pressure applied. He could not be counted upon except when pressured.

Finally, at a quiet moment, Uncle Willy said to my father. “For God’s sake, Dave, I’m here and Lester will be back in a few minutes. Take your family to lunch.”

The Automat was on Forty-second Street, a great glittering high-ceilinged hall with murals on the walls and rows and rows of tables. I dropped three nickels in a slot, I worked the little knob next to the glass door, and the sliced cheese and boloney sandwich on white bread was mine. One nickel got me a turn of the chocolate milk lever. This was quite fine. My parents had soup and bread and coffee. Strange people sat all about. Some of them peered at us: a little old woman with odd bumps on her face, wild red hair and a crocheted hat, and several men with unpressed clothes and stubble on their chins. The lady in the change-making booth rang the nickels on the marble counter. The busboys slapped the trays together. Because there were three of us, we thought we’d have a table to ourselves, but it was crowded and a man sat down at the fourth chair and ate his lunch from his tray. He wore his homburg tilted back on his head, he had on a dark shiny suit with cigarette ash rubbed into the lapels, his shirt collar was creased and dirty. All hunched over, he ate spaghetti and sucked in the strands like Charlie Chaplin, with little Hooping noises.

My father seemed oblivious to all of this, but my mother stopped eating and dabbed her mouth with a napkin and pushed her chair back and sat with her purse in her lap, ready to go. She looked at the murals on the walls. She asked my father where Donald had gone on his delivery to be away so long. He said Donald had gone to Brooklyn.

“He agreed to do that?” my mother said.

My father laughed. “We gave him a choice. Did he want to go to Brooklyn or New Jersey. He chose Brooklyn.” My mother’s eyes narrowed. “Under the circumstances,” my father said, “he
thought he was getting a good deal.” He looked at me: “Everything is relative,” he said.

My father decided he wanted dessert. “How about some fresh fruit salad,” he said. “No thank you,” my mother said.

I went with him to the food counter. “They have red Jell-O, your favorite,” he said. I didn’t want to disappoint him because I knew the Jell-O was hard, it was cut in cubes; I liked it as it was made at home and I was able to spoon it up while it was still shimmery and easily liquefied between the teeth. That was the way I liked my desserts. I liked to take a Dixie Cup and stir the ice cream around until it was soup and drink it off. My mother tapped her fingers on the table. The old man had left. She had put her tray on another table. She said, “I saw Lester take money from the register.”

“That couldn’t be,” my father said.

“But I’m telling you he did.”

“If he did, he’ll put it back,” my father said.

“No wonder the store isn’t making a dime, if one of the partners skims the cash register,” my mother said. “I’ve seen consoles disappear off the floor too. You won’t listen to me. The man is a thief.”

“Rose,” my father said. “That’s why I don’t like to have you in the store. You’re a suspicious person, you’re always thinking the worst of people. You know nothing about business, why don’t you just let me take care of it?”

“I know more about business than you do,” my mother said.

She was very unhappy now. Icy, furious. Right in front of my eyes the day had turned bad. I knew it would be worse when my father got home. Then the true argument with the shouting and the name-calling would begin. I thought now I had probably realized everything would go this way before we ever set out the door. I was not surprised. In my mind I had traded a good subway ride for the desolate afternoon ahead, which now commenced, my mother taking my hand and walking out, leaving my father smoking a cigarette at the table. In the swinging door I went around twice while she waited outside. I saw my father still sitting in the Automat. He smiled and gave a sad little wave.

FIFTEEN

T
he next day my mother refused to come on the visit to Grandma and Grandpa. Donald chose to exercise his right not to go to family things if he didn’t want to, so I was the only one to accompany my father. I felt guilty doing this because it was far more fun than staying home with my glowering silent mother. She would listen to the New York Philharmonic broadcast and read and sew. That was hardly festive.

Eastburn Avenue was empty as it tended to be on Sundays once past the lunch hour. In the morning there was always a big softball game in the schoolyard, but when it was over, the whole neighborhood grew quiet. My friends had to go visit their relatives too, or stay upstairs to receive relatives visiting them. To journey up the broad Concourse with my father was to be somehow in the proper rhythm of the day, like everyone else. He cheered up, too, outside the house. He loved to be going somewhere. He insisted we get off the bus two stops early to get a walk in. He walked with a jaunty stride. He claimed a brisk pace was the only way to get anywhere and was, besides, less tiring than walking slowly. I struggled to keep up, half running when I fell behind. “Throw your shoulders back,” he said. “Breathe in. Hold your head up. That’s the way. Look the world in the eye!” I understood this as a spiritual instruction. But I couldn’t have understood it as a self-urging, which I see it now to have
been—in that way of the parent who expresses for the child in imperatives the prayers he makes for himself. From the same religion of health and hygiene, he insisted that I turn the water all cold at the end of my showers; I was still working on that, practicing by putting my head under the cold water first, then my shoulders, and so on. But I hadn’t got much beyond a few seconds. He had shown me too how to rub myself down with a towel afterward, using it on my back the way a shoeshine man used his strip of cloth to buff the shoes. “Rub hard,” he had said. “Bring the blood to the skin.”

Immediately, when we arrived, my grandmother said, “So where’s Rose?” Without embarrassment my father said she was not feeling well. Clearly my grandmother understood the situation. She shook her head. My benign grandfather was sitting in his chair by the radio. We held our hands out palm to palm and he said, “You have grown since the last time.” Grandma bustled about setting out the tea things. My father had stopped at the Sutter bakery near Fordham Road. The babka he had bought was the centerpiece, a plump cinnamon loaf shaped like a baker’s hat.

We stayed late into the afternoon, it was always this way with my father—to arrive late, and to stay late. The light faded, I grew bored. My grandfather smoked his Regent ovals and my grandmother, without my mother to contend with, was very happy, relaxed, freely prying into the finances of my family. She offered my father advice on running the store. My father adored her, calling her
“Mamaleh
,” which means little mother. Then he and my grandfather talked about the war in Spain. They agreed it was tragic that President Roosevelt was not helping the Spanish government fight the Fascists. My father grew heated. “Hitler sends dive-bombers, Mussolini sends tanks. I have to wonder, Pop. In the South there is still a poll tax. Negroes are lynched. Who is Roosevelt, anyway? What do we
think
he is?”

My grandfather was more stoic: “You cannot expect of a President that he should not be a politician,” he said. “Even our revered Roosevelt.”

Now it was late enough to hear
The Shadow
, on the radio. The
Shadow was Lamont Cranston, a wealthy man-about-town, who possessed the power to cloud men’s minds and become invisible. By this means he fought crime. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” he said in his invisible voice at the beginning of every program. “The Shadow knows.” And then he laughed a sniggling nasal laugh that made
him
sound evil. That had always slightly bothered me. When the Shadow went into his invisible mode, you could tell because his voice sounded as if it were coming through a telephone; this made sense because you couldn’t see people in real life either when they were talking to you on the telephone. But there was something stunted about the Shadow’s adventures. They were no contest. Typically, in a Shadow story, it would take Lamont Cranston a while to realize he was faced with a severe enough crisis to change into the Shadow. Sometimes it would happen that his girlfriend Margo was threatened. The criminals were always stupid and talked either with foreign accents or in rough gravelly voices with the diction of the Dead End Kids. They would have guns and shoot wildly, but to no avail. The Shadow would laugh his sniggling laugh and tell them they had missed. Actually I knew that with a tommy gun a smart crook could hold his finger down on the trigger and spin around in a 360-degree circle spraying bullets up and down and so have a fair chance of hitting the Shadow whether he was invisible or not, and no matter how far he threw his voice. His invisible blood would run. But they never thought of that.

Listening to programs, you saw them in your mind. From the sound effects you were able to imagine what things looked like and tell from the sound of its engine if a car was sleek and streamlined, or big like a taxi with lots of leg room and a running board. I thought of Margo, Lamont Cranston’s friend, as looking like my mother’s friend Mae but without her glasses, and without Mae’s little jokes. Margo was an attractive woman, but lacking in humor. Cranston himself I thought a little slow-moving to take as long as he did to go into action; he was fairly sedentary, as compared, say, with the Green Hornet, who
could probably lick him in a fight if they went at it visibly. I didn’t think of the Shadow as being able to jump rooftops or climb ropes or run very fast. On the other hand, why should he have to? Also, I wondered about his restraint when he could become invisible anytime he chose. I wondered if he ever took advantage of women, as I surely would. Did he ever watch Margo Lane go to the bathroom? I knew that if I had the power to be invisible I would go into the girls’ bathroom at P.S. 70 and watch them pulling their drawers down. I would watch women take their clothes off in their homes and they wouldn’t even know I was there. I wouldn’t make the mistake of speaking up or making a sound, they would never even know I had been there. But I would forever after know what they looked like. The thought of having this power made my ears hot. Yes, I would spy on naked girls but I would also do good. I would invisibly board a ship, or, better still, a China Clipper and I would fly to Germany and find out where Adolf Hitler lived. I would in absolute safety, with no chance of being caught, go to Hitler’s palace, or whatever it was, and kill him. Then I would kill all of his generals and ministers. The Germans would be going crazy trying to find the invisible avenger. I would whisper in their ears to be good and kind, and they would thereafter be thinking God had been speaking. The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini. If his program hadn’t been on a Sunday afternoon, I would probably not have listened to it.