World's Fair (18 page)

Hitler was on my mind a lot lately. I had heard his voice on a radio broadcast, he shouted in German, which I heard as a language full of spitting and gulping and galumphing, almost as if the words were broken in the teeth; it sounded as if he were shattering glass in his mouth, as if he breathed fire and made the air explode in front of his face. He would say something and you’d hear his fist pounding the speaker’s platform and then a great roar go up from the crowd, like some shrieking wind, and then it would begin to pulsate and radio static would crack
through it, and the announcer, speaking calmly in English, would describe what was going on at this rally, the way everyone’s right arm extended straight in the air as the crowd chanted and did this salute taken from ancient Rome, arms shooting up and big red-and-black Nazi flags with swastikas fluttering everywhere.

I tried that salute in front of the mirror in my room, throwing my arm forward with the elbow stiff, and trying at the same time to click my heels. Donald marched around my room holding a small black comb under his nose like Hitler’s moustache and chanting German gibberish. He brushed his hair down over his forehead. It was funny. It was easy to imitate Hitler. Actually, when I had first seen his picture in a magazine I had confused him with Charlie Chaplin. Everyone seemed to notice the resemblance, they both wore these little black moustaches, and had black hair and heavy eyebrows. Charlie Chaplin himself had noticed the resemblance and Donald told me Charlie was making a movie about Hitler that was going to be really great because Charlie hated Hitler. I resolved to see that movie when it came out.

I found it disturbing, however, that they resembled each other. I loved Charlie Chaplin. We had the same taste in women, like the blind flower girl, whom we both found very beautiful and kind. He had helped her, as I would have. He was a wonderful little guy, he never got as mad at other people as they did at him, even when they were fighting, although he was often hurt by them. He just picked himself up and swung and ran. In
Modern Times
big voices telling him what to do came from speakers in this shining modern factory, but he himself, Charlie, never spoke, no matter how bad things got, he never made a sound: like the time he went after the loose nut on the assembly line and got picked up by the moving machinery and was sent winding through the gears. When he had his lunch a machine wiped his mouth for him. It seemed to me an unfortunate coincidence that he and Hitler looked alike. My father had a moustache too, they all three had moustaches. I dreamed one night my father sat with Charlie on one knee and Hitler on the other; he held on to them
by the backs of their necks as if they were ventriloquist dummies, and made their mouths clack open and shut and held out each of them to me in turn, one with his floppy little legs dangling in baggy trousers and a cutaway coat, the other in a brown Army uniform with leather boots. And then my father laughed.

DONALD

S
ure, I remember when we moved to Eastburn Avenue. I pushed you there in your carriage. It was great moving to a larger place. I had my own room. I was eight, a big fellow. The responsible older brother.

It’s only natural that we remember things differently. I had Mom and Dad to myself for all those years before you joined us. We were prosperous. Before he got into the retail end of things Dad was in the sound box business. In those days record players, Victrolas, had spring motors, you cranked them up like you cranked cars, and the critical element was the sound box at the end of the tone arm. It was a metal cylinder, about an inch wide, three inches in diameter, with a convex grille face, and inside was a diaphragm that vibrated. You stuck a steel needle into a socket on the rim, and tightened it with a fixed screw, and put the needle on the record and that was how you got sound. Dad ran the business from an office in the Flatiron Building.

The day Lindbergh was welcomed up Fifth Avenue we saw it from the office window. I was very young, maybe four, and I stood on the windowsill and saw Lindbergh in an open car, all the confetti falling, the crowd going wild. I was so excited I leaned too far out and almost lost my balance. Dad had to pull me back in.

You say he didn’t use force. Maybe he’d mellowed a bit by the
time you came along. With me he was very strict and didn’t hesitate to haul off when he felt it was necessary. My first day of school I refused to go. No amount of cajoling, imploring or bribing by Mom could budge me. Dad lost his temper. He picked me up and carried me to school under his arm. I’ll never forget it. He carried me right up the steps and down the hall, and opened the door to my classroom and dumped me on the floor, in front of everyone.

There was another time, in Rockaway. You and I were staying with Grandma and Grandpa. They had a bungalow for the summer. The folks shipped us out there to get us out of the heat, but they didn’t come themselves, Dad had to work and Mom couldn’t leave her mother. So you and I were on our own with the old people. We ran around all day on the beach and played in the penny arcades, and in that time I don’t think either of us bathed. So on the second weekend the folks came out to see us. Mom will tell you the story. She saw these two children walking toward her in the street, I was holding your hand, and your pants drooped and my socks were around my ankles, and our faces were dirty, she thought at first we were a pair of street urchins, she didn’t realize she was looking at her own sons. She was furious that Grandma, with her vaunted cleanliness, had let things get so out of hand. There was a big argument. Dad asked me to go into the bathroom and have a shower. I refused. He was mad, everyone was mad, he picked me up just as he had my first day in school, and turned on the shower and threw me in, clothes and all.

He was a terrific athlete. He spent a lot of time with me, teaching me to play tennis, or to skate or swim. He urged me to excel. Always I was made to know what his expectations were for me. I think this explains somewhat why we had a difficult time with each other in later years. After you came along it was made clear to me that I was to help with your upbringing, and put in time with you as he had with me. And so I did. A lot of the things I taught you he had taught me. One passed things on. One worked for the family. You know that picture of Dad and me walking together stride for stride on Sixth Avenue on some
business matter—where is that picture, do you have it?—I was all of thirteen at the time. I started working for him very young. Take a look at that picture when you have the chance. I have on a suit and tie just like his, but I’m wearing knickers. It’s a tinted photograph, our faces are washed in this rosy color, Dad has a cigar in his mouth, he has a packet of business papers under his arm, his shoulders are back, he looks happy, we both look happy, healthy, energetic, full of beans, and the street photographer picked up on this father and son, and snapped the picture and sold it to us.

Dad liked to patronize street people. You would be walking along with him and he’d suddenly veer over to a pushcart, or stop to buy a pamphlet from someone. He did that as a matter of principle. He idealized the little man. He had a political consciousness. He rode the train to Boston for a rally for Sacco and Vanzetti. He wanted to take me but Mom wouldn’t let him. The case obsessed him. He brought home Upton Sinclair’s novel about it—
Boston
—it was in two volumes. He was very much a man of his time. He devoured the papers. Maybe everyone was more radical in those days. Nowadays when people protest something, they’re looked on as oddities. But, for instance, Dad was talking about Hitler very early. He was onto him. That doesn’t sound so unusual now, but you’d be surprised how little was known about Hitler, it took the establishment in America a long time to understand what was going on. Dad was an antifascist. He was a leftist, like our grandpa, but more of a fighter. In the big strikes—steel, coal, automobile—he was on the side of the unions. He didn’t believe in minding his own business, his brain was always working. You could be sure he’d come up with another slant on things. Like when King Edward of England abdicated the throne to marry his girlfriend Wally Simpson. Well, Mom loved that story. You know, a king giving up his throne for love. It was in all the papers and magazines, the King’s abdication speech was on the radio, carried shortwave from London. Everyone loved that story. But not Dad. He got angry because Mom took it so seriously. “Don’t you realize,” he said, “the idea of a king in the twentieth century is ridiculous?
The English king is a fossil. Like all of them in Europe now, a bunch of useless dimwits who strut around and indulge themselves at public expense. This romantic king of yours lives on the tax revenues taken from working people. I can see why the upper classes of England would find him useful, but why the American press treats this as serious news, and you fall for it, is another matter.” Mom was quite miffed. “Don’t you ever relax about anything?” she asked him. “I’m not the intellectual you are—all right?” They disagreed about politics as about most things.

I don’t know much about Dad’s life as a boy. I know he was born on the Lower East Side. Grandma and Grandpa were both from the Minsk district, they emigrated in the 1880’s, I know that. They were young and married here. But where they lived, where Dad went to school, you would have to ask Aunt Frances, she would know. Dad was almost thirty when he got married. He’d already missed out on a couple of major opportunities. One was when he was training to be an ensign in the First World War. He was stationed at Webb’s Naval Institute on the Harlem River. He loved the water, he used to tell me how he swam in the East River as a kid. He loved ships. He was desperate to go to sea, but the war ended before he got his commission. So that had to be a great disappointment. And then you know the story about
The Perils of Pauline
. He was a handsome fellow, and they were casting for this series, and came into the bank where he worked as a teller. I don’t know, he must have been twenty-one, twenty-two at the time. And this man came into the bank who was directing the movie, I don’t remember his name, but as I heard it he had a beret and a pince-nez and wore riding boots. And he looked at Dad and asked him to take a screen test. He wanted him for the male lead. Dad refused. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he had a surer thing in banking. Who knows, he might have become a big actor in the silents or he might not. But the point is, it was unlike him to back away from a challenge. He liked to gamble, take risks, he liked what was new and different. No one had a record store to match Hippodrome Music. Dad stocked black singers from down South, race records, as
they were called, blues bands, ethnic music, jazz, he was really informed and it didn’t matter to him that some of these things were commercially risky. One day I came back from a delivery and he motioned to me and took me into the booth and put on a record. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s something new.” And it was, a wonderful bouncy music, with a great clarinet solo that made you want to dance. It was Benny Goodman’s first record. “Isn’t that fine?” Dad said. “It’s called swing.”

SIXTEEN

D
onald now had materials from his Townsend Harris High School courses that were beyond my understanding: slide rules, calipers, T squares. He brought home mechanical drawings that he had done and gotten good marks for, little 95’s and 90’s in red ink at the top corner of each drawing. They were like blueprints and showed cylinders and cones, and machine parts in three dimensions, each line measured by another that indicated its length. He explained the concept of scale to me. He knew all this and was confident with it. He had special fountain pens for drawing. All I had was one fountain pen, which I was not even supposed to use in school. But I liked to open my bottle of Waterman’s blue-black ink and fill my pen by opening the little spring clip on the side and closing it slowly. You could hear the ink being sucked up. There was a thin rubber tube inside the pen that was attached to the point—that’s what filled up. I borrowed his sticks of charcoal to draw with. He was generous. But if I was careless with something of his, misplacing it, or damaging it, he acted as if I had committed a great crime. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the care I had to take when I borrowed something, so I didn’t.

I had to acknowledge the fact that my brother was changing. He spent less time with me. High school took up a lot of his time,
and then on Saturday he had his job with my father. I was left more and more on my own.

There was a candy store near Rosoff’s on 174th Street—not the one I frequented, but one where the older boys gathered to horse around and talk about girls. Sometimes girls gathered there too. My brother and his friends Harold and Bernie and Irwin attached themselves to this society, sometimes stopping there in the afternoons after they got off the train. Gambling went on, boys pitching pennies against the wall or matching nickels. Inside they sold policy, a word familiar to me, though I didn’t know what it meant. My brother did not talk about these things. When my mother found out why he was coming home late from school, she was alarmed. She had strong opinions about Donald’s friends and never failed to deliver them. “So now they’ve turned into sidewalk cowboys,” she said. “I don’t wonder. You hang around that store and you’ll end up with them in the criminal class,” she said.