World's Fair (33 page)

“You want anything else?”

“No, thank you.”

“I have another matter to discuss,” my mother said. “Edgar has been invited to go with that little girl Meg to the World’s Fair.”

“Well?” my father said. “Why not?”

“Of course, you know whose child she is,” my mother said.

“Whose?”

At this moment a bus pulled up to the curb under my window and the doors hissed and the engine idled loudly. The doors closed and the bus drew away, its gears grinding.

“I hate gossip,” my father was saying. “In fact, that’s worse than gossip, that’s slander. How would you feel if people went around telling stories about you?”

“These are not stories, these are facts. Everyone knows. It’s common knowledge in the neighborhood.”

“Well, supposing it’s true. That was years ago. The man is dead.”

“How has she gotten by all these years?” my mother said. “Do people change that much?”

“I’m not interested,” my father said. “She sounds like a nice enough woman to me. I’ve seen his little friend. She’s a sweet girl. Let him go. He can take care of himself. I’ve been meaning for us to go to the World’s Fair.”

“One of your promises.”

“Yes, one of my promises. And I will make good on it. In the meantime, if he has the chance he should go and enjoy himself. There’s little enough for anyone to enjoy these days.”

“You’re telling me,” my mother said.

W
hen the day came, I was ready. I dressed in a shirt and tie and wore my school knickers and my new low shoes, of which I was very proud. I had until recently worn the old high lace-up kind. Folded in my pocket were two dollars that my father had given me with instructions that I didn’t have to spend all of it if I didn’t need to; but that if I needed to, then I had it to spend. I understood this instruction. It was a great morning of the spring. I raced down the hill from the Concourse, crossing Eastburn at 174th Street, and ran along past the schoolyard, crossed at 173rd, went right by my old house, turned left at Mt. Eden Avenue and ran through the Oval, and up the hill to Meg’s house overlooking Claremont Park. My mother had wanted to walk me here so as to “thank” Norma, as she said, but I knew that wasn’t a good idea and talked her out of it. She would have let Norma know what a great responsibility it was to take care of another woman’s son for a whole day. I didn’t think Norma needed to hear that. However subtle my mother believed herself to be, however delicately suggestive in her statements, she was in fact brutally direct. It was a characteristic I had come to rely on, knowing in no uncertain terms where I stood—that was her phrase,
no uncertain terms
—but it took getting used to. I didn’t want Norma to hear from my mother in no uncertain terms.

I rang the bell and Meg opened the door. She stood there smiling. She wore a white dress and white shoes newly polished and a blue-ribbon bow in her hair. Behind her, Norma in a flowered dress was putting on her hat while looking at herself in the mirror. She stood tugging at it until she found the right angle. It was one of those hats with a wide brim that throw shade on the face. As I stepped in the door and Meg closed it behind me, their phone rang and Norma answered. “Oh, hello,” she said, “this is she.” Norma threw a glance in my direction, and I realized that my mother, not to be deterred, was on the other
end of the line. “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Norma said, and smiled at me. “We love having him, he’s a joy to be with.” She paused. “Well, fairly late, I should think. Yes. Right to the door. Of course.” She listened some more. “No, I quite understand,” she said, “I would make sure too. It does get a bit cool in the evening. I see he has his sweater with him. That should do him fine, I think.”

My mother went on for a while and Norma sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette as she held the phone cradled in her shoulder. She blew smoke and looked at me through the smoke. I was embarrassed about this but didn’t know what to say. When Norma hung up she said, “Your mother likes you a lot, Edgar.” I agreed. “But why would anyone like a monkey face like you?” Norma said, and we all laughed.

TWENTY-EIGHT

E
ven from the elevated station I could see the famous Trylon and Perisphere. They were enormous. They were white in the sun, white spire, white globe, they went together, they belonged together as some sort of partnership in my head. I didn’t know what they stood for, it was all very vague in my mind, but to see them, after having seen pictures and posters and buttons of them for so long, made me incredibly happy. I felt like jumping up and down, I felt myself trembling with joy.

I thought of them as friends of mine.

We came down the stairs right into the fairgrounds. Banners flew from the pavilions. The wide streets were painted red, yellow and blue. They were absolutely clean. The buildings were mostly streamlined, with rounded edges, as I supposed buildings of the future should be. We walked on Rainbow Avenue. The day was fine. Thousands of people were here. They smiled and chatted and pointed things out and consulted their guidebooks. We walked along Constitution Mall. Brilliant tulip gardens were in bloom. The Fair had its own buses. It had its own tractor trains, and Norma decided we should have a ride. An orange-and-blue electric-powered tractor pulled a dozen rubber-wheeled cars behind it, and when the driver blew his horn it played the opening measures of “The Sidewalks of New York”: “East side, west side, all around the town.” Norma
wanted us just to look around and get our bearings. We sat on the last car of the train, so that it whipped around a bit at the corners. Of course it was very tame, nothing like the roller coaster we could see in the distance in the amusement area; it had to go slow because it moved among great crowds of strolling people. Everywhere people walked in family groups and stopped to take their pictures in front of exhibit buildings. There were lady guides in grey uniform jackets and hats. The shuffle of feet was like a constant whispering in my ears, or what I imagined a herd of antelope would sound like going in great numbers slowly through high grass. We went around Commerce Circle and through the Plaza of Light and right around the Trylon and Perisphere, which, up close, seemed to fill the sky. The pictures of them hadn’t suggested their enormity. They were the only white objects to be seen. They were dazzling. They seemed to be about to take off, they looked lighter than air. A ramp connected them, and I could see a line of people silhouetted against the blue sky. We passed the statue of George Washington. I had my map, which I consulted. But with Norma it wasn’t really necessary. She knew everything. “Let’s make our plans,” she said. She had been so happy to have me with them that she’d arranged to join the fun. “I don’t have to go to work yet, so I thought we’d start with a little education. I thought we’d look, for instance, at the interesting foreign pavilions like Iceland or Rumania.” My heart sank. Meg said, “Norma, stop your kidding!” and I looked up and saw Norma laughing and realized she was funny for a mother, and she knew what children liked and what they hated. I laughed too.

We rode across the Bridge of Wheels and got out, of course, at the General Motors Building. That was everyone’s first stop. We took our places on a long line that went up a ramp and turned a corner and up another, alongside this great streamlined building of rounded corners and windowless walls. It reminded me of the kind of structure I would make by turning over a pail of wet sand at the beach and pounding the bottom of the pail and lifting it off the sand mold. The General Motors exhibit was the most popular in the whole Fair, and so I didn’t mind the
long wait we had, practically an hour. We inched along. Meg held my hand, and Norma just behind us smoked her cigarettes and fanned herself with her hat. We were quiet. In the momentousness everyone was quiet. It was the quiet World of Tomorrow, everyone all dressed up.

Finally we got inside. My stomach tightened and my heart beat as we prepared for the exhibit. We ran and took seats, each of us in a chair with high sides and loudspeakers built into them, they faced the same direction and were on a track. The lights went down. Music played and the chairs lurched and began to move sideways. In front of us a whole world lit up, as if we were flying over it, the most fantastic sight I had ever seen, an entire city of the future, with skyscrapers and fourteen-lane highways, real little cars moving on them at different speeds, the center lanes for the higher speeds, the lanes on the edge for the lower. Cars were regulated by radio control, the drivers didn’t even do the driving! This miniature world demonstrated how everything was planned, people lived in these modern streamlined curvilinear buildings, each of them accommodating the population of a small town and holding all the things, schools, food stores, laundries, movies and so on, that they might need, and they wouldn’t even have to go outside, just as if 174th Street and all the neighborhood around were packed into one giant building. And we passed bridges and streams, and electrified farms and airports that brought up airliners on elevators from underground hangars. And there were factories with lights and smoke, and lakes and forests and mountains, and it was all real, which is to say, built to scale, the forests had real tiny trees, and the water in the tiny lakes was real, and around it all we went, at different levels, seeing everything in more and more detail, thousands of tiny cars zipping right along on their tracks as if carrying their small beings about their business. And out in the countryside were these tiny houses with people sitting in them and reading the paper and listening to the radio. In the cities of the future, pedestrian bridges connected the buildings and highways were sunken on tracks below them. No one would get run over in this futuristic world. It all made sense, people didn’t
have to travel except to see the countryside; everything else, their schools, their jobs, were right where they lived. I was very impressed. No matter what I had heard about the Futurama, nothing compared with seeing it for myself: all the small moving parts, all the lights and shadows, the animation, as if I were looking at the largest most complicated toy ever made! In fact this is what I realized and that no one had mentioned to me. It was a toy that any child in the world would want to own. You could play with it forever. The little cars made me think of my toy cars when I was small, the ones I held between my thumb and forefinger, the little coupes and sedans of gunmetal whose wheels spun on axles no thicker than a needle as I drove them along the colored tracks of my plaid carriage blanket. The buildings were models, it was a model world. It was filled with appropriate music, and an announcer was describing all these wonderful things as they went by, these raindrop cars, these air-conditioned cities.

And then the amazing thing was that at the end you saw a particular model street intersection and the show was over, and with your
I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE
button in your hand you came out into the sun and you were standing on precisely the corner you had just seen, the future was right where you were standing and what was small had become big, the scale had enlarged and you were no longer looking down at it, but standing in it, on this corner of the future, right here in the World’s Fair!

That dazzled me. Perhaps it might only have been the sudden passage from darkness to daylight, but I actually wobbled on my feet. I had the feeling that I too had changed size, and it only lasted a moment but it was quite strange. It alerted me to the sizes of everything at the Fair. Norma took us to the Railroads Building. We sat in an auditorium facing a stage with a scenic diorama of O-gage trains and locomotives rolling through hills and valleys and over rivers and through cities. So we were big again. A model freight train would disappear around a bend just as a model passenger train came over a bridge. An announcer told us they had laid the tracks for this exhibit on seventy thousand tiny railway ties that were fastened with a quarter of a
million tiny spikes. And then outside, in the daylight behind the exhibit hall, was a real railroad yard with ancient steam engines on display, “The General,” the “Daniel Nason,” and the newest most modern locomotive of all, a sleek and monumental monster of dark green whose wheels were taller than a man. So there it was again!

And then at the Consolidated Edison exhibit, again everything was shrunk—it was a diorama of the entire City of New York, showing the life in the city from morning till night. We could see the whole city and across the Hudson River to Jersey, the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. We could see up in Westchester and Connecticut. I looked for my house in the Bronx, but I couldn’t see it. Norma thought she saw Claremont Park. But below us were the great stone skyscrapers, the cars and buses in the streets, the subways and elevated trains, all of the working metropolis, all of it sparkling with life, and when afternoon came there was even a thunderstorm, and all the lights of the buildings and streets came up to deal with the darkness.

Everywhere at the World’s Fair the world was reduced to tiny size by the cunning and ingenuity of builders and engineers. And then things loomed up that were larger than they ought to have been. The Public Health Building had an exhibit showing the different parts of the body, each of them depicted many times their real size. An enormous ear, and nose, with their canals and valves and cellular bone marrow exposed—big pink plastic organs, bigger than I was. The eye was so big you walked into it! You walked into this eye, saw through its lens, which changed to make you nearsighted or farsighted. We all grew dizzy with that one. And then an enormous man made of Plexiglas, I suppose, with all his giant internal organs visible, but no visible penis, a mistake in representation about which I said nothing to Meg and Norma, thinking it was not polite.