World's Fair (34 page)

And everywhere outside were stone statues of men and women in various poses, wrestling dogs, or bulls, swimming with dolphins, or standing on one foot, or carrying farm tools. They wore stone dresses or stone pants, or they were naked with stone breasts and backsides. You could see the muscles in
their legs or arms, you could see their ribs and spinal columns of stone. They stood or lay about in pools or atop pylons or rose up from shrubbery. Some of them were pressed into the sides of buildings, so only the front halves of them showed, sculptures of concrete pressed in like sand molds. The same kinds of expressionless people were painted on the sides of buildings, enormous murals of them holding beakers of chemicals or blueprints in their hands. They looked like no one I knew, parts of them were immense, other parts were small. They intermingled, so you didn’t know which arms belonged to which bodies. I was made light-headed by the looming and shrinking size of things.

We wanted to go everywhere, do everything. “Whoa, whoa, hold your horses,” Norma said. We were getting wild. She took us to a dairy counter and we sat down and had egg salad sandwiches on white bread and malted milks, an excellent lunch. We sat at a little metal table under an umbrella and ate and drank while Norma leaned on an elbow and smoked a cigarette and watched us. She had bought a buttermilk for herself. When we had finished, she leaned forward and gently wiped with a paper napkin the malted milk around Meg’s mouth, who lifted her chin and closed her eyes while this was done.

Then we were off again. It was late afternoon. We saw a rotating platform on which real cows were milked by electric pumps. The cows stared at us as they turned past. They were like the cows on that farm in Connecticut. That they had to be milked by machines while they were rotated I did not question. I thought this was a new discovery; perhaps it kept the cream from rising. We saw in the General Electric Building hall an artificial lightning generator. This was truly fearsome. Bolts of lightning shot thirty feet through the air. Meg screamed and people around us laughed. You could smell the air burn, the thunder was deafening. This was part of the exhibit showing General Electric Appliances for the home. There was so much to see and do. We watched Coca-Cola being bottled and Philadelphia Cream Cheeses wrapped and we saw France and Spain and Belgium. In the Radio Corporation of America Building,
which was shaped like a radio vacuum tube, we saw a demonstration of wireless telegraphy saving a ship at sea, and a new invention, picture radio, or television, in which there were reflected on mirrors tilted over a receiver actual pictures of people talking into microphones at the very moment they were talking from somewhere else in the city, not the World’s Fair.

We were tired now and stopped to rest on a bench, and to watch the people walk by. All you had to do was turn around and wherever you were you could see the Trylon and Perisphere.

“OK, kids,” Norma said, “now I’ve got to go to work. I have it all planned out. If you’re going to make it through this evening, you’ve got to rest awhile.”

She took us on another tractor train to the section of the Fair where she worked. The Amusement Zone. This was very familiar to me. It looked like the boardwalk at Rockaway, with the same penny arcades and shooting galleries and scales to stand on while the concessionaire guessed your weight. But there were big rides too and showplaces like Gay New Orleans and Forbidden Tibet. Meg tugged my arm. “Look, Edgar!” We were going past what I had thought was only another building. But on the roof was a truly amazing sight, a gigantic red revolving National Cash Register, seven stories high. It showed the day’s Fair attendance as if it were ringing up sales. Clouds floated peacefully behind it.

N
orma’s place of work was a wooden theater building with a platform and a barker’s lectern in front. The doors were still closed. It was some sort of nautical show. An underwater scene with an octopus was painted on a curtain. Nothing was going on. Behind this building, in a little backyard with a broken-down fence, with towels and women’s underwear hanging on a clothesline, was a canvas tent. The flaps were down. Norma found us deck chairs and told us to rest. When she raised the
flaps and went into the tent, I saw women sitting at dressing tables.

The afternoon was turning dark now, a chill was in the air here in the shade behind the wooden building. I put on my sweater. Meg sat in her chair all asprawl with her legs hanging over the sides. She looked at me as her eyes glazed over. These chairs were old. The colored stripes were faded. Even two light children sank back into the old canvas—I saw the outline of Meg’s back in her chair, the weight and roundness of her in the chair sling. It was very quiet here behind the World’s Fair. I heard the murmur of voices but couldn’t hear the actual words said. I heard a woman’s laughter. I heard calliope music—a circus march that I recognized and that at any other time would have made my heart pound with excitement. I closed my eyes.

TWENTY-NINE

N
orma’s job was to wrestle with Oscar the Amorous Octopus in a tank of water. First she stood outside with five or six other women on the platform stage in front of the building. The women wore bathing suits and high-heeled shoes and stood up there while a barker, in a straw hat and holding a cane, told the people who had gathered what they would see inside. Norma looked down and smiled at us. Her bathing cap was turned up on the back of her head. Her one-piece woolen bathing suit was dark blue.

When the doors were opened we pushed inside and got right in front of the glass tank; it was like a small swimming pool made of glass. People pushed behind us. Inside the tank, on the floor, was an octopus. I could tell immediately it was not real. First of all, I had read that octopuses were smaller than people generally believed, their heads were not much bigger than grapefruits; their tentacles were seldom more than a few feet long. This was a rubber model, with a head the size of a sack of potatoes; the tentacles rippled along the floor of the tank in a kind of mechanical way. The eyes ogled us, and the creature moved to the glass and pressed against it as if it wanted to get at us. The audience laughed. He had eight tentacles, and they swished around in more or less independent searching patterns. Occasionally one
of the tentacles curled back and touched his mouth, as if he had found something to eat and was eating it, the way an elephant will bring its trunk to its mouth. But it was always the same one. I didn’t believe the octopus was real. The little suckers at the end of each tentacle looked molded. The whole thing was the amber color of a rubber nipple.

We could see the women now. They were kneeling at the back edge of the tank on a kind of deck or standing with their hands on their knees and peering in. They were in shadow. The light was in the water where Oscar was. He lifted that one tentacle and curled it back toward himself, like someone saying “Come here” with his index finger. The crowd appreciated this. Then music began, an electric organ playing “The Blue Danube Waltz,” and Oscar began to sway in time to the music. One of the women dove in smartly and rose up past the tank window and looped over herself neatly and touched Oscar on the top of his head and then hoisted herself out of the tank. Another dropped in and Oscar grabbed for her, but she eluded him and swam past us, smiling with her eyes open, even though she was underwater, kicking her legs right past us, and she too climbed out of the tank just before the octopus almost grabbed her foot. They were all playing a game with him. Norma dove into the tank now, she dove well. She did the bravest thing of all, she actually allowed Oscar to put his tentacles in her hands and they did an underwater dance together, swaying in time with the music, an underwater ballet, although Oscar looked out at us while he danced and one tentacle came up behind Norma and attached itself to her backside while he ogled at the audience, rolling his eyes, and his mouth curled back in a kind of leer. The audience laughed.

But Norma got away, up the ladder, and now two by two the women jumped in and flirted with Oscar and touched him and swam away before he could get his tentacles on them, although sometimes he did. And soon they were all in the tank with him, and their white legs flashed by, or their arched backs, or they came up from the bottom along the glass front with their hands
over their heads, their palms pressed together and their bathing suits stretched taut over their bodies. I couldn’t tell anymore which was Norma.

All this time underwater lights were playing through the water, turning it different colors, light blue and green and dark green and red that at first looked black. Now the music had changed, and it was hard to see what was going on, it was dark and foreboding music, like the music of
Inner Sanctum
, a horror-story radio program, very dark music. A white body pressed up to the glass and was tugged back into the murk. And then I felt Meg’s hand in mine. She pulled me through the crowd to the door. I understood why. We let the crowd flow around us. It was mostly men, a few women, we were the only children that I could see.

Norma had told us we could wander as we wished around the Amusement Zone, she had even given us money so that we could do what we liked. The only condition was that we had to check back with her every half hour or so during the time when she was offstage. Meg had pulled me back from the tank because we were losing valuable time watching her mother when we could be seeing the Fair.

Y
et as we ran along not knowing what to do first, it became clear that we would have to be organized. There were lines everywhere at the big important rides. If we had to show up back at Norma’s tent every half hour or forty minutes, it was clear we would have only one thing each time around; we should plan what that was beforehand.

“What is your absolutely essential ride?” I said.

“Parachute,” Meg said after a few moments of thought.

I dreaded going up in the parachute, but couldn’t let on. “Me too,” I said. “Now, what is the absolutely most important exhibit as far as you’re concerned?”

“The babies in the incubators,” she said. That was a keen disappointment.

“I thought you saw that already.”

“I know,” Meg said. “So what?”

“I’d rather see Frank Buck’s Jungleland,” I said. Nevertheless we were getting somewhere. Neither of us was interested in Little Old New York or the Winter Wonderland, despite its contingent of penguins brought back from Antarctica by Admiral Byrd. And we both could do without Merrie England. And we agreed that if we had time, we would like to visit the Odditorium, which was supposed to have amazing freaks of all kinds, according to my friend Arnold.

So with our agenda set, we ran into the night. In front of the Infant Incubator building was a giant thousand-pound sculptured stone baby on its back with its arms and legs waving in the air. But inside, behind glass partitions, attended by nurses in white, these real ugly little scrawny ratlike babies jerked their hands around or slept. How they could sleep in bright light I didn’t know, although I understood that babies this age are still blind. Before the invention of the incubator, babies born too early would not have lived. Meg pressed her face against the glass. A nurse saw her and wheeled over an incubator so that she could see it more clearly. The little kid inside was all hooked up to things. It had the face of a wrinkled nut or peach pit. But Meg thought it was cute.

We ran back to Norma. She stood in front of her tent behind the Octopus building. She wore a terrycloth robe and her hair was combed back, all her makeup was gone and her face looked very white, and her eyes red, from swimming in the tank. She smiled when she saw us, she had been awaiting us anxiously. We hugged her. I put my arm around her lower back. I could feel the swell of her hips under my forearm. She wore pink mules on her feet.

Almost immediately we were off again, running down the Midway to Frank Buck’s Jungleland. At last! It was a zoo technically, he had lots of different animals, but the railings were wood and the cages were portable, so it was more makeshift
than a zoo, more in the nature of a camp. There were three different kinds of elephant, including a pygmy, and there was a black rhinoceros standing very still, as still as a structure, and who obviously understood nothing about where he was or why; there were a few sleeping tigers, none of them advertised as a man-eater; and tapirs, an okapi, and two sleek black panthers. You could ride on a camel’s back, which we didn’t do. On a miniature mountain, there lived, and screamed and swung and leaped and hung hundreds of rhesus monkeys. We watched them a long time. I explained Frank Buck to Meg. He went into the wilds of Malaya, usually, but also Africa, and trapped animals and brought them back here to zoos and circuses and sold them. I told her that was more humane to do than merely hunt them. In truth, I had worshiped Frank Buck, he lived the life I dreamed for myself, adventurous yet with ethical controls, he did not kill. But I had to confess to myself, though not to Meg, that I had now read his book twice and realized things about him I hadn’t understood the first time. He complained a lot about the personalities of his animals. He got into scraps with them. Once an elephant picked him up and tossed him away. An orangutan bit him, and he nearly fell into a pit with a certified man-eating tiger. He called his animals devils, wretches, pitiful creatures, poor beasts and specimens. When one of them died on the ship to America, he felt sorry for it, but he seemed sorrier to lose the money the specimen would have brought. He called the Malays who worked for him in his camp “boys.” Yet I could see now in the Malay village in Jungleland that these were men, in their loincloths and turbans, and they handled the animals in their care quite well. Frank Buck himself couldn’t have been more impressive. They laughed among themselves and moved in and out of their bamboo shacks with no self-consciousness, barely attending to the patrons of Jungleland. I looked around for Frank Buck, knowing full well he wouldn’t be here. I understood his legendary existence depended on his not being here, but I looked anyway. The truth was, I thought now, Frank Buck was a generally grumpy fellow, always cursing out his “boys” or
jealously guarding his “specimens” or boasting how many he had sold where and for how much. He acted superior to the people who worked for him. He didn’t get along with the authorities in the game preserves, nor with the ships’ captains who took him on their freighters with his crated live cargo, nor with the animals themselves. I saw all that now, but I still wanted to be like him, and walk around with a pith helmet and a khaki shirt and a whip for keeping the poor devils in line. The Jungleland souvenir was a gold badge, with red and yellow printing. I pinned Meg’s to her dress and mine to my shirt.