World's Fair (4 page)

Cars were built high off the ground and so the dog survived. We were all to praise her for her instructive reaction before the
oncoming car; we did not tell each other how stupid she was for having gotten in front of it in the first place. My mother put Vaseline on Pinky’s scrape, and within an hour it was as if nothing had happened.

And I went back to watching Smith. He was working slowly and steadily in that way of skilled laborers. After the last barrowload was put away he came back out and hosed the sidewalk. The big penumbra of black dust dissolved. Then, everything clean and fresh again, Smith slowly went back to his basement.

I sat alone in the silence on the front stoop. My dog was safe. I sat there on the steps and looked into the peaceful shining street. In the passage of this sun-filled afternoon, it was as if the monumental event of the coal truck had never occurred, and that weightless light, and the iridescence of sprayed water, were, after all, the reigning forces of the universe.

S
ome black-and-white eight-millimeter film records a moment when I was commissioned by my brother to hold the spring-wound Universal movie camera that our father had brought home to us. The camera was not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, though much heavier. My job was to press the button and photograph Donald and his friends grouped around Pinky in the sun in front of the double folding garage doors alongside our house. First you see a sedate composition of boys standing and kneeling like a team around its mascot. Pinky barks and strains at her leash, which Donald has trouble holding. The group is waving, smiling, but then Pinky jumps, knocks over one of the kneeling boys, and soon the whole company are falling over themselves, laughing and shouting and mugging for the camera while the dog gets loose among them. They bang into each other grabbing for her. As you watch this scene the film seems to waver, the subjects careen out of frame and back, and Donald, disengaging himself from the extras, advances toward
me with a frown. He shakes his head, waves his hands, and indicates with his characteristic expression of intense concern that I am doing something wrong. His scowl looms into the shot—I was determined to keep the button pressed as long as I could.

ROSE

B
y the time the war started, World War One, I had through Mr. Unterberg gotten interested in social welfare work. He had said to me watching the way I dealt with people who came into the office, that I had greater abilities than secretarial. I was very sensitive to poor people, and sometimes going to the settlement house on some errand of Mr. Unterberg’s I would see these people in need and talk to them and try to help them. So he got me a job working for the Jewish Welfare Board, dealing with immigrants and their problems. The Board had set up a model tenement apartment up on 101st Street and First Avenue—up near the vinegar works. I taught the immigrant women and men how to live in the modern world. How to keep clean, store food, make beds, all that sort of thing. It was astonishing how little people knew, how uneducated and green they were. It was touching, you could not help being moved to see the struggles they had to understand, to learn, their desire to make good in America. I, having been born here, had no idea of my own parents’ struggle, they too had come as young people not knowing the language, the ways of the new world, but at least they had skills, my father had a profession, he had work the day he landed, he was always very proud of telling us that. My father always knew how to make a living, and he worked till the day he died. He was extremely responsible, for him the family was
everything, he not only got himself work but other musicians too, he became a sort of booking agent for musicians in addition to working himself. I learned ambition from him.

At any rate, working for the Jewish Welfare Board, when the war started I was naturally involved with that. Teams of us used to travel to the armories to serve coffee and doughnuts and talk to the soldiers and maybe dance with them at their functions. It was all chaperoned, all proper. Your father by then was in the Navy, he was training to be an ensign at the Webbs Naval Institute on the Harlem River, and as usual, he was devilish; he would each night climb over the fence and sneak out to see me without official leave. He did things like that. He would come to wherever I was working—we did this work in the evening—and there he would be in his blue sailor suit, one sailor among hundreds of soldiers and it could be quite a problem for him, the rivalry between soldiers and sailors being what it was, and he was totally outnumbered and still he’d take me away from these other boys with whom I’d been talking or dancing. He was lucky not to be killed.

Then in 1918 we had the terrible flu epidemic, and my two older sisters, my dear sisters, one twenty-three, the other twenty-four, they each contracted the flu and within months of each other they both died. To this day I don’t like to think about it. I saw my poor mother turn old before my eyes. It was never an easy life, she was the hardest-working person I had ever seen, and how they had struggled the both of them to make a good life, and bring us up properly and see to it that we had some prospects for our own lives, some promise. It was not easy raising six children on the wages of a free-lance musician, however responsible he was; and in those days, of course, there was nothing that made running a home easy; you washed clothes with a washboard, you scrubbed them by hand in the sink. I used to do that myself, and you shopped every day because there was no refrigeration, and you cooked from scratch, there were no conveniences in cooking any more than in anything else. She had never had help. And these two beautiful young women got sick and died. She lost her two oldest daughters! I’ve blocked it
all out, I don’t remember the funerals. I try not to picture those girls. I don’t remember any of it, only that that time in my mind is blank, a grey space, an emptiness.

When I was twenty-three I eloped with your father. We went to Rockaway Beach and we got married. What had happened is that my brother Harry, who was always very protective, went to Dave and he said, “You and Rose have been going out for eight years. She’s twenty-three and she wants to get married. She would like to marry you, but if you won’t she doesn’t want to see you anymore. You either marry her or stay away.” Well, you remember your father. He had a most unusual mind. He didn’t think the way other people thought, he was unconventional, his ideas were different. Even then. I knew he wanted to marry me. But he didn’t like to be told what to do, he never liked that. So the answer was to marry in this scandalous way, to elope, and get married by a justice of the peace rather than formally in a synagogue with a bridal veil and a celebration with the families’ blessing. He disliked religion, your father. He was very modern, interested in the new ideas—just as he loved new gadgets he loved new ideas. He believed in progress. He’d learned some of this from his father, Isaac, a wonderful man, very scholarly, but not pious. For Isaac religion meant superstition and poverty and ignorance as it had in the old country. He was a socialist, your grandfather Isaac, he believed the problems on earth in life—food, shelter, education—should be solved on earth. The promises of Heaven didn’t interest him. So your father had a background in these sorts of ideas. We went out to this remote beach community and married and set up house there. Both families were outraged and hurt. We lived a block from the ocean away from everyone else. I loved it there, it was very beautiful. Every day Dave took the train into the city. He worked for a man named Markel, who was in the phonograph business. After World War One, phonographs—Victrolas we called them—became popular. Markel liked Dave and taught him the business. That is how he got into it, through that man. For a while before we were married, I worked for Markel too, keeping the books, running the office. Dave had gotten me that job.

At any rate, though it was sometimes lonely in Rockaway, that was more than compensated for by the ocean and the sky and the privacy. We didn’t have our families on our backs. You don’t know what that meant. To have come from a large family living together, to have grown up in apartments and city streets. Now we were alone and we had privacy and we had space. It was a wonderful time in our lives. When we went out we went down to the Village, Greenwich Village. It was very much the thing then. Your father had a gift for making friends, meeting people, and he naturally gravitated to people of intelligence, people with fine minds and radical ideas. Well, in the Village that’s the way things were, lots of young people thinking new thoughts and living differently from everyone around them. We had artists for friends, and writers. We read the latest books, listened to poets reading their poems in living rooms, in garrets in the Village. We knew Maxwell Bodenheim, who was then a very well known Village poet, we even met Edna Millay, who was already well known outside the Village. We ate in restaurants where actors and playwrights ate; I remember one, you walked down a few steps from the street, Three Steps Down, that was the name of it, and there we found ourselves sitting at a table next to Helen Hayes. How young and beautiful she was.

George Tobias, the actor, was a friend of ours. He was a young man then. He later went to Hollywood. And Phil Welch, a reporter for the
New York Times
. Phil admired your father very much. We had wonderful friends. Only now do I see that our lives could have gone in an entirely different direction.

FOUR

W
inters, with their short and darkening days, were difficult. When it stormed, snow got down my collar, inside my galoshes and under my sleeves. Despite my mother’s bundling me in several layers of clothes, all sealed in by my snowsuit, I was wet and freezing in a discouragingly short time considering everything I had had to go through to get out the door. I moved lurchingly, stiffly, breasting the snow like some tiny golem.

But the season had its revelations. I stood one afternoon at my front steps with a gale blowing and immense drifts of snow filling the block, banking against the parked cars, and making dunes of the stone stoops of the private houses. It was awesome, furious, but afterward, the sky clearing, the stars appearing in the dusk, I breathed the sharpest coldest air as some draft of incredibly clear and delicious water. In a moment my senses were alert and settled me in a stillness of perception as quiet as the snow. No cars moved, no people were in sight, and then, silently, the streetlamps came on like the assurance of survival of the buried.

Another day, a Saturday, with the sun shining and two feet of fresh snow on the ground, I discovered Donald and his friends in the backyard. Inspired perhaps by the legendary Admiral Byrd, they had undertaken to build an igloo. I did not usually
venture into the backyard. It meant first of all going down the alley past Smith’s door. And it was an enclosed space with stone retaining walls on three sides. It was a place to be trapped. At the rear our house and the one across the alley were three stories high and included car garages at basement level. Not that anyone had a car. Over a wood fence on the retaining wall at the back of the yard loomed a tenement with clotheslines strung from all the windows to an enormous creosoted pole planted just behind the wall.

But with Donald in the backyard, I ran right down. Talking, chattering, arguing, working away with their jackets thrown off, shirttails hanging, woolen watch caps askew, the friends were cutting blocks of snow with one of Smith’s coal shovels and laying out a circular foundation. Their faces were red and their breaths were spouts of steam. As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing; bit by bit, it was eliminating itself as an idea from the light of the sun. I felt that what was being built was not a shelter but some structured withdrawal from the beneficence of the lighted day, and my excitement was for invited darkness, the reckless enclosure, as if by perverse and self-destructive will, of a secret possibility of life that would be better untampered with. I jumped up and down in a kind of ecstasy of my own being, inducing deliberately from my frame a series of spasms of shivers of concentrated awareness. Little by little the light was being blacked out, and when the final block of wet snow was installed at the apex of the hemisphere, my brother, who had been working as the inside man, disappeared entirely.

I was very impressed. It was a marvel of an igloo for anyone to have built, let alone five or six arguing, pushing, shouting boys. Donald dug his way carefully out the side and then they all built a crawl-through entrance, a kind of hemicylindrical foyer. Then a hose was brought out to play water over the igloo so that it would freeze up hard. Then they punched an air hole in the top with a length of broomstick and the thing was done.

By the next day the igloo had become the talk of the neighborhood.
Not only children but adults came down the alley from the street to have a look at it: Dr. Perlman, our family dentist and friend, who lived in the apartment house across the street; Mrs. Silver’s chauffeur, who lived over the garage of the late Justice’s mansion on the corner; Lieutenant Galardi of the Sanitation Department, who lived on 173rd Street; and several other mothers and fathers I didn’t know by name.