World's Fair (5 page)

My mother had donated a square of old carpet and a candle and the five builders had settled in, only sometimes deigning to respond to the importunings of the children outside who wanted a turn. Actually, they soon grew bored of occupying the thing, learning fast enough that the real excitement had been the building of it; but it was almost as good lording it over their friends and those who were younger, designating this or that one to take a turn, and instructing him as to the rules of deportment once he was admitted. For a while they had considered charging admission, but settled instead for barter offered in bribe—one child paying with a small American flag on a stick, which they embedded in the top like Peary at the North Pole, another a candy bar, another a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and so on. As younger brother of one of the founding architects, I had a special relationship to the igloo, being one of the first guests permitted entrance and, thereafter, more or less free to enter and exit at my own judgment at such moments as the crowd inside was not too great. It was a source of considerable amazement to me how, in this hemisphere of snow, my house, my yard and the Bronx, New York, disappeared in space and time, I was further engrossed by the paradox of the warmth of a structure made of solid ice. You sweated in there, it was so hot. You took off your hat and snowsuit jacket or you were, almost immediately, glisteningly hot as on the hottest day of summer.

The igloo lasted physically long after the builders and everyone else grew bored with it. Inside a week it was almost totally forgotten. It began to shrink, but maintained its geometry even as it grew smaller and greyer and less interesting. I had discovered this about ice cream cones too—that they maintained their
original proportions even as they were consumed. Long after I had lost any interest in sitting inside the igloo I nevertheless took pleasure from its integrity of form, almost as if my brother and his friends had used the magic of an ethereal idea as something to hand—like the most skillful magician.

Eventually I joined some other children working at the igloo and kicking it down into a pile of solid snow. It seemed as important to do that as it had been to go inside and sit down when the thing was in its fresh, crystal glory and all the world was reduced to the cold and silent space of an Arctic night, and the faces of your fellow humans looked at you, red and expectant, with the light of the candle flame filling the centers of their widened eyes.

FIVE

A
s my birthday, January 6, approached each winter I anticipated it with the conviction that the number six was sacramental, my number, the enumeration of my special being. It was like my name, which was mine alone. The holiday season and the New Year seemed to me just a lighting of the way, an advance fanfare for the culminating event, like all the motorcycle policemen in their slouch caps and riding boots, and with their captains in the sidecars, roaring down the street ahead of the President.

My mother inadvertently confirmed my feeling by considering my birthday, as she did every ritual, in its historical context.

“Can you imagine not wanting this golden little boy?” she said to her friend Mae as they sat in the kitchen having tea. We were waiting for the first of my party guests.

In my white shirt and tie and my short pants held up by attached suspenders, I stood by my mother’s side leaning my elbows on the table and indolently eating a cookie. She combed her fingers through my blond hair and I shook my head as a horse shakes his mane.

“Give him to me if you don’t want him,” Mae said, who was an unmarried woman. She winked at me. Unlike my round-armed mother, Mae was skinny. She wore thick eyeglasses that made her eyes small. And she smoked cigarettes, which my
mother did not do. With her elbow crooked, Mae held the cigarette between her index and middle fingers and she pointed it at the ceiling.

“Oh, we like him now all right, I suppose,” my mother said. She pulled me up on her lap. “Now that he’s here, we’ll keep him.”

More than once my mother had told me that I was a mistake. What this meant I both knew and did not know, in that way children have for getting just enough of the sense of something not to want to pursue it in detail. The idea that I was not expected or striven for did not injure me, however. I felt assured of my mother’s love, as troublesome as I may have found it.

“He’s always been difficult,” she said proudly. “Full of surprises, from the day he was born. A breech birth no less.”

“An acrobat,” Mae said.

“I’ll say. Except the acrobat didn’t walk till eighteen months. And you remember the trouble I had weaning him?”

“Maybe now that he’s a big four-year-old fella he’ll take it easy on you,” Mae said, smiling at me through the smoke.

At that moment the doorbell rang, and in anticipation of my first guest I wriggled out of my mother’s arms, slid my arched spine over her knees, and landed on the floor under the table, and crouched there. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” my mother asked. But I had no intention of doing that; I only wanted to hide.

The day was momentous, but parties were mixed blessings. You got presents, all right—pick-up sticks, or crayons, or flat boxes of modeling clay in many colored strips—but they were the lesser presents of party admissions. And we all had to sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats, and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful delirium. In fact, a birthday party was a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics of the event, the way each child was dressed for it and so on; and who set us upon one another in games of the most
acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or punched each other to inflict pain.

And it was all done up in the impermanent materials of crepe paper, thin rubber and tin, everything painted in the gaudy colors of lies.

And the climax of the chaos, blowing out the candles on the cake, presented likely possibility of public failure and a loss of luck in the event the thing was not done well. In fact, I had a secret dread of not being able to blow out the candles before they burned down to the icing. That meant death. Candles burning down to the end, as in my grandmother’s tumblers of candles, which could not be tampered with once lit, memorialized someone’s death. And the Friday-night Sabbath candles that she lit with her hands covering her eyes, and a shawl over her head, suggested to me her irremediable grief, a pantomime of the loss of sight that comes to the dead under the earth.

So I blew for my life, to have some tallow left for the following year. My small chest heaved and I was glad for my mother’s head beside mine, adding to the gust, even though it would mean I had not done the job the way one was supposed to, with aplomb.

G
randma lived in the room next to mine. She was a desiccated, asthmatic little woman who wore high-laced shoes and all manner of long old-fashioned dresses, and shawls, usually black. She lived a very private life, which made me wary of her. She stayed in her room for hours on end, and often came out in such a thoughtful, brooding state as not to notice what was going on around her.

She was very slender and tiny with delicate features. But her face was all wrinkled and her complexion was sallow. She wore her long wavy grey hair neatly braided and coiled when she was feeling well, and uncombed and flying when she was unwell. Like my mother, she had the palest blue eyes. But they looked
at me, these eyes, either with great smiling love and animation, or with no recognition in them at all. I never knew on any given day whether Grandma would know and love me, or stare at me as if she had never seen me before.

Had I known precisely what her trouble was, it might have helped to remove some of the terror of her in my mind. My mother only told me what a sad hard life she had had. She had lost two children many years ago. And the year before I was born, her husband, who would have been my grandfather, had died. In this view Grandma’s behavior was appropriate. But then why did she insist that my mother taste everything she put before her on the table? Grandma would not eat anything if my mother did not taste it first. She believed my mother, her own daughter, was trying to poison her. She sat with her hands in her lap and stared at her food. So now, whether Grandma was feeling that way or not, my mother tasted everything conspicuously before she served it. And she did that with everyone, even me. She sipped from my glass of milk and set it down before me, a practice I came to regard as normal.

Sometimes, when everything was all right, Grandma helped my mother with the cooking. In fact, she was a good cook, and knew things my mother didn’t know. “Oh Mama,” my mother said, “why don’t you make your wonderful cabbage soup.” I could tell my mother loved Grandma—she lost her self-assurance when Grandma was not well. She worried about the old woman terribly. She could not get her to go to a doctor. My father was kind to Grandma, but was not around her enough to worry about her. Donald, I suspected, was as shy of her as I was, though he tried not to show it. He sometimes gave Grandma his arm so that she could descend the front steps more easily when, the weather being mild, she was persuaded to get some air. Grandma negotiated steps the baby way, bringing both feet together on each level.

She spoke mostly in the other language, the one I didn’t understand. When she felt all right she blessed me and kissed me on the forehead and produced pennies from her change purse and pressed them into my hand. “For a good boy,” she
said. “So he should buy something.” She pulled me to her, and with my face lodged in her skeletal shoulder she muttered an instruction to God as to the good health He must always assure me. Since these love words were in the other language, as her curses were on her bad days, they made me similarly uneasy.

I knew the name of the other language: Jewish. It was for old people.

Grandma’s room I regarded as a dark den of primitive rites and practices. On Friday evenings whoever was home gathered at her door while she lit her Sabbath candles. She had two wobbly old brass candlesticks that she kept well polished. She had brought them many years ago from the old country, which I later found out was Russia. She covered her head with a shawl, and with my mother standing beside her to keep the house from burning down, Grandma lit the white candles and waved her hands over the flames and then covered her eyes with her wrinkled hands and prayed. The sight of my own grandma performing what was, after all, only a ritual blessing seemed to me something else—her enacted submission to the errant and malign forces of life. That an adult secretly gave way to this sentiment I found truly frightening. It confirmed my suspicion that what grown-ups told me in my life of instruction was not the whole truth.

Grandma kept her room clean and tidy. She had a very impressive cedar hope chest covered with a lace shawl, and on her dresser a silver hairbrush, and comb. There was a plain slat-back rocking chair under a standing lamp so she could read her prayer book, or Siddur. And on an end table beside the chair was a flat tin box packed with a medicinal leaf that was shredded like tobacco. This was the centerpiece of her most consistent and mysterious ritual. She removed the lid from this blue tin box and turned it on its back and used it to burn a pinch of the leaf. She applied a match and blew on the leaf as my brother blew on punk, to get it started. It made tiny sputtering pops and hisses as it burned. She turned her chair toward it and sat inhaling the thin wisps of smoke—it was a treatment for her asthma. I knew
it helped her breathing, and that it was scientific, having been purchased from Rosoff’s Drugstore on 174th Street. But the smell was pungent, as if from the underworld. I didn’t know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my Grandma burned was marijuana. Even had they known, it would have held no significance, since it was readily and legally available without prescription. But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shtetl, a backfired life full of fume and sparks, like a Fourth of July held in an open grave and projecting on the night a skull’s leer and a clap of crossed bones.

O
ne of my favorite ways to spend Grandma’s pennies came along Eastburn Avenue in the afternoons: Joe the Sweet Potato Man. He pushed a small unmarked cabinet on wheels. Inside the cabinet was a kind of oven of homemade design, the fuel being charcoal. Joe raised the hinged top lid and reached down practically to his armpit to withdraw one of his roasted sweet potatoes. He was an impassive man who wrapped himself in sweaters and coats, obviously scavenged, and a watch cap over which was a peaked khaki hat of rough wool. He wore old Army shoes, cracked and splitting. Over all his clothing he had tied a shoulder-to-ankle waiter’s apron not recently washed. This costume suggested great authority to me. With his large hands, dirt uniformly running under his nails, Joe slapped the potato on the cart, pulled an enormous knife from its wooden sheath and sliced the potato in half lengthwise. He then stuck the tip of the knife into a can and withdrew a slab of butter, which he inserted in a slit made almost simultaneously in the meat of the potato, and, after sheathing the knife, wrapped the purchase like a cornucopia in a torn half sheet of the
Bronx Home News
so that you could hold the potato and eat it without burning your fingers.
For this golden, sweet, steaming hot feast I gave up two pennies. Another, and I could have the potato whole.