World's Fair (6 page)

Joe went along his impassive way as, with dusk descending on the cold blue-grey sky over the Bronx, I sat on my stoop and ate his remarkable cuisine. It was not only something to eat but something to warm my hands against, as if I had plucked a tiny hearth from an elf’s house.

Sometimes when my mother was going shopping I went along so that I could spend my money at the candy store on the corner of Eastburn and 174th Street. Many different things were to be had for a penny, candies of various kinds, Fleer’s Double Bubble gum, or some shoe leather, which was what we called a pounded sheet of dried apricot, or Indian nuts that fell from the chute of a glass canister after you deposited the coin and twisted the key, or, what I usually went for, a shot-glassful of sunflower seeds poured into my hands by the proprietor.

I put the seeds in my jacket pocket and followed my mother from store to store as I cracked the shells one at a time between my front teeth and withdrew each seed with the tip of my tongue. I did this without missing a thing that was going on around me. In fact, the steady and relentless crunching of Polly seeds brought my gaze to sharp focus. One next to another, stores were built at street level in the sides of apartment houses. The street was astir with cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons. It interested me that horses could, without any reduction in speed, raise their tails and leave a trail of golden dung.

The old Italian who repaired shoes managed to conduct his business without speaking English. His shop was a dark little basement store throbbing with the running motors and looped and slapping belts of leather trimmers and buffing wheels. Each wheel was stained with shoe polish of a different color. My mother held out a pair of my father’s shoes. “Heels and tips,” she said, and the old man, barely looking up from a shoe he clutched to his chest while he carved its sole to size, nodded and grunted something in Italian. My mother asked him the cost and when the shoes would be ready. She addressed him in English and he replied in Italian, and the negotiation was completed to
everyone’s satisfaction. As we left he grabbed a handful of nails and put them in his mouth: he was about to attach the sole.

A few doors down was the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, where a man in an apron stood behind his wooden counter and ground up coffee to order and collected the items you asked for from the shelves behind him. If what you wanted—a box of junket, for example, or Cream of Wheat—was too high for him to reach, he grabbed it with a long pinching stick whose ends he could contract by squeezing the handle. The box flew through the air and he caught it. Then, with the purchases stacked in front of him, he wrote the cost of each on a brown paper bag with a small pencil he took from behind his ear and totaled the row of sums smartly, and then used the same bag to pack everything. I liked this store because of the coffee smell and the sawdust on the floor. I liked sawdust as long as it was dry.

In Irving’s Fish Store, the sawdust was often wet. Irving’s had a kind of swimming-pool atmosphere about it. The walls were bare of shelves. Everything was white. Two holding tanks of live fish were along the wall where the customer came in. Water ran in them continuously. Irving’s apron tended to be wet and red with fish blood. He was a big jovial man. “Hello, Missus!” he said to my mother as we walked in. He was scaling a big brown fish. Fish scales flew through the air, some sticking to his glasses like snow. “How are you, sonny boy?” he said to me. “I want some salmon, Irving,” my mother said, “but only if it’s not expensive.” Irving came around from behind his counter, took a short-handled net from the wall and ran it around the dark tank, where I could see the shadows of several fish slithering in panic. They looked elusive to me, but in a second or two Irving had raised one twisting and curling in the net and dripping water on the floor. “I saved this beauty for you,” he said to my mother. He slapped the salmon down on the counter and held it pressed against the wood block with one hand while with the other he banged it on the head with a heavy wooden mallet. The fish went still. I admired Irving’s fast hands. My mother turned away, but I watched as he sliced off the salmon’s head with one of his large
knives, eviscerated it, washed it under the faucet, and sliced it up in steaks. I recognized the salmon now.

Our last stop was Rosoff’s Drugstore, on the corner of Morris Avenue. Large glass jars of red and blue liquid stood on display in the window; what they were meant to suggest I had no idea, but I liked the way the sunlight went through them and lit the colors. Also on display was a brass mortar and pestle, whose function I understood because my grandmother had one just like it to use in the kitchen to pound nuts and seeds. There were also various mysterious items made of red rubber. Inside the store I breathed an atmosphere of sweet soaps and bitter medicines, rolled bandages and anodynes, sodas, salts and pungent tinctures. Along the walls were glass cabinets that went all the way up to the patterned tin ceiling. Mr. Rosoff reached the upper levels by means of a railed ladder, which he rolled along the wall. He climbed the ladder for the implement of porcelain or the bottle, box, packet or tin the customer called for. He was a tiny sweet-tempered man with a round face and a soft voice. He politely inquired about the health of everyone in the family, particularly my grandmother. He shook his head in sympathy as my mother told him. He wore a starched white short-sleeved tunic buttoned to the neck, like a doctor’s, and could offer such medical services as taking out things that had gotten into your eye—rolling your eyelid back and dabbing off the offending mote with a bit of cotton. He had done that for me.

My mother made a purchase, a box that Mr. Rosoff placed precisely in the middle of a sheet of dark green wrapping paper, which he had torn from a big roll on his counter. His pudgy hands flew about the box like bird wings and in a matter of seconds the green wrapping had been folded over, tucked in at the corners, triangulated at the ends, and tied around with white string from a spool hanging from the ceiling above his head. To break the string he looped it around each hand and gave a smart tug.

When we left I asked my mother what was in the box. She didn’t want to tell me. “It doesn’t concern you,” she said. But
I persisted. I had no more Polly seeds and no more pennies. “What did you buy,” I said. “Tell me.” She strode along. “Tell me,” I whined.

“Oh stop it, they’re sanitary napkins. Are you satisfied?”

I was not satisfied because I didn’t know what sanitary napkins were, but I knew from her tone that I had used up my allotment of questions and so pursued the matter no further.

SIX

I
t was early spring when my uncle Billy came to live with us. He was an older brother of my mother’s, a gentle ineffectual man down on his luck. Claremont Park was beginning to turn green. Uncle Billy moved into Donald’s room, and Donald came down the hall to stay in my room, which was actually a bit larger. I was thrilled by this arrangement but Donald was deeply affronted. “It’s only for a little while,” my mother told him. “Till Billy gets back on his feet. He has nowhere else.”

Donald lay on his bed and threw a hardball toward the ceiling and caught the ball in his first baseman’s glove, one-handed. He did this over and over. Sometimes the ball hit the ceiling. A polka-dot pattern of black marks began to appear there. Sometimes the ball missed his glove and thudded on the floor and under the bed. I retrieved it for him.

Uncle Billy was a divorced man, something quite rare at this time, and he had the further distinction of having been a successful bandleader in the nineteen twenties. He was not insensitive to the disruption caused by his joining the household. Before he had finished unpacking his suitcase, he came into our room with a rolled cloth under his arm. His vest was unbuttoned. “You boys ever see this?” He gave the cloth a flap and spread it on the floor. It was a rectangular banner of purple velvet with gold lettering, all in capitals, and a border of gold.
On the floor it was like a room rug. Before I could work it out Donald said, “‘BILLY WYNNE AND HIS ORCHESTRA.’”

“That’s right,” Uncle Billy said. “You hung that over the bandstand everywhere you played—‘Billy Wynne and His Orchestra.’ That was me in the good old days.”

Donald and I were awed. We hadn’t known he was that famous. He leaned against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets and began to fell us about the hotels he had played, the nightclubs. “We were booked for two weeks in the Ambassador,” he said. “And we stayed for thirteen.” He had a reedy voice, up in his head. I was too shy now to look at him directly. But he had the hurt blue eyes of that side of the family, though smaller and closer together than my mother’s or grandma’s. He had a double chin and had thinning hair combed carefully sideways to hide his scalp. His nose was red and bulbous. When he laughed he had teeth missing.

I felt the velvet with my fingertips. “You boys keep it,” he said.

“Don’t you want it?” Donald said.

“Naah, take it. It’s a nice souvenir of the good old days.”

We thanked him. He turned to go. “You know the first orchestra ever to broadcast over the radio?”

“Billy Wynne?” Donald said.

“That’s right. WRPK Pittsburgh, 1922.”

How Uncle Billy had lost his orchestra was never made clear to me, but it seemed to have had to do with a crooked business manager as well as his own ineptitude. He’d had numbers of jobs in the years since. He fit into the house easily enough—in a matter of a week or two it felt as if he had always lived with us. He was a decent, kind man. My mother appreciated his help in dealing with Grandma. Uncle Billy talked to the old woman and pacified her. She was glad to see him, but she also shook her head and cried, seeing how poor he’d become. “Mama,” he said, “don’t you worry about a thing. I’ve got a coupla aces up my sleeve.”

In fact he was now working for my father in the Hippodrome music store downtown on Sixth Avenue. They went off to the subway together every day. My father’s theory was that Billy
would bring customers into the store. Some of them might even remember his name. The salary wasn’t much, but he could earn commissions on the big items. Uncle Billy was grateful. He was not an educated man and regarded the books in my parents’ house with great respect. I saw him once pick up a book and squeeze it and riffle its pages and put it down and smile and shake his head. When my father talked to him about politics, or history, he felt honored. “Dave,” he’d say. “You should’ve been a professor.”

“Thanks, Willy,” my father said. I noticed both my father and my mother used the names Billy and Willy interchangeably as if there were no difference. Later I found out my mother’s family’s name was Levine. So Billy Wynne was Willy Levine. After I worked that out I always called him Uncle Willy.

Uncle Willy sometimes did tricks for us, and I remember one trick in particular that was my favorite and that he did very well. He’d stand in the doorway to my room and make it appear that a hand belonging to someone else just hidden from view was grabbing him by the throat and trying to drag him away. He would choke and gasp and his eyes would bulge and he’d try to tear at the clawlike hand; his head would disappear and reappear again in the struggle, and sometimes it was so realistic that I’d scream and rush to the door and beg him to stop, jumping up and swinging on the arm of the malign killer hand, which, of course, was his own. It didn’t matter that I knew how the trick was done, it was terrifying just the same.

W
ith the lengthening of the days I stayed out longer. Warm breezes blew into the evening. The new leaves of the privet were pale green. People opened their windows and came out of doors, women with their baby carriages, children at games. I studied the more difficult or daring games against the time when I would be old enough to play them: hit and span, which took
you into the gutter and was waged with one’s best marbles; the infernally difficult paddle ball, in which a small red ball connected to a paddle by a long single strand of rubber was hit so that it would fly off and return to the face of the paddle to be hit again. (Rhythm was everything.) And the variations of baseball, including stoop ball, punch ball and stickball; and also the ball games utilizing the sides of buildings or the cracks in sidewalks, such as slug or hit the stick.

Of course the ice cream vendors appeared—going very slowly and jingling their bells till a child came running. The Bungalow Bar truck was roofed like a fairy-tale house. A Good Humor pop, at a dime, was twice as expensive, but if your stick had the words Good Humor burned into it you’d get a free one. Competing with these motorized corporations was the swarthy steadfast Joe. The Sweet Potato Man was now dressed for the spring in a strawhat with the top punched out and his pushcart retooled to sell ices. Impassive as ever, Joe gave you for your two cents a scoop or ball of shaved ice over which he pumped the vile syrup of your choice—cherry, lemon or lime. The concoction was served in a small pleated paper cup that was so porous it soon took on the color of the syrup.

The mothers themselves came out for Harry’s vegetable wagon, the fruits and vegetables displayed in their wooden crates in tiers, steeply raked, and the prices of things scrawled on paper bags still folded flat and stuck over slats in the front of the crates. A spring scale hung from three chains. Harry was a thickset, red-faced man with a gravel voice and an incantatory salesmanship. He packed up the purchases of one customer while calling up to the windows the catalogue of what he had for sale, how good it was, and how fairly priced, in a kind of double mode of communication, the soft voice for the already sold customer, the loud voice to broadcast for the customer still to come. I liked Harry’s horse too, an ancient flea-ridden creature with sores on his back who chewed the oats from his feed bag in a way to capture my interest, slowly but tirelessly, with the glassy eyes of a superior contemplation.