Casting about for something to sober her, something to sting her back to the hard facts of that evening, Eddie undid the damage to his Irish pug and said, “You two ducked out just in time to miss the show.” Instantly he regretted both content and style of delivery. He hated himself when he got snide. “Sorry,” he said. “Artie’s fault. He’s a bad influence on me.”
Mom stopped in mid-sashay, searched her children for any sign of willful falsehood, and, finding none, did a distinctly undancelike ball change down the runway and upstairs. Had the Teaneck photographer been present, he might have captured the remaining four in an uncanny second set of ovals—Then and Now—or, more likely, given up the project as stranger than fiction.
Artie got up from the table and shut off Mom’s irrelevant gas burner. He poured the steaming kettle water into the sink. When he finally spoke, he kept his head sinkward, addressing the porcelain. “Bedside manner brings out the best in her.”
Lily switched alliances in a second. She glared at him, not the universal women’s look of sovereign dismissal of men but one tailored expressly for this male. “She has her work,” she said, as soft as imaginable, and mimed her mother’s exit step into her bedroom at the back of the house.
Artie mumbled a confusus of mock Latin just loud enough to hear. “Mea culpa, mea maxima . . .” In a Catholic, the act might have passed for a blasphemy of contrition, but in a Lutheran it was sheer, scholastic showing off. He fiddled with a faulty washer on the cold faucet, recalling a story his father frequently repeated at table, sometimes varying in the particulars but always fundamentally the same, about how Grandfather, who had died before Artie was born, had come to the Cure. The oldest of the Eddies, Irish by background and temperament, had taken as his bride a Mediterranean woman, one of whose eight personalities (the traditional four better and four worse) imagined that the best way to get a leaky faucet fixed was to appear every fifteen minutes and demand that the huddled immigrant refuse get off the couch and plumb. After a few days of berating, Granddad shouted, “You want that drip fixed? I’ll fix the drip for you, forever!” He flew into the kitchen and smashed his fist against the offending pipe. Opening his hand, he was amazed to find a steady stream of blood and bone joining the water dripping into the basin. He vowed on the spot never to allow another drop of alcohol in his house. According to Pop, Granddad had only to remember that color combination—maroon on off-white—to keep his vow. Now, so many years after the reformation, Artie smiled, thinking how simple that cure had been compared to what the present generation would need.
He felt Rachel pinch him in the bicep, whispering “Crabs” as she passed behind him and sat down at the table across from Eddie Jr. Little brother sat motionless, head in hands, agonized at causing his mother additional and unneeded grief. Rachel took a pitch pipe out of her pocket, blew a C, and sang, to the tune of “Goodnight, Ladies,”
Don’t cry, Edski,
Don’t cry, Nedski,
Don’t cry,
Wedski, We’ll let you take the blame.
Eddie, whose face indeed formed an unwitting, paint-by-numbers version of St. Sebastian, came back to himself. Blushing, he tried to grab the pitch pipe from her hand, but failed. He put his elbow on the table, challenging her to an arm wrestle. Rachel grabbed his palm in both of hers, sprang to her feet, and began to twist his wrist off. When he jerked free, Rach smiled sweetly and said, in her best singsong Why-I-Vote-Every-Four-Years voice, “I win.”
Artie, at the touch of his younger sister, felt his static thoughts fall off and leave him temporarily in the clear. Maybe Rach was right: consign Dad to his own muck-making and go on with the work of being well disposed toward the world. He tried to show the other two that he, too, was ready to join back in. He put his voice into treble and warbled, “I thought I told you kids that if you’re going to kill each other, to do it in the yard. I just washed . . .” But when he turned from the sink, there in front of him was the object of his mockery, looking shook.
Artie thought for a moment that Dad had taken the long-expected last turn for the worst. But it was just the opposite, and equally incomprehensible. “I thought you kids meant he had a spell when we were out.”
“He did. Bad as I’ve ever seen. Tigers on the ceiling. Eddie and I had to take him upstairs and put him to bed.” Artie gestured toward the table for proof that he wasn’t lying. Eddie nodded concurrence.
“Then how do you explain that he’s all right now?”
“All right?” Artie answered, despite his mother’s having spent two dozen years telling him never to answer a question with a question.
“He’s sitting up in bed.” Ailene shook her head, unable to accept the reprieve. “Happy. Dictating. Working on Hobstown.”
Hobstown: 1939
Everything we are at that moment goes into the capsule: a camera, a wall switch, a safety pin. The task, a tough one, is to fit inside a ten-foot, streamlined missile a complete picture of us Americans, circa 1939. Glass and stainless steel, a silver dollar, a toothbrush. A stroke of genius, including that toothbrush—an item so common it might have been overlooked. If people of the future learn everything about us except for toothbrushes, we are lost.
The missile aims at the future. How far in the future? Exactly fifty centuries, five thousand years. Fair officials sink the missile underground, not to be opened until the year 6939. Bud counts backward the same number of years. In 3061 B.C., Egyptians experimented with the plow, Sumerians with wheeled vehicles and writing. Five thousand years is a big leap for a boy of thirteen. But if the first step was big, the next will be bigger. For every thirteen-year-old knows the theme of this year’s World’s Fair: each year speeds the rate of change. That’s why this message in a bottle is so crucial, a note from ourselves to our later selves, when all is forgotten.
The cache includes a tape measure, of course. A can opener. The alphabet in type. Soon Bud sees that fitting all America into the tube would take a tube the size of all America. But thanks to the recent invention of microfilm, we can fit into this space the blueprint for something far larger. On film, we include our favorite magazines, dictionaries, atlases, technical manuals. We slip the Lord’s Prayer in three hundred languages between photos of baseball and poker games.
We pack a healthy regimen of news, the same newsreels that supply matinee instruction for boys of thirteen. We choose, from thousands of miles of film, Roosevelt speaking, a Miami fashion show, the bombing of Canton by the Japanese. Bud feels the endeavor take on the air of science and high seriousness. Yet it confuses him, too, about the dominant tense. We make tomorrow’s archaeology today. How can that be?
Bud Middleton visits the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, Queens. He comes with his family from their home in the American Midwest. Dad, Mom, Babs, Bud, and Grandma. The entire twelve-hundred-acre miniature country floors Bud. Its theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow,” knocks him over. He begins his tour at the park’s Theme Center, with its seven-hundred-foot Trylon needle and two-hundred-foot Perisphere containing the moving platforms, piped symphonies, projected images, and precision models of Democracity, the perfect, planned metropolis. From there he gravitates to the Rotolactor at Borden’s Dairy World, missing that it is just Elsie being milked on a merry-go-round. He speeds through the Court of Peace, the gleaming buildings from Greece, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. He cannot afford to dawdle at the League of Nations exhibit in the far corner of the park if he wants to see any fraction of the fifteen hundred exhibits. He catches Planters’s “Mr. Peanut and His Family Tree,” as well as Ford’s “A Thousand Times Neigh,” a horse’s-eye view of the auto. He waits in line to thrill to the famous General Motors Futurama. He indulges his adolescence for a half hour at the Aquacade, Jungle Land, and Nature’s Mistakes pavilions over in the Amusement Zone.
Even getting stuck with his mother at the top of the Life Saver Parachute Drop for three hours, although traumatic, cannot mar the most astonishing, eye-opening vacation of his life.
The fair culminates for Bud in the Westinghouse pavilion, with Elektro, the talking, cigarette-smoking robot, and, above all, with the time capsule, that torpedo locked on a target five thousand years off. That this exhibit is his favorite stands to reason, for Bud, Mr. and Mrs. Middleton, Grandma, and even the charming Babs are themselves Westinghouse creations.
The mythical Middleton family is manufactured to serve as model Americans at this model America. In 1939, the family appears in trade books, magazine ads, even a feature-length film put out by Westinghouse promoting the exhibit that in turn promotes the immense and undeniable benefits of Westinghouse’s product, the product Bud’s dad calls “science’s greatest gift to the world of the future.”
“But won’t the capsule deteriorate in all that time?” Mother asks. But science solves even that. A Westinghouse magic substance called “cup-aloy” and a special sealant gas ensure that safety razor and wall switch and one thousand pictures and ten million words will survive their long passage intact.
“What if folks five thousand years from now can’t read English?” Bud asks, displaying the practical turn of mind of bright young Americans of 1939. Westinghouse sees to that, including in the capsule an English lexicon with pictures, a Rosetta stone for teaching the language from scratch. They distribute, to countless universities and libraries across the country, microfilmed multilingual instructions and maps for locating and disinterring the capsule if it is ever lost in time. History is a treasure hunt.
Somewhere in Bud’s still budding brain he fails to see how any amount of gloss will help creatures from the future reconstruct what the newsreels of Jesse Owens’s 1936 Olympic victories mean. He cannot imagine conveying to an alien of five thousand years from now what is obvious to the Middletons: why no time capsule of America in 1939 could be complete without a Mickey Mouse plastic cup. Yet Bud Middleton approves the anthology of objects, especially one final bit of recursion. The capsule contains a newsreel documenting that capsule world in miniature, the World’s Fair itself.
For all its elevating vision of the promise of tomorrow, something terribly wrong with the 1939 World’s Fair escapes Bud. A tremendous gulf splits it down the middle. It epitomizes all we have done well. It is the abyss of insipidness. It is urgent, high-toned, and aware—the most magnificent civil-engineering project ever, transforming an ash dump into a model of the future. But just down the pastel avenue, shading into the hues of the fair’s color-coded “zones,” the place degenerates into a nudie show where near-naked girls tussle with octopi. One exhibitor’s film, The City, asks of the world we take for granted, “Who built this place? What put us here? And how do we get out again?” Bud has no answer, being just thirteen and himself a creation of that same fair. He has just the degree of insight the fair gives him and no more.
What world do the Middletons return to after their film is over? A world where the family newspaper gives more room to church socials than to the Mine Workers’ strike or the collapse of Slovakia. A world where Shirley Temple, the number-one box-office champion for four years, has just lost her title to Mickey Rooney. The two most popular stars in the most popular medium ever in the world have an average age of fifteen. Bud, at thirteen, with only a few magazine appearances and one second billing in a trade-show feature, is over the hill.
Hollywood, without knowing it, has its most magnificent year ever. Never again will it come close to matching this year’s product. Gone With the Wind takes the Oscar. But it has stiff competition from Goodbye Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, and Juarez. Even as the movie industry peaks it sickens, although it won’t show the symptoms for years. This incredible flowering is not simply escapism from economic hardship. Times have been far harder without producing anywhere near this burgeoning bouquet of other worlds. Movies somehow replace the Middletons’ lost hold on the real place, now too desperate and absentee to feel.
Swing is King, a sound that has Bud and Babs almost hysterical with rhythm. “Deep in a Dream” tops Variety’s Hot 15. Television makes its debut at the Fair: Bud stands in front of a camera and does a monologue for his folks. Radio holds an uncontested hammerlock on the Middletons’ hearts and minds, the one, oak-cabineted portal through which they catch an astigmatic glimpse of the larger landscape. On September 1, 1939, Mrs. Middleton and Grandma hear an announcer conclude an extended description of Hitler’s morning Blitzkrieg into Poland by saying, “We should like to express our appreciation again at this time to . . . the makers of Ivory Soap, sponsors of Life Can Be Beautiful.”
In November, Babs Middleton’s copy of Photoplay runs an article called “Clouds Over Hollywood.” It reads:
The crowds were laughing as they emerged from the premiere of “The Women,” gay with the sparkle of watching a gay, sparkling picture, happy with that sense of well-being within the industry which comes from the knowledge that another hit is born. Then, as they reached the street, the newsboys’ cries reached their ears.
A stunned moment before the full impact of the news struck home. Bitter silence as realization came. Then a growing murmur of restlessness and fear and heartache for the many strangers within the gates who for so long now had been no longer strangers.
“What of Boyer?” “What of Niven?” “And Richard Greene?”
“Hollywood,” Babs reads, an anxious rawness in her throat for Pepe Le Moko, hero of Algiers, “is face to face with grim reality.”
Across the living room, Mr. Middleton settles into his overstuffed chair with the November 13 issue of Time. In it, he learns that 1939 has proved the final defeat of appeasement as a credible policy for establishing and enforcing cooperation among nations. Now the world’s last hope is Tit for Tat. He reads that Lloyd’s of London offers insurance against death and dismemberment from aerial bombing: one pound per one hundred pounds’ coverage. He reads a scrap of doggerel currently making the rounds:
Hitler is a gangster,
Daladier’s a bore,
Chamberlain’s a counterfeit,
And so’s the new world war!
But the piece that slams home, that jumps off the magazine page at him, shouts in great letters, “unprepared.” “you unprepared.” “Don’t let winter catch you unprepared.” An advertisement for Quaker State antifreeze. Dad resolves to take action the next day, correct his neglect, and avert what might turn into a family disaster if he leaves it any longer.
Upstairs, Bud struggles with a letter to his friend Ed. “Dear Eastie,” he begins. “Seems like forever since we met last spring at the Fair.” He stops and chews on his pencil end. He stares into the shedding trees outside his window. When the gleaming pavilions once more reform in front of his eyes, he grows animated and writes quickly. “But that’s a bat’s blink compared to 5,000 years, huh, buddy?”
Or rather, Ed, in his home in Jersey, stops on a November afternoon and wonders what the Middletons might be up to. He has met them only once, in the Westinghouse film, but their future seems somehow crucial to the boy. He knows, without knowing, that something terribly wrong infects the world of 1939. He learns in school that the world’s showdown has supposedly come and gone already, twenty-one years before—averted in the eleventh month of the eleventh day at the eleventh hour. Now he feels what no one admits: that we are about to drift into darkness again. He reads about it, hears about it, waits for it, but neither he nor anyone he knows has the least notion of what to do about it.
But the real crisis of 1939 is not just his helplessness in the face of the coming violence, the final, unthinkable crimes that will end up, as always, harmless in history books. Little Eddie’s great terror is that his life is more benign and beneficent than ever. An unimaginable gap opens between the place people make to live in and the place springing up all around them and despite them. Enjoying life like everyone else might actually make things worse. The possible no longer keeps pace with the necessary. Little no longer divides cleanly into Big. Eddie Hobson
no longer has anything to do with events. He is too small to be the only one to fall out and say no. That is the subterranean evil rising from the sidewalk cracks behind him as he pedals down the street. What can Edward Hobson do, being just thirteen and himself a child of the darkward drift? He is just a beginner in his own life. He is only as insightful as the world that made him. He can’t be expected to sew up the rift running right down the middle of his paper-routed world. But to live through his remaining days, he must.
The sun shines crisply if weakly on his autumn afternoons. The wind creates its allaying breezes. Light glances off grass lots and squints under bridges. All is the same as in any other year, except the balance between livable, awful, and real.
Something sinister sits open on the Hobson coffee table. In an ad in the May 15 issue of Life, Grandma Middleton stands in front of a model of the time capsule and regrets, “It’s too bad Westinghouse couldn’t put in all those other electrical devices that make our lives so much more pleasant.” “Yes,” says her daughter, Bud’s mother. “Like refrigerators, irons, toasters and vacuum cleaners. If they don’t have those things 5000 years from now I certainly wouldn’t want to be living then.” Her grammar reflects the current confusion over the dominant tense, what light is about to go out, what the capsule must urgently preserve.
Edward Hobson, in northern suburban Jersey, pure product of this year’s World’s Fair, goes to a matinee of that other Oz: Oz. The show begins with this year’s Academy Award–winning cartoon, Disney’s Ugly Duckling. Then a newsreel, one that did not make the Westinghouse time capsule, on the first decimation of Europe and Asia. A big leap to make, even for a boy of thirteen.
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