Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Solomon had ruined everything, Joseph thought, just as he turned to see the public health building, with its statues of the American icons Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Efficiency and Benevolence incarnate. Bowing his head in acknowledgment of these American virtues, Joseph thought of the tarnish Solomon had left in his wake. How could his brother have forsaken these qualities? Joseph kept walking, the whole fair before him, inviting him to partake. It was the first time he had felt part of something. He passed board games, card games, a device that measured the thickness of hair, passed a gas mask.

  The gas mask? It chilled Joseph through and through. His mother, were she to come to the fair, a thought she never even entertained, would have zeroed in on that one. How wrong his mother was not to have come. All our parents were wrong, thought Joseph; they never left their little street. They had no vision of the future. Everyone had been so scared. He too had been scared, growing up scrawny and taught to fight not with his fists but with words, words in a neighborhood where language meant nothing. Joseph was grateful he had gone north and found Esther waiting outside that building in Cambridge, her red silk scarf tied beneath her chin.

  His mother, Selma, the inveterate pessimist, uptown on Riverside Drive. Are you happy, Ma? Joseph had asked her as he settled her in just a few months ago. He had bought her a place before he bought one for his own family. Joseph had been so proud to get her out of Brooklyn and to bring her up to that five-room apartment on the top floor, a place filled with light and high ceilings, views of the cliffs of New Jersey.

  “Now I’m all alone, what do I need all this space for?” she’d asked him, running her index finger over the kitchen counter.

  He shook his head to think of how Solomon could have moved her out of Brooklyn in a heartbeat, but that she wouldn’t speak to her son, wouldn’t take his blood money, feared him so that, even with Solomon in prison, she still wouldn’t talk of him. They will kill me, his own mother. With pleasure, she had said to Joseph in Yiddish. Mekhaye.

  Happy? she said to her son in English that day, which made Joseph search for the Yiddish translation and wonder if there was no word for it in his mother’s language. Turned out she was miserable. She complained that no one wanted to talk to her. No one wanted to haggle over the price of meat. She’d brought her friend Ruth uptown for some company. Isn’t this grand? Selma had said, thankful to have someone to eat with standing up in the kitchen. She’d thrown Ruth an old rag, and the two had eaten herring off a chipped china plate. Just like the old days, Ruthie! she’d said. She had been thrilled when she told Joseph. Until she heard the terrible rumors started on South Fifth Street about how Selma was so stingy she would not even share her good fortune with her oldest of friends.

  Selma had refused her son’s invitation to bring her to the fair. But it’s just over the river, Joseph had said. All those people? Selma had screamed. Over my dead body, she’d said, shaking her head.

  He thought of taking his mother to the amusement side of the fair, at Coney Island. He laughed to think of her on the Cyclone, her hair on end, slack skin gone taut as she sped down the enormous dip. Not likely, Joseph thought. One can never win. No matter what, it is a problem, he thought as he wove his way over to the Essoil display. “Try the Miracle!” his banner said in large green letters. Blue and amethyst glass bottles of the cleanser, catching and refracting light, lined the back of the booth like prizes at a country fair. Tomorrow there would be a line of beautiful women, drawing Essoil-soaked cloths over plates blackened with soot and grease. At the exact same time, Joseph himself had directed them. Like the synchronized swimmers! he’d said. And two strapping young men dressed as ship captains would be on a life-sized boat, a model of the double bows of the marine transportation building, cleaning the entire deck until it gleamed.

  Joseph had to smile at the marvel of it all. Only two years ago, he would have been reading about the World’s Fair in the papers. Esther! He would have screamed up from his reading chair. Look at this!

  But Esther was more interested in “Dear Maggie.”

  Joseph found the column troubling. Very troubling. Even though he railed against the new feature, telling his wife how preposterous it was that women would ask such personal advice from a complete stranger, he did sneak a peek once. He remembered the letter well, because he had been utterly appalled: Dear Maggie, an S from Manhattan had written. Once I was an actress, but now the only role in my future is Manhattan mother. Not a very challenging role—cheers in the morning, a quick visit in the afternoon, and always, when home in the evening, a long kiss good night. I hate myself for thinking it, but I can’t bear the infant smells of them, their baby crap, their terrible suffering, the cries and cries all through the night. My goodness, thought Joseph. It made him extremely uncomfortable to watch Esther seated at the table in that cheery yellow kitchen, poring over another woman’s misery. Or was her misery the same?

  Joseph knew how close he’d come to only reading about the World’s Fair in the papers. But he was actually here, invited by the governor himself. So focused was Joseph on finding his booth among those of the hundreds of other products and technologies that were being set up that day, he did not see his old friend Vladimir, who, in the Westinghouse Pavilion, as big as a small village, was hunched over his notes. Vladimir stood up and pushed back his glasses just as Joseph passed by, rubbing his rough, chapped hands together, as if for warmth.

  Also defying the world gloom, the lucky Seymour Bloom was making his way toward Vladimir. By the time Tom Dewey had come along, like Hugo’s Javert, cleaning the streets of all those vicious men, including the Terrier, Seymour had been out of Mob life for nearly four years. Though those guys had protected him, there was no way a Broadway musical producer could be part of a gang. The whole squad laughed at him, everyone but Chuckles, the sad fatso from the Lower East Side who secretly phoned Seymour up for house seats for nearly every show. Got anything for tonight? Chuckles would ask. Seymour always felt it was a demand.

  The Joint had cashed him out for a bit, and it had certainly weakened his relationship with the Terrier. It was probably for the best they’d put him away before he could get Seymour back for so much bad judgment. And, even though Seymour had lost a lot of cash on The Joint, it had helped him wedge his foot in the door of many productions on the Great White Way, as he invested in other shows. The rest went into the Kinescope, which was about to pay him back in spades.

  He passed the airplane, set up so anyone could sit in the cockpit and have a (grounded) go at being a pilot. David would love this, Seymour thought. Seymour hated to think of the eight-year-old son he rarely saw; the thought filled him with the kind of guilt that could be assuaged only by what he told himself: that he was doing all of this, this, he thought, mentally waving his hand over the entire grounds of the fair, so his son could inherit something wonderful. Inherit all the things he had not. Don’t we work so our children won’t have to? thought Seymour. Even now, Seymour knew his work was more complicated than the simple immigrants’ mantra: Work! Work! Work! For our children, so they can buy land, so they can have a better life. Seymour was forced to put out of his head the evenings he’d come home to see his wife passed out on the bed, David playing quietly next to her, singing softly to himself. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?” He put out of his head the time he’d come in from the theater, past midnight, and David had come to him with empty bottles of gin. These were under my bed, he’d said, one bottle in each little hand. Seymour had snatched the bottles brutally from his boy’s hands, and the hopeful look on David’s face had turned into a terrible frown, his lower lip quivering. Did he work for his children, or did he work to get away from his children’s sadness? Seymour thought how, tomorrow, he would bring David here. He would bring him to see the Futurama everyone was buzzing about, and he would get David one of the little blue pins that said: “I have seen the future!” which were being handed out to every Futurama goer. He would take David to watch the waves of his own
voice registering in light on a machine. And he would keep his son there until evening, when the entire fair would be streaming with magic and light, thought Seymour as he headed toward the Westinghouse Pavilion.

  Seymour found Vladimir, hunched over his television. “Good morning, Vladimir,” he said.

  The scientist nodded, not even looking up from his machine. “Can you believe they’re selling these for one hundred and ninety-nine dollars? Who on earth could buy something for such money?” He examined the contraption, flipping the Kinescope light on and off, watching the beam, and readying it for tomorrow’s demonstration. “I think it’s all a bit embarrassing.”

  “Everything’s got to sell for something,” Seymour said. “And besides, it’s worth it.”

  It had been almost ten years since the first time he had seen the Kinescope image of Vladimir’s wife. The war. The war. Every last effort went to military applications and it all got slowed down. Business should be business, Seymour thought irrationally. Frances smiling into the camera versus the Frances he had helped to cast in his play; Frances, who’d turned his beautiful drama into a catty comedy. Seymour couldn’t help but shake his head and sigh over the whole thing. We live, we learn, he thought now. His mother standing up and screaming at Frances in the middle of the theater. It was all so ludicrous, really.

  “Everything?” said Vladimir. “Really?”

  “So, Vladimir,” Seymour asked, ignoring the philosophical question, “what will you be showing to the world tomorrow? Who will be the first person to be on television?”

  “That, my friend, is a surprise. Tomorrow you come back, and tomorrow you will see what the world will see.”

  “Can’t I get a little peek?” Seymour asked teasingly. “After all, you couldn’t have done it without me.”

  “No?” Vladimir said, clearly trying to check his annoyance. “I think, Seymour, you need me a little bit more than I need you.”

  Seymour shook his head and jiggled his pocket change aggressively. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll come tomorrow then.” He laughed. “Tomorrow you can show me.” Even though Vladimir was being fairly friendly, Seymour had not been spoken to in this way since he’d sold encyclopedias in Westchester: I don’t think so, the wives had said, looking him up and down, and smiling as they slowly closed the door. Sorry. Had it been more than money after all? Now Seymour’s power was different—it was not almighty. He could no longer play God. Playing God, Seymour thought as he walked away from the pavilion. Was that what I was doing? His own grandmother crossed a rainy Parisian street toward him in his imagination. She held his hand and brought him across the Marais into the synagogue, the sound of the shofar, an ancient cry he could not shake. How had his mother, her nights in the clubs, her sulking artist friends, the men dangling off her like mink stoles, how had Inez shirked the piety of her own mother? Inez, he knew, had paved the way for him to be who he’d become. His mother, who now took his money greedily, stuffing it into her enormous brassiere for safekeeping, always waiting for more. And Seymour remembered the terrified faces he’d looked into as he nudged one man after another into each of those stolen sedans. Half the time he didn’t even know what they’d done. He hadn’t killed them, it was true, but he’d certainly got them there in time for the killing.

  Seymour wondered if the rest of his life would be his punishment, God’s will. His wife: Was it illness that made her deteriorate, her mental health a spiral whose twisting, turning path he could no longer follow? Where did she go? Sometimes Seymour would shake Sarah, gather her up from the bed and shake her like hell, just to see a change on her frozen face, intensity in her eyes again. There were moments when he caught a glimpse of her, her eyes shining for brief intervals with the wit he had once loved. He remembered Sarah on that casting call, floating across the stage, head tilted back, a perfect, grand, stretched silhouette. The way she forgot. This is a teapot, Sarah, he’d screamed at her when she’d pointed to the thing, unable to name it just the week before. A teapot, goddamn it! To make the bloody tea.

  Seymour knew it was not healthy for his children. And The Joint, was that punishment for a life of crime? Now he thought of Vladimir testing, writing, looking up at him with that pointed chin, his mouth gathered in concentration. Would this fail too? Would Seymour now, as he went on, infect all the lives he touched with the cruelty of his lawlessness?

  The next day thousands lined up to watch the first public demonstration of television. This was the billing, though a decade before, at the New Amsterdam, had actually been the first. Reading the guidebook of events—twenty-five cents!—Joseph had seen this television listed. It was accompanied by a great deal of fanfare from RCA, and, holding the program, Joseph remembered his conversation with Frances over a decade before. No! No! No! he’d told her. How could you ask me for money? he’d thought. Could this have been what she had been speaking about?

  Joseph brought Miriam from the hotel to see the historic event. Esther remained with the younger Gloria back at the hotel, the Carlyle.

  “Now we can stay wherever we like, Joe. It must be the Carlyle! It just must be.” Esther had told Joseph time and again of her fond memories of going to New York alone with her father for the weekend. After a long trial, Leo Weinstein would reward his daughter for the time he had spent away from her. They would take the Flying Yankee or drive the nine hours from Portland to Boston and then get on the train at South Station and pass through the city. Esther said when they entered New York, her father always reached for her hand.

  The Carlyle was fine with Joseph. What did he care? He could afford it now, and it gave him pleasure to fulfill Esther’s every desire, allow her to relive every good memory. Whatever you like, my dear, he’d said, and, after writing to make sure that Jews were allowed, which he found they were in most places in New York City, he had booked the rooms himself. And so they stayed at the Carlyle, and the clerks could not have been kinder to him and his children.

  As Joseph and Miriam approached the Westinghouse Pavilion, which, he told his daughter, we would see is shaped like a radio tube if only we could view it from above, Seymour led his son, David, to the demonstration. Dulcy was away at prep school, and Seymour brought David as he had promised himself he would. If Sarah didn’t want to come, so be it. Seymour had invited her as well, but she had pooh-poohed the idea. It wasn’t so much the act of coming but the idea of television that really got her goat. At least films are on a grand scale! she’d said. For Sarah, acting was the theater, plain and simple.

  “Oh, just try it out,” said Seymour. “And there’s so much else to see!”

  “No,” Sarah replied. “That whole fair seems like a bunch of fascist hooey to me anyway. And seventy-five cents! Fascist is what it is.”

  She threw the newspaper in his direction, opened to page 6, where that column, “Dear Maggie,” ran. His wife had so little passion these days that anything which interested her made him take notice. Often Seymour would sneak up behind Sarah, the afternoon paper spread before her on her desk, as she wrote letters to Maggie, this woman from the papers. Did she think this stranger would finally give her the advice she had always coveted?

  “Can’t you just enjoy anything?” Seymour asked, smoothing out the paper on his lap. He caught some of a letter: Everywhere I feel so nervous. This anxiety is pressing down on me. I am nervous for my daughters. Also for myself. Sometimes I miss my father so much it is unbearable, even after all these years, wrote an E, Roxbury, Boston. I am embarrassed by this, by how I still ache for him, as if I were still a girl. Seymour flicked the paper aside—so much neurosis, he thought. What were these women becoming? Perhaps it was all Freud’s fault, just as the Germans said, thought Seymour as he shut the door so David wouldn’t hear their argument.

  “Apparently not,” Sarah said, snatching the paper from him. The sleeves of her robe whooshed past him, a flash of silk. “Go have your little fascistic fun without me,” she said.

  A huge crowd had assembled by ten o’clock,
but people weren’t allowed in until eleven thirty. Set in the lobby, in front of a Stuart Davis mural with huge renditions of technological innovations, illuminated by natural light filtered through a glass wall, was a Lucite cabinet—new from DuPont!—with a television set inside. The Lucite was used to show a transparent version of the typical cabinet (TRK 12) where a television would be perched, so that the viewers could see inside and watch the device functioning. The press would later dub it the “Phantom Teleceiver,” but to Vladimir it was quite the opposite. The Lucite made the television seem even more physical, and Vladimir told Frances that very morning how he often thought of himself as a doctor looking into a body to see the way it ticked and breathed. Watching it function made his apparatus seem human. My love for this television is greater than I had thought possible, he told his wife.

  At the stroke of noon, when the lobby was filled to capacity, David Sarnoff gave a long speech introducing what the crowd was about to see. Miriam stuck her fingers in her mouth, waiting for the lecture to end. Goot? her father teased.

  Finally Vladimir turned on the television set. And on clicked Judy Garland, whose movie The Wizard of Oz was just now out in theaters. It was a clip of Garland alone on a stool in the studio singing “Over the Rainbow,” the signal sent by the RCA’s mobile television car to the transmitter at the Empire State and rebroadcast.

  Most of the crowd had never seen television before, though nearly everyone had seen the movie. And who at the fair did not believe they had finally reached Oz? The crowd clapped wildly for television, for the living room of the future, for the new Lucite, which was as transparent as glass or water, for Dorothy, that girl adventurer so sad on that stool alone in the studio, and for technology that would take them all over the rainbow. As Frances watched, beaming with pride, she felt just like Dorothy, that girl from the old world looking for a path on the golden streets of the new.