World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  How did I know this? On those darkening Sunday afternoons I only half heard the conversation. It would start quietly enough, filled with pleasantries, and then, almost imperceptibly, go bad. On this day my grandmother Gussie picked up my new hand-tailored camel tunic to examine my mother’s sewing. “Very nice,” she said, her eyebrows rising, her mouth turning down at the corners. “And lined too, no less. My daughter-in-law stops at nothing.”

  Behind this remark was my grandmother’s penury. She took the position that my mother was impractical and careless with my father’s money. My mother knew this was untrue. It was a terrible slander and it hurt her deeply. It hurt her that my grandmother Gussie felt privileged to give her opinions as to the way my mother dressed her children, how she ran her house, and whether or not she took proper care of her husband. Though Grandma’s tone was sweet, her style was sly and indirect. She could bring my mother to tears, as she had now done. My tempestuous mother started to yell and my father told her to lower her voice. I looked for the pictures in books. I wound the Victrola and let the turntable spin. My grandparents maintained two goldfish in a bowl; I stared at the goldfish, studying their ways.

  The visit was clearly over. My mother would not say good-bye. She put on my coat and buttoned it, and she took my hand and walked out of the door. My grandfather came after us in his slippers. “Rose,” he said in the hallway. “Forgive Gussie. That’s the way she is, she means no harm, she has the greatest respect for you.”

  “Oh Papa,” my mother said. “That is not respect. That is not even civility. You are a compassionate, kind man, perhaps too kind.” She hugged Grandpa, and we went down the stairs to the lobby and waited for my father. She could not sympathize with whatever anxiety of universal judgment, or perhaps God’s, led my grandma on. The old woman made her regularly understand that she was not good enough to be married into this family, that she was not good enough for my father, that she was not what he needed.

  I lived in the weather of my mother’s spirit, and at these times, after these visits, the sky grew black. My father came down the stairs and he was whistling, as he did when something bad had happened and he was trying to be cheerful about it. We stood in the dusk at the bus stop. “Why do you let her talk to me that way?” my mother said. “Don’t you care how I feel? Nothing I ever do is good enough, nothing is ever right enough. If I wash one of her dishes she will wash it after me. And you like that behavior. You like that viciousness. Never once have you defended me from dear sweet Gussie.”

  But the argument between my mother and father didn’t really begin until they got home. Here the sight of the pathetic remnants of her own ancestry magnified the injustice she felt: Did anyone on my father’s side ever inquire about her mama’s health? My father’s whole and thriving family treated her like dirt and her poor mother like a social pariah. Did they ever invite Mama on a Sunday? Did they ever invite Billy? I went into my room and closed the door, but it was no good, it was too interesting. It was as if my father had caught my grandma’s point of view, just as my mother insisted.

  But then he offered a criticism of my mother that I knew, in part, to be accurate. “You always think the worst,” he said. “You’re suspicious and distrustful.” She told him to go to hell. He called her a fishwife. Mythic realms were indeed the territories of these disputes. Ascriptions of good and evil flew back and forth like furies, like phantoms, to take shape as sweet truths or malign imputations. Truth hovered above everything waiting to alight, and as I grew older I saw that it never did anywhere, for any length of time. I felt guilty that I preferred the company of my grandma and grandpa up on the Concourse to my sick little grandmother in the room next door. I sometimes saw my grandma Gussie as truly mischievous, jealous and up to no good. But I could not believe anything bad about any one of these people for very long, because they all seemed to love me so much.

  TEN

  In fact, love was what it was all about. However painful it might be, as sure as heat or freezing cold or storms were in the nature of weather, the daily tempest of my life among these elemental powers—the screams, demands, disagreements—was the nature of love. But they had their sly ways: I secretly grieved for the dark mysterious things my parents did in the privacy of their relationship. I didn’t know quite what these things were, but I knew they were shameful, requiring darkness. They were never referred to or acknowledged in the light of day. This aspect of my parents’ life lay like a shadow in my mind. My mother and father, rulers of the universe, were taken by something over which they had no control. How problematical that was, how unsettling. Like my little grandma with her spells, they were afflicted in the manner of some kind of possession, and then afterwards they seemed to be normal again. I could not talk about this to anyone, certainly not my brother. If he didn’t know about it he was lucky. The devastating truth was that there were times when my parents were not my parents; and I was not on their minds. It was not a subject to dwell upon. I resented the early hour of my bedtime, in part because it was earlier than anyone else’s bedtime, in part because it brought on that vast period of darkness when those things happened about which I had insufficient knowledge; I could only make do, like a detective with the barest of clues, inaudible words, an indefinable sound of panic, a dim light, going on and off, all of it enfolded and obscured in my sleep-drugged state.

  But I was coming to rely on my brother in some way that my parents’ vehemently intense life together did not allow me to rely on them. Donald was steadfast. He lived his earnest life as one human being, not as half of two. He was still within reach. He taught me card games, easy ones like War and Go Fish, and a hard one, Casino. We played on the floor, where I was comfortable. He held my hand as we walked to the candy store. He was at home when my parents went out at night. The sight of Donald doing his homework suggested to me the clear and purposeful intention of life and its march to a visionary future. He would soon be graduating from P.S. 70 and going on to high school. He was now thirteen or so. Painstakingly, with his characteristic frown of concentration, he constructed airplane models of balsa wood, as light as feathers, and hung them on sewing thread from the ceiling of our room—snub-nosed racing planes, and a Ford Trimotor. The skins on the wings and fuselage were thin colored papers stretched taut by dampening. He was also building a solid wooden Strom-Becker model of the China Clipper. He read Popular Mechanics and pulp detective-story magazines, and in a magazine called Radio Craft, which my father had brought him, he found instructions for the building of a crystal radio set at a cost of sixty-five cents. He was saving his money.

  Of course we had our problems. When his friends were around he tended not to want me to be with them, but I understood that, even as I complained and pestered him. It was a matter of principle with me to pester Donald and his friends. Of course they were not without resources in dealing with this. They knew my weaknesses, that, for instance, if anyone around me cried, I cried too. It was true, I caught crying as if it were a communicable disease, I couldn’t help it, I was a walking dust mop of emotions. Donald pretended to cry to get rid of me. In fact, he had refined the art of it by only threatening to cry, holding his arm up to his eyes and issuing one preliminary sob and peeking out from under his arm to find me biting my lip, my eyes filling, ready to bawl for no reason, not even knowing what the matter was, the pain, but only that whatever it was, it was overwhelming and impossible to endure. I was burdened with this terrible affliction, just as my friend Herbert from Weeks Avenue had crossed eyes, or a little boy who played in my park had inward-turning feet. There was nothing to do but hope to grow out of it, this awful teariness. First it would hit me in the throat. Then it affected my ability to see, I had to close my eyes. It was a form of shyness or sorrow for the world’s hard life. Sometimes my brother and his friends Bernie and Seymour and Irwin would, all together, pretend to cry; and I would be made so tearful by this mass assault that even knowing they were teasing me and even after having them emerge from their pretense laughi
ng and jolly, I would find myself uncontrollably sobbing, as if a substantive wrong had taken place, like a bashed thumb or a cut, or the loss of something precious. And then, of course, it took forever to wind down, a trail of heartbreaking hiccuppy sobs issuing from me for several minutes as I went about my business.

  Weakness and insufficiency seemed always to be my lot. I suffered from dust and pollen, colds, coughs, flus. At times of seasonal change I more or less lived in bed. All of this led, without my understanding it, to a crisis in my relationship with my brother. My parents concluded one day that Pinky, our dog, would have to be gotten rid of because I was allergic to her.

  It was her hair that was the problem, not her character. She shed her white hair on the rugs and on the furniture. Donald would not believe this was a reason for losing his dog forever. “You don’t like her,” he said to our mother. “That’s what this is all about. You never have liked her.”

  “That’s a false charge,” my father said, coming to my mother’s defense. “On occasion she has saved Pinky’s life.” He had us there. One day the dog had come up from the basement and my mother had noticed, as none of us did who were Pinky’s champions, that she was dragging herself about with uncommon listlessness. My mother saw a speck of something green on the tip of Pinky’s nose. “Oh my God,” she said, “this stupid dog has eaten rat poison.” Quickly she whipped up a couple of raw eggs in a bowl and put the dog and the bowl in the grass yard, a tiny patch on the south side of the house under the windows of Donald’s room. Pinky slurped up the eggs and vomited, as my mother had expected she would, and thus her life was saved.

  But the argument continued for several days. During this time we had reason to reflect on our history with this dog. She had been run over several times, and was no worse for wear. The green-poison story had become famous, although, as my mother told it to our neighbors, she did not want to admit that anything resembling a rodent could have needed the serious attention of a poison in our basement, and so she had represented that Smith had left open a can of some sort of janitorial substance of industrial strength and this was what the stupid dog had gotten into. Pinky had also enlightened our lives one day by giving birth to three or four puppies on Donald’s bed, an event I peeked in at from the doorway and could accommodate with brief glimpses. Little squirming pups were coming out of her backside. She attended to everything with her tongue. Her ears were flat and her demeanor uncharacteristically solemn, and as each moving creature emerged she licked it and licked it and, in the same manner, herself and the bedspread, like the most responsible and decorous of dogs. Something my brother called the afterbirth she consumed in its entirety. I had not quite worked out the concept of procreation. It was not a matter in which anyone in my family thought I needed instruction. I was amazed that my mother was not angry at the mess Pinky was making. In my mind materials from the inside of the body were abhorrent to one degree or another; I included puppies. Yet a big shallow box was found and made into a nursery with shredded newspaper, and the dog Pinky, now given the astounding title of Mother, retired there to nurse; and eventually the puppies were placed.

  All of this was in the nature of a lifelong commitment, my brother argued. Pinky to us and we to her. How could we kick out our dog at this point in all our lives together? Was nothing sacred? Other less drastic measures might be taken. Perhaps he could vacuum the entire house every day. Yes, he would be prepared to do that! Maybe Pinky could spend more time out of doors. He could train her not to run away. She might be kept in the cellar. And so on.

  Donald was skilled in disputation, he was a good student and was able to call up all manner of appeals from the fields of science, ethics, and psychology, but none of them seemed to work. “It’s not fair,” he said in what I thought was his most trenchant remark, “it’s not fair that an entire family should lose its dog just because one baby pipsqueak gets a runny nose.” Nevertheless he seemed to believe that there was still time, still room for negotiation, and perhaps my parents did somehow give that impression. Even as he rehearsed me to make a passionate protest of my own, which I was earnestly prepared to do between sneezes and eye-watering coughs, Donald was talking to his friends to try to get one of them to keep Pinky. His idea was that with the dog gone, were I to show continuing signs of allergic hysteria, then it would be proven not to be Pinky’s fault and she could be brought back home. In any event, he went off to school one morning, and while he was gone my parents struck: With the help of our family friend, the dentist Abe Perlman, who lived across the street, my father took time off from work so as to transport Pinky to a place he insisted was the closest thing to an ideal existence for a dog, a place called the Bide-A-Wee home. Here Pinky would be cared for and have other dogs for friends. After a day or so she would not even miss us. I was very nervous about this and insisted on hugging the dog even though that might bring on an asthmatic attack. I asked for full particulars about the Bide-A-Wee home, I wanted to accept its credentials at face value because I didn’t want to be a sniveling wheezing sissy all my life. I did not miss the heavy meaningful glance between my father and Dr. Perlman, nor the barely concealed smirk on that man’s face as he assured me the dog would be loved even more where she was going than in our house, but I decided to believe everything would be all right. I did not think that was possible, but still stood, irresolute and uneasily pacified, on the sidewalk as they drove away in Dr. Perlman’s Plymouth with Pinky sticking her head out of the window because Dr. Perlman’s driving made her carsick, just as it did me.

  When Donald got home from school and found no Pinky, and heard my report to him, he became enraged. His green eyes grew large. “You believed that baloney about the Bide-A-Wee home? They took her to the ASPCA! They put her to sleep! You let them trick you! Pinky is dead and it’s your fault!” He threw down his books, grabbed his fielder’s mitt and began to pound the pocket. He paced up and down. “I hate you!” he said. “I hate Mom and I hate Dad and I hate Dr. Perlman, but most of all, I hate you, because you caused the problem in the first place. You’re a little shit. Get out of here! Go on. Get out,” he said. He pushed me into the hallway and slammed the door.

  I went outside. The more I thought about the situation, the worse I felt. A panic of grief rose in me. Implicit in what my brother said was the truth, I knew, that adults could be loved but never trusted; only Donald could be trusted. He had always told me the truth, he was passionately attached to reality and could always be relied upon to tell me exactly how things were. He showed me how to do things, and when I did them the way he said they should be done—you hold the bat this way, you catch the ball so—they worked out just as he predicted. Donald was never wrong. I had failed him, I had betrayed him, I had let them take our dog off to be killed. Our Pinky dead! I was to blame. I sat on the front stoop. I was stunned and sick. I knew the most terrible of states, irremediable damnation. I had done something fainthearted and it could not be made right, it was a disastrous act, irreversible. Some terrible chord of self-knowledge rang in me. Pinky, now invested with my moral soul, had fled and for the last time. She would never come back, running in that fleet abandoned fur-flattened way of hers, across streets, through yards, through tunnels, over bridges, under cars, but farther and farther from me, far past any range of my calling, heedless of my despair.

  I was not as advanced a being as my brother. In my anguish it never occurred to me to be angry at my parents. I could perceive their characters, but I could not go on to make moral judgments of them. All my wit was spent in avoiding their critical judgments of me.

  Yet now, here, I surely must have resented the clear evidence of the adult’s crass disregard for the feelings of children. It was so devious of them to have gotten rid of Pinky in this way. Evading confrontation with his thirteen-year-old son and conning his five-year-old, my father had spirited away the family dog. Was it difficult for him? I knew he liked Pinky. When he walked her he took her off the leash and knew how to talk to her to keep her with him. Perhap
s he regretted the decision to get rid of her. The urgency to do it would have come from my mother. But he was charming, my father. He did not raise his voice, he cajoled. He did not give commands, he appealed to reason. He rarely used physical force, unlike my mother who would swing away at the drop of a hat. I recognized the evasive style of the kidnapping as his.

  My father loved tricks, gentle practical jokes, “now you see it, now you don’t” kinds of things. He loved word games, riddles. I first heard Zeno’s paradox from him, the runner halving the distance to the finish line, and halving it again, getting closer and closer but never reaching it. He loved puns and limericks.

  A queer old bird is the pelican

  His mouth holds more than his belly can

  He can hold in his beak

  Enough food for a week

  And you wonder how the hell he can.

  He could not resist buying a volume of light verse if he happened to see one in a bookstore. He liked Sir Arthur T. QuillerCouch:

  The lion is the beast to fight,

  He leaps along the plain.

  And if you run with all your might

  He runs with all his mane.

  He relished the lore of the trickster in song or story. He had great appreciation for the legendary entrepreneur P.T. Barnum. He told me how Barnum had had a problem keeping people moving through his exotic animal exhibits so that more paying customers could be admitted. Barnum’s solution was to put up a sign at the exit that said this way to the egress. And the people poured through thinking an egress was another rare animal.