World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  Later, with the thing officially acknowledged and phone calls made and the visit of the doctor, I felt better. That the adults had taken charge was comforting to me, and no moment since my discovery of my grandma had been quite as bad. Everyone talked in whispers. I had not yet begun to think of her as dead, only that she had died. These seemed to be two separate ideas in my mind. She still lay in her room. It was still her room. I peeked through the half-closed door and saw Dr. Gross examining her with a stethoscope. He was our family doctor, a short, round jowly man with greying black hair and a moustache who wore looped across his vest a chain with a membership badge of some sort depending from it. I had studied that little badge many times as he attended me through my wheezes and hacks and earaches. His office was only a few blocks away. He had removed the covers from my grandma and taken off her gown. She lay white and slender; I could not see her face, but her body, the female whiteness of it, was dazzling to me, not at all wrinkled and not bent but straight. I had just a glimpse before my mother saw me and told me to go about my business and shut the door firmly. I wondered if it was a thing about death that made grandmas into girls.

  The next day my mother and father and Uncle Willy, all of them dressed in dark clothes, went off to the synagogue, which was around the corner and one block down on 173rd Street and Morris Avenue. Donald stayed home from school, but neither he nor I was allowed to go to the services. But we were drawn there somehow, and so we walked with my hand in his to where we could stand across the street from the synagogue and hear what traces of the music and prayer could be heard. It was a large square synagogue faced in a pebbly texture of concrete. I had touched it many times. It had white granite steps in the front that narrowed toward the top, and curving brass handrails. It had stone columns on either side of the front door, like a post office, and a translucent dome for a roof. At the very top, where pigeons sat, were two tablets connoting the Ten Commandments. Around the side where we stood, stained-glass windows were tilted open in a way that didn’t allow you to see inside. We heard singing.

  “Poor Grandma,” Donald said. “The only fun she had was going to services.”

  We saw the black hearse, and another black car behind it, move slowly to a stop in front of the synagogue. “People will be coming out in a minute,” Donald said and we walked back home.

  I had the distinct impression death was Jewish. It had happened to my grandma, who spoke Jewish, and everyone had immediately repaired to the synagogue. A memorial candle in a glass now stood flickering on the kitchen table for Grandma, whom I had seen light similar candle glasses for her own dead. Hebrew letters were on the glass label as on the window of the chicken market where dead chickens hung on hooks by their feet, some plucked, some half plucked, some with all their feathers. Chickens, I knew, were Jewish. For days after Grandma’s burial, the mirrors were covered in our house and my mother walked around in stockinged feet. We were visited by friends, who brought many white bakery boxes tied with string and put them on the kitchen table. Pots and pots of coffee were made, and women I didn’t know, friends of my mother, stood strangely at the kitchen sink and washed dishes. My mother hugged me in front of visitors, drew me to her and hugged me till it hurt. She was tearful, sentimental, easy to deal with. She complimented me and told everyone how bright I was. “This is the boy who knew before any of us,” she said. “He came to tell us and he knew exactly what had happened.” But she also spoke Jewish to these people, just as she had to my grandmother. I went to my grandmother’s room. The bed was stripped, the closet had been emptied. But in her cedar chest there were still her treasures, shawls of lace and folded dresses, and wool sweaters and knitted things all wrapped in thin white paper and with mothballs between the layers. There were also old sepia pictures of her family when she was a child, many little girls and boys standing and reclining around old men with white beards and black hats who sat stiffly in chairs, behind which stood several stern-looking women with their hands on the old men’s shoulders. The little boys and girls were dressed oddly and all seemed to have drawn faces and dark hair hanging over their ears and enormous staring dark eyes. On the top of the chest was my grandma’s prayer book, her Siddur, and the cover had those Jewish letters on it that looked to me like arrangements of bones. In my room I played with my pick-up sticks to see if I could arrange them in Jewish letters, but they lacked bony width, they lacked the knobby thickness even of chicken bones.

  Now it was my mother who, on Friday nights at the kitchen table, placed white Sabbath candles in the wobbly old brass candlesticks, and drew a kerchief over her head and lit the candles and prayed with her hands over her glistening blue eyes.

  TWELVE

  More frequently now there came to the front door the old men in black who wore their prayer shawls under their coats and carried letters from rabbis and credentials from yeshivas. Now they were invited in. My mother sat them in the parlor and gave them tea. They told their stories in hushed tones or spoke only in Jewish, and so my eavesdropping didn’t yield anything that specific. But I was getting the gist of things. And finally one man spoke enough English to make it clear. “The kinder from the schools are pushed, so now they can’t go. And the business of the fathers are taken from them. Little by little. And in the street they revile them, the brownshirt heathen, and spit on them. And to the polizei they must report. Thousands are leaving, Missus. Their homes, their livelihood is gone. All of it gone. To Palestine, on boats, but anywhere! Where can they go! What can they do!”

  My mother produced two crumpled bills from her purse, folded them, and pushed them into the old man’s coin box. It was a blue box with white stripes and a white six-pointed star.

  My mother joined the Sisterhood of the synagogue and began going to services on Saturday morning. She had never been religious before. “I never had the patience,” she told her friend Mae. “When I was a girl, I gave Mama such a hard time because I wouldn’t go. I thought it was all so old-fashioned and unnecessary. We were bohemians, Dave and I. And look at me now.”

  One Saturday I went with her just to see what it was all about. The women sat upstairs in the synagogue. The men, who were the bosses, sat downstairs. Sometimes there was crying, sometimes singing, but mostly Jewish death words. Jewish death was spreading.

  I left and ran home by myself. Through a grate in the sidewalk on the 173rd Street side of the synagogue I could see into the basement windows. Another synagogue was down there where the poor people prayed.

  I was familiar with the texture of sidewalks and the embellishments in brick at the sides of buildings. Most brick was red and of a pocked cracked surface that scraped the finger; some brick siding was yellow and was smoother. The steps of my front stoop were worn white granite, very smooth to the touch.

  After this summer I would be going to school. This had been discussed several times by my parents. They were pleased about it. I was ready for school—eager, in fact—but now my mother was saying that I would also go to Hebrew school twice a week in the afternoons. She said this as a kind of declaration and she put her hand on my head. I secretly resolved to fight the edict. It seemed to me a reckless, even insane act of public exposure. I already knew that if I found myself in the wrong part of Claremont Park I could be knifed and robbed for being Jewish. I knew from the old men’s whisperings in the front parlor that similar things, though even worse, were happening in Europe, especially Germany. A little boy who went to Hebrew school would live in endlessly concentric circles of danger, beginning with my park, and rippling out over the globe. Everything connected in a circle of being that, unfortunately, had assigned to us the life of prey, as on the steppes, or the veldt, where the herds of beautiful zebra or wildebeests were run down and this or that animal isolated and slaughtered for the evening meal of the predator cats, I could not have reasoned consciously that European culture took revengeful root in the New World, to which it had been transplanted. Yiddish-speaking households were not foreign to me, they were American. I did not
speak the language, but I understood bits of it as spoken by my grandmother to my mother or in less purist fashion by my father’s parents to him. In my comic books purchased at the candy store on the corner of 174th Street, or on the faces of the bubble gum cards, stories were told of wars between gangsters or wars between countries. Planes dive-bombed the agonized faces of screaming civilians, tanks rearing like horses on their hind legs loomed over Oriental babies crying for their mothers, and G-men and crooks, who were dressed alike, drilled each other with tommy guns. It all seemed of a piece to me, and insofar as it had something to do with the strategy of survival, I attended to it. I understood that one had as resources oneself, one’s brother, one’s parents and then perhaps President Roosevelt.

  Of course I knew virtually nothing about religion, beyond a few of the major Bible stories and the holidays associated with them. I knew so far that most of the Jewish holidays were not as much fun as the regular ones. There was some forced insistence behind them. This was not true of the Fourth of July or New Year’s or Thanksgiving, Purim, where you got apples and raisins and noisemakers and little blue-and-white flags, was sort of fun; and Chanukah, of course, where you got presents. But spinning the wooden top, to see which Hebrew letter would fall, like a gambler in death, was not to my liking. And the Purim story seemed to me not as victorious as it was made out to be. One bad man was shamed and deposed, but the king was still there who was the real problem.

  Passover was the giant of the Jewish holidays and had much to say for it. The story was good and the food was good. Technically it lasted eight days, but the fuss was made for only one. It came along in the spring, but with that peculiarity of Jewish holidays of being very casual about the date of its arrival. I noticed when adults talked about Passover they said either that it was late or that it was early, but never that it was on time. This year it was late. My mother bought flowers for it, tulips and daffodils. Passover involved getting dressed up and taking an enormous journey with packages and flowers.

  We were most of the day getting ready. Early in the afternoon, an unusual time for me to be so clean and well groomed, we set off—Donald, my mother and I—walking east on 173rd Street over the Topping Avenue hill, and descending by degrees to the valley of Webster Avenue. This was the East Bronx of mythological dangers; surrounded by my family I was not concerned, although it would have been better still were my father with us. But he was required to work most of the day and would be meeting us later.

  We boarded a red-and-yellow streetcar with rush seats, all occupied. It was the W car, headed north. It went clanging up Webster, a wide thoroughfare of gas stations, warehouses, lumberyards and auto repair shops. The farther north we rode, the longer the stretch between stops. One by one we found seats. My mother, sitting first, kept all the bundles on her lap. At 180th Street the car swung sharply right, the wheels screeching loudly and all the passengers tilting in unison. At this point, Donald began a sharp lookout. He was our navigator. We rode to the stop under an elevated station that he had been waiting for, and got off to transfer to another trolley, the A car. Now the Bronx flattened out in blocks of empty lots, with schools in the middle of dirt fields, and spired churches, and even an occasional wooden house with its own yard. Finally, after a turn or two, we broke into the peaceful suburban avenues of Mt. Vernon. Here the car ride was smooth and we were practically the only passengers. We sat together. I liked the brown wood decks of streetcars, the walls and window frames and ceilings were of wood too; it must feel like this in a bunkhouse or a riverboat, I thought. And it all rested on steel carriages. It appealed to me that fast or slow, barreling along or creaking around corners, the trolley car could go only as directed by the tracks; it was all planned, all the motorman could do was crank up the power and the flanged wheels had dutifully to go the way they were led. Of course, occasionally the motorman stopped the car, got off and, with a crowbar, moved the track switch one way or another, but the principle held.

  The air was cool. The streets were not of cobblestone but of smooth cream-colored seamless paving. Green parks and fields were on either side of us. Then near the end of the line, the conductor already walking down the aisle and yanking the seat backs forward for the return trip, the car reached a certain corner in Pelham Manor, where, to my mind, began the quietest, most elegant block in the world. And here we disembarked, and made our way along the beautifully named Montcalm Terrace, after a general in the French and Indian War. This was where Aunt Frances lived, on a street of raised lawns and grand homes. Her house had a sharply raked tile roof, and casement windows, and dark wood beams impressed in the grey stucco siding.

  Aunt Frances greeted us with a smile at the door. Behind her was her full-time maid, Clara, a tall, angular black woman who wore a white uniform with matching white shoes. Clara took our coats and bundles. To our surprise and delight, my habitually late father was already there. He had come up from Grand Central Station on the New York Central. “You’re late,” he said. “What took you so long!” And everyone laughed. Then the master of this house appeared, Uncle Ephraim, horse-faced, very proper, a bit pompous, in fact—a portly man who spoke always as if delivering a speech. He gazed down at me, with critical intelligence coming like sparks of light off his eyeglasses. He had enormous teeth. “And how is Edgar?” he said. I could tell he felt superior to his wife’s family. He had a patronizing air. On the second night of Passover they would have a seder for his family; the two families never met. And it was true, we were a raucous crowd. Uncle Ephraim conducted the seder down at the end of the table. Beside him sat my atheist grandfather, who was equally proper about the form of the thing. Together they prayed and directed the sacramental moments for us all, while we, our attention wandering, talked and whispered, Donald and my cousin Irma trying to step on each other’s feet under the table, and my father getting into a political argument with Uncle Phil the cabdriver, who did not believe the cabdrivers should be unionized. Uncle Phil wore not the ceremonial black skull cap supplied by the house but the same felt hat with the front brim turned up in which he drove his cab. Irreverent Aunt Molly kept up a patter of remarks that made us laugh. She always looked disheveled, even in holiday clothes, with wisps of her hair not quite tucked in, face florid, bosom crooked, dress sticking to her from its own static. “Where do you suppose the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are having their seder tonight,” she said. Even my grandmother Gussie laughed, who was pious and God-fearing and tried to shush everyone before she laughed again. When things got too noisy, Uncle Ephraim, without looking up, slapped the table with his open palm, and for perhaps thirty seconds everyone was chastened until someone broke out in the giggles, usually me, because of the funny faces Aunt Molly was making to get me to do just that.

  And here we were all of us sitting around the long table in the dining room, a room where you only ate, imagine that, and even the animosity between my mother and grandmother was suspended as the sweet holiday wine, sipped at the requisite times in the ceremony, began to bring color to people’s faces. The candlelight shone in everyone’s eyes. There was a splendid chandelier of many crystal lights. I was asked to open the front door for Elijah, the prophet, for whom a place setting was laid and wineglass filled. It was a heavy wooden door, with a cathedral arch and black cast-iron fixtures. I peeked into the darkness of Montcalm Terrace to make sure Elijah was not there. I pictured him as one of the old bearded men who came to the door with terrible stories and a collection box in his hand. I was relieved that he hadn’t come. The night sky was filled with millions of shining stars.

  My brother was prevailed upon to ask the four questions the youngest male asks at the seder. He protested, was overruled and, scowling, turned to me and said, “This is the last time I do this, next year you better know how.” He felt demeaned—a student at Townsend Harris High School asking why this night was different from all other nights. The answers in Hebrew to the four questions seemed, not only to me but to most everyone at the table, interminable. “Liste
n to them down there,” Molly said of Grandpa and Uncle Ephraim. “The Jews are the only people in the world who give you a history course before they let you eat.” Finally the big moment arrived—the actual dinner. Aunt Frances rang a little bell and a moment later Clara appeared from the kitchen and began to serve. I had nibbled at the bitter herbs and barely sniffed at the hard-boiled egg in salt water. Now my time had come. The chicken soup with knaydl, how good that was! The fish I passed over. That was my father’s joke that made everyone laugh: “No thank you, Aunt Frances. I’ll pass over that.” Then roast lamb, baked potatoes, I even ate the string beans. Honey cake and watered wine for dessert. Then, after a brief reprise of the impenetrable ceremony, the time for singing, at which point everyone with great gusto, as much in gratitude for the finish of this exhausting event as in praise of God, sang the traditional songs as loudly as possible. The song I liked best was one of those add-on songs, like “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.” This song described a father buying a kid, meaning a goat. Then a cat devoured the kid, then a dog came and bit the cat, a staff came and smote the dog, and a fire came and burned the staff and then water came and extinguished the fire, then the ox came and drank the water, and finally, by the last verse you got the whole causal sequence—the slaughterer came and slaughtered the ox, which had drunk the water, which had put out the fire, which had burned the staff, which had smitten the dog, which had bitten the cat, which had eaten the kid, which my father had bought for two coins—one only kid, one only kid. I had no idea what any of this meant and I didn’t want to ask for fear of being answered, but it pleased me very much.