World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  When the time came to leave, Aunt Frances stood talking to my mother about her poor mother, and then the two women hugged. Uncle Ephraim had a gold toothpick that he kept on a fob. He held up a hand to cover his mouth while he picked his teeth. We all piled into Uncle Phil’s De Soto taxi, which had jump seats. It was crowded but we fit. I sat on my father’s lap and fell asleep as we went back down to the Bronx. First Phil dropped off the old folks. Then he drove us to our door. My father carried me up the front steps, I half asleep in his arms, the cool night air of spring blowing gently around my ears like an echo of the Passover songs in my mind.

  THIRTEEN

  School was just a half block from my house, across the corner of 173rd Street, but my whole life changed once I began there. I was six—no longer a child. I wore a white shirt with a red tie. In the morning my time was as important as anyone else’s. I had to be turned out at a certain hour just like my brother and father; I ran home for lunch at twelve and back at twelve-forty-five, and when I got home from school in the afternoon I had just a few hours before I’d have to start thinking about homework. I enjoyed the seriousness of my calling. Reading came to me effortlessly. I had in a subliterate way been making sense from books for some time. The moment I began competently to read was imperceptible to me. Numbers were more difficult.

  My teacher Mrs. Kalish asked me on my first day in her class if I was Donald’s brother. He had been a brilliant student, she said, her favorite student at the time. This sort of comparison would eventually disturb me. Now I smiled with pride at the identification. I was a confident scholar. School held no terrors. I did not once vomit in the classroom. The janitor had a surefire system for dealing with such disasters. He appeared with his pail of ammoniated water and his mop, and a shovel and a garbage can and a bag of sawdust. He would spill the sawdust on the offensive pool, shovel it up, and then mop the whole thing with ammonia and drive the smell away. Why did children vomit so much at P.S. 70? Bathroom accidents were oddly less frequent, perhaps because the rules about going to the bathroom were fairly relaxed.

  The materials of school interested me, the stiff colored paper, the jars of white paste, the sticks of chalk, the erasers larger than bars of brown soap that had to be taken outside and pounded against each other to get the dust out. To be chosen to do that, to be authorized to leave the classroom and go out in the closed yard in the sun, all alone, was an honor. Another honor was to be designated monitor of the window shades, which needed adjustment all during the day as the sun went across the sky and the light shone in our eyes or in the teacher’s. Honors seemed to fall my way in school without my having to do much to get them. I was liked by the other children and they elected me class president, although neither I nor they had very much idea what the class president was supposed to do. Yet I enjoyed being president. The stair monitor had more power, but that was all right.

  In the spelling bees I was the best of the boy students and invariably wound up the last of my kind to face three or four of the girls on the other side of the room. Girls were devilishly good at spelling. I might defeat almost all of them, but just as I was the boy champion, Diane Blumberg led the girls, and inevitably, when the showdown came between me and Diane, she would win. She was good at math too, and taller than I was, with fat little squirrel cheeks and a mouth perpetually primed in contemptuous judgment. Diane Blumberg was in all ways smug and insufferable.

  A watercolor portrait of President Roosevelt hung above the blackboard in the front of the room. On the window ledges were various things we did for Nature, one of the best of subjects—bulbs growing in pots, or a frog in a terrarium. We had a bowl of turtles, who sunned themselves on stones, and for one or two days in spring an Easter rabbit donated by one of the mothers. Abraham Lincoln was shown on a poster and over his figure was printed the Gettysburg Address. In the long closet with sliding doors at the side of the room, on rainy days steam seemed to come from our rubber slickers and galoshes. I loved anything that got me out of the classroom. We would in two-by-twos trek downstairs to the big auditorium for the weekly movie, never something as good as we’d expect to find at the real movies, but something old and tame, like Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch or Tom Sawyer. After each reel the lights would come on and we would be noisy and throw spitballs at one another—the discipline was less exacting at these times. The best breaks in the routine were the fire drills, because then we could march outside and stay there for mysterious endless amounts of time, the whole school standing quietly in ranks in the breeze, all the apartment buildings of the neighborhood surrounding our yard, while seemingly secret and troubled school administrative self-examination took place. On mornings of fire drills lunchtime always came quickly.

  I had discovered in myself the double personality engendered by school: the good attentive boy in class, the raucous, unsprung Dionysian in the schoolyard at recess. It was a matter of expressing the dominant force—order or freedom. Other boys in the class were bigger, rougher in the mold, and their wildness was a model to us all. The quiet teacher’s child in me went and sat down somewhere in the back of my brain while the hellion ran about shouting and punching. You found weaknesses and went chasing after them, like the cheetah, which I knew was, for short distances, the fastest animal in the world. The weakness of girls was their underpants. To see these or mention them or allude to them brought red embarrassment to their faces, or glances of fear, or hisses of hatred. They had an awful way of half bending their knees, holding their hands in their skirts, protecting something. I knew to stop, always, short of the flying fanged leap. One or two boys did not know, they had some ungoverned crudeness of spirit that did damage, bent arms back, humiliated their prey, and turned themselves into the despised among all of us, girls and boys. They were feared and detested, and went on living that way in rude derision of their unpopularity, for months at a time. When I went back into class I became serious, as if my character could only be maintained by alternations of opposites. I tried out different Edgars in the class, in the schoolyard. In transit from school to home and back in that short half block, I ran from one of my beings to another aware only of the sound of the racing breath in my ears, the scent of cold air in my brain, some pungent essence of winter and the momentary revelation of my own lengthening limbs.

  School made me hungry. For lunch I loved a baked potato with butter and salt and a glass of milk. Or cabbage soup with potatoes in it and sour cream. Under my father’s advice, I was developing a taste for tart things, a taste, he claimed, that was far more enduring than one for the sweet things. I was bought my first pair of knickers. They were corduroy and worn with long argyle socks. I liked my looks in the mirror, a young knickered student in his fall wool sweater, and a shock of blond hair over one eye. I liked to see my softness going away, the leanness of cheekbone emerging, a line of jaw.

  There was in my second-grade class the smallest of girls, Meg. She had grey eyes and very light straw-colored hair worn short, and her mother favored more doll-like versions of the skirt and middy that girls customarily wore—skirts with stiff outward-spreading understuff and white knee socks and white-and-brown strap shoes polished clean every morning. She was the shortest person in the class, and as she was extremely quiet as well, she was clearly too delicate and inconsequential to excite the envy or malice of the other girls or the desire of the boys to inflict torture and torment. She had no apparent wish to use what she had or what she came from to make her place in our society. We all knew what a spoiled child was and she was not one. She demanded no obeisances as any of us would on the basis even of the ownership of a new pencil box. Our social life was competitive, we made alliances and broke them with the cunning of nations, but she was clearly not one of our coarse breed. She did her work well and throughtfully, without ostentation; she never volunteered an answer but always knew it when she was called on. When the school day was over she did not linger in the yard, but with her books stacked and held against her chest in that way of girls, she wal
ked through the schoolyard gate and to the corner, and looking both ways before crossing 173rd Street, made her way along Eastburn, right past my house to the corner of Mt. Eden Avenue, where she crossed the Oval, turned left and went along the Claremont Park wall to her apartment, overlooking the park up the hill near Monroe Avenue. Although the theatricality of her mother’s taste made Meg’s underpants easier to see than most, she did not suffer from this. No one bothered her, least of all me. Perhaps her size made her the baby in our minds. But for the same reason, size, I may have seen in her an assumption of that titled babyhood for which I had less and less desire in myself. I was grateful to her. I was glad no one bothered her because then I would have had to reveal myself as her defender. And then it would have been said I loved her, which would be unfortunate. She had a full, inflamed-looking upper lip, which I found attractive. I was not yet bold enough to walk beside her even though her path took her right past my stoop, but her quietness, and a quality of inner certitude she had, conveyed, in the brief moments I watched her or thought about her, a similar central silence to me, and I felt as if I were looking ahead down a still corridor into my calm and resolute manhood.

  School brought about an enlarged social life, generally, for I was now permitted on Saturday to go out for lunch and then spend the afternoon at the movies with one or more of my school friends. My expeditions were funded with a weekly allowance of twenty-five cents. Two hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola cost fifteen cents at the delicatessen on 174th Street; and the dime in change was exactly the price of admission to the Surrey Theater on Mt. Eden Avenue just the other side of the Concourse. The Surrey showed a cartoon, a newsreel, either a travelogue or a short, such as one of Lew Lehr’s monkey pictures, where the monkeys rode bikes and wore diapers and sat in high chairs to eat baby food, one or two chapters of a serial like Tim Tyler’s Luck or Buck Jones and the Phantom Rider, and finally, a double feature, an A picture and a B, the A usually about gangsters and G-men, the B a Laurel and Hardy comedy or perhaps a Charlie Chan mystery. At the end of the afternoon I came out of the theater staggering. I was shocked to see that it was still daylight, that mankind did not live in eternal darkness lit only by flashes of gunfire or the flames of car crashes, and in fact was going about its ordinary business in no visibly dramatic manner. This letdown, or perhaps it was the light, or that my skull still resounded with the unmodulated screams of joy of a theaterful of children, invariably brought me home with a headache, which, however, I could not confess to my mother lest I be reminded of it the following Saturday.

  Sometimes this routine was varied with a trip downtown, if we could persuade one of the mothers or an older brother or sister to go with us. We did not choose places that were chosen by our teachers for trips on a bus during school hours—the Museum of Natural History, for instance, or Fraunces Tavern, where Washington said farewell to his troops. We liked to see radio shows. One day we got into the Babe Ruth program, where the great man himself stood in front of the microphone, although not, disappointingly, in his baseball suit but in an ordinary double-breasted suit and tie, and read from a script haltingly and ran a quiz with lucky kids picked from the audience. In fact he was past his prime as a player. But there were prizes up to five dollars and a lot of advice about clean living from the Babe. His voice was hoarse at the end, his tie loosened, his hair rumpled, but he got through it. We didn’t have to be cued by the director with his placards to cheer; stopping our throats was more difficult.

  On expeditions such as these I liked to drop in at my father’s store, if it was within range, and show it off to my friends. “Hey, young fellow,” my father would say as I walked in. Donald would be there putting stock on the shelves, Uncle Willy might be taking an order on the phone. I cautioned my friends not to make noise. I gave them a guided tour in hushed tones as we passed among the customers.

  Downtown was my father’s realm. In my mind it belonged to him. Every day he went to it on the subway as a diver in a big iron bell descended to the depths of the ocean; and he found things there and brought them back. His restless mind lapped our house every night like the evening tide and brought to our shores the treasures of his escapades—opera tickets, art books, magazines, papers, little badly printed magazines of radical thought, a new electric clock with an illuminated dial, a wonderful set of silver electric trains. When he took me downtown to spend the day with him, that was the best trip of all. I could then open my mind to the chaos of adult civilization, knowing that he would find the order for me. He pointed out buildings and named them and told me what was done in them, he instructed me on the difference between streets and avenues, he described the routes of the trolley cars by the letters they displayed on the front, he knew flawlessly how to get from one place to another, he knew the best shops for this or that, the best values, he knew everything. My father was an expert jaywalker walking us boldly across the streets of traffic with unerring grace. When my mother brought me downtown, she deferred uncharacteristically to his decisions, he was the master in this realm. He loved the great city of stone—it made him catch his breath and laugh. I understood, studying him, that his mind made a design of it. There was the appearance of it, which I knew, a dazzle of noise and disparate intention, jackhammers punching holes in the street, cars and trucks flowing past obstructions, yellow cabs with their skylights, double-decker buses, the great liners in the harbor blowing their basso horns; but in reality all of it was somehow arranged, it was a place of accommodation for human desire, it supported the diverse intentions of millions of people simultaneously, and he knew that and gave me the confidence to understand it and not be afraid. The heels of thousands of people drummed the sidewalk. He had been born on the Lower East Side. New York was his home, he loved its music, and through a speaker over the front door of Hippodrome Radio he sent the sound of symphonies and swing bands into the street like his own voice.

  Yet when I walked from our home to the subway station on 174th Street and entered that cool catacomb through the tightly sprung turnstile, it was usually in the company of my mother, herself no mean guide. She too was a native. Holding my hand tightly, she brought me to spectacles designed for children—theatricals, puppet shows, Thanksgiving Day parades. It was to my mother I would turn in the huge air-cooled cathedral of Radio City when Snow White ran through the woods and the trees came alive to grab at her tresses and scratch her clothes into tatters; my mother was the sponsor of all that looming animated surreality.

  One day she took me to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden on Fiftieth Street. My father had gotten the tickets free. It was a weekday matinee and he could not come. My school was over, but Donald still had his high school exams, and so it was just the two of us. Far below me on the tanbark of the center ring a sad-faced clown swept the spotlight into a smaller and smaller circumference until finally it went out altogether. Another clown strode along with half a dozen baby pigs trotting after him. He pressed a button and his nose lit up. Someone doused him with water, so he opened a tiny umbrella the size of a saucer and held it by its long handle high over his head. I watched the great swinging teams of fliers doing somersaults in the air. I saw the march of elephants.

  It interested me particularly that in the circus there was one wistful clown who climbed the high wire after the experts were done, and scared himself and us with his uproariously funny, incredibly maladroit moves up there. Slipping and sliding about, losing his hat, his floppy shoes, and holding on to the wire for dear life, he was actually doing stunts far more difficult than any that had gone on before. This was confirmed, invariably, as he doffed his clown garments one by one and emerged from the woeful little potbellied misfit as the star who headlined the high-wire act. In his tights and glistening bare torso he pulled off his bulbous nose and stood spotlighted on the platform with one arm raised to receive our wildest applause for having led us through our laughter, our fear, to simple awe. I took profound instruction f
rom this hoary circus routine. It was not merely that I, the sniffler with the red nose, would someday in my good time reveal myself to be a superman among men. There was art in the thing, the power of illusion, the mightier power of the reality behind it. What was first true was then false, a man was born from himself. All the problems of my own being were not the truth of me, I knew. In my own eyes I was a man no matter what daily evidence was thrown in my face to the contrary. But that there were ways to dramatize this to an unsuspecting world was the keenness of my understanding. You didn’t have to broadcast everything you knew all at once, but could reveal it suspense-fully, and make them first cry out in fear, and make them laugh, and, above all, make them applaud, when they finally saw what an achievement had been yours by taking on so well and accurately the comic being of a little kid.

  Of course that was a hard illusion to maintain once the show was over and the lights went on. I aspired to the power of myself. My struggle went on every day but not always in my consciousness of it. School assisted me because I did well there, I was among peers and I was proving out. But the odds at home were against me; no matter how I grew and what I learned, I couldn’t seem to better my position. Invariably there were ceremonies of my helplessness that caused me to revert to the child I had been and thought I was no longer—as, for instance, when my mother decided it was time for still another excursion downtown, but to a place I despised and detested, S. Klein’s on Union Square.