World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  I don’t know much about Dad’s life as a boy. I know he was born on the Lower East Side. Grandma and Grandpa were both from the Minsk district, they emigrated in the 1880’s, I know that. They were young and married here. But where they lived, where Dad went to school, you would have to ask Aunt Frances, she would know. Dad was almost thirty when he got married. He’d already missed out on a couple of major opportunities. One was when he was training to be an ensign in the First World War. He was stationed at Webb’s Naval Institute on the Harlem River. He loved the water, he used to tell me how he swam in the East River as a kid. He loved ships. He was desperate to go to sea, but the war ended before he got his commission. So that had to be a great disappointment. And then you know the story about The Perils of Pauline. He was a handsome fellow, and they were casting for this series, and came into the bank where he worked as a teller. I don’t know, he must have been twenty-one, twenty-two at the time. And this man came into the bank who was directing the movie, I don’t remember his name, but as I heard it he had a beret and a pince-nez and wore riding boots. And he looked at Dad and asked him to take a screen test. He wanted him for the male lead. Dad refused. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he had a surer thing in banking. Who knows, he might have become a big actor in the silents or he might not. But the point is, it was unlike him to back away from a challenge. He liked to gamble, take risks, he liked what was new and different. No one had a record store to match Hippodrome Music. Dad stocked black singers from down South, race records, as they were called, blues bands, ethnic music, jazz, he was really informed and it didn’t matter to him that some of these things were commercially risky. One day I came back from a delivery and he motioned to me and took me into the booth and put on a record. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s something new.” And it was, a wonderful bouncy music, with a great clarinet solo that made you want to dance. It was Benny Goodman’s first record. “Isn’t that fine?” Dad said. “It’s called swing.”

  SIXTEEN

  Donald now had materials from his Townsend Harris High School courses that were beyond my understanding: slide rules, calipers, T squares. He brought home mechanical drawings that he had done and gotten good marks for, little 95’s and 90’s in red ink at the top corner of each drawing. They were like blueprints and showed cylinders and cones, and machine parts in three dimensions, each line measured by another that indicated its length. He explained the concept of scale to me. He knew all this and was confident with it. He had special fountain pens for drawing. All I had was one fountain pen, which I was not even supposed to use in school. But I liked to open my bottle of Waterman’s blue-black ink and fill my pen by opening the little spring clip on the side and closing it slowly. You could hear the ink being sucked up. There was a thin rubber tube inside the pen that was attached to the point—that’s what filled up. I borrowed his sticks of charcoal to draw with. He was generous. But if I was careless with something of his, misplacing it, or damaging it, he acted as if I had committed a great crime. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the care I had to take when I borrowed something, so I didn’t.

  I had to acknowledge the fact that my brother was changing. He spent less time with me. High school took up a lot of his time, and then on Saturday he had his job with my father. I was left more and more on my own.

  There was a candy store near Rosoff’s on 174th Street—not the one I frequented, but one where the older boys gathered to horse around and talk about girls. Sometimes girls gathered there too. My brother and his friends Harold and Bernie and Irwin attached themselves to this society, sometimes stopping there in the afternoons after they got off the train. Gambling went on, boys pitching pennies against the wall or matching nickels. Inside they sold policy, a word familiar to me, though I didn’t know what it meant. My brother did not talk about these things. When my mother found out why he was coming home late from school, she was alarmed. She had strong opinions about Donald’s friends and never failed to deliver them. “So now they’ve turned into sidewalk cowboys,” she said. “I don’t wonder. You hang around that store and you’ll end up with them in the criminal class,” she said.

  Donald was hurt by her remarks but did not change his ways. His green eyes showed defiance. I didn’t stop to think, nor did my mother, what an estimable life Donald was leading—he was doing well in school, knocking out good grades, he worked all day Saturday, and he was studying music. Yet from my mother’s vivid testimony I imagined him going to jail. I circumspectly went to see the infamous store one afternoon, being careful to do my surveillance from across the street, from the vantage point of the Morton bakery.

  I saw my brother and his friends in a crowd of older boys and girls. The crowd moved about constantly. They leaned against the newsstand in front of the candy store, or sat on the fender of a car parked nearby. One boy grabbed a girl from behind and wrestled with her and put his arms around her and she screamed and laughed too. Two boys were having a boxing match but without really hitting each other. I saw Donald talking to a blond girl while ostentatiously smoking a cigarette. At that moment, for some reason, his eye caught sight of me, just a flickering glance. But even across the street I knew from the look I got that I was never to tell on him or my life would be over.

  So all of this made me thoughtful. I could see my brother changing, but in no way detected any difference in myself. I didn’t look taller in the mirror, I didn’t feel older or anything like that. Meanwhile a thin moustache appeared above Donald’s upper lip. His voice became deeper. He was moody, and his passion for music increased. He began to collect records in lieu of wages from my father. He practiced the piano now every day and without being asked. He was a better pianist, there were not those agonizing delays I remembered from the old days when in the middle of a piece all life would stop while we waited for Donald to find the keys for the next chord. When he was through practicing his lesson, he took out his music copybook in which he’d written out swing tunes borrowed from my father’s stock of sheet music, and he played those. Uncle Willy had moved out of our house after Grandma died; he had taken a small apartment on the West Side of Manhattan not far from Hippodrome Music. So Donald moved back into his old room and hung Uncle Willy’s banner on the wall, the purple and gold of BILLY WYNNE AND HIS ORCHESTRA taking on some suggestion of defiance or irrepressible intent, as if Donald were saying to the world that it had better get ready for him.

  One New Year’s Eve my parents arranged to go out and there was a big family fight because Donald no longer wanted to stay with me as he had on past New Year’s Eves. He wanted to go to a party with his friends. My father wore his tuxedo this particular night, and my mother a long pale blue dress with lacy sleeves. Their eyes were alight with excitement and I felt gloomy and neglected watching them prepare themselves. My father tied a black satiny cummerbund around his waist. He let my mother carry on the argument with Donald. I enjoyed the special buttons for his shirt front and cuffs, which he showed me how to operate. But this was not compensation enough for their leaving, and putting me in the charge of my resentful brother with a moustache. “All right,” Donald shouted as they were heading for the door, “but I warn you, this is it. I swear I will never, never stay home again on New Year’s Eve.” My mother in her long pale blue dress and her hair newly marcelled, her lips painted red, a little beaded bag in her hands, soothed Donald and with uncharacteristic gentleness agreed that this would be the last New Year’s he would be called upon to take care of his little brother.

  Although I would have enjoyed a game of war, or battleship, I diplomatically chose to stay in my room and play by myself. I did leave my door open to hear what I could hear. Donald was on the phone in the front hall a good deal of the time. Then he turned on the console radio in the living room to listen to the dance music being broadcast from some hotel downtown. I secretly wanted to stay up to see in the New Year but knew better than to ask. Instead I got into my pajamas and pretended to go to bed. I had my own windup clock. It had a radium dia
l. I could see it in the dark. At midnight I tiptoed down the hall to the living room and I found Donald asleep on the sofa in front of the radio, which was still playing. The broadcast was from Times Square. Crowds cheered, horns blew, and the announcer interviewed people who shouted their greetings into the microphone. It was 1937. I looked out the window. Eastburn Avenue was dark. I hoped my parents would be home soon. Happy New Year, I said to myself, and went back to bed.

  As winter moved into spring I began to hear from the front parlor, in the late afternoons, not only Donald’s swing piano but the honks and squeaks of Seymour Roth’s saxophone, and the earsplitting blasts of Harold Epstein’s trumpet. There was also a snare drummer, Irwin. In the kitchen my mother said, “If those boys had conspired to drive me crazy, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it.” The band met not only after school but on Sunday afternoons. My mother wanted to know why Harold’s mother or Seymour’s couldn’t sacrifice themselves and their households for at least one day a week. Donald said, “We’re the only ones who have a piano,” and that was that. At night he listened to Make Believe Ballroom on the radio, where the announcer, Martin Block, played his records while pretending to be broadcasting from an actual bandstand. Of course, it was not an illusion too emphatically insisted upon. It was not, for example, as scrupulous in its representations as the broadcast baseball games in which the announcer in the studio, using sound effects of the bat cracking and the crowd roaring, pretended to be at the ballpark. Martin Block kept lists of the most popular songs of the week, and Donald wrote down the titles and made a note to get them copied.

  Finally I learned what was going on. Donald and Seymour, the saxophone player, had put their first names together and invented a fictitious bandleader, Don Seymour. Don Seymour’s band was known as the Musical Cavaliers, and they were preparing to audition for a summer job at a resort hotel in the Catskills, the Paramount. They had not yet decided which of them would pose as Don Seymour if they ever reached the lofty heights of the Paramount Hotel bandstand. They were too busy rehearsing. As day after day I heard them go through their repertoire I learned every song by heart. “Deep Purple” was one: “In the still of the night, once again I hold you tight, Tho’ you’re gone your love lives on when moonlight beams, And as long as my heart will beat, Lover we’ll always meet, here in my Deep Purple Dreams.” They played that well, I think, because it was slow. They were better with slow songs. “I Must See Annie Tonight” was one of their rare fast ones, and sometimes they created a double-time effect with it because Irwin’s downbeat on the drums was often dissynchronous with Donald’s on the piano. It was not uninteresting. And then that peculiar “Stairway to the Stars”: “Let’s build a Stairway to the Stars, and climb that Stairway to the Stars, with love beside us to fill the night with a song.” That part of it was all right, although it was not a terribly appealing idea as I thought about it—a long climb, in fact, in cold black space. But then it went: “Can’t we sail away on a little dream and settle high on the crest of a thrill, Let’s build a Stairway to the Stars….” and at that point I was always made nervous, just as I was when I read Alice in Wonderland, because sailing is what you do on water, not on stair treads, and the crest of a thrill made me think of some sort of jungle bird, the Crested Thrill, so they would all be sailing up these stairs and ending up perched on the head of a bird. But it was “Japanese Sandman” that gave me the worst time, the idea of a sandman who could put you to sleep as he chose had always bothered me, that casting of grains that made your eyelids heavy and robbed you of volition was a magic I didn’t like to contemplate. Added to that, the fact that the Sandman was Japanese was especially worrisome. On my bubble gum cards very toothy leering Japanese soldiers in green uniforms were machine-gunning Manchurian civilians. They were leaping over trenches with bayonets affixed to raised rifles. They cast not magic sleep grains but pure red and orange flame from the mouths of flamethrowers.

  With the inclusion of a string bass and another saxophone player, Frankie, the band had grown to six pieces. On a Sunday afternoon, instead of going with my father and mother to see my grandparents, I was permitted to stay home and hear the Cavaliers rehearse. In a moment of inspiration I ran back to my room and took one of my pick-up sticks and came back and led the band with it. I stood in front of the Cavaliers and conducted. Maybe I could be Don Seymour. The light coming through the parlor windows turned the leaves of the potted snake plants a brilliant green. Donald thumped away happily at the upright, his back to the rest of the band. Next to him was Sid the string bass man, playing with eyes closed in transports of head-shaking self-approval; Sid liked to hum one octave higher than the bass notes, like Slam Stewart, a famous jazz bassist, who was his hero. Next to Sid was Irwin the drummer, now endowed with a snare, a tom-tom, cowbells, and a bass drum resting on its side, which he played with an attached pedal that catapulted a big bulbous hammer up against the drum skin. And sitting side by side in the front row of the band, just like the men of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, were the two saxophonists, Seymour and Frankie, and the trumpet player, Harold. First they played “I Have Eyes to See With,” then a rousing rendition of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” which Donald thought was their best number. Standing in front of the band, I waved my baton and tapped my foot. It didn’t seem to bother anyone. But then I saw that the new saxophone player, Frankie, seemed not to be exerting himself. There was some hesitancy about him. I watched him closely without being obvious about it. When the moment came in the sheet music to go on to the next page, Seymour and Harold leaned forward simultaneously and turned the pages sitting on their music stands, but Frankie waited a split second before he did the same thing. Then I saw that his fingers did not depress keys on his saxophone, they only touched them. And that most of the time they weren’t the same keys Seymour was pressing on his saxophone. Frankie was a tall, long-faced boy with sad, deep-set eyes and the shadow of a dark beard on his face. He did not live in the neighborhood. He glanced nervously at me over his saxophone. Clearly I was a danger to him. The others were making their music, and loudly. The Cavaliers were not always exactly on key but had a lot of enthusiasm. I felt the same excitement as when a parade band passed close to me on Memorial Day along the Grand Concourse, that same vault of the heart in the blare of performed music. But I knew the band members were intensely occupied with keeping up with Irwin, the drummer, who tended to go faster and faster with each passing bar, and that none of them was secure enough as a musician to really hear the others. None of them, not even Donald, knew that Frankie was making no sound.

  When the number ended, Donald said, “Let’s go through it one more time, and try to make the opening attack crisper and to build a little higher for the ending.” As the bandleader, he had that responsibility of critique. I asked to see him, pulling at his arm as he stood in front of them. He shrugged me off and kept talking. I persisted. Finally he said, “What is it, pest!” I pulled him into the living room and closed the parlor doors. “Donald,” I said, pulling again on his arm as he looked at me with that frowning wary expression of his. A shock of hair habitually fell over his forehead, his light green eyes were the eyes of an adult, his face had not a bit of fat on it, he was a lean, not very tall, wiry big brother, a good athlete, a brain at high school, a fellow with many plans and responsibilities at age fifteen and a half. But he had hired a musician who couldn’t play. He bent over and I whispered in his ear: “Frankie is faking.”

  He looked at me incredulously and I nodded affirmation of what I had said. “You stay here,” he said and went back into the parlor and closed the door after him. I heard them go into “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” again, but after a bar or two they stopped. Then I heard my brother’s voice. He sounded angry. Soon they were all talking. An argument began. “Shit,” I heard Irwin say, and then it was quiet and I smelled cigarette smoke. A few minutes later the parlor door opened, and Frankie came out carrying his saxophone case. His shoulders hunched and he didn’t look at me as he passed into
the hall and went out the front door.

  Nobody felt that I had been, in essence, a tattletale. The hapless Frankie was, first of all, much older than I and therefore not in the same moral universe. In the second place, he was an impostor, a fraud, who stood to gain from his imposture at the expense of the other members of the band. What would it have done to the credibility of their audition had the booker for the Paramount Hotel noticed that one of them couldn’t even play? My brother was delighted with me. Everyone was. The story was told within the family and around the neighborhood how the little kid brother had turned out to be more perceptive than the musicians themselves. I was a hero. For once I had proven useful to my older brother, I had done something for him. I could make a fair claim now to be taken seriously. There was also a new awareness in me that size wasn’t everything, that wit was a strength in the world, the exercise of one’s brain.