World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  My mother was better at earning a living than my father. She did piecework. For a while she had a tea shop. Later she ran a resort, a kind of boardinghouse, in the country. I was fifteen or so. The resort failed. She was strict with us girls, with me and Molly, the baby. But Dave could do no wrong. Dave she adored. Dave was the apple of her eye. And he loved her.

  From Gouverneur Street we moved all the way up to 100th Street, where the hospital is now. Then there were tenements. There was a farm on Park Avenue at Ninety-eighth Street. My mother would hand me ten cents and I’d go to the farm and pick the things we needed. Everything was a penny. A bunch of radishes, a penny, a cucumber, a head of lettuce. One penny.

  Dave and I were not close until many years later when we were each married, with children. I married much earlier. When he married Rose they made the handsomest couple I had ever seen. Rose was a beautiful girl.

  Ephraim and I began to court when I was sixteen. Dave was thirteen or fourteen. There is a family story that Dave threw Ephraim down the stairs, but that is not true. What he did was lock him out, hold the door to keep him from visiting me. Dave made Ephraim’s life miserable. There was friction between them. They never liked each other.

  Ephraim and I had a wonderful marriage. We never argued. He was a conservative Republican, a member of the Liberty League. He knew I felt differently. I voted for Norman Thomas one year and simply didn’t tell him and he didn’t ask. He trusted me to handle all the household accounts and make the domestic decisions while he attended to his law practice. He never questioned my judgment. The system worked beautifully. Ephraim was a remarkable man. You know, by the twenties we had a household staff of five—housekeeper, cook, maid, a nurse for the children, and a chauffeur. But when the stock market was booming, Ephraim advised many of his clients to take out second mortgages on their homes and invest in the market and so after the crash in ’29 he felt responsible to those people and made good on every one of those mortgages. He didn’t have to, but that’s the way he was. He wiped out his fortune. We had to let the staff go, except for Clara. We had to struggle to put our boys through college.

  Dave should have done better than he did. But he was a dreamer. When we lived on the Lower East Side, he liked to go down by the docks and look at the sailing ships. In those days the ships came right up to the street. The prows extended over the sidewalks. You could hear the ropes flapping in the wind, you could hear their masts creaking. He loved that he stared at the sailors. My mother told him not to go there. She thought he would run away to sea. He was unpredictable. He was a trial to us all. Papa had a wonderful sense of humor! When they were retired and living up on the Concourse, Dave would call on the phone and say he was coming to visit on Tuesday, for example. Tuesday would come and he wouldn’t appear, and wouldn’t appear, and my mother would fret and Papa would say, well, he didn’t say which Tuesday.

  I loved Dave, we all did. When he was so sick, the last year of his life, I drove him around Manhattan to his accounts, to the stores he sold to. He could hardly walk, he was on crutches, but he couldn’t afford to stop working.

  I do remember one story about your father when he was a little boy. There was a wonderful family, the Romanoffs, who had taken my mother and father under their wing when they were first married. They were an older couple with no children. Mr. Romanoff enrolled me in school because at that point my parents’ English was not that good; he knew English and could speak to the authorities. Anyway, they were delighted with us. Mr. Romanoff had a successful business, a drugstore up in the hundreds somewhere. That was the country. And he especially loved Dave. So the Romanoffs invited Dave to stay the weekend with them, they had no children of their own, you see, and so my mother, wanting to show her little boy at his best, bought a beautiful new suit for him with a hat. Dave turned red when they dressed him up for the visit. He hated the new suit. The hat was a little top hat, I think. When Mama brought him to the Romanoffs, Dave went upstairs and while the adults were downstairs on the street in front of the house, the suit came sailing out the window and landed at their feet. He would not wear it. And to emphasize the point he came outside in his underwear, this four-year-old, and came down the steps and in front of everyone threw the hat down in the dirt and stomped on it. He jumped up and landed with both feet on the hat again and again. Stomped it into the dirt. So they would know what he thought of it.

  TWENTY-ONE

  For several months I would sleep badly. I was afraid to go to sleep: in my dreams I smelled ether and felt a knife cutting into my belly.

  When I went back to school, I was for a day or so treated as a returning hero. We all smiled shyly at each other. My classmates had sent me a big homemade get-well card with everyone’s name painstakingly autographed. My friend Meg’s hand was very clear and round and firm, which had not surprised me—as a girl she would be good at penmanship. My friend Arnold wrote like a spider.

  All along my teacher had been sending me the lessons and I was almost caught up.

  At home I learned that my father was moving his store to another location. The Hippodrome theater was being torn down and all the businesses there had to leave. He had found another site a few blocks north on Sixth Avenue, up near the new Radio City Music Hall between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets and was hopeful about it. It was a large space, which meant he could display more stock; on the other hand, the rent was more and there would be inevitable losses of sales from the move. So everything was at a risk, including the money he and his partner had borrowed to build the shelves and the cabinets for the display of merchandise. There would also be a loss of selling time while this work went on.

  One day my mother took me downtown to see the new store as it was being renovated. We found my father in his shirt sleeves, which was unusual, he always wore his coat and vest and tie, even at home on weekends. He was running around with a cigar in his mouth and stacks of records in his arms; he and Donald were stocking the shelves with albums. Lester, his partner, was unpacking radio consoles, and in the back a man on a ladder was still painting the wall and two carpenters were building the listening booths, of which there were to be three. I was tremendously excited by what was going on. The store was much bigger than the old one, half again as wide. The floor was carpeted. A wide staircase halfway back and in the middle of the floor led to a basement level that was to be devoted entirely to musical instruments. Uncle Willy was to be in charge of this section. My father’s face was flushed with excitement. He put his cigar down on a counter for a moment and his partner, Lester, said, “Dave, don’t you know better than to put a lighted cigar on a new piece of furniture? We haven’t even opened the store yet!” We all stopped what we were doing. My father said very firmly, “Lester, this cigar won’t burn the counter. Don’t you know anything about tobacco? A cigar is a rolled leaf, it is not shredded like cigarette tobacco. A cigarette will continue to burn, a cigar goes out when you put it down.” He was very scientific in his explanation, and I was relieved. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he said to Lester, and everyone laughed.

  Outside, crowds of people moved along the sidewalks. I was excited that my father’s new store was so close to the Radio City Music Hall. Only a block away was the Roxy. We were at the heart of things. Occasionally people stopped to peer through the locked doors. They pressed their noses up against the windows. They were very curious.

  Some days later the store opened, and the following Saturday we again went down to see it. Everything was finished now and shining. Red, white and blue bunting was draped across the top of the windows and the front door. In the windows were displays of radios and electrolas, and photographs of Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Fats Waller, and Arturo Toscanini and Josef Hoffmann, as if somehow they all knew my father and had gathered to celebrate the new store. The inside was hushed and remarkable. Standing on slightly raised platforms were the latest models of console radios, all the famous makes, like Stewart-Warner, Grunow, Maytone, Phil
co, and Stromberg-Carlson. Attached to each was a small tag with the price and description of the radio’s feature. I liked particularly the RCA Victor model in heart walnut that went for $89.95. It had eight tubes, two of glass, a magic eye, an edge-lighted dial and a phono connection. Also there was a Crosley with fifteen tubes, five of them glass, an autoexpressionator, a mystic hand, and a cardiamatic unit for $174.50. Smaller table radios were grouped on counters and shelves behind the counters in the radio section. I liked very much a new-model Radette that featured telematic dial tuning. It was a telephone dial set right over the circular station indicator so that you could dial your station as you dialed a telephone. I thought that was really fine for only $24.95.

  There were many different kinds of phonographs as well, and one or two units that combined radios and record players, although these were very expensive. A glass cabinet held packets of steel needles and books on musical subjects, including The Victor Book of the Opera. We had that at home. The walls were lined with shelves filled with record albums, and in the listening booths there were standing ashtrays and record players built into the counters with electric pickup arms, the kind you didn’t have to wind, and soundproofing panels on the side walls and ceiling. I liked the way the doors to these booths clicked shut.

  Downstairs all the musical instruments shone in their cabinets, golden saxophones and black clarinets, and silver trumpets, and accordions with gleaming ivory and black keys. There was even a card with batons of different sizes with tapered cork tips. A set of drums sat on a pedestal lit with special spotlights. Uncle Willy let me sit up behind this rig and play for a minute or two, but with the brushes only, so that nobody would be disturbed. Of course, there were no customers down here, so it didn’t matter that much. And when I went upstairs just one or two people were on the premises, one in a listening booth, the other studying the rack of sheet music. Lester stood behind the radio counter, his arms folded, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. My father awaited customers at the classical music counter. Behind him was a whole wall of record albums of symphonies and operas and concertos. Their bindings were dark green. He stood with his hands flat on the glass countertop, he was dressed in his blue serge suit with the vest and his dark red tie, he looked impressive to me standing there leaning slightly forward, attentive to the occasion and awaiting for whoever it was would come in needing assistance.

  We had not yet been to the World’s Fair, but all around were signs that it was going on. Kazoos and ocarinas in their cards had World’s Fair emblems. Next door was a souvenir shop where Trylon and Perisphere pins were on sale, and banners with pictures of them painted on the cloth. The Trylon was a sky-scraping obelisk; the Perisphere was a great globe. They stood side by side at the Fair, and together they represented the World of Tomorrow, which was the Fair’s theme. Almost every day in the newspaper was a picture of Mayor La Guardia welcoming some dignitary or movie star to Flushing Meadow, the site of the Fair. I did not pester my parents, I knew we would go eventually. Everyone was very busy. Besides, the truth was I had misgivings about it, it seemed so vast, such an enormous place, with so many things going on simultaneously, shows and exhibits and people from foreign countries, that I did not know where I wanted to go first. It was difficult to visualize. I was not even there yet but had fallen into the habit when I thought about the World’s Fair of worrying that I would miss the best things. I didn’t know why I felt that way.

  My father had predicted the Fair would be good for business. He explained that people were coming to see it from all over the country. They would have to stay in hotels, they would have to have dinner, they would spend money going to Radio City and they would pass the shop and see records and electrolas they wanted and they would come in and buy something. People on trips always set aside money to buy things. Besides, in his store they could find things you couldn’t find anywhere else. He was very optimistic.

  Nevertheless, as the year moved into the winter, and the year 1940 began, the Fair closed for the season and business had not been what he had hoped.

  At home in the evenings earlier now, my father was in the habit of listening to all the news commentators to find out what was going on in Europe. I knew, even before it was discussed in my class during current events, that a terrible war had begun—Hitler and Mussolini against England and France. He listened to every one of those news commentators; they didn’t just read the news bulletins, but analyzed them too. Then my father analyzed their analyses. His new theory was that you had to listen to them all to figure out what the truth was. He liked Gabriel Heatter and Walter Winchell because they were antifascist. He detested Fulton Lewis and Boake Carter and H. V. Kaltenborn because they were against the New Deal and against unions and made comments verging on fascist, America First sympathies. He hated Father Coughlin, who said the Jewish bankers were to blame for everything. I grew to recognize the voices of these men and the products that sponsored them. Gabriel Heatter talked about gingivitis, which was a fancy name for bleeding gums; he passionately described the advantages of Forhan’s toothpaste for this condition in the same fervent tones with which he described democracy’s battle against fascism. If you didn’t listen carefully, you might think that fascism and bleeding gums were the same thing.

  My father sat in a chair near the radio and the newspapers opened in his lap to news stories with maps about the very same events being discussed by the commentators. He bought most of the papers—the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Post, the World-Telegram, even the Daily Worker. He would not read the Hearst papers.

  In the movies on Saturday afternoons, after the cartoons, the Fox Movietone newsreels showed scenes from the war in Europe: big cannon muzzles afire in the night, German dive-bombers with angled wings coming out of the clouds. You saw the bombs falling. You saw burning buildings in London. You saw people swinging bottles of champagne against the sides of ships and diplomats getting out of cars and walking hurriedly up the steps of palaces for meetings. The war was talked about everywhere and shown in pictures. I liked to draw, I had made up my own comic-book stories and drawn them and colored them with crayon. I had a hero modeled after Smilin’ Jack, the comic-strip pilot. I called my man Daring Dave. He had a moustache and wore a leather helmet with goggles and a lumber jacket and he had flown racing planes—like Smilin’ Jack. I loved to draw these planes, snub-nosed daring little machines with checkerboard designs on their wings and ailerons. I drew them trailing exhaust in the sky so you could see what looping maneuvers they were capable of. They flew around courses measured by pylons. They flew over hangars decorated with wind socks. I wasn’t sure exactly how something as vast and immeasurable as air could be used for a closed race course but I trusted that it could. I drew all sorts of those racing planes, some with cylindrical engine cowlings, some with enclosed cowlings pointed like index fingers. I drew cockpits that were open to the wind and cockpits that were enclosed with Plexiglas covers, but whatever the plane, whatever the design, I always put those streamlined wheel covers on them that were like raindrops coming along the window sideways in a windy rain. I liked streamlining, I liked those Chrysler cars that looked like beetles because their wheels were almost completely covered over and all their surface was rounded to get through the wind more easily, and for the same reason I liked those rear tapered airplane wheel covers. But now that World War Two had come to Europe I decided to get Dave into a fighter plane. I put him into a Spitfire flying over London for the Royal Air Force. The English insignia was a bull’s-eye colored red, white and blue. I liked the colors but wondered if it wasn’t a mistake to paint brightly colored targets on the wings and fuselage of your planes for the enemy to shoot at. I showed Nazi Messerschmitts going down in smoke.

  I did not think the war was anything but far away. I did not feel personally threatened. But my mother talked about the war with worried references to Donald. He had graduated from Townsend Harris High School under a rapid advance program and now, age seventeen, he was enrolled at City
College. My mother was afraid Donald would draw a low number in the Selective Service registration and be drafted into the Army and taken off to fight in Europe. This seemed to me an outlandish worry, inasmuch as America wasn’t even in the war. I could not quite make the connections adults around me were making. One day I saw a headline in my father’s copy of the Post: WAR CLOUDS, it read. The article went on to speculate about how and when the United States might have to become involved in the war against Hitler.

  In the same Madison Square Garden where I had seen the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus with that family that rode bicycles on high wires and the little clown who swept the spotlight at his feet, the American Nazis, called the Bund, had held a rally. They had put up a flag with a swastika next to an American flag, and marched in their brown shirts and with belts like Texas Rangers going from their shoulders down slantwise to their waists. They gave the fascist salute. There were thousands of them. Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin had spoken to them and they shouted and screamed just as the Germans did when Hitler spoke to them. “They are everywhere, this rabble,” my father said one night at dinner. “Two of them came into the store today and I kicked them out. Can you imagine the temerity—coming into my store in their uniforms to try to sell me a subscription to their magazine?”