World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  A while later we were on our way home in Joe’s taxi. He was a cabdriver, like my uncle Phil. Because he was Norma’s friend, Joe had not put down the flag on the meter.

  Meg and I had the back to ourselves. We had lots of room to sprawl in. I leaned against a corner and she lay across the seat with her head in my lap. Joe drove with his arm around Norma and she sat huddled against him. Her hair was still damp. I could see it shining in the light of the World’s Fair.

  We made our way slowly past the fairgrounds. “Look!” Norma said, and we sat up. The big fireworks show had begun over Fountain Lake. We watched it on our knees in the backseat, first through the side window, then through the rear. Great cascades of booming color, showers of red and green and white, pops and swirls and parachutes of color firing the sky and exploding in our ears. It was a most terrible racket. The World’s Fair stood in separate instances of daylight. The cab seemed to shake and shudder under the concussive explosions, sparks whirled in circles over our heads, as if we were under attack. We turned a corner, now hearing more than we saw, only the highest rocket showers visible through the window.

  Meg sank down on the seat and I joined her. We lay again as we had been. Soon everything was quiet once more.

  Meg had said nothing to me about her mother nor acted as if anything unusual had happened under water this evening. She was used to this. I tried to put the images of Norma out of my mind. I knew no one like her. She acted free. I did not think of her as a bad woman but as someone who probably took a different view of things. Otherwise she would not be this way. I could not talk to her about this, of course, but I wondered what she would say. I thought about the casual recklessness of her life. There she was sitting in the front seat of the cab with her boyfriend’s arm around her and they were like some new mother and father still in love. I again saw her body in its underwater ballet. I didn’t want to think about it. I felt queasy thinking about it, the picture of it produced the faintest illness from somewhere under my stomach, something between nausea and an ache; I knew, though it was there for everyone at the World’s Fair to see, I shouldn’t have seen it. Norma’s freedom made life more thrilling and more dangerous. I felt the danger now. Meg had been born to the thrilling freedom that I only now suspected was possible. The burden of it made her quiet and beautiful. I loved her. The weight of her small body against me now I took as some natural condition of my life, as if we were joined and we shared the same blood, like those Siamese twins, although the twins had been men. Or perhaps we were like swimmers under water, undulating and drifting over each other, rolling about around each other’s limbs, I was very sleepy now, and could not distinguish the hum of the taxi on the streets from the resonance of my own thoughts. The fireworks echoed in my mind as a kind of congratulations to me for what I knew. I saw once again Norma’s body, the tremors of the muscles of her inner thigh as she swam through the water, the extension and contraction of musculature under the quivers of flesh of her buttocks and belly. And the other women too, that revolving underwater dance of them in their exertions with Oscar. I found now if I held myself the nauseating ache was bearable. Then I pressed Meg’s head against myself. I knew everything now, the crucial secret, so carelessly vouchsafed. After all, I had not intended this, it had come to me without my bidding, without any planning or calculation on my part, presented, in fact, as an accident of the adventure. It was not my fault. I had worried before, all the time in this enormous effort to catch up to life, to find it, to feel it, comprehend it; but all I had to do was be in it and it would instruct me and give me everything I needed. As I fell asleep the fireworks went off over and over again like me pounding my own chest and sending my voice to the heavens that I was here.

  THIRTY

  A few weeks later I found out that Norma and Meg were moving to Brooklyn as soon as the school term was over. Norma was going to marry Joe the hackie, as she called him, and they were going to live in a private house in the Bensonhurst section, wherever that was. “Oh, Edgar,” Norma said to me one day, “the only bad thing is how we’re going to miss you!” I affected nonchalance. Meg, too, seemed undisturbed by the prospect, we both left it to Norma to express the regrets of the matter.

  But then we had the last week of school, with its half days, and then a class party, and then school was out and Meg was gone. I went to the park across the street from their house and I looked up at the windows. The shades were up. I could see sunlight on the walls, it was obviously a vacant apartment. My mother asked me after a day or two if I missed my friend, by which she meant to show sympathy, I suppose, but which sounded to me like a tactless annotation of my pain. I denied that I did. “Well, that was nice of them anyway to take you that day to the World’s Fair. What did you say the mother’s job is?”

  “She’s one of the guides,” I said. “They have these guides in uniform and she is one.”

  Norma had said that as soon as they got settled they would get in touch and invite me to their new home. This was not a promise I took seriously, Brooklyn being so far from everyone’s experience as to be a foreign country. I knew it had the baseball Dodgers but I was not fond of the Dodgers. People liked their pugnacity, as if they were a street gang. Sports cartoons showed them pitching and batting with black stubble on their faces, and cigar butts in their mouths. The whole borough offered itself in that characterization—raucous, rowdy, proud of its lack of manners, like the Dead End Kids. That was all right, except that they meant to claim for themselves the essential New York spirit. I was a Yankee fan myself. I liked the quiet brilliance of Joe Di-Maggio, the derring-do of Tommy Henrich. Bill Dickey was a solid professional, strong and fair-minded. All the Yanks were like that—Red Ruffing, Joe Gordon. They were good players who concentrated on what they were doing, who were modest about their tremendous skills and never argued with umpires or played to the crowd. When things were going badly for them, they did not complain but bore down harder. They were civilized and had a naturally assured way about them. That was the true New York quality of spirit. Not bumhood.

  Meg did write a letter and then another, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I kept promising myself that I would write but I didn’t. Baseball was a new passion of mine and I didn’t think she would be interested. I liked to listen to the games on the radio. Even when the Yankees were out of town, the game circumstances were telegraphed to the studio in New York and the announcer described the game from the telegraph wire, but as if he were on the scene. That interested me more than the game itself. Crowd background noise, the bat hitting the ball, crowd cheering noise. You could hear the telegraph clicking, but the announcer could make you picture the field all the same. “Joe McCarthy’s going out to the mound now with that duck’s waddle of his. The manager takes the ball from Lefty and waves to the bullpen. So that’s all for Lefty Gomez. He walks slowly to the dugout. The Boston fans give him a good hand. He tips his cap.”

  I played my own baseball games with cards or dice. Aces were home runs, kings triples, queens doubles, jacks and tens were singles, there being more of these in a game. I kept scoreboards and made up player names and kept the batting averages. Before my friend Arnold went away to camp, we played strikeouts in the schoolyard. This was a hard game for us but we changed some of the rules to make things easier. We brought the pitcher’s mound closer to the schoolyard wall. One out per team per inning, otherwise first man up would bat all day. Hitting was much easier than fielding. We played for hours in the sun inside the chain link fence on the great concrete expanse of the schoolyard.

  I didn’t know anybody who lived on the Concourse, and by July, when I went down the hill to my old street, there was rarely anyone there. Most families had gone for the summer. My father struggled to make good in his job—he could not afford to give us a vacation. My mother was glad we had moved away so that none of the neighbors would be aware of this. We went to the movies a lot, sometimes the three of us, but most often just my mother and I. I was bored by the movies she liked, wh
ich were usually about love, except if they were funny. She didn’t have favorite movie actors, she thought most of the leading men were dopes. But she liked and admired actresses. She liked elegance, and wit. She liked women who spoke well and stood up for themselves. She made a point of seeing a movie if Loretta Young or Margaret Sullavan or Irene Dunne or Rosalind Russell was in it. My favorite actresses were Fay Wray and a beautiful woman I had seen only once or twice, but whom I loved, named Frances Farmer. In one picture Frances Farmer played both a mother and her daughter. That reminded me of Norma.

  My father when he came with us couldn’t sit still for a whole double feature. The newsreel always interested him. He told me that sometimes when he had a free hour during the workday he would go to one of the Trans-Lux newsreel theaters and watch the news and maybe a travelogue. He always wanted to know what was going on, keeping up with the world was what mattered to him more than stories.

  Donald came home once or twice on the weekend and he took me to the beach or the movies. He was very relaxed and happy and was a sport with his money. He bought me lunch in a Chinese restaurant. He showed me his bug, an intricate-looking technical device in a black box. He removed it and gave me a demonstration. It was like a tuning fork laid on its side. You didn’t tap down, as with an old-fashioned telegraph key, but rattled the key between your thumb and forefinger, thus doubling the rate of clicks. I gave him a sentence from a book and he clicked it out almost as fast as I read it. He explained that every operator developed a sending style that was as recognizable over the air as his signature on paper. That interested me. I resolved to learn the Morse code. You could write it out in dots and dashes. A dot followed by a dash was an a. Maybe I would send Donald a letter all in Morse code.

  In the heat I lay around a lot and read. My mother wanted me to go out, but I had no place to go. I was very lazy. I thought about the World’s Fair. I came upon the Little Blue Book no. 1278, Ventriloquism Self-Taught, that I had ordered through the mail long before but had never read. I had always been attracted to ventriloquism. It was a powerful magic, throwing your voice and fooling people, although the author warned that the expression “throwing the voice” was misleading: “A large part of the otherwise intelligent public still labor under the delusion that the ventriloquist is endowed by nature with the power of throwing his voice … but what the ventriloquist really does is to imitate as exactly as possible a sound as it is heard by the ears after it has travelled some distance….” I got past this nitpicking and into the training. The most difficult consonants to say without moving your lips were b and p. But in the context of a sentence you could get away with “vhee” for the b and “fee” for the p. Thus, a big piano would be a vhig fiano. But before I could even work on the letters, I had to master the ventriloquial drone. “To acquire this,” the manual said, “take a long deep breath and, holding it, make a sound at the back of your throat as though you were trying to be ill….” This I did, over and over. I was aiming for the resonant drone tone that the author assured me I would recognize as soon as I found it vibrating in my vocal organs. But what kept coming out was a very liquid gurgle that attenuated, as my breath ran out, to the sound of someone choking to death. “Edgar,” my mother said, “what is the matter with you!” She fervently wished for the end of the summer when, by law, I would have to return to school.

  And to my delight as well as her gratitude, September did arrive and I reported for the fifth grade in my first pair of long pants.

  I had always loved the beginning of the school year. All the children looked older and more serious. There was a shyness among us for the leaps in height we had made over the summer. Growth required us to become reacquainted. We were older and wiser, and had put childhood behind. Even the louts and fools appeared at their best for the first few days of the term. Everyone arrived with combed hair, clean shirts or middies, and new pencils and erasers. Some of the girls wore stockings instead of socks. We listened to our teacher outline the planned course of work and realized we were respected for the responsible scholars we had become. It was all very engrossing.

  Best of all was the equipment our advanced studies required. New notebooks with more lines per page, compasses, protractors. Thicker textbooks than any we had known. And new subjects, such as Civics. I was always eager to do my assignments at the beginning of the school year. I liked having a fresh Composition notebook, whose binding of pressed cardboard layers had not begun to separate at the corners and whose black-and-white marbled design was still shiny with varnish. I had not drawn on the inside of the covers yet, no airplane dogfights, no masked and booted avengers, no block letters that made my name appear hewn in stone. That would all come later, with boredom.

  One evening as I was doing my homework on the living room floor I looked up and found my father peering at me over the edge of his newspaper. His eyes blinked. He kept staring at me and so I was not able to avert my gaze. I might have thought something was wrong, except that his eyes had no concern or anger in them. When he lowered the page to reveal his face, his mouth was set in the faintest of startled smiles.

  “How many boys with your name, do you suppose, live at 1796 Grand Concourse, The Bronx?”

  “Just me,” I said. In fact there were no other boys of any name in this house that I had ever seen.

  He consulted his paper for a moment. “Well then, this must be you,” he said.

  I got to my feet. “What must be me?”

  “It must be you who won honorable mention in the World’s Fair essay contest for boys.”

  “What now?” my mother said, standing in the door and wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Our son entered a contest and won,” my father said.

  I was peering over his shoulder at the news story. I was one of six honorable mentions. The winner was an eighth grader from P.S. 53.

  “Not exactly,” I said. I was trying to appear casual about the whole thing, but there was my name in black and white in the newspaper. My mother had sat down on the couch. “When did this happen?” she said. “I knew nothing about a contest.”

  “My name is in the newspaper!” I shouted. “I’m famous! I’m in the newspaper!”

  Then we were all laughing. I hugged my father. I ran across the room and hugged my mother. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” she said.

  My father read the entire news story aloud. Included in the account was an excerpt from the winning essay. “‘The typical American boy should possess the same qualities as those of the early American pioneers. He should be handy, dependable, courageous, and loyal to his beliefs. He should be clean, cheerful and friendly, willing to help and be kind to others. He is an all around boy interested in sports, hobbies, and the world around him…. The typical American boy takes good care of public property he uses. He enjoys the comics, the movies, outdoor games, pets, and radio programs. He is usually busy at some handicraft or hobby and is always thinking up something new to do or make. That is why America still has a future.’”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “It’s not that good,” I said. “It sounds like the Boy Scout pledge. A Scout should be courteous, friendly, clean and all that drivel.”

  “Now, Edgar,” my mother said.

  I was upset. I had had sports in mine too, and kindness. He had pioneers. Why hadn’t I thought of that? And he had brought in the future of America. He was right—the typical American boy mentions America.

  “Shouldn’t they inform the winners directly?” my mother said. “Supposing we didn’t happen to read the New York Times?”

  “Has anyone checked the mail recently?” my father said.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “Where’s the key?”

  “Before you do,” he said, “bring me your essay, I’d like to read it if I may.”

  I brought out my first copy, the one I couldn’t send because I had gotten an inkblot in the margin, and gave it to my father. Then I went out and ran down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes in the front hal
l at the bottom of the stairs.

  Inside the box was a long white envelope addressed to me with the word “Master” in front of my name. A small blue-and-orange Trylon and Perisphere were stamped on the back flap. The letter was from Grover Whalen, chairman of the Fair Corporation. I knew him from the newsreels, he had a moustache and liked to cut ribbons and congratulate people. Now he was congratulating me. He said that by merely presenting this letter at the gates I and my family would be entitled to a free day at the Fair with privileged access to all exhibits and events and free admission to all shows and rides. He said that I was a fine boy, and a good citizen. And he congratulated me again. I wouldn’t have known who he was if he hadn’t typed his name, that’s how badly written his signature was.

  “We can go to the Fair!” I shouted as I came into the apartment. “The whole family! It’s free!”

  But my father held up his hand. My father was reading my essay aloud to my mother.

  “‘He should be able to go out into the country and drink raw milk. Likewise, he should traverse the hills and valleys of the city. If he is Jewish he should say so….’”

  It sounded good in my father’s voice. He read it with feeling. He read it better than I could have. I was thrilled that he thought it worth reading aloud in his own voice. As he reached the end he spoke almost in a whisper.