Praise for World’s Fair
“A world of life … a novel of rare warmth and intimacy.”
—People
“Extraordinary in its crystalline detail.”
—The Boston Globe
“Doctorow captures and makes fast the magic of a time of innocence and wonders.”
—Chicago Tribune
“When you finish reading E. L. Doctorow’s marvelous novel, you shake your head in disbelief and ask yourself how he has managed to do it…. You get lost in World’s Fair as if it were an exotic adventure. You devour it with the avidity usually provoked by a suspense thriller.”
—The New York Times
“Doctorow’s most powerful book … lyrical in its telling, resonantly expressive of the universal aspects of human life, this wise and tender novel will haunt readers with its resurrected memories.”
—Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY E. L. DOCTOROW
Welcome to Hard Times
Big as Life
The Book of Daniel
Ragtime
Drinks Before Dinner (play)
Loon Lake
Lives of the Poets
Billy Bathgate
Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (essays)
The Waterworks
City of God
Sweet Land Stories
The March
Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006
Contents
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
About the Author
Copyright
For R. P. D.
A raree-show is here,
With children gathered round …
Wordsworth
The Prelude
ROSE
I was born on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side. I was the next to youngest of six children, two boys, four girls. The two boys, Harry and Willy, were the oldest. My father was a musician, a violinist. He always made a good living. He and my mother had met in Russia and they married there, and then emigrated. My mother came from a family of musicians as well; that is how, in the course of things, she and my father had met. Some of her cousins were very well known in Russia; one, a cellist, had even played for the Czar. My mother was a very beautiful woman, petite, with long golden hair and the palest blue eyes. My father used to say to us, “You think, you girls, you’re beautiful? You should have seen your mother when she and her sisters walked down the street in our village. Every head turned, they were so slim, their bearing so elegant.” I suppose he did not want us to get conceited.
I was four when we moved up to the Bronx, a big apartment near Claremont Park. I was a good student, I went to P.S. 147 on Washington Avenue; when I was graduated from there I went to Morris High School. I completed all my courses and graduated, and reenrolled to take the program of commercial courses there and got enough credits to graduate all over again if I chose. I knew now how to type, how to keep books, I knew shorthand. I was very ambitious. I had paid for my own piano lessons by playing for silent movies. I watched the screen and improvised. My brother Harry or my father used to sit right behind me to see that nobody bothered me; movie houses were still primitive and they attracted a bad element. After my courses, I found a job as private secretary to a well-known businessman and philanthropist named Sigmund Unterberg. He had made his money in the shirt business and now spent a good deal of his time doing work for Jewish organizations, social welfare, that kind of thing. There were no government bureaucracies in social work, no programs as there are now, everything charitable came from individuals and the private agencies they created. I was a good secretary, Mr. Unterberg would dictate a letter to me and I could take it right on the typewriter, without an error, and so when he was finished I was finished and the letter was ready for him to sign. He thought I was wonderful. His wife was a lovely woman and used to invite me to tea with them, to socialize with them. I suppose I was by now nineteen or twenty. They introduced me to one or two young men, but I never liked them.
I by now was interested in your father. We had known each other since high school. He was extremely handsome, dashing, he was a good athlete; in fact, that’s how I met him, on the tennis courts, there were clay courts on Morris Avenue and 170th Street and we were each playing there. You played tennis in long skirts in those days. I was a good tennis player, I loved sports, and that’s how we met. He walked me home.
My mother did not like Dave. She thought he was too wild. If I went out with another boy he would ruin the date. He would hang around outside our house even if we hadn’t arranged to do anything together and when he saw another boy coming to pick me up he’d do terrible things, he’d pick a fight, or stop us and talk when I was with this other boy. He would warn the other boys to treat me with respect or he would come after them. Naturally, he frightened a few of them away, it was very annoying, I was furious, but somehow I would not break off with him as my mother advised. In the winter we went ice-skating, in the spring he would surprise me with flowers, he was very romantic and over the course of these years I was falling in love with him.
Things were different then, you didn’t meet someone and go out and go to bed with them one two three. People courted. Girls were innocent.
ONE
Startled awake by the ammoniated mists, I am roused in one instant from glutinous sleep to grieving awareness; I have done it again. My soaked thighs sting. I cry, I call Mama, knowing I must endure her harsh reaction, get through that, to be rescued. My crib is on the east wall of their room. Their bed is on the south wall. “Mama!” From her bed she hushes me. “Mama!” She groans, rises, advances on me in her white nightgown. Her strong hands go to work. She strips me, strips the sheets, dumps my pajamas and the sheets, and the rubber sheet under them, in a pile on the floor. Her pendulous breasts shift about in the nightgown. I hear her whispered admonitions. In seconds I am washed, powdered, clean-clothed, and brought to secret smiles in the dark. I ride, the young prince, in her arms to their bed, and am welcomed between them, in the blessed dry warmth between them. My father gives me a companionable pat and falls back to sleep with his hand on my shoulder. Soon they are both asleep. I smell their godlike odors, male, female. A moment later, as the faintest intimation of daylight appears as an outline of the window shade, I am wide awake, blissful, guarding my sleeping parents, the terrible night past me, the dear day about to dawn.
These are my earliest memories. I liked when morning came to climb down from their bed and watch my parents. My father slept on his right arm, his legs straight, his hand coming over the pillow and bending at the wrist against the headboard. My mother lay curled with the curve of her broad back touching his. Together under the covers they made a pleasing shape. The headboard knocked against
the wall as they stirred. It was baroque in style, olive green, with a frieze of small pink flowers and dark green leaves along its fluted edges. On the opposite wall were the dresser and mirror of the same olive green and fluted edges. Sprays of the pink flowers were set above the oval brass drawer pulls. In my play I liked to lift each handle and let it fall back to hear the clink. I understood the illusion of the flowers, looking at them, believing them and then feeling the raised paint strokes with my fingertips. I had less fondness for the bedroom curtains of sheer white over the window shades and for the heavy draperies framing the curtains. I feared suffocation. I shied away from closets, the dark terrified me mostly because I wasn’t sure it was breathable.
I was an asthmatic child, allergic to everything, I was attacked continually in the lungs, coughing, wheezing, needing to be steamed over inhalators. I was the mournful prodigy of medicine, I knew the mustard plaster, the nose drop, the Argyrol throat swab. I was plugged regularly with thermometers and soap water enemas. My mother believed pain was curative. If it didn’t hurt it was ineffective. I shouted and screamed and went down fighting. I argued for the cherry-red mercurochrome for my scraped knees and I got the detested iodine. How I howled. “Oh stop the nonsense,” my mother said, applicating me with strokes of searing pain. “Stop it this instant. You make a fuss over nothing.”
I had difficulty with the proportions of things and made reasonable spaces for myself in what otherwise was an unfairly giganticized home. I liked to sit in the shelter of the piano in the parlor. It was a Sohmer upright of black mahogany, and the cantilevered keyboard made a low-lying roof for me. I enjoyed the patterns of rugs. I was a familiar of oak flooring and the skirts of upholstered chairs.
I went readily to my bath in part because the tub was of reasonable dimensions. I could touch its sides. I sank walnut-shell boats in the tub. I swamped them in tidal waves and then I quieted the water.
I was also aware that for some reason my mother’s relentless efficiency was suspended when I was in my bath. Other than calling in to me from time to time to make sure I hadn’t drowned, she left me in privacy. The pads of my fingers would wrinkle before I rose from the bathwater to unplug the drain.
Of the wooden kitchen table and chairs I made a fortress. Here I had surveillance of the whole vast kitchen floor. I knew people by their legs and feet. My mother’s sturdy ankles and large shapely calves moved about on the pinions of a pair of ladies’ heeled shoes. From sink to icebox to table they went accompanied by the administrative sounds of silverware clattering, drawers sliding open and shut. My mother took confident solid steps that made the glass doors of the cabinets tremble.
My little grandmother inched her feet forward without lifting them from the floor, just as she drank her tea in tiny sips. She wore high-laced shoes of black whose tops were hidden beneath her long limp skirts, also black. Of all the family Grandma was the easiest to spy on because she was always in her thoughts. I was wary of her, though I knew she loved me. She prayed sometimes in the kitchen with her prayer book lying open upon the table and her old-fashioned shoes flat on the floor.
My older brother Donald could not be spied upon. Unlike adults he was quick and alert. Targeting him for even a few seconds before he knew I was there was a great triumph. I lingered one day in the hallway outside the open door of his room. When I peeked around the corner his back was to me, he was working on a model airplane. “I know you’re there, Mr. Bubblenose,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.
I valued my brother as a confident all-around source of knowledge and wisdom. His mind was a compendium of the rules and regulations of every game known to mankind. His brow furrowed with attentiveness to the proper way of doing things. He lived hard and by the book. He was an authority not only on model building but on kite flying, scooter racing, and the care of pets. He did everything well. I felt for him the gravest love and respect.
I might have been daunted by his example, and the view I had through him of everything I had to learn, except that he had the generous instincts of a teacher. One day I was with our dog, Pinky, in front of our house on Eastburn Avenue, when Donald came home from school and put his books down on the front stoop.
He plucked a large dark leaf from the privet hedge under the parlor window. He placed the leaf between his palms and cupped his hands to his mouth and blew into the gap formed by his adjacent thumbs. This produced a marvelous bleat.
I jumped up and down. When Donald made the sound again, Pinky began to yowl, as she did also when a harmonica was played in her presence. “I want to try,” I said. Under his patient instruction I chose a leaf like his, I placed it carefully on my palms, and I blew. Nothing happened. He arranged and rearranged my little hands, he changed leaves, he corrected my form. Still nothing happened.
“You have to work at it,” Donald said. “You can’t expect to get it right away. Here, I’ll show you something easier.”
The same leaf he had used for a reed he now split in half simply by pressing the heels of his palms together and flattening his hands.
My brother was very fine. He wore the tweed knickers and ribbed socks and shoes with low sides of a young man. A shock of straight brown hair fell over one eye. His knitted sweater was dashingly tied by the sleeves around his waist and his red school tie was loosened at the knot. Long after he had taken our maniac dog into the house, I conscientiously applied myself to the tasks he had set me. Even if I couldn’t get the hang of them right away, I knew at least what had to be learned.
Donald was like my mother in applying himself resolutely to the demands and challenges of life. My father was a different sort. I thought he got to where he was by magic.
He would let me watch him shave because I rarely saw him except in the mornings. He came home from work long after my bedtime. With a partner, he owned a music store in the Hippodrome, a famous theater building on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street in Manhattan.
“Good morning, Sunny Jim,” he said. He had noticed early in my life that each morning I woke smiling, an act of such extraordinary innocence that he had ever since commented upon it. When I was a baby he lifted me into his arms and we played a game: he puffed up his cheeks like a hippopotamus and I punched the air out, first one side of his face, then the other. No sooner was the job done than his eyes went wide and his cheeks refilled and I had gigglingly to do it all over again.
The bathroom was lined in squares of white tile and all the fixtures were white porcelain. An opaque crinkled window seemed to glow with its own light. My father stood in the diffuse sunlight of the white bathroom after he had partially dressed—shoes, trousers, ribbed undershirt, suspenders looping off his flanks—and brought his shaving soap to a lather in its mug. Then he applied the lather to his face with an artful slopping of his shaving brush.
He did this while humming the overture to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.
I loved the scratchy sound the brush made on his skin. I loved the soap as it turned from a froth to a substantive lather under his rubbing. Next, he held taut from its hook on the wall a long leather strop about three inches wide, and upon this he wielded his straight razor back and forth with a twist of the wrist. I failed to understand how something as soft as leather could hone something as hard as a steel razor. He explained the principle to me, but I knew it was just another example of his magic powers.
My father did sleight-of-hand things. He could appear to remove the top joint of his thumb, for example, and then put it back. Behind the screen of one hand, you’d see the thumb of the other come apart and then the space between the two halves. Like all good tricks, it was horrifying. He’d lift the thumb off and then put it back with a little twist, and hold it out for my inspection and wiggle it to assure me that it was as good as new.
He was full of surprises. He punned. He made jokes.
As he shaved, here and there tiny springs of blood quietly leaked through the white foam and turned pink. He did not seem to notice but simply went on shaving an
d humming.
After he had rinsed his face and patted it with witch hazel, he parted his shiny black hair in the middle and combed each side back. He was always well barbered. His handsome pink face shone. He smoothed his dark moustache with the tips of his fingers. He had a thin straight nose. He had vivid sparkling brown eyes that sent out signals of a mischievous intelligence.
Assiduously he applied the lather remaining in his shaving mug to my cheeks and chin. In the medicine cabinet was one of my wooden tongue depressors; every time I required a visit from our family physician, Dr. Gross, I was given a new one as a present. My father handed me a depressor so that I could shave.
“Dave,” called my mother as she rapped on the door. “You know what time it is? What do you do in there!”
He grimaced, ducking his head between his shoulders, as if we were, both of us, naughty boys.
My father always made promises as he went off to work.
“I’ll be home early tonight,” he told my mother.
“I have no money,” she said.
“Here’s a couple of dollars to tide you over. I’ll have cash this evening. I’ll call you. Maybe I can pick up some things for dinner.”
I pulled on his sleeve and begged him to bring me a surprise.
“Well, I’ll just see what I can do,” he said, smiling.
“You promise?”
Donald was already at school. When my father left I’d have nothing to look forward to, so I watched him to the last second. He was portly, though trim enough in one of his suits with the vest buttoned tight. He checked the knot of his tie in the mirror in the front hall. When he set his fedora on his head at the stylish angle he affected, I ran into the parlor so as to be able to see him as he came out the front door. Down the steps he skipped, and turning to wave, and smiling at me as I stood in the parlor window, he strode off down the street in that brisk jaunty gait of his. I watched him turn the corner and from one moment to the next he was out of sight.