World's Fair

  This terrible event loomed larger and larger as it did not happen. It was the subject of all our lives. Donald continued to work in my father’s store on Saturdays, just as he had since the age of thirteen. He was not paid, it was his family responsibility, which he dutifully met. I campaigned to help too. On Saturdays I went downtown to be Donald’s assistant. As I grew stronger I accompanied him on his delivery rounds. Stores on Sixth Avenue adjoined residential neighborhoods. All the little brown-stones and residential hotels between Sixth Avenue and Ninth, on both sides of Broadway, provided a small town’s population for any shop or service. Donald delivered records that people ordered by phone, and radios and phonographs that they had left for repair. Sometimes he journeyed south to the Fourteenth Street area, where one or another of my father’s jobbers supplied him with spare parts or record stocks. These were interesting trips for me, my courage held in tremulous tension by the presence of my older brother at my side. We walked in the dappled shadows of the El on Third Avenue, under the structure of black steel trestles that shook and sounded into the depths of the street bed the thunderous but unseen passage of the trains. There was no louder noise. It was like a tornado of sound; you could not, as the train passed overhead, hear what was said to you. You could see in some places the crossties laid under the tracks with nothing but air between them. People lived in tenements whose third-or fourth-floor windows looked out on the tracks, so close they could jump right onto them if they chose, so close the headlamps of the clattering trains would shine into their windows at night. We passed Christian missions with men in soft caps and shabby black coats standing about gazing at everyone who walked by, we passed electric tattooing parlors and barbershops that advertised fifteen cents for a shave and haircut, there were pawnshops with wooden Indians out front, and shooting galleries, ten shots for ten cents. Men with sandwich boards hung over their shoulders and flyers in their hands walked along advertising “Best Price for Old Gold,” “Gaiety Follies.” We stood under the marquee of a theater showing a triple bill with movies and movie stars I had never heard of. Men sat in there all day for ten cents, Donald said, just to have somewhere to sleep. Pushcart peddlers at the curbs sold everything—shoes, notions, fruit, even books. Men slept on their sides in the doorways, their hands under their heads, they were grown men but they slept curled up as I did. The doorways were their homes. How could I not with these sights in my eyes understand the meaning of a business? It was not an obscure lesson. Donald took us through gatherings of people poised at the corners waiting for the lights to change, he jaywalked us between jams of yellow cabs and trucks, streetcars running in the shadows of the elevated lines rang their bells at us, and he got us unerringly to our destination, into lofts or offices where we were expected and where packages marked with my father’s name were waiting for us. My father still existed in business, and this encouraged me. My brother knew his way around town. Back at the store, people were buying things. Hippodrome Music looked busy. Why was all of this not sufficient?

  I thought neither my father nor my mother was the one to whom this question should be put. I asked Donald.

  “It’s hard to understand,” he said. “But it’s not your problem. It is not anything a kid should worry about.”

  “Everyone’s always hiding things from me,” I said. “We weren’t allowed to go to Grandma’s funeral, which was really stupid when I was the one who found her dead.”

  “What are you talking about that for?” Donald said. “This is business. When the store moved they lost customers. It’s taken them longer to build a clientele. Reliable customers who come in again and again are called a clientele. They can’t get enough money from what they’re selling to pay their salaries, and their bills, and to buy more things to sell too. Now, do you understand?”

  Then while all this was going on Donald quit college at the end of his first term. He told me it was boring and that was why he was getting out. But that didn’t make sense. He had joined a fraternity and I knew he loved spending time with his frat brothers, as he called them. They even owned their own house. They all smoked briar pipes there. Snooping around Donald’s room when he was out, I found a letter from the college in his bureau drawer and it gave his marks, two D’s and two F’s. I knew what these grades meant, he had explained to me that in college they didn’t mark with numbers, they marked with letters. I could not believe that my wonderful brother, who had been held out to me all through grade school as a wonderful student, was failing courses at City College. He was becoming like my parents—an adult to be observed and worried about. All these strange things were going on, everyone was unhappy and the three of them got into all sorts of arguments now, nobody liked what anybody else in the family was doing, my father was angry at my brother, and my mother was furious with both of them. All of it together pushed me down into myself, I wondered if I was to blame because of my operation; people didn’t just leave the house, they slammed the door, dinners were silent, I felt small. I felt my ears were flattened along the sides of my head. My friend Arnold, from my class, had ears that grew that way, tight against his head and very tiny, and that’s the way I felt my ears were now. I was feeling all hunched up into myself.

  In this terrible time some basic practices were maintained, including the Sunday afternoon visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on the Concourse north of Kingsbridge Road. Once again I was the only representative of the family to accompany my father on these visits. It was Grandma’s feeling that extravagance at home had contributed to the financial fix he was in; Rose had not been as economical as she might have, she was careless with a dollar, she liked good things too much.

  “Please, Gussie,” my grandfather said. “The man is talking business. If you have nothing intelligent to say, say nothing.”

  Even my father was piqued by his mother’s inability to think of anything but his wife’s spending habits. “Papa,” he said, “why are all women like this? It’s as if we don’t exist. Whether they love or they hate, they think only of each other, they are alone in the universe,” he said with exasperation.

  “You talk,” my grandma said in an ugly spiteful voice, hobbling across the room with the tea things, and slamming them down. “And she spends.”

  On one of these trips our visit coincided with the visit of Aunt Frances, who for the first time heard all the details of our family’s troubles. She looked very fine, with a dark blue suit and a black hat and a white blouse. She wore white gloves and put them down on top of her leather handbag when she came in. She took off her hat and ran her fingers through her beautiful white hair. She calmed everyone down, she could do that, calm people down because she spoke so softly and with such grace. “I will talk to Ephraim,” she said.

  I respected Aunt Frances because she was so soothing. My parents had relied on her to get the right doctor for me. My mother hated my grandma but disliked Frances only on occasion. However, she liked Aunt Molly, the funny one who was so sloppy, and she felt they were friends. My father loved both his sisters as well as his mother, but disliked Frances’s husband, Ephraim, although he would not tell me that, I knew it for myself.

  But Frances and her husband Ephraim had powers over us all. I didn’t know why. I knew they were wealthier, but I didn’t know if they were wealthier because they had these powers, or if they got them from being wealthy, but they were not troubled people, as far as I could tell; even when they had had troubles such as my cousin Lila’s getting polio when she was a little gin, before I was born, they would not have doubted their powers to do something to save her, as they did, or to know what to do to save me, which they knew. It was hard for me to understand exactly what I perceived of my aunt and her husband, but they were a degree or two above us, although I couldn’t have said what I meant by “above.” People wouldn’t talk to them in a way they wouldn’t want to be talked to. They had power over situations, they could command things, they could run things, and especially impressive in my beautiful aunt’s case, they could do
so without raising their voice.

  Donald had been looking for any kind of a job he could get, he did not want to work for my father now because he would not be paid. He would put in part-time hours while he was looking, he said, but he wanted a real job of his own. One of Uncle Ephraim’s connections, it turned out, was the owner of a large printing firm, B. J. Warriner. This firm was so important it printed the ballots for all the elections held in the City of New York. It printed documents of all kinds for the city and the state, and the man who owned this firm was Uncle Ephraim’s friend and legal client. One day Donald received in the mail a letter from Uncle Ephraim and another letter under it addressed to the Employment Manager of the B. J. Warriner firm. I studied this letter over Donald’s shoulder as he sat in the kitchen. “Be careful,” my mother said, “or you’ll get it wet. Keep it off the table.” At the top of this letter, which lookec almost like parchment, was the name Ephraim Goldman in raised letters, you could feel them with the tips of your fingers—Attorney at Law. In the letter Uncle Ephraim called the attention of the Employment Manager to Mr. Donald Altschuler of 1650 Eastburn Avenue, The Bronx, as a young man known to him for many years, whom he could recommend as being of sterling character, commendable intelligence and great promise, and who was now looking for suitable employment.

  Donald got a job with the Warriner firm as a messenger boy for fifteen dollars a week. It was not a job he could take satisfaction in, he found it demeaning after having led a band and attended college. “Uncle Ephraim’s influence isn’t what he thinks it is,” Donald said. He left every morning very early, because Warriner was far downtown, on Hudson Street, and the subway ride was very long. When he came home he smelled faintly of ink. He said the presses were interesting to watch. He said he liked the men in the pressroom but not the executives in the office. They sat at phones and sold people printing and thought they were hotshots. He liked getting out and making the deliveries. Regularly he took proofs of things to police headquarters on Centre Street and to the Municipal Building on Chambers Street. He liked the far downtown; when he had a free minute he liked to go to the piers. He could steal a few minutes from delivering something on Whitehall Street to watch the ferries at Battery Park. Or if a delivery ran into his lunch hour he could go to the Aquarium.

  But his disposition had changed, he didn’t see his friends now, he didn’t want to play with me at all; when he got home from work, he didn’t talk to anyone but threw himself across his bed and went to sleep.

  In my memory I now think of this time as sunless. It was a harsh winter with snow always in the street, accumulating through several snowfalls despite the Department of Sanitation snow-plows, which were really water wagons with plows attached, and despite the sanitation men who with long-handled flat-bladed shovels pushed the slush and snow into the sewers. Snow built up in banks along the curb, and lay against the sides of buildings grey and crusted. The sun never seemed to come out and light left the sky not long after school was over for the day. I huddled near my radio and listened to my programs. I read my Richard Halliburton book that Mae Barsky had brought me in the hospital: The Complete Book of Marvels. Richard Halliburton went around the world exploring its marvels. He swam the length of the Panama Canal, and climbed to the top of the George Washington Bridge while it was being built. He slept secretly one night in the Taj Mahal, and he had his picture taken sitting at the top of the biggest pyramid in Egypt. He climbed the mountain to Macchu Pichu, the ancient hidden site of the Incas of Peru. He went places by ship and sometimes flew the flying boats.

  I also found myself deeply attentive to movie serials. It was a matter of serious discussion with my friends how closely the heroes of the movie serials resembled the originals of the comic strips. Dick Tracy was one of the more effective in bringing the comics to life. I believed Tracy was Tracy, his chin wasn’t as pointed as I’d hoped but he had that look about the eyes. Don Winslow of the Navy was another good one. Don Winslow got into fights on speedboats as they were running along out of control. At one point he was captured and taken by motorboat into a secret cave hidden inside a cliff; there were landing docks in there and steel doors in stone walls and sailors in black sweaters under the command of an evil Oriental. Anything with caves fascinated me. The caves in Missouri that Mark Twain describes in Tom Sawyer I had never forgotten: When Tom and Becky got lost in those caves, and they shared their pitiful piece of cake and Becky lay down to die and Tom went on in the narrow lightless passageway with only a string to bring him back to her, I could almost not bear to read. The worst moment of all was when they heard the voices of rescuers come closer and closer only to recede and leave them alone once again, in the silence. I could not breathe reading that. I thought in that situation I would not be as brave as Tom or resigned, however piteously she cried, as Becky. In sheer terror, like someone buried alive, I would exhaust myself screaming and trying to break through the cave walls with my bare fists, I would run around in circles and stumble into deep clefts in the rocks, I would gasp and moan and die of apoplexy. But Don Winslow, who habitually found himself imprisoned in caves, did not worry me. They were very well lit caves, they were electrified, steel doors rose and fell silently, a mark of civilization, and it was far preferable to be a prisoner of someone, no matter how evil, than to be alone in the darkness miles underground. In fact, it wasn’t until Tom Sawyer saw Injun Joe’s candle around the corner in one of the dark rock corridors that I knew the children would escape. As mean and frightening a villain as he was, Injun Joe Was life. For me he was a sign of the way out, a hint from the author that he would relent and give his children back to the ordinary concerns of good and evil.

  But, generally speaking, the movie versions of comic book heroes were great disappointments. Flash Gordon, for example, was too thick around the middle. He didn’t seem to be as quickwitted as he was in the panel drawings, there was some sinuous capability lacking there. Of course, Zorro was better on the movie screen than in the original. And The Green Hornet was best of all on the radio. My friends and I were thoughtful critics of these conversions of life forms. Arnold—the boy with the peculiar flattened ears and handwriting like a spider, in addition to strangely large eyes behind his eyeglasses and a wet sort of speech that produced a kind of spray when he was excited—was the most astute of all of us. He knew everything about serials, he could tell us who produced them—Republic Studios or Universal or Monogram—and the names of the actors who played in them. He even knew the genealogy of Britt Reid, the Green Hornet: Britt Reid, he said, was none other than the Lone Ranger’s grandnephew. We were skeptical, and hurt Arnold’s feelings by laughing at him, but he drew himself up and marshaled his facts. “One, the Lone Ranger’s real name was Reid, and he had a nephew, Dan Reid.” We gave Arnold that—Dan Reid was in several of the radio stories. “Two,” said Arnold, “Britt Reid, who is the Green Hornet, has a father named Dan Reid. Three, this Dan Reid who is Britt Reid’s father is an old white-haired man, which proves enough years have passed for him to be the same Dan Reid, the boy, whose uncle was the Lone Ranger. Four—Britt Reid is the Lone Ranger’s grandnephew!”

  Wiping my face, I grudgingly accepted Arnold’s analysis. I thought privately that if it was true, it was disappointing. The Lone Ranger was one thing, the Green Hornet was another. One rode horseback, the other drove a Lincoln Zephyr with custom wheel covers. The Green Hornet moved about the city, a modern city, he wore a hat with a snap brim and a belted raincoat with the collar up. I didn’t want to know that he was related to the Lone Ranger. Also I didn’t like to believe that families through generations tended to wear masks and dedicate their lives to fighting crime. Each of them would be presumed to eliminate all crime forever. There was a loss of the idea of perfection. The Lone Ranger was lone, and that was the way he should have been.

  But then one night when The Green Hornet radio program came on, my mother happened by and heard the opening theme music. It was very fast and full of tension. “‘The Flight of the Bum
blebee,’” my mother said. “Why do you suppose these junky programs all use classical music for their themes?” She was thinking also of The Lone Ranger, which used the overture from William Tell, an opera by Rossini. That led to my revelation. In school the next day I sought out Arnold. “Arnold,” I said, “it’s not that the Green Hornet and the Lone Ranger are related. It’s that their writers are related! I bet you we will find out that both stories are written by the same person. Both programs use classical music, both the heroes wear masks, the Lone Ranger has Tonto at his side, and the Green Hornet has Cato driving his car.”

  Arnold looked at me. His favorite subject was Science. He wanted to be a scientist when he grew up. He already had the objectivity of the scientist, which is the willingness to give up one hypothesis for another that is more reasonable. His eyes widened. “And they both leave calling cards!” he shouted.

  “A silver bullet!” I cried.

  “A hornet pin!” he screamed. And we pounded each other and jumped up and down and laughed.

  I found out that my father had lost his store one morning when I met him at the breakfast table. He was cheerful. “How are you, young man,” he said. He had brought home a radio that you didn’t have to plug in. It worked on a battery. It was covered in alligator skin and had a leather carrying handle. It was like a small suitcase and you flicked the switch and it lit up on the dial just like a regular radio. You could carry it anywhere, to the beach or picnics, but I found it heavy. Then I noticed a cardboard box with many packets of needles and also a microphone, the kind used by radio stations, except that it wobbled on its base. And finally there was a pack of records in green envelopes. Some of them were old with grooves only on one side. “These are rare recordings by Caruso and Gigli,” my father said. “If we hold on to them long enough they’ll be valuable.” While I ate my oatmeal he opened his newspaper. I saw the headlines. The other bad news was that France had fallen to Hitler.