In God We Trust (13 page)

It seemed seconds later:

BBBRRRRRAAAAAWWWRRRRR
 … eeeeeeeeeh!

Up the driveway he charged in a shower of cinders and burning rubber. You could always tell the mood of the Old Man by the way he came up that driveway. Tonight there was no question.

A heavy thunder of feet roared up the back steps, the kitchen door slammed. He’s carrying three cans of glue. Iron glue. The kind that garage mechanics used for gaskets and for gluing back together exploded locomotives. His voice is now quiet.

“Don’t touch it.
Don’t touch that lamp!”

He spread a newspaper out over the kitchen floor and carefully, tenderly laid out the shattered fleshy remains. He is on all fours now, and the work began. Painfully, hopelessly he tried to glue together the silk-stockinged, life-size symbol of his great victory.

Time and again it looked almost successful, but then he would remove his hand carefully.… 
BOING
! … the kneecap
kept springing up and sailing across the kitchen. The ankle didn’t fit. The glue hardened into black lumps and the Old Man was purple with frustration. He tried to fix the leg for about two hours, stacking books on it. A Sears Roebuck catalog held the instep. The family Bible pressed down on the thigh. But it wasn’t working.

To this day I can still see my father, wearing a straw hat, swearing under his breath, walking around a shattered plastic lady’s leg, a Freudian image to make Edward Albee’s best efforts pale into insignificance.

Finally he scooped it all up. Without a word he took it out the back door and into the ashbin. He sat down quietly at the kitchen table. My mother is now back at her lifelong station, hanging over the sink. The sink is making the Sink noise. Our sink forever made long, gurgling sighs, especially in the evening, a kind of sucking, gargling, choking retch.

Aaaagggghhhh—and then a short, hissing wheeze and silence until the next attack. Sometimes at three o’clock in the morning I’d lie in my bed and listen to the sink—Aaaaaggggghhhh.

Once in a while it would go: gaaaaagggghhhh … 
PTUI
!—and up would come a wad of Mrs. Kissel’s potato peelings from next door. She, no doubt, got our coffee grounds. Life was real.

My mother is hanging over her sink, swabbing eternally with her Brillo pad. If mothers had a coat of arms in the Midwest, it would consist of crossed Plumbers’ Helpers rampant on a field of golden Brillo pads.

The Old Man is sitting at the kitchen table. It was white enamel with little chipped black marks all around the edge. They must have been made that way, delivered with those flaws. A table that smelled like dishrags and coffee grounds and kids urping. A kitchen-table smell, permanent and universal, that defied all cleaning and disinfectant—the smell of Life itself.

In dead silence my father sat and read his paper. The battle had moved into the Trench Warfare or Great Freeze stage. And continued for three full days. For three days my father spoke not. For three days my mother spoke likewise. There was only
the sink to keep us kids company. And, of course, each other, clinging together in the chilly subterranean icy air of a great battle. Occasionally I would try.

“Hey Ma, ah … you know what Flick is doing … uh.…”

Her silent back hunched over the sink. Or:

“Hey Dad, Flick says that.…”

“WHADDAYA WANT?”

Three long days.

Sunday was sunny and almost like a day in Midsummer. Breakfast, usually a holiday thing on Sundays, had gone by in stony silence. So had dinner. My father was sitting in the living room with the sun streaming in unobstructed through the front window, making a long, flat, golden pattern on the dusty Oriental rug. He was reading Andy Gump at the time. My mother was struggling over a frayed elbow in one of my sweaters. Suddenly he looked up and said:

“You know.…”

Here it comes! My mother straightened up and waited.

“You know, I like the room this way.”

There was a long, rich moment. These were the first words spoken in seventy-two hours.

She looked down again at her darning, and in a soft voice:

“Uh … you know, I’m sorry I broke it.”

“Well …” he grew expansive, “It was … it was really pretty jazzy.”

“No,” she answered, “I thought it was very
pretty!”

“Nah. It was too pink for this room. We should get some kind of brass lamp for that window.”

She continued her darning. He looked around for a moment, dropped the Funnies noisily to get attention, and then announced in his Now For The Big Surprise voice:

“How ’bout let’s all of us going to a movie? How ’bout it? Let’s all take in a movie!”

Ten minutes later we’re all in the Oldsmobile, on our way to see Johnny Weismuller.

The drizzle had become a full rain by the time I realized I was the only one left in the windswept garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The lights were on inside, warm and glowing, and I could see a pink arm reaching skyward. I went back in to have another last, loving look at
IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET
.

XI
FLICK MAKES AN ARTISTIC JUDGMENT

“How come they called it that?”

I laughed my notorious ironic cackle:

“It’s some kind of soap or something.”

“You mean they named a statue after
soap?”

Flick squeezed his bar rag juicily onto the duckboards behind the mahogany. I had a vague feeling that the beer was beginning to get to me.

“Well … it’s a slogan.”

Behind us, all around us, everywhere, the jukebox boomed heavily and then stopped abruptly.

“Fer Chrissake, I can’t see why they named a statue after soap.”

“Well, I told you, you gotta be With It.”

“Nuts.”

Once again I was reminded forcibly that I was back in the Midwest, very far from the effete East.

An uproar broke out in one of the booths back in the gloom near the wall. Two structural ironworkers were loudly Indian-wrestling.

“I’ll be right back.”

Flick’s jaw squared as he darted from behind the bar. I watched in the mirror as he quelled the battle, fed the combatants two more boilermakers, and returned.

“I’m not as tough as I used to be,” said Flick matter-of-factly. “I argue more these days.”

I remembered the day well when Flick in his salad period had thrown three Tin Mill Reckoners out on the street in quick succession, which is the Hohman equivalent of taking on King Kong, Gargantua, and Gorgeous George simultaneously.

“I noticed they stopped,” I said.

“Well, they’re on my bowling team. They’d better.”

We sat silently for a moment as old friends will when in the midst of a reminiscing orgy. Flick slid another beer toward me.

“That reminds me, Flick. Is it still where it used to be?”

“Yep.”

A minute later I was back at the bar, ready for more action and more beer. A faint snow was falling from the lead-colored skies. The wind rattled the plate glass windows of Flick’s Tavern. Across the street the plastic streamers snapped and fluttered over the rows of like-new, mint-condition, creampuff, fully loaded, ready-to-go-specials. The Used-Car lot is a kind of shrine in Northern Indiana.

“You mean girls ride
motorcycles
in New York?”

“That is not
all
they do.”

“Boy. New York sure sounds like a crazy place. I wanted to take my wife to see the Fair, but I couldn’t get away.”

“You didn’t miss much.”

Flick snapped a pretzel in two, moodily.

“Just the same, I’d a liked to have gone. I sure remember that one they had in Chicago.”

“Oh come on, Flick. We were just little tiny kids.”

“Yeah. But I remember it.”

I sipped my beer and thought about that for a few seconds.

“You know, Flick, I read somewhere that John Dillinger, the old bank robber, used to go to that fair and ride the Sky Ride, between heists.”

“I’ll be damned. He was from Indiana, wasn’t he?” Flick’s Hoosier pride welled to the surface.

“You’re damn right, Flick. You know, I remember only one thing about that fair.”

XII
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Right there on the Lake, next to the Outer Drive, they began to build a model of Fort Sheridan. This was a fort that was operating during Indian times on the site of Chicago. It was the scene of several very bloody Indian battles. And here they were once again putting this fort together log by log in a perfect reproduction of the original. It sat there looking out over the cold blue water, and you could see it from the car. It was brown and low, and looked like it was made out of Lincoln Logs. To a kid, forts are very big things. I asked my father, driving the Olds:

“What is that?”

“Fort Sheridan.”

“Oh.”

“Yup. They’re building a World’s Fair.”

At that time the shore stretched empty and white, with little tufts of grass here and there, almost to the Fields Museum and down to the cold water, with only Fort Sheridan in the middle of the emptiness.

And, sure enough, a World’s Fair began to grow. It spread outward like a mushroom patch from the tiny fort, and grew and grew and grew. Month by month, year by year, great blue and yellow and orange buildings right out of the land of Oz
blotted out the Lake, until the tiny fort disappeared behind them all. Mile after mile was covered with this fantasy, this wonderland, this land of real, genuine, absolute Magic.

And I lived in a land that was eminently, very very unmagical. The least magic of all neighbhorhoods, a pure Oatmeal neighborhood—lumpy Oatmeal. And so the idea and the vision of the World’s Fair began to be a true Fairyland. The Emerald City had come to the South Side.

It took hold of my imagination until there was room for nothing else, and I was not alone. All the newspapers ran stories, tremendous reams of copy, wondrous descriptions of what it was going to be like, this Shangri-La right there on the shores of Lake Michigan. And then the story began to spread about a special Kid thing that was going to be at the Fair. This Something grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me right into the vortex, and I will never forget it. It was a tremendous thing in my life. Treasure Island!

Treasure Island was a tiny World’s Fair within the World’s Fair. There was the Hall of Science, the Hall of Communications, the Hall of Man; all these great, wonderful halls that were dedicated to the proposition that Man was the most magnificent thing in the world, and that he was just beginning. A Century Of Progress! Over the horizon was even more magnificence and greatness, and in the middle of it all—Treasure Island!

The
Tribune
printed pictures of Treasure Island and told how it was going to be. I clipped them out and saved them, tons of them. One day I would be there myself.

This was a time in history before television, and kids didn’t go to the movies very much because movies cost money and over the land lay the Depression. It was
not
just another show in a succession of shows. It
was
Treasure Island!

Spring came, and the day approached when the Fair was to open. Already the flags were flying. The Avenue of Flags. We would drive past in the Oldsmobile and try to see through the modernistic fence, and we could catch glimpses of Martian landscapes and golden pagodas. It was a magnificent sight outlined against the blue water of the Lake.

During the Depression it rained a lot, and things were gray and there were a lot of fistfights, but then, suddenly,
this!

One bright Sunday the Fair actually opened. There were speeches and parades, and I sat next to the radio and listened to everything that happened. The word was out that we would go “when the weather got warmer.” At least that was the explanation my brother and I got. No one talked to us much about money.

The Fair was all that anyone talked about for weeks, and a couple of my cousins had actually
been
there. It was impossible even to talk to them about it. They were speechless. They were like veterans of some indescribable war. They could understand each other, but we who hadn’t been there were on the outside.

I would ask: “How about Treasure Island? The Magic Mountain? How about it? What was it like?”