World's Fair (30 page)

It was peculiar living in the house without Donald, it was not the same as his being away for the summer, I felt the distance of our ages keenly, that I was a boy and he was now a grown man. Somehow I had not kept up to my original rate of lagging behind. When he did come home from Philadelphia for a weekend, I found I was shy, I didn’t know what to say. And he was reserved too, he asked me about school as if he didn’t remember what it was like.

He had a snapshot of himself standing in front of a car with his arm around a dark-haired girl in a belted wool coat and they were both smiling at the camera. Behind the car was a red brick building, which was the apartment house where he lived.

And then as time went on Donald came home less and less on the weekends and the house was very still. I couldn’t seem to make the noise to fill it up, even when I asked a friend over. When I came home from school my father would not be there, of course, he worked now for a distributor, selling appliances to stores around Manhattan. As often as not my mother would be out shopping, or doing work for the Sisterhood, and so I would be alone in the house. I would have instructions from my mother to turn on the light under the three-sided iron pot in which she baked potatoes. Or there would be some change for my ice cream. Alone in my house after school, I sometimes became desolate. On one afternoon of rain my mother was late coming back and I began to imagine she had been hit by a car. Maybe she had fallen on the subway track. I cried. I don’t know why her absence affected me so.

When she came home I hugged her, which made her laugh with surprise.

There was some sort of chastened peace between my mother and father having to do with the changed circumstances of our lives. Donald would be called into the Army if war came. That was very much on their minds. And then this new job of my father’s had done something to his spirit. He had not worked for anyone else for many years, he had become used to being his own boss, he did not easily acclimate to his setback. On the occasions when I stayed home from school with one of my
colds I saw that he did not leave the house eagerly. He found excuses not to leave, he would clean up the kitchen or offer to do some shopping for my mother before he left for work. He claimed that, as a salesman calling on accounts, he had to give the stores time to open their doors and get going on their day. This reasoning did not persuade her, she felt he was losing out to his competitors. But my father could not be budged, he took a long time over breakfast and then washed all the dishes, and then even on the way to the subway stopped to do errands.

He was not attentive to me, at home he read the newspaper or listened to music. He was thoughtful. He was always a robust man but now seemed to be stolid and portly and losing his joy of things. I would not think of mentioning the World’s Fair to him. Nor to my mother, who was out of sorts most of the time and afflicted with various aches or pains. Her shoulder was giving her trouble, she had some sort of inflammation of the shoulder and sometimes wore her arm in a sling. She rested on the sofa a lot; she could not easily play the piano with her bad shoulder.

A
nd then I was told that we would be moving out of our house. The reasoning was that, with Donald not living at home anymore, the three of us didn’t need such a large place. The landlord was intending to raise the rent when the lease was up, and it just wasn’t worth the money.

My mother had found just the apartment for us and she took me to see it while it was being painted. It was up on the Grand Concourse. She met me after school. North of 174th Street, Eastburn Avenue became a hill. We trudged up Eastburn past apartment houses of the walk-up variety, four or six stories around small courtyards and with dingy front halls. Our new house was at the top of the hill where Eastburn met with the
Concourse and also 175th Street—a six-story edifice of ocher brick triangularly shaped to the corner it was on, like the famous Flatiron Building in Manhattan. My father had made this comparison by way of encouragement when he knew I’d be going to have a look.

The apartment was on the second floor, one flight up. You entered a narrow windowless corridor that led into a foyer. The foyer opened in one direction into the living room and in the other to a small kitchen and dinette. A painter was on his ladder in the kitchen. A second painter was doing the bathroom next to the dinette. Then down another narrow hall, exactly at the triangulated end of the building, was the bedroom. There were three big windows, one on each wall. We overlooked the stop where we had always waited for the bus going up the Concourse to my grandma and grandpa’s house.

“You see,” my mother said as I looked out the window, “it’s a wonderful view. When there’s a parade on the Concourse you can stand here and see the whole thing. Everything’s so light and airy. You’re not much farther from school than you were. A nice wide street, with trees, the Grand Concourse. This is the place to be. We’re very lucky.”

But I knew what she felt. It was painful to me that she was making the best of things, finding reason to be thankful about this and that when I could tell she was miserable. We no longer had the means to maintain ourselves as we had. It was a degree of the seriousness of our decline that she would not articulate it. “The only thing is, we’ll be a little bit pressed for closet space,” she said. I liked my mother to be tough and realistic and to call a spade a spade, as she always had. As she went around now, pointing out why this tiny apartment would be such a wonderful place to live, I was truly glum. It felt as if you could barely turn around in it. I had never lived anywhere but in a private house near the park. The Concourse was a wide six-lane thoroughfare with pedestrian islands to help one cross, the outer lanes being for local traffic, the four inner lanes for express traffic. The pedestrian islands were planted with trees. Way over on the far side was an unbroken bank of apartment
houses, north and south, as far as the eye could see. I didn’t know anybody who lived in them, or if there were any children.

W
hen the move actually occurred, I was in school. That morning I had gotten up from my own bed in my own room as usual, I had my breakfast in the kitchen, where I’d always had it, the morning sun coming in the windows that looked on the alley, the old wooden table with the oilcloth, and the wooden chairs with the spoked backs, just where they’d always been in the middle of the large kitchen. On one wall the refrigerator with the cylindrical motor on top; on the other, the big enameled cabinet my mother called a “Dutch kitchen” with a slide-out ledge, lots of little closet doors and a flour sifter built in. “Here’s your lunch,” my mother said, handing me a paper bag. “Tuna salad sandwich, which you like, and an apple. Here’s ten cents for your milk. At the end of the day, don’t come back here. Come to the new apartment. Look both ways before crossing.”

I left the house walking over bare floors and through cardboard cartons of packed things. Pulling up to the curb was a moving van.

At the end of the school day, as instructed, I turned right as I came out of the schoolyard, crossed 174th Street, and took the long walk up the Eastburn Avenue hill to the new apartment on the Concourse. It felt strange. I kept turning around to look down the hill, I saw children coming out of school and going my old way home.

The door was open. My steps resounded on the bare floor. I found my mother sitting alone among many of our things, which now looked strange in these new rooms painted cream, the latest color, she had told me. She sat on the sofa and looked exhausted. She gave me a wan smile. She had managed the whole move herself, my father having gone off to work as I had to school.

In the new kitchen I drank my milk as I always had. The refrigerator was a new model with round corners and the motor hidden in the rear. White metal cabinets hung from the walls over the sink. Everything was very close together. The kitchen floor was little more than a space between the fixtures. It was all neat and compact. The kitchen was divided by partitions that came to my shoulders. The partitions created the dinette. We had a new oval table with a shiny, marbleized top and four matching chairs.

The modernity of everything was what we talked about; that and the reasonable rent and the concessions given by the landlord as a reward for our having moved in.

The new living room was filled to capacity with our upright Sohmer and sofa and chairs and lamps, and console radio and record player and carpet and end tables and knickknacks. Against the wall at right angles to the old sofa with its curved Empire back was a new square two-cushion sofa with high square arms that could be converted into a bed. My parents would sleep here. Gone was the olive bed with the frieze of flowers on the headboard. I would have the triangular bedroom looking out over the bus stop. There were two new single beds here. When Donald came home, he would share the room with me.

Each day when I returned from school I explored more of the neighborhood. The Concourse, I saw, was actually built along a ridge; if there were no buildings, if all the land were returned to early times, the Concourse would be a plateau overlooking valleys to the west—that would be Jerome Avenue—and, less precipitously, those to the east. The light was different on the top of the plateau. A bit colder. There were no green hedges or plots of grass. We were suspended one story above a great impersonal street, with a lot of sky visible, and the constant hum of traffic. Across 175th Street, on our side of the Concourse, was the Pilgrim Church, whose bell rang on Sunday. And directly on the other side of the Concourse and one block down, was the new Junior High School that I would be going to when I finished the sixth grade, at P.S. 70. And so my last connection with
Claremont Park and with my old street and schoolyard would be gone.

Understanding the isolation I felt, my mother relaxed the rules about my coming home immediately after school was out. She even consented to my visiting my friend Meg. I had only to advise her in the morning if I intended to stay on in the old haunts with my friends and play. I played stoopball or punchball in the same clothes—white shirt, red school tie—I wore for my classes. I came home with shirt tails hanging, my sweater tied by the sleeves around my waist, and my knickers drooping. My mother, who had to scrub the clothes on a small washboard in the sink in the little kitchen, did not complain. She missed Donald and had softened her discipline of me. She too found things to do in the old places, taking on the direction of the Mt, Eden Synagogue Sisterhood choir two afternoons a week.

TWENTY-SIX

I
n the spring, with the days getting warmer and the light lasting, I spent as little time at home as I possibly could. On rainy days I went invariably to Meg’s and drank milk with her. Meg had grown a bit, she was still petite, but she had filled out some. I was aware of the faintest golden down on her forearms and legs. She was very graceful and held her head high when she walked, her hair was thicker, which made her look older; and I happened to notice at times when I was behind her that her skirt moved in the rhythm of her moving backside, which was round enough now to push out the cloth that way. I couldn’t have said what I felt, but all the children in the class now considered me Meg’s boyfriend and believed that when we grew up we were going to get married. If someone teased me about this, I had to throw my books down and jump him. But most of the time I was not directly confronted in this manner and so did not have to deny anything. She and I never discussed these things, recognizing the danger of entrusting such delicate matters to words. If either of us had said anything, the other could no longer have sustained the relationship. It could only continue unarticulated, tacit, in the pretense of ignorance. We felt loyal to each other and calm in each other’s presence. We shared things: she gave me cookies and, outside, I would buy two ice creams with my money. We played in Claremont Park a lot, where we were by
ourselves. I sometimes found her looking at me with a grave expression on her face. I liked her mouth, especially the upper lip, which flourished in a thickened curve toward its corners so that at any moment you would think she was about to cry. She had light grey eyes, which had grown larger. We were nine years old now.

Meg’s mother, Norma, worked every day at the World’s Fair from four in the afternoon to closing time. This meant she went off to the subway in the early afternoon, before we were out of school. Norma had to take a subway to Manhattan and then transfer to the Queens IRT. When I saw her she was very weary, but said she was lucky to have the job. But that meant Meg and I were left alone most of the time. We did our homework together. She still liked to play with dolls, to serve them an imaginary tea on little tin plates and cups, and talk to them. One of her dolls was a very popular model called a Didy-Doll, as ridiculous a bit of cutesyness as everything else having to do with girl culture. The feature of this doll was that a small nippled bottle of water could be applied to its mouth and a moment later the water would come out of a hole between its legs. I found my friend’s attentions to this doll embarrassing. One rainy afternoon we were sitting on the floor in her living room and she insisted that I administer the water. I didn’t want to. The doll was lying there on its back with its legs spread out and no clothes on. Meg insisted that I push the little nippled bottle against the doll’s painted mouth. The blue glazed-button eyes of the infant doll stared up at me. Meg kept saying, “Go ahead, she’s thirsty, can’t you see she’s thirsty. Please, do it, she is very thirsty.” Her voice grew constricted as she repeated these words, and my own pulse was loud in my ears and I felt my face flushing. The intensity of her belief, as if this toy were really alive, I found both disgusting and thrilling at the same time. But I was determined not to give in, but to torment these feelings of hers and be cruel to them. I jammed the rubber nipple not into the doll’s mouth but at the hole between the legs. I pushed down until water spilled over the doll and onto the floor. Meg cried out and threw her small self at me, knocking me backward from my sitting
position. In the next moment she was on top of me and using her whole body to pound me, rearing up and dropping down flat, as if trying to pound the breath out of me, doing that again and again while I lay there on my back. Each time she fell on top of me I could feel her warm breath chuff in my ears. I felt the warmth of her, I smelled her sweet soap smell, I put my arms around her and found myself holding her backside with my hands. Her dress was up around her waist and I felt her thighs and her cotton underwear. She tired suddenly and lay still on top of me. Then she became aware of something that was not too familiar to her, although it was to me—my stiffening. She struggled back from it in alarm, the prod of it was uncomfortable to her. I wouldn’t let her go but pushed up and rolled her over and lay on top of her as she struggled. Her eyes were lowered. Just for a moment I held her pinned like this and then got off and sat up, as she did, and a moment later we were playing as if nothing had happened. The little puddle of water became spilled tea in her game and she sponged it off the floor with a paper napkin. Later we did our homework and then I went home.