World's Fair (38 page)
Donald and I had no particular interest in these things. We agreed to split in two groups and arranged when and where to meet. My parents rode off in a hand-pushed chair, like children in a stroller. “I’m sorry they tore down the Soviet pavilion,” my father said to no one in particular. “I’d like to have seen it.” He turned and waved to us the hand that held the cigar.
Donald and I took the bus down Rainbow Avenue, across the bridge and into the amusement section. Here it was more crowded. I didn’t let on I knew about the amazing Oscar, but secretly I hoped to see my friend Meg. I imagined her sitting in the back, in a faded deck chair. I strolled along with Donald and just happened to bring him to the place. But there was no more Oscar the Amorous Octopus, the building was occupied by jugglers and fire-eaters. So we rode a Dodgem electric car with rubber bumpers, in a great mad crackling horde of similarly equipped drivers, all murderously intent. We bumped them and they bumped us, and we laughed hysterically. Donald let me drive, his arm over my shoulders, as we spun about crashing and banging into people and being bashed in return, everyone’s head threatening to fly off. Donald yelled over the din:
“This
is the Futurama!” Then we went to a fun house and watched ourselves bend and flatten and elongate in the mirrors, our recognizable selves disappearing into nothing, and looming over us a moment later. We ended up at the Savoy, a place where swing was played and people danced to a band on the bandstand. Donald was entranced, the Jimmy Lunceford band was on the stage and we stayed for two whole shows while Donald shook his head in time to the music and closed his eyes and rapped his fingers on the tables like drumsticks. The dancers jitterbugged and did the Big Apple. It was good music.
Later it rained, and I remember seeing the fireworks go up in the black night and lighting the rain as if some battle were being fought between the earth and the sky.
M
y winning honorable mention in the essay contest brought me a degree of celebrity for a few days at P.S. 70. The detestable Diane Blumberg, whom I had yet to beat in a spelling bee, looked at me with a new respect, I thought. The principal, Mr. Teitelbaum, saw me in the hall and stopped to shake my hand. “That’s the kind of student we turn out at Seventy,” he assured me in case I had thought the credit should be mine. Perhaps my sense of accomplishment is what kept the World’s Fair in my mind, a kind of dwelling in secret amazement at the boy I was for having boldly done the job; or perhaps it was the recollection of those clean and painted streets, red and yellow and blue, and the flower gardens and the whiteness of the future as it expanded in my mind perispherically and thrust its needle into the sky. One day in October I decided to make up my own time capsule. I think the idea came to me when I found a cardboard mailing tube my father had brought home. I lined the tube inside and out with tinfoil I methodically collected from the insides of cigarette packs and gum wrappers. My friend Arnold found out what I was up to and joined in. And one day after school he accompanied me to Claremont Park, the place I had chosen as the burial site.
I led us fairly deep in the park where there was a little clump of bushes. Here the ground was soft, and also one could dig something and be circumspect about it. Meg and I had played close by here. Arnold helped dig the hole. We measured it with the tube itself until finally it could be slipped down and not show.
Ceremoniously I showed Arnold the items I had chosen to represent to the future my life as I had lived it: my Tom Mix Decoder badge with the spinner shaped like a pistol. My handwritten four-page biography of the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for which I had gotten a grade of 100. This had to
be rolled like a cigar. My M. Hohner Marine Band harmonica in its original box that was Donald’s but which he had given me when he got the larger model. Two Tootsy Toy lead rocket ships, from which all the paint had been worn, to show I had foreseen the future. My Little Blue Book,
Ventriloquism Self-Taught
, not because I had succeeded but because I had tried. And finally something I was embarrassed to let Arnold see, a torn silk stocking of my mother’s, badly run, and which she had thrown away and I had recovered, as an example of the kind of textiles we used—although it was true I had heard that women no longer wore silk stockings in protest against the Japanese, but now wore cotton or that new nylon stuff made of chemicals.
Arnold had brought something too and he asked if he could drop it in the tube. “It’s my old prescription pair of eyeglasses,” he said. “The frame is cracked but they might understand something about our technology when they look through the lenses.” I said OK. Once, long ago, Arnold had showed me he could start a fire in dry brush with those glasses. He dropped them in and I screwed the cover on the tube and slipped it into the ground.
Then I pulled the tube back up and unscrewed the cap and removed the ventriloquism manual. It seemed to me a waste of a book to bury it like that.
I dropped the tube back down in the hole. Looking around to make sure that we hadn’t been seen, we filled in the hole with dirt, and stood up and stamped the ground to make it as hard as it was everywhere else. I think we both felt the importance of what we were doing. We brushed some leaves and crumbs of dirt over everything for camouflage.
I remember the weather that day, blustery, cold, the clouds moving fast. The dead leaves flew in the gusts, and the great trees creaked in Claremont Park. My way home headed me into the wind. I put my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders and went on. I practiced the ventriloquial drone. I listened for it as I walked through the park, the wind stinging my cheeks and bringing a film of water to my eyes.
E. L. D
OCTOROW’S
work has been published in thirty languages. His novels include
Homer & Langley, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks
, and
The March
. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives in New York.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1985 by E. L. Doctorow
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., in 1985.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to CBS Robbins Catalog Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from the following songs:
“Deep Purple” by Mitchell Parish and Peter DeRose, Copyright 1939. Renewed 1967 Robbins Music Corporation. Rights Assigned to CBS Catalogue Partnership. All Rights Controlled and Administered by CBS Robbins Catalog Inc. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.
“Stairway to the Stars” by Mitchell Parish, Matt Malneck, and Frank Signorelli, Copyright 1939. Renewed 1967 Robbins Music Corporation. Rights assigned to CBS Catalog Partnership. All Rights Controlled and Administered by CBS Robbins Catalog Inc. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Doctorow, E. L.
World’s fair : a novel / E. L. Doctorow
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76296-2
I. Title.
PS3554.03W6 1985 813′.54 85-10728
v3.0
