5.3. Winters, sometimes, my father would take me down to the Washington Market (at the city’s edge, on Washington Street), and through the vast, skylit hangars, I would walk, occasionally holding his hand, over red tiles slung with wet sawdust — gone black if there was snow outside — and gaze at the glass-fronted cold-counters. A brace of pheasants hung by their feet behind three busy butchers. Three deer dangled from high hooks, still in skins and antlers. Blood congealed at their noses, a half dozen tweedy hares swung just enough to notice, over a counter of game, set about with brown baskets of quails’ eggs. At another, salamis and sausages and bolognas were slung from waxed ropes. At still another, in rounds and spheres, thin and white, yellow and thick, waxy or creamy or crumbly about dark flecks of mold, cheeses heaped a counter covered with green paper. Somewhere else someone in purple and white vended nuts and candies, just visible between the backs of the customers. Here, men in red hats sold soups from high black pots over iron rings of flame. There, my father and I edged up to slopping marble, where a white-smocked man with a knitted cap just resting on gray hair cropped army short knifed back the shells of cherrystones or littlenecks at your order, sliding them across to you to eat with wooden, twin-pronged forks and dunked in catsup seasoned from glass cruets of horseradish.
“Raw clams …?” my father said. “I like them. But I don’t know if you will. …”
“Yeah!” I tugged the arm of his overcoat (when I was seven) to stand on tiptoes. “I will!”
And did.
And split my second dozen with him, while he laughed and I wondered at the markety smell of the place that spoke of bazaars as vast as Asia.
We would walk through those buildings big as city blocks, it seemed, now in this one, now in that, the length of ancient stadia, beneath glass roofs underhung with jungle gyms of beams and girders. The great columns near the walls were painted black to the height of my head, then white on up to the skylights.
“You can get anything in the world at this market,” my father explained, on our first trip down. “Anything. I mean it. Anything in the world.”
I looked at the pile of gold and green boxes with writing in an unknown alphabet to one side of me and the great, tilted tray of ice on the other, on which the pink and gray flesh of an octopus stretched out its suckered legs among eight different kinds of fish. And I believed him — oh, I believed him, literally and completely, as a young mage knows magic is mighty. Firmly we pushed out the lead-glass doors, with the brass bar aslant them, onto the sidewalk and into the smell of Christmas trees, bound up and ranked on wooden racks. White and black men in jeans, high laced boots, and dirty jackets wheeled dollies piled with crates.
“Watch out now, Sam!” My father pulled me aside. “Pay attention, I tell you — you’re going to get yourself killed!”
Then he went off by the market wall, tiled in white and blue, where a vendor with a long maroon scarf hanging down the front of his tan coat stood by a hill of white boxes. Open, the top displayed bright Christmas bulbs.
And I wandered on to where flames glittered behind the feathery rust edging the holes in the side — and leaped, like orange cats above the black rim — of the oil drum at the corner.
Beside it, a workman as tall as Dad and a lot more muscular stood with his jacket open over a thermal undershirt, yellow hair clawing the gray collar, the ham of a hand cupped by his mouth, calling to the men unloading crates from the back of a truck under the highway. Firelight bronzed his jaw: orange played on the muscle there, moving to his bellowing and making it sandy gold. Looking like the young Burt Lancaster — or maybe Kirk Douglas — he called again, blinking eyes that, even in the deep, four-thirty blue beyond the rim of the overhead highway, were very, very light — hazel or green — between lashes as heavy as, and darker than, his hair.
I ambled toward him, watching without thinking — when he turned, reached down, grabbed my arm, and snatched me forward: “Hey, there, little fella’—!”
I reached out to stop myself falling, one hand against his jacket — stiffened with something that made it rough as canvas — and my other hand half against his belt and buckle (beneath the thermal cloth, hard and warm): “Watch it, now!”
I twisted around to see this guy — Chinese, I think — rolling his loaded dolly along, looking over at me and shaking his head, while the workman who’d pulled me out of the way steadied me.
I looked back, where he still held my arm — hard enough to hurt. His fingers were broad as broom handles and dirt gray, with knuckles big as walnuts. What astonished me, though I couldn’t have told you why, was that his nails were as badly bitten as Robert’s at school. (My heart pounded, but I couldn’t have said if it was the scare, or what.) He was a man four or five times my (or Robert’s) size, but his fingernails, though three or four times as wide, were no longer — from dirt-lined cuticle to grease-rimmed crown — than Robert’s wrecks, as though this adult had had the habit since infancy, so that they’d never been able even to approach the ends of his fingers.
I looked up at him. He grinned — and, as anomalously, in the face that had seemed so handsome, I saw there were no front teeth. Long and yellow, two thrust down at either side of the upper gum’s gap, showing lots of his tongue when he talked: “Ya’ all right there, little fella’? You gotta watch where you’re walkin’ out here!” He loosened his grip. “It can be dangerous. Heads up, now!”
He blinked his light, light eyes.
He smiled his tongue-filled grin.
“Thank you, sir!” I blurted. “I’m all right — thank you!” Then I pulled away and dashed back to my father — trying to pay a little more attention to the rushing and hurrying people on the evening street.
Beside Dad again (who was still examining the ornaments), I looked back at the flaming drum.
The workman was shouting again to the men at the truck — but he dropped his hand now, called a curse, then loped from the curb, out between the cars and across the cobbles, firelight dulling on his jacket back.
Later that evening, in still one of the other market buildings, Dad bought a big blue tin of an oriental spice someone had told him about, which simply went by its chemical name: monosodium glutamate. (After the first week when we tried it on everything we ate, I wasn’t to hear of it again for another half dozen years.) And the next year he bought a canned plum pudding that had to be boiled for forty minutes and that tasted … well, interesting. And still another year when I went with him, he purchased a set of elliptical Christmas ornaments of pearly glass, painted with metallic reds and greens and blues, a whole eight of them, larger than any we’d ever owned. Each was bigger than my — no, as big as my father’s … no, as big as that workman’s fist! And when the first one fell from the tree and broke, I could see in the concave silver within, distorted and reflected, the whole of our Christmas living room.
5.31. At my Aunt Dorothy’s and Uncle Myles’s Brooklyn brownstone, on McDonough Street, there was an umber commemorative dish, on which, carved from white ivory, the 1939 World’s Fair Trylon and Perisphere were raised in relief. In the upstairs living room that frequently smelled of my uncle’s cigars, by the green leather chair, the dish stayed on a rotating knickknack table. Books, some of them leather, with flaking spines, sat in the turning shelves beneath. At seven or eight I’d stand, gazing into the plate, trying to imagine what “the future” had been like at the Fair before I was born. My father and Uncle Myles had explained to me that the long-vanished Fair, which they’d both so enjoyed and at which they’d seen so many marvels, had been all about the future. …