World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online

sparks, like a Fourth of July held in an open grave and projecting on the night a skull’s leer and a clap of crossed bones.
    O ne of my favorite ways to spend Grandma’s pennies came along Eastburn Avenue in the afternoons: Joe the Sweet Potato Man. He pushed a small unmarked cabinet on wheels. Inside the cabinet was a kind of oven of homemade design, the fuel being charcoal. Joe raised the hinged top lid and reached down practically to his armpit to withdraw one of his roasted sweet potatoes. He was an impassive man who wrapped himself in sweaters and coats, obviously scavenged, and a watch cap over which was a peaked khaki hat of rough wool. He wore old Army shoes, cracked and splitting. Over all his clothing he had tied a shoulder-to-ankle waiter’s apron not recently washed. This costume suggested great authority to me. With his large hands, dirt uniformly running under his nails, Joe slapped the potato on the cart, pulled an enormous knife from its wooden sheath and sliced the potato in half lengthwise. He then stuck the tip of the knife into a can and withdrew a slab of butter, which he inserted in a slit made almost simultaneously in the meat of the potato, and, after sheathing the knife, wrapped the purchase like a cornucopia in a torn half sheet of the Bronx Home News so that you could hold the potato and eat it without burning your fingers.For this golden, sweet, steaming hot feast I gave up two pennies. Another, and I could have the potato whole.
    Joe went along his impassive way as, with dusk descending on the cold blue-grey sky over the Bronx, I sat on my stoop and ate his remarkable cuisine. It was not only something to eat but something to warm my hands against, as if I had plucked a tiny hearth from an elf’s house.
    Sometimes when my mother was going shopping I went along so that I could spend my money at the candy store on the corner of Eastburn and 174th Street. Many different things were to be had for a penny, candies of various kinds, Fleer’s Double Bubble gum, or some shoe leather, which was what we called a pounded sheet of dried apricot, or Indian nuts that fell from the chute of a glass canister after you deposited the coin and twisted the key, or, what I usually went for, a shot-glassful of sunflower seeds poured into my hands by the proprietor.
    I put the seeds in my jacket pocket and followed my mother from store to store as I cracked the shells one at a time between my front teeth and withdrew each seed with the tip of my tongue. I did this without missing a thing that was going on around me. In fact, the steady and relentless crunching of Polly seeds brought my gaze to sharp focus. One next to another, stores were built at street level in the sides of apartment houses. The street was astir with cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons. It interested me that horses could, without any reduction in speed, raise their tails and leave a trail of golden dung.
    The old Italian who repaired shoes managed to conduct his business without speaking English. His shop was a dark little basement store throbbing with the running motors and looped and slapping belts of leather trimmers and buffing wheels. Each wheel was stained with shoe polish of a different color. My mother held out a pair of my father’s shoes. “Heels and tips,” she said, and the old man, barely looking up from a shoe he clutched to his chest while he carved its sole to size, nodded and grunted something in Italian. My mother asked him the cost and when the shoes would be ready. She addressed him in English and he replied in Italian, and the negotiation was completed toeveryone’s satisfaction. As we left he grabbed a handful of nails and put them in his mouth: he was about to attach the sole.
    A few doors down was the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, where a man in an apron stood behind his wooden counter and ground up coffee to order and collected the items you asked for from the shelves behind him. If what you wanted—a box of