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

what was in the box. She didn’t want to tell me. “It doesn’t concern you,” she said. ButI persisted. I had no more Polly seeds and no more pennies. “What did you buy,” I said. “Tell me.” She strode along. “Tell me,” I whined.
    “Oh stop it, they’re sanitary napkins. Are you satisfied?”
    I was not satisfied because I didn’t know what sanitary napkins were, but I knew from her tone that I had used up my allotment of questions and so pursued the matter no further.

SIX
    I t was early spring when my uncle Billy came to live with us. He was an older brother of my mother’s, a gentle ineffectual man down on his luck. Claremont Park was beginning to turn green. Uncle Billy moved into Donald’s room, and Donald came down the hall to stay in my room, which was actually a bit larger. I was thrilled by this arrangement but Donald was deeply affronted. “It’s only for a little while,” my mother told him. “Till Billy gets back on his feet. He has nowhere else.”
    Donald lay on his bed and threw a hardball toward the ceiling and caught the ball in his first baseman’s glove, one-handed. He did this over and over. Sometimes the ball hit the ceiling. A polka-dot pattern of black marks began to appear there. Sometimes the ball missed his glove and thudded on the floor and under the bed. I retrieved it for him.
    Uncle Billy was a divorced man, something quite rare at this time, and he had the further distinction of having been a successful bandleader in the nineteen twenties. He was not insensitive to the disruption caused by his joining the household. Before he had finished unpacking his suitcase, he came into our room with a rolled cloth under his arm. His vest was unbuttoned. “You boys ever see this?” He gave the cloth a flap and spread it on the floor. It was a rectangular banner of purple velvet with gold lettering, all in capitals, and a border of gold.On the floor it was like a room rug. Before I could work it out Donald said, “‘BILLY WYNNE AND HIS ORCHESTRA.’”
    “That’s right,” Uncle Billy said. “You hung that over the bandstand everywhere you played—‘Billy Wynne and His Orchestra.’ That was me in the good old days.”
    Donald and I were awed. We hadn’t known he was that famous. He leaned against the doorjamb with his hands in his pockets and began to fell us about the hotels he had played, the nightclubs. “We were booked for two weeks in the Ambassador,” he said. “And we stayed for thirteen.” He had a reedy voice, up in his head. I was too shy now to look at him directly. But he had the hurt blue eyes of that side of the family, though smaller and closer together than my mother’s or grandma’s. He had a double chin and had thinning hair combed carefully sideways to hide his scalp. His nose was red and bulbous. When he laughed he had teeth missing.
    I felt the velvet with my fingertips. “You boys keep it,” he said.
    “Don’t you want it?” Donald said.
    “Naah, take it. It’s a nice souvenir of the good old days.”
    We thanked him. He turned to go. “You know the first orchestra ever to broadcast over the radio?”
    “Billy Wynne?” Donald said.
    “That’s right. WRPK Pittsburgh, 1922.”
    How Uncle Billy had lost his orchestra was never made clear to me, but it seemed to have had to do with a crooked business manager as well as his own ineptitude. He’d had numbers of jobs in the years since. He fit into the house easily enough—in a matter of a week or two it felt as if he had always lived with us. He was a decent, kind man. My mother appreciated his help in dealing with Grandma. Uncle Billy talked to the old woman and pacified her. She was glad to see him, but she also shook her head and cried, seeing how poor he’d become. “Mama,” he said, “don’t you worry about a thing. I’ve got a coupla aces up my sleeve.”
    In fact he was now working for my father in the Hippodrome music store downtown on Sixth Avenue. They went off to the