![]() ![]() By the time he’d run back up there were drumming feet overhead and in the halls, the din stilled only momentarily for a statement from the Secretary of the Interior. There was a banging on the floor below-Mrs. “We interrupt this broadcast.” It was the first bulletin. He was bent close to the radio, his eyes on us, but wide and unseeing. Perhaps because he had no singing voice, Pop leaned forward to twist the dial when Nelson Eddy came on to do “Song of the Vagabonds.” “What, Saul,” my mother called from the doorway, giving a wiggle of her hips, “you got something against a little music?” but my father shushed her so sharply I looked up from my books. He was an actuary back then, one of a team of calculators bent over their racketing adding machines, but he dreamed of being an agent-“to assure people, Edith, to calm their fears.” Sipping his scotch, my father repeated the punchline to himself, chuckling, but also in his careful way-his striving, immigrant way-rehearsing it in case he might be able to use the witticism himself at his office. ![]() Tonight Edgar was promising Charlie a ghost story.īERGEN: Say, Charlie, do you like spooky tales?ĬHARLIE: Sure! They scare me out of my wits. I’d pointed out to my father a ventriloquist act on radio was no great shakes, but he didn’t care. It would bark a warning if anything was happening in Europe.īut until then we had Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. When I explained it to Milt, I told him that to Pop, the radio was like a guard dog. “A kind of insurance, is what it is.” (He was in insurance, himself, though, if he remembered he affected to call it assurance, after the British fashion). “You think the radio’s for what, boys? Fun only?” he asked. And indeed, that month we’d listened gravely to the report of the Munich crisis, Germany’s entry to the Sudetenland interrupting The Hound of the Baskervilles, my mother bowing her head, my father murmuring darkly, “Didn’t I say so?” (There’s a comfort, I suppose, in our worst fears coming true-a sense of control amid the chaos it’s what we can’t foresee that shocks most deeply.) Milty and I were allowed to listen to ball games-Milt still forbidden to touch the radio, while I handled the dial as gingerly as a safe-cracker listening to the tumblers in a lock-but it was understood that if my father needed to listen to something, no matter the score, no matter the inning, he could change the station. The “situation in Europe,” as they called it, was worsening. The radio, I knew, had been bought for the news-that’s how my parents justified the expense ($19.95, from Cantor the Cabinet King on Radio Row-my father bequeathed me the nickel change for carrying it home from Cortlandt Street). There remained some ritual to this, some formality-we’d only had the radio, a Truetone, for a year (prior to that we’d squeezed into the Zukers’ to listen to their set on special occasions like the inauguration in ’33), and no one ever spoke over it-so it still startled me to hear my father belly-laughing at Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I’d come in from my troop meeting and was finishing my civics homework at the kitchen table, still in uniform, while my mother put Milt to bed and my father poured the one scotch and soda he allowed himself each week and prepared to settle down to “The Chase and Sanborn Hour” on NBC. It had been a mild fall day, chill but bright under vaulted blue skies that offered no hint of the threat to come now it was evening. Zuker, the seamstress in the apartment below, thump on the ceiling with her yardstick whenever he crossed the floor. I was fourteen that fall, the tan of summer camp fading from my forearms, and back in the city, in the cramped railroad flat on the lower east side I shared with my parents and my younger brother Milt-Milt-the-stilt, as I was calling him then he’d busted his leg sliding into home in the district championship game and was clumping around in a cast that made Mrs. We can run from what we fear, but we carry the shame of running with us. ![]() Fear is not the only thing we have to fear. They’re going to kill me if they get hold of me.įDR was my boyhood hero-long before the New Deal, as President of the New York City Boy Scouts Association, he’d founded the Ten Mile River Youth Camp near Narrowsburg, where I spent the happiest weeks of my young life-yet, I can’t agree with him. Short fiction by Peter Ho Davies from our Fall 2011 issue. ![]()
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