A Moment in the Sun (119 page)

T’would fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss

But I know that a dozen I never would miss!

Harry and the other visitors, slightly embarrassed, look to the dozen or so children in their party, the only ones still rapt in the illusion now that they have left the realms of Galactic Flight for that of Music Hall. There are adults, he knows, who will only visit the movie parlors if they bring their children with them, some lingering unease at giving themselves up to the gossamer images on the screen.

I’ll go up in a great big balloon

And see my sweetheart in the moon

Then behind some dark cloud, where no one’s allowed

I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon!

They lose Harry in the Palace. It is only a proscenium, however elaborately decorated, the giants seemingly bored, the tumbling dwarves no better than circus performers, the Moon Pageant replete with shifting scenery and flashing colored lights but without dramatic tension, the greenish gorgonzola offered by beaming Moon-Maids more than he can stomach this early in the day. Moving, projected views, he thinks, to replace the lantern slides. They can only be tinted, of course, till the color problem is solved, but think of the illusion, think of the impact, if while you are being moved forward in a vehicle all that you see from the front and side portals has been filmed in some foreign capital or natural vista! You could tour the streets of Mexico from any city in the States, and never step out of the carriage.

The show ends with a promise of friendship between peoples. “Just as the nations of North and South America have come together at this great Exposition,” says the Man in the Moon, “thus shall the citizens of my realm be ever bonded with those of your planet Earth.”

They exit through the shadowy gorge and jaws of a dragon-like creature called a Moon Calf onto the raucous, steaming Midway. Just one entrance down is the Old Plantation, a glimpse, as the brochure describes it, of the sunny South before the War. Sweat begins to run down Harry’s forehead from his hat brim. He wonders how they keep it so cool on the moon. Dozens of spectators, yankees, are flowing through the doorway of the “mansion” that fronts the exhibit. Harry checks his pocket watch, digs out a quarter, and follows them in.

Pretty, ringletted girls in stiff pastel dresses greet the visitors, all smiles and coquetry. Harry has been to gala occasions something like the one presented in the chandeliered ballroom they pass into, Sally’s coming out for one, though never with a colored band playing
Dixie
, and certainly never with so many colorful fans fluttering in ladies’ hands. There are unpainted slave quarters out back, along with log cabins claimed to have been occupied by Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Davis, and a swarm of negroes unlike any he’s ever encountered, even in South Carolina. Cotton-headed old uncles, pipe-smoking aunties doing wash and spinning yarn, clean but raggedy children running everywhere. Men and women stoop and pick cotton in several rows planted at the far end of the compound, several pale women with parasols watching intently. One knot of white visitors gathers around two little boys doing a frantic, barefoot buck-and-wing to the ministrations of a grinning banjo player, while others ring an old man sitting on a porch chuckling and giggling and slapping his knee with every response to their queries. Harry drifts over by a young fellow filling buckets of water from a hand pump.

“Good morning.”

“Mornin to you, Cap’m,” replies the young man, touching two fingers to his forehead in salute but continuing to pump.

“Where you folks from?”

“Oh,” he sighs, straightening to look around at his fellow Plantation dwellers, “mostly it’s Georgia, Alabama, M’ssippi. Me, I’m fum Valdosta.”

“You stay here at night?”

“Mostly, yassuh.”

Harry looks over toward the pickers. “That cotton,” he says, “what happens when it’s all been harvested?”

The hint of a smile tugs at the water boy’s mouth. “Well, Mr. Skip who run the Plantation, he bring in another patch by’an’by, but most mornins we gots to get up an stick them bolls back in the plants fore they open up the fair.”

“That seems like an awful lot of trouble.”

“Yessuh, an that’s why he got him some per
fess
ional niggers like us. You see them what’s wanderin around the Midway, fum this yere Buffalo? That ain but
am
aters.”

“I see.” They both turn as the toothless old man on the porch emits a particularly high-pitched cackle, rocking back and forth in mirth as he entertains a growing crowd of yankees.

“That Laughin’ Ben. He ain right,” says the water boy, touching his temple with a finger. “But the white fokes sure love him.”

“I can see that.”

“You not fum up here neither, is you, Cap’n?”

“North Carolina.”

The boy nods. “Thas one of them in-between states. We run through it on the train.”

Harry bids him good day and manages to reach the exit just as the pickers and spinners and tale-tellers all drop what they’re doing to join the eleven o’clock cakewalk. His leg is hurting him, sharp pains running from ankle to hip, and he has perspired through to his vest.

At least, he thinks, pushing hard with his cane to make time through the crowded Mall, they haven’t included an Irish Pavillion.

He finds Paley still in the restaurant, comparing the apple and cherry pie selections.

“Anything good?”

“The Trip to the Moon—”

“It’s on my list,” says Daddy, extricating himself from the table. “But Skip Dundy wants a fortune to shoot it.”

“I had another idea. What if we were to stage a battle in the Filipino Vil-lage? They’ve got huts, palms trees, a lagoon with canoes, real Filipinos—”

“And who’s going to ask the Boss for the money to do that? There’s woods in Jersey, right near the shop.”

“If we’re going to stay competitive—”

“When Mr. Edison’s lawyers finish their business,” says the cameraman, helping arrange the apparatus and tripod on Harry’s shoulder, “we won’t
have
any competition.”

“But think of the excitement it would add, the verisimilitude.” Harry has pictured the view in his mind. A young captain, maybe even Niles himself, leading a desperate charge into the village as
insurrectos
leap from the huts to fire at them. And then a shot—the roller chair could be employed here—as if the viewer himself was running through the melee, native rebels firing directly at him—

“We’ve nabbed Aggy, my friend. That war’s over.” Paley stabs a last forkful of pie and snaps it down. “We’d better get over to the Esplanade.”

The Assassin watches him approach, preceded by marching bands and squadrons of cavalry, snug in his open victoria pulled by four glistening steeds, waving affably to the cheering citizens who line the Causeway. The Assassin leans on one of the piers till the carriage has passed, then joins the throng across the flag-draped Triumphal Bridge in pursuit.

Idolatry. The word has been pressed in his mind since his entrance this morning. The dreaming woman’s massive face, the Sphinx over the Beautiful Orient, Cleopatra, the Baker’s Chocolate maiden, the Goddess of Light perched on the Electric Tower, the kindly President in his silk top hat and frock coat—this is the Pantheon of false gods, and these poor, deluded sleepwalkers have come to worship them.

Applause as he climbs down from his carriage, is led onto the platform that has been set up in the Esplanade. The Assassin tries to move forward through the multitude as the Expostion head introduces the President. People are hot, ladies have their parasols open against the noonday sun, all are pressing forward to see closer, hear better. More applause as he rises, begins to speak. The words are unclear at this distance. The Assassin passes the men he saw in the gondola, now with their tripod mounted on what look like apple boxes to see over the crowd, the fat one with his eye pressed tight to it, cranking all the while. A man in a suit silently moving his lips on a platform decked with bunting that will be without color. Pointless idolatry. Men glare as the Assassin pushes between them. He can make out words now, but still they make no sense. He comes to a wall of policemen, standing face to the crowd, hands folded behind their backs, immobile. Expressionless. More statues. The grounds are full of statues, heroic statues, allegorical groupings, Indians in wax and wood, massive bear and buffalo and moose and elk, statues representing Labor and Capital and Motherhood and Bounty. The Shield of Despotism, this grouping could be called, or The Blue Wall of Tyranny.

The Assassin pushes up to look between their shoulders. If he is lucky it might work from here. But no, one of the statues is staring at him.

“Take a step back, Bud,” says the policeman. “Yer crowdin me.”

Rapturous applause as the President finishes his address, as hands are shaken on the platform, as bemedaled John Philip Sousa himself leads his band in
The Stars and Stripes Forever
. The President starts down from the platform and the crowd behind pushes the Assassin toward him. He reaches into his pocket, closing his hand around the little pistol. Maybe, maybe—but the Blue Wall holds fast, pushing back as McKinley is escorted away in a phalanx of security agents for his tour of the Exposition.

“Easy, folks,” calls the burly copper. “He’ll be back tomorrow to shake hands.”

The Assassin drifts away then, throwing looks back over his shoulder at the official party, counting bodyguards. A man seems to be watching him, following. A blue-eyed man with a moustache and a bowler tilted on his head, a gold-headed walking stick resting casually on his shoulder. The Assassin hurries through the dispersing crowd, pulling his watch out to look at it as if he is late for an appointment, bathed in sweat now, the rubbing bodies of the multitude, the noon sun, the fate of the future in his pocket. He struggles back down the Mall, past the little Acetylene Exhibit, a man shouting the praises of the Wonder Gas even as hundreds turn into the massive Electricity Building across the way, flicking a look back to see that the watcher is still there, closer now, feigning inattention but definitely following. How can they know? How can they know? And the Assassin cuts sharply left and trots into the welcoming coolness of the Infant Incubators.

It is mostly women in the building. The nurses, of course, in their white uniforms, and then a dozen female spectators of various ages, cooing and whispering over the babies in their steel and glass ovens.

“Poor, dear things,” says one in a dress of black crepelike material. “I can’t imagine they’ll be normal.”

“Our graduates do very well,” responds a nurse, transferring one of the tiny, monkey-face creatures from incubator to a basket in a dumbwaiter shaft. “Those that survive.”

“You’ve lost some, then?”

“A few. Less than one out of ten.”

“God wanted them.”

“God is in no hurry,” says the nurse. “They just died, and their mothers were distraught.” She presses a button and waits while the basket is drawn out of sight, then turns to the watching women. “Every two hours each child is changed and fed.”

The Assassin walks along the machines, peering in at the infants, mindful of the entrance door. The man has not followed him in.

“No matter what their weight, Dr. Couney believes that a warm, clean environment is the key to these babies’ survival. Until the hospitals in this country accept his findings,” the nurse spreads her arms to indicate the exhibit, “here we are.”

“I don’t think I could bear having my child in a side-show hatchery,” says a young woman making a pained face as she stares in through a porthole.

The nurse smiles politely. “Let’s hope you never have to, then. Please tell your friends who visit the Exposition about us,” she says brightly to the others in the room. “Your quarters make our efforts possible.”

America, thinks the Assassin, watching a discolored, pint-sized creature struggle for breath, translucent eyelids fluttering but never quite opening. Even the infants have to earn their keep.

Harry spends the afternoon touring the more educational exhibits. Graphic Arts, Ethnology, Machinery and Transportation, the state and foreign buildings. All very informative but nothing active enough for the camera lens. They’ll do the Indian Congress tomorrow, maybe get the President with Red Cloud or Geronimo, and film the mock battle with the cavalry in the Stadium. Evening brings more young couples to the Pan, strolling hand-in-hand to Venice in America and taking the boat ride, swaying together by the many bandstands listening to waltzes, sitting in the Plaza by the Sunken Garden. There is a casual anonymity here, an escape from judgment. Not that he is ever ashamed to be seen with Brigid, but—

As the sun sets most of those still strolling the grounds make their way back to the Esplanade. The speakers’ platform is now serving as a reviewing stand for the President and his entourage, gazing with thousands of his constituents across the Court of the Fountains toward the Electric Tower, waiting for the Illumination.

It begins at the very edge of dusk.

The doors of the Temple of Music have been thrown open and the Great Organ within, joined outside by Sousa’s band, begins to play
The Star-Spangled Banner
, slowly building power and volume. The lamps set low around the fountains dim, as do the streetlamps. Then, starting with the Electric Tower and the larger structures, lights begin to glow, faint and pink at first, just a few of them, then more, outlining the buildings, outlining the fountains, edging the heroic statues, growing in number and intensity as the crowd sighs as one, and then as the last blush of sun fades from the sky the whole Exposition blazes forth in golden effulgence as the organist strikes a mighty chord and the people are cheering and applauding and thrilled to be here for this wonder, light all around them, a city of light, and if the Airship could indeed make the voyage Harry has no doubt you would see this beautiful light from the moon.

It isn’t over, though, not tonight. As the organ’s last note echoes away there is another mass sigh—spitting, sparkling fires of green, red, blue, and gold flame up at the four corners of the fairgrounds, and then hundreds of balloons, somehow glowing from within, are released at once and float above the light-adorned buildings of the Pan, followed by a barrage of rockets, a hundred of them streaking and screaming up from all sides and then larger rockets exploding, shrieking horizontal to the ground with silver and gold comet tails streaming after and
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
rainbow starbursts in the air and Harry almost breathless with it, the crowd gasping and oohing and aahing like a great enraptured creature and he aches to have her with him at this moment, Brigid beside him, longs to see her face lit by these colors, to feel her pulse quicken, the radiance of her unstudied delight. Fireworks are exploding now to form the colorful flags of the South American nations taking part in the Exposition and he wonders what the Judge would think, can feel the tone of Niles’s dismissive banter like a twinge down his spine and
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
each bombardment more spectacular than the last, shells bursting into flowering patterns and beginning to fade just as
BOOM! BOOM!
the next barrage begins, raining parachutes now that swing down slowly toward the earth with ruby globes sizzling beneath them, pouring multi-hued lightning over the Rainbow City from the black sky and he vows to himself, Harry Manigault vows that he will come back to this place with her, that they will see the Falls as man and wife like so many of these beaming, cheering Americans around him have done before and a band begins to play, Sousa’s band again and
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
the ground trembles as four mighty bombs explode, one forming an outline of the United States, one forming the outline of Cuba, one of Porto Rico, and the last spattering into smaller shells that pop into a myriad of Philippine islands. We should have the camera here, thinks Harry, something of this would register on the nitrate.
KABOOM!
a last, earth-shaking explosion, directly above the Tower, and then a gunfire crackling as a thousand tiny balls ignite while they hang in the air to make a portrait of their beloved leader, the one who has brought them to prosperity, to victory, to this glorious new century, and Harry wonders if they are watching in the Filipino Village and the Indian Congress and in the red-dirt courtyard of the Old Plantation, wonders what those dusky, vanquished peoples feel as they gaze upon this majesty—