World's Fair Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dusk, I breathed the sharpest coldest air as some draft of incredibly clear and delicious water. In a moment my senses were alert and settled me in a stillness of perception as quiet as the snow. No cars moved, no people were in sight, and then, silently, the streetlamps came on like the assurance of survival of the buried.
    Another day, a Saturday, with the sun shining and two feet of fresh snow on the ground, I discovered Donald and his friends in the backyard. Inspired perhaps by the legendary Admiral Byrd, they had undertaken to build an igloo. I did not usuallyventure into the backyard. It meant first of all going down the alley past Smith’s door. And it was an enclosed space with stone retaining walls on three sides. It was a place to be trapped. At the rear our house and the one across the alley were three stories high and included car garages at basement level. Not that anyone had a car. Over a wood fence on the retaining wall at the back of the yard loomed a tenement with clotheslines strung from all the windows to an enormous creosoted pole planted just behind the wall.
    But with Donald in the backyard, I ran right down. Talking, chattering, arguing, working away with their jackets thrown off, shirttails hanging, woolen watch caps askew, the friends were cutting blocks of snow with one of Smith’s coal shovels and laying out a circular foundation. Their faces were red and their breaths were spouts of steam. As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing; bit by bit, it was eliminating itself as an idea from the light of the sun. I felt that what was being built was not a shelter but some structured withdrawal from the beneficence of the lighted day, and my excitement was for invited darkness, the reckless enclosure, as if by perverse and self-destructive will, of a secret possibility of life that would be better untampered with. I jumped up and down in a kind of ecstasy of my own being, inducing deliberately from my frame a series of spasms of shivers of concentrated awareness. Little by little the light was being blacked out, and when the final block of wet snow was installed at the apex of the hemisphere, my brother, who had been working as the inside man, disappeared entirely.
    I was very impressed. It was a marvel of an igloo for anyone to have built, let alone five or six arguing, pushing, shouting boys. Donald dug his way carefully out the side and then they all built a crawl-through entrance, a kind of hemicylindrical foyer. Then a hose was brought out to play water over the igloo so that it would freeze up hard. Then they punched an air hole in the top with a length of broomstick and the thing was done.
    By the next day the igloo had become the talk of the neighborhood.Not only children but adults came down the alley from the street to have a look at it: Dr. Perlman, our family dentist and friend, who lived in the apartment house across the street; Mrs. Silver’s chauffeur, who lived over the garage of the late Justice’s mansion on the corner; Lieutenant Galardi of the Sanitation Department, who lived on 173rd Street; and several other mothers and fathers I didn’t know by name.
    My mother had donated a square of old carpet and a candle and the five builders had settled in, only sometimes deigning to respond to the importunings of the children outside who wanted a turn. Actually, they soon grew bored of occupying the thing, learning fast enough that the real excitement had been the building of it; but it was almost as good lording it over their friends and those who were younger, designating this or that one to take a turn, and instructing him as to the rules of deportment once he was admitted. For a while they had considered charging admission, but settled instead for barter offered in bribe—one child paying with a small American flag on a stick, which they embedded in the top like Peary at the North