Too Close to the Falls (4 page)

My father's love affair with the future of technology did not end there. Naturally Mother and I felt some trepidation when Dad announced that he had ordered the ultimate gadget, a box that talked. Our concern was somewhat assuaged when he guaranteed us we would never have to wear it. He had ordered the talking box in 1948, the year of my birth. Every night for years he would
come home from work, jump out of the delivery car, and ask if the talking box had arrived yet. He was assured by letter that he was on the list but they were back-ordered. However, by 1952 even
his
enthusiasm waned and finally he gave up. I'd been waiting for the talking box since birth and didn't know life without waiting for
it
to arrive.

One cold but sunny day in 1953, my mother was standing at the window watering her bearded cactus collection, and I was singing along to a Tex Ritter 78: “There are two little magic words that can open any door with ease, one little word is thanks and the other little word is please.” I heard the eager revving of a truck on the gravel driveway. I ran to the window, where Mom and I saw a huge transport, with a picture on the side of a dog looking askance at an old-fashioned Victrola. Two men in grey one-piece jumpsuits, bearing the same dog insignia on their pockets, unloaded a large wooden crate. The men lumbered under the obviously heavy object, and carried it, sidestepping like skittering crabs, up our front steps. My mother and I exchanged bewildered looks as the doorbell rang.

I opened the door and one sweaty man announced with flair, “RCA Victor with your television!” as though he were Michael Anthony bearing John Beresford Typton's million dollars.

Mom said, “How do you do, Mr. Victor, I'm Mrs. McClure.”

He laughed, saying, “No, I'm Bob. This,” he said, pointing to the television, “is RCA Victor.” I had no idea what a “television” was, but at least now I knew its name.

I watched, as puzzled as the quizzical dog, as they crowbarred open the box, which had a greenish opaque empty picture frame on the front and thousands of multicoloured wires in the back.
Mother and I looked blank, if not downright dubious, having suffered a number of my father's great ideas, while Bob tried to drum up some enthusiasm. “Well, this is the first tel-
e
-vision I've delivered anywhere in Niagara County. We had to travel for six hours to get here today.” While he was describing his odyssey, I again noticed a tiny picture of the strange dog with the neck cramp in the lower right-hand corner of RCA Victor's wooden frame. I told Mother that the picture window had something to do with a dog with a stiff neck. I thought maybe it was a doghouse that plugged in for warmth. She looked alarmed, and then I had another brainwave. I quickly explained to her my new hypothesis, that really you could tell from the name
tell-a-vision
it was like my stereoscopic Viewmaster that I held up to the light, placing round discs in a slot and advancing each picture by pushing a lever. My favourite was Hansel and Gretel; the gingerbread house sparkled when I held the Viewmaster close to my father's desk light.

After unfolding their tool kits, which gracefully parted into cascading trays, they fiddled with the box for hours, one man behind the set with tools and one in front yelling odd phrases like “more horizontal!” They finally packed up and left, and there I was alone in a dark room looking at an Indian in full war headdress in the centre of concentric circles. The Indian obviously felt uncomfortable in my house. He never faced forward but always remained in profile, facing the door, clearly longing to leave. I watched him for a very long time, yet the Indian never moved, nor did he ever turn to look at me. I wanted to leave the room but felt rude abandoning him in
my
house and not entertaining him in any way. Finally, reluctantly, I began speaking to him. Although
he didn't answer directly he listened, much as I imagined a brother or sister might have, if we could have played together.

As the weeks went by and I had already spent hours on my own with the Indian, I began to understand that RCA Victor was indeed something that had altered my life. Clearly I was not alone in finding RCA Victor a mesmerizing phenomenon, for everyone who approached the house, including the milk, dry-cleaning, and grocery deliverymen, made excuses to come in and catch a live moment of the spectacle before them. My favourite visitor was Alexander Hamilton, who drove the bakery truck. (Of course, much was made of his historical lineage, particularly in the Lewiston Centennial Parade when all the men from the town grew beards and wore bowler hats; our own baker, Alexander, dressed in period costume, led the parade in an open Packard convertible next to a woman from Lewiston whose real name was Martha Washington.) Alex arrived every day during
The Guiding Light
and, needing an excuse to sit down, would suggest that I try his sticky buns to make sure they weren't stale as we were the last stop on his route. He even brought a Milkbone for Willie, our dog. Friends of my parents from the village of Lewiston, as well as mere acquaintances who ran farms way out the Ridge Road, came pouring into our living room to pay homage to the talking heads on RCA Victor.

Some evenings we had guests who arrived moments before the Indian left and John Cameron Swayzee came on. John was far different from the Indian in that he actually talked to me and shared his love of favourite products with me. I began to know
him quite well, and much to the amazement of my parents' friends, I was able to predict what he would say and when he would hold up the Camel cigarettes. He often chatted to me about what was going on in the world. He, like my father, was an Eisenhower fan, and showed me lots of pictures of the president and his wife, Mamie. Whenever he showed the Eisenhower snapshots, I held up my “I-like-Ike” button and my mother's white gloves that had the same slogan stamped all over them in tiny red, white, and blue letters.

I was aware that my mother called John's chats “news,” while other people who talked to me on RCA Victor, such as Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan, and Roy Rogers, were called “programs.” I didn't get the distinction. It was all news to me. Mother was completely uninvolved with RCA Victor, and clearly confused because she said things like “Do you believe that Lucy and Desi are married in
real
life?”

My favourites were cowboy programs of any variety. I always wore my cowboy suit for any show like
Roy Rogers
or
The Cisco Kid
. Now that I had the RCA Victor window on the world I began to realize that Indians were really dangerous, and that the Tuscaroras, whose reservation was near Lewiston, must have secret meetings and scalp people in the dead of night, because you never heard about their chief, Black Cloud (it said “Elton Greene” on his prescriptions), the way you heard about Cochise. I assumed the reason Cochise from out west was so visible was because he attacked in the daytime when it was too hard to hide on open plains. The Tuscaroras, on the other hand, could walk through the woods near Devil's Hole and probably through the entire town without making a sound. In fact, I never heard the Indians my
father said were outside of cigar shops in every city. I felt sorry for the westerners in covered wagons who wore those long skirts and bonnets; they always sent scouts ahead to look for Indian war parties. If only they had RCA Victor, they would know that whenever they travelled over the plains they had to look
up
for Indians who waited to ambush them in those craggy mountain rocks. If you lived on a cattle ranch like the Schmidts' cousins you must be very brave and stand watch and make sure you're not surrounded, and a flaming arrow is not thrown into your ranch house by a war party.

Now that I saw what went on the world, I began to understand why my mother didn't want me to go to Shim-Shacks tavern with Roy on the edge of the Tuscarora reservation when we were on delivery. While I'd previously found her trepidation inexplicable, I now realized that the Indians could kidnap me and raise me as one of them and then twenty years later someone would find me and know from my blond hair that I'd been abducted. By the time I was found on the reservation it would be too late to return home because I would have adopted Indian ways.

Not only were there scenes of wagon trains being ambushed, but the
Senator Joe McCarthy Show
was on our RCA Victor. My mother said she didn't like cowboy programs or RCA Victor in general, but she really liked the Joe McCarthy program. Senator McCarthy told me, and a roomful of other people, that nearly everywhere there were communists amongst us; they were people who looked like you and me; they were in local government right up to Washington. His lawyer, Roy Cohn, yelled at communist sympathizers and said things like “I bet” or “This is your
last
chance to tell the truth” when he interrogated traitors. My mother
said that Roy Cohn was rude and that McCarthy needed more information. My father, who usually agreed with her, said that this was “no tea party” and that by the time they got hard evidence it might be too late. The communists had taken over Russia and China and now they were giving the Koreans weapons. They might let off the atomic bomb while we were looking for evidence. Who would have thought to look in a pumpkin for Alger Hiss's spy information? If communists had infiltrated the army and the government, as McCarthy said, then we couldn't be soft on them or we'd all be living on collective farms getting our prescriptions from the state and not allowed to go to mass.

This really terrified me. I remembered Sister Timothy, my kindergarten teacher telling us at nap time, as we lay curled up on our rugs, that the reason the Chinese used chopsticks was so the communists could perforate the ear drums of little Catholic children if they ever heard them pray. I'd never seen a Chinese person, but I pictured them with blood dripping from their earlobes. My friend Donna Ormsby's father was stationed in Formosa with the U.S. Army, and she went to visit him for Christmas. I told her to wear earmuffs. She, like the rest of Lewiston, didn't have RCA Victor to tell her what was really happening.

I began to worry about communists. If my father was right, they were infiltrating everywhere. Mr. Helms, the butcher, once told me that the miracle at Fatima was “bunk” and I'd seen him leaving church for a cigarette right after communion and not waiting for the closing prayers. All of this seemed very suspicious to me and my worst fears were confirmed one day when I overheard a snippet of conversation at Schoonmaker's Restaurant. While my mother waited for our order in the dining room, I had
wandered into the bar to play the bowling game. I also enjoyed lying on my stomach and twirling on the bar stools. While I was swivelling at the long wooden bar, Bill Helms strolled in for a nightcap, and bold as brass asked for a “white Russian.” He hadn't seen me as my head wasn't above bar level; I was lying flat with only my stomach on the stool in a Superman flying position. I sat up and shot him a glance that indicated I didn't need a pumpkin patch to recognize a spy. Clearly he'd been schooled in the art of nonchalance at his spy academy. Pretending nothing was wrong, he went so far as to challenge me to a bowling game with Mr. Schoonmaker. I decided never to be alone with him again. His wife, Betty Helms, was the town reeve and she could be infiltrating the government. I warned my mother that I might have smoked out some communists. She suggested that I never say anything about anyone unless I had absolute proof about them, but my father assured me it didn't hurt to be on our toes. When Father and I went to The Horseshoe for breakfast on the way to work, all the men at the counter talked about the McCarthy show. All the suited Rotarians who were perched in a row on their stools agreed with Loretta's husband, Giuseppe, known to the patrons as “Lorry,” when he poked his head out through the order window and said, as he smashed down the breakfast specials (I always ordered a Cock-a-doodle-doo #3) that it was high time
someone
cleaned up this country before the American flag was no more than a tablecloth.

Although people crowded into our house to watch the McCarthy show, there were far more people over to watch Ed Sullivan. He visited on Sunday at 8:00 p.m. I never understood why people enjoyed his show. He had idiots like Topo Gigio, an
Italian mouse who said about three lines, one of the most inane being “Hey, Eddie, kiss-a-me-goodnight.” I had two questions about that. First, who wanted to be kissed good night by
Ed Sullivan
? Second, why was it funny? Then there was his idiot rival, Pedro, who said, “S'all right? S'all right.” I watched my parents' friends laugh at these antics and I didn't get it.

I never really enjoyed RCA Victor when others were present. It lost its intimacy. In a way it was like praying. When we said the rosary aloud at school it was boring, but when I talked to God on my own in my good-night prayers, after my mother left the room, I felt His presence. What I cherished was my personal interaction with John Cameron Swayzee and, as time went on, I became more and more fond of the Indian who never spoke but with whom I had formed a friendship. While almost everyone else had brothers and sisters to play with early in the morning while parents slept, I had the Indian. No matter what I played I kept him informed with a running monologue.