Love and Other Consolation Prizes(28)

He had new respect for Juju’s profession as he sighed and removed his reading glasses. He thought about what he should say, could say, and what bits he might stitch together to hide the unsavory details of his and Gracie’s peculiar upbringing.

He’d explained how he had ended up at the Tenderloin, and Juju had been enthralled, as well as shocked.

“You mean they actually gave you away?” she had asked, stunned that the rumor she’d pursued had turned out to be true. “Like a barrel of apples or a bushel of corn. How could people do that? That’s beyond ridiculous, that’s cruel.”

“It was a vastly different time,” Ernest had told her with a shrug. He’d come over on a ship with children who were later sold into servitude, so being given to someone of means, by whom he’d also been offered a job and a new life—that had seemed marvelous by comparison, a generous gift of circumstance. “The way I always looked at it,” Ernest had said, “if I hadn’t been taken in by Madam Flora, I might have wound up as a street kid, eventually sent to a poorhouse, or a reform school that was more like a jail, or worse…”

“What could possibly be worse?” Juju had asked.

Ernest had smiled sadly, feeling his eyes glisten as he patted his daughter’s arm. “If I didn’t end up in the Tenderloin, I might never have met your mother.”

Now, he gave up trying to write. It was too late to attempt to rescript the past. Juju had already begun a comparative piece on what the world was like then and now, from the price of a gallon of milk to how women influenced politics. In addition, she’d tracked down dozens of locals who’d been to the AYP—those who were his age and older, men and women who could offer reflections and commentary on the two spectacles more than fifty years apart. The newspaper had named them Special Ambassadors to the Future.

To Ernest, the fairs were merely bookends, sentinels carved from stone, rooted in bedrock, immovable. His life, Gracie’s life, was the mystery caught in between.

That was worth writing about, if only to help Gracie remember the sweet moments, Ernest thought. Not old dirt and certainly not all this new stuff. Not the Cathedral of Science. Not the monorail. Not the Bubble-lift, Bubbleator, Bubble…whatever that elevator-thing was called.

The idea for the fair had originated a few years ago, when Sputnik went “beep-beep-beep” overhead, launching the Space Race. America and Boeing, which was based in Seattle, had been dragged into the future. And what better way to showcase Seattle to the whole wide world (and especially to the Soviets, and the People’s Republic of China, and the North Koreans) than by hosting another epic world’s fair? That’s when the twinges of Ernest’s deeply buried, seismic nostalgia had begun to stir.

Worried that an old news article—possibly even the one Juju had found—might drag him into the frenzy, Ernest had fortified his memories against a tsunami of queries and interviews that never came. With each evening-news broadcast that showcased the construction of the fair along with some old-timer who had been around back then, each starry-eyed, gray-haired recollection that came and went without a mention of his name, Ernest relaxed, relented, and embraced the comfort of his anonymity. If his life were a play, his had been a moment in the spotlight, and then an exit with no applause.

He never suspected his older daughter would be the first to come calling.

Ernest was still staring at the blank page when he heard a knock on the door. He thought that perhaps Juju had come back when he heard a familiar “Pssst!” from the hallway. Ernest sighed, unbolted the locks, opened the door, and was greeted by Pascual. Ernest noted that his friend was decked out in a dark black suit—his only suit. He also had on a tight V-neck sweater worn over a sharp, pressed dickie and a rockabilly necktie, which usually meant one thing.

“Kuya, I’m heading up to the Black and Tan,” Pascual said with a wink.

“I’m pretty busy…” Ernest protested.

“That’s why I thought you might like to come along, brother—take a break. Besides, a single man our age is just a lonely guy looking for trouble. But a pair of dashing old gents—that’s respectable magic.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver flask. “We can drink our way over.”

Ernest was about to say no, that he’d much rather stay in and read a good book, when he remembered that he was supposed to meet Juju tomorrow at the site of the first world’s fair. Suddenly a strong drink sounded irresistible. He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror on his bureau and straightened his tie. He adjusted the double Windsor. Why not? Ernest thought as he buttoned his cuffs and grabbed his coat and hat from a single hook near the door.

Meanwhile his friend splashed a little whiskey in the corner of the hallway. “That’s for the demon.” Pascual grinned, looking like a fifty-year-old schoolboy. He offered the flask to Ernest, who took a large gulp, feeling the alcohol burn his throat. Then the two of them headed downstairs and out the front door into the cool night mist, which smelled like fetid leaves and the rotting pinecones that plugged up storm drains on every corner.

They walked against the tide of swing-shift workers carrying their nighttime lunch pails to the docks and avoided getting run over by delivery bikes laden with Chinese food as they made their way to the neighborhood’s last great jazz club. As they approached, Ernest could hear live music over the sound of rubber tires on wet pavement.