Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  I thought, without gratitude, Maybe Hattie has saved my life.

  When the Carter and Sharp radio show went on the air (Tuesday nights at seven, shipped overseas via Armed Forces Radio), Penny wanted a part. Fred Allen had hired his wife, why not Rocky?

  Because he’d never do anything that Fred Allen did.

  Okay, then, like Jack Benny.

  No, said Rocky.

  I don’t know why he was so adamant, though it was true that Penny wouldn’t have been right: our sponsors, the manufacturers of Cape’s Turkish soap, wanted the show bubble light and cheerful, and Penny torch-sang everything, even “Keep Your Sunny Side Up.” Compared to Penny, Marlene Dietrich was Helen Kane.

  Rocky adored radio, where you could stand with your script and the audience could recognize and love even the plainest ad-lib. My mike fright was a little better than it had been on the Vallee show. Mostly, I worried about getting the giggles, then I discovered that the audience loved it when I got the giggles. They thought that was hysterical. The only time I became incapacitated was the night our soundman showed up drunk—his wife had just left him—and for every single sound effect clattered the hoof-beat coconuts. A visitor knocks: clippety-clop. Rocky walks to the door: clippety-clop. We’re riding around in the car, and I tell him to hit the horn; Rocky extracts a kiss from the vocalist; I fall down the stairs: here comes the cavalry, every single time. I could hardly breathe after the first ten minutes, and maybe we should have sent the guy home, but it was so funny.

  “Hey, Rocky,” I said, “you sound a little horse.”

  “Must you always be such a naysayer?” he answered.

  The radio show allowed Rocky to finally kidnap my sisters. He did it behind my back. He convinced the writers that he should be the only boy from a large family.

  “Six beautiful sisters!” he said to me, breaking the news, but who was he fooling? Beautiful sisters wouldn’t be funny.

  “Why can’t I keep my own sisters?”

  “Because,” said Rocky, “you’re the straight man. Six sisters is a punch line, not a setup.” They even named Rocky’s fictional sisters after mine, though they changed Hattie to Betty after I insisted. Maybe I should have also insisted on changing the other names, but we did need the gags—if you came up with enough running jokes, your audience felt in cahoots with you, and they’d keep tuning in.

  Rocky’s sisters loved him. They knit him six-armed sweaters. They baked him sugarless, eggless, butterless, tasteless Victory cookies that, when you bit into them, made a sound like a struck gong. Soon enough, they were as famous as he was: they got fan mail. Reporters wrote articles about them. They assumed the sisters were real. Why would someone make up siblings, just for a laugh? On the other hand, who really had six sisters? I was, radio-wise, a guy without a family. Rocky was the guy with too much, including a protective mother who hated me. “Listen, Mr. So-called Sharp,” she’d say to me, “you leave Lovey alone.” (Both halves of that sentence became catchphrases.) The fictional Mrs. Carter loved her son so much that she got in fistfights (the soundman hit the pages of an open dictionary with a damp glove) with everyone: me; Bill Thomas, our announcer; Loretta Patchett, the vocalist; and a slew of guest stars, including Lana Turner, Jack Benny, Don Ameche, and Joe Louis.

  Do you have to ask who won?

  I felt like I was cheating on my real sisters with another pack of girls. Their letters didn’t mention their radio counterparts. They said, simply, that they’d listened to the show, and that I was very funny. Would Pop listen, I wondered. Then I thought: Annie makes him, because one of the sisters is named Rose, that forbidden name suddenly spoken in the house again. And then, as it happened, Rose’s ill-fated marriage to the Roman Catholic met its ill fate; Quigley-less, she’d come back to Vee Jay. If you wanted to cast a spell over Rose, of course you used the radio: her name was said aloud in the parlor, and like any ghost, she was summoned back. She sent me a letter: you can write to me here, now. Picture me in the parlor, listening to you. My father forgave her, because he’d been proved right.

  “Rocky!” people yelled on the street. “How are your sisters?”

  “Unmarried!” he yelled back. “What are you looking for? We got ’em in all sizes.”

  Undraftable and overpaid as I was, my own war was pretty glamorous, despite myself. In 1942, the year I turned thirty-one, I had money in the bank and money in my pockets. I volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen. I dated starlets and would-be starlets. Every Tuesday night at seven, people tuned in to hear my mockable, quavering voice say, “What will we do with you, Rocky, what will we do?” And in Lithuania, forty thousand Jews in the town of Vilna were killed, some shot in their homes and some taken into the Ponary Forest and exterminated there, but they were all killed, including those related to a man who had once been called Jakov Shmuel Sharensky.

  I didn’t know that then. As I said, in my line of work, we did not discuss killing, only rescues.

  Everyone Dances Underwater

  There were days when I came home, and, having spent hours going Yipes! Duck in this alleyway; here comes the sarge! could not shake it. I went Yipes through the door, Yipes to the kitchen, Yipes into bed under the covers, my shoulders up around my ears and my arms fluttering like the flightless bird I was.

  So to soothe my nerves, I bought things, including—at Rocky’s urging—a house. (On our radio show, we joked about the housing shortage. We just never suffered from it.) The lady agent showed me a five-year-old white stucco house in North Hollywood, with a flat-topped Spanish-style roof that seemed impractical; I told her so: what about snow? Would you have to shovel it off so it wouldn’t cave in your ceilings?

  She looked at me. She looked at the sky. She looked at the palm trees that lined the street.

  Yes, that’s right: California. I laughed and pulled out my checkbook. You could stroll across that roof like a park if you wanted. Safe. Anyone who wanted to hurt herself here would have to jump, I thought.

  I hadn’t given much thought to the house itself, which God knows was more room than I needed, but I was like someone who’d starved as a kid: all I wanted was space. I’d grown up in a house crowded with people; I’d roomed in broom closets all my years on the road. Sometimes, in vaude houses, dazzled by the space and high ceilings, I’d daydream about moving onto the stage, or even into one of the boxes that overlooked it—maybe I’d install a Murphy bed to pull down from the wall, an invention I’d only seen in movies, where they behaved like dragons accustomed to a steady diet of sleepers. My new place—not quite a mansion, but pretty close—had six bedrooms, and five bathrooms, and a whole variety of rooms in which to live and dine and recreate and play games, and all for me. Dimly I thought, Well, kid, if you ever marry you can fill the place up; mostly I judged it a hell of a spot for assignations.

  There had been nothing in my childhood home newer than the nineteenth century except some of the people: I wanted a place where everything was new and modish and luminous. That was how I decorated: mirrors everywhere, setting like suns and rising like moons; slim tables with blue glass tops. A martini cart trembling with glasses.

  Rocky and Penny bought a bona-fide Beverly Hills mansion that had belonged to a suicided silent movie director. The place was as fountainous as Rome: in every corner on the grounds, there was something or someone cast in concrete and spitting. They had two swimming pools and a tennis court and a guesthouse and bathrooms for days and days. Their greatest regret was that because of the manpower shortage, they couldn’t build on more bathrooms. Happily, the place came with a movie theater already, and they added a popcorn machine and moved in a soda fountain by the main swimming pool. Rocky, fondly remembering that cellar in Milwaukee, put in a bar in the basement and hired, before any other household help, a bartender, a wonderful old Portuguese guy named Bobby who wore his hair in a dyed black pageboy and mixed weaker and weaker drinks as the night wore on. Penny wanted a Ferris wheel, though Rocky was putting that off. They threw parties downstai
rs, and invited everyone—crew guys from our movies, people who Penny had met in stores, soldiers on leave. Rocky vowed that he’d never forget what it was like to be a regular working stiff—though when was he ever?—which to his mind meant laying out as much cash as it took to get the working stiffs dead drunk. Sometimes the parties would start with dinner; mostly, they’d start with drinks and end with breakfast for whoever was left standing. The soda fountain had a giant grill, and we would emerge from the smoky basement and go out to the pool, the sky the color of a dress that Penny wanted. Rocky would scramble dozens and dozens of eggs.

  Sometimes then, five in the morning, Penny would sing. She missed her New York nightclubs, and tried her best to re-create them in the silk jersey dawn. Band members still among the living would gamely try to play along with her. Lately, she had acquired a taste for blues numbers full of murder:

  I love you like a razorblade

  I love you like a knife

  I love you like a Gatling gun

  You love me like a wife.

  Or:

  Poppa, don’t push me.

  I’ve killed men before.

  You’ll be kissing the threshold

  If you walk toward that door.

  An unsavory song over scrambled eggs. It seemed just right.

  Some nights I brought over a lady comic I’d met at the Hollywood Canteen named Sukey Decker. We were pals. Sukey was bucktoothed to that narrow margin of beauty between forgettable and unfortunate: with some effort she could make herself look comic straight on, but she couldn’t help her gorgeous profile. Lovely figure, too, the kind that comics trace in the air with the flats of their hands, saying zowie or hubba hubba. The movies didn’t know what to do with her; she would pal around with the leading lady and crack wise and only show her legs as a burlesque punch line. On radio, and later on TV, she did well. Her shtick was a kind of world-weary man-hunger. Her voice was like that, too, low and slightly soft around the edges: hearing it was like tasting expensive candy. Till then, you’d never realized how lousy most candy was.

  The four of us often ended up at Rocky’s basement bar and smoked cigarettes and insulted each other and drank too much. “What time is it?” Penny would ask, unable to see the clock over the bar. “Tomorrow,” Rocky would answer: nine in the morning, or ten. “A little eye-opener never hurt anyone,” said Sukey, who could outdrink us or anyone.

  I like Sukey a lot. As far as we knew, she’d never married. She didn’t even go with anyone, though on the radio she joked that she could do without silk and nylon and meat and gas and sugar, but the man shortage was about to kill her.

  “She likes me,” said Rocky one drunken tomorrow morning, though that wasn’t true. She hated him; she only came to his parties because he had great taste in musicians. But Sukey fascinated Rocky. “What’s her story?” he asked me, though Sukey was sitting next to him. He hooked an arm around her neck.

  “Who knows?” I said.

  “Okay, sweetheart.” He pulled her in and kissed the top of her head. “You tell me your story.”

  “What story?” she asked.

  “Boyfriends,” he said, giving her a wobbly gesture that meant, Do you have any?

  “I’m allergic,” she said.

  Sukey was like a high elevation: when she was around you, you got drunker quicker. Penny was already drowsing like the dormouse on the edge of the bar. “You’re afraid,” Rock said, sloppy and sage.

  “Of what?”

  “Men,” said Rocky, in a pure imitation of how Sukey as a leading lady’s best friend would have said it, equal parts contempt and longing. That he managed this was a coincidence, the way sometimes the third verse of a long-forgotten song will come cresting into your brain on too much whiskey.

  Sukey laughed. “You sadden me,” she said. “You amuse me. But you don’t frighten me.”

  “Okay,” said Rocky, “sex. You’re afraid of.”

  “Oh, sex. No, I’m not afraid of sex. I’m all for sex. Sex doesn’t give me a second’s pause. Sex?” she said. “Sex is swell.”

  “Good,” said Rocky, puzzled.

  “But romance,” said Sukey, “mortifies me.”

  Sukey liked me fine as a friend, and I pretended that the feeling was mutual, that all I longed for was her company and clever wit and the occasional firm handshake. Really, I wanted to get her into bed. I mean, not just into bed, because I also loved her company and clever wit; it’s just that her firm handshake tortured me with its possibilities. I suspected that the Professor had monkey-wrenched my love life: she would have gone for me if I’d been a leading man. I decided I could wait her out. She wasn’t your usual girl; she required unusual tactics. But Sukey seemed quite immune to my charms. In retrospect I’d say she was immune to charm, period; she hated anything that smacked of pretense or practice. She was a devout cynic, which meant that only naïve sincerity could melt her heart. In other words, she adored Penny and her five-in-the-morning declarations of homicide. Sweetheart, I’ll stab you/Tangled up in my bedding./I want to cry at your funeral/Not at your wedding.

  “She’s like a cartoon girl,” Sukey once told me, and I realized who Penny had always reminded me of: certain female impersonators who’d studied girlishness. “Betty Boop,” Sukey called Penny, who giggled and showed her garters. The four of us mostly palled around together at Rocky’s place, because Sukey did not want to be photographed next to me at a nightclub with a caption that only said the truth, but suggested much more: Funnyman Mike Sharp and Funnylady Sukey Decker, out on the town, insist they’re “Just Friends.”

  Penny finally ordered a Ferris wheel when Rock and I were out on a bond drive, and one Sunday she invited Sukey and me over for its inaugural spin. We had cocktails by the pool, under its empty turning shadow. Penny kept trying to talk me onto it.

  “Keep talking,” I told her.

  She wore a green top with slim green pants and green shoes, and lay across Rock’s lap on a chaise longue. She looked like a piece of parsley on the blue plate special. “Suit yourself,” she said sleepily.

  Then she rolled to her feet and put her hands out to Sukey, Will you dance, and Sukey took them in agreement. That was one of the loveliest things about Penny: she’d ask anyone to dance, old men and grandmas and five-year-olds and homely single women, though this might be because all of the above looked the same, to Penny; what she could see, from across the room, were shoulders shifting longingly in time to the rhythm.

  “It Had to Be You” played on the portable record player. Penny was the stronger dancer, and so she tried to use her advantage to force Sukey into leading. This ploy failed, but they looked lovely dancing together, in time but out of step. Both of them wore giant Andrews Sisters rolled hairdos; Sukey had on a fascinating halter top and a pair of camel-colored bell-bottoms. Penny placed her hand on the knot that held up Sukey’s top.

  Soon enough, Rocky stood up and offered his hands to me. We danced. Next to each other awhile, then arm-in-arm, both of us self-conscious but not embarrassed: we were men who’d danced together plenty onstage and in the movies. According to Rocky, heavy guys were always great dancers, because they flung themselves around to music at an early age to get a laugh and found out they liked it.

  He started to sing: “When Mose Sharp was booooorn, ’mid Iowa coooooooorn . . .” Then he swiveled me around and dipped me one way. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Penny threaten to untie Sukey’s halter top. Maybe that’s what threw me off balance when Rocky suddenly dipped me the other way. I fell through his arms and into the pool. On the other hand, he might have dropped me on purpose, for a laugh. I still don’t know.

  Gravity must have treated me like any other heavy object—the seat of my pants must have gotten wet before the tips of my fingers as Rocky let go of them—but in my memory I’m a character in a comic strip: panel one, dancing on the deck with Rocky. Panel two, suddenly underwater—it wasn’t that I’d forgotten that I couldn’t swim; I’d forgotten that swimming was something
you wanted to do, if you ended up in a pool. The water yanked at my necktie, the bottom of my jacket, as though it planned to make me presentable. Panel three: a half a dozen hands slip into my various pockets to lift me up. Panel four: I’m on the deck, lying on my back, surrounded by people who want to give me artificial respiration but are laughing too hard.

  The sky beyond them looked as hard as the tile under me. I felt pinned down by my wet clothes, but full of life. If I’d been in a movie, I would have sat up, spit out a mouthful of water, and removed a goldfish from my pocket.

  “Can’t you swim?” Sukey asked.

  “Not a stroke!” I said cheerfully. “I could have drowned!”

  We were all giggling. Well, they giggled; I laughed and wept at the same time as they hauled me to my feet, trying to slap the water out of my clothes, out of my toupee, which had kept half a toehold on my head. Who cared? I wasn’t vain: I was alive!

  “I could have drowned!” I told Sukey.

  “You didn’t,” she said. She removed my wig and tucked it in her handbag, which set us all to laughing harder.

  There wasn’t a stitch of clothing anywhere in any of the dozens of closets in that house that would have fit me. I was folded into Rock’s oversized toweling robe, and then folded into the passenger’s side of my Buick, a gift from the studio in late 1941, just before the manufacturers quit production on civilian vehicles.

  “I could have drowned!” I kept saying. “I could have drowned!”

  Rocky leaned into the car. “You would have figured out how to swim eventually.”

  Sukey drove me to my house, as always relatively sober. “How will you get home?” I asked her, and she said that we’d figure that out later. Meaning: I drove her home the next morning, because she spent the night with me. At first I was still shocky and sodden from the pool, and then I was shocky and sodden from Sukey. She’d helped me into the house and into my bedroom, at which point I turned to her and said, “For God’s sake, Suke, don’t leave me alone.” “You’re all right,” she said, but I think she saw the look on my face that said I wasn’t. “I could have drowned,” I said, my hands reaching for her but lost in the sleeves of the robe, “I could have drowned,” and she told me to shut up, and then she shut me up.