Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “You don’t understand.”

  I found, on my desk, a folder of publicity photos, waiting for a pair of signatures. Carter and Sharp in a mock fight; Carter and Sharp doing their radio show; Carter and Sharp leaning on their canvas-backed chairs, not speaking to each other but looking like the best of pals. It had been years since I’d been photographed alone.

  “What don’t I understand?” asked Jessica.

  “He threatened my wife.”

  “Okay,” she said reasonably. “You’re mad. Be mad a while, that’s fine. And the act’s broken up, that’s fine too. You’re too old, the two of you, if not this year, then the next. But what you have to remember is, it’s going to be easier for you. It’s going to be hell on him.”

  I turned back to my desk and shrugged. A little hell would be the least that he deserved.

  “He’s my friend too,” she said.

  I said, “He’s not anyone’s friend.”

  Shortly after the fight, in April of 1954, my sister Sadie’s husband died, and we went to Des Moines for the funeral. He’d had a heart attack, and then another—the second, according to Sadie, because he was so worried over the first. The service was the right amount of sad: Abe, sixty-five, had gone prematurely but not tragically. He’d had four weeks after the first attack to spend with his wife and his kids and his grandkids. Enough time for sentiment and good-byes. We’d miss him, we would, we’d already told him so. Still, I wished I’d given him a part in a movie, the way I’d promised all those years ago.

  April in Iowa. It wasn’t Paris, but it would do. I took a snapshot of Jessica in front of the State Capitol, the wind in her hair and four-year-old Gilda in her arms. Jess is wearing a dark jacket with white piping, a little scarf tied at her neck; you can see the breeze trying to peek under Gilda’s Peter Pan collar. They look as though they’re in Rome, in front of a building filled with old masters. I couldn’t remember what Hattie had looked like at Gilda’s age, but I imagined it had been like this, the same copper curls, the same slight baby overbite and soft cheeks. A kid in love with her parents. She can’t decide which way to look, at her mother who holds her or her father who says, “Gilda, will you smile?” even though she already is. Sometimes I had to remind myself not to blame Gilda for all the people she made me miss: my mother, Hattie, Betty. She was an altogether goofier kid than her sister (she did not even know she’d had a sister then), made happier by goofier things. A make-up baby. She took the job seriously.

  “Look at the birdie,” I said. What birdie? She looked at the sky. I snapped the picture. Then she jumped from her mother’s arms and ran up the State House lawn to join her brothers, who were rolling down the hill like loose barrels. I had Jake’s glasses in my breast pocket, so they wouldn’t be crushed.

  “You know,” I said to Jess, “we could move back here.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. She took the camera from my hands and looked around, not taking pictures, as though it was a pair of binoculars.

  “I’m not. We have a family. You could reopen your studio. We could join the temple. Our kids could roll down hills.”

  “You’re not going to stay retired. You know that.”

  “Depends on what Rocky does.”

  She lowered the camera and sighed. She had told me and told me he’d never see through his threats. My believing otherwise could only be stubbornness.

  The kids came down in the same order, chronological, every time: Jake, Nathan, Gilda, picking up speed till they ended up in a pile at our feet, then running away to tumble again. Gilda rolled up onto the toes of my shoes. I lifted her by the ankles. “What’s this?” I said. I answered one of her saddle shoes like a telephone. “Hello? Hello? This is a very poor connection.” Then I swung her back and forth like a pendulum.

  “You’re a man without hobbies,” said Jessica. “What will you do with yourself if you don’t work?”

  “I’ll take up golfing,” I said darkly, and she laughed. Gilda laughed, too, her curls brushing the ground.

  “I’ll take up knitting,” I said, and Jess snorted. Gilda snorted in response.

  “I’ll take up sailing,” I said, and Jessica said, “Please love, don’t get lost at sea.”

  “Don’t!” squealed Gilda, and I tossed her in the air and grabbed her, upright, by the tummy. “No!” she said. “Swing me more!”

  How could Jessica forgive Rocky that easily? Now I understand: she felt sorry for him the same way (though she never would have said so) she felt sorry for herself. She saw a man at the end of a career, desperate to extend it. Physical comedians have performing lives as brief as ballerinas’. The very thing you do—falling down stairs, going en pointe—gives you arthritis, so you can no longer do the very thing you do. An aging singer is still gorgeous. She can’t hit all those familiar notes, but she reminds you of their lost beauty, and her new, narrow voice is as lovely as any ruin, the Venus de Milo, the Colosseum. What’s left is the same, just simpler.

  But an old guy who flubs a pratfall only resembles the young guy he used to be in what he can’t do. A vague gesture toward funny is the opposite of funny. It’s cruel to laugh at a man that old, pretending to be that young.

  A flexible straight man, though, can just move on. That much I knew, as I stood at the foot of the State House, flipping Gilda over again. We’d been Siamese twins, I’d often thought: our appeal was how utterly stuck together we were. I’d tried more than once over the past few years to run away, but every time I did, the other guy—Rocky, bending over at the waist to muscle me off my feet—ran me back.

  Now I was free. Three weeks before, when I was smack in the middle of it, Carter and Sharp appeared to be all of Hollywood. One part of my career was over, but I could probably work. I wanted to. “Aren’t you dizzy?” I asked upside-down Gilda, and she nodded while laughing. I’d forgotten that was the point.

  “Yeah,” I said to Jessica. “I’ll call Tansy when we get back.”

  At home, there was a pile of communications from Rocky waiting for us, including one hand-marked FINAL NOTICE. I flung them in the trash. It looked like anger, but I knew the moment I read a single word, I’d be back in the act. Tearing them in half: that would be anger. I considered it.

  “Mose,” said Jess.

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll forgive him,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if this was a prediction, a question, a command.

  Jessica was right: Rocky did not go to the government with his information, though he did have to go to the government plenty, the Treasury Department instead of the Senate: he owed the IRS pretty big. Later I heard that he blamed a crooked accountant, but I think he balled it up himself. He was one of those guys so bad with money he wouldn’t trust a professional—how would he notice any funny dealings? He never invested in anything. He kept all his cash in his checking account.

  I called Tansy when we got back. He alluded to Rock’s money problems, believing we were fighting over salaries again. I didn’t say otherwise. Rocky’s finances didn’t soften me at all: he wasn’t desperate for my company. The guy needed cash.

  “But you’re finding him work?” I asked Tansy.

  “Sure. Here and there. People want to see if he’s a team player. If he behaves himself, he’ll be fine.”

  I said, “Then he’s in serious trouble.”

  Greasepaint

  My first post-Carter-and-Sharp break came two months after the fight. Johnny Atkinson invited me over to the bungalow he and Alan shared near Venice Beach. The place was crammed with memorabilia—Alan, who worked in the billing department of Bullock’s, was crazy about the movies. You’d think he’d had no idea of how they were made. Even the end tables were covered with signed head-shots of starlets and frilled china figurines of silent-movie actresses. The furniture had been arranged around the inventory, as though it, too, was part of a museum exhibition. For all I knew, it was, the coffee table a souvenir from Dark Victory, the cabinet from a corner of a Ma and Pa Kettle fl
ick.

  And there, in a Sydney Greenstreet peacock chair, wedged between end tables as though he was part of the collection, was Ripley Davidson, a movie director. A real movie director. Even though our pictures (at least early on) did great at the box office, for directors we were the minor leagues, what you did on your way up or down when you, too, were only B material. This guy had actually directed well-reviewed movies. He balanced a coffee cup on one knee, tried to put it on a table, but clonked it into a framed still of Pola Negri, and so brought it back to his knee. He was a tall man in his thirties. A youngster.

  Turned out he was working on a drama about a bunch of vaudevillians and was looking for a few genuine articles. I was game. Johnny had talked me up.

  I balanced on the arm of the sofa, which seemed like the most convenient spot. I held my breath. Directors had always hated Carter and Sharp, who had such scorn for order.

  “So,” he said. “What did you do in vaude?”

  “I was a straight man,” I answered, puzzled. Could he never have heard of me? The idea appalled, then cheered me.

  “Oh, I thought Johnny said you did some other acts before. Acrobatics, maybe?”

  “Dancing,” I whispered. I cleared my throat so I’d sound confident. “I was a song-and-dance man.”

  “Yeah?” Davidson said, perking up. He set the coffee cup on the floor. “Were you any good?”

  I said, “You should have seen me.”

  Why had I even paused? That was how you got jobs in vaudeville: someone asked, “Can you?” and you answered, “Are you kidding me?” Many a trouper nearly drowned in a tank act or got thrown from a horse, doing what they’d sworn they were old hands at. The movie already had a double act, but they could use a hoofer, someone old enough to give advice to the young folks. At first I worried that I’d be playing an old-timer, a failed singer who died a never-was, but actually it was a pretty jaunty role, and not beyond my talents. Greasepaint, they called the picture. I played Cecil Dockery, song-and-dance man.

  “You won’t mind not being the star?” Tansy asked me later, when I asked him to okay the deal. He drummed his fingers on the script. “It’s a good part, but not huge. One musical number.”

  “Sign me up,” I said, and he did.

  Be vigilant, I told myself. Don’t let the Professor’s mannerisms come creeping in. Don’t jump too high, or fidget, or become overly involved with your necktie. Don’t spoonerize or malaprop. Don’t keep looking to your right, for a fat little man ready with a punch line.

  I didn’t. It was as though my fight with Rocky had burned out any sentiment or reliance I’d had on the Professor. Instead, I leaned on my bamboo cane like the swell I’d never been. The musical number was best: in-one, in front of the curtain, like Carter and Sharp in the old days, except I was allowed to cover the whole stage. My God, how had I endured it all those years, not moving? I posed patiently for stills, alone, rakish in my derby. I learned my dance steps overnight, and sang my song for hours around the house. I drove my family crazy. “Okay, Sinatra,” Jessica said once, and then the kids started calling me that. Sinatra, can I have five bucks? Sinatra, can I go to the movies?

  The picture wasn’t a huge hit, but the critics who reviewed it always mentioned me as a minor revelation, someone they didn’t recognize till the credits rolled. I looked different enough—no mortarboard or specs, no oversized scowl. No hairpiece. No comic, who’d absorb all my light and work it over and then throw it out to the audience, like fish to trained seals, flashing, luminous, something else entirely. Something, I now believed, cheap.

  Meanwhile, Rocky worked some, too, mostly on television. He tried his hand at straight parts on TV dramas, and showed up on variety shows, shooting pistols with Spike Jones, singing a duet with an annoyed Eddy Arnold. I didn’t watch him, but it was impossible not to hear some news, especially from my kids, who missed him. Jessica took them to see his first—and last—solo movie, Rock and Roll Rock. I spotted a publicity shot at Tansy’s office, Rock in a pompadour that looked like a black plastic mold. I groaned when I saw it.

  Tansy shrugged. “He’s trying to cash in on that Elvis Presley fad.”

  “Uh-huh. Rebel without a comb.” (It was 1956. Presley had just made it big. I didn’t think that would last either.)

  “That’s the look,” Tansy said. “He’s supposed to.”

  “Okay.”

  “I still can’t believe the two of you split,” said Tansy. “I always thought you’d be like Smith and Dale, together forever. No way you’ll reteam? Not even for a one-time thing? He could use the money. I’ve got some offers from Vegas.”

  “No,” I said. Then I thought, and said more tentatively, “No, I don’t think so. How bad is it, the money thing?”

  Tansy grimaced, shook his head. To say anything aloud would be indiscreet, which seemed silly since I’d known for years what the guy made. Twenty percent more of the salary than me, that’s what he made.

  Still, I sometimes pined for him. Not the act, the fat guy in the striped shirt, but Rocky himself. Occasionally, Jessica or Tansy would drop his name, and I’d simply shake my head, because I realized I could be talked into seeing him, and if I saw him I’d forgive him, and if I forgave him, he’d whip out the mortarboard he’d just happened to be holding behind his back. No. He’d threatened my wife. I had to keep myself stubborn.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Yet!” said Tansy, as happy as I’d seen him since he landed us the Broadway show.

  “No time soon,” I said quickly.

  “Mose.” Tansy took off his glasses. Of all the people I knew, he had aged the least; he’d been such a middle-aged little man all his life. The squintiness that had made him mouse-ish when I met him now made him look shrewd. Like an honest lawyer. A prosperous one. Now he had dozens of clients. I always liked to think he loved me best, because he had known me longest. I would have done anything for the guy. “Mose,” he said again, “call him.”

  “Tansy—”

  “Not for business. Just as a friend. He needs it these days. He’d call you, but he’s afraid you’ll snap his head off.”

  “I might.” I played with a giant crystal paperweight on Tansy’s desk. It weighed about a billion pounds, though it looked like plain old glass to me. “Snap his head off, I mean. Okay. All right. I guess.”

  “You’ll call?”

  “I’ll call.”

  He wrote down Rock’s new phone number on a piece of paper and slid it across the blotter.

  So I did call, after several hours of approaching the phone in my den and then walking away. What could it hurt? I asked. Everything, I replied. A hotel operator answered the number. She put me through. He was in. I yanked the phone away from my ear to hang it up, and immediately brought it back, clonking myself in the temple. I cleared my throat.

  The guy recognized even that. “Mose,” he said, “what’s wrong,” as though he was still the person I’d call in an emergency.

  “Hey, Rock,” I said.

  “What’s wrong,” he repeated.

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” I cleared my throat again. I’d expected to ease into a casual conversation. “It’s just that I was over at Tansy’s office.”

  “Yeah?” Rock said.

  This was a stupid thing to do on the telephone. I should have had Tansy arrange a lunch. Even that might have been too much: I should have had Tansy tell Rock, “Mose hopes you’re okay.” We could have worked up from there.

  “Well,” I said, “Tansy and I got to talking.”

  “That’ll happen,” said Rocky.

  “Yes, and—well, he was just saying it was a shame we broke up—”

  “Professor,” said Rocky excitedly. I could hear him pacing in his hotel room. I wondered how swank or low a place it was. “You’re killing me here. Just tell me what you guys came up with. A movie? A TV special? Christ, I’m willing to start out with a benefit, even though I can tell you I could use some charity myself. I haven’t had st
eady work in—”

  “Oh, God, Rock,” I said. “Nothing like that. I just wanted to see how you were. That’s all.”

  “Ah!” he said. Then he fell silent. “Sure,” he said. “You could have told me. . . .”

  “I didn’t think you’d be home.”

  “I’m not home,” he said. “I’m in a fucking hotel.” I listened to the background noise, trying to figure out what he was doing. I couldn’t hear anything. “No chance, huh?” he said.

  The last time I’d talked to him on the phone, I was exactly here, staring at the bush outside my window. He’d been on the line doing what he was doing now, trying to talk me into work. I closed my eyes and rubbed my ear with the phone. “Later, maybe. I don’t know. A benefit, like you said. It’s just now—”

  “Now you have work,” he said.

  “Well, and the kids—”

  “And you have work,” he said breezily. “Obligations. I understand. I got some projects too.”

  “Tansy told me,” I said, though Tansy hadn’t. “But really. In a couple of years—”

  “Keep me in mind,” said Rocky. “Later, kid.” He hung up the phone.

  Carter and Sharp Go to Hell in a Handbasket

  Who’s my favorite piggy-wig?

  Who’s my favorite pig?

  Who has such lovely pork chops

  That she makes me flip my lid?

  It’s Sadie Sow, it’s Sadie Sow,

  I’m happy to report!

  With a grunt and an oink and a grunt and an oink

  And a grunt and an oink and a snort!

  Voilà. Rocky had a regular job, without title billing: the host of The Sadie Sow Show. He’d probably had the offer when I called, and hoped I’d save him from it. Instead I’d driven him into the arms of a pig, a puppet operated by a temperamental man named Marcus; when Rocky made a slightly blue comment to Sadie, Marcus turned his wrist and Sadie turned her back. Still, it was a national show, and kids had always loved Rocky. He wore his striped shirt and changed hats every five minutes to suit the theme of the segment.