Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  The thing was, all he had were those awful parents, the most recent wife. They wouldn’t call up the exes, and I guess Lillian wouldn’t release Rocky junior. If somebody kept track—by which I mean, Rocky—it would be hard not to notice: my first partner, my wife, my children, my sisters. Me, who had never once been called lovable in a review. Me, who never walked into a bar full of strangers and dazzled them. Me. The straight man. No matter how you counted it up, somehow I’d gotten the lion’s share after all. I could hear him practically whine about it: sure, you get all this love, and what do I get?

  Of all the people they’d excavated for Rocky up onstage, I was the one he’d always loved most. Most stubbornly. Most irrevocably. Despite all his best interests. I should have been the one walking through the door, Ralph Edwards saying, Now, this is a voice you haven’t heard in a while. And when Rocky recognized who was speaking, I’d come through that door so fast I’d bust the hinges, and we’d fall into each other’s arms, and the audience, quite rightly, would give us an ovation.

  The show got that right. You always needed a door. Reunions, good-byes, anything, you had to have a door to do it right.

  My next couple of days were taken up by my sisters, a gaggle of middle-aged and elderly women who were acting like teenagers. I mean, they giggled for a solid three days. They wanted to stand in footprints outside of Grauman’s; they wanted to eat at the Brown Derby and Cantor’s; they wanted to drive through Beverly Hills and sit in hotel lobbies and go to Trader Vic’s for mai tais.

  “Only rubes do that,” I said. Then I examined them more closely. What do you know? Rubes!

  I planned to call Rock once they flew home. Already I looked forward to him trying to scandalize me with stories of Ella and where he’d found her. I’d even started to think he’d been smart announcing our breakup on the show. By now, even Rocky knew we were too old. When you were eulogized on TV, it was probably time to throw the dirt on the coffin. So once my sisters had filled their suitcases with souvenirs and swizzle sticks, I’d call.

  I never got the chance. Something strange happened: Rocky Carter disappeared. He walked out on Ella, and Rocky junior, and even Sadie Sow. He left a short note saying he was leaving on purpose. He didn’t want any time or money wasted on a search.

  “Good-bye,” said the note, which had been addressed to no one in particular. “I’m sure we’ll meet again someday.”

  15

  He Left a Hole in Sadie Sow

  I thought I’d gotten used to life without Rocky. Two years practice, though, turned out to be nothing. We hadn’t been speaking, but he was around, everywhere, really, in stories my kids told each other, in sly questions from Tansy and offers from Vegas, stored in the box we called television in the family room. I snubbed him at every turn, but he’d been available.

  Then he wasn’t.

  The morning papers covered his disappearance, coming as it did five days after he’d announced the end of Carter and Sharp. Do you know where he went? reporters asked me. Surely he must have told you. They’d seen us together on This Is Your Life, looking like the best of chums. Nobody had asked me about Rocky in some time, but now I spent several hours a day discussing his whereabouts. And so Rock, in leaving, had managed what he’d failed to do in staying: he reteamed Carter and Sharp. Suddenly, I was responsible for the guy again, and I’d let him slip through my fingers.

  People kept asking why we’d split. I should have come up with a consistent story. We were old. I wanted to retire. Rocky had always wanted to do something especially for children. He left me for a pig. We’d gone as far with the act as we could. When asked, I chose the answer that seemed most true at the time.

  I continued to make movies after Rocky left. I played fathers and grandfathers and mayors of small towns, men who glanced, befuddled, over the tops of newspapers. In Fair Warning, I played an elderly junkie who tells the hero it’s not too late, he can change, he doesn’t have to die of dope; then I died of dope. I always had work. Jessica too: she continued to choreograph for TV, and then when variety began to die on the tube (as it had years before in real life) she took up choreographing for a local theater company, where she was beloved and feared. When I went to opening nights with her, I held her hand, jealous of all the young people who brought her bouquets of flowers.

  Tansy took on more clients and two assistants. Sadie Sow found a young fellow in a sport shirt with whom she seemed quite smitten. Old movie stars disappeared every day, of course. Obscurity was not front-page news. A year passed, and then another. People forgot that Rocky had gone missing. He was just gone.

  Our kids got older, the way kids will. Rocky junior, too, who we took under our wing some; Lillian thought we were good influences, I guess. He and the boys were about the same age, and here he was, a fatherless kid. A really nice kid, too, a little heavy (like his father he ate when nervous, which was often), but completely at ease around grown-ups. He called us Aunt Jess and Uncle Mose, as our kids had called his father Uncle Rocky.

  The freeway came through Los Angeles. The freeway came through Des Moines. Jess’s hair turned snow white all of a sudden, and I had some idea of what she must have looked like, all those years ago, as a blonde: spectacular. Jake went to college, then Nathan, and then they both went to medical school, and before long—it felt like no time at all—Jess and I were the parents of a gynecologist and a dentist. They did not appreciate the jokes I made about this pairing. Two practical young men! They married nice Jewish girls and settled in southern California and began to have children: Nathan, for some reason I still cannot fathom, changed his last name to Sharensky, to honor the grandfather he’d never met. These boys had been taught at an early age how to do a spit take, how to tap-dance and project when they sang, and so they both ran away and joined the circus, by which I mean ordinary life.

  Gilda, however, wanted to follow her father’s footsteps. I’d been right, all those years ago: she grew up to look like Hattie, long limbed and red-haired. She danced on television, and wrote some sitcom scripts. She never got married. I thought she clung to us, the way children born to older parents sometimes will: there was hardly a gap between us taking care of her and her taking care of us. A charming, pushy young woman; our make-up baby. When she visited, she’d go through our medicine cabinets and come out with the prescription bottles.

  “What’s this for?” she’d demand. “Oh, and it says it’s supposed to be stored away from the damp.”

  When Jess got sick in ’74, Gilda wanted to do everything, and so did I. We fought all the time. So she moved into her old bedroom, and took over the invisible, thankless jobs that I couldn’t remember to do and therefore didn’t notice when they were done. I drove Jess to the doctor’s, for the diagnosis, and then the mastectomy, then the chemo. I did not care about the breast, but I wanted to shake the doctor, who seemed to think my tiny wife, ninety pounds now, had a single ounce of weight to spare.

  I’d always thought of myself as the most competent of men. I could patch, hem, darn; I could even take in and let out suits, thanks to childhood lessons from Ed Dubuque. I could starch and iron a shirt till it glowed like a snowy lawn, capable of bending but not creasing. I could clean. I had beautiful manners. My wife had never once had to straighten my tie.

  But I could not cook. I’d never had to. For years during my vaudeville days, I never so much as switched on a stove. And then Jess got sick, and I wanted to cook for her.

  “Anyone can make bouillon,” said Gilda. Not me. I snatched the kettle off the burner and poured the water, lukewarm, over the cube, where it managed to suck off a little flavoring but nothing else. Or I forgot to stir, and left a nugget at the bottom. All of the things the world claims you can cook if you can boil water, I failed at. The water would boil eventually, sure; the laws of thermodynamics would not bend to my incompetence. I brewed coffee you could read magazines through. I forgot to latch the tea ball, and poured cups of what looked like a river that had jumped its banks.

 
Then I’d walk around the house. Somehow, I would have slipped two bouillon cubes in my pants pocket. I’d shake them like dice. Why square, I’d wonder, why not round? A question like that could absorb me for hours. My aluminum palate seemed a colossal character flaw: I should have prepared. I should have taken lessons.

  Jessica thanked me for everything. She couldn’t eat anyhow: the chemo was poison, of course. I should have sent out for prop meals every day, set them on the nightstand beside her bed, and saved the trouble. She spent two months in bed; I spent two months looking at her profile, the long nose, the thinning hair combed up off her forehead, that Roman-coin beauty. Then she got sicker, and even her beauty was gone.

  I took care of my wife, though when I think back on the months she was really sick, I remember all the time I spent in other rooms, putting off going back to her side. She was so sick it left me gasping.

  People had died before, of course, and people would die hence. But really, but really, hadn’t I—shouldn’t the one person—

  —I know I had a warning this time, but the one person—

  —just this once—

  A Double Act

  At the memorial service, Gilda gave a eulogy. I could not. Her words made everyone cry, but she got it wrong. She said: “It was like my parents were one person.”

  No, I thought. We were like two people. We did not share one soul, or one mind: simple division shows you the folly of that. Before Jessica, I’d wandered around, very much like one person, no matter whose company I was in. It wasn’t always fun. She did the same thing. Every now and then, maybe we’d find someone to be the disappointment act, to fill out the bill for the evening, or a week. Then Jess and I met, and were never, not for one moment, anything like one person.

  But Rocky and I were. I think that was the problem. Onstage, in front of the cameras, we knew exactly what the other guy was thinking. No: we just thought the same thing at the same time, a comic animal with four legs and four arms and two heads bumping, bumping. The animal slaps itself across the face, throws itself over a balustrade. Time to step this way. Time to pause. No surprise, how did you know? We knew. It was our job.

  One person, yes, but the one person we were like was Rocky.

  When Jess died, all of us—my kids, and me, and Tansy—thought Rocky might show up. What a eulogy he could have given! The phone rang and rang, and it was never him. My sisters stayed in Des Moines again, at my request. I’d be out there soon enough and they could comfort me then, because I was bringing Jess’s body back to be buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

  “Shall we come with you?” the kids asked. “We’ll come.”

  “No,” I said. We’d already had the memorial in L.A., and while I’d wanted it to be small, barely noticeable, it was filled with weeping dancers and amateur actors, all the people she’d choreographed over the years. They seemed to shudder and sob in unison, as though they’d been instructed, and they unfurled their hankerchiefs with unsettling grace.

  “I just promised her,” I told my kids, which was a lie. Jessica did not care where she was buried. I couldn’t bury her by Betty, who was still in Babyland, and I had no interest in an exhumation, a word that made me want to throw myself in an open grave. I couldn’t bury her by Joseph, who like his father had died of a heart attack in his fifties: Joseph, or his ashes, were in our front hall in a tin can. This had bothered me at first. “One of these days we’ll scatter him,” Jessica had said. “We’ll think of a nice place.” So we stuck the can in the cloak closet. After a while, I got used to the idea—I started calling him Prince Albert—and then even jealous. I would have liked Hattie’s ashes, something so homely and ridiculous. Where’s Hattie? Ah, yes: behind that door, up on the shelf, among the hats.

  But I could bury Jessica beside her parents. So in September of 1975, the Howard kids traveled back to Iowa together in one box: Jessica, intact, in a casket; Joseph tucked at her feet. Her parents’ graves were in the Jewish section of Greenwood, a stone or three’s throw from my parents’ and Hattie’s—Rabbi Kipple had been interred across town, in a tiny Jewish graveyard that now had a view of the interstate.

  Really, that’s why I brought Jessica back: I could think, She lives in Des Moines now. Far away and safe. No graveside service, and the day I buried her I wished I’d had her cremated: the ground was so cold, and the sky was so blue.

  I stayed in Vee Jay with Annie, who was in her early eighties and in remarkable health. Sweet Bessie Mackintosh, her friend, had died the year before. I figured maybe Annie would be a distraction from my grief—she was an old woman, and lonely, and I could look after her—but in fact she was in better shape than me. All of the oldest girls had become sturdy old women. But Little Rose, our baby, had spent the past two years having nearly everything removed—her uterus, then part of her stomach, then her ovaries. Annie spent most of the time at the Dubuques’ house, since Ed frequently ran away to the store. “You know how men are,” Annie said. “He can’t take the fact that she’s in pain.”

  “No,” I said.

  Then Annie looked sympathetic. “Rose’ll love to see you. You’ll go over to their place today?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you be cheery? I hate to ask you. I know this isn’t a cheery time for you. But we have to keep her in good spirits, doctor says. So can you?”

  “I’m an actor,” I said, “I can be cheerful no matter what.”

  She pursed her mouth cynically then, which I took as a comment on my talents.

  Once again to downtown Valley Junction. The Lyric Theater had become a theatrical shop, with rubber masks of Nixon and Agnew in the window, gorilla suits, feather boas: it looked like Rocky’s pool house. Down the street, antique-store windows glittered with cut glass and old china cups; a few new restaurants had been decked out to look old-timey. There wasn’t a pool hall anywhere. And Sharp’s Gents’ was now Sharp’s Ladies’. All they stocked for men were handkerchiefs and pocket flashlights in the front case. Ed Dubuque looked like a Dutch farmer, his hair gone white but still sticking up. “Master Sharp,” he said to me when I came in. “I hope you’re not looking for clothes.”

  “I’m thinking of doing a drag act,” I said. “I always looked good in lilac.”

  “We have several things in a nice wash and wear,” he said seriously.

  I leaned on the counter. The wooden sign on the back wall still said SHOES in thirties flat-topped serpentine script, but the footwear on the stands were sandals and high-heeled pumps, a few kids’ sneakers. This is where I spent my childhood, I thought, but of course it wasn’t: the place had moved, the railroad men were dead or retired, my father was gone. I tried to remember the smell of the old original building, a kind of leathery tang tamped down by dust, a hint of whiskey blown in from the tavern next door. “Don’t you miss the menswear?”

  “It’s what Rose wanted,” he said. “I’m happier surrounded by ladies than she was by men.”

  “How is she?”

  “Not well, Master Sharp. Annie’s over there now. I’ll go home after lunch, when my high school kid comes in. I should stay with her all the time, but work . . .”

  “Helps,” I offered. He nodded.

  I went to their house on Sixth Street, an old property of my father’s that he’d signed over to Ed in the thirties. Rose was on their screened-in porch on the front of the house, Annie beside her. She’d seen Rose come into this world. Now she’d see her go out.

  They’d moved a wheeled hospital bed onto the porch; it must have been Rose’s main form of transportation these days. Annie’s nursing hadn’t changed. The bed had been made up in white sheets and a pink blanket so neatly that Rose looked like a love letter waiting to be sealed and sent. A child’s Mickey Mouse doll with a plush body and a plastic face had been slid under the covers next to her, his head on the edge of the pillow. That embarrassed me more than anything else.

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like springtime.”
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  “You look it.”

  She coughed, but her voice didn’t sound so bad. Annie gave me her chair, then went into the house to get another.

  Rose said, “Now if I could only get that doctor to leave me alone.”

  “He bothering you, kid? Point him out and I’ll take care of him for you.”

  “He just got ahold of my ovaries. I told him, ‘Put them in a jar so we can keep them on the mantelpiece.’”

  “Rose!” Annie said, from inside the house.

  “Well, I miss them,” Rose muttered. “I suppose I was done with them, but still.”

  “I’ll punch his lights out,” I said.

  “Thanks. Hand me that glass of water on the table? I think he’s got one of those treasure maps left over from your movies, except it’s of me, so he keeps digging.” She accepted the water with one hand, and with the other traced two lines on the blanket above her torso. “X marks the spot. What movie was that?”

  “Yo Ho Ho.”

  “Yo Ho Ho,” she said. “I liked that one. I wish you’d make movies like that one again.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know. Silly. Broad jokes. People falling down. Whales blowing water in your face. You were good at that. Oh, I’ve hurt your feelings. I mean, I like the movies you make now, but I liked the old ones too. Nobody makes stupid funny movies anymore.”

  Annie’s face appeared briefly at the window; she was giving the two littlest kids some time alone. I never palled around with Rose when we were young—Hattie, of course—and now I wished I had. She’d offered to be my vaudeville partner once, and now, partnerless, I wanted her to offer again.

  “You didn’t hurt my feelings,” I said. “I’m serious about punching your doctor. He’s not a big guy, is he?”

  She shrugged in slow motion. “Who knows? I haven’t met him when we’ve both been standing up. Oh!” she said. I jumped to my feet.