Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Oh,” Gert said. She put her hand on the kitchen counter, as though she’d have to be pulled out.

  “It’s all right, Gert,” Rocky said.

  “You know,” Rocky said confidentially, once they were gone, “she’s a Nazi.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  He nodded. “My own darling Nazi.”

  I felt my shoulders relax. This we’d done many times. Rocky’s paranoia was one of our running jokes. “She’s German,” I said. “And won’t let you drink that much. But that doesn’t mean she’s eyeing world domination. Besides, she’s, I don’t know, forty? She’s too young.”

  He shrugged. “You try living with her. Today this trailer, tomorrow, the trailer next door. Younger women, boy. I think; soon I’ll be dead, and I want to leave her something, but what have I got? Nothing.”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked around the joint and couldn’t argue. Anything posh he’d left in California thirty years before, or sold off for taxes and alimony. Maybe I had something at home, some award we’d gotten for fund-raising, a piece of Jessica’s jewelry that I could claim somehow rightly belonged to him. “I’m sure—”

  He interrupted me. “I think I thought up something.” He leaned on his hand dreamily. “I have a little plan worked out.”

  “Is it legal?” I asked.

  “This is Nevada,” he said dismissively. Then he put his hands out, voilà. “Me.”

  “Why not give her something she doesn’t already own?”

  “You misunderstand me,” he said. “After I’m dead. Some men leave their bodies to science. I’m leaving mine to Gert.”

  “That’s some Catholic thing,” I said. “Right? Lie around in a glass coffin, breath like roses? You told me about this once. Some saint you had a crush on. Let me think: if your body remains uncorrupted twenty days—I’m trying to remember this part—well, let’s just say that would be a lifetime record.”

  “Funny man,” he said, smiling.

  “Or you were thinking maybe of taxidermy?”

  “Nothing that fancy, no. I told you: she’s a Nazi. Lampshades.” He fingered his now half-sunk anchor tattoo. “Nautical theme, maybe. I figure, the place could use some sprucing up, right? I got enough skin for a whole chandelier. Maybe a couple of rings from the gold in my teeth—”

  “Jesus, Rocky.” I laughed and closed my eyes in happy horror.

  Happy, no kidding. A happy ending: two old men joking about the worst thing in the world in an Airstream trailer. Another time I would have explained to him why there was nothing the least bit funny about what he’d just said, but right now I found it hilarious, may God and the Audience forgive me.

  One of our ongoing fights: Rocky asserted that with enough diligence and joie de vivre, you could turn anything to comedy. If he’d been born twenty years later, he would have made completely different films. Farces. Movies with mean streaks. But he hit it big in the 1940s, when everybody—moviegoers, politicians, censors, and me—believed that certain things were not funny, could not be made funny, would not be made funny. The physics of censors meant that a funny joke about something unfunny was even less funny than a clunker.

  When I’d asked Junior to bring me to Reno, the best I’d hoped for was something sentimental, apologies and forgiveness. A movie might have shown us launching into an old routine, a soft shoe choreographed for men who could no longer pick up their feet so well. Not this: both of us with senses of humor so funereal nobody young could even see the jokes. What kind of act would we work up now? The Two Undertakers. The Ghouls. Black and Barry: Comedy with a Grievous Touch.

  “You know,” I said, “I read where the chemicals in the human body are worth upwards of thirty-seven dollars.”

  He nodded. “I’m asking fifty a pint. I put a lot of money into this thing”—he slapped his missing belly—“and I’m not going to let anybody lowball me. Speaking of which—”

  But then Gert and Junior walked back in, to find us laughing.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Gert said accusingly. She probably thought we’d gotten into the liquor.

  “We were just talking, my only love, about the human atrocities of your fatherland,” said Rocky.

  Junior looked at his shoes. “Socko stuff, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve told you,” Gert said to Rocky, and he showed his palms in surrender.

  Then he turned to me, as though his ladyfriend and son weren’t there. He leaned forward out of his chair, and I realized he hadn’t stood up the entire time. “I sort of hope she does it. What I said? Let the light go through me. Think of me when the sun goes down. Maybe you’d like one too.”

  “Rocky,” I said, shuddering.

  “You know?” he said. “Might as well make myself useful.”

  When we got up to leave, Rocky said, “This was nice.”

  “It was,” I agreed.

  “But you know, Professor,” and that was the first time he’d called me by that name, the first time in ages anyone had, “we can’t be buddies.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I had some inkling.

  “We can’t be buddies. Glad you came down with the kid. Would have told you not to—you know that—glad you did it, but that’s that, right? This is my life now.” He gestured around the trailer to the TV, the Hummels, everything—and, I saw now, a total lack of memorabilia. No photos, no plaques, no souvenirs. No copies of his movies on tape. “This is it,” he said, in a voice I couldn’t interpret, I don’t want anything else, or Please don’t make me want anything else. “And,” he said, though I’d already figured it out, I wanted to stop him, “you’re not in it.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re not picking up where we left off.”

  “Sure not.”

  “Don’t want you going off and telling people where I am. Don’t want—listen, this one’s important—you telling any reporters, and the one guy whose editor maybe thinks I’m this human interest story actually sends him down to find me, already with the lead: ‘You won’t find Rocky Carter’s place on any map of the stars’ homes.’ ”

  “Of course, Rock.”

  “Right? Right.” He clapped his hands together.

  I stood up to go. Rocky caught my eye, and said, “You understand me?”

  “You know me, Rocky,” I said. “I always do.”

  “So did you?” Rocky junior said on the way home.

  “What?” I answered, playing dumb.

  He sighed and tapped the steering wheel. His hands were mammoth. “Penny,” he said at last.

  I had never told anyone, not even Jessica. A drunken escapade; bad behavior, but hadn’t I been mostly good? What could it matter, then or now?

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  He ran a hand through his black hair, and switched on the radio. The Caddy had a fine radio, with big knobs that were a pleasure to turn. We drove twenty miles without talking before he said, “Well, then, I guess I’m provincial.”

  We drove another forty miles.

  “So it was your fault the act broke up,” he said. He turned his head to me one last time. How was it possible he looked so much like his father? I realized he cultivated the resemblance, combed his hair the same way, ate the same way, for all I knew drank the same way. I wanted to confess to him all the sins of my life: Hattie’s death, my father’s, Betty’s, all the hours I should have been by Jess’s sickbed when I paced the house, how I’d stomped in food when my mother died, danced the night my father died. Look, I would have said, you want to know about guilt?

  Fancy thinking. A coward always feels guilt over the things he’s not guilty of. The things he really did he never mentions.

  My fault?

  “Well, yes,” I said to Rocky junior. “It certainly seems that way.”

  What’s the difference between a comedy team and two people who happen to be funny together? Not just longevity, though that’s part.

  The movie starts: two people. Could be two men, two women, some of e
ach, several of one or the other. You recognize them instantly, by their clothes and their silhouettes and the way they stand in relation to each other. Laurel will always cry; Hardy will always look at the camera in consternation; Gracie Allen will always gaze at her husband chin tilted up; George Burns will always look back at his wife, chin tucked to his chest. George will feed his wife a straight line. Gracie will say, “Don’t be silly,” and offer a punch line.

  They will never change, and if they ever do, it’s for a moment, and that’s a joke: suddenly the comic is sensible and the straight man humiliated, but never for long. They are bound together. You will never see them meet for the first time. You will never see them part forever.

  George Burns, for example. Next to tiny Gracie, he looked like a big guy, tall and broad shouldered and handsome enough. He combed his wavy hair straight back from his forehead. Age alone can’t explain how his looks changed: the dumb wig (blond for a while, then silver) that he wore parted on the side like a kid, those round black glasses, the way his eyes narrowed to slits. How small he was. You could hardly recognize the guy. Sure, he was older, and eventually he was very old indeed, but plenty of it was his own choosing. After his wife died, he was no longer Gracie’s straight man. If he looked the way he always had, audiences would know what was missing.

  This is a comedy team: one person straightening the other’s necktie, and it makes sense.

  Soldiers with legs amputated suffer from phantom pain. Me, I’ve suffered forty years from phantom punch lines. For all the noise I made about being glad to get rid of him, the things I did afterward, the movies I appeared in—being with Rocky was the best time of my life. I love my children, but they don’t understand.

  I waited for a phone call for a long time after Reno, until I realized the call wouldn’t be from him, but from someone telling me what had happened. So I started to call, every six months or so. Gertrude answers. She’s used to me. “Hello, Gert,” I say, and there’s the muffled sound of her smoky hand going over the receiver, and then she says, “Sorry, darling, no.” The last time, though, the number had been disconnected. But I don’t think he’s dead. I’d know. The damnedest people live forever. Rocky, my father, Annie, pulling up the median age of my acquaintances. I mean, the people I loved. Rocky junior moved to Europe sometime in the late eighties—he never finished the documentary—and I don’t much hear from him anymore. I thought maybe he’d be the one to call me.

  I do the routines in my head, every single night. I go over our final routine, too, the one in his trailer. I thought I said some funny things myself. And everywhere I go, I hear his voice, pushing me around, giving me advice, yelling sometimes. Have a drink. Cheer up, kid. Don’t stand that way, nobody’ll notice you. What the hell were you thinking—I did everything, everything, everything for you. Sometimes I contradict all his advice on purpose, just so I can hear his correction.

  Look, here we are on some black-and-white boulevard. An early movie, then, nothing supernatural about it. Walking down the street with suitcases in our hands. You can’t tell yet whether we’re running away or starting out fresh. My little fat friend has sat on his hat, it looks like; I’m wearing a mortarboard that by movie’s end will spin like a top. We get closer and closer to the camera. Somewhere there’s a policeman looking for us. Everything in this world is made to fall apart: breakaway pianos, breakaway bottles, breakaway pants, breakaway skirts, breakaway vases, breakaway chairs, breakaway windows—panes, mullions, sashes, everything. Soon enough there’ll be sugar glass and balsa wood everywhere. Nothing is of consequence.

  At first it sounds like Rocky is asking questions and I’m answering, but if you analyze it, you can see it’s really the opposite, no matter the punctuation: I set up, he responds, I set up, he responds.

  He says, “Where are we going?”

  “Over there.”

  “What’ll we do when we get over there?”

  “Whatever’s next.”

  “Could sitting down be next?”

  “I’ll decide when we get there.”

  “You’ll decide when we get there, okay.”

  Whatever we’re about to do is a very bad idea, three reels of hot water for sure. We can’t help ourselves, though. I’m sitting here in my chair in Sherman Oaks, California, but really, I’m on a movie set, or on some vaudeville-house stage—not the Palace, we never played the Palace, but someplace nearly as good. He’s skittering away from me, but soon he’ll come back, I’m his only friend in the world, he has to trust me. I’m saying, What’s wrong with you, Rocky? Stand still. Pay attention. Whatever will we do with you?

  You see, I still miss the guy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Endless gratitude to:

  my editor, Susan Kamil, whose patience and good sense about this book boggle my mind; my beloved agent, Henry Dunow; my darling big brother, Harry McCracken; my first reader forever, Ann Patchett, and my parents.

  And also to:

  Rob Phelps, Paul Abruzzo, Max Phillips, Bruce Holbert, Paul Lisicky and Mark Doty, Zoe Rice, Carla Riccio, Robin Robertson, Tim and Wendy DeVries, Hunter O’Hanian and Jeffry Cismoski, Fritz McDonald, Maurice Noble, Marguerite White, Frank Cullen of the American Vaudeville Museum ( www.vaudeville.org), the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

  Many people talked to me about nineteenth- and twentieth-century life in Des Moines and West Des Moines, including Carolyn Matulef, Richard and Ellen Caplan, Chick and Helene Barricks, Ozzie and Carla Lucas, Mary Robinson, Henry Davitt, Ted Livingston, and those I miss: Sidney and Rose Pearlman, Estyre Hockenberg, Irene Sideman, Yetta Toubes, Harold Brody, Elizabeth Perowsky, and Norman Matulef.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is a National Book Award finalist. She is recipient of the Harold Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also honored as one of Granta’s 20 Best American Writers Under 40. In addition to The Giant’s House, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner, she is the author of Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry.

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth McCracken

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: The Dial Press, New York, New York.

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001028314.

  Reprinted by arrangement with The Dial Press

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33391-3

  v3.0