How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  Happy called him. “The Happy Bloom Hour needs you!”

  “My face on a screen?” Joss said. “I can’t see that. I was a flop in Movieland . . .”

  “It’s not the same, kid. This screen is just a postcard. People aren’t looking for handsome on it. They’re looking for uncular.”

  “What?”

  “Like an uncle,” screamed Happy.

  “Avuncular.”

  “Sure, what you say. That turkey you’re in, Joss . . . how long can it last? Television: it’ll be forever. Us together.”

  Joss said he’d think about it.

  “Yeah, think. I’ve got your schtick worked out already. You’ll be mute, won’t even have to smile.”

  Once, early days, they had a near-disaster on camera. A guest came on drunk; he flubbed, froze, fell over the cables, passed out. And one of the girls had a hemorrhage backstage and was rushed to the hospital. The props were in the wrong places because they had not yet found the Brigadier. They had to improvise an entire number. Happy wriggled into his tuxedo and pulled on a pageboy wig, blonde. Joss grabbed a tweed jacket from the assistant producer. He came on slowly, the love-struck, ruined professor; he sat down heavily at the stage upright piano. He played “Falling In Love Again.” The orchestra kept still. Happy leaned against the piano and sang the song with a Marlene accent, nice, W’s and R’s pursed just as Joss would have done them, corners of the mouth compressed. The wheeled camera came close and Joss saw that it was focusing on his own face and he squeezed out some water. The papers made a lot of them that week, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Hoyle, bringing sensitivity to burlesque, melding tragedy with comedy, mixing tears and laughter, all that stuff.Dear Mr. Hoyle,

  What an article, that one in the Post, telling secrets, all about Happy Bloom’s writers, and the people who have quit, and the ones who have stayed. And the rehearsals in the Hotel Pamona. Fans will be hanging around the Pamona all day now, won’t they?

  The rehearsal site had been known for months. Fans already hung around. But unwigged and un-made-up and bespectacled, Happy Bloom was as anonymous in a New York hotel as he was in his Brooklyn house of worship. At five o’clock he whisked unnoticed through the side door, a revolving one.

  I myself will be in the lobby of the Pamona next Monday, April 13th, at noon.

  The Lady In Green

  On Saturday:

  “Lunch? Monday? Out?” screamed Happy.

  “Can’t be helped,” said Joss. “You fellows work on the patter number—I’m not in it.”

  And then Happy in one of his turnarounds said, “My dentist is threatening me like the Gestapo, all my gums are falling out. Okay, everybody goes out to lunch on Monday. Paolo will kill himself when he doesn’t find us. Don’t bother to come back until Tuesday morning. My dentist will bless you, Hoyle . . . But we start at eight on Monday, not nine,” he yelled.

  Monday they did start at eight; and at quarter of twelve the gang skedaddled, kids on holiday. Only Joss was left.

  He straightened his tie and adjusted his blazer in front of the big mirror. First position, second, third . . . He grasped the barre and raised his right leg, high. It might be a good bit: mournful male balletomaine. Would it be funnier in whiteface? Suppose he played a bum trying to play Ghiselle? A churchbell rang. He was so sallow. Still on one foot he let go of the barre and pinched his cheeks; he had seen Mary do that twenty years ago. He resumed his normal stance, left the room, shut the door, locked the door.

  He rode the elevator to the lobby.

  The elevator doors parted.

  He stepped out.

  On a chair beside a palm, facing not the elevators but the registration desk, sat a female in glasses. The forest green of her jacket and the forest green of her pleated skirt hinted more at uniform than suit. Her legs were bare. Her ankles were warmed by bobby socks. She was about fourteen years old.

  He walked slowly forward. She had a bony nose with a little bump. Her dark hair was curly and thin. She was probably Jewish or one of those hybrids. He looked at the feet again. One laced shoe had a thickened sole and heel.

  Her age had angered him; her defect turned anger into fury. It was a familiar tumble. Whenever one of his brothers showed up at the door—just a loan, Joss, something to tide me over—he was only vexed. But: I have kids, Joss—when he heard that he wanted to kill the jerk, and then he wanted the jerk to kill him.

  He paused, waiting for rage to peak and subside. Meanwhile the girl took off her glasses. He walked forward again. He slipped behind her chair. He placed his hands over her eyes. Unstartled—she had perhaps sensed his approach—she placed her hands over his. For a few moments they maintained this playful pose. Then he slid his avuncular hands from beneath hers. He glided around to the front of the chair and stood looking down at his correspondent.

  “I am Jocelyn Hoyle,” he said.

  “I am Mamie Winn.” Her gaze didn’t falter. Her small round eyes were the gray of gravel. She put on her glasses again.

  “You haven’t had lunch, I hope,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t had lunch.”

  “Otto believes that young people should be introduced to alcohol early,” she said to Joss across the booth; and then she said to the waiter who was inquiring about drinks, “Kir, please.”

  “Wot?”

  “White wine with a splash of cassis.”

  “Forget the cassis, Mamie,” said Joss. “Draft for me,” he said to the waiter. Perhaps Cassidy’s had been a mistake. He wondered if he could be arrested for plying a minor. He didn’t know her age exactly; that would be his defense. He did know she was in tenth grade, the prosecution would point out. The waiter served the drinks . . . “Otto?” Joss inquired.

  “He lives in the next apartment. From Vienna. The University of Chicago is the only true American University; Otto says; all the others imitate European ones. So I want to go to Chicago.” She sipped her wine, leaving lipstick on the glass. She had much to learn about cosmetics. “Is your daughter in college?”

  “Thanks,” Joss said to the waiter, who had brought their specials, both plates on one forearm. “She’s in boarding school,” he said to Mamie: the practiced lie. “Your penmanship is excellent.”

  “Oh, cursive. I practiced a lot when I was young.”

  “And your writing, too.”

  “I go to a private day school,” and she named it. “On scholarship. We are required to wear a uniform.” She fingered her pleated skirt.

  “Ladies in green.”

  “Rich bitches.” A bold smile. “So ignorant! National Velvet is their idea of a masterpiece.”

  She came from a large, loose, wisecracking family. “Happy Bloom could be one of my uncles.” The men were sales representatives, the women salesladies, an optimistic crowd tolerating in its midst members who were chess players and members who were race track habitues and members who were fat and thin and good-natured and morose and peculiar—“My great-aunt walks the length of Manhattan every day”—and even Republican. She loved movies and gin rummy and novels. She had a very high I.Q.—“That just means I’m good at I.Q. tests,” she said with offhand sincerity—and because of her intelligence she’d been sent to the green school. “The uniform—it’s equalizing, that’s good, it’s a costume, that’s good too . . .”

  “Mamie,” he said; enough babble, he meant. He leaned across his corned beef. “Why these letters. Why to me.”

  She reddened; it was not beautifying.

  “A bit of fun?” he helpfully asked.

  “At first. I thought, hey, he’ll answer . . .”

  “There was no return address.”

  “Answer another way, get Happy Bloom to mention ladies, or green. Some trick. But then, I don’t know, I didn’t need an answer any more. I just wanted you to read the words, to wonder. When you look out of the screen with that face, it’s like a carving, you’re looking for me, you’re looking at me . . .”

  “Yes,” he soothed, thinking of the camera’s red bulb, the thing the
y had to look at.

  “At school, they all have boyfriends,” and she was all at once lonely and forty, and nothing had ever happened to her and nothing would. “I love your silence,” she said after a while.

  “My silence—it’s imposed.”

  “Everybody at home talks all the time. I love the way you dance.”

  “The silent character—Bloom made it for me.”

  “I love the way you fall down.”

  He had mastered the technique young, while still at the Jesuits. He had gone to every circus, every vaudeville show. He studied clowns and acrobats. And in the first troupe and then the second he spent seasons watching, imitating, getting it right. He practiced on the wire, he practiced with the tumblers. Never broke a bone. Learned how not to take the impact on the back of the head or the base of the spine or the elbows or the knees. Knew which muscles to tighten, which to relax… She said: “You make me want to fall, but with my, you know, I can’t.” She paused. “I have fallen,” she confessed. She took off her glasses. Her little eyes softened. Would she ever be pretty? “Actually, I have fallen in love,” she said. “With you,” she added, in case he’d missed her drift.

  There were several things he could do at this juncture, and he considered each one of them. He could award her an intent, sorrowful look, he knew which one to use; and from his gaze and her flustered response there would develop, during future meetings, a kind of affection. Stranger romances had flourished. When she turned twenty he would be . . . Or he could talk smart: prattle tediously about the Irish in America, his hard boyhood, the Fathers, the early jobs, the indifference of the public, the disappointing trajectory of his life. Bore her to fidgets, push her calf-love out the swinging doors . . . Or he could offer to introduce her to Paolo, what a pair... Or he could pretend to get drunk and stumble out of Cassidy’s leaving her to pay their bill. She probably had a couple of fives tucked into that orthopedic shoe.

  He did none of those things. Instead he reached his hand across the table and gently pulled the nose, the nose with the little bump.

  They lingered over their lunch and then walked the length of Fifth Avenue. Walking, she hardly limped at all. “I don’t do sports,” she told him. “Steps are sometimes difficult,” she said mildly. They discussed, oh, the Empire State Building, and the dock strike, and Hizzoner: the idle conversation of two friends who have met after a long silence, and who may or may not meet again. At the subway entrance on Eighth Street they paused. He took both her hands and swung them, first side to side, then overhead. London Bridge is falling down. Then he let them go.

  “This afternoon has been . . .” she began.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She clumped down the stairs.

  That Thursday they did a take-off on On The Town—they couldn’t make fun of the War, but dancing sailors were fair game. A movie tapster danced with them, another guy on his way down. But the spoof was too short. Three minutes to go before the good-night monologue, signaled the Brigadier. So Happy said “Sweet Georgia,” under his breath—they’d done that number together on the circuit a dozen years earlier, feet don’t forget. It was a Nicholas Brothers routine, so what, they never claimed originality, Happy stole most of his jokes. The Brigadier said “Georgia” to the orchestra, and then she hooked the Hollywood fellow off the stage, and there they were, Joss and Happy, dancing, just dancing. Happy flapped into the wings thirty seconds before the finish, to get out of the sailor suit and into the tux. Joss kept cramp-rolling. He felt Mamie’s gray eyes on him and his on hers. He double-timed into a leap, why not, and he kicked midair, heels meeting, and he dropped onto his feet and then slid down slantwise, perfect, thigh taking the weight, and now he was horizontal. The camera’s lens lowered, smoothly following him; those guys were getting better. Elbow on floor and chin on palm and body stretched out and one leg raised, foot amiably twitching, Joss grinned. Yes: grinned.

  “What made you smile, they’ll get rid of you,” griped Mary an hour later.

  He touched her hair. So dry; you’d think one of her cigarettes would set it on fire.

  “I was smiling at you,” he said.

  Signs of Life

  They were not adventurous, no, no! An unremarkable couple. Whenever someone suggested otherwise they raised four protesting palms in negation as if they were under arrest.

  They lived in a small weathered house halfway up Calderstone Lane, the street that winds from Jefferson Boulevard to the top of Godolphin Hill and rewards the climber with a view of the Boston skyline. Clara and Valerie frequently climbed their hill; also they worked, gardened, paid taxes, got together with their many friends. Most summers they traveled to a village in Spain they’d discovered just after the War, when they were first in love. Then Valerie had seemed to Clara as beautiful as a sculpted boy—taut as a boy, bold as a boy, eyes swiveling like a fascinated boy’s, and occasionally possessed of a boy’s slingshot-straight power to wound. Then square-faced Clara had seemed to Valerie as authoritative as a Roman aedile. Val remembered the pictures of aediles, or at least of their busts, in her Latin Grammar—municipal grandees who supervised the building of sewers and roads in the ancient City.

  Now Clara and Valerie were in their placid fifties. Each summer they smuggled in a bottle of absinthe, and on festive occasions treated themselves to a thimbleful. They enjoyed legal alcohols too, in moderation; and, also in moderation, tobacco, caffeine, and a smokeable opium they were sometimes able to procure—the year was nineteen sixty-five. Walking was their sole exercise, unless one counted spirited conversation. They made love, yes; but affection had supplanted passion. Valerie taught flute and recorder in the Godolphin elementary schools. She was assistant director of the high school orchestra, and she played with various amateur groups. Clara practiced pediatrics.

  The illness—it was a mystery. Much that happens to the body is mysterious. Valerie experienced fever, fatigue. Her physician verified an infection. Medicines failed to defeat the infection. The fever persisted; fatigue became exhaustion. Clara and the physician treated her at home for a while, with a little corps of nurses. They tried one intravenous antibiotic after another. Valerie sank.

  She was dying, though of what nobody could say. She entered a nursing home—that is, she was transported there in an ambulance, holding Clara’s hand. She did not seem fearful or agitated. These things happen, Clara said bleakly to herself; all doctors are acquainted with inexplicable illnesses and inexplicable deaths. Valerie lay for two days in a room six stories above Jefferson Boulevard. Clara, standing at the window, looked down at the Boulevard’s elms, themselves ravaged by disease. Valerie breathed deeply but infrequently. Her pulse was shallow but regular. Then she breathed less often. Her pulse became fainter. She died.

  She died at ten at night, in the presence of Clara and an old, kindly nurse. Clara borrowed the nurse’s stethoscope to listen to Valerie’s dead heart and the nurse’s flashlight to examine Valerie’s dead eyes. Then she said she would take a walk: she must leave this place that life had fled from. The nurse tried in vain to stop her.

  When Clara returned she found the nurse, hysterical, and a Russian doctor, bewildered. Summoned to Pronounce, he had discovered the patient weak but alive. Vital signs concurred. The two women assured him that an hour earlier, respiration and cardiac function had failed. Recalled to Life, he finally wrote on the chart—he was of a literary turn.

  Where had Clara walked, that fateful hour? Oh, around the Town. She trudged along the Boulevard. The trolley from Boston passed, lit up like a nightclub. It carried two passengers. Aimlessly she paused at one of the bookstores in Godolphin Square. The announcement of its imminent closing was pasted on the window. Walking again, she dodged several automobiles. She noted with sadness that Godolphin—once lively even at this hour, its stores open, its citizens strolling—was flattening into a suburb. Valerie too would have found this grievous... Clara sank onto a bench at a bus stop. She covered her face with her hands and wept for her beloved. />
  Godolphin’s decline was one of the many things they talked about during the weeks of convalescence, in their bedroom, Valerie immobile on the bed like her own sarcophagus—the illness took its time departing from bones and joints—and Clara in the tufted chair. Their trees, lindens, were in full and fragrant leaf, and the light entering the room through them was as green as the sea. The robust furniture they had bought in Spain seemed to dissolve in this watery surround. Yes, a bookstore was closing, the elms were dying, one of their friends had fearfully installed a household alarm. The Town was dead. But Valerie was alive! Could they attribute her revival to the various substances floating in her veins? They couldn’t be certain, they didn’t crave certainty, they planned to discuss the matter till the end of their days.

  The nurse allowed herself to be quoted in the Godolphin Times. “There were no signs of life,” she said. The Russian doctor was next. “Me, I never saw her dead,” he declared. “I walked in, she breathed.”

  When her recovery was complete, Valerie returned to work. One evening on the way home she looked into the window of Nature’s Remedies and saw an ointment called Val’s. In the café next door somebody unfamiliar pointed a finger at her and somebody else unfamiliar nodded. Tourists: Godolphin’s first. Then there was an article in a Boston daily; and then a new inn advertised its proximity to the place of miracle; and then a great number of enterprises opened all at once, like flowers which had been waiting for the sun.

  “Faith healers! Two of them, side by side in that alley, they’ll be strangling each other . . .”

  “Which alley?” Val inquired, and dipped her forefinger into the pot of honey that gleamed on their breakfast table. So unsanitary; for she would lick it now, and then dip it again, and again.

  “The alley next to the movie house, with the arcade.”

  “Oh, yes, kids smoke pot there.”