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Authors: Elizabeth McCracken

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BOOK: Niagara Falls All Over Again
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“I have an average of five toes,” he answered. “Less than most, more than some.”

Archie Grace the ventriloquist came in with the violet sister instead of Sammy. The other girls—Daisy and Rose—had changed, but Violet hadn't; when she sat down, her crinoline-filled skirt flounced up in front like a broken accordion. She must have been under the impression that Grace had been beguiled by the outfit, and was afraid that in street clothes she'd look like what she was: a chapped-looking teenager, no better or worse than the rest of her sisters.

“Hello,” Grace called to us.

Jack Robertson pushed himself up on his elbow. “Yeh know I don't talk to yeh when you're alone. Where's your little friend?”

“At the hotel,” said Grace.

“Asleep!” said Robertson.

“Stored,”
said Grace.

“Asleep,”
said Robertson, “and you shouldha stayed there, and Sam shouldha come with us.”

“His body's in a box,” Grace said, “and his head's in the chest of drawers. Well,
one
of his heads.”

“Jesus,” said Robertson, as though Grace had just confessed to a particularly grisly murder. I shivered myself. Grace, despite his name, was graceless, a man with a terrible temper and no talent for small talk, but Sammy—I feel dumb even saying this—was a panic. He wore a tweed cap and painted eyeglasses, like Bobby Clarke; he could do a great double take; he laughed like a bird. He chased after girls, and liked a drink now and then, and movies and nightclubs (or so he said), and I realize that I am talking about a couple of pounds of wood, but you never met him. Sammy was a star. It was a shame he had to work with such a dullard. Imagine what he could have been with the right partner!

“Listen to me, Professor,” Rocky said in my ear.

“Okay,” I said, though it was hard. Grace was talking to Jack Robertson in Sammy's voice, and Robertson had hopped off the bar and coiled and hissed, “Now yeh're just mocking him.” I wanted to see what would happen.

Rock kicked my calf. “First thing we do, is we work on your concentration.”

“Uh-huh.”

He grabbed the rim of my barstool and turned it. “Here I am.” He had a cigar in his hand, which he smoked in a series of short sudden puffs. Mostly it was a prop. He brought the cigar up, parked it a quarter of an inch from his lips, and said, “Listen: I'm Annie Sullivan, and you're Helen Keller.”

Another night, I thought, I wouldn't understand it, but tonight! No. Wait. I
didn't
understand it. “Sorry?”

“You're Helen Keller. We're starting from scratch. I'm going to teach you everything I know, so the first thing to do is forget everything
you
know.”

“But, Rocky.” I elbowed the bar in an attempt to prop myself up. “I don't
want
to be Helen Keller.”

“Neither did Helen Keller, but look how well that's turning out.”

“I've been around awhile,” I said. Where was that bar? I kept missing it.

“I know.” Rock grabbed my arm and set it on the bar for me. My stool turned and I wobbled and he caught my other elbow, and set that next to the first. Then he slung his arm around my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his cigar by my ear. “You've learned things, Professor,” he said. “You're not the green kid you used to be. But you have two choices. Either you remember everything and I have to disabuse you of one fatheaded notion at a time, or starting now you develop amnesia and I don't have to talk so much.”

I nodded. I had that sudden drunken belief in transformation. I was the Professor. A man of style. A
vaudevillian
.

“And another thing,” he said. “You need some new suits.”

I looked down to examine my jacket and gripped the lapel as tenderly as I could. Inside was the label that said
Sharp and Son's Gents' Furnishings
in black cursive. I'd worn that jacket hard, out of nostalgia and thrift: I spent my money on costumes, not street clothes.

“You are not a tramp comic,” said Rocky. He took his arm back. Ashes fell like snow past my nose. “Small guy like you, it's even more important to dress the act. You gotta look sharp, Sharp.”

We'd only been together for five days, and I'd already observed Rock's personal sartorial style, half vanity, half slovenliness. He had some silk ties, and some that seemed made from funeral-wreath ribbon. He owned one fine-fitting pale blue suit that made him look like a prosperous prizefighter, but he'd outgrown the rest of his clothes. Jackets pulled across his shoulders, shirts parted in a triangle above his belt. Right now he wore a windowpane tweed coat over a V-necked sweater and a pair of pale gabardine pants gone glossy at the knees. He looked like a pile of kicked-off blankets. And he was giving me advice?

Of course he was.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we'll talk timing.”

Across the room Jack Robertson pounded the table and said to Archie Grace, “Sam's twice the man you'll ever be!”

Grace looked at him, then closed his eyes for a long moment. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I
know
.”

Rocky turned me back on my stool so we could watch the proceedings. “Girls,” he pointed out. Yes, he was right: girls. All the flowers from the flash act had arrived, along with the Indian Rubber Maid, who sat at a table by herself. Rocky sighed. “Pretty, pretty girls. How do you talk to them, Professor?”

It might have been the drink; it might have been Rock's teacherly insults. I said, “Watch,” and jumped off my perch. My knees bounced; I was lucky I didn't keep going till I was sprawled out snoozing on the floor. Go for the girl who's by herself. It's all a matter of asking the right question. This is just an act; you're just playing a part.

I arrived at the Indian Rubber Maid's table grinning. She looked at me, then looked away. I sat down in the chair across from her, and put my hands in my lap, playing shy. That is, I was a shy person pretending to be a bold person pretending to be shy. Finally she said, “Hello.”

I said, “I think you're wonderful.”

She smiled and revealed dimples and a set of tiny china-doll teeth. “No, you don't.”

Thank God she hadn't recognized the line: it was what Sammy had said, leaning off Grace's knee, to a woman in the front row. “Now, Sammy,” Grace had said, and Sammy interrupted: “But I do. I think she's wonderful.” I'm not saying that every woman would fall for a strange man who'd picked up romantic tips from a ventriloquist's dummy, but there are worse ways to go about it: Believe yourself lovable, confident. Know that it's a miracle you can even talk to a girl.

“But I do,” I said to the Indian Rubber Maid. “I think you're wonderful.”

I could feel Rocky watch us from across the room. For his benefit—and mine, naturally—I took her plump hand in mine. She was a pretty dark-haired girl, though how she'd gotten into the contortionist racket was anyone's guess: onstage her breasts kept getting in the way; she almost had to tuck them in her armpits for the most rigorous stunts. We'd rented separate rooms, Rocky and I, at his insistence: as hail-fellow-well-met as he ever got, he needed time to himself, and besides, we could afford it. I leaned forward and suggested that she come back with me, and she nodded, still playing coy.

Then the cellar door banged open. “Hello?” Dr. Elkhorn called, his fist full of leash handles. The dogs jumped down the stairs sideways, like mountain goats.

“Buy those animals a drink on me!” said Jack Robertson, who sat on a chair across from Archie Grace's Violet, his leg thrust under her skirt. She wore on her face a sleepy-eyed expression that might have been the start of pleasure, irritation, hunger, amusement, deep thought, any number of things that look identical at the start, though unlike at the end. Grace himself was crawling across the floor toward the bathroom, muttering, “Don't get up, please don't get up.”

“In America, the dogs are teetotalers,” Rocky called from the bar.

You could see the long muscles in Robertson's lone leg flex. “Till now they are.” Violet let one gloved hand fall to his calf.

“Do dogs drink milk?” Rocky asked Dr. Elkhorn.

“Cats drink milk,” offered Robertson.

“Dogs'll drink
anything,
” Archie Grace said miserably into the floor. He'd stalled out near the back of the room.

“Milk?” said Christine, as though this were some newfangled invention.

“Scramble 'em some eggs,” said Rocky. “Dogs like eggs?” he asked Dr. Elkhorn. “I'm only guessing scrambled. Poached, maybe.”

Christine slammed her hand on the bar. “I am not poaching eggs for seventy-five dogs.”

“You're exaggerating for no reason again. There are not seventy-five dogs. There are . . .”

And then Dr. Elkhorn let go of the leads, and it sure felt like there were seventy-five dogs. They ran under chairs, they came snuffling up to ankles. One approached Rocky and began barking, for no reason I could figure, unless he thought he'd treed some weird animal in some weird chrome-trimmed elm. Another grabbed hold of my sock, didn't pull, just bit down. One dog jumped onto a table and ran around the perimeter circus-ring style. The biggest tried to molest Archie Grace in an offhand way, as though making a pass at a crawling man was part of the theatrical canine's code. Love, I mean to tell you, was in the air. I couldn't imagine how such professionally well-behaved dogs could be so badly behaved off-duty, except to say that they were vaudevillians. In six months I would read in
Variety
that Dr. Elkhorn had poisoned those strange dogs and himself, that they'd all been found together in a hotel bed, the dogs tilting their muzzles up to their master's chin. Well, they said Elkhorn was the murderer. Maybe it was one bright angry dog.

That night some of us knew and some of us didn't, but vaudeville was sinking already. A few people made it out; a disaster always has survivors. I did, and Rocky, and Fred Allen and Burns & Allen and Cantor and Bert Lahr and Baby Rose Marie. More drowned. Where could Jack Robertson dance when vaudeville was over? Who'd hire an inept but buxom contortionist? And as for ventriloquists, there really was only room for one, and Edgar Bergen stepped in. There are memorials, as there should be, for soldiers killed in every war, for those who died in camps in the Holocaust, for those lost at sea. There should be one with the names of all those who disappeared when vaudeville finally died. Dr. Think-a-Drink Hoffman. The Cherry Sisters. Patine and Rose. Maybe the best of us survived, but I don't think so.

Now, Dr. Elkhorn clapped his hands, and the dogs suddenly sat. They didn't even pant. “Seven,” said their master in a soft voice. “Scrambled will be fine.”

By then I'd stood up, hand-in-hand with the Indian Rubber Maid, whose actual name I can't remember. I found her coat and helped her on with it. Across the room, Rocky raised his glass to me. Helen Keller was never so suave, I wanted to tell him, but instead, still playing the dummy-about-town, I winked and walked out into the night with a sweet tipsy girl, and that, no matter what I might later tell reporters and fans and my own curious children, is the moment I knew I would be a success in show business.

The Education of a Straight Man

A fan of Carter and Sharp—and we have them still, a fan club even—would recognize the boys in our earliest performances, but just barely. Rocky wore a suit, not his trademark striped shirt, and his voice was deeper, and though you could call him fat—plenty of people besides Freddy Fabian did—he was a mere shadow of his future self. (We had terrible fights when I could no longer lift him: was he too heavy, or was I too old? Probably we met in the middle.) My offstage moniker, Professor, was still strictly offstage. What's more, my character was a mean fop, a confidence man who saw in the poor guy an easy mark. Later I became a stern but addlepated academic.

We did our act in-one, meaning in front of the drawn curtain. Behind us, scenery shifted and scraped. Rocky threw himself around that stage, first like a feather pillow, then like a sack of potatoes, then like a ballerina who hasn't noticed she's gone to seed. Me, I stood still and smoked a cigarette and leaned against an imaginary lamppost, upright and nonchalant. When we were bored, we did dialect. Sometimes we sang, me seriously, Rock in mock opera. We did everything two young men could possibly do to make the audience remember us, but our material didn't make us funny, Rocky did.

Also, I hit him a lot.

It was called a knockabout act, and the slap was our tag, the way the audience knew when to laugh. George Burns took a puff on his cigar, Will Rogers twirled his lariat, I hit Rocky: over the head, across the face. Sometimes I delivered a kick to the seat of his pants. I hated it. Rocky insisted it was hysterical. What really amused him, though, was running into someone on the street who'd seen our show and wanted to hit
me,
for treating that fat little fella so rough.

I learned all of his gestures: the tilted head with the hand to the ear, listening; the tilted head with the clasped hands near his knees, wrist touching wrist, deep love; hands clasped behind the tilted head, one leg cocked out, an impression of the girl who inspired this passion. The man could not hold still. There he goes sliding across the apron of the stage on one knee—two knees if it's a tough crowd. There he is falling in a dead faint, because I've scared him. He hugs the proscenium arch. He hugs his straight man—briefly, because the straight man is scowling at such mush: there's serious work to be done. When all else fails, he hugs himself, so tightly it seems like his elbows have swapped sides, so needfully one leg comes around and embraces the other. He turns to look at me—he's
terrified
—and with the upstage eye, the one the audience can't see, he winks. Then he scuttles away in his own arms, limping with crossed legs. The poor little man, don't you love him, love him, love him?

BOOK: Niagara Falls All Over Again
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