Niagara Falls All Over Again (12 page)

The All-Girl Cure

Middling success gets exhausting, take my word for it. Rocky ate more, drank more. Fatter was funnier, so he claimed, but really he was just hungry. He couldn't get enough. He'd clean off his plate and then look at mine, hopeful. At first it was a request, but soon enough it might as well have been written into the contract: once he'd demolished his meal, he got to eat whatever was left of mine. Sometimes he ordered two meals at once, the only man for whom the fried-clam platter was a side dish. You passed an ice-cream shop with Rocky, and two doors down you suddenly realized you were walking alone. Go back, peer through the window, and there he was, instructing the help on how to lay on the whipped cream, the maraschino cherries, like a pharaoh overseeing a pyramid.

As for me, I became a ladies' man. I'd discovered the secret, which was mostly just deciding to be one. Wasn't Rocky right? I needed the practice for the act. The more girls I saw offstage, the more my timing improved: I learned the uses of the long look, the pause, the sudden twinkling smile. How could I think I knew anything about comedy, back when I knew nothing about sex? Waiter, another girl please, we're booked in Chicago next week and I have a piece of business I need to polish. What the hell, I'll take all the girls in the house. Girls like that never harmed anyone.

I spent my money on clothes, slick plaid jackets and light wool pants. In other words, I became a dandy, a religious affiliation I still cling to. I took up smoking, so I could carry a lighter and a case. I wore my hat at angles that my father would have considered a thumb in the eye of society: the way you wore your hat was not a joke. Nothing, thought my father, was more serious.

Now I was seeing lots of girls, chorines and dramatic actresses and tumblers and hoofers and soubrettes. Not all of them were as eager as the Indian Rubber Maid to come back to my room, but plenty were. Lots and lots of girls. This one smells like roses and that one smells like cake. This one knows the words to the Iowa fight song and will sing them; this one likes to drink; this shy one will surprise you by slipping the cigar from your hand and taking a puff. This one is just your size; this one is smaller; this one outweighs you in a pleasant, daunting way.

I had a lot of fun. What can I say? I made them laugh.

Rocky, though he'd seen it happen, could not understand. He loved women, but he was inept, so romantically amateurish he'd ask anyone for advice. Sometimes I watched him trying to talk to a girl. If he was sober, he came off too brisk and busy. Drunk, he bumbled, overaffectionate, a dog wanting nothing but to lay its head in your lap. He'd go to kiss a girl's hand, and she'd end up damp to the elbow. He spent endearments like nickels, called everyone Baby and Sweetheart and Darling and Little Friend and Cutie. This worked until he called the bartender Doll Baby, and the girl he had his eye on suspected that Rock's affection was for the world at large, not her in particular.

“There must be some tricks you're not telling me,” Rocky would beg.

“What can I tell you?” I'd answer. “It's love.”

Not that I didn't have my methods. Ever since the start of the world, girls have been told by their mothers: a certain kind of man is only after one thing. A suspicious mother is almost always right. Some guys (Rocky, for instance) believed that this meant a guy on the make should act innocent, interested only vaguely in the girl's company, and not at all in the One Thing. But girls didn't care. All you had to do was convince a girl that it was Her One Thing that you were angling for, hers and hers alone, surrounded as it was by all her charms. Of
course
you wanted to sleep with her—how will you ever get there if you don't make that clear?—it's you, my darling brunette, my beloved redhead, my most glorious bottle blonde. You with the three brothers, or the father with the butcher shop, or a love of Bach. Let me kiss you, because your butcher father writes you letters that quote Tennyson. Come back to my room, because you love Bach.

So you find your girl and sit down next to her between shows, in a restaurant, or a sitting room, or best of all a park, on a bench. Courtesy and courage. You rest your right elbow on the back of the bench, near her shoulder, make a bow of your arms, hands clasped in front, your left elbow pointing at your left hip. Maybe a bow of your legs, too, your ankle crossed on your knee. Smile as though she has just told nine tenths of a long joke that promises to be the funniest thing you ever heard, you can taste the punch line. Don't touch her, but keep close. Ask her questions. Look her in the eyes, sure, but look away, down to her lap, at her shoulder—you're either a confident man made shy by her beauty, or an emboldened shrinking violet; either transformation'll charm her. If you hold still enough, she will be the one to put her hand on your nearby knee, and then slide it closer to your hip, and then, on a good day, she will spread her overcoat across your laps. Better still, a newspaper, which will rattle but is disposable, and makes more sense as a prop. You are theatrical people, after all. Tabloids are too small: you need something respectable and full sized. You are only sitting with your girl, reading the paper together—is the right movie playing at the right theater—and you look at the paper, and then at your girl, your free hand holding your side of the daily news, and hers hers. The prim pigeons will fly away, but squirrels are worse perverts than old ladies, and will loiter. One set of her garters has come undone (Oh, you men who care nothing for fashion, let me tell you a story about the days before pantyhose!) and the pale stocking has fallen around her pale shoe on the dark grass like a ring around the moon. If you are a good actor, and a quiet careful polite boy brought up in a houseful of girls, only those local squirrels will wonder why you don't run a finger along the newsprint, why the far left columns crumple in your grip, why she folds the horoscope nearly in half, her thumb threading it between her fingers, her tongue between her teeth. Why it takes so long for the two of you to fold the paper up, neatly, as though you are making the bed.

6

Ah! It's You!

We were playing the Casino Theater at Coney Island when Rocky became enamored of a nearsighted chanteuse named Penny O'Hanian, a pretty girl with a great deal of nut-brown hair who specialized in love-gone-wrong songs. Maybe she was just a good singer, but despite a thin voice she sounded like she meant every stepped-on word. Her eyesight was so bad (she refused to wear glasses) that she had to sidle stage right and feel for the curtain with her fingers. Then she whipped it around herself like a cape—that was her exit—and whipped it back for her bow. Sometimes in the whirlwind of velvet, she nearly toppled over.

Even backstage, she made noise: she sang under her breath so people would know she was coming. Years later, when I heard about the way bats navigate, I thought of Penny, singing out as she groped her way through life. She fixed on her face a standoffish expression because she didn't want to smile at strangers, and you could get quite close to her before she could make out your features, and this was her charm. The minute you came into focus, Penny would suddenly look delighted, relieved, nearly heartsick.
Just the person I was longing to see!
She'd grab you by the forearm. She wouldn't let go.

You had to love Penny for that, and Rocky did. He never noticed that she did it to everyone she knew.

“She's adorable,” he told me.

“She is,” I answered, and I thought, Right up until she opens her mouth. I found her—forgive me, Penny, I didn't know you well then—maddening. Completely. She couldn't shut up. Spending time with Penny was like walking into a crowd of chickens: that noisy and that meaningful. Or like she'd been having a conversation with herself all day, and there was no way you'd catch up. Rocky, no mean talker himself, watched her babble, happily shaking his head. He started keeping company with her. At least I think he did. It was hard to tell. Maybe
I
was keeping company with her. All I knew was that for a week at the Casino, followed by a week at Loew's Majestic in the Bronx, then finally in Manhattan at the Eltinge (named after the famous female impersonator), she was around all the time, at dinners, in taverns. She'd reach out and snag one of our forearms and say, brightly, “Where will we dine tonight, boys?” I'm still not convinced that Penny wasn't just desperate for a couple of seeing-eye friends. It must have been a great relief to her not to totter into a burlesque house thinking it was a department store.

For instance: at a midtown chop house, Rocky was telling a story about Julian Eltinge, the theater's namesake: he'd once punched Rocky in the nose.

“Why?” I asked.

“He thought I made a comment about his virility.”

“Did you?”

Rocky looked theatrically sheepish. “No. No words were exchanged at all.”

“So why did he hit you?”

“I patted him on the keester. I thought it was a compliment, from one professional to another.”

“What a beautiful dress,” Penny said.

We had manners, we were game: we looked around to see what dress Penny meant.

“The one I saw Eltinge in,” she said. “He was fat already, but, my God! I wish I looked that good.” Then she said to Rocky, “I mean, you've never patted
my
keester.”

“I'm a gentleman,” Rock explained. “That was my problem: so was Eltinge.”

“I could use a nice dress.” Penny sighed. “I like blue.” Then, moments later, “I like cut flowers in a vase.” She sensed movement in the room, and called out to the man who was approaching our table, “I could use a fresh napkin.”

The guy in question was a tall blond young man in a tan suit with oversized shoulder pads and a dizzying checked yellow tie. The waiters, on the other hand, were all puny Jewish fellows in short red jackets and black bow-ties. “Couldn't we all?” the guy said amiably, and kept on going toward the Gents'.

“Was that the maître d'?” Penny asked.

I laughed. “For Pete's sake, Penny, why don't you get glasses?” Maybe I was just a glasses snob, having gotten my first pair at age twenty-five. I admired myself in the mirror constantly, though I don't know whether that was because they suited me or because I hadn't clearly seen my own face for several years. Or because I had also just purchased my first toupee, and I was working on not noticing it.

“I don't need them,” Penny said. Then, to Rocky, as if I'd suggested she should wear a mask to cover her puss, she said, “Mike thinks I should get glasses!”

He said, “Not till we're married, sweetheart,” and slapped me heartily on the back.

That was a joke, I was sure. He thought she was pretty sweet—it was all he could do to resist picking her up and carrying her around so she wouldn't bump into things—but he wasn't even sleeping with her. I thought he should give it a try. Penny was so eccentric, not to mention free with her fingers, that it would at least have been an interesting experience.

Niagara Falls the First Time

Penny saw us off at Penn Station—we were headed for Buffalo, then Canada, the first time I'd ever leave the States. She stood on the platform and waved at all the passing windows, just in case someone she knew was on the other side, waving back.

“Nice girl,” I said to Rocky, hoping for some information. He shrugged, and shouldered his suitcase onto the luggage rack.

“Very nice girl,” I said again.

He nodded absentmindedly. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I want to stop and see Niagara Falls. We'll go?”

“I guess.”

“You
guess
?”

“Water running downhill,” I said. If he was bored by Penny, I was bored by some dog-legged river. “What's the big to-do?”

“You'll see. Don't play jaded, kid. It doesn't become you.”

He was right. Good God: I'd only known the Falls as part of that old bit. In real life the river poured and poured and poured, rainbows woven in at the bottom, the giant plume of mist floating up, water giving into gravity and then finding a loophole. I could see how the mere memory could drive someone insane. I felt unstable myself.

“Rocky,” I said in wonder. “Why don't they take a
breath
?”

“They don't have waterfalls in Iowa?” he asked casually.

I didn't know the answer to that. Anyhow, it sure wasn't Duluth.

There was a guy there who engraved drinking glasses with names. He used a pneumatic drill tipped with a diamond, and the glass chips rained down, beautiful as the diamond, beautiful as the finished glass, beautiful as the Falls themselves. I thought about getting one, but didn't know whose name to put down. In my father's house, there were seven ruby glass cups, souvenirs of some fair from some cousin, one for each of us living kids, our names and birth dates written on the side. By now my sisters had plenty of children whose names might be engraved in glass by a fond uncle; Annie, my dogged correspondent, had cataloged them for me. I fingered a bill in my pocket.

“C'mon,” said Rocky. “Let's go.”

Souvenirs everywhere, mostly for the fabled visiting newlyweds and their spendthrift sentiment. I examined reverse-glass painted brooches, change purses made of tiny seashells, etched aluminum cups. We stood on the Canadian side of the border and Rocky read aloud from a pamphlet about all the people who'd ever gone over the Falls in a barrel. Not all of the barrels were barrels: one guy rode over in a giant rubber ball, another in a tin ship that crumpled like foil on the river below.

“Here's someone,” said Rocky. “‘His capsule bounced behind the great curtain of the Falls, out of the reach of rescuers. Despite all efforts to save him, Stathakis suffocated behind the rush of water.' ”

“Well, then he lived longer than he deserved to.”

“You wouldn't go over?” Rocky asked. “You'd be a hero if you lived.”

I turned to him. The wind had pulled his hair into chunks. He looked at the Falls as though they were a particularly worthy adversary, and I decided not to tell him that in June of 1927 I'd lost my stomach for acts of pointless, gravity-tempting bravery. That man who starved had had a family, and they'd never forgiven him for what he'd done.

“We're booked for weeks,” I said. “Please don't go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”

“Well, if that's how you feel, I won't. Otherwise I'd go. Coverage in all the papers whether you make it or not. Rubber. Big rubber enclosed ball. It'll bounce, it'll float, it'll be watertight. Made of old girdles, maybe: nothing can get through a girdle. And can you imagine the view?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine it right here where I'm standing, thanks.”

For his sake I tried to see it: the tiny enclosed ship, a single window for its single passenger. Furtively, you bring it to the top floor of the Falls. You look around for the authorities, set it in the water, and anchor it to shore. You get in. Any minute you'll be facing your death, but right now, even though the current is knocking you around, you can think: any leaks? No. Breathe in. Pull the anchor from the shore. Shoot forward.

Stare out the window to the spot where the bottom drops out of the river. What's that: fear? Exhilaration? Belief that God has time to save idiots like you, when everywhere people die through no fault of their own? No, He'd wash His hands of you, here was the sink He'd do it in.

What you think, just before you plummet:
You know, I'm sure the view is actually much better from dry land.

Back to New York to play the boroughs. In my spare time, I picked up girls. If I ran into a girl I'd slept with, it was like I had to bed her again, to make sure she still thought I was a nice guy. The ones who'd changed their minds made me crazy, though almost none of them did. Two or three, maybe, and they'd married, and even then that didn't seem like a good excuse. I tried flowers, songs, whatever might work. One recently wed former paramour said, “Why me? There are plenty of girls,” and I scratched my head and said, “You know? You're right,” and let go of her hand and fairly skipped off.

That
worked.

I'd always been taught that love went something like this: There is a girl out there for you, and you find her, and then you work endlessly to keep love around. “Your parents loved each other, Mose,” my father told me more than once, “better love because harder work.” And so I came to understand: love is an animal that can—with a great deal of patience—be taught to sleep in the house. That doesn't mean it won't kill you if you're not careful.

Really, do you want it in your house?

Maybe I liked some of those girls better than others. A girl named Gwen, maybe, and an Italian girl named Carlotta. Maybe sometimes I was glad to get away, and other times not, but mostly I remember being full of love while lying down with every girl, and then less so when I stood up to leave, as though my brain was a bowl tilted to collect a stingy serving of something that, when I was upright, drained to my feet, where it did no good.

But before then I felt swell, I felt fine, I felt perfectly cheerful. The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don't care what anyone says. The guys in vaudeville, they took all sorts of cures, you only had to watch what they ran to first thing in the morning to ease the last bits of their night terrors: a bottle, a needle, a bookie, a Western Union office, a stage, a wife, a child, a giant meal, a strange pretty girl. Would we be ashamed later? Sure. These days, when shamefulness and shamelessness are both sins, I don't know how people operate. Back then, only shamelessness was: we were ashamed, and so we buried ourselves in the thing that shamed us, because it was the only thing that might make us feel better. And then we repented. And then, flush with repentance, we sinned again.

Tansy's Discovery

Carter and Sharp were weary. Vaudeville wheezed all around us, milking its deathbed scene worse than, well, a vaudevillian. By 1937 we played as many nightclubs as vaude houses. Summers we worked in the Catskills or out near the Minnesota lakes. It got so Rocky wouldn't go to a movie or listen to the radio. He couldn't stand all those guys with less talent than us who nevertheless got big breaks.

And then we met Buddy Tansy.

We were in New York again, playing a run-down theater in the Bronx that had quit booking vaude acts in the early thirties in favor of movies, and was now adding a few performers to warm up the audience before the pictures. I think we opened for
The Good Earth
. The dressing rooms were in the basement and smelled like one hundred years of trained-dog acts. When we walked into ours after the show, there was a tiny man sitting on the old daybed, reading a newspaper. He squinted at us when we came in.

“I'm Buddy Tansy,” he said, trying to wrestle the paper to the ground. It seemed to be getting the better of him.

“Good for you!” said Rocky.

“I want to represent you.”

“We have representation,” I said, reaching past him for my case. After the act Rock was cheerful and filled with the milk of human kindness. I was filled with a burning need to hit the cold cream. The towel by the sink had, like the shroud of Turin, the impression of someone's face.

“I'm better,” said the little man unconvincingly.

“So talk to us, Buddy Tansy,” said Rocky. “Tell us how you will change our life.”

“Really? You won't be sorry. You sure?” He wrung his hands, as if this invitation was too much to bear.

Rocky and I weren't tall men, but Tansy was minuscule. He had the exasperated dignity of a man who'd spent his life being shut up in dumbwaiters and theatrical trunks as a gag. I'd never had such leanings in my life, but even
I
wanted to find out what unlikely place I could cram Tansy into. His given name was Edward, and he tried to get people to call him Buddy, but everyone called him Tansy, an elf of a name for an elf of a man. He hated it. Good old Tansy. He had a small head with small features, and pointed teeth that showed when he smiled, which made him look nervous and cornered. All in all, he resembled some avid little animal, one who'd spend all its time nibbling on things it shouldn't—the lettuce in your garden, the wiring under your house.