Niagara Falls All Over Again (14 page)

We had more money that we'd ever had in our lives. Rocky spent every dime, on fresh flowers for his buttonhole, on good suits and good food and drinks for everyone in the house, no matter what the house was. Rocky loved gratitude. Gratitude from strangers was even better.
The Money Show
closed after two months, but we didn't care. We'd been called to California, by a big studio, for a
feature
.

“We'll stop in Valley Junction this time,” said Rocky. I was helping him pack up his apartment, which in two months he'd managed to fill with outgrown-clothes and half-eaten sandwiches. He was rewarding himself for his industry by taking sips from a silver flask that Penny had given him.

“No,” I said. “Are you saving these magazines?”

“Why,” he asked, “are you so pigheaded about this? You got a family who loves you. I want my sixty percent of that love. Course, I'm willing to take all of my cut of the love from Rose—”

“Stop that. I'm not pigheaded. I want . . .” Even talking about going to Valley Junction terrified me. My fear, I know now, was a brand of homesickness so thorough you feel helpless, and so want to stay away from the thing that infected you in the first place.

I've lived a long time, and so people ask if longevity runs in the family. Now I can say yes: my sister Annie lived to be more than a hundred, my sister Sadie ninety-two. Various nieces and nephews who are about my age still walk the earth, and by walk I mean actually
walk
. But if you'd asked in 1939, I would have said no, sadly. My mother had died young; so had Hattie. I did not know any forebears other than my parents and Rabbi Kipple, and I always thought of Rabbi Kipple as exactly the age he was in his portrait, in his forties. Everyone else was dead; everyone else had died before I was born; therefore, everyone else had died young.

When I'd left town more than ten years before, I'd reconciled myself to the fact I'd never see my father again. My sisters, I figured, would show up in my life eventually. They'd come to a show, or I'd walk into a train car and there one would be, or—this was most likely—I'd get a telegram informing me of my father's death and if I got it in time and wasn't on one of the coasts, I'd go to the funeral. But my father would die. Who survived old age?

Sometimes I thought: surely he's dead by now, and nobody's told me. Then I'd get a letter from Annie, bless her heart, filling me in on the news of the family. How could it be that a man who died in my head once a month could live so long? Understand: I wanted him to live forever. Thinking about his death was how I punished myself. Heartless boy (I would always be a boy in my father's presence) to have left a father who loved you. Heartless brother, to leave your sisters weeping in the parlor. People in Valley Junction knew my mother, but they
loved
my father. I imagined the back steps piled high with offerings. Soon the steps would fill, and the neighbors would hang the branches with tureens of soup. They'd line up as many pound cakes as would fit on windowsills. There's a loaf of bread in the mailbox. There are pies in the bushes, their meringues dusted with snow. Someone has slipped a stack of pancakes under the doormat. Candy like fallen leaves lies in heaps everywhere, everywhere.

But he didn't die. Over and over he didn't die.

Now Rocky shook his flask at me. “I've already cabled them,” he said. “I signed your name. It's all set.”

“Oy
vey,
” I said. My hands and feet began to prickle with fear. “No—”

“You've already said yes. You can't just change your mind. You promised me.”

“When did I ever—”

“We were thirty-two miles southeast of Chicago, sitting in the dining car of the Wolverine. You said, ‘Next time. I promise.' It's next time. You
promised
. Me, and now the rest of the Sharenskys.”

“Goddamn your memory.” I massaged my eyebrows, which for some reason usually calmed me. “Rocky. Rocky. I'll—”

“Don't break our hearts, Mosey,” he said quietly.

I sighed. He had me. It was one thing not to go home; it was another thing to say I would and then not show up, even though I
hadn't
said I would. I sat down on the sofa. Something broke beneath the cushion—a plate, maybe. I held out my hand for the flask. “Okay. Good God. Why on earth? I guess we could.”

“Sure!” said Rock. “And I'll stay in a nice hotel—the Corn Cob Arms, that the best one?”

“The Fort Des Moines,” I said.

“The Fort Des Moines. And maybe you can invite poor
goyishe
me over for dinner so I can meet your sisters. I've been dreaming about those sisters for a while now. I mean, I'd never be unfaithful to Rose, but I'd like to get a gander at the whole sorority. How many are there? Thirty-six?”

“Five,” I said.

He said, “Annie-Ida-Fannie-Sadie-Hattie-Rose.”

“Five living sisters,” I said, “and three of those are married.”

He took back his flask and toasted. “Many a fine woman is.”

7

An Orphaned Girl Is Hard to Marry

Rocky and I got separate sleepers for our trip West. “No more berths for us!” he declared. In Chicago, we'd change for the the Rock Island Rocket.

“You'll get off in Des Moines,” I said, consulting the timetable in the dining car. “And I'll—”

“We'll both get off in West Des Moines,” Rock said.

“There is no West Des Moines,” I explained, but there it was in print, the next stop after Rock Island Station, right where Valley Junction should be.

“Annie
wrote
you,” said Rocky. “They changed the name last year. And I'm coming with you.”

“That's not—”

“Yes, it is. First West Des Moines née Valley Junction. Then I'll investigate the fleshpots of Des Moines, and you'll reconvene with your sisters.” He thought I'd bolt. I'd keep going west till I got to Nebraska.

You would have thought he was the one going to meet his family, whom he loved. In the dining car he wondered what Annie would cook.

“Green beans,” I said. “And cookies that taste like pencil drawings of cookies.”

“I can't wait.” He sighed. “And to see little Rose, all grown up. Do you think she'll remember me? Do you think she's been true?”

“Rocky.”

“Little Rose Sharensky. I do love that girl. . . .”

“Why did you do this to me?” I asked. I swiveled to sit sideways in the booth, then got a little motion sick and swiveled back.

“You're not mad, are you? You're going home a hero!”

“Of course I'm mad,” I said. “I don't want to do this. You're making me.”

“You know what I've never understood about you?” said Rocky. “I'm being serious now. Tell me why you left home.”

“You know why,” I said.

“Okay, so let me tell you why
I
left home. My father once beat me because I left my homework on the sofa.”

My father, a shopkeeper, wanted me to inherit his store.

“My mother once refused to talk to me for three weeks because she thought I'd taken more than my share of sugar. I was eleven,” said Rocky.

My father wanted me to work beside him every day, to be his right-hand man.

“My parents once went on a research trip to Ontario. They left me at home with a list of things not to touch. I was nine.”

My sisters wanted to see me become, like my father, a pillar of the community. They wanted me to marry a nice Jewish girl and have children and never leave Iowa.

“My mother told me I had ruined her education. My father told me I had ruined my mother. My mother said she hated the sight of me. My father said he despised my voice.”

My family worried, worried, worried about me, until I couldn't breathe.

“And you know what? We write. We talk on the phone. They can't stand me and I love them, and what's kept me on the road is that someday they'll go into a movie theater and see my face and maybe for a moment think, Look at the kid! Who
wouldn't
love him? But you,” he said.

“Me.”

“You ran away from home because your family loves you too much!”

I tried to smile at every single person in the dining car: Nothing wrong here, folks. An olive-skinned girl in a violet blouse gave me a sympathetic look before turning to gossip with her friends. I wanted to go and join them. “Sshh. That's not it.”

“Right, right, right, your sister died and she would have been a star and you made a promise and you'll kill yourself to keep it. But she never would have made it in vaudeville, you know that.”

“Rocky—”

“Look, I'll leave Hattie alone. She's dead, she's wonderful—I'm sorry, it's just that your cowardice on this subject, it gives me a headache. I don't understand it. And the reason I sent that cable was because I knew—don't fool yourself, I know everything about you, I know every stupid secret—is that once you see your sisters and your father and that store, which, I assure you, you have escaped for all time, you will be happier and less fearful. And that will make me happier. And possibly less fearful. For Christ's sake,” he said bitterly, “I'm tired of your moods.”

He pushed away his china dinner plate and glared at me. There was a trail of grease down his shirt from where he'd dropped a piece of ham steak. Then he got up from the table. “Please, Professor,” he said. “Don't fuck this up for me.” He turned and left for his sleeper.

I didn't know this before, but it is comparatively easy to pick up a girl in a dining car if she sees you being bullied by a fat man, even if she doesn't speak English.

In the morning he was contrite. He knocked on the door of my room—the sympathetic Portuguese girl (I think she was Portuguese) had gone back to her friends before dawn—with a plate of scrambled eggs in his hands, which he managed to eat standing up, despite the train's shimmying. “I got things on my mind,” he said. “I don't mean to take them out on you.”

“What things?” I asked.

He waved his fork dismissively in the air. “You know. Everything. I just don't want you to worry. You'll see your family. We'll have a nice meal. Rose and I will make our wedding plans. Then we'll all go out to California and make movies.”

“All of us?”

“Sure. Annie play the oboe or something? We'll find a spot for her. She'll give ZaSu Pitts a run for the money. We'll invite all the Sharps into the act.”

That's what I was afraid of.

We stepped off the train into an ice-blue afternoon. There would have been frost on the ground that morning. West Des Moines, huh? It was as though Valley Junction had been forced into a bad marriage, and decided to put on a brave face. I was wearing one of my old Sharp's Gents' suits out of nostalgia and realized, for the first time, that I'd gotten a little taller and a little wider since I'd left. My wrists hung out of the sleeves and the wind bit at them.

“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”

I looked up Fifth Street.

“Well?” said Rock.

“Strangest thing,” I said. “Store's not here.”

“It moved.”

“What? It was right here—” I pointed at a dubious-looking restaurant.

“It
moved,
” Rocky said. “Do you even read Annie's letters? Five years ago, your old man moved the store. Come on.” He grabbed the back of my coat and towed me up the street till we got to the slightly more genteel two-hundred block, my suitcase bouncing against my leg. Our trunks had been sent on to California. That's what a small town it was, one block and you were in a better neighborhood. There was the store. Across the new window painted letters spelled,
Sharp and Son's,
which broke my heart and made me happy.

The Depression hadn't missed Valley Junction. Ten years after the crash the town looked rearranged and abandoned. The Rock Island line had moved its roundhouse. The trains still came through, but few of them stopped. No good to the town unless they stopped. The men who'd banked with my father were smart. Old Man Sharp paid no interest, but he charged no fees and he'd never fold.

The new store was clean, with linoleum floors and bright hanging light fixtures and signs on the walls that pointed out departments, if you could call them that:
Shoes, Suits, Hats
. They'd kept the sliding iron ladders, I was glad to see, and the big front counter, and the man who stood behind the counter, his hands held an inch above the glass top.

“Well, good grief,” Ed Dubuque said to me. “The fatted calf has come home.”

“I don't think it's the calf that comes home,” I said, but he was already throwing his long puppetish arms around my neck. Ed's hair had thinned and his face had picked up a few lines, but then so had mine, so had mine. He looked wonderful. Did I have to go to the house? Couldn't the three of us spend the afternoon in a pool hall, drinking beer and making bets?

“I hear you're a star of stage and screen, Master Sharp,” he said.

“Stage, I guess,” I said, “and not a star. Other than that, you've got it right. Is my father here?”

He gave me a head-swinging appraisal, his forearms still resting on my shoulders. “No,” he said. “He doesn't come in anymore. He's not at home?”

“We're on our way there. Never comes in?”

Ed grimaced and smiled at the same time. “He's ninety. He's not so good, Mose. Figured that's why you were here.”

“It is why,” said Rocky from the back of the store, where he was leafing through a stack of folded shirts. He walked over to the counter to shake Ed's hand. “Pleased to meet you—Ed? I'm Rocky Carter, Mose's partner.”

“A pleasure,” said Ed.

Rocky clapped his hands together. “So. Let's go. Let's go to six twenty-five Eighth Street and see your father.”

“You know the place?” Ed asked.

“Oh,” said Rocky, “I imagine I'll know it when I see it.”

Ed turned to me. “Master Sharp,” he said delicately. “Your suit.”

“You recognize it?”

Ed inclined his head in sorrow. “You can't see your father like that.” He fingered the lapel, which was shredding at the edges. He was right: nothing would count if my father thought I looked shabby. Well, I had a suitcase full of fine clothes, I'd just go in the back and change—but Rocky, always helpful, had started undressing a mannequin who leaned in the doorway in the back.

“We can find something—” Ed began. He must have thought I was down on my luck, dressed as I was.

“No,” I said. “Rock's right. I'll wear what that guy's wearing.” So we stripped the dummy of his herringbone jacket and I put it on, and Rocky and I set out.

At least the house was where we'd always kept it, at Eighth and Hillside at the top of the hill. Rock and I walked there in silence. Every now and then he gave me a pat on one shoulder. Four steps up the porch; red door; chipped black knob. Was I supposed to knock? I didn't know. Rock reached around and did it for me. I looked down at my new clothes: that dummy must have been in the window, once, and for a long time; the jacket was sun-damaged.

I swore I would remain my grown-up self. Everything had changed since I'd left ten years before: people paid money to look at me. They applauded and usually laughed. Girls from every state in the nation had praised me for my kindness, my patience, my impatience. It's only your father, I thought. It's only any old tough audience.

“Knock 'em dead, kid,” Rocky said under his breath as the door began to open.

There was Annie, middle-aged, fat, and gray. “You're not supposed to be here yet!” she cried, hugging me. She was soft; she smelled of boiled vegetables; she smelled like Iowa. “I didn't think you'd really come, Mosey,” she said. “I thought you were gone forever. Come in, come in. Nobody's here now but Papa and me, not till dinner. Come in. And your friend! Mr. Carter?”

“Annie Sharp,” Rocky said warmly. “I'd recognize you anywhere.” He pushed me through the doorway. “Do I smell cookies?” he asked.

“No,” said Annie, puzzled.

Then we were in the house at the foot of the stairs, the flowered blue wallpaper, the carved newel post that looked like a chess piece. Rocky was still pushing me. “Here,” said Annie, and she led me to the parlor. I felt Rocky's hands leave my back.

Pop sat in a chair, his feet propped on a comically small ottoman I didn't recognize. He'd grown his beard back, red despite his age. A made-up bed had been jammed in the corner by the front windows.

“Hello,” I said, and he raised his head.

Something had happened to his face. The left side had fallen like a velvet curtain caught on a prop. He looked like the thing he'd been outrunning his whole life: an old Jew, a remnant of the old country. A foreigner. In fact, he looked something like I did in my Hebe act. I'd changed suits because I didn't want to look shabby in his presence, but his own clothes were ragged, and I understood that he realized he was dying, and there was no point in being fitted for a new suit. This was not frugality—my father owned a storeful of suits—but a kind of superstition. In his old age my father believed that the Evil Eye was everywhere, even in dressing rooms. Don't tempt it with plans. The beard made him look sloppy, but his softened cheek wouldn't have stood up to a razor.

I only wanted him to invite me into the room. I only wanted his forgiveness. His blessings—Oh, I wanted everything my father had planned to give me all those years before: I just didn't want the building they were stored in. My father was a businessman and had offered me a deal: I turned it down, everything, and only now did it occur to me that we should have bargained longer, that I could have bought the stock—by which I mean my father's love—and left behind the real estate.

“Look, Papa: it's Mosey,” said Annie. I took a few more steps in. “He's like this,” she said to me. “Stroke. Just two weeks ago. He's fine, only a little slower. I would have written, but then we got your wire.” She knelt at his chair and held his hand: I'd never seen her so tender. “It's fine, it's fine. You know who this is.” If he wasn't sure it was me, who was I? Some young man in a suit that looked familiar, ruined by the sun so it seemed, in the dark room, as though he was standing in a sunbeam anyhow. Was I looking for work? A handout? His blessing to marry one of his daughters? Pop raised his arms, though one barely left his lap. I went and took that heavier hand. It felt like a prop, too, a folded dusty lady's fan, lace over cracked ivory.

“So,” said Pop, in a similarly cracked voice, “you're a little late for dinner.”

My father, the comedian. At last we had something in common.

Annie had left the room; I could hear her talking to Rocky in the kitchen, the clang of dishes: she was trying to make up for the lack of cookies.