Niagara Falls All Over Again (21 page)

“No,” I said. “They loved their instruments too much. When a girl gets to know a tuba real well, she's pretty much spoiled for human company.”

“You know . . .” Penny said confidentially. She reclined sideways and tossed her calves across my thighs, making a hash mark of my lap. “Where's my julep, Julep?”

“Let me free, and I'll get you one.”

“Any minute now.” Penny's dress was a bright emerald green, gathered with rhinestone clips at either point of her collarbone. “You know,” she said again, “when I started hanging around with you boys, it wasn't Rocky I liked.”

“No?”

“No.”
She nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “So you grew to love him.”

“Yes!” she said. “He talked me into it. I figured the two of you had a conversation and decided he'd get me.”

I decided to be polite. “He always did get the lion's share of everything.”

“Sixty-forty,” she said, and that was another thing I resented, Rocky telling her the terms of our agreement. “So, you want to collect?”

“What?” I said.

“Your forty percent.” One of her green shoes fell off her foot onto the banquette next to me. I picked it up, slipped my hand inside. I could feel the row of elliptical indentations like little stones where her toes had settled into the leather.

“Listen,” I said.

“You listen, Julep.” The other shoe fell off. “You're going to have to carry me home. The all-julep orchestra. I mean, I always liked you. And I could tell you always liked me. I'm not really drunk, I mean, not much. Not more than you are, if that's what you're worried about—”

What
had
Rocky been telling her? That was what I always told him: Never sleep with anyone drunker than you are. True enough, I was drunk, and that would have been excuse number four except that I never did anything I regretted simply because I was drunk. Rocky liked to say, “Too bad, the way you always keep your wits about you.”

“—and besides,” Penny said, and she looked like she wished she had a third shoe to kick off, “you don't want to hurt my feelings.”

Excuse number four: I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

In the movies, I never so much as kissed a girl. These days they give even the fattest and least appealing comedians their own love interests, a pretty girl who has nothing to do with the business at hand. Our movies had the pretty girl plus her dull handsome gentleman friend. Now and then Rocky would be in love with a girl comedian, because Rocky was made even less than I for Romance, and therefore was a funnier Romeo. A kiss between them was a spoof, a giant zealous puckering sound like a zipper going, as though for Rocky even kissing was slapstick, slightly painful, unserious. In
Ghost of a Chance
I had a fiancée who was so much a foregone conclusion that we barely appeared on-screen together, though she did beg me not to go into a haunted house with only the Wee Willie Winkie candle on a plate I clutched in my hand. The joke was that girls frightened the Professor more than any old ghost.

In real life, I hadn't been afraid of a girl in a long time, not even Sukey, but Penny spooked me. Drunk as we were, we didn't get much sleep that night. Penny seemed always to have just brushed her teeth, her kisses all canines and peppermint. Why on earth was I doing this? She seemed amazed that I guessed that her dress unzipped on the side. Maybe she hoped that I'd give up if I didn't know the secret. That part was easy; her underthings were complicated, a camisole over a long-line brassiere, a half slip over a girdle and garters, hooks and eyes everywhere. Despite this bracing assortment of garments, she seemed smaller undressed. One knee was childishly skinned, rough and hot. Everywhere I touched felt like a different temperature: her narrow shoulders, her slightly wider hips. She took her hair down, and suddenly looked even more naked.

What unnerved me was watching this woman I knew perfectly well, this woman I'd grown fond of, turn, by degrees, into a woman about to have sex. I hadn't ever slept with someone I'd really known before, I mean, not for the first time. There was Mimi, but Mimi in bed was Mimi out of bed; I'd never known a woman who changed less in the act of love. As for Sukey: I'd never known a woman who changed more. Penny was somewhere in between. I hadn't seen her make that expression before, but it was familiar. Her hand went fluttering under my chin.

I bit the insides of her thighs, and she almost squirmed away but moved my hands with her own to her waist to keep her steady. I thought I was betraying everyone, Rocky and Sukey and Penny herself, and maybe the only difference the drink made was that I couldn't tell how much I cared. I had crossed over: I was no longer a man of discretion, I was a lousy goddamn sneak. She was his
wife
. She was living in his
house
.

Such a squirming girl. I am changing the subject.

“Do you think—” I began, but she shushed me with a shudder, sat up and kissed my shoulder and bit my collarbone. Where had her legs gone all of a sudden? Ah. They were around my waist, and I was sitting up on my heels, and Penny slid her lips across my chin and down my throat. My heart felt like a ball bearing in a child's maze, moved around by her mouth.

We'd gone to Penny's house, which is to say Rocky's, which was why I missed the telegram from the former Valley Junction, now West Des Moines. I found it slid beneath my door when I went home at four in the morning, just after Penny and I swore not to tell anyone, especially Rocky.

March 3, 1943
Michael Sharp
1123 Belmont Drive
Sherman Oaks, Calif.

darling Papa died today come home if you can all love Annie.

Beautiful frugal Annie, who wouldn't have said
died
but all the euphemisms cost more, and she'd already wasted forty cents on
darling
. I wondered who Michael Sharp was, and then realized she wanted to be both respectful of my stage name and formal. That was what I concentrated on, because my father's death seemed made up. I hadn't seen him in four years, not since Rocky had tricked me into going home.
You've come home once
, Annie said to me then.
Now you can do it over and over
. I'd agreed with her. But then the war came, and Carter and Sharp were a hit, and it was hard to travel in wartime, and we were a hit, and I'd meant to and meant to . . . but I didn't, because we were a hit. Busy.
Come back
. Those were his last words to me. He'd gotten too deaf to use the phones. All I knew of his life from the past four years I got from Annie.
His appetite is good. He doesn't mention the war. He's grown fond of crossword puzzles
.
He adores his grandchildren. He thanks you for the necktie, he thanks you for the bottle of wine, he thanks you for the new radio.
What a failure I was. Bad enough to run away from home once, but twice?

I wondered whether I could catch a plane so I could make the funeral, which was probably today and if not today, then tomorrow. Most of the spots on planes were saved for servicemen, but I sat down and wrote several telegrams—one to Rocky, one to Tansy, and one to Annie, explaining where I'd gone, where I'd be, and I drove to the airport and waited for a flight, and there I remembered Penny, and sent her a wire too.

9

He Called Everyone Goldie

As I walked up Eighth Street to the house in Vee Jay, I could see a young woman sitting on the front steps, despite the late winter nip. She stood up as I got closer, a young woman in a brown dress with black piping and very red lipstick. Some niece, or great-niece, or unaccounted in-law. She met me halfway across the lawn, and I realized two things: I was about to be hugged; the woman was Rose, grown up.

“Mose!” she said in the sandy voice all my sisters had inherited from my mother, a kind of
yiddishe
Gene Kelly.

“You look different,” I said, almost laughing.

“I stopped being twelve years old.”

“Well, it suits you,” I said, and it did. She looked like my other sisters, with her dark hair and blue eyes, but somehow more beautiful: her skin was pinker, her waist more emphatic. The whole town must have thought of her as the prettiest of the Sharp girls. No wonder some Quigley had kidnapped her.

She put her arm around my waist and pointed at the front stairs. “I was just thinking,” she said. “About you and Hattie the day after Mama died. You stepped in all the food.”

“We did. How can you remember that? You were a baby.”

She stopped for a second. “You're right,” she said, rubbing her chin with her free hand. “I shouldn't remember it, but I do. Annie was furious.”

“She was?”

“Sure. What a waste!” She sighed. We still stood off the walk. “It's not so bad from here,” she said. “The house. Not so bad altogether, I guess. But right now, I want to run away.”

I kissed her temple. “Me too,” I said.

“You're better at it than me,” said Rose, and then the front door opened, and Annie waved us in.

“I found him on the floor,” Annie told me. “I got up and came downstairs and went to the kitchen because I didn't want to wake him. I made some tea. I sorted and soaked some beans for dinner. Then I thought I'd make him some milktoast. He hadn't been feeling well. Stomach. Head, too, I guess. He called me Goldie. He called the little boys Goldie. I mean, he didn't think they were, but it was the only name he could remember, and that made him mad, and he'd point at whoever he meant, and say, Goldie, that Goldie. Got to be in a wheelchair, it's behind the door now. Doctor said strokes, maybe lots of little ones. He was ninety-four, the oldest man in Valley Junction, did you know? Doctor said he died in his sleep and then fell out of bed, but he didn't. He was reaching for something. Us. That's what I think: he knew he was dying, and he wanted to get to us!”

By
us
she meant herself and Rose, both sleeping upstairs. Now the house was filled with sisters and nieces and nephews, all those fascinating strangers.

Your people are barbaric,
I'd said to Rocky when he'd told me what a wake was. Now I understood. I wished I had seen him. I wished he was as vivid to me as he was to my sisters: the crime scene, his last known whereabouts. His eyes were open. His beard was tangled. His right arm was over his head, and he had his hand out as though in the dark he'd seen the rabbi's face in the portrait over the mantel and had said, “Stranger, help an old man up, I beg you.” Maybe he said it in Yiddish or Lithuanian. In the dark, the rabbi would have looked underwater; to be in black and white, then, was only sensible. Perhaps the rabbi had called my father out of bed. Pop sleeps, and wakes, and wants to look at his friend's face, but all he can see is a ball of light where the moonbeams from the kitchen window hit the curved glass. Something feels wrong, as though one of the children has been trying to scrape out his heart with a spoon. He leans out of bed, and he falls to the floor.

Nothing hurts except the wool of the carpet under his cheek. Then he realizes: he can feel that cheek again. He can nearly count the petals of the flowered carpet. Still, he can hear his friend, the man behind the glass who calls to that fine old gentleman on the floor—for a few seconds more, the oldest living citizen in Valley Junction—by every name he's ever been called in his life:
Jake, Jacob, Papa, Pop, darling, darling Mr. Sharp, sir, sir, Zayde, Jakov Shmuel—tell me, what is your name?

Not anymore, here's a new one, good luck.

We said how lucky we were to have had him so long. A man who died well loved, well kissed, well fed. A life of sadness, but not of regret. Front-page news in the
West Des Moines Express
. All that food I'd imagined before: the neighbors brought covered dishes and platters of meat and dozens of muffins. Step in it, I thought, but instead I ate an entire coffee cake from the point of a knife.
Mose, what are you doing?
someone asked me as I polished it off, and I said,
Cleaning up.

My father's will left the store for me if I agreed to come home and run it. If I refused, Sharp's Gents' would be sold to Ed Dubuque at a very reasonable price.

“Well?” Annie asked.

For thirty seconds I imagined myself giving up on the movies, coming back to Valley Junction, working with Ed Dubuque and Annie. I could feel the cloth tape measure slip between my fingers as I encircled the customers, telling them their size as though I were predicting a pleasant fortune. Then I might ease my guilt: I'd finally do what my father, my dead father, had always wanted. But I couldn't stop myself, and in my head I filled the store with chorus girls who flew back and forth on the sliding ladders; they did a dance with the metal measures for feet; some disguised themselves as mannequins and some as customers.

I shook my head.

“He could have left it to me!” said Annie, and burst into tears.

Well, I was shocked, first by Annie's greediness, and then, moments later, by the realization that she was right: poor, devoted firstborn Annie, who'd done everything an heir should have except been born a boy.

The sympathy in that house was like the coffee cake: too much, too sweet, too familiar. I wearied of all those sisterly embraces. The service at B'nai Jeshurun was packed with Jews and Gentiles. The one place I least wanted to be famous was the one place I was most: “It's the movie star!” said old school friends, and minor cousins, and men to whom I'd as a teenager sold underwear. In the
temple
, at my father's
memorial
. All I wanted was to forget myself and remember my father, but I automatically shook hands and smiled, and then was sickened from smiling.
This is not a personal appearance. This is a personal disappearance
. Ed Dubuque finally rescued me, his nose red from weeping. “Master Sharp,” he said solemnly. The rabbi of my youth was still there, and he threw his arms around me and rubbed my bald head (I left my hairpiece in California, I suddenly realized, I hoped not in Penny's—Rocky's!—bed).

At the graveside I stood with the shovel, planning to turn over the usual three spadefuls of dirt onto my father's pine coffin, but somehow, I lost track. He'd called everyone Goldie. Maybe he'd forgotten my name, too. Of course he had. When the dirt hit the pine, tiny white rocks revealed themselves there, and I wanted to jump down and pick them out. Hattie's grave was next to us; Mama's next to hers. I would not even look in that direction. When the family turned from my father's grave to head back home, they'd stop and leave stones for Hattie and Mama, to show they remembered. Not me. I'd lose track then, too, I'd heap so many rocks up you wouldn't be able to find the graves at all. Across from me, one son-in-law handed his shovel to another, but I was making up my own ritual, a spadeful of dirt for every year I'd stayed gone, proof of my regret. The only thing I could do for my father now was bury him.

“Mose?” said the rabbi, who stood behind me. His voice was both bewildered and educational. “Mose? You do know that it's only symbolic?”

Pop's old Jewett was full of gas despite all shortages: no one ever drove it. That night I took it coughing up Fifth Street to downtown Vee Jay. Someone had tacked a memorial wreath to the door of Sharp's Gents'. If I crossed Railroad Avenue, I'd get to Johnny's Vets' Club, a disreputable bootleg joint that maybe my father had never heard of. I'd killed him, I decided, though it took a lot of work even for me to figure out how. What I came up with: he realized, at last, that I wasn't coming home to run the store, that the next time I came to Des Moines would be to bury him, and he thought, Let the boy have his wish. Oh, that wasn't true. But I also knew that my father had spent his life assembling and perfecting Sharp's Gents' as a gift for me—who knew what he'd given up over fifty years to make it a going concern?—and every time he offered it, I turned him down. As though he were offering money, or an exploding cigar. Sitting in the Jewett at the end of Fifth Street, I tried to imagine how my refusal would have felt to him.

No: I wouldn't go to Johnny's, where the town toughs might be toasting to my father. I'd swing into Des Moines, maybe go to Babe's (another bootlegging restaurant; Iowa still held on to Prohibition), maybe find myself one of those nice WACs. We'd check into a downtown hotel, a grand one—I chose the Fort Des Moines, in honor of her home base. I wouldn't bother to call my sisters. Understand: I knew I would do nothing of the kind. I decided to do these things so that I could then decide not to.

So I drove past Greenwood Park, up Grand Avenue to Babe's, and around the state capitol, past the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, back toward downtown, then north. I went past the Jewish Community Center, where Hattie and I had gone to dances at my father's urging. As a matter of fact, there was a dance going on that very night; couples strolled in through the front door. They looked cheerful and full of pep. I parked the Jewett and stared at the place. It was as though I'd been talking to my father:
Pop, I'm going to Johnny's Vets', maybe Babe's
.

Mose, no nice girl will ever be in those places, because no nice boy would take her there. Why not go to the Community Center? You like to dance, so dance. Have a soft drink. Talk to nice people.

So in I went.

Most of the people inside seemed to know each other—they attended the Temple, or Tifereth Israel, the Conservative synagogue. I got myself a glass of lemonade from a plump girl in a tight pink dress. It was weird to see people dancing like this, earnestly, as though they'd studied dancing for a test. The band was two fat men in blue suits, one a piano player, the other a saxophonist. They played on a small stage near the lemonade girl.

Was dancing allowed during mourning? I flexed my toes in my funeral shoes, and thought I could maybe work it in.

When I first saw the woman, she was trying to avoid having her shoes trampled by an old guy whose bald head shone with sweat. I touched my own forehead in sympathetic embarrassment. They were doing the Castle Walk, an ancient dance. Probably it was the only one he knew. The woman wore her black hair in a Spanish bun, with curls on either side. You could tell she thought she came off as taller than she was, but actually she was tiny, with a long nose and white skin and I had never, never seen anyone who looked like her, so unlikely and so beautiful. She was bossy when she danced. If they were the Castles, Castle-walking, she was certainly Vernon, and he Irene.

The saxophonist was giving the pianist room to do some fancy stuff on the keyboard. He leaned over to me and said, a mind-reader, “Go ahead, ask her to dance. What's the worst that could happen?”

So I walked off to do that very thing. Later I found out he was the lemonade girl's father, and that's probably who he meant.

But the woman I had my eye on was with yet another man, this one skinny and pimple faced, with an active Adam's apple—was he talking, or swallowing nervously? She made the way she dodged his jabbing elbows into a little ballet. I lost heart. She was too good, and though I knew I could outdance any of the men here, I couldn't outdance her. Who could?

I caught up with her at the refreshment table.

“May I?” I asked. The lemonade was free. My offer was only to accept the drink from the fat girl and hand it over.

My woman smiled. “Surely. Thank you.”

The lemonade girl handed me a dripping glass, though earlier her aim had been faultless.

“My name is Mike Sharp,” I told the dark-haired woman. I waited for her recognition. The saxophonist said to the piano player, “See?”

“I'm Jessica Howard,” she said. She wiped the glass with a handful of her black skirt, which was made of bands of lace you could see light through: it was a Roman Colosseum of a skirt. Beneath it, she wore a dark red slip. “That guy I was dancing with?” she said. “Voice like a saltine cracker. Made me thirsty.”

The sax player pulled his instrument apart and laid it in its velvet lined case.

“No more music,” Jessica said sadly.

“Next time,” the saxophonist told her, despite himself, “I'll play you a flamenco.”

She winked at him. Oh God, I thought, I need a wink like that myself. I said, “May I give you a ride home?”

“I don't get in strange cars with men.”

“I don't have a car,” I said, renouncing anything she might not like. “May I walk you home?”

She was looking at me with what was either contempt or the earliest stages of affection. “Why?”

“Why,” I repeated. “I've been away from Des Moines for a while. I'd like to take a walk. We could keep each other company.”

“Well, then,” she said. “Let's walk.”

The air outside felt damp and cool, like something laid across the chest of an ailing child. I felt cured already. She had a kind of skipping stride. Maybe she was thinking of how she'd attack the flamenco at the next dance. I couldn't decide if I liked the fact that she didn't know I was the Movie Star. I was pretty sure I did.

“You dance beautifully,” I told her.

“Should,” she said. “It's my business.”