Niagara Falls All Over Again (41 page)

George Burns, for example. Next to tiny Gracie, he looked like a big guy, tall and broad shouldered and handsome enough. He combed his wavy hair straight back from his forehead. Age alone can't explain how his looks changed: the dumb wig (blond for a while, then silver) that he wore parted on the side like a kid, those round black glasses, the way his eyes narrowed to slits. How small he was. You could hardly recognize the guy. Sure, he was older, and eventually he was very old indeed, but plenty of it was his own choosing. After his wife died, he was no longer Gracie's straight man. If he looked the way he always had, audiences would know what was missing.

This is a comedy team: one person straightening the other's necktie, and it makes sense.

Soldiers with legs amputated suffer from phantom pain. Me, I've suffered forty years from phantom punch lines. For all the noise I made about being glad to get rid of him, the things I did afterward, the movies I appeared in—being with Rocky was the best time of my life. I love my children, but they don't understand.

I waited for a phone call for a long time after Reno, until I realized the call wouldn't be from him, but from someone telling me what had happened. So I started to call, every six months or so. Gertrude answers. She's used to me. “Hello, Gert,” I say, and there's the muffled sound of her smoky hand going over the receiver, and then she says, “Sorry, darling, no.” The last time, though, the number had been disconnected. But I don't think he's dead. I'd know. The damnedest people live forever. Rocky, my father, Annie, pulling up the median age of my acquaintances. I mean, the people I loved. Rocky junior moved to Europe sometime in the late eighties—he never finished the documentary—and I don't much hear from him anymore. I thought maybe he'd be the one to call me.

I do the routines in my head, every single night. I go over our final routine, too, the one in his trailer. I thought I said some funny things myself. And everywhere I go, I hear his voice, pushing me around, giving me advice, yelling sometimes.
Have a drink. Cheer up, kid. Don't stand that way, nobody'll notice you. What the hell were you thinking—I did everything, everything, everything for you
. Sometimes I contradict all his advice on purpose, just so I can hear his correction.

Look, here we are on some black-and-white boulevard. An early movie, then, nothing supernatural about it. Walking down the street with suitcases in our hands. You can't tell yet whether we're running away or starting out fresh. My little fat friend has sat on his hat, it looks like; I'm wearing a mortarboard that by movie's end will spin like a top. We get closer and closer to the camera. Somewhere there's a policeman looking for us. Everything in this world is made to fall apart: breakaway pianos, breakaway bottles, breakaway pants, breakaway skirts, breakaway vases, breakaway chairs, breakaway windows—panes, mullions, sashes, everything. Soon enough there'll be sugar glass and balsa wood everywhere. Nothing is of consequence.

At first it sounds like Rocky is asking questions and I'm answering, but if you analyze it, you can see it's really the opposite, no matter the punctuation: I set up, he responds, I set up, he responds.

He says, “Where are we going?”

“Over there.”

“What'll we do when we get over there?”

“Whatever's next.”

“Could sitting down be next?”

“I'll decide when we get there.”

“You'll decide when we get there, okay.”

Whatever we're about to do is a very bad idea, three reels of hot water for sure. We can't help ourselves, though. I'm sitting here in my chair in Sherman Oaks, California, but really, I'm on a movie set, or on some vaudeville-house stage—not the Palace, we never played the Palace, but someplace nearly as good. He's skittering away from me, but soon he'll come back, I'm his only friend in the world, he has to trust me. I'm saying,
What's wrong with you, Rocky? Stand still. Pay attention. Whatever will we do with you?

You see, I still miss the guy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Endless gratitude to:

my editor, Susan Kamil, whose patience and good sense about this book boggle my mind; my beloved agent, Henry Dunow; my darling big brother, Harry McCracken; my first reader forever, Ann Patchett, and my parents.

And also to:

Rob Phelps, Paul Abruzzo, Max Phillips, Bruce Holbert, Paul Lisicky and Mark Doty, Zoe Rice, Carla Riccio, Robin Robertson, Tim and Wendy DeVries, Hunter O'Hanian and Jeffry Cismoski, Fritz McDonald, Maurice Noble, Marguerite White, Frank Cullen of the American Vaudeville Museum (
www.vaudeville.org
), the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Many people talked to me about nineteenth- and twentieth-century life in Des Moines and West Des Moines, including Carolyn Matulef, Richard and Ellen Caplan, Chick and Helene Barricks, Ozzie and Carla Lucas, Mary Robinson, Henry Davitt, Ted Livingston, and those I miss: Sidney and Rose Pearlman, Estyre Hockenberg, Irene Sideman, Yetta Toubes, Harold Brody, Elizabeth Perowsky, and Norman Matulef.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is a National Book Award finalist. She is recipient of the Harold Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also honored as one of
Granta
's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. In addition to
The Giant's House,
a Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner, she is the author of
Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry.

 

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This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth McCracken

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: The Dial Press, New York, New York.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001028314.

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eISBN: 978-0-440-33391-3

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