Niagara Falls All Over Again (6 page)

The problem was, it wasn't hard. The problem was, the minute my father looked at me, I was ready to kick off those oxfords, hem my pants instead of cuffing them, give up all those clothes no workingman would ever consider even trying on, and assume my position behind the counter at Sharp's Gents'. If I did that, my heart would harden for real. People who manage to turn things down, jobs and marriage and children, love and steady meals, have hearts soft as velvet, hearts—like my new fine duds—never meant for work. These people cry at movies and weddings and funerals. They compose sentimental songs crooned across country, and letters to long-gone lovers. (But only lovers who will stay gone.) They paint. They write poetry. They star in movies. Believe me, I know. Their voices make fun of their own bad habits—a love of money or liquor or pretty girls in skimpy dresses—on living-room radios turned louder by strange teenage girls who laugh in all the wrong places.

History remembers the velvet hearted. I hoped to remain one of them.

But the Cow Wasn't Armed

Two days later I worked at Sharp's Gents' for the last time. Ed had taken the day off. He might have worried that he'd suddenly blurt out the details of my escape. At five, my father and I closed the store. Something had gone wrong with a shipment of gloves: the factory had thrown them in a box, all sizes, each glove separated from its partner. So for an hour after five, that's what we did; we sat in the back of the store and married gloves. I had to open each glove to find the label, but my father could judge size by a glance. He sorted them as though he was shaking hands with dozens of strangers, as quickly as a politician at a campaign whistle-stop: good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

“Who teaches the business course at school?” he asked. “You'll take it?”

“Miss Kemp,” I said. The school year started in a week. Of course he assumed I'd be there.

“A woman,” he said. “You could teach it better. Ah, well.”

The brown canvas of the gloves dried out my fingers. “Miss Kemp's smart.”

“She is not a businessman,” said my father. “She is not like us. Well, you'll get an A, and then after college, maybe you'll teach the class.”

I tried to break the news. “I don't know where I'll be in four years,” I told Pop.

“Here,” said my father.

“I'll go to Iowa City,” I lied. “And then maybe—”

“Listen.” My father looked at me. He never wore glasses a day in his life, though he lived to be ninety-four. His brown irises were gold flecked. “This is your store.”

“No, Pop, it's your store.”

“It is not. This store belongs to you. Do you know how old I am? I am seventy-eight years old. There is nothing on the earth that belongs to me. I am done with it: this store, this town, this life. Anything now I use, I borrow. I borrow from you. Do you understand?”

“You're fine, Pop,” I told him.

“Today, yes. Tomorrow, who knows? I have come a long way, Mose. I am nearly finished. You are just getting started. Don't let this go to waste.”

“I don't know how to run a business.”

He stopped matching gloves for a minute and touched me on the shoulder. “You think you don't,” he said gently. “You'll meet a girl. You'll get married, you'll have children. You have this store, then your son will have this store. You needn't wander around.”

“But if I want to—”

“Don't,” he said. He picked up another pair of gloves. “I did. It's no life.”

He did not look like a man done with life: he'd outlived his much younger wife and seven of his children, but nobody would have guessed his age; he'd grown to be a cute old man, his creamy skin kept smooth by morning shaves at Carson's barbershop, his mustache and hair trimmed several times a week. He could have shaved himself, of course, but how else would he get to know the men of Valley Junction? By leaving me Sharp's Gents' of Vee Jay, he imagined he was bequeathing not just a job for the rest of my days, not just the chance to support my sisters when he was dead, but something much better: the love he had cultivated in this tiny town bordered on one side by the state capitol, and the other by cow barns and cornfields. Not as good as a mother's love, he knew, but more durable. The girls could take care of each other. A motherless boy needed something else.

If I was going to break his heart anyhow I'd rather not watch. That night, I added him to the list of people I'd miss for the rest of my life: my mother, Hattie, and now my father. I wrote him a long letter that explained, because wasn't I my father's favorite? Wouldn't he understand? Like him I had to leave my hometown and travel; like him I needed to make my own way among strangers. I begged his pardon and his sympathy. Then I realized my father would read such an apology and tear it up, so I beat him to the punch and shredded it myself; instead I left a brief note, explaining how I loved everyone, how I'd promised Hattie we'd be vaudeville stars and I had to make good on as much of that vow as I could. Maybe I'd get booked into Des Moines and I'd take them out to dinner downtown. The next day I snuck out of the house for an early train, Ed's cardboard suitcase full of clothes in my hand, a few family photos filched from the sideboard.

In Chicago I found Ed's friend Paolo, who played piano in a Bucktown vaude house. He said, “I got enough advice to discourage a dozen guys like you,” and then told me I had to start even lower than I'd planned, at amateur nights, if I could get on at all. I got on, and then I snagged a job across town as a juvenile in a melodrama: my qualifications were that I looked capable of breaking my parents' hearts. Terrible stuff and almost no money and five shows a day, but good enough till I got a real break. The melodrama went on to play some cowtowns in Minnesota, and soon enough a letter that had been following me for some time—from Paolo to the first, second, and third theaters I appeared in—finally found me in Lawrence, Kansas. It was from my father, though in Annie's perfect penmanship. Ed must have told them where I'd gone.

November 27, 1927
For my dear son—

You say you do not want to be a shopkeeper. You have grander plans for yourself. People who have grand plans are starving to death. I am only a shopkeeper. But in my family nobody starves. I take care of Annie and Rose. And you. You have always had money, a shopkeeper's money.

Remember your family. I don't know what will happen to all these people I pay for when I die. They need you. If you do not come to take your place at Sharp's you must not love them, or me.

If you do not come home to run Sharp's, do not come home.

May God bless and strengthen you, my dear son, and that He may lead you back into virtue's path is the earnest prayer of,

yr. loving father

That night I went on, stunned and stiff, perfect for my role. After the last show, at two in the morning, I took a walk to the outskirts of town. Then I kept walking, past the houses, into the field. The sky was full of starry fizzy lights, but the roads were black: I couldn't really see where I was going, though I tried to both remember and forget the forgettable little town and its vaude house behind me. Maybe I was just trying to figure out how it would feel to lose a place, to completely remove my own carcass and look back to see how much I'd miss, how much I was missed myself. No matter how far I walked, I couldn't get enough distance. I leaned against a fence and heard noises in the field behind me. A farmer, come to shoot a trespasser. I stuck my hands in the air, waited for a shotgun to hit me in the back. Instead, a cow lowed.

Was this a sign? If in real life you are acting out ludicrous bits of business, well, why not get paid for it?

I'd heard of guys trapped by girls, but not their own fathers. I suppose I'd known that I was giving up my family when I left, but I didn't realize that
they
would give up me. I imagined they'd forgive me anything.

I tried to see myself years in the future, an orphan. The dresser top would be bare of photographs. If I ever married, I'd have to explain: my family was as good as dead, because I did not wish to spend my days helping strangers in and out of clothes. That night, when I made my way back to the boardinghouse, I looked at the pictures I'd nabbed, one of my parents, one of all us kids. My mother has that distracted old-photograph look: her eyes have lost their focus, though she's gently smiling. But Pop! He is not looking at the photographer, he is not looking at the camera, he is looking into the camera, past the glass lens, past the sliding shutter, so ready that he can see the brief appearance of the film itself, staring back at him.
Remember your family, Mose
, he had written, and I thought,
As if I could ever forget
. I tucked him and then the rest of us in my suitcase, and told myself I would travel alone and be happy alone.

But my father knew, better than I did. He wanted to save me from a life of restlessness. Traveling on foot in the Iowa snow was the earliest story he told about himself, back when he was fresh off the boat from Lithuania. “It was so cold,” he would say when we were small, “I dreamed of sleeping in a cow. Must be warm inside a cow. But the snow, it turned out, was a good thing, because in one bad blizzard, I was stranded for a week at a farm with a schoolteacher, and she taught me English. I might not have learned otherwise.”

In a week? We didn't believe it.

“Isn't this English I'm speaking?” he asked.

I don't know who that schoolteacher was, young or old, beautiful, plain, kind, or merely bored. Was she unmarried, looking to make over a young man who came up the walk, feet frozen but still clanging his pots as if to prove their worth—
Look, lady, fine pots, good pots
? Was she married but lonely, like a wife in a dirty joke? Was she simply a woman who always needed a student? What did my father think, the next morning, when they opened the door and were met by a wall of snow?

Men who travel dream, it's unavoidable. I don't know what my father dreamed of then besides bedding down in a cow. He was so far away from home that even in fields where the snow had blown away into drifts, he could not drop to his knees to the frozen ground, lumpy like the underside of a familiar calloused foot, and know that he touched something that eventually touched people he loved.

My mother believed in curses, my father once told me. She believed in a vindictive God, a vicious practical joker, an eavesdropper who killed children. I don't know what she would have made of Hattie's death.

But my father believed that God was good. He saw before I did that God makes bargains, and he believed that my presence in the store was part of a tragic, already sealed bargain. He had his son. He had five fine daughters. And he knew why Hattie had gone up on the roof: God had put her there, to deliver me. God knew that it was necessary, and so He whispered in Hattie's ear.

My father loved and missed Hattie. He said so. He wept for her in his office off the stockroom; he prayed for her at B'nai Jeshurun. He would not have bargained her life away, he would not have considered it for a moment. God makes his own bargains. God is a businessman, and God loves those in His store, and God does not give things away. You may go from one end of this world to the other, from the plains by the Nemen River in Lithuania to the plains by the Raccoon River in America: there are prices for everything. You do not live without paying terrible, terrible prices for the flimsiest of pleasures, the smallest rewards. So your bargain with God is arranged by God, and afterward you can only walk away, and look at what you have closed in your fist, and use that as best you can.

4

Enter Mimi

I was fired from the melodrama when the middle-aged lady who played my disappointed mother fell in love with an out-of-work actor who wanted my role. “He's too fat,” she said, “he's too old, but love is blind, eh?” It surely is, I told her. Then I worked for three weeks as a straight man for a trained seal named Boris—its owner had wrenched his back and needed a sub—and I tossed chopped fish into its humid mouth and tolerated the baleful looks and occasional nips it gave me when I missed a line, not to mention its body odor: you could hardly believe a live thing could stink that badly. Then the seal fired me with a chomp to my fingers and a slap of its tail. “He doesn't like you, I guess,” said Boris's owner, lying on the floor next to his boarding room bed. “But at least your hand won't smell of fish. After a while”—he sniffed his own fingers, wincing at the effort—“it's permanent.” Boris and I were appearing in a small theater in Duluth, and I convinced the house manager to give me a spot by myself. “What do you do?” he asked, and I told him I could sing and dance. Well, I could, even though for years all I'd sung was duets. He was dubious, but let me finish the week because he hated my old partner, the seal.

What kept me going was Hattie. In the few moments before I stepped on the stage, I imagined she was in the audience. Somehow, my journey had brought me here, to this midwestern backwater where she'd moved instead of dying. She'd seen my name on the bill or had spotted me going through a stage door or had simply been bored and had come to the theater. I could see her, amid the alien elbows of the audience. The woman behind her is upset to be sitting behind such a tall girl, with such distracting red hair, but Hattie doesn't notice. She is waiting for her only brother to step onstage. She is ready to applaud.

And then, every night, I would lose heart, because she was supposed to be beside me onstage. Even Boris was better than no one. Though inhuman and hateful, at least he looked in my direction once in a while, for herring and straight lines. I needed a partner. I had always needed a partner.

So I found one, or she found me.

Hattie had been my first partner, of course, and later Rocky and I would claim he was my second, that I wandered lonely as a cloud until he appeared by my side. We said this the way long-married parents never mention first loves to the children, or if they do, as a joke—
Your mother was set to marry Chuck O'Neill, bucktoothed kid, ears out to here, nice enough, did I mention his nose?
I always felt bad about that, because before I had Rocky, I had Miriam.

We met in Duluth, at the end of my disastrous week as a single act. For all I know, Boris pointed me out to Miriam:
See that guy? He's lonely. He smells of fish. Chances are he'll do anything for you if you're nice to him.
She was a child comic, a woman dressed as a girl, à la Baby Snooks except sexy: miles of crinolines, corkscrew blond curls, glossy Mary Janes that she stared at, toes in, when she started to say something tinged with innuendo. By the punch line she looked up, all smiles. A guy named Ben Savant was her straight man, a dark-hearted rogue trying to talk her into a kiss. Basically it was a Dumb Dora act.
Mimi, what do your parents do at night? They put out the cat. Well, what does your father do in the morning? He lets in the cat. No, no: forget about the cat, the cat's run away from home. Wa-ahah!

She carried an enormous lollipop that, though she only mimed licking it, got somehow sticky anyhow and picked up pieces of fluff, so it had to be replaced every few days. (If she'd kept the cellophane on, the stage lights would have flashed off.) The act was mostly Savant leering and her acting innocent. Like so many things, funny then, unacceptable now. His suit was as black as his mustache, which was as black as his hat; her blond hair matched her dress. Only the lollipop was lively.

I had a habit of watching other acts from the wings; green as I was, someone else's talent could cheer me up. It was the only thing that did. That Saturday night, I saw Mimi and Savant lay 'em in the aisles, which was almost as interesting as their transformation as they stepped off the stage. Savant was a kid, probably not much older than me, and his villainous mustache was blackened cotton wool spirit gummed to his upper lip. “Hot,” he said to me, peeling it off. He stuck it in my hand, like he was tipping a bellboy. Miriam followed. Up close you could see she was no kid. I figured she was at least ten years older than me. You could see how wide her real mouth was, blotted out with pancake, a tiny cupid's bow pout painted over it like a ribbon on a wreath. Same with her nose: it was a fair-sized hook, but she had it shaded into buttonhood. I'm sure it was convincing from the house. As Mimi, lost child, she kept her eyes wide open, her upper lashes hitting the bottom of her eyebrows; she applied the mascara with a heated pin, to make it thick. Each lash ended in a round ball, like a drawing of a crown in a children's picture book. It must have been an effort to keep so wide-eyed, because in real life she had the heavy-lidded look of a vamp, sleepy and cynical. The lids came down the minute the curtain did.

She noticed me clutching another guy's used mustache and smiled. One of her incisors had come in crooked; it made her look extra delighted.

“Hello, son,” she said. “Hungry?”

I shrugged. Six months on the road alone had made me a lousy conversationalist. Miriam didn't care.

“Come to dinner,” she said.

I shrugged again.

“You're about to be handed your pictures,” she said accurately. “I'm offering you a free meal. Don't be dumb.” She extended her hand, and I took it, and she dragged me across the street to a Chinese restaurant, my first. Dark red walls and dark green booths, Chinese tchotchkes everywhere, and a woman dressed as a toddler who sat across the table and seemed to be flirting with me. Despite the costume, I couldn't reconcile the kid who skipped onstage with this languid creature.

“Hey, boy wonder,” Miriam said.

“Who, me?”

She'd filled in the rest of her lips the minute we sat down; now they matched the scarlet rickrack that trimmed our emerald-green booth. Her elbows were on the tabletop, her hips all the way back on the seat. Though I could not see down her high-necked dress, somehow I felt like I could. “I collect boy wonders,” she said.

“Like your partner?”

“Ben? Ben has a crush on the saxophone player.”

I tried to remember a lady saxophone player.

“Don't look so shocked!” she said, though at the moment I wasn't. “He's a nice boy. They all are.”

So then I began to get shocked. But she reached across the table and fingered a button on my jacket cuff. She smoked. She swore. An old-timer, she'd been playing six years old for ten years. “I've tried other acts, but this is the only one.”

“What will you do when you get too old for it?” I said.

“Hey! Who says?”

“No,” I said. “I—Never. Of course never.”

“That's right.” She had her fingers in my plate. I had ordered chop suey, because it was the only thing on the menu I'd ever heard of. “You don't think I'm too old, do you?” she asked, and she reached across the table with her sticky fingers and fiddled the button again.

“For what?” I asked. I was trying to flirt. Now I suspect flirting on my part would have been beside the point.

“That remains to be seen.”

I was eighteen years old, but before this night—this memorable night, as it turned out—I'd never so much as kissed a girl. In the most abstract way the female sex was not a mystery: I'd grown up in a house filled to the rafters with it. I'd had passing crushes on girls at Valley High, but they were not Jewish. There were no nice Jewish girls my age in Vee Jay; my father sent Hattie and me to dances at the Jewish Community Center in Des Moines, where we took to the floor with each other. We picked out couples to mock. Hattie could mimic anyone's shuffling step. If Pop had wanted us to meet our future spouses, he should have sent us without each other. Now here I was in a Chinese restaurant, some strange woman tickling me on the wrist, and I realized I could have gone with any of those Valley Junction girls, if it hadn't been for Hattie. She had taken up all my time. These days any psychiatrist will tell you that it's normal to feel anger at someone who dies—first for being dumb enough to quit living, then for every other transgression—but I didn't know that. There I was, invigorated with rage for Hattie. I turned my hand around and caught Mimi's.

“He lives!” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette and blinked at me—a movement so deliberate and lash heavy I thought I could feel the wind from it on my cheek. I brought her knuckles to my mouth and kissed them.

Nine hours later, after the second show, in her hotel room, I said, “The only thing you're too old for is this wig.” It was a wig after all; it had shifted under my hand.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Well, I may have been underexperienced, but I wasn't a lost cause. “I don't know.”

“Sixteen.”

I laughed.

“Sixteen,” she repeated, and suddenly I saw it: she
was
sixteen. Six years old for ten years, six plus ten. Maybe it was her lovely large nose that made her look older, or her cigarettes, or the way she'd seduced a lonely young man as though she were a vaudeville cliché. Later I got so good at guessing women's ages—not out loud, of course—that I could have done it as an act. At the time, though:
sixteen?

“You're still too old for the wig,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, the wig.” She got up and went to the chair by the window to smoke a cigarette. She had a swimmer's figure, lovely to me, tiny through the torso but wide hipped and perfectly suited to her costume: nothing to tape down above, concealed by petticoats below.

“Why?” I asked. As the boys in the band would say, I had already discovered that she wasn't a natural blonde. The way she was sitting, I could see the major piece of evidence.

She looked at me, and sighed. “Because this,” she said, and pulled off the wig. What was underneath was not exactly hair: it was flossy blond in some parts, and white in others, and ragged and peaked; underneath you could see its original dark brown, like tree bark in a snowstorm. “I've been peroxiding for . . . Last week some chorus girl did this to me. She said she knew how I could go real. . . .” She tossed the wig around on her fist, and then regarded it, as though she were on the edge of a sentimental wig-induced monologue, a sweet vaudeville Hamlet. “It'll grow out eventually, but in the meantime . . .”

“That's not so bad,” I said. “You should just cut it short.”

“The wig?”

“Your hair. I could do it for you.”

“You know how?”

“I cut my own. That's harder. Do you have scissors?”

“In . . .” She gestured toward a bag on the vanity. I found them: they were shaped like a long-billed bird.

“You're sure?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

And so, in Duluth, Minnesota, shortly after sleeping with a girl for the first time in my life, I cut her hair short, and tried to comb it back. I was so grateful to Miriam that I would have done anything: after the haircut, I could clip her nails, or iron her dresses, or polish her shoes.

“It bristles,” she said.

“You need some greasy kid's stuff.” She had Vaseline in her bag; that would do, though a few moments later I would wrestle her back to bed and we'd get the pillowcases and sheets so greasy they turned translucent. Now I took a glob from the jar and combed it through her hair, which was actually nearly mahogany.

“I think I'll keep you around,” she said. “You're handy.”

And so she did, and so I was.

The Disappointment Act

“You're going on in Indianapolis tomorrow,” Miriam said the next morning over the room-service tray. She had ordered me coddled eggs and dry toast, like the invalid I was. “With me,” she added. “Okay, Savant?”

I'd never meant to be a comedian, but as always my breaks came when I rode on someone else's coattails, in this case Miriam's frothy yellow skirt. Ben Savant said he wanted to take some time off. He knew that Mimi had been eyeing me that week—that's why he'd handed over his handlebar mustache—and before he left town he handed over everything else too: his costume, his supply of cotton wool and spirit gum, even his name and glossies, because there was no point in throwing out perfectly good pictures. Turned out the guy I met wasn't even the real Ben Savant; he'd stepped in so seamlessly everyone, including Mimi, had forgotten his real name. The first Savant had drunk himself to death some years before, and had been, in fact, Miriam's father. The mustache, as advertised, was hot, and the spirit gum tasted awful.

There was something about seeing Miriam close-up onstage that unnerved me, too many layers of what-age-was-she and where-had-we-met. I could see the girders of brown makeup meant to bend her nose into something less Semitic; I could see a bruise on her neck, free of makeup because only someone standing right next to her could peer past her collar and see it. Good God, did I do that? The wide-open eyes and the simpering giggle seemed designed to drive me crazy, not to amuse the audience.

Mimi, who do you like better, your father or your mother?

Why, I don't have anything against either one of 'em.

The shorn hair turned her from a cutie to a beauty. I'd never noticed that a hairstyle could make such a difference. There, revealed, her arching nose, her newly huge brown eyes. The neck so long it seemed impossible. Cheekbones. A profile. Her dark oiled hair showed comb marks like the grain of dark oiled wood, and entirely changed her complexion from slightly ruddy, under the blond wig, to roses-and-cream. Her eyebrows matched the rest of her, instead of looking like a proofreader's fatheaded correction: insert eyebrows here.