Niagara Falls All Over Again (9 page)

He nodded, still leaning into his hand, wistful. “I've studied it myself, with no success. I had a feeling about you. Here's my theory: good straight man is good with women. It comes from the same part of your brain. Charm. I always wanted to go on the road with a guy who had a talent for meeting women. Me and Fabian, we sat in bars and played hearts. But that's not good enough for guys like us,” he said, indicating me, then him. “We have to be ambitious in everything, even girls.”

Guys like us, I thought, tickled to be a guy like him. Already I was wondering how I could become a ladies' man. “You ever been close to married?”

“You should eat something.” He lifted the napkin from the plate to see if anything edible had escaped his notice: no. “I've never had a near miss, but I do have a distant missus. I'm married.”

“Where's your wife?”

“A good question. Florida? I think that's what the note under the milk bottle said. Plus it said: Don't try to find me. Personally I think she ran away with the milkman. I never did get a bill for that bottle.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It was easier with the second wife. The next one, number three? That'll be true love, whoever she is. See what I mean? Ambition.”

He flagged down the waitress for a plate of pancakes and some toast. “I'm trying to gain weight,” he said. “While you've been studying women, I've been studying comedy, and I think fat men are funnier.”

“Not always,” I said.

“Not always,” he agreed. “Not Chaplin. But Chaplin might be funnier if he got heavy. There's no telling.”

“No,” I said, fascinated.

“Don't you gain weight, though,” he said. “You look fine. Wouldn't be funny, you being fat. But you're going to need a wig.”

“What?” I'd been so happy, flinging that wig to the sidewalk below.

“A piece,” he said. “You're losing your hair. I mean, you don't need to do anything about it
today
. Just keep an eye out.”

My fingers were in my hair, trying to find what he was talking about.

“Right here,” he said, and he reached across the table and touched my forehead where, if I'd had horns, they would have sprouted. “Look, you're not bald, but one day?”

“I have a widow's peak,” I said. “It just depends how I comb it.”

“You can fool the mirror,” he said, “but you can't fool the balcony. Okay, Sharp, if everything goes right, I'll buy you a mirror and you can see what I'm talking about. Get your fingers out of your hair.”

“Sorry.” I set my hands down on the table so he could watch them.

“You're still worried,” he said. “About what Freddy told you. Don't be. Please don't be. I don't remember how long you've been on the circuit, but take it from me, six partners in two years is nothing. That's what you do. You switch around till you find someone who matches up. That's us. On my honor. Thirty years from now there'll be books about me and you. Movies. National holidays. I promise. Believe me, I never promised Freddy a national holiday, or any of those other guys. This meal's on me, by the way, so order something. Come on, eat something, don't be so delicate. Do you cook? I learned in the navy, myself. I'd offer to make you dinner sometime, but I can't cook for less than two hundred.”

He paused here, and ate some toast thoughtfully.

“If it's a matter of the math,” I said, “I can help you with it.”

“No, Clever Hans,” he said, “it's not a matter of the math.”

If all of this sounds like romance, it was, in its way. I'm not talking about any kind of funny business. But an act is a marriage—years later, when I met my future wife, I thought
Yes, I remember this
. You meet someone, and you take all sorts of things on faith, but it doesn't
feel
like faith. You have to be a little faithless to talk of faith; if you believe, it's all facts. We will be together forever; the two of us will be a smash. If you had any inkling of the odds against you—and I'm talking both of show business and Wedded Bliss—you'd break up the next day and save yourself a lot of trouble.

I loved the guy. It's hard to describe it, exactly; it's even hard for me to remember, what with everything that came later. I'd idolized Hattie, but I'd known her all my life. Rocky was bluff and sometimes mean and funny and smart and a stranger, so I couldn't take any of it for granted. All day long, he surprised me.

He took a shine to me, too. Who is so adorable as a devoted fan with a nice personality?

Dogs Like Eggs

But I wasn't transformed, not yet. I was still myself, a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who'd stumbled from one act to another. My transformation came the next week, when we'd moved on to the Milwaukee Palace to play on a motley bill: Archie Grace and Sammy, a ventriloquist act; Dr. Elkhorn and his canines, all of them, man and dogs, fancy and stump-legged and mournful—I wouldn't have been surprised to see the doctor baying at the moon with his pack; and the headliner, Jack Robertson, the human cobra, a monopede dancer from Aberdeen who'd somewhere misplaced his right leg and left arm. Back in my Mimi-and-Savant days, I'd played the Kalamazoo Magestic with the admirable Robertson: he shimmied up a rope and twined himself around it so fast it was hard to tell what was man and what was rope. “I used to have a tank act,” he told the audience, “a big tank filled with water, but I kept going in circles.” He'd gotten even more muscular since Kalamazoo, and had added a bit that involved bending backward, grasping his ankle, and rolling around the stage like a thrown hubcap.

There was a bad flash act, a big musical number featuring one juvenile singer who seemed composed of slightly chewed candy (licorice hair, jelly-bean lips, round gumdroppish feet that stuck to the stage) and five unpretty girls dressed up as flowers. Sisters, I realized when I looked at them, and he was probably the sole brother, creepily singing to each one, “My violet, my daisy, my Irish rose/My buttercup, I'll eat you up. . . .” The opener was a zaftig contortionist who called herself the Indian Rubber Maid, by which she must have meant that she looked like she'd bounce.

The stage was so uneven we had to watch where we put our feet. Well, I only had to stand still. Rocky kept tripping, on purpose, and when he jumped into my arms at the end of the act it was a flying leap. How I caught him I'll never know, but I did, and the audience roared: they thought we'd made the whole thing up just for them. “Where did you come from?” I asked my armful, and he answered, “Daddy says from heaven, but Mama says the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

After the second show, around 10:00
P
.
M
., Rocky said, “A drink? I know a place.” Jack Robertson was still onstage; he'd left his crutch, as usual, in the wings. His simplest running hop was worthy of applause.

We caught a cab, I figured to a downtown speakeasy, but instead we drove till the buildings petered out and we got to a large white house on a good-sized lot. “Here we go,” said Rocky. He caught me by the arm when I headed for the front porch. “This way, darling boy.”

Around back was a slanted cellar door, which might have seemed furtive if it hadn't been painted bright red. He knocked with the heel of his shoe. After a moment, one side of the door flew open, and a round head poked out, which belonged to a lady with white curls that looked like they'd been combed with a pillow.

“My favorite!” she said. She reached up and grabbed Rock's ankle, then kissed the toecap of his shoe. “Come in!”

We followed her down the stairs into a room that looked ready for a family dinner party, the chairs and tables borrowed from a variety of neighbors: oak and wicker and wrought iron. A bar ran along one wall, fronted by red-leather-topped stools.

“My favorite!” said the lady of the house again. She was a plump middle-aged woman dressed in a man's suit, black, a crumpled shirt of impressive whiteness open at the neck. Rocky picked her up, kissed her pink nose, and then set her down to see what she'd do. She socked him tenderly in the stomach. “Ouch,” said Rocky. “I told some other guys on the bill to come over.”

“A party!” she said, as though we were throwing one in her honor. “Hooray!” Ladies' clothes might have made her look stout and mannish; the suit gave her a kind of end-of-the-night glamour. She grabbed me by the shoulders.

“You!” she said.

Me?

She leaned in, and kissed me on the lips. I felt like I'd been hit in the face with a whiskey pie. Then she let me go so she could sock me in the stomach. “Who are you?” she asked.

“This is the Professor,” Rocky told her, which was news to me.

“Ah! He knows things.”

“He knows a few things.”

“But will he tell us?”

“You might persuade him, Christine.”

She touched my cheek fondly. Her fingers felt like rose-filled cannolis. “I'm very persuasive, Professor. Aren't I persuasive, Mr. Carter? I'm very persuasive,” she said to me.

I could see it might be some time before I'd be speaking.

“Listen,
I
know
,
” said Rocky, “but careful you don't spend all night persuading him, and forget about me. I like a little persuasion myself.”

She laughed dirtily and leered at him.

“Christine!” said Rocky. “And me so meek and mild. The Professor's the one you need to watch out for. He's a heartbreaker.”

“Lucky for me, I got an anthracite heart. Hard and black.” She rapped her breastbone to prove it, though she had to push her knuckles through her cleavage to manage.

I cleared my throat. “‘Says Phoebe Snow, the miners know, that to hard coal, my fame I owe, for my delight, in wearing white, is due alone, to anthracite.' ”

“Poetry!” Christine clapped her hands. “He's a professor of poetry!”

Rocky said, “You know, I've been here five minutes and I haven't seen a bottle yet.”

Someone knocked on the door behind us. “That'll be Jack, I bet,” said Rocky, and it was, our friend the monopede dancer. He jumped over five stairs at once and grabbed Rocky's shirt collar.

“All right,” Robertson said.

Rocky assumed a pose of fraudulent innocence. “Jackie! Jack, my lad! What brings you here?”

“What doesn't bring me here, more like. Where is it?”

Rocky opened his mouth. Robertson's hand began to gather more and more of Rocky's shirtfront. “O-
kay
,” Rocky said. He pulled Robertson's crutch from under the back of his coat. I could not figure out how he could have stolen it without me noticing, never mind sneaking it here. “We just wanted to be assured of your presence.”

Robertson tucked the crutch under his arm. “There's liquor here, is there?” he asked in his Scottish mortician's voice, as if politely wondering the location of a corpse. Christine kissed him; that was the toll she demanded of everyone. She didn't punch him in the stomach though. I thought he'd push her away, but suddenly he smiled shyly. They looked like initial letters in a book of fairy tales, Jack for
In the day of kings
, Christine for
Once upon a time
.

“Excuse my manners,” Jack said. “Pleasure to meet you. There's liquor here, is there?”

Onstage he wore an acrobat's unitard, tailored to minimize what was left of his leg and arm. Now he had on a tight single-legged pair of pants, a one-armed sweater, one pull-on boot. His red hair was shorn in a military brush cut that showed the base of his skull but got thicker over his ears. He looked like an aging college football player caught in a stripe of light. He nodded at me.

“You lose your limbs in the war?” Christine asked.

“No, miss. I knew their exact location the whole time. Stepped on a mine.” Somehow, he made it seem like he was just a different model of man, a coupe instead of a sedan.

“And they couldn't be saved?”

“Probably were,” said Jack. “Probably stuffed like a trout over some doctor's fireplace. A drink?”

I don't know when the night began to get out of hand, though I do know that it grieved Christine to see a guest with an empty glass. She served good smuggled Canadian whiskey and bad home-brewed beer that tasted like pound cake, and a little absorbent food so her guests could keep drinking. Eventually half the bill showed up: the entire house orchestra, several of the flash-act sisters. The basement filled up with cigarette smoke, which must have floated though the floorboards to the mysterious house above, climbing the spirals of bed springs, filling coffee cups. Rocky and I sat on stools at Christine's bar; Jack Robertson lifted himself onto the bar top.

“Didn't your mother teach you manners?” Rocky asked him.

“She did na. She taught me this—”and then he started a long song that mostly had no words but involved knifing a man in his sleep. When he finished, he said to Rocky, “Yeh don't know how to drink.”

“
I
don't?”

Robertson shook his head and stretched out on the bar. “Backache,” he said to me as he reclined. Rocky set his whiskey glass in the space where Robertson's right leg should have been.

“Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, fingering the fabric over Robertson's leg stump.

“Yeh dirty bastard,” said Robertson. “I'm missing what it looks like I'm missing, and that's all. Don't go looking. You,” he said to me. “Where did you find this thief? Last time I saw you, you had a girl. Pretty big-nosed girl.”

“She's a boy now,” I said.

He nodded and polished the bar with the back of his head. “I heard. What did this one used to be?”

“Sober,” said Rocky, waving his glass at Christine, who had for some reason pulled Jack Robertson's boot off. “But that was a long time ago.”

Christine fingered Robertson's toes. “Only five,” she said sadly.