Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Another night, I thought, I wouldn’t understand it, but tonight! No. Wait. I didn’t understand it. “Sorry?”

  “You’re Helen Keller. We’re starting from scratch. I’m going to teach you everything I know, so the first thing to do is forget everything you know.”

  “But, Rocky.” I elbowed the bar in an attempt to prop myself up. “I don’t want to be Helen Keller.”

  “Neither did Helen Keller, but look how well that’s turning out.”

  “I’ve been around awhile,” I said. Where was that bar? I kept missing it.

  “I know.” Rock grabbed my arm and set it on the bar for me. My stool turned and I wobbled and he caught my other elbow, and set that next to the first. Then he slung his arm around my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his cigar by my ear. “You’ve learned things, Professor,” he said. “You’re not the green kid you used to be. But you have two choices. Either you remember everything and I have to disabuse you of one fatheaded notion at a time, or starting now you develop amnesia and I don’t have to talk so much.”

  I nodded. I had that sudden drunken belief in transformation. I was the Professor. A man of style. A vaudevillian.

  “And another thing,” he said. “You need some new suits.”

  I looked down to examine my jacket and gripped the lapel as tenderly as I could. Inside was the label that said Sharp and Son’s Gents’ Furnishings in black cursive. I’d worn that jacket hard, out of nostalgia and thrift: I spent my money on costumes, not street clothes.

  “You are not a tramp comic,” said Rocky. He took his arm back. Ashes fell like snow past my nose. “Small guy like you, it’s even more important to dress the act. You gotta look sharp, Sharp.”

  We’d only been together for five days, and I’d already observed Rock’s personal sartorial style, half vanity, half slovenliness. He had some silk ties, and some that seemed made from funeral-wreath ribbon. He owned one fine-fitting pale blue suit that made him look like a prosperous prizefighter, but he’d outgrown the rest of his clothes. Jackets pulled across his shoulders, shirts parted in a triangle above his belt. Right now he wore a windowpane tweed coat over a V-necked sweater and a pair of pale gabardine pants gone glossy at the knees. He looked like a pile of kicked-off blankets. And he was giving me advice?

  Of course he was.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll talk timing.”

  Across the room Jack Robertson pounded the table and said to Archie Grace, “Sam’s twice the man you’ll ever be!”

  Grace looked at him, then closed his eyes for a long moment. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I know.”

  Rocky turned me back on my stool so we could watch the proceedings. “Girls,” he pointed out. Yes, he was right: girls. All the flowers from the flash act had arrived, along with the Indian Rubber Maid, who sat at a table by herself. Rocky sighed. “Pretty, pretty girls. How do you talk to them, Professor?”

  It might have been the drink; it might have been Rock’s teacherly insults. I said, “Watch,” and jumped off my perch. My knees bounced; I was lucky I didn’t keep going till I was sprawled out snoozing on the floor. Go for the girl who’s by herself. It’s all a matter of asking the right question. This is just an act; you’re just playing a part.

  I arrived at the Indian Rubber Maid’s table grinning. She looked at me, then looked away. I sat down in the chair across from her, and put my hands in my lap, playing shy. That is, I was a shy person pretending to be a bold person pretending to be shy. Finally she said, “Hello.”

  I said, “I think you’re wonderful.”

  She smiled and revealed dimples and a set of tiny china-doll teeth. “No, you don’t.”

  Thank God she hadn’t recognized the line: it was what Sammy had said, leaning off Grace’s knee, to a woman in the front row. “Now, Sammy,” Grace had said, and Sammy interrupted: “But I do. I think she’s wonderful.” I’m not saying that every woman would fall for a strange man who’d picked up romantic tips from a ventriloquist’s dummy, but there are worse ways to go about it: Believe yourself lovable, confident. Know that it’s a miracle you can even talk to a girl.

  “But I do,” I said to the Indian Rubber Maid. “I think you’re wonderful.”

  I could feel Rocky watch us from across the room. For his benefit—and mine, naturally—I took her plump hand in mine. She was a pretty dark-haired girl, though how she’d gotten into the contortionist racket was anyone’s guess: onstage her breasts kept getting in the way; she almost had to tuck them in her armpits for the most rigorous stunts. We’d rented separate rooms, Rocky and I, at his insistence: as hail-fellow-well-met as he ever got, he needed time to himself, and besides, we could afford it. I leaned forward and suggested that she come back with me, and she nodded, still playing coy.

  Then the cellar door banged open. “Hello?” Dr. Elkhorn called, his fist full of leash handles. The dogs jumped down the stairs sideways, like mountain goats.

  “Buy those animals a drink on me!” said Jack Robertson, who sat on a chair across from Archie Grace’s Violet, his leg thrust under her skirt. She wore on her face a sleepy-eyed expression that might have been the start of pleasure, irritation, hunger, amusement, deep thought, any number of things that look identical at the start, though unlike at the end. Grace himself was crawling across the floor toward the bathroom, muttering, “Don’t get up, please don’t get up.”

  “In America, the dogs are teetotalers,” Rocky called from the bar.

  You could see the long muscles in Robertson’s lone leg flex. “Till now they are.” Violet let one gloved hand fall to his calf.

  “Do dogs drink milk?” Rocky asked Dr. Elkhorn.

  “Cats drink milk,” offered Robertson.

  “Dogs’ll drink anything,” Archie Grace said miserably into the floor. He’d stalled out near the back of the room.

  “Milk?” said Christine, as though this were some newfangled invention.

  “Scramble ’em some eggs,” said Rocky. “Dogs like eggs?” he asked Dr. Elkhorn. “I’m only guessing scrambled. Poached, maybe.”

  Christine slammed her hand on the bar. “I am not poaching eggs for seventy-five dogs.”

  “You’re exaggerating for no reason again. There are not seventy-five dogs. There are . . .”

  And then Dr. Elkhorn let go of the leads, and it sure felt like there were seventy-five dogs. They ran under chairs, they came snuffling up to ankles. One approached Rocky and began barking, for no reason I could figure, unless he thought he’d treed some weird animal in some weird chrome-trimmed elm. Another grabbed hold of my sock, didn’t pull, just bit down. One dog jumped onto a table and ran around the perimeter circus-ring style. The biggest tried to molest Archie Grace in an offhand way, as though making a pass at a crawling man was part of the theatrical canine’s code. Love, I mean to tell you, was in the air. I couldn’t imagine how such professionally well-behaved dogs could be so badly behaved off-duty, except to say that they were vaudevillians. In six months I would read in Variety that Dr. Elkhorn had poisoned those strange dogs and himself, that they’d all been found together in a hotel bed, the dogs tilting their muzzles up to their master’s chin. Well, they said Elkhorn was the murderer. Maybe it was one bright angry dog.

  That night some of us knew and some of us didn’t, but vaudeville was sinking already. A few people made it out; a disaster always has survivors. I did, and Rocky, and Fred Allen and Burns & Allen and Cantor and Bert Lahr and Baby Rose Marie. More drowned. Where could Jack Robertson dance when vaudeville was over? Who’d hire an inept but buxom contortionist? And as for ventriloquists, there really was only room for one, and Edgar Bergen stepped in. There are memorials, as there should be, for soldiers killed in every war, for those who died in camps in the Holocaust, for those lost at sea. There should be one with the names of all those who disappeared when vaudeville finally died. Dr. Think-a-Drink Hoffman. The Cherry Sisters. Patine and Rose. Maybe the best of us survived, but I don’t think so.

  Now, Dr. Elkhorn
clapped his hands, and the dogs suddenly sat. They didn’t even pant. “Seven,” said their master in a soft voice. “Scrambled will be fine.”

  By then I’d stood up, hand-in-hand with the Indian Rubber Maid, whose actual name I can’t remember. I found her coat and helped her on with it. Across the room, Rocky raised his glass to me. Helen Keller was never so suave, I wanted to tell him, but instead, still playing the dummy-about-town, I winked and walked out into the night with a sweet tipsy girl, and that, no matter what I might later tell reporters and fans and my own curious children, is the moment I knew I would be a success in show business.

  The Education of a Straight Man

  A fan of Carter and Sharp—and we have them still, a fan club even—would recognize the boys in our earliest performances, but just barely. Rocky wore a suit, not his trademark striped shirt, and his voice was deeper, and though you could call him fat—plenty of people besides Freddy Fabian did—he was a mere shadow of his future self. (We had terrible fights when I could no longer lift him: was he too heavy, or was I too old? Probably we met in the middle.) My offstage moniker, Professor, was still strictly offstage. What’s more, my character was a mean fop, a confidence man who saw in the poor guy an easy mark. Later I became a stern but addlepated academic.

  We did our act in-one, meaning in front of the drawn curtain. Behind us, scenery shifted and scraped. Rocky threw himself around that stage, first like a feather pillow, then like a sack of potatoes, then like a ballerina who hasn’t noticed she’s gone to seed. Me, I stood still and smoked a cigarette and leaned against an imaginary lamppost, upright and nonchalant. When we were bored, we did dialect. Sometimes we sang, me seriously, Rock in mock opera. We did everything two young men could possibly do to make the audience remember us, but our material didn’t make us funny, Rocky did.

  Also, I hit him a lot.

  It was called a knockabout act, and the slap was our tag, the way the audience knew when to laugh. George Burns took a puff on his cigar, Will Rogers twirled his lariat, I hit Rocky: over the head, across the face. Sometimes I delivered a kick to the seat of his pants. I hated it. Rocky insisted it was hysterical. What really amused him, though, was running into someone on the street who’d seen our show and wanted to hit me, for treating that fat little fella so rough.

  I learned all of his gestures: the tilted head with the hand to the ear, listening; the tilted head with the clasped hands near his knees, wrist touching wrist, deep love; hands clasped behind the tilted head, one leg cocked out, an impression of the girl who inspired this passion. The man could not hold still. There he goes sliding across the apron of the stage on one knee—two knees if it’s a tough crowd. There he is falling in a dead faint, because I’ve scared him. He hugs the proscenium arch. He hugs his straight man—briefly, because the straight man is scowling at such mush: there’s serious work to be done. When all else fails, he hugs himself, so tightly it seems like his elbows have swapped sides, so needfully one leg comes around and embraces the other. He turns to look at me—he’s terrified—and with the upstage eye, the one the audience can’t see, he winks. Then he scuttles away in his own arms, limping with crossed legs. The poor little man, don’t you love him, love him, love him?

  A straight man is the fellow who spins the yo-yo. The yo-yo’s the fun part, you keep your eye on the yo-yo, but you lose interest the minute it doesn’t come back.

  PROFESSOR: So here’s your salad fork, your meat fork, your fish fork, your oyster fork, your salad knife, your meat knife, your fish knife, your soup spoon, your fruit spoon. What’s the matter?

  ROCKY: All this hardware, and nothing to stir my coffee with.

  PROFESSOR: Pay attention. (SMACKS HIM) Coffee comes later.

  ROCKY: Good. Can I have some cream?

  PROFESSOR: Sure, sure.

  ROCKY: And some sugar.

  PROFESSOR: Okay, but pay attention.

  ROCKY: I like sugar in my coffee.

  PROFESSOR: Sure, who doesn’t?

  ROCKY: And a doughnut.

  PROFESSOR: A doughnut?

  ROCKY: A cup of coffee’s sad without a doughnut.

  PROFESSOR: (SMACKS ROCKY) Are you going to pay attention?

  ROCKY: And maybe another doughnut.

  PROFESSOR: Another doughnut?

  ROCKY: To keep the first doughnut company.

  PROFESSOR: You’re being ridiculous.

  ROCKY: Poor lonely doughnut.

  PROFESSOR: Rocky!

  ROCKY: I feel sad for that doughnut.

  PROFESSOR: Look. You come into the dining room. Here’s the beautiful table. What do you say to your hostess?

  ROCKY: What, no doughnuts?

  PROFESSOR: Now why would you say a terrible thing like that?

  ROCKY: I don’t mean to be rude.

  PROFESSOR: You’ll hurt her feelings, you say something like that.

  ROCKY (NEAR TEARS): I’m sorry.

  PROFESSOR: Okay.

  ROCKY: This is the saddest story I ever heard.

  PROFESSOR: What are you talking about?

  ROCKY: That poor woman, and no doughnuts!

  PROFESSOR: Now, look. It’s time to sit down.

  (ROCKY SITS. PROF SMACKS HIM.)

  PROFESSOR: Not yet! There are ladies.

  ROCKY: There are ladies?

  PROFESSOR: Yes, there are ladies.

  ROCKY: Maybe they’re out back eating the doughnuts.

  PROFESSOR: No, no. I mean imagine there are ladies.

  (ROCKY WOLF-WHISTLES)

  PROFESSOR: What’s that for?

  ROCKY: I got a good imagination.

  Success seemed always around the corner. We got reviewed in Variety. We became headliners, our salaries grew, people in the business knew our names. Any minute now, we’d hit it big. We barely felt the Depression, if only because we had struggled all our working lives for jobs and lodging. What are you complaining about? I heard my father say. You have a job when many do not. I knew that. And still we wanted more. We worked and worked—winters in vaude houses, summers at beach and lake resorts. If there were a movie version of our life—there hasn’t been, just a lousy TV special starring guys who looked like us if you squinted—our ten years in vaudeville would be described by all the usual clichés: the pages falling off a calendar, footage of a locomotive racing diagonally at a camera, us onstage doing the act, a spinning newspaper announcing the stock market crash or FDR’s election, calendar (year change), train (other direction), stage (same old team, new costumes). I kept waiting to show up at the theater to see Rock shaking hands with some keen-eyed straight man in a good suit. He had a history of leaving, I had a history of being left. But he didn’t: he stuck it out.

  Our agent forwarded letters from Annie, who wrote me weekly letters full of news. Rocky read them aloud admiringly. “What a family you have!” he said. “Let’s visit them.”

  “Visit your own family,” I told him.

  “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m in love with yours,” he said, sticking the latest missive in his pocket. We were a team: my letters were his letters. “Rose especially. She’s my dream girl—”

  “You leave her alone,” I said.

  We played all kinds of theaters. Some small-time vaudeville took place in mildewed tents. The audience sat on wood benches, and you could hear them shift their weight. In the right kind of quiet you could almost detect seats of pants prying up splinters. Applause sounds different in a tent: not so good. It doesn’t have that rising, heated sound.

  In real vaude houses, the velvet seats were the color of the insides of bonbons, cherry red or yellow cream. Some houses were painted like Versailles, some in the newest Deco designs, celluloid green trimmed in black. Chandeliers big as bedrooms—bigger!—hung in the lobby. I liked touring the houses themselves, sitting in the seats, pretending to be part of the audience. The balcony was my favorite, of course: I’d never seen vaudeville from the orchestra. Up in the cheap seats, I could hold s
till, and imagine the dark, and then the girl on the horse taking the stage, and finally, Hattie fidgeting beside me—she hates that horse, and that fake girl covered with shoe polish to make her look Navajo—and so I worked to take up only my rightful half of the armrest, and when I turned and she was gone, I could pretend she’d just stalked out and was waiting for me, fed up, in the lobby. “I got somebody you have to meet,” I wanted to tell her, because Rocky made me miss Hattie more than I had in ages, more than Miriam ever did.

  “Stay out of the seats,” he finally told me, when he caught me wool-gathering there. “This isn’t amateur hour. Time to stop thinking like an audience.”

  Ixnay on the Uckfay

  Rock talked me into drinking more than I might have, but since I went on the road I’d picked up the habit of a drink now and then. We were young, we believed all the alcohol gave us more energy. I still do. How do you stay up until five in the morning without a drink in your hand? Sober, I’d go yawning into bed after the second show, but drunk I was always up for an adventure. These adventures usually meant chasing after more booze, it’s true. Where’s the next drink? It’s in some chorus girl’s purse, and I hear she’s got a crush on you, Mose, so let’s go. It’s in a private club downtown. It’s in the backseat of a car that’s driving south to Missouri, we’ll get back somehow, we’ll find another backseat and another bottle. One of my oldest pals in the world lives just outside town, and he’s always up for something; one of my biggest fans runs a restaurant here, and so what if this is a dry county—for me it isn’t, for me this county is sopping wet.

  Why do you fellows drink so much, some girls wanted to know. Well, it depended on what time of day you asked us. I never drank in the morning till I teamed up with Rock, and then only sometimes, and if I hadn’t been drinking too much the night before, but it was one of my favorite things, a drink before lunch, sweet brandy cut with coffee or cream. It makes you feel like a kid snowed out of school: no rules, just something syrupy to soothe your throat. You feel like your fever’s breaking. You’re idle but hopeful and fooling your mother, who, wherever she is, is giving you sympathy you don’t deserve, the best kind. If you drink in the afternoon, you’re trying to stretch the hours out. Think lazily about the dinner that will sober you up before your first show, there’s plenty of day ahead of you. If you drink in the evening, when decent people drink, you’re just trying to get drunk. For us, anyhow, it meant we weren’t working.