“Ninety-four!” said Jessica. And though I felt a little flood of grief—here I was with Jessica, thinking of my father—the grief began to turn to something else. My sisters had said we were lucky, but they didn’t believe it. Jessica and Joseph did, and I was convinced. I thought of my father and Rose and Annie at the Lyric, every few months suiting up to see another movie: what other proof did I need of my father’s love? My father had never renounced me. He lived a long life. Luck. Later I would understand that my guilt had been a kind of egotism: if I couldn’t be the hero of my father’s life, then I could be the villain of his death.
The Howards owned a clumsy spaniel who looked like an old man, liver spotted and red eyed. The weather was fine, and the dog wanted to play catch with a fabric ball, which, when I inspected it, turned out to be a pair of tights rolled around themselves. They were wet and smelled like the dog, but I thought about stealing them. Instead, I sat on the back steps and talked through the screen to the Howards. They told me about their beloved parents. We gossiped a little about piano players we knew around town. They asked me how I’d gotten into show business, and instead of my life with Rocky I told them about my partnership with Hattie, because it was true, and because I thought they’d like a story about an Iowan brother-and-sister act, even one that broke up before its debut.
Jessica sat on a folding chair behind me, and every now and then she kicked me in the small of my back through the screen with a pointed toe. I couldn’t tell whether this was on purpose until I said something slightly mean about a neighbor lady. Then she kicked me lightly at the ticklish part of my waist, which felt fond and primitive, as though this was how they courted in modest foreign countries: through wire mesh. Joseph, after a bit, went to bed, and Jess and I stayed there, swapping family stories. I waited for her to invite me back into the porch, but she didn’t, so I sat on the step and threw the ball to the dog, who joylessly caught it and brought it back, brought it back, like a milkman longing for retirement. I threw it again, hoping the dog would love me. Then I might manage the rest of the house. I worried it wasn’t working. The dog admired my tirelessness, which was doglike, but it didn’t seem to think that was anything special. Dogs are not impressed with what dogs do.
A Wartime Wedding
“Mr. Sharp,” she said when I showed up for a lesson the next afternoon. “I’ve never had such an enthusiastic student.”
“I expect you haven’t,” I said.
She wore a scarf in her hair, so long it nearly trailed on the floor. “Today I’m Isadora Duncan, I hope with better luck.”
We danced. Joseph played. I must have stepped on her feet plenty as I thought of California. Another Tuesday was on its way, and Durante wouldn’t be free forever while I courted a girl in Des Moines. “To the left,” said Jessica. I watched her, not her real self, but her back, her scarf—she’d bought it in Paris, she said—like water-soaked flowers in the mirror.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
I said, “I want . . .” What a lousy way to start. I dropped my hands and stared at my shoes. I wanted to cry. I hadn’t even kissed her yet. “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel ridiculous. I can’t believe—”
“What do you want, Mr. Sharp?” asked Jessica.
I said, “I want you to marry me.”
At the piano Joseph burst into laughter. He must have overheard ten proposals a month; it was liable to get comic. All right. My hat was on the Victrola cabinet by the door. I’d just get it and leave.
But Jessica was looking at me. Her eyes were cherrywood brown. “That’s it?” she asked. She took my hands again, businesslike. “That’s easy. The way you were going on, I thought you wanted the moon.”
I wondered whether I’d heard her right. She seemed to be proceeding with the lesson, even though her brother had stopped playing. Instead he stroked the keys in a mumbling way, as though the piano was their father, who didn’t approve of the match.
“It’s easy?” I said cautiously.
“Perfectly easy,” Jessica said, and for a moment lifted her right hand to my cheekbone—she was still dancing—and said, “We can make plans later.”
“Oh, brother,” said Joseph, still laughing, still playing with the piano keys. “I suppose these things get easier with practice. But him?”
So I stopped dancing again, and Jessica frowned in a teacherly way. I’d thought he liked me. I kept expecting him to run out of the room, but he didn’t. It was his house too. He suddenly began to play something fancy and classical, which was what he preferred to play anyhow, he said, not this ridiculous popular stuff where you had to listen to the words to know whether it was a happy or unhappy song.
Where do you take a total stranger, once you’ve proposed to her? We went to the screened porch, listening to Joseph pummel the ivories. In half an hour Jessica had a group tap-dancing lesson.
“He won’t forgive me,” she said, and then, “Of course he will.”
“Of course he will,” I said. I was holding her hand.
She turned it over to look at her wristwatch. “Oy. The tap dancers will be here any minute.”
I turned her hand back over. “Cancel them.”
“Oh, I can’t do that,” she said. “Bad business.” But she was smiling at me, smiling at me, out in the sun for me, both of us sitting on the back steps. Inside, Joseph played music to go mad by.
“Tomorrow’s lessons, I’ll cancel,” said Jessica. “California?”
“If that’s okay with you.”
“I’m portable,” she said.
“We could take Joseph, with us, you know.” I didn’t want to take him, but I lived in a big house, and he could play piano at Rocky’s parties. We’d cheer the guy up some, find him jobs, then move him out.
“No,” said Jessica. “Joe should be leading his own life. He lives too much for me these days.”
“But you won’t change your mind?” I said. “You can change your mind. But please, please, don’t change your mind.”
She was holding my hat in her free hand; she twirled it around and around. The dog was asleep. The outside of her right foot just touched the outside of my left foot. I had been engaged to be married for fifteen minutes, and I still hadn’t kissed her, and I could not imagine how I got here, her knee swinging back and forth and sometimes hitting mine. She tossed the hat in the air and caught it by the brim. “I once did a dance with a hat, a Chinese one. I never change my mind,” she said. “Ask anyone. I’ll give you references.” Then she put the hat on my head, and kissed me on the cheek. Time for you to go. Just then I heard the clatter of taps on the brick walk in front of the house.
“I want you to know I’m very happy,” she said. “I’m sad that Joe’s sad, but mostly I’m happy. You’re very dear to me, all of a sudden.”
I didn’t think she loved me then, exactly. My feelings for her were so grand they couldn’t possibly be mutual. Maybe she was making a mistake. Still, I’d take advantage. I’d bring her to California. I’d build her a dance studio, buy a piano. We’d go to hear the best music. Joe would come for visits. We’d redecorate my house with things she liked, posters of bullfighters and Balinese masks and dark wallpaper full of birds. I’d trick her, slowly, into loving the air around me, and she could work her way in. In other words, I hoped—as Rose had said—that if Jessica was making a mistake, I could turn it into a lovable blunder.
Grief, guilt, true love—I didn’t know whether love was a hole you’d have fallen into anyhow, or a trapdoor that sprung open only under certain conditions. A hole, I think now: an orchestra pit. An ungodly canyon that makes an ugly noise something like music when you tumble in. Your job, then, is to make it seem as though you did it on purpose.
I hadn’t told Rocky about Jessica. I had a feeling he might be jealous; he’d always adored my devotion to him. In the past, I’d toss aside any girl if he wanted to go out drinking. I didn’t think Jessica had anything to do with how I felt about Rock, but I well knew he was a guy who
compared the slices of cake on an arriving dessert tray and got disappointed, really disappointed, when the largest was delivered to somebody who wasn’t him. He measured everything that way, glasses of liquor and applause and billing. Just a little more, please. Give me a little more than you think I could possibly want.
Love, like a hanging, concentrates the mind. Rocky would tell you it’s for the same reason.
I told my sisters they’d have to get ready for a wedding. I cabled Rock: Am engaged to be married but don’t worry will be taking the girl out of Iowa you know the rest.
He cabled back: A wife? Only Moses Sharensky could sit shiva with a girl in his lap.
All week long I’d been wearing the hodgepodge of clothing I’d managed to toss into my suitcase in California; the only good suit I’d brought still had cemetery mud across the knee. Who else to help me with my wedding duds: I went to Sharp’s to talk to Ed.
“No time for alterations,” I told him. “Wedding’s tomorrow.”
“You always do things suddenly,” Ed told me, “and I always get you dressed in time. Look at the way the jacket bags at the waist! I’ll take it in tonight.”
I looked around the store. The old-fashioned headless mannequins wore some pretty slick jackets. “You’ll be making some changes around here, huh?”
“Some,” he said, turning back my cuffs, chalking them. The pins threaded through his lapel looked like medals of valor for service in some parismonious war. “It’ll still be your father’s shop. It’ll still be Sharp’s.”
“No,” I said. “You’re going to buy it. If it were up to me, I’d give it away, but there’s my sisters to worry about. Hey,” I said suddenly, “how ’bout I buy it and give it to you?”
Ed tugged at my lapels affectionately. “Silly. No. But thank you.”
“There’s no dishonor to it. If I’d inherited the store outright, I’d give it to you.”
“Go like this.” He flapped his arms and I imitated him. The jacket felt fine. “I’m going to buy the store,” he said. “There’s something else I want to do, but I have to ask your permission. I’ll probably do it anyway, but I need to ask.”
“Anything, Ed. You know that.”
“Stop flapping,” he said, catching me by the elbows. “Does it fit? Good. I’m going to marry your sister.”
This made me flap one more time, to escape the hands still holding my arms, so I could clap him on the shoulders. “No kidding! My sister! One question?”
“Oh!” he said. “Rose!”
How long had they been in love? Well, he’d been in love with her almost forever, at least since she was sixteen; she’d fallen for him definitely post-Quigley, and possibly even pre-. Annie hadn’t known until the day after the funeral, but had since given her blessing; Ed wanted mine, though Rose didn’t care.
“I didn’t tell your father, because I didn’t want him to think I was marrying his daughter to get the store,” Ed said gallantly, though we both knew the real reason: neither one had wanted to test my father’s love again.
The same rabbi who’d eulogized my father married Jess and me four days later. I’d worried that my sisters would think it ghoulish, marrying mere days after burying my father, but they were thrilled: I’d done the right thing, I’d found a nice Jewish girl, an Iowan, no less. “I thought I’d have to read about your marriage in the paper,” said Annie, taking a brisket out of the oven. (Her recipe: Coca-Cola, ketchup; cook forever.) Our wedding was furnished by my sisters and their husbands, the midwestern merchants: the brisket had come from Ida and Morris’s butcher shop; Sadie and Abe brought chocolates and paper streamers from the dime store; Fannie and Ben brought tablecloths, and pajamas for me and a nightgown for Jess. Even surly Joe managed to smile, with all of my sisters making a fuss over him. Everything was easy, and beautiful. All weddings should be so spur-of-the-moment; leastways, all wartime weddings.
Then the sweetest thing: they filled our laps with gas ration stamps so we could drive back to Hollywood. They must have petitioned everyone in the neighborhood. It would take us days and days, what with the thirty-five-mile-per-hour victory speed limit, and we’d have to hope the gas station attendants wouldn’t check our license numbers against the backs of the coupons, but it turned out that Jessica was terrified of flying, would not do it, not ever. At least the coupons weren’t counterfeit. Durante would just have to stick around for another week.
And then Annie walked up to Rabbi Kipple’s portrait and took it off the wall, wrapped it in brown paper, and handed it over.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“You always loved it,” she said, though I knew that we’d all always loved it.
It was March, and the night before our wedding there had been a freak snowstorm, and so Jessica had come to her wedding dinner with a toboggan under her arm—she’d asked me if there was a hill—and wearing slacks.
“Slacks!” Annie said to me, and then, “They suit her.”
We’d been married in the morning of March 9, 1943. Jessica spent the afternoon sliding down the Eighth Street hill, and then came through the back door in her wedding slacks, dappled with snow. Dripping, really, on the clean kitchen floor, and so she took off the offending slacks, and walked through the house in her leotard and tights. She sat down to dinner that way.
And the Sharp family, all of us, gaped.
Our Honeymoon Song
We left after dinner—no time to waste—and drove out of town between the fallow cornfields patterned with pig houses and melting snow. The freakish cold had turned to ordinary warmth. It’s easy to forget the beauty of Iowan skies, especially when you’re keen to leave them: they have the look of reverse glass paintings, backlit and full of a kind of smudged clarity. Our honeymoon sky was blue-jay blue, blueberry blue, mellowing slowly into serge black. The horizon seemed precisely as close as the stars over our heads.
I drove Jessica’s car; she seemed to think that my sisters should see me at the wheel as we went off to our new life. Ahead of us the empty road stretched steady as a sharpshooter’s arm. “Here,” I said to my wife, “take the wheel a minute.” She reached over and held it with one hand, and I leaned over and put my fingers at the back of her hair and kissed her. With her free hand she braced herself against my right hip. We were still driving. I’d thought it would be a momentary kiss, a silly thing, because though we’d been married ten hours, we hadn’t kissed seriously yet: by which I mean, without a rabbi watching us. But we continued to drive and we continued to kiss, my foot on the gas and her hand on the wheel. I could see the barest edge of the road in my peripheral vision.
“Mmmmm,” she said through the kiss, and I understood this meant that we planned to pull over. I felt the steering wheel turn against the left side of my waist, and I put my foot on the brake, and we narrowly avoided tipping into the ditch that fronted the fields. I’m sure we wouldn’t have cared if we had.
We kissed in the car awhile.
“What I don’t get,” I said, “is why you were willing to marry me so fast.”
She shrugged, my practical wife. “I knew I was going to marry you someday,” she said. “That much was clear. Might as well be sooner than later.”
I laughed.
“I’m dead serious,” she said. “Best advice my father ever gave me: never do anything for the principle of the thing. I knew I was going to marry you, and then you asked, and saying anything but yes would have been for the principle of the thing.”
Before this year—my thirty-second on earth—if you’d asked me about romantic love, I would have told you that I believed in it after a fashion. I knew about longing and affection; certainly I believed that people fell in love with other people, and that this state caused them to do stupid, heroic things. But in all of my study of the subject, it seemed that love was a table tennis game: you swung your paddle at the ball, or your partner did, but physics demanded that you waited your turn. One player would eventually pull ahead. Sure, people fell in love, of course
they did, but for two people to fall at the same time and to the same depth seemed like the kind of unbelievable coincidence that movie comedy was made of: the keys are in the car you need to steal; the guy who chases you will find you, even six counties away from the start of the pursuit; you sit on the button of the tape recorder just as the villain starts to confess.
With other girls—those girls I was forgetting, just the way songs say you will (though they never mention that eventually your memory returns)—I could think of her, or I could think of me, and I believed that much of my romantic success was my ability and willingness to think more often of my date than myself. Why not? She was mesmerizing, I was not. But with Jessica—once we were married, in hotel rooms from Vee Jay to L.A. and ever after—I somehow kept both of us in mind at once. This seemed more a trick of the mind than of the body, as though for years I’d had to write down the simplest mathematical equation and carry ones and twos and threes and count on my fingers, and then one day discovered that I could multiply ten-digit numbers in my head without even trying.
“Should we find a place to stay the night?” Jessica asked when we went bumping out of the edge of the ditch and back onto the road. I shook my head. All that night we drove, Jessica leaning on my shoulder, kissing it sometimes, my hand on her knee, her knuckles brushing the bottom of my ear, and every time we came to a town she suggested that we stop and I drove past it. I couldn’t explain. I think I needed to turn my longing for her into something noble, a state I withstood for as long as I could. I loved even that. I wasn’t quite done loving it. Maybe that’s why she insisted on driving for most of the rest of the trip. Just because she was now technically a wife didn’t mean she liked being subject to a smitten husband’s whims. It was two in the morning when we pulled off in a town on the far side of Nebraska, where we had to wake the gaunt desk clerk. He wheezed like a bulldog and he sniffed the air like a bulldog but he looked like a collie awakened from a coma, all nose and no brain. He squinted as though we were the most brightly lit things he had ever seen.
Niagara Falls All Over Again Page 21
