Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Even the children—Jessica’s specialty—were not impressed. They took dance lessons as a matter of course, even though most of them hated to. They were the children of the rich and famous, and they had one woman who cooked them breakfast and another who buttoned their coats and another who helped them correct their turnout and posture and faulty rhythm. All the world was hired help, wasn’t it? Jess would have taught adults, but they generally studied with people more directly connected to a studio. If I’d been a musical star, they might have signed up with my wife so they could dance loudly, hoping I was hungry for discoveries. Years later she got choreography work in television, and loved it. “All that time with those awful, awful, awful children!” she said. “What a waste!” But it was good for us, like eating loaf after loaf of lousy bread—you pick up some tips on how to get your own dough to rise.

  Her only grown-ups were my old pal Johnny Atkinson and his roommate, Alan. Johnny managed to find a part in most of our movies—we always needed a blustery tough-guy to frown at our high jinks. I figured they took tap classes together.

  “How’d the lesson go?” I asked Jessica one night when we were in bed.

  She sighed. “Well, fine, except that John finally dropped Alan.”

  “What?”

  “Not hard, dear. Toward the end of the lesson. But he needs to train so it won’t happen again. You know. Adagio is hard work. John’s not the youngest man in the world. Not the thinnest. A person should be one or the other or both. With two men, we must be inventive.”

  “One or the other for what?”

  “For adagio,” she said. She gestured with her hands. Then she did it a little more emphatically, and I saw her hands gripped an imaginary waist and tossed an imaginary dancer in the air. “That’s what we’re doing.”

  I said, “I didn’t know two men ever danced adagio together.”

  “I didn’t, either, until they asked. John and Alan want to dance adagio, so. John’s too heavy to lift, so he lifts Alan, and so he’ll have to get stronger. That’s how it works. You look shocked, dear. They sleep together, I don’t think dancing together is such a surprise.”

  I furrowed my brow at her.

  “They’re dancers,” she said. “Very common among dancers.”

  “Johnny’s not a dancer. He’s a second banana.”

  “To you he’s a second banana. To Alan and me, he’s a dancer.”

  I sat up and stuffed my pillow behind my back. “I don’t like the idea,” I said. Adagio? Two guys? In front of my wife?

  “Well then,” said Jess, arranging my pillow better, just the way I liked it, in fact, “I suppose he can’t be your friend anymore.”

  Most of my life, my education has come this way: someone else being nonchalant about things I had never dreamed of. I don’t mean men who slept with men—plenty of those in Hollywood and vaudeville; the previous Savant had been a nance—I mean friends of mine who were men who slept with men. Johnny and Alan? I sighed. “Invite me to the recital,” I told Jess.

  She kissed me. “You’re invited.”

  (How had I not known about Johnny? Rocky did. Once I mentioned it, he referred to them as Romeo and Julius, which ended up being the title of one of our movies, though with a different plot than Johnny and Alan’s life.)

  There never was a recital, though I did imagine it: Johnny in his white shirt and striped tie, a cigar in his mouth, dancing with little Alan, struggling only momentarily to get him airborne.

  In March of 1943, I had been a man-about-town in Hollywood, promised to no one (but Rocky), responsible for no one (but Rocky), enamored of no one (but Rocky). By New Year’s, I was a father, besotted by my new life, save for the few moments it absolutely terrified me. Jessica had our first child, Jacob, named for my father, on the last day of December. He seemed as good a resolution as any. Before, I had never wanted to be a father, particularly. I’d have been happy to honeymoon for the rest of my life. In this I was perhaps like my own father, who hadn’t even started on the enterprise until he was in his forties, and then he never stopped.

  But a baby! What a fascinating invention. They were so sleek and new and cunning, I wanted to believe that they too must be native only to California. Jake, for instance, was a shrugging, squinch-faced, black-haired newborn. I held him; he touched his fist to his chin, and then to mine. A communicator, is what I mean. When he got older, he liked to untuck my tie, like a girl in one of our movies.

  “My hummingbird,” Jess called him when he cried, reading my mind as usual. He was a tightly wound kid, florid, a flapper, worried already. A regular hummingbird.

  Nathan was born a year later. “How’re things in the Fertile Crescent?” Rocky asked Jessica. “Mind your business, Mr. Carter,” she said, blushing for once. “Your neighborhood, I meant!” he said with a whoop. “Not your own personal Fertile Crescent. I would never ask about that. Not in front of your husband.” Natey was Jake’s opposite, mild mannered, white-skinned where his brother was ruddy, a baby you could tuck under your arm like a football while you attended to the business of the day. Jessica refused a nanny, but we had plenty of help by then, a housekeeper, a gardener, a cook, a driver, and Nathan was passed from arm to arm. He could sleep anywhere, he smiled all the time, but he only laughed while he was around his mother.

  “She’s not so funny,” I told him. “Me, I’m funny. Everyone says so.”

  “Give!” Rocky said, putting out his arms. So I did. “I’ll make him laugh.” He tried everything, surefire bits from 1,000 Jokes for Infants and Calvacade of Silly Faces. Nothing worked. He put Nathan back in Jessica’s arms, where he began to chuckle.

  “My laugh!” said Rocky, pointing. But everyone knew it wasn’t true. He sat on the sofa morosely. “She always was the funny one.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” I said.

  That was the night before V-J Day. Neddy and I had planned to meet at Musso’s for lunch that noon, but there was no going anywhere on Hollywood Boulevard. We decided to meet there anyhow, not knowing it would be impossible. You couldn’t call it a crowd, or a throng, or a mob—all those people, all that flittering paper, all that joy: from storefront to storefront, a giant animal made up of hands and arms and kissing mouths. I stood on one of the side streets, looked for Neddy, and laughed at the thought of finding him, and then stepped in. How long had it been since I’d been a part of a crowd? Usually I stood in front of one at personal appearances, walked down a center aisle at premieres. No one knew me here, sans toup, sans mortarboard, sans flashing egghead glasses and prissy fussbudget expression. A man in kitchen whites slapped my flank; a woman in a tweed suit kissed my cheekbone, then moved away, still kissing, as though she were a fish that moved by suction, a rare Angeleno smooch fish, except everywhere you looked there they were: women and men, their mouths tilted up and down and sideways. And no one knew me. All we knew was that we’d won! All of us! Standing on the sidewalk or the gutter or smack in the center of Hollywood Boulevard, we’d done it, we’d given things up and we’d slaughtered them, Hitler first and now the Japs and we loved ourselves, we loved each other, every elbowing, kissing, caressing stranger on the street. I began to lose a sense of myself. Just another guy on the street, his mouth full of lipstick and damp confetti. The people in this world who actually knew me were back at my house, my sons and my wife, and who else’s attention did I need? Maybe even then I knew, surrounded by ecstasy, that my work here, by which I mean as a Hollywood headliner, was done: Carter and Sharp had won the war, too, we’d contributed everything we could to the effort. We were soldiers; we’d done our country proud. Soon enough, we’d be discharged, though not right away, when there was so much peacetime celebrating to do.

  Loaded for Bear

  First scene: a double bed in a boardinghouse. Snoring beneath a crazy quilt, two men. Right side of the bed: a thin man sleeping at attention in striped pajamas. Left side: a plump lump, a pair of plump feet resting on the pillows where a head should be. The thin man’s snores are ord
erly and girlish; the fat man gerphlumphs like a clogged drain.

  The alarm clock rings. The two men sit up—the fat man is wearing a top hat—and manage to bump heads. The top hat flies into the air with a champagne-cork pop.

  In silence, they dress. The fat guy is wearing a full-length nightshirt with a ruffled front; a pair of tuxedo pants hang by their suspenders from one bedpost. What a good idea: first he finds his hat and puts it back on, then he drags one side of the suspenders to the other bedpost, and jumps from the foot of the bed into the trousers. The hat pops off, the suspenders ricochet onto his shoulders like slingshots. He finds a bow tie on an elastic string, snaps it around the collar of his nightshirt, his hat pops off, he dons it again, locates a pair of tails, struggles into them, loses the hat, picks it up, reaches in, finds an elastic string, which he snugs under his double chin as he lowers the hat on his head.

  Meanwhile, the other guy is doing deep knee-bends, deep breathing exercises. His pajamas look silk but are actually an awful nylon. He gargles. He gargles. He tilts his head, not gargling, just thinking, then gargles again. He steps out of the room for five seconds and reenters in a tux and a mortarboard.

  “Barry,” the thin man says, “it’s your big day.”

  “I got cold feet,” says the little man.

  “Let’s take a look.” The thin man drops to his friend’s feet, discovers a pair of bunny slippers, and takes them off angrily. Then he catches himself, and tries to warm the fat man’s toes with his hands. “Sit down, why dontcha? Here, sit down. Cold feet? You’re marrying a beautiful girl, a beautiful rich girl. With all that money you could buy a million pairs of shoes! You could buy me a million pairs of shoes! Don’t louse this up for me, Barry. I’ve been waiting forever for this wedding.” By now he’s practically throttling his friend’s feet. “After all I’ve done for you, and now this? Cold feet?”

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “And rich!”

  “Oh,” says the little fat man, “my mama told me never to marry for money. Only love.”

  The thin man stands up. “Fair enough. You take the love. I’ll take the money.”

  We never made a serious picture, but Marry Me, Barry was the silliest, giddy with its own jokes and costume changes and slamming doors. The war was over, and we could do whatever we wanted. I’ve always loved a wedding: Marry Me, Barry featured seven. Neddy Jefferson wrote it, our first flick made for just us alone, not an old script or a retread of an old script. Neddy even put in private jokes: Professor Mervin keeps betting Barry that he won’t get married again. (In real life, Rocky’d bet me a post-Penny three thousand dollars.) Soon Barry’s handing over bags of cash, sorrowfully, because every time he tries to marry the girl of his dreams—the poor-but-honest daughter of a greengrocer—he somehow ends up standing in front of an altar or a justice of the peace or, in one case, a movie of a justice of the peace, at his side a different bucktoothed harridan. At the end, of course, he finally weds his girl, who carries a bouquet of carrots. When she tosses them over her shoulder, I catch and share them with his third wife, the jilted pony.

  Marry Me, Barry came out the first week of 1946, my favorite year ever. Rocky arrived at Jake’s second birthday party with a bottom-heavy dishwater-blond woman in a Chinese dress that made her look more Ming vase than Suzie Wong. “This is Lillian,” he said. Lillian cleared her throat and raised a set of eyebrows so plucked they looked like two columns of marching ants. Rocky slapped her shoulder. She cleared her throat again. “Oh!” said Rocky. “Of course. My current wife.” Current, Lillian mouthed to herself, and hooked her arm through his arm. He’d married the interior decorator he’d hired to spiff up his now obsolete bachelor pad. I put out my hand for my money, and Rock obliged.

  The war was over, and Carter and Sharp—like everyone else—were out of uniform and full of optimism. I was a father in peacetime: I’d won the war for them, hadn’t I? A father of three—in May, we brought home our postwar boom baby, Betty. Okay, then: three kids, just right.

  I loved my sons, no mistake, but I’d never longed for an heir. What I wanted was a girl baby, a baby girl, and that’s what we called her: the baby. Where’s the baby? How are you, baby? Hey, over there, you know who you are? The baby.

  “I want one of those,” Rocky said, when he came to meet her, bringing with him a box of chocolates and a giant, scowling teddy bear that looked like Lon Chaney, Jr.

  “Not this one.” The baby was cuddled into the crook of my arm. Already I’d decided we were each other’s favorite. She liked to slip her fingers between my shirt buttons, and she had a luxurious sigh when she was happy. In her crib, she’d sob; all she wanted was to be held, all the time, round the clock, and I obliged her. “Let her cry it out,” Jessie suggested. “Your mother’s heartless,” I told the baby, rescuing her from her misery.

  I bought Jess a fur coat to celebrate. I hadn’t planned to: I’d just gone to the Wilshire Bullock’s, looking for a present, and I was assured that any woman’s dearest wish was a fur. “Really?” I said.

  “Sir,” said the salesgirl. That was all she said, but she made it sound significant.

  Who knew? I was out of the habit of women, so maybe I’d once known this fact and forgotten. The salesgirl offered me a pink-upholstered chair, and then she had other girls—models? store employees? aspiring actresses who’d happened by and heard I was there?—don the coats in the dressing room and then parade in front of my chair. Well, I’d have to shop for women’s clothing more often. Who knew the merchandise would have actual women in it? Pretty girls in fur coats, trying their best to act rich and privileged.

  I knew, at least, that Jessica would not wear a full-length fur coat. She’d want something a little more eccentric, something you could use as a prop. Out came a blond girl in a short white coat, ermine, I think, though it could have been Samoyed.

  “Let me see that one on a brunette,” I asked. So the girl turned around and left. They thought it more elegant not to let me see them put the furs on, and I couldn’t think of a way to ask without sounding filthy. They merely walked out of the dressing room as though they’d been born wearing fur, and opened one wing of the coat to display the satin lining: camel or black or silvery white. Just one wing: a woman in a fur coat did not fly, she was chauffered. I would have loved to have seen the blond girl take off that pale fur made of whatever unfortunate animal, careful not to let her ring snag the satin, and hand it over to the brunette, help her on with it, let the weight and the leftover warmth settle.

  But I couldn’t ask. I just bought the coat.

  When Jessica lifted the lid off the box, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “What?” I said.

  She saw how she’d hurt my feelings, and said, softly, “A fur coat? We live in California. It’s summer.”

  “So?”

  “I can’t.” She pulled the coat from its box and laid it on her lap, as though it were a dead beloved pet. Several of them. She stroked the fur. My wife was not someone who made nice over unsuccessful gifts: she believed that was both dishonest and wasteful. “We’ll send it to Annie. Iowa winters are cold.” We’d visited Des Moines summers since the end of the war, and Jessie, an older sister herself, was particularly fond of the oldest Sharp girl.

  “Do you recall how many sisters I have? If I send one to her, I have to send one to everybody.”

  “Then return it,” she said. “The store will take it back.”

  She knew I never would.

  “Okay,” I told her. “We’ll send it to Annie. I’ll swing by Bullock’s and buy out the department. You work on commission, or something?”

  I imagined my oldest sister, by then in her fifties, in this coat that had been modeled that very day by two pretty girls. Annie would wear it to Friday-night services at the temple, explaining that it was a gift from her brother. She’d offer up an arm to any interested party: go ahead, feel. Annie had, as she had aged, developed a weakness for foolishness and gran
deur. Her roommate, Bessie Mackintosh, an old school chum, was foolish and grand herself. She’d moved in after Rose had married Ed, and now Annie and Bessie lived in my childhood home, two plump midwestern ladies who had pooled their money and their family china.

  “It’s so practical of Annie,” my sister Ida wrote; we were all glad that Annie did not have to live alone. Practical, yes, I agreed. Our last visit home, when I kissed Annie—who’d always seemed perfumed by boiled parsnips—I noticed that she smelled wonderful, like hot spice. Then I kissed Bessie, who did too. Annie told me, looking fondly at her friend, “Bessie is my best girl.” I knew that she would not believe that they smelled the same, that she was in any way like Bessie: who, Annie would say to me, was anything like Bessie?

  I sent Annie the original fur, and my other sisters near duplicates. “Thank you for the beautiful coat,” Annie wrote back to me. “We take turns wearing it.” And so I went back to the store—I must have been a running joke by then, it’s amazing my habits didn’t turn up in the gossip columns—and bought the same style in a different, darker animal, and sent it to Bessie. I wasn’t thinking, of course: taking turns was part of the pleasure of the fur, the settling weight, the leftover warmth.

  I Will Be a Sister to You

  Tuesday nights I kissed my kids and wife and then drove down to the radio studio for the Carter and Sharp Show. A show-business father has access to all kinds of magic working stiffs don’t: my family turned on the radio and—though they’d seen me walk out the door minutes before!—heard my voice in the playroom (or living room, or kitchen, or dance studio; our house was crazy for radios). There he is, plain as day: Daddy.

  Jessica tried to explain it to them. Jake, at three, was scientifically inclined and understood how my voice could make it through a bramble of electrical wires and atmosphere and arrive at our house, but was puzzled by the things I said; Nate, two, knew I was pretending but figured I must be hiding in a closet as a joke. As for the baby, she crawled across the floor and tried to turn up the volume, smart girl. Jessica was never sure about letting them listen to their old man talking such nonsense with their uncle Rocky—at home we all got along, so why did I always sound so angry with him Tuesday nights at seven? Sometimes when I got home, they’d grill me.