Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “The head hobo.” Penny gave him a little salute.

  “You’ll be okay out here, Penn? I told Lil some buddies of mine are sleeping off a few too many drinks, so she won’t bother you. I’ll come out at breakfast time.”

  “Sure. Thanks. And in the morning you’ll toss me out on the street?”

  “Don’t say that, Penny,” said Rocky. “You can stay as long as you want, if you lay low. And anyhow, you keep turning up.”

  “Like a bad Penny,” she said.

  He said, cheerfully, “Very bad.”

  He set the sheets behind her on the chaise, then sat upon them. He looked at both of us, then, sighing, set his cheek on the back of his ex-wife’s shoulder. “Don’t mention it. We’ll harbor anyone. The Carter Home for Little Wanderers.”

  This little wanderer, however, wandered home. Rocky shook my hand, bewildered, and Penny kissed my cheek and said, “Nobody ever takes my advice!” Faint heart ne’er won fair lady. I did feel fainthearted. I’d felt that way all week. Not brokenhearted, which suggests that you know that your life is over, but faint, which is why I’d spent so much time in bed. Should I get some flowers to court my wife? No, it was late, no florist would be open, and in my hobofied state, if I crawled through someone’s garden I’d probably be arrested. I considered this: would it be romantic to be taken in and tell the desk sergeant to call my wife to make my bail? Look what trouble I get into without you. Then I remembered that it would be written up in the papers—Mike Sharp Arrested for Pinching Peonies—and that would be hard to explain to our sponsors.

  Even though I’d spent the past week repenting the misery I’d inflicted on my wife and my boys, I hadn’t really fathomed it. In the car, as I drove to the house, I began to. I tried to plan what I would say to Jessica, but no matter what I came up with, I saw her frowning at me. I nearly turned around at one point, so I could ask Penny, Okay, so I’m going back, but what do I say?

  Fact was, Jess had been right a week ago: I hadn’t forgiven her. Now I somehow had. (I knew better than to make this the thesis of my speech.) I’d spent a week suffering like she had for a year: inconsolable, and in private.

  There was my driveway. At the end was my house. Inside was my family.

  Everyone was asleep when I went prowling in, the boys in their beds, and Jessica in a nest of blankets on the carpet at the foot of ours. I heard a voice—my father’s, actually—bawling me out: What did you do to that girl? Apologize, right now. On the way over, I’d imagined her the way we’d last met, in bed, lying like a tin soldier beneath the covers, plenty of room for me to crawl in next to her. Instead she lay on her side, knees tucked up and heels behind, soapy water going down a drain. I didn’t recognize that blanket; she’d probably packed her aunt’s quilt. The moonlight at Rocky’s was cheap nickel, but the light from our hallway was rose gold. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled toward her. I tried to fold myself into that swirl.

  She woke up. She looked at me. I’d gotten a long streak of fake coal dust on her pillow. She said, “Where have you been?”

  “Out riding the rails,” I answered. “Tramped around. Saw this place and figured the lady of the house was softhearted. Can you spare something?”

  “Always with the jokes,” she said, but with some love. We both knew: for the past year, it had not been always with the jokes. It had been ages since I cracked wise unless paid to do so.

  “This leaving,” I said.

  “Whose?”

  “Everyone’s.” I brushed the hair at the back of her neck, and then just kept brushing, at the feathery edge at one side of her nape, then the place at the very back where her hair came down in a point. Not a widow’s peak: that was the V of hair on the other side of her head. What was this called? “Cancel everything,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t argue because she was so sleepy. Then she turned around underneath the blankets and looked at me.

  “You’re in a good mood,” she said. “I hardly recognize you.”

  I nodded. If that’s what she thought, I could ease into one.

  All through that night, I made promises, I explained things, I swore to be better, less angry. She stayed under the covers, and eventually I wormed my way under them, too, in my wrinkled suit. I kept talking. In the morning, I went to the boys’ room and woke them up and kissed them. They seemed mostly confused that I had been away on a trip and had come back without any presents, an unheard-of thing in our house.

  For a while, I believed that I’d apologized my way back into the house, that my eloquence convinced Jess not to go. That wasn’t it, though. She only let me talk to make me feel better. It was that first joke, she said, and the way I brushed the hair off her neck: she could tell my misery had broken like a fever, and it had been my misery that she planned to leave.

  Not that all was forgiven, of course, on either side. Still, we vowed to be kinder to each other. It’s amazing how far a vow can go. I had the pool filled in, and the entire back lawn torn out and then reseeded. We started a foundation in Betty’s name, for underprivileged children, and Rock and I did a benefit to get it going.

  “How’d you do it?” he asked me, looking at Jess and the boys.

  “Do what?”

  “Go back in time,” he said.

  Rock himself was going forward. He’d left Lillian, just as Penny had said he would, though he hadn’t fully realized that this meant leaving Junior too. So he rented a beach house in Malibu, thinking the kid would like that, forgetting that his estranged wife knew some people who’d recently lost a child to drowning: no swimming for Rocky junior. They’d have to meet in town. So he stayed in the house by himself, and called me up to say that he couldn’t figure out where to put the sofa, as though what he missed most about Lil was her good sense concerning furniture.

  “Let’s go out,” he’d say, but I was sticking close to home. These days, I mostly saw him on movie sets and at the radio studio. I thought a lot about what Penny had said the night of the hobo party: that Rocky threw people away, even as he kept their photographs—“I suffer,” he once told me, “from memoraphilia.” Sometimes I thought she’d been right: here was a man about to go through his fourth divorce, who wouldn’t visit his own parents. Other times I thought, Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? So’s Tansy, and so’s Neddy. I wanted to talk to Penny about it, as though she were a friendly, reasonable devil, and we were negotiating for Rocky’s soul. If I put up a sound enough defense, he’d be saved.

  But I don’t know when Penny moved out of the pool house. I didn’t see her again, not for years.

  Every day, Rocky drove around for hours: up the coast, to see Junior, to his lawyers, to the nearly bankrupt nightclub, to Tansy’s office. They were talking about TV again.

  “What do you think, Mosey?” Rock asked.

  “You and Tansy fight it out,” I said. “I’ll go along.”

  In the meantime, I was a homebody, maybe for the first time in my life. Up until then, I’d looked for ways to sneak out, wherever I lived: to downtown Des Moines with Hattie, and then to vaudeville without her; to bars and restaurants and strange girls’ rooms; to Sukey’s, back in my bachelor days. Even during my marriage I’d done my share of nightclubbing. Jessica wanted to stay home with the kids, away from the smokers and drinkers. I loved going out. I loved walking into a room full of strangers, a party, a club. I loved watching other people perform. Don’t get me wrong, movies were the luckiest break I ever got, but I’d still rather see the clumsiest comic fiddle player struggle in the flesh with “The Flight of the Bumblebee” than watch Heifetz on a screen. People are so dear, in person. They implicate you in their talent. I know I keep talking about luck, but I never felt luckier than when I was anywhere—a hole-in-the-wall bar, someone’s living room, some swank joint that cheated you on the drinks—and heard someone really good sing. Or dance or do magic tricks or jump, suddenly, onto a table. Even the things I could do seemed better done by someone else—and to think, if I’d stayed home I wou
ld have missed it.

  But after my strange week at Rocky’s, anyplace that wasn’t my house, with my family, couldn’t hold my interest. “Your spirit’s been broken,” Rock said to me, newly bachelored and looking for company. No: I’d had a taste of my own medicine. Maybe I hadn’t been in the habit of throwing people away, but I’d left plenty behind in my long wandering career. I’d always hated to say good-bye to people—which isn’t anything special, of course, most people are miserable failures at farewells. I’d do anything to get out of them. Even now, when Jess and I and the kids went to Des Moines to see family, I’d get anxious the day of our exit, because I’d have to say good-bye to all my sisters, to Ed Dubuque, who I loved, to Jessica’s Joseph, who I didn’t. Bad luck to say, This is the end. Better: Soon. Still. I made it, you see, a nearly religious belief, a twist on my mother’s curses. If you never say good-bye, no one will ever leave you.

  Then Jessica said she would, and though she decided against it I developed a fear of the thing itself, and not just the word.

  Gilda was born a year later, nearly prescribed by Jessica’s doctor. That’s what doctors did in those days: when a woman lost a child, they told her to have another, a make-up baby, as quickly as possible, to help you over the grief. We named her for my mother, and after that I barely went out at all.

  Looking back, I think the team died that week I spent at Rocky’s. I’d thrown myself into work; now I wanted to throw myself into family.

  “A couple years more,” said Rocky. “Then we can retire. We gotta crack TV, for instance. You gotta let the boys see you on TV.”

  “I guess,” I said, though privately I believed that television was a fad, a waste of material; between the radio show and the movies, we barely had enough anyhow. We’d look awful, too, shrunk down and fishy. Who’d want to watch that?

  Remember, I’m the guy who thought vaudeville would never die.

  13

  Live from Hollywood

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome—

  (FANFARE)

  It’s the Carr Oil Comedy Hour!

  (FANFARE)

  Starring this week’s hosts—

  (DOUBLE FANFARE)

  Rocky Carter and Mike Sharp—

  with their guests

  (HORNS)

  Don Ameche!

  Martha Raye!

  The Dove City Dancers!

  And now, ladies and gentlemen—

  (HORNS)

  Carter and Sharp!

  (THE BAND BREAKS INTO “MY DARLING LIVES IN DES MOINES”)

  (THE CAMERA SHOWS AN EMPTY STAGE, A CRUDELY PAINTED BACKDROP OF A PARK)

  Carter and Sharp!

  (HORNS. BAND STARTS AGAIN)

  Where are those guys!

  (A WHISTLE FROM THE HOUSE)

  ROCKY: Camera three! Over here, camera three!

  (APPLAUSE)

  And the camera swivels to find two mugs in the audience, Carter and Sharp, hands in pockets, the surrounding crowd cracking up for no reason.

  I’d been wrong. I loved TV.

  We broke into television as the once-a-month hosts of a weekly hour-long live variety show. By 1951, our movie career was mostly over, and we were back where we’d begun, except famous, rich, and middle- aged: a thin man and a fat man on a stage, willing to do anything for a laugh. We were shameless. We insulted the band leader, we knocked down scenery on purpose, we tried to crack each other up. We broke props we’d need later, just so we could improvise first about the breakage, and then about the lack of props. Our old wheezing vaudeville jokes were new again, thanks to the postwar baby boom: the country was full of brand-new people with blissfully unsophisticated senses of humor. You could see Rocky search for the red light that told us which camera was paying attention, doing a slow burn and then saying, “Watch me, camera two,” and tipping his hat. You could see me shove an extra cream puff in his mouth in a banquet scene, so he couldn’t deliver his next line.

  Sometimes we laughed so hard we ended up in each other’s arms, even if offstage we weren’t speaking. We spent a lot of time not speaking.

  I can’t remember what tipped off that round of fights. No, wait, I do: yes. He’d wanted to talk, and called me up. “Come out to the club,” he said, meaning his own.

  “Can’t you come here?”

  “No,” he said. “It makes me too sad. You got your happy family there, and what have I got?”

  So I went to the Rock Club, into which Rock now poured all of his spare money. He couldn’t stand the idea of it closing—a guy can spend all day in his own bar drinking, and it’s business; a guy drinking in another man’s bar is bad behavior. Chances are Rock deducted his martinis off his taxes. That night, he wore a light brown gabardine suit, a mustard-colored shirt, and a yellow tie. He probably thought he looked spiffy, but mostly he resembled a large cheese sandwich. A cigarette burned in his hand, a bad sign: he favored cigars unless he was upset enough to chain-smoke.

  “Friend, Hebrew, countryman,” he said. “Lend me your ear.”

  “Have both,” I offered.

  He waved to a waiter, who brought us whiskeys. I sipped mine; I’d been drinking so little lately I’d lost all capacity.

  “I’ve missed you, Professor,” he said.

  “Where have I been?”

  “You tell me. Lying in bed, is my guess.”

  “Rocky, I see you all the time.”

  He tilted his head to let what seemed to him a lie pass. “Anyhow. Drink your bourbon, it’s good for you. I’m just lonely. Just want some company. How are the kids?”

  “Swell,” I said. “Wonderful.”

  He nodded. “I miss being married.”

  “When you’re married you want to be a bachelor, when you’re single you want a wife.”

  He got a thinking look on his face, and I realized he’d misinterpreted me: I meant he wanted to be a bachelor, he wanted a wife, but he’d taken this as some universal wisdom, as though I suffered from the same desires.

  “You need to make up your mind, Rocky,” I said.

  He’d taken ahold of the salt and pepper shakers, made them dance across the white cloth of the table and then kiss, silver top to silver top. I watched this puppet show. Finally he sighed, as though he’d learned another universal truth from the condiments: even salt and pepper belonged together, but he’d never have anyone to own, to own him, except maybe his straight man. “You know me, Professor. I have such lousy luck.”

  For some reason, I saw this all of a sudden for the preposterous lie it was: Rocky had plenty of luck with women. I thought of his four wives; of the landladies, all those years ago, who loved him; of the chorus girls on our show I knew would be happy to cheer him up, at least momentarily. He could charm any woman who didn’t particularly interest him, and even some who did. Long ago, though, he’d decided that he was a failure at love, and had held on to that fact as though it were the striped shirt he still, at forty-seven, wore professionally: a vaudeville prop. He once told me that to be a star, you had to have a spectacular romantic life, or a miserable one. “No one with average luck in love has ever made it big,” he said. “Look it up.”

  “So go back to Lillian,” I said now. “She’ll take you.”

  “Whatever my problems are, Lillian’s not the solution.”

  “So when you say you miss being married, you’re looking for a fifth wife?”

  “Oh, who keeps count?”

  I could tell he expected me to laugh, the way I would have once. Instead, I told him what his third wife had said to me two years before: “You have a family. Go home to it.”

  He looked at me almost hatefully. Go home? In this suit? Then he sighed again, as though he had explained this to me dozens of times but I was too dumb to absorb it. “Well, in the fairy-tale world of Moses Sharensky, maybe that works. You leave, you come back, all is forgiven. Life isn’t so fucking easy for the rest of us.”

  “You make yourself miserable, Rock,” I said. I didn’t yell. I didn’t contradic
t him. “You pick up the hammer and hit your thumb, over and over, and after a while, it gets boring. And maybe that was okay before you had a kid, but now you need to think about him.”

  Rocky didn’t say anything. We must have sat there silently for five minutes, and I was proud to think he was considering my advice. Then I said, “Rock?” and he didn’t look at me, and I realized it had happened again. Probably he’d stopped listening when I uttered the word boring. His club, his banquette: he wouldn’t leave. “For Pete’s sake, Rocky,” I said, but he didn’t look at me, he just picked up the salt and pepper shakers and clonked them together, the glass toe of the salt to the silver hat of the pepper, which left dents. Good old salt, surely, was the comic, kicking its highfalutin straight man in the head.

  But he forgave me again, on the set of our next rotten motion picture. He needed to complain to someone without being argued with: there’s nothing as dispiriting as making garbage and having some well-meaning person assure you that it’s gold.

  God knows we made a of lot movies, garbage and aluminum and fool’s gold if not real gold. Twenty-eight features in thirteen years. Our fan club—oh, our fan club, full of men (mostly) who memorize our statistics the way other men learn baseball scores—has arguments in their newsletter about which of our pictures was best. My daughter Gilda, who reads all that stuff, tells me. “There’s a guy who loves Rock and Roll Rock,” she said once, naming Rocky’s last movie, a solo effort, middle-aged Rocky in an Elvis Presley–styled pompadour. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  “It’s unconscionable,” I said.

  The club spends a great deal of time defending my reputation. “A great straight man,” they say. “The greatest!” They write long annotations of our pictures, full of cross-references and games: find Shemp Howard. Look for this flubbed line. And they also mention the saddest fact of all: that everyone knows that Rocky Carter was funnier (even funnier, they put it) offscreen than on. They wish, more fervently than Carter and Sharp themselves ever did, that just once The Boys had been given a top-notch script to work with. They try to make themselves feel better with Marry Me, Barry, the best of the lot.