Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Gilda made me watch it with her. She was six, and had hardly any memories of Rocky at all, though the boys talked about him still. I kept thinking they’d grow out of it. (Later, when someone was trying to put together a documentary about the team, Jake described his childhood this way: “It was like having two fathers.” At first I though he meant me as both, the screen version and the at-home guy who acted the part, but then he said, “I was devastated when they broke up. It was like a divorce.”) Jessica made herself scarce when Sadie Sow was on. She wanted me to be the one who kept Gilda company.

  At our house, Rocky laid ’em in the aisles, Gilda at least. Everything he did slayed her: kiss Sadie on the snout, pour a bucket of water over his head, fall down the stairs, sing, You must have been a beautiful piglet or I found a million-dollar piglet. The first time she called me to the sofa—“Here, Daddy,” she said, pointing to a cushion—I didn’t go right away. I stood at the back of the family room, and looked at Rocky on the TV screen. He’s in our furniture, I thought. I hadn’t seen him in two years. How had I avoided it? Now he wore a beret and his striped shirt, a narrow moustache, a broad French accent.

  “Daddy, here,” said Gilda, pounding on the sofa. So I settled down, and she snuggled up to me. I told her I knew that guy pretty well, and she developed a whole new appreciation for her old man. You could have seen the show two ways: A. Rocky had been reduced to teaming up with a felt and cotton-batting pig. B. I had been easily replaced, by a felt and cotton-batting pig.

  Despite everything, I vacillated between A and B.

  Rock and I hadn’t announced our breakup. Nobody noticed for a while: in the early fifties we made only one movie a year, and the radio show had been canceled, and people weren’t so used to seeing us on TV that they noticed when we didn’t show up. TV Guide finally asked Rocky about it when he guested on the Texaco Star Theater in a semiserious role, and he made it sound like we’d just taken a breather from each other. “No dramatic story,” he said. “Working apart for a while, that’s all.”

  I landed a couple of other movie roles playing fathers of teenagers—nothing as good as Greasepaint, but nothing as bad as the last few Carter and Sharp flicks. The rest of my time I spent at home with the kids, writing letters to my sisters, reading magazines and newspapers and books of history. I didn’t see much of my old friends, so when Neddy Jefferson invited me out to dinner at the Brown Derby, I said sure, even though I didn’t much like the place, being devoted to the less splashy Musso’s down the street.

  “Dress up,” said Neddy. “Boys’ night out.”

  “I always dress up,” I told him.

  “Well,” said Neddy, “you’re in semiretirement. I just didn’t want you to show up in your bathrobe and carpet slippers. We’ll invite Tansy, hey? No wives.”

  “Boys’ night out,” I assured him.

  So I spiffed up and went to the Derby the next week and scanned the dining room for Neddy’s giant head. There it was in the corner, there was the rest of him underneath it, next to him tiny Tansy, and next to him: Rocky.

  I stood, holding between two fingers the green plastic chip the coat-check girl had just dealt me. I could leave without redeeming it. The three of them conferred around a half-moon table, heads tilted toward the relish plate. They looked like something out of Lewis Carroll: tall, short, fat, waiting for something unlikely to deliver a speech. A parker house roll, the pitcher of cream. Then Tansy glanced up, and waved me over. I gave a faint finger-wiggle in return, and he tried to reel me in. Neddy and Rocky lifted their chins.

  Did my heart melt? Did I forgive him instantly? Did I want to throw myself into his arms and suggest we that minute start filming a movie?

  Well, yes.

  Like me, he’d let his hair fade to its natural color, which was mostly sandy gray. He was in his early fifties by now, and he didn’t look great but he didn’t look as bad as he might: roses in his cheeks, for instance. The hair suited him. He wore a pretty snazzy suit, a subtle tattersall plaid. Between his fingers he pinched the stem of a martini fresh from the shaker, still with its sheen of ice, which held still while he twirled the glass around it.

  “Fellas,” I said when I got to the table, and Rocky said, “Darling boy. You never call, you never write. I’m beginning to think you don’t love me.” He lifted the martini like a flower he meant to sniff and then stick in his buttonhole.

  He’d had all the time in the world to think of an opening line. I just looked at him.

  “Sit down, Professor,” he said gently. “Have a drink.”

  I think I was about to do that very thing, but that was when the television cameras showed up, and we heard the hearty disembodied voice of Ralph Edwards explaining, redundantly, that This Was Our Life.

  Have you seen this show, ever? A televised prank, and you had to take it, and smile. They sit you on a couch. A voice you either recognize or don’t comes over the speaker and tells half an anecdote, and then the voice’s owner comes out of the wings, a person whose entrance to a party might, under other circumstances, cause you to hide in the kitchen.

  A sweet idea, it must have seemed, when the producers had originally come up with the plans for such a show. You’re back in touch with the people you love. A foretaste of heaven: everyone you’ve lost over the years comes through a door and hugs you and tells one fond story. You peer over their shoulders to see who’s next. When that door opens, you think you recognize someone deep in the wings, though of course that’s impossible. Even through the magic of, as they say, television, they can’t bring the people you really want to see, your beloved dead.

  But what a show that would be, huh?

  I’m sure somebody’s working on it.

  We walked across the street to the Roosevelt Hotel, where the show was taped—hurry, hurry, the audience waits—up the stairs and into the Magnolia Room. A huge jumble, and then we were onstage, under the lights, and the people in the seats applauded us, and Rocky slapped me on the back. He hadn’t known ahead of time, either, but he probably had hoped every day that a television crew would show up to tell him the story of his life, no matter how abridged.

  They sat us down on the love seat, which normally held only one honoree; I had the spot closer to stage center. “Mike,” the host said jovially, “got enough room left over for you there?” I almost corrected his manners—why insult the weight of an invited guest—but smiled. I could feel the warmth of Rocky’s knee near mine, but I concentrated on the show.

  Rocky first. They showed a chubby baby photo that caused the audience to coo, then brought out a seventy-year-old showgirl who’d known Rock at the Old Howard Theater in Boston. Then a baby picture of me, buck naked on a bearskin rug. How had they got hold of that? I would have blamed Jessica, but I didn’t think I’d seen that picture in years.

  “Mike,” the host said, “you were born in Valley Junction, Iowa, in 1911.” It seemed like the kind of thing you’d say to a stroke victim. Then a voice: Ed Dubuque’s, and he came through the door. All over again I was surprised that Ed was a man not much older than me. He hugged me first with one arm, and then the other. The host told me to sit back down on the sofa, and Ed began to talk. He was stiff; he must have rehearsed.

  “One summer, Mose worked at his family’s store after he’d broken both wrists.” Ed gestured to his own. “His father told him to go over the stock with a feather duster, and one day, when he was holding the duster between his casts”—Ed demonstrated—“he started to sing to it. And then he began to dance. He moved all through the store, singing and dancing. When he was finished, we applauded, customers and everything. Loveliest thing you ever saw, and all for a feather duster.” Ed’s nose and ears were bright red. That’s how he always blushed. Then he was whisked backstage again.

  I wanted to call him back. Dancing with a feather duster? I didn’t remember, though as soon as he’d said it, I could see myself, the way I slid and nearly went down on one knee, a clot of dust in one cuff of my pants, my thick hair th
at needed cutting as usual. Then I realized I saw it as though I’d been filmed. If it really happened, if I really remembered, what I would see would be the gray head of the duster, the handle like a turned table leg between my plastered arms. Come back, Ed. Are you sure you’re not thinking of some other kid?

  Meanwhile, Ralph Edwards had skipped back to Rocky. I tried to pay attention. This disembodied voice said, “Hello, son.” And then, out walked Professor and Professor Carter, Rocky’s parents.

  They looked unbelievably aged and sour. Arthritis had left his father like some flat-out-of-luck dinosaur whose ancestors had been able to fly and whose descendants would be able to walk upright. You expected his wife to help her husband across the stage, but she didn’t, she held the clasp of her white pocketbook as though she were about to start rummaging through it. It might have been the most suspenseful moment in the history of This Is Your Life: would Rocky Carter’s parents make it to center stage without expiring?

  Rocky got up and shook his father’s hand and kissed his mother’s cheek, and then sat back down. This time, I could feel his knee vibrate with nerves; he was agitating his whole leg with rapid minuscule bounces of his heel. He probably thought nobody would notice, but over the air the tattersall pattern of his pants would pulsate.

  Twenty-six years I’d known this guy. Never in all that time—not once, no matter the venue, no matter the size of the crowd—had anything like this ever happened. Not what we were doing, though we sat hip-to-hip, and that was strange, both the posture and the proximity. (Usually if he was close enough to touch, I was smacking him over the head, removing his hat to use it as a weapon on his cranium.) Not the man holding a microphone and our prop biography. Not even the two terrifying elderly people, glowering at the mixed marriage before them, unlikely to deliver their blessing.

  The unprecedented thing: Rocky was frightened in front of a crowd. He was onstage and silent, wedged in next to me, and contemplated—I could tell, I’d worked with him and knew his ways, even this one thing that had never happened before—running from the stage without an apology. Stage fright. Nerves like an amateur’s.

  I don’t remember what the Professors Carter said. Some scrap of a story, told without much affection. Then they were gone too.

  I tried to hold body and mind together, but it was hard. There was Mimi, and she was almost thin again but not quite, and her nose was still all wrong; she kissed me and pinched my upstage ear. Here comes Tansy, shaking both our hands. They had to rush to fit two lives in one half hour, and it was over so quick there was no more time for suspense. Only later I would think: I wish they’d found Penny, it would have been nice to see Sukey Decker, why didn’t they ask Johnny Atkinson? They mentioned Betty’s death (though not Hattie’s), and I wish they hadn’t: anyone who couldn’t come shouldn’t be invited to the party. At the very end, they called out Jessica and then Rocky’s new wife, a very tall young blonde named Ella, who kissed her husband on the top of his head. My kids came out. Rock and I both looked around for Rocky junior, but he didn’t show up. My sisters flooded the stage, and that’s when I began to cry—I’d been to see them six months before, but that was in Iowa, and here they were, Annie, Ida, Fannie, Sadie, Rose, dressed up and on television, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  Why not get back together, I thought, sitting on the This Is Your Life love seat. Nothing big. A TV appearance where we actually had some lines. A week of club work in Vegas. I got a kick out of my new movies, but I missed thinking on my feet. No, I didn’t miss that: I missed Rock. After the show I’d talk to Tansy—

  “Well, boys,” Ralph Edwards said, “we’ve got fifteen seconds. Any words you’d like to leave us with?”

  We stood up. I was still crying and waved away the microphone. Rocky threw one arm around me, which for him was always a gesture equal parts fond and hostile. “This has been wonderful,” he said, not looking at me. “Mike and I had such a long, happy ride together. This show is a perfect end to a perfect partnership. I can’t think of a better going-away party.”

  “Oh?” said Edwards, confused.

  “Didn’t you know?” said Rocky. “Carter and Sharp have broken up.”

  They threw a party for us afterward in the hotel’s dining room. Rock and I were seated at either end of the table, twin fathers, with our extended families all around us. I wanted to talk to him, but not here. You didn’t have to do that. I believed he’d thought he’d done me a favor. What insanity, to see your longtime partner on national television after an extended silence. How happy I was to see him anyhow. What a bad idea this all was. Rocky talked to Tansy and Neddy and Mimi and Jessica and our kids, especially Jake, who hadn’t forgotten his favorite wayward uncle. I talked to Mimi and Ed and Ida and Fannie and Sadie and Annie and Mrs. Rose Dubuque, proprietress now of Sharp’s Apparel of West Des Moines. Annie still did the books. They’d decided to stock women’s clothing, she told me, and I felt like a club member whose old haunt has gone coed without his permission. Ladies’ frocks in Sharp’s Gents’! Ladies’ underthings, even!

  Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  Professor and Professor Carter spoke to no one. As I suspected, Mrs. Professor Carter cared only for the contents of her purse, which she emptied onto the tabletop. I worried that she’d eventually pull out a gun. Instead, she began to fill the purse with sugar cubes and silverware.

  Plenty of mingling all around—my sisters approached Rocky and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we had dinner together sixteen years ago.” He greeted them all warmly, by name. Gilda sat on everybody’s lap. I thought she’d be shy around her idol, Sadie Sow’s best friend, but instead she leaned on one of his knees and asked him to do something funny.

  By the end of the evening, Rocky was as drunk as I’d ever seen him. Strange as it sounds, I took that as almost good news: maybe sturdy Ella made him drink less, and therefore he was more susceptible to the martinis. She sat next to the Carters, who seemed to be berating her for not knowing what the Bayeux Tapestry was. “The Babe Ruth what?” she asked. I sat down next to Rocky.

  “So how’s the boy?” I inquired.

  I watched him try to piece together a clever answer. I watched him fail.

  “Money troubles,” he said. “You probably heard.”

  “You know,” I told him, “if I can help you out with a loan . . .”

  He raised his head, and gave me a look that went from haughty to embarrassed to grateful to defeated in the space of two seconds: I could almost chart each reaction as it arrived at his forehead and tumbled down his face and into his drink.

  “I don’t think it’s come to that,” he said.

  “I like Ella. She’s a very giant woman.”

  “I’m playing Vegas next week.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Tonight I have to see my folks.” He pointed them out to me, in case I’d forgotten. He laughed. “They haven’t changed a bit. Forty years. You know,” he said. The waiter set down a new martini in front of him. He started to turn it, and we both looked at the thin layer of ice doing its steady trick despite the revolutions of the glass. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It seemed an apology was in order, but I didn’t know who was owed. “You know, Professor,” he said, “not many people realize this”—he nodded at his glass—“but the ice in a martini always points to true north.”

  “So,” I said to Jessica as she drove us home, “that was a surprise.”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She made it sound as though she still thought it wasn’t a bad idea. “Did you get a chance to talk to Rocky?”

  “He was fried. As usual.”

  “I didn’t know they’d brought in his parents.”

  “Of course they did. That’s what the show is about.”

  From the backseat, Jake wondered how many people watched This Is Your Life.

  “Too many,” I told him. He was thirteen, just the age vanity would get the best of him, one way or
the other. “You looked like a prince. The new teen heartthrob. Across North America, girls are burning their pictures of Pat Boone.”

  “They should,” said Nathan, “but over him?”

  “All we wanted was for the two of you to talk a little,” said Jessica.

  “He pulled a fast one, huh? Shocked the hell out of Tansy. I’m sure he thought we’d get back together after tonight. Neddy probably had a script all ready: Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits.”

  We pulled into the drive and then into the garage. Jess put the car into park with a clunk. “Nobody wanted anything but for you guys to talk. You miss him. You don’t realize it, but you miss him.”

  Of course I realized it. For instance, he would have laughed at Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits. I didn’t know anyone else who’d find that really funny. We might have gone on making up geriatric slapstick titles. Carter and Sharp Break a Hip. Carter and Sharp Wander Off. Carter and—What Was Your Name Again?

  “Darling boy,” he’d called me, when he saw me at the restaurant.

  But I hadn’t begun to fully bend until his parents took the stage. Ah, thought the audience, his parents: how proud they must be! I understood exactly how proud they were. All the years I’d known Rocky, Mrs. Carter’s motherly correspondence consisted of requests for money when the fictional Mrs. Carter showed up on the radio. They couldn’t profit from the sisters, since they belonged rightfully to me, but I had in my head several paragraphs written in case Father Professor Carter decided that because I wore a mortarboard I was patterned after him. He never made a claim. “My father doesn’t care for show business,” Rocky used to tell me before we hit it big, “but he adores money. I have a little plan cooked up to buy his love. . . .” Then he discovered that his father would cash the checks and welsh on Rocky’s dreamt-up deal. In other words, I had followed the whole complicated plot of the past twenty-six years: I’d had a major role. I would have known not to invite those people who happened to share his name. This, I knew, is not his life.