Niagara Falls All Over Again Read online

  “To you!” he said.

  “To me!” he said.

  “Especially to me!”

  12:45 A.M.

  “Look,” said Rocky. “I want you to listen. Are you listening? Pay attention. This is very important. Stop laughing! No, I mean it! Okay, laughing boy. Keep on laughing.”

  1:00 A.M.

  “How many sisters you got? What? You lucky son of a bitch! Listen: I’m an only child. Six sisters, you ought to be able to spare one. Pick me out a pip, okay? We’ll send her a telegram in the morning.”

  1:25 A.M.

  “Miriam who? Veblen? Oh, yes, yes, yes: Mimi and Savant. That act’s bullshit, you know that. Really? Let me shake your hand. No, the other one, your empty hand. The guy I saw in the act was a nance. I’m sure you gave it a je ne sais quoi. Mimi, on the other hand: tout le monde sait her quoi. No kidding? Really? Well, I’m sure you gave that some class too.”

  1:50 A.M.

  “Didn’t they teach you to drink, wherever it is you’re from? Oh. Well, no, they wouldn’t teach you to drink there.”

  1:55 A.M.

  “Hey, kid, how old—your glass is empty, here—how old are you? A youngster! I’m twenty-five, fourteen years experience in show biz. My parents—are you kidding? Who do you think packed my bag?”

  2:00 A.M.

  “Let me shake your hand. No, I’m serious. I am.”

  We drank in my boardinghouse room, and the landlady came in to shush us once an hour, like a cuckoo in a clock. First Rocky and then I flirted with her—that’s probably why she kept coming back, she liked the flattery. Also I threw my Dutch wig out the window, to signal that I would never need it again, and only afterward did I remember that it was borrowed, and this seemed like the funniest thing in the world, and though it was the middle of the night we discussed who it fell on: the landlady, a dog, a cop. Rocky spoke in his childish stage voice all night, I think. Maybe he wanted to convince me that our spot that night wasn’t a fluke.

  No. I’m wrong. Back then there was a slight difference in his voice onstage and off, but he didn’t start to squeak full-time till some years later, when we guested on the Rudy Vallee radio show and listeners complained that they couldn’t tell us apart. Rocky knocked himself up an octave to solve that problem.

  Still, that’s how I remember it: Rocky in falsetto describing a Dalmatian in a little Dutch-boy wig discovering he’s lost his appeal to all other dogs. I do know that we believed we would become famous, a thought that had never strictly occurred to me before. I believed because Rocky was positive, and though many a lost lamb has thus been led to slaughter—maybe he’d said the same thing the night before to Freddy Fabian, maybe he said it to anybody—the most curious thing of all was he turned out to be right.

  “So,” he said. “How’d you get into show business?”

  “Oh,” I answered. “One of my sisters pushed me.”

  2

  The Sharps of Iowa

  I grew up in Valley Junction, Iowa, a little whistle-stop town just west of Des Moines, the only boy among six sisters. Annie, Ida, Sadie, Fannie, Hattie, Rose. (There was another list, too, of the brothers and sisters who hadn’t lived: Samuel, Libby, Sarah, Abie, Louis, Hilla. This was a list we never said aloud.) I came sixth, two years after Hattie, almost to the day. This one we’ll coddle, said my father, who loved his daughters but longed for an heir.

  Hattie, aged two, had other plans. She looked into my crib and decided that Mama and Papa had finally brought home what she really wanted for her birthday: someone to boss around. “Mine!” she told our sisters. She slapped their hands away from me. “Okay,” the older girls said, laughing, “see if you can stop his crying.” My oldest sister fished me out and sat Hattie down and plopped me on her plush little lap. What do you know? I shut right up.

  I swear I remember staring up at her on my first day on earth. I was—there’s photographic evidence—a good-looking baby, with a full head of black hair that Hattie stroked with the back of her wrist. Did she even know my name? She cooed, “Mine, mine, mine.”

  I cooed back, thinking the same thing.

  From my crib, from the flowered carpet in the living room, from the back steps where I staged plays with root vegetables stolen from the bins in the pantry: what I remember is Hattie’s face looking back at me, Hattie’s voice singing lullabies, Hattie scolding me for dreaming when we could be climbing trees or fording puddles. Our mother was always pregnant, shut away in her bedroom. Mama’s breath was hot and inky; her hair was black; her voice was sandy and kind; we were told to leave her alone until she felt better. She never did. She finally died after our sister Rose was born. I was four, and Hattie six.

  The morning of Mama’s funeral, confused by the gloom indoors, I stepped outside and directly into a casserole dish. The neighbors had brought us food, which they left on the back stairs of our house. Cold navy beans slid into the sagging cuff of my sock, and this was an unhappiness I understood: I felt myself about to cry, a ticklish feeling around my nose. I stood ankle-deep in the casserole, and then, suddenly, Hattie stepped down beside me, into a loaf of bread. Then she stepped into a lemon cake. Then—the bread stuck on her foot like a boot—she stomped into all the other dishes, a roast chicken, a crock of butter, some thoughtfully sliced pot roast. She did this soberly, as though she were rending a garment, or covering a mirror.

  I stamped my foot into an apple crumble, breaking the glass pie plate beneath. Mrs. Combs, our next-door neighbor, might have wondered about the noise that came from our backyard, but what could she do? Besides, she’d heard Jews broke glasses at weddings. Why not pie plates at funerals? We trampled all the food. In houses around us, north, south, across the back lot, neighbors pulled back curtains and wondered whether this is what Jews did, when their mothers died.

  The older girls watched us from the kitchen windows. Such waste, they thought. Such ingratitude. Fannie and Ida and Sadie wanted to stop us, but Annie, the oldest, rocked the baby and kept them from the door.

  “Let them alone,” she said. “There’s time enough for crying.”

  The other girls agreed. Soon enough we’d miss our mother. Soon enough we’d weep. They’d be ready for us then. They had examined their own grief and decided they couldn’t use it, not when the littler kids suffered, so they folded it up, and ironed and scented it, and tried to make it look like something else entirely, offered it to us as though it was plain, brand-new, original concern. Hattie, savvy, recognized sympathy for what it is, hand-me-down love.

  Get that away from us, she thought.

  Oh, the older girls wanted to mother us. They tried to wrestle us onto their laps; they tried to order us around, but it was too late: I belonged to Hattie, and she belonged to me.

  Some days I forgot my mother was dead and went looking for her. Was she in her bedroom? The pantry? No. I’d hide on the back staircase then, exhausted. Hattie would find me. “There you are,” she’d say as though I was the one who’d been misplaced, and she’d thrust her arms under mine and bear-hug me to my feet and pull me, my toes bumping each step, through the kitchen and out the door. She must have missed Mama too, I realize now. But she kept me busy so we could both forget. Like Annie, she knew there was all the time in the world for crying, and so it was best never to start.

  She tried to teach me things: I made a fine audience but a miserable student. I applauded lessons. When I refused to learn to tree-climb, Hattie tossed me into the arms of the elm in front of our house. I bounced once, then sat down to see what she’d do next. I was a composer of songs as a child, though often I merely sang opera—

  Potato! Potato, Potato!

  Potato. Potato. Potato?

  Potato potato potato potato.

  —and Hattie could join in on the harmony, even if I was making up the lyrics right then. Harmony was what we called her inability to carry a tune.

  All of Valley Junction knew us, the little Jewish kids, two of Old Man Sharp’s brood: the tall redheaded girl and her
short black-haired swarthy brother. We didn’t look like each other, but we didn’t look like anybody else in town either. Together we wandered everywhere in Vee Jay, fearless. Our sister Annie, who was afraid of everything—smallpox, the nearby river, the slightest cough, birds, fire—thought this was a sign of muddleheadedness. She told us so.

  “Keep on that way,” she warned, “and you’ll come to grief.”

  My Father’s First Stand

  My father’s store, Sharp’s Gents’ Furnishings, was a long narrow store that differed from the other long narrow stores on Fifth Street only in what it stocked. The floors were composed of wide unfinished boards that had been seasoned with dirt that sweeping couldn’t budge and mopping turned to a stubborn paste. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of stock made accessible by sliding wrought-iron ladders stood against each wall—denim coveralls so stiff you could spread butter with them, union suits in bright red and speckled cream.

  That was where my father went, after he was widowed. He’d buried six children by the time his wife died, and would live with that sorrow for the rest of his life, but he did not believe in mourning, which to him was a kind of idleness that could kill you. Like my sisters, he believed that grief was a fact. You put it in your pocket where you felt it at all times, and then you went back to work.

  In 1891, he’d been a peddler in the Iowa countryside, selling to farmers and farmers’ wives. Then he heard that the Rock Island Line planned to open a roundhouse in Walnut Township, just west of Des Moines. Why not become one of the settlement’s first merchants? Within days of arriving, he’d cast off every detail of his old life, like a cowboy in a Western who’d shot a man, except in this case the last bad place was Vilna, and what he threw away was not, he thought, of much consequence: an unpronounceable name, a careful adherence to his religion, a bushy red beard that had kept him warm while he traveled, and his childhood languages—Lithuanian and Yiddish, neither of which I ever heard him speak more than three words of. His sentimental tongue refused to assimilate: he heard the words in American but they came out Yiddishe.

  The boat hadn’t landed on the shores of Des Moines: he must have started on the East Coast or the Gulf Coast and worked his way to the center of the country, where he met my mother’s father, Rabbi Benjamin Kipple. We had a portrait of Rabbi Kipple in our parlor, a bearded man wearing a hat as round as an ottoman. A peculiar man, said our father—he had a hard time keeping a pulpit: he quoted Milton in sermons, for instance, and was known for springing onto chairs to make a point, and then tumbling off them. A slapstick man of God, in other words. When the rabbi arrived in Des Moines, invited by the Children of Israel shul, he leaped from the train in front of a woman waiting for her sister. She took him in—dark beard, pink cheeks, and large blue eyes—and fell to the platform, screaming, “Jesus Christ has come!” Rabbi Kipple stepped over her feet. He murmured, “No, madam, just His mizpocah.”

  My father, a new arrival to Iowa himself and a congregant at Children of Israel, had a weakness for smart men who were willing to be foolish. Every summer of my childhood, my father brought us to the state fair: he’d never missed one all his years in Iowa, he told us. He’d gone the first time with his future father-in-law. What would the natives have made of the two of them, one small deliberate man of commerce, one tall gawky enthusiastic man of God?

  I imagine them walking the fairgrounds, black-clad but happy in the Iowa heat. A comedy team, absolutely. The prize bull is as big as a building. The hogs seem mean and sunburnt. My grandfather (I like to think) cannot meet an animal without doing an impression—strutting like a rooster, lowing like a cow, sneezing like a horse with his whole head. My father the peddler has met plenty of American livestock, but the rabbi is transfixed. Best are the goats, so lovable and pushy he wants to climb in their pen and butt heads with each one in the jostling way of little boys. He has one leg slung over the corral before my father catches the back of his coat to talk him out of it. (Actually, the rabbi is relieved. His sense of humor depends on reasonable people like my father keeping him out of trouble.) The goats stick their anvil heads through the rail-and-post fence like salesmen, and nibble at the knees of the rabbi’s trousers. In the company of goats, he suddenly realizes, it is easy to ask a favor. So he turns to Jakov Shmuel Sharensky—as my father is still known—and explains that he is dying. No, my father says, as though that will change the rabbi’s mind. The rabbi straightens my father’s collar fondly, and makes his request: please marry my Goldie, let me worry less. She’s seventeen, you can teach her anything.

  That much is true, anyhow: my father married my mother because his dying best friend asked him to; then he took the child home and found that they loved each other. Duty, he explained to us, is always rewarded.

  They stayed in love despite everything: the age difference, too many dead children, so many live ones. Nobody has an imagination anymore: they figure an older man, an orphaned teenager, she always pregnant—a brute, that man. They picture the nineteenth-century sex, like sex is furniture and changes styles with the years, like sex is transportation or weaponry, something that has been around since the beginning of time but only recently has acquired any panache.

  I don’t think that’s how it was at all. My mother was young; my father was her slave. He agreed to anything she asked, even all those children.

  “But you have three already,” he might say.

  “Not enough,” my mother would answer.

  “And me.”

  “And you,” she’d say kindly. “I don’t want another husband. Husbands I have enough of.”

  He’d never imagined outliving her. Once she died, my father turned to me, the thin boy among all those girls, and thought: my little businessman, let us begin.

  To start with, he changed the name of the store to Sharp and Son’s. This he had painted in red-and-black letters on the window. Then he brought me to the store and set me on the glass counter out front and introduced me to his customers, the railroad men, who shook my hand and called me Boss. They told me how honest my father was, as though I, too, had once suspected that all Jews were crooks, still suspected the rest of ’em but not my father. Jake Sharp, the men of Vee Jay called him, like he was an Irish tough. He sold them clothing and cashed their paychecks and acted as banker; in the flowered safe in the back room were dozens of envelopes full of cash, accounts kept on the back flaps in pencil.

  At four I slept among the inventory; at six I learned to straighten; at eight I restocked the shelves from the storeroom; and when I turned ten my father began to talk of me taking over the store, and Hattie decided she needed to put a stop to the nonsense. She hadn’t raised me up by hand so that I could become a shopkeeper. For my tenth birthday, she decided, she needed to give me something larger than even Sharp’s, and so she did: she gave me vaudeville.

  “Okay, kid,” she whispered in our front hall. She wound a scarf around my neck. The lapels of her brown coat, a favorite of mine, were fur trimmed; she wore a fur hat that nearly matched, like a black-bearded man with a chestnut mustache. My other sisters were a matched set: short, narrow-hipped and busty, with small hook noses and pale distracted cat-eyes. Hattie was tall and wide across the hips and there was nothing the least bit subtle about her nose; her hair shone like a mesh coin purse, coppery and, like copper, both warm and cool. She tucked another scarf into the collar of my coat, though already I was sweating.

  I don’t remember the streetcar ride from downtown Valley Junction to downtown Des Moines; I don’t remember the marquee. We must have bought tickets at the booth outside; we certainly had to climb the stairs to the balcony. Still, I remember the day as though Hattie smuggled me inside, wrapped in her coat, until the moment we stepped into the house of the Des Moines Orpheum.

  Ribbons and ribbons of gold, and velvet, and silk cord. The seats were pink velveteen. I grabbed Hattie’s arm, dizzy with the real perspective of the distance and the forced perspective of the railings and sloping floor. Beyond and below the balcony, mo
re seats. The drawn curtains were darker pink; on the ceiling painted angels were made modest by floating scraps of fabric. Gap-mouthed organ pipes stood against the wall to the right of the stage. I thought of a jewelry box my mother owned, with a celluloid ballerina who popped up when you lifted the lid, and just at that moment—as though the building itself could read my mind—the organist appeared on a platform, rising from the orchestra pit, and began to play.

  “From up here we’ll be able to see everything,” Hattie explained. She unfolded a seat for me.

  I sat. “A movie?”

  She put a gloved hand on my neck to shush me.

  While people around us took their seats, the organist descended, still playing, and a troupe of five Oriental acrobats began to fling themselves around onstage in time to the music. First just grown-ups, who I took to be siblings. The tallest acrobat sprung offstage and then sprung back carrying two carpetbags, and then someone in the wings threw him a third, which he caught and set down next to the others in one swinging motion. He undid the brass buckles—in my head I can still hear them ping, though maybe the house percussionist simply struck the triangle—opened them up, and out stepped the contents: a medium-sized child, a small child, and a child so tiny it seemed like a trick, a dog in a toddler suit. Applause. The Fujiyama Japs, the program called them. Somehow, they made the way they tossed each other around seem like good manners. Pass the salt, pass the potatoes, pass the twelve-year-old, pass the baby, thank you, don’t mention it. At any moment, they might have started flinging each other into the audience. Would you like the baby? Here, sir. Hand him along the row when you’re done.

  “Vaudeville,” Hattie whispered in my ear, as though that explained everything.

  That one act would have been enough. But the acrobats were followed by a singer, a shrunk-down version of a play about a crooked politician, a dog act, a man who folded paper in complicated ways, a stout lady who sang about the man she loved who then pulled her hair right off her head—she was a man herself!—a comedy trio, a pair of eccentric dancers who weren’t the Fujiyamas but not bad either: they were brother and sister, which made sense when you watched them roughhouse in time to the music. While they danced they were effortless, but they panted like spaniels when they took their bows. (We did not see a young comic from Boston named Rocky Carter, though years later this myth would slip into my official biography: bitten by show-biz bug, aged ten, when he saw his future partner perform at the Des Moines Orpheum. Rocky started that rumor.) I don’t remember who the headliner was that afternoon, but my favorite act was a girl who came out on a horse and warbled a song (I’ve never heard it since) called “My Navaho Love.” All I knew was a horse inside a theater was the most astounding thing I’d ever seen, though outside I didn’t care for them one way or the other.