Niagara Falls All Over Again Read online

  “Why?” I shifted my foot to her neck. I was twelve, and as determined as a dentist to find the spot that would cause her to flinch. She just tucked her chin down on my toes, and considered the question.

  “The first time,” she said, and already I was amazed: more than once, then? “I wondered how much I could see.”

  I could feel her voice buzz on my hot toes. The sock seemed to conduct the sensation all the way to my ankle. “And?”

  “A lot. Next time I’ll show you.”

  I shrugged, though she couldn’t see that.

  “I’ll show you how not to fall,” said Hattie, as though not-falling was a piece of information she’d picked up.

  “Annie would faint,” I said.

  “So we won’t invite her.”

  Our town would look like a map from up there, Des Moines like Canada, except east. Maybe off in the corner there’d be a compass; I had an idea they were actual things, municipal constructions that told you where north was. Here’s city hall, here’s the high school, here’s the municipal compass, a contraption like a metal merry-go-round.

  On the roof, said Hattie, the view was mostly trees. You could see a little bit of Fifth Street, three blocks away. Not Sharp and Son’s Gents’ Furnishings—well, maybe one brick or two, among the nearer leaves. She could see the river, though, and the railroad tracks which, I now decided, were made of the same stuff as my dreamt-up north-pointing dials, except they didn’t tell you where to go, they just went there.

  “Can you see the racetrack?” I asked. There had been a wooden racetrack on the far west side. We’d never gone, but we heard stories: they broke the hundred-mile-per-hour mark. A barnstormer dropped flour bombs in the middle of the track, and you could see the plume a mile away. Barney Oldfield raced there once. And on opening day, two men died in crashes, which wasn’t enough for the rest of the cars to stop racing.

  “No,” she said. “They tore that down years ago. Don’t you remember?”

  “Maybe.”

  “They used the wood to build some houses.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t remember which ones.”

  We were quiet then, imagining living in a house upon whose walls cars had driven a hundred miles per hour. Upon whose walls, on opening day, two men had died in crashes.

  “You know what I used to pretend?” she asked. She threw off my feet and sat up. “I used to think that Mama was a race-car driver at the track, because that’s when she got sick. She’s not in her room, I told myself: she’s racing. She’d come home in her duster, driving one of those cars that looks like a canoe. I thought she would have broken the record, and she’d have the prize money, and I’d be on the front porch—”

  We never spoke about our mother, Hattie and I, and now I understood why: at this moment, I could almost feel through the floorboards the slight tremor of our front door opening, the soft spot just over the threshold that made a footfall audible all through the house. No everyday ghost, she’d snuck up on me the way she snuck into dreams: she’d been away, and now she was home. All these years later, I still dream about the people I have lost: Hattie, my mother, my wife, Rocky. They are always travelers, always home with a suitcase, mildly surprised at how much I love and miss them. Then I wake up, and it takes minutes for me to realize they’ve left for good. It’s a common dream among survivors, I’m told. I never know whether it’s the meanest trick God plays on us, or the purest form of His love.

  Now Hattie dreamed for me. “And she walks up the steps,” she said, “and sets down the money, and she shakes my hand. To congratulate me. Because I’m the only one who guessed. And when I’m on the roof, I think, ‘She’s home now, but by the time I get down she’ll be gone.’”

  These days, sometimes, I picture Hattie sitting safely astride the roof. The shingles shine, as if sugared. So does the sky, ringed by clouds like meringues. I want it sweet up there, because she loved sweets: rock candy, anise balls, chocolate babies, chocolate Easter bunnies, anything you could bite the ears or toes off of. I think for her, in her voice, Mama will be home soon.

  I still avoid heights, but I imagine that people scale them to make where they’ve been more beautiful. Look at that green, look at that blue water. Look at Valley Junction as the sun sets, the sky full of light, the clouds rimmed in gold like china cups. Blue and gold and pink. Valley Junction is beautiful in it, a gray-faced lady in an evening gown, elegant and unlikely as Margaret Dumont. From up here, you can believe that your mother, who you know is dead, might come up that walk, past that flagpole, up those stairs, and under the roof of the porch. As long as you stay up here, she might be in the kitchen, singing to your baby brother.

  3

  Who Needs Hattie

  Years passed. My father joined Temple B’nai Jeshurun, the Reform congregation in Des Moines, and though Fannie was already married and Annie (according to Hattie) seemed determined to stay a spinster, Ida and then Sadie met and married nice Jewish boys. I worked at the store one or two afternoons a week, a good son, dutiful, deferential, my necktie precisely knotted, my hair perfectly combed. I asked questions, customers answered. I grew taller (though not tall) and, according to the local gossip, handsome. Good looks are an asset for a businessman. At home, I practiced with Hattie, learned to lead while dancing (though we made it all up; my father would not pay for dancing lessons), learned to watch and guess what would come next.

  In other words, I was brought up a straight man.

  But then, at the start of Hattie’s senior year of high school, the principal came to the house. Mr. Blaine was a young man with a flat, round face and matching silver-rimmed spectacles: the only color to him was whatever the lenses caught and reflected. The kids at school liked his childish nervousness; we thought we could always outwit him. He walked into our parlor holding his hat, and said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, I’ve come to talk to you about Hattie.”

  Pop nodded. “Hattie, Mose. Why don’t you wait in the yard?”

  So we went outside and sat on the back steps. “Has Mr. Blaine come to propose marriage, then?” I asked.

  Hattie smirked. “Of course. We were planning to run away together, but—” Her gray cotton dress had a rash of roses stitched near the collar; she felt them with the tips of her fingers. “No. He’s talking to Pop about college. For me.”

  “Oh. He thinks you should go?”

  She shrugged. Not many Valley Junction girls went to college in 1924. Nobody in our family ever had, except for Rabbi Kipple, smiling from his portrait. We read always. But college?

  “You don’t need a degree to dance,” I said.

  “No,” she said. Then suddenly, “Don’t get mad.”

  “I won’t,” I answered, already starting.

  “I think college isn’t such a bad idea. For me. We’ll go somewhere afterward. Mose?”

  I had thought I’d be getting out of Iowa soon. Vaudeville would surely take me out; the only problem was it might keep bringing me back. But that would be okay, playing Des Moines. We’d be written up in the paper. When the Titanic went down, a boxed item on the front page of the Register announced that there were no Iowans on board. It went on and on about no Iowans being on board. Surely if that was news, two local kids headlining at the Orpheum Theater would be. There was another Iowa vaude act, the Cherry Sisters, four girls from Indian Creek who were famous—really—because they sang so terribly, and so obliviously. The local papers loved the Cherry Sisters.

  “Iowa City,” said Hattie. “That’s where Mr. Blaine says I should go. He says”—here Hattie used the voice she’d made up for all dull grown-ups—“‘there are Jewish girls there, Ha-aa-Hattie.’ He figures Hattie has to be a nickname, but what’s the full form? He says I’m a pioneer. He means I’m Jewish. They call me the little Jewish girl. That bright little Jewish girl.”

  I turned and looked at her. “So why do you want to do what he says?”

  She was quiet. The roses on her dress looked inflamed from her scratching.
“I just do,” she said finally.

  Now I think: she wanted to get away from us. I understand. It’s why I eventually left myself. In Vee Jay, she was a Sharp girl, part of a famous family. My sisters were the Sharp Girls, I was the Sharp Boy, my father was Old Man Sharp. We weren’t the only Jews in town—there were the Brodies, who owned the grocery, and the Jacobses, who ran the dime store, and Old Man Soltot, the cobbler, and in Des Moines there were enough Jews to sustain four congregations—B’nai Jeshurun, plus two Orthodox and one Conservative shul—but we were visible. We had been taught to keep our hands clasped behind our backs whenever we visited someone’s house, to wait until we were invited to sit down, and to not look at anything: not down at rugs or straight ahead at paintings or up at dishes on plate rails, for fear our curiosity would seem like avarice. It was hard to do this and not appear stupid. At home, we could run wild, but out in the world, our father said, people would be examining us, wondering what Jews were like. We had to be good.

  Why wouldn’t Hattie want to try out what it was like to be just Hattie?

  Now, though, I left her on the stairs and lay on my back in the grass. “If that’s what you want,” I said, wounded.

  After a while, we heard Pop show the principal to the door. Then he came through the house and out the back. My fastidious father never loosened his tie except when he undressed at night; even now he wore his jacket and vest.

  “Sweetheart,” he said to Hattie. He sat down next to her on the stairs. Then he sighed almost happily and clapped his hands. “So! What will you study in school?”

  I could see her shiver: who knew it would be this easy? “English?” she said.

  He nodded. “And Mose—”

  I sat up. I thought he’d say something to comfort me, because I sorely needed comfort.

  “—when it’s your time, you can go, too. Iowa City has a fine business school. My smart children.” He smiled, as though the principal had come to the house to give him this gift: a son and a daughter capable of learning. It was so odd to see them together, Hattie and my father, the two halves of my life at last conspiring over my future. My father had his arm around Hattie’s waist.

  I’d thought I’d known everything about Hattie. How could I not? My favorite sister, my best pal: of course I knew her. I knew, for instance, the matter-of-fact syncopated feel of her hip beneath my hand as we waltzed, first dignified, then faster and faster, till one then the other of us lifted off the ground; eventually we got airborne at the same time, a trick we imagined looked both easy and impossible. I knew, when we tried some little piece of patter, dancing side by side, how to wait until she was done, first with the joke and then with the step, before I answered with another joke, and then another step. After practice, while she plotted our career—we’d go to Chicago first, a big city but still midwestern—I knew not to interrupt her as she scratched a map with the toe of her shoe in the dirt, or wound her hair on the back of her head in an attempt to look older. In other words, I understood her timing, and I believed that meant I understood her soul.

  Now that I’ve been in the business for seventy years, I know the difference.

  I don’t remember what became of Hattie’s diploma, though her graduation dress was ruined. “I hate it,” she said after we got back from the ceremony at the high school. She looked wonderful. Clever Ed Dubuque had made it out of white silk; it had a dropped waist and a boat neck that showed off her throat.

  “I feel like a doll.” She nibbled on the edge of a cookie.

  “You look like a doll,” said Annie, thinking this a compliment. We sat in the parlor, the three children left (Annie, me, Rose) and the one who was leaving. The married sisters had come to the ceremony and fussed over Hattie and then gone off to their families. My father had already returned to the store.

  “So,” said Annie. “What will you study?”

  “I’d like to be a lawyer,” Hattie said, not looking at me.

  “I’d like to be a bird,” said Annie.

  A lawyer? She’d been promising me: after college, vaudeville. Maybe even before: I’d come to Iowa City in two years and then we’d make our escape without having to run away from home.

  I looked at Hattie, but she stared up at Rabbi Kipple. She looked ready for a portrait herself, a graduation portrait, which in fact she intended to pose for the next day at the Stamp and Photograph Gallery in Des Moines. She frowned, as though already wrestling with a tricky legal question. A lawyer? I tried to catch her eye the way I always did, by simply wanting her to look at me. Suddenly, I knew the truth. She would become a lawyer, and if I complained, she’d say that I could become a lawyer too. Like Annie, I’d never heard of a lady lawyer before—that’s why she said she’d like to be a bird; to her it was as unlikely—but I knew that Hattie would do it. She would forget about me. She would leave me to run the store.

  I hadn’t even wanted to be a dancer before her (a ridiculous thought, because when did I ever have a before Hattie? She had a before Mose, but I had been born into the partnership). She’d come up with the whole plan. She’d taught me. I had been a boy who never gave a thought to the future, except I didn’t want to be a shopkeeper, and I knew that because Hattie told me. I was sixteen years old. Now I don’t know which is more ludicrous: that I had thought, before this moment, that my future was assured, or that I thought, after this moment, that it was destroyed.

  “Excuse me,” said Hattie, and left the room.

  If I opened my mouth I’d burst into tears. I felt babyish there on the sofa, dressed up for Hattie’s graduation, a cookie crumbling in my hand. My shoes were polished, and I wanted to muddy them. A lawyer? Yes, we can be partners, Sharp and Sharp. (Would Sharp be a good name for a lawyer, or bad?) Hattie was smarter than me, of course she was: I just hadn’t realized how clearly she knew that.

  Forget it. I’d be a single. I’d tap-dance and sing. I’d put together a minstrel act just to spite her, because she hated minstrel acts. The Sharp Boy. A lawyer. What snobbishness. We’d always said we’d be hoofers. Well, I still would.

  Rose, sitting on the sofa next to me, said, “I’ll be your dance partner, if you want.”

  The front of her dress was flocked with powdered sugar from the cookies. I patted her hand absentmindedly. “Maybe,” I said, but who could replace Hattie? Not my twelve-year-old sister, she of the bad eyesight and knock knees. No, I’d have to work the act over into something I could do alone.

  First, though, I’d take the shine off my shoes. Outside it was a cloudy June day; I walked into the backyard and looked at the elm and thought about climbing it, to prove that my fear of heights had to do with Hattie, and now that we were no longer partners I could do anything. I have since learned that this theory is sound: if someone is willing to be brave for you, you are less likely to be brave yourself.

  “Who needs her?” I said aloud. “Not me.”

  From behind me: a soft scraping. I turned around.

  There was Hattie, on top of the house. Behind her, the sky was gray, the sun a silk patch on a wool blanket. The birds who flew by were birds; they wanted to fly, so they did. Hattie walked along the peak of the roof as though it were a tightrope. She must not have heard me; she didn’t glance down. Maybe she was just looking east to Iowa City. Maybe she wanted to be a bird, too.

  I forgave her, mostly. That is to say, I recognized her. She was still a person who was willing to climb out a window onto a roof. Still up for a stunt. Still Hattie, not a lawyer yet.

  “Hey,” I said.

  At the sound of my voice, she turned, then wobbled. For a minute I thought her clumsiness was a joke. She wheeled her arms in the air. In her white dress against the gray sky, she looked like a movie, dappled and imprecise, clearly an actual person but not really moving like one.

  Then she slid. She fell to her knee, to her stomach. Then her whole body flipped onto her shoulder. I’d seen her do things like that before: a body is an object you can throw around from the inside, like this—then
she’d cartwheel or somersault or she’d just stand and pick me up by my ankles and hoist, and before I fell to the ground I’d think I could fly. She said when I was bigger I’d have to catch her.

  Now she was the one who flew. She came to the edge of the roof. Her hands kept scrambling to grab hold of something. I watched her without understanding: at any moment I thought she’d manage to stop and save herself; she’d get her fingers around a shingle, or she’d come to rest sitting at the gutter, or she’d grab a limb of the elm like a trapeze. Then she wailed, a noise I can still hear, she was calling for help, and that unstuck my feet: I was supposed to be doing something. I ran to the edge of the house and put out my hands to catch her, the way she’d been trying to teach me. I waited for her to land in my arms. I waited to learn the trick.

  Give Him the Business

  In all our years together, I never told Rocky what killed Hattie. Sometimes it almost felt as though he planned to win her away from me, he asked so many questions. He wanted every detail. I’d shrug as though I hadn’t heard the doctor’s diagnosis.

  I told him everything else, just not that.

  When I was exhausted with wishing that Hattie was still alive, I wished at least she’d had a different death. I wished she had spent some time dying, in other words: I wished I could have sat on the edge of her sickbed, that I could have climbed the roof—

  No. Even if I try, make myself over into Harold Lloyd or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., my fantasy self puts one knee on my bedroom windowsill, looks down, and climbs back inside. Okay, I would sneak past Annie, then, into Hattie’s room, ready to risk some killing germ, weighed down with a board game and bagfuls of candy from the dime store. Her arms would worm out from under Annie’s fierce tucking, ready for presents.

  I believed then—part of me still believes—that I had killed Hattie. I had called out, knowing she would always answer me. It must have been windy up on the roof, said Annie; it must have been slick; she must not have known how tricky it was to walk on slanted shingles. I never explained that she had plenty of practice. When Rocky asked what Hattie had died of, I wouldn’t say, because I believed that if I put it into words, it would be true. But my version of her death, the one in which I killed her, became true anyhow. Secrecy turns the slightest worry into your deepest fearful belief; over time, it builds up, a pearl inside an oyster, and that’s how carefully you guard it.