Niagara Falls All Over Again Read online

  “That’s not so bad,” I said. “You should just cut it short.”

  “The wig?”

  “Your hair. I could do it for you.”

  “You know how?”

  “I cut my own. That’s harder. Do you have scissors?”

  “In . . .” She gestured toward a bag on the vanity. I found them: they were shaped like a long-billed bird.

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  And so, in Duluth, Minnesota, shortly after sleeping with a girl for the first time in my life, I cut her hair short, and tried to comb it back. I was so grateful to Miriam that I would have done anything: after the haircut, I could clip her nails, or iron her dresses, or polish her shoes.

  “It bristles,” she said.

  “You need some greasy kid’s stuff.” She had Vaseline in her bag; that would do, though a few moments later I would wrestle her back to bed and we’d get the pillowcases and sheets so greasy they turned translucent. Now I took a glob from the jar and combed it through her hair, which was actually nearly mahogany.

  “I think I’ll keep you around,” she said. “You’re handy.”

  And so she did, and so I was.

  The Disappointment Act

  “You’re going on in Indianapolis tomorrow,” Miriam said the next morning over the room-service tray. She had ordered me coddled eggs and dry toast, like the invalid I was. “With me,” she added. “Okay, Savant?”

  I’d never meant to be a comedian, but as always my breaks came when I rode on someone else’s coattails, in this case Miriam’s frothy yellow skirt. Ben Savant said he wanted to take some time off. He knew that Mimi had been eyeing me that week—that’s why he’d handed over his handlebar mustache—and before he left town he handed over everything else too: his costume, his supply of cotton wool and spirit gum, even his name and glossies, because there was no point in throwing out perfectly good pictures. Turned out the guy I met wasn’t even the real Ben Savant; he’d stepped in so seamlessly everyone, including Mimi, had forgotten his real name. The first Savant had drunk himself to death some years before, and had been, in fact, Miriam’s father. The mustache, as advertised, was hot, and the spirit gum tasted awful.

  There was something about seeing Miriam close-up onstage that unnerved me, too many layers of what-age-was-she and where-had-we-met. I could see the girders of brown makeup meant to bend her nose into something less Semitic; I could see a bruise on her neck, free of makeup because only someone standing right next to her could peer past her collar and see it. Good God, did I do that? The wide-open eyes and the simpering giggle seemed designed to drive me crazy, not to amuse the audience.

  Mimi, who do you like better, your father or your mother?

  Why, I don’t have anything against either one of ’em.

  The shorn hair turned her from a cutie to a beauty. I’d never noticed that a hairstyle could make such a difference. There, revealed, her arching nose, her newly huge brown eyes. The neck so long it seemed impossible. Cheekbones. A profile. Her dark oiled hair showed comb marks like the grain of dark oiled wood, and entirely changed her complexion from slightly ruddy, under the blond wig, to roses-and-cream. Her eyebrows matched the rest of her, instead of looking like a proofreader’s fatheaded correction: insert eyebrows here.

  I was eighteen: of course I loved her. She’d rescued and renovated me, and in return I kept proposing marriage. How else could I keep her around? She turned me down every time, which I took to mean she loved me but hated convention. Years after we’d broken up, I’d tell myself: you were a kid, you didn’t really love her. In the months afterward, though, I walked the streets of every new and old town, saying, you loved her, you loved her, you loved her, that was love. She always faced the audiences, and I faced her.

  She was a nice Jewish girl, like me from somewhere unlikely: Louisville, Kentucky. She was a little confused when I brought her a Christmas stocking filled with candy and dime-store presents; she was totally flummoxed three months later when I presented her with an Easter basket. “I hate to break it to you,” she said, “but we’re Jewish. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Some Jews celebrate Easter,” I said.

  She stared at me.

  I tried to explain that I’d always thought of Easter as a secular holiday: chicks, candy, bunnies, cards. My mother and then Annie bought us Easter baskets from the five-and-ten. I don’t know how old I was before I realized it all had something to do with the death of Jesus Christ, but I know exactly how old I was before I realized it was entirely connected to the death of Jesus Christ: eighteen, at the Monroe Hotel in Chicago. Thereafter, we sometimes went to Saturday-morning services, if we were in the right town and awake in time.

  Miriam was the least serious person I’d ever known. She laughed constantly, at my jokes and my foibles: the time I tried to iron a pair of pants and left a cathedral-shaped burn on the seat without realizing, my first unpleasant encounter with a pickled egg. She seemed always to have just bitten me somewhere, about to run away from the scene of her mischief. She had teenage skin, by which I mean beautiful, and even then, when I ran a hand down her back, I realized I would never sleep with anyone that young again. She decided she’d educate me in everything. “Now, pay attention,” she said, leaning over me in bed. “I’m only going to show you this once.

  “What a sweet, sweet boy you are.”

  She was a beautiful girl. Sometimes she drank too much—always after the shows, never before—and then she did seem a little like onstage Mimi, because she cried and then laughed immediately afterward. Sometimes she even talked in her baby voice. I hated it.

  “You’re a grown woman,” I said, even though this wasn’t exactly true, and she would pout, and come over and sit on my lap—she was quite a lapful—and say, “You’re supposed to help me forget.”

  So: we weren’t married, but I assumed we somehow were. Miriam didn’t. She still flirted with an occasional boy wonder, praising him for his youth as though she herself was seventy-five. Then she said, one morning when we’d finished a week in Madison, “I think it’s time to break up the act.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, that might be easier. The agent can get us work—”

  “No, no,” said Miriam. We were surrounded by room-service trays again; she had a terrible weakness for bellboys. “Everything, I meant. No act. No romance.”

  Oh.

  Despite the wig and the cupid’s bow mouth, she never saw life onstage as separate from life off: to her, that would have been as ridiculous as claiming you were one person while taking a walk, and another while sitting in a restaurant, and then someone else again while bathing. But, see, I did feel that way. Even standing up from a chair I felt suddenly changed, now a standing man, a man who stood, and if I put my mind to it, I could be a man who walked, and a man who sang. This is why I always loved to dance: everyone wanted to know a man who danced.

  Turned out my predecessor in the Ben Savant biz had decided to make a comeback, and they were going to try something new, a reverse drag double, where she’d play the male part and he the female. With the short hair—which I had cut for her every two weeks—she could go wigless.

  “Finally I can get out of these petticoats. Good-bye,” she said to me, and walked away into the sunset—actually, we were in our hotel room and she didn’t move. Still, I see her in men’s pants held up by suspenders, her coat hooked over one shoulder on two curved fingers, a boater tucked under her arm. She tries to swagger away like a boy, but she’s still my girl, though smaller and smaller, till she disappears at the end of the road where the sidewalks clap together and there’s no room for anyone. She hasn’t bumped her nose on the backdrop, she’s just gone.

  Aha, you might say to me: she left you, and so you hated her. I toyed with hate, and then chose something harder. I decided I wanted to be her pal. Other people who’d left me had managed by dying, and it seemed a shame to let a whole living woman go to waste. I wanted her to think well
of me, which seemed a kind of revenge in itself. Look what a reasonable fellow you just left! Look how you can’t forget him! So I courted her—for the first time—I wrote her letters, which she returned with postcards, and once or twice, though I couldn’t afford it, I called her on the telephone (I tracked her new act’s progress with the week’s Variety). She seemed fresh out of love, but I was sure that somewhere in her luggage, among the makeup and the worn-out shoes, was a tiny package of affection for me, which I kept petitioning for. It belonged to me. Hating her wouldn’t have been so awful, so constant, but that might require her to hate me, and that, I realized, I couldn’t bear.

  We’d parted at the Madison Orpheum, after ten months on the road together. I refused to say good-bye; I had a horror of the word. I had not said good-bye to my sisters, I had not said good-bye to my father, I would not say good-bye to Miriam. That last night, I could hear her call my name backstage, but I’d gone to hide among the blades in a sword-swallower’s dressing room. “You’re safe here,” the sword swallower assured me, laughing because he believed I was the heartbreaker. Eventually, Miriam gave up, and went back to the hotel room to pack her things alone. Will I ever see you again? I’d asked, and she’d shrugged. But that’s the thing about the circuit: what you once lost—on purpose, by accident—is delivered to your doorstep sooner or later. And make no mistake: you are delivered, too, even to people who’d like to refuse you. Maybe especially.

  The Genuine Article

  So I was back to being a single, a comedian, I decided. I figured what most people figure: a comedy act is a business, the comic is the boss, the straight man’s just the hired help. Surely after my time on the road with Miriam, I deserved a promotion. I tried to write some patter songs. One—inspired by my eleventh-grade English class—went this way:

  I’ll be a satyr that’s wiser but sadder

  if you’re not my nymph anymore.

  All of the patter I had wouldn’t matter

  if you walked away from my door.

  Wasn’t it bliss when we kissed in the mist?

  It wasn’t a myth, then, my lips on your wrist.

  Insistently kissing my kissable miss.

  Mad as a hatter, but what would it matter

  if you aren’t my love anymore.

  (To write a song, you walk down the street with your head thrown back, hoping some rhyme will trickle down your throat like a nosebleed. Kiss, bliss, sis, bris?

  Probably not bris.)

  I got some photos made up, captioned Mike Sharp, glad to get my old name or some facsimile back under my own face. Miriam and I had shared her agent, a faceless guy named Maurice who worked out of New York and didn’t care anything about this year’s Savant; he wouldn’t return my calls and telegrams. A juggler I met in Milwaukee said he knew a hungry agent in Chicago who I should cable. So I did, with the words “Find me work!”

  Theater bookers didn’t care about this year’s Savant, either; maybe that’s why last year’s Savant had come back to Mimi. I became what was called a disappointment act, a trouper who’d step in anytime someone got sick or drunk or arrested or divorced. For two years I did everything: tap-dancing, singing, tab shows, flash shows, juggling. I was the guy who was merely sufficient. You hired me, or you had a hole onstage: I caught the tumbling Irish acrobat; I sang harmony to the chubby ingenue’s declarations of love; I was the husband who opened the door at the end of a scene to catch my wife caressing the handsome stranger. Mike Sharp: the thumb in the dike.

  That was onstage. Off, I looked around and saw: no one. Not my family, not Miriam, and especially not Hattie, who I almost expected to pop up now that Miriam was gone, I’d ignored her for so long. I was a single, an orphan. And lonely. For ten months I’d had someone to say things to. Not serious things, just I wonder if these shoes will last another month or I saw the funniest baby on the street today or My stomach’s upset, but I don’t think it’s serious. In a bar you can discuss politics or women or money, but you can’t tell a stranger that your stomach’s upset but you don’t think it’s serious.

  Everyone in vaudeville was strange to me: men and women, slack-rope walkers and animal trainers, Russians and Catholics and Negroes. You couldn’t tell from an act who was real and who’d put on an accent, the counterfeit from the actual. The female impersonators, for instance: some of them were perfectly masculine, big knuckled and ready to fight. Others out of costume still seemed girlish, not like real girls, but like the most pampered eerie fairy-tale girl there ever was. They stood on the sidewalk with their unlit cigarettes, waiting for someone to approach with a match. Someone always did.

  I learned as much Yiddish from Gentiles as Jews; for years I wasn’t sure what was actual Yiddish and what was backstage slang. Sometimes I did a Dutch act, sometimes Italian. I even did a Hebe act for a couple of weeks, with a guy named Farnsworth who played an Irish tough trying to wheedle me into a bargain. Already it was appallingly dated, but I waxed my teeth so they looked pointed and worked up a Yiddishe accent modeled, I am sorry to say, on my father’s. Still, being Jewish myself wasn’t really an advantage. For a Hebe act you played smart and stingy, for a Dutch act, stupid and lovable. Anyone could do it.

  I don’t know how I got through those years after Mimi left me, except through a combination of pride and rage, the cocktail that young men guzzle down until they either wise up or die from years of consumption. They’re delicious together, pride and rage. I would not go back home. I could not fail Hattie, sometimes because I loved her and believed I was fulfilling her wishes, sometimes because I hated her and wanted to show her what I was made of. I had the worst of all worlds: I was a solo act, except when I was acting.

  I’d been doing the Hebe act when I landed in Iowa again, Cedar Rapids, about 130 miles from Vee Jay. Farnsworth, or whatever his real name was, horrified me: he smelled worse than Boris the Seal, and told me every day that he was looking for my replacement. It had gotten to where we only spoke onstage. In Iowa, I moped and thought of my sisters: Rose and Annie in Valley Junction; Ida in Des Moines; Fannie in Madrid; Sadie in Cascade, not far from Cedar Rapids. I sent money home, though I couldn’t afford it. Annie wrote back, care of my agent: Scribble a little note next time. I hadn’t. Now I composed telegrams in my head. Not to Pop: of course he wouldn’t come. But Rose loved comedians, and Annie loved Rose: they could be coaxed, couldn’t they?

  To see their brother do a Hebe act?

  I was so miserable that week everyone on the bill stayed away from me, except for a blackface tramp juggler and eccentric dancer named Walter Cutter, who played the deuce spot. We nodded when we passed each other backstage. He shook my hand once when I came off, like a critic who’d just been grudgingly impressed with a young upstart’s talent. Nice of him, since he—though not the headliner—was the guy who brought the house down, every single time. He could juggle fourteen balls and make them look like six dozen. He did a stair dance that rivaled Bill Robinson’s (and that’s saying something), rubber-limbed and elegant.

  The only thing Walter Cutter didn’t do was talk. Not onstage, not off.

  “You know why, don’t you?” Farnsworth said to me, breaking his own vow of silence. “He’s a nigger. He keeps his face blacked up and thinks he’ll get away with it, doesn’t talk ’cause that’ll show him up as colored.”

  Plenty of genuinely black acts wore greasepaint onstage. Walter used burnt cork to cover his skin. Farnsworth was right: he never took it off. He had removed his white glove to shake my hand, and I could see that he was light-complected; I myself was swarthy. In other words, we were about the same color. If he’d wanted to, he probably could have passed and worked the theaters in the south where they wouldn’t hire colored; most northern theaters booked whoever audiences wanted to come and see.

  I’d been on the same bill as plenty of Negro acts, and I’d seen anger and disdain and occasional violence and matter-of-fact friendly mixing and indifference—this was 1930, after all—but I’d never run into anything like
what Walter stirred up in our Cedar Rapids colleagues, all without saying a word. Some people, like Farnsworth, just hated his race. Some people—this was Farnsworth’s problem too—hated him because he was a showstopper they had to follow. Mostly I think his silence got to them, the comics especially. They didn’t trust a guy who didn’t talk, talk all the time, brag and kibbitz and insult. They told jokes and Walter didn’t even smile, never mind laugh. Oh, they hated him. No one playing the Criterion would speak to me, because I had shaken his hand. Somebody tried ratting Walter out to the house manager. It didn’t make any difference: the theater booked plenty of black acts, plus he’d already gone on and killed. Only a fool would take an act like that off the bill and send him down the road.

  By the end of the week we were best pals, though all we’d done was nod and shake each other’s hands and play some pinochle backstage. Walter kept score on a piece of paper with the tiniest stub of a pencil. When he won a hand, he smiled, and I saw that he was missing half his teeth. He didn’t talk, so I didn’t talk. We mimed to each other. Saturday between shows I gestured at him: a drink?

  He shrugged agreeably and beckoned me through the stage door. Not till we got to the speakeasy did I remember he might have trouble getting served, but the bartender seemed to know him. Even so, Walter hadn’t washed his face, though wherever he had the hint of wrinkles you could see his skin under the cracked cork. There we were: a black guy made up to look black and a Jewish guy dressed up as an old Jew. I almost laughed. I could taste the wax on my front teeth.

  We carried our drinks to a table and sat down to play pinochle. Between hands, he wrote things on a notepad. Our first conversation. His handwriting was ornate. Where are you from? Iowa, I told him. Home! he wrote, and then he dealt the cards.

  “After a fashion,” I said.

  Lucky you. Haven’t seen my people in thirty years.

  “No? Why not?”