Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Did you like that one?” she asks at the end. “Here’s another, folks.” And she sends them to sleep, to sex, to dinner, to work.

“I wanted to ask Hattie,” she said icily, staring at the speaker, “but you know she couldn’t sing.”

That was true.

If you make it big , Rose had said, and suddenly I burned to be on my sister’s radio show. She was a tough kid; she wouldn’t cut her brother a break. I’d have to work. I could feel something strange kicking up at the base of my skull: possibility.

“Do you promise?” I asked Rose.

“Do I promise?”

“Do you promise I’ll be on your show when I hit it big?” I said.

She appraised me. “That’ll be nice,” she said skeptically. “I imagine I’ll be happy to have you.”

The Scarlet Ampersand

I began to hatch a plan. Chicago, where Hattie and I had always planned to go. Vaudeville. I could sing; everyone said so. A foot in the door. I’d talk to Ed Dubuque, who’d lived in Chicago as a young man and told me he had friends who were performers. “You should hear Paolo play piano,” he’d told me once. “He plays hymns like they’re honky-tonk, and honky-tonk like hymns.” I was sure Ed would help: he loved me, and besides, with me gone he’d surely inherit the store. We both knew that. I worked out a whole speech, and I had my mouth open to deliver it a week after I’d insulted Rose, my father in his office at the back of the store, me and Ed by the painted window in the front of Sharp’s. The late afternoon sun dropped a banner of shadow across us: SHARP & SON’s GENTS’ FURNISHINGS. The ampersand fell right on my face: the scarlet punctuation, the mark of a straight man.

What I said was, “Ed, I can’t breathe.”

He put his hand to my chest solicitously. “Sit down,” he said.

I tried again. “I can’t breathe here . In the store. In this town. Probably in the whole state of Iowa. Ed—”

“Shhh,” he said. “Okay, Master Sharp. Hold your horses.” He looked to the back of the store, and then at his wristwatch, a Hamilton that had been a gift from my father. “After closing. We’ll talk.”

I nodded, though then I really couldn’t breathe: all my plans swelled my throat. But we stood there silently for fifteen more minutes, and then Ed went to my father’s office and came back with both of our hats. “Follow me,” he said, and we walked out and crossed the street and up the stairs into one of the dark pool halls that downtown Vee Jay was famous for. They sold bootleg beer and Templeton whiskey, named for the nearby town that distilled it. Ed walked in like he owned the place. The bartender waved him over and the two of them gabbed and laughed for a minute, and then Ed brought over a glass of beer for me, my first ever.

I took a sip and felt it in my collarbone, then all the way down my arms and to my fingers. Ed raised his eyebrows. Okay, I thought, but then a barrel-bellied man in railroad coveralls ambled up behind Ed and stared at us. He tapped Ed on the shoulder. Oh, God, a fight.

“Schmidt,” said Ed.

“Dubuque,” the guy answered. He picked up a cue and a block of chalk.

“Pay attention,” Ed said to me. “Here’s where your education begins.”

He doffed his tweed jacket and hung over the pool table, defying gravity the way he did, and they began to play. Everything I knew about pool I’d learned from a W. C. Fields short, which is really all you need, as long as you’re a spectator. Ed murdered the guy. They shook hands and the railroad man handed over a dollar bill.

“Good grief, Ed,” I said. “Where did you learn that?”

“Chicago.” He picked up his glass.

“That’s where I want to go.”

He waited for me to explain myself. I couldn’t. My plans — I’d been planning continuously since talking to Rose, more efficiently than I ever had with Hattie — were as precise and unlikely as a house of cards, and to disturb a single piece, I thought, would topple them over. I counted on Ed to read my mind.

He took a swig of beer. “Why Chicago?”

I whispered, “Vaudeville.”

“I adore your father. . ” he said.

“I know you do.”

Ed frowned. I readied myself for a lecture on Duty and Business and Courage. Instead he picked up his jacket and put it on carelessly, so he looked like a bum in a scarecrow’s too-tight duds. Then, with an elegant shake of his shoulders followed by a small finesse of his wrists, he realigned it. (That was the most valuable move Ed ever taught me. I practiced for ages, to get from fool to dandy with one shrug. It was a great sight gag. I never got as good at it as Ed.)

“Dubuque!” yelled one of the men. “Don’t leave!”

Ed flashed a salesman’s smile. “Stephens!” he yelled back, in a deep voice I’d never heard before. “Gotta leave!” He turned to me. “That’s why your father and I are a good team. Half the men in town won’t trust a fellow who won’t shoot billiards with them. The other half won’t trust one who does. Chicago.” Ed sighed, as though he hated the thought. “Vaudeville. Well, I can give you some names.”

We had stopped on the steep stairs of the pool hall down to the street; a man who looked as though he’d been sleeping in a field, flossy with straw and cornsilk, passed by us. I grabbed Ed’s hand and shook it.

He looked even more pained than he had before. “I’d try to talk you out of going, if it’d do any good.”

“It won’t.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said. “I’ve left places myself a few times. You’ll need some clothes.”

He took me back across the street to the alley entrance of the darkened store. “Mr. Sharp?” he called, unlocking the door. No answer. I’d been in Sharp’s thousands of times since childhood, but never when it was empty of my father.

Ed moved through the store, pulling shirts from shelves, a suit from one of the storage cabinets, a straw boater from a hatbox in the back room, a pair of brown oxfords. In five minutes he’d put together a pretty snappy outfit, snappier than I would have thought possible from the stock at Sharp’s. My father would have been happy to carry nothing but coveralls and funeral suits, but Ed talked him into buying a few things for the odd local college boy. I pulled on the suit’s vest, which had so many pockets it made me look like a chest of drawers. I loved it.

“You’ll break your father’s heart, you know,” said Ed.

“I know.”

“When are you going to tell him?”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I said.

“Then I guess you better start planning,” snapped the normally deferential Ed. “Don’t be a coward. It’s too hard to live with yourself. Your father deserves a good-bye. More than that, but at least that much.”

I stared at the floor. I could not imagine a world in which I would jauntily tell my father, So long, I’m off to seek my fortune. He’d tell me no, and I’d have to sneak out of town anyhow. “I’ll try,” I said.

“Mose,” he said. He gave his head a tiny, tragic shake. “You’re too young to have so hard a heart.”

The problem was, it wasn’t hard. The problem was, the minute my father looked at me, I was ready to kick off those oxfords, hem my pants instead of cuffing them, give up all those clothes no workingman would ever consider even trying on, and assume my position behind the counter at Sharp’s Gents’. If I did that, my heart would harden for real. People who manage to turn things down, jobs and marriage and children, love and steady meals, have hearts soft as velvet, hearts — like my new fine duds — never meant for work. These people cry at movies and weddings and funerals. They compose sentimental songs crooned across country, and letters to long-gone lovers. (But only lovers who will stay gone.) They paint. They write poetry. They star in movies. Believe me, I know. Their voices make fun of their own bad habits — a love of money or liquor or pretty girls in skimpy dresses — on living-room radios turned louder by strange teenage girls who laugh in all the wrong places.