Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

History remembers the velvet hearted. I hoped to remain one of them.

But the Cow Wasn’t Armed

Two days later I worked at Sharp’s Gents’ for the last time. Ed had taken the day off. He might have worried that he’d suddenly blurt out the details of my escape. At five, my father and I closed the store. Something had gone wrong with a shipment of gloves: the factory had thrown them in a box, all sizes, each glove separated from its partner. So for an hour after five, that’s what we did; we sat in the back of the store and married gloves. I had to open each glove to find the label, but my father could judge size by a glance. He sorted them as though he was shaking hands with dozens of strangers, as quickly as a politician at a campaign whistle-stop: good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

“Who teaches the business course at school?” he asked. “You’ll take it?”

“Miss Kemp,” I said. The school year started in a week. Of course he assumed I’d be there.

“A woman,” he said. “You could teach it better. Ah, well.”

The brown canvas of the gloves dried out my fingers. “Miss Kemp’s smart.”

“She is not a businessman,” said my father. “She is not like us. Well, you’ll get an A, and then after college, maybe you’ll teach the class.”

I tried to break the news. “I don’t know where I’ll be in four years,” I told Pop.

“Here,” said my father.

“I’ll go to Iowa City,” I lied. “And then maybe—”

“Listen.” My father looked at me. He never wore glasses a day in his life, though he lived to be ninety-four. His brown irises were gold flecked. “This is your store.”

“No, Pop, it’s your store.”

“It is not. This store belongs to you. Do you know how old I am? I am seventy-eight years old. There is nothing on the earth that belongs to me. I am done with it: this store, this town, this life. Anything now I use, I borrow. I borrow from you. Do you understand?”

“You’re fine, Pop,” I told him.

“Today, yes. Tomorrow, who knows? I have come a long way, Mose. I am nearly finished. You are just getting started. Don’t let this go to waste.”

“I don’t know how to run a business.”

He stopped matching gloves for a minute and touched me on the shoulder. “You think you don’t,” he said gently. “You’ll meet a girl. You’ll get married, you’ll have children. You have this store, then your son will have this store. You needn’t wander around.”

“But if I want to—”

“Don’t,” he said. He picked up another pair of gloves. “I did. It’s no life.”

He did not look like a man done with life: he’d outlived his much younger wife and seven of his children, but nobody would have guessed his age; he’d grown to be a cute old man, his creamy skin kept smooth by morning shaves at Carson’s barbershop, his mustache and hair trimmed several times a week. He could have shaved himself, of course, but how else would he get to know the men of Valley Junction? By leaving me Sharp’s Gents’ of Vee Jay, he imagined he was bequeathing not just a job for the rest of my days, not just the chance to support my sisters when he was dead, but something much better: the love he had cultivated in this tiny town bordered on one side by the state capitol, and the other by cow barns and cornfields. Not as good as a mother’s love, he knew, but more durable. The girls could take care of each other. A motherless boy needed something else.

If I was going to break his heart anyhow I’d rather not watch. That night, I added him to the list of people I’d miss for the rest of my life: my mother, Hattie, and now my father. I wrote him a long letter that explained, because wasn’t I my father’s favorite? Wouldn’t he understand? Like him I had to leave my hometown and travel; like him I needed to make my own way among strangers. I begged his pardon and his sympathy. Then I realized my father would read such an apology and tear it up, so I beat him to the punch and shredded it myself; instead I left a brief note, explaining how I loved everyone, how I’d promised Hattie we’d be vaudeville stars and I had to make good on as much of that vow as I could. Maybe I’d get booked into Des Moines and I’d take them out to dinner downtown. The next day I snuck out of the house for an early train, Ed’s cardboard suitcase full of clothes in my hand, a few family photos filched from the sideboard.

In Chicago I found Ed’s friend Paolo, who played piano in a Bucktown vaude house. He said, “I got enough advice to discourage a dozen guys like you,” and then told me I had to start even lower than I’d planned, at amateur nights, if I could get on at all. I got on, and then I snagged a job across town as a juvenile in a melodrama: my qualifications were that I looked capable of breaking my parents’ hearts. Terrible stuff and almost no money and five shows a day, but good enough till I got a real break. The melodrama went on to play some cowtowns in Minnesota, and soon enough a letter that had been following me for some time — from Paolo to the first, second, and third theaters I appeared in — finally found me in Lawrence, Kansas. It was from my father, though in Annie’s perfect penmanship. Ed must have told them where I’d gone.

November 27, 1927

For my dear son—

You say you do not want to be a shopkeeper. You have grander plans for yourself. People who have grand plans are starving to death. I am only a shopkeeper. But in my family nobody starves. I take care of Annie and Rose. And you. You have always had money, a shopkeeper’s money.

Remember your family. I don’t know what will happen to all these people I pay for when I die. They need you. If you do not come to take your place at Sharp’s you must not love them, or me.

If you do not come home to run Sharp’s, do not come home.

May God bless and strengthen you, my dear son, and that He may lead you back into virtue’s path is the earnest prayer of,

yr. loving father

That night I went on, stunned and stiff, perfect for my role. After the last show, at two in the morning, I took a walk to the outskirts of town. Then I kept walking, past the houses, into the field. The sky was full of starry fizzy lights, but the roads were black: I couldn’t really see where I was going, though I tried to both remember and forget the forgettable little town and its vaude house behind me. Maybe I was just trying to figure out how it would feel to lose a place, to completely remove my own carcass and look back to see how much I’d miss, how much I was missed myself. No matter how far I walked, I couldn’t get enough distance. I leaned against a fence and heard noises in the field behind me. A farmer, come to shoot a trespasser. I stuck my hands in the air, waited for a shotgun to hit me in the back. Instead, a cow lowed.

Was this a sign? If in real life you are acting out ludicrous bits of business, well, why not get paid for it?

I’d heard of guys trapped by girls, but not their own fathers. I suppose I’d known that I was giving up my family when I left, but I didn’t realize that they would give up me. I imagined they’d forgive me anything.

I tried to see myself years in the future, an orphan. The dresser top would be bare of photographs. If I ever married, I’d have to explain: my family was as good as dead, because I did not wish to spend my days helping strangers in and out of clothes. That night, when I made my way back to the boardinghouse, I looked at the pictures I’d nabbed, one of my parents, one of all us kids. My mother has that distracted old-photograph look: her eyes have lost their focus, though she’s gently smiling. But Pop! He is not looking at the photographer, he is not looking at the camera, he is looking into the camera, past the glass lens, past the sliding shutter, so ready that he can see the brief appearance of the film itself, staring back at him. Remember your family, Mose , he had written, and I thought, As if I could ever forget . I tucked him and then the rest of us in my suitcase, and told myself I would travel alone and be happy alone.