Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

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?