Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Not always,” I said.

“Not always,” he agreed. “Not Chaplin. But Chaplin might be funnier if he got heavy. There’s no telling.”

“No,” I said, fascinated.

“Don’t you gain weight, though,” he said. “You look fine. Wouldn’t be funny, you being fat. But you’re going to need a wig.”

“What?” I’d been so happy, flinging that wig to the sidewalk below.

“A piece,” he said. “You’re losing your hair. I mean, you don’t need to do anything about it today . Just keep an eye out.”

My fingers were in my hair, trying to find what he was talking about.

“Right here,” he said, and he reached across the table and touched my forehead where, if I’d had horns, they would have sprouted. “Look, you’re not bald, but one day?”

“I have a widow’s peak,” I said. “It just depends how I comb it.”

“You can fool the mirror,” he said, “but you can’t fool the balcony. Okay, Sharp, if everything goes right, I’ll buy you a mirror and you can see what I’m talking about. Get your fingers out of your hair.”

“Sorry.” I set my hands down on the table so he could watch them.

“You’re still worried,” he said. “About what Freddy told you. Don’t be. Please don’t be. I don’t remember how long you’ve been on the circuit, but take it from me, six partners in two years is nothing. That’s what you do. You switch around till you find someone who matches up. That’s us. On my honor. Thirty years from now there’ll be books about me and you. Movies. National holidays. I promise. Believe me, I never promised Freddy a national holiday, or any of those other guys. This meal’s on me, by the way, so order something. Come on, eat something, don’t be so delicate. Do you cook? I learned in the navy, myself. I’d offer to make you dinner sometime, but I can’t cook for less than two hundred.”

He paused here, and ate some toast thoughtfully.

“If it’s a matter of the math,” I said, “I can help you with it.”

“No, Clever Hans,” he said, “it’s not a matter of the math.”

If all of this sounds like romance, it was, in its way. I’m not talking about any kind of funny business. But an act is a marriage — years later, when I met my future wife, I thought Yes, I remember this . You meet someone, and you take all sorts of things on faith, but it doesn’t feel like faith. You have to be a little faithless to talk of faith; if you believe, it’s all facts. We will be together forever; the two of us will be a smash. If you had any inkling of the odds against you — and I’m talking both of show business and Wedded Bliss — you’d break up the next day and save yourself a lot of trouble.

I loved the guy. It’s hard to describe it, exactly; it’s even hard for me to remember, what with everything that came later. I’d idolized Hattie, but I’d known her all my life. Rocky was bluff and sometimes mean and funny and smart and a stranger, so I couldn’t take any of it for granted. All day long, he surprised me.

He took a shine to me, too. Who is so adorable as a devoted fan with a nice personality?

Dogs Like Eggs

But I wasn’t transformed, not yet. I was still myself, a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who’d stumbled from one act to another. My transformation came the next week, when we’d moved on to the Milwaukee Palace to play on a motley bill: Archie Grace and Sammy, a ventriloquist act; Dr. Elkhorn and his canines, all of them, man and dogs, fancy and stump-legged and mournful — I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the doctor baying at the moon with his pack; and the headliner, Jack Robertson, the human cobra, a monopede dancer from Aberdeen who’d somewhere misplaced his right leg and left arm. Back in my Mimi-and-Savant days, I’d played the Kalamazoo Magestic with the admirable Robertson: he shimmied up a rope and twined himself around it so fast it was hard to tell what was man and what was rope. “I used to have a tank act,” he told the audience, “a big tank filled with water, but I kept going in circles.” He’d gotten even more muscular since Kalamazoo, and had added a bit that involved bending backward, grasping his ankle, and rolling around the stage like a thrown hubcap.

There was a bad flash act, a big musical number featuring one juvenile singer who seemed composed of slightly chewed candy (licorice hair, jelly-bean lips, round gumdroppish feet that stuck to the stage) and five unpretty girls dressed up as flowers. Sisters, I realized when I looked at them, and he was probably the sole brother, creepily singing to each one, “My violet, my daisy, my Irish rose/My buttercup, I’ll eat you up. . ” The opener was a zaftig contortionist who called herself the Indian Rubber Maid, by which she must have meant that she looked like she’d bounce.

The stage was so uneven we had to watch where we put our feet. Well, I only had to stand still. Rocky kept tripping, on purpose, and when he jumped into my arms at the end of the act it was a flying leap. How I caught him I’ll never know, but I did, and the audience roared: they thought we’d made the whole thing up just for them. “Where did you come from?” I asked my armful, and he answered, “Daddy says from heaven, but Mama says the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

After the second show, around 10:00 P.M., Rocky said, “A drink? I know a place.” Jack Robertson was still onstage; he’d left his crutch, as usual, in the wings. His simplest running hop was worthy of applause.

We caught a cab, I figured to a downtown speakeasy, but instead we drove till the buildings petered out and we got to a large white house on a good-sized lot. “Here we go,” said Rocky. He caught me by the arm when I headed for the front porch. “This way, darling boy.”

Around back was a slanted cellar door, which might have seemed furtive if it hadn’t been painted bright red. He knocked with the heel of his shoe. After a moment, one side of the door flew open, and a round head poked out, which belonged to a lady with white curls that looked like they’d been combed with a pillow.

“My favorite!” she said. She reached up and grabbed Rock’s ankle, then kissed the toecap of his shoe. “Come in!”

We followed her down the stairs into a room that looked ready for a family dinner party, the chairs and tables borrowed from a variety of neighbors: oak and wicker and wrought iron. A bar ran along one wall, fronted by red-leather-topped stools.

“My favorite!” said the lady of the house again. She was a plump middle-aged woman dressed in a man’s suit, black, a crumpled shirt of impressive whiteness open at the neck. Rocky picked her up, kissed her pink nose, and then set her down to see what she’d do. She socked him tenderly in the stomach. “Ouch,” said Rocky. “I told some other guys on the bill to come over.”

“A party!” she said, as though we were throwing one in her honor. “Hooray!” Ladies’ clothes might have made her look stout and mannish; the suit gave her a kind of end-of-the-night glamour. She grabbed me by the shoulders.

“You!” she said.

Me?

She leaned in, and kissed me on the lips. I felt like I’d been hit in the face with a whiskey pie. Then she let me go so she could sock me in the stomach. “Who are you?” she asked.

“This is the Professor,” Rocky told her, which was news to me.

“Ah! He knows things.”

“He knows a few things.”

“But will he tell us?”

“You might persuade him, Christine.”

She touched my cheek fondly. Her fingers felt like rose-filled cannolis. “I’m very persuasive, Professor. Aren’t I persuasive, Mr. Carter? I’m very persuasive,” she said to me.

I could see it might be some time before I’d be speaking.