Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“I’ve been around awhile,” I said. Where was that bar? I kept missing it.

“I know.” Rock grabbed my arm and set it on the bar for me. My stool turned and I wobbled and he caught my other elbow, and set that next to the first. Then he slung his arm around my shoulder. I could feel the heat of his cigar by my ear. “You’ve learned things, Professor,” he said. “You’re not the green kid you used to be. But you have two choices. Either you remember everything and I have to disabuse you of one fatheaded notion at a time, or starting now you develop amnesia and I don’t have to talk so much.”

I nodded. I had that sudden drunken belief in transformation. I was the Professor. A man of style. A vaudevillian .

“And another thing,” he said. “You need some new suits.”

I looked down to examine my jacket and gripped the lapel as tenderly as I could. Inside was the label that said Sharp and Son’s Gents’ Furnishings in black cursive. I’d worn that jacket hard, out of nostalgia and thrift: I spent my money on costumes, not street clothes.

“You are not a tramp comic,” said Rocky. He took his arm back. Ashes fell like snow past my nose. “Small guy like you, it’s even more important to dress the act. You gotta look sharp, Sharp.”

We’d only been together for five days, and I’d already observed Rock’s personal sartorial style, half vanity, half slovenliness. He had some silk ties, and some that seemed made from funeral-wreath ribbon. He owned one fine-fitting pale blue suit that made him look like a prosperous prizefighter, but he’d outgrown the rest of his clothes. Jackets pulled across his shoulders, shirts parted in a triangle above his belt. Right now he wore a windowpane tweed coat over a V-necked sweater and a pair of pale gabardine pants gone glossy at the knees. He looked like a pile of kicked-off blankets. And he was giving me advice?

Of course he was.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll talk timing.”

Across the room Jack Robertson pounded the table and said to Archie Grace, “Sam’s twice the man you’ll ever be!”

Grace looked at him, then closed his eyes for a long moment. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “I know .”

Rocky turned me back on my stool so we could watch the proceedings. “Girls,” he pointed out. Yes, he was right: girls. All the flowers from the flash act had arrived, along with the Indian Rubber Maid, who sat at a table by herself. Rocky sighed. “Pretty, pretty girls. How do you talk to them, Professor?”

It might have been the drink; it might have been Rock’s teacherly insults. I said, “Watch,” and jumped off my perch. My knees bounced; I was lucky I didn’t keep going till I was sprawled out snoozing on the floor. Go for the girl who’s by herself. It’s all a matter of asking the right question. This is just an act; you’re just playing a part.

I arrived at the Indian Rubber Maid’s table grinning. She looked at me, then looked away. I sat down in the chair across from her, and put my hands in my lap, playing shy. That is, I was a shy person pretending to be a bold person pretending to be shy. Finally she said, “Hello.”

I said, “I think you’re wonderful.”

She smiled and revealed dimples and a set of tiny china-doll teeth. “No, you don’t.”

Thank God she hadn’t recognized the line: it was what Sammy had said, leaning off Grace’s knee, to a woman in the front row. “Now, Sammy,” Grace had said, and Sammy interrupted: “But I do. I think she’s wonderful.” I’m not saying that every woman would fall for a strange man who’d picked up romantic tips from a ventriloquist’s dummy, but there are worse ways to go about it: Believe yourself lovable, confident. Know that it’s a miracle you can even talk to a girl.

“But I do,” I said to the Indian Rubber Maid. “I think you’re wonderful.”

I could feel Rocky watch us from across the room. For his benefit — and mine, naturally — I took her plump hand in mine. She was a pretty dark-haired girl, though how she’d gotten into the contortionist racket was anyone’s guess: onstage her breasts kept getting in the way; she almost had to tuck them in her armpits for the most rigorous stunts. We’d rented separate rooms, Rocky and I, at his insistence: as hail-fellow-well-met as he ever got, he needed time to himself, and besides, we could afford it. I leaned forward and suggested that she come back with me, and she nodded, still playing coy.

Then the cellar door banged open. “Hello?” Dr. Elkhorn called, his fist full of leash handles. The dogs jumped down the stairs sideways, like mountain goats.

“Buy those animals a drink on me!” said Jack Robertson, who sat on a chair across from Archie Grace’s Violet, his leg thrust under her skirt. She wore on her face a sleepy-eyed expression that might have been the start of pleasure, irritation, hunger, amusement, deep thought, any number of things that look identical at the start, though unlike at the end. Grace himself was crawling across the floor toward the bathroom, muttering, “Don’t get up, please don’t get up.”

“In America, the dogs are teetotalers,” Rocky called from the bar.

You could see the long muscles in Robertson’s lone leg flex. “Till now they are.” Violet let one gloved hand fall to his calf.

“Do dogs drink milk?” Rocky asked Dr. Elkhorn.

“Cats drink milk,” offered Robertson.

“Dogs’ll drink anything, ” Archie Grace said miserably into the floor. He’d stalled out near the back of the room.

“Milk?” said Christine, as though this were some newfangled invention.

“Scramble ’em some eggs,” said Rocky. “Dogs like eggs?” he asked Dr. Elkhorn. “I’m only guessing scrambled. Poached, maybe.”

Christine slammed her hand on the bar. “I am not poaching eggs for seventy-five dogs.”

“You’re exaggerating for no reason again. There are not seventy-five dogs. There are. .”

And then Dr. Elkhorn let go of the leads, and it sure felt like there were seventy-five dogs. They ran under chairs, they came snuffling up to ankles. One approached Rocky and began barking, for no reason I could figure, unless he thought he’d treed some weird animal in some weird chrome-trimmed elm. Another grabbed hold of my sock, didn’t pull, just bit down. One dog jumped onto a table and ran around the perimeter circus-ring style. The biggest tried to molest Archie Grace in an offhand way, as though making a pass at a crawling man was part of the theatrical canine’s code. Love, I mean to tell you, was in the air. I couldn’t imagine how such professionally well-behaved dogs could be so badly behaved off-duty, except to say that they were vaudevillians. In six months I would read in Variety that Dr. Elkhorn had poisoned those strange dogs and himself, that they’d all been found together in a hotel bed, the dogs tilting their muzzles up to their master’s chin. Well, they said Elkhorn was the murderer. Maybe it was one bright angry dog.

That night some of us knew and some of us didn’t, but vaudeville was sinking already. A few people made it out; a disaster always has survivors. I did, and Rocky, and Fred Allen and Burns & Allen and Cantor and Bert Lahr and Baby Rose Marie. More drowned. Where could Jack Robertson dance when vaudeville was over? Who’d hire an inept but buxom contortionist? And as for ventriloquists, there really was only room for one, and Edgar Bergen stepped in. There are memorials, as there should be, for soldiers killed in every war, for those who died in camps in the Holocaust, for those lost at sea. There should be one with the names of all those who disappeared when vaudeville finally died. Dr. Think-a-Drink Hoffman. The Cherry Sisters. Patine and Rose. Maybe the best of us survived, but I don’t think so.