Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Now, Dr. Elkhorn clapped his hands, and the dogs suddenly sat. They didn’t even pant. “Seven,” said their master in a soft voice. “Scrambled will be fine.”

By then I’d stood up, hand-in-hand with the Indian Rubber Maid, whose actual name I can’t remember. I found her coat and helped her on with it. Across the room, Rocky raised his glass to me. Helen Keller was never so suave, I wanted to tell him, but instead, still playing the dummy-about-town, I winked and walked out into the night with a sweet tipsy girl, and that, no matter what I might later tell reporters and fans and my own curious children, is the moment I knew I would be a success in show business.

The Education of a Straight Man

A fan of Carter and Sharp — and we have them still, a fan club even — would recognize the boys in our earliest performances, but just barely. Rocky wore a suit, not his trademark striped shirt, and his voice was deeper, and though you could call him fat — plenty of people besides Freddy Fabian did — he was a mere shadow of his future self. (We had terrible fights when I could no longer lift him: was he too heavy, or was I too old? Probably we met in the middle.) My offstage moniker, Professor, was still strictly offstage. What’s more, my character was a mean fop, a confidence man who saw in the poor guy an easy mark. Later I became a stern but addlepated academic.

We did our act in-one, meaning in front of the drawn curtain. Behind us, scenery shifted and scraped. Rocky threw himself around that stage, first like a feather pillow, then like a sack of potatoes, then like a ballerina who hasn’t noticed she’s gone to seed. Me, I stood still and smoked a cigarette and leaned against an imaginary lamppost, upright and nonchalant. When we were bored, we did dialect. Sometimes we sang, me seriously, Rock in mock opera. We did everything two young men could possibly do to make the audience remember us, but our material didn’t make us funny, Rocky did.

Also, I hit him a lot.

It was called a knockabout act, and the slap was our tag, the way the audience knew when to laugh. George Burns took a puff on his cigar, Will Rogers twirled his lariat, I hit Rocky: over the head, across the face. Sometimes I delivered a kick to the seat of his pants. I hated it. Rocky insisted it was hysterical. What really amused him, though, was running into someone on the street who’d seen our show and wanted to hit me, for treating that fat little fella so rough.

I learned all of his gestures: the tilted head with the hand to the ear, listening; the tilted head with the clasped hands near his knees, wrist touching wrist, deep love; hands clasped behind the tilted head, one leg cocked out, an impression of the girl who inspired this passion. The man could not hold still. There he goes sliding across the apron of the stage on one knee — two knees if it’s a tough crowd. There he is falling in a dead faint, because I’ve scared him. He hugs the proscenium arch. He hugs his straight man — briefly, because the straight man is scowling at such mush: there’s serious work to be done. When all else fails, he hugs himself, so tightly it seems like his elbows have swapped sides, so needfully one leg comes around and embraces the other. He turns to look at me — he’s terrified —and with the upstage eye, the one the audience can’t see, he winks. Then he scuttles away in his own arms, limping with crossed legs. The poor little man, don’t you love him, love him, love him?

A straight man is the fellow who spins the yo-yo. The yo-yo’s the fun part, you keep your eye on the yo-yo, but you lose interest the minute it doesn’t come back.

PROFESSOR: So here’s your salad fork, your meat fork, your fish fork, your oyster fork, your salad knife, your meat knife, your fish knife, your soup spoon, your fruit spoon. What’s the matter?

ROCKY: All this hardware, and nothing to stir my coffee with.

PROFESSOR: Pay attention. (SMACKS HIM) Coffee comes later.

ROCKY: Good. Can I have some cream?

PROFESSOR: Sure, sure.

ROCKY: And some sugar.

PROFESSOR: Okay, but pay attention.

ROCKY: I like sugar in my coffee.

PROFESSOR: Sure, who doesn’t?

ROCKY: And a doughnut.

PROFESSOR: A doughnut?

ROCKY: A cup of coffee’s sad without a doughnut.

PROFESSOR: (SMACKS ROCKY) Are you going to pay attention?

ROCKY: And maybe another doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Another doughnut?

ROCKY: To keep the first doughnut company.

PROFESSOR: You’re being ridiculous.

ROCKY: Poor lonely doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Rocky!

ROCKY: I feel sad for that doughnut.

PROFESSOR: Look. You come into the dining room. Here’s the beautiful table. What do you say to your hostess?

ROCKY: What, no doughnuts?

PROFESSOR: Now why would you say a terrible thing like that?

ROCKY: I don’t mean to be rude.

PROFESSOR: You’ll hurt her feelings, you say something like that.

ROCKY (NEAR TEARS): I’m sorry.

PROFESSOR: Okay.

ROCKY: This is the saddest story I ever heard.

PROFESSOR: What are you talking about?

ROCKY: That poor woman, and no doughnuts!

PROFESSOR: Now, look. It’s time to sit down.

(ROCKY SITS. PROF SMACKS HIM.)

PROFESSOR: Not yet! There are ladies.

ROCKY: There are ladies?

PROFESSOR: Yes, there are ladies.

ROCKY: Maybe they’re out back eating the doughnuts.

PROFESSOR: No, no. I mean imagine there are ladies.

(ROCKY WOLF-WHISTLES)

PROFESSOR: What’s that for?

ROCKY: I got a good imagination.

Success seemed always around the corner. We got reviewed in Variety . We became headliners, our salaries grew, people in the business knew our names. Any minute now, we’d hit it big. We barely felt the Depression, if only because we had struggled all our working lives for jobs and lodging. What are you complaining about? I heard my father say. You have a job when many do not. I knew that. And still we wanted more. We worked and worked — winters in vaude houses, summers at beach and lake resorts. If there were a movie version of our life — there hasn’t been, just a lousy TV special starring guys who looked like us if you squinted — our ten years in vaudeville would be described by all the usual clichés: the pages falling off a calendar, footage of a locomotive racing diagonally at a camera, us onstage doing the act, a spinning newspaper announcing the stock market crash or FDR’s election, calendar (year change), train (other direction), stage (same old team, new costumes). I kept waiting to show up at the theater to see Rock shaking hands with some keen-eyed straight man in a good suit. He had a history of leaving, I had a history of being left. But he didn’t: he stuck it out.

Our agent forwarded letters from Annie, who wrote me weekly letters full of news. Rocky read them aloud admiringly. “What a family you have!” he said. “Let’s visit them.”

“Visit your own family,” I told him.

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“I’m in love with yours ,” he said, sticking the latest missive in his pocket. We were a team: my letters were his letters. “Rose especially. She’s my dream girl—”

“You leave her alone,” I said.

We played all kinds of theaters. Some small-time vaudeville took place in mildewed tents. The audience sat on wood benches, and you could hear them shift their weight. In the right kind of quiet you could almost detect seats of pants prying up splinters. Applause sounds different in a tent: not so good. It doesn’t have that rising, heated sound.

In real vaude houses, the velvet seats were the color of the insides of bonbons, cherry red or yellow cream. Some houses were painted like Versailles, some in the newest Deco designs, celluloid green trimmed in black. Chandeliers big as bedrooms — bigger! — hung in the lobby. I liked touring the houses themselves, sitting in the seats, pretending to be part of the audience. The balcony was my favorite, of course: I’d never seen vaudeville from the orchestra. Up in the cheap seats, I could hold still, and imagine the dark, and then the girl on the horse taking the stage, and finally, Hattie fidgeting beside me — she hates that horse, and that fake girl covered with shoe polish to make her look Navajo — and so I worked to take up only my rightful half of the armrest, and when I turned and she was gone, I could pretend she’d just stalked out and was waiting for me, fed up, in the lobby. “I got somebody you have to meet,” I wanted to tell her, because Rocky made me miss Hattie more than I had in ages, more than Miriam ever did.