Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Well, if that’s how you feel, I won’t. Otherwise I’d go. Coverage in all the papers whether you make it or not. Rubber. Big rubber enclosed ball. It’ll bounce, it’ll float, it’ll be watertight. Made of old girdles, maybe: nothing can get through a girdle. And can you imagine the view?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine it right here where I’m standing, thanks.”

For his sake I tried to see it: the tiny enclosed ship, a single window for its single passenger. Furtively, you bring it to the top floor of the Falls. You look around for the authorities, set it in the water, and anchor it to shore. You get in. Any minute you’ll be facing your death, but right now, even though the current is knocking you around, you can think: any leaks? No. Breathe in. Pull the anchor from the shore. Shoot forward.

Stare out the window to the spot where the bottom drops out of the river. What’s that: fear? Exhilaration? Belief that God has time to save idiots like you, when everywhere people die through no fault of their own? No, He’d wash His hands of you, here was the sink He’d do it in.

What you think, just before you plummet: You know, I’m sure the view is actually much better from dry land.

Back to New York to play the boroughs. In my spare time, I picked up girls. If I ran into a girl I’d slept with, it was like I had to bed her again, to make sure she still thought I was a nice guy. The ones who’d changed their minds made me crazy, though almost none of them did. Two or three, maybe, and they’d married, and even then that didn’t seem like a good excuse. I tried flowers, songs, whatever might work. One recently wed former paramour said, “Why me? There are plenty of girls,” and I scratched my head and said, “You know? You’re right,” and let go of her hand and fairly skipped off.

That worked.

I’d always been taught that love went something like this: There is a girl out there for you, and you find her, and then you work endlessly to keep love around. “Your parents loved each other, Mose,” my father told me more than once, “better love because harder work.” And so I came to understand: love is an animal that can — with a great deal of patience — be taught to sleep in the house. That doesn’t mean it won’t kill you if you’re not careful.

Really, do you want it in your house?

Maybe I liked some of those girls better than others. A girl named Gwen, maybe, and an Italian girl named Carlotta. Maybe sometimes I was glad to get away, and other times not, but mostly I remember being full of love while lying down with every girl, and then less so when I stood up to leave, as though my brain was a bowl tilted to collect a stingy serving of something that, when I was upright, drained to my feet, where it did no good.

But before then I felt swell, I felt fine, I felt perfectly cheerful. The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don’t care what anyone says. The guys in vaudeville, they took all sorts of cures, you only had to watch what they ran to first thing in the morning to ease the last bits of their night terrors: a bottle, a needle, a bookie, a Western Union office, a stage, a wife, a child, a giant meal, a strange pretty girl. Would we be ashamed later? Sure. These days, when shamefulness and shamelessness are both sins, I don’t know how people operate. Back then, only shamelessness was: we were ashamed, and so we buried ourselves in the thing that shamed us, because it was the only thing that might make us feel better. And then we repented. And then, flush with repentance, we sinned again.

Tansy’s Discovery

Carter and Sharp were weary. Vaudeville wheezed all around us, milking its deathbed scene worse than, well, a vaudevillian. By 1937 we played as many nightclubs as vaude houses. Summers we worked in the Catskills or out near the Minnesota lakes. It got so Rocky wouldn’t go to a movie or listen to the radio. He couldn’t stand all those guys with less talent than us who nevertheless got big breaks.

And then we met Buddy Tansy.

We were in New York again, playing a run-down theater in the Bronx that had quit booking vaude acts in the early thirties in favor of movies, and was now adding a few performers to warm up the audience before the pictures. I think we opened for The Good Earth . The dressing rooms were in the basement and smelled like one hundred years of trained-dog acts. When we walked into ours after the show, there was a tiny man sitting on the old daybed, reading a newspaper. He squinted at us when we came in.

“I’m Buddy Tansy,” he said, trying to wrestle the paper to the ground. It seemed to be getting the better of him.

“Good for you!” said Rocky.

“I want to represent you.”

“We have representation,” I said, reaching past him for my case. After the act Rock was cheerful and filled with the milk of human kindness. I was filled with a burning need to hit the cold cream. The towel by the sink had, like the shroud of Turin, the impression of someone’s face.

“I’m better,” said the little man unconvincingly.

“So talk to us, Buddy Tansy,” said Rocky. “Tell us how you will change our life.”

“Really? You won’t be sorry. You sure?” He wrung his hands, as if this invitation was too much to bear.

Rocky and I weren’t tall men, but Tansy was minuscule. He had the exasperated dignity of a man who’d spent his life being shut up in dumbwaiters and theatrical trunks as a gag. I’d never had such leanings in my life, but even I wanted to find out what unlikely place I could cram Tansy into. His given name was Edward, and he tried to get people to call him Buddy, but everyone called him Tansy, an elf of a name for an elf of a man. He hated it. Good old Tansy. He had a small head with small features, and pointed teeth that showed when he smiled, which made him look nervous and cornered. All in all, he resembled some avid little animal, one who’d spend all its time nibbling on things it shouldn’t — the lettuce in your garden, the wiring under your house.

“I want to get you boys famous,” he said to us in that Bronx dressing room. “I want to do great things for you.”

“Yeah?” Rocky said. “How.”

Tansy bared his teeth; we didn’t know that was his smile. He hopped off the daybed and sat on the counter in front of the mirror. “I know some people. I could get you in a Broadway show.”

“Really,” I said.

“I don’t know about Broadway,” Rocky said. “Right now, we can work all year round if we want. That’s secure. A Broadway show closes, and we’re out of a job.”

“Nothing’s secure,” said Tansy. “But I could get you a thousand a week.”

“We get that,” said Rocky.

“A piece ,” said Tansy. “You’d each get a thousand.”

No, I thought, I’d get eight hundred and Rocky would get twelve. Still, it was quite a bit more than we had been making — which, by the way, was not a thousand dollars. Well, as far as I knew, it wasn’t.

“Minus ten percent,” said Rocky.

Tansy showed us his alarming teeth again. “I have to eat.” He looked at me. “But I’ll earn you more than the extra ten. I’m good.”

“Yes,” I said.

Rocky turned and looked at me — what was I doing, making a decision? Rocky handled those, and career ambition, and nearly everything. For the first time I saw something he’d left out, something he’d failed to aspire to.

“Broadway,” I said helplessly. I hadn’t realized it until this very second, but I’d always wanted to play Broadway. I’d only dreamt of vaudeville because it seemed possible. There hadn’t been Broadway in Iowa.

Rocky whistled. “Broadway, huh? Okay, little one.” He patted Tansy’s shoulder. “Whatever jobs you find us, ten percent.”