Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“You doubted me,” he said.

“We never doubted you,” said Rocky.

“You doubted me,” Tansy repeated. He was trying his best to look downtrodden, but he giggled. In fact, he couldn’t stop.

“What is it, little one?” Rocky asked.

Tansy was steering his steak around his plate with a fork. “Broadway,” he managed to squeak out. “A revue. In the spring.”

Rocky reached out with his own fork and stopped Tansy’s steak. They sat there a moment, fork to fork, and Rocky gave a whoop, and speared the steak and brought it to his own plate, where in celebration he began to carve it in thirds the way a dreaming general slices a map of enemy territory.

“Tansy!” I said, because it was all I could think of. “Tansy!” My first instinct was to run to the phone and call — well, who? Annie. Miriam. My father. Hattie, who would have been flat-out stunned. It was the first sudden success I’d ever had that didn’t involve a girl.

Rocky said to Tansy, one hand over his heart, “We never doubted you.” He put a piece of meat on my plate and a piece on Tansy’s and began eating what was left, as though through this ritual he and I, like the little man with the pointed teeth, would be able to see into the future.

How We Became The Boys

The Money Show, like our Grossinger’s appearance, was a burlesque-style review — one of those shows that was like Hellzapoppin ’ but wasn’t Hellzapoppin ’. Some dancing, some singing, a couple of knockabout comedians. We had two bits, a comic skit and a song-and-dance number in which I played a cop trying to arrest a comely young lady who was, of course, Rocky in drag, trying to escape a couple of mobsters. Rocky didn’t like the song we were given, so he rewrote the lyric. It was called, “Stop! You’re Under Arrest.” I still sing it around the house:

ROCKY: But aren’t you married?

MIKE: Aw, she’s an old battle-ax.

I’ll keep you in diamonds

I’ll keep you in Cadillacs

I’ll keep you in caviar

Up to your elbas.

ROCKY: What, no dessert?

MIKE: A dozen peach melbas!

ROCKY: Officer, darling,

You’re sweet, I’ll confess,

But I’m spoken for—

MIKE: —Stop!

You’re under arrest!

Plenty was different, now that we were in a show with actual backers, but the best of it were the costumes. My cop’s uniform was real, not a dark suit dressed up with silver buttons. Rocky’s dress was heavy cotton accented with black lace. Beneath it he wore a kind of padded union suit to make him curvy.

“Wouldn’t you marry me?” he asked, swooning at himself in the mirror. Though he’d already applied his giant red lipstick and his giant red wig, all he wore was his voluptuous undersuit.

“Well,” I said, “I’m thinking it over. No.”

He put down his powder puff. “Why not?” he asked, hurt.

“Because you’re too good for me, sweetheart.”

He blew me a kiss.

How long had it been since either of us had stayed anywhere for more than a month? What luxury, to really live somewhere. We got apartments in the same building on East Sixty-fourth Street — nothing grand, just one-room places in a turn-of-the-century building with a view of the river. I unpacked my suitcase, went to see movie matinees, ordered telephone service in my own name. By now Penny and Rocky were an absolute item. She came backstage after the show every night, trying to find Rock. It must have been an unpleasant surprise for Penny to make out, down the hall, the blurred figure of a dowager, only to discover upon her arrival that it was in fact her steady beau. “I don’t like you like this,” she said.

“Why not, darling?” Rocky put his arm around her and patted his sizable bosom. “You scared? Just rest your head here and tell me all about it.” He kissed her cheek. She scowled and tried to scrub the lipstick off with her knuckles.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I thought you liked female imps. You liked Eltinge, didn’t you?”

She tried to pull off his wig, but he wouldn’t let her. “Eltinge,” she hissed, “didn’t look like my mother .”

The Money Show tried out in Providence and opened in New York in the middle of September 1938. The show was a modest hit, but Carter and Sharp, all the reviews said, were a real find — Rocky Carter never played his scenes the same way twice, and Mike Sharp kept up with every turn he took. Brooks Atkinson said we were the only reason to go. Between that and spots on the Vallee show and a few late-night club gigs, we did pretty well for ourselves. Before 1938, if we’d broken up, nobody would have noticed. Now we were The Boys. That’s what people called us. Where are The Boys? The Boys are headlining at the Steel Pier next month. The Boys won’t work for less than two thousand a week.

We had more money that we’d ever had in our lives. Rocky spent every dime, on fresh flowers for his buttonhole, on good suits and good food and drinks for everyone in the house, no matter what the house was. Rocky loved gratitude. Gratitude from strangers was even better. The Money Show closed after two months, but we didn’t care. We’d been called to California, by a big studio, for a feature .

“We’ll stop in Valley Junction this time,” said Rocky. I was helping him pack up his apartment, which in two months he’d managed to fill with outgrown-clothes and half-eaten sandwiches. He was rewarding himself for his industry by taking sips from a silver flask that Penny had given him.

“No,” I said. “Are you saving these magazines?”

“Why,” he asked, “are you so pigheaded about this? You got a family who loves you. I want my sixty percent of that love. Course, I’m willing to take all of my cut of the love from Rose—”

“Stop that. I’m not pigheaded. I want. .” Even talking about going to Valley Junction terrified me. My fear, I know now, was a brand of homesickness so thorough you feel helpless, and so want to stay away from the thing that infected you in the first place.

I’ve lived a long time, and so people ask if longevity runs in the family. Now I can say yes: my sister Annie lived to be more than a hundred, my sister Sadie ninety-two. Various nieces and nephews who are about my age still walk the earth, and by walk I mean actually walk . But if you’d asked in 1939, I would have said no, sadly. My mother had died young; so had Hattie. I did not know any forebears other than my parents and Rabbi Kipple, and I always thought of Rabbi Kipple as exactly the age he was in his portrait, in his forties. Everyone else was dead; everyone else had died before I was born; therefore, everyone else had died young.

When I’d left town more than ten years before, I’d reconciled myself to the fact I’d never see my father again. My sisters, I figured, would show up in my life eventually. They’d come to a show, or I’d walk into a train car and there one would be, or — this was most likely — I’d get a telegram informing me of my father’s death and if I got it in time and wasn’t on one of the coasts, I’d go to the funeral. But my father would die. Who survived old age?

Sometimes I thought: surely he’s dead by now, and nobody’s told me. Then I’d get a letter from Annie, bless her heart, filling me in on the news of the family. How could it be that a man who died in my head once a month could live so long? Understand: I wanted him to live forever. Thinking about his death was how I punished myself. Heartless boy (I would always be a boy in my father’s presence) to have left a father who loved you. Heartless brother, to leave your sisters weeping in the parlor. People in Valley Junction knew my mother, but they loved my father. I imagined the back steps piled high with offerings. Soon the steps would fill, and the neighbors would hang the branches with tureens of soup. They’d line up as many pound cakes as would fit on windowsills. There’s a loaf of bread in the mailbox. There are pies in the bushes, their meringues dusted with snow. Someone has slipped a stack of pancakes under the doormat. Candy like fallen leaves lies in heaps everywhere, everywhere.