Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

1:00 A.M.

“How many sisters you got? What? You lucky son of a bitch! Listen: I’m an only child. Six sisters, you ought to be able to spare one. Pick me out a pip, okay? We’ll send her a telegram in the morning.”

1:25 A.M.

“Miriam who? Veblen? Oh, yes, yes, yes: Mimi and Savant. That act’s bullshit, you know that. Really? Let me shake your hand. No, the other one, your empty hand. The guy I saw in the act was a nance. I’m sure you gave it a je ne sais quoi. Mimi, on the other hand: tout le monde sait her quoi . No kidding? Really? Well, I’m sure you gave that some class too.”

1:50 A.M.

“Didn’t they teach you to drink, wherever it is you’re from? Oh. Well, no, they wouldn’t teach you to drink there .”

1:55 A.M.

“Hey, kid, how old — your glass is empty, here — how old are you? A youngster! I’m twenty-five, fourteen years experience in show biz. My parents — are you kidding? Who do you think packed my bag?”

2:00 A.M.

“Let me shake your hand. No, I’m serious. I am .”

We drank in my boardinghouse room, and the landlady came in to shush us once an hour, like a cuckoo in a clock. First Rocky and then I flirted with her — that’s probably why she kept coming back, she liked the flattery. Also I threw my Dutch wig out the window, to signal that I would never need it again, and only afterward did I remember that it was borrowed, and this seemed like the funniest thing in the world, and though it was the middle of the night we discussed who it fell on: the landlady, a dog, a cop. Rocky spoke in his childish stage voice all night, I think. Maybe he wanted to convince me that our spot that night wasn’t a fluke.

No. I’m wrong. Back then there was a slight difference in his voice onstage and off, but he didn’t start to squeak full-time till some years later, when we guested on the Rudy Vallee radio show and listeners complained that they couldn’t tell us apart. Rocky knocked himself up an octave to solve that problem.

Still, that’s how I remember it: Rocky in falsetto describing a Dalmatian in a little Dutch-boy wig discovering he’s lost his appeal to all other dogs. I do know that we believed we would become famous, a thought that had never strictly occurred to me before. I believed because Rocky was positive, and though many a lost lamb has thus been led to slaughter — maybe he’d said the same thing the night before to Freddy Fabian, maybe he said it to anybody — the most curious thing of all was he turned out to be right.

“So,” he said. “How’d you get into show business?”

“Oh,” I answered. “One of my sisters pushed me.”

I grew up in Valley Junction, Iowa, a little whistle-stop town just west of Des Moines, the only boy among six sisters. Annie, Ida, Sadie, Fannie, Hattie, Rose. (There was another list, too, of the brothers and sisters who hadn’t lived: Samuel, Libby, Sarah, Abie, Louis, Hilla. This was a list we never said aloud.) I came sixth, two years after Hattie, almost to the day. This one we’ll coddle , said my father, who loved his daughters but longed for an heir.

Hattie, aged two, had other plans. She looked into my crib and decided that Mama and Papa had finally brought home what she really wanted for her birthday: someone to boss around. “Mine!” she told our sisters. She slapped their hands away from me. “Okay,” the older girls said, laughing, “see if you can stop his crying.” My oldest sister fished me out and sat Hattie down and plopped me on her plush little lap. What do you know? I shut right up.

I swear I remember staring up at her on my first day on earth. I was — there’s photographic evidence — a good-looking baby, with a full head of black hair that Hattie stroked with the back of her wrist. Did she even know my name? She cooed, “Mine, mine, mine.”

I cooed back, thinking the same thing.

From my crib, from the flowered carpet in the living room, from the back steps where I staged plays with root vegetables stolen from the bins in the pantry: what I remember is Hattie’s face looking back at me, Hattie’s voice singing lullabies, Hattie scolding me for dreaming when we could be climbing trees or fording puddles. Our mother was always pregnant, shut away in her bedroom. Mama’s breath was hot and inky; her hair was black; her voice was sandy and kind; we were told to leave her alone until she felt better. She never did. She finally died after our sister Rose was born. I was four, and Hattie six.

The morning of Mama’s funeral, confused by the gloom indoors, I stepped outside and directly into a casserole dish. The neighbors had brought us food, which they left on the back stairs of our house. Cold navy beans slid into the sagging cuff of my sock, and this was an unhappiness I understood: I felt myself about to cry, a ticklish feeling around my nose. I stood ankle-deep in the casserole, and then, suddenly, Hattie stepped down beside me, into a loaf of bread. Then she stepped into a lemon cake. Then — the bread stuck on her foot like a boot — she stomped into all the other dishes, a roast chicken, a crock of butter, some thoughtfully sliced pot roast. She did this soberly, as though she were rending a garment, or covering a mirror.

I stamped my foot into an apple crumble, breaking the glass pie plate beneath. Mrs. Combs, our next-door neighbor, might have wondered about the noise that came from our backyard, but what could she do? Besides, she’d heard Jews broke glasses at weddings. Why not pie plates at funerals? We trampled all the food. In houses around us, north, south, across the back lot, neighbors pulled back curtains and wondered whether this is what Jews did, when their mothers died.

The older girls watched us from the kitchen windows. Such waste, they thought. Such ingratitude. Fannie and Ida and Sadie wanted to stop us, but Annie, the oldest, rocked the baby and kept them from the door.

“Let them alone,” she said. “There’s time enough for crying.”

The other girls agreed. Soon enough we’d miss our mother. Soon enough we’d weep. They’d be ready for us then. They had examined their own grief and decided they couldn’t use it, not when the littler kids suffered, so they folded it up, and ironed and scented it, and tried to make it look like something else entirely, offered it to us as though it was plain, brand-new, original concern. Hattie, savvy, recognized sympathy for what it is, hand-me-down love.

Get that away from us, she thought.

Oh, the older girls wanted to mother us. They tried to wrestle us onto their laps; they tried to order us around, but it was too late: I belonged to Hattie, and she belonged to me.

Some days I forgot my mother was dead and went looking for her. Was she in her bedroom? The pantry? No. I’d hide on the back staircase then, exhausted. Hattie would find me. “There you are,” she’d say as though I was the one who’d been misplaced, and she’d thrust her arms under mine and bear-hug me to my feet and pull me, my toes bumping each step, through the kitchen and out the door. She must have missed Mama too, I realize now. But she kept me busy so we could both forget. Like Annie, she knew there was all the time in the world for crying, and so it was best never to start.

She tried to teach me things: I made a fine audience but a miserable student. I applauded lessons. When I refused to learn to tree-climb, Hattie tossed me into the arms of the elm in front of our house. I bounced once, then sat down to see what she’d do next. I was a composer of songs as a child, though often I merely sang opera—

Potato! Potato, Potato!