Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”

I looked up Fifth Street.

“Well?” said Rock.

“Strangest thing,” I said. “Store’s not here.”

“It moved.”

“What? It was right here—” I pointed at a dubious-looking restaurant.

“It moved, ” Rocky said. “Do you even read Annie’s letters? Five years ago, your old man moved the store. Come on.” He grabbed the back of my coat and towed me up the street till we got to the slightly more genteel two-hundred block, my suitcase bouncing against my leg. Our trunks had been sent on to California. That’s what a small town it was, one block and you were in a better neighborhood. There was the store. Across the new window painted letters spelled, Sharp and Son’s, which broke my heart and made me happy.

The Depression hadn’t missed Valley Junction. Ten years after the crash the town looked rearranged and abandoned. The Rock Island line had moved its roundhouse. The trains still came through, but few of them stopped. No good to the town unless they stopped. The men who’d banked with my father were smart. Old Man Sharp paid no interest, but he charged no fees and he’d never fold.

The new store was clean, with linoleum floors and bright hanging light fixtures and signs on the walls that pointed out departments, if you could call them that: Shoes, Suits, Hats . They’d kept the sliding iron ladders, I was glad to see, and the big front counter, and the man who stood behind the counter, his hands held an inch above the glass top.

“Well, good grief,” Ed Dubuque said to me. “The fatted calf has come home.”

“I don’t think it’s the calf that comes home,” I said, but he was already throwing his long puppetish arms around my neck. Ed’s hair had thinned and his face had picked up a few lines, but then so had mine, so had mine. He looked wonderful. Did I have to go to the house? Couldn’t the three of us spend the afternoon in a pool hall, drinking beer and making bets?

“I hear you’re a star of stage and screen, Master Sharp,” he said.

“Stage, I guess,” I said, “and not a star. Other than that, you’ve got it right. Is my father here?”

He gave me a head-swinging appraisal, his forearms still resting on my shoulders. “No,” he said. “He doesn’t come in anymore. He’s not at home?”

“We’re on our way there. Never comes in?”

Ed grimaced and smiled at the same time. “He’s ninety. He’s not so good, Mose. Figured that’s why you were here.”

“It is why,” said Rocky from the back of the store, where he was leafing through a stack of folded shirts. He walked over to the counter to shake Ed’s hand. “Pleased to meet you — Ed? I’m Rocky Carter, Mose’s partner.”

“A pleasure,” said Ed.

Rocky clapped his hands together. “So. Let’s go. Let’s go to six twenty-five Eighth Street and see your father.”

“You know the place?” Ed asked.

“Oh,” said Rocky, “I imagine I’ll know it when I see it.”

Ed turned to me. “Master Sharp,” he said delicately. “Your suit.”

“You recognize it?”

Ed inclined his head in sorrow. “You can’t see your father like that.” He fingered the lapel, which was shredding at the edges. He was right: nothing would count if my father thought I looked shabby. Well, I had a suitcase full of fine clothes, I’d just go in the back and change — but Rocky, always helpful, had started undressing a mannequin who leaned in the doorway in the back.

“We can find something—” Ed began. He must have thought I was down on my luck, dressed as I was.

“No,” I said. “Rock’s right. I’ll wear what that guy’s wearing.” So we stripped the dummy of his herringbone jacket and I put it on, and Rocky and I set out.

At least the house was where we’d always kept it, at Eighth and Hillside at the top of the hill. Rock and I walked there in silence. Every now and then he gave me a pat on one shoulder. Four steps up the porch; red door; chipped black knob. Was I supposed to knock? I didn’t know. Rock reached around and did it for me. I looked down at my new clothes: that dummy must have been in the window, once, and for a long time; the jacket was sun-damaged.

I swore I would remain my grown-up self. Everything had changed since I’d left ten years before: people paid money to look at me. They applauded and usually laughed. Girls from every state in the nation had praised me for my kindness, my patience, my impatience. It’s only your father, I thought. It’s only any old tough audience.

“Knock ’em dead, kid,” Rocky said under his breath as the door began to open.

There was Annie, middle-aged, fat, and gray. “You’re not supposed to be here yet!” she cried, hugging me. She was soft; she smelled of boiled vegetables; she smelled like Iowa. “I didn’t think you’d really come, Mosey,” she said. “I thought you were gone forever. Come in, come in. Nobody’s here now but Papa and me, not till dinner. Come in. And your friend! Mr. Carter?”

“Annie Sharp,” Rocky said warmly. “I’d recognize you anywhere.” He pushed me through the doorway. “Do I smell cookies?” he asked.

“No,” said Annie, puzzled.

Then we were in the house at the foot of the stairs, the flowered blue wallpaper, the carved newel post that looked like a chess piece. Rocky was still pushing me. “Here,” said Annie, and she led me to the parlor. I felt Rocky’s hands leave my back.

Pop sat in a chair, his feet propped on a comically small ottoman I didn’t recognize. He’d grown his beard back, red despite his age. A made-up bed had been jammed in the corner by the front windows.

“Hello,” I said, and he raised his head.

Something had happened to his face. The left side had fallen like a velvet curtain caught on a prop. He looked like the thing he’d been outrunning his whole life: an old Jew, a remnant of the old country. A foreigner. In fact, he looked something like I did in my Hebe act. I’d changed suits because I didn’t want to look shabby in his presence, but his own clothes were ragged, and I understood that he realized he was dying, and there was no point in being fitted for a new suit. This was not frugality — my father owned a storeful of suits — but a kind of superstition. In his old age my father believed that the Evil Eye was everywhere, even in dressing rooms. Don’t tempt it with plans. The beard made him look sloppy, but his softened cheek wouldn’t have stood up to a razor.

I only wanted him to invite me into the room. I only wanted his forgiveness. His blessings — Oh, I wanted everything my father had planned to give me all those years before: I just didn’t want the building they were stored in. My father was a businessman and had offered me a deal: I turned it down, everything, and only now did it occur to me that we should have bargained longer, that I could have bought the stock — by which I mean my father’s love — and left behind the real estate.

“Look, Papa: it’s Mosey,” said Annie. I took a few more steps in. “He’s like this,” she said to me. “Stroke. Just two weeks ago. He’s fine, only a little slower. I would have written, but then we got your wire.” She knelt at his chair and held his hand: I’d never seen her so tender. “It’s fine, it’s fine. You know who this is.” If he wasn’t sure it was me, who was I? Some young man in a suit that looked familiar, ruined by the sun so it seemed, in the dark room, as though he was standing in a sunbeam anyhow. Was I looking for work? A handout? His blessing to marry one of his daughters? Pop raised his arms, though one barely left his lap. I went and took that heavier hand. It felt like a prop, too, a folded dusty lady’s fan, lace over cracked ivory.