Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“She was beautiful,” said Rocky, as though he remembered her.

Pop nodded. He seemed exhausted. “So, my friend, Mr. Carter, this is why I tell you: it is good to marry. I didn’t know myself. I thought I was only being kind.”

Oh, we were grateful to Rocky. We were angry, too. We — I am willing to speak for my sisters, now, for any child of a close-mouthed father — could not believe this was happening. A guy just waltzes in, and the next thing we know my father is telling stories like it’s nothing. He held a baby in his arms, and fifteen years later he married her. That story was my inheritance, not Rocky’s!

I am an old man myself now, and I understand. Your own children and their questions! They interrupt you. Their eyes bulge when a relative in a story behaves in a way they can’t imagine (and they can’t imagine much). They interrupt again, though every question they ask, every single one, is the same: How exactly has this story shaped my life? Why haven’t you told me this before, didn’t you know what it would mean to me?

Maybe it’s just a good story. Maybe you just want to tell it.

My sisters left not long after dinner; with the table set up in two rooms, it was hard to linger. Rock and I formed a two-man receiving line at the door. After Ida had kissed Rocky’s cheek, she turned to me. Then she burst into tears. “You’re bald!” she said. “And I’m fat!” She threw herself into my arms.

“I’m not bald, ” I said, the bratty little brother. She pinched my back to make me behave. “Sorry, sorry,” she said into my shoulder, then she stepped back and dried her face with a lavender handkerchief. “It’s just: next time, don’t be gone so long. Don’t let me only hear you on the radio. I never thought I’d be jealous of Rudy Vallee, but I thought, Why does he get to talk to my brother and I don’t?”

I took her hand and handkerchief, both wet. At least somebody in the family had an idea that comedy wasn’t some hobby I’d picked up. She wasn’t fat, Ida, just plump around the middle, and her eyes were still purplish-blue.

“He promises!” Rocky said.

“And he’s a man of his word,” said Ben, shepherding his wife out.

The house felt forsaken once they’d all gone. Annie invited Rocky to stay overnight. No point going all the way to the Fort Des Moines.

“Take my room,” I said. “I’ll stay down here, and sleep near Pop.”

My father’s bed had been moved to the parlor so he didn’t have to climb stairs. I didn’t want to climb them myself, to wake up in the sleigh bed, waiting for Hattie to come through the window. Instead, I’d sleep on the sunporch on the old wicker settee, piled under quilts to keep warm.

It was late enough. Rock and my father both went to bed in opposite corners of the house, and I went to talk to Annie while she cleaned. There wasn’t much to do, she’d had so much help in the kitchen.

“See?” she said. She sat me down at the table and poured me a cup of coffee. I could see the elm out back, and suddenly I wanted to climb it. “You’ve come home once. Now you can do it over and over.”

“Sure,” I said.

“A nice man, your friend Rocky. Tell him I’m not waiting for a proposal.”

“I will. So tell me — where is Rose?”

“Gone,” said Annie, and turned her attention to the sink.

“Yes, I know, but where has she gone?”

She shrugged and began to wash the bottom of a round pot in careful circular strokes, as though trying not to wake it. “Married. So she told us. To a man named Quigley.”

“Quigley,” I said. I tried to absorb this: Rose had married a man with a funny name, and so—

“Catholic,” Annie said quietly to the pot.

“Oh.” I nodded. “Disowned.”

Annie shrugged again, miserable.

“Did he disown me, when I left?”

She spun suddenly, and held the soapy pot to her chest, as though she’d forgotten what it was — a bouquet of flowers, the hand of someone to whom she professed love. “No, of course not. We couldn’t forget you. You were always our boy.”

Exactly what I was afraid of and hoped for. “Well, at least Rose left for love.”

“Love!” Annie sniffed. “No, for love she would have stayed. She didn’t even ask!”

“Ask what?”

“If she should marry him! She should have asked!”

“Would Pop have said yes?”

“No: that’s why she should have asked.”

I laughed. Smart Rose.

“We don’t mention her,” said Annie. She put the pot back in the sink. The front of her dress was damp. “So please. Don’t.”

“You mean Pop doesn’t mention her.”

“No.” Then she said, more to the last of the dirty dishes than to me, “He’s never said her name. Not once.”

I imagined she did, though, every night: Rose, where are you?

In the living room my father snored so raspily it made the back of my throat ache. I was always their boy. I’d never been lost, just gone. Just away. Not like Rose, good as dead. Worse: she was dead but insulting them still, wherever she was. I don’t think Rose was a thing my father had ever imagined losing; he had only seen that she would lose him. An orphaned girl is hard to marry. My father had lost other children: Samuel and Libby and Sarah and Abie and Louis and Hilla. Hattie. He’d almost lost me, too, but here I was, thanks to Rocky. My father had worked to keep hold of me, I was a fortune, but Rose was the loose change in his pocket, and he’d lost her out of carelessness. He’d never told her who she should marry. He’d never told her, Your life is here, with those who love you.

He was busy telling that to me.

A Catholic, a barbarian. He knew nothing of Catholics except the words that came to him: flesh, thorns, passion . He saw gilt-edged blood when he closed his eyes. And now Roseleh was married to one.

“Lots of people hate Jews too,” I told Annie.

“The ignorant,” she answered.

Iowa Stripped to the Waist

One memorable night in my childhood, we found a vagrant sleeping on the settee on the screened porch; he’d let himself in through the screen door. We didn’t know what to do; we stared at him as though he were a dozing skunk. My father said, “Let him rest,” and in the morning Hattie (the only one of us brave enough) went out with a sack of doughnuts that Annie had made that morning, which, considering Annie’s doughnuts, was either charity or punishment.

I wondered whether the diamond pattern of the wicker had bitten into his skin the way it was biting into mine. I was home, but I wasn’t home: I was in the transient spot, the place you could fall asleep without the honest members of the household noticing. Above me, in my own bed, Rocky snored, the guy who’d engineered this neat trick: me in Valley Junction again. What a prank that telegram had been, a harebrained, cruel, canny, kind trick. I was so grateful to the guy I hated it, and to this day — six decades later — one of my greatest regrets is I never managed to tell him so.

Rocky the practical joker snuck into the sunporch early the next morning. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go look at the bright spots of your youth.” We took my father’s car, an old Jewett, which nobody drove anymore, and headed out for the city.

“I don’t think I’ll marry Annie,” Rocky said. “Do you mind?”

“Who says she wants to marry you?” I asked.

“A wise woman. But Rose! Rose has forsaken me!”

I explained what I knew of what had happened.

“A Catholic!” Rocky said, and whistled. “A bad business, that bunch. If I were your father, I’d form a posse.”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“S’okay. Little Rose, married. I never thought she’d do me this way. What’s she, eleven?”