Elizabeth McCracken: Niagara Falls All Over Again

Potato. Potato. Potato?

Potato potato potato potato.

— and Hattie could join in on the harmony, even if I was making up the lyrics right then. Harmony was what we called her inability to carry a tune.

All of Valley Junction knew us, the little Jewish kids, two of Old Man Sharp’s brood: the tall redheaded girl and her short black-haired swarthy brother. We didn’t look like each other, but we didn’t look like anybody else in town either. Together we wandered everywhere in Vee Jay, fearless. Our sister Annie, who was afraid of everything — smallpox, the nearby river, the slightest cough, birds, fire — thought this was a sign of muddleheadedness. She told us so.

“Keep on that way,” she warned, “and you’ll come to grief.”

My Father’s First Stand

My father’s store, Sharp’s Gents’ Furnishings, was a long narrow store that differed from the other long narrow stores on Fifth Street only in what it stocked. The floors were composed of wide unfinished boards that had been seasoned with dirt that sweeping couldn’t budge and mopping turned to a stubborn paste. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of stock made accessible by sliding wrought-iron ladders stood against each wall — denim coveralls so stiff you could spread butter with them, union suits in bright red and speckled cream.

That was where my father went, after he was widowed. He’d buried six children by the time his wife died, and would live with that sorrow for the rest of his life, but he did not believe in mourning, which to him was a kind of idleness that could kill you. Like my sisters, he believed that grief was a fact. You put it in your pocket where you felt it at all times, and then you went back to work.

In 1891, he’d been a peddler in the Iowa countryside, selling to farmers and farmers’ wives. Then he heard that the Rock Island Line planned to open a roundhouse in Walnut Township, just west of Des Moines. Why not become one of the settlement’s first merchants? Within days of arriving, he’d cast off every detail of his old life, like a cowboy in a Western who’d shot a man, except in this case the last bad place was Vilna, and what he threw away was not, he thought, of much consequence: an unpronounceable name, a careful adherence to his religion, a bushy red beard that had kept him warm while he traveled, and his childhood languages — Lithuanian and Yiddish, neither of which I ever heard him speak more than three words of. His sentimental tongue refused to assimilate: he heard the words in American but they came out Yiddishe.

The boat hadn’t landed on the shores of Des Moines: he must have started on the East Coast or the Gulf Coast and worked his way to the center of the country, where he met my mother’s father, Rabbi Benjamin Kipple. We had a portrait of Rabbi Kipple in our parlor, a bearded man wearing a hat as round as an ottoman. A peculiar man, said our father — he had a hard time keeping a pulpit: he quoted Milton in sermons, for instance, and was known for springing onto chairs to make a point, and then tumbling off them. A slapstick man of God, in other words. When the rabbi arrived in Des Moines, invited by the Children of Israel shul, he leaped from the train in front of a woman waiting for her sister. She took him in — dark beard, pink cheeks, and large blue eyes — and fell to the platform, screaming, “Jesus Christ has come!” Rabbi Kipple stepped over her feet. He murmured, “No, madam, just His mizpocah .”

My father, a new arrival to Iowa himself and a congregant at Children of Israel, had a weakness for smart men who were willing to be foolish. Every summer of my childhood, my father brought us to the state fair: he’d never missed one all his years in Iowa, he told us. He’d gone the first time with his future father-in-law. What would the natives have made of the two of them, one small deliberate man of commerce, one tall gawky enthusiastic man of God?

I imagine them walking the fairgrounds, black-clad but happy in the Iowa heat. A comedy team, absolutely. The prize bull is as big as a building. The hogs seem mean and sunburnt. My grandfather (I like to think) cannot meet an animal without doing an impression — strutting like a rooster, lowing like a cow, sneezing like a horse with his whole head. My father the peddler has met plenty of American livestock, but the rabbi is transfixed. Best are the goats, so lovable and pushy he wants to climb in their pen and butt heads with each one in the jostling way of little boys. He has one leg slung over the corral before my father catches the back of his coat to talk him out of it. (Actually, the rabbi is relieved. His sense of humor depends on reasonable people like my father keeping him out of trouble.) The goats stick their anvil heads through the rail-and-post fence like salesmen, and nibble at the knees of the rabbi’s trousers. In the company of goats, he suddenly realizes, it is easy to ask a favor. So he turns to Jakov Shmuel Sharensky — as my father is still known — and explains that he is dying. No, my father says, as though that will change the rabbi’s mind. The rabbi straightens my father’s collar fondly, and makes his request: please marry my Goldie, let me worry less. She’s seventeen, you can teach her anything.

That much is true, anyhow: my father married my mother because his dying best friend asked him to; then he took the child home and found that they loved each other. Duty, he explained to us, is always rewarded.

They stayed in love despite everything: the age difference, too many dead children, so many live ones. Nobody has an imagination anymore: they figure an older man, an orphaned teenager, she always pregnant — a brute, that man. They picture the nineteenth-century sex, like sex is furniture and changes styles with the years, like sex is transportation or weaponry, something that has been around since the beginning of time but only recently has acquired any panache.

I don’t think that’s how it was at all. My mother was young; my father was her slave. He agreed to anything she asked, even all those children.

“But you have three already,” he might say.

“Not enough,” my mother would answer.

“And me.”

“And you,” she’d say kindly. “I don’t want another husband. Husbands I have enough of.”

He’d never imagined outliving her. Once she died, my father turned to me, the thin boy among all those girls, and thought: my little businessman, let us begin.

To start with, he changed the name of the store to Sharp and Son’s. This he had painted in red-and-black letters on the window. Then he brought me to the store and set me on the glass counter out front and introduced me to his customers, the railroad men, who shook my hand and called me Boss. They told me how honest my father was, as though I, too, had once suspected that all Jews were crooks, still suspected the rest of ’em but not my father. Jake Sharp, the men of Vee Jay called him, like he was an Irish tough. He sold them clothing and cashed their paychecks and acted as banker; in the flowered safe in the back room were dozens of envelopes full of cash, accounts kept on the back flaps in pencil.

At four I slept among the inventory; at six I learned to straighten; at eight I restocked the shelves from the storeroom; and when I turned ten my father began to talk of me taking over the store, and Hattie decided she needed to put a stop to the nonsense. She hadn’t raised me up by hand so that I could become a shopkeeper. For my tenth birthday, she decided, she needed to give me something larger than even Sharp’s, and so she did: she gave me vaudeville.

“Okay, kid,” she whispered in our front hall. She wound a scarf around my neck. The lapels of her brown coat, a favorite of mine, were fur trimmed; she wore a fur hat that nearly matched, like a black-bearded man with a chestnut mustache. My other sisters were a matched set: short, narrow-hipped and busty, with small hook noses and pale distracted cat-eyes. Hattie was tall and wide across the hips and there was nothing the least bit subtle about her nose; her hair shone like a mesh coin purse, coppery and, like copper, both warm and cool. She tucked another scarf into the collar of my coat, though already I was sweating.