Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Mose!” she said in the sandy voice all my sisters had inherited from my mother, a kind of yiddishe Gene Kelly.

“You look different,” I said, almost laughing.

“I stopped being twelve years old.”

“Well, it suits you,” I said, and it did. She looked like my other sisters, with her dark hair and blue eyes, but somehow more beautiful: her skin was pinker, her waist more emphatic. The whole town must have thought of her as the prettiest of the Sharp girls. No wonder some Quigley had kidnapped her.

She put her arm around my waist and pointed at the front stairs. “I was just thinking,” she said. “About you and Hattie the day after Mama died. You stepped in all the food.”

“We did. How can you remember that? You were a baby.”

She stopped for a second. “You’re right,” she said, rubbing her chin with her free hand. “I shouldn’t remember it, but I do. Annie was furious.”

“She was?”

“Sure. What a waste!” She sighed. We still stood off the walk. “It’s not so bad from here,” she said. “The house. Not so bad altogether, I guess. But right now, I want to run away.”

I kissed her temple. “Me too,” I said.

“You’re better at it than me,” said Rose, and then the front door opened, and Annie waved us in.

“I found him on the floor,” Annie told me. “I got up and came downstairs and went to the kitchen because I didn’t want to wake him. I made some tea. I sorted and soaked some beans for dinner. Then I thought I’d make him some milktoast. He hadn’t been feeling well. Stomach. Head, too, I guess. He called me Goldie. He called the little boys Goldie. I mean, he didn’t think they were, but it was the only name he could remember, and that made him mad, and he’d point at whoever he meant, and say, Goldie, that Goldie. Got to be in a wheelchair, it’s behind the door now. Doctor said strokes, maybe lots of little ones. He was ninety-four, the oldest man in Valley Junction, did you know? Doctor said he died in his sleep and then fell out of bed, but he didn’t. He was reaching for something. Us. That’s what I think: he knew he was dying, and he wanted to get to us!”

By us she meant herself and Rose, both sleeping upstairs. Now the house was filled with sisters and nieces and nephews, all those fascinating strangers.

Your people are barbaric, I’d said to Rocky when he’d told me what a wake was. Now I understood. I wished I had seen him. I wished he was as vivid to me as he was to my sisters: the crime scene, his last known whereabouts. His eyes were open. His beard was tangled. His right arm was over his head, and he had his hand out as though in the dark he’d seen the rabbi’s face in the portrait over the mantel and had said, “Stranger, help an old man up, I beg you.” Maybe he said it in Yiddish or Lithuanian. In the dark, the rabbi would have looked underwater; to be in black and white, then, was only sensible. Perhaps the rabbi had called my father out of bed. Pop sleeps, and wakes, and wants to look at his friend’s face, but all he can see is a ball of light where the moonbeams from the kitchen window hit the curved glass. Something feels wrong, as though one of the children has been trying to scrape out his heart with a spoon. He leans out of bed, and he falls to the floor.

Nothing hurts except the wool of the carpet under his cheek. Then he realizes: he can feel that cheek again. He can nearly count the petals of the flowered carpet. Still, he can hear his friend, the man behind the glass who calls to that fine old gentleman on the floor — for a few seconds more, the oldest living citizen in Valley Junction — by every name he’s ever been called in his life: Jake, Jacob, Papa, Pop, darling, darling Mr. Sharp, sir, sir, Zayde, Jakov Shmuel — tell me, what is your name?

Not anymore, here’s a new one, good luck.

We said how lucky we were to have had him so long. A man who died well loved, well kissed, well fed. A life of sadness, but not of regret. Front-page news in the West Des Moines Express . All that food I’d imagined before: the neighbors brought covered dishes and platters of meat and dozens of muffins. Step in it, I thought, but instead I ate an entire coffee cake from the point of a knife. Mose, what are you doing? someone asked me as I polished it off, and I said, Cleaning up.

My father’s will left the store for me if I agreed to come home and run it. If I refused, Sharp’s Gents’ would be sold to Ed Dubuque at a very reasonable price.

“Well?” Annie asked.

For thirty seconds I imagined myself giving up on the movies, coming back to Valley Junction, working with Ed Dubuque and Annie. I could feel the cloth tape measure slip between my fingers as I encircled the customers, telling them their size as though I were predicting a pleasant fortune. Then I might ease my guilt: I’d finally do what my father, my dead father, had always wanted. But I couldn’t stop myself, and in my head I filled the store with chorus girls who flew back and forth on the sliding ladders; they did a dance with the metal measures for feet; some disguised themselves as mannequins and some as customers.

I shook my head.

“He could have left it to me!” said Annie, and burst into tears.

Well, I was shocked, first by Annie’s greediness, and then, moments later, by the realization that she was right: poor, devoted firstborn Annie, who’d done everything an heir should have except been born a boy.

The sympathy in that house was like the coffee cake: too much, too sweet, too familiar. I wearied of all those sisterly embraces. The service at B’nai Jeshurun was packed with Jews and Gentiles. The one place I least wanted to be famous was the one place I was most: “It’s the movie star!” said old school friends, and minor cousins, and men to whom I’d as a teenager sold underwear. In the temple , at my father’s memorial . All I wanted was to forget myself and remember my father, but I automatically shook hands and smiled, and then was sickened from smiling. This is not a personal appearance. This is a personal disappearance . Ed Dubuque finally rescued me, his nose red from weeping. “Master Sharp,” he said solemnly. The rabbi of my youth was still there, and he threw his arms around me and rubbed my bald head (I left my hairpiece in California, I suddenly realized, I hoped not in Penny’s — Rocky’s! — bed).

At the graveside I stood with the shovel, planning to turn over the usual three spadefuls of dirt onto my father’s pine coffin, but somehow, I lost track. He’d called everyone Goldie. Maybe he’d forgotten my name, too. Of course he had. When the dirt hit the pine, tiny white rocks revealed themselves there, and I wanted to jump down and pick them out. Hattie’s grave was next to us; Mama’s next to hers. I would not even look in that direction. When the family turned from my father’s grave to head back home, they’d stop and leave stones for Hattie and Mama, to show they remembered. Not me. I’d lose track then, too, I’d heap so many rocks up you wouldn’t be able to find the graves at all. Across from me, one son-in-law handed his shovel to another, but I was making up my own ritual, a spadeful of dirt for every year I’d stayed gone, proof of my regret. The only thing I could do for my father now was bury him.

“Mose?” said the rabbi, who stood behind me. His voice was both bewildered and educational. “Mose? You do know that it’s only symbolic?”

Pop’s old Jewett was full of gas despite all shortages: no one ever drove it. That night I took it coughing up Fifth Street to downtown Vee Jay. Someone had tacked a memorial wreath to the door of Sharp’s Gents’. If I crossed Railroad Avenue, I’d get to Johnny’s Vets’ Club, a disreputable bootleg joint that maybe my father had never heard of. I’d killed him, I decided, though it took a lot of work even for me to figure out how. What I came up with: he realized, at last, that I wasn’t coming home to run the store, that the next time I came to Des Moines would be to bury him, and he thought, Let the boy have his wish. Oh, that wasn’t true. But I also knew that my father had spent his life assembling and perfecting Sharp’s Gents’ as a gift for me — who knew what he’d given up over fifty years to make it a going concern? — and every time he offered it, I turned him down. As though he were offering money, or an exploding cigar. Sitting in the Jewett at the end of Fifth Street, I tried to imagine how my refusal would have felt to him.