Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Do what?”

“Go back in time,” he said.

Rock himself was going forward. He’d left Lillian, just as Penny had said he would, though he hadn’t fully realized that this meant leaving Junior too. So he rented a beach house in Malibu, thinking the kid would like that, forgetting that his estranged wife knew some people who’d recently lost a child to drowning: no swimming for Rocky junior. They’d have to meet in town. So he stayed in the house by himself, and called me up to say that he couldn’t figure out where to put the sofa, as though what he missed most about Lil was her good sense concerning furniture.

“Let’s go out,” he’d say, but I was sticking close to home. These days, I mostly saw him on movie sets and at the radio studio. I thought a lot about what Penny had said the night of the hobo party: that Rocky threw people away, even as he kept their photographs—“I suffer,” he once told me, “from memoraphilia.” Sometimes I thought she’d been right: here was a man about to go through his fourth divorce, who wouldn’t visit his own parents. Other times I thought, Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? So’s Tansy, and so’s Neddy. I wanted to talk to Penny about it, as though she were a friendly, reasonable devil, and we were negotiating for Rocky’s soul. If I put up a sound enough defense, he’d be saved.

But I don’t know when Penny moved out of the pool house. I didn’t see her again, not for years.

Every day, Rocky drove around for hours: up the coast, to see Junior, to his lawyers, to the nearly bankrupt nightclub, to Tansy’s office. They were talking about TV again.

“What do you think, Mosey?” Rock asked.

“You and Tansy fight it out,” I said. “I’ll go along.”

In the meantime, I was a homebody, maybe for the first time in my life. Up until then, I’d looked for ways to sneak out, wherever I lived: to downtown Des Moines with Hattie, and then to vaudeville without her; to bars and restaurants and strange girls’ rooms; to Sukey’s, back in my bachelor days. Even during my marriage I’d done my share of nightclubbing. Jessica wanted to stay home with the kids, away from the smokers and drinkers. I loved going out. I loved walking into a room full of strangers, a party, a club. I loved watching other people perform. Don’t get me wrong, movies were the luckiest break I ever got, but I’d still rather see the clumsiest comic fiddle player struggle in the flesh with “The Flight of the Bumblebee” than watch Heifetz on a screen. People are so dear, in person. They implicate you in their talent. I know I keep talking about luck, but I never felt luckier than when I was anywhere — a hole-in-the-wall bar, someone’s living room, some swank joint that cheated you on the drinks — and heard someone really good sing. Or dance or do magic tricks or jump, suddenly, onto a table. Even the things I could do seemed better done by someone else — and to think, if I’d stayed home I would have missed it.

But after my strange week at Rocky’s, anyplace that wasn’t my house, with my family, couldn’t hold my interest. “Your spirit’s been broken,” Rock said to me, newly bachelored and looking for company. No: I’d had a taste of my own medicine. Maybe I hadn’t been in the habit of throwing people away, but I’d left plenty behind in my long wandering career. I’d always hated to say good-bye to people — which isn’t anything special, of course, most people are miserable failures at farewells. I’d do anything to get out of them. Even now, when Jess and I and the kids went to Des Moines to see family, I’d get anxious the day of our exit, because I’d have to say good-bye to all my sisters, to Ed Dubuque, who I loved, to Jessica’s Joseph, who I didn’t. Bad luck to say, This is the end . Better: Soon. Still. I made it, you see, a nearly religious belief, a twist on my mother’s curses. If you never say good-bye, no one will ever leave you.

Then Jessica said she would, and though she decided against it I developed a fear of the thing itself, and not just the word.

Gilda was born a year later, nearly prescribed by Jessica’s doctor. That’s what doctors did in those days: when a woman lost a child, they told her to have another, a make-up baby, as quickly as possible, to help you over the grief. We named her for my mother, and after that I barely went out at all.

Looking back, I think the team died that week I spent at Rocky’s. I’d thrown myself into work; now I wanted to throw myself into family.

“A couple years more,” said Rocky. “Then we can retire. We gotta crack TV, for instance. You gotta let the boys see you on TV.”

“I guess,” I said, though privately I believed that television was a fad, a waste of material; between the radio show and the movies, we barely had enough anyhow. We’d look awful, too, shrunk down and fishy. Who’d want to watch that?

Remember, I’m the guy who thought vaudeville would never die.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome—

(FANFARE)

It’s the Carr Oil Comedy Hour !

(FANFARE)

Starring this week’s hosts—

(DOUBLE FANFARE)

Rocky Carter and Mike Sharp—

with their guests

(HORNS)

Don Ameche!

Martha Raye!

The Dove City Dancers!

And now, ladies and gentlemen—

(HORNS)

Carter and Sharp!

(THE BAND BREAKS INTO “MY DARLING LIVES IN DES MOINES”)

(THE CAMERA SHOWS AN EMPTY STAGE, A CRUDELY PAINTED BACKDROP OF A PARK)

Carter and Sharp!

(HORNS. BAND STARTS AGAIN)

Where are those guys!

(A WHISTLE FROM THE HOUSE)

ROCKY: Camera three! Over here, camera three!

(APPLAUSE)

And the camera swivels to find two mugs in the audience, Carter and Sharp, hands in pockets, the surrounding crowd cracking up for no reason.

I’d been wrong. I loved TV.

We broke into television as the once-a-month hosts of a weekly hour-long live variety show. By 1951, our movie career was mostly over, and we were back where we’d begun, except famous, rich, and middle- aged: a thin man and a fat man on a stage, willing to do anything for a laugh. We were shameless. We insulted the band leader, we knocked down scenery on purpose, we tried to crack each other up. We broke props we’d need later, just so we could improvise first about the breakage, and then about the lack of props. Our old wheezing vaudeville jokes were new again, thanks to the postwar baby boom: the country was full of brand-new people with blissfully unsophisticated senses of humor. You could see Rocky search for the red light that told us which camera was paying attention, doing a slow burn and then saying, “Watch me, camera two,” and tipping his hat. You could see me shove an extra cream puff in his mouth in a banquet scene, so he couldn’t deliver his next line.

Sometimes we laughed so hard we ended up in each other’s arms, even if offstage we weren’t speaking. We spent a lot of time not speaking.

I can’t remember what tipped off that round of fights. No, wait, I do: yes. He’d wanted to talk, and called me up. “Come out to the club,” he said, meaning his own.

“Can’t you come here?”

“No,” he said. “It makes me too sad. You got your happy family there, and what have I got?”

So I went to the Rock Club, into which Rock now poured all of his spare money. He couldn’t stand the idea of it closing — a guy can spend all day in his own bar drinking, and it’s business; a guy drinking in another man’s bar is bad behavior. Chances are Rock deducted his martinis off his taxes. That night, he wore a light brown gabardine suit, a mustard-colored shirt, and a yellow tie. He probably thought he looked spiffy, but mostly he resembled a large cheese sandwich. A cigarette burned in his hand, a bad sign: he favored cigars unless he was upset enough to chain-smoke.