Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

The city, of course. The Party. Maybe I had known this, ten years ago. Rocky was a member of the Swans’ Club; Jessica was a member of the Communist party. Now she combed her hair with her hands and realigned a bobby pin above one ear. She wasn’t contrite, of course. Years later, the threat might sound silly — who cares whether someone’s wife was slightly pink as a kid? Romantic, even: Jessica with her dark hair, testifying. She might miss her TV choreography a little, but not enough to lie or apologize. TV work was not artistic, not a great thing you planned for the world.

Oh, yes. After they called her, they’d call me.

I was a bigger star than anyone who’d been ruined by the hearings so far, sort of a dream name for HUAC: famous, but not beloved. Known, but past my prime. A fine example. A lovely scandal. People could deny me work and not feel like they’d been cheated out of anything.

I organized a few thoughts. Rocky was smart enough to know that if he informed on Jessica, he would ruin both her career and mine, which wouldn’t do him any good. If he did it out of spite anyhow, well, I’d wanted to retire, hadn’t I? I’d rather choose the terms myself, but we had money, and if it got unpleasant to live in North Hollywood, then we’d move somewhere else — to New York. To Des Moines. We were hardly the Rosenbergs. What kept me in California?

Only Rocky, who had his hand in his hair, as though he’d just become self-conscious of the creeping blond in it. All in all, an impressive display of betrayal: threaten my wife, her livelihood, mine. Years ago, maybe even months ago, maybe even last week, I would have begged him not to do such a thing. I would have been driven crazy, like the straight man in that old bit about Niagara Falls, who hears the words and clenches his fists and advances on the comic, all because his wife ran off with his best friend to Niagara. Those two words remind him of all he’s lost and still desires. Not a bad part for a straight man. Maybe Rocky thought if he couldn’t make me bend, he could make me rage. If he said the right words, I would turn around like a trouper and walk toward him, feeding him setups for panicked punch lines. Revenge, after all, is a kind of love.

But this? He broke my heart, as brutally as anyone or anything had ever broken it, and now I was too old to throw myself at his silly two-toned shoes and beg him to stay. Heartbreak makes you plead and weep, or else it shuts you up. Who was I to him? The Professor. As Mose Sharp I was useless.

Rocky said, uncertainly, “I won the bet.”

“There was no bet,” I said. “No bet, no show, no team. Nothing.”

Suddenly he seemed afraid of what he’d done. Thinking back, I believe he’d tried to get out of his threats by calling it a gamble. He didn’t care about politics any more than I did. Just another story we’d tell: one day, in 1954, we wagered over some ridiculous thing, and that’s how Life with Rocky began.

“Mose,” he said. “Professor.”

But I had my back turned to him. My kids were in the yard — Jake and Nate had heaped all of the cowboy costumes on Gilda, and died gloriously as she shot the pistols into the tree, over the roof of Jess’s studio. All those times we stopped talking, and this was the first time I’d begun it. I could see the appeal. I hadn’t known before, when I’d borne the brunt, that it was the worst thing you could do to someone. I felt cruel and happy. Rocky said, “Mosey.”

I am not talking to you.

Rocky said, “Okay, listen, wait.”

I am not talking.

If I’d opened my mouth, I would have said, over and over, You broke my heart, can’t you see you broke my heart? I kept my back turned. Jessica murmured something to him, and led him to the front door, and then I didn’t see him again for a long time.

In Greenwood Park, when I was fourteen and Hattie sixteen, I got mad and sat on the grass and refused to speak to her. “The little man has a temper,” said Hattie, which is what my sisters always said when I fell into a sulk, almost admiringly. A boy could get away with that kind of moodiness, and though I never yelled or threw punches or used my teeth (Rose, at age two, went through a brief biting period), my silences seemed full of manly anger to them, or so I was happy to think. I liked to be cajoled the way some kids liked to be tickled: I held very still and waited for someone to tease me into cheerfulness.

Not this day in Greenwood Park, though. Hattie and I had gone to a picnic, on one of those July days so hot your brain poaches in your skull and your blood turns to mucky syrup. This was nine months before Hattie died. We’d packed a lunch and taken the streetcar in. Some kids had made a fire and thrown in potatoes and corn to roast, and Hattie wanted to stand near it to talk to people, and I wanted to lie in the grass as far away from any kind of extra heat as possible.

So we each did what we wanted, and I might have been annoyed that she preferred to joke with strangers instead of me, but that’s not what got me so mad. I found a tree for shade. The best ones had already been taken: this was a scrubby maple, not much of a parasol, roots braiding through the dirt at its feet. It took me a while to get comfortable. When I looked at the cook-fire, some huge freckle-faced teenager had speared an ear of corn for Hattie at the end of a stick; he blew across it gallantly and — to my eyes — lasciviously. His breath was probably too hot to do much good. Then he stripped off the husk and burned his fingers. Good. He stuck them in his mouth and looked at Hattie, who laughed and touched the back of his wrist. Bad.

I ate my chicken sandwich — mustard, no mayonnaise, because of the heat. How long would Hattie want to stay? Maybe I should just go back to Vee Jay by myself. Drowned by the heat, I napped.

When I woke up, I looked: no Hattie. No big teen boy.

I waited. I scanned the park. Had I lost her? Was she my responsibility, or her own? Should I call someone, or sit tight and hope the guy wasn’t a white slaver?

God. A white slaver. I wished I hadn’t thought of that. Annie believed in white slavers so completely she made me want never to leave the house, even though she didn’t think I was at peril. (In that trade, boys weren’t precious.) She even kept a pamphlet in the kitchen drawer, with other instructive tracts, Annie’s version of motherly advice. There was a fascinating one published by the Kotex company that I wasn’t supposed to read, and another on using electricity safely, and another on baking. “If you have a question, just read the pamphlet,” Annie said, and so the contents of the drawer were so jumbled together in my memory that I sometimes believed my sisters were visited every month by Reddy Kilowatt or — because there was also a tract a religious person had left at the door, angrily annotated by Annie — that we should be careful not to be converted to Christianity, possibly by Aunt Jemima.

White slavers. Were they freckle-faced? High-school students? As imaginary as Aunt Jemima? Maybe they hired high schoolers as agents. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I looked at the edge of the woods and considered storming them. The only person who’d give me good advice was Hattie, and I’d let her be kidnapped.

Then suddenly Hattie walked out of the woods with her gangly friend. At first I thought they were holding hands, but instead they each gripped a hat. Then they exchanged the hats, because they’d been holding each other’s. The boy put his cap on his head, and then tipped it and walked away, and Hattie came up the slant of the park, adjusting the men’s straw boater from Sharp’s Gents’ that she had covered with silk flowers. Bigheaded Hattie.