Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

I landed a couple of other movie roles playing fathers of teenagers — nothing as good as Greasepaint, but nothing as bad as the last few Carter and Sharp flicks. The rest of my time I spent at home with the kids, writing letters to my sisters, reading magazines and newspapers and books of history. I didn’t see much of my old friends, so when Neddy Jefferson invited me out to dinner at the Brown Derby, I said sure, even though I didn’t much like the place, being devoted to the less splashy Musso’s down the street.

“Dress up,” said Neddy. “Boys’ night out.”

“I always dress up,” I told him.

“Well,” said Neddy, “you’re in semiretirement. I just didn’t want you to show up in your bathrobe and carpet slippers. We’ll invite Tansy, hey? No wives.”

“Boys’ night out,” I assured him.

So I spiffed up and went to the Derby the next week and scanned the dining room for Neddy’s giant head. There it was in the corner, there was the rest of him underneath it, next to him tiny Tansy, and next to him: Rocky.

I stood, holding between two fingers the green plastic chip the coat-check girl had just dealt me. I could leave without redeeming it. The three of them conferred around a half-moon table, heads tilted toward the relish plate. They looked like something out of Lewis Carroll: tall, short, fat, waiting for something unlikely to deliver a speech. A parker house roll, the pitcher of cream. Then Tansy glanced up, and waved me over. I gave a faint finger-wiggle in return, and he tried to reel me in. Neddy and Rocky lifted their chins.

Did my heart melt? Did I forgive him instantly? Did I want to throw myself into his arms and suggest we that minute start filming a movie?

Well, yes.

Like me, he’d let his hair fade to its natural color, which was mostly sandy gray. He was in his early fifties by now, and he didn’t look great but he didn’t look as bad as he might: roses in his cheeks, for instance. The hair suited him. He wore a pretty snazzy suit, a subtle tattersall plaid. Between his fingers he pinched the stem of a martini fresh from the shaker, still with its sheen of ice, which held still while he twirled the glass around it.

“Fellas,” I said when I got to the table, and Rocky said, “Darling boy. You never call, you never write. I’m beginning to think you don’t love me.” He lifted the martini like a flower he meant to sniff and then stick in his buttonhole.

He’d had all the time in the world to think of an opening line. I just looked at him.

“Sit down, Professor,” he said gently. “Have a drink.”

I think I was about to do that very thing, but that was when the television cameras showed up, and we heard the hearty disembodied voice of Ralph Edwards explaining, redundantly, that This Was Our Life.

Have you seen this show, ever? A televised prank, and you had to take it, and smile. They sit you on a couch. A voice you either recognize or don’t comes over the speaker and tells half an anecdote, and then the voice’s owner comes out of the wings, a person whose entrance to a party might, under other circumstances, cause you to hide in the kitchen.

A sweet idea, it must have seemed, when the producers had originally come up with the plans for such a show. You’re back in touch with the people you love. A foretaste of heaven: everyone you’ve lost over the years comes through a door and hugs you and tells one fond story. You peer over their shoulders to see who’s next. When that door opens, you think you recognize someone deep in the wings, though of course that’s impossible. Even through the magic of, as they say, television, they can’t bring the people you really want to see, your beloved dead.

But what a show that would be, huh?

I’m sure somebody’s working on it.

We walked across the street to the Roosevelt Hotel, where the show was taped — hurry, hurry, the audience waits — up the stairs and into the Magnolia Room. A huge jumble, and then we were onstage, under the lights, and the people in the seats applauded us, and Rocky slapped me on the back. He hadn’t known ahead of time, either, but he probably had hoped every day that a television crew would show up to tell him the story of his life, no matter how abridged.

They sat us down on the love seat, which normally held only one honoree; I had the spot closer to stage center. “Mike,” the host said jovially, “got enough room left over for you there?” I almost corrected his manners — why insult the weight of an invited guest — but smiled. I could feel the warmth of Rocky’s knee near mine, but I concentrated on the show.

Rocky first. They showed a chubby baby photo that caused the audience to coo, then brought out a seventy-year-old showgirl who’d known Rock at the Old Howard Theater in Boston. Then a baby picture of me, buck naked on a bearskin rug. How had they got hold of that? I would have blamed Jessica, but I didn’t think I’d seen that picture in years.

“Mike,” the host said, “you were born in Valley Junction, Iowa, in 1911.” It seemed like the kind of thing you’d say to a stroke victim. Then a voice: Ed Dubuque’s, and he came through the door. All over again I was surprised that Ed was a man not much older than me. He hugged me first with one arm, and then the other. The host told me to sit back down on the sofa, and Ed began to talk. He was stiff; he must have rehearsed.

“One summer, Mose worked at his family’s store after he’d broken both wrists.” Ed gestured to his own. “His father told him to go over the stock with a feather duster, and one day, when he was holding the duster between his casts”—Ed demonstrated—“he started to sing to it. And then he began to dance. He moved all through the store, singing and dancing. When he was finished, we applauded, customers and everything. Loveliest thing you ever saw, and all for a feather duster.” Ed’s nose and ears were bright red. That’s how he always blushed. Then he was whisked backstage again.

I wanted to call him back. Dancing with a feather duster? I didn’t remember, though as soon as he’d said it, I could see myself, the way I slid and nearly went down on one knee, a clot of dust in one cuff of my pants, my thick hair that needed cutting as usual. Then I realized I saw it as though I’d been filmed. If it really happened, if I really remembered, what I would see would be the gray head of the duster, the handle like a turned table leg between my plastered arms. Come back, Ed. Are you sure you’re not thinking of some other kid?

Meanwhile, Ralph Edwards had skipped back to Rocky. I tried to pay attention. This disembodied voice said, “Hello, son.” And then, out walked Professor and Professor Carter, Rocky’s parents.

They looked unbelievably aged and sour. Arthritis had left his father like some flat-out-of-luck dinosaur whose ancestors had been able to fly and whose descendants would be able to walk upright. You expected his wife to help her husband across the stage, but she didn’t, she held the clasp of her white pocketbook as though she were about to start rummaging through it. It might have been the most suspenseful moment in the history of This Is Your Life: would Rocky Carter’s parents make it to center stage without expiring?

Rocky got up and shook his father’s hand and kissed his mother’s cheek, and then sat back down. This time, I could feel his knee vibrate with nerves; he was agitating his whole leg with rapid minuscule bounces of his heel. He probably thought nobody would notice, but over the air the tattersall pattern of his pants would pulsate.

Twenty-six years I’d known this guy. Never in all that time — not once, no matter the venue, no matter the size of the crowd — had anything like this ever happened. Not what we were doing, though we sat hip-to-hip, and that was strange, both the posture and the proximity. (Usually if he was close enough to touch, I was smacking him over the head, removing his hat to use it as a weapon on his cranium.) Not the man holding a microphone and our prop biography. Not even the two terrifying elderly people, glowering at the mixed marriage before them, unlikely to deliver their blessing.