Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

The unprecedented thing: Rocky was frightened in front of a crowd. He was onstage and silent, wedged in next to me, and contemplated — I could tell, I’d worked with him and knew his ways, even this one thing that had never happened before — running from the stage without an apology. Stage fright. Nerves like an amateur’s.

I don’t remember what the Professors Carter said. Some scrap of a story, told without much affection. Then they were gone too.

I tried to hold body and mind together, but it was hard. There was Mimi, and she was almost thin again but not quite, and her nose was still all wrong; she kissed me and pinched my upstage ear. Here comes Tansy, shaking both our hands. They had to rush to fit two lives in one half hour, and it was over so quick there was no more time for suspense. Only later I would think: I wish they’d found Penny, it would have been nice to see Sukey Decker, why didn’t they ask Johnny Atkinson? They mentioned Betty’s death (though not Hattie’s), and I wish they hadn’t: anyone who couldn’t come shouldn’t be invited to the party. At the very end, they called out Jessica and then Rocky’s new wife, a very tall young blonde named Ella, who kissed her husband on the top of his head. My kids came out. Rock and I both looked around for Rocky junior, but he didn’t show up. My sisters flooded the stage, and that’s when I began to cry — I’d been to see them six months before, but that was in Iowa, and here they were, Annie, Ida, Fannie, Sadie, Rose, dressed up and on television, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

Why not get back together, I thought, sitting on the This Is Your Life love seat. Nothing big. A TV appearance where we actually had some lines. A week of club work in Vegas. I got a kick out of my new movies, but I missed thinking on my feet. No, I didn’t miss that: I missed Rock. After the show I’d talk to Tansy—

“Well, boys,” Ralph Edwards said, “we’ve got fifteen seconds. Any words you’d like to leave us with?”

We stood up. I was still crying and waved away the microphone. Rocky threw one arm around me, which for him was always a gesture equal parts fond and hostile. “This has been wonderful,” he said, not looking at me. “Mike and I had such a long, happy ride together. This show is a perfect end to a perfect partnership. I can’t think of a better going-away party.”

“Oh?” said Edwards, confused.

“Didn’t you know?” said Rocky. “Carter and Sharp have broken up.”

They threw a party for us afterward in the hotel’s dining room. Rock and I were seated at either end of the table, twin fathers, with our extended families all around us. I wanted to talk to him, but not here. You didn’t have to do that . I believed he’d thought he’d done me a favor. What insanity, to see your longtime partner on national television after an extended silence. How happy I was to see him anyhow. What a bad idea this all was. Rocky talked to Tansy and Neddy and Mimi and Jessica and our kids, especially Jake, who hadn’t forgotten his favorite wayward uncle. I talked to Mimi and Ed and Ida and Fannie and Sadie and Annie and Mrs. Rose Dubuque, proprietress now of Sharp’s Apparel of West Des Moines. Annie still did the books. They’d decided to stock women’s clothing, she told me, and I felt like a club member whose old haunt has gone coed without his permission. Ladies’ frocks in Sharp’s Gents’! Ladies’ underthings, even!

Why hadn’t I thought of that?

Professor and Professor Carter spoke to no one. As I suspected, Mrs. Professor Carter cared only for the contents of her purse, which she emptied onto the tabletop. I worried that she’d eventually pull out a gun. Instead, she began to fill the purse with sugar cubes and silverware.

Plenty of mingling all around — my sisters approached Rocky and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we had dinner together sixteen years ago.” He greeted them all warmly, by name. Gilda sat on everybody’s lap. I thought she’d be shy around her idol, Sadie Sow’s best friend, but instead she leaned on one of his knees and asked him to do something funny.

By the end of the evening, Rocky was as drunk as I’d ever seen him. Strange as it sounds, I took that as almost good news: maybe sturdy Ella made him drink less, and therefore he was more susceptible to the martinis. She sat next to the Carters, who seemed to be berating her for not knowing what the Bayeux Tapestry was. “The Babe Ruth what?” she asked. I sat down next to Rocky.

“So how’s the boy?” I inquired.

I watched him try to piece together a clever answer. I watched him fail.

“Money troubles,” he said. “You probably heard.”

“You know,” I told him, “if I can help you out with a loan. .”

He raised his head, and gave me a look that went from haughty to embarrassed to grateful to defeated in the space of two seconds: I could almost chart each reaction as it arrived at his forehead and tumbled down his face and into his drink.

“I don’t think it’s come to that,” he said.

“I like Ella. She’s a very giant woman.”

“I’m playing Vegas next week.”

“That’s good.”

“Tonight I have to see my folks.” He pointed them out to me, in case I’d forgotten. He laughed. “They haven’t changed a bit. Forty years. You know,” he said. The waiter set down a new martini in front of him. He started to turn it, and we both looked at the thin layer of ice doing its steady trick despite the revolutions of the glass. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It seemed an apology was in order, but I didn’t know who was owed. “You know, Professor,” he said, “not many people realize this”—he nodded at his glass—“but the ice in a martini always points to true north.”

“So,” I said to Jessica as she drove us home, “that was a surprise.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She made it sound as though she still thought it wasn’t a bad idea. “Did you get a chance to talk to Rocky?”

“He was fried. As usual.”

“I didn’t know they’d brought in his parents.”

“Of course they did. That’s what the show is about.”

From the backseat, Jake wondered how many people watched This Is Your Life .

“Too many,” I told him. He was thirteen, just the age vanity would get the best of him, one way or the other. “You looked like a prince. The new teen heartthrob. Across North America, girls are burning their pictures of Pat Boone.”

“They should,” said Nathan, “but over him ?”

“All we wanted was for the two of you to talk a little,” said Jessica.

“He pulled a fast one, huh? Shocked the hell out of Tansy. I’m sure he thought we’d get back together after tonight. Neddy probably had a script all ready: Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits .”

We pulled into the drive and then into the garage. Jess put the car into park with a clunk. “Nobody wanted anything but for you guys to talk. You miss him. You don’t realize it, but you miss him.”

Of course I realized it. For instance, he would have laughed at Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits . I didn’t know anyone else who’d find that really funny. We might have gone on making up geriatric slapstick titles. Carter and Sharp Break a Hip. Carter and Sharp Wander Off. Carter and — What Was Your Name Again?

“Darling boy,” he’d called me, when he saw me at the restaurant.

But I hadn’t begun to fully bend until his parents took the stage. Ah, thought the audience, his parents: how proud they must be! I understood exactly how proud they were. All the years I’d known Rocky, Mrs. Carter’s motherly correspondence consisted of requests for money when the fictional Mrs. Carter showed up on the radio. They couldn’t profit from the sisters, since they belonged rightfully to me, but I had in my head several paragraphs written in case Father Professor Carter decided that because I wore a mortarboard I was patterned after him. He never made a claim. “My father doesn’t care for show business,” Rocky used to tell me before we hit it big, “but he adores money. I have a little plan cooked up to buy his love. . ” Then he discovered that his father would cash the checks and welsh on Rocky’s dreamt-up deal. In other words, I had followed the whole complicated plot of the past twenty-six years: I’d had a major role. I would have known not to invite those people who happened to share his name. This , I knew, is not his life .