Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Anyone can make bouillon,” said Gilda. Not me. I snatched the kettle off the burner and poured the water, lukewarm, over the cube, where it managed to suck off a little flavoring but nothing else. Or I forgot to stir, and left a nugget at the bottom. All of the things the world claims you can cook if you can boil water, I failed at. The water would boil eventually, sure; the laws of thermodynamics would not bend to my incompetence. I brewed coffee you could read magazines through. I forgot to latch the tea ball, and poured cups of what looked like a river that had jumped its banks.

Then I’d walk around the house. Somehow, I would have slipped two bouillon cubes in my pants pocket. I’d shake them like dice. Why square, I’d wonder, why not round? A question like that could absorb me for hours. My aluminum palate seemed a colossal character flaw: I should have prepared. I should have taken lessons.

Jessica thanked me for everything. She couldn’t eat anyhow: the chemo was poison, of course. I should have sent out for prop meals every day, set them on the nightstand beside her bed, and saved the trouble. She spent two months in bed; I spent two months looking at her profile, the long nose, the thinning hair combed up off her forehead, that Roman-coin beauty. Then she got sicker, and even her beauty was gone.

I took care of my wife, though when I think back on the months she was really sick, I remember all the time I spent in other rooms, putting off going back to her side. She was so sick it left me gasping.

People had died before, of course, and people would die hence. But really, but really, hadn’t I — shouldn’t the one person—

— I know I had a warning this time, but the one person—

— just this once—

A Double Act

At the memorial service, Gilda gave a eulogy. I could not. Her words made everyone cry, but she got it wrong. She said: “It was like my parents were one person.”

No, I thought. We were like two people. We did not share one soul, or one mind: simple division shows you the folly of that. Before Jessica, I’d wandered around, very much like one person, no matter whose company I was in. It wasn’t always fun. She did the same thing. Every now and then, maybe we’d find someone to be the disappointment act, to fill out the bill for the evening, or a week. Then Jess and I met, and were never, not for one moment, anything like one person.

But Rocky and I were. I think that was the problem. Onstage, in front of the cameras, we knew exactly what the other guy was thinking. No: we just thought the same thing at the same time, a comic animal with four legs and four arms and two heads bumping, bumping. The animal slaps itself across the face, throws itself over a balustrade. Time to step this way. Time to pause. No surprise, how did you know? We knew. It was our job.

One person, yes, but the one person we were like was Rocky.

When Jess died, all of us — my kids, and me, and Tansy — thought Rocky might show up. What a eulogy he could have given! The phone rang and rang, and it was never him. My sisters stayed in Des Moines again, at my request. I’d be out there soon enough and they could comfort me then, because I was bringing Jess’s body back to be buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

“Shall we come with you?” the kids asked. “We’ll come.”

“No,” I said. We’d already had the memorial in L.A., and while I’d wanted it to be small, barely noticeable, it was filled with weeping dancers and amateur actors, all the people she’d choreographed over the years. They seemed to shudder and sob in unison, as though they’d been instructed, and they unfurled their hankerchiefs with unsettling grace.

“I just promised her,” I told my kids, which was a lie. Jessica did not care where she was buried. I couldn’t bury her by Betty, who was still in Babyland, and I had no interest in an exhumation, a word that made me want to throw myself in an open grave. I couldn’t bury her by Joseph, who like his father had died of a heart attack in his fifties: Joseph, or his ashes, were in our front hall in a tin can. This had bothered me at first. “One of these days we’ll scatter him,” Jessica had said. “We’ll think of a nice place.” So we stuck the can in the cloak closet. After a while, I got used to the idea — I started calling him Prince Albert — and then even jealous. I would have liked Hattie’s ashes, something so homely and ridiculous. Where’s Hattie? Ah, yes: behind that door, up on the shelf, among the hats.

But I could bury Jessica beside her parents. So in September of 1975, the Howard kids traveled back to Iowa together in one box: Jessica, intact, in a casket; Joseph tucked at her feet. Her parents’ graves were in the Jewish section of Greenwood, a stone or three’s throw from my parents’ and Hattie’s — Rabbi Kipple had been interred across town, in a tiny Jewish graveyard that now had a view of the interstate.

Really, that’s why I brought Jessica back: I could think, She lives in Des Moines now . Far away and safe. No graveside service, and the day I buried her I wished I’d had her cremated: the ground was so cold, and the sky was so blue.

I stayed in Vee Jay with Annie, who was in her early eighties and in remarkable health. Sweet Bessie Mackintosh, her friend, had died the year before. I figured maybe Annie would be a distraction from my grief — she was an old woman, and lonely, and I could look after her — but in fact she was in better shape than me. All of the oldest girls had become sturdy old women. But Little Rose, our baby, had spent the past two years having nearly everything removed — her uterus, then part of her stomach, then her ovaries. Annie spent most of the time at the Dubuques’ house, since Ed frequently ran away to the store. “You know how men are,” Annie said. “He can’t take the fact that she’s in pain.”

“No,” I said.

Then Annie looked sympathetic. “Rose’ll love to see you. You’ll go over to their place today?”

“Of course.”

“Can you be cheery? I hate to ask you. I know this isn’t a cheery time for you. But we have to keep her in good spirits, doctor says. So can you?”

“I’m an actor,” I said, “I can be cheerful no matter what.”

She pursed her mouth cynically then, which I took as a comment on my talents.

Once again to downtown Valley Junction. The Lyric Theater had become a theatrical shop, with rubber masks of Nixon and Agnew in the window, gorilla suits, feather boas: it looked like Rocky’s pool house. Down the street, antique-store windows glittered with cut glass and old china cups; a few new restaurants had been decked out to look old-timey. There wasn’t a pool hall anywhere. And Sharp’s Gents’ was now Sharp’s Ladies’. All they stocked for men were handkerchiefs and pocket flashlights in the front case. Ed Dubuque looked like a Dutch farmer, his hair gone white but still sticking up. “Master Sharp,” he said to me when I came in. “I hope you’re not looking for clothes.”

“I’m thinking of doing a drag act,” I said. “I always looked good in lilac.”

“We have several things in a nice wash and wear,” he said seriously.

I leaned on the counter. The wooden sign on the back wall still said SHOES in thirties flat-topped serpentine script, but the footwear on the stands were sandals and high-heeled pumps, a few kids’ sneakers. This is where I spent my childhood , I thought, but of course it wasn’t: the place had moved, the railroad men were dead or retired, my father was gone. I tried to remember the smell of the old original building, a kind of leathery tang tamped down by dust, a hint of whiskey blown in from the tavern next door. “Don’t you miss the menswear?”