“I hear you’re a star of stage and screen, Master Sharp,” he said.
“Stage, I guess,” I said, “and not a star. Other than that, you’ve got it right. Is my father here?”
He gave me a head-swinging appraisal, his forearms still resting on my shoulders. “No,” he said. “He doesn’t come in anymore. He’s not at home?”
“We’re on our way there. Never comes in?”
Ed grimaced and smiled at the same time. “He’s ninety. He’s not so good, Mose. Figured that’s why you were here.”
“It is why,” said Rocky from the back of the store, where he was leafing through a stack of folded shirts. He walked over to the counter to shake Ed’s hand. “Pleased to meet you—Ed? I’m Rocky Carter, Mose’s partner.”
“A pleasure,” said Ed.
Rocky clapped his hands together. “So. Let’s go. Let’s go to six twenty-five Eighth Street and see your father.”
“You know the place?” Ed asked.
“Oh,” said Rocky, “I imagine I’ll know it when I see it.”
Ed turned to me. “Master Sharp,” he said delicately. “Your suit.”
“You recognize it?”
Ed inclined his head in sorrow. “You can’t see your father like that.” He fingered the lapel, which was shredding at the edges. He was right: nothing would count if my father thought I looked shabby. Well, I had a suitcase full of fine clothes, I’d just go in the back and change—but Rocky, always helpful, had started undressing a mannequin who leaned in the doorway in the back.
“We can find something—” Ed began. He must have thought I was down on my luck, dressed as I was.
“No,” I said. “Rock’s right. I’ll wear what that guy’s wearing.” So we stripped the dummy of his herringbone jacket and I put it on, and Rocky and I set out.
At least the house was where we’d always kept it, at Eighth and Hillside at the top of the hill. Rock and I walked there in silence. Every now and then he gave me a pat on one shoulder. Four steps up the porch; red door; chipped black knob. Was I supposed to knock? I didn’t know. Rock reached around and did it for me. I looked down at my new clothes: that dummy must have been in the window, once, and for a long time; the jacket was sun-damaged.
I swore I would remain my grown-up self. Everything had changed since I’d left ten years before: people paid money to look at me. They applauded and usually laughed. Girls from every state in the nation had praised me for my kindness, my patience, my impatience. It’s only your father, I thought. It’s only any old tough audience.
“Knock ’em dead, kid,” Rocky said under his breath as the door began to open.
There was Annie, middle-aged, fat, and gray. “You’re not supposed to be here yet!” she cried, hugging me. She was soft; she smelled of boiled vegetables; she smelled like Iowa. “I didn’t think you’d really come, Mosey,” she said. “I thought you were gone forever. Come in, come in. Nobody’s here now but Papa and me, not till dinner. Come in. And your friend! Mr. Carter?”
“Annie Sharp,” Rocky said warmly. “I’d recognize you anywhere.” He pushed me through the doorway. “Do I smell cookies?” he asked.
“No,” said Annie, puzzled.
Then we were in the house at the foot of the stairs, the flowered blue wallpaper, the carved newel post that looked like a chess piece. Rocky was still pushing me. “Here,” said Annie, and she led me to the parlor. I felt Rocky’s hands leave my back.
Pop sat in a chair, his feet propped on a comically small ottoman I didn’t recognize. He’d grown his beard back, red despite his age. A made-up bed had been jammed in the corner by the front windows.
“Hello,” I said, and he raised his head.
Something had happened to his face. The left side had fallen like a velvet curtain caught on a prop. He looked like the thing he’d been outrunning his whole life: an old Jew, a remnant of the old country. A foreigner. In fact, he looked something like I did in my Hebe act. I’d changed suits because I didn’t want to look shabby in his presence, but his own clothes were ragged, and I understood that he realized he was dying, and there was no point in being fitted for a new suit. This was not frugality—my father owned a storeful of suits—but a kind of superstition. In his old age my father believed that the Evil Eye was everywhere, even in dressing rooms. Don’t tempt it with plans. The beard made him look sloppy, but his softened cheek wouldn’t have stood up to a razor.
I only wanted him to invite me into the room. I only wanted his forgiveness. His blessings—Oh, I wanted everything my father had planned to give me all those years before: I just didn’t want the building they were stored in. My father was a businessman and had offered me a deal: I turned it down, everything, and only now did it occur to me that we should have bargained longer, that I could have bought the stock—by which I mean my father’s love—and left behind the real estate.
“Look, Papa: it’s Mosey,” said Annie. I took a few more steps in. “He’s like this,” she said to me. “Stroke. Just two weeks ago. He’s fine, only a little slower. I would have written, but then we got your wire.” She knelt at his chair and held his hand: I’d never seen her so tender. “It’s fine, it’s fine. You know who this is.” If he wasn’t sure it was me, who was I? Some young man in a suit that looked familiar, ruined by the sun so it seemed, in the dark room, as though he was standing in a sunbeam anyhow. Was I looking for work? A handout? His blessing to marry one of his daughters? Pop raised his arms, though one barely left his lap. I went and took that heavier hand. It felt like a prop, too, a folded dusty lady’s fan, lace over cracked ivory.
“So,” said Pop, in a similarly cracked voice, “you’re a little late for dinner.”
My father, the comedian. At last we had something in common.
Annie had left the room; I could hear her talking to Rocky in the kitchen, the clang of dishes: she was trying to make up for the lack of cookies.
“Are you married?” Pop asked me. He’d probably been rehearsing that line too.
“No.”
He nodded, and then said, “Don’t wait too long.” Annie and Rocky appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Already Rock was eating a beige boiled chicken leg. Then he saw my father and, thinking he should look presentable and be introduced already, tried to find a place to put it. Annie put her hand out, and he gratefully gave her the awful-looking thing. She took it with her back to the kitchen.
“Pop,” I said, “I want you to meet my partner. This is Rocky Carter.”
Rock knelt at my father’s feet, as Annie had, and shook my father’s ailing hand. “It’s a pleasure, sir,” he said.
“Mr. Carter,” said my father, nodding. “What is it that you do for a living?”
Rock looked up at me.
“He’s a comedian. Like me. We do an act together.”
“But after that?” said my father. He pointed at Rock. “Not forever.”
“Probably not,” said Rocky, “but for now.”
Pop regarded me with an expression I recognized. Hope. Sure: this was my partner, we were in some strange business together—why not stay here and take over the store? Always room for another name on the plate glass window: Sharp and Son and Friend.
“You,” said my father to Rocky. “Sir. Are you married?”
Rocky scratched the back of his head, ashamed. “That’s a complicated question.”
“Bah!” said my father, but he smiled. “You young men! Why do you wait like this? Not good to have children late. Too much time wondering, will they be orphans.”
Pop meant himself, of course: he waited, he worried. Now he looked at me. “Why I married your mother.”
“Why?” I asked.
“An orphan,” he said. “Now, I wonder like my friend the rabbi. What will become of my daughter? Who will marry her? An orphaned girl is hard to marry. You,” he said to Rocky. “You, perhaps.”
Rocky looked at me slyly. “Where is Rose?”
My father frowned, and hissed in contempt at s
uch a question. “No. Not—Annie. Who will marry Annie.”
From the kitchen we heard the humiliated sound of someone trying to drown out gossip from the other room with running water. I couldn’t tell whether Pop’s eyes were so bad he couldn’t see that Rocky was young, or his memory so bad he’d forgotten that Annie was old. Middle- aged, anyhow: she was nearly fifty, too old even for a slaphappy friendly guy like Rock.
“You’ll stay for dinner,” my father said to Rocky.
I was about to make an excuse, but Rocky answered, wincing only slightly, “Thank you, sir. Of course I will.”
In the kitchen, I tried to ask Annie about Rose, but she hushed me, and pointed to the parlor. I understood only that my father did not want her name spoken. As the house filled up with my sisters and their families, Rose was not even mentioned. My sister Fannie arrived first, holding a fat pink baby I was shocked to learn was her granddaughter. “This is Great-Uncle Mose,” she said, waggling the baby into my arms.
“Oof,” I said. “Who are you? You’re heavy.”
“That’s Francine,” she said. “Marilyn’s girl.”
The baby scanned my forehead as though it were the morning paper.
That was how the night went: This is Leah’s Lou; there’s Sally’s David. I was as flummoxed as a total stranger, my sisters and their children had been so fruitfully multiplying. My brothers-in-law—Morris, Ben, Abe—each took me aside and offered me money. Abe, Sadie’s husband, actually slipped some bills into my hand. “Take it,” he said. “To set you up. I’m jealous, you know.”
“What of?”
We stood in the hall, and he peered into the parlor, teeming with babies and children and teenagers and wives. My God: how many sisters did I have? “Youth,” Abe said. “You know, I was a pretty fair dancer as a kid.” He gave his considerable belly a pat, as though it were a trunk that held all of his former success. “So take the money, and become famous with it, and maybe you’ll give me a part in one of your pictures.”
I didn’t need the cash, but you know what? His pride was worth more than my pride, so I took it. Seventy-five bucks.
I talked to Fannie, Sadie, Ida. I talked to their daughters—God’s fancy joke, all those girls turning into more girls, though in the next generation down there were plenty of boys, and I wanted to say to my father, See? You can leave the store to Max and David and Lou: Sharp and Great-Grandsons.
The dining-room table had been stretched to an Olympic length with leaves and card tables at either end; we all sat around it, some in the dining room and some in the parlor. My father sat at the head of the table, Rocky and I flanking him, the long-lost son and his portly goyishe fair-haired brother. The design on Rock’s dinner plate never saw daylight, with so many women rushing to serve him. He was extra-solicitous of Annie, who avoided him till she realized he wasn’t avoiding her.
“I thought tsimmes had carrots,” he said.
“No,” Abe said gravely—my God, I hope he didn’t slip Rocky money!—“Elsewhere, yes, but not in this family. Carrots in a tsimmes are a crime. Never speak of them.”
“I’m sorry,” said Rocky, just as gravely. “I didn’t know.”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” said Annie, ladling more tsimmes onto Rock’s plate.
When Abe made a reference to the European war, the sisters quieted him. Fannie, who was given to speaking what she believed was Yiddish so the children wouldn’t understand, said, “Ssshh. Der Kinder.”
“I’m saying only that at the Settlement House—”
“Tell me, Mr. Sharp,” Rocky said to my father. “When did you come to this country?”
My father turned to Rocky very slowly, brushing some crumbs out of his beard with the edge of his good hand. “Eighteen eighty,” he said. “First, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I met my wife—”
“Sssh, sshh,” I said to some teenage niece, who was whispering about a boyfriend in my ear. All around the table, the Sharp children quieted whoever was talking. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania? Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania?
There is nothing the least bit shocking about Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. We had simply never heard my father suggest anything but that life began in Iowa.
All sides of the endless table grew silent. My father noticed, though he continued to address Rocky directly: he just spoke louder. It was an effort for him. “Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” he said, “was where I met Rabbi Louis Kipple.” He pointed down the table to the portrait in the parlor. “And his daughter, my Goldie.”
“Did you love her right away?” Rock asked.
My father smiled. “She did not make a good impression, no. She was not so fond of me. But she was new. I went to see the rabbi to ask a question. His wife, not a well woman, not a nice woman, answered the door with the baby, I asked for the rebbe, she thrust the baby into my arms, squalling and screaming”—my father mimed a thrust baby as best he could—“and so I met Goldie. But had I plans to marry then, no.”
Have you ever wondered about what happens before Genesis? Why didn’t God make Adam and Eve infants? My father had never told us this story. We had never asked.
Rocky said, “So then—”
“So!” said my father. “My question for Rabbi Kipple: How shall I worship when I travel? Shall I go to Iowa? We discuss. Fifteen years later his wife is dead, and he writes a letter: Can you get a minyan together in Des Moines, what about a shul, and then he comes, with Goldie, to Children of Israel. And then he grows sick, wants to arrange a wedding. Goldie prepared the meal. Awful. I thought, who will teach her to cook? A little Jewish girl, alone. Sixteen and fat. She would become a maid or shopgirl. I invited a child to live with me, I married her so no talk from the neighbors. I knew nothing of marriage. American marriages. They must involve love. Mine did.”
“She was beautiful,” said Rocky, as though he remembered her.
Pop nodded. He seemed exhausted. “So, my friend, Mr. Carter, this is why I tell you: it is good to marry. I didn’t know myself. I thought I was only being kind.”
Oh, we were grateful to Rocky. We were angry, too. We—I am willing to speak for my sisters, now, for any child of a close-mouthed father—could not believe this was happening. A guy just waltzes in, and the next thing we know my father is telling stories like it’s nothing. He held a baby in his arms, and fifteen years later he married her. That story was my inheritance, not Rocky’s!
I am an old man myself now, and I understand. Your own children and their questions! They interrupt you. Their eyes bulge when a relative in a story behaves in a way they can’t imagine (and they can’t imagine much). They interrupt again, though every question they ask, every single one, is the same: How exactly has this story shaped my life? Why haven’t you told me this before, didn’t you know what it would mean to me?
Maybe it’s just a good story. Maybe you just want to tell it.
My sisters left not long after dinner; with the table set up in two rooms, it was hard to linger. Rock and I formed a two-man receiving line at the door. After Ida had kissed Rocky’s cheek, she turned to me. Then she burst into tears. “You’re bald!” she said. “And I’m fat!” She threw herself into my arms.
“I’m not bald,” I said, the bratty little brother. She pinched my back to make me behave. “Sorry, sorry,” she said into my shoulder, then she stepped back and dried her face with a lavender handkerchief. “It’s just: next time, don’t be gone so long. Don’t let me only hear you on the radio. I never thought I’d be jealous of Rudy Vallee, but I thought, Why does he get to talk to my brother and I don’t?”
I took her hand and handkerchief, both wet. At least somebody in the family had an idea that comedy wasn’t some hobby I’d picked up. She wasn’t fat, Ida, just plump around the middle, and her eyes were still purplish-blue.
“He promises!” Rocky said.
“And he’s a man of his word,” said Ben, shepherding his wife out.
The house felt forsaken once they’d all gone. Annie invited Rocky to
stay overnight. No point going all the way to the Fort Des Moines.
“Take my room,” I said. “I’ll stay down here, and sleep near Pop.”
My father’s bed had been moved to the parlor so he didn’t have to climb stairs. I didn’t want to climb them myself, to wake up in the sleigh bed, waiting for Hattie to come through the window. Instead, I’d sleep on the sunporch on the old wicker settee, piled under quilts to keep warm.
It was late enough. Rock and my father both went to bed in opposite corners of the house, and I went to talk to Annie while she cleaned. There wasn’t much to do, she’d had so much help in the kitchen.
“See?” she said. She sat me down at the table and poured me a cup of coffee. I could see the elm out back, and suddenly I wanted to climb it. “You’ve come home once. Now you can do it over and over.”
“Sure,” I said.
“A nice man, your friend Rocky. Tell him I’m not waiting for a proposal.”
“I will. So tell me—where is Rose?”
“Gone,” said Annie, and turned her attention to the sink.
“Yes, I know, but where has she gone?”
She shrugged and began to wash the bottom of a round pot in careful circular strokes, as though trying not to wake it. “Married. So she told us. To a man named Quigley.”
“Quigley,” I said. I tried to absorb this: Rose had married a man with a funny name, and so—
“Catholic,” Annie said quietly to the pot.
“Oh.” I nodded. “Disowned.”
Annie shrugged again, miserable.
“Did he disown me, when I left?”
She spun suddenly, and held the soapy pot to her chest, as though she’d forgotten what it was—a bouquet of flowers, the hand of someone to whom she professed love. “No, of course not. We couldn’t forget you. You were always our boy.”
Exactly what I was afraid of and hoped for. “Well, at least Rose left for love.”
“Love!” Annie sniffed. “No, for love she would have stayed. She didn’t even ask!”