Niagara Falls All Over Again

  Now it seems to me that Hattie was never quite a Sharp, though I know that any of my sisters, magnified under the glass of time and regret, might seem so. Each one, you might have said: the youngest, the oldest, the kindest, the best mother, the middle girl of all those girls—she was the one we couldn’t spare.

  Or me. Years later, if it had been me, someone would have said, The only boy. Surely his father’s favorite. Look, here he is among the girls in his Battenberg lace collar. He was going to go into vaudeville, you know. Uncle Mose could dance like a dream.

  In all of my memories of Hattie, forever and ever, I’m looking up at her chin and dreaming of the day I’ll be tall enough to look down on the curve of her nose. (I never would have been.) She looks like an allegorical figure, like Liberty, or Grace, or the Pride of the Rock Island Line, or the Woman at Home for Whom You Fight.

  She’s Hattie, though. She’s a long-nosed, curly-headed, acid-tongued, too-smart-for-her-own-good Jewish girl from Iowa, and every day I wish she were still here to boss me around.

  The morning after Hattie died, my father helped me dress. That was a dance in itself, Pop holding out first my pants, then my shirt. I hopped as solemnly as I could, tried to sneak the casts on my wrists down sleeves without touching the fabric. Then I tipped up my chin to make room for his buttoning fingers.

  “Sad life, sad life,” said Papa. “Sad life, Mose.”

  And I thought, I am the ruined one.

  Two steps closer, and I would have caught her. I was certain of this. She fell into my hands, and then my wrists gave way. I tried to remember the feel of her silk dress rushing past my palms, but I couldn’t.

  That afternoon, my family sat in the sanctuary of the temple, nearly braided together on our bench: Rose lay across my lap, my father had his hand on my back beneath my jacket, Annie leaned on his shoulder, Fannie had her arm linked with Annie, then Sadie, then Ida: there was no air between us at all. My sisters’ wise husbands kept their distance: when a mother dies, a husband can comfort, can present himself and your life with him as a kind of substitute, but after the death of a sibling, a husband and children seem skimpy compared to the grief. The rabbi recited the Twenty-third Psalm, the one that told you not to be afraid of death because God walked with you always.

  It wasn’t God’s company I wanted.

  At home, my living sisters fussed till I had to run up the stairs and slam the door and roll in my bed with guilt for hating their kindness. You’ll miss her most, they said to me. I didn’t want that job all to myself. I fell asleep and dreamed of Hattie’s weight landing in my cradling arms, my knees bent to cushion my sudden burden, the flourish I took to display her to the neighbors: you will note that the young lady is completely unharmed. On the sidewalk, a crowd applauded. Then I dreamt that she landed right on top of me, safe, and I was the one who was killed, and I thought, as I woke, I’m happy to die.

  This is how it starts, I thought: your dreams are smashed and so you stay at home and accept only what life hands over. You might as well become a shopkeeper. So I tried to take my father’s cure. I worked afternoons at the store. Men came in, a little shy over how shabbily life had treated Old Man Sharp. They shook his hand, they shook their heads, and then they conducted their business. They did not even look at me, the boy who’d failed to save his sister. I held a feather duster between my forearms and pushed stock around. The doctor had set my wrists so my hands tipped back, as though I was about to applaud.

  At home, I set my wrists on my knees and stared at the casts. I’d loved my hands, though I’d never said that aloud. I’d thought them heroic. They’d rested at the small of Hattie’s back when we danced; they rose in front of me when I delivered a monologue. When I sang I let them point at my invisible and adored audience, to let them know who had broken my heart: that woman there, and that one three rows behind, and you, the blonde in lavender in the balcony. Now, locked away in plaster, they seemed small people I’d let down, friends of Hattie’s who’d always preferred her company to mine.

  These things take time, I heard my sisters whisper to each other. He’ll come around, Ed Dubuque told my father. Shows what they know, I thought to myself. I did not plan on coming around. I did not plan on letting time change me at all. I spent the whole summer this way, a silent, shattered kid, three months of bad thoughts and grieving for Hattie.

  In August, just before school started, I sat in my usual spot in the parlor, on the edge of our elderly horsehair sofa, the curtains shut against the afternoon sun. Rose came in and switched on the radio. She was strange, a little miniature Annie except more cheerful, and she loved the radio more than anything.

  “Turn that off,” I told her. “I have a headache.”

  She sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of the radio cabinet and fiddled with the knobs. “It’s time for the Fitch Shampoo Hour.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do,” said Rose. She turned and looked at me, squint-eyed. Somewhere she owned a pair of eyeglasses that she hated. “I’m going to have my own radio program,” she said.

  “No kidding,” I sighed.

  She said, grandly, “I am going to introduce great musicians. Some will be live, and some will be on records. If you make it big as a singer, you can be a guest.”

  Hadn’t anyone told her? I wasn’t a singer. I was a sixteen-year-old shopkeeper’s assistant. It irked me, as if she was really going to be in show business while I stayed in Vee Jay to man Sharp’s Gents’. “That’s great, Rose,” I said. “You’ll be a success. You’ve got a face for radio.”

  She was almost pleased before the insult hit. Then she just stared at me, and I realized who she was: our audience. My audience. Whenever Hattie and I danced or sang or tumbled, there was Rose, watching. Sometimes she asked to join in, but mostly she listened and applauded and called for encores. She might have been good on the radio. The live musicians I wasn’t so sure of; Rose was not so awfully good with people. But the records themselves—I could see her. There’s Rose, in her hands a record as black and slick and grooved as a bandleader’s brilliantined head. She’s by herself in the studio; maybe there’s someone else on the other side of the glass, but she can’t see him for the glare. She holds the record flat between her palms, as if it’s a face she’s about to dreamily kiss. (Maybe she does kiss it, just off center of the label. If it’s French, she kisses it twice. She can almost smell the pomade.) Then she sets the record on the player. Then she sets the tone arm on the record. Then in homes across the city, maybe across America, living rooms and kitchens and Hollywood bathrooms with starlets in bubbly tubs, Rose’s one action takes place.

  “Did you like that one?” she asks at the end. “Here’s another, folks.” And she sends them to sleep, to sex, to dinner, to work.

  “I wanted to ask Hattie,” she said icily, staring at the speaker, “but you know she couldn’t sing.”

  That was true.

  If you make it big, Rose had said, and suddenly I burned to be on my sister’s radio show. She was a tough kid; she wouldn’t cut her brother a break. I’d have to work. I could feel something strange kicking up at the base of my skull: possibility.

  “Do you promise?” I asked Rose.

  “Do I promise?”

  “Do you promise I’ll be on your show when I hit it big?” I said.

  She appraised me. “That’ll be nice,” she said skeptically. “I imagine I’ll be happy to have you.”

  The Scarlet Ampersand

  I began to hatch a plan. Chicago, where Hattie and I had always planned to go. Vaudeville. I could sing; everyone said so. A foot in the door. I’d talk to Ed Dubuque, who’d lived in Chicago as a young man and told me he had friends who were performers. “You should hear Paolo play piano,” he’d told me once. “He plays hymns like they’re honky-tonk, and honky-tonk like hymns.” I was sure Ed would help: he loved me, and besides, with me gone he’d surely inherit the store. We both knew that. I worked out a whole speech, and I had my mouth open
to deliver it a week after I’d insulted Rose, my father in his office at the back of the store, me and Ed by the painted window in the front of Sharp’s. The late afternoon sun dropped a banner of shadow across us: SHARP & SON’s GENTS’ FURNISHINGS. The ampersand fell right on my face: the scarlet punctuation, the mark of a straight man.

  What I said was, “Ed, I can’t breathe.”

  He put his hand to my chest solicitously. “Sit down,” he said.

  I tried again. “I can’t breathe here. In the store. In this town. Probably in the whole state of Iowa. Ed—”

  “Shhh,” he said. “Okay, Master Sharp. Hold your horses.” He looked to the back of the store, and then at his wristwatch, a Hamilton that had been a gift from my father. “After closing. We’ll talk.”

  I nodded, though then I really couldn’t breathe: all my plans swelled my throat. But we stood there silently for fifteen more minutes, and then Ed went to my father’s office and came back with both of our hats. “Follow me,” he said, and we walked out and crossed the street and up the stairs into one of the dark pool halls that downtown Vee Jay was famous for. They sold bootleg beer and Templeton whiskey, named for the nearby town that distilled it. Ed walked in like he owned the place. The bartender waved him over and the two of them gabbed and laughed for a minute, and then Ed brought over a glass of beer for me, my first ever.

  I took a sip and felt it in my collarbone, then all the way down my arms and to my fingers. Ed raised his eyebrows. Okay, I thought, but then a barrel-bellied man in railroad coveralls ambled up behind Ed and stared at us. He tapped Ed on the shoulder. Oh, God, a fight.

  “Schmidt,” said Ed.

  “Dubuque,” the guy answered. He picked up a cue and a block of chalk.

  “Pay attention,” Ed said to me. “Here’s where your education begins.”

  He doffed his tweed jacket and hung over the pool table, defying gravity the way he did, and they began to play. Everything I knew about pool I’d learned from a W. C. Fields short, which is really all you need, as long as you’re a spectator. Ed murdered the guy. They shook hands and the railroad man handed over a dollar bill.

  “Good grief, Ed,” I said. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Chicago.” He picked up his glass.

  “That’s where I want to go.”

  He waited for me to explain myself. I couldn’t. My plans—I’d been planning continuously since talking to Rose, more efficiently than I ever had with Hattie—were as precise and unlikely as a house of cards, and to disturb a single piece, I thought, would topple them over. I counted on Ed to read my mind.

  He took a swig of beer. “Why Chicago?”

  I whispered, “Vaudeville.”

  “I adore your father. . . .” he said.

  “I know you do.”

  Ed frowned. I readied myself for a lecture on Duty and Business and Courage. Instead he picked up his jacket and put it on carelessly, so he looked like a bum in a scarecrow’s too-tight duds. Then, with an elegant shake of his shoulders followed by a small finesse of his wrists, he realigned it. (That was the most valuable move Ed ever taught me. I practiced for ages, to get from fool to dandy with one shrug. It was a great sight gag. I never got as good at it as Ed.)

  “Dubuque!” yelled one of the men. “Don’t leave!”

  Ed flashed a salesman’s smile. “Stephens!” he yelled back, in a deep voice I’d never heard before. “Gotta leave!” He turned to me. “That’s why your father and I are a good team. Half the men in town won’t trust a fellow who won’t shoot billiards with them. The other half won’t trust one who does. Chicago.” Ed sighed, as though he hated the thought. “Vaudeville. Well, I can give you some names.”

  We had stopped on the steep stairs of the pool hall down to the street; a man who looked as though he’d been sleeping in a field, flossy with straw and cornsilk, passed by us. I grabbed Ed’s hand and shook it.

  He looked even more pained than he had before. “I’d try to talk you out of going, if it’d do any good.”

  “It won’t.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “I’ve left places myself a few times. You’ll need some clothes.”

  He took me back across the street to the alley entrance of the darkened store. “Mr. Sharp?” he called, unlocking the door. No answer. I’d been in Sharp’s thousands of times since childhood, but never when it was empty of my father.

  Ed moved through the store, pulling shirts from shelves, a suit from one of the storage cabinets, a straw boater from a hatbox in the back room, a pair of brown oxfords. In five minutes he’d put together a pretty snappy outfit, snappier than I would have thought possible from the stock at Sharp’s. My father would have been happy to carry nothing but coveralls and funeral suits, but Ed talked him into buying a few things for the odd local college boy. I pulled on the suit’s vest, which had so many pockets it made me look like a chest of drawers. I loved it.

  “You’ll break your father’s heart, you know,” said Ed.

  “I know.”

  “When are you going to tell him?”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” I said.

  “Then I guess you better start planning,” snapped the normally deferential Ed. “Don’t be a coward. It’s too hard to live with yourself. Your father deserves a good-bye. More than that, but at least that much.”

  I stared at the floor. I could not imagine a world in which I would jauntily tell my father, So long, I’m off to seek my fortune. He’d tell me no, and I’d have to sneak out of town anyhow. “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Mose,” he said. He gave his head a tiny, tragic shake. “You’re too young to have so hard a heart.”

  The problem was, it wasn’t hard. The problem was, the minute my father looked at me, I was ready to kick off those oxfords, hem my pants instead of cuffing them, give up all those clothes no workingman would ever consider even trying on, and assume my position behind the counter at Sharp’s Gents’. If I did that, my heart would harden for real. People who manage to turn things down, jobs and marriage and children, love and steady meals, have hearts soft as velvet, hearts—like my new fine duds—never meant for work. These people cry at movies and weddings and funerals. They compose sentimental songs crooned across country, and letters to long-gone lovers. (But only lovers who will stay gone.) They paint. They write poetry. They star in movies. Believe me, I know. Their voices make fun of their own bad habits—a love of money or liquor or pretty girls in skimpy dresses—on living-room radios turned louder by strange teenage girls who laugh in all the wrong places.

  History remembers the velvet hearted. I hoped to remain one of them.

  But the Cow Wasn’t Armed

  Two days later I worked at Sharp’s Gents’ for the last time. Ed had taken the day off. He might have worried that he’d suddenly blurt out the details of my escape. At five, my father and I closed the store. Something had gone wrong with a shipment of gloves: the factory had thrown them in a box, all sizes, each glove separated from its partner. So for an hour after five, that’s what we did; we sat in the back of the store and married gloves. I had to open each glove to find the label, but my father could judge size by a glance. He sorted them as though he was shaking hands with dozens of strangers, as quickly as a politician at a campaign whistle-stop: good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

  “Who teaches the business course at school?” he asked. “You’ll take it?”

  “Miss Kemp,” I said. The school year started in a week. Of course he assumed I’d be there.

  “A woman,” he said. “You could teach it better. Ah, well.”

  The brown canvas of the gloves dried out my fingers. “Miss Kemp’s smart.”

  “She is not a businessman,” said my father. “She is not like us. Well, you’ll get an A, and then after college, maybe you’ll teach the class.”

  I tried to break the news. “I don’t know where I’ll be in four years,” I told Pop.

  “Here,” said my father.

  “I’ll go to
Iowa City,” I lied. “And then maybe—”

  “Listen.” My father looked at me. He never wore glasses a day in his life, though he lived to be ninety-four. His brown irises were gold flecked. “This is your store.”

  “No, Pop, it’s your store.”

  “It is not. This store belongs to you. Do you know how old I am? I am seventy-eight years old. There is nothing on the earth that belongs to me. I am done with it: this store, this town, this life. Anything now I use, I borrow. I borrow from you. Do you understand?”

  “You’re fine, Pop,” I told him.

  “Today, yes. Tomorrow, who knows? I have come a long way, Mose. I am nearly finished. You are just getting started. Don’t let this go to waste.”

  “I don’t know how to run a business.”

  He stopped matching gloves for a minute and touched me on the shoulder. “You think you don’t,” he said gently. “You’ll meet a girl. You’ll get married, you’ll have children. You have this store, then your son will have this store. You needn’t wander around.”

  “But if I want to—”

  “Don’t,” he said. He picked up another pair of gloves. “I did. It’s no life.”

  He did not look like a man done with life: he’d outlived his much younger wife and seven of his children, but nobody would have guessed his age; he’d grown to be a cute old man, his creamy skin kept smooth by morning shaves at Carson’s barbershop, his mustache and hair trimmed several times a week. He could have shaved himself, of course, but how else would he get to know the men of Valley Junction? By leaving me Sharp’s Gents’ of Vee Jay, he imagined he was bequeathing not just a job for the rest of my days, not just the chance to support my sisters when he was dead, but something much better: the love he had cultivated in this tiny town bordered on one side by the state capitol, and the other by cow barns and cornfields. Not as good as a mother’s love, he knew, but more durable. The girls could take care of each other. A motherless boy needed something else.