Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken Page B

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.
    â€œDid 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œDo you promise?” I asked Rose.
    â€œDo I promise?”
    â€œDo 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—”
    â€œShhh,” 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.
    â€œSchmidt,” said Ed.
    â€œDubuque,” the guy answered. He picked up a cue and a