Niagara Falls All Over Again (16 page)

“The ignorant,” she answered.

Iowa Stripped to the Waist

One memorable night in my childhood, we found a vagrant sleeping on the settee on the screened porch; he'd let himself in through the screen door. We didn't know what to do; we stared at him as though he were a dozing skunk. My father said, “Let him rest,” and in the morning Hattie (the only one of us brave enough) went out with a sack of doughnuts that Annie had made that morning, which, considering Annie's doughnuts, was either charity or punishment.

I wondered whether the diamond pattern of the wicker had bitten into his skin the way it was biting into mine. I was home, but I wasn't home: I was in the transient spot, the place you could fall asleep without the honest members of the household noticing. Above me, in my own bed, Rocky snored, the guy who'd engineered this neat trick: me in Valley Junction again. What a prank that telegram had been, a harebrained, cruel, canny, kind trick. I was so grateful to the guy I hated it, and to this day—six decades later—one of my greatest regrets is I never managed to tell him so.

Rocky the practical joker snuck into the sunporch early the next morning. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go look at the bright spots of your youth.” We took my father's car, an old Jewett, which nobody drove anymore, and headed out for the city.

“I don't think I'll marry Annie,” Rocky said. “Do you mind?”

“Who says she wants to marry you?” I asked.

“A wise woman. But Rose! Rose has forsaken me!”

I explained what I knew of what had happened.

“A Catholic!” Rocky said, and whistled. “A bad business, that bunch. If I were your father, I'd form a posse.”

“That's not it,” I said.

“S'okay. Little Rose, married. I never thought she'd do me this way. What's she, eleven?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Oh, well, then, she
had
to settle for a Quigley. That's some story, about your folks. So, hey: where are those bright spots?”

Des Moines at first glance isn't pretty, but if you look hard and in the right places, it reveals its beauty. Look harder, and it gets ugly all over again.

We drove down Polk Boulevard, under the elms, past the grand lawns, then swung around and took Grand Avenue downtown, past George the Chili King's, over to Gray's Lake. It was 7:00
A
.
M
., and the city was still shut down, a museum of my childhood, everything behind glass. We drove by the Jewish Community Center, where I used to go to dances, and then past the fairgrounds. I'd managed to come back home. I'd seen my family. I'd lived.

The one person I was still avoiding was Hattie.

It was like Hattie was a dear friend who I'd fallen out of touch with while I was away, one I'd thought of all the time and meant to write, and then the meaning-to-write began to eclipse the friendship itself, until the memory was half guilt, half melancholy. I'd betrayed Hattie somehow. I had the sense that she still lived in town but I'd been so lousy about everything that I couldn't bear to look her up. And so I had to avoid all of the places she might possibly be. If this had been a movie, I suppose I would have gone to her grave and wept. I didn't. I hate cemeteries. We should all be cremated. We should all be thrown up in the air. How would
I
like to be remembered? Not as a body in a box, that's for sure.

We ended up at the State House grounds, Des Moines' grandest spot. Once there had been some slums at the western foot of the hill, but they'd been torn down. I'd've loved to take Rock into the State House itself: even an Easterner would be impressed by the glory of that building. Instead, we walked around to the south side to look at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, a solid column topped by Victory, skirted at its base with sculptures of Iowa Personified, A Mother's Sacrifice, and (at each corner) a Soldier or Sailor. A beaut of a monument when you first saw it; then, suddenly, not. The triumphant servicemen seemed on closer inspection leeringly drunk. The old mother sitting with a child at her feet was venerable, then haggard. Was that a feather duster in Victory's hand? And Iowa Personified was a young bare-to-the-waist woman who held up her breasts, one in each hand, thrusting them toward—well, who knew? She was supposed to be offering nourishment, but she looked like a cooch dancer. The inscription above her head read,
Iowa, her affections, like the rivers of her borders, flow to an inseparable union.

As a kid I'd suspected there was something smutty about that. Most astonishing to me then was that a man hadn't left Iowa topless: a woman had. There was the sculptress's name on the pedestal, Harriet Ketchum. I was an educated boy, and I knew that a naked sculpture implied the existence of an actual naked lady. The statue itself didn't titillate me, but the fact that it had once been near a semiclad artist's model did. Maybe Harriet Ketchum just looked at herself in the mirror.

Now Rocky eyeballed it. He said, “She looks like she's trying to unscrew her tits, but can't figure out if they come off clockwise or counterclockwise.”

He had a point.

“And,” he added, “all the boys come here and give her a rub for luck.”

“Could be. I've never heard that.”

“I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. Wherever there are public breasts, there are boys rubbing them for luck. See how they're a different color than the rest of her?”

“No, actually.”

“So what did you do here as a kid? Sled? What?” It was windy and bright on the hill, and Rocky looked like a monument himself, his coat flowing behind him, the wind rattling his white shirt. Heavy men always look handsome in a breeze.

“We took our sleds here, sure.” And though I thought I'd brought him to an unsentimental place, I remembered coming here with Hattie, winters with toboggans, summers with sheets to spread out on the lawn. Our sister Ida and her family lived on Ninth Street, and in August on visits we were allowed to bundle up our bedclothes and walk here for the breeze that hit this hill and no place else, as though it was paying its respects to the politicians. Plenty of families would have had the same clever idea. The side of the hill, as we walked up hugging our pillows, looked like a ramshackle galaxy: a child beneath a bleached sheet, glowing faintly, was a distant star; a fat man in his undershirt shone as bright as Venus; look, there are the Pleiades, all seven, dozing. I can't imagine sleeping outside these days, but we could, we did. Not all night. Hattie would wake me. She'd poke me with the toe of her shoe, but I bided my time till she had to crouch and put her hand on my back. “Mose, Mosey,” she said, quiet because of the dreamers all around us. “Ida will worry. Let's go.”

Ah, God. Grief was a flood. I knew that from growing up in Valley Junction, where the Raccoon River jumped its banks once a decade and slunk into town like a convict come back to a favorite crime scene. The floods soaked your basement, the rains that caused the floods came through the shingles of the roof into the attic, the very places you saved things. People sandbagged and waited for the water to go down. Basements were worse. Your beloved belongings floated until they sank. The water eventually dragged down everything you owned, your books, your diaries, your most seaworthy childhood toys. When the water left and your life was back out in the air, your things would be so heavy you couldn't lift them to throw them away, mildew blooming like black roses already. But before the water receded, everything you loved was somewhere underneath, and if you couldn't clearly see it all, neither could you see what had been destroyed. While your belongings were submerged, you could walk among them, slowly by necessity. There was no need to clean up. There was no need to salvage some things and burn others and arrange for replacements. You stood in the water, and though once the place dried out you could get to work, you hoped it never would: look, that chair's sound, that magazine's legible, that face in the photo album's only slightly blurred, ready for conversation or kisses. We're only separated. We still can see.

Leave that shipwreck alone.

Adam and Eve Was a Marriage of Convenience

Our train left the next morning at nine. “Stay!” said Annie, and we had to explain that we actually
were
employed, that people waited for us in California. My father was sitting in his chair when I got ready to leave. I took his outstretched hand and he reeled me in—where had such strength come from?—and I tumbled into his lap. I'm breaking my elderly father! I thought, but I felt his arm around me, his knuckles fondly knocking my shoulder. “Come back,” he whispered. “Come to California,” I whispered back. He knocked on my shoulder twice more and let me go. My father shared my superstition—maybe he was the one who put the idea in my head—and we did not say the word
good-bye
. I was not so sad. I'd come to Iowa and lived, and surely that meant I could return whenever I wanted.

We took a local to Fort Madison, where we boarded the Super Chief to California, an all-Pullman train, very deluxe, very Hollywood. Ahead of us, in our car, a thin woman in a suit with a fox collar stepped out of a compartment. She turned around and looked up.

“Penny!” I said.

“Mr. Sharp!” she said back, and then in a low friendly voice, “Mr. Carter.”

He paused. “
Mrs.
Carter.” He muscled by me to kiss her. When they turned, Rocky held out Penny's wrist, as though her hand were a flashlight he meant to shine at my face.

“Meet the little woman,” said Rocky, and Penny smiled dazzlingly in my general direction. Ah. There was a ring on that hand. I tried to sort this out: Penny was not in New York. Penny was on the train. Penny and Rocky appeared to be married.

How could he have kept
that
a secret from me?

“No kidding!” I said, and gave her a kiss. We had to bust it up to let a middle-aged couple get past us.

“You haven't told me how I look,” said Penny.

“You're beautiful, Pen,” I said. “You don't look married at all.” That wasn't true. She looked married and divorced and already facing a long future alone. “But when did this
happen
?”

Rocky shrugged. Penny said, “The night before you left. We figured, California! Why not go together? We'd've told you, but . . . surprised, right?” She laughed delightedly, as though your husband wanting to keep your marriage from his best friend was good news under certain circumstances. Rocky wouldn't look at me.

Nevertheless, the newlyweds went to their compartment and I went to mine. The bed pulled down from the wall right in front of the window: it made me feel like a failed tank act, drowned, pressed up against the glass for the audience—people at the stations we pulled into, that is—to gawk at. I couldn't get over this sudden marriage. Probably he'd been drunk, maybe they both had. I remembered how indifferent he'd seemed to Penny when we left her the first time, waving in Penn Station at our northbound train. Maybe he'd married her out of a different brand of boredom, and was ashamed.

I was a bachelor then. Now I'm sure it wasn't shame or restlessness. Rocky knew how to talk about anything but happiness, and Penny, for all her chatter and nightclub flash, made the guy authentically happy. He couldn't explain it, so he wouldn't try. In those days Rock never said anything he couldn't bluff his way out of.

Somehow I could not imagine that we were actually moving toward California: it seemed more likely that California was being pulled toward us, on giant chains run by the train engine, and that we stayed where we were while the cars rocked from the effort. Where I had picked up such a cinematic notion, I have no idea, but that's what eventually happened in our movies. No matter where trouble found Carter and Sharp—Mexico, Mars, Italy, New Orleans—we ourselves were always on a Californian movie lot, and the mountains, the craters, the Mardi Gras parade, were pulled in by chains and prettied up with paint.

In the morning I went to meet them in the red-and-black dining car. Penny wasn't up yet; Rock waited by himself in one of the orange leather booths.

“She's a great girl,” I said as I sat down. “Now, tell me the truth. Are you divorced from your
last
wife?”

“Yes!” he said. “Penny made me, actually, and there went my last good reason for not getting married. I only hope your father is right about this come-to-love business.”

“You love her already, and you know it,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. I'll tell you the truth, Professor. I've never seen a woman so quickly ruined by marriage.” He said this as though he was not the man who instigated the marriage, and therefore the ruin.

“She looks fine,” I said. I was a matrimonial amateur, but it struck me as unseemly to talk about your wife that way. Then I said it: “I know I'm an amateur—”

“That's right,” said Rocky. “You'll learn. You know”—he reached across the table and flicked at my lapel—“I've never seen you look so unpressed.”

“Unimpressed?”

“Wrinkled,”
said Rocky.

Penny arrived then, yawning and smoking. She slid in next to Rocky and reached across him to grind out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Mike's a mess,” said Rocky.

“He looks swell,” said Penny, for whom wrinkles were a kind of sartorial braille.

Poor kid. She was wearing a great deal of makeup, which just made her look more exhausted. I don't think Rocky really was to blame. Nightclub singers don't age well—all that smoke and liquor and nightly pining. Besides, someone who liked to flirt as much as Penny did would be miserable married: she was like a dog chasing a rabbit for years only to discover that, upon cornering the thing, she didn't much care for rabbits. I started really liking Penny, once she was married to Rock: as she put it (somewhat to my embarrassment), we shared a husband. That would get me into trouble later.