Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken Page A

starts again, and stops again, and starts.
    When you travel alone, you pick up your own set of words. If asked, you’d say you never wanted to hear them again:
Niagara Falls, Miriam, Mimi, Savant, Louisville, Valley Junction, Iowa
. But that’s not true. You wish some innocent stranger
would
say them, so you can act in self-defense. You stare at people; you dare them to say the words. Comedy is not realistic: the straight man stops and lets the comic live, three, four, five times—he beats him silly but not bloody. In real life you wouldn’t stop, you’d keep pummeling until you’d thrashed those words right out of the world. They’d be gone, and you’d be the one who banished them.
    I took the train back to Chicago, to try my luck at another talent show. From there, I got a job assisting a morphine-addicted magician who seemed bent on setting me on fire. Then suddenly I was in Duluth again, dancing alone in my boardinghouse to keep my legs up. Someone knocked at the door, and for a moment, still dancing, I imagined who it might be: Miriam, come to ask my forgiveness. Boris the seal, honking that fish tasted sweeter from my fingers than anyone else’s. Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, fighting over whether I’d be the headliner in the Follies or the Scandals.
    It was the landlady, a red-nosed woman in a striped housecoat. “You’re keeping everyone awake,” she said. Then she thrust an envelope into my hand, a telegram from the hungry agent that said,
Can you dance? Learn Pantages Minneapolis tomorrow
.
    Could I dance? I could fly. I packed my case and caught a train that night. “Lucky guy,” I told myself as we pulled out of Duluth, and then wondered when I’d started talking aloud. That is, I said, aloud, “When did you start talking to yourself?” The guy next to me sighed, then changed seats.
    All the way to Minneapolis, I shined my shoes. When I got there, I had to dirty them up again, because the skinny guy in charge of the tab show wanted a Dutch comic who could dance—the one they’d booked had a bum appendix. He’d been taken to the hospital in his costume but left behind his wig. Afterward, I was fired again. The beginning of the end, I thought. Time to listen: vaudeville was dying. I should leave before it killed me too. I stood in the wings and watched the girls onstage, lovely in their skimpy costumes, the light off the umbrellas they turned hitting my face like rainwater. Maybe that’s why the agitated comic behind me—his straight man vomiting in somebody’s purse—noticed me. Probably I was just close up. He was a stout man whose suspenders seemed in danger of pulling his pants to his chin, and he was doing a small dance of impatience in the wings.
    â€œYou’ll do,” he said to me.
    Remember: the Pantages, Minneapolis, September 1931?
    This is where you came in.

5
    Good-bye, Freddy, Good-bye
    The morning after we met, like a couple who gets drunk in a strange town and wakes up with rings on their fingers and a few faint happy memories of the evening before, Rocky and I went out to breakfast to take a gander at what we’d gotten ourselves into. What had roused me from bed was rolling over and getting stabbed by a pin that affixed a note to my shirtfront:
Meet me at the Busy Bee 10 A
. M .
Your partner.
    My partner!
    Said partner, I had thought, was a dark-haired clown in makeup and baggy pants. A patsy. An overexcited fat man. I looked around the Busy Bee, and all I saw was a blond guy in a good suit, puffy from drink but handsome, who waved at me. Then he waved a little harder.
    When people ask me what he was like, I always want to say the one thing they won’t believe: he was good-looking. They have eyes, these people, and they’ve seen the party in question plenty. Dark hair sticking up, sloppy fat, useless with his hands and feet, squeaky, breathless. With rare exceptions, if you