3

Who Needs Hattie

Years passed. My father joined Temple B’nai Jeshurun, the Reform congregation in Des Moines, and though Fannie was already married and Annie (according to Hattie) seemed determined to stay a spinster, Ida and then Sadie met and married nice Jewish boys. I worked at the store one or two afternoons a week, a good son, dutiful, deferential, my necktie precisely knotted, my hair perfectly combed. I asked questions, customers answered. I grew taller (though not tall) and, according to the local gossip, handsome. Good looks are an asset for a businessman. At home, I practiced with Hattie, learned to lead while dancing (though we made it all up; my father would not pay for dancing lessons), learned to watch and guess what would come next.

In other words, I was brought up a straight man.

But then, at the start of Hattie’s senior year of high school, the principal came to the house. Mr. Blaine was a young man with a flat, round face and matching silver-rimmed spectacles: the only color to him was whatever the lenses caught and reflected. The kids at school liked his childish nervousness; we thought we could always outwit him. He walked into our parlor holding his hat, and said, “Mr. Sharp, sir, I’ve come to talk to you about Hattie.”

Pop nodded. “Hattie, Mose. Why don’t you wait in the yard?”

So we went outside and sat on the back steps. “Has Mr. Blaine come to propose marriage, then?” I asked.

Hattie smirked. “Of course. We were planning to run away together, but—” Her gray cotton dress had a rash of roses stitched near the collar; she felt them with the tips of her fingers. “No. He’s talking to Pop about college. For me.”

“Oh. He thinks you should go?”

She shrugged. Not many Valley Junction girls went to college in 1924. Nobody in our family ever had, except for Rabbi Kipple, smiling from his portrait. We read always. But college?

“You don’t need a degree to dance,” I said.

“No,” she said. Then suddenly, “Don’t get mad.”

“I won’t,” I answered, already starting.

“I think college isn’t such a bad idea. For me. We’ll go somewhere afterward. Mose?”

I had thought I’d be getting out of Iowa soon. Vaudeville would surely take me out; the only problem was it might keep bringing me back. But that would be okay, playing Des Moines. We’d be written up in the paper. When the Titanic went down, a boxed item on the front page of the Register announced that there were no Iowans on board. It went on and on about no Iowans being on board. Surely if that was news, two local kids headlining at the Orpheum Theater would be. There was another Iowa vaude act, the Cherry Sisters, four girls from Indian Creek who were famous—really—because they sang so terribly, and so obliviously. The local papers loved the Cherry Sisters.

“Iowa City,” said Hattie. “That’s where Mr. Blaine says I should go. He says”—here Hattie used the voice she’d made up for all dull grown-ups—“‘there are Jewish girls there, Ha-aa-Hattie.’ He figures Hattie has to be a nickname, but what’s the full form? He says I’m a pioneer. He means I’m Jewish. They call me the little Jewish girl. That bright little Jewish girl.”

I turned and looked at her. “So why do you want to do what he says?”

She was quiet. The roses on her dress looked inflamed from her scratching. “I just do,” she said finally.

Now I think: she wanted to get away from us. I understand. It’s why I eventually left myself. In Vee Jay, she was a Sharp girl, part of a famous family. My sisters were the Sharp Girls, I was the Sharp Boy, my father was Old Man Sharp. We weren’t the only Jews in town—there were the Brodies, who owned the grocery, and the Jacobses, who ran the dime store, and Old Man Soltot, the cobbler, and in Des Moines there were enough Jews to sustain four congregations—B’nai Jeshurun, plus two Orthodox and one Conservative shul—but we were visible. We had been taught to keep our hands clasped behind our backs whenever we visited someone’s house, to wait until we were invited to sit down, and to not look at anything: not down at rugs or straight ahead at paintings or up at dishes on plate rails, for fear our curiosity would seem like avarice. It was hard to do this and not appear stupid. At home, we could run wild, but out in the world, our father said, people would be examining us, wondering what Jews were like. We had to be good.

Why wouldn’t Hattie want to try out what it was like to be just Hattie?

Now, though, I left her on the stairs and lay on my back in the grass. “If that’s what you want,” I said, wounded.

After a while, we heard Pop show the principal to the door. Then he came through the house and out the back. My fastidious father never loosened his tie except when he undressed at night; even now he wore his jacket and vest.

“Sweetheart,” he said to Hattie. He sat down next to her on the stairs. Then he sighed almost happily and clapped his hands. “So! What will you study in school?”

I could see her shiver: who knew it would be this easy? “English?” she said.

He nodded. “And Mose—”

I sat up. I thought he’d say something to comfort me, because I sorely needed comfort.

“—when it’s your time, you can go, too. Iowa City has a fine business school. My smart children.” He smiled, as though the principal had come to the house to give him this gift: a son and a daughter capable of learning. It was so odd to see them together, Hattie and my father, the two halves of my life at last conspiring over my future. My father had his arm around Hattie’s waist.

I’d thought I’d known everything about Hattie. How could I not? My favorite sister, my best pal: of course I knew her. I knew, for instance, the matter-of-fact syncopated feel of her hip beneath my hand as we waltzed, first dignified, then faster and faster, till one then the other of us lifted off the ground; eventually we got airborne at the same time, a trick we imagined looked both easy and impossible. I knew, when we tried some little piece of patter, dancing side by side, how to wait until she was done, first with the joke and then with the step, before I answered with another joke, and then another step. After practice, while she plotted our career—we’d go to Chicago first, a big city but still midwestern—I knew not to interrupt her as she scratched a map with the toe of her shoe in the dirt, or wound her hair on the back of her head in an attempt to look older. In other words, I understood her timing, and I believed that meant I understood her soul.

Now that I’ve been in the business for seventy years, I know the difference.

I don’t remember what became of Hattie’s diploma, though her graduation dress was ruined. “I hate it,” she said after we got back from the ceremony at the high school. She looked wonderful. Clever Ed Dubuque had made it out of white silk; it had a dropped waist and a boat neck that showed off her throat.

“I feel like a doll.” She nibbled on the edge of a cookie.

“You look like a doll,” said Annie, thinking this a compliment. We sat in the parlor, the three children left (Annie, me, Rose) and the one who was leaving. The married sisters had come to the ceremony and fussed over Hattie and then gone off to their families. My father had already returned to the store.

“So,” said Annie. “What will you study?”

“I’d like to be a lawyer,” Hattie said, not looking at me.

“I’d like to be a bird,” said Annie.

A lawyer? She’d been promising me: after college, vaudeville. Maybe even before: I’d come to Iowa City in two years and then we’d make our escape without having to run away from home.

I looked at Hattie, but she stared up at Rabbi Kipple. She looked ready for a portrait herself, a graduation portrait, which in fact she intended to pose for the next day at the Stamp and Photograph Gallery in Des Moines. She frowned, as though already wrestling with a tricky legal question. A lawyer? I tried to catch her eye the way I always did, by simply wanting her to look at me. Suddenly, I knew the truth. She would become a lawyer, and if I complained, she’d say that I could become a lawyer too. Like Annie, I’d never heard of a lady lawyer before—that’s why she said she’d like to be a bird; to her it was as unlikely—but I knew that Hattie would do it. She would forget about me. She would leave me to run the store.

I hadn’t even wanted to be a dancer before her (a ridiculous thought, because when did I ever have a before Hattie? She had a before Mose, but I had been born into the partnership). She’d come up with the whole plan. She’d taught me. I had been a boy who never gave a thought to the future, except I didn’t want to be a shopkeeper, and I knew that because Hattie told me. I was sixteen years old. Now I don’t know which is more ludicrous: that I had thought, before this moment, that my future was assured, or that I thought, after this moment, that it was destroyed.

“Excuse me,” said Hattie, and left the room.

If I opened my mouth I’d burst into tears. I felt babyish there on the sofa, dressed up for Hattie’s graduation, a cookie crumbling in my hand. My shoes were polished, and I wanted to muddy them. A lawyer? Yes, we can be partners, Sharp and Sharp. (Would Sharp be a good name for a lawyer, or bad?) Hattie was smarter than me, of course she was: I just hadn’t realized how clearly she knew that.

Forget it. I’d be a single. I’d tap-dance and sing. I’d put together a minstrel act just to spite her, because she hated minstrel acts. The Sharp Boy. A lawyer. What snobbishness. We’d always said we’d be hoofers. Well, I still would.

Rose, sitting on the sofa next to me, said, “I’ll be your dance partner, if you want.”

The front of her dress was flocked with powdered sugar from the cookies. I patted her hand absentmindedly. “Maybe,” I said, but who could replace Hattie? Not my twelve-year-old sister, she of the bad eyesight and knock knees. No, I’d have to work the act over into something I could do alone.

First, though, I’d take the shine off my shoes. Outside it was a cloudy June day; I walked into the backyard and looked at the elm and thought about climbing it, to prove that my fear of heights had to do with Hattie, and now that we were no longer partners I could do anything. I have since learned that this theory is sound: if someone is willing to be brave for you, you are less likely to be brave yourself.

“Who needs her?” I said aloud. “Not me.”

From behind me: a soft scraping. I turned around.

There was Hattie, on top of the house. Behind her, the sky was gray, the sun a silk patch on a wool blanket. The birds who flew by were birds; they wanted to fly, so they did. Hattie walked along the peak of the roof as though it were a tightrope. She must not have heard me; she didn’t glance down. Maybe she was just looking east to Iowa City. Maybe she wanted to be a bird, too.

I forgave her, mostly. That is to say, I recognized her. She was still a person who was willing to climb out a window onto a roof. Still up for a stunt. Still Hattie, not a lawyer yet.

“Hey,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, she turned, then wobbled. For a minute I thought her clumsiness was a joke. She wheeled her arms in the air. In her white dress against the gray sky, she looked like a movie, dappled and imprecise, clearly an actual person but not really moving like one.

Then she slid. She fell to her knee, to her stomach. Then her whole body flipped onto her shoulder. I’d seen her do things like that before: a body is an object you can throw around from the inside, like this—then she’d cartwheel or somersault or she’d just stand and pick me up by my ankles and hoist, and before I fell to the ground I’d think I could fly. She said when I was bigger I’d have to catch her.

Now she was the one who flew. She came to the edge of the roof. Her hands kept scrambling to grab hold of something. I watched her without understanding: at any moment I thought she’d manage to stop and save herself; she’d get her fingers around a shingle, or she’d come to rest sitting at the gutter, or she’d grab a limb of the elm like a trapeze. Then she wailed, a noise I can still hear, she was calling for help, and that unstuck my feet: I was supposed to be doing something. I ran to the edge of the house and put out my hands to catch her, the way she’d been trying to teach me. I waited for her to land in my arms. I waited to learn the trick.

Give Him the Business

In all our years together, I never told Rocky what killed Hattie. Sometimes it almost felt as though he planned to win her away from me, he asked so many questions. He wanted every detail. I’d shrug as though I hadn’t heard the doctor’s diagnosis.

I told him everything else, just not that.

When I was exhausted with wishing that Hattie was still alive, I wished at least she’d had a different death. I wished she had spent some time dying, in other words: I wished I could have sat on the edge of her sickbed, that I could have climbed the roof—

No. Even if I try, make myself over into Harold Lloyd or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., my fantasy self puts one knee on my bedroom windowsill, looks down, and climbs back inside. Okay, I would sneak past Annie, then, into Hattie’s room, ready to risk some killing germ, weighed down with a board game and bagfuls of candy from the dime store. Her arms would worm out from under Annie’s fierce tucking, ready for presents.

I believed then—part of me still believes—that I had killed Hattie. I had called out, knowing she would always answer me. It must have been windy up on the roof, said Annie; it must have been slick; she must not have known how tricky it was to walk on slanted shingles. I never explained that she had plenty of practice. When Rocky asked what Hattie had died of, I wouldn’t say, because I believed that if I put it into words, it would be true. But my version of her death, the one in which I killed her, became true anyhow. Secrecy turns the slightest worry into your deepest fearful belief; over time, it builds up, a pearl inside an oyster, and that’s how carefully you guard it.

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.

If I was going to break his heart anyhow I’d rather not watch. That night, I added him to the list of people I’d miss for the rest of my life: my mother, Hattie, and now my father. I wrote him a long letter that explained, because wasn’t I my father’s favorite? Wouldn’t he understand? Like him I had to leave my hometown and travel; like him I needed to make my own way among strangers. I begged his pardon and his sympathy. Then I realized my father would read such an apology and tear it up, so I beat him to the punch and shredded it myself; instead I left a brief note, explaining how I loved everyone, how I’d promised Hattie we’d be vaudeville stars and I had to make good on as much of that vow as I could. Maybe I’d get booked into Des Moines and I’d take them out to dinner downtown. The next day I snuck out of the house for an early train, Ed’s cardboard suitcase full of clothes in my hand, a few family photos filched from the sideboard.

In Chicago I found Ed’s friend Paolo, who played piano in a Bucktown vaude house. He said, “I got enough advice to discourage a dozen guys like you,” and then told me I had to start even lower than I’d planned, at amateur nights, if I could get on at all. I got on, and then I snagged a job across town as a juvenile in a melodrama: my qualifications were that I looked capable of breaking my parents’ hearts. Terrible stuff and almost no money and five shows a day, but good enough till I got a real break. The melodrama went on to play some cowtowns in Minnesota, and soon enough a letter that had been following me for some time—from Paolo to the first, second, and third theaters I appeared in—finally found me in Lawrence, Kansas. It was from my father, though in Annie’s perfect penmanship. Ed must have told them where I’d gone.

November 27, 1927
For my dear son—

You say you do not want to be a shopkeeper. You have grander plans for yourself. People who have grand plans are starving to death. I am only a shopkeeper. But in my family nobody starves. I take care of Annie and Rose. And you. You have always had money, a shopkeeper’s money.

Remember your family. I don’t know what will happen to all these people I pay for when I die. They need you. If you do not come to take your place at Sharp’s you must not love them, or me.

If you do not come home to run Sharp’s, do not come home.

May God bless and strengthen you, my dear son, and that He may lead you back into virtue’s path is the earnest prayer of,

yr. loving father

That night I went on, stunned and stiff, perfect for my role. After the last show, at two in the morning, I took a walk to the outskirts of town. Then I kept walking, past the houses, into the field. The sky was full of starry fizzy lights, but the roads were black: I couldn’t really see where I was going, though I tried to both remember and forget the forgettable little town and its vaude house behind me. Maybe I was just trying to figure out how it would feel to lose a place, to completely remove my own carcass and look back to see how much I’d miss, how much I was missed myself. No matter how far I walked, I couldn’t get enough distance. I leaned against a fence and heard noises in the field behind me. A farmer, come to shoot a trespasser. I stuck my hands in the air, waited for a shotgun to hit me in the back. Instead, a cow lowed.

Was this a sign? If in real life you are acting out ludicrous bits of business, well, why not get paid for it?

I’d heard of guys trapped by girls, but not their own fathers. I suppose I’d known that I was giving up my family when I left, but I didn’t realize that they would give up me. I imagined they’d forgive me anything.

I tried to see myself years in the future, an orphan. The dresser top would be bare of photographs. If I ever married, I’d have to explain: my family was as good as dead, because I did not wish to spend my days helping strangers in and out of clothes. That night, when I made my way back to the boardinghouse, I looked at the pictures I’d nabbed, one of my parents, one of all us kids. My mother has that distracted old-photograph look: her eyes have lost their focus, though she’s gently smiling. But Pop! He is not looking at the photographer, he is not looking at the camera, he is looking into the camera, past the glass lens, past the sliding shutter, so ready that he can see the brief appearance of the film itself, staring back at him. Remember your family, Mose, he had written, and I thought, As if I could ever forget. I tucked him and then the rest of us in my suitcase, and told myself I would travel alone and be happy alone.

But my father knew, better than I did. He wanted to save me from a life of restlessness. Traveling on foot in the Iowa snow was the earliest story he told about himself, back when he was fresh off the boat from Lithuania. “It was so cold,” he would say when we were small, “I dreamed of sleeping in a cow. Must be warm inside a cow. But the snow, it turned out, was a good thing, because in one bad blizzard, I was stranded for a week at a farm with a schoolteacher, and she taught me English. I might not have learned otherwise.”

In a week? We didn’t believe it.

“Isn’t this English I’m speaking?” he asked.

I don’t know who that schoolteacher was, young or old, beautiful, plain, kind, or merely bored. Was she unmarried, looking to make over a young man who came up the walk, feet frozen but still clanging his pots as if to prove their worth—Look, lady, fine pots, good pots? Was she married but lonely, like a wife in a dirty joke? Was she simply a woman who always needed a student? What did my father think, the next morning, when they opened the door and were met by a wall of snow?

Men who travel dream, it’s unavoidable. I don’t know what my father dreamed of then besides bedding down in a cow. He was so far away from home that even in fields where the snow had blown away into drifts, he could not drop to his knees to the frozen ground, lumpy like the underside of a familiar calloused foot, and know that he touched something that eventually touched people he loved.

My mother believed in curses, my father once told me. She believed in a vindictive God, a vicious practical joker, an eavesdropper who killed children. I don’t know what she would have made of Hattie’s death.

But my father believed that God was good. He saw before I did that God makes bargains, and he believed that my presence in the store was part of a tragic, already sealed bargain. He had his son. He had five fine daughters. And he knew why Hattie had gone up on the roof: God had put her there, to deliver me. God knew that it was necessary, and so He whispered in Hattie’s ear.

My father loved and missed Hattie. He said so. He wept for her in his office off the stockroom; he prayed for her at B’nai Jeshurun. He would not have bargained her life away, he would not have considered it for a moment. God makes his own bargains. God is a businessman, and God loves those in His store, and God does not give things away. You may go from one end of this world to the other, from the plains by the Nemen River in Lithuania to the plains by the Raccoon River in America: there are prices for everything. You do not live without paying terrible, terrible prices for the flimsiest of pleasures, the smallest rewards. So your bargain with God is arranged by God, and afterward you can only walk away, and look at what you have closed in your fist, and use that as best you can.