7

An Orphaned Girl Is Hard to Marry

Rocky and I got separate sleepers for our trip West. “No more berths for us!” he declared. In Chicago, we’d change for the the Rock Island Rocket.

“You’ll get off in Des Moines,” I said, consulting the timetable in the dining car. “And I’ll—”

“We’ll both get off in West Des Moines,” Rock said.

“There is no West Des Moines,” I explained, but there it was in print, the next stop after Rock Island Station, right where Valley Junction should be.

“Annie wrote you,” said Rocky. “They changed the name last year. And I’m coming with you.”

“That’s not—”

“Yes, it is. First West Des Moines née Valley Junction. Then I’ll investigate the fleshpots of Des Moines, and you’ll reconvene with your sisters.” He thought I’d bolt. I’d keep going west till I got to Nebraska.

You would have thought he was the one going to meet his family, whom he loved. In the dining car he wondered what Annie would cook.

“Green beans,” I said. “And cookies that taste like pencil drawings of cookies.”

“I can’t wait.” He sighed. “And to see little Rose, all grown up. Do you think she’ll remember me? Do you think she’s been true?”

“Rocky.”

“Little Rose Sharensky. I do love that girl. . . .”

“Why did you do this to me?” I asked. I swiveled to sit sideways in the booth, then got a little motion sick and swiveled back.

“You’re not mad, are you? You’re going home a hero!”

“Of course I’m mad,” I said. “I don’t want to do this. You’re making me.”

“You know what I’ve never understood about you?” said Rocky. “I’m being serious now. Tell me why you left home.”

“You know why,” I said.

“Okay, so let me tell you why I left home. My father once beat me because I left my homework on the sofa.”

My father, a shopkeeper, wanted me to inherit his store.

“My mother once refused to talk to me for three weeks because she thought I’d taken more than my share of sugar. I was eleven,” said Rocky.

My father wanted me to work beside him every day, to be his right-hand man.

“My parents once went on a research trip to Ontario. They left me at home with a list of things not to touch. I was nine.”

My sisters wanted to see me become, like my father, a pillar of the community. They wanted me to marry a nice Jewish girl and have children and never leave Iowa.

“My mother told me I had ruined her education. My father told me I had ruined my mother. My mother said she hated the sight of me. My father said he despised my voice.”

My family worried, worried, worried about me, until I couldn’t breathe.

“And you know what? We write. We talk on the phone. They can’t stand me and I love them, and what’s kept me on the road is that someday they’ll go into a movie theater and see my face and maybe for a moment think, Look at the kid! Who wouldn’t love him? But you,” he said.

“Me.”

“You ran away from home because your family loves you too much!”

I tried to smile at every single person in the dining car: Nothing wrong here, folks. An olive-skinned girl in a violet blouse gave me a sympathetic look before turning to gossip with her friends. I wanted to go and join them. “Sshh. That’s not it.”

“Right, right, right, your sister died and she would have been a star and you made a promise and you’ll kill yourself to keep it. But she never would have made it in vaudeville, you know that.”

“Rocky—”

“Look, I’ll leave Hattie alone. She’s dead, she’s wonderful—I’m sorry, it’s just that your cowardice on this subject, it gives me a headache. I don’t understand it. And the reason I sent that cable was because I knew—don’t fool yourself, I know everything about you, I know every stupid secret—is that once you see your sisters and your father and that store, which, I assure you, you have escaped for all time, you will be happier and less fearful. And that will make me happier. And possibly less fearful. For Christ’s sake,” he said bitterly, “I’m tired of your moods.”

He pushed away his china dinner plate and glared at me. There was a trail of grease down his shirt from where he’d dropped a piece of ham steak. Then he got up from the table. “Please, Professor,” he said. “Don’t fuck this up for me.” He turned and left for his sleeper.

I didn’t know this before, but it is comparatively easy to pick up a girl in a dining car if she sees you being bullied by a fat man, even if she doesn’t speak English.

In the morning he was contrite. He knocked on the door of my room—the sympathetic Portuguese girl (I think she was Portuguese) had gone back to her friends before dawn—with a plate of scrambled eggs in his hands, which he managed to eat standing up, despite the train’s shimmying. “I got things on my mind,” he said. “I don’t mean to take them out on you.”

“What things?” I asked.

He waved his fork dismissively in the air. “You know. Everything. I just don’t want you to worry. You’ll see your family. We’ll have a nice meal. Rose and I will make our wedding plans. Then we’ll all go out to California and make movies.”

“All of us?”

“Sure. Annie play the oboe or something? We’ll find a spot for her. She’ll give ZaSu Pitts a run for the money. We’ll invite all the Sharps into the act.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

We stepped off the train into an ice-blue afternoon. There would have been frost on the ground that morning. West Des Moines, huh? It was as though Valley Junction had been forced into a bad marriage, and decided to put on a brave face. I was wearing one of my old Sharp’s Gents’ suits out of nostalgia and realized, for the first time, that I’d gotten a little taller and a little wider since I’d left. My wrists hung out of the sleeves and the wind bit at them.

“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”

I looked up Fifth Street.

“Well?” said Rock.

“Strangest thing,” I said. “Store’s not here.”

“It moved.”

“What? It was right here—” I pointed at a dubious-looking restaurant.

“It moved,” Rocky said. “Do you even read Annie’s letters? Five years ago, your old man moved the store. Come on.” He grabbed the back of my coat and towed me up the street till we got to the slightly more genteel two-hundred block, my suitcase bouncing against my leg. Our trunks had been sent on to California. That’s what a small town it was, one block and you were in a better neighborhood. There was the store. Across the new window painted letters spelled, Sharp and Son’s, which broke my heart and made me happy.

The Depression hadn’t missed Valley Junction. Ten years after the crash the town looked rearranged and abandoned. The Rock Island line had moved its roundhouse. The trains still came through, but few of them stopped. No good to the town unless they stopped. The men who’d banked with my father were smart. Old Man Sharp paid no interest, but he charged no fees and he’d never fold.

The new store was clean, with linoleum floors and bright hanging light fixtures and signs on the walls that pointed out departments, if you could call them that: Shoes, Suits, Hats. They’d kept the sliding iron ladders, I was glad to see, and the big front counter, and the man who stood behind the counter, his hands held an inch above the glass top.

“Well, good grief,” Ed Dubuque said to me. “The fatted calf has come home.”

“I don’t think it’s the calf that comes home,” I said, but he was already throwing his long puppetish arms around my neck. Ed’s hair had thinned and his face had picked up a few lines, but then so had mine, so had mine. He looked wonderful. Did I have to go to the house? Couldn’t the three of us spend the afternoon in a pool hall, drinking beer and making bets?

“I hear you’re a star of stage and screen, Master Sharp,” he said.

“Stage, I guess,” I said, “and not a star. Other than that, you’ve got it right. Is my father here?”

He gave me a head-swinging appraisal, his forearms still resting on my shoulders. “No,” he said. “He doesn’t come in anymore. He’s not at home?”

“We’re on our way there. Never comes in?”

Ed grimaced and smiled at the same time. “He’s ninety. He’s not so good, Mose. Figured that’s why you were here.”

“It is why,” said Rocky from the back of the store, where he was leafing through a stack of folded shirts. He walked over to the counter to shake Ed’s hand. “Pleased to meet you—Ed? I’m Rocky Carter, Mose’s partner.”

“A pleasure,” said Ed.

Rocky clapped his hands together. “So. Let’s go. Let’s go to six twenty-five Eighth Street and see your father.”

“You know the place?” Ed asked.

“Oh,” said Rocky, “I imagine I’ll know it when I see it.”

Ed turned to me. “Master Sharp,” he said delicately. “Your suit.”

“You recognize it?”

Ed inclined his head in sorrow. “You can’t see your father like that.” He fingered the lapel, which was shredding at the edges. He was right: nothing would count if my father thought I looked shabby. Well, I had a suitcase full of fine clothes, I’d just go in the back and change—but Rocky, always helpful, had started undressing a mannequin who leaned in the doorway in the back.

“We can find something—” Ed began. He must have thought I was down on my luck, dressed as I was.

“No,” I said. “Rock’s right. I’ll wear what that guy’s wearing.” So we stripped the dummy of his herringbone jacket and I put it on, and Rocky and I set out.

At least the house was where we’d always kept it, at Eighth and Hillside at the top of the hill. Rock and I walked there in silence. Every now and then he gave me a pat on one shoulder. Four steps up the porch; red door; chipped black knob. Was I supposed to knock? I didn’t know. Rock reached around and did it for me. I looked down at my new clothes: that dummy must have been in the window, once, and for a long time; the jacket was sun-damaged.

I swore I would remain my grown-up self. Everything had changed since I’d left ten years before: people paid money to look at me. They applauded and usually laughed. Girls from every state in the nation had praised me for my kindness, my patience, my impatience. It’s only your father, I thought. It’s only any old tough audience.

“Knock ’em dead, kid,” Rocky said under his breath as the door began to open.

There was Annie, middle-aged, fat, and gray. “You’re not supposed to be here yet!” she cried, hugging me. She was soft; she smelled of boiled vegetables; she smelled like Iowa. “I didn’t think you’d really come, Mosey,” she said. “I thought you were gone forever. Come in, come in. Nobody’s here now but Papa and me, not till dinner. Come in. And your friend! Mr. Carter?”

“Annie Sharp,” Rocky said warmly. “I’d recognize you anywhere.” He pushed me through the doorway. “Do I smell cookies?” he asked.

“No,” said Annie, puzzled.

Then we were in the house at the foot of the stairs, the flowered blue wallpaper, the carved newel post that looked like a chess piece. Rocky was still pushing me. “Here,” said Annie, and she led me to the parlor. I felt Rocky’s hands leave my back.

Pop sat in a chair, his feet propped on a comically small ottoman I didn’t recognize. He’d grown his beard back, red despite his age. A made-up bed had been jammed in the corner by the front windows.

“Hello,” I said, and he raised his head.

Something had happened to his face. The left side had fallen like a velvet curtain caught on a prop. He looked like the thing he’d been outrunning his whole life: an old Jew, a remnant of the old country. A foreigner. In fact, he looked something like I did in my Hebe act. I’d changed suits because I didn’t want to look shabby in his presence, but his own clothes were ragged, and I understood that he realized he was dying, and there was no point in being fitted for a new suit. This was not frugality—my father owned a storeful of suits—but a kind of superstition. In his old age my father believed that the Evil Eye was everywhere, even in dressing rooms. Don’t tempt it with plans. The beard made him look sloppy, but his softened cheek wouldn’t have stood up to a razor.

I only wanted him to invite me into the room. I only wanted his forgiveness. His blessings—Oh, I wanted everything my father had planned to give me all those years before: I just didn’t want the building they were stored in. My father was a businessman and had offered me a deal: I turned it down, everything, and only now did it occur to me that we should have bargained longer, that I could have bought the stock—by which I mean my father’s love—and left behind the real estate.

“Look, Papa: it’s Mosey,” said Annie. I took a few more steps in. “He’s like this,” she said to me. “Stroke. Just two weeks ago. He’s fine, only a little slower. I would have written, but then we got your wire.” She knelt at his chair and held his hand: I’d never seen her so tender. “It’s fine, it’s fine. You know who this is.” If he wasn’t sure it was me, who was I? Some young man in a suit that looked familiar, ruined by the sun so it seemed, in the dark room, as though he was standing in a sunbeam anyhow. Was I looking for work? A handout? His blessing to marry one of his daughters? Pop raised his arms, though one barely left his lap. I went and took that heavier hand. It felt like a prop, too, a folded dusty lady’s fan, lace over cracked ivory.

“So,” said Pop, in a similarly cracked voice, “you’re a little late for dinner.”

My father, the comedian. At last we had something in common.

Annie had left the room; I could hear her talking to Rocky in the kitchen, the clang of dishes: she was trying to make up for the lack of cookies.

“Are you married?” Pop asked me. He’d probably been rehearsing that line too.

“No.”

He nodded, and then said, “Don’t wait too long.” Annie and Rocky appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Already Rock was eating a beige boiled chicken leg. Then he saw my father and, thinking he should look presentable and be introduced already, tried to find a place to put it. Annie put her hand out, and he gratefully gave her the awful-looking thing. She took it with her back to the kitchen.

“Pop,” I said, “I want you to meet my partner. This is Rocky Carter.”

Rock knelt at my father’s feet, as Annie had, and shook my father’s ailing hand. “It’s a pleasure, sir,” he said.

“Mr. Carter,” said my father, nodding. “What is it that you do for a living?”

Rock looked up at me.

“He’s a comedian. Like me. We do an act together.”

“But after that?” said my father. He pointed at Rock. “Not forever.”

“Probably not,” said Rocky, “but for now.”

Pop regarded me with an expression I recognized. Hope. Sure: this was my partner, we were in some strange business together—why not stay here and take over the store? Always room for another name on the plate glass window: Sharp and Son and Friend.

“You,” said my father to Rocky. “Sir. Are you married?”

Rocky scratched the back of his head, ashamed. “That’s a complicated question.”

“Bah!” said my father, but he smiled. “You young men! Why do you wait like this? Not good to have children late. Too much time wondering, will they be orphans.”

Pop meant himself, of course: he waited, he worried. Now he looked at me. “Why I married your mother.”

“Why?” I asked.

“An orphan,” he said. “Now, I wonder like my friend the rabbi. What will become of my daughter? Who will marry her? An orphaned girl is hard to marry. You,” he said to Rocky. “You, perhaps.”

Rocky looked at me slyly. “Where is Rose?”

My father frowned, and hissed in contempt at such a question. “No. Not—Annie. Who will marry Annie.”

From the kitchen we heard the humiliated sound of someone trying to drown out gossip from the other room with running water. I couldn’t tell whether Pop’s eyes were so bad he couldn’t see that Rocky was young, or his memory so bad he’d forgotten that Annie was old. Middle- aged, anyhow: she was nearly fifty, too old even for a slaphappy friendly guy like Rock.

“You’ll stay for dinner,” my father said to Rocky.

I was about to make an excuse, but Rocky answered, wincing only slightly, “Thank you, sir. Of course I will.”

In the kitchen, I tried to ask Annie about Rose, but she hushed me, and pointed to the parlor. I understood only that my father did not want her name spoken. As the house filled up with my sisters and their families, Rose was not even mentioned. My sister Fannie arrived first, holding a fat pink baby I was shocked to learn was her granddaughter. “This is Great-Uncle Mose,” she said, waggling the baby into my arms.

“Oof,” I said. “Who are you? You’re heavy.”

“That’s Francine,” she said. “Marilyn’s girl.”

The baby scanned my forehead as though it were the morning paper.

That was how the night went: This is Leah’s Lou; there’s Sally’s David. I was as flummoxed as a total stranger, my sisters and their children had been so fruitfully multiplying. My brothers-in-law—Morris, Ben, Abe—each took me aside and offered me money. Abe, Sadie’s husband, actually slipped some bills into my hand. “Take it,” he said. “To set you up. I’m jealous, you know.”

“What of?”

We stood in the hall, and he peered into the parlor, teeming with babies and children and teenagers and wives. My God: how many sisters did I have? “Youth,” Abe said. “You know, I was a pretty fair dancer as a kid.” He gave his considerable belly a pat, as though it were a trunk that held all of his former success. “So take the money, and become famous with it, and maybe you’ll give me a part in one of your pictures.”

I didn’t need the cash, but you know what? His pride was worth more than my pride, so I took it. Seventy-five bucks.

I talked to Fannie, Sadie, Ida. I talked to their daughters—God’s fancy joke, all those girls turning into more girls, though in the next generation down there were plenty of boys, and I wanted to say to my father, See? You can leave the store to Max and David and Lou: Sharp and Great-Grandsons.

The dining-room table had been stretched to an Olympic length with leaves and card tables at either end; we all sat around it, some in the dining room and some in the parlor. My father sat at the head of the table, Rocky and I flanking him, the long-lost son and his portly goyishe fair-haired brother. The design on Rock’s dinner plate never saw daylight, with so many women rushing to serve him. He was extra-solicitous of Annie, who avoided him till she realized he wasn’t avoiding her.

“I thought tsimmes had carrots,” he said.

“No,” Abe said gravely—my God, I hope he didn’t slip Rocky money!—“Elsewhere, yes, but not in this family. Carrots in a tsimmes are a crime. Never speak of them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rocky, just as gravely. “I didn’t know.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” said Annie, ladling more tsimmes onto Rock’s plate.

When Abe made a reference to the European war, the sisters quieted him. Fannie, who was given to speaking what she believed was Yiddish so the children wouldn’t understand, said, “Ssshh. Der Kinder.”

“I’m saying only that at the Settlement House—”

“Tell me, Mr. Sharp,” Rocky said to my father. “When did you come to this country?”

My father turned to Rocky very slowly, brushing some crumbs out of his beard with the edge of his good hand. “Eighteen eighty,” he said. “First, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I met my wife—”

“Sssh, sshh,” I said to some teenage niece, who was whispering about a boyfriend in my ear. All around the table, the Sharp children quieted whoever was talking. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania? Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania?

There is nothing the least bit shocking about Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. We had simply never heard my father suggest anything but that life began in Iowa.

All sides of the endless table grew silent. My father noticed, though he continued to address Rocky directly: he just spoke louder. It was an effort for him. “Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” he said, “was where I met Rabbi Louis Kipple.” He pointed down the table to the portrait in the parlor. “And his daughter, my Goldie.”

“Did you love her right away?” Rock asked.

My father smiled. “She did not make a good impression, no. She was not so fond of me. But she was new. I went to see the rabbi to ask a question. His wife, not a well woman, not a nice woman, answered the door with the baby, I asked for the rebbe, she thrust the baby into my arms, squalling and screaming”—my father mimed a thrust baby as best he could—“and so I met Goldie. But had I plans to marry then, no.”

Have you ever wondered about what happens before Genesis? Why didn’t God make Adam and Eve infants? My father had never told us this story. We had never asked.

Rocky said, “So then—”

“So!” said my father. “My question for Rabbi Kipple: How shall I worship when I travel? Shall I go to Iowa? We discuss. Fifteen years later his wife is dead, and he writes a letter: Can you get a minyan together in Des Moines, what about a shul, and then he comes, with Goldie, to Children of Israel. And then he grows sick, wants to arrange a wedding. Goldie prepared the meal. Awful. I thought, who will teach her to cook? A little Jewish girl, alone. Sixteen and fat. She would become a maid or shopgirl. I invited a child to live with me, I married her so no talk from the neighbors. I knew nothing of marriage. American marriages. They must involve love. Mine did.”

“She was beautiful,” said Rocky, as though he remembered her.

Pop nodded. He seemed exhausted. “So, my friend, Mr. Carter, this is why I tell you: it is good to marry. I didn’t know myself. I thought I was only being kind.”

Oh, we were grateful to Rocky. We were angry, too. We—I am willing to speak for my sisters, now, for any child of a close-mouthed father—could not believe this was happening. A guy just waltzes in, and the next thing we know my father is telling stories like it’s nothing. He held a baby in his arms, and fifteen years later he married her. That story was my inheritance, not Rocky’s!

I am an old man myself now, and I understand. Your own children and their questions! They interrupt you. Their eyes bulge when a relative in a story behaves in a way they can’t imagine (and they can’t imagine much). They interrupt again, though every question they ask, every single one, is the same: How exactly has this story shaped my life? Why haven’t you told me this before, didn’t you know what it would mean to me?

Maybe it’s just a good story. Maybe you just want to tell it.

My sisters left not long after dinner; with the table set up in two rooms, it was hard to linger. Rock and I formed a two-man receiving line at the door. After Ida had kissed Rocky’s cheek, she turned to me. Then she burst into tears. “You’re bald!” she said. “And I’m fat!” She threw herself into my arms.

“I’m not bald,” I said, the bratty little brother. She pinched my back to make me behave. “Sorry, sorry,” she said into my shoulder, then she stepped back and dried her face with a lavender handkerchief. “It’s just: next time, don’t be gone so long. Don’t let me only hear you on the radio. I never thought I’d be jealous of Rudy Vallee, but I thought, Why does he get to talk to my brother and I don’t?”

I took her hand and handkerchief, both wet. At least somebody in the family had an idea that comedy wasn’t some hobby I’d picked up. She wasn’t fat, Ida, just plump around the middle, and her eyes were still purplish-blue.

“He promises!” Rocky said.

“And he’s a man of his word,” said Ben, shepherding his wife out.

The house felt forsaken once they’d all gone. Annie invited Rocky to stay overnight. No point going all the way to the Fort Des Moines.

“Take my room,” I said. “I’ll stay down here, and sleep near Pop.”

My father’s bed had been moved to the parlor so he didn’t have to climb stairs. I didn’t want to climb them myself, to wake up in the sleigh bed, waiting for Hattie to come through the window. Instead, I’d sleep on the sunporch on the old wicker settee, piled under quilts to keep warm.

It was late enough. Rock and my father both went to bed in opposite corners of the house, and I went to talk to Annie while she cleaned. There wasn’t much to do, she’d had so much help in the kitchen.

“See?” she said. She sat me down at the table and poured me a cup of coffee. I could see the elm out back, and suddenly I wanted to climb it. “You’ve come home once. Now you can do it over and over.”

“Sure,” I said.

“A nice man, your friend Rocky. Tell him I’m not waiting for a proposal.”

“I will. So tell me—where is Rose?”

“Gone,” said Annie, and turned her attention to the sink.

“Yes, I know, but where has she gone?”

She shrugged and began to wash the bottom of a round pot in careful circular strokes, as though trying not to wake it. “Married. So she told us. To a man named Quigley.”

“Quigley,” I said. I tried to absorb this: Rose had married a man with a funny name, and so—

“Catholic,” Annie said quietly to the pot.

“Oh.” I nodded. “Disowned.”

Annie shrugged again, miserable.

“Did he disown me, when I left?”

She spun suddenly, and held the soapy pot to her chest, as though she’d forgotten what it was—a bouquet of flowers, the hand of someone to whom she professed love. “No, of course not. We couldn’t forget you. You were always our boy.”

Exactly what I was afraid of and hoped for. “Well, at least Rose left for love.”

“Love!” Annie sniffed. “No, for love she would have stayed. She didn’t even ask!”

“Ask what?”

“If she should marry him! She should have asked!”

“Would Pop have said yes?”

“No: that’s why she should have asked.”

I laughed. Smart Rose.

“We don’t mention her,” said Annie. She put the pot back in the sink. The front of her dress was damp. “So please. Don’t.”

“You mean Pop doesn’t mention her.”

“No.” Then she said, more to the last of the dirty dishes than to me, “He’s never said her name. Not once.”

I imagined she did, though, every night: Rose, where are you?

In the living room my father snored so raspily it made the back of my throat ache. I was always their boy. I’d never been lost, just gone. Just away. Not like Rose, good as dead. Worse: she was dead but insulting them still, wherever she was. I don’t think Rose was a thing my father had ever imagined losing; he had only seen that she would lose him. An orphaned girl is hard to marry. My father had lost other children: Samuel and Libby and Sarah and Abie and Louis and Hilla. Hattie. He’d almost lost me, too, but here I was, thanks to Rocky. My father had worked to keep hold of me, I was a fortune, but Rose was the loose change in his pocket, and he’d lost her out of carelessness. He’d never told her who she should marry. He’d never told her, Your life is here, with those who love you.

He was busy telling that to me.

A Catholic, a barbarian. He knew nothing of Catholics except the words that came to him: flesh, thorns, passion. He saw gilt-edged blood when he closed his eyes. And now Roseleh was married to one.

“Lots of people hate Jews too,” I told Annie.

“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.

A marriage of convenience. What marriage isn’t? Penny and Rocky, getting hitched in New York. My father marrying my mother so the neighbors don’t talk. Love is inconvenient; marriage makes it less so. Years later, me and Jessica, my fancy dancer, as Rocky called her: I wanted to marry Jessie so that in the morning, when we woke up, there we’d be, married, convenient, sufficient. Rose on the highway with Quigley at the wheel, Rose leaving Iowa. Marry your driver, girls, and you’ll get where you’re going faster.

“What next?” Penny said now, which is what she always said. Once it meant she was looking forward to the next adventure; this time it sounded as though she was addressing a punishing God.

“What indeed?” said Rocky, not catching the tone. “What heights shall we soar to now?”