“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.