“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 deaclass="underline" 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.”