How to Fall (2 page)

When he got home he put the second letter on top of the first in the bottom drawer of the dresser, underneath his sweaters. He could have stuck it between the salt-and-pepper cellars on the kitchen table, for all Mary cared.

She was asleep, lying on her back, her thin hands side by side on the coverlet. She would have watched the program in the darkened living room, bourbon at her elbow, already wearing nightgown and wrapper. Already? There were days she never got dressed at all. Tomorrow, on their walk to the train, she would tell him about his performance in a flat voice. How the camera had cut him in half not once but several times. How it had dropped him
entirely during the production number. How Happy held the audience in the palm of his hand. How Joss had outlived his usefulness . . . but she wouldn't say that.

The specialists he'd brought Mary to always first acknowledged the tragedy of their daughter's condition, then suggested that Mary's attachment and grief were excessive. You
could
have a second child. You
should
have a second child. You are in your twenties, Mrs. Hoyle... You are in your thirties . . . You are not yet forty.

Hospitals had been tried; baths; insulin. Nothing made a difference. She had been a darling little thing with soft lashes when they met; but the small downturned smile on her pointed face might have warned him of her fragility... A second child? He had too many children as it was. He had his sad-sack kid brothers, he had his damaged wife, he had Happy. And he had Theodora, Teddie, his one issue. Every Friday they went to visit her. It was Friday now, wasn't it—he glanced at the clock as he wearily undressed: one a.m. In a few hours he and Mary would walk to Grand Central and take the train and get off the train and take a bus and get off the bus and walk two blocks. They'd come to the iron gate. The guard nodded: he knew them.

Teddie knew them. She made that hideous moan; or she covered her eyes with huge hands. Sometimes obesity seemed the worst thing about her. She wore cotton dresses made by Mary, all from the same hideous pattern—short-sleeved, smocked, white collared. The fabrics were printed with chickens or flowers or Bambis. Sometimes Joss felt shamed by Happy Bloom's drag—lipsticked face and fright wigs and bare masculine shoulders emerging from an oversized tutu, or yellow braids flopping onto a pinafore—but why should Joss feel shamed, Happy was the one
who should feel shamed, big famous comedian aping big retarded girl. Aping? Happy had never seen Teddie. “How's your daughter?” Happy would ask maybe once a year, his gaze elsewhere. “The same,” Joss always said.

Though she was not always the same. He sometimes sensed a change. The exhausted staff shrugged. “Not growth,” one of the doctors warned, his English infirm; “not expect growth, no.” Okay; but once in a while her unforgiving expression softened a little, or her vague look of recognition slid into an equally vague one of welcome. If she could only talk. Perhaps she understood, a little. When they were alone—when Mary had left for one of her desperate walks around the fenced-in pond—he told Teddie that he loved her. He held her fat fingers. He kissed her fat cheek.

 

“Hoyle!”

Joss took his place at the table with Happy and the Brigadier and the writers. They revised, argued, laughed. Every so often Joss dropped his hand into his pocket and fingered this week's letter from The Lady in Green. He knew it by heart—he memorized each one now, like a script, easy as breathing.

Happy and the writers avoided the raw subject of the recent War. But the Europe exposed by the War had inspired many of Happy's inventions—the British dowager, for instance; the French floorwalker; even the milkmaid who yodeled first and then warbled in Yiddish.

The public needed the dowager's meek husband? The floorwalker's intimidated customer? The milkmaid's goat—a
horned, garlanded, Joss-faced goat who raised itself on two hoofs and executed a double-flap and a shuffle.

Happy and Joss would be wallpaper hangers this Thursday. Costumed in overalls they would lift a protesting clerk, chair and all, out of an office. They would heedlessly paper over bookcases, radiators, paintings. The rolls of wallpaper wouldn't match. Happy would disappear into a doorless closet to decorate its inner walls. Joss would paper over the recess. There'd be shouts from the imprisoned Happy, in a variety of accents; he'd sing a few bars of “Alone”; he'd sing “Somewhere I'll Find Me.” At last his head would burst through the paper, that round loveable head: the teeth, slightly buck anyway, goofily enlarged; a multitude of curls spilling over the brow; the eyebrows darkened and the eyes kohled. While Happy mugged to applause, Joss's back would be turned to the audience—the silent consort, papering a window.

 

“The show was funny,” Mary acknowledged on the train that Friday. “You were funny.” Her smiled turned downwards as it had in her young womanhood—but it was a smile; it was.

Teddie, sitting, looked away when they came, and banged her forehead against the hip of an attendant. After a while she stopped banging. The weather was mild for January; they sat on metal chairs in the brown garden. The paint on his chair was chipping. At these prices you'd think . . . It was better not to think.

 

And maybe she too endured a mutual dependence, a marriage
of convenience, a spousal alliance like his with Happy. Poor Happy —overbearing mother, two greedy ex-wives, years on the circuit, years in radio; and then, at last, seized by the new men of the New Medium.

Joss was doing third lead in a musical at that time, playing a father-in-law. The thing was holding on. Demobilized servicemen liked it. People were traveling again: out-of-towners liked it. It gave him a chance to hoof a little.

Happy called him.
“The Happy Bloom Hour
needs you!”

“My face on a screen?” Joss said. “I can't see that. I was a flop in Movieland . . .”

“It's not the same, kid. This screen is just a postcard. People aren't looking for handsome on it. They're looking for uncular.”

“What?”

“Like an uncle,” screamed Happy.

“Avuncular.”

“Sure, what you say. That turkey you're in, Joss . . . how long can it last? Television: it'll be forever. Us together.”

Joss said he'd think about it.

“Yeah, think. I've got your schtick worked out already. You'll be mute, won't even have to smile.”

Once, early days, they had a near-disaster on camera. A guest came on drunk; he flubbed, froze, fell over the cables, passed out. And one of the girls had a hemorrhage backstage and was rushed to the hospital. The props were in the wrong places because they had not yet found the Brigadier. They had to improvise an entire number. Happy wriggled into his tuxedo and pulled on a pageboy wig, blonde. Joss grabbed a tweed jacket from the assistant producer. He came on slowly, the love-struck, ruined professor; he
sat down heavily at the stage upright piano. He played “Falling In Love Again.” The orchestra kept still. Happy leaned against the piano and sang the song with a Marlene accent, nice, W's and R's pursed just as Joss would have done them, corners of the mouth compressed. The wheeled camera came close and Joss saw that it was focusing on his own face and he squeezed out some water. The papers made a lot of them that week, Mr. Bloom and Mr. Hoyle, bringing sensitivity to burlesque, melding tragedy with comedy, mixing tears and laughter, all that stuff.

The rehearsal site had been known for months. Fans already hung around. But unwigged and un-made-up and bespectacled, Happy Bloom was as anonymous in a New York hotel as he was in his Brooklyn house of worship. At five o'clock he whisked unnoticed through the side door, a revolving one.

On Saturday:

“Lunch? Monday?
Out?”
screamed Happy.

“Can't be helped,” said Joss. “You fellows work on the patter number—I'm not in it.”

And then Happy in one of his turnarounds said, “My dentist is threatening me like the Gestapo, all my gums are falling out. Okay,
everybody
goes out to lunch on Monday. Paolo will kill himself when he doesn't find us. Don't bother to come back until Tuesday morning. My dentist will bless you, Hoyle . . . But we start at
eight
on Monday, not nine,” he yelled.

Monday they did start at eight; and at quarter of twelve the gang skedaddled, kids on holiday. Only Joss was left.

He straightened his tie and adjusted his blazer in front of the big mirror. First position, second, third . . . He grasped the barre and raised his right leg, high. It might be a good bit: mournful male balletomaine. Would it be funnier in whiteface? Suppose he played a bum trying to play Ghiselle? A churchbell rang. He was so sallow. Still on one foot he let go of the barre and pinched his cheeks; he had seen Mary do that twenty years ago. He resumed his normal stance, left the room, shut the door, locked the door.

He rode the elevator to the lobby.

The elevator doors parted.

He stepped out.

On a chair beside a palm, facing not the elevators but the registration desk, sat a female in glasses. The forest green of her jacket and the forest green of her pleated skirt hinted more at uniform than suit. Her legs were bare. Her ankles were warmed by bobby socks. She was about fourteen years old.

He walked slowly forward. She had a bony nose with a little bump. Her dark hair was curly and thin. She was probably Jewish or one of those hybrids. He looked at the feet again. One laced shoe had a thickened sole and heel.

Her age had angered him; her defect turned anger into fury. It
was a familiar tumble. Whenever one of his brothers showed up at the door—just a loan, Joss, something to tide me over—he was only vexed. But: I have
kids,
Joss—when he heard that he wanted to kill the jerk, and then he wanted the jerk to kill him.

He paused, waiting for rage to peak and subside. Meanwhile the girl took off her glasses. He walked forward again. He slipped behind her chair. He placed his hands over her eyes. Unstartled—she had perhaps sensed his approach—she placed her hands over his. For a few moments they maintained this playful pose. Then he slid his avuncular hands from beneath hers. He glided around to the front of the chair and stood looking down at his correspondent.

“I am Jocelyn Hoyle,” he said.

“I am Mamie Winn.” Her gaze didn't falter. Her small round eyes were the gray of gravel. She put on her glasses again.

“You haven't had lunch, I hope,” he said. “Tell me you haven't had lunch.”

 

“Otto believes that young people should be introduced to alcohol early,” she said to Joss across the booth; and then she said to the waiter who was inquiring about drinks, “Kir, please.”

“Wot?”

“White wine with a splash of cassis.”

“Forget the cassis, Mamie,” said Joss. “Draft for me,” he said to the waiter. Perhaps Cassidy's had been a mistake. He wondered if he could be arrested for plying a minor. He didn't know her age exactly; that would be his defense. He did know she was in tenth grade, the prosecution would point out. The waiter served the drinks . . . “Otto?” Joss inquired.

“He lives in the next apartment. From Vienna. The University
of Chicago is the only true American University; Otto says; all the others imitate European ones. So I want to go to Chicago.” She sipped her wine, leaving lipstick on the glass. She had much to learn about cosmetics. “Is your daughter in college?”

“Thanks,” Joss said to the waiter, who had brought their specials, both plates on one forearm. “She's in boarding school,” he said to Mamie: the practiced lie. “Your penmanship is excellent.”

“Oh, cursive. I practiced a lot when I was young.”

“And your writing, too.”

“I go to a private day school,” and she named it. “On scholarship. We are required to wear a uniform.” She fingered her pleated skirt.

“Ladies in green.”

“Rich bitches.” A bold smile. “So ignorant!
National Velvet
is their idea of a masterpiece.”

She came from a large, loose, wisecracking family. “Happy Bloom could be one of my uncles.” The men were sales representatives, the women salesladies, an optimistic crowd tolerating in its midst members who were chess players and members who were race track habitues and members who were fat and thin and good-natured and morose and peculiar—“My great-aunt walks the length of Manhattan every day”—and even Republican. She loved movies and gin rummy and novels. She had a very high I.Q.—“That just means I'm good at I.Q. tests,” she said with offhand sincerity—and because of her intelligence she'd been sent to the green school. “The uniform—it's equalizing, that's good, it's a costume, that's good too . . .”

“Mamie,” he said; enough babble, he meant. He leaned across his corned beef. “Why these letters. Why to me.”

She reddened; it was not beautifying.

“A bit of fun?” he helpfully asked.

“At first. I thought, hey, he'll answer . . .”