“Can you see the racetrack?” I asked. There had been a wooden racetrack on the far west side. We’d never gone, but we heard stories: they broke the hundred-mile-per-hour mark. A barnstormer dropped flour bombs in the middle of the track, and you could see the plume a mile away. Barney Oldfield raced there once. And on opening day, two men died in crashes, which wasn’t enough for the rest of the cars to stop racing.
“No,” she said. “They tore that down years ago. Don’t you remember?”
“Maybe.”
“They used the wood to build some houses.”
“Really?”
“I can’t remember which ones.”
We were quiet then, imagining living in a house upon whose walls cars had driven a hundred miles per hour. Upon whose walls, on opening day, two men had died in crashes.
“You know what I used to pretend?” she asked. She threw off my feet and sat up. “I used to think that Mama was a race-car driver at the track, because that’s when she got sick. She’s not in her room, I told myself: she’s racing. She’d come home in her duster, driving one of those cars that looks like a canoe. I thought she would have broken the record, and she’d have the prize money, and I’d be on the front porch—”
We never spoke about our mother, Hattie and I, and now I understood why: at this moment, I could almost feel through the floorboards the slight tremor of our front door opening, the soft spot just over the threshold that made a footfall audible all through the house. No everyday ghost, she’d snuck up on me the way she snuck into dreams: she’d been away, and now she was home. All these years later, I still dream about the people I have lost: Hattie, my mother, my wife, Rocky. They are always travelers, always home with a suitcase, mildly surprised at how much I love and miss them. Then I wake up, and it takes minutes for me to realize they’ve left for good. It’s a common dream among survivors, I’m told. I never know whether it’s the meanest trick God plays on us, or the purest form of His love.
Now Hattie dreamed for me. “And she walks up the steps,” she said, “and sets down the money, and she shakes my hand. To congratulate me. Because I’m the only one who guessed. And when I’m on the roof, I think, ‘She’s home now, but by the time I get down she’ll be gone.’”
These days, sometimes, I picture Hattie sitting safely astride the roof. The shingles shine, as if sugared. So does the sky, ringed by clouds like meringues. I want it sweet up there, because she loved sweets: rock candy, anise balls, chocolate babies, chocolate Easter bunnies, anything you could bite the ears or toes off of. I think for her, in her voice, Mama will be home soon.
I still avoid heights, but I imagine that people scale them to make where they’ve been more beautiful. Look at that green, look at that blue water. Look at Valley Junction as the sun sets, the sky full of light, the clouds rimmed in gold like china cups. Blue and gold and pink. Valley Junction is beautiful in it, a gray-faced lady in an evening gown, elegant and unlikely as Margaret Dumont. From up here, you can believe that your mother, who you know is dead, might come up that walk, past that flagpole, up those stairs, and under the roof of the porch. As long as you stay up here, she might be in the kitchen, singing to your baby brother.
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.