childish stage voice all night, I think. Maybe he wanted to convince me that our spot that night wasnât a fluke.
No. Iâm wrong. Back then there was a slight difference in his voice onstage and off, but he didnât start to squeak full-time till some years later, when we guested on the Rudy Vallee radio show and listeners complained that they couldnât tell us apart. Rocky knocked himself up an octave to solve that problem.
Still, thatâs how I remember it: Rocky in falsetto describing a Dalmatian in a little Dutch-boy wig discovering heâs lost his appeal to all other dogs. I do know that we believed we would become famous, a thought that had never strictly occurred to me before. I believed because Rocky was positive, and though many a lost lamb has thus been led to slaughterâmaybe heâd said the same thing the night before to Freddy Fabian, maybe he said it to anybodyâthe most curious thing of all was he turned out to be right.
âSo,â he said. âHowâd you get into show business?â
âOh,â I answered. âOne of my sisters pushed me.â
2
The Sharps of Iowa
I grew up in Valley Junction, Iowa, a little whistle-stop town just west of Des Moines, the only boy among six sisters. Annie, Ida, Sadie, Fannie, Hattie, Rose. (There was another list, too, of the brothers and sisters who hadnât lived: Samuel, Libby, Sarah, Abie, Louis, Hilla. This was a list we never said aloud.) I came sixth, two years after Hattie, almost to the day.
This one weâll coddle
, said my father, who loved his daughters but longed for an heir.
Hattie, aged two, had other plans. She looked into my crib and decided that Mama and Papa had finally brought home what she really wanted for her birthday: someone to boss around. âMine!â she told our sisters. She slapped their hands away from me. âOkay,â the older girls said, laughing, âsee if
you
can stop his crying.â My oldest sister fished me out and sat Hattie down and plopped me on her plush little lap. What do you know? I shut right up.
I swear I remember staring up at her on my first day on earth. I wasâthereâs photographic evidenceâa good-looking baby, with a full head of black hair that Hattie stroked with the back of her wrist. Did she even know my name? She cooed, âMine, mine, mine.â
I cooed back, thinking the same thing.
From my crib, from the flowered carpet in the living room, from the back steps where I staged plays with root vegetables stolen from the bins in the pantry: what I remember is Hattieâs face looking back at me, Hattieâs voice singing lullabies, Hattie scolding me for dreaming when we could be climbing trees or fording puddles. Our mother was always pregnant, shut away in her bedroom. Mamaâs breath was hot and inky; her hair was black; her voice was sandy and kind; we were told to leave her alone until she felt better. She never did. She finally died after our sister Rose was born. I was four, and Hattie six.
The morning of Mamaâs funeral, confused by the gloom indoors, I stepped outside and directly into a casserole dish. The neighbors had brought us food, which they left on the back stairs of our house. Cold navy beans slid into the sagging cuff of my sock, and this was an unhappiness I understood: I felt myself about to cry, a ticklish feeling around my nose. I stood ankle-deep in the casserole, and then, suddenly, Hattie stepped down beside me, into a loaf of bread. Then she stepped into a lemon cake. Thenâthe bread stuck on her foot like a bootâshe stomped into all the other dishes, a roast chicken, a crock of butter, some thoughtfully sliced pot roast. She did this soberly, as though she were rending a garment, or covering a mirror.
I stamped my foot into an apple crumble, breaking the glass pie plate beneath. Mrs. Combs, our next-door neighbor, might have wondered about the noise that came from our backyard,
Diana Montané, Kathy Kelly