You cannot save the dead, though I’d spent years in dreams trying, catching Hattie and catching Hattie and every morning she was still dead. Now, I dreamt I dove into the pool until I remembered that this was a good way to kill myself as well, and then I thought that wasn’t such a bad idea: it didn’t count as suicide if it was accidental, did it? Then I told myself, uncertainly, that I did not want to kill myself. I had responsibilities, so then I tried out other rescues: the net on the long pole that the pool man used to fish out flotsam. A call for help. Too long. Eventually, over and over, I merely locked the gate, with a giant padlock on a chain like a sunken treasure chest.
“If the gate was locked,” I said to Jessica. This was cruelty, I knew even as I said it. Those days after the accident—the gates now actually locked—I wept, and she didn’t. She curled up on the sofa with the boys, or walked into the kitchen, or sat on the floor cross-legged. My slight wife dwindled. She looked as though she’d wandered into another person’s closet to dress, someone bigger and more optimistic. I regret to say that she grew oddly more beautiful: the few pictures I have from those days prove it. Skinny, too skinny to live, but gorgeous.
As for me, I wept, nearly all the time. It’s come to this, I thought: I’d believed that as I got older I got more sentimental, but really I was losing my mind day by day, and this blow knocked me right out of it. “Mike Sharp’s Tragedy,” said the newspapers and magazines. “Tears of a Funnyman.” Documentation everywhere, and well-meaning but horrific bouquets of flowers. Soon the florists knew to deliver to the local hospitals instead. All these years later, I can imagine how it would have been for Jessica, this great interest from the outside world in how I felt, what I had lost, as though by not being famous her own grief was not so compelling. Then, though, I agreed. My grief was as engrossing, as vivid, as unremitting as a hallucination.
I’d fallen into a pool once. I could have drowned! And yet I’d had one installed, I’d never learned to swim, I ignored everything.
Tell us what to do, my sisters said, in telegrams and phone calls. Say the word. I told them to stay home, that Jessica and I were doing our best for the boys now, and that a whole houseful of mourning grown-ups would only make things worse. My sisters agreed: that was how we’d been raised. But Jessica’s brother, Joseph, arrived without warning; he’d heard the news on the radio and drove straight to the airport and once in Hollywood talked his way past the maid, who’d been instructed not to let anyone in. He was the one who arranged the burial—we had no funeral—and bought a plot in Forest Lawn at Babyland, which (I learned this later, though I still have never been by the grave) is a heart-shaped plinth of grass in the center of the park, a place in every way so tasteful that it’s tasteless beyond imagining.
The maid was a poor guard dog. The day after the accident—Joseph already at the Forest Lawn—we had another visitor who slipped past.
“Mosey,” Rock said as he stood in the door of my den, and I burst into tears and threw myself into his arms. I’d been crying by myself for so long. “Ah, sweetheart,” he said to me. “Oh, babe.”
We never officially made up, unless you call me weeping in his arms making up. Ask anyone: a tragedy will drive two people apart or together. In my case both things happened.
The first thing Rocky did was get me drunk. Terrible man, you think, but no, it was exactly what I needed. We sat in my study on the leather sofa Lillian, Rocky’s decorator wife, had talked me into—if you napped on it, you woke up red faced and button printed—and he handed me glass after glass of brandy until I stopped weeping and could talk. The brandy slowed me down. Drunk, I could almost think. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been drunk. Surely it had been with Rocky, him pressing drinks on me, talking me into just one more.
“Just one more,” I said now, and handed him back the glass.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know.”
The sofa made a fussy noise as he rearranged his weight. He wasn’t drinking himself. “You know what I think? You need to get back to work.”
I shook my head. But what I said was “Yes.” My father’s cure: keeping busy. Who knew more about such things than my father? We’d wrap the racetrack pic, which was nearly done—that’s why we’d been posing for stills—and there was the radio show on Thursday night. They’d already arranged for Eddie Cantor to replace me. There would have been jokes about all of Rocky’s mythical sisters and Cantor’s very real daughters: he had five. “Five daughters,” I said to Rocky on the sofa, the way he used to say, Six sisters! He just patted my back. Maybe he thought I was making plans for the future.
“Work,” he said to me. “It’s not a cure, but it will help.”
That first radio show was torture, not funny in the least. You will find it on no tape of The Best of Carter and Sharp. Cantor showed up anyhow, just in case I couldn’t go on. The script seemed especially stupid to me, but radio work was perfect for the state I was in: I could sit down when they didn’t need me, just listen to Loretta sing her ballad, sounding ready to burst into tears herself. The writers hadn’t changed anything; they probably should have given her something upbeat. On the other hand, that might have been worse, sniffling through “The Sunny Side of the Street.”
The audience gave me a standing ovation. The papers marveled at my bravery, as though my greatest duty in the world was entertaining people (not that I was the least bit entertaining that night: I flubbed my lines, I stepped on cues). I was a trooper, like the soldier I’d once thought I should be, charging ahead despite my fear. The only people who didn’t admire me were Jessica and Joseph. When I got home that night, Joseph said, “Your wife needs you.” He looked like he was working on his resemblance to Mahler.
I shrugged, and started for our room.
“Not now,” he said. “She needed you to be home. Now she’s asleep.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad she can sleep.”
“The doctor gave her a sedative,” he told me. I remembered when I thought he had liked me, and then finding out that he didn’t. He was eating this up. See, he seemed to say, what my sister needs is me. You, she’s not even related to.
“Where are the boys?”
“Everyone’s asleep.”
“Didn’t they listen to the show?” They always listened to the show.
“No,” he said. “They weren’t in the mood for comedy.”
“Me neither. Sometimes you have to force yourself.”
“Forced laughter,” said Joseph, “is no kind of laughter at all.”
When we were kids, Hattie and I sometimes talked about what our mother had been like before we were born. Annie would tell us to remember the babies that had died. We couldn’t understand why Annie was so bitter, when she was the lucky one, the firstborn, before our mother started all that grieving: Annie in her arms. Full of love in those days, surely. Full of health and dumb rhymes, ready for anything that might happen. Ordinary, in other words. Six dead children would change any woman. Hattie and I hadn’t forgotten those siblings, but we hadn’t forgiven them either. They had been bad for Mama. They were ancestors who had never done anything. I never understood it fully, until the accident. A lost child means—in a way a living child never does—a little less love for those who are left. A dead baby is a bank failing: you’ll never get that particular fortune back.
Maybe my own youngest child, Gilda, wonders what it would have been like to know her mother and me before Betty. She’s such a good girl, Gilda. (Girl! She’s in her late forties.) She runs the Carter and Sharp fan club, and wrote a book about my career that mentions nearly none of my faults and sold nearly no copies. Probably it makes sense that of all of the children, she was the one who tied up her life with Carter and Sharp: she needed to believe in partnerships.
“It’s different for me!” I yelled at Jessica the week after Betty died. She looked at me. “Because I’ve lost everybody!”
“Oh? And who a
m I? And who,” she said, the orphaned girl who’d been spirited away from home by a wandering husband, “haven’t I lost?”
She wanted to fill in the swimming pool. I refused, though we drained it. This, too, might have been cruelty, might have been me wanting her to look at her mistake every day. But I couldn’t bear the idea of men coming to throw dirt into that impractical heart, as though we wanted to pretend that it never existed. Of course it existed. Why bury the baby twice? I imagined that even if we’d planted it over, like a curse some sign of it would always remain: grass would refuse to grow right, a brown heart, worse than a swimming pool ever was.
“It’s dangerous,” Jessica said, and I said, “Not if you lock the gates.”
12
Anything Without a View
Rocky and I started on a movie that took place, sort of, in ancient Egypt. That is, Rocky gets clobbered by a crate of bananas in the first scene, and the screen goes wavy and when he wakes up he’s suddenly a pharaoh.
How can he tell? A crowd of people surround him and sing:
For he’s a jolly good pharaoh
For he’s a jolly good pharaoh
For he’s a jolly good pha-a-a-raoh—
and he, of course, answers, “Which nobody can deny!”
I played his loyal minister of something-or-other. A long tunic, sandals, a mortarboard. “Moses in the desert,” said Rocky. Mummies chased us: that was the plot. All those movies, and the only thing that changed was what the guys chasing us were wearing, and how fast they moved. The mummies stumbled and were easily tricked.
Our twenty-fifth picture, fuller of song parodies than a Jewish family reunion. Mummy, how I love you, how I love you/My dear old Mummy./I’d give the world to be/Right there with you in E-G-Y-P-T, oh, Mummy.
Rocky never mentioned the money to me again, but Tansy had to. “How about fifty-five/forty-five?” he asked.
“Who gets what?”
He stared miserably into the giant pencil holder. It looked like the Holy Grail in his hand.
“Okay,” I said, feeling both bullied and grateful.
So I worked, radio and the movie and personal appearances. Then I went home, where, every single day, Betty was still dead. Sometimes Jess and I managed to be tender with each other, but mostly we were not: money does not buy happiness, but it does buy a great expanse of real estate, and in our house you could avoid the other occupants without much effort. I spent time in my den. Jess and the boys hung around her studio, or the playroom by the solarium. She did her best to be cheery around them, and I could not bear to see such love aimed at anyone in the world, because the world did not deserve it even if the boys did.
I hope my sons have forgiven me now for the strange barking nasty man I was for the year after Betty died. I wouldn’t blame them if they haven’t. I was an angry father. I can hardly remember what I was thinking, though I can recall my actions, the things I said.
Not everything got me mad. My temper took them by surprise; me too. Lies always enraged me, though now I know that children always lie: in fact, they lie because they’re afraid of their father’s anger. Then, though: whose muddy footprints were these? Not mine, said Jake, though we were a movie family and knew a detective’s ways: here’s the print. Here’s the shoe. Here’s the foot that fits that shoe. Who left this ukelele out on the sofa? I held the neck of the uke and swung it through the air. Only Nathan played the ukelele, and yet he swore he didn’t do it. He believed that I’d believe him. I flung it onto the ceramic tiles in the entranceway so it would shatter. I remember the pleasure in my shoulder as I overhanded the uke into the foyer; I remember Nathan, curled into a ball on the sofa, as though I’d go for his neck next.
“Natie,” I said. He had his head pressed into a pillow, sure I meant to do him harm. Never. The anger itself was the point, the scrim of flames the magician draws to hide himself. But really, why did he lie?
“Go to your room,” I told him. He ran at top speed.
Suddenly it was June again. In two weeks it would be the Baby’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. We all could feel it coming. I came home one day to what I thought was an empty house—the boys were at a birthday party—and found Jessie in bed, two o’clock in the afternoon. She was weeping. I’d known her seven years and I’d never seen her cry like that. Our bedclothes were heirlooms: pillow shams trimmed in lace made by Jessica’s mother, a quilt stitched by an aunt. Lillian, Rock’s wife, was scandalized. Surely we could afford new sheets.
I sat down. Jessica did not look at me. “I’ve been in bed three hours,” she said. “I don’t think I can get out.”
“You’re missing her, that’s all.”
“No. I mean yes, but I’m in bed because I miss you.”
“I’m right here,” I said.
“But you know, my darling, that I have to leave you.”
I knew no such thing.
“I feel like a bad person,” she said. “I used to think I was a good person. I prided myself on it. I thought, no matter how mean someone is to me, I won’t be mean back.”
“Who’s mean to you?”
“You are. I don’t care about that. People have been mean to me before. But not the boys. Not the boys. I need to take them someplace where people won’t be mean to them.”
“People,” I said.
“You can’t forgive me, that’s obvious, but they haven’t done anything to anyone, and now we have to go.”
“No, you don’t—”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re going to Des Moines. My studio’s still there, Joseph hasn’t changed a thing. It’s a big house. You’ll come and see them.”
“Jessica,” I said. “Jessie.”
“Maybe you can stay with Rocky and Lillian for a while. It’ll take me a week to pack. To arrange things.”
She was still under the covers. I tried to get beneath them too. She wouldn’t let me. I lifted one of her arms.
“Mose,” she said, “I can’t.”
I could feel her hand trying to make up its mind. She hadn’t opened her eyes. I stared at her, trying to will her to look at me. She had something gray caught in her hair, and I brushed it out with the tips of my fingers. She had stopped crying, and I was about to start. “Where did you find a cobweb?” I asked.
She gave a swallowing smile. “Before I was in bed, I was under it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought it would make me feel better. All day long I crawl into places, beneath the sofa cushions, under your desk. There isn’t a closet in the house small enough. I can’t bear to live here and I can’t bear to leave and everywhere I go I turn around and see myself and pretty soon I’m going to try to sleep in dresser drawers or in the sink and it’s time to go.”
I held her one hand in my two hands. “Things will get better!”
“Sweetheart, if I believed that for a moment, would I feel this way? You think I don’t miss her.”
“I never said that.”
“I don’t do anything else. I love her. And I love Jacob and Nathan. I love them all the same, still, and I can’t do anything for her. And I can’t do anything for you, the way you hate me now.”
“I don’t—”
That’s when she finally turned her head and opened her eyes. “Go to Rocky and Lil’s,” she said. “I’ll call you when we get settled.”
I did. She’d already packed me a little suitcase.
First, though, I drove around in my car. Should I go back? There had to be something I could say, even though I now understood the whole past year from her point of view: she’d been waiting for me to say something to her forever. I laughed, thinking that Rock had told me years before that I should come to him if I wanted divorce advice. You’ll fuck around, he’d said, and I hadn’t. I’d figured that was the only rule.
I drove past our house again. What should I do? I could go back in and put my foot down, You will not leave me, you will not take my sons, but that was what had gotten me into this tro
uble in the first place. I could cry, but I already had. I could plead, but I’d done that too. My fault, I told myself, my fault, and every time I tried to split the blame between me and someone else—Jessica or God or even Rocky, who’d told me that work would solve my problems—I realized again it was my fault.
In the morning I would know what to do.
The Lodger
Lillian and Rock took me in right away; Jessica had called them ahead of time. They moved me into a guest room that overlooked the swimming pool. I crawled into bed. The sheets were still warm from the iron.
That whole week might have been comic, if I had been in a laughing mood. Actually, that first day I often laughed, inappropriately. Every time I saw her, Lillian was wearing one cosmetic mask or another, blue or brown or surgical white. Her vanity in such things was double, I think: she wanted to improve her complexion, but she also knew that for some reason those masks suited her. They highlighted her two best features—large light brown eyes, and lovely full lips—and minimized her puggish nose and her wide wrinkled forehead. In fact, she always looked quite beautiful that way, a strange apparition bringing me tomato soup, tomato juice, pitchers of lemon-clogged ice water.
I felt pretty bad that first day, but I believed I would live. In the morning I realized I was one of those people who’d been kicked in the head and managed to get up and walk around for twelve hours, rubbing his noggin and saying, A little headache, that’s all, only to wake up an invalid.
Niagara Falls All Over Again Page 27
