Niagara Falls All Over Again

  “The sponsors want both of us or neither.”

  “Gotta be neither, then, Rocky. I’m telling you: I need time off.”

  I don’t think I really understood his desperation then. He looked awful—he’d been gaining weight steadily since he and Lil broke up, from the drink and too many breakfasts. He rarely ate anything but ham and eggs and buttered toast, up to five times a day. He had a scratch under one eyebrow, and his hair needed dyeing, and if I’d been thinking about it I would have known something was wrong, because he was so vain about his hair: he had it colored every two weeks and, for the TV show and movies, painted his scalp black beneath to cut down on the glare. Now I could see a little border of sandy brown at his hairline, like a curtain starting to rise.

  He bit his upper lip, and then ran his tongue over his front teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he planned to threaten or beg me.

  “Look,” he said. “Commit to a year. One year of the show, and then you’re out. By then it’ll be on its way and they won’t even miss you.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said. “After all you’ve done to me?”

  He must have meant, after all I’ve done for you.

  We stared at each other while we both deliberated over how much of a joke he was making. I could hear Jake knocking with the butt of his gun on the French doors behind me. “Daddy,” he said, his voice muffled through the glass. “Mom says can I have some ice cream.”

  I didn’t turn around. “In a minute, honey.”

  For some reason, I felt like we were in some ridiculous Western, maybe because I’d watched Jake’s cowboy dance earlier. Rocky and I faced each other. He had the advantage: he could look out on my family sitting on the grass. No telling what he’d do if I let my guard down. I couldn’t tell whether this was a comic Western or a real one, whether I’d be saved by the cavalry or a pull-apart horse.

  I said, with some forced kindness, “How’s Junior?”

  “He could use the money, same as me. I guess. His mother won’t let me see him. But, see, if I was on TV again, he could watch—”

  Good God, what fancy thinking. “Rocky,” I said. “Do not make this about me keeping you from your kid. Okay? You left. Right? And if your life has not been what you wanted since you and Lil—”

  “Since Penny,” he said. “My life’s not been what I wanted since Penny. Look at you. Look at your own life, and look at mine. Your gorgeous children. Your brilliant wife. Do me one fucking favor in your life. Mike,” he said, because I was turning away from him, “wait. Mike. I can make it so you don’t have a choice.”

  “Get out your handcuffs,” I said, “and I’ll hire a locksmith. Threaten me with lawyers, and I’ll go abroad. I will not do this show. I don’t know how else to put it.”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and shook them, polished one shoe on the back of the opposite calf. “It’s nice Jess is working,” he offered.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, exasperated.

  “At the networks.” He said this helpfully, as though I’d misunderstood. “Doing her dance stuff. She likes that, right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, then, I’ll blackball her.”

  Poor Rock, to have such a high opinion of himself. This was 1954, not 1944, and though he could convince one or two people not to hire my wife as a personal favor to him, he wasn’t exactly the most powerful man in Hollywood. If he was, he’d be on TV by himself now, wouldn’t he?

  And that’s what I told him, laughing.

  He flinched a little, as though this was news. Then he said, “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I’ll bring up her past.”

  I had no idea of what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. Certainly I’d never known him to make up stories about anyone other than himself, but that must be what he was doing now, he was working on some fake scandal about Jessica, something just awful enough. He would have threatened me directly, but he needed to keep me employable.

  Was I going to have to push him out the door? He was heavy, but I’d been building my biceps in my time off. “Rocky,” I said, “go home. Sleep off whatever it is that’s making you this way. Get Tansy to find you some jobs, work on your act, leave me alone.”

  He said, “You know what will happen if people find out she’s a communist.”

  I laughed again. “Current events, is it? That’s the best story you can come up with? My wife’s a commie.” I turned and pointed through the window. “Is it the blue jeans? No, I get it: you have pictures of her in a red dress. She loves Tchaikovsky?”

  He looked puzzled. “She never told you?”

  “She doesn’t keep me up to date on your delusions, no.”

  Jake had gone back to sit with his siblings, who watched their mother. She was dancing on the grass—she told me later she could hear the two of us fighting, and wanted to distract them. She didn’t know we were arguing about her. An ordinary dance wouldn’t do: Jessica, forty-one, was turning cartwheels, doing back bends, all of those things children think make for really fine ballet.

  “I’ll bet you,” Rocky said. “I’ll bet you one year of work.” He swung open one of the French doors and called to her. “Jessie,” he said, and his voice was suddenly more reasonable than it had been all day, or all year. “Would you come in for a minute?”

  She walked to the threshold. Rock waved her in like a maître d’, with a small bow and a sweeping hand. “We’ve called you in to settle a bet.”

  “What he wants to know, dear,” I said, taking hold of my all-American sweetheart’s hand, “is are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?”

  There was a pause while she cocked her head at me, then at Rocky. The cartwheels had styled her hair into something island-girlish; she wore it lately to her shoulders, where it hung in lovely waves. The right knee of her blue jeans was grass stained.

  She said to me, “You knew that.”

  All these decades later, the issue of the hearings seems simple: bad men asked questions they shouldn’t have. What goes on in someone else’s head is none of your business, cannot hurt you. Asking is un-American.

  It wasn’t that easy at the time. I turned my back on Rocky because he threatened my wife, yes. He menaced us with a truth instead of a lie, but that made no difference. I felt the way I had when someone in a wartime crowd shouted, “Slacker!” You lack character, he seemed to be saying. I’ll expose you, and your so-called patriotism, Mr. So-called Sharp. If I were a character in a movie, I would have delivered a speech, my eyes shining, about my immigrant father who’d come to this country with nothing and had built up a business, a man who so loved his new home and opportunities that he never mentioned his past life in Lithuania, never spoke his own language again—at this there might be a double exposure of my father, eyes similarly shining, and then another of a waving flag.

  “Aha!” said Rocky, like some lawyer who’d been trying to break her for five years.

  I still held Jess’s hand, a little tighter now, though of course I didn’t care about her politics, which to be sure had always been left of mine. “What did I know?” I asked her.

  “You were here. When Rocky and I talked about New York. All of my friends in the city were members of the Party. We were artists,” she said. “We wanted great things for the world.”

  The city, of course. The Party. Maybe I had known this, ten years ago. Rocky was a member of the Swans’ Club; Jessica was a member of the Communist party. Now she combed her hair with her hands and realigned a bobby pin above one ear. She wasn’t contrite, of course. Years later, the threat might sound silly—who cares whether someone’s wife was slightly pink as a kid? Romantic, even: Jessica with her dark hair, testifying. She might miss her TV choreography a little, but not enough to lie or apologize. TV work was not artistic, not a great thing you planned for the world.

  Oh, yes. After they called her, they’d call me.

  I was a bigger star than anyone who
’d been ruined by the hearings so far, sort of a dream name for HUAC: famous, but not beloved. Known, but past my prime. A fine example. A lovely scandal. People could deny me work and not feel like they’d been cheated out of anything.

  I organized a few thoughts. Rocky was smart enough to know that if he informed on Jessica, he would ruin both her career and mine, which wouldn’t do him any good. If he did it out of spite anyhow, well, I’d wanted to retire, hadn’t I? I’d rather choose the terms myself, but we had money, and if it got unpleasant to live in North Hollywood, then we’d move somewhere else—to New York. To Des Moines. We were hardly the Rosenbergs. What kept me in California?

  Only Rocky, who had his hand in his hair, as though he’d just become self-conscious of the creeping blond in it. All in all, an impressive display of betrayal: threaten my wife, her livelihood, mine. Years ago, maybe even months ago, maybe even last week, I would have begged him not to do such a thing. I would have been driven crazy, like the straight man in that old bit about Niagara Falls, who hears the words and clenches his fists and advances on the comic, all because his wife ran off with his best friend to Niagara. Those two words remind him of all he’s lost and still desires. Not a bad part for a straight man. Maybe Rocky thought if he couldn’t make me bend, he could make me rage. If he said the right words, I would turn around like a trouper and walk toward him, feeding him setups for panicked punch lines. Revenge, after all, is a kind of love.

  But this? He broke my heart, as brutally as anyone or anything had ever broken it, and now I was too old to throw myself at his silly two-toned shoes and beg him to stay. Heartbreak makes you plead and weep, or else it shuts you up. Who was I to him? The Professor. As Mose Sharp I was useless.

  Rocky said, uncertainly, “I won the bet.”

  “There was no bet,” I said. “No bet, no show, no team. Nothing.”

  Suddenly he seemed afraid of what he’d done. Thinking back, I believe he’d tried to get out of his threats by calling it a gamble. He didn’t care about politics any more than I did. Just another story we’d tell: one day, in 1954, we wagered over some ridiculous thing, and that’s how Life with Rocky began.

  “Mose,” he said. “Professor.”

  But I had my back turned to him. My kids were in the yard—Jake and Nate had heaped all of the cowboy costumes on Gilda, and died gloriously as she shot the pistols into the tree, over the roof of Jess’s studio. All those times we stopped talking, and this was the first time I’d begun it. I could see the appeal. I hadn’t known before, when I’d borne the brunt, that it was the worst thing you could do to someone. I felt cruel and happy. Rocky said, “Mosey.”

  I am not talking to you.

  Rocky said, “Okay, listen, wait.”

  I am not talking.

  If I’d opened my mouth, I would have said, over and over, You broke my heart, can’t you see you broke my heart? I kept my back turned. Jessica murmured something to him, and led him to the front door, and then I didn’t see him again for a long time.

  14

  Instead of Me

  In Greenwood Park, when I was fourteen and Hattie sixteen, I got mad and sat on the grass and refused to speak to her. “The little man has a temper,” said Hattie, which is what my sisters always said when I fell into a sulk, almost admiringly. A boy could get away with that kind of moodiness, and though I never yelled or threw punches or used my teeth (Rose, at age two, went through a brief biting period), my silences seemed full of manly anger to them, or so I was happy to think. I liked to be cajoled the way some kids liked to be tickled: I held very still and waited for someone to tease me into cheerfulness.

  Not this day in Greenwood Park, though. Hattie and I had gone to a picnic, on one of those July days so hot your brain poaches in your skull and your blood turns to mucky syrup. This was nine months before Hattie died. We’d packed a lunch and taken the streetcar in. Some kids had made a fire and thrown in potatoes and corn to roast, and Hattie wanted to stand near it to talk to people, and I wanted to lie in the grass as far away from any kind of extra heat as possible.

  So we each did what we wanted, and I might have been annoyed that she preferred to joke with strangers instead of me, but that’s not what got me so mad. I found a tree for shade. The best ones had already been taken: this was a scrubby maple, not much of a parasol, roots braiding through the dirt at its feet. It took me a while to get comfortable. When I looked at the cook-fire, some huge freckle-faced teenager had speared an ear of corn for Hattie at the end of a stick; he blew across it gallantly and—to my eyes—lasciviously. His breath was probably too hot to do much good. Then he stripped off the husk and burned his fingers. Good. He stuck them in his mouth and looked at Hattie, who laughed and touched the back of his wrist. Bad.

  I ate my chicken sandwich—mustard, no mayonnaise, because of the heat. How long would Hattie want to stay? Maybe I should just go back to Vee Jay by myself. Drowned by the heat, I napped.

  When I woke up, I looked: no Hattie. No big teen boy.

  I waited. I scanned the park. Had I lost her? Was she my responsibility, or her own? Should I call someone, or sit tight and hope the guy wasn’t a white slaver?

  God. A white slaver. I wished I hadn’t thought of that. Annie believed in white slavers so completely she made me want never to leave the house, even though she didn’t think I was at peril. (In that trade, boys weren’t precious.) She even kept a pamphlet in the kitchen drawer, with other instructive tracts, Annie’s version of motherly advice. There was a fascinating one published by the Kotex company that I wasn’t supposed to read, and another on using electricity safely, and another on baking. “If you have a question, just read the pamphlet,” Annie said, and so the contents of the drawer were so jumbled together in my memory that I sometimes believed my sisters were visited every month by Reddy Kilowatt or—because there was also a tract a religious person had left at the door, angrily annotated by Annie—that we should be careful not to be converted to Christianity, possibly by Aunt Jemima.

  White slavers. Were they freckle-faced? High-school students? As imaginary as Aunt Jemima? Maybe they hired high schoolers as agents. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I looked at the edge of the woods and considered storming them. The only person who’d give me good advice was Hattie, and I’d let her be kidnapped.

  Then suddenly Hattie walked out of the woods with her gangly friend. At first I thought they were holding hands, but instead they each gripped a hat. Then they exchanged the hats, because they’d been holding each other’s. The boy put his cap on his head, and then tipped it and walked away, and Hattie came up the slant of the park, adjusting the men’s straw boater from Sharp’s Gents’ that she had covered with silk flowers. Bigheaded Hattie.

  She kicked the bottom of my shoe, but it was too late: I was furious at her. Not shanghaied at all, worse, just walking in the woods with a boy.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Ready to go home?”

  I shrugged.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Another shrug.

  “The little man has a temper,” she said.

  All the way home she examined my face. She’d say something cheerful. I’d grunt, or shrug. Why couldn’t she just guess why I was mad? I wanted her to know, so we could forgive each other, but it seemed impossible to explain myself, and I got angrier the longer she failed to read my mind.

  I’d never been that upset with Hattie before. Soon enough, that anger was forgotten, eclipsed by her death. Now, of course, I can see it plainly: months before she announced she’d be going to Iowa City, I realized Hattie might leave me. I saw how easily she talked to someone who wasn’t me, how handsome she looked next to a kid happy to burn his fingers for her. How ordinary it felt to be watching her from a distance: That’s how she talks, without me. That’s how she walks. That’s how she laughs.

  I thought Rocky’s threats came out of something similar. He might have worried when I
first got married, but I stayed in the picture, up for nightclubs and movies, all the trappings of our success. He might have eyed each of my children, wondering whether a person who might take me away from him had finally arrived. Still, I hung around, I donned my mortarboard, I hit my mark. Then, suddenly, I planned to walk away into the woods, my arm around that girl from Des Moines after all. Obviously, he would have to deal with her.

  Stuck in his ways, I thought. Devoted to the shadow I cast on him, because he needed a shadow to dance around. I wanted for someone to talk me out of my anger—I didn’t think I could be cajoled this time, but someone would tell me, as they always did, to cut the guy some slack.

  Nobody did.

  While Jessica didn’t indulge me, she did think I should give him some air. Tansy hadn’t thought much of the situation-comedy idea anyhow, didn’t think the public would buy Carter and Sharp as family men. Neddy—now working for Milton Berle, another famous pain-in-the-neck—said I was better off.

  As for Rocky himself: he wrote a few letters, and then a few telegrams. Maybe he apologized, and maybe he told me to go to hell. I don’t know. I never read them. I was working on forgetting him.

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy.

  I wondered whether Rocky went through this when he divorced a wife. Do you take the pictures down, or would that mean you cared too much? Do you call and explain exactly what you meant, when you said it was over? How do you stop thinking of someone, when you’re accustomed to thinking of that someone all the time?

  “He won’t actually do anything,” Jess told me. “He won’t make a report. He told me so, when I showed him out.”

  I was in my office, trying to decide what came next. In every drawer in every piece of furniture—selected by Lillian a few years before—was nothing but documents pertaining to the careers of Carter and Sharp: contracts, scripts, comic books.

  “He would have told you anything,” I said.

  “My point.” She sat cross-legged on the leather sofa. “He’d say anything. He wouldn’t do anything.”