Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

There never was a recital, though I did imagine it: Johnny in his white shirt and striped tie, a cigar in his mouth, dancing with little Alan, struggling only momentarily to get him airborne.

In March of 1943, I had been a man-about-town in Hollywood, promised to no one (but Rocky), responsible for no one (but Rocky), enamored of no one (but Rocky). By New Year’s, I was a father, besotted by my new life, save for the few moments it absolutely terrified me. Jessica had our first child, Jacob, named for my father, on the last day of December. He seemed as good a resolution as any. Before, I had never wanted to be a father, particularly. I’d have been happy to honeymoon for the rest of my life. In this I was perhaps like my own father, who hadn’t even started on the enterprise until he was in his forties, and then he never stopped.

But a baby! What a fascinating invention. They were so sleek and new and cunning, I wanted to believe that they too must be native only to California. Jake, for instance, was a shrugging, squinch-faced, black-haired newborn. I held him; he touched his fist to his chin, and then to mine. A communicator, is what I mean. When he got older, he liked to untuck my tie, like a girl in one of our movies.

“My hummingbird,” Jess called him when he cried, reading my mind as usual. He was a tightly wound kid, florid, a flapper, worried already. A regular hummingbird.

Nathan was born a year later. “How’re things in the Fertile Crescent?” Rocky asked Jessica. “Mind your business, Mr. Carter,” she said, blushing for once. “Your neighborhood, I meant!” he said with a whoop. “Not your own personal Fertile Crescent. I would never ask about that. Not in front of your husband.” Natey was Jake’s opposite, mild mannered, white-skinned where his brother was ruddy, a baby you could tuck under your arm like a football while you attended to the business of the day. Jessica refused a nanny, but we had plenty of help by then, a housekeeper, a gardener, a cook, a driver, and Nathan was passed from arm to arm. He could sleep anywhere, he smiled all the time, but he only laughed while he was around his mother.

“She’s not so funny,” I told him. “Me, I’m funny. Everyone says so.”

“Give!” Rocky said, putting out his arms. So I did. “I’ll make him laugh.” He tried everything, surefire bits from 1,000 Jokes for Infants and Calvacade of Silly Faces . Nothing worked. He put Nathan back in Jessica’s arms, where he began to chuckle.

“My laugh!” said Rocky, pointing. But everyone knew it wasn’t true. He sat on the sofa morosely. “She always was the funny one.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” I said.

That was the night before V-J Day. Neddy and I had planned to meet at Musso’s for lunch that noon, but there was no going anywhere on Hollywood Boulevard. We decided to meet there anyhow, not knowing it would be impossible. You couldn’t call it a crowd, or a throng, or a mob — all those people, all that flittering paper, all that joy: from storefront to storefront, a giant animal made up of hands and arms and kissing mouths. I stood on one of the side streets, looked for Neddy, and laughed at the thought of finding him, and then stepped in. How long had it been since I’d been a part of a crowd? Usually I stood in front of one at personal appearances, walked down a center aisle at premieres. No one knew me here, sans toup, sans mortarboard, sans flashing egghead glasses and prissy fussbudget expression. A man in kitchen whites slapped my flank; a woman in a tweed suit kissed my cheekbone, then moved away, still kissing, as though she were a fish that moved by suction, a rare Angeleno smooch fish, except everywhere you looked there they were: women and men, their mouths tilted up and down and sideways. And no one knew me . All we knew was that we’d won! All of us! Standing on the sidewalk or the gutter or smack in the center of Hollywood Boulevard, we’d done it, we’d given things up and we’d slaughtered them, Hitler first and now the Japs and we loved ourselves, we loved each other, every elbowing, kissing, caressing stranger on the street. I began to lose a sense of myself. Just another guy on the street, his mouth full of lipstick and damp confetti. The people in this world who actually knew me were back at my house, my sons and my wife, and who else’s attention did I need? Maybe even then I knew, surrounded by ecstasy, that my work here, by which I mean as a Hollywood headliner, was done: Carter and Sharp had won the war, too, we’d contributed everything we could to the effort. We were soldiers; we’d done our country proud. Soon enough, we’d be discharged, though not right away, when there was so much peacetime celebrating to do.

Loaded for Bear

First scene: a double bed in a boardinghouse. Snoring beneath a crazy quilt, two men. Right side of the bed: a thin man sleeping at attention in striped pajamas. Left side: a plump lump, a pair of plump feet resting on the pillows where a head should be. The thin man’s snores are orderly and girlish; the fat man gerphlumphs like a clogged drain.

The alarm clock rings. The two men sit up — the fat man is wearing a top hat — and manage to bump heads. The top hat flies into the air with a champagne-cork pop .

In silence, they dress. The fat guy is wearing a full-length nightshirt with a ruffled front; a pair of tuxedo pants hang by their suspenders from one bedpost. What a good idea: first he finds his hat and puts it back on, then he drags one side of the suspenders to the other bedpost, and jumps from the foot of the bed into the trousers. The hat pops off, the suspenders ricochet onto his shoulders like slingshots. He finds a bow tie on an elastic string, snaps it around the collar of his nightshirt, his hat pops off, he dons it again, locates a pair of tails, struggles into them, loses the hat, picks it up, reaches in, finds an elastic string, which he snugs under his double chin as he lowers the hat on his head.

Meanwhile, the other guy is doing deep knee-bends, deep breathing exercises. His pajamas look silk but are actually an awful nylon. He gargles. He gargles. He tilts his head, not gargling, just thinking, then gargles again. He steps out of the room for five seconds and reenters in a tux and a mortarboard.

“Barry,” the thin man says, “it’s your big day.”

“I got cold feet,” says the little man.

“Let’s take a look.” The thin man drops to his friend’s feet, discovers a pair of bunny slippers, and takes them off angrily. Then he catches himself, and tries to warm the fat man’s toes with his hands. “Sit down, why dontcha? Here, sit down. Cold feet? You’re marrying a beautiful girl, a beautiful rich girl. With all that money you could buy a million pairs of shoes! You could buy me a million pairs of shoes! Don’t louse this up for me, Barry. I’ve been waiting forever for this wedding.” By now he’s practically throttling his friend’s feet. “After all I’ve done for you, and now this ? Cold feet?”

“She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

“And rich!”

“Oh,” says the little fat man, “my mama told me never to marry for money. Only love.”

The thin man stands up. “Fair enough. You take the love. I’ll take the money.”

We never made a serious picture, but Marry Me, Barry was the silliest, giddy with its own jokes and costume changes and slamming doors. The war was over, and we could do whatever we wanted. I’ve always loved a wedding: Marry Me, Barry featured seven. Neddy Jefferson wrote it, our first flick made for just us alone, not an old script or a retread of an old script. Neddy even put in private jokes: Professor Mervin keeps betting Barry that he won’t get married again. (In real life, Rocky’d bet me a post-Penny three thousand dollars.) Soon Barry’s handing over bags of cash, sorrowfully, because every time he tries to marry the girl of his dreams — the poor-but-honest daughter of a greengrocer — he somehow ends up standing in front of an altar or a justice of the peace or, in one case, a movie of a justice of the peace, at his side a different bucktoothed harridan. At the end, of course, he finally weds his girl, who carries a bouquet of carrots. When she tosses them over her shoulder, I catch and share them with his third wife, the jilted pony.