Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“The sadness, I mean.” Tansy settled back in his chair. His feet didn’t touch the ground. “No woman should have to bear that sadness.”

It hadn’t occurred to Rocky to blame himself in any way until Tansy yelled at him. What was he if not an innocent bystander? Nevertheless, within a few months, Lillian and he had adopted Rocky junior, a fat, chortling black-haired baby. Rocky senior joked to the press that in order to keep up with the Sharps, he and Lil had considered taking home half the ward at the Marymount Orphanage, but for now they were just keeping up with Rocky junior.

“We picked out the one who’ll laugh at anything, ” Rocky told me. He’d brought the baby over so Lillian could get some beauty rest. She required a great deal of beauty rest, apparently — she turned down all invitations that involved leaving her own house, though she liked throwing theme parties. Rocky made it sound as though she spent hours every day rearranging the furniture.

Junior was ten months old when they brought him home, an excellent age for a baby. Our own baby, nine months older, was fascinated by him. They sat together on the grass where our back lawn sloped down toward the gated swimming pool I’d had installed for Jessica, shaped like a heart because in California you couldn’t have a swimming pool shaped like a mere swimming pool. (I’d suggested the state of Iowa, itself nearly swimming-pool shaped, but Jessica vetoed that.) Our two babies poked at each other and laughed — our baby, like Rocky and Lil’s, was a prodigious giggler.

“This kid—” said Rocky. But then he stopped. “He’s a good kid. Probably above average, but I don’t care if he’s a dope. I hope he is one.”

“He’s not a dope,” I said.

“I just hope he doesn’t remember too much, you know?”

“No,” I said. “You mean whoever his actual mother was? Who remembers that far back?” Rocky junior turned over in the grass and began to graze. His father seemed unconcerned, but I went and flipped him back sunny-side up.

“Me,” said Rocky. “I remember the crib, sure. My father once dropped a slice of meat loaf on my head. You know, that’s my problem. No, no, don’t say it, not the meat loaf: I just remember too much. Everything, every single embarrassing thing I ever did, every rotten name anyone ever called me, every rotten name I ever called someone else. .”

I sat back down. “Comes in handy, that memory.”

“I’d trade it away in a minute if I could. That’s why I want the kid to be forgetful. Happy.”

“He won’t have any bad memories to wish away,” I said, “his childhood will be milk and chocolate cake—”

“He’ll find a way to fuck it up,” said Rocky. “It’s human nature. All’s that matters is how quick you get over it. If you’re lucky, you’ll forget what you need to and revise what you can’t.”

“What a philosophy!” I said. I looked at our kids, both now dozing in the shade of a midget palm tree. Maybe he couldn’t tell, but I knew they were both geniuses, beloved, as lucky as a pair of loaded dice.

Compared to Rocky junior, our own baby was not really a baby anymore: she was nearly two, though she was still as plump and milky as an infant. One day you look at your kid and see that she’s become a child, a little person, but it happens to every kid at a different time. Thinner arms and legs, a more muscular mouth, hair that needs cutting. The whole world of noninfant expressions: babies do not smirk, but toddlers can. Our baby had not outgrown her baby ways, though her older brothers had become actual little people by the time they were one year old. Betty — I love that name, the way it sounds like Hattie but luckier — did not talk much. She gestured. She waved like a starlet. And then there was her giggle, God how she giggled, slow at other things but at laughter a genius!

“An audience,” said Jessica, dryly.

So what if the baby was not in a hurry to be a kid, a toddler, a refuser of fatherly advice? Maybe she just enjoyed the condition of infancy. In my own childhood home we’d always known that there were good babies and bad babies. There wasn’t any pattern: good babies could grow up to be miserable people, and bad babies saints. My father always said that Fannie, the mildest and quietest of my sisters, had been such a squalling vomiting bundle that sometimes he threatened to take her to the store and put her in the case that held smaller accessories, white handkerchiefs for businessmen, bandanas for the railroad men. “I could have gotten a good price for her,” my father said, and Fannie smiled, and apologized for her earlier behavior.

Just as I’d planned, Betty was my favorite and I was hers. The boys preferred their mother, and who could blame them? The baby stuck to me. She gave her mother what I called the House Detective Glare, a kind of polite suspicion. Jessica probably wasn’t stealing the towels, but she bore watching. I sat on the sofa, and the baby backed up between my knees and slung her arms across my thighs, watching her mother stretching on the floor.

“Where did you come from, my little blondie?” I asked her. It seemed impossible that Jess and I could have produced such a creature.

“She’ll darken,” said Jess. “I was blond as a child.”

“What?” That seemed even more impossible.

“Sure. My hair didn’t turn this dark till I was a teenager.”

“A former blonde,” I said musingly. “No kidding. All the women I know are former brunettes.” Already I felt sad that Betty might become like the rest of us. I loved her this way, different, my changeling, my little bubblehead. Don’t darken, I thought, and of course later I could hear my sister Annie whispering in my ear, See? See? Things you wish for will be granted, in the worst possible way. Wishes are fatal.

By 1948 Rocky and I had made a dozen and a half movies, so many that the oscillations on our careers happened very quickly. Still, we’d been on a downswing, box-office-wise, for a couple of years. We suffered — like most comedians — from the very thing that had made us. We reminded people of the war, and the war was over.

Why not take some time off? I said. Give the audience a year to miss us. Give Neddy and the studio more time with the scripts. We were saturating the market all by ourselves. I wasn’t talking retirement — we had the radio show, there were some murmurs about getting into television, we could play Vegas or London. Just no more movies for a while, no more holding my mortarboard to my head as I turned corners one-legged or jumped down a manhole. On our last picture, Slaphappy Saps, I’d been chided by wardrobe, and then the studio: Jess, a champion of all sorts of exercise (a pioneer, I think now), had presented me with a set of dumbbells for my birthday, which she installed in the corner of her studio so I could watch myself in the mirror, and by developing a couple of muscles I’d done the unthinkable and monkeyed with the Professor’s chickenhearted scrawniness. “Leave off the weights, Adonis,” a studio exec warned me, and that seemed too much to bear.

We met with Tansy to discuss the future. Tansy loved his office, where he could always be seated when people were ushered in, though to show off his prosperity he’d bought a desk that could have seated twenty for dinner, which made him look more than ever like a mouse peeping out of a hole to see if the coast was clear of cats. Even the pencil holder was enormous. Rocky paced the room; I settled into one of the huge leather armchairs for guests, which made me feel agreeably like a snagged pop fly.

“It’s not like we need the money,” I told Rocky.