Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

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 am 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.”

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.