Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“A change of pace,” said Rocky.

“I don’t want one,” I told him.

What I wanted was out. We had plenty of money; I’d invested pretty well over the years. I was getting too old — correction, I’d gotten —though I’d dive through a store window for old times’ sake, and I could still stand next to a table, then suddenly jump on top of it. In fact, under the iron hand of my health-nut wife, I was in fine physical condition: I just thought a man of forty-two should find more dignified work. I didn’t tell Rocky this; he’d take it as an insult, since he was even older, and even sillier.

And besides, something had to change. The guy was destroying himself.

Well, then, why didn’t I save him?

I couldn’t have.

Why didn’t I try?

Good question. Now it seems obvious: I just should have said something. As it was, I spent hours in bars and restaurants with him, always a fraction of a second from saying, You know, Rocky, that you drink too much.

And then I’d imagine what he’d say in return.

I know. (Still, he takes a gulp of his fresh drink.)

Come on, move in with us, stay in the guest suite. We’ll keep you busy. Jess will whip you into shape in no time. Spinach, deep knee bends—

Sounds great. (He takes another gulp.)

You’ll love it.

No really , says Rocky, his finger in the ice cubes at the bottom of his now empty glass, it sounds terrific. But I’d rather die.

And I couldn’t watch. I wanted no part of it.

I believed then — as almost everyone believed — that if one of us went on to have a solo career, it wouldn’t be me. Sometimes, when I thought of stepping down, I imagined the comeback we’d make later, staid, cleverer. A sophisticated double act. Other times I thought that without the Professor hectoring him, Rocky could finally become, as he wanted, great. A guy who could speak that many languages could do something with his own, once he had to, write movies, become an auteur. Go abroad, hang out with brooding comic Englishmen — he loved The Lavender Hill Mob . Hang up the damn striped shirt and act his age, in other words. I believed that I’d have to orphan the on-screen childish Rocky to push him out into the world. Okay, I’d be selfless and walk away. Like many a guardian, I tried to leave in degrees. Like many a juvenile delinquent, he clung and misbehaved, longing for attention and punishment.

Six years before, I’d threatened to quit the act, but waffled. This time I stood my ground: I wanted to take a break, at the very least. Jake was ten, Nathan nine, and Gilda three. Betty would have been seven. Rocky called all the time to twist my arm. The last time was March 17, 1954. The kids and Jess and I were in her studio, watching Jake practice a Western dance — he had a cowboy outfit he loved, with chaps and a holster and a hat he wore slung back on his shoulders, its string across the hollow of his throat. I could hear the phone ring in the house. By that time we had no live-in help to answer, just a maid who came in the mornings and a cook who came at night. Normally I would have let it alone, but my sister Sadie’s husband, Abe, had been sick, and I worried she might be calling with bad news. I took the call in my study, so if we needed to fly to Des Moines for a funeral I could check my calendar to see what I’d have to cancel.

“I want to talk about this television thing,” Rocky said without prelude.

“You never rest,” I said.

“You hang around the house enough as it is.” He said this like it was a new argument, though we’d been having it since 1943. Used to persuade me.

“We’ve been working for almost twenty-five years steady,” I said. “Don’t you want to take some time off?”

That was a stupid question.

He said, “How much time?”

I pretended to think carefully. “Three years.”

“In three years,” Rocky said, “every jerk’s going to have a show. In three years, Tansy ’ll have a program. Live, from Hollywood: the Buddy Tansy Hour. He’ll look at the camera and bare his teeth and pull down millions.”

“I’ll be happy for him. All that thwarted promise, finally realized.”

“But it should be us .” He tried to appeal to the actor in me. “Same character, every week. You can develop it. You’ll be married. Hey,” he said, and lowered his voice, “—I bet we could swing it so Jess can play your wife, and your kids can play themselves. How about that?”

Once upon a time this might have sounded swell to me. In the early days of our radio show, I listened to our competitors — at home, of course, never around Rock — and got jealous. Not of the laughs: of the on-air marriages. George Burns, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Fibber McGee — those guys got to work with their wives, got to broadcast to the country that they were married, even if they didn’t play married. I loved to hear Portland Hoffa on the Fred Allen program say, in her slightly stiff, slightly boop-oop-a-doop voice, “Oh, Mister A-a-a-allen.” He’d answer, and the audience would applaud, as though both he and the people in the studio had had no idea she’d show up that night. I knew that an on-air romance resembles an off-mike one only in the names, but through the radio it sounded wonderful.

But now Jess had a job: she’d just started choreographing variety-show dance numbers at the networks. She had no interest in being in front of the camera. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything worse, my whole family on TV. “I’m not putting my kids to work,” I said. “Who am I, Fagin?”

“I was thinking Ozzie Nelson,” said Rocky, “but okay. We’ll get kid actors.”

“No, Rock. I don’t want to do this.”

“Tell me why, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

My den was in the back of our house, on the first floor so I could shuffle papers without being disturbed. The window looked out on a little patch of foliage. Fifteen years in California, and I still couldn’t identify the flora. I wished I could see Jess’s studio, though I thought I could hear Gilda and Nate and Jessica applauding Jake. Yes, there was Nate, yelling in his oddly husky voice, “Brava,” which was what I called out to his mother when she danced. Jess must have corrected him, because now he yelled, “Bravo, Bravo, Braveeeeessssssimo!” How had I come up with a kid so smart? I thought about telling Rock this story, but he was after business and it had been years — I realized with a start — since I’d told him such things. It felt like bragging.

“Two guys, two wives,” I said instead, “one guy, one wife. What’s the difference? Call it The Rocky Carter Show . Who’ll notice that I’m gone?”

He said, brusquely, “If that’s the way you want it,” and hung up.

Two hours later he drove over. He found us in the yard. Jake was on his back, idly firing his toy guns in the air; Nathan, our critic, was telling his mother a long story about a little girl at school who liked to lick other people’s sandwiches. Gilda had put on Jake’s hat and was rattling it around on her head. Everyone but me wore blue jeans. The Mike Sharps at Home, the picture in a movie magazine would have said, though we hadn’t posed for any such stories since Betty died. Before then, we did a couple, plus a newsreel piece of Jake’s fourth birthday party, Rocky standing by the heart-shaped pool and waving, me threatening fiercely to push him into the pool, then kissing him on the cheek.

“Mike,” said Rocky, which gave me a shock — he never called me Mike. “Spare a moment?”

“Hey!” said Jake, still Rocky’s particular favorite.

“Howdy pardner,” Rock said with no real enthusiasm. “Mike?”