Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

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.”

“You don’t understand.”

I found, on my desk, a folder of publicity photos, waiting for a pair of signatures. Carter and Sharp in a mock fight; Carter and Sharp doing their radio show; Carter and Sharp leaning on their canvas-backed chairs, not speaking to each other but looking like the best of pals. It had been years since I’d been photographed alone.

“What don’t I understand?” asked Jessica.

“He threatened my wife .”

“Okay,” she said reasonably. “You’re mad. Be mad a while, that’s fine. And the act’s broken up, that’s fine too. You’re too old, the two of you, if not this year, then the next. But what you have to remember is, it’s going to be easier for you. It’s going to be hell on him.”

I turned back to my desk and shrugged. A little hell would be the least that he deserved.

“He’s my friend too,” she said.

I said, “He’s not anyone’s friend.”

Shortly after the fight, in April of 1954, my sister Sadie’s husband died, and we went to Des Moines for the funeral. He’d had a heart attack, and then another — the second, according to Sadie, because he was so worried over the first. The service was the right amount of sad: Abe, sixty-five, had gone prematurely but not tragically. He’d had four weeks after the first attack to spend with his wife and his kids and his grandkids. Enough time for sentiment and good-byes. We’d miss him, we would, we’d already told him so. Still, I wished I’d given him a part in a movie, the way I’d promised all those years ago.

April in Iowa. It wasn’t Paris, but it would do. I took a snapshot of Jessica in front of the State Capitol, the wind in her hair and four-year-old Gilda in her arms. Jess is wearing a dark jacket with white piping, a little scarf tied at her neck; you can see the breeze trying to peek under Gilda’s Peter Pan collar. They look as though they’re in Rome, in front of a building filled with old masters. I couldn’t remember what Hattie had looked like at Gilda’s age, but I imagined it had been like this, the same copper curls, the same slight baby overbite and soft cheeks. A kid in love with her parents. She can’t decide which way to look, at her mother who holds her or her father who says, “Gilda, will you smile?” even though she already is. Sometimes I had to remind myself not to blame Gilda for all the people she made me miss: my mother, Hattie, Betty. She was an altogether goofier kid than her sister (she did not even know she’d had a sister then), made happier by goofier things. A make-up baby. She took the job seriously.

“Look at the birdie,” I said. What birdie? She looked at the sky. I snapped the picture. Then she jumped from her mother’s arms and ran up the State House lawn to join her brothers, who were rolling down the hill like loose barrels. I had Jake’s glasses in my breast pocket, so they wouldn’t be crushed.

“You know,” I said to Jess, “we could move back here.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. She took the camera from my hands and looked around, not taking pictures, as though it was a pair of binoculars.

“I’m not. We have a family. You could reopen your studio. We could join the temple. Our kids could roll down hills.”

“You’re not going to stay retired. You know that.”

“Depends on what Rocky does.”

She lowered the camera and sighed. She had told me and told me he’d never see through his threats. My believing otherwise could only be stubbornness.

The kids came down in the same order, chronological, every time: Jake, Nathan, Gilda, picking up speed till they ended up in a pile at our feet, then running away to tumble again. Gilda rolled up onto the toes of my shoes. I lifted her by the ankles. “What’s this?” I said. I answered one of her saddle shoes like a telephone. “Hello? Hello? This is a very poor connection.” Then I swung her back and forth like a pendulum.

“You’re a man without hobbies,” said Jessica. “What will you do with yourself if you don’t work?”

“I’ll take up golfing,” I said darkly, and she laughed. Gilda laughed, too, her curls brushing the ground.

“I’ll take up knitting,” I said, and Jess snorted. Gilda snorted in response.

“I’ll take up sailing,” I said, and Jessica said, “Please love, don’t get lost at sea.”

“Don’t!” squealed Gilda, and I tossed her in the air and grabbed her, upright, by the tummy. “No!” she said. “Swing me more!”