Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

The thing was, all he had were those awful parents, the most recent wife. They wouldn’t call up the exes, and I guess Lillian wouldn’t release Rocky junior. If somebody kept track — by which I mean, Rocky — it would be hard not to notice: my first partner, my wife, my children, my sisters. Me, who had never once been called lovable in a review. Me, who never walked into a bar full of strangers and dazzled them. Me. The straight man. No matter how you counted it up, somehow I’d gotten the lion’s share after all. I could hear him practically whine about it: sure, you get all this love, and what do I get?

Of all the people they’d excavated for Rocky up onstage, I was the one he’d always loved most. Most stubbornly. Most irrevocably. Despite all his best interests. I should have been the one walking through the door, Ralph Edwards saying, Now, this is a voice you haven’t heard in a while. And when Rocky recognized who was speaking, I’d come through that door so fast I’d bust the hinges, and we’d fall into each other’s arms, and the audience, quite rightly, would give us an ovation.

The show got that right. You always needed a door. Reunions, good-byes, anything, you had to have a door to do it right.

My next couple of days were taken up by my sisters, a gaggle of middle-aged and elderly women who were acting like teenagers. I mean, they giggled for a solid three days. They wanted to stand in footprints outside of Grauman’s; they wanted to eat at the Brown Derby and Cantor’s; they wanted to drive through Beverly Hills and sit in hotel lobbies and go to Trader Vic’s for mai tais.

“Only rubes do that,” I said. Then I examined them more closely. What do you know? Rubes!

I planned to call Rock once they flew home. Already I looked forward to him trying to scandalize me with stories of Ella and where he’d found her. I’d even started to think he’d been smart announcing our breakup on the show. By now, even Rocky knew we were too old. When you were eulogized on TV, it was probably time to throw the dirt on the coffin. So once my sisters had filled their suitcases with souvenirs and swizzle sticks, I’d call.

I never got the chance. Something strange happened: Rocky Carter disappeared. He walked out on Ella, and Rocky junior, and even Sadie Sow. He left a short note saying he was leaving on purpose. He didn’t want any time or money wasted on a search.

“Good-bye,” said the note, which had been addressed to no one in particular. “I’m sure we’ll meet again someday.”

I thought I’d gotten used to life without Rocky. Two years practice, though, turned out to be nothing . We hadn’t been speaking, but he was around, everywhere, really, in stories my kids told each other, in sly questions from Tansy and offers from Vegas, stored in the box we called television in the family room. I snubbed him at every turn, but he’d been available.

Then he wasn’t.

The morning papers covered his disappearance, coming as it did five days after he’d announced the end of Carter and Sharp. Do you know where he went? reporters asked me. Surely he must have told you . They’d seen us together on This Is Your Life, looking like the best of chums. Nobody had asked me about Rocky in some time, but now I spent several hours a day discussing his whereabouts. And so Rock, in leaving, had managed what he’d failed to do in staying: he reteamed Carter and Sharp. Suddenly, I was responsible for the guy again, and I’d let him slip through my fingers.

People kept asking why we’d split. I should have come up with a consistent story. We were old. I wanted to retire. Rocky had always wanted to do something especially for children. He left me for a pig. We’d gone as far with the act as we could. When asked, I chose the answer that seemed most true at the time.

I continued to make movies after Rocky left. I played fathers and grandfathers and mayors of small towns, men who glanced, befuddled, over the tops of newspapers. In Fair Warning, I played an elderly junkie who tells the hero it’s not too late, he can change, he doesn’t have to die of dope; then I died of dope. I always had work. Jessica too: she continued to choreograph for TV, and then when variety began to die on the tube (as it had years before in real life) she took up choreographing for a local theater company, where she was beloved and feared. When I went to opening nights with her, I held her hand, jealous of all the young people who brought her bouquets of flowers.

Tansy took on more clients and two assistants. Sadie Sow found a young fellow in a sport shirt with whom she seemed quite smitten. Old movie stars disappeared every day, of course. Obscurity was not front-page news. A year passed, and then another. People forgot that Rocky had gone missing. He was just gone.

Our kids got older, the way kids will. Rocky junior, too, who we took under our wing some; Lillian thought we were good influences, I guess. He and the boys were about the same age, and here he was, a fatherless kid. A really nice kid, too, a little heavy (like his father he ate when nervous, which was often), but completely at ease around grown-ups. He called us Aunt Jess and Uncle Mose, as our kids had called his father Uncle Rocky.

The freeway came through Los Angeles. The freeway came through Des Moines. Jess’s hair turned snow white all of a sudden, and I had some idea of what she must have looked like, all those years ago, as a blonde: spectacular. Jake went to college, then Nathan, and then they both went to medical school, and before long — it felt like no time at all — Jess and I were the parents of a gynecologist and a dentist. They did not appreciate the jokes I made about this pairing. Two practical young men! They married nice Jewish girls and settled in southern California and began to have children: Nathan, for some reason I still cannot fathom, changed his last name to Sharensky, to honor the grandfather he’d never met. These boys had been taught at an early age how to do a spit take, how to tap-dance and project when they sang, and so they both ran away and joined the circus, by which I mean ordinary life.

Gilda, however, wanted to follow her father’s footsteps. I’d been right, all those years ago: she grew up to look like Hattie, long limbed and red-haired. She danced on television, and wrote some sitcom scripts. She never got married. I thought she clung to us, the way children born to older parents sometimes will: there was hardly a gap between us taking care of her and her taking care of us. A charming, pushy young woman; our make-up baby. When she visited, she’d go through our medicine cabinets and come out with the prescription bottles.

“What’s this for?” she’d demand. “Oh, and it says it’s supposed to be stored away from the damp .”

When Jess got sick in ’74, Gilda wanted to do everything, and so did I. We fought all the time. So she moved into her old bedroom, and took over the invisible, thankless jobs that I couldn’t remember to do and therefore didn’t notice when they were done. I drove Jess to the doctor’s, for the diagnosis, and then the mastectomy, then the chemo. I did not care about the breast, but I wanted to shake the doctor, who seemed to think my tiny wife, ninety pounds now, had a single ounce of weight to spare.

I’d always thought of myself as the most competent of men. I could patch, hem, darn; I could even take in and let out suits, thanks to childhood lessons from Ed Dubuque. I could starch and iron a shirt till it glowed like a snowy lawn, capable of bending but not creasing. I could clean. I had beautiful manners. My wife had never once had to straighten my tie.

But I could not cook. I’d never had to. For years during my vaudeville days, I never so much as switched on a stove. And then Jess got sick, and I wanted to cook for her.