“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.”
12. Anything Without a View
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.
I hope my sons have forgiven me now for the strange barking nasty man I was for the year after Betty died. I wouldn’t blame them if they haven’t. I was an angry father. I can hardly remember what I was thinking, though I can recall my actions, the things I said.
Not everything got me mad. My temper took them by surprise; me too. Lies always enraged me, though now I know that children always lie: in fact, they lie because they’re afraid of their father’s anger. Then, though: whose muddy footprints were these? Not mine, said Jake, though we were a movie family and knew a detective’s ways: here’s the print. Here’s the shoe. Here’s the foot that fits that shoe. Who left this ukelele out on the sofa? I held the neck of the uke and swung it through the air. Only Nathan played the ukelele, and yet he swore he didn’t do it. He believed that I’d believe him. I flung it onto the ceramic tiles in the entranceway so it would shatter. I remember the pleasure in my shoulder as I overhanded the uke into the foyer; I remember Nathan, curled into a ball on the sofa, as though I’d go for his neck next.
“Natie,” I said. He had his head pressed into a pillow, sure I meant to do him harm. Never. The anger itself was the point, the scrim of flames the magician draws to hide himself. But really, why did he lie?
“Go to your room,” I told him. He ran at top speed.
Suddenly it was June again. In two weeks it would be the Baby’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. We all could feel it coming. I came home one day to what I thought was an empty house — the boys were at a birthday party — and found Jessie in bed, two o’clock in the afternoon. She was weeping. I’d known her seven years and I’d never seen her cry like that. Our bedclothes were heirlooms: pillow shams trimmed in lace made by Jessica’s mother, a quilt stitched by an aunt. Lillian, Rock’s wife, was scandalized. Surely we could afford new sheets.
I sat down. Jessica did not look at me. “I’ve been in bed three hours,” she said. “I don’t think I can get out.”
“You’re missing her, that’s all.”
“No. I mean yes, but I’m in bed because I miss you.”
“I’m right here,” I said.
“But you know, my darling, that I have to leave you.”
I knew no such thing.
“I feel like a bad person,” she said. “I used to think I was a good person. I prided myself on it. I thought, no matter how mean someone is to me, I won’t be mean back.”
“Who’s mean to you?”
“You are. I don’t care about that. People have been mean to me before. But not the boys. Not the boys. I need to take them someplace where people won’t be mean to them.”
“People,” I said.