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!”
How could Jessica forgive Rocky that easily? Now I understand: she felt sorry for him the same way (though she never would have said so) she felt sorry for herself. She saw a man at the end of a career, desperate to extend it. Physical comedians have performing lives as brief as ballerinas’. The very thing you do — falling down stairs, going en pointe — gives you arthritis, so you can no longer do the very thing you do. An aging singer is still gorgeous. She can’t hit all those familiar notes, but she reminds you of their lost beauty, and her new, narrow voice is as lovely as any ruin, the Venus de Milo, the Colosseum. What’s left is the same, just simpler.
But an old guy who flubs a pratfall only resembles the young guy he used to be in what he can’t do. A vague gesture toward funny is the opposite of funny. It’s cruel to laugh at a man that old, pretending to be that young.
A flexible straight man, though, can just move on. That much I knew, as I stood at the foot of the State House, flipping Gilda over again. We’d been Siamese twins, I’d often thought: our appeal was how utterly stuck together we were. I’d tried more than once over the past few years to run away, but every time I did, the other guy — Rocky, bending over at the waist to muscle me off my feet — ran me back.
Now I was free. Three weeks before, when I was smack in the middle of it, Carter and Sharp appeared to be all of Hollywood. One part of my career was over, but I could probably work. I wanted to. “Aren’t you dizzy?” I asked upside-down Gilda, and she nodded while laughing. I’d forgotten that was the point.
“Yeah,” I said to Jessica. “I’ll call Tansy when we get back.”
At home, there was a pile of communications from Rocky waiting for us, including one hand-marked FINAL NOTICE. I flung them in the trash. It looked like anger, but I knew the moment I read a single word, I’d be back in the act. Tearing them in half: that would be anger. I considered it.
“Mose,” said Jess.
I shook my head.
“You’ll forgive him,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if this was a prediction, a question, a command.
Jessica was right: Rocky did not go to the government with his information, though he did have to go to the government plenty, the Treasury Department instead of the Senate: he owed the IRS pretty big. Later I heard that he blamed a crooked accountant, but I think he balled it up himself. He was one of those guys so bad with money he wouldn’t trust a professional — how would he notice any funny dealings? He never invested in anything. He kept all his cash in his checking account.