14

Instead of Me

In Greenwood Park, when I was fourteen and Hattie sixteen, I got mad and sat on the grass and refused to speak to her. “The little man has a temper,” said Hattie, which is what my sisters always said when I fell into a sulk, almost admiringly. A boy could get away with that kind of moodiness, and though I never yelled or threw punches or used my teeth (Rose, at age two, went through a brief biting period), my silences seemed full of manly anger to them, or so I was happy to think. I liked to be cajoled the way some kids liked to be tickled: I held very still and waited for someone to tease me into cheerfulness.

Not this day in Greenwood Park, though. Hattie and I had gone to a picnic, on one of those July days so hot your brain poaches in your skull and your blood turns to mucky syrup. This was nine months before Hattie died. We’d packed a lunch and taken the streetcar in. Some kids had made a fire and thrown in potatoes and corn to roast, and Hattie wanted to stand near it to talk to people, and I wanted to lie in the grass as far away from any kind of extra heat as possible.

So we each did what we wanted, and I might have been annoyed that she preferred to joke with strangers instead of me, but that’s not what got me so mad. I found a tree for shade. The best ones had already been taken: this was a scrubby maple, not much of a parasol, roots braiding through the dirt at its feet. It took me a while to get comfortable. When I looked at the cook-fire, some huge freckle-faced teenager had speared an ear of corn for Hattie at the end of a stick; he blew across it gallantly and—to my eyes—lasciviously. His breath was probably too hot to do much good. Then he stripped off the husk and burned his fingers. Good. He stuck them in his mouth and looked at Hattie, who laughed and touched the back of his wrist. Bad.

I ate my chicken sandwich—mustard, no mayonnaise, because of the heat. How long would Hattie want to stay? Maybe I should just go back to Vee Jay by myself. Drowned by the heat, I napped.

When I woke up, I looked: no Hattie. No big teen boy.

I waited. I scanned the park. Had I lost her? Was she my responsibility, or her own? Should I call someone, or sit tight and hope the guy wasn’t a white slaver?

God. A white slaver. I wished I hadn’t thought of that. Annie believed in white slavers so completely she made me want never to leave the house, even though she didn’t think I was at peril. (In that trade, boys weren’t precious.) She even kept a pamphlet in the kitchen drawer, with other instructive tracts, Annie’s version of motherly advice. There was a fascinating one published by the Kotex company that I wasn’t supposed to read, and another on using electricity safely, and another on baking. “If you have a question, just read the pamphlet,” Annie said, and so the contents of the drawer were so jumbled together in my memory that I sometimes believed my sisters were visited every month by Reddy Kilowatt or—because there was also a tract a religious person had left at the door, angrily annotated by Annie—that we should be careful not to be converted to Christianity, possibly by Aunt Jemima.

White slavers. Were they freckle-faced? High-school students? As imaginary as Aunt Jemima? Maybe they hired high schoolers as agents. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I looked at the edge of the woods and considered storming them. The only person who’d give me good advice was Hattie, and I’d let her be kidnapped.

Then suddenly Hattie walked out of the woods with her gangly friend. At first I thought they were holding hands, but instead they each gripped a hat. Then they exchanged the hats, because they’d been holding each other’s. The boy put his cap on his head, and then tipped it and walked away, and Hattie came up the slant of the park, adjusting the men’s straw boater from Sharp’s Gents’ that she had covered with silk flowers. Bigheaded Hattie.

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!”

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.

I called Tansy when we got back. He alluded to Rock’s money problems, believing we were fighting over salaries again. I didn’t say otherwise. Rocky’s finances didn’t soften me at all: he wasn’t desperate for my company. The guy needed cash.

“But you’re finding him work?” I asked Tansy.

“Sure. Here and there. People want to see if he’s a team player. If he behaves himself, he’ll be fine.”

I said, “Then he’s in serious trouble.”

Greasepaint

My first post-Carter-and-Sharp break came two months after the fight. Johnny Atkinson invited me over to the bungalow he and Alan shared near Venice Beach. The place was crammed with memorabilia—Alan, who worked in the billing department of Bullock’s, was crazy about the movies. You’d think he’d had no idea of how they were made. Even the end tables were covered with signed head-shots of starlets and frilled china figurines of silent-movie actresses. The furniture had been arranged around the inventory, as though it, too, was part of a museum exhibition. For all I knew, it was, the coffee table a souvenir from Dark Victory, the cabinet from a corner of a Ma and Pa Kettle flick.

And there, in a Sydney Greenstreet peacock chair, wedged between end tables as though he was part of the collection, was Ripley Davidson, a movie director. A real movie director. Even though our pictures (at least early on) did great at the box office, for directors we were the minor leagues, what you did on your way up or down when you, too, were only B material. This guy had actually directed well-reviewed movies. He balanced a coffee cup on one knee, tried to put it on a table, but clonked it into a framed still of Pola Negri, and so brought it back to his knee. He was a tall man in his thirties. A youngster.

Turned out he was working on a drama about a bunch of vaudevillians and was looking for a few genuine articles. I was game. Johnny had talked me up.

I balanced on the arm of the sofa, which seemed like the most convenient spot. I held my breath. Directors had always hated Carter and Sharp, who had such scorn for order.

“So,” he said. “What did you do in vaude?”

“I was a straight man,” I answered, puzzled. Could he never have heard of me? The idea appalled, then cheered me.

“Oh, I thought Johnny said you did some other acts before. Acrobatics, maybe?”

“Dancing,” I whispered. I cleared my throat so I’d sound confident. “I was a song-and-dance man.”

“Yeah?” Davidson said, perking up. He set the coffee cup on the floor. “Were you any good?”

I said, “You should have seen me.”

Why had I even paused? That was how you got jobs in vaudeville: someone asked, “Can you?” and you answered, “Are you kidding me?” Many a trouper nearly drowned in a tank act or got thrown from a horse, doing what they’d sworn they were old hands at. The movie already had a double act, but they could use a hoofer, someone old enough to give advice to the young folks. At first I worried that I’d be playing an old-timer, a failed singer who died a never-was, but actually it was a pretty jaunty role, and not beyond my talents. Greasepaint, they called the picture. I played Cecil Dockery, song-and-dance man.

“You won’t mind not being the star?” Tansy asked me later, when I asked him to okay the deal. He drummed his fingers on the script. “It’s a good part, but not huge. One musical number.”

“Sign me up,” I said, and he did.

Be vigilant, I told myself. Don’t let the Professor’s mannerisms come creeping in. Don’t jump too high, or fidget, or become overly involved with your necktie. Don’t spoonerize or malaprop. Don’t keep looking to your right, for a fat little man ready with a punch line.

I didn’t. It was as though my fight with Rocky had burned out any sentiment or reliance I’d had on the Professor. Instead, I leaned on my bamboo cane like the swell I’d never been. The musical number was best: in-one, in front of the curtain, like Carter and Sharp in the old days, except I was allowed to cover the whole stage. My God, how had I endured it all those years, not moving? I posed patiently for stills, alone, rakish in my derby. I learned my dance steps overnight, and sang my song for hours around the house. I drove my family crazy. “Okay, Sinatra,” Jessica said once, and then the kids started calling me that. Sinatra, can I have five bucks? Sinatra, can I go to the movies?

The picture wasn’t a huge hit, but the critics who reviewed it always mentioned me as a minor revelation, someone they didn’t recognize till the credits rolled. I looked different enough—no mortarboard or specs, no oversized scowl. No hairpiece. No comic, who’d absorb all my light and work it over and then throw it out to the audience, like fish to trained seals, flashing, luminous, something else entirely. Something, I now believed, cheap.

Meanwhile, Rocky worked some, too, mostly on television. He tried his hand at straight parts on TV dramas, and showed up on variety shows, shooting pistols with Spike Jones, singing a duet with an annoyed Eddy Arnold. I didn’t watch him, but it was impossible not to hear some news, especially from my kids, who missed him. Jessica took them to see his first—and last—solo movie, Rock and Roll Rock. I spotted a publicity shot at Tansy’s office, Rock in a pompadour that looked like a black plastic mold. I groaned when I saw it.

Tansy shrugged. “He’s trying to cash in on that Elvis Presley fad.”

“Uh-huh. Rebel without a comb.” (It was 1956. Presley had just made it big. I didn’t think that would last either.)

“That’s the look,” Tansy said. “He’s supposed to.”

“Okay.”

“I still can’t believe the two of you split,” said Tansy. “I always thought you’d be like Smith and Dale, together forever. No way you’ll reteam? Not even for a one-time thing? He could use the money. I’ve got some offers from Vegas.”

“No,” I said. Then I thought, and said more tentatively, “No, I don’t think so. How bad is it, the money thing?”

Tansy grimaced, shook his head. To say anything aloud would be indiscreet, which seemed silly since I’d known for years what the guy made. Twenty percent more of the salary than me, that’s what he made.

Still, I sometimes pined for him. Not the act, the fat guy in the striped shirt, but Rocky himself. Occasionally, Jessica or Tansy would drop his name, and I’d simply shake my head, because I realized I could be talked into seeing him, and if I saw him I’d forgive him, and if I forgave him, he’d whip out the mortarboard he’d just happened to be holding behind his back. No. He’d threatened my wife. I had to keep myself stubborn.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Yet!” said Tansy, as happy as I’d seen him since he landed us the Broadway show.

“No time soon,” I said quickly.

“Mose.” Tansy took off his glasses. Of all the people I knew, he had aged the least; he’d been such a middle-aged little man all his life. The squintiness that had made him mouse-ish when I met him now made him look shrewd. Like an honest lawyer. A prosperous one. Now he had dozens of clients. I always liked to think he loved me best, because he had known me longest. I would have done anything for the guy. “Mose,” he said again, “call him.”

“Tansy—”

“Not for business. Just as a friend. He needs it these days. He’d call you, but he’s afraid you’ll snap his head off.”

“I might.” I played with a giant crystal paperweight on Tansy’s desk. It weighed about a billion pounds, though it looked like plain old glass to me. “Snap his head off, I mean. Okay. All right. I guess.”

“You’ll call?”

“I’ll call.”

He wrote down Rock’s new phone number on a piece of paper and slid it across the blotter.

So I did call, after several hours of approaching the phone in my den and then walking away. What could it hurt? I asked. Everything, I replied. A hotel operator answered the number. She put me through. He was in. I yanked the phone away from my ear to hang it up, and immediately brought it back, clonking myself in the temple. I cleared my throat.

The guy recognized even that. “Mose,” he said, “what’s wrong,” as though he was still the person I’d call in an emergency.

“Hey, Rock,” I said.

“What’s wrong,” he repeated.

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.” I cleared my throat again. I’d expected to ease into a casual conversation. “It’s just that I was over at Tansy’s office.”

“Yeah?” Rock said.

This was a stupid thing to do on the telephone. I should have had Tansy arrange a lunch. Even that might have been too much: I should have had Tansy tell Rock, “Mose hopes you’re okay.” We could have worked up from there.

“Well,” I said, “Tansy and I got to talking.”

“That’ll happen,” said Rocky.

“Yes, and—well, he was just saying it was a shame we broke up—”

“Professor,” said Rocky excitedly. I could hear him pacing in his hotel room. I wondered how swank or low a place it was. “You’re killing me here. Just tell me what you guys came up with. A movie? A TV special? Christ, I’m willing to start out with a benefit, even though I can tell you I could use some charity myself. I haven’t had steady work in—”

“Oh, God, Rock,” I said. “Nothing like that. I just wanted to see how you were. That’s all.”

“Ah!” he said. Then he fell silent. “Sure,” he said. “You could have told me. . . .”

“I didn’t think you’d be home.”

“I’m not home,” he said. “I’m in a fucking hotel.” I listened to the background noise, trying to figure out what he was doing. I couldn’t hear anything. “No chance, huh?” he said.

The last time I’d talked to him on the phone, I was exactly here, staring at the bush outside my window. He’d been on the line doing what he was doing now, trying to talk me into work. I closed my eyes and rubbed my ear with the phone. “Later, maybe. I don’t know. A benefit, like you said. It’s just now—”

“Now you have work,” he said.

“Well, and the kids—”

“And you have work,” he said breezily. “Obligations. I understand. I got some projects too.”

“Tansy told me,” I said, though Tansy hadn’t. “But really. In a couple of years—”

“Keep me in mind,” said Rocky. “Later, kid.” He hung up the phone.

Carter and Sharp Go to Hell in a Handbasket

Who’s my favorite piggy-wig?
Who’s my favorite pig?
Who has such lovely pork chops
That she makes me flip my lid?

It’s Sadie Sow, it’s Sadie Sow,
I’m happy to report!
With a grunt and an oink and a grunt and an oink
And a grunt and an oink and a snort!

 

Voilà. Rocky had a regular job, without title billing: the host of The Sadie Sow Show. He’d probably had the offer when I called, and hoped I’d save him from it. Instead I’d driven him into the arms of a pig, a puppet operated by a temperamental man named Marcus; when Rocky made a slightly blue comment to Sadie, Marcus turned his wrist and Sadie turned her back. Still, it was a national show, and kids had always loved Rocky. He wore his striped shirt and changed hats every five minutes to suit the theme of the segment.

Gilda made me watch it with her. She was six, and had hardly any memories of Rocky at all, though the boys talked about him still. I kept thinking they’d grow out of it. (Later, when someone was trying to put together a documentary about the team, Jake described his childhood this way: “It was like having two fathers.” At first I though he meant me as both, the screen version and the at-home guy who acted the part, but then he said, “I was devastated when they broke up. It was like a divorce.”) Jessica made herself scarce when Sadie Sow was on. She wanted me to be the one who kept Gilda company.

At our house, Rocky laid ’em in the aisles, Gilda at least. Everything he did slayed her: kiss Sadie on the snout, pour a bucket of water over his head, fall down the stairs, sing, You must have been a beautiful piglet or I found a million-dollar piglet. The first time she called me to the sofa—“Here, Daddy,” she said, pointing to a cushion—I didn’t go right away. I stood at the back of the family room, and looked at Rocky on the TV screen. He’s in our furniture, I thought. I hadn’t seen him in two years. How had I avoided it? Now he wore a beret and his striped shirt, a narrow moustache, a broad French accent.

“Daddy, here,” said Gilda, pounding on the sofa. So I settled down, and she snuggled up to me. I told her I knew that guy pretty well, and she developed a whole new appreciation for her old man. You could have seen the show two ways: A. Rocky had been reduced to teaming up with a felt and cotton-batting pig. B. I had been easily replaced, by a felt and cotton-batting pig.

Despite everything, I vacillated between A and B.

Rock and I hadn’t announced our breakup. Nobody noticed for a while: in the early fifties we made only one movie a year, and the radio show had been canceled, and people weren’t so used to seeing us on TV that they noticed when we didn’t show up. TV Guide finally asked Rocky about it when he guested on the Texaco Star Theater in a semiserious role, and he made it sound like we’d just taken a breather from each other. “No dramatic story,” he said. “Working apart for a while, that’s all.”

I landed a couple of other movie roles playing fathers of teenagers—nothing as good as Greasepaint, but nothing as bad as the last few Carter and Sharp flicks. The rest of my time I spent at home with the kids, writing letters to my sisters, reading magazines and newspapers and books of history. I didn’t see much of my old friends, so when Neddy Jefferson invited me out to dinner at the Brown Derby, I said sure, even though I didn’t much like the place, being devoted to the less splashy Musso’s down the street.

“Dress up,” said Neddy. “Boys’ night out.”

“I always dress up,” I told him.

“Well,” said Neddy, “you’re in semiretirement. I just didn’t want you to show up in your bathrobe and carpet slippers. We’ll invite Tansy, hey? No wives.”

“Boys’ night out,” I assured him.

So I spiffed up and went to the Derby the next week and scanned the dining room for Neddy’s giant head. There it was in the corner, there was the rest of him underneath it, next to him tiny Tansy, and next to him: Rocky.

I stood, holding between two fingers the green plastic chip the coat-check girl had just dealt me. I could leave without redeeming it. The three of them conferred around a half-moon table, heads tilted toward the relish plate. They looked like something out of Lewis Carroll: tall, short, fat, waiting for something unlikely to deliver a speech. A parker house roll, the pitcher of cream. Then Tansy glanced up, and waved me over. I gave a faint finger-wiggle in return, and he tried to reel me in. Neddy and Rocky lifted their chins.

Did my heart melt? Did I forgive him instantly? Did I want to throw myself into his arms and suggest we that minute start filming a movie?

Well, yes.

Like me, he’d let his hair fade to its natural color, which was mostly sandy gray. He was in his early fifties by now, and he didn’t look great but he didn’t look as bad as he might: roses in his cheeks, for instance. The hair suited him. He wore a pretty snazzy suit, a subtle tattersall plaid. Between his fingers he pinched the stem of a martini fresh from the shaker, still with its sheen of ice, which held still while he twirled the glass around it.

“Fellas,” I said when I got to the table, and Rocky said, “Darling boy. You never call, you never write. I’m beginning to think you don’t love me.” He lifted the martini like a flower he meant to sniff and then stick in his buttonhole.

He’d had all the time in the world to think of an opening line. I just looked at him.

“Sit down, Professor,” he said gently. “Have a drink.”

I think I was about to do that very thing, but that was when the television cameras showed up, and we heard the hearty disembodied voice of Ralph Edwards explaining, redundantly, that This Was Our Life.

Have you seen this show, ever? A televised prank, and you had to take it, and smile. They sit you on a couch. A voice you either recognize or don’t comes over the speaker and tells half an anecdote, and then the voice’s owner comes out of the wings, a person whose entrance to a party might, under other circumstances, cause you to hide in the kitchen.

A sweet idea, it must have seemed, when the producers had originally come up with the plans for such a show. You’re back in touch with the people you love. A foretaste of heaven: everyone you’ve lost over the years comes through a door and hugs you and tells one fond story. You peer over their shoulders to see who’s next. When that door opens, you think you recognize someone deep in the wings, though of course that’s impossible. Even through the magic of, as they say, television, they can’t bring the people you really want to see, your beloved dead.

But what a show that would be, huh?

I’m sure somebody’s working on it.

We walked across the street to the Roosevelt Hotel, where the show was taped—hurry, hurry, the audience waits—up the stairs and into the Magnolia Room. A huge jumble, and then we were onstage, under the lights, and the people in the seats applauded us, and Rocky slapped me on the back. He hadn’t known ahead of time, either, but he probably had hoped every day that a television crew would show up to tell him the story of his life, no matter how abridged.

They sat us down on the love seat, which normally held only one honoree; I had the spot closer to stage center. “Mike,” the host said jovially, “got enough room left over for you there?” I almost corrected his manners—why insult the weight of an invited guest—but smiled. I could feel the warmth of Rocky’s knee near mine, but I concentrated on the show.

Rocky first. They showed a chubby baby photo that caused the audience to coo, then brought out a seventy-year-old showgirl who’d known Rock at the Old Howard Theater in Boston. Then a baby picture of me, buck naked on a bearskin rug. How had they got hold of that? I would have blamed Jessica, but I didn’t think I’d seen that picture in years.

“Mike,” the host said, “you were born in Valley Junction, Iowa, in 1911.” It seemed like the kind of thing you’d say to a stroke victim. Then a voice: Ed Dubuque’s, and he came through the door. All over again I was surprised that Ed was a man not much older than me. He hugged me first with one arm, and then the other. The host told me to sit back down on the sofa, and Ed began to talk. He was stiff; he must have rehearsed.

“One summer, Mose worked at his family’s store after he’d broken both wrists.” Ed gestured to his own. “His father told him to go over the stock with a feather duster, and one day, when he was holding the duster between his casts”—Ed demonstrated—“he started to sing to it. And then he began to dance. He moved all through the store, singing and dancing. When he was finished, we applauded, customers and everything. Loveliest thing you ever saw, and all for a feather duster.” Ed’s nose and ears were bright red. That’s how he always blushed. Then he was whisked backstage again.

I wanted to call him back. Dancing with a feather duster? I didn’t remember, though as soon as he’d said it, I could see myself, the way I slid and nearly went down on one knee, a clot of dust in one cuff of my pants, my thick hair that needed cutting as usual. Then I realized I saw it as though I’d been filmed. If it really happened, if I really remembered, what I would see would be the gray head of the duster, the handle like a turned table leg between my plastered arms. Come back, Ed. Are you sure you’re not thinking of some other kid?

Meanwhile, Ralph Edwards had skipped back to Rocky. I tried to pay attention. This disembodied voice said, “Hello, son.” And then, out walked Professor and Professor Carter, Rocky’s parents.

They looked unbelievably aged and sour. Arthritis had left his father like some flat-out-of-luck dinosaur whose ancestors had been able to fly and whose descendants would be able to walk upright. You expected his wife to help her husband across the stage, but she didn’t, she held the clasp of her white pocketbook as though she were about to start rummaging through it. It might have been the most suspenseful moment in the history of This Is Your Life: would Rocky Carter’s parents make it to center stage without expiring?

Rocky got up and shook his father’s hand and kissed his mother’s cheek, and then sat back down. This time, I could feel his knee vibrate with nerves; he was agitating his whole leg with rapid minuscule bounces of his heel. He probably thought nobody would notice, but over the air the tattersall pattern of his pants would pulsate.

Twenty-six years I’d known this guy. Never in all that time—not once, no matter the venue, no matter the size of the crowd—had anything like this ever happened. Not what we were doing, though we sat hip-to-hip, and that was strange, both the posture and the proximity. (Usually if he was close enough to touch, I was smacking him over the head, removing his hat to use it as a weapon on his cranium.) Not the man holding a microphone and our prop biography. Not even the two terrifying elderly people, glowering at the mixed marriage before them, unlikely to deliver their blessing.

The unprecedented thing: Rocky was frightened in front of a crowd. He was onstage and silent, wedged in next to me, and contemplated—I could tell, I’d worked with him and knew his ways, even this one thing that had never happened before—running from the stage without an apology. Stage fright. Nerves like an amateur’s.

I don’t remember what the Professors Carter said. Some scrap of a story, told without much affection. Then they were gone too.

I tried to hold body and mind together, but it was hard. There was Mimi, and she was almost thin again but not quite, and her nose was still all wrong; she kissed me and pinched my upstage ear. Here comes Tansy, shaking both our hands. They had to rush to fit two lives in one half hour, and it was over so quick there was no more time for suspense. Only later I would think: I wish they’d found Penny, it would have been nice to see Sukey Decker, why didn’t they ask Johnny Atkinson? They mentioned Betty’s death (though not Hattie’s), and I wish they hadn’t: anyone who couldn’t come shouldn’t be invited to the party. At the very end, they called out Jessica and then Rocky’s new wife, a very tall young blonde named Ella, who kissed her husband on the top of his head. My kids came out. Rock and I both looked around for Rocky junior, but he didn’t show up. My sisters flooded the stage, and that’s when I began to cry—I’d been to see them six months before, but that was in Iowa, and here they were, Annie, Ida, Fannie, Sadie, Rose, dressed up and on television, as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

Why not get back together, I thought, sitting on the This Is Your Life love seat. Nothing big. A TV appearance where we actually had some lines. A week of club work in Vegas. I got a kick out of my new movies, but I missed thinking on my feet. No, I didn’t miss that: I missed Rock. After the show I’d talk to Tansy—

“Well, boys,” Ralph Edwards said, “we’ve got fifteen seconds. Any words you’d like to leave us with?”

We stood up. I was still crying and waved away the microphone. Rocky threw one arm around me, which for him was always a gesture equal parts fond and hostile. “This has been wonderful,” he said, not looking at me. “Mike and I had such a long, happy ride together. This show is a perfect end to a perfect partnership. I can’t think of a better going-away party.”

“Oh?” said Edwards, confused.

“Didn’t you know?” said Rocky. “Carter and Sharp have broken up.”

They threw a party for us afterward in the hotel’s dining room. Rock and I were seated at either end of the table, twin fathers, with our extended families all around us. I wanted to talk to him, but not here. You didn’t have to do that. I believed he’d thought he’d done me a favor. What insanity, to see your longtime partner on national television after an extended silence. How happy I was to see him anyhow. What a bad idea this all was. Rocky talked to Tansy and Neddy and Mimi and Jessica and our kids, especially Jake, who hadn’t forgotten his favorite wayward uncle. I talked to Mimi and Ed and Ida and Fannie and Sadie and Annie and Mrs. Rose Dubuque, proprietress now of Sharp’s Apparel of West Des Moines. Annie still did the books. They’d decided to stock women’s clothing, she told me, and I felt like a club member whose old haunt has gone coed without his permission. Ladies’ frocks in Sharp’s Gents’! Ladies’ underthings, even!

Why hadn’t I thought of that?

Professor and Professor Carter spoke to no one. As I suspected, Mrs. Professor Carter cared only for the contents of her purse, which she emptied onto the tabletop. I worried that she’d eventually pull out a gun. Instead, she began to fill the purse with sugar cubes and silverware.

Plenty of mingling all around—my sisters approached Rocky and said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we had dinner together sixteen years ago.” He greeted them all warmly, by name. Gilda sat on everybody’s lap. I thought she’d be shy around her idol, Sadie Sow’s best friend, but instead she leaned on one of his knees and asked him to do something funny.

By the end of the evening, Rocky was as drunk as I’d ever seen him. Strange as it sounds, I took that as almost good news: maybe sturdy Ella made him drink less, and therefore he was more susceptible to the martinis. She sat next to the Carters, who seemed to be berating her for not knowing what the Bayeux Tapestry was. “The Babe Ruth what?” she asked. I sat down next to Rocky.

“So how’s the boy?” I inquired.

I watched him try to piece together a clever answer. I watched him fail.

“Money troubles,” he said. “You probably heard.”

“You know,” I told him, “if I can help you out with a loan . . .”

He raised his head, and gave me a look that went from haughty to embarrassed to grateful to defeated in the space of two seconds: I could almost chart each reaction as it arrived at his forehead and tumbled down his face and into his drink.

“I don’t think it’s come to that,” he said.

“I like Ella. She’s a very giant woman.”

“I’m playing Vegas next week.”

“That’s good.”

“Tonight I have to see my folks.” He pointed them out to me, in case I’d forgotten. He laughed. “They haven’t changed a bit. Forty years. You know,” he said. The waiter set down a new martini in front of him. He started to turn it, and we both looked at the thin layer of ice doing its steady trick despite the revolutions of the glass. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It seemed an apology was in order, but I didn’t know who was owed. “You know, Professor,” he said, “not many people realize this”—he nodded at his glass—“but the ice in a martini always points to true north.”

“So,” I said to Jessica as she drove us home, “that was a surprise.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She made it sound as though she still thought it wasn’t a bad idea. “Did you get a chance to talk to Rocky?”

“He was fried. As usual.”

“I didn’t know they’d brought in his parents.”

“Of course they did. That’s what the show is about.”

From the backseat, Jake wondered how many people watched This Is Your Life.

“Too many,” I told him. He was thirteen, just the age vanity would get the best of him, one way or the other. “You looked like a prince. The new teen heartthrob. Across North America, girls are burning their pictures of Pat Boone.”

“They should,” said Nathan, “but over him?”

“All we wanted was for the two of you to talk a little,” said Jessica.

“He pulled a fast one, huh? Shocked the hell out of Tansy. I’m sure he thought we’d get back together after tonight. Neddy probably had a script all ready: Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits.”

We pulled into the drive and then into the garage. Jess put the car into park with a clunk. “Nobody wanted anything but for you guys to talk. You miss him. You don’t realize it, but you miss him.”

Of course I realized it. For instance, he would have laughed at Carter and Sharp Collect Social Security Benefits. I didn’t know anyone else who’d find that really funny. We might have gone on making up geriatric slapstick titles. Carter and Sharp Break a Hip. Carter and Sharp Wander Off. Carter and—What Was Your Name Again?

“Darling boy,” he’d called me, when he saw me at the restaurant.

But I hadn’t begun to fully bend until his parents took the stage. Ah, thought the audience, his parents: how proud they must be! I understood exactly how proud they were. All the years I’d known Rocky, Mrs. Carter’s motherly correspondence consisted of requests for money when the fictional Mrs. Carter showed up on the radio. They couldn’t profit from the sisters, since they belonged rightfully to me, but I had in my head several paragraphs written in case Father Professor Carter decided that because I wore a mortarboard I was patterned after him. He never made a claim. “My father doesn’t care for show business,” Rocky used to tell me before we hit it big, “but he adores money. I have a little plan cooked up to buy his love. . . .” Then he discovered that his father would cash the checks and welsh on Rocky’s dreamt-up deal. In other words, I had followed the whole complicated plot of the past twenty-six years: I’d had a major role. I would have known not to invite those people who happened to share his name. This, I knew, is not his life.

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.”