Maybe sometimes she forgot to shut them.
The baby had wandered out of the house. Look: a beautiful shimmering heart in the backyard, glittering romance to a baby girl. There were always little wavelets in our pool, the water holding coins of light between its fingers. The baby doesn’t know the difference between water and light, unless it’s on her skin: one is cold, and the other warm, but how can you tell if you don’t touch? So she tries to touch. She is a magpie; she steals all the shiny things in the house and hides them in her bed, butter knives and costume jewelry and the foil from packs of cigarettes. She walks to the edge of the pool. She doesn’t look around. She doesn’t know this is forbidden. She leans over the water, and now the flash is beyond her reach, so she leans farther, and she is so small there is no splash, and she is so round that she floats, and she is so surprised that she does nothing, nothing at all, and when her mother finds her — only minutes later, says the doctor — she is still floating, little jellyfish, greedy little jellyfish, her hands empty and her face, when they turn her over, disappointed.
You cannot save the dead, though I’d spent years in dreams trying, catching Hattie and catching Hattie and every morning she was still dead. Now, I dreamt I dove into the pool until I remembered that this was a good way to kill myself as well, and then I thought that wasn’t such a bad idea: it didn’t count as suicide if it was accidental, did it? Then I told myself, uncertainly, that I did not want to kill myself. I had responsibilities, so then I tried out other rescues: the net on the long pole that the pool man used to fish out flotsam. A call for help. Too long. Eventually, over and over, I merely locked the gate, with a giant padlock on a chain like a sunken treasure chest.
“If the gate was locked,” I said to Jessica. This was cruelty, I knew even as I said it. Those days after the accident — the gates now actually locked — I wept, and she didn’t. She curled up on the sofa with the boys, or walked into the kitchen, or sat on the floor cross-legged. My slight wife dwindled. She looked as though she’d wandered into another person’s closet to dress, someone bigger and more optimistic. I regret to say that she grew oddly more beautifuclass="underline" the few pictures I have from those days prove it. Skinny, too skinny to live, but gorgeous.
As for me, I wept, nearly all the time. It’s come to this, I thought: I’d believed that as I got older I got more sentimental, but really I was losing my mind day by day, and this blow knocked me right out of it. “Mike Sharp’s Tragedy,” said the newspapers and magazines. “Tears of a Funnyman.” Documentation everywhere, and well-meaning but horrific bouquets of flowers. Soon the florists knew to deliver to the local hospitals instead. All these years later, I can imagine how it would have been for Jessica, this great interest from the outside world in how I felt, what I had lost, as though by not being famous her own grief was not so compelling. Then, though, I agreed. My grief was as engrossing, as vivid, as unremitting as a hallucination.
I’d fallen into a pool once. I could have drowned! And yet I’d had one installed, I’d never learned to swim, I ignored everything.
Tell us what to do, my sisters said, in telegrams and phone calls. Say the word. I told them to stay home, that Jessica and I were doing our best for the boys now, and that a whole houseful of mourning grown-ups would only make things worse. My sisters agreed: that was how we’d been raised. But Jessica’s brother, Joseph, arrived without warning; he’d heard the news on the radio and drove straight to the airport and once in Hollywood talked his way past the maid, who’d been instructed not to let anyone in. He was the one who arranged the burial — we had no funeral — and bought a plot in Forest Lawn at Babyland, which (I learned this later, though I still have never been by the grave) is a heart-shaped plinth of grass in the center of the park, a place in every way so tasteful that it’s tasteless beyond imagining.
The maid was a poor guard dog. The day after the accident — Joseph already at the Forest Lawn — we had another visitor who slipped past.
“Mosey,” Rock said as he stood in the door of my den, and I burst into tears and threw myself into his arms. I’d been crying by myself for so long. “Ah, sweetheart,” he said to me. “Oh, babe.”
We never officially made up, unless you call me weeping in his arms making up. Ask anyone: a tragedy will drive two people apart or together. In my case both things happened.
The first thing Rocky did was get me drunk. Terrible man, you think, but no, it was exactly what I needed. We sat in my study on the leather sofa Lillian, Rocky’s decorator wife, had talked me into — if you napped on it, you woke up red faced and button printed — and he handed me glass after glass of brandy until I stopped weeping and could talk. The brandy slowed me down. Drunk, I could almost think. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been drunk. Surely it had been with Rocky, him pressing drinks on me, talking me into just one more.
“Just one more,” I said now, and handed him back the glass.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know.”
The sofa made a fussy noise as he rearranged his weight. He wasn’t drinking himself. “You know what I think? You need to get back to work.”
I shook my head. But what I said was “Yes.” My father’s cure: keeping busy. Who knew more about such things than my father? We’d wrap the racetrack pic, which was nearly done — that’s why we’d been posing for stills — and there was the radio show on Thursday night. They’d already arranged for Eddie Cantor to replace me. There would have been jokes about all of Rocky’s mythical sisters and Cantor’s very real daughters: he had five. “Five daughters,” I said to Rocky on the sofa, the way he used to say, Six sisters! He just patted my back. Maybe he thought I was making plans for the future.
“Work,” he said to me. “It’s not a cure, but it will help.”
That first radio show was torture, not funny in the least. You will find it on no tape of The Best of Carter and Sharp. Cantor showed up anyhow, just in case I couldn’t go on. The script seemed especially stupid to me, but radio work was perfect for the state I was in: I could sit down when they didn’t need me, just listen to Loretta sing her ballad, sounding ready to burst into tears herself. The writers hadn’t changed anything; they probably should have given her something upbeat. On the other hand, that might have been worse, sniffling through “The Sunny Side of the Street.”
The audience gave me a standing ovation. The papers marveled at my bravery, as though my greatest duty in the world was entertaining people (not that I was the least bit entertaining that night: I flubbed my lines, I stepped on cues). I was a trooper, like the soldier I’d once thought I should be, charging ahead despite my fear. The only people who didn’t admire me were Jessica and Joseph. When I got home that night, Joseph said, “Your wife needs you.” He looked like he was working on his resemblance to Mahler.
I shrugged, and started for our room.
“Not now,” he said. “She needed you to be home. Now she’s asleep.”