– I’ve never given you any other kind.
– Cross your heart?
– Cross my heart.
Ben Shipman takes a deep breath.
– I am reading this from the newspaper. Listen carefully. Are you listening?
– I’m listening.
– Okay. ‘Lutes –’ Incidentally, Lutes is the man who married you and your new bride.
– I know. I just told you his name.
– I was concerned that you might already have forgotten. After all, there have been so many, you may be having trouble keeping track. ‘Lutes said the blond woman, who gave her age as thirty-nine and her birthplace as Russia, did not further identify herself. Her description resembled that of his third wife, Vera Ivanova Shuvalova, the Russian dancer known as Illeana, from whom he was divorced in 1939.’ So my question is this: you haven’t accidentally married Illeana again, have you?
He hangs up on Ben Shipman, although he is too polite not to say goodbye first.
179
At the Oceana Apartments, Ida plumps his cushions, and checks his blood sugar. She asks if he needs anything, but he does not. He hates being a diabetic, but the disease has saved him. Liquor was always his weakness. It made him foolish. Without it, he is less foolish, but still, like all men, a fool at heart.
He follows Ida’s progress as she walks away. He thinks that Ida is beautiful, whereas he is merely old.
Why did you stay with me when all the others left?
Why did you love me, and never stop?
This is the waning of the day, the twilight. Soon it will be dark.
And yours will be the hand I hold when night falls at last.
180
What is left for him and Babe?
Nothing.
Nothing but pictures imagined yet unfilmed.
Nothing but pictures that will never be made.
Ben Shipman calls him.
– We’ve had an offer.
He does not want to hear it. What studio will take them now? Republic? Monogram? He will not end his days on Poverty Row.
Not pictures, says Ben Shipman. Live performance.
– The circuit?
He is not sure that he can return to cold dressing rooms and darkened train stations, to unfamiliar bedrooms musty with the spoor of others. And most of the venues with which he was once familiar are now no more, converted instead into picture houses. He thinks that it would break his heart to perform as part of a variety bill between features.
Formerly in pictures.
And nightclubs, or cabaret shows? He no longer has the energy. He cannot even drink as he once did. As recently as the wartime fundraisers, the Victory Caravan, he and Babe and Groucho Marx did not know a sober day. Now he will never again know a drunk one.
Not here, says Ben Shipman. England.
In Britain, the war has preserved them in amber. The British have not seen the Fox pictures, or the MGM disasters. The British remember them only as they once were. In his homeland, there has been no decline. In his homeland, they have not faded. They will fill the theaters ten times over.
Or so Ben Shipman says.
But Babe is fifty-five, and he is older still. He has grown to resemble A.J., as though in fulfillment of a destiny long denied yet ultimately inevitable. In England, the Audience is in love with the men he and Babe once were, if they are truly recalled at all. It is a long way to go only to disappoint, and be disappointed in turn.
But he is broke once more. He has so little money that when he marries Ida he cannot afford a ring for the ceremony, and so she reuses the one given to her by Raphael, Concertina Virtuoso. He would like to see England again, but he does not possess the funds to travel unaided.
Babe’s pockets are also empty, but neither does Babe enjoy being idle for long. Work is Babe’s justification for hours spent on the golf course, or betting on the horses, and one cannot place a gentlemanly wager on a round of golf, or back a pony, without pennies in one’s purse.
It’s good money, he tells Babe. We’ll stay in nice places – the girls, too. They’ll pay for all of us to go.
– But will they remember us?
– Ben says we’re still big over there. Maybe not as big as before, but we’ll make more than we would here. And last I heard, Hitler failed to bomb all the golf courses. There’s also this: I want to see home, but I can’t do it without you, and I won’t.
Babe and Lucille like Ida. To travel together as couples for two months is no great imposition.
Then I’m happy to go, says Babe.
But with the arrangements in place, Lucille takes ill, and faces a long convalescence.
The doctors won’t allow her to travel, Babe tells him.
– What will you do?
– I can’t leave her.
Babe would rather be forced from his home by penury than abandon Lucille when she is ailing.
Can you perform without me? Babe asks.
He does not know. He supposes he could go to England alone, but the routine on which they have worked hardest, the Driver’s License sketch, requires two people. Even if a substitute could be found for Babe, he doubts that the payments would remain the same. He will be lucky to receive half of what was promised, and the houses will be commensurately smaller. This worries him. He loves Ben Shipman, but he does not believe that he will be welcomed as rapturously in England as before, either alone or with Babe beside him. He came up through vaudeville: if someone promised an orchard, you planned for an apple. He has learned to manage his expectations.
But he will not allow Babe to suffer financially because of Lucille’s incapacitation. This is not their way. The money, whatever it may amount to in the end, will be paid to their company and divided equally, whether Babe is part of the tour or not.
This is their way.
So Babe informs Lucille of his decision to stay with her, and Lucille, were she not laid horizontal by the problems with her lower spine, would have responded by grabbing Babe by the collar and shaking him. Instead she sets Babe straight on matters pertaining to money, and his career, and their future together.
In February 1947, Babe joins Ida and him on the Queen Elizabeth, bound for England.
181
He stands with Babe on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth, Ida sleeping in a cabin below. It is the night before they are due to dock in Southampton, but he may be guilty of altering the timeline for effect, because this is how it would have been in a picture.
They can see no stars, only the lights of another vessel in the distance. He is wearing so many layers of clothing that his head resembles a pin poking from the collar of his coat. Babe’s jacket is open. Babe does not feel the cold in the same way.
He is worried about what they will find the next day. He has seen the photographs, the newsreels: whole streets demolished, cities on fire. He knows of those from his past who have died in bombing raids, and others who have given their children to holes in foreign soil. What place, then, for two aging men come to trade on former glories, their gray hair a reminder of all that has been lost?
It’s not important, says Babe.
– What isn’t?
– How many come, how big the houses are.