– It’s important to Bernard Delfont.
Bernard Delfont is the English impresario who has convinced them to make the journey. He does not wish to be responsible for Bernard Delfont’s impoverishment.
I think it may be more important to you, says Babe.
– I don’t want to come all this way just to be forgotten. I could have stayed back in California if I’d wanted to be forgotten.
He is exaggerating. Their old pictures have begun showing up on television, making more money for Hal Roach, if not for them. But television does not yet seem quite real to him. He was raised on the Audience. He does not wish to watch a picture on a box, alone.
And if the Audience does not come, if the theaters remain empty, then what is he?
He is just a man in a box, although not alone. Babe will be with him.
I’m glad I didn’t stay back in California, says Babe. I miss Lucille, but I never thought we’d have the chance to take another trip like this. I figured we were done. And if someone was prepared to put us on a ship, I believed it would be in steerage, not first class.
– We could have stoked the boilers, paid our way.
– With what we could shovel, we wouldn’t even have made it out of port.
– I’m glad you’re here. I’m happy you’re with me.
Babe pats him on the back.
– I’m going to bed. When morning comes, we’ll be in British waters.
– Don’t dream that you’re awake, and wake up to find yourself asleep.
– Wise words.
Yes, he says, they are.
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At the Oceana Apartments, when he cannot rest easy in his bed, and the silence is too loud, he sometimes walks to the window, and looks out at the sea, and remembers Southampton, 1947:
The dock emerging from the mist, and figures glimpsed in the half-light, so many that he believes he must be mistaken, that he has peopled this land with specters. Perhaps he has briefly transmuted to his younger self, reaching for a past when he was still vital. But he can feel the moisture on his skin, and the heat of Ida’s hand in his, and beside him Babe is waving, waving, and now he too is waving as the fog clears, and the faces become visible, and he thinks that he has never seen so many people gathered in one place, and a great wave of human warmth rolls toward him over the water, a tidal wash of emotion, and he is smiling, smiling, and he never wants to leave this ship or this moment, Babe on one side, Ida on the other, and he misses only his daughter, and wishes that she were here with him to see this, to be a part of it, so that everything he loves might be in one place, sealed in this single instant of perfection.
Then it comes to him, now as before, rising like the song of unseen birds, ascending from the dock and the city beyond, carried by the wind to where he stands.
The sound of whistling.
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They are booked for six weeks. They stay for nine months.
By June, Lucille is well enough to join them.
And Babe is complete.
The first weeks are cold. The Audience queues amid snowdrifts. There are fuel shortages. Coal is scarce. They register by candlelight at chimerical lodgings, and hand over ration books in return for the plainest of food. They open in Newcastle, where the theater is so poorly heated that their breath plumes like smoke from funnels, even under the lights, and later they gather for warmth around their shared fire at the Royal Station Hotel.
He does not care. He is home.
And he begins to understand that in this changed country, with its bombsites and its dead, it does not matter that they are older men.
That they have made poor choices in the name of poorer pictures.
That their personal lives have become fodder for gossip and newspaper columns.
What matters is that they came back.
In London, floodwaters rise in the thaw. At the Palladium, Babe is in costume hours before curtain. Babe cannot sit, Babe cannot rest. The stage is his home, not Babe’s. Babe is always nervous before a live performance, and the Audience made real. Thousands are waiting, with thousands more to come. Babe is sweating so much that Babe’s clothing is soaked, his shirt transparent. Babe has lost weight – austerity favors him – but Babe remains a big man.
You have to relax, he says. They already have one flood outside.
– I can’t remember my lines.
– You can remember your lines. You’ve just forgotten that you remember them.
Babe stops pacing to stare at him.
There are times, says Babe, when I don’t know where the real you ends and the other you begins.
– If you need clarification, you could call some of my ex-wives.
As if they could help, says Babe, and resumes his pacing.
When they take to the stage, the Audience rises. The noise is unlike any that he has heard before. The Audience cheers and claps in unison, becoming one voice of approbation, a perfect series of adulatory strikes pulsing from the dark. It begins as a joyful sound before growing deeper, more elemental. It transforms, and in transforming, it liberates.
It drowns out the orchestra.
It drowns out their voices.
It drowns out war and pain and fear and loss and hunger and grief.
It drowns out death itself.
184
At the Oceana Apartments, he recollects leaving England in triumph, infused with a joy he has not felt in many years. England has reinvigorated them. England has given them hope.
But hope is a candle.
Hope burns, and then it is gone.
185
In England, he has been given a book inscribed to Chaplin, with a request to pass it on. He considers mailing it, but decides instead to renew their acquaintance. He makes an appointment, as one might with a politician or public dignitary, and arrives at Chaplin’s house in Beverly Hills at the appointed time.
Chaplin greets him heartily. They sit. They drink. They reminisce.
They speak of the dead.
And he glimpses the old Chaplin, the being that existed before Chaplin became a god.
We are alike, you and I, says Chaplin, and he is back on the waters off Catalina Island, back with Chaplin, and Paulette Goddard, and Ruth.
He is, once again, a man adrift.
No two fellows, Chaplin continues, have shared the adventure we have shared. We are children of Karno, of the music halls. Who else like us is left?
Chaplin talks of damp rooms on the vaudeville circuit, the two of them enfolded in shared beds, and meals taken in shabby restaurants, and women fucked whose names Chaplin has long since forgotten. He sits in the ambit of Chaplin’s light, in the warmth of Chaplin’s affection, and he watches the spell being cast, but he is older now, and Chaplin’s words are hollow bones: they hold no marrow. Yet he cannot help but admire Chaplin, even as he wishes him more capable of truth, and more worthy of affection.
They part. Promises are made. They will stay in touch. They will meet. They must do so, Chaplin says, because they are alone of their kind.
He never sees or speaks with Chaplin again.
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