he: A Novel(2)

(And later, as he tries to recall the scent and the beauty of her; and later, as he searches in vain for her grave, its marker lost; and later, on the set of the Oceana Apartments, he will think that he should have run to Madge more often, because as he treads the boards of Pickard’s Museum the final sands are already funneling through the hourglass of his mother’s life, and she will be dead within two years.)

So he does not seek safety at home, behind Madge’s skirts. He ventures to the Metropole, A.J.’s lair. He will confront the old lion in its den.

A.J. is waiting for him, waiting for him to explain the ruined trousers, waiting for him to explain the purloined coat. The top hat is gone; he loses it in his flight from the stage, and the pianist crushes it beneath his boot and displays the remains for the amusement of the Audience, believing it to be a prop, a dud, and not A.J.’s beloved handmade silk hat.

A.J. summons him to the office. A.J. is already drinking a whisky and soda. This does not bode well.

The gags, says A.J. Where did you get the gags?

And he shares with A.J. the attic rooms, the hours spent honing each line, each step, reflected only in a dusty mirror and the dead eyes of dolls. And he shares with A.J. the sallies stolen from Boy Glen and Nipper Lane. And he shares with A.J. the routines that he alone has created, these poor imitations, these counterfeit claims.

A.J. listens. A.J. does not speak.

He wants to remind A.J. that they laughed. The Audience, those hard men and women of Glasgow – no turn left unstoned – laughed.

At him.

For him.

I heard them, says A.J., although he has not yet spoken to A.J. of the laughter. I was there. I witnessed all.

He starts to cry.

He signs on with A.J.’s company for ￡1.5/- a week.

A.J. says that he still owes him a top hat.





4


At the Oceana Apartments, he is with Babe.

Babe is dead.

But Babe is always with him.

It is long before the dead days, and he and Babe are walking together in New York. Babe stops to speak with the son of a shoeshine man, Babe’s face a beacon of delight. Now Babe can run his routine.

Babe tells the boy that Babe also was born in Harlem, and the boy, already in thrall to this man familiar from the screens of the black-only theaters, can do no more than gaze in further wonder as Babe feeds the punchline.

– Harlem, Georgia!

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.

Babe laughs, and the boy laughs with him, and Babe tips the father a dollar and gives the son a dollar too, because the gag was worth it.

But then, Babe has always been a soft touch.

He and Babe walk on.

Would the shoeshine man and his son have laughed as hard or as loud, he wonders, if they knew that Oliver Hardy – Babe’s father, his progenitor – lies buried down in Harlem, Georgia alongside his second wife, the sister of the Magruder plantation heirs, and therefore slave owners also; or that Babe’s father was an overseer, a middleman, employed to keep the darkies subdued and their masters satisfied, and a former soldier who served willingly in the Confederate army under Captain Joshua Boyd as part of Ramsey’s Volunteers, only to be wounded for his trouble in the Battle of Antietam?

Oliver Hardy died in the year of Babe’s birth, so Babe never knew him, but every man lives his life touched by intimations of his father, and none more so than Babe, because in form and demeanor Babe is his father’s son. He has been shown by Babe the photograph of the patriarch, is aware of the resemblance. He has read the treasured cutting from the Columbia paper describing Babe’s father: ‘open, jolly, funful … covered all over with smiles … lives to eat, or eats to live … this Falstaffian figure.’

Babe should have played Falstaff, he thinks. No matter.

So Babe laughs heartily, and tips every man well regardless of his color, all in order that Babe may not be mistaken for someone of the Confederate stripe, even as Babe assumes his father’s first name while his own – Norvell – is reduced to a letter in his signature, a half-forgotten N.

An afterthought.

So much about Babe is hidden behind that N, because Babe – like all comics

like Chaplin

like himself

– does not really exist. Babe acquiesces in the myths peddled by a succession of motion picture studios, just as Babe, under examination, will relegate his status from actor to that of gagman, golfer, and good fellow. Babe will speak of a father who was a lawyer, and of ancestors who knew Lord Nelson, and will not blush at these falsehoods. Babe will permit himself to be acclaimed as a law graduate of the University of Georgia, even if Babe no more studied law than his father did, all to add mantles to his being. Babe will be fat, because Babe must be, and jolly, because Babe must be, and Babe will spin fantasies like cotton candy and feed them to the masses.

But here is another Babe, a younger Babe: the fat boy, already Oliver after his parent, two hundred pounds of slow-moving quarry, trudging the streets of Milledgeville, Georgia, like Christ to the crucifixion, bearing a sandwich board advertising the meal specials at the Baldwin Hotel run by his mother, Miss Emmie. When Babe speaks of this time, as Babe rarely does, day becomes night, and Babe’s eyelids drop like hoods to conceal the brightness beneath.

I might just as well, says Babe, have been wearing a target.