he: A Novel(5)

9


Milledgeville, situated at the heart of Baldwin County, and once the capital city of Georgia. Black labor built it, the slaves bought and sold in the marketplace by the Presbyterian Church on Capital Square. He supposes the ones who constructed the houses, the skilled artisans, were more fortunate than the poor souls carted off to pick cotton, but everything is relative.

At the eastern border, fast flowing, runs the Oconee River. Sam Tant, Babe’s older half-brother, is killed while swimming in the Oconee River. Babe sometimes speaks of trying to rescue Sam Tant. Sam Tant jumps from a high branch, but misjudges the depth of the water and lands on his head. Babe pulls Sam Tant’s body from the river, but Sam Tant isn’t moving, and later Sam Tant dies. Babe tells the story often, one more burden for him to carry. He guesses that Babe was perhaps sixteen or seventeen when the incident occurred, but has never been able to pin down the year.

Babe’s role in the tragedy adds another stratum to Babe’s mythology, continuing the process of augmentation and concealment in which Babe is engaged, Babe’s grief obvious and therefore not to be interrogated further, a deflector of intrusion. Sometimes he imagines himself peeling away Babe’s integuments, excavating the seams, so that Babe becomes thinner and thinner, smaller and smaller, until at last all that remains is the shining core of the man, the radiance within.

But Babe is immune from such exploration, and when disease finally pares away the layers of Babe, all that is left is death.





10


Where is the plot?

The answer is that there is no plot: plots are for the stage alone. There is no plan, no manifest destiny. There is only a series of events, some connected, some discrete, and this will be called a life. Destiny is for gods, and he is just a man.

He is not Chaplin.

He tries. Acts come together, acts fall apart. Perhaps A.J. will have him back, although A.J. has no time for Fred Karno’s foot soldiers, the deserters from the army. One cannot serve two masters.

Failure: failure in America, then Britain, and finally Europe. If he had the money and ambition, he could probably have failed in Australia too, but in the absence of both he returns to London.

He remembers Waterloo Station. He remembers rain and filth. He remembers the walk to High Holborn. He remembers the regretful sound of a horse’s hooves, slow in the night, like the ticking of an old clock, the clock in Fred Karno’s office, more seconds falling away, as of promise in decay, as of his own inexorable abatement; and the smell of the Cittie of Yorke, all piss and spilled beer. He remembers the hesitancy of his footsteps as he approaches the flat of Gordon, his brother.

Gordon is managing the Prince’s Theatre. Gordon does not turn him from the door. This, then, is to be the pattern of his continuance: bit parts, and the shadowing of his brother. He will end his days in a back room surrounded by moldy scripts and shilling chits. To avoid confusion, he will forever forsake his first name for his middle one, and be known as S.J., his father’s heir, and when the stalls are empty and the lights are extinguished, he will prance in the dimness to the laughter of ghosts.

A.J. was right.

A.J. will have his way.

He walks Shaftesbury Avenue.

He walks Soho.

He walks Leicester Square.

His name is called. He turns. Alf Reeves, the man who smiles at Chaplin, but only with his mouth.

Handshakes, backslaps.

What news of America, he asks Alf Reeves. What news of the Guv’nor?

He knows that Karno’s Comedians, as they are now called, are back in England, a respite before the return. He tries not to read of Fred Karno, but Fred Karno is unavoidable. The smell of burning bridges lingers in his nostrils. He threw Fred Karno’s generosity back in Fred Karno’s face. He has almost forgotten the biting of fleas, and sleeping in waiting rooms, and having his shoes stolen because he was foolish enough to leave them outside the right room in the wrong establishment. He remembers only what was lost.

Alf Reeves gestures at the theaters around them, to gods in lights.

– Where is your name?

At the bottom of the right bills, he replies, and the top of the wrong ones.

He puts his hands in the pockets of his trousers. There is a hole in the left. He can touch, with his index finger, the skin of his leg: sandpaper goose bumps. He is so attenuated, he wonders that he cannot yet scratch the very bone. He wishes that he had never walked through Leicester Square this day. He wishes that he had never met Alf Reeves.

Come back to America with us, says Alf Reeves, or so he imagines, until he realizes that Alf Reeves has spoken, and this is indeed what Alf Reeves has said.

He will be paid $30 a week.

He will be paid $30 a week to understudy Chaplin.

It is the autumn of 1912.





11


The Sullivan–Considine circuit.

Cincinnati, A Night in an English Music Hall.

Seattle, Vancouver, Portland.

The cold. God, the cold.

(‘Charles Chaplin is exceedingly funny.’) Chaplin.

Chaplin is different now, because Chaplin is worse. Mack Sennett is calling once again. Mack Sennett’s Keystone machine must be fed, and Chaplin is the meat that will give good mince. In November, 1913, as the weather changes, Chaplin jumps.

For $150 a week, with no more nickel lunches.

For $150 a week, with his name above the title.