he: A Novel(7)

The Audience laughs. It laughs when Edgar Hurley appears. It laughs because Chaplin makes it laugh.

He watches Edgar Hurley mimic him mimicking Chaplin. It breaks him, and in breaking he understands.

He abandons the Hurleys.

The Hurleys fire him.

Does either version change the plot? There is no plot, so it does not.

He is tired. This is too much for him. He could go home. His family is there. The music halls are there.

The war is there.

He remains.





15


Back in Milledgeville, home to Miss Emmie and the ghosts of dead brothers, Babe is the electrician at the Electric Theater, the job of projectionist being so new that the word in question has yet to be properly coined, so ‘electrician’ will have to suffice for now. Five cents entry, in an age when viewing a musical comedy in New York, or Boston, or Chicago costs a dollar, and Milledgeville most assuredly does not have a stage to compare with the big cities, or even the smaller ones. One-reelers and two-reelers: adventures, educationals, comedies, westerns. The Audience loves each and every one, but the westerns most of all.

Abernathy Kids to the Rescue.

Bill Sharkey’s Last Game.

Broncho Billy’s Redemption.

Babe watches the pictures from his post by the lantern, his face incandescent in the darkness. Babe sees John Bunny in Teaching McFadden to Waltz and Captain Jenks’ Dilemma. It is said that John Bunny is earning $5 a day at Vitagraph, rain or shine. There are no more unpaid rehearsals for John Bunny, and there is no more sleeping in train stations or scrabbling for nickel dinners. John Bunny has left vaudeville behind, and burned the shoes that once stumped its territories.

Like Babe, John Bunny is a large man, although nature has cursed John Bunny with a nose to match. John Bunny’s visage, memorable in its ugliness, is insured. John Bunny is a product of the stage transplanted to the screen, broad in body and expression, performing for the peanut gallery.

John Bunny, it is whispered, is also a prick of the highest order. Untypically for an actor, John Bunny does not drink. John Bunny does not need to be a drunkard to be a prick.

Babe will not be like John Bunny. Babe will not be a prick.

But neither will Babe be an actor like John Bunny. Babe will be a new beast, a child not of the stage but of motion pictures. Babe will be a creature of small gestures, of slight movements. Babe will raise an eyebrow where John Bunny waves his arms like a man drowning. Babe has stood beside the lantern and felt its warmth. When Babe looks the camera in the eye, Babe will not fear it.

Because behind that eye is the Audience.

Babe leaves the Electric Theater. Jacksonville, Florida, home of the pictures, future of the business, is not far south, but Babe still needs to eat. Cutie Pearce’s roadhouse offers Babe a singing gig to supplement his earnings at the Orpheum Theater. At $40 a week, even before the cash from Cutie Pearce, Babe may be earning more than John Bunny did at the beginning of his career, although John Bunny – prick or no prick – is now rolling in clover.

Babe spends his nights singing and dancing and pratfalling, and his days at the Lubin Manufacturing Company by the Florida Yacht Club, watching the pictures being made. But Babe is too far from the actors to see them properly, so Babe offers to fetch water for the crew. Eventually, a fat boy is needed for a role, and Babe is a fat boy.

Outwitting Dad, April 1914.

This Babe remembers.





16


How small he seems next to Babe, how slight. He catches the surprise in the faces of those who meet him without his partner, when the shadow is his alone. It works in his favor. It enables him to hide. With his hair slicked back and his head down, he can ghost through crowds. By the time his presence registers, if it registers at all, he has already passed by. He keeps moving. He has learned not to stop.

Except, perhaps, for women.

Like Chaplin, he now has that weakness.





17


He has known women: not as many as Chaplin – there are entire regiments that have not known as many women as Chaplin – but some. He has an eye for them, and they for him. He also has money, although not much, and can drink, and drink more when required. But these women are passing trade, and none lasts.

Until her.

Jesus, but there’s a hardness to her. It’s in the cheekbones, bladelike. He can glimpse the skull beneath the skin. She has feral eyes.

She is a Hayden Sister, although the Hayden Sisters do not exist, or not as blood sisters.

Her real sisters are dead, she tells him. Annie and Edith. Older. Buried back in Brunswick.

He does not know where this is.

Melbourne, she says. Australia.

Australia. He almost went there. Did not almost go there. Did not go there.

She laughs. They dance. They fuck.

She is May Charlotte Dahlberg.

She is May Charlota Dahlberg.

She is May Cuthbert, wife of Rupert Cuthbert.

But Rupert Cuthbert is dead. Nineteen fourteen, one year after she and Rupert Cuthbert disembarked from the RMS Niagara in Seattle. So sad, she says, although they were already drifting apart before they left Australia.

Except Rupert Cuthbert, it emerges, is not dead, but merely elsewhere. What of it? This is the stuff of a better tale: a widow, talented, making her own way, far from home.

There is a son, also Rupert. Rupert, Jr is nine.

Rupert, Jr, like his father, is elsewhere.