he: A Novel(91)

178


On May 6th, 1946, Ben Shipman’s secretary detects a cry from her boss’s office as of a being in agony, and fears Ben Shipman is having a heart attack, or that someone beloved of Ben Shipman has died.

When she enters the office, Ben Shipman is holding a newspaper in one hand, and trying to pour himself a drink with the other.

Jesus Christ, says Ben Shipman, he’s married another Russian.

He does not just marry Ida Kitaeva Raphael: he elopes to Yuma with Ida Kitaeva Raphael. It is, as reporters delight in noting, his third elopement, his fourth bride, and his seventh marriage – or his eighth ceremony, if one counts the officiations of Rasputin.

You’re a fifty-six year old man, Ben Shipman tells him, when Ben Shipman finally manages to get him on the phone at the Grand Hotel in San Diego, to which he has repaired with his new bride. You have no business eloping. It’s bad for your health. Worse, it’s bad for my health.

Ida Kitaeva Raphael is thirty-nine years old, the child of White Russians. Vera, Ben Shipman reflects, was also born of White Russians, but in her case it was the cocktails. Ida Kitaeva Raphael is a widow. Her first husband was Raphael, Concertina Virtuoso, of whom it was said that there was none to surpass him in drawing from his instrument silken strains of song. Raphael performed before FDR, the King of England, and the Tsar of Russia. Raphael also played suppers at the Waldorf-Astoria, supporting Hugo Mariani’s Tango Orchestra.

The elopement was a spur-of-the-moment decision, he tells Ben Shipman.

– You don’t say. According to the newspapers, you woke a justice of the peace at his home at five o’clock in the morning.

– We hoped to arrive earlier, but we got lost. And Justice Lutes operates a marriage parlor from his house. It’s called Cupid’s Corner. Justice Lutes went right back to bed after the ceremony.

– I don’t care if Justice Lutes fled to China after the ceremony. You got married somewhere called Cupid’s Corner? Where’s the honeymoon going to be, Lover’s Lane?

– We haven’t decided yet.

– My God. I just have one more question I want to ask.

– Go ahead.

– And I want an honest answer.

– 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.