The bed was taken. The sheets were a filthy tangle, as if, for several weeks, they had been washed in alcohol, then dried in the sun. There were heaps of clothing at the foot, lingerie and the uniform of—yes—the Naval Reserve. Along the nightstand were empty bottles and, in surprisingly well-organized symmetry, a series of syringes topped with medicinal needles. Lying in the bed were Jack Pickford and Olive Thomas, newly-weds. She was a lovely young girl, prone to good times, and what compromised the pleasure of regarding her slender body was its condition: she was gray. Jack’s skin was the color of earwax, and Chaplin wasn’t sure if they were dead.

“They’re alive,” Frances whispered. “I checked. Oh, the weary hero of his country.”

“What should we do?”

She stood and arched her back in a stretch. Humming Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” she gathered up the syringes and wrapped them in a towel. “There’s probably a better room for us.”

The two of them left together. The room directly across the hall was empty. Frances dumped her towel and its contents into a wastepaper basket, and then sat on the bed. Chaplin locked the door. There were two ways this could go, and one of them involved ignoring what they had just seen.

Frances bit at her thumbnail. “I feel very sorry for her.”

“Not for him?” This would be going the other way, he realized. So he pulled up a chair.

“He loves his pain. And he’s spoiled. She goes which way the wind blows. It’s more of a tragedy in her case. Or perhaps I just feel more sympathy for women.”

“As do I,” he said, eyes brimming over with sympathy. She looked up, her thumb still at the edge of her lip, and she began a low, chortling laugh. It was so sure of itself that it made Chaplin slightly nervous.

“Of course you do,” she said, closing her eyes and opening them as if for the first time. It was a beautiful motion. “So,” she said.

He stood, and with the heel of his shoe kicked the chair up, tumbling it over his head, back into his hand, now extended forward, and setting the chair on the floor, next to the bed, where he sat again.

“That was clever.” She laughed.

He whispered, all in a pleased rush, “It both got me closer to you and made you laugh, which is a highly efficient outcome: two benefits to a single action, one of the laws of the conservation of comedy.”

“Oh,” she said, patting away a grotesque yawn. “Comedy.”

“Have you studied Dr. Freud? He believes everything is based on repressing our sexual natures.”

“Dr. Freud was almost like an uncle around our house.” She settled back on the bed, kicking off her boots, and putting an arm behind her head. “My mother has been in therapy since the hot summer of 1898, I think.”