Throughout, eyes began to flick toward Leland, who said nothing, simply sipping at his thin beer like anyone else.

Yes, it was roundly agreed, any man, Allied or otherwise, with the Norse god–like requirements to ignite a woman’s fancy would be fêted into the night, made an honorary colonel, celebrated in madrigals, and within his own lifetime, all legal tender would feature studious engravings of the many angles of his heroic face.

A captain with jug ears and a shoelace mustache was the first to see the things Leland sported as if they were regulation issue: the finger puppets.

There they were, Nanette and her boy, as if they had grown there, as if they were appendages, and the captain knew, as did all the other men who fell silent upon gazing at Leland, that this enlisted man, the one with the sad eyes and endless cheekbones, had walked into the aerodrome with a better story than anyone had as yet accumulated, after many months in the war. No one asked if he had really gotten the puppets from a girl, no one teased him about buying them himself, no one quizzed him for details, because the response would be too painful. There was no doubt that Leland knew the right way to tickle Marie. Conversation drifted, throats cleared, the late time noted, and the room emptied.

And so, for a while at least, he continued to be lonely, until he pursued the friendship that almost killed him and brought him the love of his life.

5

The film business was pioneered by salesmen, dry goods, men with a single suit and shoes they had to share with younger brothers, men who had come from the wind-blown steppes of Eastern Europe during lulls between pogroms. They believed in fortune as if she were a statue, like justice, say, or a goddess of the harvest. As they acclimated to American ways, they determined that fortune was as fickle as opinion, and as easily offended as a chorus girl.

Not one of them believed in the sustainability of the motion picture, just that it was a commodity whose popularity was expanding. When it, like all commodities, was in its sunset, in a year or in ten, there would be hammers or stucco or ten-ton blocks of granite to sell next.