Right now, Chaplin was at peace. Because he was not answering his phone, because the operator at the Club did not know where he was, there were others besides Edna on their way. Soon there would be a rush up the street, soon the sidewalk would be overflowing with his brother, his newly hired secretary, his newly hired publicist, his technical directors, financiers, friends, starlets who knew him, starlets who didn’t. They would be on the sidewalk, they would mount the fire escape as if they were ants climbing over one another, heads would pop out of every window on the street. And when he appeared, standing on the roof’s edge and looking down on the street to give a pleasant wave and to pretend to fall off, to recover, they would laugh with relief, and then they would stare at him for a moment longer in a way different from ever before. And he would notice this. But not yet. These were the last moments when Chaplin could still think of himself in a certain way.

“What are you thinking, Charlie?” Edna kissed his hand.

He ran a finger down her top and flicked open a button like picking a rose. He whispered, “I’m thinking about love,” and Edna looked left and right to see if she and Charlie could be seen by anyone; they couldn’t, and so she smiled, and, with the rising street noise, the shouts of paper boys and grocers and movie folk below them, Chaplin thought and rethought, as if practicing the same four measures on his violin, that the only way to keep a person’s love was to be unworthy of it, and he watched how the lovely local light caught Edna’s eyes before they closed for him.

Travelogue

Unter dem Licht der
westlichen Sterne

Viewed as a drama, the war is in some ways disappointing.

—D. W. Griffith (1916)

1

In the 1890s, Crescent City, California, was no longer a paradise of mines and copper ore, and the age in which the local acres of redwood could support an economy had not quite dawned. So all there was—was the sea. Which meant that daily life depended on the harbor, the canvas sails and forged steel rudders of boats and ships and steamers, the songs of the fishermen, how Elk Creek dumped into the ocean, the way diving pelicans gave up schools of feeder fish, how terns pecked for sand dollars beside the salt water. There were perhaps eight hundred souls here, and all of them respected Emily Wheeler because of her lighthouse, which everyone depended on.

When Leland Wheeler was small, he walked with his mother across the tidepool line. She told him there were tides twice a day, and never to play when the water touched Serpent Rock, because it meant you would be trapped in Timber Cove, with no way to get out.