Hugo stood. Tapped his fingers against his father’s thigh, to no response. The motion! He had no words for it. This was an experience he was having all by himself. His skin chilled. He had heard of the ocean, but seeing it was an entirely different matter; it was like seeing an elephant after someone has mentioned one in passing. He wanted to sing.

There was wonder in the world, and he realized he did not yet understand it. Perhaps there was a word in French for this feeling. Then he noticed onscreen a boy slightly older and probably taller than himself standing on the shoreline, moving his arms as if he were directing the currents.

“Oh,” he whispered. He walked forward several steps, unaware he was doing so. The shot took up a number of seconds, so Hugo drew very close to the screen, close enough that his eyes began to smart, and yet the waves were just as real as before, the boy’s motion was as enchanting. Had Hugo known how to play, he could have played with this other boy. This was as close as he would ever come to Leland Wheeler or to the California shore.

There were two forces in the world—education and fear—and they always fought, and Burton Holmes, with his lantern, was a proponent of the former long before the rest of the world decided a motion picture could teach any sort of lesson.

“After my trip to Crescent City,” Burton Holmes intoned in his friendly voice, “I returned to the hotel, to nap before the fire, to end on a moment of happy reflection and anticipation of further happy purpose. With that, a good ni—”

It happened quickly. The next image was the fireplace. It was an extreme close-up. The flames were taller than Hugo, whose nose was almost against the screen.

“Fire!” Hugo cried. And with the quick wit and trigger finger he had restrained all summer long, he and his bucket on Jefferson Avenue, Hugo knocked the screen onto the ground. “Fire! Fire!” He stomped on it with his good shoes, and several long seconds later realized someone somewhere had made a mistake.

It was his last family visit to a travelogue. He grew up with an antipathy to motion pictures that—many years from now—would invite disastrous consequence.

2

In 1917, a few months after his attempt to rescue Chaplin at sea, Leland, now twenty-five and strong, tall, often silent, went to Eureka, lying to his mother about the purpose. He told her he was bringing linens to invalids, and to that end he actually canvassed Crescent City, collecting quilts and so forth, and piling them in the back of the truck.