But Edna was there today. Though she was not on call, she had come to the set, as she often did, to knit, to read poetry. When she heard what he was shooting, she decided to watch, and around the fourth or fifth take, she was reminded of that terrible day two years before when she had thought he was lost at sea. She approached the road, standing behind Rollie, who glanced at her twice—more often than he ever did.

With every new slate, word spread a little farther, and by the end of the afternoon, when the shadows were threatening to finish it, Edna was surrounded by the crew.

One last try for luck, as Chaplin sometimes said. They rolled. The board clacked. He flashed a beatific smile and ambled onto the road, no longer melancholy or resigned. With the agent of his death approaching, his body was limber. He leaned forward as if the wind could support him. His face radiated bliss. Had she ever seen his face like this? Yes.

Chaplin’s eyes were closed. He was acting. He pretended that he was off his mark. That the brake cables had been slashed. That Kono was out of control. His arms were high in the air, his knees slightly bent; his torso was tilted forward to accept full impact. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten, and then impact implied, impact imagined, dissolve, dissolve.

40

The plan to marry Hugo was a plan made by princesses, bold in intent and rather fuzzy about details. They had rarely done anything for themselves. So now the invitation to dance startled them into stillness. What to do?

Hugo straightened out his uniform, which seemed to take an unnaturally long time, perhaps because alcohol made his actions much more precise. In anticipation of bestowing the required corsages on his dance partners, he steadied his hand and aimed to pluck flowers from the porcelain compotiers, which dated to the time of Ivan the Terrible. “Oh, no, that’s all right, I don’t need your help, Monsieur Aarne,” he said.

When Hugo had been removed from the compotiers, the women whispered about what, exactly, to dance with him. It was obvious Hugo was best suited for a ländler, if only for the stamping in hobnail boots. But no one wanted to hear him yodel.

Vasilisa campaigned for Anna and Maria to play the exciting “grosser Ausgang,” while she and Hugo danced or perhaps—her eyes grew round with excitement—a hesitation waltz, followed by the violent and criminal Apache dance, with which Maurice Mouvet was said to have confounded the chorus girls of the Ziegfeld Follies. Anna and Maria were uninterested in serenading any lovers on the dance floor, and bickering ensued.