The night before, Chaplin, restless, had walked across the million-dollar carpet of the Alexandria Hotel and met a father-and-son vaudeville team: Jack and Jackie Coogan. They didn’t know about his baby’s birth or death, and he lost himself in a conversation. Jack was good enough at hoofing, but his four-year-old son was a splendid mimic, with a great sense of humor, a dancer, quite hilarious, showing off a perfect little shimmy dance, and he and Chaplin played soldiers and cowboys and Indians and for about a minute; Chaplin had considered putting him in a movie, and then he remembered he wasn’t making movies anymore, and he left the hotel, knowing that in hours he would have to watch Mildred dress for their son’s funeral.

The sermon was brief. Mildred’s church, Saint Lawrence the Divine, had arranged the whole thing, which Chaplin expected to be a new level of insipid anecdotes and “wise old sayings.” But instead a very serious young man with a clerical collar stood before the pews and spoke for perhaps five minutes. He did not smile. He said that some things happened for no known reason. It was useless to try and draw a moral from them. He said, “According to Thomas Jefferson, who helped put us on the path we walk today, he who believes nothing is less remote from the truth than he who believes what is wrong. So, when something awful happens, we must put aside needing to understand or to fit it into a system where the world’s cruelties make sense. Perhaps, after life is over, it will all be explained. Or not.”

Chaplin began to like him, slightly.

The minister explained that the question on his mind was this: Was life basically random, and were our agile human brains, trained in analogy and connecting dots, always making constellations out of chaos? Or was there a deeper meaning, and was it when we were in touch with the divine that we allowed ourselves to see it? Every moment of belief was actually about choosing belief, and that was what he called faith. Perhaps, one moment in the future, every person in this room would again have some kind of faith. Amen.

It’s not as if the minister were a visionary, but Chaplin found himself moved. He was fidgeting in his seat. He wondered about Jackie Coogan, the four-year-old boy. He saw himself as clearly as if it were already projected onto a screen, himself on a tightrope over Niagara Falls, swarmed and bitten by a troupe of spider monkeys. He saw himself shivering outside a Klondike saloon. He saw himself being pulled through the gouging gears of fantastic machinery. He saw himself falling down onstage, through the skin of a bass drum, to tremendous laughter, only his heart had stopped and he had died. And then he saw himself, punished. Punished and punished, in movies he hadn’t yet made.