“No one is asking you to be shot. No army in the world would put you in the front line.”

Chaplin didn’t quite believe that. He stared at his plate, which was still mostly filled, since he had recently learned to eat slowly. He imagined how the men in the front lines would want to murder him for his special treatment. “All right, picture this—Corporal Douglas Fairbanks.”

“At the ready. Over the top!”

“But imagine you’re at the mercy of people stupider than you are. Tell me that’s not your personal nightmare.”

Doug worked the dirt with his stick in silence. Chaplin glanced at the design he was making. It was a crude, childish drawing of a house. Smoke came from the chimney, and a family stood outside, mother, father, baby figures, smiling. Then: “All right, Charlie. You don’t want to join the army because you don’t want anyone else to direct you.”

“Now, that’s just… just…” What it was was just accurate. He shook his head. “This isn’t about the slacker business anyway.”

Doug believed him. “Ha! Then it’s about your mother?”

“What? No,” Chaplin said, immediately annoyed.

“I thought she was coming from England.”

“She was. Now she isn’t.”

“A man never outgrows his mother. She’s his precious—”

“For the love of— Doug, your mother was a monster. You said so yourself.”

“I should have talked to her more.”

“You didn’t speak to her for years.”

“You shouldn’t make my mistakes.”

“Is the guilt you feel part of the goods, too?”

Doug looked stricken, and Chaplin was alarmed at how easily he had just sent the point of his épée directly into his friend’s heart. Doug said, “Not exactly sure, old man, why you had to say that, but I have little aches and pains. Yes.”

“What sort of aches and pains?”

“They don’t matter,” Doug said, and it was like closing a door. Doug had written a book, Laugh and Live, which told the rest of the world— more or less—how to be Douglas Fairbanks. It advised that happiness was a continual choice, vitality the natural state of man, that one’s family was one’s cornerstone, that “three squares to eat and five rounds to spar and eight hours to rest” was the essential way to contentment, or productivity, or something. Chaplin had never finished reading it and Doug hadn’t, either.