I was crying by then, couldn’t stop myself. There were tears on my cheeks, and he turned back and looked at them, then up at me; and with an effort that was truly painful to see, he stretched his mouth into a form of smile.
‘Don’t you worry!’ he cried, with not even a trace of light; a parody of his old self. ‘I shall be absolutely fine! . . . Looking forward enormously to a spell in the big city. Isn’t life a grand adventure? And Mr Guglielmi shall show me the way! No, it will be quite marvellous. Jolly good fun! No doubt about it at all!’
He blew me a kiss, and I watched him stumbling away to his seat, and I think I knew then that he was done. Finished. Gone. The charm was gone. The fight had gone. As the train rolled out of the station, I was weeping so profusely I couldn’t see or hear when it finally departed.
After that I don’t know what happened, or how, or why, but it was written in the paper a few days later that Mr and Mrs de Saulles were to divorce, and that a hearing had been set a month or so hence.
Mrs de Saulles and Jack, Mr Hademak, Madeleine and one or two others, myself included, moved from The Box to a smaller cottage in the village of Roslyn, just a few miles down the road. I wanted to take the typewriter with me, but Mr Hademak forbade it. He said the noise, in a smaller house, would upset his mistress. But he was a kind man. He used to take me to the train station early each Sunday morning so I could spend the day with my father in the city. And other than that, life continued pretty much as it had before. Except there was no Rudy. And each week there were the Sundays. I spent most of the week worrying what would become of my father while I was away from him, but I’m afraid I used to dread those Sundays.
Somehow, some half-remembered instinct for his own survival had guided my father on the journey from Penn Station to the boarding-house Mr Hademak had recommended. But after that, which I suppose must have been a gargantuan effort, he was clearly exhausted. It was three days before I was first able to visit him, and when I arrived he was still in the clothes he had been wearing when he had left The Box. From the greyness of his skin, and the dreadful hollows beneath his eyes and cheekbones, it was obvious that my once handsome, talented papa had neither slept nor eaten.
His room was small and grubby, on the fifth floor of a gloomy dilapidated building on East 39th. It had a gas stove in the corner, which he never learned to use, but which I did – to cook him food he never ate – and a single bed. On the first floor there was a small washroom, shared by forty or so residents, with water that ran only intermittently. And that was it. Papa’s home.
His materials lay stacked against one corner, by the door, where I suppose he had dropped them on the day he arrived, and beside them his suitcase, which, without me, would have remained packed for ever.
He lived there for about four months in all – and did nothing. He sat on that bed beside the window, gazed out onto the street, and he drank. First he drank through the money given him by the de Saulles, and then he drank through the money I delivered to him from my wages each week. Poor wretched man.
That twenty-minute walk across midtown to Papa’s boarding-house was, for some time, all I managed to see of the great city of New York. And in truth I used to walk it with feet that pulled me in any direction but the one I was meant to go. I would zigzag the blocks, sucking in the magical, frenetic activity, awestruck by those long, wide, endless avenues, the shameless gleam of the new buildings, the glorious chaos of the building sites, and the crowded ramshackle stores; the foreign voices, the steaming food stands, and the autos, and the horses, the newspaper boys and the boot boys – the heaving, exhilarating mass of striving, shouting humankind. I still adore it, even now, in this August heat. Back then, when it was so new to me, so unlike the greyness of war-bowed London, or the neurotic silence of Roslyn, it made my spirits soar. I would draw out that short journey for as long as I dared, before guilt at the pleasure I was taking and worry for my poor father overcame me.
I did abscond, just once, with Madeleine’s encouragement (though she couldn’t come herself: even on her day off, Mrs de Saulles would never allow her to stray beyond Westbury). We planned it together, my little escape.
It was only for an hour. I walked across town, as I always did – gazing this way and that, as I always did – as far as East 39th, and then continued another three blocks to the Rialto on 42nd. Rudy had described it to me in detail, and I had read about it, too. It had only been open a few months. The papers – and Rudy, too – insisted it was the grandest, largest, most fabulous, movie theatre in all the world.
I had watched movies before, of course; any number of unmemorable five-reelers in dismal little halls back in Chelsea. Three or four times Madeleine and I had visited the picture house in Westbury, too. But this was like entering another world. Intolerance was playing – what good fortune was that? To see the most extravagant film in the history of film-making in the most extravagant movie theatre in the history of movie theatres! I watched it – the first half – and I was spellbound. As we all are, of course, when first we see it. I would have liked to stay to the end and watch it again, and again, and possibly spend the rest of my life in there, staring at that cinema screen. But after a while the image, though I tried to banish it, of my papa gazing listlessly out of his window, all alone, burned through even D. W. Griffith’s most extravagant depictions, and I had to go.
I ran all the way to his boarding house – arrived at his door breathless, full of excitement. And before his melancholy overcame us both, I tried to pass on a little of the magic: I described to him, before even I had sat down, the Rialto’s vaulted golden ceiling, and the row upon row of gilt and velvet chairs. I told him about the spotlights that danced in time to the music on either side of the enormous cinema screen, and of the golden organ sound which filled every corner of that massive space. I told him of the phenomenal, unimaginable tricks of Mr Griffith’s camera – the ‘close-ups’ on actors’ faces, magnified so as to fill the entire screen, allowing the audience to read every flicker of their smallest emotion. I told him about the ghostly superimposing of one image upon another, the different-coloured tints – sepia, blue, amber – all the tricks which Mr Griffith used to tell his story; and of the live elephants in his Babylon, and of the thousands upon thousands of extras and of the sheer, extraordinary scale of the film, and the theatre, and the wonderful, beautiful world just waiting to be discovered outside his window . . . I tried my best. I did. I tried to lure him back to the Rialto to watch the film with me.
God knows what miracle I had been hoping for. Of course he wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t have done so before, when he was still well. Papa belonged to the generation who believed that movies were designed for the degenerate masses, not for him – and most certainly not for his daughter.
By then, in any case, Papa never left his room – except, I suppose, to stock up on liquor, since he seemed never to run out. Often, when I came to see him, he wouldn’t talk to me. When he did, when he volunteered any comment at all, it was almost only in relation to Mrs de Saulles.
Was she well?
No.
Did she speak of him?
No.
Had she sent a message?
Of course not.
Whole hours would pass and he wouldn’t speak a word. I would tidy the room, cook for him, chatter about this and that – anything that came into my head: England, mostly; memories of happier times. I would tell him my feeble gossip – that Madeleine was seeing a car mechanic in Westbury; that Mr Hademak had written again to Mary Pickford – but my father rarely responded. I told him the typewriter lent to me by Mr de Saulles was broken.
‘What d’you want it for anyway?’