As the Baron went on talking, Mother looked across the table at the two children sitting next to each other. The idea of examining through a frame what was ordinarily seen by the eye intrigued her. She composed them by her attention, just as if she had been holding the preposterous frame. Her son’s hair was combed back from his forehead for the occasion and he wore a large white collar with his little-man suit and flowing tie. His blue eyes, flecked with yellow and green, looked up at her. All the beautiful child next to him needed in her white lace and satin dress was a veil. Her eyes were raised now and she returned Mother’s gaze with a directness that verged on defiance. Mother saw them as the bride and groom in a characteristic grade-school exercise of the era, the Tom Thumb wedding.
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nd so the two families met. The sun spread over the sea each morning and the children sought one another down the wide corridors of the hotel. When they rushed outside the sea air struck their lungs and their feet were chilled by the beach sand. Awnings and pennants snapped in the wind.
Every morning Tateh worked on the scenario of his fifteen-chapter photoplay, dictating his ideas to the hotel stenographer and reading the typewritten pages of the previous day’s work. When he was alone he reflected on his audacity. Sometimes he suffered periods of trembling in which he sat alone in his room smoking his cigarettes without a holder, slumped and bent over in defeat like the old Tateh. But his new existence thrilled him. His whole personality had turned outward and he had become a voluble and energetic man full of the future. He felt he deserved his happiness. He’d constructed it without help. He had produced dozens of movie books for the Franklin Novelty Company. Then he had designed a magic lantern apparatus on which paper strips printed with his silhouettes turned on a wheel. A wooden shuttle passed back and forth in front of an incandescent lamp like a loom. The apparatus was accepted for mail-order distribution by Sears, Roebuck and Company, and the owners of Franklin Novelty offered to make Tateh a partner. In the meantime he had discovered that others were doing animated drawings like his except for projection on celluloid film. From this he became interested in film itself. The images did not have to be drawn. He sold his interests and went into the movie business. Anyone with enough self-assurance could get backing. The film exchanges in New York were desperate for footage. Film companies were forming overnight, re-forming, merging, going to court, attempting to monopolize distribution, taking out patents on technical processes and in all ways exemplifying the anarchic flash and fireworks of a new industry.
There were commonly in America at this time titled European immigrants, mostly impoverished, who had come here years before hoping to marry their titles to the daughters of the nouveaux riches. So he invented a barony for himself. It got him around in a Christian world. Instead of having to erase his thick Yiddish accent he need only roll it off his tongue with a flourish. He dyed his hair and beard to their original black. He was a new man. He pointed a camera. His child was dressed as beautifully as a princess. He wanted to drive from her memory every tenement stench and filthy immigrant street. He would buy her light and sun and clean wind of the ocean for the rest of her life. She played on the beach with a well-bred comely boy. She lay between soft white sheets in a room that looked into an endless sky.
The two friends every morning went to the deserted stretches of beach where the dunes and grasses blocked the hotel from their sight. They dug tunnels and channels for the sea water, walls and bastions and stepped dwellings. They made cities and rivers and canals. The sun rose over their bent backs as they scooped the wet sand. At noon they cooled themselves in the surf and raced back to the hotel. In the afternoons they played in sight of the beach umbrellas, collecting sticks of wood and shells, walking slowly with the little brown boy splashing after them in the ebb tide. Later the adults retired to the hotel and left them alone. Slowly, with the first blue shadows reappearing in the sand, they followed the tide line beyond the dunes and lay down for their most serious pleasure, a burial game. First, with his arm, he made a hollow for her body in the damp sand. She lay in this on her back. He positioned himself at her feet and slowly covered her with sand, her feet, her legs, her belly and small breasts and shoulders and arms. He used wet sand and shaped it in exaggerated projections of her form. Her feet were magnified. Her knees grew round, her thighs were dunes and on her chest he constructed large nippled bosoms. As he worked, her dark eyes never left his face. He lifted her head gently and raised a pillow of sand under it. He lowered her head. From her forehead he built lappets of sand that spread out to the shoulders.