which were so advanced that they were not used by the United States until World War II. They included a recoilless rocket grenade launcher, a low-pressure land mine, sonar-directed depth charges, infrared illuminated rifle sights, tracer bullets, a repeater rifle, a lightweight machine gun, a shrapnel grenade, puttied nitroglycerine and a portable flame thrower. It was to arrange for adoption of certain of these weapons that Father had repaired to Washington and become a familiar of high-ranking officers of the United States Army and Navy. What with tests of prototype models, sales contract negotiations, conferences in the halls of the Congress and various expensive lobbying procedures, including lunches and dinners and weekend entertainments, Father had had to take an apartment at the Hay-Adams Hotel. His response to his personal unhappiness was to throw himself more avidly into his work than he had ever done. With the onset of the Great War in Europe he was one of those who feared Woodrow Wilson’s lack of fighting spirit and was openly for preparedness before it became the official view of the Administration. There was great interest expressed by other governments than our own in the malign works of Younger Brother’s genius, and under the advice of counselors in the State Department Father tended to recognize some of these at the expense of others. To the Germans he was quite rude, to the British friendly and conciliatory of terms. He was anticipating just the final alignment of American sympathies with the Allies that in fact took place in 1917, but which began to be inevitable as early as 1915 when the British passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland. The Lusitania, registered as an armed merchant ship, was secretly carrying a manifest of volatile war matériel in her holds. Twelve hundred men, women and children, many of whom were American, lost their lives, among them, Father, who was going to London with the first shipments for the War Office and the Admiralty of the grenades, depth charges and puttied nitro that undoubtedly contributed to the monstrous detonations in the ship that preceded its abrupt sinking.
Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.
Mother wore black for a year. At the end of this time Tateh, having ascertained that his wife had died, proposed marriage. He said I am not a baron, of course. I am a Jewish socialist from Latvia. Mother accepted him without hesitation. She adored him, she loved to be with him. They each relished the traits of character in the other. They were married in a civil ceremony in a judge’s chambers in New York City. They felt blessed. Their union was joyful though without issue. Tateh made a good deal of money producing preparedness serials—Slade of the Secret Service and Shadows of the U-Boat. But his great success was still to come. The family found tenants for the house in New Rochelle and moved out to California. They lived in a large white stucco house with arched windows and an orange tile roof. There were palm trees along the sidewalk and beds of bright red flowers in the front yard. One morning Tateh looked out the window of his study and saw the three children sitting on the lawn. Behind them on the sidewalk was a tricycle. They were talking and sunning themselves. His daughter, with dark hair, his tow-headed stepson and his legal responsibility, the schwartze child. He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again. Actually not one movie but several were made of this vision. And by that time the era of Ragtime