The death of Rabo Karabekian’s father occurred in 1938, when he went alone to the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio and remained there after the movie ended and the audience went home. Rabo, then an advertising-agency artist living in Manhattan, reconstructs the death as more than a family loss: it exposes the distance between his father’s California life and the Armenian world he had lost, and becomes inseparable from Rabo’s later judgment of his father’s loneliness and choices.

Circumstances and the theater

Rabo dates the death to the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio. His father had gone to the movies alone; after the screening, the lights came on and everyone else left, but his father stayed behind. Rabo identifies the film as Captains Courageous, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, a story about cod fishermen in the North Atlantic. The theater’s ordinary sequence—screening, lights, departing audience—frames a death that Rabo can describe precisely in place and circumstance, even as he cannot know what his father made of the film.

At the time, Rabo had been living in Manhattan for five years and working as an artist for an advertising agency. His father remained in San Ignacio, above the small store where he had first established himself in the United States. The son’s career and city life had carried him away from the household in which his father continued to live; the account of the death therefore also fixes the separation between them at the moment of loss.

The film and the world his father had lost

Rabo speculates that his father may not have seen any of the movie before he died. If he did watch it, the film’s subject must have felt remote: it had nothing to do with anything his father had seen or anyone he had known. Rabo presents that distance not as a simple failure of entertainment, but as an expression of his father’s estrangement from the world that had replaced his childhood one. His father welcomed evidence that the planet he had loved as a boy had disappeared entirely.

That response is connected to the massacre that had taken his father’s friends and relatives. Rabo interprets his father’s attraction to proof of a vanished world as a way of honoring those lost people. The account does not claim that the film caused the death or disclose what his father thought in his final moments; instead, it places the movie beside the losses that shaped his father’s life and lets their contrast carry the weight of the scene.

Family history and Rabo’s retrospective judgment

The death also returns through the family’s unrealized hopes. Years earlier, as Rabo prepared to leave for New York in 1933, his father had given him a photograph of a grand white house supposedly in San Ignacio. The house had been offered by Vartan Mamigonian in Cairo in exchange for most of Rabo’s mother’s jewelry; the photograph and a bogus deed, covered with signatures and sealing wax, had remained in the bedside table of the family’s small apartment above the shoe-repair shop. His father asked Rabo to tell him if he ever found the house, because it belonged to him wherever it was.

After his father’s funeral, Rabo returned to New York and tore the photograph to pieces. He had not seen San Ignacio for five years and counted himself among only three people at the funeral. He was angry with his dead father, but his anger had shifted beyond the property fraud: he concluded that his father had harmed himself and his mother more through the life he chose afterward than Vartan Mamigonian had harmed them through the scam. In Rabo’s view, his father could have moved to Fresno, where an Armenian community might have sustained language, customs, and religion, or become a teacher again. Instead, despite his education, he became a cobbler like his father and grandfather. The photograph thus survives in the narrative as a family object that gathers the lost house, the father’s stubborn attachment to San Ignacio, and the son’s belated accusation.

Aftermath and significance

Rabo’s later reflections place his father’s death within a longer inheritance of isolation and injury. Rabo himself lost his left eye while serving with an artist platoon in Luxembourg near the end of World War II, and he later describes enduring loneliness as a boy, during the Great Depression in New York, and after his first wife and sons left him in 1956. The father’s story and the son’s story are not identical, but Rabo repeatedly measures his own suffering against the older man’s ordeal and recognizes a shared absence of a secure homecoming.

At the end of the war, the United States paid for cosmetic surgery at Fort Benjamin Harrison, outside Indianapolis, where Rabo was treated after losing his eye. He recalls feeling blank rather than bitter and compares that blankness to Fred Jones, who, like Rabo, had nothing to come home to. Much later, Rabo calls his failure as a husband to Dorothy and the resulting alienation of Henri and Terry among the things he is most ashamed of. These later losses do not alter the circumstances of his father’s death, but they make the 1938 memory part of a continuing reckoning with loneliness, family rupture, and the ways a person can remain attached to a world that is already gone.