Читать книгу The Daredevils - Gary Amdahl - Страница 10

Auditions—the third round of auditions—for his production of Henry James’s The American included a Polite Parlor Questionnaire. He did not know what else he might do and was afraid his theater would be stillborn. He had seen more than a hundred persons in three days and could not remember a single distinguishing feature: the faces were all round white balloons, all but featureless, atop stick figures, which were tap-dancing with canes and bowler hats, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in four parts all by themselves, and concluding, as if delivering a punch line, “Our revels are now ENDED! This actor, as I foretold you—” while waving little American flags. He believed he would have laughed had he possessed a sense of humor, something he believed he neither possessed nor wished to possess, believing himself to be essentially and perfectly humorless. He sat in a composed way and neither smiled nor frowned when he thanked them. He was acting for them. He was a Mystery. He was the Ghost of a Secret Theater and he would populate his theater with these shrieking stick figures, if that was the only way open to him.

The idea of an ensemble of local actors, highly trained in ancient and exotic techniques was, of course, ludicrous.

Some of them were friends, if he could in fact be said to have friends, and they could not fail to find his vision laughable. It was not even, technically speaking, his vision: it was the legendarily ludicrous but defiantly potent Sir Edwin Carmichael’s vision, which he was purchasing, owning, operating, with sir Edwin’s guidance.

He would move to Paris, tomorrow, if something galvanic failed to happen—if he failed to make these frogs hop.

But what could happen in a Polite Parlor Questionnaire?

“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?

In what place would you like to live?

What is your ideal of earthly happiness?

For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?

What is your principal fault?

What would you like to be?

What is your favorite quality in a man?

What is your favorite quality in a woman?

What is your favorite occupation?

What is your present state of mind?”

I might be thinking of a way of life that includes everything. A way of theatrical life that shows real life up for the sham and horror it is.

After the earthquake and the fires, his voice had broken. Mother had not made good on her threat to castrate him, and he decided in the hideous croaking aftermath of the break that he would never sing again, except as his explorations of the theater might call for it. His mind had not broken, had it? What did the voice have to do with it? The voice was what he had charmed and disarmed the pretty ladies with.

Oh yes, he had seen them thinking, as if they were characters in a comic strip with thought balloons puffing from their temples, that after all this was San Francisco and they might very well get away with it.

But Voice was now Mind.

And Mind required Stage.

Breakfast had always been a good time for miniature debates, such as might ensue once polite parlor questions had been asked and answered. But once he’d dressed and made his way to the dining room, he found only the twins—brothers who had been born the year after the earthquake in a fishing village in the south of France, Cassis, in a house once used by Napoleon as headquarters—and Father working their way rather desultorily but with good humor through a hypothetical labor problem.

“The painters’ union,” Father declared, “wants to limit the size of brushes. Are you for it or against it?”

August (Gus) replied that it seemed clear that if they had bigger brushes they could get the job done more quickly.

“I can confirm, then, that you are against any legislation that would restrict the size of a paintbrush?”

Anthony (Tony) suggested that the painters would want above all to get the job the hell over with and go have a beer. If they had, say, two- or three-man brushes that were ten feet wide, they could be out of there in no time. They wouldn’t have to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, slopping paint up and down a wall. They could listen to music, read a book—or even go to the theater! He flashed a grin at Charles. “I would advocate,” Tony went on, “discounted tickets for workingmen in those circumstances.”

The twins were fair-skinned and freckled, with red-gold hair and handsome, ordinary features. Both of them knew how to beam, and would do so after an exchange like that. And while Father was still understood to be a rough and candid outdoorsman who had gambled on riverboats and been gunned down in a court in Arizona and who could beam with the best of California’s grinning Western swindlers, and who was in fact one of a handful of men who had been nicknamed “The Regenerators,” who had battled graft in the courts and rebuilt San Francisco with their own hands, he also still believed that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and insisted on rather passionately Puritan manners: Gus would sober up at that point but Tony continue to grin, even as he apologized.

“I’m sorry, Father.”

Mother, Amelia, and Amelia’s husband, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles, entered the dining room. Charles pulled his watch from its pocket and saw that it must have stopped sometime the night before. He was disoriented by the idea more than he thought he should be. It in fact troubled him, and he looked around the room, wondering if he was being seen being troubled, itself an act of discomposure and even guilt that troubled him even more. He felt sweat forming on his face. Why did he care what time it was? If he was sweating, why not act it out? See it through and be sweaty.

“Mother? Amelia?” asked Tony. “I hope you’ll forgive my rude remarks.” Trying to make the grin rueful. “Reverend Ruggles?”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” said Reverend Ruggles, “but that is no bar to forgiveness.” Ruggles was small but agile and strong, built like a gymnast, and he put a headlock on Tony. He often came at you as if he wanted to wrestle or box, or walking on his hands. It was one thing to speak of a muscular Christianity, but who dared speak of a fun Christianity? If the clownishness, however, had not been in the immediate company of a deep, almost disturbing seriousness, it would have been a different matter. He was a Baptist but the family could not help but like him.

Amelia, a year older than Charles, had been, before the earthquake, incredibly high-strung and unhappy, but brilliant: like Henry Adams’s wife Marian and Henry James’s sister Alice, Charles sometimes said. He had grown up thinking she was going to die any second, that he would find her collapsed with a stroke or hanging by the neck, but had found wells of compassion rising up in her, where everyone had expected hysteria even in the very best, in ideal circumstances, and humility descending like a blessing, a consolation from a gentle, just, clear, and sweet heaven. She was an all but entirely different woman, and people did not shrink from speaking of her transformation as miraculous. She would only say that she had been saved, and that she wanted to bring the power and glory of the gospels, as she was only just beginning to see them, in their rags, speaking quietly, to bear on the social crisis that was threatening to destroy the greatest nation on earth. She had read Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis when it was published in 1907, coinciding perfectly with the throes of her own rebirth—and possibly San Francisco’s as well—in Christ, and when Rauschenbusch’s disciple at Rochester Theological Seminary, Thomas Ruggles, had come west, she had married him.

“If they finish a job in one hour rather than ten, they get paid a dime rather than a dollar,” Amelia said.

“Don’t get hysterical, sister,” Tony suggested in his precociously vaudevillian way, having heard Andrew kid Amelia in this way more than once.

“If a dime,” Amelia said mock-tersely, “bought a dollar’s worth of groceries—”

At which point Mother, out of hard-earned habit that would likely never fade, gently spoke her daughter’s name.

“—then certainly they could take advantage of your fabulous discount, my dear little brother, but it doesn’t, it’s more like a nickel, so either they take longer to do the job and get paid a living wage or they hop to and starve to death.”

Father thanked Amelia with jovial conclusivity: yes, her brothers, both the younger and the older, were dolts but they would run the country.

Amelia smiled and said they ought to consider ten-man brushes that could be controlled by a lone halfwit and so expensive that no single painter could afford it, leaving the purchase as usual to Big Business.

In the old days, she would have then nodded at Father in a final attempt to be courteous—not to mention knowledgeable about the imperatives and requisites of actual large businesses—before dashing at the dining-room door, struggling as if drunk to open it, slamming painfully into the frame, and staggering into the hall. Mother would have offered the rest of the family a tastefully understated look of comic surprise, and they would have resumed their meal.

Now, however, the Reverend Ruggles, who had relaxed his grip on Tony’s head but not released him, put a head-lock on Gus, and the three of them began to laugh and struggle.

It had happened so often that it was referred to as a Ruggle-struggle.

The boys flailed and grunted and Thomas shifted his weight about.

When the boys gave up and went limp in his embrace, he said, “Your sister has learned to talk rough with her brothers, but don’t take lightly what she says. It will be very easy for you to say to her, and to all women, ‘And what in the world does a woman know about it?’ So I want to urge you to think very seriously about what women may know about things. All right?”

The boys cheerfully agreed that they would do so.

Charles said, “I’m asking whoever wishes to answer: ‘What is for you the greatest unhappiness?’”

Father was smiling vacantly, eyes angled to the side of his plate of bacon and eggs. He looked as if he had not heard a word anybody had said for some time. Mother was staring at Father. She turned to Charles, puzzled at first, then annoyed.

“What kind of question,” she asked, “is that?”

“In what place would you like to live? What is your ideal of earthly happiness? For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence? What is your principal fault?”

“In Anatarctica!” shouted Tony, “where I would never have to hear questions like those at breakfast.”

Charles half-smiled at him.

“I’m kidding you, Chick!”

“The ranch,” said Father. “It is my ideal of earthy happiness.”

“Simply existing there?” probed Charles, with faint but apparent testiness. “Standing in a meadow? Rocking on the porch? Soaping the saddles? Those are all fantasies that depend on a state of mind, a condition of soul. Continued indefinitely without change. Which is impossible.”

“You asked me what my ideal of earthly happiness was and I—”

“I too,” said Amelia, “would like to live at the ranch, breeding Appaloosas, but my ideal of earthly happiness is working in a hospital twelve or eighteen hours a day. I think particularly a hospital for the insane.”

“Yes,” said Pastor Tom, “you see, that has been my point all along, that living an ideal of earthly happiness is not only possible, it is preeminently so, supremely and excellently possible. It is simple to do and it is easy to do. The spirit is reticent. The ego is aggressive. Surrender is the antidote.”

“Surrender to what, the ego?” asked Charles, laughing lightly and mirthlessly.

“When you surrender, when you let your ego collapse, you achieve union with God. In that union, a life of humbly helping other people seems . . . ideal. Happiness follows, as our Oriental friends like to say, like the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox. The line is from their Dhammapada and refers to suffering rather than happiness, but the implication is that if you want nothing and accept the world as it is, you will cease, at least, to suffer. One substitutes love for selfishness. It is revolutionary but can be accomplished in the wink of an eye. ‘Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.’”

“Thank you, Pastor Tom. For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence? What is your principal fault?”

“I have the greatest possible indulgence for all faults. My own principal fault? I think the best illustration is to be found in the proud ease with which I answered your question.”

Instead of politely acknowledging his brother-in-law’s wisdom and humility, he turned to his little brothers.

“I sure shut you two up, didn’t I.”

They had long since ceased to smile and were now silently gauging Charles and Mother.

“Yes, Charles,” said Mother, “you certainly did. Was that your goal? To cause your brothers to stop laughing and begin to worry about you? Or were you playing to Amelia, hoping she would say something careless about your own mental health that would confirm you delightfully in your new role of theater visionary. Your board wants you to produce a play by Henry James, a play by Shakespeare, and a play by August Strindberg. They would like to see you do it with a small ensenble and the plays in constantly rotating repertory. They would like you to bring to bear current ideas in design. They would like to see charming, interesting shows, and they would like to see the house at capacity every night, as they rightly are concerned about viability in the long term. I would never have even so much as spoken Sir Edwin’s name much less invited him here had I known how vulnerable you were to spiritual imbalance.”

“Mother’s answer stands like a druidess invisibly behind her actual speech, as per usual. ‘Spiritual imbalance’?”

“Sadness,” said Father, “is the fault for which I have the least indulgence. The Stoics forebade it and I—well, you know this already. You’ll have to pardon an old man who has used up all the brains he had and is limping along as best he can without any.”

Charles gave nobody the chance to laugh. Father was playing at seeming as weak and old as he actually was. As far as Charles was concerned, he was demonstrating how he could not be replaced: not swiftly, not easily, not at all.

“Father, what is your principal fault?”

“That I think I have none!” Father laughed loudly and longly, allowing everybody but Charles and Mother to join in. “No, no, my greatest fault is that I am old. I gave my life to San Francisco and have nothing left.”

“Excepting San Francisco herself, of course,” said Pastor Tom.

Father smiled but shook his head. He still looked like a gunfighter losing at cards.

“I put one Jew behind bars,” he said. “Other men rebuilt the city.”

“One Jew, perhaps,” said Mother. “But you must admit an important Jew.”

“Boss Ruef was not important. He was a sitting duck. He was a bagman.”

“Sitting duck,” said Gus.

“Bagman,” said Tony.

“For your father, boys,” said Father, “and your father’s friends.”

“Oh, Father, please,” Mother moaned deeply, gorgeously, “shut up.”

“The Regenerators,” said Tony.

“That’s right,” said Father. “And remember, when you ask a Jew how things are going, across the street or around the world, and no matter what may in fact be going on, he will say, ‘For the Jews, not so good.’ My point being that anybody could have done what I did, and that I don’t really deserve the name ‘Regenerator.’ I speak in all humility and bearing foremost in mind what Pastor Tom said earlier.”

“But Father!” shouted Gus.

“You took a bullet!” Tony continued his brother’s complaint.

“In a court of law!” finished Gus.

“Twice,” said Amelia. “Don’t forget Arizona just because you hadn’t yet been born, my lads!”

And Charles said: “What would you like to be? What is your favorite quality in a man? What is your favorite quality in a woman? What is your favorite occupation? What is your present state of mind?”

Nobody replied. Everybody looked at their plates. Someone sighed. The twins began to eat again. Soon everybody had taken at least a forkful and appeared to be musing rather than resentful.

“Your present state of mind,” said Mother. “What about that? I would say it’s horribly and gratuitously antagonistic. Why is that?”

“Not antagonistic. Humorless. These are important questions. You see there is nothing ‘polite’ about them. I intend to ask the actors who have survived the second round of auditions these very questions. Those brave enough to answer thoughtfully and honestly I will invite to be part of my ensemble. And for every show we do, there will be a second unspoken and invisible performance going on at the same time. The audience will see and applaud the unreal play, completely innocent of the knowledge that the real play cannot be seen without destruction of the unreal.”

“STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!” sang Mother radiantly.

Pastor Tom nodded.

Amelia had tears in her eyes.

“The population, the audience, without question wants to hear its own story. They want to tell it and they want to hear it. They want us to know what it is without them telling us, assuming we have the same story they do, and will tell it. We are all San Franciscans, we are all Americans, and so on. There is great trust in these names. But they have in truth failed to remember accurately what has happened. They have lost the power of accurate memory. We all have. If in fact we ever had it. But particularly within the confines of this ruined city we are merely branded automatons.”

“But the city is no longer ruined, Charles,” said Amelia, walking her tone perfectly along the line between perplexity and helpfulness.

“Have it your way,” said Charles. “I would think, though, that you of all people, you and Tom, would know that all the cities of the pleasure planet are ruined, that there are many who actually like wholesale destruction for its own sake, that is to say, someone honestly if hideously committed to, how shall I say . . . to change. ‘Thou (the human being) are that which is not. I am that I am. If thou perceivest this truth in any soul, never shall the enemy deceive thee; thou shall escape all his snares.’ Can anybody tell me who said that? No? Saint Catherine of Siena. My theater will be a rough and immediate theater, but it will above all be a holy theater. A holy theater in an empty space.”

“Empty space: of that there can be no doubt!” said Mother. As for holiness, I think rather ‘spitefulness’ or ‘mean-spiritedness’ is the word you are looking for.”

“No, ‘holiness’ is the word.”

“Boring,” said Mother. “Boring, mean-spirited theater in an empty space.”

“Well,” said Charles mock-amiably, “I sure hope not. But people will be bored no matter what you do.”

“Wrong side of bed, Chick?” asked Father.

“No,” said Charles. “I levitated.”

“You know I don’t care for sarcasm,” said Father, smiling, “especially from my sons.”

“You have been taking jabs at everybody here,” said Mother. “You have hurt everybody here with your nonsense. Can you please tell us why you have embarked on such a course? I want to blame Sir Edwin because I am surprised and disappointed at what a stinking drunkard and fraud he is, but you cannot be so easily—”

“—and swiftly replaced?”

“—excused.”

“I am rehearsing my life.”

“I asked you once before,” said Mother quietly. Then she really let go with everything her extraordinary voice had to give: “STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!”

Because she had sung it, Charles applauded, briefly, politely. And said, “Father, if I hurt your feelings with what I said about destruction and change, please forgive me. It wasn’t meant to hurt you or even refer to you. Everything I know about the world I’ve learned from you and I am grateful for every last bit of it.”

“Of course I forgive you,” said Father.

“The sarcasm is a weakness I hope I can learn to do without.”

“I’d rather you were sarcastic,” said Mother, “than humorless.”

Amelia wiped her eyes and smiled. Tom nodded. The twins veiled their interest somewhat successfully. Mother glared and trembled, so finely that it could not be seen by the others save the strange rigidity. Socially Darwinian Christians, thought Charles, laboring for the glory of a Socially Darwinian Jesus Christ and the Socially Darwinian Regeneration of Socially Darwinian San Francisco when—and this was the kicker—they didn’t know the first thing about Darwin! Everything was an accident. Father paid lip service to the idea when he said everything that was lost could easily and swiftly replaced, but he didn’t understand what he was saying. If he did, he would save his numerous foes the trouble and shoot himself in the head.

Though Germany had declared the North Atlantic a war zone, Father and Mother left the next week for New York, where they boarded a ship that took them to Iceland. For the fly-fishing, Father had said, in no mood to talk to Charles about anything serious, or anything at all, really, even though he said he had forgiven him. For the salmon. Indeed it was possible they were going for the salmon and the sea trout. There was a joke in there somewhere about brown trout and German submarines, but no one felt like making the effort. Charles had fished with flies a great deal when they had lived in Paris but summered in Scotland—not to mention golden days camping with Andrew and Alexander and even Father on the rivers of northern California—and if he could not help but continue to remember it as a pleasant pastime, indeed as golden, he could no longer find the time or rather the inclination to find the time to go fishing. Strangely, he could no longer even imagine himself standing in a river making a cast. He could see such a picture—could not help but do so, but it wasn’t himself he was seeing: it was a kind of photograph of Charles Minot, someone he had once known but lost touch with. An old friend, if he could be said, as the quaint old saying had it, to have had any friends. A character he had played, more likely, the idea of which still made him nervous, alert, ready for performance. He knew he ought to examine that inability to truly imagine himself fishing, but chose not to—or rather, he could admit it, was afraid of it—as it appeared to have something to do with wishing to fish in the dark. The dazzling dark of the Sufis, the dark light of the Gnostics, he thought. Was that a good, true image, from Zoroaster’s Good Mind? Or was it a bad image, from the Destructive Mind of a Person of the Lie? What he believed, secretly and more deeply than he thought possible, was that in the pitiful understanding of men, universal darkness was called celestial light.

Because they were afraid of the dark.

Because they were Bronze Age bullies and nitwits who worshipped the sun.

The Devil lives in darkness because he hates the light? Demons crouch in dark corners? He begged to differ: the Devil lived in merciless light, light that showed through bodies, that exposed everything to everybody, that extended into space, a line, a bit of geometry that winked out once it left a man’s weak and suffering mind and entered the super-abundant emptiness of the heaven he could not imagine, could not perceive, but which he would come into, be born into, just as he had been born into life and light.

He had seen this light at work: it had destroyed Little Joe. He was crouching in the dark and he was not a demon and the light had destroyed him.

He could quote Tennyson, if anybody wanted to get tough with him:

“Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades

Forever and ever when I move.”

Heaven was dark.

Heaven was a dark theater.

A dark theater, the lights of which picked out Evil.

The mounted policemen began cantering toward the little platform stage that the antiwar people had erected. The crowd, entirely pro-war as far as Charles could tell, was either unwilling or unable to disperse. People, mostly young men and boys, ran here and there and shouted. Charles thought he heard screaming as well. Distant screaming, which was hard to be sure of. In all likelihood it was feigned screaming, coming from behind and below him in the brand-new theater that Mother and Father had built for him—it was nearly impossible for them not to, if you understood that it was simply a consequence of rebuilding the city—exactly where the old theater had stood. He stayed with his arms spread and his hands on the handles of the French windows as if he had just flung them open and was going address the nation, until the crowds, dispersing and gathering and dispersing, were gone. Everybody seemed to be laughing, no matter what they were doing: getting smacked with a baton across the back of the head, watching someone else get smacked with a baton across the back of the head, smacking someone with a baton across the back of the head. It made no sense. Mounted policemen had made their way through group after group, but it had seemed like a carnival. He had heard screaming, he was sure of it, but had seen no one lying in a pool of blood, within a circle of strangers. The sun was setting, and in the deep clear twilight some fireworks were being discharged somewhere near; they rose and shone as if they were not only on fire but gave off a kind of glossy, lacquered light—everything looked that way, buildings, people, earth, sky—but he could not tell if they were the fireworks of patriots or of radicals. It was a carnival, and its theme had been the war in Europe. No. It made no sense. People would not be celebrating carnage and horror. Perhaps it was not supposed to make sense . . .? Why did he wish anything to make sense? He of all people! He went back down the stairs and into the theater and stood at the railing of the little balcony. The stage was now full of people. His people. “Friends.” They were arranged in small groups and engaged in discussions. Some of these conversations were calculated, their subjects free of apparent context or even forthrightly nonsensical, their objectives contrived and variable, delivered with courtly animation from angelically bright faces—this was a vision of hell. The other conversations were conducted in dusty darkness, or at least away from the pools of light, by nearly immobile and featureless figures, and this was heaven.

Charles breathed evenly and slowly though he could feel his heart pounding in his fingertips and teeth, and he smiled faintly as these visions appeared and disappeared before and below him. The feverish light did indeed seem to determine the quality of life, as he had always suspected. He had read, in an account of the Indian wars, that one great and defeated chief had weighed his options and declared that heaven was no place for a man and he wanted nothing to do with it—and yet his place, Charles thought, was so clearly here on the border of heaven and hell that he could not help but feel some relief at the sight of it.

An actress he hoped might prove suitable for the big roles sat wrapped in mummy-like winding sheets approximately in the center of the little theater, under its chandelier, which hung from the underside of a shallow dome painted with peacocks, owls, a buck deer and doe, vines with berries and flowers, and a wizard with a flask out of which streamed a banner with the words eamus quesitum quattuor elementorum naturas.

Her name was Vera.

Vera K., born of Russian parents in Muscatine, Iowa, where she had worked in a button factory.

Muscatine was the Button Capital of the World.

He picked up a sheaf of papers from the seat next to him, riffled through them until he found the page he was looking for, then read it aloud but not loudly, looking down at her. She probably couldn’t hear him, but would she turn round, look up?

“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?”

“I sometimes, too often, think I am no longer competent to live in the world.”

“In what place would you like to live?”

“The world.”

“What is your ideal of earthly happiness?”

“Forgoing happiness.”

“For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fault.’”

“What is your principal fault?”

“Ah: my recurring inability to believe I can live in the world.”

“What would you like to be?”

“Oh! What all the young women have said to you goes double for me: the star of your shows!”

“What is your favorite quality in a man?”

“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

“What is your favorite quality in a woman?”

“A fine critical apparatus focused on whether or not I am kidding.”

“What is your favorite occupation?”

“Acting truly.”

“What is your present state of mind?”

“A nearly overwhelming feeling of joy that I can live in the world after all.”

Vera, alone in all of histrionic San Francisco, had been worthy of the Polite Parlor Questionnaire. In her presence, as she answered the questions slowly and eloquently, he had not been able to feel like anything but a prince in a fairy tale.

He stared down at her intensely, imagining taking her sheet off and finding her naked beneath it, moving his hands over her neck and shoulders and breasts, kissing her deeply but languidly—and falling again under the spell of imagination, believing for a moment that he could cause the seduction to happen simply by staring down at the woman with his remorseless will.

It had happened before, and more than once.

Of course he would hold and kiss her in coming rehearsal many times, but the emptiness of those experiences would confound her completely—he would see it in her big glistening brown eyes—and throw so profoundly the question of the nature of pleasure into terrible doubt, that he would be forced to refuse to acknowledge those embraces as in any way representative of what he hoped to accomplish. He supposed that he was compensatorily cold to her. And the nature of what he “hoped to accomplish” was decaying swiftly too, anyway, after some ridiculous failures in New York that winter—from what had seemed at first simply a case of ceasing to neglect the pursuit and seduction of women, as he certainly had, in favor of the cultivation of artistic vision, to a struggle with physical impotence, the staving off of something pathological.

He was quite sure she could not act, and had cast her—the others as well—precisely because he was sure she could not act. The skills usually acknowledged as essential to or at least encouraging of dramatic presence, when they had been displayed for him, to him, for his approval and pleasure, only made him uneasy. It was like he had said to Little Joe ten years earlier: he would rather watch the stagehands. If such displays went on too long, they began to fray his nerves. That she made him feel like a prince had nothing to do with anything.

Because one of the plays they were rehearsing was Romeo and Juliet (the other two were August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata and Henry James’s The American), swordplay had broken out on the stage and in the auditorium. Swordplay often broke out if Charles was even momentarily absent, because actors were like children and directors were like forbidding fathers. Most of the group of fifteen were the legendary friends or friends of friends from Berkeley, if he could be said to have friends, but there was no mistaking it: a father and his children.

With the probable exception of Vera in her grave shroud.

Two duels were taking place, one in exaggeratedly slow motion that seemed Oriental in its precision, the other fast and awkward and accompanied by a great deal of laughter, yelps of pain, and shouted apologies. Five other young men were trying to sort out the fundamental moves of a brawl, made uneasy by Charles’s suggestion via Sir Edwin Carmichael that choreography was the antithesis of violence, that a fight was ugly and embarrassing, and that all attempts to make it a pleasing dance must be in vain. The different son of a different plumber and one of his older brothers were clacking lengths of doweling with each other. Charles, to no one’s surprise, had been schooled in fencing since he was old enough to wave a small toy sword, and was in fact the ensemble’s Romeo, but was concerned that hour with The American and so was armed only with monocle and walking stick. As he watched and breathed and was content—for a moment—to feel the blood pulsing in his extremities, over the din of mock-fighting and outside the theater, he thought he heard more firecrackers going off.

There was a release of light somewhere over his shoulder and a withdrawal of it and a faint clap, followed by the shushing of heavy fabric over the carpeting of the balcony’s center aisle; he could just barely hear it over the voices below. Then came the cloud of smell: stale tobacco and fresh burning leaf, alcohol on the breath and in the cloth, some kind of ammoniac solution, and an alarmingly bracing body odor. This was the theater’s artist in residence, Sir Edwin Carmichael. He was visiting from Verona, where he had his own theater and school of design, named after its principal funder, Lord Howard de Walden. He had acted with Henry Irving and designed sets for Konstantin Stanislavski. He had designed and directed a production of Dido and Aeneas that had almost single-handedly revived interest in the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell—which was where Mother had come in. The man wrapped his cloak more tightly around his frail and trembling body, trapping the stench of himself but allowing the fabric to send eddies and gusts from its folds. He was an artist’s artist and his black, bloodshot eyes were in no way diminished by the shadow of his great slouch hat. He was shivering in the wretched cold of the peninsula’s summer, but all he could think to say to his young hero was that his dinner disagreed with him; he was digesting it poorly—belly inflated like a medicine ball and shooting fireworks at the back of his throat—and could not think straight. His breath was unbearably laden with garlic and deeper evidence of the indigestion, and Charles leaned away. That Sir Edwin could not think straight, and yet was up to admitting it, this was a confusing sign in his experience: too much steam building up in a kind of self-conscious engine already starting to shake and rattle its bolts. Sir Edwin claimed to be a futurist, but Charles was hard pressed to understand what such an identity entailed. More specifically, but even less clearly, he was a vorticist—that was to say, not Italian, but something “like a futurist” from “the vortex of London.” He preferred “found sound” to composed and performed music—but was an acknowledged influence of the Second Viennese School—and was very much in favor of the war: war was “the one great art,” and the only way civilization had to remove the more “festering and stinking of humankind’s many gangrenous limbs.”

Charles and Sir Edwin watched the rehearsal, its director absent but lurking, disintegrate: acrobatic silliness, exaggerated, mask-like mimicry of primary emotional states in ridiculous contexts, and the kind of mincing mock-violence that had actors chasing each other around tables with very small steps, furiously waving their arms and puffing their cheeks out, not knowing what to do once, for instance, one character succeeded in getting his hands around the neck of another character, whom he ostensibly wished to throttle to death. The plumber’s sons broke off their swordplay, and Sir Edwin suggested to Charles that even the children found it all unbearably childish.

“I would rather you tried, all of you, really tried to hurt each other. This waggling of fingers and chasing someone whom you clearly do not want to catch—it’s appalling! Don’t you think so, Charles? I mean, really. It’s insulting unless your audience are children eating birthday cake. You know how to use a sword.” It was true that he was able to fence dramatically well; and while fencers perforce show each other the slenderest profile, Charles often found it possible to drop the point of his foil to the floor and advance, spine straight and shoulders square, one, two, even three long arrogant strides directly into his opponent’s range. “Go down there,” commanded Sir Edwin, “and shove it up someone’s arse, why don’t you.”

“My position, Sir Edwin, is that somersaults and comic faces are delightful.”

“They make me want to vomit.”

“The thought of attempting to wound someone—”

“Yes, but that’s just it! The thought of the attempt—precisely!”

“—to wound a brother or a sister is abominable, maestro.”

“Stop and think a moment while your fluttering little heart becomes a piece of pumping meat again.”

“I find it directly opposed to the nature of the theatrical enterprise.”

“That is not only sentimental horseshit but the foundation of everything that is infantile in the arts.”

“Maestro, this may in fact not be a heaven fit for heroes, but I find I do not much care. I wish only to examine the nature of the real via actions of obscure delight.” Charles had done a great deal of debating in the course of his superb education—and was uncomfortably aware that he did not actually know how he felt. He was uncomfortable as well with his facility in the face of such an absence or ignorance.

“You’re simply naïve,” said Sir Edwin, apparently able to read minds.

“Maybe I am,” Charles admitted.

“You are wrong.”

“Maybe I am.”

“You could not be more wrong. That actors should feel delight at behavior so remote from actuality, from consequentiality, from truth, is almost unforgivably wrong. The urge to wound, to really and truly wound, is the only force that can actually animate lifeless words and weary gestures—the only force, at least, that an audience will sit still for.”

“They seem to be willing to sit through just about anything.” Charles surprised himself with this remark: Was it a truer self at last beginning to emerge?

“Do not confuse desire with pleasure.” Edwin spoke with muted passion.

“I must beg your pardon, maestro. Your meaning is obscure.”

Both of them were acting, not altogether happily, but evidently unwilling or unable to leave off, to break into sincerity and earnestness.

“Do not confuse desire, I tell you, with pleasure.” It was possible Sir Edwin was frustrated, annoyed. His vehemence was pitched uncertainly. He was either in the grip of something, or pretending to be. As he was a drunkard, it would never be certain.

“Having still no actionable clue as to what you are talking about, I will nevertheless promise you that if it is ever within the scope of my immature intellect to distinguish the two, I will do so. I will attempt to do so, at any rate—for no other reason than that you have said so with such clear strength of feeling.”

“Goddamn you.” Suddenly Sir Edwin was no longer acting. It was a gift.

“Goddamn me.”

“Goddamn you.”

“All right then,” Charles said, still game, but inwardly beginning to shy. “Goddamn me.”

Sir Edwin turned away in disgust and Charles saw that though he had not exactly missed the man’s inscrutable and alcoholic signs and crucial but murky inflections, he had, once again, ignored them, and was now, consequently, imperiled. Sir Edwin was panting with stifled rage.

“I tell you to go down there and act like a man, to grab those infants by the scruffs of their necks and shake them until it’s clear they are no longer in their playpens—and you simper like the rich parlor fucking smart ass that you incontrovertibly are and will always be. I tell you it’s nauseating and you become a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde. I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE!” The last was a shriek and he was now very nearly in tears. “Over and over and over again—do you not, do you really not, are you incapable, completely FUCKING INCAPABLE of understanding what we are struggling against? Conformation to the etiquette of the stage, to its infantile rules and bourgeois complacencies—it’s like fucking a corpse. It’s loathsome. Or it would be if it were real. It is merely ridiculous, merely embarrassing.”

Sir Edwin sat down and pulled his cloak around him so that not even his eyes could be seen. He hunched forward and appeared to be weeping, but made no sound. After a short while, he seemed to relax. He sat back and the cloak fell away from his face. He breathed deeply and evenly.

“And so,” Charles said, “just to make sure I understand you, I am to not confuse desire with pleasure. Was that it?”

Sir Edwin refused to look at him.

“Was that fucking it?” Charles demanded.

Sir Edwin was weary now, and wise. “I meant only to suggest that there are layers and layers of desire for pleasure. We actors revel quite rightly in these superficial desires, in the gratification of these superficial desires—that is what we are paid to do. Still, the corpse is a corpse and her cunt is full of maggots. I’m not trying to be outrageous—you know this as well as I do. We all know. What you may not know is that beneath all those layers of pleasures is a primary desire. We may think of it as an original desire. We may think of it as a primal desire. You must show us, if you can, what it is to want food, to want sex, to want to brain another man so you can have his food and his women—but you are exhibiting the superfice. You may bring something to life if you are successful. And that is the great desire you must not confuse with pleasure: simply to be alive.”

He began weeping again, loudly, with a kind of abandoned happiness, and Charles descended to the stage.

The stage was high enough so that when Charles came to the leading edge of it he was looking at his actors’ shoes as they shuffled and swept left and right, forward and back. He tipped his head back and called out for everyone to mark out a playing space and begin to go through the motions and whisper the lines of whatever scene marked their entrance into The American. After they’d done so for a few minutes, over the gentle, strange murmuring punctuated by the creak and clap of the boards, he told them to speak up and to slow down.

From the balcony Sir Edwin shouted. “NOTICE HOW THE NATURE—”

And Charles took it up, almost as if he were echoing Sir Edwin: “Notice how the nature of what you are doing changes along with the speed, your apprehension and judgment of what you are doing.”

A few more minutes passed and he climbed up on the stage, moving around an imaginary painting on an easel, speaking Christopher Newman’s first lines of the play—“That’s just what I wanted to see!”—while the young woman who was the imaginary painting’s painter, Noémie, fell in with him.

“Now half again as slow and notice—”

“NOTICE HOW YOUR THOUGHTS STILL LAG BEHIND YOUR ACTIONS, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE COME NEARLY TO A STANDSTILL!”

“Move as slowly as you can move and still maintain a sense of one single continuous movement and notice how your thoughts still lag behind your actions, which indeed are reactions themselves to something we cannot see, name, understand.”

“ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU DO NOT FEEL WHOLE WHEN YOU ARE A CHARACTER!” shouted Sir Edwin, who then began again to sob, loudly—and, it had to be said, histrionically.

“Pick a new scene,” said Charles. “Move normally, speak softly.”

Vera—Claire de Cintré—joined him for their first scene together. Charles spoke his lines with her for a while—“It’s as if there had been a conspiracy to baffle me tonight: we have been kept asunder from the moment I arrived”—then said, “Indeed, as Sir Edwin suggests, you know who you are at the expense of being happy. Ask yourself why that is. Know that you will never be happy until there is no division between you and the other characters. Know that you are sinning when you are isolated and alone on the stage. Know that sin means only that you have missed the point and that repentance means only to change your perspective. You in your isolation have created the other characters and now you are afraid of them, of what they will do, of how you will act in consequence. You created them but you are afraid of being dragged into their lives. Do not be afraid, my actors. You are living in a constant state of anxiety and anticipation. Change your sinning way: everything is waiting for you, here on the stage, in the character of the other.”

Again he gave them just a few minutes, two or three, then asked them to slowly and gently cease to speak and move. He asked them to savor the silence and stillness and yet remember where they were and what they were doing. When they were ready, calm and alert, they were to return to the scenes they had just been acting but include the other characters in the scene, two or three others, reform, as it were, and choose a property that was important to the scene, a chair or an easel.

“You will never be convincing on a stage, my friends, if you cannot treat your props properly. You must see and use them—and allow them to use you—in exactly the same way you see and use and are used by the other human beings onstage with you. A chair is every bit as miraculous as a human being is. Look at the chair, feel it. It is floating there in space just as you are. Just as the planet does. Its constituent parts are your constituent parts. You may wish to think of yourself as related to your property interdependently. This in truth is how we live. Distinctions between consciousness and self-consciousness, between organic and inorganic are only superficially true and useful. Consider the story the chair will tell: as we are flesh, it is wood, fashioned by a maker in a shop, who got the wood from a timber merchant, who got the wood, with subtle but overwhelming violence, from a tree in the forest. Of course you tell yourself you know where the tree came from: it grew from a seed. Break open the seed: Is it empty or merely invisible? Without water, and soil, and sunlight, what will come of it? What is water? The wave recognizes itself only when it is washed upon a shore. Instantly it vanishes, is withdrawn from the shore into the singularity of the ocean. What is soil? Light? Where does light come from and where does it go to? Does it come from darkness and go to darkness? Does it need darkness in order to claim its singularity? Does darkness need light to claim its singularity? Does darkness come from light and go to light? ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, behold, the jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion.’ All this coming and going implies time and space, a clock and a grid. Who built this clock? Who drew and laid down the grid? Who declared five senses and no more? What is a senseless man? What is a dreaming man? What is man dreamlessly sleeping? What is prior to logic, to reason? Is character, your own and your character’s character, a matter of outward performance and social polish, as La Rochefoucauld would have it, or of inward essence? Where is the Christ who promised to show us what could not be seen? Why was this gnosis banned from our Bible? Where is the Christ of the Upanishads? Why must we hear only Jeremiah when our cities are destroyed? ‘Behold, that which I have built up, will I break down. That which I have planted will I pluck up.’ The worker is hidden in his shop. The work has drawn a veil over the worker. Only on the stage of simultaneous being and not being can we see the work and the worker together.”

Charles ceases to speak. Slowly the ensemble follows him into silence—and it is only then that they realize the cellist of the continuo group Charles has engaged has slipped in sometime during the weaving and fallen immediately under the spell, providing a single unceasing ground note, moving imperceptibly up to the sharp, then back down to natural, further still to the flat, then up again. No one moves, everyone listens. There are more persons in the theater than he had thought. Children, mostly. Children of the crew, he supposes.

Vera tries to catch Charles’s eye, but he refuses—or is intent on something else. She wants to see how seriously he has taken himself—taken himself as opposed to what he has spoken of with such bafflingly strange eloquence. She wants him to remember that it is a game. Rather: she wants that belief confirmed in herself. He has either over-rehearsed or, how shall she put it . . . lost his balance. He is, she thinks, using one of his pet phrases, “out of joint,” and she wants to know which of these metaphors he prefers. She sees how liable he is to become an icy clown or an ironic lout if he is not understood and applauded. That a spell was woven she cannot deny, but now wants out.

A little boy, no more than five, who has been standing very near them, only half-there, like a sprite, or a cupid, he is so chubby and pretty, like a cupid carved in the corner of a great ceiling now mysteriously between herself and Charles, says—no, sings, chants—very clearly and sweetly in the silence, “When I put a chair in my head, it’s so I can sit in my head. I take my body apart and put the pieces in my head. And then I sit in my head.”

He is the plumber’s son. Again and again and again, he is the plumber’s son.

Cheerful laughter chitters and laps around them.

Charles claps his hands. She sees he is not laughing, but, to her great relief, would like to.

“And what’s yer name, young feller?” Charles asks him.

Suddenly shy, he looks down, then, spinning, runs stage left and disappears in the shadows of the wing, shouting for his father, who is standing and chuckling in the middle aisle of the steeply raked orchestra seats, under the chandelier, where Vera had been sitting in her winding sheet. Laughing loudly, father calls out to son.

Allowing himself to smile, Charles addresses his actors. “I know you don’t all have all of your lines yet, but find a script and, quick as you can, let’s run through the whole play, shouting your lines as fast as you can say them and running around the theater until you run out of breath! That includes the balcony, the wings, the stairways! Run until your heart is pounding! Noémie! Lord Deepmere! Start us off, please!”

Thus was the story told of the wealthy Californian who goes to Europe in search of art, of beauty, who falls in love with the widow of an impoverished aristocrat, and who encounters simultaneously a deep disdain for his lack of family and a deep lust for his surplus of money—in about a quarter of an hour of helter-skelter hilarity . . . while outside, a tiny, celebratory, nominally pro-war rocket rose up on a thin line of fizzing and sparking red flame, broke the window next to the one Charles had left open (there was, in the immediate aftermath and first stages of investigation, some suspicion, for a moment or two, that someone had secretly entered the theater and opened a window on purpose). It exploded loudly but without much force, and began to burn itself out smokily in the carpeting. Which in turn caught fire, spreading quickly over the floor and consuming the false dome, under which hung the chandelier that was the main source of general lighting in the theater. When they smelled smoke and looked up and saw the paint begin to bubble, the ensemble, already darting and jogging, moved in confused anticipation toward the center of the theater, their lines trailing off and the speed of their movements slowing. When it became clear that the ceiling was burning, they scrambled left and right past the velvet seats, then up or down the aisles toward the stage or the exits, from which vantage points they watched the chandelier go dark. Shouting run run run, they all ran. Some of the last, Charles included, heard the heavy, slow crash in the darkness.

He held a novelty handkerchief—red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, mandated by his board for publicity purposes—to his nose and mouth, and bent low as he could, bringing his knees nearly to his still falsely bearded chin, and walked up the front stairway to the second-floor lobby. The haze either stung and filmed his eyes and distorted his perception of the red-carpeted, red-wallpapered stairway, making it look narrower and steeper and higher than it was; or was he perhaps simply light-headed from the smoke . . .? This may be the beginning of my death, he thought. Will I know? Each second growing more and more certain until the final moment when the smoke is gone and my head is cool and there is a flash of clear light and I know that the sham is over and that I am, how do we say, dead? The lobby was like a mountaintop cave, a small dark mouth opening in the swirling mist. There was no trace of a wise man—he was all alone and could hear the building whispering, moaning, shouting restlessly to itself. It did not wish to die, and yet was willing to burn. Sir Edwin’s aesthetic love of destruction, of collapse and immolation, did not extend, it appeared, to those things of his own which he wished to preserve. He had begun to ask Charles in a normal tone of voice, manly but urgent, one understood, one knew, brooking no bullshit, straight to the point, if Charles might consider dashing in and retrieving a few valuable bits and pieces of theatrical memorabilia—but he hadn’t been able to maintain the tone. He lost control of his voice and his face and his hands at the same moment: he squeaked and shrieked and shook like a leaf. Charles couldn’t look at him and turned away in disgust. His prize possessions amounted to museum pieces indicating the aesthetic ancestors of what Sir Edwin called “The Free Theater” but which everyone else referred to now as “the Minot”: a portrait in oil of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen; a spotted and torn photograph of the Meininger Players assembled on a tiny picture-frame stage somewhere in the heart of Thuringia or Saxony; another, blurry and desiccated, of those same players either lying facedown on a mattress or huddled over it as if about to pounce on it, grinning melodramatically (the use of the mattress to muffle offstage “crowd noise” was legendary in the birth of “stage realism”); more photographs of Andre Antoine and his Théâtre Libre, and the famous “missing fourth wall” stage set put together with junk lumber and cast-off furniture; wood-cut prints of Sir Edwin’s fantastic, eerie set design for the Moscow Art Theater’s Hamlet. Charles yanked paintings and photographs down from the walls, wrapped them in a tablecloth, then smartly rapped a display case, breaking its glass. He thought he could stay in the burning room forever: this was how things were. Nothing could have made him happier, more deeply content. But he balanced two miniature stage sets on top of the bundle of pictures and autograph letters, stuffed two small sculptures under his arms, and made his way back down the stairs. They had become something like the face of a cliff, and he walked perpendicularly to it, defying gravity. Then he was in the main lobby and he could hear crackling and crashing and the firemen shouting inside the theater. Then different shouts and cannonading bursts of water. Outside on the street, Sir Edwin had gotten hold of himself and lit a cigar. Drawing voluptuously on it, he stared at Charles with a strange, almost mocking, superior gratitude. Both men were slick with soot-black sweat, sticky with blood from small wounds. Edwin seemed satisfied with the show of destruction and manly staving off of destruction, now that it was all over—even pleased. He spoke with fatuously coy irony of a dream to use the sounds of the firefight, from gush of water to shriek of fear, from splatter of horse dung to clatter of shoes on cobblestones, in place of the small orchestra: “That,” he insisted, “was the music of the future.” Firemen trudged past alternately muttering and braying with victorious exhaustion. Charles and Sir Edwin could hear hot wood sizzling and steaming above them in the black building, and smell the wet ash, the burnt spores and flowers of mold. Charles was nauseated by the ridiculously sweet smoke of Sir Edwin’s cigar, and disgusted with his reinvigorated incoherence and perversity, but they were walking now and had passed into a livelier block, full of restaurants and saloons, people with stuffed bellies and laughing mouths, and Charles surrendered to a fleeting vision of his master’s alcoholically perceived but immutable truth. Something “great” might be revealed if he did something “real” on the stage. Let it happen to me, he thought, seeing in his mind the crackling flames in the lobby, as you say it will. Then someone came running after them to tell them that a little boy, one of the plumber’s sons, no doubt, had been found under the chandelier.

Father and Mother returned safely from Iceland, revealing that there had been as well a detour to the Svalbard Archipelago, on Norway’s arctic coast, with a Boston coal baron named Longyear. Andrew and Alexander came from Sacramento for a short visit to welcome them home, and they were joined a day later by Amelia and the Reverend Ruggles, who had been attending a meeting of President Wilson’s Ecumenical Council. Because Charles no longer lived at the family home, and had not seen anybody in his family for quite some time, he wore the false auburn beard when he came for dinner. Neither Father nor older brothers nor Tom Ruggles, seemed to notice. Amelia pretended not to, and Mother merely watched him, as was now her wont, closely but neutrally. Only the younger brothers, Gus and Tony, saw it for what it was. They laughed hysterically but quietly between themselves, and would not reveal the source of their amusement. The men discussed the trip to Iceland, and Charles pretended to be surprised, even a little ashamed of himself, when he appeared finally to understand that the purpose of the trip had not been sport fishing, that the reference to the tying of flies had been ironic, and that the facilitation and encouragement of negotiations for control of Iceland’s commercial fisheries had been the real activity, along with the study of general opportunities for people with ships, which were carrying mutton and stockfish to Belgium and France, where normal husbandry had been interrupted by the sudden deaths of millions of young men. Iceland was Danish, Father said—as Danish as Mother, whose great-grandparents on her mother’s side had been born, lived, and died in that country—but was seeking its independence. Denmark had, during various decades of the last few centuries, been desirous of, even desperate for, buyers of Iceland, but independence had never entered into it. Now it appeared that the United States might one day not too far in the future consider purchasing the country. That was the kind of place America was now. Just as a rich man might buy himself an island and declare himself king of it, a rich country could buy a poor one and run it like any other business. And while the Icelanders, Father admitted, were experiencing a desire for nationalism that was moving and gratifying to witness, and while they were justly proud of operating the world’s oldest parliamentary republic and causing a society to subsist in which neither a ruling clergy nor aristocracy could find handholds—he wanted very much, and he said this twice, wanted very much for Iceland to understand, yes, first and foremost to understand and then naturally to accept, America’s influence, and, not coincidentally, to prosper as they had never done before. Not ever, he repeated coolly. They had demonstrated perfectly well that the end of communal anarchism—and Charles particularly should understand the term was being used advisedly but pointedly—was poverty. Grinding, centuries-long famine and misery. They take their fish from open rowboats, he said, and so can spend no more than a day at a time on the water, and shallow water at that. Which does not prevent them from drowning at an appalling, not to say incredibly unprofitable, rate. One hundred sixty-five men had been drowned in a single day—which was not only a terrible tragedy but a significant percentage of the country’s male population. Decked ships from England had been fishing Iceland’s waters for centuries, literally centuries, but the new steam-driven trawlers were simply sweeping up everything in their wake. Not because, Father went on with a more pronounced gravity, their captains were heartless sons of bitches or blind idiots, or because their owners were evil villains working hand in hand with corrupt tyrants, but because the world was changing and the English could no more not fish from their overwhelming trawlers than Charles could not not enjoy, for example, his motorcycle rides now that he had acquired the capability for that powerful—make no mistake about it—thrill.

“So fishing was good,” Charles said.

“You know I don’t care for sarcasm from anybody—”

“Yes, you have said so.”

“—much less my sons—”

“Yes, I understand.”

“—so don’t let me hear it from you again.”

“It was a joke, Father.”

“It could indeed have been one, but was not,” said Father with mild authority. “The mean look in your eye gives you away. I don’t like to hear what comes out of your mouth when you look like that and I don’t like to see you look like that.”

“All right,” Charles said, reddening over the auburn beard, which now felt ridiculous. “You put me off-balance with the motorcycle reference. I sold or am selling them all. I am no longer interested in thrills.”

“Are beards back in fashion?” he asked.

“No,” giggled Amelia, “they most certainly are not.”

“You look like your grandfather,” said Father. “Quite remarkably.”

“Yes,” said Mother. “He does.” The father-in-law was clearly present, while the son clearly was not.

Mother and Father both murmured with bemused approval, and it was hard to say if they suspected the beard’s falseness.

“I was wearing it when the theater caught fire. I can’t bring myself, for some odd reason, to take it off.”

No one knew what to say. One of the girls appeared in the doorway and indicated that the chauffeur was idling in the eastern portico. The family collected themselves and went out to inspect Father’s latest purchase, a new automobile, a Mountain Wagon, manufactured by the Stanley firm and powered by steam. There were four rows of bench seats and no roof. If it proved a reasonable conveyance, they would take it to the ranch. The controls of the steamer, however, baffled the chauffeur, Albert, a tiny man who’d once been a jockey, causing some embarrassment and minor delay. After a few anxious minutes, they set off for the Presidio, and a picnic. Mother became convinced as the journey wore on that the boiler would blow and kill them all, and swore that her first ride in the Mountain Wagon would be her last. Everyone began the ride wearing goggles and dusters, but shucked everything when it became clear they weren’t going to reach any terrific velocity. Father in fact felt it safe enough to put his big-brimmed Western hat on. With his long coat and knee-length boots and immense drooping moustache, he once again looked like the rancher he sometimes thought he would liked to have been, or the cavalry officer he had been in his youth, once in a while even perhaps a gunfighter, a righteous gunfighter, of course—certainly a San Franciscan from the old days. When these characteristics came to the fore, there was almost no hint of the refined and sophisticated man of law, the prosecutor of graft in the city’s Golden Age of Graft, “The Regenerator,” one of those men who are seen behind the man at the podium, the westernmost confidant of Colonel Roosevelt, a potential purchaser of Iceland.

Charles moved his goggles carefully to his forehead and made sure his beard was still securely fastened to his face. Then he moved the goggles from his forehead back over his eyes with a snap that he hadn’t intended and which caused some pain to his blush-sensitized face.

“Mockery is for weaklings,” Father said, returning to his earlier remonstrance, but drawling noticeably this time.

“‘I am a weakling,’ he said mockingly,” Charles said. His beard lifted up and flew away without a sound.

He could feel Father staring at him with dark gunfighter impassivity for some time. It was certainly not a mean look, but for all its immobility of feature it was a violent one. The wind ruffled their heads of luxurious Minot hair. The picnic was being hosted by the detested but important San Francisco businessman and socialite, Durwood Keogh. Keogh was a director of United Railroad, and was widely considered to be both audaciously younger and more winningly handsome than could rightly be expected of one of the ultimate authorities of so deeply entrenched and spectacularly powerful a presence in the daily life of the nation as a railroad. Some frankly dismissed him as a figurehead, a playboy, and a dolt. Others thought he was secretly accomplished, and, ominously, “more than able.” A few political philosophers of influence, however, holding leisurely conferences at both, interestingly, the Bohemian and the Pacific clubs, presented him as neither dolt nor efficient executive disguised as dolt, but as purely ruthless, or ruthlessly pure, in the service of convictions that were not his own, which could not be his own as he was unable to think on that moral level, but which he held, as a mean-spirited child holds candy. With a delight, that is to say, that obscures the poisoned ferocity of the need. Father believed he was dangerous in just this way: purity was ruthless, he said, again disregarding his own purity, his own ruthlessness, because they were products of deep belief, not superficial greed and power: Keogh had no staying power, while Father had Jesus Christ. But his neighbor be damned, he loathed Keogh personally as well. He had done his best to put him and all his associates, avowed and otherwise, behind bars, and it was none other than Keogh’s uncle, the ur robber baron, whom he’d caused to flee the country. The Jew in jail, and the spectacularly corrupt robber baron fled: Father’s legacy, in case anyone cared to remember the horrible failure of the Spring Park Water Company when the quake and fires had destroyed the city. And of course they’d found a way to shoot at him. He was always getting shot at—it only strengthened his disdain for shooters. But nothing had ever come of it, and here they were, nine years later, their mutual hatred softened with a kind of nostalgia for the shooting, and the volcanic hatred that could bring things to a shooting pass, and even the kind of respect that comes when two men find themselves not only still standing but thriving, in Golden Old California, when so many others were dead and gone.

Keogh had just returned from a trip to Mexico with General “Black Jack” Pershing. They’d been sent to apprehend or kill the internationally infamous political celebrity and terrorist Pancho Villa, who had crossed, a couple of months earlier, the international border into the little adobe village of Columbus, New Mexico. There he had murdered a dozen and a half of the tiny town’s citizens, pillaged it, and burned it to the ground. Pershing and Keogh had failed in their mission and seemed almost forlornly stupid as they wandered about northern Mexico—at least from the vantage point of the northern capitals of the United States—but nobody blamed them, as that vast and primitive country seemed to have been expressly designed as a haven for barbarian villains.

So said Durwood Keogh anyway, leaning against his automobile in his jodhpurs and tapping one long strong flank with a crop. He made it look like the Minots had gathered around him, but it was he in fact who had approached them, affably, sportingly, generously. They all had bigger fish to fry, did they not?

It was preparedness for war in France that Keogh had taken up as his cause and duty upon his return to San Francisco. He had been named grand marshal of the Preparedness Day Parade, three months off yet, scheduled for mid-July to dovetail with Independence Day, but already a major and popular theme of civic discourse. German spies (a term synonymous with anarchists for more than a decade now) were said to be preparing too: to bomb the parade, kill paraders, and make a mockery of freedom and democracy. The attack on the Minot Theater—so went one highly controversial strand of public discourse—had merely been an exploratory jab.

Charles had never heard such an idea, but remained impassive and silent, as did Father. Were they suddenly playing some kind of poker? Mother, nearly under her breath, begged Keogh’s pardon, but Keogh ignored her.

They were going to blow the city to pieces.

Charles remained as he was, resisting the urge to say that cities were made to be blown to pieces, that in reality they were in a constant state of being blown to pieces and rebuilt, so what was Keogh’s beef?

Keogh had organized a volunteer cavalry troop—businessmen with time on their hands, fellow socialites, most of the polo team from the Burlingame Country Club—and got them immediately front and center in the public eye. There, it was stated proudly and unconditionally in all the best and most trusted newspapers that they would function as a deterrent to the mad, the craven, and the un-free. They might lunch at the Fairmont one day, conversing by way of exaggerated anecdotes about tactics, then be off to the beach or the Presidio. For security reasons, times and places were never officially announced, and Keogh often took his boys to a place other than the one to which he’d said they be going, sometimes in the company of a professional cavalry officer for drills, sometimes not. Spectators in the know (Amelia Minot Ruggles, for instance, who did in fact work twelve hours a day in various hospitals but managed to remain informed, discreet, sophisticated, and sympathetic) arrived punctually at even the most secret exercises, accompanied by reporters from William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner.

“Sanguinary feeling for an all-out war with Mexico is building, wouldn’t you agree, Minot?”

“Not at all.”

“No, of course not.” Why he had opened with reference to his failure, rather than the triumph to come, was mystifying—unless you understood he wanted a fight.

“How much money did you and Black Jack spend on your vacation down there? 130 million dollars is what we all heard.”

“You’ve got to spend money to make money. You know that very well, Bill! You know that better than most of us, I dare say! ‘The Regenerator!’ Why, your office supplies bill alone . . .! Genuine expense, Bill, don’t get me wrong! I’m not complaining even if some of that ink went on my indictment, which I have hanging in my office, did you know that? I say your office supplies bill alone could have bought you, where was it, Iceland? Lucky for you, you had that vacuum tube to the White House and a Moral President who didn’t think twice about using federal money to help his old friend buy, what was it you used to say, good dogs who do what they’re told? But listen, that’s all water under the bridge, forgiven and almost forgotten. We’re talking about now and we’re talking about Mexico: these people are the enemies of our country. You’re going to count beans in the face of racial degeneracy and unrepentant hatred?”

“The enemy is in the main amorphous, and where it has recognizable form—say a bandito generale, for example—the checklists for confirmation that he is indeed foe and not friend never quite tally up convincingly. Wilson can’t tell, and none of his men can, either. Some honest men think Villa should have, could have been, our friend. But we’re too busy tinkering with what we think are the mechanisms of the oldest civilization in this hemisphere, mechanisms so complicated they are useless to the Indians or whatever you call them when they’ve sold their white blood for a mess of potage.”

“I am impervious to your speeches, as you well know, Mr. Minot!”

“You can’t tinker with another country.”

This struck Charles as a rather flat contradiction of Father’s recently stated principles, but he said nothing, suspecting there was an important distinction to be made somewhere between the tinker and the purchase.

“Destroy it, then. Occupy it and do your ciphering afterward. Pick your man and tell him to duck. It can’t be Villa because Villa is an unstable warlord. Pick one of the others. Carranza. Who cares. Huerta would have sufficed, even when you accepted the idea that he was a mean drunk with more Indian blood in him than white. And don’t talk to me about Wilson. He’s a fool and a coward.”

“Come now,” said Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles with stern serenity. “Come now.”

“Zapata,” said Charles in an even but loud tone of voice.

“Zapata!” cried Keogh. “Go down to Los Angeles and make a movie about him! He’s so romantic with his big dark eyes under that fabulous sombrero. I want one just like it. In fact, I have one just like it. Have him walk quietly into a saloon and run the camera in close to his face. Make the shot all mustachios and burning commitment. Make no genuine alliances with him, however. Spend nothing of value on him. He’ll go to pieces in no time. He’s a sensitive warlord. He will cry when things turn out badly. Interesting that you should find him compelling.”

“This is stimulating, Captain Keogh, Colonel Keogh—” Charles admitted and paused “—or whatever the fuck you think you are, Generale Keogh, but the war in Europe, you must admit, you of all people, certainly now has priority. I mean, haven’t you got enough to do?”

Everybody but Father looked away.

“Two birds with one stone,” said Keogh. “Just have to figger mah tra-jec-toe-reez.”

They were then joined by Sir Edwin. He appeared to have been sleeping in his clothes, possibly for weeks now, on the floor of theater’s green room, and was quick to tell people how stupid and heartless he thought they would be when they criticized and mocked him for it, or even questioned him on the subject. It was a living thing, the theater, and he would no more leave it in its wounded condition than he would the bedside of a sick child. He spoke at first in French, for no good reason, soliciting views about the Stanley Steamer.

“It looks like one of those magnificent things one threshes wheat with and which one day reveals its true, dark, and misunderstood nature and kills all the unsuspecting farmers having lunch in its shade,” said Sir Edwin.

“It is not nearly so large as a threshing machine,” said Father reprovingly. “It is a toy compared to a threshing machine.”

“And yet how many times more powerful than a horse!” shouted Sir Edwin.

“It is,” Charles said, “slower than a horse, and ungainly. You might get around town just as easily in a threshing machine.”

Sir Edwin began to speak English and turned to the weather, which, though of course mild, was nearly unbearable for one as unwell and raggedly worn as himself, who frankly admitted he had sacrificed his manly vitality for his art.

“Don’t think I don’t regret it,” said Sir Edwin.

“You regret it, do you?” asked Father.

“I do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Lucky for me, I don’t give a damn what you believe!” shouted Sir Edwin, loudly, more loudly, perhaps, than he’d thought he would. He was so tired he thought he might become delirious.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Father. He was amused by his wife’s artist, his son’s artist, for God’s sake, but this amusement was mitigated by a general distaste for people who boiled over too easily, like spoiled horses, and who thought it was all right because they were thoroughbreds. He felt as well the strong man’s increased desire to defeat a weaker man once that weaker man has displayed the weakness and its probable trajectory toward greater weakness—if he could use such a term, he did not like it at all, but how else might he put it—decreased vigor? Increased vulnerability? Fever? Nausea? Infantile impotence? Terror?

“Both ways? Describe, please, these two ways which are no longer mine.”

“Soulful visionary and virile man of consequential action.”

“I was encouraged in my youth, it is true, to think that the artist was like no man so much as a religious martyr, the practical consequence of which was the subtle but steady wasting of my resources and the silent but insidious ravaging of my health. But I am making up for it now with the vivid, vital violence . . . that only the mortally wounded . . . apostate anchorite is capable of.”

Sir Edwin was very pleased with his speech, but was not quite finished. Trembling with vengeful glee, he thrust his ace in Father’s face: “And besides, I have your son to do my living for me.”

Father smiled patronizingly and shook his head. “You have no such thing,” he said in seemingly gentle reproof. “Charles is enrolled in your little kindergarten here of public performance, but will soon be moving on. He has real work in Minnesota in the fall. The Commission of Public Safety.”

“You won’t,” asked Keogh, “be going ‘over there’?”

“He will be going over there by staying here. There is a formidable enemy here as well. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you so.”

“Terrible news, however the situation stands, about your theater,” murmured Keogh. Something in his tone of voice, however muted and drawling it was, alarmed Charles and caused him to look directly into Keogh’s eyes. The penetration was allowed for a moment. Keogh then smiled and turned to Amelia.

“We want,” he said, “to help in any way we can. Of course with money, but publically, morally, we want to do everything that can be done to help bring a patriotic show like The American to its rightful audience.

“They are saying now—” Amelia began.

“Who is saying now?” interrupted Mother. “Who is saying what now?”

“It was a small fire, I am told,” said Father. “Easily contained and causing little damage. Everything can be quickly and easily replaced.”

“That is excellent news,” said Keogh, smiling at one and all.

“A boy was killed,” said Charles.

“—that it was deliberately set,” Amelia continued, picking up the controversy of the earlier strand in the conversation left dangling. “The fire marshal believes a small explosive device was launched by a cadre of anarchists under cover of the fireworks display—that is to say, by one of them, a crack archer who used a window purposefully left open as his target. And yes, that a child was killed makes the investigation far more important than it might have been, Father.”

“I left the window open,” Charles said. “And the arrow came through a window that wasn’t open.”

Father nodded, but nobody really cared very much about that sort of detail.

And so Charles sat on the blanket feeling weak and stupid and cold, shivering in the ridiculous details of a political melodrama he could only just barely stand imagining, while some of Captain Keogh’s horsemen twits dug small holes out in the field and Amelia—to his great surprise on her favorite horse, Jolly—barrel-raced around them. Drinking wine one glass after another, he dozed off, and woke to cheering. A horse and rider went thundering past, the rider hanging off one side of his mount and snatching something from the ground and hauling himself back upright in the saddle. There had been a strange sound and a spray of dirt. Another horse and rider appeared at the far end of the field. They galloped past and again the rider hung off low to the ground like an Indian, snatched something that made a small explosion, and rode off shaking his prize. “What are they doing?” he mumbled. Father shaded his eyes and looked down at him. He was insubstantial in the overpowering light. Charles repeated the question, sitting up dizzily and shading his eyes too.

“You know very well what they’re doing,” said Father. “It’s traditional amongst cavaliers,” he said. “An exercise in . . . in . . .”

“What is?” Charles asked, standing unsteadily. “What is an exercise in what?”

Charles looked over at Sir Edwin and told him that chickens had been buried up to their necks. Horsemen rode by and snapped their heads off.

“Ah,” said Sir Edwin.

“This isn’t a war they’re preparing for,” Charles went on equably, “it’s a joke. It’s pitiful, really.”

“If you can’t enjoy the day, why don’t you go home,” suggested Father. “And shave. You look like a bum. A drunken bum.”

Cheers from the far end of the field made their way down the field as another rider charged toward another chicken. People were shouting now and laughing. Charles could see heads turning up and down the field. He lay back down and closed his eyes to the sun, lids burning blood-red and luminous, brain hot in a cold head and reeling. He put his hands over his eyes just as Mother softly exclaimed that, oh, it was Amelia. And there she was, Charles’s mad saint sister like an Amazon Godiva, long chestnut hair in streamers behind her, hanging low and bounding off Jolly’s flank, his spotted coat brilliant in the intense sunlight, his great crazy head nodding rhythmically as he charged. Knowing it was a chicken buried there, he now saw it, its ridiculous startled head straining upward, jerking left and right as it fought off both sleepiness and fear, and then gone, appearing before Charles and Sir Edwin dripping in Amelia’s glove in much less time than Charles thought possible, Jolly reined up in front of the family, Amelia laughing hysterically, laughing and laughing and laughing, infectious but frightening, Mother and Reverend Ruggles both rising to steady her, laughing a little themselves too, helplessly, but wanting to calm her before something happened. But it was too late and Charles knew it. She flung the bloody scrap of chicken head at Sir Edwin. It landed on Charles’s stomach. After a moment, he daintily plucked it up and laid it aside. Then he stood and removed his vest and listened to Amelia sputter and whinny, his little brothers shriek with pleasure, and Mother say to Father that that was it, that was enough, it was too much, we’ve got to get everybody out of here.

Later, at the house, Charles found himself standing rather forlornly with Mother and Father.

“Amelia wants to hurt me too,” said Father. “I don’t understand why.”

“You’ve got no business lecturing Charles, then, William, now do you?”

“Charles and Amelia are two quite distinct matters,” said Father.

Mother spoke as soothingly as she always did, but took Father very much by surprise. The Spring Park Water Company scandal came and went, and for the moment, was among them. Father’s eyes grew quite large and moist and he looked away from her. All around them, in other rooms, the family were hooting. Charles could hardly hear them, but he could see them, as plainly as if the house lights had gone up in the middle of a scene.

Early in the morning a few days later, because Father had made a strange, unlooked-for point of it, Charles decided to get rid of the last of his motorcycles: a Belgian Minerva and a big orange Flying Merkel out of Pottstown, a V-twin displacing sixty-one cubic inches. He entered a shop not far from the theater that appeared to be closed: no one was about and he could hear no sound coming from the back rooms, the mechanics’ bays, nor the offices along the little mezzanine gallery. Sunlight was slanting in through the three big but fly-specked and cobwebbed windows and the manufacturers’ logos painted on them—the Indian, the Cyclone, the Thor—which in turn burned like brands on the oil-stained wood planks of the floor. At the far end of the display case, which glowed in the rare sunlight as if stuffed with diamonds and silver and gold, a grimy and tattered piece of red cloth hung over the narrow doorway that led to the parts bins. The sunlight struck it as a spotlight would a stage curtain, and he found himself staring expectantly at it. It was easy to imagine a kind of comical-nightmare auditorium behind the red curtain, a long and narrow corridor of a stage, an auditorium for puppets compared to the vast stage and wings and unknown world at his back, people perched high above him on the shelves, cackling and buzzing—poor people, because it was “the anarchy of poverty that delighted” him—waiting, waiting for the swollen, thunderous music of the final scene, waiting for the death of the beautiful young tragedienne, waiting for something they could not name, or perhaps only for Charles Minot, a person simply standing there, no particular lines to speak or props to hold, no marks on a carefully measured floor to hit with the grace and precision of a dancer. He edged his way around the display case and stood before the curtain. Something in the distant reaches of the cloudy sky happened and the light faded slightly, drawing swiftly back toward and then into the windows, then brightened again, flowing back across the room to the curtain, red to gray to red. He reached out and touched it, patted it, looked for the fold that might part it just a little, and the musicians in his mind uneasily awaited their cue. Then he clutched the soiled, limp fabric and threw it open.

Walking toward him, at the far end of an astonishingly long and narrow aisle of beetling shelves, was none other than his actress, Vera.

His first impulse was to shout her name and run down the long aisle, take her in his arms and kiss her, but she seemed to be going away from him rather quickly—not running, but going further and further as if by rents of unconsciousness in his perception, and then suddenly she was gone. He let the curtain fall in alarm, strode backward into the display case and banged it loudly, rattling the chromed fittings, the sparkling jets and needles, the red, white, and blue handlebar streamers, the glinting opaque glass and glistening black rubber of the goggles. He set his hands upon it and leaned over, as if to settle and dampen the jingling things and suggest a casual interest in the concentric piles of gears next to a typed and folded card listing ratios and prices. He assumed Vera would reappear, in the shop proper, shortly, and prepared a smile for the young woman’s arrival, conscious that his instinct had failed him, that he had, no other way to put it, fled in the face of her appearance and disappearance. But she did not reappear. And what, after all, had she been doing there in the first place? After quite a long time, he moved stealthily back to the curtain and pulled it slowly away: Vera had her back to him, about halfway down the aisle. Still he could not call out to her: Was she really there? He let the curtain swing stiffly back in place.

Above and behind him, a door in one of the mezzanine cubbyholes was opened with a bang on its hinges and closed with an even louder bang. He craned about and looked up but no one appeared.

Vera was now standing in the doorway, holding the red curtain aside with one finger. She and Charles regarded each other in what seemed like a long silence. Then he greeted her brightly, pretending that if they did not exactly know each other very well, they had seen each other around, were a part of the big happy family that the shop really was, fancy meeting you here and so on. She raised her head slightly, narrowed her eyes, and smiled faintly. Sandy hair, a face somehow smooth and clear and weathered at the same time, and smooth, deep, clear black eyes, sculptured lips. She seemed neither to know Charles nor to care that she did not. And yet there was something of remembrance or premonition in her mild, indifferent scrutiny. Charles was more fascinated than confused. Fascination precluded confusion. She nodded almost imperceptibly—or was he merely imagining such a validation of his wounded, vaunted instinct—then suddenly brightened, laughed, and said that she worked there. She said “Just a sec,” and turned back into the narrow aisle and let the curtain once again fall. Had she been lost in thought? Or had she been appraising Charles privately, or remembering their professional embraces and finding some genuine erotic content, and was just as startled to see him as he was to see her? Perhaps she was shy and manifested it with a kind of mystical hauteur. Perhaps she was drugged. Perhaps he was drugged. Indeed he felt somewhat high. Perhaps she had not been there at all. It was just barely possible, but possible nevertheless. Believing her to be, in that instant of embarrassment and redoubled desire, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he struggled to hold her image in his mind, but could not recall, a second later, a single feature. Sandy hair? Dark eyebrows? Flashing teeth? He moved like a puppet to the curtain and drew it back but she was nowhere to be seen.

He moved silently, with a kind of dreamlike dread and volition, down the aisle, calling out a greeting every few paces, until he reached the end, and retraced, silently, fully awake now for just that moment, his steps, parted the curtain yet again, and found the room noisily full of people, bustling about as if, yes, as if they were on a stage set: three colorfully distinct pairs of men coming one after another in a train through the big double doors with crated motorcycles, another man, a Mexican probably, a gentleman at a small table cluttered with newspapers against the far wall and the last window, which appeared to be pulsing now, faintly, with ore-bearing light, and four men again leaning over the gallery railing but not in shadow—at least three of them—this time, and laughing as if at a baseball game or in a saloon of the Gold Rush years. These four looked like rough and tough men—certainly not the hard but jolly mechanics—if not altogether desperados, and their laughter was clearly not the kind inspired by mirth or light-heartedness, but rather of defeat, despair, mockery, defiance. Still they appeared to have popped out of stage doors and were about to sing. One was a sleek and pink-faced gorilla with a luxurious head of hair, another had sunken cheeks and a monocle, the third had a round and close-shaven skull and a week’s growth of beard, and the fourth hung back in the shadow of a pillar. There were a couple of young men too, boys, who were trying to look and act like customers standing on either side of a yellow Beveridge Cyclone. They were younger than Charles, but not much, dirty and unnecessarily loud, boasting in an Italian dialect he could not make out. Beyond Rome, beyond Naples. Eboli perhaps. Sicilian. A lot of shu-shu-shushing. Sicilian. The truth was they offended him in some way he could not articulate. They looked like gang boys hoping for a chance to do something outrageously violent and useful. One of the men looking down at the shop from the mezzanine half-turned and let another man cross the trembling resounding gallery behind him. The man descended the stairs against the far wall of the shop, banging loudly on each step. He was owlish-looking, with large eyes that seemed nearly yellow behind his thick spectacles, and great shaggy brows shooting like black-veined bolts of lightning from the bridge of his equally remarkable nose to his bulging temples. He smelled strongly of whiskey and Charles faltered a bit before this predatory but teetering ferocity. He carried his hands before him, not quite balled in fists, as if wishing to grasp some invisible thing and tear it to shreds. Not appearing to notice Charles, the man left the shop, negotiated his way through a particularly dense crowd on the sidewalk, waited for a cable car, several Fords, and a horse-drawn wagon to pass, then crossed the street and entered, with exaggerated gestures of formality, into conversation with a jitney driver who was smoking a cigarette outside his little bus. The driver took an envelope from the owlish man and the two shook hands. Another man, wearing a bright red driving cap and a big black moustache, who Charles thought owned the shop joined the owlish man and the jitney driver, and after a moment they all crossed the street and entered the shop. The Owl stood center stage and announced that he had “spoken to the president,” and that said president had agreed to give him, Owl, it seemed, but possibly the others were included, sixty thousand dollars.

“You spoke to Mahon,” said Owner. There was no incredulity, feigned or unfeigned, in his voice.

“Yes?” confirmed Owl querulously.

“Sixty,” repeated Jitney, not with incredulity or sarcasm but awed unbelief.

“That is,” said Owner, now with admiration but still cool, “an awfully fucking immense deal of change.”

“I TOLD YOU, YOU COCKSUCKERS!” shouted Owl in a friendly but nevertheless alarming way.

“Mahon is a decent chap,” said Owner. “He’s in town?”

“He is not,” said Owl. “He is in Washington conferring with the heads of a few other important unions.”

“And where is the money?”

“Pinkerton,” murmured Jitney, his gaze serenely focused outside the shop, on a trolley car on the far side of the intersection. “On the back step. I don’t know if he’s getting on or off. On. No. He’s getting off, he’s getting off and—”

“Quickly, then,” said Owner, moving slowly away and turning his back.

“It’s coming in an unusually circuitous fashion, and we need Farnsworth to receive it here in an unusually quiet corner,” said Jitney.

“No one knows where he is,” said Owl conversationally. “Is he in prison?” He laughed bitterly, and both Owner and Jitney let smiles pass over their faces.

“I’ll find him,” said Owner. “I’ll find Vera and Vera will find Little Billy Farnsworth, the only man among us who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.”

Owl softened and saddened perceptibly. “It’s true. And I love Billy, I truly do. He’s good and he likes getting dirty. I rode with Eugene Debs,” he went on.

“Yes, yes,” said Owner, moving another step away and lighting a cigarette to cover his unacceptable nervousness.

Owl turned to Charles as if he’d been part of the conversation all along. “On the Red Special in 1908 and we got a solid million votes. One million American socialists. Debs and I will both be in prisons before the end of the war—but I intend to bring down United Railroad before they nail me.”

Father’s well-known hatred of URR may have had a great deal to do with the apparent ease in which Charles had become part of the general group—along with the nasty Sicilian boys—if not in the know. Or it may have had very little to do with it. No one seemed terribly interested in oaths and the cover of darkness. He had been in the shop two or three times, getting rid of his motorcycles . . . but had Vera been there all along, watching him, wondering if she might audition . . .?

Owner was counting money in the till but could not help turning and shouting with a great flashing smile, “SIXTY!”

“Mr. Minot!” Owner slammed the register shut and turned his attention to Charles, who bowed perceptibly but not dramatically.

“Are you here to give me the Merkel?”

“Yes, I am. And the Minerva.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Minot. Would you repeat what you just said, sir? Days and nights of internal combustion have weakened my ears as well as my eyes. My nerves are shot and I can hardly walk a straight line. Everything tastes of oil and my fingers are numb from the vibrations.”

“I say I am here to sell you the Merkel and the Minerva.”

“Ah, that’s what Oi t’ought you said.”

The men at the railing regarded Charles impassively, the Italian boys fell silent as if embarrassed. The men carrying crates stood outside smoking, and Mexican murmured to himself, apparently translating a story in the newspaper.

Charles had never looked at the photographs and advertisements papering the walls, but did so now. One caught his eye. Five men with their arms slung around each other, hanging on and sagging against each other, clowning and making faces. Rising massively behind them was the heavy lumber of the armature of a great bowl-shaped track in—he leaned closer—in Detroit. In huge white letters, ten feet high and nailed to the outermost studs, the sport’s chief attraction was spelled out: NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH. The man in the middle, upright, grinning, had either told a terrific joke or was the only sober member of the group. The other men were convulsed in hilarity, faces as blackened as if they were pretending to be a nigger minstrel banjo band, with wide, white, clean rings around their eyes where the goggles had been. Beneath the clean and sober man in the middle were the words “Daredevil Derkum and his friends are neck and neck with death—AND THEY USE OILZUM!” Derkum was a man well known in California racing, who was also a fireman on the lead engine of the Owl train that ran every night from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

“How’s your old man?” asked Owner.

“He’s fine, he’s fine, he . . .” Charles said, faltering a little in the face of all the apparent knowledge of his family strangers were ready to draw on—strangers and Vera. “He’s just back from Iceland.”

“Iceland!”

“Yes, as strange as that may sound: Iceland.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Fishing.”

“Fishing! Fishing—for what sort of fish might one angle in Iceland? Let me guess, let me . . . grayling?”

“Umm, no, you’d think so, wouldn’t you, but interestingly enough, no, no grayling.”

“Trout, of course.”

“Browns, yes.”

“Nasty fish, the brown. Cannibal fish. That’s what I hear.”

“I think they prefer baitfish to their own, but sure, I guess that’s true to some extent,” he said with the return of his casual authority.

“German fish,” continued Owner. He winked.

“Oh yes, of course. German fish.”

“It’s in all the newspapers. A German fish and they are eating up all the good American brook trout. And they’re supposed to be inferior on the table.”

“Au bleu, with the right wine, they taste all right to me.”

There was a brief silence and then the place was roaring with laughter. When it subsided, Owner gave Charles a wry but gently consoling look. “Char,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking of earlier. The rare and mysterious arctic char.”

“Sure, lots of nice species of char. But it’s the salmon they went for.”

“Of course. Salmon. How could I forget? Salmon! So the fishing was good?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“No?”

“I mean, I haven’t heard.”

“But generally, the reputation of Iceland is . . .?”

“Good, yes, very good.”

“Why else go to Iceland, right?

“My father says it’s the most beautiful country in the world. Volcanoes with glaciers creaking around them. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds straight from the North Pole and you can stick your hand in a creek of nearly boiling water. They’re only just emerging from the Middle Ages, thanks ironically to the war in Europe.”

“But ironically too the war in Europe makes it a risky business to go steaming about in the northern Atlantic, does it not?”

Charles shrugged. “He likes to fish.”

“But you do not?” asked Owner. “Like to fish.”

“Oh no, I do, I do, I do very much, but I’m, uh, I’m, uh . . .” Charles faltered again, inexplicably. “I’m in a play and . . . you know. Vera too—”

“You’re an actor,” said Owner, a bit like a lawyer.

“Yes,” Charles admitted emphatically, maybe a bit testily. “Yes, I am. Several plays, actually. A season of them. In repertory.”

“And the shows must go on.”

“That’s what they tell me. Even if the theater is burned to the ground.”

“The Savoy is a beautiful building. We were relieved to hear the damage was not great and that repair will go quickly.”

“Yes. We found the money pretty easily too. Mother finds the money. She used to sing, but she prefers now just to find the money. The insurers feel now that the fire was not caused by a firework launched by, they think, some trolley drivers who were celebrating something about San Francisco’s role in the war that one of the city commissioners said, or promised, or promised to say at some point in the near future. Or didn’t say. Promised not to say.”

“Not caused,” Owner repeated.

“That’s right: not caused. I’m not sure about any of the details. I should be, but I’m not. But it was late at night, after that . . . anarchist picnic . . . .”

Everyone in the room was suddenly uneasy. The results of the investigation had not yet been made public. Charles had forgotten that. This would be news to them: that they, or their friends, had done it. If in fact these men were actually anarchists. It was a leap, but they had the look and feel and sound of, well . . . anarchists, did they not? Which meant that it was to be understood as a blow against, Charles supposed, the aristocracy, or perhaps the aristocracy specifically involved in what was perceived as a patriotic theatrical production of a play called The American. The aristocracy specifically known as “the Minots.” Known more specifically in that room as “Charles Minot.” Father’s adventures in the punishment of graft and his hatred of URR were, the thinking was evidently to go, not good enough for the anarchists. Whatever Father may think, may wish and yearn to believe about his progressive Christian politics, it was too little too late: you get your ass ripped apart like all the rest of the rich people.

It was as preposterous a lie as they’d heard yet in the city, but still it gave them pause and made the room, the shop, the big happy family with its radical character actors ranged up along the mezzanine rail and its colorful young Italian criminals, all terribly quiet.

Charles thought what silenced them was the shadow of lies to come falling over their stage. His stage, their stage, everybody’s stage. The little old stage set about to come apart, once again, at the seams.

“And what is the name of the first show that must go on?” It was Owner’s shop and he would conduct them through a reasonable conversation that eased their vague fears.

“The American,” said Charles.

“Sounds patriotic!”

“Well, yes, it is and it isn’t. You see . . . Vera, I think, could tell you—”

“Fits the mood of the city, certainly.”

“Yes, that is certainly so.”

“Henry James’s The American? Or some other sort of American.”

“Henry James, right. Adapted it himself, I understand, from his novel.”

“He’s dead, you know.”

“No, I did not know that.”

“Couple of months ago.”

“I see, I see. That’s, well, that’s . . . too bad. I’m sorry to hear it. Did you, do you, like his novels . . .?” Charles couldn’t believe he was discussing literature with a daredevil, but pressed on, making a note to ask Sir Edwin if he knew about “his friend” James’s death. He was sure he did not, and would extol it as the man’s supreme fiction.

“Yes, I do,” said Owner judiciously. “And I don’t care who knows it. Once I learned to read I didn’t care how complicated things got. I think I’ve gotten to where I prefer them complicated. Simplicity is some kind of snake oil. Simplicity is, you know, like the story of the little theater that wasn’t damaged in a fire set off by an errant firework but by evil men who are not like us and who hate us and who hold human life in utter contempt. You?”

Somehow he knew he was back to the novels and stories of Henry James. “Yes. I think I’ve read most if not all of the New York edition.”

“And your theater is physically viable, is that right? Structurally sound?”

“Yes, that’s right, and we hope to open very nearly on schedule,” said Charles with once-again-regained composure and authority. “The American is in terrific shape, August Strindberg’s Spook Sonata is very difficult—do you know Strindberg? He was given an anti-Nobel a few years ago, just before he died.”

There was some clapping, whether in honor of the inventor of dynamite or of Strindberg it was hard to say.

“Difficult—” Charles began to say but could not repress the laughter that was going around the room, a strong suggestion that it was the inventor of dynamite who had been applauded, “—difficult I say to work on but very exciting, and Romeo and Juliet, well . . . there are a lot of lines to be memorized there, of course, but we think we’ll be ready with what our artist in residence calls a dream of the future.”

“Romeo and Juliet as a dream . . .?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of the future.”

“Yes, sir. That’s the phrase that keeps coming up in our . . . our talks. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt and Mercutio and the rest of them, are not causes for sadness and grief and weeping.”

“No?” Owner was amused but deferential.

“They are sacrifices in a glorious cause.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. They are . . . hastening the downfall of the corrupt . . . forms . . . of their fathers. Their poisonous ways and decadent tyrannies. When they are together and in love, they are actually . . . in the, uh . . . in the future. You can tell it’s the future because the lighting is different and we speak differently. The violence all takes place in the present. We use it as a kind of way to rend the fabric . . .” and here Charles faltered. He was tired of this faltering and could not understand it. Sooner walk into a burning room than subject oneself to the judgment of strangers who act like they know you.

The hidden Vera once again saw the icy clown just beneath his handsome features, the ironic lout just beneath his goodwill.

“Yes?”

“Of time.”

“Probably a little too sophisticated for me.”

Charles took a good breath and recovered himself. “I’m not sure that that is the word for it. Sir Edwin is a visionary and freely accepts ridicule on that count. There’s a good deal of entertaining sword fighting, in any case, and poetry.”

“‘Sir’ Edwin?” asked Owner.

“Yes. An English knight.” Charles chuckled falsely, grinning, to make up for it, with even greater falsity around the room. Because it sounded like an exit line in a scene that left the audience roaring with laughter, Charles decided to make for the big open doorway, at that moment a great archway of light.

“You’ll leave the Merkel with us, then?”

“Yes, and the Minerva!” Charles shouted, stunned that he’d forgotten why he’d come. He took a few uncertain steps back into the gloom. “Tell Vera I—”

“MINERVA?” shouted Owl. “WHAT THE FUCK IS A MINERVA?”

“Belgian make. Minerva. 1902.”

“What’s the kid talkin’ about?” Jitney asked Owl.

“HE WANTS TO SELL US A BELGIAN WAFFLE! YOU HUNGRY?”

“No interest in the Minerva, Mr. Minot,” said Owner. “You have to shut the engine off to change gears.”

Charles stopped then and turned and held up his hand as if he were departing a group of able and courageous men with whom he had accomplished something of sentimental as well as practical value. “THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE OF VALUE TO A COLLECTOR,” he fairly bellowed.

“NO COLLECTORS HERE, KID! ONLY DAREDEVILS!” Owl bellowed back.

“THANK YOU! THANK YOU ALL! YOU’VE BEEN A TERRIFIC AUDIENCE! PLEASE BE SO GOOD AS TO CONVEY MY GREETINGS TO VERA!”

“VERA WHO?” Owl redoubled his bellow.

The laughter in the shop continued until Charles was quite a long way down the sidewalk and out of earshot.

Vera watched all this from the other side of the curtain, holding it closed and revealing only the unnaturally white oval of her face, wanting only to play a game, hoping Charles would overcome his politeness and a profound and certain confusion and come running down the aisle again to find her. Yes: she wished it was a game. But if it was a game, what kind of game was it? Who would win and who would lose and, in the end, would they know why they had played? Her salon—at what passed for one without the structure and animation of money, at her salon des pauvres, somebody had nicknamed it and which had stuck, le Salon Romantique et Revolutionnaire, she preferred to call it, with pride that was maybe a little defensive, a little guilt-ridden as she had always wanted to be part of a smart set and had just begun to learn French—there, yes, they knew all about it: Henry James would be taken at his word and escorted quite a bit further down the road, where his American would become not the fresh air in the moldy museum of Old World aristocratic privilege, bright and kind, resourceful and determined, but a ruthless destroyer of the weak, the sick, the ridiculous. Romeo and Juliet would be a savage and bloody fairy tale about utopia. Watching The Spook Sonata would be like taking a powerful narcotic that would set free the enslaved minds of its audience. They had heard these ideas proposed and articulated, and debated them with learned pleasure, like doctors in the amphitheater of a surgery. They were anarchists, so of course they were interested in all new theories of disease and cure, in plans for the real abolition of slavery, an understanding of true weakness, for the demolition of palaces and the deaths of tyrants. Still, she was uneasy. There was so much authority and obedience to authority in even the most charming and reckless of these speeches, so much discipline and sacrifice in even the daffiest of these aesthetics, that unspeakable atrocity seemed right around the corner. Petty despots would race up and down the high roads and the low roads like insane tinkers who’d wrested magical weapons from stupid sorcerers, or mountebanks playing the shell game and killing everybody who happened to win. Killing and killing and killing because even the rigged game could not be counted on, you had to kill them all, winners and losers alike, until you finally were killed yourself. No, she did not subscribe to endless killing. Therefore (she had to admit, because the continuity was as clear as day) she could not subscribe to the beginning of killing, either. She said as much to herself—later, of course, but not much later, to Charles—with a kind of gentle but false patience, knowing that she could scream and slap and break things that need not have been broken, and was, in her dreams, too often violent—even with loved ones, it troubled her to note morning after morning—hysterically and remorselessly merciless in her sleeping hatreds and vengeance.

As Charles made his ridiculous departure that day, he saw, thought he saw, Vera push her face through the greasy red drapery and then withdraw it. Perhaps he had seen it in the corner of his eye—the sudden absence. He could feel her every moment across all time and space, no? He was in love with her, no? Love was not thinking about love, it was not about lolling about in feelings of love, it was apprehending the movements of the loved one across all time and space.

She knew more than a little about Charles, and about his family—not simply because she was the hostess of a salon and a terminal of radical gossip but because they were a family about whom things necessarily were known. The desire of the people of San Francisco to have knowledge of the Minots was somehow virtuous—because they were in so many easily demonstrable ways so admirable and so detestable. And the release of knowledge from the family, too, seemed virtuous: We belong to our city, they seemed to admit and proclaim at the same time, to our state, to our country, our God. Playing dumb, sometimes just for the derisive fun of it, sometimes to draw out an unsuspecting and perhaps valuable speaker, was something she did frequently and too easily; she disliked the occasional arrogant nastiness and fundamental lawyer-like deception of it but also could not help but be fascinated by the newly visible person she saw, or thought she saw, blinking uncertainly but hopefully, where the opaque and therefore hostile stranger had been standing. This was especially the case, it turned out, with Charles, whom she was afraid she was prepared to like, despite his wealth, because he was admirable—and because, she was also afraid, he had a target painted on his back.

Taking his feelings as genuine, primary, and direct responses to recent, incontrovertible acts, and noting that all action was incontrovertible and therefore worthy of the most intensely rigorous scrutiny, Charles decided to invite Vera out for an afternoon at the Sutro Baths, on the ocean side of the peninsula. This was an extravagance of engineering in which seven tanks were flushed and filled daily by the tide, several of them heated for the purposes of relaxation, one filled with fresh water: two acres of swimming, diving, and bathing pools within a luminous structure—even on the bleakest and grayest of days—of glass and black iron that could accommodate fifty thousand swimming, eating, drinking, smoking, waltzing, and promenading people.

Vera said that she was familiar with the place: her friends had taken her there after a particular grim and grimy year.

They had taken the lift down from the sidewalk and were staring into the gloom of the basement beneath the motorcycle shop. After a moment Vera stepped across the threshold of metal and cement and motioned for Charles to follow as she opened a door and made her way through a damp dripping space redolent of burnt oil and mildew and gasoline, navigating almost purely by memory between piles of junk and frames of motorcycles like skeletons and disassembled engines with parts spread around them on greasy cloths, all shapeless masses shifting in the dark, until she came to a second door, on which she used a key, selected in darkness and fitted to its lock as surely as if it had been broad daylight. She entered the room and with a long, measured sigh, lit an oil lamp.

A printing press took up most of the room. She took a sheet from the press tray and brought it near the lamp. A cartoonist using pen and ink had drawn a doctor handing a rich woman with a single child a packet of birth control information with one hand, while waving away, with the other hand, behind his back, a poor woman with six or seven children. The caption read: THE BOSS’S WIFE CAN BUY INFORMATION TO LIMIT HER FAMILY AND THE BOSS CAN BUY YOUR CHILDREN TO FILL HIS FACTORIES WITH CHEAP LABOR. She moved to the washstand, glanced at herself in a tiny oval mirror with an ornate grillwork of vines and leaves framing it; then at the old printed slogan:

NO GODS TO FEAR

NO MASTERS TO APPEASE

NO DOGMAS TO RECITE

She stood for a moment staring blankly at it, then back at herself in the little mirror. Some breathlessly unmeasured time later, Charles watched Vera and Vera’s reflection as she poured water from the jug into the bowl. She splashed her face and neck and arms and dried herself with a snow-gray towel. With the raspy cloth still to her face, she appeared to remember that she’d not locked the doors behind her. She hung the towel on its hook and turned to the door, where a man strange to Charles now stood.

He looked shy and arrogant on the shadowy threshold, a tender bully. Looking over Vera’s shoulder at Charles he said, “I’m sure not that sleek asshole they call ‘the American.’ In fact, I look like a rat. But I’m not. And I do have whiskey and cigarettes.” It took Vera only seconds to recover herself. “I like to drink,” she said. “And I like to fuck.”

His name was Warren Farnsworth and they had been lovers for some time, but it was understood that the room in the basement was a private, nearly secret place, where he was not, where no one, was welcome. “That’s terrific,” he said, stepping from the murky shadow into the yellow light. She saw where his dirty suit had been ripped, and fingered it. “Knifework,” he said. “Fraction of an inch.” He took hold of her fingers and held them for a moment. Then it became clear that he was struggling not to sob, and failing. He made several noises that were more like barks than anything else and his face was wet with tears. “I wouldn’t have come down here if I wasn’t at the end of my fucking rope,” he whimpered. “Get him the fuck out of here, please.” She held his head to her breast and then it was over. Warren was embarrassed and turned away. Charles excused himself and made his way back to the lift.