Читать книгу The Daredevils - Gary Amdahl - Страница 8

Two boys squatted together on either side of an open limelight box. They were adjusting the mixture of gases entering it, with an intensity of care—both nodding silently as if at the idea of it—that was preternatural. The block of lime began to glow, and the light grew brighter and brighter until it seemed it could become no brighter, not in this world, and still it grew.

But then the older boy’s sense of care appeared to slacken while the other boy’s intensified—perhaps in compensation. Both boys felt this change with a shiver.

The older boy went down the main aisle and climbed up on the small stage, across which the curtain, depicting a tranquil northern lake, was drawn. He was wearing a false auburn beard that was much too big for his face, a monocle, a cream-colored suit that was his size and which in fact he owned, and a bowler hat that was also comically big, forcing him to tip it stylishly to one side to keep it from interfering with the all-important monocle. Because the side flaps of the limelight box had not been clapped in place, light was not focused on him but filled the entire theater. He saw the other boy, who was closest to the source, in a heavenly, deathly light that disturbed—even perhaps, in the strict medical sense of the term, shocked him: hellish and heavenly and dead and alive and perfect. It was one kind of light but another as well, a light that was even stronger, even stranger: he thought it must be a kind of hallucination or a kind of madness. He did not feel well. And yet he was able to make a bizarre distinction and say that neither did he feel unwell.

His friend, who was the son of the plumber who ran the gas for the theater, wore a greasy newsboy’s cap that hung down over the sides of his face like the floppy ears of a hound, and a pair of short pants that were comically large: held up by braces, they were like a stiff gabardine barrel into which he’d climbed to hide himself, the top crossing his bare suspendered chest, the ragged hems brushing the floor and under which his toes peeked out. He had a fat, wet toothpick in his tiny pursed mouth, so that from the stage, in that incredible light—light the older boy perceived now as “sensitive,” so sensitive it picked up motes of dust and magnified them—he appeared to be smoking a cigarette or small, fancy cigar.

The older boy watched the other as intently as the other watched the flame. He positioned himself exactly center stage and let himself be hypnotized. The light was a host or vector of some kind of fever, a means of generating or regenerating through fever a superior or at least supernatural life.

Father had said: it was only acceptable temporarily, for a very brief time, to be susceptible to that kind of day-dreamy indolence or outright weakness of mind, if that was how you insisted on seeing it, if at the same time you were reconciled to the unspoken but daily admonition that the only transformative powers to which a man, Charles in this case, might aspire were political, Christian, and expensive.

“I am wearing this disguise for no particular reason,” he announced.

He was speaking loudly and clearly, but in a special way, as if performing. Was he performing? He mused in a satisfied way. He was sure he could pass for twenty in the disguise, even though he was a little short yet—and, most importantly for the immediate artistic concerns, his voice had not yet broken. He tapped the jeweled end of a walking stick in the palm of his hand, as if he was waiting impatiently for his friend to do something. And there it was again: Performing? If so, for who, and why?

Toulouse-Lautrec, he wondered. Was that who he was thinking of? I need a sketch pad. His voice was sure to break any minute. He did not know if he wanted it to happen or not. If Mother intends to castrate me, she has got to act now, he thought. I’m joking, he thought. Right? How good, really, is my voice? Good enough for Mother to want to cut my balls off to save it? How many times had Mother said, “You can never find a castrato when you need one”? Many, many times. If Mother thought someone had failed to catch her witticisms, she would back her horse up and gallop over them again.

It was the finest treble San Franciscans had heard in a generation of boy choirs. How many times had Mother said so? How many times had people owing nothing to Mother, under her influence in no readily apparent way, said so?

Many, many times.

He could sing well.

He knew it was true, even if he refused comment. It was an accident of evolution. Not the right word, he knew, but that was how he saw it: it had come down through the ages, a million years of yodeling homo this and homo that and landed in his pristine voice box. He believed it—the essential, ideal Voice—had reached its zenith in Mother’s contralto, but he was her baby. His brothers and sister could sing—as certainly could Father—but not like he could, not like Mother could.

An accident. Or gift from God, depending on whom he was talking to and what kind of mood he was in. And just as Plato said would happen to an ideal, it was degenerating—even as he spoke! He had to laugh at that one, and in the peal of that angelic laugh he thought he heard the first creak of a shiver of a crack beginning to form, his perfect little larynx beginning to bulge and thicken and coarsen.

Mother? Sharpen the knife.

He called out to Little Joe who was still muttering and tinkering with the limelight: he told him he thought it was funny. In a distracted stage whisper—incredibly enough, Little Joe seemed to be performing too—faintly annoyed perhaps, or even “faintly annoyed,” the toothpick stretching the corner of his mouth, Joe asked Charles what it was he thought was funny, and did he mean funny strange or funny ha-ha.

Charles considered the remark. He felt an urge to get down off the stage, to tinker and advise and pester, as an adult might, not to “play” with his friend—the specter of that kind of performance rose and fell ominously in Charles’s soul before he had a chance to acknowledge it, as what, a loss?—but engage him as his brothers did their opponents in the debating club across the bay in Berkeley—surely my young friend understands that his abridgment of my remarks constitutes a fraud—but the remark stayed in his throat and unsettled him somewhat. He looked at Joe and could not help but wonder if he wasn’t after all talking to a gnome or a dwarf or a wizard—or the ambulatory foetus of such fantastic creatures. Then he recalled the boy’s father asking the same question, “Funny strange or funny ha-ha, Mr. Minot?” calling him “mister” instead of “young sir” as he usually did. And recalled too this colorful workingman’s fondness for toothpicks, all fourteen members of his colorful working family seeming to chew them at once.

But it was as if he, Joe, were the one putting on the show. That was what was funny.

“What?” Joe whispered, preoccupied but not annoyed.

Charles could hardly hear him. “I have often been struck,” he howled in that chilling way that only a strong treble can, “in my many days and nights in the theater, during rehearsals or between acts, at how much more interesting the stagehands moving the furniture and props about are than my fellow singers and actors.”

He had made many sorties in this mode of the theatrical extempore, was constantly improvising, well, what would you call it, wit? Ready intelligence? Rhetorical exuberance?

But this: this was something different. He certainly had his rhetoric down and was more than facile in his manipulation of it, but had he not said something interesting as well? In a theatrical way? Falsely magnificent but with an aura of strange truth faintly glowing around it?

Joe made no reply; not, Charles thought, out of a lack of sophistication, but because he’d reached a critical point in his tuning of the gas.

The limelight now poured from the box so brilliantly it almost made its own sound. Joe himself was an incandescent ghost. The seats for many rows behind him stood out blood red, little rips in the fabric clearly visible, like gaping wounds, each snarl of thread or nubbin a blemish, or hairy mole. Most of the small theater was in fact illuminated, the carved demons and angels of the proscenium arch looking blinded as if by attempted entrance to the Eternal Paradise of the stage, just beyond the Earthly Paradise of the curtain.

Suddenly Joe flipped the lids of the box closed around the filament, focusing the light onstage and causing himself and most of the theater to vanish in the deep black spaceless space of the surprised optic nerve.

Charles let the walking stick swing to his side and raised his free hand to his face, shielding his eyes.

Certainly it is a kind of fever, he thought.

“Only it’s in reverse,” he said, continuing the earlier thought. “I am onstage, but watching you offstage.”

Then Joe went too far and the limelight went out with a loud firecracker pop. “That’s funny,” he said as the darkness and silence overwhelmed them. His small, soft voice was musing and concerned. Charles could hear it perfectly now: it was genuine.

“Funny strange?” he asked, decreasing the volume but intoning grandly, “or funny ha-ha.” His voice filled the theater in an imitation of the corrupt, jubilant oratory of his father and his father’s friends. “I say to you, funny straaaaaaange? Or funny HA-HA? Ladies? Gentlemen? Which, I put it to you now, for the hour is upon us, will it be?” Charles brought the walking stick around to his front, folded his gloved hands around the fake jewel, and waited.

“You’re strange,” said the quiet voice barely making its way out of the darkness. “You can take it from me. Anybody says you’re not, you tell ’em come see me. We’ll set this person straight.”

Charles nodded solemnly. It was true as true could be. It was 1906, and all bets were off. La Belle Époque was over. Everybody agreed the world had never been stranger. Europeans were expressing cheerful optimism in the so-called great alliances, but that didn’t stop them from thinking there was something terribly strange in the air. A new world? Not the Americas, not the United States of America—something far more new? Was that possible? It was the American Century. Father’s good friend President Roosevelt had said so. Charles was expressing neither idle nor psychotic conversational wonder. He wasn’t good for much more than nodding and smiling and furrowing his shining young brow when the conversation was politics but that did not mean he was failing to take it in, somehow, on some level of concern, and Father made sure he got the basics, over breakfast, with the others, and had a first-rate opinion ready if called upon to amaze everybody with his firm but gentle Christian savoir faire. Father also urged Charles’s older brothers to go to Japan, if they wanted to steal a march on the young men who were too focused on simply making a pile of money as fast as possible and spending it in Europe while there was still a Europe to be purchased.

“Go to Japan. You will not regret it.”

“We’re Californians, Father. We are Progressives.”

“California is not what it once was, gentlemen. Neither is Progressivism. Go to Japan.”

A little light could be seen now way up high around the edges of the doors leading to the third-floor lobby, and though it was a weak and alien, an unpleasant light, he made his way off the stage and into the disorienting maze of voice-filled stairways. He did not emerge until he was on the third floor. As he opened the stairway door, he glanced at the row of little rectangular casement windows. They showed oddly vivid rectangles of a grassy square and the empty space that would soon be the foundation of the Silesian Brothers church. To the left of the little windows were big French windows, opening onto a small balcony. He meant to examine the strange images made by the little windows, but went to the big ones. It was a warm, still, sunlit afternoon. The park was divided by the setting sun into shadow so lustrous it was almost golden, the darkest amber maple syrup you could find, or molasses, and a solid, marble-hard and almost deathly white. Limelight white. There were paraders on the far side of the park, accompanied by a small brass band that he couldn’t hear, going around the square, and they moved from golden darkness into blinding light and back into darkness. Charles tugged a key from his waistcoat pocket and opened the doors.

It took him a moment to sort out: the paraders were shouting something he could just barely hear in a military cadence in the absence of music from their band, while directly below him, just across the street, a small group on a bandstand was singing a folksong. The bandstand was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and there were large flags hanging around their poles at the corners: the USA, the California, and two he couldn’t make out, labor unions no doubt. The marching band began to play, but as they were on the far side of the square, Charles couldn’t make out much beyond the unmistakable rhythm of the march.

This was one of the sensations that stayed with him: music, acting, performance was everywhere he looked. It wasn’t an intellectual observation, it was a feeling. Nobody was not performing. That was to say, nobody was not holding their real selves back, in readiness for something else he and they could not imagine.

Nobody was not performing: it must be a consequence of the expulsion from the garden. A mass psychosis that nobody noticed anymore, or cared about.

There was a large crowd, he guessed, massing mostly out of sight toward the intersection of Stockton and Columbus.

The folksingers crooning on the bandstand with their backs to him, arms linked around waists, tightly swaying, were apparently a barbershop quartet, but a girl, or a small young woman, hopped up on the stage and stood in front of them. She was so small Charles couldn’t see over the massed backs of the large men of the quartet, but he could hear her over their harmonizing quite clearly:

“They go wild, simply wild, over me

I”m referring to the bedbug and the flea;

they disturb my slumber deep, and I murmur in my sleep,

they go wild, simply wild, over me.

Oh the bull he went wild over me,

and he held his gun where everyone could see.

He was breathing rather hard when he saw my union card,

and he went wild, simply wild, over me.”

Charles leaned over the balcony, counting: Hundreds of people? There were shouts, some booing. Popular tunes with seditious lyrics made many San Franciscans uneasy to the point of irritation—he had often heard the vogue for it derided—and diffuse applause muffled by something pointedly not the wind, as there was still not the hint of a breeze.

A sandy, treeless little park, on the edge of a sandy treeless peninsula where cold wind off the ocean was a constant—and it was hot! Gosh, it was hot! Charles plucked the handkerchief from its pocket and mopped his brow as if he were actually sweating, not to mention speaking aloud, and looked back through the doors for Joe, who was not there. He had never been so hot, he thought. April? Hot enough for ya? Astonishing!

Nerves, he thought. Flop sweat. Though I am not actually sweating, not actually performing.

He wanted to get back to the little windows, and started to when it came to him: they had seemed in that moment like paintings, not windows. Then something below had caught the sun and flashed, or he saw movement across the park . . . .

Two men brought a podium to the front of the little stage, and another man ascended the platform. He strode to the podium, took fierce hold of it, and began to speak in the loud but measured tones of the orator that Charles liked so well to study. First impression: somewhat less jubilant and corrupt than was the norm. The speaker apologized, because what he had to say was pretty dry stuff, and he wished he could rhyme and sing it, but alas, he could not. His job was to report on the progress of some twenty-odd trials of union organizers going on at that moment across the country, from sea to shining sea. He described the plaintiffs and the sort of municipalities in which they found themselves imprisoned in a few vivid words, the charges against them, and the nature and sufficiency of the evidence supporting those charges. He then ranked these trials on a scale of one to ten, according to the types and amounts and relative effectiveness of the perjury being committed in broad daylight by the various jubilant and corrupt prosecution teams. A score of one meant that there was no perjury involved in the trial, while a score of ten indicated plainly and simply a trial in which nothing but perjury was going on. Only one trial scored lower than a five, and a round dozen were rated at ten, and he shouted those “TENS!” with increasing volume, matching the rising noise of the crowd, but before he could gloss his findings, a wave of booing and catcalls overwhelmed him. He tried to speak over it, and there were apparently a large number of people trying to counter the catcallers with applause and whistling, shouting, “They will all be killed like the Haymarket Martyrs were if we don’t do something right now,” but he could not make himself heard. Someone directly below Charles in a pocket of resonant silence said, “Good, kill ’em then!” Then the speaker was hit squarely in the chest with a tomato. It looked, to Charles, as if he’d been shot with a twelve gauge. A great red stain appeared on his white shirt and he fell over backward, knocking over several chairs in two rows and toppling the men sitting on them. He came to rest against one of the poles holding the Stars and Stripes and knocked it half-over. Getting up and reaching for it, it fell completely. Miraculously, this resulted not in retaliatory violence escalating to general mayhem, or even in postures of indignation and barking, but in crowd-wide laughter, rippling, like the sound of vast flocks of settling birds, from all corners of the park. Even the men on the platform, the speaker included, could be seen with their mouths wide open, laughing heartily.

What kind of performance was this? Real or fake? Were they performing in reality but playing fast and loose with what they believed? For reality with some kind of fealty for the real, for the sake of reality with convictions that kept them on the straight and narrow? Were they performing in some way against reality? Did they want to change reality? Was it a fantasia on themes of reality? He was a musician first and foremost—but did this have anything to do with music? Did they mean what they were saying? If the crowd did try to string them up, would they plead that strength of characterization, along with native rhetorical talent and tricks of the trade, had overwhelmed them and consequently the mob? That it was what it all too often looked like: Just a show? Political vaudeville? Were they joking and were the jokes being taken seriously? Were they deadly serious but being taken as comedians?

Charles understood that perjury was commonly held to be antithetical to due process and the proper, effective functioning of the laws of the nation, that it was in fact a crime itself, and that to believe or even suggest otherwise—that it was in fact a way to function effectively—was to hold yourself open to scornful cries of cynic (from friends), depraved cynic or even depraved adolescent knee-jerk cynic (the adolescent being his older brother Andrew), and anarchist or worse from people wishing to defame you. “But perjury,” Andrew said, “let me be frank, I don’t care what names you call me, I am merely attempting to think clearly about what is real and what is not, about the way things really are, perjury is only perjury if someone makes it so. If no man of steadfast Christian honesty and sympathy makes it a crime, then it’s as true as anything else the prosecution carts out. To merely say something is perjurious, to even think you can prove it in some legally binding way, is to whistle past the grave.” So while Charles was inclined to like men like the speaker on the platform with the tomato stain on his shirt, as a man of principle and clear thought and articulate speech, his insistence—his genuine, not feigned (it seemed) insistence, because he was a warm and sincere person (it seemed)—insistence on truth and compassion were, just as Andrew’s were, embarrassingly out of place in an empire. The insistence on ideals when things came and went so remorselessly, changed so mercilessly—it was a childish insistence, a childish violence, a temper tantrum, even if it became murderous. Charles liked, admired these men, he would never say otherwise, but knew, just as Father knew and had gently cooled and corrected Andrew, these men were clowns and headed for catastrophe.

He was not really confused at all about what kind of theater it was.

There was a way, Father had said, to live always in sight of Christian ideals and yet rule the world.

To live within Christian ideals and be buoyed up by them, said Andrew, as you rule the world.

Standing on the little half-circle balcony outside the French doors of the tall and narrow jewel-box theater where, in just a little more than a day—tonight, tomorrow, then tomorrow night—he would sing with Mother the Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi before the most important men and women in the world-embracing world of San Francisco music, he thought: I am a clown and I am headed for catastrophe.

Because I want to be.

Because I am a daredevil!

If there was a chance for a man to be something other than a victim or a villain (he had heard this said in his own home, in the company not just of his illustrious family but a table brimming with important men and women, of somewhere, someplace where things were very bad, not the United States of America, someplace in old mad Europe, he could not have been more than seven), his only resort was to become an artist, or art itself if that was possible, or more like art than like life, away from the silly made-up conclusions that come, it was said, from close attention to, a thorough inspection of life, of reality, of truth. The trial is perjurious? The sky is blue: make it rain. Be a rainmaker in a time of nothing but blue skies. Charles came, young and innocent as he was, to these unpleasant opinions because Father was so adept in the law and politics, and because he insisted his skill was moral and that his morality was exclusive, and because he put a lot of pressure on his sons to attempt to become, one of them—why not?—the president of the United States, experimenting on them, sometimes overtly and explicitly, sometimes, he was sure, subconsciously, having Charles read a certain book that had been forbidden Alexander, Andrew, and of course Amelia, or meet a certain person—even going so far as to allow a life in the theater, a life, an apprenticeship to life of law and politics . . . singing and acting? It was hard to reconcile in a man who took the law and politics so seriously that he had not been deterred by being shot in the head. Charles, Father reasoned, needed to know how to improvise and project character, and how to make that character work for you, make you entertain and persuade. Or just exactly the opposite: forbidding him certain behaviors that got blinked at in his older brothers, so that he might know how to project no character whatsoever . . . experimenting on Charles, carefully, to be sure, with a sense that a great deal was at stake, but experimenting nevertheless. And that went for Mother too: rediscovery of lost Italian Baroque composers, commissioning a biography of Scarlatti père, authentic practices—and all of it coming down on Charles’s head with her revolutionary idea to use a boy whose voice had not yet broken instead of the lyric coloratura everyone else was settling for as the piece made its bid to break into the world’s repertory.

But here, here is what he honestly thought: people are not really all that interested in truth most of the time. They are interested in what makes them feel good, and this goes in high and mighty courts of law too. You define what makes you feel good as the truth, or as a truth, as something true, you assert it, you defend it, you try to win people over to your way of thinking, and finally you impose it. What the speaker on the platform was doing was bad theater—common theater.

And as if to confirm him in his magically superior thought, a man holding a placard identifying himself as a representative of the International Radical Club, stepped up to the podium. He was attended by another man holding the fallen flag, and they were gesturing comically to each other in the midst of the confusion, and generally people still seemed to be laughing. Everyone was laughing but Charles was uneasy: it was still just bad theater. This man he knew, a nutty professor in Berkeley who was possibly speaking in several different languages. And for it he was pelted with vegetables. Another man, holding a placard over his head that said LOCAL 151 OAKLAND, was big enough, and loud and angry enough, to make himself heard for a minute, but this clarity was met by the crowd with louder, articulate cries concerning the citizenship of the speaker. He said he was a citizen of the US of A, which meant, for starters, that he was free to stand up where he was and say what he’d come to say, admitting that his audience was free too, to heckle him. Then someone hidden from Charles’s view, but unmistakably using a bullhorn, said, “Free to be a goddamn coward, I guess!” As he leaned out and scanned the square looking for the bullhorn somewhere, perhaps under one of the young, dark, flashing trees up toward Filbert Street, Charles saw, where before had been one or two cops, there were six or seven now, and where before had been a single mounted policeman, just in sight up Union, there were more than he could count. Yes, everyone was laughing but something bad was going to happen. The new speaker had his arms over his head and was apparently shouting, judging the by the way his body swayed and snapped, but Charles could make out very little over the roar.

Then the bullhorn: “ARE YOU A CITIZEN?”

Speaker: “OH, PLEASE, WILL YOU SHUT THE HELL UP WITH THE CITIZEN NONSENSE NOW? WE HAVE HAD QUITE ENOUGH OF THAT!”

Bullhorn: “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?”

Speaker: “NO, I MOST CERTAINLY DO NOT!”

Bullhorn: “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, HOW DO YOU EXPECT YOUR TESTIMONY IN A COURT OF LAW TO BE BELIEVED?”

Speaker: “I EXPECT NO SUCH THING YOU GODDAMNED IDIOT!” He tried to continue, and went on for some time as the crowd grew more and more restive, more and more loud, more and more, it seemed, unhappy, describing anarchism, with great difficulty, as admittedly a destructive force, but destructive only of ignorance with knowledge, fear with compassion, despair with ideas—but this made little sense to either Charles or the crowd: Leon Czolgosz, for instance, had not destroyed ignorance with knowledge or any of that, choosing instead to destroy the president of the United States with a gun. What kind of anarchist Czolgosz was was just another analysis of the fluctuation of the plot: bad theater. Then he said the magic words, the fighting words: that anarchists fought capitalist pigs by practicing birth control, and warmongers, when war came, as it surely would, by refusing to fight. It was on its face reasonable enough, but perceived to be otherwise because the crowd’s list of anarchists who fought off despair, fear, and ignorance with murder was quite long: an anarchist—and this was true too—tried to poison three hundred people at a dinner honoring Archbishop Mundelein. An anarchist had stabbed King Umberto, ripped the eyes, ears, tongue, and fingers off the prime minister of Spain, and hung an empress of Austria by her female sexual part on a meat hook. So it was said. They cared not a jot for human life—not even their own! They would just as soon shoot you in the head as look at you, even if, perhaps especially if, you were a comrade. Read the right Russian and you would learn that they blew themselves up just to practice—or even for the fun of it. The speaker’s truth was real but meaningless and he should have known better. Refusing to fight? They were killing machines. Henry Clay Frick was no Christian statesman—Father went so far as to say he was a nauseating halfwit, dressed up as the crucially clever and ruthlessly capable Captain of Coal—but Alexander Berkman had not argued with him, he had hacked at him with a knife. People were really mostly upset by the poisoned food at the dinner for the archbishop. The erratic Andrew had tried to make a joke about Catholics but Father had shut him down with unprecedented anger, or unprecedented feigned anger. That had just happened and three hundred innocent people looking only for a good meal and a holy celebration had gotten sick, had vomited themselves nearly to death. Charles had been reading a story about San Francisco’s response to anarchism in one of the newspapers scattered on the table that morning. Both of his older brothers had been home, and the three young men had had a jolly breakfast:

“Authorities—” said Charles. He and Alexander were sitting together over the Examiner while Andrew stood bent over them. He had recently shaved off a thick dark-red moustache and looked now, Mother had said, like an egg. His naked upper lip seemed to reveal something unpleasant about his politically erratic personality.

“Who?” he asked, as if he had not heard well.

Father walked in.

“Authorities, Andrew,” said Father. “And that is my point. Authority.”

“It’s a free country,” said Andrew conversationally.

“Well, sir, may I suggest you don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“Certainly that is possible, sir.”

“Authorities have identified ninety-eight persons in the Bay Area alone known to be dynamiters. They are going to come down hard on these ninety-eight persons. Whether, Andrew, they do anything or not.”

“Whether, I suppose, they are actually even dynamiters or not,” said Andrew, his conversational tone now pointed and irritating.

“That’s right, you goddamned sarcastic know-it-all.”

Alexander and Charles looked up from their newspaper, and Alexander coughed. Andrew laughed, and then Charles laughed too. Because he liked and admired his brother.

“Chick,” said Alexander. “Look here. What Father really wants to say to you—at least what I want to tell you and what I think Father will tell you as well—”

Charles was trying for a deep man’s voice: “‘Top-secret and high-level actions on the part of government authorities—’”

“What?” giggled Andrew, helplessly. “Who? What?”

“‘Authorities!’” hollered Charles. “‘Authorities! And private crime specialists are at work in the city disentangling the local strands of the gigantic web of anarchist plots to uh, to uh . . .’”

He was running out of steam over the grandiosity and the ridiculous words, and losing the sense of the article. Alexander peered closely, then yanked the paper from his brother’s hands and assumed a high-pitched society lady’s wail: “‘Assassinate, to assassinate John Pierpont Morgan and other money and um, and um . . .’”

Andrew leaned over Charles’s shoulder and pretended to sound out munitions.

“‘Money and moo-nit-ions barons,’” Charles continued, “‘of America. The heads of these plots are Germans. The German anarchist has the shrewd, ever-, um, ever-, uh . . .’” He moved his lips but said nothing, waiting for Father to stop imploring the ceiling and come back over to them. “‘Anticipating,’” he said. “‘Shrewd and ever-anticipating.’”

“What does it mean, Al?” asked Charles.

“I don’t know,” said Alexander.

“Yes, you do,” said Charles. “You’re just being shrewd.”

“I wonder,” said Father, “if any of you have ever known what you’re saying or if you’re just freak-show chimpanzees dressed up like nigger minstrels.”

He seemed appeased somehow. Amused again as was his wont.

Charles picked up the narration. “‘Soooooo-preme delicacy,’” he orated in the mock-deep voice, “‘is called for in the task of giving these anarchists all the rope they can use. They are not children, and dealing with them is not, therefore, child’s play.’”

Andrew and Alexander adored their little brother. Their high regard for his gifts, his obvious intellectual and artistic capacities and talents, his precocious social charm, often caused them to overlook or ignore their sister, Amelia, who had nothing, it seemed, but nervous beauty. Mother was strange, sometimes amusing but more often obscurely pointed, and not a moment-to-moment force in any case, not in their neck of the public woods, as she was almost always, these days, dealing with scholar-gangsters in rough old Naples. It was Father who troubled them the most: he had been an austere and humorless man in their early experience—possibly as a result of having been shot in the head, it had to be admitted!—though gentle, who seemed only to notice them when he prayed with them, if that was not a paradox, if those were not mutually exclusive duties, as they had seemed so clearly to them to be, at night before they went to bed. They had developed impersonations of everyone in the family, and the primary device in Father’s characterization was to never quite look you in the eyes, or only occasionally, with frightening intensity—a nervous habit nobody else in the world had been forced to consider and interpret in parley with that candid, clear, genial man. It also made the impersonation seem quite wide of the mark to everybody but themselves, certainly not as hilariously apt as the coquettish giggling and suddenly lunatic shrieking of their “Amelia” or their “Charles”: several firm hand shakings and in a girlish voice, “Good of you to say so.”

And they wished to speak to him, now, of Father, as they did with each other, because, they said, Charles appeared to have a sort of friendship with the man, a dangerous one, certainly, but of a strength they could only wonder at. They wanted Charles to advise them, to teach them how to talk to Father about baseball and football and hunting and fishing and the ranch up in Fall River Mills—all of which were central family enthusiasms either old or new, and which were regularly used as a means of not talking (or playing) law and politics but which seemed to have no life where Andrew and Alexander were concerned, at least not anymore. Alexander spoke of these subjects as what he believed to be the keys to an ominous but appealing new kind of relationship—ominous because something he couldn’t understand or name depended on it; and Andrew in turn warned Charles that this forbidding but interesting man was nursing the pain of some terrible secret they could not even begin to guess at but which, if they were to look for precedent in their own lives, must revolve around . . . but Andrew faltered. He did not know what he meant. He could not say what it was that he did not know, other than that it was Father. As the beloved darling baby of the family, maybe Charles had some insight . . .?

His brothers had been born to govern the nation. They were intelligent, sympathetic, ambitious, principled, firm in their exclusions, biting in their ideas for reform, but generous in their humanity. Father loved them more than he could say. But he did try, and Charles said so.

“He seems to care,” Andrew tried again, “more for things that aren’t political. For anything that isn’t political. Now. Suddenly.”

Charles said nothing because he had nothing to say, and Andrew shrugged.

Alexander motioned to one of the serving women and asked for a horse and buggy to be put in motion so that he and Andrew could get to the wharves, a boat, and Berkeley.

Charles left for the theater, not wanting to miss the speech-making in the square promised for that afternoon.

Another marching band assembled under Charles’s balcony. As soon as he saw them, so did the band across the park. They were visibly bestirred and instantly began sounding their horns. From below came horns answering in clear if hysterical defiance, ripping scales, barking arpeggios, or simply blaring and shrieking. But if at first it might have been taken as something like the unlooked-for acoustic property of some strange concert hall—an orchestra tuning up and its echo seeming to come from the lobby—it became, for Charles, something else altogether. It was not two sets of cacophony, separated by shouts and murmurs. It was a complicated heterophony, a single melody being varied constantly and simultaneously by voice of instrument, rhythm, pitch—and only apparently randomly.

Yes: he could hear a design. Designs. An infinite number of designs within the one.

Then noise died down and all he could hear was a hum of voices, a steady monotone. Then a trumpet directly beneath his feet played five notes: B-flat for three beats, a low C-sharp for a beat, up to E for a beat then up an octave to E-flat for two, finishing with three beats again at B-flat.

He leaned out over the little balcony, swiveled left and right: no trumpet in sight. Leaned even farther, so that his legs were up in the air and he was in danger of falling.

Across the park: the answering notes in perfect imitation, but as if from the center of the galaxy . . . .

It was an incredibly odd collection of notes. It made him think of Little Joe in the heavenly and hellish light.

He went inside, closed the French windows as upon a dream, and headed for the stairway, noting again the picture-like windows—which had not lost that quality of vivid immobility as the angle of the light changed and the sun began to flare on the ocean, and which now joined the five notes and the brilliant white light—staring back at them as he took the first two steps down, misstepping and flailing out for the handrail, skidding two or three steps before he could catch himself in the deepening darkness of the well.

On the stage he found the members of Mother’s “authentic” ensemble—a string quartet, a bass player, and a chamber organist—taking their instruments out of their cases. The organist was watching the stage manager and a few hands wrestle the ornate and unwieldy organ in place. Little Joe and Big Joe and a few of Joe’s brothers watched the hands grunt and shuffle and count off to each other. One of them was staring at the organist in some kind of disbelief or incredulity. Charles watched everybody watching everybody else.

The first violinist, a rugged-looking man who would not have seemed out of place directing traffic in and out of a placer mine, though quite old, was at his side before he knew it. He asked if Charles was going to hear Caruso, who was singing Don José in the Metropolitan Opera Company’s touring Carmen at the Mission Opera House that night.

“No excitement will be allowed,” said Charles. “Mother says we rehearse and hit the hay.”

“I wonder,” said the old man, “if she means to apply the prohibition to us.” Charles grinned at him in his superbly social way. “I’m not joking,” said the man, rather crossly, looking around in annoyance. He focused on the organ. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Charles agreed. It had been modeled, it was said, on the water organ carved into the pedestal of Theodosius’s Obelisk, built according to Mother’s specifications—that was the official line at any rate—by Moody and Billings in Detroit, a maker better known for their barrel organs, on one of which the organist had been rehearsing.

Referring to this, the old violinist said, “Ernst is delirious.”

No one on the bustling stage dared, it seemed, to enter the limelight, which was focused on two chalked X marks, where Charles and Mother were to stand when singing.

Mother walked into the light.

Was she beautiful, as people told him? Was she daunting, as people told him? Was she inexpressibly kind and sweet beneath the intricately worked armor of hyper-privileged can-do? When they sang the Stabat Mater, they were to seem a single voice, winding in and out of itself, moving away a note or two up or down the scale, or less, usually less, ceaselessly weaving sound, exchanging notes, while the quartet and continuo ticked away like a cosmic clock, or a pedal on a slowly spinning loom . . . his heavenly cherub-treble to “her darkly radiant, and yes, frankly imperial contralto”—the voice of not merely an ascendant United States of America but of a triumphant leader of the tired, old, confused or simply inferior nations of the world, a Statue of Liberty with a world-class voice, sixty years old, four children: Mother. In a way it was embarrassing to think of any part of one’s self as being “sinuous” with one’s mother’s self, not to mention “hauntingly sensuous,” but to hear it, to hear that single voice moving ineluctably toward two and back again to one, one note striving to become a different note, the second note striving to stay as it was—that was an altogether different matter. The voice had evolved and was part of a rising convergence that was very close to God.

Charles knew it and Mother knew it. And they both knew each other knew it.

“Ineluctable,” from the Latin for the struggle to be free or clear of something.

He had looked it up. Everything about it made him uneasy—or frightened him outright. This was why you knew how to talk about baseball and football, and why you took the trouble to be a good shot when killing sickened you. It was perhaps why Father responded to you so warmly, when all the talk on the surface was of more rising convergences, of Christian evolution and fate.

The second violinist played the five notes and Charles shivered. Had the first violinist noticed the shiver? What if he had? The second violinist must have heard them as Charles had. But would it do to ask him? He had to admit it, shivering, that he was afraid to ask. Mother’s intention in the early going was simply to do justice to Scarlatti père, to Alessandro (the father of the keyboard composer known and loved by generations of supple parlor virtuosi such as, for example, Father and Mother, Alexander, Andrew, and Amelia), a genius who had been made out by “the Victorians” to be some kind of villain who’d “nearly destroyed dramatic music.” Mother had commissioned the biography, and one thing led to another . . . and here they were: scholars of music, specialists in the baroque, Mother’s man in Napoli, leading figures in the “authentic practices” movement, seeking on behalf of and with the support of Mother—on her behalf because she was an incontestably great singer and with her support because she was incontestably wealthy—to recreate the way the music made by the Italians and their northern imitators sounded in 1650, in 1700, in 1750 . . . so it was easy, on one hand, to say that the five melancholy notes that had apparently lodged in so many minds were, for Charles, merely pegs to hang his own anxiety on . . . but on the other hand, where had they come from and how had they come by their power?

Mother, in the limelight, sang the five notes, and Charles’s knees wobbled. He felt his rectal muscles loosen and he thought he might piss his pants as well. It was absurd, it was humiliating, and he did not understand it.

Mother was looking directly and intently at him as she spoke: “. . . a trumpeter in the band representing the Building Trades Council—” (described for her friends who were unfamiliar with San Francisco labor politics as a group of unions that passed knowledge and membership along only to the sons of union members with a guild-like sense of mastery and exclusion), “—played them in a lull, and a trumpeter in the band representing the San Francisco Labor Council—” (who sneered at such feudalism and were drawing dangerously near the controversial if not outright suicidal acceptance of negroes, the Chinese, the what-have-you, Indians from the Stone Age!), “—picked it up. It was so forlorn and lovely, but it seemed to be a battle cry, because the bands began to move in opposite directions, so as to meet somewhere on Union and do this tiresome thing which is all the rage now, march into each other’s ranks and fight out it, note for note, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” versus “La Marseillaise.” Whose tune will prevail and why? What a question! But those five calling notes—so strange! So enchanting!”

The house lights had gone down without Charles noticing. Mother spoke to him as if in a play in a dream. Plays within plays within plays—there was no end to it. No beginning. And that was the question: the question that could not be answered. One recognizes oneself, and in that recognition, listen closely, Charles, my poor darling boy, in that recognition one is spontaneously able to recognize all the other selves in the universe. One sees them, literally, as one encounters them, and extrapolates the infinite rest. Those which seem “rare and strange” are no different than those which seem ordinary: they are all complete and particularly themselves. And there, dear Charles, is where we come to ruin and sorrow as human beings. We see the particular and cannot conceive the whole, or sense the whole and cannot remember the particular. We cannot hold them both in our minds at once. It is impossible. Think of the rhomboid your mathematics tutor drew for you: the crystallographer Herr Necker’s cube. The soul tears itself to pieces knowing that it cannot know.

But she was not speaking. He was not hearing. He was not even thinking. She was gesturing impatiently for him to join her. Tonight was a run-through. The second movement was all his: if he was bad tonight, he would be good tomorrow. God help him if he was good tonight. But good or bad, it would be over. Then it was either to bed or to Caruso.

When the strange noises began . . . early in the morning, Charles snug, cozy, dreaming deep meaningful dreams, meaningfully complex psychological dreams, not the insipid nightmares of a little boy . . . and the house to shake, and things to fall, with the discrete recognizable sounds of falling now and smashing to pieces later—he thought he could hear the falling of the object through the air, or its creaking away from its place, and only after some time the shattering, breaking noise, but it is certainly possible that he was still in some way dreaming—and finally the house to seem to jump down on its foundation and collapse, Father had them (Mother, Amelia, Charles, the servants) out on the streets immediately, and it was easy, too easy, to see how you got things done. In the early going it was “frightening,” of course it was, but it was the consequent sadness that Father urged Charles to repel, brutally if he had to. He quoted Montaigne at him, which was something he did under ordinary circumstances too: “I neither like nor respect it, although everyone has decided to honor it. They clothe wisdom, virtue, conscience with it! But the Italians have baptized malignancy with its name. It is always a harmful quality, always insane, always cowardly and base, and the Stoics forbade their sages to feel it.” And while the thought would ring quite resoundingly in his memory a hundred years later or however long it had been (he didn’t know and didn’t care—though his secretary informed him it had been less than twenty): Sadness? The brutal, if necessary, repulsion of sadness? He wondered: Have I got that right? He wanted to laugh in Father’s face. Where does sadness come into it? He was only twelve years old but had to say it was ludicrous: The great magical city, isolated by the blue blue ocean on its chilly yellow hills and impregnable in its glorious golden, silver, railroaded Wild Western American queenliness, had crashed to the ground in less than a minute and broken apart and burned to ash so easily that he could not think of it except as something of no or little consequence. It had disappeared. The entire vast intricacy, the little cosmos. What had it been that it could disappear like that? Whatever it was, it had been swept up and away in poisonous black whirlwinds. The dome of City Hall looked like the burned-out and still smoking cage of a monstrous bird against the red sky and the bellies of buildings seemed to have been ripped open, spilling iron intestines and organs composed of brick and wood. Faces of buildings had been stripped, revealing tiny stage piled upon tiny stage, floors and floors and rows and rows of secret rooms thrown open and lit as if to prove there were no other kind of drama than pitiless silence and nakedness. The dead men and women on the sidewalk, shrunken and blackened and charred. The first time they’d encountered such a corpse, his first thought was that it was some kind of objet d’art, and he’d turned away. Amelia said, “Oh my God, it’s a man.” They’d drawn nearer and suddenly ice was running up and down Charles’s spine, his head was spinning and his knees gave way. “No,” he said, getting up quickly but with help, “it’s a woman.” There was no sign of gender on the corpse, almost no sign of species, but something in the black hard lava of the head seemed . . . feminine. It made no sense at all that it should matter, even when it had mattered so much just a few hours earlier, but it harrowed him. And the horses, those poor magnificent horses, swollen and deformed, turned to grotesque marble statues, the hideous chess pieces of a gigantic blazing weeping demon who was sweeping the piles of junk along the streets with the skirts of his robe as he staggered and flew in little hops in search of something they could not guess at. At some point—it must have been the second or third day—he found himself standing with his older brothers, Andrew and Alexander, and Father in front of the theater. They were banishing sadness. The building had not been altogether destroyed in the earthquake—it was in fact in relatively good shape, but was going to be dynamited along with hundreds of other structures as breaks against the fires. They were using black powder, which created a hundred little fires for every break it might or might not reduce a structure to. Who had told them to use black powder? Who had authorized the use of black powder? Father had angrily asked these questions. But black powder was all they had. The texture of the sky was of dense roiling low clouds, but its color was luminous orange and they were not clouds. Shadows as stark as any cast on the sunniest of sunny days attached themselves strangely to people standing or lying on the street, but they were dark red instead of black. They lit the fuse and waited. No explosion was forthcoming, though many could be heard elsewhere in the city, single tolls of immense bells. Father and a man he knew, an engineer from the Spring Park Water Company, a private holding and distribution system in which Father held a significant number of shares and which seemed, secretly, to be, somehow, at issue, as there wasn’t a whole lot of water to be had, waited incredulously a minute or two more, then walked up the steps to the front door of the building. The other man picked up the dead fuse and examined it just as Father’s hand reached for the doorknob and the powder exploded. The engineer was killed; Father took many shards of glass and splinters of wood in his face and neck and chest, and one big piece nearly eviscerated him and broke his hip, making him fall backward down the steps, taking Charles with him, who passed out and broke an arm in the fall but who was otherwise unhurt.

When he returned to consciousness, he realized he had been elsewhere. And realized as well that he had not returned to the place he had retreated from. He was lying next to Father in the street and people were shouting in the distance and hovering above him. Father liked to say, quoting someone else, that a man could believe boldly in truth A—that Jesus, for example, had suffered and died for your sins, or that the things around you constituted a reality, a real world—and escape thereby a belief in falsehood B—that Satan owned your fallen soul, or that the things around did not constitute a real world, were not real—but simply disbelieving B did not mean you believed A. In fact, by simply disbelieving B, you could fall into other falsehoods, C or D, that were just as bad as B. Or you might escape B by not believing anything at all, not even the Truth.

“Nothing has been lost here,” Father whispered to him, “that cannot be replaced. Easily and swiftly replaced. Not this building, not this city. Not me. Not you.”

So, Charles thought: nothing had been lost because nothing had been there in the first place. Father continued to croak and bubble and spit: “Virgil confirms this for me: ‘nothing unreal is allowed to survive.’”

“Yes, Father,” Charles whispered, trying to sop of some of Father’s blood with his own shirt, not really knowing what he intended to do with the blood once he’d collected it: wring it out over Father’s intestines and hope it seeped back to places where it would do some good? Wring it out somewhere else, in an effort to tidy up? Point was, he was trying! He was banishing sadness, as far as anyone else could tell. He was clean and cool and clear. And these qualities would surely not be lost on Father, for whom Charles wanted to appear fearless. He was utterly afraid and not at all confused about it, but for Father’s sake, he wanted to appear as something he was not.