The Daredevils (2 page)

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.