The Daredevils (32 page)

“‘Real realism!' Don't make me laugh!”

“—genuine objects on his stages and not props, walls that did not shake when doors were slammed, an apple pie one could eat and not painted card-board.
If he was going to do a show about a poor little mill girl, he wanted a poor little mill girl to play the part, wearing her own authentic clothing, usufructuary rights to which he was willing to pay handsomely for. He had astonished beggars in this very way—”

“Yes, yes, I know the ridiculous story.”

“—his assistants stripping the shirts off their backs as he peeled notes from a wad.

“The idea of a play about the Paterson silk workers did take hold that night. It would be a pageant, a series of more or less static tableau-like scenes depicting important episodes in the life of the strike, as vast and emotionally resonant as any ten productions in a cathedral by the great visionary of the theater Max Reinhardt, because it was real, with hundreds of workers onstage, playing themselves, moving from sorrow and desperation to triumph and glory via courage and principle. One of the wealthy intellectuals, John Reed, who had acceptable credentials as a daredevil journalist—he had ridden with the infamous bandido generale Pancho Villa, and had been in jail with scores of rank-and-filers in Paterson—made himself responsible for the mise-en-scène, both financial and artistic. A light-hearted lothario, he saw a lovely weird target painted on Rosemary's back, and endeavored to be the salient feature in a world that she was surely experiencing as more and more delightful by the second.”

“‘Although it may indeed happen,' I once read aloud to Rosemary, ‘that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.'”

“You—
what's
that you're saying?”

“I have to stop and think about it for quite some time—”

“I can't believe I heard what I just heard.”

“—and all the thinking I've done about in the past never seems available to me or applicable when once again I turn to it, but that sums up our feelings quite as fully as is humanly possible. At least for me. At least in that wonderful moment when I am able to return to it, to think it again. We did not want to be caught up in belief and disbelief—and yet at the same time we wanted to act, we wanted to live! And you can't live freely and fully, you can't act boldly and easily, if you don't properly believe in something. Conversing in this way, we—Rosemary, myself, and a friend of John Reed's—turned on Twenty-Third and walked up Madison to the Garden, its yellow bricks and terracotta fading in the twilight while at the top of the tower, thirty-two stories high, the Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana swiveled back and forth two or three degrees in the gusty spring wind and caught the last red light of the setting sun. We entered the ground-floor arcades and I said that I liked arches, liked looking at them and walking through them. As the baffled wind blew through those arches, following us, gently carrying us, Rosemary asked me why I felt that way, but I had no answer. It was no great secret, I suggested, that people were drawn to archways, but whatever it was that was at work in that kind of architecture, I felt it very strongly. ‘It makes me feel soft and safe,' I said, an admission that would have astounded if not choked us—we were Wobblies!—in any other circumstances. John Reed's friend suggested—”

“Jules Beveridge.”

“—suggested we visit Seville and Florence someday, see the loggias and porticos and so on. ‘I'm not even sure what those things are or where those places are in the world,' Rosemary admitted with candor equal to my own, ‘but I'd go there in a second. Anywhere in the world, I would.' She squeezed my hand. ‘With you.'”

“Jules wondered if there was a lift to the top of the tower. Thirty-two stories seemed a great deal to ask, especially without authorization, but it turned out that we could get to the parapets and columns surrounding the little
space, the lantern, it was called, beneath the many-tonned but mobile Diana, almost without moving a muscle. Thus was the horrible noise of the city swallowed up. It was another world altogether. The city was not real. All we could hear was a faint but steady grinding of stone on stone, and the wind, buffeting one ear and then, turning to consider another aspect of the island city, the other. The arm of the ancient goddess moved above us, in the upper corners, as it were, of our eyes. There were fewer and fewer people in the lantern lookout, night had swallowed up the city, there were only a few floating streams of light . . . . ‘Or we could just stay up here,' murmured Rosemary. Jules had his arm around her. ‘We could move to San Francisco.' ‘Yes,' he said. ‘We could just stay up here. We could move to San Francisco.' Diana groaned and creaked in the darkness and stone just above our heads. A week or two later, up in the lantern again, Rosemary had an idea, an image of something that might happen and somehow matter. We went down a flight of narrow stairs, painfully, then another and another until they came to a room that appeared to cater to unused utility: electricity! And based on what Jules thought he understood from his engineers he had come to know and to talk to about this and that, he thought it could easily be drawn from this room. A little old man, so quiet and still we hadn't known he was in the room, Rosemary and I at least, Jules giving a faint impression of prior meetings if not old acquaintance, began to speak from a tiny triangular desk in a dark corner. When Diana had been unveiled twenty years earlier, they had draped her legs and belly with ten thousand incandescent electric bulbs, so that her lovely breasts and forbidding face could be seen by anyone who cared to look up, all night long. Jules said we were associated with the Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, which would be performed in less than a week, surely the old man knew of this spectacle? Yes, yes, he thought he did. Well, we were wondering if Diana might be somehow relit, to help us advertise our show. The old man said that she would be lit now, lit eternally, if he had anything to say about it, but that the scandal of gigantic titties lighting up Manhattan, mesmerizing people and drawing them nearer and nearer her magnificent safety like a lighthouse—it had been too much for
decent people to bear. Three hours later we were in the offices of the
Passaic Weekly.
Rosemary took care of a neglected duty—using a typewriter to make daily reports of news gathered shop by shop, job by job, everybody from the native-born, highly-skilled, and relatively well-paid ribbon workers and weavers, to the immigrant loomfixers and twisters and horizontal warpers—while Jules and I sought and found old light-bulb boards, electrical wire, flashers, and fuses. When he had everything he thought he needed, we hired a wagon, though it was nearly midnight now, and brought it all to the apartment in the Village he shared with John Reed, put as much as we could in three suitcases, and locked them in his bedroom. Then we had a late supper. It was the first time in our lives when we could count on all the food we wanted whenever we wanted it, and we never tired of eating. When we finished eating, we walked to the Garden and ascended the tower once more. It made all the sense in the world as we listened rapturously to the sound of the goddess atop her little six-pillared lantern, grinding from one minute of perspective to the next.
Here is what I see now. Here is what I see now. Here is what I see for a moment then never again.
The lantern was evidently something of an attraction and was filled with people even at that late hour, the lift going ceaselessly up and down, up and down, up and down, but Jules was quite sure there would be a slack period in the wee hours when they could rig their lights. Secreting the contents of the suitcases wherever we could, here and there in the tower's highest rooms, another three suitcases each day, we waited for opening night.”

“An exhibition of the latest art was on display at the Armory. Jules, with whom, yes, as you have been suspecting, I had fallen hopelessly in love, he was so handsome and capable and so clearly desirous of the kind of life I had slowly been working up a description of with my friends, had seen many paintings and sculptures in his life, and been moved by a few, but Rosemary and I had not. But because the work in the Armory was new to everybody, Jules found no precedent for it in his imagination. He therefore thought he
did not much care for most of what he saw, but as he and I and Rosemary walked—Jules and Rosemary hand in hand, me waiting patiently for the time when I knew someone would snatch Rosemary away and Jules would turn to me in astonished love, as if a storm had passed and I was the one who was still there—from one curtained gallery to the next, under the canopy of bright yellow streamers billowing up into the darkness of the somehow still military ceiling, amid the boughs and sprays of evergreens and baskets of flowers, I think he could not help but feel some of our amazement and excitement: the tumbling but suave sweep of geometric shapes in Duchamp's mockery of the ‘cult of big women,'
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,
the strange but vivid, too-vivid colors and objects in Matisse—I heard someone call it ‘epileptic'—the hallucinated landscapes of van Gogh. . . . No, he could not deny what I was saying with such conviction: the affinity many of the paintings had with narcotic perception, or with narcotic thought, with what it was like to work in a mill. And so he was annoyed for our sake to hear people buzzing in every room about what former president Roosevelt—had he just been there, and if so, how had we missed him?—had said, suggesting Americans take the work no more seriously than they did P. T. Barnum's mermaids. Which was to say, somewhat seriously, as you could look far and wide and not find a more striking, beloved, archetypical example of an American than Barnum, but skeptically or at arm's length, with tongue in cheek, with an eye toward amusement and belly laughs rather than edification and sublimity. Certainly there was more repugnance than beauty in much of the work. One left a canvas too often irritated and confused, and there was even a sense of outright falseness in every one of the eighteen octagonal rooms, either the result of ineptitude and childishness, or the calculated deceit of a huckster. But Rosemary and I were thrilled with the recognition of something essential in our lives. She was holding my hand tightly now, and could say little more than
oh oh ohhhh,
as if she were having an orgasm—a sensation I could not help but feel drawn closer and closer to myself. We could only be responding, in our completely untutored, inexperienced way, to what we sensed was the life in the paintings. That too Jules
could not deny: there was life and ecstasy in them, some of them. There was life somewhere. He could smell it. It stank but it was alive. I shivered. And then we came to Odilon Redon, whose first works were ridiculous and grotesque: the huge grinning spider, the hot-air balloon that looked like an eyeball, worms and deliquescent flowers, the puerile doodlings of a bored but gifted little boy. A sad, creepy Cyclops. Six lithographs inspired by Poe. Rosemary drifted away. When she came back, her face was clouded. She stood over us and we could see her eyes were wet and that tears had run down her cheeks. Then she smiled and it seemed the tears were of joy. She pulled us to our feet and told us he must come and see
The Druid Priestess.
She was in profile, and her head and neck and shoulder were clothed in a kind of silken fluid gold that became a reddish orange on her arm. Her jaw and cheek were darkened, and at first glance she would be taken for mannish, the dark staining an early growth of beard. But then it began to look more as if she were made of wood, the lower part of her face darkened with age or mold, or the nose and large dark eye and forehead bleached by the sun. The blue, green, and black background suggested a luminous forest at twilight, and there was a spattered yellowish moon in the upper left corner. Her golden hood appeared to be raining around her. Her eye grew deeper and darker, her sharp nose and thin lips more feminine. Hair flowed from under the golden rain, like a deeper, darker current. We were hypnotized. ‘I think that's my grandmother,' said Rosemary. ‘She is a strange but lovely woman,' said Jules. ‘Grandmother,' I repeated reverently. We waited for a large group of murmuring people to pass into the next room, then swung around the burlap-covered partition wall and came face-to-face with the first of the horses. It was a dark, earth-brown and gold demonic Pegasus, embroiled in its own fury, writhing and contorted as it struggled to fly, or having flown, to not fall. Next was a silver and white Pegasus, rearing up on a black, blue, and silver mountaintop, majestic, magical, and beautiful—but alone. The winged horse and rider in
Roger and Angelica,
or
Perseus and Andromeda,
was purely golden, with very small wings. A kind of wormy serpent and mutant fish monster—possibly the Medusa but possibly not—menaced
them in the blue clouds. We decided these paintings were beautiful, but troubling, and admitted we had become distinctly uneasy. Finally we came to
The Chariot of Apollo.
There was the blue sky again, now frighteningly blue—not dawn, not noon, not dusk, not midnight—and the white horses in agony. Only a small smear of the sky was that shade of strange bedlam blue; the clouds were brown and green, as if the world were upside down, and the chariot, stolen from Apollo by the brash young reckless Phaeton . . . seemed to be falling. Phaeton's head appeared to be on fire, and the chariot was falling.”

“Though playgoers lined the sidewalk the length of the Garden, went around the block and nearly the length of its other side, most of them, assevering poverty or union brotherhood, would get in for pennies, or without charge, if they were Paterson silk workers not appearing in the show. The pageant's backers, Jules told us as we stood in the park across the street, had been depending, in the face of sky-high—we all looked up involuntarily at the statue of Diana—Garden rental fees, on subscription and the selling out of the pricier stalls to intellectual sympathizers with money. These sympathizers had not been as forthcoming as had been hoped, and Jules said the backers reckoned that they would probably not break even. Worse, it was looking like he was being left holding, so to speak, the books: bills had been left unpaid, and while some vendors and lenders would be happy to write their losses off in a good cause, some would not. There wasn't much he could do, but it looked like he would have to deal with the part that wasn't any fun. I said that that was because he was a good, kind, decent man who could not help but do such things for the welfare of others. He sat down on a bench that was out of the lamplight they'd been standing in, and Rosemary instinctively sat down next to him, held his arm and snuggled close. She liked him, and that was all there was to it. I think she knew I loved him, but she liked him, and when she liked people, she showed it. For his part, Jules liked nearly everybody he met, but felt he would, without thinking, risk his life, just like that, for Rosemary. How could
I discredit such a feeling? Why would I? And, again, without thinking or any sort of articulation, he was confident that the feeling was reciprocal. It was simply the kind of man he was. Was he a daredevil? Not in any way that you would notice. Was he handsome? Yes, but not incredibly so. Was he charismatic? No. But I loved him. His eyes were kind and intelligent and he was not afraid to suffer, not afraid to die. And here is where I began to see things, as it were, peripherally. Nothing bore in on me. I could see everything floating past me but focus on nothing. Even perfectly clear shapes very near did not startle or impinge on me. They moved at ordinary speed, but seemed to drift and were quietly making ordinary noises. I could see things very far away and it was soothing to have it all so far away. It was something like being high, but I wasn't, and I was glad I wasn't. All three of us had fallen silent, listening to the shouts across the street. Once most of the crowd was inside and the Pageant had begun—you could hear the first choral shouts even in the park—we made our way with a small hand truck from the shipping dock to the tower lift. From the hand truck to the lift we moved four big boards holding red-painted electric light bulbs, a roll of electrical cord, and a little leather satchel of tools. We appeared to be handling scenery and to be involved in ordinary stagecraft; the people milling about didn't give us a second look as we closed the iron-grill doors of the lift's little car and set off, rattling and banging our way upward. We passed up through many floors in the darkness of the elevator shaft, but came suddenly to the Parthenon-like summit of the tower's first twenty floors, and glimpsed, through the massive columns, the little streams of light flowing into the vast darkness beyond Central Park. Slowing and swaying and creaking, we went up another fifty feet into a once-again-closed dark space, that looked something like a miniature neoclassical bank or government building, the lift coming to a loud banging stop at its roof, which was the floor of the first of three, successively smaller balconied arcades, the last of which was the lantern, on top of which Diana rested and turned. We would have to climb narrow circular stairs now, with our awkwardly big and increasingly heavy light boards, each of the four six feet by three. Halfway with the first board, Rosemary, going first, said
oh no
sharply, and slipped. Though all she
did was sit heavily, the board came down with a crack on the top of her skull, and I was jolted backward. I let go of the board with both hands to grab the handrails, and somehow managed to hold the board on the rack of my arms and shoulders while it pressed into my throat. It was as if I were standing before the carder with an immense weight choking me. Rosemary struggled to her feet and quickly pulled the board up so that I could breathe. Satisfied that we were all right, we made our way slowly and carefully up to the lantern. We propped the board against the balustrade, and waited for Jules, who was carrying the second by himself. Then we went down for the third board. Halfway up, the same thing happened again: the step was somehow irregular, or slick, and Rosemary, careful as she could be, slipped. She made the same sharp sound, and I, hearing something this time in the intake of breath just before the cry, was able to ready myself, hunching my shoulders to protect my throat. Up in the lantern we panted and waited for Jules and the last board. Rosemary then went down and came back up with the electrical cord, and Jules set about cutting, separating, and splicing it. Then without a word she went through one of the window arches onto the ledge, a good wide ledge of about two feet, running the perimeter of the lantern. She looked up and told us she could see the splendid swell of Diana's breasts above the folds of her toga. She was all alone at the top of the city, as calm as an angel, seeing everything. Jules, being a man, said she should come back in: he should be the one on the ledge. I slowly pushed my end of the first board out farther and farther through the opening into the darkness. At precisely the point where I thought I would lose control of it, Rosemary dropped it lightly and quickly to the ledge, and crawled back in. A single short piece of rope secured the board to a column. Again and again and again she went out onto the ledge while I slowly, slowly, slowly pushed the boards out at her, thinking with every breath that something terrible was going to happen and I would be responsible for her death. Again and again and again she dropped the boards into place and popped back into the lantern with us. We were, I suppose, in awe of her. Breathless all of us, silent, feeling we were living so fully we were nearly at the edge of it, that real things were seeming less and less real, and unreal things more and more real. Then
we went back down the winding stairway, unspooling cord as we descended, until we were back in the confines of the bank-like structure. Here was the utility room. The little old man who presided over it was not to be found. Jules cut and spliced more cord, studied a fuse box, said
this ought to do it,
and flipped a switch. Up we went one last time to the lantern, to see if in fact the bulbs were lit, and Rosemary hopped out onto the ledge. We waited for her to say something, but she said nothing. I thought I heard a faint whistling, and I turned to Jules and said, or murmured to myself, or merely thought:
whistling while we work.
By the time we worked up the courage, or rather the saliva, to speak, to call out her name, we knew she had fallen, knew that she was gone. We said nothing to each other, thinking somehow that if we remained calm all would be well. Jules went out onto the ledge. I could hear his shoes scraping around me as he made the circuit. Then he came back in. He shook his head and I began to tremble. We went down to the lift, jammed its door open, and walked down thirty floors and out one of the loading dock doors. A cab took us to Penn Station, and three days later, we were in San Francisco, reading various accounts in five or six newspapers of the terrifying lights above Madison Square Garden: NO BOSS spelled out the board facing south. NO DOGMA shone to the east, NO GOD to the north, and finally, in the west, NO FEAR. The identity of the young woman who had evidently engineered the feat was eventually revealed. Her name was Rosemary Thorndike, a well known anarchist.”