by Gary Amdahl
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?” ask
ed 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.”
