by Gary Amdahl
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 minu
te 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.’”
