by Gary Amdahl
“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.
PART TWO:
“THE AMERICAN”
“The thing is consistently, consummately—and I would fain really make bold to say charmingly—romantic; and all without intention, presumption, hesitation, contrition. The effect is equally undesigned and unabashed, and I lose myself, at this late hour, I am bound to add, in a certain sad envy of the free play of so much unchallenged instinct.”
—Henry James, Preface to The American
“In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible become our normal element.”
—Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague”
Auditions—the third round of auditions—for his production of Henry James’s The American included a Polite Parlor Questionnaire. He did not know what else he might do and was afraid his theater would be stillborn. He had seen more than a hundred persons in three days and could not remember a single distinguishing feature: the faces were all round white balloons, all but featureless, atop stick figures, which were tap-dancing with canes and bowler hats, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in four parts all by themselves, and concluding, as if delivering a punch line, “Our revels are now ENDED! This actor, as I foretold you—” while waving little American flags. He believed he would have laughed had he possessed a sense of humor, something he believed he neither possessed nor wished to possess, believing himself to be essentially and perfectly humorless. He sat in a composed way and neither smiled nor frowned when he thanked them. He was acting for them. He was a Mystery. He was the Ghost of a Secret Theater and he would populate his theater with these shrieking stick figures, if that was the only way open to him.
The idea of an ensemble of local actors, highly trained in ancient and exotic techniques was, of course, ludicrous.
Some of them were friends, if he could in fact be said to have friends, and they could not fail to find his vision laughable. It was not even, technically speaking, his vision: it was the legendarily ludicrous but defiantly potent Sir Edwin Carmichael’s vision, which he was purchasing, owning, operating, with sir Edwin’s guidance.
He would move to Paris, tomorrow, if something galvanic failed to happen—if he failed to make these frogs hop.
But what could happen in a Polite Parlor Questionnaire?
“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?
In what place would you like to live?
What is your ideal of earthly happiness?
For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?
What is your principal fault?
What would you like to be?
What is your favorite quality in a man?
What is your favorite quality in a woman?
What is your favorite occupation?
What is your present state of mind?”
I might be thinking of a way of life that includes everything. A way of theatrical life that shows real life up for the sham and horror it is.
After the earthquake and the fires, his voice had broken. Mother had not made good on her threat to castrate him, and he decided in the hideous croaking aftermath of the break that he would never sing again, except as his explorations of the theater might call for it. His mind had not broken, had it? What did the voice have to do with it? The voice was what he had charmed and disarmed the pretty ladies with.
Oh yes, he had seen them thinking, as if they were characters in a comic strip with thought balloons puffing from their temples, that after all this was San Francisco and they might very well get away with it.
But Voice was now Mind.
And Mind required Stage.
Breakfast had always been a good time for miniature debates, such as might ensue once polite parlor questions had been asked and answered. But once he’d dressed and made his way to the dining room, he found only the twins—brothers who had been born the year after the earthquake in a fishing village in the south of France, Cassis, in a house once used by Napoleon as headquarters—and Father working their way rather desultorily but with good humor through a hypothetical labor problem.
“The painters’ union,” Father declared, “wants to limit the size of brushes. Are you for it or against it?”
August (Gus) replied that it seemed clear that if they had bigger brushes they could get the job done more quickly.
“I can confirm, then, that you are against any legislation that would restrict the size of a paintbrush?”
Anthony (Tony) suggested that the painters would want above all to get the job the hell over with and go have a beer. If they had, say, two- or three-man brushes that were ten feet wide, they could be out of there in no time. They wouldn’t have to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, slopping paint up and down a wall. They could listen to music, read a book—or even go to the theater! He flashed a grin at Charles. “I would advocate,” Tony went on, “discounted tickets for workingmen in those circumstances.”
The twins were fair-skinned and freckled, with red-gold hair and handsome, ordinary features. Both of them knew how to beam, and would do so after an exchange like that. And while Father was still understood to be a rough and candid outdoorsman who had gambled on riverboats and been gunned down in a court in Arizona and who could beam with the best of California’s grinning Western swindlers, and who was in fact one of a handful of men who had been nicknamed “The Regenerators,” who had battled graft in the courts and rebuilt San Francisco with their own hands, he also still believed that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and insisted on rather passionately Puritan manners: Gus would sober up at that point but Tony continue to grin, even as he apologized.
“I’m sorry, Father.”
Mother, Amelia, and Amelia’s husband, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles, entered the dining room. Charles pulled his watch from its pocket and saw that it must have stopped sometime the night before. He was disoriented by the idea more than he thought he should be. It in fact troubled him, and he looked around the room, wondering if he was being seen being troubled, itself an act of discomposure and even guilt that troubled him even more. He felt sweat forming on his face. Why did he care what time it was? If he was sweating, why not act it out? See it through and be sweaty.
“Mother? Amelia?” asked Tony. “I hope you’ll forgive my rude remarks.” Trying to make the grin rueful. “Reverend Ruggles?”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” said Reverend Ruggles, “but that is no bar to forgiveness.” Ruggles was small but agile and strong, built like a gymnast, and he put a headlock on Tony. He often came at you as if he wanted to wrestle or box, or walking on his hands. It was one thing to speak of a muscular Christianity, but who dared speak of a fun Christianity? If the clownishness, however, had not been in the immediate company of a deep, almost disturbing seriousness, it would have been a different matter. He was a Baptist but the family could not help but like him.
Amelia, a year older than Charles, had been, before the earthquake, incredibly high-strung and unhappy, but brilliant: like Henry Adams’s wife Marian and Henry James’s sister Alice, Charles sometimes said. He had grown up thinking she was going to die any second, that he would find her collapsed with a stroke or hanging by the neck, but had found wells of compassion rising up in her, where everyone had expected hysteria even in the very best, in ideal circumstance
s, and humility descending like a blessing, a consolation from a gentle, just, clear, and sweet heaven. She was an all but entirely different woman, and people did not shrink from speaking of her transformation as miraculous. She would only say that she had been saved, and that she wanted to bring the power and glory of the gospels, as she was only just beginning to see them, in their rags, speaking quietly, to bear on the social crisis that was threatening to destroy the greatest nation on earth. She had read Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis when it was published in 1907, coinciding perfectly with the throes of her own rebirth—and possibly San Francisco’s as well—in Christ, and when Rauschenbusch’s disciple at Rochester Theological Seminary, Thomas Ruggles, had come west, she had married him.
“If they finish a job in one hour rather than ten, they get paid a dime rather than a dollar,” Amelia said.
“Don’t get hysterical, sister,” Tony suggested in his precociously vaudevillian way, having heard Andrew kid Amelia in this way more than once.
“If a dime,” Amelia said mock-tersely, “bought a dollar’s worth of groceries—”
At which point Mother, out of hard-earned habit that would likely never fade, gently spoke her daughter’s name.
“—then certainly they could take advantage of your fabulous discount, my dear little brother, but it doesn’t, it’s more like a nickel, so either they take longer to do the job and get paid a living wage or they hop to and starve to death.”
Father thanked Amelia with jovial conclusivity: yes, her brothers, both the younger and the older, were dolts but they would run the country.
Amelia smiled and said they ought to consider ten-man brushes that could be controlled by a lone halfwit and so expensive that no single painter could afford it, leaving the purchase as usual to Big Business.
In the old days, she would have then nodded at Father in a final attempt to be courteous—not to mention knowledgeable about the imperatives and requisites of actual large businesses—before dashing at the dining-room door, struggling as if drunk to open it, slamming painfully into the frame, and staggering into the hall. Mother would have offered the rest of the family a tastefully understated look of comic surprise, and they would have resumed their meal.
Now, however, the Reverend Ruggles, who had relaxed his grip on Tony’s head but not released him, put a head-lock on Gus, and the three of them began to laugh and struggle.
It had happened so often that it was referred to as a Ruggle-struggle.
The boys flailed and grunted and Thomas shifted his weight about.
When the boys gave up and went limp in his embrace, he said, “Your sister has learned to talk rough with her brothers, but don’t take lightly what she says. It will be very easy for you to say to her, and to all women, ‘And what in the world does a woman know about it?’ So I want to urge you to think very seriously about what women may know about things. All right?”
The boys cheerfully agreed that they would do so.
Charles said, “I’m asking whoever wishes to answer: ‘What is for you the greatest unhappiness?’”
Father was smiling vacantly, eyes angled to the side of his plate of bacon and eggs. He looked as if he had not heard a word anybody had said for some time. Mother was staring at Father. She turned to Charles, puzzled at first, then annoyed.
“What kind of question,” she asked, “is that?”
“In what place would you like to live? What is your ideal of earthly happiness? For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence? What is your principal fault?”
“In Anatarctica!” shouted Tony, “where I would never have to hear questions like those at breakfast.”
Charles half-smiled at him.
“I’m kidding you, Chick!”
“The ranch,” said Father. “It is my ideal of earthy happiness.”
“Simply existing there?” probed Charles, with faint but apparent testiness. “Standing in a meadow? Rocking on the porch? Soaping the saddles? Those are all fantasies that depend on a state of mind, a condition of soul. Continued indefinitely without change. Which is impossible.”
“You asked me what my ideal of earthly happiness was and I—”
“I too,” said Amelia, “would like to live at the ranch, breeding Appaloosas, but my ideal of earthly happiness is working in a hospital twelve or eighteen hours a day. I think particularly a hospital for the insane.”
“Yes,” said Pastor Tom, “you see, that has been my point all along, that living an ideal of earthly happiness is not only possible, it is preeminently so, supremely and excellently possible. It is simple to do and it is easy to do. The spirit is reticent. The ego is aggressive. Surrender is the antidote.”
“Surrender to what, the ego?” asked Charles, laughing lightly and mirthlessly.
“When you surrender, when you let your ego collapse, you achieve union with God. In that union, a life of humbly helping other people seems . . . ideal. Happiness follows, as our Oriental friends like to say, like the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox. The line is from their Dhammapada and refers to suffering rather than happiness, but the implication is that if you want nothing and accept the world as it is, you will cease, at least, to suffer. One substitutes love for selfishness. It is revolutionary but can be accomplished in the wink of an eye. ‘Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.’”
“Thank you, Pastor Tom. For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence? What is your principal fault?”
“I have the greatest possible indulgence for all faults. My own principal fault? I think the best illustration is to be found in the proud ease with which I answered your question.”
Instead of politely acknowledging his brother-in-law’s wisdom and humility, he turned to his little brothers.
“I sure shut you two up, didn’t I.”
They had long since ceased to smile and were now silently gauging Charles and Mother.
“Yes, Charles,” said Mother, “you certainly did. Was that your goal? To cause your brothers to stop laughing and begin to worry about you? Or were you playing to Amelia, hoping she would say something careless about your own mental health that would confirm you delightfully in your new role of theater visionary. Your board wants you to produce a play by Henry James, a play by Shakespeare, and a play by August Strindberg. They would like to see you do it with a small ensenble and the plays in constantly rotating repertory. They would like you to bring to bear current ideas in design. They would like to see charming, interesting shows, and they would like to see the house at capacity every night, as they rightly are concerned about viability in the long term. I would never have even so much as spoken Sir Edwin’s name much less invited him here had I known how vulnerable you were to spiritual imbalance.”
“Mother’s answer stands like a druidess invisibly behind her actual speech, as per usual. ‘Spiritual imbalance’?”
“Sadness,” said Father, “is the fault for which I have the least indulgence. The Stoics forebade it and I—well, you know this already. You’ll have to pardon an old man who has used up all the brains he had and is limping along as best he can without any.”
Charles gave nobody the chance to laugh. Father was playing at seeming as weak and old as he actually was. As far as Charles was concerned, he was demonstrating how he could not be replaced: not swiftly, not easily, not at all.
“Father, what is your principal fault?”
“That I think I have none!” Father laughed loudly and longly, allowing everybody but Charles and Mother to join in. “No, no, my greatest fault is that I am old. I gave my life to San Francisco and have nothing left.”
“Excepting San Francisco herself, of course,” said Pastor Tom.
Father smiled but shook his head. He still looked like a gunfighter losing at cards.
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“I put one Jew behind bars,” he said. “Other men rebuilt the city.”
“One Jew, perhaps,” said Mother. “But you must admit an important Jew.”
“Boss Ruef was not important. He was a sitting duck. He was a bagman.”
“Sitting duck,” said Gus.
“Bagman,” said Tony.
“For your father, boys,” said Father, “and your father’s friends.”
“Oh, Father, please,” Mother moaned deeply, gorgeously, “shut up.”
“The Regenerators,” said Tony.
“That’s right,” said Father. “And remember, when you ask a Jew how things are going, across the street or around the world, and no matter what may in fact be going on, he will say, ‘For the Jews, not so good.’ My point being that anybody could have done what I did, and that I don’t really deserve the name ‘Regenerator.’ I speak in all humility and bearing foremost in mind what Pastor Tom said earlier.”
“But Father!” shouted Gus.
“You took a bullet!” Tony continued his brother’s complaint.
“In a court of law!” finished Gus.
“Twice,” said Amelia. “Don’t forget Arizona just because you hadn’t yet been born, my lads!”
And Charles said: “What would you like to be? What is your favorite quality in a man? What is your favorite quality in a woman? What is your favorite occupation? What is your present state of mind?”
Nobody replied. Everybody looked at their plates. Someone sighed. The twins began to eat again. Soon everybody had taken at least a forkful and appeared to be musing rather than resentful.
“Your present state of mind,” said Mother. “What about that? I would say it’s horribly and gratuitously antagonistic. Why is that?”
“Not antagonistic. Humorless. These are important questions. You see there is nothing ‘polite’ about them. I intend to ask the actors who have survived the second round of auditions these very questions. Those brave enough to answer thoughtfully and honestly I will invite to be part of my ensemble. And for every show we do, there will be a second unspoken and invisible performance going on at the same time. The audience will see and applaud the unreal play, completely innocent of the knowledge that the real play cannot be seen without destruction of the unreal.”
