by Gary Amdahl
“This is stimulating, Captain Keogh, Colonel Keogh—” Charles admitted and paused “—or whatever the fuck you think you are, Generale Keogh, but the war in Europe, you must admit, you of all people, certainly now has priority. I mean, haven’t you got enough to do?”
Everybody but Father looked away.
“Two birds with one stone,” said Keogh. “Just have to figger mah tra-jec-toe-reez.”
They were then joined by Sir Edwin. He appeared to have been sleeping in his clothes, possibly for weeks now, on the floor of theater’s green room, and was quick to tell people how stupid and heartless he thought they would be when they criticized and mocked him for it, or even questioned him on the subject. It was a living thing, the theater, and he would no more leave it in its wounded condition than he would the bedside of a sick child. He spoke at first in French, for no good reason, soliciting views about the Stanley Steamer.
“It looks like one of those magnificent things one threshes wheat with and which one day reveals its true, dark, and misunderstood nature and kills all the unsuspecting farmers having lunch in its shade,” said Sir Edwin.
“It is not nearly so large as a threshing machine,” said Father reprovingly. “It is a toy compared to a threshing machine.”
“And yet how many times more powerful than a horse!” shouted Sir Edwin.
“It is,” Charles said, “slower than a horse, and ungainly. You might get around town just as easily in a threshing machine.”
Sir Edwin began to speak English and turned to the weather, which, though of course mild, was nearly unbearable for one as unwell and raggedly worn as himself, who frankly admitted he had sacrificed his manly vitality for his art.
“Don’t think I don’t regret it,” said Sir Edwin.
“You regret it, do you?” asked Father.
“I do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Lucky for me, I don’t give a damn what you believe!” shouted Sir Edwin, loudly, more loudly, perhaps, than he’d thought he would. He was so tired he thought he might become delirious.
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Father. He was amused by his wife’s artist, his son’s artist, for God’s sake, but this amusement was mitigated by a general distaste for people who boiled over too easily, like spoiled horses, and who thought it was all right because they were thoroughbreds. He felt as well the strong man’s increased desire to defeat a weaker man once that weaker man has displayed the weakness and its probable trajectory toward greater weakness—if he could use such a term, he did not like it at all, but how else might he put it—decreased vigor? Increased vulnerability? Fever? Nausea? Infantile impotence? Terror?
“Both ways? Describe, please, these two ways which are no longer mine.”
“Soulful visionary and virile man of consequential action.”
“I was encouraged in my youth, it is true, to think that the artist was like no man so much as a religious martyr, the practical consequence of which was the subtle but steady wasting of my resources and the silent but insidious ravaging of my health. But I am making up for it now with the vivid, vital violence . . . that only the mortally wounded . . . apostate anchorite is capable of.”
Sir Edwin was very pleased with his speech, but was not quite finished. Trembling with vengeful glee, he thrust his ace in Father’s face: “And besides, I have your son to do my living for me.”
Father smiled patronizingly and shook his head. “You have no such thing,” he said in seemingly gentle reproof. “Charles is enrolled in your little kindergarten here of public performance, but will soon be moving on. He has real work in Minnesota in the fall. The Commission of Public Safety.”
“You won’t,” asked Keogh, “be going ‘over there’?”
“He will be going over there by staying here. There is a formidable enemy here as well. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you so.”
“Terrible news, however the situation stands, about your theater,” murmured Keogh. Something in his tone of voice, however muted and drawling it was, alarmed Charles and caused him to look directly into Keogh’s eyes. The penetration was allowed for a moment. Keogh then smiled and turned to Amelia.
“We want,” he said, “to help in any way we can. Of course with money, but publically, morally, we want to do everything that can be done to help bring a patriotic show like The American to its rightful audience.
“They are saying now—” Amelia began.
“Who is saying now?” interrupted Mother. “Who is saying what now?”
“It was a small fire, I am told,” said Father. “Easily contained and causing little damage. Everything can be quickly and easily replaced.”
“That is excellent news,” said Keogh, smiling at one and all.
“A boy was killed,” said Charles.
“—that it was deliberately set,” Amelia continued, picking up the controversy of the earlier strand in the conversation left dangling. “The fire marshal believes a small explosive device was launched by a cadre of anarchists under cover of the fireworks display—that is to say, by one of them, a crack archer who used a window purposefully left open as his target. And yes, that a child was killed makes the investigation far more important than it might have been, Father.”
“I left the window open,” Charles said. “And the arrow came through a window that wasn’t open.”
Father nodded, but nobody really cared very much about that sort of detail.
And so Charles sat on the blanket feeling weak and stupid and cold, shivering in the ridiculous details of a political melodrama he could only just barely stand imagining, while some of Captain Keogh’s horsemen twits dug small holes out in the field and Amelia—to his great surprise on her favorite horse, Jolly—barrel-raced around them. Drinking wine one glass after another, he dozed off, and woke to cheering. A horse and rider went thundering past, the rider hanging off one side of his mount and snatching something from the ground and hauling himself back upright in the saddle. There had been a strange sound and a spray of dirt. Another horse and rider appeared at the far end of the field. They galloped past and again the rider hung off low to the ground like an Indian, snatched something that made a small explosion, and rode off shaking his prize. “What are they doing?” he mumbled. Father shaded his eyes and looked down at him. He was insubstantial in the overpowering light. Charles repeated the question, sitting up dizzily and shading his eyes too.
“You know very well what they’re doing,” said Father. “It’s traditional amongst cavaliers,” he said. “An exercise in . . . in . . .”
“What is?” Charles asked, standing unsteadily. “What is an exercise in what?”
Charles looked over at Sir Edwin and told him that chickens had been buried up to their necks. Horsemen rode by and snapped their heads off.
“Ah,” said Sir Edwin.
“This isn’t a war they’re preparing for,” Charles went on equably, “it’s a joke. It’s pitiful, really.”
“If you can’t enjoy the day, why don’t you go home,” suggested Father. “And shave. You look like a bum. A drunken bum.”
Cheers from the far end of the field made their way down the field as another rider charged toward another chicken. People were shouting now and laughing. Charles could see heads turning up and down the field. He lay back down and closed his eyes to the sun, lids burning blood-red and luminous, brain hot in a cold head and reeling. He put his hands over his eyes just as Mother softly exclaimed that, oh, it was Amelia. And there she was, Charles’s mad saint sister like an Amazon Godiva, long chestnut hair in streamers behind her, hanging low and bounding off Jolly’s flank, his spotted coat brilliant in the intense sunlight, his great crazy head nodding rhythmically as he charged. Knowing it was a chicken buried there, he now saw it, its ridiculous startled head straining upward, jerking left and right as it fought off both sleepiness and fear, and then gone, appearing before Charles and Sir Edwin dripping in Amelia’s glove in much less time than Charles thought
possible, Jolly reined up in front of the family, Amelia laughing hysterically, laughing and laughing and laughing, infectious but frightening, Mother and Reverend Ruggles both rising to steady her, laughing a little themselves too, helplessly, but wanting to calm her before something happened. But it was too late and Charles knew it. She flung the bloody scrap of chicken head at Sir Edwin. It landed on Charles’s stomach. After a moment, he daintily plucked it up and laid it aside. Then he stood and removed his vest and listened to Amelia sputter and whinny, his little brothers shriek with pleasure, and Mother say to Father that that was it, that was enough, it was too much, we’ve got to get everybody out of here.
Later, at the house, Charles found himself standing rather forlornly with Mother and Father.
“Amelia wants to hurt me too,” said Father. “I don’t understand why.”
“You’ve got no business lecturing Charles, then, William, now do you?”
“Charles and Amelia are two quite distinct matters,” said Father.
Mother spoke as soothingly as she always did, but took Father very much by surprise. The Spring Park Water Company scandal came and went, and for the moment, was among them. Father’s eyes grew quite large and moist and he looked away from her. All around them, in other rooms, the family were hooting. Charles could hardly hear them, but he could see them, as plainly as if the house lights had gone up in the middle of a scene.
Early in the morning a few days later, because Father had made a strange, unlooked-for point of it, Charles decided to get rid of the last of his motorcycles: a Belgian Minerva and a big orange Flying Merkel out of Pottstown, a V-twin displacing sixty-one cubic inches. He entered a shop not far from the theater that appeared to be closed: no one was about and he could hear no sound coming from the back rooms, the mechanics’ bays, nor the offices along the little mezzanine gallery. Sunlight was slanting in through the three big but fly-specked and cobwebbed windows and the manufacturers’ logos painted on them—the Indian, the Cyclone, the Thor—which in turn burned like brands on the oil-stained wood planks of the floor. At the far end of the display case, which glowed in the rare sunlight as if stuffed with diamonds and silver and gold, a grimy and tattered piece of red cloth hung over the narrow doorway that led to the parts bins. The sunlight struck it as a spotlight would a stage curtain, and he found himself staring expectantly at it. It was easy to imagine a kind of comical-nightmare auditorium behind the red curtain, a long and narrow corridor of a stage, an auditorium for puppets compared to the vast stage and wings and unknown world at his back, people perched high above him on the shelves, cackling and buzzing—poor people, because it was “the anarchy of poverty that delighted” him—waiting, waiting for the swollen, thunderous music of the final scene, waiting for the death of the beautiful young tragedienne, waiting for something they could not name, or perhaps only for Charles Minot, a person simply standing there, no particular lines to speak or props to hold, no marks on a carefully measured floor to hit with the grace and precision of a dancer. He edged his way around the display case and stood before the curtain. Something in the distant reaches of the cloudy sky happened and the light faded slightly, drawing swiftly back toward and then into the windows, then brightened again, flowing back across the room to the curtain, red to gray to red. He reached out and touched it, patted it, looked for the fold that might part it just a little, and the musicians in his mind uneasily awaited their cue. Then he clutched the soiled, limp fabric and threw it open.
Walking toward him, at the far end of an astonishingly long and narrow aisle of beetling shelves, was none other than his actress, Vera.
His first impulse was to shout her name and run down the long aisle, take her in his arms and kiss her, but she seemed to be going away from him rather quickly—not running, but going further and further as if by rents of unconsciousness in his perception, and then suddenly she was gone. He let the curtain fall in alarm, strode backward into the display case and banged it loudly, rattling the chromed fittings, the sparkling jets and needles, the red, white, and blue handlebar streamers, the glinting opaque glass and glistening black rubber of the goggles. He set his hands upon it and leaned over, as if to settle and dampen the jingling things and suggest a casual interest in the concentric piles of gears next to a typed and folded card listing ratios and prices. He assumed Vera would reappear, in the shop proper, shortly, and prepared a smile for the young woman’s arrival, conscious that his instinct had failed him, that he had, no other way to put it, fled in the face of her appearance and disappearance. But she did not reappear. And what, after all, had she been doing there in the first place? After quite a long time, he moved stealthily back to the curtain and pulled it slowly away: Vera had her back to him, about halfway down the aisle. Still he could not call out to her: Was she really there? He let the curtain swing stiffly back in place.
Above and behind him, a door in one of the mezzanine cubbyholes was opened with a bang on its hinges and closed with an even louder bang. He craned about and looked up but no one appeared.
Vera was now standing in the doorway, holding the red curtain aside with one finger. She and Charles regarded each other in what seemed like a long silence. Then he greeted her brightly, pretending that if they did not exactly know each other very well, they had seen each other around, were a part of the big happy family that the shop really was, fancy meeting you here and so on. She raised her head slightly, narrowed her eyes, and smiled faintly. Sandy hair, a face somehow smooth and clear and weathered at the same time, and smooth, deep, clear black eyes, sculptured lips. She seemed neither to know Charles nor to care that she did not. And yet there was something of remembrance or premonition in her mild, indifferent scrutiny. Charles was more fascinated than confused. Fascination precluded confusion. She nodded almost imperceptibly—or was he merely imagining such a validation of his wounded, vaunted instinct—then suddenly brightened, laughed, and said that she worked there. She said “Just a sec,” and turned back into the narrow aisle and let the curtain once again fall. Had she been lost in thought? Or had she been appraising Charles privately, or remembering their professional embraces and finding some genuine erotic content, and was just as startled to see him as he was to see her? Perhaps she was shy and manifested it with a kind of mystical hauteur. Perhaps she was drugged. Perhaps he was drugged. Indeed he felt somewhat high. Perhaps she had not been there at all. It was just barely possible, but possible nevertheless. Believing her to be, in that instant of embarrassment and redoubled desire, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he struggled to hold her image in his mind, but could not recall, a second later, a single feature. Sandy hair? Dark eyebrows? Flashing teeth? He moved like a puppet to the curtain and drew it back but she was nowhere to be seen.
He moved silently, with a kind of dreamlike dread and volition, down the aisle, calling out a greeting every few paces, until he reached the end, and retraced, silently, fully awake now for just that moment, his steps, parted the curtain yet again, and found the room noisily full of people, bustling about as if, yes, as if they were on a stage set: three colorfully distinct pairs of men coming one after another in a train through the big double doors with crated motorcycles, another man, a Mexican probably, a gentleman at a small table cluttered with newspapers against the far wall and the last window, which appeared to be pulsing now, faintly, with ore-bearing light, and four men again leaning over the gallery railing but not in shadow—at least three of them—this time, and laughing as if at a baseball game or in a saloon of the Gold Rush years. These four looked like rough and tough men—certainly not the hard but jolly mechanics—if not altogether desperados, and their laughter was clearly not the kind inspired by mirth or light-heartedness, but rather of defeat, despair, mockery, defiance. Still they appeared to have popped out of stage doors and were about to sing. One was a sleek and pink-faced gorilla with a luxurious head of hair, another had sunken cheeks and a monocle, the third had a round and close-shaven skull and a week’s growth of beard, and
the fourth hung back in the shadow of a pillar. There were a couple of young men too, boys, who were trying to look and act like customers standing on either side of a yellow Beveridge Cyclone. They were younger than Charles, but not much, dirty and unnecessarily loud, boasting in an Italian dialect he could not make out. Beyond Rome, beyond Naples. Eboli perhaps. Sicilian. A lot of shu-shu-shushing. Sicilian. The truth was they offended him in some way he could not articulate. They looked like gang boys hoping for a chance to do something outrageously violent and useful. One of the men looking down at the shop from the mezzanine half-turned and let another man cross the trembling resounding gallery behind him. The man descended the stairs against the far wall of the shop, banging loudly on each step. He was owlish-looking, with large eyes that seemed nearly yellow behind his thick spectacles, and great shaggy brows shooting like black-veined bolts of lightning from the bridge of his equally remarkable nose to his bulging temples. He smelled strongly of whiskey and Charles faltered a bit before this predatory but teetering ferocity. He carried his hands before him, not quite balled in fists, as if wishing to grasp some invisible thing and tear it to shreds. Not appearing to notice Charles, the man left the shop, negotiated his way through a particularly dense crowd on the sidewalk, waited for a cable car, several Fords, and a horse-drawn wagon to pass, then crossed the street and entered, with exaggerated gestures of formality, into conversation with a jitney driver who was smoking a cigarette outside his little bus. The driver took an envelope from the owlish man and the two shook hands. Another man, wearing a bright red driving cap and a big black moustache, who Charles thought owned the shop joined the owlish man and the jitney driver, and after a moment they all crossed the street and entered the shop. The Owl stood center stage and announced that he had “spoken to the president,” and that said president had agreed to give him, Owl, it seemed, but possibly the others were included, sixty thousand dollars.
