The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  And Jules said, “He’s an ordinary kid. He’s one of us, or he could pass, even if he is filthy stinking rich. That’s what I told you, Vera, from the very first, and I know you know it’s true.”

  Charles affirmed that it was true: he was an ordinary kid. He believed nothing of the kind, but this seemed an appropriate falsehood.

  “Just stupefyingly rich,” Vera reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said evenly, “that’s right. Here we are back at money! How surprising! How refreshing!”

  “Whose daddy thinks he will be pwezzydent some day!”

  “I’m sorry: thinks I will be what?”

  “You know what’s worse than an actor whipping up the patriots?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

  “A stupefyingly rich actor whipping up the patriots.”

  “Do you people really not get it? I am not Christopher Newman and I did not whip up any patriots.”

  “Oh, but see now,” said Vera, going to him and caressing him, soothing him, as well as giving him an instantaneous erection, which dizzied and thrilled him even more than he had been, so much so that he felt lightheaded, drunken, “there’s where you are wrong, dear. You are Christopher Newman and you did whip up the patriots, but it’s all right, it’s all right, shush now. I was a French princess and I helped you.”

  “There is no connection between Christopher Newman and myself.”

  “No connection? Shush now. Of course there is.”

  “No real connection.”

  “No real connection, all right, shush now, can you?”

  “Did you just say you helped me?””

  “To be fair,” said Sir Edwin mildly, even disinterestedly, “the better job he does, the more tenuous is the connection.” He slipped into his Russian accent. “All this talk of rill is mislidding.”

  “An ordinary kid,” said Jules, “one of us, rich, sure, but here’s the difference: he can stand there alone on that stage, naked for all the costumes and disguises, in a pool of light, and know that we are all out there looking at him and judging him. And not be afraid to stand there. Doesn’t have to say a word. Doesn’t have to light a cigarette or look out a window that’s got a piece of tar paper where the glass should be. Just stand there and not be afraid of us. That’s some kind of American, at least. I mean here tonight, Charles, not on your stage.”

  Vera was positively hugging him now and suddenly he could not have been happier. “I know,” she said, cooing. “I know, it’s the other Americans, the ones who are watching and judging. They’re stampeding their little selves.”

  “There’s all kinds of Americans, surely,” somebody in the crowd observed with a kind of sententious quiet.

  “What kind of American are you, Shirley?” asked Warren Farnsworth.

  There was a brief silence, as Farnsworth’s tone had not been altogether “in the spirit” of the conversation.

  “My name’s not Shirley. It’s Vera and Vera’s not my real name, either, because I wanted to have a revolutionary name, the name of a brave woman who had sacrificed everything for the cause. The name of a Russian. That’s the kind of American I am. I was born and raised in Muscatine, Iowa, and worked from the time I was born until just, I don’t know, a few months ago, a year or two, in a button factory. My task was the most tedious task in the factory but it was critical as the factory could not sell mixed buttons. I and my friends graded the buttons according to manufacturing defects, natural stains, color, luster, and iridescence. I also sewed buttons to decorative cards, for a while. I tried to drown the owner in a big tub of buttons but even though I failed I had to leave town. Now I print revolutionary materials on a secret press. NO GODS TO APPEASE, NO MASTER TO BOW DOWN TO, NO DOGMA TO RECITE! That’s what I say, and that’s the kind of American I am!”

  Sandy, golden hair, dark eyebrows, tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with very thin and long arms and legs, but very pretty; she had the kind of red-cheeked and golden-curled glow one saw in advertisements, and she beamed modestly as the salonnières cheered and whistled their approval of her speech. Farnsworth was so much shorter than she was, and uglier, that Charles could not veil the derision in the look of superiority he shot at him. He looked like a rat at this distance. And yet his eyes had been far more intelligent than those one saw in rat faces. And they were kind—or if not exactly kind, understanding of something not usually or easily understood. When the applause died down for Vera, Farnsworth—being, everyone assumed, her lover—was persuaded to describe the kind of American he was.

  “I am a good citizen and I proved it by learning a trade. I was born and raised on a farm but my daddy beat me so I left and learned how to cut leather for the soles of shoes. No, I’m sorry, wait, my daddy died and left my mother and my nine brothers and sisters and me with his brother-in-law, who had a cow way out somewhere around the far side of Jamaica Bay. Had one cow and I milked it until I was twelve and then my mind turned to other philosophies. That was when I learned how to cut linings. Satisfied with my progress toward heaven, I became a streetcar conductor for the fun of it, the sheer daredeviling hell of it, don’t you know? It’s true I was guilty of nickeling now and then and it’s also true I came into possession of a set of burglar’s tools. Don’t ask me how. They were there in the morning on the doorstep and that’s all I know. I took them in and cared for them like they were my own. But that wasn’t any kind of life so I decided I would go to Mexico to help Pancho Villa with his revolution. I made it as far as Los Angeles, where this strike was going on. The Wobblies were striking . . . a shoe factory! I made a deal with the Wobblies I was playing pool with that I would get a job as a lining cutter—because it was as a lining cutter that I had made my stand as a citizen!—and report back to the Wobblies on the activities of the scabs and their leaders. The Wobblies said okay, that sounded like good fun and off I went. Only they forgot to tell everybody that I was only posing as a scab—and here I think I can speak with some authority about what our young thespian has been up against—and I got the fucking shit kicked out of me. Once we got that straightened out, I went back to spying, and I framed some scabs. Then I decided I would find out where these strikebreakers were coming from. I borrowed one of Julie’s motorcycles and I tailed one of the owners of the factory for a few days. Then he got wise to me and led me back to the factory, where he ran me over and a bunch of scabs who’d been hanging out at the paymaster’s window jumped me. I would have been killed, stomped to death, if it hadn’t been for somebody in this room whose name I won’t say in case there’s somebody else in this room who wants to put him in prison. He was unbeknownst to me playing craps with the guard and getting him drunk, after which point he undressed him, dressed himself up as the guard, took his keys, and went into the factory where he smashed up some equipment. When he was about to make his getaway, he saw them picking me up and throwing me down and he rides up on his motorcycle in his guard’s uniform, blowing his whistle and firing his gun! That stops everybody cold and he says, ‘Warren Farnsworth, I believe?’ I still don’t know if he’s a real cop or who he is, but at least I’m no longer being thrown up in the air and landing on my head, so I jump on the back of the motorcycle. That’s the just the beginning of my story, but that’s the kind of American I am.”

  When Charles tried to leave a few minutes later, Vera stopped him.

  “I wonder if I might have a private word, Mr. Minot?”

  “Oh, do please call me Charles. And please speak freely.”

  “I want you to know that despite all this business, we, most of us, thought that whatever it is you did up there, you did it well. You did it astonishingly well. And whether most of us can admit it or not, we derived a definite benefit from your performance.”

  This rather awkwardly delivered, terse, formal speech that in no way addressed her current concerns was nevertheless stunning and magical in its effect. It suggested very strongly that a woman could after all assuage hurt feelings, shore up a shaken foundation, smooth ruffl
ed feathers, provide shelter, refuge, and that part of what he felt—he no longer had to feel ashamed about it—when he felt desire for women was a desire for consolation, and warmth, and peace. Finishing with her smile a gesture that Mother may have begun once when he was a little boy but left undone, or never made in the first place, Vera opened herself to him, and utterly transformed herself.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said, still guarded. “Thank you for taking the trouble to say so.”

  “We were rough with you,” she apologized.

  He contrived to be gallant. “Not at all. I deserved it. If I can’t take responsibility for my actions on the stage, then I should not mount it.”

  “Oh, Charles, you are not responsible for what we make of your actions.”

  She seemed to be speaking very softly but he heard her quite clearly. The noise around them rose and fell simultaneously as the crowd gathered and dispersed and gathered and dispersed.

  “No,” he said, “I suppose not. But part of my responsibility is to expect . . . I mean to say, if I clamber up on the stage and make a speech, make a big fuss over myself, I can’t expect people to listen to me only as I wish to be heard. I can’t expect them to listen to me when I want them to listen, understand what I want them to understand, and treat me as I wish to be treated!”

  “That’s right,” said Vera. “You can only treat them as you wish to be treated. And that is what I’m trying to say to you: you treated us to the best you could do, and I for one am grateful.”

  “Again I must insist: you are too kind.”

  “Tell that to the man I tried to drown in buttons!”

  “Ha ha, yes, yes indeed,” he said. Then: “Did you really try to drown him?”

  “Oh, Charles.”

  “In buttons?”

  “Why not in buttons?” Then, much closer: “It was an act.”

  “Yes, of course,” he agreed, but not really understanding in what sense she meant what she said.

  “This is what I wanted to talk to you about!” she whispered with lovely ferocity in his ear.

  She stepped back and stared at him. It was a haughty, lascivious stare that still somehow promised a warm oven of sympathy and relief.

  “Follow me,” she both suggested and commanded. She took his hand and drew him through the kitchen and a bedroom to a door that opened on a steep and dark staircase. The light from the bedroom failed to penetrate its depths, but Vera began her descent with an alacrity and agility that he found inexplicably exciting: it was almost as if she’d leapt into a well. He followed as quickly as he could and when he reached the bottom step he could see Vera’s face glowing in the darkness. She now wore a serious look that thrilled him to his marrow. There was heartache and loneliness in it, but it was perfectly calm and its desire was incontrovertible. He took that face in his hands and kissed it. There was a great deal of strength flowing through her hands and lips, but they remained exquisitely soft. Excluding the stage embraces and adolescent silliness, it was possible that this was really and truly his first kiss. It seemed the first time a kiss had been mutual, had been expressive of something other than a reflex. He now felt as if he’d been born to it. He wanted to kiss Vera for the rest of his life. He clapped a hand around the back of her skull and one around a buttock, but just as it had begun it was over and Vera was laughing. She led him through a darkness of crates and he thought perhaps the frames and disassembled engines of motorcycles until they came to another door. He tried to recommence the kissing—he had found his métier, he was a natural—but Vera pushed him away and took off a bracelet, from which evidently a key jingled, because a lock was clicking and the door was now open. He stood in the doorway of the room that held the press as Vera once again disappeared in darkness. He realized he was panting and tried to calm himself. He had lost his virginity years earlier; he had never kissed a woman as he’d just kissed Vera. The light from an oil lamp appeared, not too far away but far enough for the hiss and sputter to be nearly inaudible, and slowly, as if it were filling the room with water, began to illuminate its shapes and limits. Taking up most of the room was the printing press, which seemed for a moment to have gargoyles attached to its outermost parts; in a corner was a simple wooden washstand on which were placed a pitcher and a bowl and a small towel, all of which appeared snow-gray in color but which slowly became yellow as he looked at them. A tiny oval mirror with an ornate grillwork of vines and leaves framing it was hung on the wall. Next to it was a piece of paper, old newsprint, yellow, tattered, smeared, on which he, drawing nearer, read the slogan Vera had proclaimed only minutes earlier, in another world:

  NO GODS TO APPEASE

  NO MASTERS TO BOW DOWN TO

  NO DOGMAS TO RECITE

  In this dark and strange cave-like place, it was incantatory, incantesimo, not defiant, a relic from an ancient rite and not a political battle cry. Altogether there was a faint sense of hallucination gathering, and while it didn’t dampen his ardor, he felt a certain elevation and refinement of what, until that expanding, nebulous moment, had seemed almost brutal in its perfectly ungovernable simplicity.

  An unmitigated or unadulterated seriousness had overtaken Vera as well. He moved around the press and found her sitting on the edge of a small, tidily made bed. She patted a spot beside her and he sat down. A natural shyness had caught up with them.

  “Here is what I wanted to say,” said Vera tentatively. “I don’t think we should go to the theater to see plays about politics or our lives. I mean, they are wrong to make you stand for something and say you’re good only if they agree with you. The reason I think that is because the theater is a dreamy place, it’s not a real place. I mean, everything in it seems like it’s happening in a dream. And when you’re good, as you were good, Charles,” and here she paused to kiss him warmly and lingeringly on the cheek, “you do things you would never do in real life, but exactly the things you would do in a dream. As we were good. I’m sorry I’ve been baiting you like that all evening.”

  “Well, yes, it’s—”

  “Let me finish. Everyone knows we’re not saying what you think, we’re just repeating the lines you memorized, and we’re doing something we practiced over and over again. And everybody knows that we do and say the same things night after night, but they don’t care because it’s a dream. At least it is if we’re good. If we’re bad, it isn’t anything at all like a dream. It’s ridiculous and pointless. As you said so many times in your impassioned provocations to the company. It makes a person feel bad to watch it, rather than strangely happy. I’m not very smart, certainly not in your league, anyway—”

  “I’m not smart,” he said urgently. “Please don’t think I’m smart. They teach you how to make speeches after dinner and I can fake everything, even being smart, I spent four years studying the classics, but I’m really just a fool.”

  Vera paused to consider her new lover in the lamplight and ended by smiling at him mysteriously. She then continued her thought.

  “I’m not thinking this stuff up originally,” she said. “This all comes from a friend of mine, Jules’s wife, who died three years ago, Rosemary—”

  “I don’t believe you. I’m sorry your friend died, but I don’t believe you’re simply parroting—”

  “—and she said it much better than I do. I’m just agreeing with her because I think it’s true and important. I think that all good actions have a dreaminess to them that you can’t describe or deny. If you do something and it doesn’t feel right, you know it’s the wrong thing to do. And the harder you push it, the more wrong it feels. When you do something and it feels right, you know it too. And the more right it is, the more like a dream it is. The more you look like you rehearsed your lines, the more like you practiced your movements. It’s like nothing happened before you started to set you up, or cause it, and the future doesn’t matter, either. The effect is for someone else to think about. And when you’re done, you can almost hear the applause. Even though you know there’s no
one out there. That’s why I came to you. I have always wanted to act, and then I came up with these other ideas that . . . I don’t know . . . made it imperative.”

  “I often dream,” Charles said after a brief but thoughtful, and somewhat tense, silence, “that I am about to go onstage, and not only can I not remember my lines, I know I never learned them in the first place.”

  It was as if the ground had now been carefully prepared: Vera pushed him backward on the bed, unbelted and unbuttoned him, and commenced the kissing of his swollen cock. He could not have been more astounded by this abrupt and unprecedented action. He was, in a sense, dismayed. The idea, he thought, was merely fashionably dissolute in his leading lady, a venting of sexual energy that was common in the theater; but with Vera it was work of another order, and he felt, despite the incredible pleasure of it, faint at heart and unequal to the challenge. He thought how terrible it would now be if he lost her. Now that he loved her. Needless to say, he felt fraudulent because he did not understand what love was and when the body followed the mind in a perversion of the proper method of the sane and effective actor, when he lost his focus and became impotent, he could only sigh and say, “Now you know the real me.”

  “Nonsense. But you’ve got to go. Warren has promised to kill you. He won’t, of course, but we can all save ourselves so much trouble if you just quickly go now.”

  Attendance numbers remained high and the crowds wildly enthusiastic as July 4th approached. Charles continued to be nauseous before every performance and to wave a little flag during curtain calls. Amelia fell from her horse while chasing Durwood Keogh on the beach but was lucky enough to have broken no bones on the soft sand. Laughing and crying at the same time, she allowed herself to be carried by Keogh to her limousine. The Reverend Thomas Ruggles was in Washington, DC, and so was unable to do the carrying. As he was leaving, Keogh said, “Your brother is becoming pretty well-known, isn’t he. And well-liked.” But as she wasn’t sure what he meant by the remark, she merely looked at him in frank but patient disdain, which seemed to please or at least amuse him. She told her brother about it, wanting to warn him that if she was allowing Durwood Keogh to pick her up and carry her about and coo over her tenderly, then scandal, ruin, and catastrophe would follow as surely as the oxcart follows the ox or however it was he liked to put it . . . but no, no, no, it was worse, it was that if she was allowing Durwood Keogh to seduce her, the poison was very deep and it was far too late to do anything about it, the whole family would die or was already dead and just didn’t know it, that was the way Amelia saw things and if Charles had once been willing and able to discount it, he surely and sorrowfully could do so no longer. She tried to tell him traps were being laid and if he thought he could merely continue his policy of being blithe about it in public, ecstatic for his theater-folk, and contemptuous in his soul, he was wrong wrong wrong. He was a fool and she had never before thought that of him. She wanted desperately to return to selfless toil in miserable hospitals but could not. She did not know why. She tried to tell him, to ask him, but he was feeling too charismatic and powerful to even listen, much less reply. She feared he would shake her hand and murmur, “Good of you to say so.” She wanted to make fun of him and for the two of them to laugh, but she could not, they could not. Something was over and while many things remained possible, many things had become impossible as well. He found it hard to think of anything but sexual relations with Vera—even to the point of hardly recalling his bizarre impotence. He wanted desperately to love, to be in love and to love, and if the shadow of death hung over the stage, well, he did not understand death very well, either. Father certainly had tried to see to that, but Charles had been neither bright nor willing about Stoic sensibility.