by Gary Amdahl
Swanson interrupted him. “The Alarm and Forward and on and on—what else? Backward? I read this guy Berkman’s paper. Tries to assassinate Frick back in Homestead, goes to jail, gets out, comes here, an anarchist, mind you, a murdering godless fucking anarchist—excuse me, miss—and he starts a paper called the Blast. Hard to take a guy like that seriously, you know what I mean? But what are some other newspapers? This is fun, help me out. You must get around, Mr. Minot. Cronaca Sovversiva and Broyt un Frayhayt, there’s two more.” His pronunciation of the Italian and the Yiddish was faultless. Then he mispronounced them, as if having fun.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Charles said. “Those are all foreign-language newspapers, aren’t they? I was brought up to read the newspapers of Christian white men.”
“Now there you go, that’s it, exactly!” Swanson’s slitted eyes grew horribly wide again, and his wide red mouth opened with amused pleasure. “Foreign nationals behind every one of ’em! It’s not American radicalism at all!” He suddenly pulled a wad of bills from an inside coat pocket. “Here’s the five thousand I promised you,” he stage-whispered, holding the money out to Minkowski, who reached for it. Swanson withdrew it slightly, waving it back and forth. “Just promise me again you’ll do what I asked you.”
“Give me the money you fucking asshole and we’ll see what happens,” said Minkowski genially.
Swanson laughed, stopped, then laughed again, and it seemed like the thing to do. It was infectious and effectively handed, Charles saw, the stage back to the strange detective, who was getting something like applause somewhere in his perception of the interior of the bus. He laughed a little longer, enjoying it clearly, then waved good-bye as he stepped from the bus and almost instantly disappeared into the crowd. Just as they were exhaling, he scared them all by appearing at Vera’s open window.
“I know what you’d do, miss,” he said, “with five grand.”
“You do?” she giggled.
“Climb up the tallest building in the city and put one of those electric signs up, like your friend did in New York a few years back, way up there on the top of that tower over, uh, over the uh . . . Madison Square Garden, jeepers, how I lose a name like that beats me! At the feet of lovely Diana, that big old naked lady who spins around like a weather vane.”
Minkowski engaged first gear and jumped away from the curb.
Charles saw it: the faint red letters, hundreds of feet up in the murky night, coming down Lexington from the Armory Show and all its insane new art, hoping to catch the first performance of the pageant of the striking Paterson Silk Workers at the Garden, turning on Twenty-Sixth, and seeing it over the treetops of Madison Square Park, floating in complete cloudy darkness above the feeble gaslight of the streets, as if written in fire that had burned itself down to embers—this was the work of someone Vera knew? He had been there—of course he’d been there! And had Vera not seen them? He thought she had.
He could not get the picture out of his mind. 1913. Alexander was already the governor’s chief of staff in Sacramento, and Andrew was figuring out what do in the wake of the humiliating Bull Moose defeat—not to mention the attempt by Schrank on the former president’s life: had the attempt been made in California, it might have occurred to Andrew to protect “Uncle Ted,” and gunshots had always sobered the family in ways gunshots did not ordinarily sober people—e.g., by seeking cover, either physical or psychological, panting, giving thanks to God Almighty that they were still alive, committing themselves to kindness and gentleness for the rest of their days, or casting about hysterically for a weapon to call their own. No, the Minots had, rather like T. R. himself, received gunshots and other potentially mortal wounds as signs from God that they had been chosen for great work. Charles had several semesters at Cal under his belt, was restless, and of course, while they were ascertaining the nature of the next bit of great work, they had come across the country to see the Armory Show!
A small crowd of ticket buyers had gathered around the box office window. Charles parked his Studebaker at the far end of the block and removed his goggles. He was much too preoccupied with Vera’s sudden transformation in his mind—from what to what, it was hard to say, beautiful young woman to daredevil, dangling herself high above the city to declare an era in which no one need be afraid? From somebody he wanted to fuck to somebody he wanted to worship? Much too amazed to care about the crowd, and they appeared to be cheering anyway, more cheering knuckleheads waving signs—but it was hard in the deepening twilight to tell. He moved unsteadily down the alley toward the stage door, his stomach rising and falling and percolating its acids. He put his hand on the railing that led to the door and prepared himself to see his nausea through, to, as it were, stick a finger down his throat and be done with it, bear the grave responsibility before him, do the ridiculous and false thing they expected him to do, or brave and true, depending on your mood and point of view, enter into the nightmare time and space of the stage and humiliate himself in an ill-conceived and awkwardly played-out bit of fraudulence, then emerge from it, miraculously relieved to find it had been worthy and real, bursting finally with gratitude and love of life, wryly amused at his earlier childish torments and wading into the riotous esteem of his fellow San Franciscans. Yes, that was how it was—or could easily be seen to be.
He went down a dark corridor that still smelled of sawn wood and fresh cement and hot metal, crammed with old clothes from centuries, even millennia, past, odd props the use of which could not be guessed at, and junk, plain junk, that had been accumulated in the drive for funding, seeing no one, hearing no one and nothing, and entered into the dressing room where the other actors sat slumped and stinking of paints and creams and anxiety and indigestion before streaked and spotted mirrors throwing back hideous made-up masks. The princess’s understudy looked up at him. “Aren’t you the daredevil,” she enunciated.
They were all, he realized in a surge of bile, looking at him through the predatory safety of their mirrors, two banks of them on either side, three apiece, six faces, a gauntlet . . . but rather than plunging him into a deeper vomitous misery, it, to his great surprise, emboldened him.
“What,” he demanded, “is the matter with you children now?”
They looked away, six different moues of sarcasm, bored, it now seemed to him, with their anxiety and his late arrival. Then the old man, Garagiola, stood up and told him to go soak his head. He used his old Brooklyn voice, a sign that all was not well, and that he was feeling peevish. “Aw, go soak yuh head,” he said with a small dismissive flip of his liver-spotted and veinous old claw of a hand.
“Relax,” said Teddy Blair, rubbing his false belly. “For Christ’s sake.”
The electric lights went off and on, and the old man squeaked with annoyance. “Now what the hell was that?” shouted Blair.
“That’s just what I wanted to see!” Charles said, striding confidently onstage, but it was clear that something had happened and whatever he was pretending to see was not what the audience or his fellow actors were seeing. He felt quite alone. The city was ruined. The vast schematic in his mind diagramming all the points of warmth and assurance and connection seemed no longer to apply, though he moved from one to the next and the next as if they still did, feeling perhaps a faint tingle or echo at the climax of each moment. He seemed somehow onstage and yet not in the play. He was neither Christopher Newman nor Charles Minot—which, after all, was part of what he’d been playing at all through rehearsals. The context, though: it had changed. He did not know in what way it was changed, nor exactly how the change had come about, but it was no longer, in any way, a positive environment. He was in some way he suddenly understood very well, nobody. But nobody where and in the service of what? Whenever the audience laughed or drew in their breath, or when he touched another actor, when he, for instance, embraced the false princess, the non-Vera, and kissed her with the by-now-lifeless facsimile of passion, he felt as if he were watching someone else. He no longer fel
t safe. He knew in the back of his mind that this was no way properly to act, and he consequently became frightened. It was not the simple if nauseating and paralyzing anxiety of stage fright, but a kind of pathological anomie—if in fact it was pathological to see things as they were, to feel isolated and disoriented and friendless. But he broke off the kiss at just the moment he always had done, the audience began to applaud as they always had done, the curtain surged across the stage and swept back and the audience continued to applaud, though not quite thunderously now, he noted, and saw as well that the house was not quite full.
“That wasn’t so bad,” murmured Teddy, holding his false stomach before him as if it were disgusting. No one replied, cleansing themselves as quickly as they could and dressing for home or for nightlife—which was not, Charles mused from his terrible distance, out of the ordinary at all. And then they were gone. The hands and the manager made noise for a while and then they too were gone. He went back onstage. Where was Sir Edwin? He called out, softly. A single limelight blasted out of its box, illuminating like desert sunlight a section of the balcony, and he looked to see if one of the plumber’s sons was again experimenting with the gas, but he was nowhere in sight. Again the light, in the absence of any other, struck him as if possessed of sound, and in the slowly drifting dust of the audience’s departure, it appeared to billow. He had once, not long ago, dreamed he was sailing alone through the Golden Gate, and felt the wind, the famous wind, almost imperceptibly slacken. His telltales fluttered. When they fell limp against the sail, he perceived the event as ominous. He was as usual not overly concerned, certainly not frightened—he never was in life, he reminded himself, much less in dreams, no matter how dreadful or sorrowing—but remembered that the wind was something emphatically not under his power of control. It had nothing to do with his family’s wealth, but rather with the turning of the planet in space, and he could call as loudly as he liked for a certain level of performance in that strait, but the answer would always be the same: here is how the world works. He called out his first line to the empty theater: “That’s just what I wanted to see!” but the world had changed in some subtle way, the world was working itself without him, and he imagined Vera sitting at the back of the main floor, in the darkness under the balcony. “The telltales are fluttering! They’re drooping!” he called out, thinking that one consequence of this change—whatever else was happening, had happened, or would happen—was that he was completely in her power, as hypnotized as if she were a mad-bombing Svengali. If he had always seen himself in the world as somehow playing, he now saw himself in a dream that was darkening even as he watched it unfold around him, deepening in tone at the same time it became more vivid and fantastic: the little house orchestra executing a precisely controlled allargando, something out of Wagner, Das Rheingold, as the characters, people near and dear to him as well as strange and new, took on the costumes and gestures of the fairy tale, and as the footlights snickered and fizzed and went out one by one across the stage, became the unstrung puppets of their own fantastic shadows.
The theater’s marquis was dark but he could still see quite plainly CHARLES MINOT AS THE AMERICAN. He looked up and down the street: it was not a lively street and was deserted now, and dark. The wind was cold and he put on his leather jacket and began to walk to his automobile, the only vehicle left on the whole somber street. Turning to get one arm in, he saw a large white shape against the brick of the building. He stopped and looked at it: it almost seemed a basement window filled with light, a scrim, or some kind of magical portal. Then he saw it was a sign and had a long wooden stake attached to it. He went over to it and turned it over: CHARLES MINOT IS NO AMERICAN!!! Another behind it cried, SHAME ON YOU CHARLES MINOT!!!
The house declined steadily and visibly each night, which turned out, of course, to be a good thing. Father brushed it aside as a knee-jerk popular response against which there was no, never had been a, remedy. It was a little wave. Charles was not fooled: Father was visibly relieved, almost cheerful. The only question was, what kind of relief, what kind of good cheer was it? There were two distinct modes: either he felt he had gotten his way, or he knew something, something that only the rulers of the city could know, and was pleased that he did not have to be, as it were, patriarchal, judgmental, and dismissive about something he had always had little sympathy for in his son’s life—but what could the nature of such knowledge be? How could a play, that Father found trivial, matter politically, even when it was, if it was, the politics that happened around the Tree at the Center of the Universe, with its roots in corruption and decay and its flowers in heaven?
Before The American was canceled, and the openings of the theater’s other two shows indefinitely postponed, a bomb, contained in a small suitcase, was hurled, or more properly, dropped, from the balcony. It wasn’t clear if the bomber was trying for the stage or the audience, but the bomb killed actors and wounded musicians: Grandpa Garagiola, portly Teddy Blair, pretty Mary Girdle, Vera’s blossoming understudy Catherine White, community-minded newcomer Margaret Stensrud—who came off the stage into the wing with such force that she knocked Charles unconscious—and his friend Gene Woodcock were all blown to bits. Charles was broadly believed to be the bomber’s probable target. But he had been offstage—so briefly, an exit, a breath, an entrance—at the moment of the explosion. Had it been just bad timing? And if he was he the target, why was he the target? Because he was “the American”? An oligarch? An oligarch in the making? Was it simply a blow at the aristocracy as made manifest by the Minots and their theater and their disgusting play? Or was he the target because he had been associating, as the protest signs made clear, with anarchists. Was he perhaps not the target at all? Had an anarchist meant to scare the war-mongering general public? Or were the railroaders, working on a decade-old grievance with William Minot, simply doing what they did best: destroy—either good or evil, depending on your point of view. These possibilities, along with the indispensable frame-ups—railroad barons framing anarchists, anarchists framing railroad barons—merged and then, in an orgasmic release of spermy public rumor-mongering, was made manifest in what the Buddhists call “the ten thousand things,” an effectively infinite process of variations of the species conspiraciensus.
He was summoned to Fall River Mills, to the ranch, where everybody, including Amelia and Pastor Tom, his two older brothers and the women they were engaged to, his younger brothers and a platoon of their friends, were spending the summer. He had not wanted to seem to be fleeing the city, the horror, as his family had, and decided to stay for as long as he could stand it. He felt he could stand it forever with Vera, but her whereabouts, he was once again told, were unknown, and he saw he could not press his concern, not an inch. Two weeks later, on the day of the Preparedness Parade, dispirited and restless and confused, he went to the shop and found it full of new faces. Nobody could tell him where even someone as integral to the shop as Jules was, either. A mechanic who claimed to have done some work for him told him he thought they were going to watch the parade from a rooftop of a building on Market. He gave Charles the number, then asked him if he knew of anybody who wanted to buy rare old motorcycles.
“Like what, for instance?” asked Charles, sensing a joke in the offing.
The mechanic, pink lips reaching out from an oily face to close around the mouth of a bottle of beer: “Like an ’02 Triumph with a Belgian Minerva motor?”
Someone standing near said, “What’s that?”
The mechanic said, “This is the kid had a Belgian waffle he wanted to unload.”
“Minerva,” Charles said. “And my name is Minot.”
“A Belgian Minot and his name is Minerva.”
“Other way around,” Charles said.
“Whatever,” said the mechanic.
“I’d take the waffle,” said the other man, “but who needs a Minerva? You gotta shut the engine off every time you come to a stop, don’t you?”
The mechanic nodded and belched. Charl
es thanked him for his help, left the shop, and made his way as near to Market Street as he could get. Walking through dense and happy crowds waving flags, he heard a marching band. Climbing five flights of stairs, he came to the last door and stood before it. He knocked and waited. Knocked a second time and continued to wait. Then opened the door and stepped into the sunlight. There were enough people on the roof to make it impossible to see everyone at once, and he paused on the threshold. There, he saw that everyone he could see was looking at him.
He knew they were looking at nothing, at an actor, and was untroubled.
He saw Vera, deep in conversation with the woman he had met the night Farnsworth had beaten her up. Talking to the woman but looking at him.
She saw Charles see her and looked away.
His heart began to thump—insisting he was something—as he searched the crowd for Warren Farnsworth and his sworn agency of death. How Farnsworth’s jealous wrath could prevail, even survive, in the face of a mass murder only days old, Charles did not know. Appraised calmly, from a crucial but not necessarily great distance, it was impossible to countenance. No sane man would kill another who had just survived a bomb blast over a sexual matter. Remove that distance, though, and place your mind back onstage with the carnage, with the severed limbs, the rolling, rocking heads coming to a stop in the limelighted pools of brilliant, smoking, crimson, still-spreading blood, the heaps of intestine and organ meat that had been actors draped like bunting on the furniture or fallen like confetti on paraders . . . and whether or not you thought they could be replaced and that the show would go on, as everything was replaced and every show went on, and that terror was ordinary and that there were no sane men, not in the moment of the act as every moment was a moment of an act, there, on the stage, you saw that everything was possible and that the only way to go on was to see that you were some kind of nexus of nothing, or nexus of everything, if you preferred, and therefore immortal. In other words, Warren Farnsworth could very easily step up and stab him in the heart, or—how had Father’s Montaigne put it?—make a person repent by killing them?
