The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  “Though playgoers lined the sidewalk the length of the Garden, went around the block and nearly the length of its other side, most of them, assevering poverty or union brotherhood, would get in for pennies, or without charge, if they were Paterson silk workers not appearing in the show. The pageant’s backers, Jules told us as we stood in the park across the street, had been depending, in the face of sky-high—we all looked up involuntarily at the statue of Diana—Garden rental fees, on subscription and the selling out of the pricier stalls to intellectual sympathizers with money. These sympathizers had not been as forthcoming as had been hoped, and Jules said the backers reckoned that they would probably not break even. Worse, it was looking like he was being left holding, so to speak, the books: bills had been left unpaid, and while some vendors and lenders would be happy to write their losses off in a good cause, some would not. There wasn’t much he could do, but it looked like he would have to deal with the part that wasn’t any fun. I said that that was because he was a good, kind, decent man who could not help but do such things for the welfare of others. He sat down on a bench that was out of the lamplight they’d been standing in, and Rosemary instinctively sat down next to him, held his arm and snuggled close. She liked him, and that was all there was to it. I think she knew I loved him, but she liked him, and when she liked people, she showed it. For his part, Jules liked nearly everybody he met, but felt he would, without thinking, risk his life, just like that, for Rosemary. How could I discredit such a feeling? Why would I? And, again, without thinking or any sort of articulation, he was confident that the feeling was reciprocal. It was simply the kind of man he was. Was he a daredevil? Not in any way that you would notice. Was he handsome? Yes, but not incredibly so. Was he charismatic? No. But I loved him. His eyes were kind and intelligent and he was not afraid to suffer, not afraid to die. And here is where I began to see things, as it were, peripherally. Nothing bore in on me. I could see everything floating past me but focus on nothing. Even perfectly clear shapes very near did not startle or impinge on me. They moved at ordinary speed, but seemed to drift and were quietly making ordinary noises. I could see things very far away and it was soothing to have it all so far away. It was something like being high, but I wasn’t, and I was glad I wasn’t. All three of us had fallen silent, listening to the shouts across the street. Once most of the crowd was inside and the Pageant had begun—you could hear the first choral shouts even in the park—we made our way with a small hand truck from the shipping dock to the tower lift. From the hand truck to the lift we moved four big boards holding red-painted electric light bulbs, a roll of electrical cord, and a little leather satchel of tools. We appeared to be handling scenery and to be involved in ordinary stagecraft; the people milling about didn’t give us a second look as we closed the iron-grill doors of the lift’s little car and set off, rattling and banging our way upward. We passed up through many floors in the darkness of the elevator shaft, but came suddenly to the Parthenon-like summit of the tower’s first twenty floors, and glimpsed, through the massive columns, the little streams of light flowing into the vast darkness beyond Central Park. Slowing and swaying and creaking, we went up another fifty feet into a once-again-closed dark space, that looked something like a miniature neoclassical bank or government building, the lift coming to a loud banging stop at its roof, which was the floor of the first of three, successively smaller balconied arcades, the last of which was the lantern, on top of which Diana rested and turned. We would have to climb narrow circular stairs now, with our awkwardly big and increasingly heavy light boards, each of the four six feet by three. Halfway with the first board, Rosemary, going first, said oh no sharply, and slipped. Though all she did was sit heavily, the board came down with a crack on the top of her skull, and I was jolted backward. I let go of the board with both hands to grab the handrails, and somehow managed to hold the board on the rack of my arms and shoulders while it pressed into my throat. It was as if I were standing before the carder with an immense weight choking me. Rosemary struggled to her feet and quickly pulled the board up so that I could breathe. Satisfied that we were all right, we made our way slowly and carefully up to the lantern. We propped the board against the balustrade, and waited for Jules, who was carrying the second by himself. Then we went down for the third board. Halfway up, the same thing happened again: the step was somehow irregular, or slick, and Rosemary, careful as she could be, slipped. She made the same sharp sound, and I, hearing something this time in the intake of breath just before the cry, was able to ready myself, hunching my shoulders to protect my throat. Up in the lantern we panted and waited for Jules and the last board. Rosemary then went down and came back up with the electrical cord, and Jules set about cutting, separating, and splicing it. Then without a word she went through one of the window arches onto the ledge, a good wide ledge of about two feet, running the perimeter of the lantern. She looked up and told us she could see the splendid swell of Diana’s breasts above the folds of her toga. She was all alone at the top of the city, as calm as an angel, seeing everything. Jules, being a man, said she should come back in: he should be the one on the ledge. I slowly pushed my end of the first board out farther and farther through the opening into the darkness. At precisely the point where I thought I would lose control of it, Rosemary dropped it lightly and quickly to the ledge, and crawled back in. A single short piece of rope secured the board to a column. Again and again and again she went out onto the ledge while I slowly, slowly, slowly pushed the boards out at her, thinking with every breath that something terrible was going to happen and I would be responsible for her death. Again and again and again she dropped the boards into place and popped back into the lantern with us. We were, I suppose, in awe of her. Breathless all of us, silent, feeling we were living so fully we were nearly at the edge of it, that real things were seeming less and less real, and unreal things more and more real. Then we went back down the winding stairway, unspooling cord as we descended, until we were back in the confines of the bank-like structure. Here was the utility room. The little old man who presided over it was not to be found. Jules cut and spliced more cord, studied a fuse box, said this ought to do it, and flipped a switch. Up we went one last time to the lantern, to see if in fact the bulbs were lit, and Rosemary hopped out onto the ledge. We waited for her to say something, but she said nothing. I thought I heard a faint whistling, and I turned to Jules and said, or murmured to myself, or merely thought: whistling while we work. By the time we worked up the courage, or rather the saliva, to speak, to call out her name, we knew she had fallen, knew that she was gone. We said nothing to each other, thinking somehow that if we remained calm all would be well. Jules went out onto the ledge. I could hear his shoes scraping around me as he made the circuit. Then he came back in. He shook his head and I began to tremble. We went down to the lift, jammed its door open, and walked down thirty floors and out one of the loading dock doors. A cab took us to Penn Station, and three days later, we were in San Francisco, reading various accounts in five or six newspapers of the terrifying lights above Madison Square Garden: NO BOSS spelled out the board facing south. NO DOGMA shone to the east, NO GOD to the north, and finally, in the west, NO FEAR. The identity of the young woman who had evidently engineered the feat was eventually revealed. Her name was Rosemary Thorndike, a well known anarchist.”

  In Saint Paul, Charles took up a new project: understanding William James and Plato; James because he was such a genial and erudite companion, the explorer of the will to believe when there was ‘nothing’ to believe in, Plato because Plato defied understanding at every turn and yet seemed to have set out a model for government that no one could shake off. If Charles could bring James to Plato or Plato to James, maybe he could find ‘something’ to believe in strongly enough to efface his bone-deep feeling that it was an illusion that he was even alive—along with the honing of an ability to keep the world of objects and other people in close but not threatening proximity, while at the same time maintaining in perfect
, nearly silent but faintly humming equipoise, the working of his own physical organs and processes, and the turbulent, sometimes frightening thoughts his mind bore and nurtured, in what seemed a universe parallel to, but completely separate from, the one in which his body took up space.

  Vera and he spent a good deal of their time observing the proceedings of the Minnesota legislature, which was heating up and drawing consequently a wide variety of persons to its hearth to warm their hands. A delegation from the Chicago office came up to participate in hearings, and Vera found herself functioning as a kind of spokesperson, a secretary briefing reporters with regard to theory, practice, history, and current positions of the Industrial Workers of the World, moderate and radical socialists, and the dreaded anarchists. The sudden visibility of men and women perceived as shadowy figures inclined toward sabotage and murder (when they weren’t singing songs and talking sedition on street corners hoping to be arrested and have a grand old free-speech trial) caused an uproar. The milling district, it was relentlessly rumored, was going to be blown up several times over; the city would be destroyed, and IWW participation in the hearings was decried as suicidal. An attorney working for a number of lumber companies grew so rabid and obscene in his denunciations that he was made, by legislators, to apologize before he would be allowed to continue.

  They would meet him again, fatally, in the spring.

  Vera’s friends from Lawrence and Paterson, Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovanniti notably, were hailed, astonishingly, as charming and intelligent citizens of the republic, as helpful as the legislators listening to them thought possible. Great strides were in fact made as the winter wore on. Crowds of many thousands formed to listen to antiwar speakers, and the socialist mayor of Minneapolis was seen everywhere beaming with satisfaction and delight. Despite Vera’s philosophical devotion to the abolition of all states and all governments, she found herself caught up in the day-to-day pressures and pleasures of politics. And found herself caught up as well in a night-to-night fantasy that struck her in the mornings as even stranger than idle daydreams of sabotage: settling down and having children. Only in moments when she was taken, as it were, by surprise—by low spirits or low blood sugar, exhausted nerves, a bad head cold—did black thoughts of their murdered and maimed friends in San Francisco whisper at her, like the cold wind seeping under her doors, like the slowly leaking corpses of boys dying too quickly and in too great numbers to be buried in the war that now seemed would never end, like the girls playing with dolls in the revolving drum—only then did she acknowledge that all was not well and that she was a fool to think it was. Yes, the vision of the little girls in the drum was a very bad one indeed.

  In February—a month in which not a single inch of snow fell, and temperatures climbed above freezing every day—the United States severed diplomatic ties with Germany. The Minnesota legislature concluded its overwhelmingly reformist session with a violent about-face in which were passed three profoundly repressive bills. In March, half the snow on the ground melted, only to be replaced by three more wet and heavy feet of it in a late blizzard. Charles spoke openly and ardently of his desire to take Vera to London, where they would wait to see in what way he would serve. There was no hope, he said, for America. He suddenly wanted to get out and stay out. The Gilded Age was giving way to the Age of Empire, and it would be founded on commercially viable xenophobically poisonous Christian fundamentalism. In April, the United States declared war on Germany.

  In the lovely spring weather Vera walked two miles every morning, past the mansions on Summit Avenue, then down the hill and along the river downtown to Rice Park, the Hamm Theater, the Saint Paul Hotel, and the wonderful new neoclassical Federal-style library, where she stayed, enraptured, until it closed, and walked two miles back home. She had begun work on her autobiography, she told Charles, and felt fit, clean-handed and cool-headed. It was his idea that a writer ought to be clean-handed and cool-headed—he believed he’d gotten it from Flaubert or the Goncourts—but they were still fond of alcohol, of drinking alcohol by themselves and with Daisy Gluek and others until they all blacked out. Charles was waiting to hear how and where and when he would join the war, each day more concerned that something was wrong; and Vera was waiting for a spring speaking tour with Daisy to be organized and funded—and for the roads to dry, since they would not be traveling by horseback, as Vera had, through the long cold dark winter, daydreamed they might. Oh, they were like sisters, Vera Dark and Daisy Light, in their characters, not their looks, and they were deep in a giddy drunken confusion of newspapers and small talk of saturnalias and bomb-throwing one night—they vehemently agreed with each other, over and over, that reckless bomb-throwing was just another form of authoritarian coercion, but that the careful use of explosives was as American as apple pie—when a group of people they had met from the Saint Paul Peace League sat down at their end of a long warped table. Vera had thought, at some point, that there was someone, a man, sitting across from her, reading something she’d wanted him to read while she continued to scribble notes, but he had apparently departed without saying good-bye. She stopped scribbling in the middle of a sentence—“If no one cares I will . . .”—and welcomed the new group to her country. The women, two of them, seemed lost in their voluminous hats and interminable feather boas, mumbling what Vera made out to be bons mots, while the men, two also, smiled and bristled with great energy, saying very little while talking nonstop.

  “It was Malatesta who shot King Umberto at Monza,” said one of them.

  Vera wasn’t even sure if it was a male or female who’d spoken. They all, including Daisy, looked at her while she drank.

  “What’s your question?” she demanded at last.

  “Wasn’t it?” asked a second.

  “No,” Vera shook her head, “it wasn’t.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “Malatesta?”

  “Yes, Malatesta.”

  “What did he do? You’re asking me what Malatesta did? For God’s sake, man, woman, he’s only one of the—”

  “She wants to know who he killed,” said a woman. “Or rather, who killed King Umberto at Monza.” This woman spoke as if she were listening to music. Vera looked at her notes, then at the group, then back at her notes. Daisy leaned conspiratorially over the table, causing everyone else to do so as well. Charles was sodden but beginning to glaze over. Then a troupe of musicians paraded past them, down the aisle to a little bandstand. Their instruments were shiny and exotic: an oboe, a flute, a bassoon, a clarinet, a French horn. The musicians and their instruments exerted a powerful attraction over most of the people in the saloon and seemed particularly to mesmerize the Peace Leaguers. A sixth man joined the musicians, conferring quietly with them for a moment, then walked down the aisle, winking at Daisy. He went through a little door, and closed it, only to emerge seconds later with a much bigger horn. Again he smiled at Daisy, who said, “Tuba, or not tuba. That is the question.” It was not an especially funny thing to say, but Daisy was just generally amusing, and there was loud laughter up and down the long tables and from the bandstand, where the musicians grinned around their reeds and blowholes as they tuned up.

  “Okay,” said Vera slowly, “it goes like this. Say, you know what? Things really jump, don’t they, in the Peace League? Am I missing something, because you don’t seem all that peaceful to me . . . . Never mind. Malatesta is lecturing in West, I don’t know, Hoboken, I think, West Hoboken. Guy name of, uh, Domenico Scarlatti or what was it, Scarlatti, yeah, I think that was it, Scarlatti pulls out a pistol and shoots Malatesta at the podium. Ooo, got me, right in the podium! Nobody knows why. Not then, not now. Main theory seems to center on the idea that the Italians, hey, they know how to cook. But Malatesta is seriously wounded by the gunshot. Scarlatti, no, wait, what am I thinking, the guy’s name was Pazzaglia, Pete Pazzaglia, he looks like maybe he wants to finish the job, but this other guy, can’t think of his name, either, jeez, Provenzale, Legrenzi . . . Leonardo Leonard
i . . .? Bresci! Gaetano Bresci, he tackles him and subdues him. Malatesta refuses to press charges against Pazzo because he is a brother anarchist, and Bresci meanwhile is hailed as a man of peace and temperance and justice. A year later, he turns up at Monza, not infamous anarchist Malatesta, not trigger-happy Pazzo, but Bresci, and he guns down the good King Umberto.”

  “Maybe Bresci tackled the other guy to get the gun,” said one of the men.

  The women rose to go to the ladies’ room. “What is it with you folks?” Vera asked.