The Daredevils (3 page)

But here, here is what he honestly thought: people are not really all that interested in truth most of the time. They are interested in what makes them feel good, and this goes in high and mighty courts of law too. You
define
what makes you feel good as the truth, or as a truth, as something true, you
assert
it, you
defend
it, you try to
win people over
to your way of thinking, and finally you
impose
it. What the speaker on the platform was doing was bad theater—
common theater.

And as if to confirm him in his magically superior thought, a man holding a placard identifying himself as a representative of the International Radical Club, stepped up to the podium. He was attended by another man holding the fallen flag, and they were gesturing comically to each other in the midst of the confusion, and generally people still seemed to be laughing. Everyone was laughing but Charles was uneasy: it was still just bad theater. This man he knew, a nutty professor in Berkeley who was possibly speaking in several different languages. And for it he was pelted with vegetables. Another man, holding a placard over his head that said LOCAL 151 OAKLAND, was big enough, and loud and angry enough, to make himself heard for a minute, but this clarity was met by the crowd with louder, articulate cries concerning the citizenship of the speaker. He said he was a citizen of
the US of A, which meant, for starters, that he was free to stand up where he was and say what he'd come to say, admitting that his audience was free too, to heckle him. Then someone hidden from Charles's view, but unmistakably using a bullhorn, said, “Free to be a goddamn coward, I guess!” As he leaned out and scanned the square looking for the bullhorn somewhere, perhaps under one of the young, dark, flashing trees up toward Filbert Street, Charles saw, where before had been one or two cops, there were six or seven now, and where before had been a single mounted policeman, just in sight up Union, there were more than he could count. Yes, everyone was laughing but something bad was going to happen. The new speaker had his arms over his head and was apparently shouting, judging the by the way his body swayed and snapped, but Charles could make out very little over the roar.

Then the bullhorn:
“ARE YOU A CITIZEN?”

Speaker:
“OH, PLEASE, WILL YOU SHUT THE HELL UP WITH THE CITIZEN NONSENSE NOW? WE HAVE HAD QUITE ENOUGH OF THAT!”

Bullhorn:
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?”

Speaker:
“NO, I MOST CERTAINLY DO NOT!”

Bullhorn:
“IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD, HOW DO YOU EXPECT YOUR TESTIMONY IN A COURT OF LAW TO BE BELIEVED?”

Speaker:
“I EXPECT NO SUCH THING YOU GODDAMNED IDIOT!” He tried to continue, and went on for some time as the crowd grew more and more restive, more and more loud, more and more, it seemed, unhappy, describing anarchism, with great difficulty, as admittedly a destructive force, but destructive only of ignorance with knowledge, fear with compassion, despair with ideas—but this made little sense to either Charles or the crowd: Leon Czolgosz, for instance, had not destroyed ignorance with knowledge or any of that, choosing instead to destroy the president of the United States with a gun. What kind of anarchist Czolgosz was was just another analysis of the fluctuation of the plot:
bad theater.
Then he said the magic words, the fighting words: that anarchists fought capitalist pigs by practicing birth control, and warmongers, when war came, as it surely
would, by refusing to fight. It was on its face reasonable enough, but perceived to be otherwise because the crowd's list of anarchists who fought off despair, fear, and ignorance with murder was quite long: an anarchist—and this was true too—tried to poison three hundred people at a dinner honoring Archbishop Mundelein. An anarchist had stabbed King Umberto, ripped the eyes, ears, tongue, and fingers off the prime minister of Spain, and hung an empress of Austria by her female sexual part on a meat hook. So it was said. They cared not a jot for human life—not even their own! They would just as soon shoot you in the head as look at you, even if,
perhaps especially if,
you were a comrade. Read the right Russian and you would learn that they blew themselves up just to practice—or even for the fun of it. The speaker's truth was real but meaningless and he should have known better. Refusing to fight?
They were killing machines.
Henry Clay Frick was no Christian statesman—Father went so far as to say he was a nauseating halfwit, dressed up as the crucially clever and ruthlessly capable Captain of Coal—but Alexander Berkman had not argued with him, he had hacked at him with a knife. People were really mostly upset by the poisoned food at the dinner for the archbishop. The erratic Andrew had tried to make a joke about Catholics but Father had shut him down with unprecedented anger, or unprecedented feigned anger. That had just happened and three hundred innocent people looking only for a good meal and a holy celebration had gotten sick, had vomited themselves nearly to death. Charles had been reading a story about San Francisco's response to anarchism in one of the newspapers scattered on the table that morning. Both of his older brothers had been home, and the three young men had had a jolly breakfast:

“Authorities—” said Charles. He and Alexander were sitting together over the
Examiner
while Andrew stood bent over them. He had recently shaved off a thick dark-red moustache and looked now, Mother had said, like an egg. His naked upper lip seemed to reveal something unpleasant about his politically erratic personality.

“Who?” he asked, as if he had not heard well.

Father walked in.

“
Authorities,
Andrew,” said Father. “And that is my point.
Authority
.”

“It's a free country,” said Andrew conversationally.

“Well, sir, may I suggest you don't know the meaning of the word.”

“Certainly that is possible, sir.”

“Authorities have identified ninety-eight persons in the Bay Area alone known to be dynamiters. They are going to come down hard on these ninety-eight persons. Whether, Andrew, they
do
anything or
not
.”

“Whether, I suppose, they are actually even dynamiters or not,” said Andrew, his conversational tone now pointed and irritating.

“That's
right,
you goddamned sarcastic know-it-all.”

Alexander and Charles looked up from their newspaper, and Alexander coughed. Andrew laughed, and then Charles laughed too. Because he liked and admired his brother.

“Chick,” said Alexander. “Look here. What Father really wants to say to you—at least what I want to tell you and what I think Father will tell you as well—”

Charles was trying for a deep man's voice: “‘Top-secret and high-level actions on the part of government authorities—'”

“What?” giggled Andrew, helplessly. “Who? What?”

“‘Authorities!'” hollered Charles. “‘Authorities! And private crime specialists are at work in the city disentangling the local strands of the gigantic web of anarchist plots to uh, to uh . . .'”

He was running out of steam over the grandiosity and the ridiculous words, and losing the sense of the article. Alexander peered closely, then yanked the paper from his brother's hands and assumed a high-pitched society lady's wail: “‘Assassinate, to assassinate John Pierpont Morgan and other money and um, and um . . .'”

Andrew leaned over Charles's shoulder and pretended to sound out
munitions.

“‘Money and moo-nit-ions barons,'” Charles continued, “‘of America. The heads of these plots are Germans. The German anarchist has the shrewd, ever-, um, ever-, uh . . .'” He moved his lips but said nothing, waiting for
Father to stop imploring the ceiling and come back over to them. “‘Anticipating,'” he said. “‘Shrewd and ever-anticipating.'”

“What does it mean, Al?” asked Charles.

“I don't know,” said Alexander.

“Yes, you do,” said Charles. “You're just being shrewd.”

“I wonder,” said Father, “if any of you have ever known what you're saying or if you're just freak-show chimpanzees dressed up like nigger minstrels.”

He seemed appeased somehow. Amused again as was his wont.

Charles picked up the narration. “‘Soooooo-preme delicacy,'” he orated in the mock-deep voice, “‘is called for in the task of giving these anarchists all the rope they can use. They are not children, and dealing with them is not, therefore, child's play.'”

Andrew and Alexander adored their little brother. Their high regard for his gifts, his obvious intellectual and artistic capacities and talents, his precocious social charm, often caused them to overlook or ignore their sister, Amelia, who had nothing, it seemed, but nervous beauty. Mother was strange, sometimes amusing but more often obscurely pointed, and not a moment-to-moment force in any case, not in their neck of the public woods, as she was almost always, these days, dealing with scholar-gangsters in rough old Naples. It was Father who troubled them the most: he had been an austere and humorless man in their early experience—possibly as a result of having been shot in the head, it had to be admitted!—though gentle, who seemed only to notice them when he prayed with them, if that was not a paradox, if those were not mutually exclusive duties, as they had seemed so clearly to them to be, at night before they went to bed. They had developed impersonations of everyone in the family, and the primary device in Father's characterization was to never quite look you in the eyes, or only occasionally, with frightening intensity—a nervous habit nobody else in the world had been forced to consider and interpret in parley with that candid, clear, genial man. It also made the impersonation seem quite wide of the mark to everybody but themselves, certainly not as hilariously apt
as the coquettish giggling and suddenly lunatic shrieking of their “Amelia” or their “Charles”: several firm hand shakings and in a girlish voice, “Good of you to say so.”

And they wished to speak to him, now, of Father, as they did with each other, because, they said, Charles appeared to have a sort of friendship with the man, a dangerous one, certainly, but of a strength they could only wonder at. They wanted Charles to advise them, to teach them how to talk to Father about baseball and football and hunting and fishing and the ranch up in Fall River Mills—all of which were central family enthusiasms either old or new, and which were regularly used as a means of not talking (or playing) law and politics but which seemed to have no life where Andrew and Alexander were concerned, at least not anymore. Alexander spoke of these subjects as what he believed to be the keys to an ominous but appealing new kind of relationship—ominous because something he couldn't understand or name depended on it; and Andrew in turn warned Charles that this forbidding but interesting man was nursing the pain of some terrible secret they could not even begin to guess at but which, if they were to look for precedent in their own lives, must revolve around . . . but Andrew faltered. He did not know what he meant. He could not say what it was that he did not know, other than that it was Father. As the beloved darling baby of the family, maybe Charles had some insight . . .?

His brothers had been born to govern the nation. They were intelligent, sympathetic, ambitious, principled, firm in their exclusions, biting in their ideas for reform, but generous in their humanity. Father loved them more than he could say. But he did try, and Charles said so.

“He seems to care,” Andrew tried again, “more for things that aren't political. For anything that isn't political. Now. Suddenly.”

Charles said nothing because he had nothing to say, and Andrew shrugged.

Alexander motioned to one of the serving women and asked for a horse and buggy to be put in motion so that he and Andrew could get to the wharves, a boat, and Berkeley.

Charles left for the theater, not wanting to miss the speech-making in the square promised for that afternoon.

Another marching band assembled under Charles's balcony. As soon as he saw them, so did the band across the park. They were visibly bestirred and instantly began sounding their horns. From below came horns answering in clear if hysterical defiance, ripping scales, barking arpeggios, or simply blaring and shrieking. But if at first it might have been taken as something like the unlooked-for acoustic property of some strange concert hall—an orchestra tuning up and its echo seeming to come from the lobby—it became, for Charles, something else altogether. It was not two sets of cacophony, separated by shouts and murmurs. It was a complicated heterophony, a single melody being varied constantly and simultaneously by voice of instrument, rhythm, pitch—and only apparently randomly.

Yes: he could hear a design. Designs. An infinite number of designs within the one.

Then noise died down and all he could hear was a hum of voices, a steady monotone. Then a trumpet directly beneath his feet played five notes: B-flat for three beats, a low C-sharp for a beat, up to E for a beat then up an octave to E-flat for two, finishing with three beats again at B-flat.

He leaned out over the little balcony, swiveled left and right: no trumpet in sight. Leaned even farther, so that his legs were up in the air and he was in danger of falling.

Across the park: the answering notes in perfect imitation, but as if from the center of the galaxy . . . .

It was an incredibly odd collection of notes. It made him think of Little Joe in the heavenly and hellish light.

He went inside, closed the French windows as upon a dream, and headed for the stairway, noting again the picture-like windows—which had not lost that quality of vivid immobility as the angle of the light changed and the sun began to flare on the ocean, and which now joined
the five notes and the brilliant white light—staring back at them as he took the first two steps down, misstepping and flailing out for the handrail, skidding two or three steps before he could catch himself in the deepening darkness of the well.