The Daredevils (12 page)

“And the shows must go on.”

“That's what they tell me. Even if the theater is burned to the ground.”

“The Savoy is a beautiful building. We were relieved to hear the damage was not great and that repair will go quickly.”

“Yes. We found the money pretty easily too. Mother finds the money. She used to sing, but she prefers now just to find the money. The insurers feel now that the fire was not caused by a firework launched by, they think, some trolley drivers who were celebrating something about San Francisco's role in the war that one of the city commissioners said, or promised, or promised to say at some point in the near future. Or didn't say. Promised not to say.”

“
Not
caused,” Owner repeated.

“That's right: not caused. I'm not sure about any of the details. I should be, but I'm not. But it was late at night, after that . . . anarchist picnic . . . .”

Everyone in the room was suddenly uneasy. The results of the investigation had not yet been made public. Charles had forgotten that. This would be news to them: that they, or their friends, had done it. If in fact these men were actually anarchists. It was a leap, but they had the look and feel and sound of, well . . . anarchists, did they not? Which meant that it was to be understood as a blow against, Charles supposed, the aristocracy, or perhaps the aristocracy specifically involved in what was perceived as a patriotic theatrical production of a play called
The American.
The aristocracy specifically known as “the Minots.” Known more specifically in that room as “Charles Minot.” Father's adventures in the punishment of graft and his hatred of URR were, the thinking was evidently to go, not good enough for the anarchists. Whatever Father may think, may wish and yearn to believe about his progressive Christian politics, it was too little too late: you get your ass ripped apart like all the rest of the rich people.

It was as preposterous a lie as they'd heard yet in the city, but still it gave them pause and made the room, the shop, the big happy family with its radical character actors ranged up along the mezzanine rail and its colorful young Italian criminals, all terribly quiet.

Charles thought what silenced them was the shadow of lies to come falling over their stage. His stage, their stage, everybody's stage. The little old stage set about to come apart, once again, at the seams.

“And what is the name of the first show that must go on?” It was Owner's shop and he would conduct them through a reasonable conversation that eased their vague fears.

“
The American
,” said Charles.

“Sounds patriotic!”

“Well, yes, it is and it isn't. You see . . . Vera, I think, could tell you—”

“Fits the mood of the city, certainly.”

“Yes, that is certainly so.”

“Henry James's
The American
? Or some other sort of American.”

“Henry James, right. Adapted it himself, I understand, from his novel.”

“He's dead, you know.”

“No, I did not know that.”

“Couple of months ago.”

“I see, I see. That's, well, that's . . . too bad. I'm sorry to hear it. Did you, do you, like his novels . . .?” Charles couldn't believe he was discussing literature with a daredevil, but pressed on, making a note to ask Sir Edwin if he knew about “his friend” James's death. He was sure he did not, and would extol it as the man's supreme fiction.

“Yes, I do,” said Owner judiciously. “And I don't care who knows it. Once I learned to read I didn't care how complicated things got. I think I've gotten to where I prefer them complicated. Simplicity is some kind of snake oil. Simplicity is, you know, like the story of the little theater that wasn't damaged in a fire set off by an errant firework but by evil men who are not like us and who hate us and who hold human life in utter contempt. You?”

Somehow he knew he was back to the novels and stories of Henry James. “Yes. I think I've read most if not all of the New York edition.”

“And your theater is physically viable, is that right? Structurally sound?”

“Yes, that's right, and we hope to open very nearly on schedule,” said Charles with once-again-regained composure and authority. “
The American
is in terrific shape, August Strindberg's
Spook Sonata
is very difficult—do you know Strindberg? He was given an anti-Nobel a few years ago, just before he died.”

There was some clapping, whether in honor of the inventor of dynamite or of Strindberg it was hard to say.

“Difficult—” Charles began to say but could not repress the laughter that was going around the room, a strong suggestion that it was the inventor of dynamite who had been applauded, “—difficult I say to work on but very exciting, and
Romeo and Juliet,
well . . .
there are a lot of lines to be memorized there,
of course, but we think we'll be ready with what our artist in residence calls a dream of the future.”

“
Romeo and Juliet
as a dream . . .?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of the future.”

“Yes, sir. That's the phrase that keeps coming up in our . . . our talks. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt and Mercutio and the rest of them, are not causes for sadness and grief and weeping.”

“No?” Owner was amused but deferential.

“They are sacrifices in a glorious cause.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. They are . . .
hastening
the downfall of the corrupt . . .
forms
. . . of their fathers. Their poisonous ways and decadent tyrannies. When they are together and in love, they are actually . . . in the, uh . . . in the future. You can tell it's the future because the lighting is different and we speak differently. The violence all takes place in the present. We use it as a kind of way to rend the fabric . . .” and here Charles faltered. He was tired of this faltering and could not understand it.
Sooner walk into a burning room than subject oneself to the judgment of strangers who act like they know you.

The hidden Vera once again saw the icy clown just beneath his handsome features, the ironic lout just beneath his goodwill.

“Yes?”

“Of time.”

“Probably a little too sophisticated for me.”

Charles took a good breath and recovered himself. “I'm not sure that that is the word for it. Sir Edwin is a visionary and freely accepts ridicule on that count. There's a good deal of entertaining sword fighting, in any case, and poetry.”

“‘Sir' Edwin?” asked Owner.

“Yes. An English knight.” Charles chuckled falsely, grinning, to make up for it, with even greater falsity around the room. Because it sounded like an exit line in a scene that left the audience roaring with laughter, Charles decided to make for the big open doorway, at that moment a great archway of light.

“You'll leave the Merkel with us, then?”

“Yes, and the Minerva!” Charles shouted, stunned that he'd forgotten why he'd come. He took a few uncertain steps back into the gloom. “Tell Vera I—”

“MINERVA?” shouted Owl. “WHAT THE FUCK IS A MINERVA?”

“Belgian make. Minerva. 1902.”

“What's the kid talkin' about?” Jitney asked Owl.

“HE WANTS TO SELL US A BELGIAN WAFFLE! YOU HUNGRY?”

“No interest in the Minerva, Mr. Minot,” said Owner. “You have to shut the engine off to change gears.”

Charles stopped then and turned and held up his hand as if he were departing a group of able and courageous men with whom he had accomplished something of sentimental as well as practical value. “THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE OF VALUE TO A COLLECTOR,” he fairly bellowed.

“NO COLLECTORS HERE, KID! ONLY DAREDEVILS!” Owl bellowed back.

“THANK YOU! THANK YOU ALL! YOU'VE BEEN A TERRIFIC AUDIENCE! PLEASE BE SO GOOD AS TO CONVEY MY GREETINGS TO VERA!”

“VERA WHO?” Owl redoubled his bellow.

The laughter in the shop continued until Charles was quite a long way down the sidewalk and out of earshot.

Vera watched all this from the other side of the curtain, holding it closed and revealing only the unnaturally white oval of her face, wanting only to play a game, hoping Charles would overcome his politeness and a profound and certain confusion and come running down the aisle again to find her. Yes: she wished it was a game. But if it was a game, what kind of game was it? Who would win and who would lose and, in the end, would they know why they had played? Her salon—at what passed for one without the structure and animation of money, at her
salon des pauvres
, somebody had nicknamed it and which had stuck,
le Salon Romantique et Revolutionnaire
, she preferred to call it, with pride that was maybe a little defensive, a little guilt-ridden as she had always wanted to be part of a smart set and had just begun to learn French—there, yes, they knew all about it: Henry James would be taken at
his word and escorted quite a bit further down the road, where his American would become not the fresh air in the moldy museum of Old World aristocratic privilege, bright and kind, resourceful and determined, but a ruthless destroyer of the weak, the sick, the ridiculous.
Romeo and Juliet
would be a savage and bloody fairy tale about utopia. Watching
The Spook Sonata
would be like taking a powerful narcotic that would set free the enslaved minds of its audience. They had heard these ideas proposed and articulated, and debated them with learned pleasure, like doctors in the amphitheater of a surgery. They were anarchists, so of course they were interested in all new theories of disease and cure, in plans for the real abolition of slavery, an understanding of true weakness, for the demolition of palaces and the deaths of tyrants. Still, she was uneasy. There was so much
authority
and
obedience to authority
in even the most charming and reckless of these speeches, so much
discipline
and
sacrifice
in even the daffiest of these aesthetics, that unspeakable atrocity seemed right around the corner. Petty despots would race up and down the high roads and the low roads like insane tinkers who'd wrested magical weapons from stupid sorcerers, or mountebanks playing the shell game and killing everybody who happened to win. Killing and killing and killing because even the rigged game could not be counted on, you had to kill them all, winners and losers alike, until you finally were killed yourself. No, she did not subscribe to endless killing. Therefore (she had to admit, because the continuity was as clear as day) she could not subscribe to the beginning of killing, either. She said as much to herself—later, of course, but not much later, to Charles—with a kind of gentle but false patience, knowing that she could scream and slap and break things that need not have been broken, and was, in her dreams, too often violent—even with loved ones, it troubled her to note morning after morning—hysterically and remorselessly merciless in her sleeping hatreds and vengeance.

As Charles made his ridiculous departure that day, he saw, thought he saw, Vera push her face through the greasy red drapery and then withdraw it. Perhaps he had seen it in the corner of his eye—the sudden absence. He could feel her every moment across all time and space, no? He was in love
with her, no? Love was not thinking about love, it was not about lolling about in feelings of love, it was apprehending the movements of the loved one across all time and space.

She knew more than a little about Charles, and about his family—not simply because she was the hostess of a salon and a terminal of radical gossip but because they were a family about whom things necessarily were known. The desire of the people of San Francisco to have knowledge of the Minots was somehow virtuous—because they were in so many easily demonstrable ways so admirable and so detestable. And the release of knowledge from the family, too, seemed virtuous: We belong to our city, they seemed to admit and proclaim at the same time, to our state, to our country, our God. Playing dumb, sometimes just for the derisive fun of it, sometimes to draw out an unsuspecting and perhaps valuable speaker, was something she did frequently and too easily; she disliked the occasional arrogant nastiness and fundamental lawyer-like deception of it but also could not help but be fascinated by the newly visible person she saw, or thought she saw, blinking uncertainly but hopefully, where the opaque and therefore hostile stranger had been standing. This was especially the case, it turned out, with Charles, whom she was afraid she was prepared to like, despite his wealth, because he was admirable—and because, she was also afraid, he had a target painted on his back.

Taking his feelings as genuine, primary, and direct responses to recent, incontrovertible acts, and noting that all action was incontrovertible and therefore worthy of the most intensely rigorous scrutiny, Charles decided to invite Vera out for an afternoon at the Sutro Baths, on the ocean side of the peninsula. This was an extravagance of engineering in which seven tanks were flushed and filled daily by the tide, several of them heated for the purposes of relaxation, one filled with fresh water: two acres of swimming, diving, and bathing pools within a luminous structure—even on the bleakest and grayest of days—of glass and black iron that could accommodate fifty thousand swimming, eating, drinking, smoking, waltzing, and promenading people.

Vera said that she was familiar with the place: her friends had taken her there after a particular grim and grimy year.

They had taken the lift down from the sidewalk and were staring into the gloom of the basement beneath the motorcycle shop. After a moment Vera stepped across the threshold of metal and cement and motioned for Charles to follow as she opened a door and made her way through a damp dripping space redolent of burnt oil and mildew and gasoline, navigating almost purely by memory between piles of junk and frames of motorcycles like skeletons and disassembled engines with parts spread around them on greasy cloths, all shapeless masses shifting in the dark, until she came to a second door, on which she used a key, selected in darkness and fitted to its lock as surely as if it had been broad daylight. She entered the room and with a long, measured sigh, lit an oil lamp.