The Daredevils (16 page)

“They will get the show they deserve, eh?” whispered the marquis, plumping his belly.

“We had better be good,” Charles whispered, his heart suddenly pounding.

“Yes,” agreed the marquis. “They will tar and feather us if we aren't.”

The curtain rose in voluminous, screeching jerks, and what had only seemed a polite silence was now terrifying condemnation. A man in the balcony cleared his throat.

Would the balcony collapse?

The footlights, which still ran on gas, snapped and quivered behind their mesh grating. The dandy chased the trollop, Noémie, around the stage. They scampered and minced in a way that made his heart sink. Noémie then stopped in her tracks and the dandy nearly collided with her: it was slapstick. It would be all right because slapstick was foolproof. She held up an imperious finger and said, “I declare that if you touch me, I'll paint you all over!”

And the audience, unaccountably, roared with laughter.

“What do you know,” whispered the marquis. He and Charles exchanged an incredulous but pleased look; the laughter was infectious.

He couldn't wait now to get onstage. The first scene was interminable and then there he was, striding languidly, confidently, handsomely, richly,
“the American,” into the limelight. He approached a painting around which Noémie coyly fluttered. He stared and stared for what in a theater seemed a very long time, a dangerously long time—but it was working, he could feel it and he liked it—and then he judged it. He pointed with his fabulous walking stick.

“That's just what I want to see!” he said with clear, carrying warmth.

The audience knew he was a man for whom people would wait, for whom
they
would wait. They wanted to wait for Christopher the American. They wanted to know what he thought and why he liked the painting so much. They wanted, in that strange and almost perverse turning of the table that sometimes happens in show business, his approval.

Charles's approval.

Noémie contrived to appear indifferent. “I think I've improved it,” she said of the painting, looking not at it, but at Charles. She could feel the audience's wish to participate in his world, and saw that she could bask in their love if she played her cards properly. She quietly let her admiration become apparent as he let a good deal more of his character appear.

“Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose you've improved it; but I don't know, I liked it better before it was quite so
good
! However, I guess I'll take it.”

He was neither, strictly speaking, himself nor Christopher Newman, and his agonized, neurotically observant introspection seemed vain and peculiar to him now, in that moment. He was acutely aware of employing himself to create the illusion of Christopher Newman, and confident that nothing could be more natural than to do so. “He” was a decent and amiable but shrewd and relentless man who'd made a fortune after the Civil War and who had come to Europe to spend some of it, a lot of it, “learning about beauty.” When the beauty turned out to be visible to him solely in the face of a young French widow, and he was confronted with the absurd strictures of the ancient families of the aristocracy—who were eager to bathe in the rivers of his cash but who could never allow him to marry one of their own—his quiet outrage and candid determination to have his reasonable but passionate way filled the theater. He loved the sad and lonely Claire
with all his great and open heart, and he would be damned if he could not make the world work the way he wanted it to work.

The one great thing took him in, amplified him a thousandfold, and sent him back to himself in wave after wave until at the end it all seemed to be crashing on the stage. They were already cheering and whistling and stamping before he could say his last lines: “Ah, my beloved!” and kiss Claire's hand, causing her to cry—she who had been so remote and resigned to despair for three solid hours—“You've done it, you've brought me back, you've vanquished me!”

Just before the curtain-closing kiss, he shouted, bellowed really, in his superb opera-quality tenor, as it was now quite hard to hear, “THAT'S JUST WHAT I WANTED TO SEE!”

The orchestra played a Sousa march throughout the rainstorm of applause, while the cast, bowing repeatedly and smiling broadly, waved little American flags. The only cloud of truth that passed between himself and the audience was his glimpse of Sir Edwin in the wings. Neither smiling nor frowning, seeming neither pleased nor relieved, he watched Charles demonstrate his gracious ease, his graceful courage, in Neverland—and of course Charles watched him. He had not the faintest throb of an erection:
dead dead dead.
An erection was, he had decided, the only sure indication he was alive. Millions of souls, swiftly and easily replaced, every time he came. So yes, he was troubled even as the packed house cheered and cheered and cheered him.

Around a lighted doorway on Filbert, halfway between Stockton and Grant, next to the motorcycle shop, he could make out ten or fifteen figures, people, no doubt, conversing unintelligibly and waiting for their turn to ascend a narrow flight of stairs. Those in the yellow light gestured to those in the shapeless dark. When he appeared, way was made for him, as it always was, and he climbed the stairs slowly. He reached the yellow lamp itself and perceived it as some kind of lamp in a fairy tale, with a life of its own and
a secret, or as a beacon very far away that only seemed near because of a trick of sorcery or atmospheric anomaly. A small group had formed around this light and in the open doorway. Talkers gestured carelessly with drinks as they worked elaborate rhetorical figures. He entered an apartment in which a common party or reception appeared to be taking place. Noisy and crowded, the room looked as if it had been shaken in the earthquake and neglected since. It appeared to tilt: the lines of the walls, floor, and ceiling seeming neither parallel nor perpendicular. Wallpaper, depicting various scenes from
The Odyssey,
hung in peeling strips from the walls, and the floorboards were warped and discolored. The place was less sturdy than a stage set, and less convincing. There were newspapers everywhere, scattered as if they'd been caught by a wind, stacked in sloping piles next to anything that might support them, rolled up in people's fists, spread open on tables.

Turning from the crowd to the wall and the bookshelves against it, he saw many volumes of Balzac, in French, bound in blue. He selected his favorite,
Le Père Goriot,
opened it, or rather let it fall open to a page upon which it had, clearly, many times before been opened, to where the cynical, worldly wise lodger Vautrin is exposed as a criminal mastermind. He read to himself, translating the French and remembering the English: “Vautrin was at last revealed complete: his past, his present, his future, his ruthless doctrines, his religion of hedonism . . . his Devil-may-care strength of character. The blood mounted in his cheeks and his eyes gleamed like a wildcat's. He sprang back with savage energy and let out a roar that drew shrieks of terror from the boarders.” Is Monsieur Vautrin here tonight? he wondered. Is the owner of this building some kind of Vautrin? Is there perhaps not a flaw of Vautrinism in all of our characters?

He picked up a newspaper to cover the swell of this attractive thought:
The Tremor,
one he'd never seen before. The masthead lettering was drawn as if it stood on shaky ground, little shivering lines suggesting vulnerability, uncertainty, and the front page featured a cartoon of a Pinkerton detective, a tiny but slope-browed and lantern-jawed head atop a huge, grossly muscled body spilling from a shapeless coat, drawn with a heavy but expert
hand in dark smears of charcoal. The caption read, “IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, FRAME 'EM.” He studied the monstrous detective and saw now a little round bomb, spitting sparks, tiny as the fellow's head, concealed in a meaty fist. Opening the paper, he glanced at one column, “The Fine Print,” and another, “A Fair Shake,” then shuffled and squared the pages, folded the paper neatly, and set it on the shelf next to the Balzac. A pleasant sense of peril overcame him, and he looked around the room with a mixture of furtiveness and mock-furtiveness: Were there in fact bombers here? Real bombers, dressed and speaking like ordinary citizens concerned about culture and the public weal? He remembered a breakfast table talk from a decade earlier: Father's insistence that ninety-eight known dynamiters in the Bay Area were going to be rounded up, whether they'd done anything or not, whether, he had asked with the sarcasm his father detested, they were dynamiters or not. Might the place be raided by “authorities”? Might there not be people here wearing serious disguises—that is to say, real disguises as opposed to the fake ones they used on the stage? Might not the ratio of disguised to undisguised people be excitingly large?

He thought for a moment of a painting Mother had bought when they were in Paris, an Ensor, a crowd scene in which the difference between a mask and a face was hard to see, as all seem caught up in some kind of knowledge giving way to terror.

The man nearest him, as tall but lighter both in weight and color, whom he thought he might have seen that strange day in the motorcycle shop below, when he'd come to unload his Merkel and the laughable Minerva, began to speak more loudly than he had been, to the man he was not quite hiding. “Dickens,” the man said, “and Dostoyevsky did not write books, they wrote newspapers! Why, a list of passengers sailing on the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
is more nearly a work of art than a novel by Thomas Hardy!”

He liked all three of the novelists named, and couldn't begin to understand the speaker's complaint. Neither could he begin to feel a duty to inquire and comprehend. He had no wish to be caught up in popular criticism, and looked away at a large poster just on the other side of the book-shelves.
“The I. W. W. is COMING!” it proclaimed across the top, while at the bottom demanding or suggesting that the observer “Join the ONE BIG UNION!” A handsome, young Wobbly, bare-chested and muscular, appeared to be climbing right up out of the picture and the smoking mills in its background, over a barricade and preparing to hurl himself into the room.

“No, give me Henry James when I want a novel.” The tall, fair man who disliked Hardy and Dostoevsky and Dickens had shifted his stance and was now openly looking at him. He glanced at the poster and again at Charles. “Looks like you!” he shouted with theatrical bonhomie, then resumed his jolly and opinionated conversation with the hidden man, who peered around his friend and smiled at Charles. “We also spoke of the meanings of strange words:
flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette,
and
rigolo.
I bought a naughty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV candlesticks. I had an omelet at the Café de la Regence, where the actors from the
Comedie Francaise
have lunch in their makeup!” The hidden man shifted his position and both men now looked at Charles, as if, it seemed, he were an actress in her makeup. He had surely seen the hidden man in the shop that day as well. The tall, fair man then shook his head at the hidden man, who said, “I am preoccupied with thoughts and images of death, most certainly. Let us find actresses.”

Another man, much shorter and skinnier, with fierce, sharp, tiny features, including a moustache of very few but longish hairs, and a shock of blond hair angling off his small head, had drawn up in their lee. A kindly looking, older woman held his arm. Charles recognized him after a hazy swarming pause in which his knowledge overwhelmed his ability to know he knew: Warren Farnsworth.

“Does look like you,” said Farnsworth. “But you're somebody else entirely, isn't
that
so?”

“It's true, yes, I'm afraid you're right,” Charles confessed suavely. “I am someone else entirely.”

“Do you,” Farnsworth asked suddenly, without preamble, but slowly and quietly, “think they will bomb the parade?”

“Parade?” asked Charles. “Pardon?”

“The Preparedness Day Parade?” Farnsworth seemed incredulous now, instantly annoyed.

“Oh yes,” Charles said, quickly and reassuringly, “Durwood Keogh's project.”

Farnsworth flared his nostrils at the mention of the playboy railroader, and breathed with difficulty for a moment. Then he worked out a way to smile at Charles again.

“Do you think they will?”

“Do I . . .?”

“Think they will bomb the fucking parade.” Farnsworth's smile had become exaggerated, his eyebrows wagging as if to say, you're very bright, but see if you can follow me now. He spoke in a quiet and friendly way. The woman, without weakening or exaggerating her features, shushed him.

“No, no, I—”

“You think they
won't,
is that right? That they
will not
?” Farnsworth probed with great care.

“No. I mean I don't know,” Charles said. “I mean I sure hope not.”

Farnsworth sighed. “I've been taking bets all month.” Suddenly but tenderly he had Charles's lapel between finger and thumb. “‘I hope not' doesn't qualify. Those days are gone. I was certainly a man who lived in hope! Do you read the papers? Because they're making threats. ‘We will bomb you warmongering bloodsuckers back to the Stone Age.' Is this the work of some inept or cowardly crackpot? Or one of us here tonight? Which is not to say there are no cowardly or inept crackpots here! But you see, you have all the elements in place now.”

Farnsworth waited for an answer.

“Yes,” Charles said. “I do?”

“Place your bet!”

“I'm sorry,” Charles pled. “Sounds like a great deal of fun but I'm afraid I can't.”

“STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!”

Startled, Charles nevertheless understood the command to be not directed at him, and he looked over his shoulder as—deciding at the last moment—a vaudevillian might.

“Come, come, Mr. Farnsworth, leave the gentleman alone now,” said the man, whom Charles recognized as “Owner.”