The Daredevils (28 page)

Charles traveled often that winter and was often delayed by snowfall, but never buried alive. Vera often traveled with him, sometimes on business of her own—she met regularly and frequently a speaker from the NPL named Daisy Gluek—sometimes not, and they went at each other vigorously on these trips, because sex was one of the only activities available to persons bound in suffering and drugged with visions of home, performing “the act” here, there, and everywhere, sometimes with mouths locked together, swallowing all sounds but a muffled hooting, other times crying out as if for salvation from a god neither believed in, Charles duck-walking with pants and long johns around his ankles, Vera climbing aboard as she might a train whistling its departure. They went for long, numbingly cold walks between blizzards that only seemed to refresh and invigorate them. They kissed each other's cold red cheeks and panted hot moist air into each other's mouth. Charles begged her to marry him, and she begged him to stop asking her.

He went mainly to bakeries and the offices of commercial fishing operations, some dairies and bars, as well, as the state had put several food programs in motion that were perceived to be vulnerable to abuse by one radical group or another. One called for licensed agents of the state to catch rough fish—carp, dogfish, redhorse, mooneye, suckers, sheepshead, etc.—that would be marketed at state stores with a profit margin of no more than 3 percent, which meant both a steady supply of fish for strapped consumers at about half the usual market price, and a steady profit for the
state—plowed, he believed and had tacitly confirmed, into the purchase of rifles and ammunition for a new “Home Guard.” Commercial fishermen felt pinched, however, and Charles's job was to interview them, to measure their level of hostility, and listen carefully for tips about what that hostility might drive them to do. Milk producers were presented with a fixed price per quart that they could charge Twin Cities wholesalers, and told they must lay open their books.

In the far north, where the temperature regularly dropped to thirty and even forty and once fifty below—“It's no colder tonight,” he was told in the town of Tower, “at the Arctic Circle than it is right here!”—he interviewed saloonkeepers: though the region, due to “county option” and various Indian treaties, was virtually saloon-free, enormous amounts of liquor were nevertheless being shipped in—ostensibly to individual consumers—via a loophole.

Vis-à-vis bread, the big millers were judged to be reasonable in their pricing, while small bakers were making out like Mexican banditos. These bakers protested while the millers clucked in feigned dismay. Charles interviewed bakers by the dozen. Many insisted the war effort was a hoax, but he winked and lifted the pen ostentatiously from his notebook for the length of these remarks.

And it was, in those moments, that he began to understand what he was doing.

He was heeding a secret, nascent impulse. He saw that he could act
cleanly,
without recourse to questions of personal prosperity. He saw that he could in effect trust himself, and that he should trust himself. He was not insane. He was not the aristocratic man of privilege gone nihilistic, not the practical Platonic republican driven into psychic exile by catastrophe and the emptiness of philosophy. Nor was he a man of peace, a soulful man: he was at war with the vastness of petty falsehood and needless suffering. He was no longer divided in himself, self against self, by fear and contempt of fear. He did not know how he had come to it, but come to it he had. He was not a radical, certainly not an anarchist, at least as its advocates described
it. He had no genuine interest in the rights of the workingman, in labor reform, in racial equality, in progressive politics.

Or did he? He took it back: he had an interest, but not a personal interest in those things. He had no agenda to advance, put it that way, no cause to espouse, no principle to maintain, no belief to kill or die for. He had no wish to make people repent and therefore had no desire to put bullets in their heads. He was perhaps an anarchist in the way that Vera possibly was an anarchist: that is to say,
she was not.
Not really. If she had ever called herself one he had not heard it. They were not divided in their selves: that he could say. They were not afraid: that too he could say.
No one is ruling? Then all are ruling.
And if all are ruling—if all are letting all rule—then that rule “speaks the truth” because there's no call for a deception; that rule is “just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, scornful of being scorned.” Oh yes, he had read Emerson, to be sure, but he had not come near an understanding of him: he seemed to think himself an idealist and immediately admit that idealists were especially subject to cant and pretension and lofty ineffectuality, that rather than having Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inhering in each other, Beauty was supreme. Charles had no interest in Beauty because, before Vera, it had seemed false. Father despised Emerson—despised New England, really, and everything it stood for—and so, he supposed, had he despised him as part of his intellectual inheritance. “Our virtue trips and totters!” He had said so himself! “It does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches to the zealot.” Like Plato it was always correct to praise or despise him, but something of a sin to understand him. Charles had come to want to understand these great men. And he came to understandings so quickly and surely that he was almost ashamed of his body, that thing that could be so quickly and easily replaced, so quickly and surely that he had to have been helped, by his strange friends, the daredevils.
I learned how to do a thing without a wish for reward or a fear of consequences.
It gave him enormous energy. He felt whole and uncomplicated. He felt he was part of an uncomplicated whole. He felt that
when conditions were sufficient for manifestation, he would manifest, and when they were not, he would not.
The universe had come together to make me.
It expected nothing of him but to be. He was free. And it was precisely when he found himself lifting the pen from his notebook and in effect winking at the baker who declared the war effort to be a hoax—a declaration that
I now knew was against the law, was seditious, and punishable by imprisonment if he was lucky and lynching if he was not
—that he knew he was free. He smiled inwardly to think that he was a hero. That he had found a way to become a hero. He could do whatever small task presented itself to be done: instead of calculating reward and consequence, he could lift his pen from his notebook. He cared one day, one hour, about nothing beyond seeing to it that the baker not be harassed and tortured. The next minute, hour, day, he would perform another brief act that might forestall cowardice and cruelty. That was all. It was so simple, so clear, so fine.

And he was able “to be in love” with Vera.

Which was not to say that he was free of his creamy blue-veined marble character, his personality of privilege and its habitual weaknesses, its routines of intellectual passion—the nearly impervious Charles Minot-ness that was inseparable from the dictates of his ceaselessly and excellently-trained brain and the receipt of constant confirmation from all those other brains around it—of the reality he had counter-trained himself to disavow for a decade. He was not free of the necessary falseness of reality, not free of the stage, but wished to be. He embodied this wish as “Vera.”

He found as well that he was becoming altogether welcoming of alcohol and narcotics and firearms—things that had never had lives of their own, things that had been present, certainly, but only unremarkably so, in a family whose patriarch was not only a Westerner, but one who had been shot twice representing law and order and nearly been blown to pieces in a natural disaster. He was susceptible to “thrills,” to “somnolence” or at least to the ideas of same, to inner thrills, if he could put it that way, and superhuman manifestations of same—thanks to Vera, who had her own frank but mysterious need of them in her drugged entanglements, and thanks to the
fact that someone had tried and nearly succeeded in blowing him, Father's boy, after all, to pieces in a political disaster—shredding, if truth be told, his nerves once and for all. Vera knew, had known for some time, long before she met Charles, how perilously close to sudden death she—everybody—was living. But that was remedial, not mysterious, a superficial explanation, not a need. When she talked about it, when she felt she could and wanted to talk about it, she could only speak of home and exile. The world is the dark and our home is the light. Evil wants to return to its home in the light just as much as good does. Good and evil was useless distinction, if not an altogether maliciously false one. Charles said she was a gnostic and that he wanted to learn the gnosis from her. Which of course made her laugh and cry and laugh and cry, and drink and fuck and take on a reckless attitude to work that could, at some point in one of a hundred projected futures, become dangerous. That
would.

But if there was nothing you could do about it, did you want to talk about it? Or not.

Vera struggled with what she quickly chose to call her “addiction”—though to what, precisely, could not be ascertained—far more desperately than Charles did—she had been at it longer, he supposed, but he was better at it because his nerves, he now saw so clearly, had been ruined when he was a child, and it made him weak and sick. Vera was not sick and weak or fragile, but she spoke more and more of a friend who had died in New York three years earlier, Rosemary, who was simply a fragile person, talking as if Rosemary had been a part of her that had suffered and died to allow Vera to suffer and live. It was a variation not at all lost on Charles of the understudy who had been onstage where Vera had been meant to be. Rosemary had a story about her father, who worked on a match factory, toiling over phosphorus fumes that had made his bones brittle: Rosemary said she saw her father step awkwardly from a curb, saw the twisted ankle break, saw her father falling and cracking to pieces, and it seemed to Vera more and
more likely every time she told the story. She had left Muscatine and buttons for Willimantic and thread, and a strike that was getting national attention. Body and soul were strung together with Willimantic thread and wrapped in smoke. It was possible Rosemary was some kind of otherworldly creature, a goddess, even, Vera didn't know. But she clung to her as the world wove the fabric of affliction ever more densely.

“We lived,” she told Charles, “in a worker's paradise. That was how I liked to put it, it made Rosemary laugh, and that was all there was to it. We were just teenaged girls, and we liked to laugh. We called ourselves ‘The Champions of Work' and we whistled a great deal. The owners were in fact kind and generous people, decent, intelligent people, and were famous for those qualities in all the mill towns of southern New England. They built an opera house in which works by all the greatest composers were performed: Verdi, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Ponchielli, Puccini, Giordano, Cilea, Catalani, Leoncavallo, Mascagni—oh, I could go on and on!”

“You will forgive me if I don't quite believe you.”

“I remember German and French names as well—tip of my tongue, can't quite get to them, though I am sure I will remember before I get to the end of this story. We never saw a performance, of course, but the owners made sure that singers with incredibly loud voices and insanely gorgeous clothing provided free concerts in the parts of the mill that weren't so noisy you couldn't hear even the loudest tenor wailing directly into your ear. Once there was a free concert by the lake in Coventry, on a Sunday. There were many, many people of Italian ancestry working in the mill (myself included) who could appreciate the lyrics just as they were sung, but we were proud of the diversity of our workforce: it's not much of an exaggeration to say that we came from the four corners of the earth. The owners, I know for a fact, subsidized the emigration of peoples from fourteen nations, including Syria, Borneo, and Patagonia. We enjoyed exotic foods, vibrant festivals celebrating ancient and obscure rites, and the glorious singing I have already
mentioned, the singing of songs that made the whistling we engaged in while working something entirely out of the ordinary. We sang, too, once I'd taught the words to her, seeing who could sing the loudest. She fancied herself Italian, and could have passed for Italian in all but the most rigorous of audits. Rosemary said she knew nothing of the circumstances of her birth. I could not imagine such a life. I could not believe it was true—but of course she was right: none of us can know. I was not at all sure but I think I envied her: all that trackless solitude where there was nothing for me but immensities of architecture. She did believe that the man and the woman with whom she lived in the earliest years in Willimantic were in fact her mother and father. The father had been employed for several years as a matchmaker, which meant that he worked unshielded over great tubs of white phosphorus, the fumes of which in that cramped and dirty, unventilated shop rose up and hung in the air like the ghosts of all the tyrants of history and prehistory, or like fallen angels from which even evil had been wasted, leaving only a radiant, naturally occurring poison. With his head in these clouds twelve hours a day and his hands in the tubs dipping and plucking thousands of little sticks, he began to come apart. At first made only nervous and irritable, he suffered headaches and losses of memory that he knew were so near and yet gone, she said, that they reduced him to weeping. Then he became simple and docile and yet somehow witty, full all of a sudden and for no reason with gems of wisdom. He spoke in a kind of singsong that often rhymed. As his brain became desiccated, so did his bones become brittle. His jaw rotted and his teeth fell out, and one day, waiting for the Sunday excursion train to Coventry where we planned to sit by the lake and listen to the lapping water and hopefully the opera stars too, holding Rosemary's little hand in his frail yet still warm and big own, he stepped off the curb, found the street further below than he'd imagined, and broke his ankle when he touched down. In a kind of chain reaction, the bones of his left leg broke, and when he swung himself wildly to the right, the bones of that foot and leg snapped also. He collapsed in a bloody, powdery heap, pelvis, backbone, and neck cracking in swift succession. Finally his poor skull shivered like an
egg-shell, leaving smiling face and cooling brain to rest softly on the cobbles of the street. Thus, at any rate, did my Rosemary narrate the tragedy, the tale of the matchmaker sick with phossy jaw who broke his leg stepping off the curb: many times and in many places, for many different reasons. She did not understand what had happened. Neither did I. She did not understand where her father had gone, nor why. Neither did I.”