The Daredevils (33 page)

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 Leonardi . . .? 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.

“We've been taking drugs,” said one earnestly.

“Well, yeah!” said Vera. “But which ones?”

The woman who had looked earnest changed her look to bland and turned to her friend, for corroboration, Vera thought, or maybe just to see if she was still there. “We came across a bit of cocaine, and the boys took that, they're so excited they're boring, and we have been experimenting with opium dreaming for some time now.”

“I see,” said Vera. “Why aren't you dreaming?”

“Do you want to try it? Or don't you approve?”

“Oh, I have tried it, I have certainly tried it!”

“Are you addicted?” asked the second woman, who was staring at herself in the dirty, spotted mirror.

“Well, I don't know, I suppose I was, still am, in a way, on some level. I started . . . very young. It was given to me as part of a plan to keep me quiet. If I was crying too much, they'd slip me some laudanum and lock me in a closet. I don't know if you ladies are familiar with Iowa button mills or Connecticut thread mills . . .? They had discounts on bulk purchases in the company store—of laudanum, I mean. Folks would work their eighty hours, or sixty-eight if they'd just had a successful strike, limp home, and relax with ten or twenty drops of the stuff. Or they'd take it in the morning before work to relieve the tension
at
work. It was either that or run shrieking out of there. And if you dreamed, as you say, your way into a crushed limb or perforated organ, that was better than starving to death, which is what would happen if you shrieked and ran. Always better to dream yourself to death, we said
around the dinner table. That's the title of a chapter, by the way, in my forthcoming autobiography,
I Don't Know Why I'm Surprised.
When I was little, when my parents were still alive, we lived in Willimantic. I mean Muscatine. Poppa had been employed for several years as a—oh, never mind—and he went to pieces. Of course, with the new laws, the new drug laws—LAWS LAWS LAWS. GOD, AREN'T YOU SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF LAWS? Poor people now have to drink themselves to death. The opium was judged to be far too pleasant a way to die—
and
it cut into profitability. But I suppose I was high too, when Poppa went to pieces. I wandered about the town and eventually adopted a talking squirrel.”

They walked back to the long table. “Returning to the new drug laws,” said Vera. “The most recent figures indicate, um, say, what's wrong with your friend there?”

“She'll be all right,” said the first woman. “You were saying.”

“I was saying health and safety? Next person who talks to me about health and safety . . .! It's control that matters! Control and productivity and predictability. Whatever the problem is, the solution will always be to clamp down on the pleasures of poor people. You got some vast burner putting up clouds of coal smoke, you can't go out for a ride in the carriage without choking half to death, why, you just pass a bill that outlaws candles in the home! Any poor person caught using a candle will be hustled into jail. Health and safety, my eye. I don't know why I'm surprised.”

“Right . . .” said the first woman. Her friend giggled. “Carol Kennicott! Stop looking like that. Stop giggling! You're giving us the creeps!”

“Ditto that,” said Vera.

“I'm sorry,” giggled Carol. “It's just, you know, a speech like that, there in the ladies' room,” and here her giggling changed key, “as if it were possible to change anything at this late date!” She seemed now on the verge of hysteria. “I am afraid if I move, my face will stay the way it was painted on the mirror.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “But my mouth is moving and I can feel it moving, so all must be well.” She swiveled her eyes at her friend and Vera and Daisy, blinking at each in turn as if they were the mirror. “What we
ought to do is get as much opium as we can and go to Belgium. Or are they just in France now? If we ever came back, we could . . . we could
speak with legitimacy of the end of time.
We could be the final witnesses. Like the Black Death. Wander across fields of corpses, trees blooming with severed heads, somnambulists and magicians, metallic chattering of guns, bombs instead of thunder, children staring at clouds of poison gas and saying they see a ducky or a kitten, homes with no doors or windows or roofs but you walk in anyway, right? As if there were?” Vera nodded in such a way that Carol was forced to pause and consider herself for a while in the mirror of Vera's face. “You walk in and there's someone sitting there in the dark staring at a pot of water, they don't even say hello, generals writing their memoirs, but they can't come up with the right word because they are actually as stupid as the day is long, and, and you're right, poor people being battered to death for lighting a candle. I keep seeing these children, can you see them . . .? They're trying to play a game. They're standing in a circle, blood on the ground, smoke in the air, and they can't figure out what the rules are, or what the . . . what the . . . what the fuck the point is.”