The Daredevils (36 page)

“There's very little,” said Gus, “that Chick doesn't know!”

“It's a little bit frightening, Gus, don't you think?” asked Tony.

“Indeed.”

“One's brother knows all.”

“Indeed.”

“Gus? Tony? I've had just about enough out of you,” said Amelia.

“Good of you to say so,” said Gus.

“Thanks for the tip,” said Tony.

“Gentlemen,” said Andrew. “You need to button up now.”

“Right you are.”

“Very good.”

“Something along the lines of . . . the deepest pain imaginable.”

“Yes.”

“And the certainty that that pain is, in fact, only imagined?”

“Yes.”

“But no less painful for being illusory?”

“Yes.”

“I am afraid,” said Amelia, “that I do not quite understand who or what are these goodly creatures of God that have been snatched away so straightly from you that you feel you must question the nature of reality. And not just your own philosophical reality, which would be fine if you kept it to yourself, but everyone else's too. People whose reality suits them just fine, most of the time. But which you feel you must meddle and tamper with, judge and rule over.”

“Sometimes,” said Pastor Tom, “we need to keep in mind the very things we want most to forget, the very things that sometimes seem to place our minds in actual peril. In this case of course I mean the public horrors that have hurt us all. The—”

“Yes, of course,” murmured Amelia, abashed and blushing. “I'm so sorry.”

“Not at all. Amelia is quite right,” said Charles, addressing the table grandly, “to make distinction between those we love and those who happen simply to be acting with us on the same stage, so to speak.”

“By all means, distinguish,” said Pastor Tom, “but not at the expense of—”

“I understand, Amelia,” interrupted Charles, “that you are being protective of your husband. He doesn't need it, though. I'm sure you know that, and am sure you are being protective simply out of the powerful love you bear him. He has one of the gentlest and strongest and most open and capacious minds I know. I admire it and place it next to Vera's.”

Vera and Pastor Tom exchanged good-natured rollings of the eyes that demonstrated how willing and how able they were to simultaneously keep in mind and dismiss from mind the public horrors.

“My own mind is strong but violent,” continued Charles. “It is open only via a conduit to a distant and strange place. I rule only upon the tiny stage I find there, which I also happen to believe is illusory, and therefore make only the most tentative of judgments.”

“You take the words right out of my mouth. I don't know why I'm surprised.”

“How are Mother and Father, Andy?”

“They're fine, fine. I've been speaking to Father a lot these days.”

“What about?”

“Oh, you know, this and that. Lots of things.”

“‘God's Funeral'?” asked Pastor Tom.

“Mmm,” nodded Andrew. “In our way, I suppose we do. That might be one end of the spectrum, and Charles's work here might be the other.”

“I do have a thought or two I'd like to share with you all,” said Pastor Tom, “seeing that I have you here like a congregation before me and have never been able to resist such an environment.”

“Hear! Hear!” said Gus.

“We are all ears!” said Tony.

“Incorrigible little rakes,” said Amelia, not unkindly.

“Rah-ther,” said Gus.

“If anyone sees a waiter,” said Tony, “I'd like a glass of wine.”

“You may not have wine,” said Amelia.

“Pray, why ever not?” asked Tony, agog.

“It is an extraordinary thing to say, Amelia,” said Gus, gently.

“I believe,” said Tony, “that I will have a glass of wine.”

“I second that. Motion carries,” said Gus, beaming.

“I'm laughing,” said Amelia. But she was not.

“I too am amused,” said Pastor Tom, and he appeared genuinely to be so.

“That doesn't mean I approve,” continued Amelia.

“What does it mean, Amelia?” asked Tony.

“Laughing, he means,” said Gus helpfully. “Not just yours, but laughing, anybody's laughing, at you or with you. What's it all about, Amelia?”

There was a significantly long and table-wide pause both of speech and of movement. After this pause, it seemed everyone was looking at Amelia, whose head was still slightly bowed.

“I don't know,” she said simply.

“Now,” said Andrew somewhat wanly, “if we could just get Chick to admit he doesn't know something, we'd really be in business.”

Pastor Tom cleared his throat. It was hard to say if he was trying for comedy or truly needed, in the wake of rising and falling emotion, to clear his throat.

“
In re
Thomas Hardy, ‘God's Funeral,' godless anarchism . . . .”

“Do go on,” said Tony.

“Shut the fuck up, Tony,” said Charles.

Another significant silence ensued.

“Well!” exclaimed Amelia. “Charles is at least at a loss for words!”

“‘Shut the fuck up, Tony.'”

“Gus is only repeating what he thinks he heard because he honestly can't believe what he thinks he heard,” said Tony.

“‘Shut the fuck up, Tony,'” Gus repeated.

Pastor Tom sighed with pointedly rueful recognition of the ungovernable nature of the boys' hilarity.

“You know what?” asked Charles. “I still don't have a sense of humor so your routines are lost on me.”

This reproof seemed to actually dampen their spirits. There was, however, a subtle but unmistakable suggestion of two vaudevillians failing to impress an agent. It was most visible in the looks Gus and Tony shot everybody, craning their necks left and right, up and down the table, including the neutrally masked Charles. No one looked the least willing to play along, but only Andrew's disapproval—
apparent disapproval,
they encouraged themselves—truly troubled them: he had after all been their master in these intrafamilial coups de theatre.

“Vera,” said Pastor Tom, “perhaps you will help me understand this.”

“Of course, I'm more than willing,” said Vera. “Able is another question.”

“It seems to me that it is only an image of God that has died. A conception of a practical God, if you will.”

“I will.”

“A sort of everyday, working God.”

“I understand you, but I'm not sure I agree with you.”

“Very few of the people who are mourning God believe we are bereft in an absolutely materialist universe. Do they?”

“I'm sure I don't know. My guess, however, is that very few do
not
.”

“I see.”

“Perhaps we are overreacting.”

“Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

“Tom!” laughed Amelia, incredulous but amused.

Gus, Tony, and Andrew laughed. Vera let a snicker escape.

“The God that is being mourned in the poem,” Pastor Tom continued, smiling, “is an image we have thrown up, as with a magic lantern—”

“Or movie projector,” said Gus.

“Zoopraxiscope,” offered Tony.

“—lantern, yes, thank you, gentlemen, like a movie projector on a big white screen of our human fears and desires. It is purely human. It is not God at all.”

“What then is God?”

“The manlike shape that is dead is as Mr. Hardy so beautifully says, ‘the junk and treasure of an ancient creed.'”

“Beautifully said indeed. But what then is God if not the junk and treasure of an ancient creed, and, moreover, the cause of endless hatred and war?”

“The spirit of loving-kindness that both constitutes and animates the universe, that makes the music of the spheres so achingly beautiful.”

“Perhaps. But religion, its time is up. I'm quoting an anarchist. Misquoting.”

“Religion? Or politics wearing religious robes.”

“Hard to tell the difference between a politician wearing priestly robes and a priest wearing a suit and tie.”

“Only if you are looking at their clothes and not listening to what they say, watching what they do.”

“No god, no dogma. That is my ancient creed.”

“You anticipate me: your ancient creed denying the existence of God and abjuring the consequently baseless dogma of belief in that God sounds . . . religiously dogmatic. Surely you see that . . .?”

“Hmmm, yes. But it's a slogan, rather, a rallying cry, not dogma. And my belief, if that's what it is, and I'm not admitting it is, is not religious in nature. It's practical.”

“Ah, but there's nothing more essentially practical than the religious urge!”

“Hmmm, yes, I'm afraid I don't see it. It seems essentially impractical, rather?”

“What could be more practical than finding a path, a method, an idea, that takes you away from existential misery and toward peace that passes all understanding?”

“Well, that's just it, isn't it? That's what ‘we' both want. And yet I see your way as essentially impractical and you see mine as . . . essentially superficial?”

“Not at all.”

“How do you see my way?”

“If your way is toward social justice, I see it, for starters, as wholly admirable.”

“Thank you, I appreciate your open-mindedness.”

“My way is toward social justice as well.”

“Perhaps you can describe that way . . .?”

“It is a Christian way. It is the Christian way. I most emphatically do not say that the Christian way is the only way toward social justice, or that only the Christian possesses the desire and tools for work along that way, but I do say it is essentially Christian to work for social justice. I profess a social gospel. You may have heard of our movement.”

“Yes, I believe I have.”

“Have you spent any time exploring it?”

“Frankly, no. I don't trust it. I trust you, Pastor Ruggles!”

“Please call me Tom.”

“I trust you, Tom! But I'm not sure I—”

“Let me put it to you this way, if I may?”

“Tom! Are you asking an anarchist for permission?”

Vera and Tom laughed. Amelia frowned.

“It's not so much a question, Miss . . . I don't know your last name, pardon me—”

“Vera. Call me Vera, please.”

“First-name basis with an anarchist! What a world!”

“Think nothing of it.”

“Oh, but I can't help it!”

“In a world where no one rules, first names are—”

“One can only imagine: one big happy family! The observation I'd like to make—if I may?”

Everybody but Charles laughed. Because she very often failed in her attempts to make people laugh—failed so often and so completely that most people never suspected attempts had been made—Amelia was more than pleased that everybody around the table was laughing. She noted Charles's abstention, which troubled but did not tumble her, and smiled and chuckled as she finished what she had set out to say.

“However we may wish to define anarchism—”

“We're going to stop laughing now, Amelia,” said Gus.

“Good show, old girl,” said Tony.

Amelia continued to smile and faintly snicker.

“However we may wish to define anarchism, it has already been rather thoroughly defined in at least the popular mind—and effectively so in the governmental mind: murderous criminals. A friend of our father's was shot but by the grace of God not killed: the former president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Oh, for goodness' sake, Schrank was insane, not an anarchist.”

“And because attempts have been made on the life of our father, as well, by lawless criminals who were not
nominally
anarchists either, we, who
may know better, often decline to make the proper distinction. It strikes us that murder is wrong no matter what the circumstances, no matter how strongly and persuasively they may seem to mitigate against outright and final condemnation.”

“You are opposed to the death penalty and to war, then, as I am, as we anarchists are.”

“I shouldn't speak for Tom, but I am both opposed to the death penalty and to war, and reconciled to their existence in this life of nearly ceaseless suffering.”

“For what it's worth, I am opposed to murder. There is nothing at all in anarchism that calls for it—precisely the opposite. Anyone who claims murder is a necessary means to an end is a very sad, mad, bad person, in my estimation. As for reconciliation with various forms of sanctioned murder, to the suffering you rightly characterize as ceaseless, I am less able, or perhaps less willing, than you are, to do so. That goes, interestingly, for Charles, as well: his theory of theater called out for what I saw as a truly bizarre kind of reconciliation with what he saw as a profound illusion.”

“Fascinating,” said Charles, “and repellant, yes. I don't see the reconciliation as bizarre—the illusion, rather—but that's . . . well, that's quibbling.”

“Quibble on, old chap!” cried Gus.

“By all means. Don't let us stop you!” cheered Tony.

“Speaking of fascinating and repellant!” said Andrew. “I've got new nicknames for you village idiots!”

“Oh dear,” said Gus. “Which one of us is repellant?”

“We are a one-two punch, old brother of mine, and you are usually the lead, which means you repel, while I finish them off in dazed confusion.”

“Charles is going to tell us to shut the fuck up again.”

“Well, he had better not.”

Charles said nothing and refused to smile.

“The naughty words are really not funny,” said Pastor Tom.

“Tom sits on the president's Ecumenical Council,” said Amelia.

“I'm not sure,” said Pastor Tom, “that that means anything to anybody, much less to Vera.”