He held a novelty handkerchief—red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, mandated by his board for publicity purposes—to his nose and mouth, and bent low as he could, bringing his knees nearly to his still falsely bearded chin, and walked up the front stairway to the second-floor lobby. The haze either stung and filmed his eyes and distorted his perception of the red-carpeted, red-wallpapered stairway, making it look narrower and steeper and higher than it was; or was he perhaps simply light-headed from the smoke . . .? This may be the beginning of my death, he thought. Will I know? Each second growing more and more certain until the final moment when the smoke is gone and my head is cool and there is a flash of clear light and I know that the sham is over and that I am, how do we say, dead? The lobby was like a mountaintop cave, a small dark mouth opening in the swirling mist. There was no trace of a wise man—he was all alone and could hear the building whispering, moaning, shouting restlessly to itself. It did not wish to die, and yet was willing to burn. Sir Edwin’s aesthetic love of destruction, of collapse and immolation, did not extend, it appeared, to those things of his own which he wished to preserve. He had begun to ask Charles in a normal tone of voice, manly but urgent, one understood, one knew, brooking no bullshit, straight to the point, if Charles might consider dashing in and retrieving a few valuable bits and pieces of theatrical memorabilia—but he hadn’t been able to maintain the tone. He lost control of his voice and his face and his hands at the same moment: he squeaked and shrieked and shook like a leaf. Charles couldn’t look at him and turned away in disgust. His prize possessions amounted to museum pieces indicating the aesthetic ancestors of what Sir Edwin called “The Free Theater” but which everyone else referred to now as “the Minot”: a portrait in oil of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen; a spotted and torn photograph of the Meininger Players assembled on a tiny picture-frame stage somewhere in the heart of Thuringia or Saxony; another, blurry and desiccated, of those same players either lying facedown on a mattress or huddled over it as if about to pounce on it, grinning melodramatically (the use of the mattress to muffle offstage “crowd noise” was legendary in the birth of “stage realism”); more photographs of Andre Antoine and his Théâtre Libre, and the famous “missing fourth wall” stage set put together with junk lumber and cast-off furniture; wood-cut prints of Sir Edwin’s fantastic, eerie set design for the Moscow Art Theater’s Hamlet. Charles yanked paintings and photographs down from the walls, wrapped them in a tablecloth, then smartly rapped a display case, breaking its glass. He thought he could stay in the burning room forever: this was how things were. Nothing could have made him happier, more deeply content. But he balanced two miniature stage sets on top of the bundle of pictures and autograph letters, stuffed two small sculptures under his arms, and made his way back down the stairs. They had become something like the face of a cliff, and he walked perpendicularly to it, defying gravity. Then he was in the main lobby and he could hear crackling and crashing and the firemen shouting inside the theater. Then different shouts and cannonading bursts of water. Outside on the street, Sir Edwin had gotten hold of himself and lit a cigar. Drawing voluptuously on it, he stared at Charles with a strange, almost mocking, superior gratitude. Both men were slick with soot-black sweat, sticky with blood from small wounds. Edwin seemed satisfied with the show of destruction and manly staving off of destruction, now that it was all over—even pleased. He spoke with fatuously coy irony of a dream to use the sounds of the firefight, from gush of water to shriek of fear, from splatter of horse dung to clatter of shoes on cobblestones, in place of the small orchestra: “That,” he insisted, “was the music of the future.” Firemen trudged past alternately muttering and braying with victorious exhaustion. Charles and Sir Edwin could hear hot wood sizzling and steaming above them in the black building, and smell the wet ash, the burnt spores and flowers of mold. Charles was nauseated by the ridiculously sweet smoke of Sir Edwin’s cigar, and disgusted with his reinvigorated incoherence and perversity, but they were walking now and had passed into a livelier block, full of restaurants and saloons, people with stuffed bellies and laughing mouths, and Charles surrendered to a fleeting vision of his master’s alcoholically perceived but immutable truth. Something “great” might be revealed if he did something “real” on the stage. Let it happen to me, he thought, seeing in his mind the crackling flames in the lobby, as you say it will. Then someone came running after them to tell them that a little boy, one of the plumber’s sons, no doubt, had been found under the chandelier.
Father and Mother returned safely from Iceland, revealing that there had been as well a detour to the Svalbard Archipelago, on Norway’s arctic coast, with a Boston coal baron named Longyear. Andrew and Alexander came from Sacramento for a short visit to welcome them home, and they were joined a day later by Amelia and the Reverend Ruggles, who had been attending a meeting of President Wilson’s Ecumenical Council. Because Charles no longer lived at the family home, and had not seen anybody in his family for quite some time, he wore the false auburn beard when he came for dinner. Neither Father nor older brothers nor Tom Ruggles, seemed to notice. Amelia pretended not to, and Mother merely watched him, as was now her wont, closely but neutrally. Only the younger brothers, Gus and Tony, saw it for what it was. They laughed hysterically but quietly between themselves, and would not reveal the source of their amusement. The men discussed the trip to Iceland, and Charles pretended to be surprised, even a little ashamed of himself, when he appeared finally to understand that the purpose of the trip had not been sport fishing, that the reference to the tying of flies had been ironic, and that the facilitation and encouragement of negotiations for control of Iceland’s commercial fisheries had been the real activity, along with the study of general opportunities for people with ships, which were carrying mutton and stockfish to Belgium and France, where normal husbandry had been interrupted by the sudden deaths of millions of young men. Iceland was Danish, Father said—as Danish as Mother, whose great-grandparents on her mother’s side had been born, lived, and died in that country—but was seeking its independence. Denmark had, during various decades of the last few centuries, been desirous of, even desperate for, buyers of Iceland, but independence had never entered into it. Now it appeared that the United States might one day not too far in the future consider purchasing the country. That was the kind of place America was now. Just as a rich man might buy himself an island and declare himself king of it, a rich country could buy a poor one and run it like any other business. And while the Icelanders, Father admitted, were experiencing a desire for nationalism that was moving and gratifying to witness, and while they were justly proud of operating the world’s oldest parliamentary republic and causing a society to subsist in which neither a ruling clergy nor aristocracy could find handholds—he wanted very much, and he said this twice, wanted very much for Iceland to understand, yes, first and foremost to understand and then naturally to accept, America’s influence, and, not coincidentally, to prosper as they had never done before. Not ever, he repeated coolly. They had demonstrated perfectly well that the end of communal anarchism—and Charles particularly should understand the term was being used advisedly but pointedly—was poverty. Grinding, centuries-long famine and misery. They take their fish from open rowboats, he said, and so can spend no more than a day at a time on the water, and shallow water at that. Which does not prevent them from drowning at an appalling, not to say incredibly unprofitable, rate. One hundred sixty-five men had been drowned in a single day—which was not only a terrible tragedy but a significant percentage of the country’s male population. Decked ships from England had been fishing Iceland’s waters for centuries,