To live within Christian ideals and be buoyed up by them, said Andrew, as you rule the world.
Standing on the little half-circle balcony outside the French doors of the tall and narrow jewel-box theater where, in just a little more than a day—tonight, tomorrow, then tomorrow night—he would sing with Mother the Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi before the most important men and women in the world-embracing world of San Francisco music, he thought: I am a clown and I am headed for catastrophe.
Because I want to be.
Because I am a daredevil!
If there was a chance for a man to be something other than a victim or a villain (he had heard this said in his own home, in the company not just of his illustrious family but a table brimming with important men and women, of somewhere, someplace where things were very bad, not the United States of America, someplace in old mad Europe, he could not have been more than seven), his only resort was to become an artist, or art itself if that was possible, or more like art than like life, away from the silly made-up conclusions that come, it was said, from close attention to, a thorough inspection of life, of reality, of truth. The trial is perjurious? The sky is blue: make it rain. Be a rainmaker in a time of nothing but blue skies. Charles came, young and innocent as he was, to these unpleasant opinions because Father was so adept in the law and politics, and because he insisted his skill was moral and that his morality was exclusive, and because he put a lot of pressure on his sons to attempt to become, one of them—why not?—the president of the United States, experimenting on them, sometimes overtly and explicitly, sometimes, he was sure, subconsciously, having Charles read a certain book that had been forbidden Alexander, Andrew, and of course Amelia, or meet a certain person—even going so far as to allow a life in the theater, a life, an apprenticeship to life of law and politics . . . singing and acting? It was hard to reconcile in a man who took the law and politics so seriously that he had not been deterred by being shot in the head. Charles, Father reasoned, needed to know how to improvise and project character, and how to make that character work for you, make you entertain and persuade. Or just exactly the opposite: forbidding him certain behaviors that got blinked at in his older brothers, so that he might know how to project no character whatsoever . . . experimenting on Charles, carefully, to be sure, with a sense that a great deal was at stake, but experimenting nevertheless. And that went for Mother too: rediscovery of lost Italian Baroque composers, commissioning a biography of Scarlatti père, authentic practices—and all of it coming down on Charles’s head with her revolutionary idea to use a boy whose voice had not yet broken instead of the lyric coloratura everyone else was settling for as the piece made its bid to break into the world’s repertory.
But here, here is what he honestly thought: people are not really all that interested in truth most of the time. They are interested in what makes them feel good, and this goes in high and mighty courts of law too. You define what makes you feel good as the truth, or as a truth, as something true, you assert it, you defend it, you try to win people over to your way of thinking, and finally you impose it. What the speaker on the platform was doing was bad theater—common theater.
And as if to confirm him in his magically superior thought, a man holding a placard identifying himself as a representative of the International Radical Club, stepped up to the podium. He was attended by another man holding the fallen flag, and they were gesturing comically to each other in the midst of the confusion, and generally people still seemed to be laughing. Everyone was laughing but Charles was uneasy: it was still just bad theater. This man he knew, a nutty professor in Berkeley who was possibly speaking in several different languages. And for it he was pelted with vegetables. Another man, holding a placard over his head that said LOCAL 151 OAKLAND, was big enough, and loud and angry enough, to make himself heard for a minute, but this clarity was met by the crowd with louder, articulate cries concerning the citizenship of the speaker. He said he was a citizen of the US of A, which meant, for starters, that he was free to stand up where he was and say what he’d come to say, admitting that his audience was free too, to heckle him. Then someone hidden from Charles’s view, but unmistakably using a bullhorn, said, “Free to be a goddamn coward, I guess!” As he leaned out and scanned the square looking for the bullhorn somewhere, perhaps under one of the young, dark, flashing trees up toward Filbert Street, Charles saw, where before had been one or two cops, there were six or seven now, and where before had been a single mounted policeman, just in sight up Union, there were more than he could count. Yes, everyone was laughing but something bad was going to happen. The new speaker had his arms over his head and was apparently shouting, judging the by the way his body swayed and snapped, but Charles could make out very little over the roar.
Then the bullhorn: “ARE YOU A CITIZEN?”
Speaker: “OH, PLEASE, WILL YOU SHUT THE HELL UP WITH THE CITIZEN NONSENSE NOW? WE HAVE HAD QUITE ENOUGH OF THAT!”
Bullhorn: “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?”
Speaker: “NO, I MOST CERTAINLY DO NOT!”
Bullhorn: “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, HOW DO YOU EXPECT YOUR TESTIMONY IN A COURT OF LAW TO BE BELIEVED?”
Speaker: “I EXPECT NO SUCH THING YOU GODDAMNED IDIOT!” He tried to continue, and went on for some time as the crowd grew more and more restive, more and more loud, more and more, it seemed, unhappy, describing anarchism, with great difficulty, as admittedly a destructive force, but destructive only of ignorance with knowledge, fear with compassion, despair with ideas—but this made little sense to either Charles or the crowd: Leon Czolgosz, for instance, had not destroyed ignorance with knowledge or any of that, choosing instead to destroy the president of the United States with a gun. What kind of anarchist Czolgosz was was just another analysis of the fluctuation of the plot: bad theater. Then he said the magic words, the fighting words: that anarchists fought capitalist pigs by practicing birth control, and warmongers, when war came, as it surely would, by refusing to fight. It was on its face reasonable enough, but perceived to be otherwise because the crowd’s list of anarchists who fought off despair, fear, and ignorance with murder was quite long: an anarchist—and this was true too—tried to poison three hundred people at a dinner honoring Archbishop Mundelein. An anarchist had stabbed King Umberto, ripped the eyes, ears, tongue, and fingers off the prime minister of Spain, and hung an empress of Austria by her female sexual part on a meat hook. So it was said. They cared not a jot for human life—not even their own! They would just as soon shoot you in the head as look at you, even if, perhaps especially if, you were a comrade. Read the right Russian and you would learn that they blew themselves up just to practice—or even for the fun of it. The speaker’s truth was real but meaningless and he should have known better. Refusing to fight? They were killing machines. Henry Clay Frick was no Christian statesman—Father went so far as to say he was a nauseating halfwit, dressed up as the crucially clever and ruthlessly capable Captain of Coal—but Alexander Berkman had not argued with him, he had hacked at him with a knife. People were really mostly upset by the poisoned food at the dinner for the archbishop. The erratic Andrew had tried to make a joke about Catholics but Father had shut him down with unprecedented anger, or unprecedented feigned anger. That had just happened and three hundred innocent people looking only for a good meal and a holy celebration had gotten sick, had vomited themselves nearly to death. Charles had been reading a story about San Francisco’s response to anarchism in one of the newspapers scattered on the table that morning. Both of his older brothers had been home, and the three young men had had a jolly breakfast:
“Authorities—” said Charles. He and Alexander were sitting together over the Examiner while Andrew stood bent over them. He had recently shaved off a thick dark-red moustache and looked now, Mother had said, like an egg. His naked upper lip seemed to reveal something unpleasant about his politically erratic personality.
“Who?” he asked, as if he had not heard well.
Father walked in.
“Authorities, Andrew,” said Father. “And that is