“Certainly that is possible, sir.”
“Authorities have identified ninety-eight persons in the Bay Area alone known to be dynamiters. They are going to come down hard on these ninety-eight persons. Whether, Andrew, they do anything or not.”
“Whether, I suppose, they are actually even dynamiters or not,” said Andrew, his conversational tone now pointed and irritating.
“That’s right, you goddamned sarcastic know-it-all.”
Alexander and Charles looked up from their newspaper, and Alexander coughed. Andrew laughed, and then Charles laughed too. Because he liked and admired his brother.
“Chick,” said Alexander. “Look here. What Father really wants to say to you—at least what I want to tell you and what I think Father will tell you as well—”
Charles was trying for a deep man’s voice: “‘Top-secret and high-level actions on the part of government authorities—’”
“What?” giggled Andrew, helplessly. “Who? What?”
“‘Authorities!’” hollered Charles. “‘Authorities! And private crime specialists are at work in the city disentangling the local strands of the gigantic web of anarchist plots to uh, to uh . . .’”
He was running out of steam over the grandiosity and the ridiculous words, and losing the sense of the article. Alexander peered closely, then yanked the paper from his brother’s hands and assumed a high-pitched society lady’s wail: “‘Assassinate, to assassinate John Pierpont Morgan and other money and um, and um . . .’”
Andrew leaned over Charles’s shoulder and pretended to sound out munitions.
“‘Money and moo-nit-ions barons,’” Charles continued, “‘of America. The heads of these plots are Germans. The German anarchist has the shrewd, ever-, um, ever-, uh . . .’” He moved his lips but said nothing, waiting for Father to stop imploring the ceiling and come back over to them. “‘Anticipating,’” he said. “‘Shrewd and ever-anticipating.’”
“What does it mean, Al?” asked Charles.
“I don’t know,” said Alexander.
“Yes, you do,” said Charles. “You’re just being shrewd.”
“I wonder,” said Father, “if any of you have ever known what you’re saying or if you’re just freak-show chimpanzees dressed up like nigger minstrels.”
He seemed appeased somehow. Amused again as was his wont.
Charles picked up the narration. “‘Soooooo-preme delicacy,’” he orated in the mock-deep voice, “‘is called for in the task of giving these anarchists all the rope they can use. They are not children, and dealing with them is not, therefore, child’s play.’”
Andrew and Alexander adored their little brother. Their high regard for his gifts, his obvious intellectual and artistic capacities and talents, his precocious social charm, often caused them to overlook or ignore their sister, Amelia, who had nothing, it seemed, but nervous beauty. Mother was strange, sometimes amusing but more often obscurely pointed, and not a moment-to-moment force in any case, not in their neck of the public woods, as she was almost always, these days, dealing with scholar-gangsters in rough old Naples. It was Father who troubled them the most: he had been an austere and humorless man in their early experience—possibly as a result of having been shot in the head, it had to be admitted!—though gentle, who seemed only to notice them when he prayed with them, if that was not a paradox, if those were not mutually exclusive duties, as they had seemed so clearly to them to be, at night before they went to bed. They had developed impersonations of everyone in the family, and the primary device in Father’s characterization was to never quite look you in the eyes, or only occasionally, with frightening intensity—a nervous habit nobody else in the world had been forced to consider and interpret in parley with that candid, clear, genial man. It also made the impersonation seem quite wide of the mark to everybody but themselves, certainly not as hilariously apt as the coquettish giggling and suddenly lunatic shrieking of their “Amelia” or their “Charles”: several firm hand shakings and in a girlish voice, “Good of you to say so.”
And they wished to speak to him, now, of Father, as they did with each other, because, they said, Charles appeared to have a sort of friendship with the man, a dangerous one, certainly, but of a strength they could only wonder at. They wanted Charles to advise them, to teach them how to talk to Father about baseball and football and hunting and fishing and the ranch up in Fall River Mills—all of which were central family enthusiasms either old or new, and which were regularly used as a means of not talking (or playing) law and politics but which seemed to have no life where Andrew and Alexander were concerned, at least not anymore. Alexander spoke of these subjects as what he believed to be the keys to an ominous but appealing new kind of relationship—ominous because something he couldn’t understand or name depended on it; and Andrew in turn warned Charles that this forbidding but interesting man was nursing the pain of some terrible secret they could not even begin to guess at but which, if they were to look for precedent in their own lives, must revolve around . . . but Andrew faltered. He did not know what he meant. He could not say what it was that he did not know, other than that it was Father. As the beloved darling baby of the family, maybe Charles had some insight . . .?
His brothers had been born to govern the nation. They were intelligent, sympathetic, ambitious, principled, firm in their exclusions, biting in their ideas for reform, but generous in their humanity. Father loved them more than he could say. But he did try, and Charles said so.
“He seems to care,” Andrew tried again, “more for things that aren’t political. For anything that isn’t political. Now. Suddenly.”
Charles said nothing because he had nothing to say, and Andrew shrugged.
Alexander motioned to one of the serving women and asked for a horse and buggy to be put in motion so that he and Andrew could get to the wharves, a boat, and Berkeley.
Charles left for the theater, not wanting to miss the speech-making in the square promised for that afternoon.
Another marching band assembled under Charles’s balcony. As soon as he saw them, so did the band across the park. They were visibly bestirred and instantly began sounding their horns. From below came horns answering in clear if hysterical defiance, ripping scales, barking arpeggios, or simply blaring and shrieking. But if at first it might have been taken as something like the unlooked-for acoustic property of some strange concert hall—an orchestra tuning up and its echo seeming to come from the lobby—it became, for Charles, something else altogether. It was not two sets of cacophony, separated by shouts and murmurs. It was a complicated heterophony, a single melody being varied constantly and simultaneously by voice of instrument, rhythm, pitch—and only apparently randomly.
Yes: he could hear a design. Designs. An infinite number of designs within the one.
Then noise died down and all he could hear was a hum of voices, a steady monotone. Then a trumpet directly beneath his feet played five notes: B-flat for three beats, a low C-sharp for a beat, up to E for a beat then up an octave to E-flat for two, finishing with three beats again at B-flat.
He leaned out over the little balcony, swiveled left and right: no trumpet in sight. Leaned even farther, so that his legs were up in the air and he was in danger of falling.
Across the park: the answering notes in perfect imitation, but as if from the center of the galaxy . . . .
It was an incredibly odd collection of notes. It made him think of Little Joe in the heavenly and hellish light.
He went inside, closed the French windows as upon a dream, and headed for the stairway, noting again the picture-like windows—which had not lost that quality of vivid immobility as the angle of the light changed and the sun began to flare on the ocean, and which now joined the five notes and the brilliant white light—staring back at them as he took the first two