“What is for you the greatest unhappiness?
In what place would you like to live?
What is your ideal of earthly happiness?
For what faults do you have the greatest indulgence?
What is your principal fault?
What would you like to be?
What is your favorite quality in a man?
What is your favorite quality in a woman?
What is your favorite occupation?
What is your present state of mind?”
I might be thinking of a way of life that includes everything. A way of theatrical life that shows real life up for the sham and horror it is.
After the earthquake and the fires, his voice had broken. Mother had not made good on her threat to castrate him, and he decided in the hideous croaking aftermath of the break that he would never sing again, except as his explorations of the theater might call for it. His mind had not broken, had it? What did the voice have to do with it? The voice was what he had charmed and disarmed the pretty ladies with.
Oh yes, he had seen them thinking, as if they were characters in a comic strip with thought balloons puffing from their temples, that after all this was San Francisco and they might very well get away with it.
But Voice was now Mind.
And Mind required Stage.
Breakfast had always been a good time for miniature debates, such as might ensue once polite parlor questions had been asked and answered. But once he’d dressed and made his way to the dining room, he found only the twins—brothers who had been born the year after the earthquake in a fishing village in the south of France, Cassis, in a house once used by Napoleon as headquarters—and Father working their way rather desultorily but with good humor through a hypothetical labor problem.
“The painters’ union,” Father declared, “wants to limit the size of brushes. Are you for it or against it?”
August (Gus) replied that it seemed clear that if they had bigger brushes they could get the job done more quickly.
“I can confirm, then, that you are against any legislation that would restrict the size of a paintbrush?”
Anthony (Tony) suggested that the painters would want above all to get the job the hell over with and go have a beer. If they had, say, two- or three-man brushes that were ten feet wide, they could be out of there in no time. They wouldn’t have to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, slopping paint up and down a wall. They could listen to music, read a book—or even go to the theater! He flashed a grin at Charles. “I would advocate,” Tony went on, “discounted tickets for workingmen in those circumstances.”
The twins were fair-skinned and freckled, with red-gold hair and handsome, ordinary features. Both of them knew how to beam, and would do so after an exchange like that. And while Father was still understood to be a rough and candid outdoorsman who had gambled on riverboats and been gunned down in a court in Arizona and who could beam with the best of California’s grinning Western swindlers, and who was in fact one of a handful of men who had been nicknamed “The Regenerators,” who had battled graft in the courts and rebuilt San Francisco with their own hands, he also still believed that Jesus Christ was his personal savior and insisted on rather passionately Puritan manners: Gus would sober up at that point but Tony continue to grin, even as he apologized.
“I’m sorry, Father.”
Mother, Amelia, and Amelia’s husband, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Ruggles, entered the dining room. Charles pulled his watch from its pocket and saw that it must have stopped sometime the night before. He was disoriented by the idea more than he thought he should be. It in fact troubled him, and he looked around the room, wondering if he was being seen being troubled, itself an act of discomposure and even guilt that troubled him even more. He felt sweat forming on his face. Why did he care what time it was? If he was sweating, why not act it out? See it through and be sweaty.
“Mother? Amelia?” asked Tony. “I hope you’ll forgive my rude remarks.” Trying to make the grin rueful. “Reverend Ruggles?”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony,” said Reverend Ruggles, “but that is no bar to forgiveness.” Ruggles was small but agile and strong, built like a gymnast, and he put a headlock on Tony. He often came at you as if he wanted to wrestle or box, or walking on his hands. It was one thing to speak of a muscular Christianity, but who dared speak of a fun Christianity? If the clownishness, however, had not been in the immediate company of a deep, almost disturbing seriousness, it would have been a different matter. He was a Baptist but the family could not help but like him.
Amelia, a year older than Charles, had been, before the earthquake, incredibly high-strung and unhappy, but brilliant: like Henry Adams’s wife Marian and Henry James’s sister Alice, Charles sometimes said. He had grown up thinking she was going to die any second, that he would find her collapsed with a stroke or hanging by the neck, but had found wells of compassion rising up in her, where everyone had expected hysteria even in the very best, in ideal circumstances, and humility descending like a blessing, a consolation from a gentle, just, clear, and sweet heaven. She was an all but entirely different woman, and people did not shrink from speaking of her transformation as miraculous. She would only say that she had been saved, and that she wanted to bring the power and glory of the gospels, as she was only just beginning to see them, in their rags, speaking quietly, to bear on the social crisis that was threatening to destroy the greatest nation on earth. She had read Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis when it was published in 1907, coinciding perfectly with the throes of her own rebirth—and possibly San Francisco’s as well—in Christ, and when Rauschenbusch’s disciple at Rochester Theological Seminary, Thomas Ruggles, had come west, she had married him.
“If they finish a job in one hour rather than ten, they get paid a dime rather than a dollar,” Amelia said.
“Don’t get hysterical, sister,” Tony suggested in his precociously vaudevillian way, having heard Andrew kid Amelia in this way more than once.
“If a dime,” Amelia said mock-tersely, “bought a dollar’s worth of groceries—”
At which point Mother, out of hard-earned habit that would likely never fade, gently spoke her daughter’s name.
“—then certainly they could take advantage of your fabulous discount, my dear little brother, but it doesn’t, it’s more like a nickel, so either they take longer to do the job and get paid a living wage or they hop to and starve to death.”
Father thanked Amelia with jovial conclusivity: yes, her brothers, both the younger and the older, were dolts but they would run the country.
Amelia smiled and said they ought to consider ten-man brushes that could be controlled by a lone halfwit and so expensive that no single painter could afford it, leaving the purchase as usual to Big Business.
In the old days, she would have then nodded at Father in a final attempt to be courteous—not to mention knowledgeable about the imperatives and requisites of actual large businesses—before dashing at the dining-room door, struggling as if drunk to open it, slamming painfully into the frame, and staggering into the hall. Mother would have offered the rest of the family a tastefully understated look of comic surprise, and they would have resumed their meal.
Now, however, the Reverend Ruggles, who had relaxed his grip on Tony’s head but not released him, put a head-lock on Gus, and the three of them began to laugh and struggle.
It had happened so often that it was referred to as a Ruggle-struggle.
The boys flailed and grunted and Thomas shifted his weight about.
When the boys gave up and went limp in his embrace, he said, “Your sister has learned to talk rough with her brothers, but don’t take lightly what she says. It will be very