“So fishing was good,” Charles said.
“You know I don’t care for sarcasm from anybody—”
“Yes, you have said so.”
“—much less my sons—”
“Yes, I understand.”
“—so don’t let me hear it from you again.”
“It was a joke, Father.”
“It could indeed have been one, but was not,” said Father with mild authority. “The mean look in your eye gives you away. I don’t like to hear what comes out of your mouth when you look like that and I don’t like to see you look like that.”
“All right,” Charles said, reddening over the auburn beard, which now felt ridiculous. “You put me off-balance with the motorcycle reference. I sold or am selling them all. I am no longer interested in thrills.”
“Are beards back in fashion?” he asked.
“No,” giggled Amelia, “they most certainly are not.”
“You look like your grandfather,” said Father. “Quite remarkably.”
“Yes,” said Mother. “He does.” The father-in-law was clearly present, while the son clearly was not.
Mother and Father both murmured with bemused approval, and it was hard to say if they suspected the beard’s falseness.
“I was wearing it when the theater caught fire. I can’t bring myself, for some odd reason, to take it off.”
No one knew what to say. One of the girls appeared in the doorway and indicated that the chauffeur was idling in the eastern portico. The family collected themselves and went out to inspect Father’s latest purchase, a new automobile, a Mountain Wagon, manufactured by the Stanley firm and powered by steam. There were four rows of bench seats and no roof. If it proved a reasonable conveyance, they would take it to the ranch. The controls of the steamer, however, baffled the chauffeur, Albert, a tiny man who’d once been a jockey, causing some embarrassment and minor delay. After a few anxious minutes, they set off for the Presidio, and a picnic. Mother became convinced as the journey wore on that the boiler would blow and kill them all, and swore that her first ride in the Mountain Wagon would be her last. Everyone began the ride wearing goggles and dusters, but shucked everything when it became clear they weren’t going to reach any terrific velocity. Father in fact felt it safe enough to put his big-brimmed Western hat on. With his long coat and knee-length boots and immense drooping moustache, he once again looked like the rancher he sometimes thought he would liked to have been, or the cavalry officer he had been in his youth, once in a while even perhaps a gunfighter, a righteous gunfighter, of course — certainly a San Franciscan from the old days. When these characteristics came to the fore, there was almost no hint of the refined and sophisticated man of law, the prosecutor of graft in the city’s Golden Age of Graft, “The Regenerator,” one of those men who are seen behind the man at the podium, the westernmost confidant of Colonel Roosevelt, a potential purchaser of Iceland.
Charles moved his goggles carefully to his forehead and made sure his beard was still securely fastened to his face. Then he moved the goggles from his forehead back over his eyes with a snap that he hadn’t intended and which caused some pain to his blush-sensitized face.
“Mockery is for weaklings,” Father said, returning to his earlier remonstrance, but drawling noticeably this time.
“‘I am a weakling,’ he said mockingly,” Charles said. His beard lifted up and flew away without a sound.
He could feel Father staring at him with dark gunfighter impassivity for some time. It was certainly not a mean look, but for all its immobility of feature it was a violent one. The wind ruffled their heads of luxurious Minot hair. The picnic was being hosted by the detested but important San Francisco businessman and socialite, Durwood Keogh. Keogh was a director of United Railroad, and was widely considered to be both audaciously younger and more winningly handsome than could rightly be expected of one of the ultimate authorities of so deeply entrenched and spectacularly powerful a presence in the daily life of the nation as a railroad. Some frankly dismissed him as a figurehead, a playboy, and a dolt. Others thought he was secretly accomplished, and, ominously, “more than able.” A few political philosophers of influence, however, holding leisurely conferences at both, interestingly, the Bohemian and the Pacific clubs, presented him as neither dolt nor efficient executive disguised as dolt, but as purely ruthless, or ruthlessly pure, in the service of convictions that were not his own, which could not be his own as he was unable to think on that moral level, but which he held, as a mean-spirited child holds candy. With a delight, that is to say, that obscures the poisoned ferocity of the need. Father believed he was dangerous in just this way: purity was ruthless, he said, again disregarding his own purity, his own ruthlessness, because they were products of deep belief, not superficial greed and power: Keogh had no staying power, while Father had Jesus Christ. But his neighbor be damned, he loathed Keogh personally as well. He had done his best to put him and all his associates, avowed and otherwise, behind bars, and it was none other than Keogh’s uncle, the ur robber baron, whom he’d caused to flee the country. The Jew in jail, and the spectacularly corrupt robber baron fled: Father’s legacy, in case anyone cared to remember the horrible failure of the Spring Park Water Company when the quake and fires had destroyed the city. And of course they’d found a way to shoot at him. He was always getting shot at — it only strengthened his disdain for shooters. But nothing had ever come of it, and here they were, nine years later, their mutual hatred softened with a kind of nostalgia for the shooting, and the volcanic hatred that could bring things to a shooting pass, and even the kind of respect that comes when two men find themselves not only still standing but thriving, in Golden Old California, when so many others were dead and gone.
Keogh had just returned from a trip to Mexico with General “Black Jack” Pershing. They’d been sent to apprehend or kill the internationally infamous political celebrity and terrorist Pancho Villa, who had crossed, a couple of months earlier, the international border into the little adobe village of Columbus, New Mexico. There he had murdered a dozen and a half of the tiny town’s citizens, pillaged it, and burned it to the ground. Pershing and Keogh had failed in their mission and seemed almost forlornly stupid as they wandered about northern Mexico — at least from the vantage point of the northern capitals of the United States — but nobody blamed them, as that vast and primitive country seemed to have been expressly designed as a haven for barbarian villains.
So said Durwood Keogh anyway, leaning against his automobile in his jodhpurs and tapping one long strong flank with a crop. He made it look like the Minots had gathered around him, but it was he in fact who had approached them, affably, sportingly, generously. They all had bigger fish to fry, did they not?
It was preparedness for war in France that Keogh had taken up as his cause and duty upon his return to San Francisco. He had been named grand marshal of the Preparedness Day Parade, three months off yet, scheduled for mid-July to dovetail with Independence Day, but already a major and popular theme of civic discourse. German spies (a term synonymous with anarchists for more than a decade now) were said to be preparing too: to bomb the parade, kill paraders, and make a mockery of freedom and democracy. The attack on the Minot Theater — so went one highly controversial strand of public discourse — had merely been an exploratory jab.
Charles had never heard such an idea, but remained impassive and silent, as did Father. Were they suddenly playing some kind of poker? Mother, nearly under her breath, begged Keogh’s pardon, but Keogh ignored her.