Charles considered the remark. He felt an urge to get down off the stage, to tinker and advise and pester, as an adult might, not to “play” with his friend — the specter of that kind of performance rose and fell ominously in Charles’s soul before he had a chance to acknowledge it, as what, a loss? — but engage him as his brothers did their opponents in the debating club across the bay in Berkeley—surely my young friend understands that his abridgment of my remarks constitutes a fraud—but the remark stayed in his throat and unsettled him somewhat. He looked at Joe and could not help but wonder if he wasn’t after all talking to a gnome or a dwarf or a wizard — or the ambulatory foetus of such fantastic creatures. Then he recalled the boy’s father asking the same question, “Funny strange or funny ha-ha, Mr. Minot?” calling him “mister” instead of “young sir” as he usually did. And recalled too this colorful workingman’s fondness for toothpicks, all fourteen members of his colorful working family seeming to chew them at once.
But it was as if he, Joe, were the one putting on the show. That was what was funny.
“What?” Joe whispered, preoccupied but not annoyed.
Charles could hardly hear him. “I have often been struck,” he howled in that chilling way that only a strong treble can, “in my many days and nights in the theater, during rehearsals or between acts, at how much more interesting the stagehands moving the furniture and props about are than my fellow singers and actors.”
He had made many sorties in this mode of the theatrical extempore, was constantly improvising, well, what would you call it, wit? Ready intelligence? Rhetorical exuberance?
But this: this was something different. He certainly had his rhetoric down and was more than facile in his manipulation of it, but had he not said something interesting as well? In a theatrical way? Falsely magnificent but with an aura of strange truth faintly glowing around it?
Joe made no reply; not, Charles thought, out of a lack of sophistication, but because he’d reached a critical point in his tuning of the gas.
The limelight now poured from the box so brilliantly it almost made its own sound. Joe himself was an incandescent ghost. The seats for many rows behind him stood out blood red, little rips in the fabric clearly visible, like gaping wounds, each snarl of thread or nubbin a blemish, or hairy mole. Most of the small theater was in fact illuminated, the carved demons and angels of the proscenium arch looking blinded as if by attempted entrance to the Eternal Paradise of the stage, just beyond the Earthly Paradise of the curtain.
Suddenly Joe flipped the lids of the box closed around the filament, focusing the light onstage and causing himself and most of the theater to vanish in the deep black spaceless space of the surprised optic nerve.
Charles let the walking stick swing to his side and raised his free hand to his face, shielding his eyes.
Certainly it is a kind of fever, he thought.
“Only it’s in reverse,” he said, continuing the earlier thought. “I am onstage, but watching you offstage.”
Then Joe went too far and the limelight went out with a loud firecracker pop. “That’s funny,” he said as the darkness and silence overwhelmed them. His small, soft voice was musing and concerned. Charles could hear it perfectly now: it was genuine.
“Funny strange?” he asked, decreasing the volume but intoning grandly, “or funny ha-ha.” His voice filled the theater in an imitation of the corrupt, jubilant oratory of his father and his father’s friends. “I say to you, funny straaaaaaange? Or funny HA-HA? Ladies? Gentlemen? Which, I put it to you now, for the hour is upon us, will it be?” Charles brought the walking stick around to his front, folded his gloved hands around the fake jewel, and waited.
“You’re strange,” said the quiet voice barely making its way out of the darkness. “You can take it from me. Anybody says you’re not, you tell ’em come see me. We’ll set this person straight.”
Charles nodded solemnly. It was true as true could be. It was 1906, and all bets were off. La Belle Époque was over. Everybody agreed the world had never been stranger. Europeans were expressing cheerful optimism in the so-called great alliances, but that didn’t stop them from thinking there was something terribly strange in the air. A new world? Not the Americas, not the United States of America — something far more new? Was that possible? It was the American Century. Father’s good friend President Roosevelt had said so. Charles was expressing neither idle nor psychotic conversational wonder. He wasn’t good for much more than nodding and smiling and furrowing his shining young brow when the conversation was politics but that did not mean he was failing to take it in, somehow, on some level of concern, and Father made sure he got the basics, over breakfast, with the others, and had a first-rate opinion ready if called upon to amaze everybody with his firm but gentle Christian savoir faire. Father also urged Charles’s older brothers to go to Japan, if they wanted to steal a march on the young men who were too focused on simply making a pile of money as fast as possible and spending it in Europe while there was still a Europe to be purchased.
“Go to Japan. You will not regret it.”
“We’re Californians, Father. We are Progressives.”
“California is not what it once was, gentlemen. Neither is Progressivism. Go to Japan.”
A little light could be seen now way up high around the edges of the doors leading to the third-floor lobby, and though it was a weak and alien, an unpleasant light, he made his way off the stage and into the disorienting maze of voice-filled stairways. He did not emerge until he was on the third floor. As he opened the stairway door, he glanced at the row of little rectangular casement windows. They showed oddly vivid rectangles of a grassy square and the empty space that would soon be the foundation of the Silesian Brothers church. To the left of the little windows were big French windows, opening onto a small balcony. He meant to examine the strange images made by the little windows, but went to the big ones. It was a warm, still, sunlit afternoon. The park was divided by the setting sun into shadow so lustrous it was almost golden, the darkest amber maple syrup you could find, or molasses, and a solid, marble-hard and almost deathly white. Limelight white. There were paraders on the far side of the park, accompanied by a small brass band that he couldn’t hear, going around the square, and they moved from golden darkness into blinding light and back into darkness. Charles tugged a key from his waistcoat pocket and opened the doors.
It took him a moment to sort out: the paraders were shouting something he could just barely hear in a military cadence in the absence of music from their band, while directly below him, just across the street, a small group on a bandstand was singing a folksong. The bandstand was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and there were large flags hanging around their poles at the corners: the USA, the California, and two he couldn’t make out, labor unions no doubt. The marching band began to play, but as they were on the far side of the square, Charles couldn’t make out much beyond the unmistakable rhythm of the march.
This was one of the sensations that stayed with him: music, acting, performance was everywhere he looked. It wasn’t an intellectual observation, it was a feeling. Nobody was not performing. That was to say, nobody was not holding their real selves back, in readiness for something else he and they could not imagine.
Nobody was not performing: it must be a consequence of the expulsion from the garden. A mass psychosis that nobody noticed anymore, or cared about.