“Yes, Father,” Charles whispered, trying to sop of some of Father’s blood with his own shirt, not really knowing what he intended to do with the blood once he’d collected it: wring it out over Father’s intestines and hope it seeped back to places where it would do some good? Wring it out somewhere else, in an effort to tidy up? Point was, he was trying! He was banishing sadness, as far as anyone else could tell. He was clean and cool and clear. And these qualities would surely not be lost on Father, for whom Charles wanted to appear fearless. He was utterly afraid and not at all confused about it, but for Father’s sake, he wanted to appear as something he was not.
PART TWO: “THE AMERICAN”
“The thing is consistently, consummately — and I would fain really make bold to say charmingly — romantic; and all without intention, presumption, hesitation, contrition. The effect is equally undesigned and unabashed, and I lose myself, at this late hour, I am bound to add, in a certain sad envy of the free play of so much unchallenged instinct.”
“In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible become our normal element.”
Auditions — the third round of auditions — for his production of Henry James’s The American included a Polite Parlor Questionnaire. He did not know what else he might do and was afraid his theater would be stillborn. He had seen more than a hundred persons in three days and could not remember a single distinguishing feature: the faces were all round white balloons, all but featureless, atop stick figures, which were tap-dancing with canes and bowler hats, singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in four parts all by themselves, and concluding, as if delivering a punch line, “Our revels are now ENDED! This actor, as I foretold you—” while waving little American flags. He believed he would have laughed had he possessed a sense of humor, something he believed he neither possessed nor wished to possess, believing himself to be essentially and perfectly humorless. He sat in a composed way and neither smiled nor frowned when he thanked them. He was acting for them. He was a Mystery. He was the Ghost of a Secret Theater and he would populate his theater with these shrieking stick figures, if that was the only way open to him.
The idea of an ensemble of local actors, highly trained in ancient and exotic techniques was, of course, ludicrous.
Some of them were friends, if he could in fact be said to have friends, and they could not fail to find his vision laughable. It was not even, technically speaking, his vision: it was the legendarily ludicrous but defiantly potent Sir Edwin Carmichael’s vision, which he was purchasing, owning, operating, with sir Edwin’s guidance.
He would move to Paris, tomorrow, if something galvanic failed to happen — if he failed to make these frogs hop.
But what could happen in a Polite Parlor Questionnaire?
“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.