“Are we going to bail Daisy out or abandon her?”
“Maybe it’s just yourself, maybe what you’re aiming for is just a closeness to it, a constancy. I shouldn’t say ‘you,’ when I clearly mean ‘we.’ Capitulation to the dream drugs, the sleep-givers — that would teach us a fucking lesson for sure. Are we ready for that, Vera? We’re pretending, we’re acting as if we’re in control, when what we really want is to be in control and then act.”
He’d not altered his monotone until the penultimate word, which he snapped angrily.
“I’m just thinking out loud,” he caught himself, feigning a chuckle.
Vera sighed. It was almost a gasp. She was shaking.
“It is true,” said Vera. “I can see that it is, but it’s pretty much going in one ear and out the other.
Charles stood up and struck a fencing pose. He looked at Vera and he looked at the clerk at his desk. “Yes?” he asked and nodded when they did not. “He thrust and I parried. I turned his thrust and my parry into a thrust of my own. One fluid motion. Yes, I was acting reflexively. No, I was not out of control.”
“Do you remember,” asked Vera, “that newspaper photograph of John outside the motordrome in Detroit?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“No, no, it was an advertisement for Oilzum maybe.? Daredevil Derkum? Paul Derkum? You never met him? NECK AND NECK WITH DEATH? These daredevils use Oilzum brand lubricants? And John had put a white cross over everybody’s head but his own?”
Surprising himself, Charles stormed out of the lobby and headed for the Western Union office. Vera followed him, hugging herself as she crossed the street, making a face and blinking several times as the stench of the stockyard assailed her. She found Charles writing out a telegram. His billfold was next to him on the counter, and she picked it up, thinking he might have miniature pictures of his famous family in it. She asked if he did, but Charles, lost in thought, pen in mouth, didn’t answer. Then she found one. It was a reproduced painting, cut from a book, a portrait of a man in a white periwig. The man was a soldier; in whose army she could not say. When she looked up in inquiry, Charles was staring at her. She asked who the man was, and he dropped his gaze. Not sure that he’d heard her, she repeated herself. He held out his hand for the picture.
“The older brother of my great-great-great grandmother,” he said, putting it back in the billfold.
“So this is circa.?”
“He was born in the Savoy in 1763.”
“And what army is he—”
“Piedmontese. The King of Sardinia. In 1790 he was arrested for dueling. Sentenced to forty-two days confinement in his house. He wrote a long poem that was very popular in royalist circles.”
“Royalist.”
“That’s right.”
“He was opposed to the—”
“The French Revolution, that’s right.”
Vera held out her hand. “May I see it again?” Charles hesitated, but produced it. “He looks like you, you think.?”
“Yes,” he said. “Put a wig on me and it’s quite striking. He emigrated to Russia with the Russian general Suvorov, the man who forced the French to leave Turin. Fought Napoleon at Waterloo, served in Finland for a while, then gave up the military for a literary life, in Petersburg. Had a salon, actually. He once said, ‘I could no more have written that poem in my uniform than I could have fought a battle in my bathrobe.’”
He ceased the speech abruptly, exhausted by it, and returned his attention to the telegram, tapping the point of the pen against the pad. “I don’t know why it’s taking the NPL so long to bail her out. Maybe they don’t have the money. Maybe that’s why she’s traveling alone. But I don’t care what the reason is. I’ll do it myself. What do you think of that, Vee?”
He looked up from the note, angry, but suddenly, strangely, full of love.
“I think,” she said, responding to the first concern, “that their finances are certainly disorganized. They likely cannot lay their hands on that kind of money, you know, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “May be tied up elsewhere.”
“Well, I can, and that’s exactly what I’m—”
“What do you want from her in exchange?”
“—I’m going to, what? Nothing. I don’t want a thing from her. What a strange thing to ask me!”
“I am only saying she is currency. Legal tender. She has been set up. The formal act of exchange is the arrest. I suspect the NPL sold her, probably with her knowledge and cooperation — she has one script and they have another and only the beginning and the end are the same, which is that select members of the NPL will escape the Justice Department’s, the FBI’s, Pinkerton’s big old roundup, whenever that happens. Which I’m sure Mr. Townley thinks, and Daisy probably thinks as well, is a good thing because it means they will be free to pursue their goals when the war ends. Their goal being the enlargement of the small businessman we know as the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, our ideal citizen, drenched in the vivid neoclassical colors of democratic, agrarian virtue, the bedrock of our country and of civilization, as painted by, say, David or Greuze. Sculpted heroically by Canova. Enlargement, I say, at the cost of a few farmers along the way, because they can’t all be titans, can they.”
“So I should or should not bail her out.”
“Again I ask you: What do you want from her in exchange?”
“What do you want from her?”
“Me? What do I have to do with it?”
“Oh, Vera. I only want to do what you want to do. I don’t care about any of this anymore.”
“Well, you spoiled little brat, you! I want you to care about this! We’re in danger of being flushed down the toilet by the dream-givers!”
“Don’t get hysterical.”
Faster than lightning, she slapped him.
Charles began to speak, but stopped himself, actually putting his hand to his mouth.
“I want to do what is right,” said Vera, breathing heavily but speaking softly.
“‘It’s never wrong to do right.’ Pastor Tom said that once. Amelia corrected him: ‘Unless someone disagrees with you about what is right.’ And let us not forget Heraclitus in our mad rush to do what is right: ‘They vainly purify themselves with blood when they are defiled with blood, as though one who had stepped into mud were to wash with mud. He would seem mad if anyone saw him doing this.’”
“I don’t want to run from consequences, Charles. That is not the kind of acting I signed up for.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I have been associated for nearly ten years, since I was thirteen, in Willimantic, with men and women who are not going to escape the big old roundup of ‘seditious shitsuckers’ bright and early next year. You will make it possible for me to escape these consequences, to run away from the traitorous doings I have had a hand in for half of my life — and all you want in exchange is life-long devotion. You want me to run away with you to the other side of the world and leave the men and women I love all alone, to rot and die for my sins. You’ll what, publish my memoirs and hire expensive lawyers for me, first-class passage the minute it looks like I’m going to be railroaded, and all I have to do is pretend to be in love with you?”
Charles laughed. “‘Pretend.’”
“That’s right, pretend!”
“What, do you think I can’t tell the difference?”
“If you think that I—”
“You are pretending not to be in love with me, Vera.”
“Oh wait, I get it,” said Vera, as if comforting Charles. He ripped his message from the pad and moved to the window, a small arched opening from which slid a pair of hands. He bent slightly and saw the operator’s distant meshed face. “I get it,” repeated Vera. “What could be more daring, right? To thumb our nose at the government of the United States of America? At your father’s government?” She grabbed his arm and angrily shook it. “Right? Right?”