It was not until his meeting with the silvery, vain, and wrathful Mr. Winter and the jovially triangular Mr. McGee that Charles was forced to accept and reconcile the kinds and degrees of various realities and realisms and acts and deceptions. Going into Winter’s sumptuous, dark private office in the Grain Exchange, he had assumed a number of fundamental premises: number one was that Winter and McGee but not the governor had known who Rejean Houle/Ray John Howell was long before Charles had known; and therefore, number two, knew that Charles’s association with such a man spoke not only of a scandalous lack of common sense in a rich young playboy whose father had — had had, once but no longer had, no longer could have, especially given the spectacular collapse of his family — big political plans, but a possible infirmity, a serious one, in his actual private, personal politics — if they could put it that way? They thought they could. It would have been hard for Winter not to see this as an immense opportunity, once his suspicions had been aroused, and the only way his suspicions would not have been aroused was if he had been too busy to do anything but accept at face value the candidate being pushed toward him: an immense opportunity to bring together railroading friends from the West with railroading friends from the Midwest. The third fundamental assumption was that while Winter knew a great deal, he could not be completely sure of what he knew, or rather, what to do with it, practically speaking: it was possible that he was sufficiently impressed by the presence, admittedly in the deep background of the now deceased, of William Minot (which perhaps implied vast forces of Roosevelt loyalists as well), to not want Charles and his Bolshevik whore seriously hurt, no matter the nature of their indiscretions and adventures; it was also possible, on the other end of the spectrum, that Winter had sworn allegiance to people who liked William Minot not one little bit — that it wasn’t just a matter of bringing friends together after all — and who — he made this fourth assumption and saw that it was in fact the primary assumption, the fundament of fundaments — would not blanch at the murders of innocent people to advance their cause. They had already done so! What he did not quite understand, and which Winter might also therefore be confused about, was what Charles really had to do with it, with anything. Was he simply a rogue element that had forced its way into play, because he was a rich boy, an idiot courtier, a gambling gentleman who felt he was entitled to interfere in any sort of life he happened across? Or had he been marked early on as the means by which a man who hated his father might hurt and hurt and hurt him? In the middle was a kind of no-man’s-land, or poker table, over which Winter and perforce McGee — whose hatred were political and not at all personal — would simply play out for Charles a good deal of rope. Charles was suddenly sure Winter had made some kind of deal with the URR men, but he had no idea what sort of deal, no understanding of its cost, no sense of how many rounds of consequence might be expected, and, finally, had seen no sign from Winter that he was committed to the deal. Maybe he had his own little plan. And what of Mighty McGee? Maybe McGee thought he could use Charles to gain advantage over the URR men, for some obscure but ruthlessly pure reason of his own. Charles had no idea. Really none at all. He was right to think that not wanting anything was a key to freedom, but very wrong to think he could walk through the Valley of Death and fear no evil just because he didn’t want anything. The power of other people’s desires could pick him up like a leaf in a tornado. Worse, most foolishly, most fatally, he had assumed he could trust himself to remain serenely indifferent. He had bought this idea from himself hook, line, and sinker. What he had wanted all along was an excuse to act violently, to punish people. to punish them for wanting things and being willing to. act violently to get them. To punish the people who kept from them what they wanted. Whatever kind of sad little trinket of self-delusion it might be.
He remembered reading the article in Hearst’s ridiculous newspaper, about the cleverness of anarchists and the need for precise amounts of rope, pretending to not be able to read very well, making his brothers laugh, if not Father.
McGee, for the moment a gregarious blustering small-town booster to Charles’s pensive aristocrat, settled matters and set the tone very quickly. He admitted that there had been serious miscommunication, but wanted, in return, for Charles to admit that he had been behaving a little oddly in Fargo or Moorhead or wherever the hell it was, when he interfered—“Perhaps correctly!” Winter shouted generously — with the arrest of Daisy Gluek. He then went a little further and said that the patriots in Bemidji were indeed out of hand, that was in the nature of patriots, but insisted that no real harm had been done, and that in fact a real service might have been provided Charles.
“How’s that?” Charles asked, smiling. He started to take off his clothes so he could show Winter his burn scars. Because all three men were suffering some kind of breakdown, Charles ended up naked, McGee talking on obliviously, Winter turned away in musical comedy disgust.
“You’re not going to be the kind of leader who lets other people do all the dirty work, are you? You’re not going to be that kind of fucking playboy progressive, are you? Your brother-in-law is a notable man of God: Are things going to be very prim and proper in the Minot White House? When you or your people finally get your ass in the war where it belongs, will that ass be lounging about on mounds of Louis XV bullshit, pouring tea for generals? Or will it be getting itself shot off in the trenches with the little people you apparently care so deeply for.”
“My God,” said Charles. “You are one glib mound of bullshit yourself.”
McGee roared at the insult with apparently genuine amusement.
But Charles had opened the sluice a bit too fully. “You’re what, a kind of good-old-boy American version of a middle-ranking pea-brained Hapsburg bureaucrat? Abusing the little people — shooting them in their fucking HEADS AND LICKING YOUR BOSS’S BOOTS?”
McGee took a long time to stop laughing, and did so by degrees. He then became briskly sincere. It was no doubt a calculated sincerity, but it worked, as Charles sat back in his chair and realized that not only was he ashamed of himself, not only was he hotheaded and losing focus — losing everything, losing everything again and again and again when he could see it, see peace and freedom so clearly — he was naked. Whoever had gotten shot in the head, for whatever reason, had simply vanished, as he knew all illusions eventually must, revealing only the deepest, most beautiful truth. Winter finally smiled at him, in a lovingly avuncular way. He said he understood that a place in the war was being prepared for him, and that Charles would be leaving soon. Whatever the nature of his duties might turn out to be, Winter was confident that they would be important duties, and that he would perform them in a way that would make all Americans proud. He even went so far as to say he hoped Charles would stay in touch, suggesting that the MCPS would be only too happy to make use of his patriotic valiance as they explained to members of Congress and so on, and yes, sure, publicized, one had to nowadays, in order to justify budgets and so on, their work on the home front.