“I wanted to run away with you and live a quiet life.”
“We can.”
“Do you want to go? Now?”
“What are you going to do with the bomb?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t go until you know.”
“I will pick an appropriate representative of our corrupt government and hurl it at him.”
“That’s fine.”
“It is?”
“Yes, but I won’t go with you under those circumstances.”
“You won’t?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“In what circumstances—”
“I DON’T KNOW, CHARLES!”
The people they were actually rubbing shoulders with were as remote as elves, just as Vera’s fabled friend Rosemary had believed so many years before, when she was a child and they had suffered a different kind of destruction. Provoked in this way, Charles and Vera looked across the park at the restaurant and were filled with grief at the thought of not being able to sit there, a little candlelit table between them.
“I want that,” Charles said. “I can’t help but want it. It’s my childhood.”
“I want it too. I want it so much I’m. I’m afraid of it.”
Snow began to appear in the air, single flakes dancing past hooded, expectant eyes. Men slapped their hands together, some gloved now, some still bare and chapped and cold, and agreed that here it was coming, at long last, everybody’s favorite weather event, a blizzard in May.
“Did you ever see a Christmas that wasn’t white?” a man asked me.
“Christmas!” Charles exclaimed. “That’s months away!”
“This is the beginning, the first snowfall. It will snow all summer. But did you ever—?”
“See a Christmas that wasn’t white?”
“That’s right.”
“Sure have,” Charles said.
“Where the hell was that?”
“Right here in River City.”
“Bullshit! Never happened!”
“I’m kidding. It was in San Francisco, where I’m from.”
“Oh man, San Francisco doesn’t count!”
A little later, they walked through the park, happy and content-seeming with their baby bomb, or pretending to be, acting almost as if it were a baby, and found a space on the marble steps of the library. Charles opened the lunchbox. On top of the grenade were several ham sandwiches, made by Winter’s cook, who’d said to save one for him, and a thermos of strong coffee. These things were temporarily and insanely delightful and they set it all out beside them on the cold stone. McGee was actually scheduled to offer a short exciting speech, then leave town to take up a new position in Washington, DC.
The bomb was not going to be exploded. Everyone knew that without speaking. They had been given a gift, a way to return to peace: dismantle the bomb. Speaking softly of dismantling the slumbering foetus, Charles said he wasn’t exactly sure how far he had gone when taking off his clothes the other day, for McGee and Winter. He said everything ran together if he let it, thought and action, beginning and end.
“You very likely did not strip naked,” said Vera. “I mean, really, Charles!”
A man near them glanced at them and Charles glanced back in a friendly, noncommittal way. The man glanced again and stepped over.
“Some coffee?” Vera asked, indicating the thermos.
“You one of Winter’s people?” the man asked.
Charles stopped smiling and looked toward the park. “Yes. I am.” Mother’s love of baroque music came to the fore: “I am the Cold Genius. ‘What power art thou, who from below, hast made me rise unwillingly and slow, from beds of everlasting snow? See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old, far unfit to bear the bitter cold, I can scarcely move or draw my breath? Let me, let me freeze again, to death.’”
“I’ll take a sip, if you don’t mind,” said the man, giving Charles a look. “You all set?” He appeared to relax. When both Charles and Vera nodded subtly, knowingly, the man shifted his gaze and looked at Vera over his steaming cup. “Don’t hide your lights under a bushel basket, sister.”
He was much older than he had first looked, and certainly not a ruffian. Vera didn’t mind being called “sister” by such a man as she now thought she was looking at: a rough-and-ready veteran of labor wars. And Charles thought of Father, even though the man looked nothing like him. He was quite sure that Father, who after all had been as ruthless as any ten ordinary men, would understand what he was about to do, and why.
Charles smiled. Vera caught it and smiled too.
“I mean,” said the man, “don’t just find a secluded cozy little nook and blow it there. We don’t want to hurt a lot of people, but the word is, and this is final, we don’t want anybody to, you know, to miss it.”
“Grandfather,” Vera said, “don’t you worry about us.”
And just like that, she was afraid again. She was afraid they were about to take the bomb away from her and that people would be killed after all. She felt panic twisting her stomach. Should she simply run, run away right now, run fast? Throw it in the river? She saw it drifting toward a little toy boat full of children slapping at the water with toy oars. She remained where she was, her arm locked in Charles’s arm, from which dangled the big unwieldy lunchbox. He was not shivering: he was shaking.
The man shook his head in a kindly way and left, setting the cap back on the thermos and screwing it down firmly, patting it when he was done.
The temperature had dropped enough to make them feel quite remarkably colder. A wind had risen too, a hard and steady wind that made their eyes tear and the men around them turn their backs to it. The snow thickened in the air and dustings of it appeared on caps and shoulders and on the grass but not on the sidewalks.
Two trucks arrived simultaneously, one on the hotel side to their right and one on the theater side to their left. From these trucks came sections of speaker platforms and podia. Crowds began to form near the platforms as they were assembled, and the general feeling seemed to be that the weather was calling for some speeches that would be frank and revealing and come swiftly to their points. The carmen seemed more cold now than indignant, and the rally looked like it might in fact fizzle.
It was at this point, Charles learned later, that the Ramsey County Sheriff was getting himself in trouble by refusing the streetcar company’s request for substantially more policemen, to protect themselves and to ensure the continued operation of streetcars in the vicinity. Outraged, the company appealed to the governor, who dispatched Home Guard units. The civilian auxiliary was also apprised of the company’s need, and this paramilitary force converged on the park as well. When the strikers saw men with Krag-Jørgensen rifles held at the ready across their chests ringing the park, they began to shout and curse. The light was now almost impenetrably murky, nearly full dark, and torches were being lit, and then several fires burning in barrels could be seen as well. With the flames angling this way, then that way, snapping and flaring in the moaning wind, with the men shouting articulate words near them, and simply roaring farther off, with the snow accumulating and the temperature continuing its swift and steady plunge, the park became a frightening place, as if it were a zoo where the cages had been suddenly sprung, with hunters strung out around the perimeter. Speakers on both sides of the park began to speak and Charles asked Vera if she remembered the marchers in San Francisco marching in opposite directions and playing rival tunes. Had that been before her time there? He could hardly speak he was shaking so hard. He said, “No, no, don’t worry, just a little cold. I want to compose music. I’m going to start as soon as I leave this terrible place. There will be American music, hymns and folk songs and marches and so on, and then underneath there will be something else, and then above it there will be something else, all of it verging on silence. My God! What has sound got to do with music? Think for a moment of Reverend Emerson’s ‘The Sphinx’: ‘The perception of identity unites all things and explains one by another. and the most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power to see the whole — all in each) then the world addresses to this mind a question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it to pieces, and it is vanquished by the distracting variety.’ And Reverend Thoreau: ‘The falling dew seemed to strain and purify the air and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. Vast hollows of silence stretched away in every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first I could appreciate sound, and find it musical.’”