The Daredevils (38 page)

“Father's progressivism is a sham. It always has been, and the best example right now is this Burnquist knucklehead, a pillar of Progressivism, who is sitting on the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, an organization that is using thugs to incite hatred, fear, and riot, to beat and kill whoever happens to catch their eye, while the splintered Left is tearing itself apart in the shadow of the crackdown, roundup, imprisonment, and deportation of undesirables that the FBI and DOJ is commencing. ‘Undesirables' of course being people who speak their mind about a given issue and are deemed criminally disloyal. That is to say: traitorous. For which they may be executed. Do you think I'm exaggerating? I ran the Bull Moose campaign in California!”

“The principles of Progressivism,” said Charles, “are just one more badly written script, and the Progressives are just another cast of bad actors. Surely you saw what you were actually doing long before this.”

“I did indeed! I was caught up in your wacky world of no cause and no effect, thinking, hoping against hope, that I saw causes anyway, and believing I could produce effects.”

“What does Father say?”

“He says not a whole lot. He says—murmurs—that the jig was up when he saw a company he partly owned wasn't going to be able to deliver water to our burning little city.”

“He also partly owned one of those French restaurants,” said Amelia.

“The Poodle Dog, yes,” said Andrew.

“And had affairs with several women there.”

“And you've never forgiven him,” asked Andrew, “is that right?”

“I have not. Why should I? He destroyed Mother's will to live.”

“Sweetheart, you know very well why you should forgive him.”

“
I forgive him
.”

“Good.”

“How has the world changed? How has anything changed?”

“Oh, it's changed, all right,” said Charles. “It's changing and it won't stop. Were you expecting applause or a paycheck for your act of forgiveness?”

“Of course I was!”

“Many actors do.”

“He says a man,” said Andrew, “who runs a newspaper called the
Minnesota Mascot
—”

“Björnsen,” said Charles. “Speaks for ascending Scandinavian Lutheran farmer-businessmen at odds with the small-town elite.”

“Sounds right. Father saw him as the kind of man he saw in Fremont Older and the other Regenerators in the newspaper business, in the Golden Age of Graft. You know what I mean: someone who wasn't afraid to say startling, painful truths out loud and damn the consequences.”

“One quick note?”

“Go ahead.”

“The consequences are quite different if you don't have someone like Father approving your truth-telling.”

“Granted. And maybe that's what Father is seeing now.”

“All right. Tell me more about what you see him seeing.”

“How wonderful Mother has been nearly all the decades of his life?” asked Amelia.

“It's interesting, Amelia, how you can champion poor Mother who did little more than tell you to shut the fuck up all your life.”

“Shut the fuck up, Charles.”

“Well said, Amelia! Do you feel an exquisite relief?”

“Brava!” shouted Gus.

“Brava!” shouted Tony.

“No, I feel perfectly awful. I'm sorry, Tom.”

“We live,” said Pastor Tom, “around the table at which we have been seated!”

“Because Father thought he knew the sort of man who was in effect talking to him—I mean Björnsen—he was inclined to trust him, believe what he was saying, take it to heart, however you want to put it, and he thought he saw the hollowness of Progressivism, and by extension, the racism and xenophobia in populism, the hypocrisy of, of . . . of the Regenerators, of himself, the tyranny of power that runs under even the most admirable social and political ideas. On what flimsy pretexts that admiration is founded.”

“Even the most admirable applications of Christian ethics?”

“Yes.”

“Aha!” shouted Charles, looking at Amelia.

“Shut the fuck up, Charles,” said Pastor Tom. But he was smiling.

Charles ceased to smile. “So it's an instance of, a variation on, say, the
Timon of Athens
transformation? Generous Christian Becomes Disillusioned Misanthrope?”

“Let me appear to ponder this,” said Andrew. “No.”

“No,” said Charles quietly. “I don't suppose Father could ever become . . . misanthropic. The Old Poker Player probably saw that Progressivism was just a card for shrewd, energetic men to play but that the game was over because it had ceased somehow to be the great hand it had been only moments before.”

“You see, Vera,” said Andrew, addressing her singly and most earnestly—almost ardently, “he came to his principles naturally. As did Colonel Roosevelt.”

Charles laughed shortly, mirthlessly.

“Who does not?” asked Vera.

“Yes, you're right. What I meant to say is, his political principles appeared, to him and to the people around him as he was developing them, to come directly and immediately from his goodwill and generous nature, from virtue, Christian virtue, I suppose, but virtue nevertheless.”

“Why,” asked Vera, “did it take him so long to see through that shimmering surface? Was he hypnotized? I apologize if I seem cold. Ungenerous. But I really do not understand. Evil and suffering are readily apparent. Ignore it? Sure. But fail to recognize it? I don't think so.”

“I think he recognized it and wanted to believe that it was . . . nothing if not changeable.”

“Excuse me: I misspoke. I meant the hypocrisy must have been—”

“Excuse me, Vera,” said Amelia. “I'm sure the hypocrisy was as evident as the suffering and the evil. But when you are predisposed to see the good, you may be chagrined at instances of hypocrisy and worse but want more than anything else to shrug it off and—”

“He has sinned,” said Andrew. “He sees at last that he has sinned. I am not making fun. I am dramatizing because that appears to be in the family blood along with everything else. Dramatizing genuine religious conviction being reborn. He has sinned. That is to say, he has missed the mark. He now repents. That is to say, he is thinking again.”

“And,” said Charles, even more quietly, “I imagine the physical experience of his life has vitiated his will to . . . think differently. I mean . . . he must be very tired.”

Amelia's eyes filled with tears and she murmured indistinctly.

“Yes,” said Pastor Tom, “we are all very tired. So tired, sometimes, that we wish for a sleep like death.”

“A deathlike sleep,” Charles murmured only slightly more distinctly than had Amelia. “A sleep-like death.”

“Mother and Father have both aged quite a lot in the last year. Al looks very bad. And as selfish as it is for me to say so, I feel very bad. I have always looked to Father for guidance and support. I never had a problem doing that. Not looking to him for guidance and support would have been a problem.
But that never happened. If I seemed too lighthearted sometimes for that sort of attitude, that sort of dependence, if I worked my mouth . . .
over-joyously
sometimes—like certain others here today, I won't name names, it's in the blood, I guess—it was because I felt free and easy and confident. I was happy to carry on what I always thought of as ‘Father's work.' Maybe that was work of expiation for his part in the Spring Park Water disaster, maybe it was something else, I'm not sure. It certainly didn't start out that way, before the quake and the fires, it wasn't that way in Arizona, but it may have become that. I say again I'm not at all sure. Maybe when I say that Al looks bad and Mother and Father look old I'm completely wrong. Maybe Al looks great and Mother and Father have never been more perky, vigorous, healthy, wealthy, wise. Maybe I am only talking about myself. I'm not stupid. I know that could easily be the case. I'll even go so far as to say that's probably the case. No, tell you what: that
is
the case.”

“Mother and Father,” said Amelia, with the strange breeziness that had alarmed everybody who knew her all her life, “will be dead before the year is out.”

“Excuse me. I must be rude and cold again. Inexcusably so, but I beg your pardon anyway. I don't know Mother or Father or any of you around this table except Charles. I will be even more frank and revealing and come, I hope, swiftly to my point. I don't want to know any of you. I know and love Charles almost against my will. Maybe that's the nature of that kind of love. I don't know. But you can't have been awake while you were manipulating the kind of power you have, or had—and very likely will have in the future if you are honest with yourselves!—and not seen at first hand everywhere you looked the sacrifice of public good for personal power or wealth! You may very well have lied to yourselves about your determination to change things, but all the while you were cultivating power, were you not? Because to change things you must have power, must you not?”

“But Vera,” said Pastor Tom, “surely you are guilty to some degree of the very charges you level against us?”

“Not at all. I have no expectation—”

“Isn't everyone guilty?” asked Amelia.

“—
no expectation
of anything remotely like success or change or gain—certainly not increased power. I merely act. I despise power. I love to act.”

“You love to act but have no regard for consequence?” asked Andrew.

“You're being naïve or foolish or selfish,” said Amelia.

“I don't care if I live or die.”

“Nonsense,” said Amelia.

“I'm not here to convince you of a thing.”

“Well, neither am I, I guess,” said Andrew. “So allow me to be frank and revealing and come swiftly to my point as well.”

“Please do. I'm sorry I am so rude and cold.”

“There have always been, in my world, in Father's world, people who were outright villains. And if not exactly, actionably so, at least detestable and ‘worse people' than we were. I think primarily of the railroaders. The engineers and builders were men of science—”

“And slave drivers too,” said Vera. “Racist slave-driving profiteers.”

“You can no longer apologize for being rude and cold,” said Amelia.

“I no longer wish to.”

“Perhaps because we were so focused on the railroad men, we failed to take notice of all the other . . . characters entering the stage. There were suddenly so many factions, and agents within factions whose motives were never clear, that we became confused. We became confused because we wished to continue to think well of ourselves, and not throw in with anybody who we thought might be worse than we were. We wished, for example, to continue to think of men of science as the clear-thinking, politically neutral allies of the progressive spirit of reform—which was itself a kind of clear-thinking political science. But for every one of those, there were—suddenly, it seemed—ninety-nine of the other. Worse, for every good man and every bad man there were ninety-eight people milling around, haplessly, irrevocably human—and maybe that's why we found our Christianity, our social gospel, our progressivism to be such a . . . a fortress. It accommodated good and evil and everybody just bobbing along in the river of whatever this is. God wasn't dead, but if you
will allow me to use a popular catchphrase, we were beyond good and evil, beyond bliss of heaven and the torture of hell. Beyond spirit and matter—which is I think what Chick's been talking about all this time.”

Charles said nothing and chose not to alter his gaze, even though the last line of Andrew's speech had been a clear and sincere appeal to not just brotherhood, but an understanding that had grown directly from obsessions officially ignored by the family: of a great moment, in other words, and probably unprecedented, but embarrassing, as if any application of the “reality versus illusion of reality” paradox to what most people insisted on thinking of as “reality” must always be somehow embarrassing—as theater must always be somehow embarrassing.

Andrew drooped. No one else was willing or able to say what he had wanted to say, what he had hinted at.

“Get beyond power and glory,” said Charles at last, “let me know.”

“I no longer have much faith in the goodness of those ninety-eight other people.”

“Ah,” said Pastor Tom.

“Faith comes and faith goes,” said Amelia. “I speak from personal experience. The important thing is to be seeking it.”

“Well that's just it, isn't it? I no longer have the slightest interest in seeking it.”

“Ah,” said Pastor Tom.

“The meek will inherit the earth by taking tips from tyrants.”

Pastor Tom waited a beat, then said “ah” again, with a kind of finality and rigorous sadness.

“Now is precisely the time to stand up and shake off despair, Andy,” said Amelia. “There is really no other time to do it.”

“A despairing person, Amelia, doesn't give a hoot for standing up. And shaking it off doesn't even enter the question.”

“But it does, Andy, truly it does.”

“Now is when it counts,” said Pastor Tom. “Now is when it matters.”

Amelia, Pastor Tom, and Andrew all now had tears visibly filling their eyes.

“Father is coming here,” said Andrew. “He wants to talk to you generally about political marketing practices, and specifically about who you may be aligned with.”

“We know who we are aligned with.”

“Well then maybe you can just tell Father that.”

“I can't tell him not to come, I suppose.”

“I believe he's already on his way.”

“And Mother?”

“Mother's on her way to Rome. Unless you make a trip there yourself, I doubt you will ever see her again.”

“What about Al?”