Charles affirmed that it was true: he was an ordinary kid. He believed nothing of the kind, but this seemed an appropriate falsehood.
“Just stupefyingly rich,” Vera reminded him.
“Yes,” he said evenly, “that’s right. Here we are back at money! How surprising! How refreshing!”
“Whose daddy thinks he will be pwezzydent some day!”
“I’m sorry: thinks I will be what?”
“You know what’s worse than an actor whipping up the patriots?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
“A stupefyingly rich actor whipping up the patriots.”
“Do you people really not get it? I am not Christopher Newman and I did not whip up any patriots.”
“Oh, but see now,” said Vera, going to him and caressing him, soothing him, as well as giving him an instantaneous erection, which dizzied and thrilled him even more than he had been, so much so that he felt lightheaded, drunken, “there’s where you are wrong, dear. You are Christopher Newman and you did whip up the patriots, but it’s all right, it’s all right, shush now. I was a French princess and I helped you.”
“There is no connection between Christopher Newman and myself.”
“No connection? Shush now. Of course there is.”
“No real connection.”
“No real connection, all right, shush now, can you?”
“Did you just say you helped me?””
“To be fair,” said Sir Edwin mildly, even disinterestedly, “the better job he does, the more tenuous is the connection.” He slipped into his Russian accent. “All this talk of rill is mislidding.”
“An ordinary kid,” said Jules, “one of us, rich, sure, but here’s the difference: he can stand there alone on that stage, naked for all the costumes and disguises, in a pool of light, and know that we are all out there looking at him and judging him. And not be afraid to stand there. Doesn’t have to say a word. Doesn’t have to light a cigarette or look out a window that’s got a piece of tar paper where the glass should be. Just stand there and not be afraid of us. That’s some kind of American, at least. I mean here tonight, Charles, not on your stage.”
Vera was positively hugging him now and suddenly he could not have been happier. “I know,” she said, cooing. “I know, it’s the other Americans, the ones who are watching and judging. They’re stampeding their little selves.”
“There’s all kinds of Americans, surely,” somebody in the crowd observed with a kind of sententious quiet.
“What kind of American are you, Shirley?” asked Warren Farnsworth.
There was a brief silence, as Farnsworth’s tone had not been altogether “in the spirit” of the conversation.
“My name’s not Shirley. It’s Vera and Vera’s not my real name, either, because I wanted to have a revolutionary name, the name of a brave woman who had sacrificed everything for the cause. The name of a Russian. That’s the kind of American I am. I was born and raised in Muscatine, Iowa, and worked from the time I was born until just, I don’t know, a few months ago, a year or two, in a button factory. My task was the most tedious task in the factory but it was critical as the factory could not sell mixed buttons. I and my friends graded the buttons according to manufacturing defects, natural stains, color, luster, and iridescence. I also sewed buttons to decorative cards, for a while. I tried to drown the owner in a big tub of buttons but even though I failed I had to leave town. Now I print revolutionary materials on a secret press. NO GODS TO APPEASE, NO MASTER TO BOW DOWN TO, NO DOGMA TO RECITE! That’s what I say, and that’s the kind of American I am!”
Sandy, golden hair, dark eyebrows, tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with very thin and long arms and legs, but very pretty; she had the kind of red-cheeked and golden-curled glow one saw in advertisements, and she beamed modestly as the salonnières cheered and whistled their approval of her speech. Farnsworth was so much shorter than she was, and uglier, that Charles could not veil the derision in the look of superiority he shot at him. He looked like a rat at this distance. And yet his eyes had been far more intelligent than those one saw in rat faces. And they were kind — or if not exactly kind, understanding of something not usually or easily understood. When the applause died down for Vera, Farnsworth — being, everyone assumed, her lover — was persuaded to describe the kind of American he was.
“I am a good citizen and I proved it by learning a trade. I was born and raised on a farm but my daddy beat me so I left and learned how to cut leather for the soles of shoes. No, I’m sorry, wait, my daddy died and left my mother and my nine brothers and sisters and me with his brother-in-law, who had a cow way out somewhere around the far side of Jamaica Bay. Had one cow and I milked it until I was twelve and then my mind turned to other philosophies. That was when I learned how to cut linings. Satisfied with my progress toward heaven, I became a streetcar conductor for the fun of it, the sheer daredeviling hell of it, don’t you know? It’s true I was guilty of nickeling now and then and it’s also true I came into possession of a set of burglar’s tools. Don’t ask me how. They were there in the morning on the doorstep and that’s all I know. I took them in and cared for them like they were my own. But that wasn’t any kind of life so I decided I would go to Mexico to help Pancho Villa with his revolution. I made it as far as Los Angeles, where this strike was going on. The Wobblies were striking. a shoe factory! I made a deal with the Wobblies I was playing pool with that I would get a job as a lining cutter — because it was as a lining cutter that I had made my stand as a citizen! — and report back to the Wobblies on the activities of the scabs and their leaders. The Wobblies said okay, that sounded like good fun and off I went. Only they forgot to tell everybody that I was only posing as a scab — and here I think I can speak with some authority about what our young thespian has been up against — and I got the fucking shit kicked out of me. Once we got that straightened out, I went back to spying, and I framed some scabs. Then I decided I would find out where these strikebreakers were coming from. I borrowed one of Julie’s motorcycles and I tailed one of the owners of the factory for a few days. Then he got wise to me and led me back to the factory, where he ran me over and a bunch of scabs who’d been hanging out at the paymaster’s window jumped me. I would have been killed, stomped to death, if it hadn’t been for somebody in this room whose name I won’t say in case there’s somebody else in this room who wants to put him in prison. He was unbeknownst to me playing craps with the guard and getting him drunk, after which point he undressed him, dressed himself up as the guard, took his keys, and went into the factory where he smashed up some equipment. When he was about to make his getaway, he saw them picking me up and throwing me down and he rides up on his motorcycle in his guard’s uniform, blowing his whistle and firing his gun! That stops everybody cold and he says, ‘Warren Farnsworth, I believe?’ I still don’t know if he’s a real cop or who he is, but at least I’m no longer being thrown up in the air and landing on my head, so I jump on the back of the motorcycle. That’s the just the beginning of my story, but that’s the kind of American I am.”
When Charles tried to leave a few minutes later, Vera stopped him.
“I wonder if I might have a private word, Mr. Minot?”
“Oh, do please call me Charles. And please speak freely.”
“I want you to know that despite all this business, we, most of us, thought that whatever it is you did up there, you did it well. You did it astonishingly well. And whether most of us can admit it or not, we derived a definite benefit from your performance.”