The theater’s marquis was dark but he could still see quite plainly CHARLES MINOT AS THE AMERICAN. He looked up and down the street: it was not a lively street and was deserted now, and dark. The wind was cold and he put on his leather jacket and began to walk to his automobile, the only vehicle left on the whole somber street. Turning to get one arm in, he saw a large white shape against the brick of the building. He stopped and looked at it: it almost seemed a basement window filled with light, a scrim, or some kind of magical portal. Then he saw it was a sign and had a long wooden stake attached to it. He went over to it and turned it over: CHARLES MINOT IS NO AMERICAN!!! Another behind it cried, SHAME ON YOU CHARLES MINOT!!!
The house declined steadily and visibly each night, which turned out, of course, to be a good thing. Father brushed it aside as a knee-jerk popular response against which there was no, never had been a, remedy. It was a little wave. Charles was not fooled: Father was visibly relieved, almost cheerful. The only question was, what kind of relief, what kind of good cheer was it? There were two distinct modes: either he felt he had gotten his way, or he knew something, something that only the rulers of the city could know, and was pleased that he did not have to be, as it were, patriarchal, judgmental, and dismissive about something he had always had little sympathy for in his son’s life — but what could the nature of such knowledge be? How could a play, that Father found trivial, matter politically, even when it was, if it was, the politics that happened around the Tree at the Center of the Universe, with its roots in corruption and decay and its flowers in heaven?
Before The American was canceled, and the openings of the theater’s other two shows indefinitely postponed, a bomb, contained in a small suitcase, was hurled, or more properly, dropped, from the balcony. It wasn’t clear if the bomber was trying for the stage or the audience, but the bomb killed actors and wounded musicians: Grandpa Garagiola, portly Teddy Blair, pretty Mary Girdle, Vera’s blossoming understudy Catherine White, community-minded newcomer Margaret Stensrud — who came off the stage into the wing with such force that she knocked Charles unconscious — and his friend Gene Woodcock were all blown to bits. Charles was broadly believed to be the bomber’s probable target. But he had been offstage — so briefly, an exit, a breath, an entrance — at the moment of the explosion. Had it been just bad timing? And if he was he the target, why was he the target? Because he was “the American”? An oligarch? An oligarch in the making? Was it simply a blow at the aristocracy as made manifest by the Minots and their theater and their disgusting play? Or was he the target because he had been associating, as the protest signs made clear, with anarchists. Was he perhaps not the target at all? Had an anarchist meant to scare the war-mongering general public? Or were the railroaders, working on a decade-old grievance with William Minot, simply doing what they did best: destroy — either good or evil, depending on your point of view. These possibilities, along with the indispensable frame-ups — railroad barons framing anarchists, anarchists framing railroad barons — merged and then, in an orgasmic release of spermy public rumor-mongering, was made manifest in what the Buddhists call “the ten thousand things,” an effectively infinite process of variations of the species conspiraciensus.
He was summoned to Fall River Mills, to the ranch, where everybody, including Amelia and Pastor Tom, his two older brothers and the women they were engaged to, his younger brothers and a platoon of their friends, were spending the summer. He had not wanted to seem to be fleeing the city, the horror, as his family had, and decided to stay for as long as he could stand it. He felt he could stand it forever with Vera, but her whereabouts, he was once again told, were unknown, and he saw he could not press his concern, not an inch. Two weeks later, on the day of the Preparedness Parade, dispirited and restless and confused, he went to the shop and found it full of new faces. Nobody could tell him where even someone as integral to the shop as Jules was, either. A mechanic who claimed to have done some work for him told him he thought they were going to watch the parade from a rooftop of a building on Market. He gave Charles the number, then asked him if he knew of anybody who wanted to buy rare old motorcycles.
“Like what, for instance?” asked Charles, sensing a joke in the offing.
The mechanic, pink lips reaching out from an oily face to close around the mouth of a bottle of beer: “Like an ’02 Triumph with a Belgian Minerva motor?”
Someone standing near said, “What’s that?”
The mechanic said, “This is the kid had a Belgian waffle he wanted to unload.”
“Minerva,” Charles said. “And my name is Minot.”
“A Belgian Minot and his name is Minerva.”
“Other way around,” Charles said.
“Whatever,” said the mechanic.
“I’d take the waffle,” said the other man, “but who needs a Minerva? You gotta shut the engine off every time you come to a stop, don’t you?”
The mechanic nodded and belched. Charles thanked him for his help, left the shop, and made his way as near to Market Street as he could get. Walking through dense and happy crowds waving flags, he heard a marching band. Climbing five flights of stairs, he came to the last door and stood before it. He knocked and waited. Knocked a second time and continued to wait. Then opened the door and stepped into the sunlight. There were enough people on the roof to make it impossible to see everyone at once, and he paused on the threshold. There, he saw that everyone he could see was looking at him.
He knew they were looking at nothing, at an actor, and was untroubled.
He saw Vera, deep in conversation with the woman he had met the night Farnsworth had beaten her up. Talking to the woman but looking at him.
She saw Charles see her and looked away.
His heart began to thump — insisting he was something — as he searched the crowd for Warren Farnsworth and his sworn agency of death. How Farnsworth’s jealous wrath could prevail, even survive, in the face of a mass murder only days old, Charles did not know. Appraised calmly, from a crucial but not necessarily great distance, it was impossible to countenance. No sane man would kill another who had just survived a bomb blast over a sexual matter. Remove that distance, though, and place your mind back onstage with the carnage, with the severed limbs, the rolling, rocking heads coming to a stop in the limelighted pools of brilliant, smoking, crimson, still-spreading blood, the heaps of intestine and organ meat that had been actors draped like bunting on the furniture or fallen like confetti on paraders. and whether or not you thought they could be replaced and that the show would go on, as everything was replaced and every show went on, and that terror was ordinary and that there were no sane men, not in the moment of the act as every moment was a moment of an act, there, on the stage, you saw that everything was possible and that the only way to go on was to see that you were some kind of nexus of nothing, or nexus of everything, if you preferred, and therefore immortal. In other words, Warren Farnsworth could very easily step up and stab him in the heart, or — how had Father’s Montaigne put it? — make a person repent by killing them?