Or did he? He took it back: he had an interest, but not a personal interest in those things. He had no agenda to advance, put it that way, no cause to espouse, no principle to maintain, no belief to kill or die for. He had no wish to make people repent and therefore had no desire to put bullets in their heads. He was perhaps an anarchist in the way that Vera possibly was an anarchist: that is to say, she was not. Not really. If she had ever called herself one he had not heard it. They were not divided in their selves: that he could say. They were not afraid: that too he could say. No one is ruling? Then all are ruling. And if all are ruling — if all are letting all rule — then that rule “speaks the truth” because there’s no call for a deception; that rule is “just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, scornful of being scorned.” Oh yes, he had read Emerson, to be sure, but he had not come near an understanding of him: he seemed to think himself an idealist and immediately admit that idealists were especially subject to cant and pretension and lofty ineffectuality, that rather than having Truth, Goodness, and Beauty inhering in each other, Beauty was supreme. Charles had no interest in Beauty because, before Vera, it had seemed false. Father despised Emerson — despised New England, really, and everything it stood for — and so, he supposed, had he despised him as part of his intellectual inheritance. “Our virtue trips and totters!” He had said so himself! “It does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches to the zealot.” Like Plato it was always correct to praise or despise him, but something of a sin to understand him. Charles had come to want to understand these great men. And he came to understandings so quickly and surely that he was almost ashamed of his body, that thing that could be so quickly and easily replaced, so quickly and surely that he had to have been helped, by his strange friends, the daredevils. I learned how to do a thing without a wish for reward or a fear of consequences. It gave him enormous energy. He felt whole and uncomplicated. He felt he was part of an uncomplicated whole. He felt that when conditions were sufficient for manifestation, he would manifest, and when they were not, he would not. The universe had come together to make me. It expected nothing of him but to be. He was free. And it was precisely when he found himself lifting the pen from his notebook and in effect winking at the baker who declared the war effort to be a hoax — a declaration that I now knew was against the law, was seditious, and punishable by imprisonment if he was lucky and lynching if he was not—that he knew he was free. He smiled inwardly to think that he was a hero. That he had found a way to become a hero. He could do whatever small task presented itself to be done: instead of calculating reward and consequence, he could lift his pen from his notebook. He cared one day, one hour, about nothing beyond seeing to it that the baker not be harassed and tortured. The next minute, hour, day, he would perform another brief act that might forestall cowardice and cruelty. That was all. It was so simple, so clear, so fine.
And he was able “to be in love” with Vera.
Which was not to say that he was free of his creamy blue-veined marble character, his personality of privilege and its habitual weaknesses, its routines of intellectual passion — the nearly impervious Charles Minot-ness that was inseparable from the dictates of his ceaselessly and excellently-trained brain and the receipt of constant confirmation from all those other brains around it — of the reality he had counter-trained himself to disavow for a decade. He was not free of the necessary falseness of reality, not free of the stage, but wished to be. He embodied this wish as “Vera.”
He found as well that he was becoming altogether welcoming of alcohol and narcotics and firearms — things that had never had lives of their own, things that had been present, certainly, but only unremarkably so, in a family whose patriarch was not only a Westerner, but one who had been shot twice representing law and order and nearly been blown to pieces in a natural disaster. He was susceptible to “thrills,” to “somnolence” or at least to the ideas of same, to inner thrills, if he could put it that way, and superhuman manifestations of same — thanks to Vera, who had her own frank but mysterious need of them in her drugged entanglements, and thanks to the fact that someone had tried and nearly succeeded in blowing him, Father’s boy, after all, to pieces in a political disaster — shredding, if truth be told, his nerves once and for all. Vera knew, had known for some time, long before she met Charles, how perilously close to sudden death she — everybody — was living. But that was remedial, not mysterious, a superficial explanation, not a need. When she talked about it, when she felt she could and wanted to talk about it, she could only speak of home and exile. The world is the dark and our home is the light. Evil wants to return to its home in the light just as much as good does. Good and evil was useless distinction, if not an altogether maliciously false one. Charles said she was a gnostic and that he wanted to learn the gnosis from her. Which of course made her laugh and cry and laugh and cry, and drink and fuck and take on a reckless attitude to work that could, at some point in one of a hundred projected futures, become dangerous. That would.
But if there was nothing you could do about it, did you want to talk about it? Or not.
Vera struggled with what she quickly chose to call her “addiction”—though to what, precisely, could not be ascertained — far more desperately than Charles did — she had been at it longer, he supposed, but he was better at it because his nerves, he now saw so clearly, had been ruined when he was a child, and it made him weak and sick. Vera was not sick and weak or fragile, but she spoke more and more of a friend who had died in New York three years earlier, Rosemary, who was simply a fragile person, talking as if Rosemary had been a part of her that had suffered and died to allow Vera to suffer and live. It was a variation not at all lost on Charles of the understudy who had been onstage where Vera had been meant to be. Rosemary had a story about her father, who worked on a match factory, toiling over phosphorus fumes that had made his bones brittle: Rosemary said she saw her father step awkwardly from a curb, saw the twisted ankle break, saw her father falling and cracking to pieces, and it seemed to Vera more and more likely every time she told the story. She had left Muscatine and buttons for Willimantic and thread, and a strike that was getting national attention. Body and soul were strung together with Willimantic thread and wrapped in smoke. It was possible Rosemary was some kind of otherworldly creature, a goddess, even, Vera didn’t know. But she clung to her as the world wove the fabric of affliction ever more densely.
“We lived,” she told Charles, “in a worker’s paradise. That was how I liked to put it, it made Rosemary laugh, and that was all there was to it. We were just teenaged girls, and we liked to laugh. We called ourselves ‘The Champions of Work’ and we whistled a great deal. The owners were in fact kind and generous people, decent, intelligent people, and were famous for those qualities in all the mill towns of southern New England. They built an opera house in which works by all the greatest composers were performed: Verdi, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Ponchielli, Puccini, Giordano, Cilea, Catalani, Leoncavallo, Mascagni — oh, I could go on and on!”