The Daredevils Read Online Free PDF Page A

their cases. The organist was watching the stage manager and a few hands wrestle the ornate and unwieldy organ in place. Little Joe and Big Joe and a few of Joe’s brothers watched the hands grunt and shuffle and count off to each other. One of them was staring at the organist in some kind of disbelief or incredulity. Charles watched everybody watching everybody else.
    The first violinist, a rugged-looking man who would not have seemed out of place directing traffic in and out of a placer mine, though quite old, was at his side before he knew it. He asked if Charles was going to hear Caruso, who was singing Don José in the Metropolitan Opera Company’s touring Carmen at the Mission Opera House that night.
    â€œNo excitement will be allowed,” said Charles. “Mother says we rehearse and hit the hay.”
    â€œI wonder,” said the old man, “if she means to apply the prohibition to us.” Charles grinned at him in his superbly social way. “I’m not joking,” said the man, rather crossly, looking around in annoyance. He focused on the organ. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
    Charles agreed. It had been modeled, it was said, on the water organ carved into the pedestal of Theodosius’s Obelisk, built according to Mother’s specifications—that was the official line at any rate—by Moody and Billings in Detroit, a maker better known for their barrel organs, on one of which the organist had been rehearsing.
    Referring to this, the old violinist said, “Ernst is delirious.”
    No one on the bustling stage dared, it seemed, to enter the limelight, which was focused on two chalked X marks, where Charles and Mother were to stand when singing.
    Mother walked into the light.
    Was she beautiful, as people told him? Was she daunting, as people told him? Was she inexpressibly kind and sweet beneath the intricately worked armor of hyper-privileged can-do? When they sang the Stabat Mater, they were to seem a single voice, winding in and out of itself, moving away a note or two up or down the scale, or less, usually less, ceaselessly weaving sound, exchanging notes, while the quartet and continuo ticked away like a cosmic clock, or a pedal on a slowly spinning loom . . . his heavenly cherub-treble to “her darkly radiant, and yes, frankly imperial contralto”—the voice of not merely an ascendant United States of America but of a triumphant leader of the tired, old, confused or simply inferior nations of the world, a Statue of Liberty with a world-class voice, sixty years old, four children: Mother. In a way it was embarrassing to think of any part of one’s self as being “sinuous” with one’s mother’s self, not to mention “hauntingly sensuous,” but to hear it, to hear that single voice moving ineluctably toward two and back again to one, one note striving to become a different note, the second note striving to stay as it was—that was an altogether different matter. The voice had evolved and was part of a rising convergence that was very close to God.
    Charles knew it and Mother knew it. And they both knew each other knew it.
    â€œIneluctable,” from the Latin for the struggle to be free or clear of something.
    He had looked it up. Everything about it made him uneasy—or frightened him outright. This was why you knew how to talk about baseball and football, and why you took the trouble to be a good shot when killing sickened you. It was perhaps why Father responded to you so warmly, when all the talk on the surface was of more rising convergences, of Christian evolution and fate.
    The second violinist played the five notes and Charles shivered. Had the first violinist noticed the shiver? What if he had? The second violinist must have heard them as Charles had. But would it do to ask him? He had to admit it, shivering, that he was afraid to ask. Mother’s intention in the early going was simply to