In 1941, its best year ever, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.-from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman's Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist's dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April-though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million. Out of his twenty-nine thousand and change, Sammy gave a quarter to the government, then half of what remained to his mother to spend on herself and his grandmother.
On the leftovers, he lived like a king. He ate lox at breakfast every morning for seven weeks. He went to baseball games at Ebbets Field and sat in a box. He might spend as much as two dollars on dinner, and once, on a day when his legs were feeling tired, he rode seventeen blocks in a taxi. He had an entire week's worth of big, visible suits, five gray skyscrapers of pinstripe and worsted, made for himself at twenty-five dollars a pop. And he bought himself a Capehart Panamuse phonograph. It cost $645.00, nearly half as much as a new Cadillac Sixty-one. It was finished in a ridiculously beautiful Hepplewhite style, maple and birch inlaid with ash, and in the cousins' otherwise modern, rather spartan apartment-soon after taking up with Joe, Rosa had begun to lobby him to move out of the Chelsea Rathole-it stood out disturbingly.
It demanded that you play music on it and then maintain the respectful silence of a sinner being sermonized. Sammy loved it as he had never loved anything in his life. The sad flutter of Benny Goodman's clarinet came so poignantly through its deluxe "panamusical" loudspeakers that it could make Sammy cry. The Panamuse was fully automatic; it could store twenty records and play them, in any order, on both sides. The marvelous operations of the record-changing mechanism, in the manner of the time, were on proud display inside the cabinet, and new guests to the apartment, like visitors to the U.S. Mint, were always given a look at the works. Sammy was smitten for weeks, and yet every time he looked at the phonograph, he was racked with guilt and even horror over the cost. His mother would die without ever having learned of its existence.
The funny thing was that, after you threw in the large but still piddling sum Sammy spent every month on books, magazines, records, cigarettes, and amusements, and his half of the $110 monthly rent, there was still more money left over than Sammy knew what to do with. It piled up in his bank account, making him nervous.
"You should get married," Rosa liked to tell him.
Her name was not on the lease, but Rosa had become the apartment's third occupant, and in a very real sense its animating spirit. She had helped them find it (it was a new building on Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square), to furnish it, and, when she realized that she would never otherwise be able to share a bathroom with Sammy, to obtain the weekly services of a cleaning woman. At first she would just drop by once or twice a week, after work. She had quit her job at Life for a job retouching, in lurid hues, color pictures of prune-and-noodle casseroles, velvet crumb cakes, and bacon canapes for a publisher of cheap cookbooks that were given away as premiums in five-and-dimes. It was tedious work, and when things got really bad, Rosa liked to indulge minute Surrealist impulses. With an airbrush she would equip a pineapple in the background with a slick black tentacle, or conceal a tiny polar explorer in the frigid peaks of a meringue desert. The publisher's offices were on East Fifteenth, ten minutes from the apartment. Rosa would often come in at five with a bag full of unlikely roots and leaves and cook strange recipes that her father had acquired a taste for in his travels: tagine, mole, something green and slippery that she called sleek. In general these dishes tasted very good; and their exotic dress served to conceal fairly well, Sammy thought, her fairly retrograde approach to winning Joe's heart via the kitchen. She herself never took more than a bite of any of it.
"There's a girl at work," Rosa said at breakfast one morning, setting in front of Sammy a plate of eggs scrambled with Portuguese sausage. She was a frequent guest at breakfast, too, if "guest" was the proper term to apply to someone who shopped for the meal, prepared it, served it to you, and cleaned up when you were through. Their across-the-hall neighbors were visibly outraged by this waywardness, and the doorman's eyes would twinkle crudely as he held the door for her in the mornings. "Barbara Drazin. She's a dish. And she's looking. You should let me introduce you."
"College girl?"
"City."
"No thanks."
When Sammy looked up from the platter of pastry, which Rosa had as usual arranged with such photogenic artfulness that he was loath to disturb the cheese danish he had his eye on, he caught her giving Joe a look. It was a look he had seen them exchange before, whenever the subject of Sammy's love life came up, as when Rosa was around it tended rather too often to do.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing."
She spread her napkin in her lap, pointedly somehow, and Joe went on tinkering with some kind of spring-loaded card-passing contraption that was part of his act; he had another of his magic gigs tomorrow night, a bar mitzvah at the Pierre. Sammy snatched the cheese danish, collapsing Rosa 's giveaway-cookbook pyramid.
"It's just," she continued, never requiring an actual rejoinder to sustain a conversation, "you always have an excuse."
"It's not an excuse," Sammy said. "It's a disqualification."
"And why are college girls disqualified? I forget."
"Because they make me feel dumb."
"But you aren't dumb. You are extremely well read, fairly well spoken, and you make your living by the pen or, in your case, the typewriter."
"I know this. It's not a rational feeling. And I can't stand stupid women. It's just, I guess I feel bad that I don't have a college education myself. And I'm embarrassed when they start asking me about what I do, and I have to tell them I write comic books, and then it's either 'Gee, aren't they awfully, well, trashy,' or else it's that patronizing 'Comic books! I adore comic books!'-which is even worse."
"Barbara Drazin would never make you feel bad about what you do," Rosa said. "Besides, I told her you also wrote three novels."
"Oh my God," Sammy said.
"I'm sorry."
"Please, Rosa, how many times do I gotta ask you not to tell anybody that anymore, okay?"
"I'm so sorry. It's just that I-"
"For God's sake, those were pulps, I got paid by the yard. Why do you think they invented the pseudonym?"
"All right," said Rosa, "all right. I just think you ought to meet her."
"Thanks, but no thanks. I got too much work to do anyway."
"He's writing a novel," Joe said, peeling a Chiquita. He seemed to take a good deal of pleasure in the exchanges between his girlfriend and his best friend. His only contribution to the decor of the apartment had been the stack of wooden crates in which he kept his burgeoning collection of comic books. "In his spare time," he added, through a big white mouthful of banana. "A real one."
"Yeah, well," Sammy said, feeling himself blush. "At the rate I'm going, we'll all be sitting around in the old-age home reading it."
"I'll read it," Rosa said. "Sammy, I'd love to. I'm sure it's very good."
"It isn't. But thank you. You mean it?"
"Of course."
"Maybe," he said, for the first but by no means the final time in their long association, "when I get chapter one into shape."
When Sammy arrived at the Empire offices on that textbook April morning-tufted sky, daffodils swinging like a big band on every patchof green, love in the air, et cetera-he took the oft-revised first (and sole) chapter of American Disillusionment out of his bottom desk drawer, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and tried to work, but the conversation with Rosa had left him uneasy. Why didn't he want to, at least, say, have a drink with a dish from City College? How did he even know that he didn't like dating college girls? It was like saying he didn't care for golf. He had a fairly good idea that it was not the game for him, but the fact was the closest he had ever been to a golf course was the peeling plaster windmills of the old Tom Thumb course at Coney island. Why, for that matter, wasn't he jealous of Joe? Rosa was a great-looking girl, soft and powdery-smelling. While it was true that he found her remarkably easy to talk to, tease with, confide in, and let down his guard around, easier than he had ever found any other girl, he felt only the faintest itch for her. At times this absence of prurient feeling, so marked and plain to both of them that Rosa had no compunction about lounging around the apartment with her underpants covered only by the flapping tails of one of Joe's shirts, troubled Sammy, and he would try, lying in his bed at night, to imagine kissing her, stroking her thick dark curls, lifting those shirttails to reveal the pale belly beneath. But such chimeras invariably faded in the light of day. The real question was, why wasn't he more jealous of Rosa !
He was just happy to see his friend happy, he typed. It was an autobiographical novel, after all. There was a hole in the man's life that no one person ever would have been able to fill.
The phone rang. It was his mother.
"I have the night off," she said. "Why don't you bring him and we'll make Shabbes. He can bring that girlfriend of his, too."
"She's kind of picky about food," Sammy said. "What are you burning?"
"All right, so don't come."
"I'll be there."
"I don't want you."
"I'll be there. Ma?"
"What?"
"Ma?"
"What?"
"Ma?"
"What?"
"I love you."
"Big joker." She hung up.
He put American Disillusionment back in the drawer and started to work on the script for Kid Vixen, the crime-fighting female boxer feature, with art by Marty Gold, that he had put in as a backup for All Doll, along with the Glovsky brothers' Venus McFury, about a hard-boiled girl detective who was the reincarnation of one of the classical Erinyes, and Frank Pantaleone's Greta Gatling, a cowgirl strip. The first issue of All Doll Comics had sold out its entire run of half a million copies; #6 was in production now, and orders were extremely strong. Sammy had half of an idea for the latest Vixen story, involving a catfight between the Kid and a champion Nazi girl boxer whom he was thinking of calling Battling Brunhilde, but he could not seem to get his mind into it this morning. The funny thing was that, as hard as he had fought with Sheldon Anapol for them to be able to keep plugging away at the Nazis, fighting the funny-book war was getting tougher all the time; though futility was not an emotion Sammy was accustomed to experiencing, he had begun to be plagued by the same sense of inefficacy, of endless make-believe, that had troubled Joe from the first. Only there was nothing Sammy saw to do about it; he wasn't about to start picking fights at ball games.
He kept at the script, starting over three times, drinking Bromo-Seltzer through a straw to keep down the pang of dread that had begun to gnaw at his belly. Much as Sammy did love his mother, and craved her approval, five minutes of conversation with her was all it took to induce a matricidal rage in his breast. The large sums of money he gave over to her, though she was gratifyingly astonished by them and always managed, in her curt way, to thank him, proved nothing to her about anything. To get paid vast sums for wasting one's life, in her view, only added to the cosmic tallying of wastefulness. Most maddening of all to Sammy was the way that, in the face of the sudden influx of money, Ethel steadfastly refused to change any element of her life, except to shop for better cuts of meat, buy a new set of carving knives, and spend a relatively lavish amount on new underwear for Bubbie and herself.
The rest she socked away. She viewed each fat paycheck as the last, certain that eventually, as she put it, "the bubble gets popped." Each month that the comic book bubble not only continued to float but expanded exponentially just confirmed Ethel's belief that the world was insane and growing madder, so that when the pin finally went in, the pop would be all the more terrible. Yes, it was always loads of fun dropping in on old Ethel, to share in the revelry and good times, to banter and sing and sup on the delicious fruits of her kitchen. Bubbie would have baked one of her bitter, brittle Bubbie babkas that they all had to make a fuss over even though each tasted as if she had baked it in 1877 and then mislaid it in a drawer until yesterday.
The only bright prospect for the day was that he and Joe had also been invited to come down to the radio studio to meet the cast of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, in run-throughs for the debut next Monday afternoon. Hitherto, Burns, Baggot & DeWinter, the advertising agency, had not involved Sammy or Joe or any of the Empire people in the production, though Sammy had heard that several of the first few episodes were being adapted directly from the comic books. Once, Sammy had met the show's writers by chance, as they were coming out of Sardi's. They knew him from the unflattering drawing that had run in the Saturday Evening Post, and stopped him to say hello and shed the gentle luster of their scorn upon him. They all seemed to Sammy like college-boy types, with pipes and bow ties. Only one would admit to ever having read a comic book, and probably all of them considered the form beneath contempt. One had written previously for Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, another for Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
But there was to be a party on Monday after the first broadcast, to which Sammy and Joe were invited; and on this balmy Friday, they went over to Radio City to get a look, if that was the right way to put it, at the vocal embodiments of their characters.
"Shabbes dinner," Joe said, as they passed the Time-Life Building. Joe claimed to have once seen Ernest Hemingway coming out of it, and Sammy looked for the writer as they went by.
"I saw him, I tell you."
"Sure you did. Yes, Shabbes dinner. At my mother's. Bad food. House like an oven. You don't want to miss that."
"I have a date with Rosa," Joe said. "I think we're supposed to eat with her father at the house."
"You do that almost every night! Come on, Joe, don't make me go alone. I'll go mad, mad, I tell you."
" Rosa is right," Joe said.
"As usual, but this time about what?"
"You need a girl."
It was cool and dark in the lobby of the RCA Building. The soft knocking of shoe heels on stone floors and the somber, reassuring pomposity of the Sert and Brangwyn murals allowed Sammy to experience what he dimly recognized as tranquility for the first time all day. A chubby young fellow was waiting for them at the guard's desk, nibbling on a manicured finger. He introduced himself as Larry Sneed, assistant to the producer George Chandler, and showed them how to sign in and pin passes to their jackets.
"Mr. Chandler's really glad you could make it over," Sneed said over his shoulder.
"It was nice of him to invite us."
"Well, he's become quite a fan of your work."
"He reads it?"
"Oh, he studies it like the Bible."
They got out of the elevator, went down a stairwell and across a hall into another stairwell, this one gray cinder-block and iron stairs, then into a dingy white corridor, past the closed door of a studio with the on air light illuminated, left, and into another studio. It was cool and smoky and dim. At one end of the big yellow room, three casually dressed groups of actors, holding scripts, were loitering around a trio of microphones. In the middle of the room, two men sat at a small table, listening. Pages of script lay everywhere, scattered on the ground and blown into drifts in the corners. There was a gunshot. Sammy was the only one in the room who jumped. He looked wildly around. Three men stood off to the left in the midst of an assortment of kitchen utensils, lumber, and scrap metal. One of them was holding a gun. They were all sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning.
"Ooh, got me!" cried Larry Sneed. He clutched his silk-fronted pot-belly and spun around. "Ha ha ha." He pretended to laugh. The actor who was delivering his line stopped talking, and everyone turned to look. They seemed to welcome the distraction, Sammy thought, except for the director, who scowled. "Hi, folks, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Mr. Chandler, here's a couple of bright young fellows like me who want to meet our marvelous cast. Mr. Sam Clay and Mr. Joe Kavalier."
"Hello, boys," said one of the two men at the center table, rising from his chair. He was about the same age as Sammy's father would have been, but tall and refined, with a trim Vandyke and extra-big black glasses that made him look, Sammy thought, like a man of science. He shook their hands. "This is Mr. Cobb, our director." Cobb nodded. Like Chandler, he was wearing a suit and tie. "And this ragged bunch is our cast. Forgive their appearance, but they've been rehearsing all week." Chandler pointed to the actors around the microphones, anointing each one from a distance with a momentary dab of his finger as he gave the name and role. "That's Miss Verna Kaye, our Plum Blossom; Pat Moran, our Big Al; and Howard Fine as the evil Kommandant X. Over there may I present Miss Helen Portola, our Poison Rose; Ewell Conrad as Omar; Eddie Fontaine as Pedro; and our announcer, Mr. Bill Parris."
"But Poison Rose is dead," said Joe.
"We haven't killed her on the radio yet," said Chandler. "And that big, handsome fellow over there is our Escapist, Mr. Tracy Bacon."
Sammy was too distracted just then to notice Mr. Tracy Bacon.
"Pedro?" he said.
"The old Portuguese stagehand." Chandler nodded. "For comic relief. The sponsor felt we ought to lighten things up a little."
"Nize to mitts your ekwentinz," said Eddie Fontaine, with a tip of his imaginary Portuguese hat.
"And old Max Mayflower?" Sammy wanted to know. "And the man from the League of the Golden Key? You aren't having the League?"
"We tried it with the League, didn't we, Larry?"
"Yes, we did, Mr. Chandler."
"When you're debuting a series, it's better to get right down to business," said Cobb. "Skip the preliminaries."
"We take care of all that with the intro," Chandler explained. "Bill?"
"Armed with superb physical and mental training," Bill Parris began, "a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats-"
The whole cast chimed in for the tag.
"And coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!"
"This-is-the Escapist!"
Everyone laughed, except Joe, who clapped his hands. But for some reason, Sammy was irritated.
"And what about Tom Mayflower?" he persisted. "Who's going to be him?"
A cheerful, scratchy teenage voice rang out from the corner.
"I'm going to be Tom, Mr. Clay! And golly, I'm awful darn excited about it!"
That busted everybody up again. Tracy Bacon was looking right at Sammy, grinning, his cheeks flushed, mostly with pleasure, it seemed, at the astonished look on Sammy's face. Bacon was such a perfect Escapist that one would have thought he had been cast to play the role in a film, not on the air. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a dimple in his chin and glossy blond hair fitted to the top of his head like a polished brass plate. He wore an oxford shirt unbuttoned over a ribbed undershirt, blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. His muscles were not as large, perhaps, as the Escapist's, but they were distinctly visible. Clean-favored, thought Sammy, and imperially slim.
"Please, gentlemen, take a seat," said Chandler. "Larry, find them a place to sit down."
"That guy looks exactly like the Escapist," said Joe. "It gives me the creep."
"I know," said Sammy. "And he sounds just like Tom Mayflower."
They sat in the corner and watched the rehearsal. The script had been adapted-very freely-from Sammy's third Escapist story, which had introduced the character of Miss Plum Blossom's evil sister Poison Rose, a straight steal from Caniff's Dragon Lady whom Sammy, embarrassed by the blatancy of his theft, had killed off in Radio #4. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, Rose had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. But the radio boys had revived her, and Sammy had to admit she certainly appeared to be well. Helen Portola was the only cast member not dressed casually, and in her bright green poplin dress she looked cool and refined and appetizing. When she growled her diabolical lines at the Escapist, whom she had rendered powerless with the stolen, legendary Eye of the Moon Opal, she looked at Tracy Bacon with accurate love in her eyes and made it sound like flirtation. Walter Winchell had already linked their names in his column.
On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed. It was all pretty much the same stuff-except for Pedro, of course-and yet somehow it was all totally different. It all seemed to have a lighter, more playful tone than in the comic books, no doubt in part because of the audible brilliance of Tracy Bacon's smile. The dialogue sounded a lot like the dialogue on Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. This was logical, but somehow it, too, depressed Sammy. He had written dialogue as bad-although, at Deasey's suggestion, he had been studying the work of snappy dialogue writers like Irwin Shaw and Ben Hecht-but spoken aloud, it sounded worse. All the characters seemed to be slow on the uptake, vaguely retarded. Sammy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Joe got lost in the proceedings for a while, but then abruptly seemed to snap out of it. He leaned over.
"Isn't this great?" he said. He was whispering now, which meant that he was up to something. He looked at his watch. "Shit, five o'clock. I have to go, gate."
"You have to go, 'gate'?"
"Yes, 'gate.' It's like 'man.' 'What's happening, gate?' 'Don't be late, gate.' You never say 'gate'?"
"No, that's something I never say," Sammy said. "Only Negroes say that, Joe. Ethel's expecting us around six."
"Yes, okay. Six."
"That's in an hour."
"Okay."
"You're coming, aren't you?" said Sammy.
Mr. Cobb turned around in his chair and scowled at them again. They covered their mouths. Joe nodded his head toward the door. Sammy got up and followed him out into the hall. Joe closed the heavy studio door and leaned his shoulder against it.
"Joe, you said you'd come."
"I was very careful not to say that."
"Well, I don't have the transcript handy, but that was how it sounded."
"Sammy, please. Don't make me. I don't want to go. I want to go out with my girl. I want to have fun." He blushed. Having fun was still a difficult thing for Joe to admit he was able to do. "It isn't my fault that you don't have anyone-"
The studio door burst open, throwing Joe back against the wall.
"Sorry!" said Tracy Bacon. He gingerly pulled back the door to see what had become of Joe. "Holy Eye of the Moon Opal, are you all right?"
"Yes, thank you," said Joe, rubbing his forehead.
"I was in such a damn hurry to get out here I didn't bother to look where I was going! I was afraid you two might have left before I got a chance to talk to Mr. Clay."
"Yes, talk! You talk," Joe said, patting Bacon on the shoulder. "Unfortunately, I have to go. Mr. Bacon, it was nice meeting you, you are a perfect Escapist I think."
"Well, thank you."
Joe drew himself up. "So," he said, pronouncing it in the German fashion. With Bacon interposed very carefully between them, he gave Sammy an awkward little wave and ducked around Bacon to make a dash for the end of the hall. Before reaching the stairwell, he stopped and turned back. He looked at Sammy right in the eyes, his expression grave and remorseful, as though he were on the verge of making a full confession of everything bad that he had ever done. Then he flashed his visitor's badge, Melvin Purvis-style, and was gone. And that, Sammy knew, was about as close as Joe Kavalier could get to an apology.
"So," said Bacon, "what's he so hot to trot about?"
"His girl," said Sammy. "Miss Rosa Luxemburg Saks."
"I see." Bacon had a little bit of a southern accent. "She a foreigner, too?"
"Yeah, she is," Sammy said. "She's from Greenwich Village."
"I've heard of it."
"It's a pretty backward place."
"Is it."
"The people are little more than savages."
"I hear they eat dogs there."
" Rosa can do amazing things with dog."
When this burst of somewhat labored bantering flagged, they were embarrassed. Sammy rubbed at the back of his neck. For some reason, he was a little afraid of Tracy Bacon. He decided that Bacon was playing with him, condescending to him. Big, radiant, confident fellows with string-bass voices always made him feel acutely how puny, dark, and Jewish he was, a goofy little curlicue of ink stamped on a sheet of splintery paper.
"You had something to ask me?" Sammy said coldly.
"Yes, I wanted-look here." He punched Sammy on the shoulder. Not painfully, but not gently, either. Not always knowing his own strength was eventually to become, thanks to Tracy Bacon, one of the Escapist's characteristic traits. "Ordinarily I wouldn't do something like this, but when I got a look at you and saw you weren't any older than I am, maybe even younger-how old are you?"
"Safely in my twenties," Sammy said.
"I'm twenty-four," said Bacon. "Last week."
"Happy birthday."
"Mr. Clay-"
"Sammy."
" Tracy."
Bacon's grip was firm and dry, and he pumped Sammy's hand up and down half a dozen times.
"Sammy, I don't know if you could tell it or not," Bacon said, "but I'm having a little problem in there-"
The door opened again, and the other actors started to file out. Helen Portola sidled up to Bacon, took hold of his arm, and gazed up at him in the ardent manner Walter Winchell had alluded to. She could see that he had something on his mind and turned inquiringly to Sammy. She smiled, but Sammy thought he saw a waver of anxiety in her big green eyes.
"Trace? We're all going over to Sardi's."
"Save me a seat, all right, gorgeous?" said Bacon. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Turns out Mr. Clay and I have a mutual friend. We're just doing a little catching up."
Sammy was amazed by the ease and naturalness of Bacon's lie. Helen Portola looked Sammy over very carefully and coldly, as if trying to calculate what possible human could be the link between him and Tracy Bacon. Then she kissed Bacon on the cheek and, not without a show of reluctance, left. Sammy must have looked puzzled.
"Oh, I'm an awful liar," Bacon said airily. "Now, come on, let me buy you a drink, and I'll explain."
"Jeez," said Sammy, "I'd like to, but-"
Bacon actually took hold of Sammy by the elbow-gently enough- and put his arm around him, steering him down to the end of the hall by a fire door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.
"Sammy, I'm going to confess something to you." He paused, as if to give Sammy a moment to feel grateful for being taken into his confidence. Sammy was almost-almost-too taken aback to comply. "I'm in way over my head here. I'm no actor! I studied civil engineering in school. Two months ago I was swabbing out the mess on a cargo freighter. All right, I have an ideal voice for radio." He composed his features, his fair eyebrows and rather girlish mouth, into a stern, fatherly mien. "That isn't enough, and I know it. You can't get by in this business on natural ability alone." He looked so pleased by the harsh line he had taken with himself that all trace of it vanished at once. "This is my first big part. I want to be very, very good. If you could give me any, you know…"
"Insights?"
"Exactly!" He smacked Sammy on the chest with the palm of his right hand. "That's it! I was hoping we could sit down, see, and I could buy you a drink, and you could just talk to me a little bit about the Escapist. I'm not having any problems with Tom Mayflower."
"No, you seem to have him down pretty good."
"Well, I am Tom Mayflower, Mr. Clay, and that's the explanation for that. But the Escapist, jeez, I don't know. He just… he seems to take everything so damn seriously."
"Well, Mr. Bacon, he has serious problems to deal with…" Sammy began, grimacing at his own pretension. He felt he ought to be glad for this chance Bacon was offering him to gain some small influence over the direction of the radio program, but instead he found that he was more afraid of Tracy Bacon than before. Sammy came from a land of intense, uninterruptable, and energetic speakers, and he was used to being harangued, but he had never before felt himself so addressed, with such a direct appeal, made not merely to his ears but to his eyes. No one who looked like Tracy Bacon had ever, to his memory, spoken to him at all. The lithe, knicker-clad golden halfback atop the football trophy, stiff-arming every obstacle in his path, was not a type stamped out in any great profusion by Brownsville, Flatbush, or the Manual Arts High School. Sammy had encountered one or two of these pink-skinned, cardigan-wearing, cultivated lunks with schoolboy haircuts during his brief dips into the world of Rosa Saks, but he had certainly never been addressed by one-or even acknowledged. "The world today has a lot of serious problems." God, he sounded like a school principal! He ought just to shut up. "I really can't," he said. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten past five. "I'll be late for a dinner date."
"At five on a Friday night?" Bacon switched on his fifty-amp smile. "Sounds swank."
"You can't even begin to imagine," said Sammy.
Where is the actual flat bush?" Bacon said as they came up out of the subway. He stopped and looked across the avenue at the entrance to Prospect Park. "Do they keep it in there?"
"Actually, they move it around," said Sammy. They'd had two drinks apiece, but for some reason, Sammy didn't feel in the least intoxicated. He wondered if fear forestalled the effects of alcohol. He wondered if he were more afraid of Tracy Bacon or of showing up for dinner at Ethel's late, reeking of gin, and with the world's largest piece of trayf in tow. In the subway station, he had bought a roll of Sen-Sen and eaten four. "It's on wheels." He gave a pull on the sleeve of Bacon's blue blazer. "Come on, we're late."
"Are we?" Bacon arched an eyebrow. "You hadn't mentioned it."
"You don't even know me," said Sammy. "How can you presume to razz me?"
As he buzzed for 2-B-he had misplaced his key-he realized that he must be very, very drunk. It was the only possible explanation for what he was about to do. He wasn't sure exactly when the invitation had been extended, or at what point it became clear to Sammy that Bacon had accepted it. In the bar at the St. Regis, under the jovial gaze of Parrish's King Cole, their conversation had veered so quickly from Bacon's difficulties with the character of the Escapist that Sammy could not remember now what wisdom, if any, he had been able to offer on that score. Almost at once, it seemed, Bacon had launched, unprompted, into a recitation (one that, while practiced, obviously still held great interest for him) of his upbringing, education, and travels, an extravagant tale-he had lived in Texas, California, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and, most recently, Seattle; his father was a brigadier general, his mother was a titled Englishwoman; he had sailed on a merchant ship; he had broken horses on Oahu; he had attended a boarding school where he played hockey and lacrosse and boxed a little-which, paradoxically, he himself claimed to view as sadly lacking in some fundamental underpinning of sense or purpose. All the while, Sammy's own upbringing and education and his travels from Pitkin Avenue to Surf Avenue, alerting him to the unmistakable smell of bullshit, had been at war with his native weakness for romance. As he sat and listened, with the ointment flavor of gin in his mouth, at once envious and unable to shake the echo of Bacon's blithe avowal-"I'm such an awful liar"- there seemed to emerge, in spite of Bacon's good looks and his actor pals and his cool gin-and-tonic of a girlfriend, and regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claims he was making, an unmistakable portrait that Sammy was surprised to find he recognized: Tracy Bacon was lonely. He lived in a hotel and ate his meals in restaurants. His actor pals took him and his tale at face value not because they were credulous, but because it was less effort to do so. And now, with an unerring instinct, he had sniffed out the loneliness in Sammy. Bacon's presence at Sammy's side now, waiting for an answer from 2-B, was testimony to this. It didn't occur to Sammy that Bacon was just drunk and twenty-one (not twenty-four) and making everything up as he went along.
"That is the most angry-sounding door buzz I've ever heard," Bacon said when it finally came.
Sammy held the lobby door for him. "That was actually the voice of my mother," he said. "There's a little wax cylinder in there."
"You're just trying to scare me," Bacon said.
They climbed the steps that had wearied Sammy's legs for so many years now. Sammy knocked. "Stand back," he said.
"Stop it now."
"Watch your fingers. Ma!"
"Look who it is."
"Don't look so excited."
"Where's your cousin?"
"They already had plans. Ma, I brought a friend. This is Mr. Tracy Bacon. He's going to be playing the Escapist. On the radio."
"Look out you don't bump your head" was the first thing Ethel said to Bacon. Then "My goodness." She smiled and held out her hand, and Sammy saw that she was impressed. Tracy Bacon made quite an impression. She stepped back to get a better look and stood there like one of the tourists Sammy waded through on his way in and out of work every day. "You're very good-looking." it just missed sounding like a wholehearted compliment; there might have been some comment intended on the deceptiveness of attractive packages.
"Thank you, Mrs. Clay," said Bacon.
Sammy winced.
"That isn't my name," Ethel said, but not unkindly. She looked at Sammy. "I never cared for that name. Well, come in, sit down, I made too much, oh well. Dinner was ready once already, and you missed the candles, I'm sorry to say, but we can't postpone sundown even for big-shot comic book writers."
"I heard they changed that rule," said Sammy.
"You smell like Sen-Sen."
"I had a little drink," he said.
"Oh, you had a drink. That's good."
"What? I can have a drink if I want."
"Of course you can have a drink. I have a bottle of slivovitz someplace. Would you like me to get it out? You can drink the whole bottle if you want."
Sammy whirled around and made a face at Bacon: What'd I tell you? They followed Ethel into the living room. The electric fan was going in the window but, in accordance with Ethel's personal theories of hygiene and thermodynamics, faced outward, so as to draw the warm air out of the room, leaving an entirely theoretical zone of coolness behind. Bubbie was already on her feet, a big confused grin on her face, her spectacles glinting. She was wearing a loose cotton dress printed with scarlet poppies.
"Mom," said Ethel, in English, "this is a friend of Sammy's, Mr. Bacon. He's an actor on the radio."
Bubbie nodded and grabbed hold of Bacon's hand. "Oh, yes, how are you?" she said in Yiddish. She seemed to recognize Tracy Bacon at once, which was odd, since she had not seemed to recognize anyone in years.
It was never clear afterward who she thought Bacon was. She shook his hand vigorously with both of hers.
For some reason, the sight of Bubbie shaking Bacon's large pink hand made Ethel laugh. "Sit down, sit down," she said. "Ma, let go of him." She looked at Sammy. "Sit down." Sammy started to sit down. "What, I don't get a kiss from you anymore, Mr. Sam Clay?"
Sammy kissed his mother.
"Ma, you're hurting me! Ouch!"
She let go.
"I'd like to break your neck," she said. She seemed to be in a very good mood. "I'll get dinner on the table."
"Careful with the shovel."
"Funny."
"Is that how you talk to your mother?" said Bacon.
"Oh, I like your new friend," said Ethel. She took hold of his arm and gave his huge right biceps a pat. She looked supremely vindicated. The shock on Bacon's face appeared to be genuine. "This young man loves his mother."
"Boy, do I," said Bacon. "Can I help you in the kitchen, Mrs., uh-"
"It's Klayman. K-L-A-Y-M-A-N. Period."
"Mrs. Klayman. I have a lot of experience peeling potatoes, or whatever you might need me to do."
Now it was Ethel's turn to look shocked.
"Oh… no, it's already fixed. I'm just reheating everything again."
Sammy wanted to point out that reheating everything several times in order to remove as much flavor as possible was an integral part of Ethel's culinary technique, but he held his tongue. Bacon had embarrassed him.
"You wouldn't fit in my kitchen," Ethel said. "Sit down."
Bacon followed her into the kitchen. Sammy had yet to see his "new friend" take no for an answer. In spite of his height and his swimmer's shoulders, it was not a confidence in his own abilities that seemed to direct Tracy Bacon so much as an assuredness of being welcome wherever he went. He was golden and beautiful, and he knew how to peel a potato. To Sammy's surprise, Ethel let Bacon follow.
"I can never reach that bowl up there," he heard her say. "The one with the toucan."
"So, Bubbie," Sammy said. "How are you?"
"Fine, darling," she said. "I'm fine. How are you?"
"Come sit down." He tried to steer her into the other yellow chair. She pushed him away.
"Go. I want to stand. All day I'm sit."
From the kitchen Sammy could hear-could hardly miss-the cheerful thumping of Bacon's voice, with its lyric upper register. Like Sammy's, the constant barrage of chatter Bacon maintained seemed designed to impress and to charm, with a key difference: Bacon was impressive and charming. Ethel's burned-sugar laugh came drifting out of the kitchen. Sammy tried to hear what Bacon was saying to her.
"So what did you do today, Bubbie?" he said, flopping on the couch. " Belmont 's open. Did you go out to the track?"
"Yes, yes," Bubbie said agreeably. "I went to the races."
"Did you win any money?"
"Oh, yes."
You were never sure with Bubbie whether you were really teasing her or not.
"Josef sends you a kiss," he said in Yiddish.
"I'm glad," Bubbie said in English. "And how is Samuel?"
"Samuel? Oh, he's fine," Sammy said.
"She kicked me out." Bacon emerged from the kitchen wearing a little dishwashing apron patterned with pale blue soap bubbles. "I guess I was getting in the way."
"Oh, you don't want to do that," Sammy said. "I got in the way of a dinner roll once and required nine stitches."
"Funny," said Ethel, stepping into the living room. She untied her apron and threw it at Sammy. "Come and eat."
Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef-flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments. Tracy Bacon took three helpings. He cleaned his plate with a piece of challah. His cheeks were rosy with the intensity of his pleasure in the meal. It was either that or the horseradish.
"Whew!" he said, laying down his napkin at last. "Mrs. K., I never had better in my life."
"Yes, but better what?" Sammy said.
"Did you get enough to eat?" Ethel said. She looked pleased but, it seemed to Sammy, a little taken aback.
"Did you save room for my babka?" Bubbie said.
"I always save room for dessert, Mrs. Kavalier," Bacon said. He turned to Sammy. "Is babka dessert?"
"An eternal question among my people," Sammy said. "There are some who argue that it's actually a kind of very small hassock."
Ethel got up to make coffee. Bacon stood up and started to clear away the dishes.
"Enough already," Sammy said, pushing him back down into his chair. "You're making me look very bad here." He gathered up the dirty plates and utensils and carried them into the tiny kitchen.
"Don't stack them," his mother said by way of thanks. "It gets the bottoms dirty."
"I'm just trying to be helpful."
"Your kind of help is worse than no help." She set the percolator on the ring and turned on the gas. "Stand back," she said, striking a match. She must have been lighting gas stoves for thirty years, but each time it was as if entering a burning building. She ran water in the sink and slid the dishes in. Steam rose from the bubbles of Lux; the dishwater must of course be antibacterially hot. "He looks just like Josef draws him," she said.
"Doesn't he, though."
"Is everything all right with your cousin?"
Sammy guessed that her feelings were hurt. "He really wanted to come, Ma," he said. "But it was short notice, you know?"
"It doesn't make any difference to me."
"I'm just saying."
"Is there news? What does the man at the agency say?"
"Hoffman says the kids are still in Portugal."
"With the nuns." As a girl, during the first war, Ethel had been sheltered briefly by Orthodox nuns. They had treated her with a kindness that she had never forgotten, and Sammy knew that she would have preferred her little nephew to remain with these Portuguese Carmelites, in the relative safety of a Lisbon orphanage, rather than to set off across a submarine-haunted ocean in a thirdhand steamer with a rickety name. But the nuns were apparently under pressure from the Catholic Church in Portugal not to make harboring Jewish children from Central Europe a permanent thing.
"The boat is on its way over there now," Sammy said. "To get them. It got itself into one of these convoy things, you know, with five U.S. Navy destroyers. Thomas ought to be here in a month, Joe said."
"A month. Here." His mother handed him a dishtowel and a dish. "Dry."
"Yeah, so Joe's happy about that. He seems happy with Rosa, too. He's not working those crazy hours like he used to anymore. We're making enough money now that I was able to talk him into dropping all the books he was working on but three. [8] I had to hire five guys to replace him."
"I'm glad he's settling down. He was getting wild before. Fighting. Getting hurt on purpose."
"The thing is, I think he likes it here," Sammy said. "I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to stay, even after the war's over."
"Kayn ayn hora," his mother said. "Let's hope he has a choice."
"That's a cheerful thought."
"I don't know this girl very well. But she seemed…" She hesitated, unwilling to go so far as to bestow actual praise on Rosa. "I got the feeling she has a good head on her shoulders." The previous month, Joe and Rosa had taken Ethel to see Here Comes Mr. Jordan; Ethel was partial to Robert Montgomery. "He could do much worse."
"Yeah," Sammy said. " Rosa 's all right."
Then, for a minute, he just dried the dishes and forks she passed to him and set them, under his mother's scrutiny, in the rack. There was no sound but the squeak of the dishtowel, the chiming of the dishes, and the steady trickling of hot water into the sink. Bacon and Bubbie seemed, in the dining room, to have run out of things to say to each other. It was one of those prolonged silences that meant, Ethel always used to say, that somewhere an idiot had just been born.
"I'd like to meet someone, you know," Sammy said at last. "I mean, I've been thinking. Just recently. Meet someone nice."
His mother shut off the tap and pulled the stopper from the drain. Her hands were bright red from the scalding water.
"I'd like that, too," she said. She opened another drawer and took out the box of waxed paper. She tore off a piece, spread it on the zinc counter, and took a dish from the rack.
"So how was he?" she asked him, setting the dish upside down on the sheet of waxed paper.
"Who's that?"
She nodded toward the dining room. "That one." She folded the ends of the sheet of paper up over the dish and smoothed them down. "At the rehearsal today."
"He was all right," Sammy said. "He was good. Yeah, I think he'll do fine."
"Will he?" she said, and, lifting the wrapped dish, she looked him in the eye for the first time all evening.
Though it would recur often enough in his memory in later years, he would never know exactly what she had meant by that look.
The following day, a wealthy young New Yorker named Leon Douglas Saks followed in the footsteps of his grandfathers and was called before the Torah to become a bar mitzvah. He was a second cousin of Rosa's, and although she had never met the boy, she managed without too much trouble to wangle an invitation to the reception at the Pierre as the date of one of the entertainers on the bill, the performing magician known as the Amazing Cavalieri.
When she woke from a post-coital nap that Saturday afternoon, in her bedroom under the eaves, the Amazing Cavalieri was standing in front of her scarf-draped mirror, looking with remarkable interest at his own naked reflection. Rosa pulled a pillow over her head and lay very still so that she could watch him watching himself. She could smell the trace of his breath in her own exhalations, the indeterminate but distinctive flavor of his lips, somewhere between maple and smoke. At first, as she watched him, she thought that he was engaging in rank self-admiration, and since she considered his lack of vanity about his appearance-his ink-stained shirtfronts, rumpled jackets, and ragged trouser cuffs-to be itself a kind of vanity, one for which she loved him, she was amused. She wondered if he could see how much weight he had added to his long, spare frame over the last several months. When they had first started going out, he was so absorbed by his work that he rarely took time for meals, existing quite mysteriously on coffee and bananas, but as Rosa herself, to her considerable satisfaction, had begun to absorb Joe more and more, he had become a regular guest at her father's dinner table, where there were never fewer than five courses and three different varieties of wine. His ribs no longer stuck out, and his skinny little-boy's behind had taken on a manlier heft. It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean. She wondered if this could be what he was looking at now-this evidence of his irrefutable existence here, on this shore, in this bedroom, as her Joe. For a while she lay staring at the gloved knuckles of his spine, the stippled pale stone of his shoulders. Presently, however, she became aware of the way he kept narrowing and widening his blue eyes, tightening them at the corners and then opening them into a pop-eyed stare, over and over again. As he did so he moved his lips constantly, engaging in some kind of patter or incantation. From time to time he gestured broadly, flourishing his fingers around a handful of empty air, pointing proudly at some invisible wonderful thing.
Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and threw off the pillow.
"What the hell are you doing?"
He jumped and knocked his cigarette from the ashtray on her dressing table. He retrieved it, brushing ash from the carpet, then came over and sat on the bed. "How long were you watching?"
"An hour," she lied.
He nodded. Had he really been standing there like that for an hour, giving himself the evil eye and marveling at nothing?
"You looked like you were trying to hypnotize yourself or something."
"I guess I was. I guess I'm a little nervous," he said. As he spent night after night in the company of inveterate and literate talkers, his English had improved considerably. "Performing in front of your family. Your father." Rosa 's father had not appeared at a Saks family event in years, but he was attending the reception tonight just to see Joe perform. He had been invited to the religious portion of the proceedings that morning, too, at B'nai Jeshurun, but God forbid. He hadn't been inside a synagogue, he calculated, since 1899. "Right now he thinks I'm the best magician in New York," Joe continued. "Because he's never seen me. After tonight, maybe he'll think I'm a palooka."
"He'll love you," she said. She was touched to see that her father's opinion meant so much to him. She interpreted it as further evidence of his belonging to her. "Don't worry."
"Mm-hmm," he said. "You already think I'm a palooka."
"Not me," she said, running a hand up his thigh and taking hold of his penis, which at once began to show renewed interest in her. "I know you're magic."
She had seen his act twice now. The truth was that Joe was a talented but careless performer, liable to bite off more than he could chew. He had renewed his career, as promised, with the Hoffman reception at the Hotel Trevi the previous November, and had gotten off to a rather shaky start when-forgetting the disdain in which his teacher Bernard Kornblum had held such "mechanisms," and succumbing to his fatal weakness, from which he suffered all his life, for acts of daring and the beau geste-he became hopelessly entangled in the Emperor's Dragon, an elaborate set-piece trick that he had purchased, on credit, from Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. It was a hoary bit of mock-Chinese flummery from the heyday of Ching Ling Foo, in which a silk "dragon" in a brass cage was made to breathe fire, then lay a number of colored eggs, each presented to the inspection of a witness for signs of seams or apertures before it was cracked with a silver wand, disgorging some personal item belonging to a member of the audience who, up to this point, had not been aware of his watch's or lighter's disappearance from his or her person. Picking pockets had never been Joe's great strength, however, and he was long out of practice. In the Trevi's lobby, before the show, there was an unpleasant incident with the bar mitzvah boy's aunt Ida, involving her beaded handbag, which had to be hastily smoothed over by Hermann Hoffman; and, during the performance, Joe singed off his own right eyebrow. He had moved quickly into cards and coins after that, and here his renewed training and the native gifts of his fingers served him well. He caused half-dollars and queens to behave in bizarre ways, endowed them with sentience and emotions, transformed them into kinds of weather, raising storms of aces and calling down nickel lightning from the sky. After Joe finished his act, young Maurice Hoffman brought over a friend who was having his own bar mitzvah in two weeks and had determined to impel his parents to hire Joe for the affair. More bookings followed: all at once Joe discovered that he had become the fashionable entertainer among the wealthy, male Jewish adolescents of the Upper West Side, many of them, of course, loyal readers of Empire comic books. They didn't seem to care that from time to time an ace dropped from his watchband or that he misread their minds. They adored him, and he accepted their adoration. In fact, he seemed actively to seek out the company of thirteen-year-old boys, not so much because it gratified his ego, Rosa thought, as because he longed to see his brother again so badly. And because their company- respectful, sardonic, willing to be awed, stubborn in their desire to get to the bottom of each trick-seemed to promise good things for Thomas on his arrival: friends of raucous intelligence, at once innocent and hard-edged, homely or handsome but uniformly well dressed, their faces free of all shadow save those of acne or an incipient beard. These were boys who lived free of the fear of invasion, occupation, cruel and arbitrary laws. With Rosa 's encouragement, Joe began, tentatively at first and then with great ardor, to envision the transformation of his brother into an American boy.
Sometimes, when he was making arrangements with the parents beforehand, the name of Houdini came up, and Joe would be asked if he might (naturally with a commensurate increase in his fee) perform an escape; but here he drew the line.
"I escaped from Prague," he would say, looking down at his bare wrists as if for the reddened trace of a manacle. "I think maybe that is enough."
Here the parents, exchanging looks with Rosa, would invariably agree and write him out a check for a hundred dollars. It had never seemed to occur to Joe that the reason for his sudden popularity on the West Side bar mitzvah circuit was neither the erratic skill of his prestigious digits, nor the unwavering fervor of his young fans, but rather the sympathy those parents felt for a homeless Jewish boy who had somehow managed to get out from under the shadow of the billowing black flag that was unfurling across Europe, and who was known to donate his entire fee to the Transatlantic Rescue Agency.
"I'm not getting any better," he said now, watching abstractly as he expanded in her hand. "Really, it's embarrassing. At Tannen's they all make fun of me."
"You're much better than you used to be," she said, and then added, with just a hint of self-servingness: "Everything's much better, isn't it?"
"Much better," he said, moving a little in her grasp. "Yes. Much."
When she first met him, he had been such a forlorn, solitary figure, bruised and broken from all his street fighting, with the little fireplug, Sammy Clay, his lone prop and associate. Now he had friends, down at that magic shop of his, and in the New York art world. He had changed; she had changed him. In the pages of Radio Comics-Rosa was now a loyal reader-he and the Escapist continued to fight the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate. But the sad futility of the struggle, which Joe had sensed so early in his run on the magazine and which had been immediately apparent to Rosa, seemed to have begun to overtake the ingenuity of his pen. Month after month, the Escapist ground the armies of evil into paste, and yet here they were in the spring of 1941 and Adolf Hitler's empire was more extensive than Bonaparte's. In the pages of Triumph, the Four Freedoms [9] attained the orgasmically impossible goal of killing Hitler, only to learn in the next issue that their victim had been merely a mechanical double. Though Joe kept fighting, Rosa could see that his heart had gone out of the mayhem. It was in the pages of All Doll, in realms far from Zothenia or Prague, that Joe's art now blossomed.
Luna Moth was a creature of the night, of the Other World, of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons, and defended all us unsuspecting dreamers against attack from the dark realms of sleep. Twice now she had flapped into battle against slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons, and while it was easy enough to see such plots as allegories of paranoia, invasion, and world war, and Joe's work here as a continuation of the internecine conflict of Radio and Triumph, the art Joe turned in for Luna Moth was very different from his work on the other books. Rosa 's father, with his eye for native American sources of the Surrealist idea, had introduced Joe to the work of Winsor McKay. The urban dreamscapes, the dizzying perspectives, the playful tone, and the bizarre metamorphoses and juxtapositions of Little Nemo in Slumberland all quickly found their way into Joe's pages for Luna Moth. Suddenly the standard three tiers of quadrangular panels became a prison from which he had to escape. They hampered his efforts to convey the dislocated and non-Euclidean dream spaces in which Luna Moth fought. He sliced up his panels, stretched and distorted them, cut them into wedges and strips. He experimented with benday dots, cross-hatching, woodcut effects, and even crude collage. [10] Through this bravura landscape of twilight flew a wisecracking, powerful young woman with immense breasts, fairy wings, and furry antennae. The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself. She could see Joe, in each new issue, contending with the conventions and cliches of Sammy's more than usually literate stories, working his way toward some kind of breakthrough in his art. And she was determined to be there when he did. She had a feeling that she was going to be the only one to notice or appreciate it when it happened; to her, Joe had that authentic air of the solitary bricoleur, the potterer of genius, like the Facteur Cheval or that strange and diffident other Joe, Mr. Cornell, striking out toward the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised. Being there, supporting him in whatever way she could, at that moment of embarkation and on all the brilliant journey that would follow, had become a key element, along with helping him bring over his brother, and binding her to him and to America with unbreakable bonds, in her mission of love. As for the practice of her own art, that had always been less a matter of mission than of long, moody habit, a way of snatching at her emotions and ideas as they flitted past and pinning them, as it were, to canvas before they could elude her gaze. In the end, it would take far less time for theworld, or at least that small portion of the world that read and thought about comic books, to acclaim Joe's genius than it took for anyone- least of all Rosa-to acknowledge her own.
"I'd better start getting ready," he said, though he did not move, and she redoubled her grip on his penis.
"What are you planning to do with this?" she asked him. "Maybe you could work it into your act. I could paint a little face on it."
"I don't work with puppets."
There was a knock on the door. She let go of him, and he clambered over her to get underneath the coverlet, too.
"Yes?" she called.
"Open up! I have a little gift for the Amazing." It was her father. Rosa got up and pulled on a bathrobe. Then she picked up the cigarette that Joe had left burning on her dresser and went over to the door.
Her father stood in the hall, dressed for the reception in an enormous three-piece cocoa-brown seersucker suit, and carrying a canvas garment bag over one arm. He peered in curiously at Joe, who had sat up in bed, the blanket pulled up just high enough to cover himself. The question of this not being a convenient time to interrupt the young lovers, or of whether perhaps he ought to come back later, did not occur to her father. He just barreled right into her room.
"Josef," he said, raising the garment bag. "We have noticed that every time you perform, you're obliged to rent your tuxedo." Her father was inclined to the imperial "we" when he felt he was being particularly magnanimous. "It seemed to us you really ought to have one of your own." He unzipped the bag. "I had it made," he said.
The jacket was the color of the sky over Prague Castle on a clear winter night. The trousers were also a glossy, coal-dark blue, piped with a bright gold stripe. And affixed to one of the satiny black lapels was a small golden pin in the shape of a skeleton key.
"I sort of thought," her father said. "In honor of you-know-who." He reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a domino mask of the same black satin as the jacket lapels, with long ties of black ribbon. "It couldn't hurt to add a little bit of mystery to the act."
Rosa was as surprised as Joe. She was smiling so hard that her ears started to hurt a little. "Joe," she said, "look what he did."
"Thank you," Joe said, "I-" He made a show of wanting to stand up, trapped in the bed by his nakedness.
"For God's sake, toss him a towel," her father drawled. "So he can thank us properly."
Joe climbed down from the bed, pulling the coverlet up around him. He knotted it around his waist and then took the blue tuxedo from Rosa 's father. A rather clumsy embrace followed, then her father brought out a flask and, after a bit of hopeless rummaging through the chaos of Rosa 's room, managed to find a glass that was only slightly smudged with lipstick prints.
"To the Amazing Cavalieri," he said, raising the pink-tinged glass of whiskey. "Whom-dare I say it?"
"Dare it," Rosa said, feeling herself blushing mightily.
"I'll just say that, in a family as small as this, there is most certainly room for one more." He drank.
Rosa was watching Joe's face, feeling almost drunk on the happiness of the moment, and so she saw the look of pain that flickered across it at these words.
"I already have a family," he said quietly.
"Oh, yes… Joe, for heaven's sake, I know that. I just-"
"I'm sorry," Joe said immediately. "That was very rude of me. Thank you so much, for everything. For this." He held up the tuxedo. "For your kindness. For Rosa."
He had nearly saved the moment, and they allowed him to think that he had. But her father fled the bedroom within the minute, and Rosa and her Joe were left alone, on the bed, naked, staring at the empty blue suit.
The last letter that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor's pen across the text):
My dear son,
It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with hope. With Thomas gone we have nothing to live for, it seems, but the knowledge that he is on his way to be with you in that fortunate nation which has already so kindly received you in its bosom.
We are all as well as can be expected given Tante Lou's fits of pique ["Tante Lou" was family code for the Nazi government of Prague]. Your grandfather has lost most of the hearing in his left ear due to an infection, and some of the use of his right ear as well. So now he dwells in a realm of shouted conversations and serene imperviousness to argument. The latter is a valuable skill to possess around our Dear Friends [i.e., the Katz family, with whom the Kavaliers shared their two-room flat], and indeed I am at times inclined to believe that Papa is simply pretending to be deaf, or at least that he arranged to become so on purpose. My wrist has not quite healed it never may in the absence of ____________________ diet and is quite useless in poor weather but we have lately had a stretch of fine days, and I have continued to work on my Reinterpretation of Dreams <emphasis><strong>[11]</strong></emphasis> though paper [? smudged] is ____________________ bother, and I am obliged to soak my old typewriter ribbons in __.
Please, Josef, do not continue to trouble yourself or waste your time attempting to win for us what you have, with the help of your friends, been able to attain for your brother. It is enough; more than enough. Your late father, as you know, suffered from chronic optimism, but it is clear to me and to anyone not foolish or addled by deafness that we ____________________ and that the present state of affairs will be as permanent as any of us shall require. You must make a life for yourself there, with your brother, and turn your thoughts from us and from ____________________.
I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music. But for you to waste another moment in worrying about us in this city of ____________________! No.
I shall not write again unless I have news of which you cannot fairly be deprived. Until then you must know, dear one, that you are in my thoughts every instant of my waking life and in my (clinically quite uninteresting) dreams as well.
Fondly,
Mother
This letter was in the hip pocket of Joe's new tuxedo as he entered the cream-and-gold Grand Ballroom of the Pierre. He had been carrying it around with him-unopened and unread-for days now. Whenever he paused to consider this behavior he found it quite shocking; but he never paused for very long. The burst of guilt that lit up the radiant nerves of his solar plexus when he handled or suddenly remembered the unopened letter was every bit as intense, he was sure, as whatever he would feel upon tearing its fragile seal and letting out the usual gray compound of bad dreams and pigeon feathers and soot. Every evening he took out the letter, without looking at it, and set it on his dresser. In the morning he transferred it to the pocket of the next day's trousers. It would not be accurate to say that it weighed there like a stone, encumbering his progress through the city of freedom and swing, or that it caught like a bone in his throat. He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation. He loved, for example, her hair in all the forms it took on her body: the down on her lip, the fuzz on her buttocks, the recurrent brown feelers her eyebrows sent toward each other in between tweezings, the coarse pubic ruff that she had allowed him to shave into the outline of a moth's wings, the thick smoke-fragrant curls of her head. When she worked on a canvas in her top-floor room, she had a habit, when pondering, of standing storklike on her left foot and lovingly massaging it with the big toe, its toenail painted aubergine, of the right. Somehow this shade of purple and the echo of contemplative childish masturbation in the way she rubbed at her ankle struck him every time as not merely adorable but profound. The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs-snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge-were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs. Only the embattled standards of a fundamentally restrained and sensible character prevented him from nattering constantly, to friends and strangers alike, about the capers she put in chicken salad (it was how her late mother had made it), the pile of dream words that accumulated by her bedside night after night, the lily-of-the-valley smell of her hand soap, et cetera. His portrayals of Judy Dark, in her up-to-the-minute gowns and bathing costumes cribbed from Vogue, and of her winged alter ego in streamlined bra and panties, grew ever more libidinous and daring- as if Luna Moth had received from the secret councils of Sex Itself an augmentation of powers like that granted to the Escapist at the outbreak of war-until she verged, in certain panels that took on a sacred and totemic significance for the boys of America, on total nakedness.
Thus, just as his mother begged him (though he did not know it), Joe had turned his thoughts from Prague, his family, the war. Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity. It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.
"What is it?" Rosa said.
He had taken off the cutaway jacket, with the key pinned to its lapel, in order to drape it over the back of a chair, and as he did so the letter had rustled in its envelope.
"Nothing," he said. "Okay, sit there. I have to get to work."
This was his third time playing the Pierre, and he knew its characteristics fairly well, but he always liked to take ten minutes to reconnoiter or reacquaint himself with the room. He went up onto the low bandstand, at the back of which there were three tall panels faced with gilded mirrors. They had to be detached and lugged, one at a time, down the steps and around to a side of the room where they would not betray the secrets of his magician's table. He dialed the five rheostats to a medium setting, so that the light of five massive chandeliers would not reveal his black silk threads or expose the false bottom of a pitcher. The crystal chandeliers had been draped for the occasion with some green crepey stuff that was supposed to represent seaweed: the theme of tonight's reception was, according to the printed programs laid across each gleaming plate, Neptune 's Kingdom. There were weird purple stalagmites jutting up from the carpet all around the room, to the right of the bandstand leaned the prow and bosomy figurehead, in papier-mache, of a sunken galleon buried in real sand, and in the center of it all yawned a giant opalescent clamshell from which Joe sincerely hoped Leon Douglas Saks was not planning to emerge. From the ceiling hung two mannequins with scallops covering their waxen breasts, and the sequined tails of hake and halibut where their legs ought to have been. Heavy fishing nets beaded with wooden floats hung from the walls, each filled with a catch of rubber starfish and lobster.
"You really look like you know what you're doing," Rosa said, watching him dismantle the mirrors and adjust the lights.
"That is the greatest of Cavalieri's illusions."
"You also look very handsome."
"Thank you."
"So are we going to have one of these things one day?"
"We are too old," he said, not quite paying attention. Then he caught on. "Oh," he said. "Well."
"I suppose we might have girls."
"A girl can have them, too, now. Somebody told me this. Then it's called a boss mitzvah."
"Which do you prefer?"
"Bas mitzvah. Bas or boss, I'm not really sure."
"Joe?"
"I don't know, Rosa," he said. He sensed that he should stop what he was doing and go over to her, but something about the topic irritated him and he felt himself closing up inside. "I can't be sure I want to have children at all."
The playfulness had left her manner. "That's okay, Joe," she said. "I'm not sure I do either."
"I mean, is this really the time or the kind of world that we want a child to be born, is all the thing."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. "Forget it." She blushed and smoothed out her skirt. "Those purple rocks look so familiar."
"I think so, too."
"I can't believe this room," she said. "I've never really, you know, dipped into the Talmud or anything like that, but it's hard to imagine that they were leaping out of giant clamshells back in Tarshish or wherever."
"So long as they did not eat the clams," Joe said.
"Did you have one of these?"
"No, I did not. I considered it. But no. We were not religious."
"Uh-huh."
"Are," he said. "Are not." He looked stricken. He stood up straight and flexed his fingers a few times. "We are not religious."
"No, we aren't either."
He walked back over to the chair where he had hung his jacket. He reached into the pocket and took out the letter in its pale-blue envelope and held it, looking at it.
"Why are you carrying that around?" Rosa said. "Did you open it? What does it say?"
There were voices; the ballroom doors burst open and the musicians came in, followed by one of the white-jacketed hotel waiters, pushing a cart. The musicians climbed up onto the bandstand and began opening their cases. Joe had worked with some of them before, and they nodded to one another, and Joe accepted their whistles and teasing about his new clothes. Joe replaced the envelope, then put his jacket back on. He shot his cuffs, smoothed back his hair, and tied on the silken mask. When the musicians saw that, they burst into applause.
"Well?" he said, turning to Rosa. "What do you think?"
"Very mysterious," Rosa said. "Indeed."
There was a strange, strangled cry by the door, and Joe turned in time to see the white-jacketed waiter dash out of the ballroom.
The Steel Gauntlet, Kapitan Evil, the Panzer, Siegfried, Swastika Man, the Four Horsemen, and Wotan the Wicked all confine their nefarious operations, by and large, to the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, but the Saboteur, Ring of Infiltration, Vandal Supreme, lives right in Empire City-in a secret redoubt, disguised as a crumbling tenement, in Hell's Kitchen. That is what makes him so effective and feared. He is an American citizen, an ordinary man from a farm in small-town America. By day he works as a humble unknown in one of the anonymous trades of the city. By night he creeps forth from his Lair, with his big black bag of dirty tricks, and makes war on the infrastructure of the city and the nation. He is every bit the dark obverse of the Escapist, as skilled at worming his way into something as the Escapist is at fighting his way out. As the Escapist's power has increased, so has the Saboteur's, until the latter can walk through walls, leap thirty feet straight up, and befog men's minds so that he may pass unseen among them.
On one wall of the command room in his Lair there is a giant electrical map of the United States. On it, military bases are marked with a blue light, munitions plants with a yellow, shipyards with a green. After the Saboteur strikes, the lightbulb for that target, whatever its original hue, turns an evil shade of red. The Saboteur is fond of declaring that he will not rest until the entire nation is alight with blood-red bulbs. On another wall hangs the Videoscope, by means of which the Saboteur keeps in constant contact with his network of agents and operatives throughout the country. There is a laboratory, in which the Saboteur devises sinister new kinds of explosives, and a machine shop in which he crafts the novelty bombs-the Exploding Seagull, the Exploding Derby Hat, the Exploding Pine Tree-for which he is known and reviled. There are also a fully equipped gymnasium, a library filled with all the most advanced texts on science and world domination, and a posh paneled bedroom with a canopy bed that the Saboteur (implicitly) shares with Renata von Voom, the Spy Queen, his girlfriend and a founding member of the United Snakes. It is in the Saboteur's well-appointed Lair that the Snakes hold their regular meetings. Ah, the raucous and jolly gatherings, over rare sweetmeats and good lager, of the United Snakes of America! They sit around the gleaming obsidian table, the Fifth Columnist, Mr. Fear, Benedict Arnold, Junior, the Spy Queen, and he, regaling one another with tales of the havoc, hate, and destruction they have sown over the past week, laughing like the maniacs they are, and plotting out new courses of action for the future. Ah, the terror they will cause! Ah, the subnormals, mixed bloods, and inferior races they will string up by their mongrel necks! Ah, Renata, in her slick black trench coat and gleaming hip boots!
One Saturday afternoon, after a particularly boisterous convocation of the Snakes, the Saboteur wakes in his sumptuous chambers and prepares to leave the Lair for the menial job that is a cover for his subversive activities. He peels off his night-black action suit and hangs it from a hook in his armory, alongside its six duplicates. His symbol, a crimson crowbar, is outlined in silver on the chest. Is there a smell of beer and sausages on the shoulder of the costume, and of Mexican cigars? He will have to send it out to be cleaned. The Saboteur is particular about such things; he cannot abide dirt or filth or disorder, unless it be the mess, the splendid entropy of a fire, an explosion, or a train wreck. Having removed his costume, he pulls on a pair of black trousers piped in black. He runs a damp comb through his thinning colorless hair and shaves his babyish pink face. Then he puts on a boiled white shirt, attaches the collar, ties on a black bow tie, and takes down a white dinner jacket. It has just come back from the cleaners and hangs in a crinkly paper bag. He slings it over his shoulder and then exits, not without regret, the clean and cavernous armory. Next he goes into his laboratory and picks up the disassembled parts of the Exploding Trident, cleverly concealed inside of a pink cake box from a Ninth Avenue bakery. With the box under his arm and the jacket over his shoulder, he turns and waves goodbye to Renata, who lies, gazing lazily at him through half-lowered long-lashed lids, under the portrait of the Fuhrer, in the great oak bed.
"Knock 'em dead, Big Boy," she says in her vermouth voice, as he lets himself out through the Lair's air lock and enters the grit, filth, and foul atmosphere, ripe with the stench of immigrants and Negroes and mongrels, of Empire City. He does not reply to her languid farewell; he is on the job, all business now.
He hops a bus across town to Fifth Avenue, then another to ride the twenty blocks uptown. Ordinarily he dislikes taking the bus, but he is late already, and if you are late, they take it out of your pay. His rent on the Lair is cheap, but his pay is low enough without being docked again for lateness. He knows he can not afford to lose another job; his sister Ruth has already warned him that she will not "prop him up." Absurd that the Saboteur should have to trouble with such mundane concerns, but these are the sacrifices entailed by maintaining a secret identity- look at all the headaches and trouble that Lois Lane, for example, makes for Clark Rent.
He arrives ten minutes late-that's fifty cents, five Te Amos, lost- and, when he gets there, finds that they have already begun to set up the ballroom for the affair. The swish decorator is busy bossing around his employees, getting them to hang the fishnets, assemble the cardboard shipwreck, and roll in the big rubber rock formations that were salvaged, so Mr. Dawson, the ballroom manager, has told him, from that Dream of Venus girlie show on the midway at the World's Fair. The Saboteur is well informed on the particulars of this evening's reception, for it is the one he has chosen to make the scene of his greatest exploit to date.
The Pierre is a popular venue for the wedding and bar mitzvah receptions of the rich Jews of the city, as the Saboteur discovered shortly after taking the job. Almost every week, they crowd in like pigs to a trough and throw their money around (they just come right up to the pimply kid-of-the-week, for God's sake, and stuff packets of cash into his cummerbund!) and get drunk and dance their tedious dances to the music of their whining violins. While it galls him to have to serve and wait upon such people, the Saboteur has known from the first that this secret identity will afford him, in due course, the opportunity to strike a terrible blow. For months he bided his time, improving his skills, under the guidance of a drunken old anarcho-syndicalist named Fiordaliso, as a bomb constructor, reading Feuchtwangler and Spengler (and Radio Comics), watching for his moment. Then, at a bar mitzvah one night last winter, the Amazing Cavalieri appeared on the bill, passing cigarettes through handkerchiefs and making flowers bloom in his boutonniere, and turned out to be none other than Joe Kavalier. (The Saboteur had long since rectified his misapprehension that it was the Sam Clay half of the team who had been responsible both for the destruction of the AAL offices and for the autographed sketch of the Escapist, which now hung from a dartboard in the gymnasium at the Lair.) The Saboteur was too astonished to act at the time, but he began to sense then that his moment might soon be at hand. For weeks after that night, he chatted up Mr. Dawson and, through him, monitored the programs for upcoming events, watching the big schedule book for a reappearance of the Amazing Cavalieri. And tonight is the night. When he arrived at work, it was with the intention of showing Joe Kavalier that while Carl Henry Ebling may be a shiftless bumbler and pamphleteer, the Saboteur is not one to be trifled with, and his memory is long. At the same time, he would be removing with masterly precision whatever other mongrels happened to be standing in the young Jew's vicinity. Yes, he would have been contented with just that. How surprising, disturbing, marvelous, strange it is, then, to roll into the Grand Ballroom, pushing the service cart that conceals the Exploding Trident, and discover that the performing magician hired for the Saks bar mitzvah is not some moonlighting scribbler but the Escapist himself, the Saboteur's dark idol, his opposite number, masked and fully costumed and wearing in his lapel the symbol of his cursed League.
At that moment, the sheet of paper on which the contours of Carl Ebling's mind have been drawn is like a map that has been folded and carelessly refolded too many times. The reverse shows through; the poles meet; at the heart of a ramifying gray grid of city streets lies an expanse of virgin blue sea.
Was there ever a moment when Superman lingered a second too long in his timid Rent aspect and suffered a fatal hesitation? Did the Escapist ever forget to clasp his talisman and stumble on crippled legs into the fray? The Saboteur tries to remain calm, but the stuttering doormat with whom he must share his existence is a bundle of nerves and, like a fool, goes running out of the room.
He stands in the foyer outside the ballroom, leaning against a wall, his cheek pressed against the soft, cool flocked wallpaper. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, calms himself. There is no call for panic; he is the King of Infiltration, and he knows what to do. He stubs out the cigarette in the sand of a nearby ashtray, and takes hold of the cart once again. This time, when he enters the ballroom, he has the presence of mind to keep his head down, to avoid being recognized by the Escapist.
"Sorry, folks," he murmurs. He pushes the cart across to the far side of the stage, by the shivered timbers of the sunken ship. It has a squeaky wheel, and he feels certain that he must be attracting the attention of the musicians on the bandstand, of the magician and his big-nose girl. But when he looks back, they are absorbed in their own preparations. She is a pretty enough girl, he supposes, and her black mannish overcoat reminds him with a twinge of the queen of his own desire. When he reaches the ship, he stops, crouches behind the cart, and opens the compartment in which hot plates of food are stored by the room-service waiters on their way up to rooms.
Until now the ballroom has been too crowded with decorators, waiters, and hotel staff, coming and going as they prepared the room for the event, for him to find the opportunity to assemble the parts of his Exploding Trident. Now he works quickly, screwing the length of thin pipe that contains the black powder and cut-up nails into a second length of pipe that is empty. This will be the shaft. At the dummy end, he affixes tines of stiff red cellophane, copped from a costume-shop devil-suit pitchfork, with a piece of masking tape. It looks a little suspicious, he knows, but fortunately, verisimilitude is not something people generally expect from a sea god's trident. He unrolls the six-inch strip of fuse that protrudes through a hole drilled in the thing's business end. Then he stands up and, checking to see that he is not being observed, edges over toward one of the fishnets tacked to the wall, filled with its catch of fake crustaceans. No one sees; his rich lifelong powers of invisibility remain his truest ally. Gingerly, he slides the trident down through the heavy mesh of the fishnet until the fuse end bumps the carpet. When the time comes-when the Escapist has begun his legendary act-the Saboteur will contrive to pass by here again. He will rest half a lighted Camel against a strand of the net, so that the unlit end touches the fuse. Then he will hie himself out of harm's way and wait. And five minutes after that, the mongrels of Empire City will begin to know something of the terror their mongrel brothers and sisters are undergoing halfway around the world.
The Saboteur pushes the cart back toward the ballroom doors. At the last moment, as he is passing the magician, he cannot prevent himself from raising his head and looking his adversary in the eye. If there is a flicker of recognition there, it is extinguished in an instant as the doors to the ballroom fly open and, laughing and shouting and crying out in their loud barnyard voices, the first of the guests arrive.
What follows is the intended program for the performance given by the Amazing Cavalieri on the evening of April 12, 1941. A copy, printed by the performer himself using a "Printer's Devil" Genuine Junior Printing Press that he had dug out of the Empire Novelties stockroom just before the move from the Kramler Building, was handed out to every guest just prior to the show.
The Wanderings of a Handkerchief.
Magic Bananas.
A Miniature Conflagration.
Fly Away Home.
Please Don't Eat the Pets.
A Contagious Knot.
Adrift in the Stream of Time.
Ice and Fire.
Where Have I Been?
The Tail Has Lost Its Monkey.
Joe's self-consciousness about his English, and a suspicion of patter inherited from his great teacher, kept his performance swift and wordless. Frequently he was told, usually by the mother or an aunt of the bar mitzvah boy, that the show had been very nice, but would it kill him to smile a little now and then? Tonight was no exception. If anything, it seemed to those scattered guests at the Saks reception who had caught his act before, he was even more guarded, more workmanlike in his approach than usual. His movements and his pacing were neither too hasty nor too slow, and there were no-as had sometimes happened in the past-dropped cards or spilled pitchers of water. But he took no apparent pleasure in the marvelous feats he performed. One would have thought it meant nothing to him that he could produce a bowlful of goldfish from a tin of sardines, or pass a bunch of bananas one at a time through the skull of a thirteen-year-old boy. Rosa supposed that he was troubled by something he had read in that latest letter from home, and wished, as she had wished many times, that he was more willing to share with her his fears, his doubts, and whatever bad news there was from Prague.
Longman Harkoo, though he tried, was one of those people incapable, due to some abnormality of vision or comprehension, of following the movements of a magic act, the way some people go to baseball games and never manage to see the ball in flight; a towering home run is just ten thousand people craning their necks. He soon gave up trying to pay attention to the things that were supposed to be amazing him, and found himself watching the boy's eyes behind the black silk mask. They continually scanned the room-that in itself was impressive enough, that he could manipulate the cards and other props of his act without looking at his hands-and they seemed, Harkoo noticed, to follow in particular the movements of one of the waiters.
Joe had recognized Ebling at once, though it took him a while, amid the distractions of greeting his hosts and Rosa 's family and of pulling dimes and matchsticks out of the bar mitzvah boy's nose, to place him. The Aryan seemed to have lost weight since their last encounter. Then, too, the sheer surprise of seeing Ebling again had interfered with his ability to identify him. He had given no thought to the man, or to his own war on the Germans of New York, in many weeks. He no longer went looking for trouble; after the bomb scare last fall, Joe felt he had bested Carl Ebling in their duel. The man simply seemed to have abandoned the field. Joe had gone back up to Yorkville once, to leave a calling card or a nyah-nyah-nyah on the Aryan-American League. The sign was no longer in the window, and when Joe broke into the office for a second time, he found it empty. The desks and the files had been moved out, the portrait of Hitler taken down, leaving not even a discolored square on the wall. There was nothing left but an old potato chip lying like a moth in the middle of the scarred wooden floor. Carl Ebling had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.
Now here he was, working as a waiter at the Hotel Pierre, and clearly-Joe knew this as surely as he knew that the goldfish in his bowl were only hunks of carrot that he had carved with an apple knife-up to no good. As Ebling hurried back and forth across the ballroom with a tray on his shoulder, he kept looking up at Joe, not at the silks and golden hoops in his hand but at him, right into his face, with an expression that struggled to remain blank and anonymous but which was tinged at the corners with a flush of bitter mischief.
As Joe was about to begin A Contagious Knot, in which, with a puff of breath, the knot that he had tied in a silk scarf appeared to transfer itself along the row of ordinary silk scarves held up by volunteers from the audience, one after another before their very eyes, Joe smelled smoke. For an instant he thought it must be the lingering odor of A Miniature Conflagration, but on further exposure he knew that it was unquestionably tobacco-and something more, something acrid like burning hair. Then he noticed a thin plume of smoke coming from the side of the bandstand, down to his left, by the sunken ship. At once he dropped the scarf with its devilish knot and walked, swiftly but without appearing to panic, toward the smoke that was scribbling the air. His first thought was that someone had dropped a cigarette; then he felt a tickle of suspicion, and the face of Ebling flashed through his mind. And then he saw it all; the cylinder of ash burned down almost to the printed tip of the cigarette, the singed carpet, the length of grayish fuse, the length of steel pipe crudely disguised with some gaudy red cellophane. He stopped, turned, and went back to his table, where the bowl from Please Don't Eat the Pets still sat, filled with bright swimming bits of carrot.
There was some murmuring from the tables as he picked up the bowl.
"Excuse me," he said, "we seem to have a little fire."
As he went to pour the water onto the cigarette, he felt something large, heavy, and extremely hard smash into the small of his back. It felt a good deal like a human head. Joe went flying forward, and the goldfish bowl tumbled from his hands and shattered on the bandstand. Ebling climbed on top of Joe, clawing at his cheeks from behind, and as Joe tried to roll onto his back, he looked over and saw that the fuse was throwing a tiny shower of sparks. He gave up trying to roll and instead pushed upward on his hands and knees and proceeded to crawl, Ebling riding him, wild as an ape on the back of a pony, toward the pipe bomb. By now the people sitting closest to the bomb had taken note of the burning, and there was a general sense in the room that none of this was part of the show. A woman screamed, and then a lot of women were screaming, and Joe was lumbering forward with his rider ripping at his face and yanking on his ears. Ebling got his arms around Joe's throat and started to choke him. At that point, Joe ran out of bandstand. He lost his balance, and he and Ebling toppled over the side to the floor. Ebling rolled, tumbling against the outspread fishnet. It snapped loose from the wall, spilling a pile of rubber starfish and lobsters across him.
Ebling just had time to say "No." Then a sheet of heavy foil seemed to fall onto Joe's head, to wrap his face and throat and ears in crumpling steel. He was thrown backward, and something hot, a burning wire, was laid with a hiss across his forehead. There followed almost immediately an awful sound like a heavy club falling on a bag of tomatoes, and then an autumnal whiff of gunpowder.
"Oh, shit," Carl Ebling said, sitting up, blinking, licking his lips, blood on his forehead, blood in his hair, tiny red pawprints of blood all over his bright white jacket.
"What did you do?" Joe heard, or rather he felt, the words somewhere down in his throat. "Ebling, god damn it, what did you do?"
They were taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital. Joe's injuries were minor compared to Ebling's, and after he had been cleaned up, his facial wounds treated, and the laceration on his forehead butterflied shut, he was able to return, by popular demand, to the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre, where he was hailed and toasted and showered with money and praise.
As for Ebling, he was first charged only with unlawful possession of explosives; but this was later expanded to a charge of attempted murder. He was eventually indicted for a number of minor fires, synagogue vandalizings, phone-booth bombings, and even an attempted subway derailment the previous winter that had gotten a good deal of attention in the papers but, until the Saboteur confessed to it and to all of his other exploits, had gone unsolved.
Late that night, Rosa and her father helped Joe from the taxi to the curb and thence along the narrow lane up to the steps of the Harkoo house. His arms were draped across their shoulders and his feet seemed to glide two inches off the ground. He had not touched a drop all night, on orders from the emergency-room doctor at Mt. Sinai, but the morphine painkillers he had been given had finally taken their toll. Of that journey from the taxi to the curb, Joe was later to retain only the faint pleasant memory of Siggy Saks's kolnischwasser smell and of the coolness of Rosa 's shoulder against his own abraded cheek. They dragged him up to the study and laid him out on the couch. Rosa unlaced his shoes, unbuttoned his trousers, helped him off with his shirt She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his chest, his belly, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and then kissed his lips. Rosa 's father brushed Joe's hair back from his bandaged brow with a soft motherly hand. Then there was darkness, and the sound of their voices draining out of the room. Joe felt sleep gathering around him, coiling like smoke or cotton wool about his limbs, and he fought against it for a few minutes with an agreeable sense of struggle, as a child in a swimming pool might attempt to stand buoyed atop a football. Just as he surrendered to his opiate exhaustion, however, the echo of the bomb burst began to chime again in his ears, and he sat up, his heart pounding. He switched on a table lamp and went over to the low settee on which Rosa had laid his blue tuxedo, and lifted the jacket. In a strange slow panic, as if his hands were wrapped in layers of gauze, he felt around the pockets. He took the jacket by the tails and dangled it upside down, and shook it and shook it again. Out tumbled wads of cash, stacks of business cards and cartes de visite, silver dollars and subway tokens, cigarettes, his pocketknife, torn corners of his program scrawled with the addresses and phone numbers of the people he had saved. He turned the jacket and each of its ten pockets inside out. He fell to his knees and shuffled over and over through the pile of cards and dollars and torn scraps of program. It was like the classic magician's nightmare in which the dreamer riffles, with mounting dread, through a deck at once ordinary and infinite, looking for a queen of hearts or a seven of diamonds that somehow never turns up.
Early the next morning he returned, groggy and aching and half-mad with tinnitus, to the Pierre and made a thorough search of its ballroom. He inquired several times over the next week at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and contacted the lost-and-found office of the Hack Bureau.
Later, after the world had been torn in half, and the Amazing Cavalieri and his blue tuxedo were to be found only in the gilt-edged pages of deluxe photo albums on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague. He would try to imagine its contents, wondering what news or sentiments or instructions it might have contained. It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion. The rest of the world was busy feeding itself, country by country, to the furnace, but while the city's newspapers and newsreels at the Trans-Lux were filled with ill portents, defeats, atrocities, and alarms, the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows. The economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptible movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America. Given the usual urge of those who believe themselves to have lived through a golden age to expatiate upon the subject at great length afterward, it is ironic that the April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence-the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness-was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.
It was one o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and Sammy stood alone atop the city of New York, gazing in the direction of the storm clouds, both literal and figurative, that were piling up away to the east. Before coming on to his shift at ten o'clock, he had showered in the rough stall Al Smith had arranged to have built for the spotters, down in their quarters on the eighty-first floor, and changed into the loose twill trousers and faded blue oxford shirt that he kept in his locker there and wore three nights a week throughout the war, taking them home after his Friday shift to wash them in time for Monday's. For appearances' sake, he put his shoes back on for the quick trip up to the observatory, but when he got there he always took them off again. It was his habit, his conceit, and his strange comfort to prowl the sky of Manhattan Island, on the lookout for enemy bombers and aerial saboteurs, in his stocking feet. As he made his regular rounds of the eighty-sixth floor, clipboard in hand, heavy army-issue binoculars on a cord around his neck, he whistled to himself, unaware that he was doing so, a tune at once tuneless and involved.
It promised to be a typically quiet shift; night flights of an authorized nature were rare even in good weather, and tonight, with warnings of thundershowers and electrical storms blowing in, there would be even fewer airplanes in the sky than usual. Affixed to Sammy's clipboard, as always, was a typed list provided by the Army Interceptor Command, in whose service he was a volunteer, of the seven aircraft that had been cleared for transit across New York metropolitan airspace that night. All but two were military, and by eleven-thirty Sammy had already spotted six of them, on schedule and in position, and made the required notation of their passages in his log. The seventh was not expected until around five-thirty, just before his shift ended and he went back down to the spotters' quarters to catch a few hours' sleep before his day at Empire Comics began.
He made another circuit through the long chrome expanse of the observation-deck restaurant, which initially had been built as the baggage and ticket counter for a planned worldwide dirigible service that had never materialized, and had then spent the last two years of Prohibition as a tearoom. The passage through the bar was the only real perturbation Sammy had ever experienced in his career as a plane spotter, for the temptation of the gleaming spigots, coffee urns, and orderly rows of glasses and cups had to be counterbalanced against the eventual subsequent need, should he indulge his thirst, to urinate. Sammy was certain that if a fatal black line of Junkers was ever to appear in the skies over Brooklyn, it would unquestionably be while he was in the bathroom taking a leak. He was just on the point of helping himself to a few inches of seltzer from the elaborate chrome tap under the still-illuminated neon Ruppert's sign when he heard a dark rumble. For a moment he thought it must have been the approaching thunder, but then, in his memory, he heard again the mechanical hiss that had underlaid it. He put down his glass and ran to the bank of windows on the other side of the room. The darkness of a Manhattan night, even at this late hour, was far from absolute, and the radiant carpet of streets reaching as far as Westchester, Long Island, and the wilds of New Jersey cast an upward illumination so bright that the stealthiest intruder flying without landing lights would have had a difficult time concealing itself from Sammy's gaze, even without binoculars. There was nothing in the sky, however, but the great cloud of light.
The rumble grew louder and somehow smoother; the hiss modulated to a soft hum; from the center of the building, there was a faint clacking of gears and cams: the elevators. It was not a sound he was accustomed to hearing at this hour, in this place. The fellow who generally relieved him at six, an American Legionnaire and retired oysterman named Bill McWilliams, always took the stairs up from the quarters on eighty-one. Sammy walked toward the elevator bank, wondering if he ought to pick up the telephone that connected him to the office of the Army Interceptor Command in the telephone-company building down on Cortlandt Street. In the pages of Radio Comics, the groundwork for an invasion of New York City could be laid in just a few panels, one of which would unquestionably depict the braining with a blackjack of a hapless plane spotter by the gloved fist of an Axis saboteur. Sammy could see the jagged star of impact, the sprung letters spelling out KR-RACK!, the word balloon in which the poor fool was shown saying, "Say, you can't come in-ohhh!"
It was one of the express elevators from the lobby. Sammy checked his clipboard again. If anyone was expected-his supervisor, some other military type, some colonel of the Interceptor Command making an inspection-surely his night's orders would have noted it. But there was only, as he had known there would be, the same list of seven planes and flight plans, and a terse notation about the bad weather expected. Perhaps this was a surprise inspection. As Sammy looked down at his stocking feet, wiggling his nonregulation toes, his thoughts took another turn: maybe this visit was unannounced because something unforeseen had occurred. Perhaps someone was coming to tell Sammy that the country was at war with Germany, or even, somehow, that the war in Europe had ended, and it was time for him to go home.
There was a metallic shiver as the car drew up to the eighty-sixth floor, a rattle of cables. Sammy ran a damp hand through his hair. Locked in a bottom drawer of the guard station, he knew, there was a service.45, but Sammy had lost track of the key, and would not even have known, in any case, how to get the safety off. He raised his clipboard, ready to bring it down on the skull of the spy. The binoculars were heavier. He took them from his neck and prepared to swing them like a mace on their leather strap. The doors slid open.
"Is this Men's Sportswear?" said Tracy Bacon. He wore a tuxedo jacket, a white silk cravat stiff and glossy as meringue, and a mien that was grave but volatile, stretched thin over an underlying smirk, as if some kind of prank were under way. A brown paper shopping bag dangled from each hand. "Have you got anything in a gabardine?"
"Bacon, you can't-"
"I was just passing by," the actor said. "Thought I'd, you know, stop in."
"We're a thousand feet up!"
"Are we?"
"It's one o'clock in the morning."
"Is it?"
"This is a U.S. Army facility," Sammy went on, sounding self-important and knowing it, struggling to ascribe a reason to the giddy flush of guilt, so like exhilaration, that suffused him at the arrival of Tracy Bacon on the eighty-sixth floor. He was perilously happy to see his new friend. "Technically speaking. After hours, nobody's allowed in or out without clearance from Command."
"Yikes," said Bacon. The magnificent Otis machinery that enclosed him gave a sigh, as of impatience. Bacon took a step backward. "Then you absolutely do not want a Nazi spy like me hanging around. What was I thinking?" The elevator doors stuck out their black rubber tongues. Sammy watched the sundered halves of his own reflection reach toward each other in the brushed chrome panels of the doors. "Auf wiedersehen."
Sammy thrust his hand through the doors. "Wait."
Bacon waited, looking at Sammy, one eyebrow raised in the challenging manner of an auctioneer about to bring his gavel down. His jacket was a charcoal silk cutaway, with piped lapels, and his broad chest was plated in the largest and whitest dickie Sammy had ever seen. In his formal attire, he seemed to beam down from a greater height than usual, certain as ever that in the end he would be, even a thousand feet up, at one in the morning, and contrary to military regulations, welcome. Even with the incongruous pair of shopping bags, or perhaps because of them, he looked impossibly comfortable in his monkey suit, shoulders pressed against the back wall of the elevator, legs crooked at the knee, the great right foot in its long black Lagonda of a shoe twisting ever so slightly on its toe tip. The elevator sighed again.
"Well," Sammy said, "seeing as how your father's a general…"
Sammy stepped aside, keeping a hand on the door that was struggling to close. Bacon hesitated a moment longer, as if daring Sammy to change his mind again. Then he pushed himself off the elevator wall and sauntered out. The doors closed. Sammy was in gross violation of the code.
"Only a brigadier," Bacon said. "You all right, Clay?"
"Fine, I'm fine, come in."
"That's the lowest, you know."
"What is?"
"Brigadier. It's the lowest grade of general they make."
"That must chafe."
"Eats him away. Wow." Bacon looked around the cool marble sweep of the observation floor's lobby, kept dim at night to cut down on reflection and permit better viewing through the great dark windows, and he squinted a little as he peered off into the glints and shadows of the bar on one hand and the long bank of windows on the other. "Wow!"
"Yeah, wow," Sammy said, suddenly feeling less exhilarated than awkward, even slightly afraid. What had he done? What was Bacon upto? What was the faintly acrid but not unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from the actor's direction? "So, uh. Welcome."
"This is great!" Bacon said. He strode toward the windows that looked out over the Hudson River, toward the black cliffs and neon billboards of New Jersey. There was something faintly lurching, Frankensteinian, in Bacon's gait, and Sammy followed him closely to make sure nothing got broken. Bacon pressed his face to the window, smashing his straight, slightly pointed nose flat against it with a vehemence that made Sammy's heart leap. The windows were made of thick tempered glass, but Tracy Bacon possessed that brand of glamorous stupidity-or so it would come to seem to Sammy-which acts as a charm against such technological safeguards. He would wriggle his way out onto a theater balcony that had been closed because it was on the verge of collapse, enter any stairway marked No Admittance, and, as Sammy would later learn, Bacon especially liked, when there was no one looking, to sneak from subway platforms down onto the tracks, penetrating some ways into the tunnels by the pale glow of his platinum cigarette lighter. It had been a terrible mistake letting him up here tonight. "I must say, I couldn't figure out why anybody in his right mind would want to sign himself up for this kind of work… unpaid… but now… you have all this to yourself, every night?"
"Three nights a week. Are you drunk?"
"What kind of question is that?" Bacon said, without elaborating whether he found the question offensive or merely superfluous, or both. "I came up here my first day in New York City," he continued, his breath fogging up the glass. "It was a lot different in the daylight. Kids running around. All that blue sky and steam out there. Pigeons. Boats. Flags."
"I've actually never been up here in the daytime. I mean, I've seen the sun come up. But I'm always gone long before they let the people in."
Bacon stepped back. A ghostly print of his skull lingered a moment on the window before evaporating. Then he slid down along the windows to the southeast corner, where, as at the three other corners of the observation floor, there was a coin-operated telescope. He stooped to peer through it. The shopping bags made a crinkling sound. Bacon seemed to have forgotten he was carrying them.
"This is really something," he said, squinting into the eyepiece. "You can see the Statue of Liberty." Unless you fed it a dime, of course, you could see nothing at all. "How about that, she sleeps in a hair net." He whirled around, the expression on his face at once innocent and reckless, for all the world like a toddler searching the nursery for something new to break.
"Mind if I look around?"
"Well…"
"This where you sit?"
Still carrying the bags, trailing a now-unmistakable odor of asparagus, Bacon walked over behind the broad podium that served during the day as a station for the guards who took tickets and gave informal tours of the celebrated panorama. This was where the Interceptor Command had installed the telephone that would, in the event of an aerial attack, connect Sammy immediately to Cortlandt Street. Sammy kept his lunch box here, his spare pencils, cigarettes, and extra log forms.
"I don't really sit… Bacon, maybe you'd better not… no!"
Bacon had set down one of the bags and lifted the receiver of the emergency phone. "Hello, Fay? It's Kong. Listen, sweetheart-hey. It's ringing."
Sammy ran around behind the guard station, snatched the phone from his hand, and slammed it back into place.
"Sorry."
"Can I ask you something, Bacon?" said Sammy. "Besides not to touch anything, I mean?" He leaned against Bacon as against a stuck door, getting his shoulder into it, and dislodged him from behind the guard station. "What's in the bags?"
Bacon looked down at his left hand, a little surprised, then at the bag he had set beside him. He picked it up and then hefted the bags in Sammy's direction. Sammy caught a whiff of something buttery and winy and green, shallots maybe.
"Dinner!" Bacon said.
They went into the dark cafe, bristling with the upturned legs of chairs. The polished stone floor whispered against their feet. The chrome bands that ringed the long bar glinted at one end in the light from the lobby. The refrigerators hummed softly to themselves. The muted atmosphere of the bar seemed to dampen, or at least to still, Bacon's spirits somewhat. He spun two chairs floorward, and then, without a word, began to unpack his shopping bags. One bag, it turned out, contained three lidded silver platters, of the type that hotel waiters in the movies were always wheeling in on linen-draped carts. The other bag held two more of the platters and a small tureen drizzled with pale green soup. After Bacon had arranged the platters and tureen on the table, he took out a somewhat random fistful of forks, knives, and spoons, an ornate, heavy pattern, and a pair of cloth napkins somewhat soiled by juices and liquids that had escaped the various platters. He also took out a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses, one of which had broken along the way.
"We'll have to share," he said. "Or I can just drink from the bottle."
"What, no baked Alaska?" said Sammy.
Bacon looked hurt. With a curt gesture, he lifted the lid on one of the platters, revealing a sad little puddle of brown-streaked white sugary ooze. "What do you take me for?"
"Sorry," Sammy said. They sat down to eat. There were quails stuffed with oysters, steamed asparagus in sauce hollandaise, a Macedonian salad, and dauphin potatoes. The pale soup was cream of watercress. Sammy could not quite bring himself to dismember one of the little bird bodies, but he picked out the stuffing and found it quite delicious. "What did you do?" said Sammy. "Order room service to go?" Bacon lived well beyond his means, according to him, at the Mayflower Hotel.
"Not exactly."
"It's good. Could be hotter."
"Salt?" Bacon reached into the shopping bag once more, took out a silver salt cellar of a design even more ornate than the flatware, and set it on the table. It was empty. "Oops." He leaned down again, peered into the bag, then lifted it up and tipped it, dipping one corner to the mouth of the salt cellar. A thin stream of lumpy salt poured down from the bag. "There. Good as new. So," he continued, gesturing to Sammy's clipboard and spotter's badge. "You just wanted to do your part, is that it? Help the Escapist in his unending fight against the Iron Chain and their Axis stooges?"
"A lot of people ask me that," Sammy said, sprinkling his potatoes with salt. "That's usually what I say."
"But you'll tell me the truth, won't you?" Bacon said, his voice mocking, but with just the slightest hint of an earnest plea.
"Well," Sammy said, flattered. "I just felt like I… ought to. I-I did something that I-I wasn't proud of. And when I got back from doing it, there was a small group of these volunteer spotters in the lobby, they were being given a tour, and I just kind of blended in with them. Before I really stopped to think about what I was doing."
"A guilty conscience."
Sammy nodded, although it was true that his stint as a plane spotter had also roughly coincided with the period when Joe began to spend more and more of his time with Rosa Saks, leaving Sammy alone with hours to kill nearly every night. "And don't ask me what was the thing I did, because I can't tell you."
"Okay, I won't," Bacon said with a shrug. He shoved a forkful of asparagus into his mouth.
"All right," said Sammy, "I'll tell you."
Bacon waggled his eyebrows. "Is it something kind of racy?"
"No." Sammy laughed. "No, I-I committed perjury. In a legal deposition. I told the lawyers for Superman that Shelly Anapol never asked me to copy their character. When he really just out-and-out had."
"My God!" Bacon said, looking perfectly aghast.
"Pretty bad, huh?"
"Hanging is too good for you."
Sammy saw then that Bacon had been teasing him. But he found that the memory of his uncomfortable and tedious afternoon in a conference room at Phillips, Nizer could still bring a flush of humiliation to his cheeks.
"Well, it was wrong," he said. "I had a good reason, but still. I guess I felt like I wanted to make up for it somehow."
"If that's the worst thing you ever did," Bacon said, shaking his head.
"So far," Sammy said. "I think it is."
Some unknown memory swam briefly into Bacon's eyes and saddened them. "Lucky you," he said.
"So, uh, where were you?" Sammy said, changing the subject. "Dressed like that. A party?"
"A little party. Very little."
"Where at?"
"Helen's. Today's her birthday."
"Helen Portola?"
"You forgot to say 'the lovely.' "
"The lovely Helen Portola?"
Bacon nodded, studying or affecting to study the thigh joint of one of his quail, as if there were a spot of blood that troubled him.
"Who was there?"
"I was there. The lovely Helen Portola was there."
"Just the two of you?"
He nodded again. He was so uncharacteristically terse on the subject that Sammy wondered if Bacon and Helen had quarreled. Sammy had little direct experience of actresses but shared in the conventional notion that by and large they possessed the sexual mores of estrous chinchillas. Surely if Helen Portola had invited her leading man to celebrate her birthday a deux in the privacy of her home, it was not because she expected the evening to end with her boyfriend out wandering around midtown with a couple of shopping bags full of tepid gourmet food.
"So how old is she?" said Sammy.
"Seventy-two, actually."
"Bacon."
"The old gal's remarkably well preserved."
"Bacon!"
"What's her secret? Liver, folks, and lots of it."
" Tracy!"
Bacon looked up from his food, pretending an innocent surprise.
"Yes, Clay?"
"What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean?"
Sammy gave him a hard look.
"Well, I didn't want to waste all this great food. Helen's cook went to a lot of trouble."
"Helen's cook?"
"Yes. I think you really ought to write her a little note."
"You mean, it was a dinner party?"
"Originally."
"Did you and Helen have a fight?"
Bacon nodded.
"A big one?"
He nodded again, looking genuinely miserable. "But it wasn't my fault," he said.
Sammy was dying to ask what they had fought about, but felt that they didn't know each other well enough for that. It did not occur to him that under similar circumstances, with anybody else, he would not have hesitated, in his best Brooklyn manner, to inquire. But Bacon enlightened him of his own accord.
"For some reason," Bacon continued, "she was under the misapprehension that I intended to propose marriage to her this evening. God knows who told her that."
"It was in Ed Sullivan," said Sammy. He had chanced upon the item in the News with an odd sense of regret; his friendship with Bacon had had so little room in which to flourish-the tiny area that marked the intersection of their separate worlds; and he sensed that it could not survive once Bacon had married his leading lady and gone off to Hollywood to be a star. "Yesterday morning."
"Oh, yeah." He gave his big handsome head a rueful shake.
"You saw it?"
"No, but I remember running into Ed Sullivan at Lindy's a couple of nights ago."
"Did you tell him you were going to ask Helen to marry you?"
"Could have."
"But you aren't."
"Didn't."
"And she got upset."
"Ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. Hit me first, actually."
"Good for her."
"Sucker punched me."
"Ouch." There was something exciting about this narrative to Sammy, or rather about the scene as he reconstructed it in his imagination. He felt that old stirring of desire he had often experienced, growing up to have… not Tracy Bacon, but rather his life, his build, his beautiful and temperamental girlfriend and the power to break her heart. When in fact what he had was a pair of binoculars, a clipboard, and the most solitary perch in the city three nights a week. "So then you took her food."
"Well, it was just sitting there."
"And brought it up here."
"Well, you were just sitting here."
The lull that this observation introduced into their talk was filled all of a sudden by a dark purple stirring in the sky all around them, a long, low summery sound, at once menacing and familiar. There was an answering murmur of bells from the stacked glasses on the bar.
"Jeez," Bacon said, getting up from the table. "Thunder."
He went over to the windows and looked out. Sammy rose and followed him.
"This way," he said, taking Bacon by the arm. "It's blowing in from the southeast."
They stood side by side, shoulders pressed together, watching the slow black zeppelin as it steamed in over New York, trailing long white guy wires of lightning. Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling at the windowpanes.
"It seems to like us." A feather of laughter fluttered in Bacon's voice. Sammy saw that he was afraid.
"Yeah," Sammy said. "We're its favorite." He lit a cigarette, and at the spark of his lighter, Bacon jumped. "Relax. They've been coming all month. They come all through the summer."
"Huh," Bacon said. He took a swallow from the bottle of Burgundy, then licked his lips. "And I am relaxed."
"Sorry."
"That stuff doesn't ever, you know, hit the building."
"Five times so far this year, I think it is."
"Oh my God."
"Relax."
"Shut up."
"They've recorded strokes that were more than twenty-two thousand amperes."
"Hitting this building."
"Ten million volts, or something like that."
"Jesus."
"Don't worry," Sammy said, "the whole building acts like one gigantic- Oh." Bacon's breath was sour with wine, but one sweet drop of the stuff lingered on his lips as he pressed his mouth against Sammy's. The stubble on their chins scraped with a soft electric rasp. Sammy was so taken by surprise that by the time his brain with its considerable store of Judeo-Christian prohibitions and attitudes could begin sending its harsh and condemnatory messages to the various relevant parts of his body, it was too late. He was already kissing Tracy Bacon back. They angled their bodies half toward each other. The bottle of wine clinked against the window glass. Sammy felt a tiny halo, a gemstone of heat burning his fingers. He let the cigarette drop to the floor. Then the sky just beyond the windows was veined with fire, and they heard a sizzle that sounded almost wet, like a droplet on a hot griddle, and then a thunderclap trapped them in the deep black caverns of its palms.
"Lightning rod," said Sammy, pulling away. As if in spite of all he had been told one evening last week by the bland and reassuring Dr. Karl B. MacEachron of General Electric, who had been studying the electrical atmospheric phenomena associated with the Empire State Building, from Saint Elmo's fire to reverse lightning that struck the sky, he was suddenly afraid. He took a step back from Tracy Bacon, stooped to retrieve his smoldering cigarette, and sought refuge by unconsciously adopting the dry manner of Dr. MacEachron himself. "The steel structure of the building attracts but then totally dissipates the discharge…"
"I'm sorry," Bacon said.
"That's all right."
"I didn't mean to-wow, look at that."
Bacon pointed to the deserted promenade outside the windows.
Along its railings, a bright blue liquid, viscous and turbulent, seemed to flow. Sammy opened the door and reached out into the ozone-sharp darkness, and then Bacon came beside him again and put out his hand, too, and they stood there, for a moment, watching as sparks two inches long forked from the tips of their outstretched fingers.
Among the magicians who haunted Louis Tannen's Magic Shop was a group of amateurs known as the Warlocks, men with more or less literary careers who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle one another with drink, tall stories, and novel deceptions. The definition of "literary" had been stretched, in Joe's case, to include work in the comic book line, and it was through his membership in the Warlocks, another of whom was the great Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles's radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Between Joe and Bacon, they had managed to get four tickets to the premiere of Welles's first film.
"So what's he like?" Sammy wanted to know.
"He's quite a guy," Rosa said. She had briefly met the tall, baby-faced actor one afternoon when she dropped by the Edison bar to meet Joe, and thought she had sensed in him a kindred spirit, a romantic, someone whose efforts to shock other people were, more than anything else, the expression of a kind of hopefulness about himself, of a desire to escape the confines of a decent respectable home. In high school, she and a friend had gone uptown to see the booming, voodooistic Macbeth, and she had loved it. "I really think he's a genius."
"You think everyone's a genius. You think this guy's a genius," Sammy said, jabbing Joe in the knee with a stubby forefinger.
"I don't think you are," she said sweetly.
"True genius is never recognized in its own time."
"Except by the one who has it," Bacon said. "Orson has no doubts on that score."
They were all headed uptown together, crammed into the back of a taxicab. Sammy and Rosa had taken the jump seats, and Rosa had a good grip on Sammy's arm. She had come from the offices of the T.R.A. and was dressed, with a dowdiness that pained her considerably, in a square-shouldered, belted brown tweed suit, of a vaguely military cut. She had been dressed like a schoolteacher the last time Orson Welles had seen her, too-the man was going to think that Joe Kavalier's girlfriend was about as fascinating as a sack of onions. Sammy had on one of his big, pinstriped leftovers from a George Raft film, Bacon the usual penguin suit-he took the part of man-about-town a bit too seriously for Rosa's taste, though, to his credit, that seemed to be just about the only thing he did take seriously. And Joe, of course, looked as if he had just fallen out of a hedge. There was white paint in his hair. It looked as though he had used the end of his necktie to blot an ink spill.
"He is a clever fellow," Joe said. "But not so good a magician."
"Is he really dating Dolores Del Rio?" Bacon said. "That's what I want to know."
"I wonder," Joe said, though he seemed completely uninterested in the question. He was feeling blue tonight, Rosa knew. Hoffman's ship, having finally reached Lisbon a few weeks previously, was to have reembarked for New York by now. But two days ago, a telegram had come from Mrs. Kurtzweil, the agent of the T.R.A. in Portugal. Three of the children had come down with measles; one of them was dead. Today they had received word that the entire convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmelo had been put on an "absolute but indefinite quarantine" by the Portuguese authorities.
"I thought you were dating Dolores Del Rio, Bake," Sammy said. "That's what it said in Ed Sullivan."
"It was Lupe Velez."
"I mix those two up."
"Anyway, you know better than to believe what you read in the papers."
"Like, for instance, that Parnassus Pictures plans to bring funny-book strong man the Escapist to the silver screen in the person of noted radio star Mr. Tracy Bacon?"
"Are they?" Rosa said.
"It's only going to be one of those serials," Bacon said. " Parnassus. They're from hunger."
"Joe," Rosa said, "you didn't tell me."
"It doesn't make no difference to me," Joe said, still looking out at the neon-and-steam spectacle of Broadway scrolling past the windows of the cab. A woman walked by with what looked like the tails of at least nine little dead weasels dangling from her shoulders. "For Sammy and me we don't get a penny."
Sammy looked at Rosa and lifted a shoulder-What's eating him? Rosa gave Sammy's arm a squeeze. She hadn't had a chance to tell Sammy about the latest telegram from Lisbon.
"Maybe not on this end, Joe," Sammy continued, "but listen. Tracy here said that if he does get the role, he's going to put in a word for us with the studio. Tell them they ought to hire us to write the thing."
"It's only natural," Bacon said. " 'Course that probably damns the idea right there."
"We could move to Hollywood , Joe. That could lead to something. It could be the start of something really legit."
"Something legit." Joe nodded his head in a ponderous way, as if, upon reflection, Sammy had settled the question that had been troubling Joe all day. Then he went back to his window. "I know that's important to you."
"There it is," Bacon said. "The Palace."
"The Palace," Sammy said, an odd crease in his voice.
They pulled up in front of what was now known as the RKO Palace, once the summit and capital of American vaudeville, at the end of a line of cabs and hired cars. A colossal cutout of Orson Welles, looking wild-eyed and tousle-haired, loomed from the marquee. The whole front of the theater was riotous with flashbulbs and shouting, and there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick. Sammy had gone white as a sheet.
"Sam?" Rosa said. "You look like you saw a ghost."
"He's just worried we're going to make him pay the fare," said Bacon, reaching for his wallet.
Joe climbed out of the cab, settled his hat on his head, and held the door for Rosa. As she got out of the cab, she threw her arms around his neck. He lifted her from the ground, squeezing her tight, and took a long deep breath of her. She could feel the people around them staring, wondering who these two were, or thought they were. Joe's gray hat started to tumble off the back of his head, but he caught it with one hand, then set Rosa back down on the ground.
"He's going to be fine," she told him. "He already had measles. It's just a little delay, that's all."
She knew from bitter experience that Joe hated to be consoled, but to her surprise, when he set her down again, he was smiling. He looked around at the photographers, the crowd, the dazzling kliegs, the long black limousines at the curb, and she could see that it excited him. It was exciting, she thought.
"I know," he said. "He's going to be fine."
"We could end up in Hollywood ourselves one of these days," she said, urged to recklessness by his unexpected change of mood. "You, me, and Thomas. In a little bungalow in the Hollywood Hills."
"Thomas would love that," Joe said.
"The Palace." Sammy had joined them, and was gazing up at the six giant letters atop the brilliant marquee. He took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. "Here you go, buddy boy," he said, handing it to Bacon. "The cab's on me."
Great stuff, the Escapist," Orson Welles told Sammy. He seemed vastly tall and surprisingly young, and he smelled like Dolores Del Rio. In 1941 it was fashionable among certain smart people to confess to a more than passing knowledge of Batman, or Captain Marvel, or the Blue Beetle. "I don't like to miss a word."
"Thank you," said Sam.
This, though he never forgot and in later years embellished it, was the extent of his interaction with Orson Welles, on that night or any other. At the party afterward, at the Pennsylvania Roof, Joe danced with Dolores Del Rio, and Rosa danced with handsome Joseph Cotten and with Edward Everett Horton, the latter by far the better dancer of the two. Tommy Dorsey's band was playing. Sammy sat and watched and listened, eyes half-closed, aware, as were all devotees of big-band swing in 1941, that it was his privilege to be alive at the very moment when the practitioners of his favorite music were at the absolute peak of their artistry and craft, a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish, and a droll, tidy variety of soul. Joe and Dolores Del Rio danced a fox-trot and then, naturally, a rumba. That was the extent of Joe's interaction with Dolores Del Rio, though he and Orson Welles continued to see each other from time to time at the bar of the Edison Hotel.
More significant by far than anything else that happened to the cousins on that first day of May 1941 was the movie they had come to see.
In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots hadbeen pretty well exhausted. Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero. The Escapist's chin grew larger and more emphatically dimpled, and his muscles hypertrophied until he bulged, as his postwar arch-foe Dr. Magma memorably expressed it, "like a sack full of cats." Miss Plum Blossom's ever-ready needle was pressed into providing the Escapist with a Liberacean array of specialized crime-fighting togs, and Omar and Big Al began to grumble openly about the bills their boss piled up by his extravagant expenditures on supervehicles, superplanes, and even a "hand-carved ivory crutch" for Tom Mayflower to use on big date nights. The Escapist was quite vain; readers sometimes caught him stopping, on his way to fight evil, to check his reflection and comb his hair in a window or the mirror of a drugstore scale. In between acts of saving the earth from the evil Omnivores, in one of the late issues, #130 (March 1953), the Escapist works himself into quite a little lather as he attempts, with the help of a lisping decorator, to renovate the Keyhole, the secret sanctum under the boards of the Empire Palace. While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. He took vacations in Cuba, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where he shared a stage at the Sands Hotel with none other than Wladziu Liberace himself. Sometimes, if he was in no particular hurry to get anywhere, he let Big Al take over the controls of the Keyjet and picked up a movie magazine that had his picture on its cover. The so-called Rube Goldberg plots-in which the Escapist, as bored as anyone by the dull routine of crime-busting, deliberately introduced obstacles and handicaps into his own efforts to thwart the large but finite variety of megalomaniacs, fiends, and rank hoodlums he fought in the years after the war, in order to make things more interesting for himself-became a trademark of the character: he would agree with himself beforehand, say, to dispatch some particular gang of criminals "barehanded," and to use his by now vastly augmented physical strength only if one of them uttered some random phrase like "ice water," and then, just after he was almost licked and the weather too cold for anyone ever to ask for a glass of ice water, the Escapist would hit on a way to arrange things so that inexorably the gang ended up in the back of a truck full of onions. He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.
The Escapist who reigned among the giants of the earth in 1941 was a different kind of man. He was serious, sometimes to a fault. His face was lean, his mouth set, and his eyes, through the holes in his headscarf, were like cold iron rivets. Though he was strong, he was far from invulnerable. He could be knocked cold, bludgeoned, drowned, burned, beaten, shot. And his missions were just that-his business, fundamentally, was one of salvation. The early stories, for all their anti-fascist fisticuffs and screaming Stukas, are stories of orphans threatened, peasants abused, poor factory workers turned into slavering zombies by their arms-producer bosses. Even after the Escapist went to war, he spent as much time sticking up for the innocent victims of Europe as he did taking divots out of battleships with his fists. He shielded refugees and kept bombs from landing on babies. Whenever he busted a Nazi spy ring at work right here in the U.S.A. (the Saboteur's, for example), he would deliver the speeches by which Sam Clay tried to help fight his cousin's war, saying, for example, as he broke open yet another screw-nosed "armored mole" full of lunkish Germans who had been trying to dig under Fort Knox, "I wonder what that head-in-the-sand crowd of war ostriches would say if they could see this!" In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1941, as America went about the rumbling, laborious process of backing itself into a horrible war.
And yet, in spite of the fact that he sold in the millions, and for a time ascended or sank into the general popular consciousness of America, if Sammy had never written and Joe had never drawn another issue after the spring of 1941, the Escapist no doubt would have faded from the national memory and imagination, as have the Cat-Man and Kitten, the Hangman, and the Black Terror, all of whose magazines sold nearly as well as the Escapist's at their peaks. The cultists-the collectors and fans-would not have shelled out appalling sums for, or written hundreds of thousands of donnish words devoted to, the early collaborations of Kavalier & Clay. If Sammy had never written another word after Radio Comics #18 (June 1941), he would have been remembered, if at all, by only the most fanatic devotees of comic books as the creator of a number of minor stars of the early forties. If Ebling's Exploding Trident had killed Joe Kavalier that evening at the Hotel Pierre, he would have been recalled, if at all, as a dazzling cover artist, the creator of energetic and painstaking battle scenes, and the inspired fantasist of Luna Moth, but not, as he is by some today, as one of the greatest innovators in the use of layout, of narrative strategies, in the history of comic book art. But in July 1941, Radio #19 hit the stands, and the nine million unsuspecting twelve-year-olds of America who wanted to grow up to be comic book men nearly fell over dead in amazement.
The reason was Citizen Kane. The cousins sat, with Rosa and Bacon between them, in the balcony of the dowdy Palace with its fancy-pants chandelier and a fresh poultice of velvet and gilding applied to its venerable old bones. The lights went down. Joe lit a cigarette. Sammy sat back and arranged his legs, which had a tendency to fall asleep at the movies. The picture came on. Joe noted that Orson Welles's was the only name above the title. The camera hopped that spiky iron fence, soared like a crow up that sinister, broken hillside with its monkeys and its gondolas and its miniature golf course and, knowing just what it was looking for, burst in through the window and zoomed right in on a pair of monstrous lips as they rasped out that ultimate word.
"This is going to be good," Joe said.
He was impressed-demolished-by it. When the lights came up, Sammy leaned forward and looked past Rosa at Joe, eager to see what he had thought of the film. Joe sat looking straight ahead, blinking, working it all out in his mind. All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.
"I want us to do something like that," he said.
This was precisely the thought that had occupied Sammy from the moment he caught on to the film's structure, when the mock-newsreelabout Kane ended and the lights came up on the men who worked for the "March of Time" newsreel company in the film. But for Joe it had been the utterance of his sense of inspiration, of taking up a challenge, while for Sammy it had been more the expression of his envy of Welles, and of his despair at ever getting out of this lucrative swindle, with its cheap-novelty roots. After they got home from the Pennsylvania, the four of them sat up well into the night, drinking coffee, feeding records to the Panamuse, recollecting bits, shots, and lines of dialogue to one another. They could not get over the long upward tilt of the camera, through the machinery and shadows of the opera house, to the pair of stagehands holding their noses while Susan Alexander made her debut. They would never forget the way the camera had dived through the skylight of the seedy nightclub to pounce on poor Susie in her ruin. They discussed the interlocking pieces of the jigsaw portrait of Kane, and argued about how anyone knew his dying word when no one appeared to be in the room to hear him whisper it. Joe struggled to express, to formulate, the revolution in his ambitions for the ragged-edged and stapled little art form to which their inclinations and luck had brought them. It was not just a matter, he told Sammy, of somehow adapting the bag of cinematic tricks so boldly displayed in the movie-extreme close-ups, odd angles, quirky arrangements of foreground and background; Joe and a few others had been dabbling with this sort of thing for some time. It was that Citizen Kane represented, more than any other movie Joe had ever seen, the total blending of narration and image that was-didn't Sammy see it?-the fundamental principle of comic book storytelling, and the irreducible nut of their partnership. Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and bold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was more, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard-its inextricable braiding of image and narrative- Citizen Kane was like a comic book.
"I don't know, Joe," Sammy said. "I'd like to think we could do something like that. But come on. This is just, I mean, we're talking about comic books."
"Why do you look at it that way, Sammy?" Rosa said. "No medium is inherently better than any other." Belief in this dictum was almost a requirement for residence in her father's house. "It's all in what you do with it."
"No, that's not right. Comic books actually are inferior," Sammy said. "I really do believe that. It's-it's just built in to the material. We're talking about a bunch of guys-and a girl-who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? If the Parnassus people make this Escapist serial, believe me, it's not going to be any Citizen Kane. Not even Orson Welles could manage that."
"You're just making excuses, Clay," Bacon said, taking them all by surprise but no one more than Sammy, who had never heard his friend sound so serious. "It's not comic books that you think are inferior, it's you."
Joe, sipping his coffee, looked politely away.
"Huh," Rosa said after a moment.
"Huh," Sammy agreed.
Sammy and Joe got in to the office at seven sharp, pink-cheeked, tingling from lack of sleep, coughing and sober and saying little. In a leather portfolio under his arm, Joe had the new pages he had laid out, along with Sammy's notes not only for "Kane Street," the first of the so-called modernist or prismatic Escapist stories, but also ideas for a dozen other stories that had come to Sammy, not just for the Escapist but for Luna Moth and the Monitor and the Four Freedoms, since last night. They went down the hall to find Anapol.
The publisher of Empire Comics had abandoned the vast chromium office that had so discomfited him and taken up residence in a large custodial closet, in which he'd had installed a desk, a chair, a portrait of the composer of Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin, and two telephones. Since the move, he claimed to be far more comfortable and reported that he slept much better at night. Sammy and Joe walked right up to the office-closet door. Once Anapol got in, there was really no room for anyone else. Anapol was writing a letter. He held up a linger to signal that he was in the middle of an important thought.
Sammy saw that he was writing on the letterhead of the Szymanowski society. Dear Brother, the letter began. Anapol's hand hovered while he read the line over, moving his fleshy purple lips. Then he looked up. He smiled grimly.
"Why do I suddenly want to hide my checkbook?" he said.
"Boss, we need to talk to you."
"I can see that."
"First of all." Sammy cleared his throat. "Everything we've done around here up to now, as good as it's been, and I don't know if you ever look at what the competition's doing but we've been better than most of them and as good as the best of them, all of that is nothing, okay, nothing, compared to what Joe and I have worked out for the Escapist from now on, though I'm not at liberty to divulge just what that will be. At the moment."
"That's first of all," said Anapol.
"Right."
Anapol nodded. "First of all, you should congratulate me." He sat back, hands clasped smugly over his belly, and waited for them to catch on.
"They bought it," Sammy said. " Parnassus."
"I heard from their lawyer last night. Production is to commence by the end of this year, if not sooner. The money is certainly not enormous-we're not talking M-G-M here-but it isn't bad. Not bad at all."
"Naturally we are obliged to ask you to give us half of it," Joe said.
"Naturally," Anapol agreed. He smiled. "Now tell me what it is. that you two have worked out."
"Well, basically it's a whole new approach to this game. We saw-"
"What do we need with a whole new approach? The old approach has been working great."
"This is better."
"Better in this context can mean only one thing," Anapol said. "And that is more money. Is this new approach of yours going to make more money for me and my partner?"
Sammy looked at Joe. He was, in fact, still not entirely persuaded of this. But he was still feeling the sting of Bacon's accusation the night before. And what was more, he knew Shelly Anapol. Money was not-not always-the most important thing in the world to him. Once, years before, Anapol had cherished hopes of playing the violin in the New York Philharmonic, and there was a part of him, albeit deeply buried, that had never completely resigned itself to the life of a dealer in whoopee cushions. As Empire Comics' sales figures had climbed, and the towering black cyclones of money came blowing in out of the heartland, Anapol, out of this residual ambition and a perverted sense of guilt over the brainless ease with which colossal success had been achieved, had grown extremely touchy about the poor reputation of comic books among the Phi Beta Kappas and literary pooh-bahs whose opinions meant so much to him. He had even imposed upon Deasey to write letters to The New York Times and The American Scholar, to which he then signed his own name, protesting the unfair treatment he considered those publications had given his humble product in their pages.
"Lots," Sammy said. "Piles, boss."
"Show me."
They fetched the portfolio and tried to explain what it was they intended to do.
"Adults," Anapol said after a few minutes of listening. "You're talking about getting adults to read comic books."
The cousins looked at each other. They had not quite expressed or understood it that way before.
"I guess so," Sammy said.
"Yes," said Joe. "Adults with adult money."
Anapol nodded, stroking his chin. Sammy could see a relief flowing into his shoulders and the hinges of his jaw, unknotting them, sending Anapol tilting back in his big leather swivel chair with a grandeur and an ease not entirely free of the threat of metal fatigue and failing springs. Whether it was relief at having at last found a worthy basis for his commerce, or merely that he was comforted by the reassuring proximity of certain failure, Sammy could not be sure.
"Okay," Anapol said, reaching for his unfinished letter. "We'll give it a try. Get to work."
Joe started to walk away, but Sammy took hold of his arm and pulled him back. They stood. Anapol added another sentence to his letter, considered it, then looked up.
"Yes?"
"What about this not-enormous money from Parnassus?" Sammy said. "We got a piece of the radio show. You gave us a piece of the newspaper strip. I don't see why we-"
"Oh, for God's sake," Anapol said. "Don't even bother to finish, Mr. Clay, I've heard it all before."
Sammy grinned. "And?"
Anapol's smile grew cagey and very, very small. "I'm not averse. I can't speak for Jack, but I'll take it up with him and see if we can't work something out."
"A-all right," Sammy said, surprised and a little suspicious, sensing an imminent condition.
"Now," Anapol said, "see if you can guess what I'm about to say to you."
"They're putting Szymanowski on a bubblegum card?"
"Maybe you aren't aware of this," Anapol said, "but Parnassus Pictures does a very healthy business in Europe."
"I didn't know that."
"Yes. As a matter of fact, their second-biggest market after the domestic is, of all places-"
" Germany," said Joe.
"Naturally, they're a little concerned about the reputation you two have earned for this company, in your many imaginative ways, as antagonistic to the citizens and government of that nation of fanatical moviegoers. I had a long talk with Mr. Frank Singe, the studio head. He made it very clear-"
"Don't even bother to finish," Sammy said. He was disgusted. " 'We've heard it all before.' " He looked appealingly at Joe, willing him to speak up, to tell Anapol about his family and the indignities to which they were being exposed, the one hundred cruelties, gross and tiny, to which, with an almost medical regimentation, they were being subjected by the Reichsprotektorat. He was sure that Anapol would give in once again.
"All right," Joe said softly. "I will stop the fighting."
Anapol's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"Joe?" Sammy said. He was shocked. "Joe, come on. What are you talking about. You can't give up! This-this is censorship. We're being censored! This is the very thing we're supposed to be standing up to. The Escapist would stand up to something like this."
"The Escapist is not a real person."
"Yeah, I know that. Christ."
"Sam," said Joe, his cheeks reddening. He put a hand on Sammy's arm. "I appreciate what you think you are doing. But I want to do this now." He tapped the portfolio. "I'm tired of fighting, maybe, for a little while. I fight, and I am fighting some more, and it just makes me have less hope, not more. I need to do something… something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good."
"Joe, I-" Sammy started to argue, but just as quickly gave up. "Fine," he said. "We'll lay off the Nazis. It won't be long anyway till we're in this war."
"And then I promise to give you the satisfaction of reminding me of my ignoble behavior here this morning," said Anapol. "As well as a share-something very modest, I assure you-in the small bounty that Hollywood is going to provide us with."
The cousins started away. Sammy looked back.
"What about the Japs?" he said.
THE SUDDEN SMALL EFFLORESCENCE of art, minor but genuine, in the tawdry product line of what was then the fifth- or sixth-largest comic book company in America has usually been attributed to the potent spell of Citizen Kane acting on the renascent aspirations of Joe Kavalier. But without the thematic ban imposed by Sheldon Anapol at the behest of Parnassus Pictures-the censorship of all story lines having to do with Nazis (Japs, too), warfare, saboteurs, fifth columnists, and so on-which forced Sammy and Joe to a drastic reconsideration of the raw materials of their stories, the magical run of issues that commenced with Radio Comics #19 and finished when Pearl Harbor caught up to the two-month Empire lead time in the twenty-first issue of Triumph Comics (February 1942) looks pretty unlikely. In eight issues apiece of Radio, Triumph, All Doll, and the now-monthly Escapist Adventures, the emphasis is laid, for the first time, not only on the superpowered characters – normally so enveloped in their inevitable shrouds of bullets, torpedoes, poison gases, hurricane winds, evil spells, and so forth, that the lineaments of their personalities, if not of their deltoids and quadriceps, could hardly be discerned-but also, almost radically for the comic book of the time, on the ordinary people around them, whose own exploits, by the time hostilities with Germany were formally engaged in the early months of 1942, had advanced so far into the foreground of each story that such emphasis itself, on the everyday heroics of the "powerless," may be seen to constitute, at least in hindsight, a kind of secret, and hence probably ineffectual, propaganda. There were stories that dealt with the minutiae of what Mr. Machine Gun, at home in the pages of Triumph, liked to call "the hero biz," told not only from the point of view of the heroes but from those of various butlers, girlfriends, assistants, shoe-shine boys, doctors, and even the criminals. There was a story that followed the course of a handgun though the mean streets of Empire City, in which the Escapist appeared on only two pages. Another celebrated story told the tale of Luna Moth's girlhood, and filled in gaps in her biography, through a complicated series of flashbacks narrated by a group of unemployed witches' familiars, talking rats and cats and reptilian whatsits, in a "dark little hangout outside of Phantomville." And there was "Kane Street," focusing for sixty-four pages on one little street in Empire City as its denizens, hearing the terrible news that the Escapist lies near death in the hospital, recall in turn the way he has touched their lives and the lives of everyone in town (only to have it all turn out, in the end, as a cruel hoax perpetrated by the evil Crooked Man).
All of these forays into chopping up the elements of narrative, in mixing and isolating odd points of view, in stretching, as far as was possible in those days, under the constraints of a jaded editor and of publishers who cared chiefly for safe profit, the limits of comic book storytelling, all these exercises were, without question, raised far beyond the level of mere exercise by the unleashed inventiveness of Joe Kavalier's pencil. Joe, too, made a survey of the tools at hand, and found them more useful and interesting than he ever had before. But the daring use of perspective and shading, the radical placement of word balloons and captions and, above all, the integration of narrative and picture by means of artfully disarranged, dislocated panels that stretched, shrank, opened into circles, spread across two full pages, marched diagonally toward one corner of a page, unreeled themselves like the frames of a film-all these were made possible only by the full collaboration of writer and artist together.
Whether the delightful fruit of this collaboration came at a price; whether the thirty-two extra issues, the two thousand extra pages of Nazi-smashing obviated by Anapol's ban, might somehow, incrementally, have slid America into the war sooner; whether the advantage gained in time would have precipitated an earlier victory; whether that victory coming a day or a week or a month earlier would have sufficed to preserve a dozen or a hundred or a thousand more lives; such questions now can have only an academic poignancy, as both the ghosts and those haunted by them are dead.
At any rate, the circulation figures for the Kavalier & Clay titles increased steadily until, by the abrupt termination of the partnership, they had nearly doubled, though whether this amazing growth was due to the books' marked advance in sophistication and quality, or was simply a product of the general explosion in comic book sales that occurred in the months leading up to the entry of America into the war, is difficult to assess. Great ringing blizzards-blowing in from Hollywood, from radio, from Milton Bradley and Marx Toys, Hostess Cakes and (inevitably) the Yale Lock Company, but most of all from the change purses, dungaree pockets, and Genuine Latex Rubber Escapist Coin Banks of the nation-blanketed the offices on the twenty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building. It required shovels and snowplows and crews of men working around the clock to keep ahead of the staggering avalanche of money. Some of this snowfall ended up, in due course, in the bank account of Josef Kavalier, where it towered in fantastic drills and was left that way, aloof and glinting, to cool the fever of exile from the day his family should arrive.
When Frank Singe, the head of production for Parnassus Pictures, came through New York City that September, Bacon got Sammy in to see him at the Gotham Hotel. Bacon had kept Sammy up all night, writing out scenarios, and Sammy, bleary-eyed and poorly shaved, had three ready to show Singe the following afternoon. Singe, a big, barrel-chested man who smoked a ten-inch Davidoff gigante, said that he had two writers in mind already, but that he liked what Sammy had done in the comics, and he would take a look at his pages. He was not at all discouraging; it was clear that he was personally fond of Bacon, and furthermore, as he said himself, it was not like the other two guys up for the job were Kaufman and Hart. After twenty-five minutes of semi-distracted listening, he told Sammy and Bacon that he had a very important appointment to look at a pair of very long legs, and the interview was over. The pair walked down to the street with the mogul from Poverty Bow and stepped out of the Gotham into the dwindling afternoon. The weather had been fine all day, and though the sun had already set, the sky overhead was still as blue as a gas flame, with a flickering hint of black carbon in the east.
"Well, thanks, Mr. Singe," Sammy said, shaking his hand. "I appreciate the time."
"The kid can do it, sir," Bacon said, reaching an arm around Sammy and shaking him a little. "The Escapist is his baby."
It was a cool evening, and in his dense, soft camel coat, with Bacon's arm around his shoulders, Sammy felt warm and content and prepared to believe that anything could happen. He was touched by the degree of Bacon's eagerness to have him come along to California, though he suspected it, too; he worried that Bacon was really just afraid of being out there all alone. It was between them now just as it had been with Joe, before Rosa; Sammy was always available, always willing to join in, keep up, hang in there, go out, and pick up the pieces after a light. Sometimes Sammy feared that he was on his way to becoming a professional sidekick. As soon as Bacon had made new friends, or a new friend, in California, Sammy would be left alone with the unhappy souls, pale gaping goldfish, whom he had read about in Day of the Locust.
"Whatever you decide is fine by me, Mr. Singe," Sammy said. "To tell you the truth, I don't even know if I want to move to Los Angeles."
"Oh, don't start in on that again," Bacon said, with a big fake radio laugh. They shook hands with Singe, and he got into a cab.
"See you boys around," Singe said. There was an odd note in his voice, hovering somewhere between mockery and doubt. The cab pulled away from the curb, and he waved a little, leaving Sammy standing there under the arm of his boyfriend.
Bacon turned on him. "What'd you go and say that for, Clayboy?"
"Maybe it's true. Maybe I like it here."
Boyfriend. The word flew into Sammy's mind and careened blindly around it like a moth while Sammy chased after it with a broom in one hand and a handbook of lepidoptery in the other. It sounded like a wisecrack, acidulous, hard-bitten, italicized: Who's your boyfriend, Percy? Though Sammy now spent all his free time with Bacon, and had agreed in principle on their sharing a house in the event that they did go west, Sammy still refused to admit to himself-at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later-that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon. It was not that he denied what he was feeling, or that the implications of the feeling had frightened him; well, he did, and they had, but Sammy had been in love with men nearly all his life, from his father to Nikola Tesla to John Garfield, whose snarl of derision echoed so clearly in his imagination, taunting Sammy: Hey, pretty boy, who's your boyfriend?
However clandestine and impossible an enterprise it might hitherto always have been or seemed, loving men came naturally to Sammy, like a gift of languages or an eye for four-leaf clovers; notions of denial andfear were, in a very real sense, superfluous. Yes, all right, so maybe he was in love with Tracy Bacon; so what? What did that prove? So maybe there had been further kissing, and some careful exploitation of shadows and stairwells and empty hallways; even John Garfield would have had to agree that their behavior since that night in the lightning storm, on the eighty-sixth floor, had been playful and masculine and essentially chaste. Sometimes in the back of a taxicab, their hands might steal toward each other across the leather banquette, and Sammy would feel his small, damp palm and bitten fingers absorbed into the deep, sober Presbyterian fastness of Tracy Bacon's grip.
The previous week, when they were at Brooks being fitted for new suits, standing side by side in their BVDs like a before-and-after advertisement for vitamin tonic, they had watched the salesman leave the fitting room, and the tailor turn his back, and then Bacon had reached out and grabbed a handful of the wool of Sammy's chest. He had fitted the hinge of his fingers into the notch of Sammy's breastbone, and run his palm down the flat slope of Sammy's belly, and then, hardening his blue eyes with an innocent Tom Mayflower twinkle, darted his hand into and out of the waistband of Sammy's briefs, like a cook testing a pot of hot water with a pinky. Sammy's cock retained, to this moment, a furtive memory of the imprint of that cool hand. As for kisses, there had been three more: one just outside the doorway of Bacon's hotel room as Sammy was dropping him home; one amid the dark latticework under the Third Avenue El at Fifty-first; and then the third and boldest, in a back row of the Broadway, at a showing of Dumbo, during the pink elephant bacchanal. For here was the novelty, the difference between the love that Sammy bad felt for Tesla and Garfield and even for Joe Kavalier, and that which he felt for Tracy Bacon: it really did seem to be reciprocated. And these blossomings of desire, these entanglings of their fingers, these four nourishing kisses stolen from the overflowing stand-pipe of New York 's indifference, were the inevitable product of that reciprocity. But did they mean that he, or Bacon, was a homosexual? Did they make Tracy Bacon Sammy's boyfriend?
"I don't care," Sammy said, aloud, to Mr. Frank Singe, New York, the world; and then, turning back to Bacon, "I don't care! I don't care if I get the job or not. I don't want to think about it, or Los Angeles, or you leaving, or any of it. I just want to live my life and be a good boy and have a nice time. That all right with you?"
"That's fine by me, sir," Bacon said, knotting his scarf against the chill. "How about we go do something?"
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know. What's your favorite place ever? In the whole city, I mean."
"My favorite place ever in the whole city?"
"Right."
"Including the boroughs?"
"Don't tell me it's in Brooklyn. That's awfully disappointing."
"Not Brooklyn," Sammy said. " Queens."
"Worse still."
"Only it isn't there anymore, my favorite place. They closed it. Packed it up and rolled it right out of town."
"The Fair," Bacon said. He shook his head. "You and that Fair."
"You never went, did you?"
"That's your favorite place ever, huh?"
"Yeah, but-"
"All right, then." Bacon hailed a taxicab and opened the door for Sammy. Sammy stood there a moment, knowing that Bacon was about to get him into something he was not going to be able to get out of very easily. He just didn't know what.
"We're going to Queens," Bacon said to the driver. "To the World's Fair."
It was not until they had reached the Triborough Bridge that the driver, in a dry monotone, said, "I don't know how to tell you fellas this."
"Isn't there anything left?" Bacon said.
"Well, I seen in the papers they been arguing about what to do with the land, between the city and Mr. Moses and the Fair people. I guess some of it still might be there."
"We'll keep very low expectations," Bacon said. "How about that?"
"I'm comfortable with that," Sammy said.
Sammy had loved the Fair, visiting it three times in its first season of 1939, and until the end of his life, he kept one of the little buttons he had been given when he exited the General Motors pavilion, which said I have seen the future. He had grown up in an era of great hopelessness, and to him and millions of his fellow city boys, the Fair and the world it foretold had possessed the force of a covenant, a promise of a better world to come, that he would later attempt to redeem in the potato fields of Long Island.
The cab left them off outside the LIRR station, and they wandered along the Fair's perimeter for a while, looking for a way in. But there was a high fence, and Sammy didn't think he could get over it.
"Here," Bacon said, crouching behind some shrubs and arching his back. "Climb on."
"I can't-I'll hurt you-"
"Come on, I'll be fine."
Sammy scrambled up onto Bacon's back, leaving a muddy footprint on his coat.
"I have mystically augmented strength, you know," Bacon said. "Oof."
Sammy tumbled and dangled and fell into the fairgrounds, landing on his ass. Bacon launched, hoisted, and dropped himself up, over, and down the fairground side of the fence. They were in.
The first thing Sammy's eye sought out were the monumental Mutt-and-Jeff structures, the soaring Trylon and its rotund chum the Peri-sphere, symbols of the Fair that for two years had been ubiquitous throughout the country, working their way onto restaurant menus, clock faces, matchbooks, neckties, handkerchiefs, playing cards, girls' sweaters, cocktail shakers, scarves, lighters, radio cabinets, et cetera, before disappearing as suddenly as they had flourished, like the totems of some discredited Millerite cult that briefly thrills and then bitterly disappoints its adherents with grand and terrible prophecies. He saw right away that the lowermost hundred feet or so of the Trylon was covered in scaffolding.
"They're taking the Trylon down," Sammy said. "Gee."'
"Which one is the Trylon, now? The pointy one?"
"Yeah."
"I had no idea it was so tall."
"Taller than the Washington Monument."
"What is it made out of, granite or limestone or something?"
"Plaster of paris, I believe."
"We've been doing very well, haven't we? Not talking about my leaving for L.A. "
"Are you thinking about it?"
"Not me. So the ball is the Perisphere?"
"That's right."
"Was there anything inside them?"
"Not in the Trylon. But yeah, inside the Perisphere they had this whole show. Democracity. It was like a scale model of the city of the future, and you sat in these little cars going all around the outside and looked down on it. It was all superhighways and garden suburbs. You just felt like you were soaring over it all in a zeppelin. They would make it like nighttime in there, and all the little buildings and streetlights would sort of light up and glow. It was great. I loved it."
"You don't say. I'd like to see that. I wonder if it's still in there, Sammy, what do you think?"
"I don't know," said Sammy, with a kind of wary thrill. By now he knew Bacon well enough to recognize the impulse, and its accompanying tone, that had sent his friend up to a military installation at the top of the Empire State Building at midnight with a gourmet meal in two shopping bags. "Probably not, Bake. I think-hey, wait for me."
Bacon was already on his way around the low circular wall that surrounded the immense pool, now drained and covered in a sodden-looking layer of burlap, in which the Perisphere once had swum. Sammy looked to see if there were any workmen still around, or guards, but they appeared to have the place to themselves. It made his heart ache to look around the vast expanse of the fairground that, not very long ago, had swarmed with flags and women's hats and people being whizzed around in jitneys, and see only a vista of mud and tarpaulins and blowing newspaper, broken up here and there by the spindly stump of a capped stanchion, a fire hydrant, or the bare trees that flanked the empty avenues and promenades. The candy-colored pavilions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles, and honeycombs, the Italian pavilion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon-he was too young to have such inklings-but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.
"Hey," Bacon called. "Clayboy. Over here."
Sammy looked around. There was no sign of Bacon. Sammy hurried, as quickly as he could, all the way around the low whitewashed wall with its rain stains and patchy skin of wet leaves, to the doors of the Trylon, which had led, via an imperial pair of escalators, into the heart of the magical egg. When the Fair was on, there was always a huge line of people coiling up to these big blue doors. Now there were only the scaffolding and a stack of planks. Some workman had forgotten the tin coffee-cup cap of his thermos. Sammy went over to the metal doors. They were heavily barred and padlocked with a thick chain. Sammy gave them a pull, and they did not budge in the least.
"I tried that," Bacon said. "Under here!"
The Perisphere was supported by a kind of tee, a ring of evenly spaced pillars joined to it at its antarctic circle, so to speak, all the way around. The idea had been for the great bone-white orb, its skin rippled with fine veins like a cigar wrapper, to look as if it were floating there, in the middle of the pool of water. Now that there was no water, you could see the pillars, and you could see Tracy Bacon, too, standing in the middle of them, directly under the Perisphere's south pole.
"Hey," Sammy said, rushing to the wall and leaning across its top. "What are you doing? That whole thing could come right down on top of you!"
Bacon looked at him, eyes wide, incredulous, and Sammy blushed; it was exactly what his mother would have said.
"There's a door," Bacon said, pointing straight up. Then he reached up over his head, and his hands went into the bottom of the Perisphere's hull. Bacon's head vanished next, his feet rose off the ground, and then he was gone.
Sammy got one leg over the wall, then the other, and lowered himself down into the pool bed. The damp burlap made squishing sounds under his shoes as he ran across the gently curved bottom of the basin toward the Perisphere. When he got underneath it, he looked up and saw a rectangular hatchway that looked as if Tracy Bacon might just have fit through it.
"Come on."
"It looks pretty dark in there, Bake."
A big hand emerged from the hatch, wavering, fingers flexing. Sammy reached for it, their palms crossed, and then Bacon pulled him bodily up into the darkness. Before he could begin to feel, or smell, or listen to the darkness, to Bacon and to the pounding of his own heart, the lights came on.
"Gee," Bacon said. "Look at that."
The systems that controlled the motion, sound, and lighting of Democracity and its companion exhibit, General Motors' Futurama, were quite literally the dernier cri of the art and ancient principles of clockwork machinery in the final ticking moments of the computerless world. Coordinating the elaborate sound track of voice and music, the motion of the cars, and the varying light-moods inside the Perisphere had required an array of gears, pulleys, levers, cams, springs, wheels, switches, relays, and belts that was sophisticated, complex, and sensitive to disruption. A mouse dropping, a sudden snap of cold, or the accumulated rumblings of ten thousand arriving and departing underground trains could throw the system out of whack and bring the ride to an abrupt halt, occasionally trapping fifty people inside. It was because of the need for frequent minor adjustments and repairs that there was a hatch in the Perisphere's underbelly. It led into an odd, bowl-shaped room. Where Bacon and Sammy came in, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a kind of corrugated steel platform. On one side of the platform, a series of cleats had been welded onto the inner frame of the sphere that reached, gradually, up along the inside of the bowl, toward the elaborate clockwork underside of Democracity.
Bacon took hold of one of the lower cleats of the ladder. "Think you can manage it?" he said.
"I'm not sure," Sammy said. "I really think-"
"You go first," Bacon said. "I'll give you a hand if you need it."
So Sammy and his bad legs climbed a hundred feet into the air. At the top, there was another hatch. Sammy poked his head through.
"It's dark," Sammy said. "Too bad. Okay, we better go."
"Just a minute," Bacon said. Sammy felt a sudden push from behind as Bacon took hold of his legs and more or less jackknifed him up into the cool, huge blackness. Something rough abraded Sammy's cheek, and then there was a creak and a series of rasping sounds as Bacon pulled himself up after. "Huh. You're right."
"Indeed." Sammy reached out along the ground, feeling for the hatch. "Good. You're crazy, Bake, you know that? You just won't take no for an answer. I-"
Sammy heard the metallic chirp of the hinge of a cigarette lighter, the scrape of its flint, and then a spark swelled magically and became the flickering face of Tracy Bacon.
"Now yours," he said.
Sammy lit his lighter. Together they managed to generate just enough light to see that they were camped far to one side of the display, in the middle of a wide, forested area half an inch high. Tracy stood up and started toward the center. Sammy followed him, protecting the flame. The surface of the floor beneath their feet was covered in a kind of rough, dry artificial moss that was meant to suggest vast rolling hills of trees. It made a crunching sound that echoed in the high empty dome. Every so often, though they tried to be careful, one of them stepped on a model farmhouse, or crushed the amusement district or central orphanage of a town of the future. Finally they reached the major city, at the very center of the diorama, which had been known as Centerville or Centerton or something equally imaginative. A single skyscraper rose from a cluster of smaller buildings. All the buildings looked streamlined and moderne, like a city on Mongo, or the Emerald
City in The Wizard of Oz. Bacon got down on one knee and brought his eyes level with the top of the lone tower.
"Huh," he said. He frowned, then lowered himself and leaned forward on one arm, slowly, taking care not to extinguish his flame, until he was lying flat on his belly along the ground. "Huh," he said again, grunting it this time. He lowered his chin to the ground. "Yeah. This is the way. I don't think I would have liked just floating over it near as much."
Sammy went over and stood beside Bacon for a moment. Then he eased himself down on the ground beside him. He folded an arm under his chest and, inclining his head slightly, squinted his eyes, trying to lose himself in the illusion of the model the way he used to lose himself in Futuria, back at his drawing board in Flatbush a million years before. He was a twentieth of an inch tall, zipping along an oceanic highway in his little antigravity Skyflivver, streaking past the silent faces of the aspiring silvery buildings. It was a perfect day in a perfect city. A double sunset flickered in the windows and threw shadows across the leafy squares of the city. His fingertips were on fire.
"Ow!" Sammy said, dropping his lighter. "Ouch!"
Bacon let his own flame go out. "You have to kind of pad it with your necktie, dopey," he said. He grabbed Sammy's hand. "This the one?"
"Yeah," Sammy said. "The first two fingers. Oh. Okay."
They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy's sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon's mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.
ON the last day of November, Joe had a letter from Thomas. In an execrable left-slanting hand, he announced, employing a sardonic tone that had not been present in his first letters from Lisbon, that the old tub-after a series of delays, reversals, mechanical failures, and governmental tergiversations, had finally been cleared- yet again-for departure, on the second of December. More than eight months had now passed since Thomas's journey from the Moldau to the Tagus. The boy had turned thirteen on a cot in the crowded refectory of the convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmel, and in his letter he warned Joe that he suffered from a mysterious tendency to start rattling off paternosters and Hail Marys at the drop of a hat, and had become partial to wimples. He claimed to be afraid that Joe would not recognize him for the spots on his face and the "apparently permanent pubertal smudge on my upper lip that some have the temerity to call a mustache." When Joe had finished reading the letter, he kissed it and pressed it to his chest. He remembered the immigrant's fear of going unrecognized in a land of strangers, of being lost in the translation from there to here.
The following day Rosa came straight to the Empire offices from the T.R.A. and burst into tears in Joe's arms. She told Joe that Mr. Hoffman had, almost as an afterthought, placed a call that afternoon to the Washington offices of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, just to make certain that everything was in order. To his astonishment, he had been told by the chairman of the committee that it looked as though all of the children's visas were going to be revoked for reasons of "state security." The head of the State Department's visa section, Breckinridge Long, a man with, as the chairman carefully put it, "certain antipathies," had long since established a clear policy of refusing visas to Jewish refugees. Hoffman knew that perfectly well. But in this instance, he argued, the visas had already been issued, the ship was about to depart, and the "security risks" were three hundred and nineteen children! The chairman sympathized. He apologized. He expressed profound regret and embarrassment at this unfortunate turn of events. Then he hung up.
"I see" was Joe's only response when Rosa, perched on his high stool, had finished her tale. With one hand he stroked mechanically at the back of her head. With the other he spun the striker of his cigarette lighter, sparking it over and over again. Rosa was ashamed and confused. She felt that she ought to be comforting Joe, but here she was, in the middle of the Empire workroom, with a bunch of guys staring at her over their drawing boards, bawling into his shirtfront, while he stood patting her hair and saying, "There, there." His shoulders were tensed, his breathing shallow. She could feel the anger building inside him. Each time the lighter sparked, she flinched.
"Oh, honey," she said. "I wish there was something we could do. Someone we could turn to."
"Huh," Joe said, and then "Look here." He took hold of her shoulders and spun her around on the stool. On a low table next to his drawing board lay a stack of lettered but uninked comic book pages on big sheets of Bristol board. Joe shuffled through the stack of pages, passing them to her one by one. They presented a story that was narrated by the custodian at the Statue of Liberation, a tall, stooped man with a mop and a billed cap, drawn to look a lot like George Deasey. Apparently, the unfortunate fellow had a bone to pick with "that long-underwear bunch." He then went on to describe how, just that morning, he had watched in horror as Professor Percival "Smarty" Pantz, hapless know-it-all rival of Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, performed an "electro-brain implantation procedure" on the Lady. The idea was to enlist the statue in the effort to keep the skies of Empire City clear of enemy planes and airships. "She'll be able to swat Messerschmitts like mosquitoes!" Pantz crowed. Instead, thanks to the usual miscalculation on the part of Dr. Pantz, she had, upon awakening, gone off striding across the bay toward Empire City, her spike-crowned electro-head filled with homicidal urges. Of course the Scientific American, employing a handy giant robot of his own manufacture that he quickly fitted out with an enormous Clark Gable mask, was able to lure her back to her pillar, and then neutralize her using "superdynamic electromagnets." But it all made, to the exasperation of the janitor-narrator, an awful mess. Not only the island but the entire seaport lay in shambles. His brother janitors and sanitation workers were already overburdened cleaning up after the donnybrooks in which the super-beings regularly indulged. How would they ever manage to clean up this latest?
At that moment, an airplane landed on Liberation Island, and a familiar figure in a broad-brimmed hat and belted topcoat climbed out, looking as if she meant business.
"That looks like Eleanor Roosevelt," said Rosa, pointing to the panel in which Joe had drawn a quite flattering version of the First Lady, waving from the top step of the plane's gangplank.
"She picks up a broom," Joe said. "And starts sweeping. Soon all the women in the town come out with their brooms. To help."
"Eleanor Roosevelt," Rosa said.
"I'm going to call her," Joe said, going to a telephone on a nearby desk.
"Okay."
"I wonder if she'll speak to me?" He picked up the receiver. "I should think she will. I get that picture from the things I read of her."
"No, Joe, I really don't think she will," Rosa said. "I'm sorry. I don't know how it was in Czechoslovakia, but here you can't just call up the president's wife and ask her for a favor."
"Oh," Joe said. He set the receiver back down and stared at his hand, his head bowed.
"But, oh, my God." She climbed down from the stool. "Joe!"
"What?"
"My father. He knows her slightly. They met doing something for the W.P.A."
"Is he allowed to call up the president's wife?"
"Yes, I believe he is. Get your hat, we're going home."
Longman Harkoo called the White House that afternoon and was told that the First Lady was in New York City. With some help from Joe Lash, whom he knew through his Red connections, Rosa's father managed to track down Mrs. Roosevelt, and received a brief appointment to visit her at her apartment on East Eleventh Street, not far from the Harkoo house. For fifteen minutes, over tea, Harkoo explained the predicament of the Ark of Miriam and its passengers. Mrs. Roosevelt, Rosa 's father later reported, had seemed to become extremely angry, though all she said was that she would see what she could do.
The Ark of Miriam, her course smoothed by the invisible hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, set sail from Lisbon on the third of December.
The following day, Joe called Rosa and asked her if she could meet him on her lunch break at an address in the West Seventies. He wouldn't tell her why, only that he had something he wanted to give her.
"I have something for you, too," she said. It was a small painting that she had finished the night before. She wrapped it in paper, tied it with string, and carried it onto the train. Shortly afterward, she found herself standing in front of the Josephine, a fifteen-story pile of cool blue-tinged Vermont marble. It had pointed parapets and took up more than half of an entire block between West End Avenue and Broadway. The doorman was uniformed like a doomed hussar in the retreat from Smolensk, down to his trim waxed mustache. Joe was waiting for her when she walked up, his coat slung over his arm. It was a pretty day, cold and bright, the sky as blue as a Nash and cloudless but for one lost lamb overhead. It had been a long time since Rosa had been in this neighborhood. The walls of high apartment houses stretching far away to the north, which had struck her in the past as self-important and stuffily bourgeois, now had a sturdy, sober look to them. In the austere light of autumn, they looked like buildings filled with serious and thoughtful people working hard to accomplish valuable things. She wondered if perhaps she had had enough of Greenwich Village.
"What is this all about?" she said, taking Joe's arm.
"I just signed the lease," he said. "Come on up and see."
"A lease? You're moving out? You're moving here! Did you and Sammy have a fight?"
"No, of course not. I never fight with Sammy. I love Sammy."
"I know you do," she said. "You guys are a good team."
"It's first, well, he's moving to Los Angeles. Okay, he says for three months only to write the movie, but I bet you good money after the bad he will stay there when he goes. What's in the package?"
"A present," she said. "I guess you can hang it in your new apartmerit." She was a little put out that he had said nothing to her about a move, but that was the way he was about everything. When they had a date, he would never tell her where they were going or what they were going to do. It was not so much that he refused as that he managed to communicate he would prefer it if she didn't ask. "This is nice."
There was a marble fountain in the lobby, festooned with glinting Japanese carp, and an echoing interior courtyard of vaguely Moorish flavor. When the elevator door opened, with a deep and musical chime, a woman got out, followed by two small, adorable boys in matching blue woolen suits. Joe tipped his hat.
"This is for Thomas you're doing this," Rosa said, getting on the elevator. "Isn't it?"
"Ten," Joe said to the elevator man. "I just thought this might be a, well, a better neighborhood. You know, for me… for me to…"
"For you to raise him in."
He shook his head, smiling. "That sounds very strange."
"You are going to be like a father to him, you know," she said. And I could be like a mother. Just ask me, Joe, and I'll do it. It was on the tip of her tongue to say this, but she held back. What would she be saying if she did? That she wanted to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to. But did she? When her father had gone to see Mrs. Roosevelt, he had told the First Lady, explaining his connection to the matter, that one of the children on the ship was the brother of the young man his daughter was going to marry. Rosa had carefully neglected to pass that part of the story on to Joe. "I think it's very sweet of you. Sensible and sweet."
"There are good schools nearby. I have an interview for him at the Trinity School which I am told is excellent and takes Jews. Deasey said he would help me get him into Collegiate where he attended."
"Goodness, you've been making a lot of plans." She really ought to know better than to take offense at his secretiveness. Keeping things to himself was just his nature; she supposed it was what had drawn him to the practice of magic in the first place, with its tricks and secrets that must never be divulged.
"Well, I have a lot of time. It is eight months I have been waiting for this to happen. I've been doing a lot of thinking."
The elevator operator braked the car and hauled the door aside for them. He waited for them to step out. Joe was gazing at her with a strange, fixed look, and she thought, or perhaps she only wished, that she saw a glint of mischief there.
"Ten," said the operator.
"A lot of thinking," Joe repeated.
"Ten, sir," the elevator man said.
In the apartment there were views of New Jersey out the windows all along one side, gilded fixtures in the larger of the two bathrooms, and the parquetry of the floors was dizzying and mathematical. There were three bedrooms, and a library with shelves on three walls reaching from floor to ceiling; every room had at least one bookshelf built in. She visited all the rooms twice, unable to prevent herself, as she did so, from imagining a life in these elegant rooms, high over this cultivated swath of Manhattan with its Freudian psychoanalysts, first cellists, and appellate-court judges. They could all live here, she and Joe and Thomas, and maybe in time there would be another child, imperturbable and fat as a putto.
"Okay now, what do you have for me?" She couldn't refrain from asking anymore. She didn't see any obvious bulges in his pockets, but whatever it was might be concealed under the drape of his coat. Or it could be something very, very small. Was he about to propose to her? What was she going to say if he did?
"No," he said. "You first."
"It's a portrait," she said. "A portrait of you."
"Another one? I didn't sit for it."
"How odd," she said teasingly. She untied the wrapping and carried the painting over to the mantel.
She had done two previous portraits of Joe. He sat for the first in shirtsleeves and vest, sprawled in a leather chair in the dark-paneled parlor where they had first become acquainted. In the piece, his doffed jacket, with a curled newspaper in its hip pocket, hangs from the back of the chair, and he leans against the arm, his head with its long wolfhound face cocked a little to one side, the fingers of his right hand lightly pressed to his right temple. His legs are crossed at the knee, and he ignores a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand. Rosa 's brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to fuck her. In the second portrait, Joe is shown working at the drawing table in his and Sammy's apartment. A piece of Bristol board lies before him, partly filled in with panels; careful examination reveals the discernible form, in one panel, of Luna Moth in flight. Joe is reaching with a long slender brush toward a bottle of ink on the taboret beside him. The table, which Joe had bought sixth- or seventh-hand shortly after his arrival in New York, is crusted and constellated with years of splattered paint. Joe's sleeves are rolled to the elbow and a few dark coils of hair dangle over his high forehead. The end of his necktie can be seen to lie precariously close to a fresh stroke of ink on the paper, and on his cheek he wears an adhesive bandage over some faint pink scratches. In this picture, his expression is serene and almost perfectly blank, his attention focused entirely on the bristles of the brush that he is about to dip into the bright black ink.
The third portrait of Joe Kavalier was the last painting Rosa ever made, and it differed from the first two in that it was not painted from life. It was executed with the same easy but accurate draftsmanship ofall her work, but it was a fantasy. The style was simpler than in the other two portraits, approaching the cartoonish, slightly self-conscious naivete of her food pictures. In this one, Joe is posed against an indeterminate background of pale rose, on an ornate carpet. He is naked. More surprisingly, he is entirely entangled, from head to toe, in heavy metal chains from which, like charms on a bracelet, dangle padlocks, cuffs, iron clasps, and manacles. His feet are shackled together with leg irons. The weight of all this metal bows him at the waist, but his head is held high, staring out at the viewer with a challenging expression. His long, muscular legs are straight, his feet spread as if he is ready to spring into action. The pose was borrowed from a photograph in a book about Harry Houdini, with the following crucial differences: unlike Houdini, who in the photo guarded his modesty with his manacled hands, Joe's genitals, with their forlorn expression, though heavily shadowed with fur, are plainly visible; the big lock in the middle of his chest is shaped like a human heart; and on his shoulder, in black overcoat and men's galoshes, sits the figure of the artist herself, holding a golden key.
"That's funny," he said. He reached into his trousers pocket. "This is what I have for you." He held out a fist to her, knuckles up. She turned the hand over and pried the fingers apart. On the palm of his hand lay a brass key. "I'm going to need help to do this," he said. "I hope with all my heart, Rosa, that you will want to help me."
"And what is this the key to?" she said, her voice sharper than she wanted it to be, knowing perfectly well that it was the key to this apartment, and that Joe was now asking her for the very thing she had been on the verge of asking for herself-that she be allowed to act as a mother, or at least a big sister, to Thomas Kavalier. She was disappointed in the same measure that she had been expecting a ring, and thrilled to the degree that she was horrified by her desire for one.
"Like in the painting," he said, in a kidding way, as if he could see she was upset, and was trying to figure out what tone to adopt with her. "The key to my heart."
She took the key and held it in her hand. It was warm from his pocket. "Thank you," she said. She was crying, bitterly and happily, ashamed of herself, thrilled to be able to really do something for him.
"I'm sorry," Joe said, taking the handkerchief from his jacket pocket.
"I wanted you to have a key, because… but I did the wrong thing." He gestured toward the painting. "I forget to say I love it. Rosa, I love it! It's incredible! It's a whole new thing for you."
She laughed, taking the hankie from him, and dabbed at her eyes. "No, Joe, it's not that," she said, though in fact the painting did represent a new direction for Rosa's work. It had been years since she had attempted to draw from her imagination. Her talent for capturing a likeness, a contour, her innate sense of shadow and weight, had biased her toward life drawing early on. Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe's body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well-to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him-to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love. "No. Joe. Thank you for the key. I want it very much."
"I'm glad."
"And I'm happy to help in every way. Nothing would make me happier. But if you're saying you want to move in here…" She looked at him. Yes. He had been. "Well, I don't think I should. For Thomas. I don't think it would be right. He might not understand."
"No," he said. "I was thinking-but no. You're right, of course."
"But I will absolutely be here whenever you need me. As much as you need me." She blew her nose into his handkerchief. "As long as you need me."
"That's good," he said. "I think we may be talking about a very long time."
She held out the soiled handkerchief uncertainly, smiling a wincing little apologetic smile at the mess.
"It's fine. You keep it, darling."
"Thank you," she said, and this time burst unrestrainedly into a ridiculous, even bizarre, fit of uncontrollable sobbing. She knew perfectly well that the handkerchief was expressly intended for the comforting of women, and that Joe always kept another, reserved for his own personal use, tucked into the back pocket of his trousers.
MANY years afterward, most of the aged boys at whose long-ago bar mitzvah receptions, in a vanished New York City, a young magician named Joe Kavalier had performed his brisk, lively, all but wordless act, could summon only fragmentary memories of the entertainer. Some of the men were able to recall a slender, quiet young man in a fancy blue cutaway who spoke accented English and seemed hardly older than they. Another, an avid reader of comic books, recalled that Joe Kavalier had invited him to drop by the Empire offices one day with his parents. Joe had given him a tour and sent him home with an armload of free comic books and a drawing, which he still had, of himself standing next to the Escapist. Yet another remembered that Joe worked with an entire menagerie of artificial animals: a collapsible fake-fur rabbit; goldfish carved from a carrot; a rather mangy stuffed parakeet that, to the surprise of spectators, remained perched on the magician's hand while its cage vanished into thin air. "I saw him cutting up the carrots in the men's room," this gentleman recalled. "In the bowl of water, they really did look like little fish." Stanley Konigsberg, however, whose bar mitzvah reception marked the last known appearance of the Amazing Cavalieri, retained for the rest of his life-like young Leon Douglas "Pipe Bomb" Saks-an ineradicable memory of our hero. An amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe's natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser's Dream, Rosini's Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his own relatives and schoolmates at the Hotel Trevi two months later. And if Mr. Konigsberg's youthful admiration, and the unfailing kindness shown him by its object, had not sufficed to preserve the Amazing Cavalieri in his memory for the next sixty years, then the singular performance Joe gave at the Hotel Trevi on the evening of December 6, 1941, undoubtedly would have been enough.
Joe arrived an hour before the reception began, as was his habit, to check the disposition of the Trevi's ballroom, salt a few aces and half-dollars, and go over the order of events with Manny Zehn, the bandleader whose fourteen Zehnsations, riotous in their mariachi shirts, were setting up on the bandstand behind them.
"How are they hanging?" said Joe, trying out an expression he had just heard in the subway on his way uptown. He pictured a row of pages from a calendar, hanging on a shiny string. He was young, he was making money hand over fist, and his little brother, after six months of quarantine, bureaucratic dithering, and those terrible days last week when it seemed that the State Department might, at the last moment, cancel all the children's entry visas, was on his way. Thomas would be here in three more days. Here, in New York City.
"Hey, kid," Zehn said, squinting a little mistrustfully at Joe, but finally shaking the hand Joe proffered. They had worked together twice before. "Where's your sombrero?"
"Sorry? I didn't-?"
"Our theme is 'South of the Border.' " Zehn reached behind his head and lifted a black sombrero embroidered with silver thread up onto his balding pate. He was a good-looking, portly man with a pencil mustache. "Sid?" The trombonist had been chatting up one of the waitresses, in a pink beribboned dress with Latin flounces. Sid turned around, an eyebrow arched. Manny Zehn raised his hands in the air and threw his head back. "Number three."
The trombonist nodded. "Hit it," he said to the band. The Zehnsations broke into a spirited bounce version of "The Mexican Hat Dance." They played four bars and then Manny Zehn cut his throat with a finger. "So where's your Mexican hat?"
"No one told me," said Joe. He smiled. "Beside to which I'm permitted only to use the topper," he added, pointing to the "loaded" silk hat on his head, which he had purchased secondhand at Louis Tannen's. Or else maybe the Mexican magicians' union will complain."
Zehn narrowed his eyes again. "You're drunk," he said.
"Not at all."
"You're acting goofy."
"My brother is coming," said Joe, and then, just to see how it sounded, added, "and I am getting married. That is, I hope I am. I have decided I am going to ask her tonight."
Zehn blew his nose. "Mazel tov," he said, giving the blot on his handkerchief a chiromantic squint. "Only I thought you guys were experts at getting out of chains."
"Excuse me, Mr. Cavalieri?" said Stanley Konigsberg, appearing rather magically at Joe's side. "But that's what I wanted to ask you?"
"You can call me Joe."
"Joe. Sorry. Okay, I was wondering. Do you ever do escapes?"
"At one time," said Joe. "But I had to give it up." He frowned. "How long have you been standing there?"
"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you hid a queen of hearts in the centerpiece of table seven," said Stanley. "If that's what you're worried about."
"I did not do any such thing," said Joe. He winked at Manny Zehn and, with a firm hand on Stanley's shoulder, steered the boy out of the ballroom and into the gilded corridor. Guests were taking off their coats, shaking the rain from their umbrellas.
"What kinds of things could you escape from?" Stanley wanted to know. "Chains? Ropes? Boxes? Trunks? Bags? Could you do it jumping off of a bridge? Or a building? What's so funny?"
"You remind me of someone," Joe said.
That same evening, Rosa shoved her paint box, a folded canvas tarp, a yardstick, and a small stepladder into the back of a taxi, and headed uptown to the apartment at the Josephine. The echoing emptiness of the place, a tin-plate rattle in the ears, unnerved her, and although with Joe's approval she had hastily called Macy's to order a dining table and chairs, some basic kitchen things, and bedroom furniture, there would be no time to furnish the rooms properly before Thomas arrived. It occurred to her that, having gone from the cramped jumble of a two-family flat on Dlouha Street, to the provisional pandemonium of a convent refectory, to the packed-in-oil tin of a stateroom on the Ark of Miriam, the boy might actually welcome a bit of space and emptiness, but all the same she wanted him to feel that the place at which he had arrived, at long last, was home, or a kind of home. She had tried to think of ways she could accomplish this. She knew enough about thirteen-year-old boys to be fairly certain that a plush bathrobe, a bouquet of flowers, or a ruffled canopy on the bed was not going to do the trick. She thought that a dog or a kitten might have been nice, but pets were not allowed in the building. She asked Joe about his brother's favorite meal, color, book, song; but Joe had proven quite ignorant of such preferences. Rosa was irritated with him-she had said he was impossible-until she saw that he was, for once, pained by his ignorance. It was the mark not of his usual luftmensch obliviousness but of the chasm of strange separation that had opened up between the brothers in the last two years. She apologized at once and went on trying to think what she could do for Thomas, until finally she'd had the idea, which struck them both as a nice one, of painting the blank expanse of his bedroom with a mural. It was not just that she wanted Thomas to feel at home; she wanted him to like her-instantly, right away-and she hoped that the mural, whether it softened the edges of his arrival or not, would at the very least stand as an offer of friendship, as a hand extended in welcome from his American big sister. But intermingled with, secretly bubbling beneath, these other motives for the gesture was concealed a desire that had nothing to do with Thomas Kavalier. Rosa was practicing- beginning to dabble, on the walls of a boy's bedroom, with the idea of becoming a mother. This morning, her doctor had called to confirm the tale of a missed period and of a week of sudden squalls and unexpected flare-ups of emotion such as the one that had sent her into hysterics over the loan of an old pocket square. Thomas was going to be an uncle. That was how she had decided that she was going to put it to Joe.
When she got into the apartment, she first changed into a pair of dungarees and an old shirt of Joe's, and put her hair back with a kerchief. Then she went into the bedroom that was going to be Thomas's and spread out the tarp on the floor. She had never painted a mural before, but she had talked it over with her father, who had been involved in the fracas over the Rivera murals at Rockefeller Center and who knew many artists who had worked on murals for the W.P.A.
Rosa had wrestled for a long time with the proper subject. Characters from nursery rhymes, wooden soldiers, fairies and frog princes and gingerbread houses, such motifs would be considered hopelessly puerile by a boy of thirteen. She considered doing a New York scene- tall buildings, taxicabs, traffic cops, the Camel sign blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Or perhaps some corny American montage, with redwood trees and cotton plants and lobsters. She wanted it to be sort of generally American, but also to relate in some way to the specific life Thomas was going to be leading here. Then she had started thinking about Joe, and the kind of work that he did. She suspected that Thomas Kavalier was going to be learning a good deal of his English from the pages of Empire Comics. While she would not have felt comfortable doing a mural that featured the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, or-God knew-Luna Moth, the idea of heroes, American heroes, intrigued her. She went to the public library and checked out a big book, with impressive Rockwell Rent-style woodcuts, called Heroes and Legends of the American People. The larger-than-life figures of Paul Bun-van, John Henry, Pecos Bill, Mike Fink, and the rest-her favorite was the original man of steel, Joe Magarac-struck her as perfectly suited to the mural form, and not beneath the contempt of a boy to whom they would probably be largely unknown. What was more, Rosa had taken to thinking of Joe himself as a hero-he had paid, out of his own pocket, for fifteen of the children who were now steaming across the Atlantic. Though she would not put Joe into the mural, she decided to include an image of Harry Houdini, that immigrant boy from Central Europe, just to connect the theme of the mural that much more directly to Thomas's life.
She had made dozens of preliminary sketches and a two-by-three cartoon of the mural, which she now set about transferring, by means of a simple grid, to the largest of the room's walls. It was tricky work laying out the guidelines on the walls with the yardstick, first the horizontals, moving the stepladder across from left to right three feet at a hop, then the verticals, easy enough at the bottom but flirting more and more dangerously with wobbliness as she drew nearer to the top and was forced to go up on tiptoe. It required far more patience than she possessed, and several times she came close to abandoning the grid and just trying to sketch the thing out freehand on the wall. But she reminded herself that patience was a cardinal virtue in a mother-God knew her own mother had had little enough-and kept to her careful plan.
By ten o'clock, she had finished laying out the guidelines. Her shoulders ached, and her neck, and her knees, and she felt that before she started in on transferring the gridded cartoon to the wall she would go for a walk around the block, for a sandwich or a cigarette. She might run into Joe; he ought to be through with his show by now and on his way up to meet her. So she pulled on her coat and took the elevator back down to the lobby. She walked up to the corner of Seventy-ninth Street, where there was a late-night grocery.
Later, Rosa would imagine that, like a cat or a spirit camera trained on a dying person, she had seen her lost happiness at the instant of its passing. As she was paying for her Philip Morrises, she happened to glance down at the Sunday papers stacked in front of the counter, bulldog editions hot off the press. In the upper-right-hand corner of the Herald there was an extra, boxed in red. She read it five times, with all her heart and attention, but the tiny amount of information it conveyed never increased or-then or afterward-made any better sense. The ten lines of tentative, bland prose said only that a boat filled with refugees, many from Central Europe, most if not all of them believed to be Jewish children, was missing in the Atlantic off the Azores and believed lost. There was no mention, as there would not be for several more hours, of a U-boat, a forced evacuation, a sudden storm tearing in out of the northeast. Rosa stood there for a moment, her lungs filled with smoke, unable to exhale. Then she looked up at the storekeeper, who was watching her with interest. Evidently something quite engrossing was going on in her face. What should she do? Was he still at the Trevi? Was he on his way up to the Josephine, as they had planned? Had he heard the news?
She drifted out to the curb and fretted for a moment longer. Then she decided she had better just go back to the apartment and wait for him. She was sure that he would eventually come looking for her there, whether in ignorance or grief. Just as she was coming to this decision, however, a taxicab pulled up and let out an elderly couple in evening clothes. Rosa brushed past them and climbed into the back of the cab.
"The Trevi," she said.
She sat in a dark corner of the taxi. The light came and went, and in the mirror of her compact, her reflection was intermittently brave. She closed her eyes and tried to recite a snatch of Buddhist prayer her father had taught her, claiming it had a calming effect. It had little apparent impact on her father, and she wasn't even sure she had the words right. Om mani padmi om. Somehow it did make her feel calmer. She said it all the way from Seventy-ninth Street to the curb outside the Trevi. By the time she stepped out of the cab, she had pulled herself fairly together. She came into the severe marble reception hall, with its icy chandeliers, and went up to the desk to inquire. From the lobby came the somehow baleful laughter of the famous fountain.
"The magician was a friend of yours?" said the clerk with an unaccountably hostile air. "He cut out hours ago."
"Oh." It hit her like a blow. He was supposed to come up to the apartment after the performance. The fact that he had not done so meant that something terrible had happened to him. And in its wake, in possession of this knowledge, he had not wanted to see her. "Are they-is anyone-"
"There's the bar mitzvah boy now," the clerk said, pointing to a skinny little kid in a three-piece pink suit lolling on one of the watered silk couches in the lobby. "Why don't you ask him?"
Rosa went over, and the boy introduced himself as Stanley Konigsberg. Rosa told him she was looking for Joe, that she had some very bad news to give him. Oh, she had some wonderful news, too, but how would she ever be able to tell him? He would think she was trying to make some horrible equivalency, when it was only one of the monstrous coincidences of life.
"I think he already knows," Stanley Konigsberg said. He was a squat boy, small for his age, with crooked spectacles and coarse brown hair. The suit was incredible, trousers trimmed with white braid, pockets and buttonholes with white frogs, precisely the color of humiliation itself. "Is it about that boat that sank?"
"Yes," Rosa said. "His little brother was on it. A boy about your age."
"Jeez." He fidgeted with the end of his brown necktie, unable to make eye contact with Rosa. "That explains it, I guess."
That explains what, Rosa wanted to ask him, but she stuck to the more pressing question. "Do you know where he went?" she said.
"No, ma'am, I'm sorry. He just-"
"How long ago did he leave?"
"Oh, two hours at least. Maybe even more."
"Wait here," Rosa said. "Will you wait here, please?"
"I guess I kind of have to." He pointed to the doors of the Trevi's ballroom. "My parents aren't finished arguing."
Rosa went to a pay telephone and called Sammy and Joe's apartment, but there was no answer, and that was when she remembered that Sammy had gone out of town for the weekend with Tracy Bacon. To the Jersey shore, of all places. She was going to have to try to track him down. Next she had the operator call the superintendent of the Josephine, Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey grumbled and warned her not to make a habit of it, but when she told him it was urgent, he went up and checked the apartment for her. No, he said when he returned to the phone, there was nobody there, and no note. Rosa hung up and went back to Stanley Konigsberg.
"Tell me what happened," she said.
"Well, I mean, I guess he was upset, but nobody knew. I mean, everybody else was pretty upset when they heard. My uncle Mort works for the J.T.A. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It's a wire service."
"Yes."
"So he came in and told us the news, he heard it first."
"Did you see Joe leave, Stanley?" said Rosa.
"Well, yeah, I mean, yes, everybody did."
"And he seemed to be upset?"
Stanley nodded. "It was really quite strange," he said.
"What happened?" said Rosa. "What was strange?"
"It was all my fault," Stanley began. "I guess I was kind of nudzhing him, and he kept saying no, no, no, so then I went to my father and he said he'd give your friend another fifty dollars, and he still said no, so then I went to my mother." He winced. "After that, I guess he didn't really have any choice."
"Any choice about what?" Rosa said. She put her hand on Stanley's shoulder. "What did you want him to do?"
"I wanted him to do an escape," said Stanley, twitching as she touched him. "He said he knew how. Maybe he was just joking, I don't know. But he told my mother okay, he would. He said I was a nice kid and he would throw it in for no charge. But there was only about a half hour before he was supposed to go on, you know, so he had to rush it. He went down to the basement and got a big wooden packing crate that something, I think it was a filing cabinet, came in. And also a laundry bag. And a hammer and some nails. Then he went and talked for a while to the house detective, and he said no. My father had to go and give him fifty dollars, too. Then it was time for him, your friend, Joe, to go on. He did his show. He was really good. He did some card tricks, and some coin tricks, and he did some tricks with apparatuses. A little of everything, which is hard, which I know, see, because I'm a magician too, kind of. Most of them, when you see them… they have a specialty. Like I just do mostly stuff with cards. Then after maybe a half hour he, your friend, got us all to stand up, and we had to leave the ballroom, and he brought us down here. Over to that." He pointed to the fountain out in the lobby, an exact replica of the famous one in Rome, all tritons and seashells and blue-lit cataracts. "Everyone. I think it was on the way down that Uncle Lou must have told him about the ship, you know, sinking and all, 'cause when we got down here he looked, uh, I don't know. Like his mouth was kind of hanging crooked. And he kept putting his hand on my shoulder, like he was leaning on me. Then some waiters brought in the bag and the box. The hotel detective came over and put him in handcuffs. He got in the bag, and I got to tie it myself. We put him in the box, and I got to nail it shut. We dropped him into the fountain. He told us if he didn't come out in three minutes to come in after him."
"Oh my God," said Rosa.
Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds from the time of his immersion in the cool blue water of the Trevi's fountain, the two waiters, the house detective, and Mr. Konigsberg in his best suit went splashing in after Joe. They had been watching the crate for signs of movement, a telltale shuddering, a visible straining in the planks that made up the crate. Rut there was no motion at all. The crate lay inert, covered up to within an inch of its nailed-on lid, in water. When Mrs. Konigsberg began to scream, though there were still a few seconds to go until the deadline, the men went in. They rolled the crate up and out of the water, but in their haste they lost their grip on it, and it shattered against the floor. The laundry sack rolled out and flopped wildly on the floor like a gasping fish. Joe was thrashing around so much on the carpet that the house detective couldn't get the sack opened alone, and had to call on the other men to lend a hand. It took three of them to hold Joe down. When they peeled away the bag, his face was red as a fresh welt, but his lips were almost blue. His eyes rolled in their orbits, and he gagged and coughed as though fresh air were poison to him. They got him to his feet and the house detective removed the cuffs; when they were passed around afterward, it was plain they had not been tampered with. For a moment Joe wavered there, soaking wet, looking slowly across the two hundred faces ranged in an anxious and wondering ring around him. His face was twisted in an expression that most of the guests would later characterize as shame but that others, Stanley Konigsberg among them, saw as a terrible, inexplicable anger. Then, in a parody of the smooth courtliness he had exhibited toward them in the ballroom a bare twenty minutes before, he bowed deeply from the waist. His hair fell down over his face and then, as he snapped back upright, flung water across the bodice of Mrs. Konigsberg's silk dress, leaving spots that proved to be ineradicable.
"Thank you very much," he said. Then he dashed across the lobby, through the revolving doors, and out into the street, shoes squeaking every step of the way.
After Stanley had finished, Rosa went back to the telephone. If she was going to try to find Joe, she would need help, and the person whose help she most wanted was Sammy. She tried to think of who might be able to track him down. Then she picked up the phone and asked the operator if there was a listing for Klayman, in Flatbush.
"Yes? Who is this?" The voice was a woman's, deep, slightly accented. A little suspicious, perhaps, but not troubled.
"This is Rosa Saks, Mrs. Klayman. I hope you remember me."
"Of course, dear. How are you?" She had no idea.
"Mrs. Klayman. I don't know how to tell you this." All week she had been the slave to unpredictable torrents of sadness and rage, but from seeing that newspaper headline until now, she had remained remarkably calm, almost devoid of feeling apart from the urge to find Joe. Somehow the thought of poor, hardworking, sad-eyed Mrs. Klayman, in her tiny apartment in Flatbush, broke the ice. Rosa started to cry so hard that it was difficult for her to get the words out. At first Mrs. Klayman tried to soothe her, but as Rosa grew more incoherent, she lost her temper a little.
"Dear, you must calm down!" she snapped. "Take a deep breath, for God's sake."
"I'm sorry," Rosa said. She took a deep breath. "All right."
She related the little she knew. There was a long silence over there in Flatbush.
"Where is Josef?" Mrs. Klayman said finally, her voice calm and measured.
"I can't find him. I was hoping Sammy might-might help-"
"I'll find Sammy," Mrs. Klayman said. "You just go home. Back to your family's house. He may come there."
"He doesn't want to see me, I think," Rosa said. "I don't know why. Mrs. Klayman, I'm afraid he may try to kill himself! I think he already tried it once tonight."
"Don't talk crazy. We just have to wait," Mrs. Klayman said. "That's all we can really do."
When Rosa wandered outside to get another cab, there was a boy selling papers, tomorrow's Journal-American. This carried a more detailed, if not quite accurate, version of the sinking of the Ark of Miriam. A German U-boat assigned to one of the dreaded "wolf packs" that were tormenting Allied shipping in the Atlantic had set upon the innocent ship and sent it to the bottom with all hands.
This account, it later developed, was not quite true. When, after the war, he was put on trial for this and other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Donitz's "Prize Regulations," he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land-the island of Corvo in the Azores-and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam. The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats so quickly that the crew of U-328 had no time to help. It was only luck that had enabled Halse and his crew of forty to escape with their own lives. If he had known that the ship carried children, Halse was asked, a good many of them unable to swim, would he still have proceeded with the attack? Halse's reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow.
"They were children," he said. "We were wolves."
When the line of cars pulled into the front drive of the house, Ruth Ebling, the housekeeper, who was watching from the great front porch as the chauffeur and Stubbs unloaded the guests and their baggage, noticed the little Jew at once. He was so much smaller and more spindly than the other men in the party-smaller, indeed, than any of the rangy, slouching, sandy-haired types, with their Brooks suits and their polished manners, who formed the usual complement of Mr. Love's entertainments. Where the other fellows emerged from the cars with the lithe step of adventurers come to plant a conquering flag, the little Jewish boy scrambled out of the back of the second car-a monstrous new bottle-green Cadillac Sixty-one-like a man who had just fallen into a ditch. He looked as if he had spent the past several hours not so much sitting alongside the other fellows in the backseat as carelessly scattered in the spaces among them. He stood, fumbling with a cigarette, blinking and pale, eyes watering in the stiff wind, rumpled, vaguely misshapen, viewing the looming gables and mad cheminations of Pawtaw with unconcealed mistrust. When he saw Ruth watching him, he ducked his head and half-raised his hand in greeting.
Ruth felt an uncharacteristic urge to avert her gaze. Instead, she fixed him with the cold level stare, cheeks immobile, jaw set, which she had heard Mr. Love refer to, when he thought her out of earshot, as her "Otto von Bismarck look." An apologetic smile briefly creased the little Jew's face.
Though he could not have known it (and never did learn for certain just what went wrong that day), Sammy Clay's bad luck was to have arrived on the very afternoon when the bubbling motor of Ruth Ebling's hostility toward Jews was being fueled not merely by the usual black compound of her brother's logical, omnivorous harangues and the silent precepts of her employer's social class. She was also burning a clear, volatile quart of shame blended with unrefined rage. The previous morning, in New York City, she had stood with her mother, her sister-in-law, and her uncle George, on the sidewalk outside the Tombs, watching as the bus carrying her remaining brother, Carl Henry, off to Sing Sing disappeared in a thick cloud of exhaust.
Carl Henry Ebling had pleaded guilty and been sentenced, by a judge named Conn, to a term of twelve years for bombing the bar mitzvah reception of Leon Douglas Saks at the Pierre. Carl Henry, a fervent, dreamy, but never especially adroit or competent boy, had carried these traits with him into a passionate and shiftless manhood. But the formless and badly dented idealism with which he had returned from the battlefields of Belgium, curdling in the long indignity of the Depression, had taken on new shape and purpose after 1936, when a friend had invited him to join a Yorkville social organization, the Fatherland Club, which by the outbreak of war in Europe had transmogrified or splintered off-she had never been able to follow it-into the Aryan-American League. While Ruth had never entirely agreed with Carl Henry's views-Adolf Hitler made her nervous-or felt comfortable with her brother's having taken such an active role in his party's activities, she saw unquestionable nobility in his devotion to the cause of freeing the United States from the malevolent influence of Morgenthau and the rest of his cabal. And furthermore, it ought to have been as clear to the judge, to the prosecutor (Silverblatt), and to everyone as it was to Ruth herself that her brother, who had insisted, in spite of his lawyer's advice, on pleading guilty, and who much of the time seemed to be under the impression that he was a costumed villain in a comic book, was clearly out of his mind. He belonged in Islip, not Sing Sing. That the bomb her brother had made-in the shape of a trident, how could they not see the craziness in that?-had somehow managed to explode, injuring only him, Ruth blamed on the bad luck and fumbling nature that had never deserted her brother. As for the harsh sentence he had received, this she blamed, as did Carl Henry, not only on the workings of the Jewish Machine but, with an unwillingness that wrenched her heart, on her employer, Mr. James Haworth Love himself. James Love had, from the early thirties, been extremely vocal in his opposition to Charles Lindbergh, to the America Firsters, and above all to the German-American Bund and other pro-German groups in this country, which in speeches and newspaper editorials he typically characterized as "fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs," attacks that had climaxed, at least in Ruth's view, with the prosecution and imprisonment of her brother. Thus was the dull dislike that Ruth ordinarily would have borne for Sammy made keen by her suppurating detestation of his host for the weekend, of the way Mr. James Haworth Love conducted his affairs, both political and social. Witnessing this relaxation of the ban, unarticulated yet absolute, on the presence of Jews at Pawtaw, hitherto among the few traditions of his parents and empire-building grandparents that Mr. Love had continued to respect, seeing it as a final proof of the man's shamelessness and debility, her heart rebelled. It would require only one further outrage to push Ruth into taking steps to alleviate the pressure that had been building in her breast for so long.
"Saw the smoke," Mr. Love barked. "Fires lit. Very good, Ruth. How are you?"
"I'm sure I'll live."
The men all trooped up the steps, tossing their bright empty greetings in her direction, complimenting her on her hair, the style of which had not altered since 1923, her color, the smells emanating from the kitchen. She greeted them politely, with something of her usual wary wryness, like a schoolteacher welcoming the return from vacation of a group of smart alecks and cutups, and told them, one by one, which rooms would be theirs and how they could find them if they didn't already know. The bedrooms had each been named by some early Love enthusiast after vanished local Indian tribes. One of the men, extraordinarily good-looking and with eyes the very color of the new Cadillac and a dimple in his chin, much taller and broader than any of the others, shook her hand and said that he had heard the most amazing things about her oyster stew. The spindly-legged Jew hung back, sheltering in the lee of the green-eyed giant. His only greeting to her was another crooked smile and a nervous cough.
"You'll be in Raritan," she told him, having held back especially for him this smallest and most cramped of the third-floor guest rooms, one with no porch and only a fragmentary view of the sea.
He looked almost fearful at this information, as if it were news of a grave responsibility she had placed upon him.
"Thank you, ma'am," he said.
Ruth would remember afterward that she was troubled by a brief, mild emotion that lay somewhere between affection and pity for the little snub-nosed Jewish boy; he seemed so out of place among all these tall and sporting daffodils. She had a hard time believing that he could really be one of them. She wondered if he had gotten here by some kind of mistake.
Ruth Ebling could not have known how nearly her speculations on Sam's status and position coincided with his own.
"Jesus," he said to Tracy Bacon, "what am I doing here?" He dropped his suitcase. It landed with a muffled thud on the thick carpet, one of several worn Oriental rugs with which the creaking floorboards of Raritan were patchworked. Tracy had already left his bags down in his second-floor room, which, in a striking access of precognition by that Indian-loving ancestor, had been designated Ramcock. He lay now across Sammy's iron bed on his back, legs raised and crossed at the knee, arms folded beneath his head, picking with a fingernail at the peeling white enamel of the bedstead. Like many big, well-built men, he was an inveterate layabout who disdained physical exertion except in brief Red Grange bursts of frantic grace. He furthermore detested standing upright, which made his radio work particularly obnoxious to him; and he loathed being obliged to sit up straight. His inherent ability to feel at ease wherever he went was coupled powerfully with a bone-deep laziness. Whenever he entered a room, no matter how formal the occasion, he generally sought out a place where he could at least put his feet up. "I'll bet I'm the first kike that's ever set foot in this joint."
"I don't think I'll take that bet."
Sammy went to the little window, each of its panes smudged with a thumbprint of frost, in the narrow dormer that overlooked the back lawn. He cranked it open, letting in a cool blast of brine and chimney smoke and the rumblings and fizzings of the sea. In the last quarter hour of the day, Dave Fellowes and John Pye were way down on the beach, tossing a football with a certain grim fervor, in dungarees and heavy sweatshirts but with their feet bare. John Pye was also a radio actor, the star of Paging Dr. Maxwell, and a friend of Bacon, who had introduced Pye to the sponsor of The Adventures of the Escapist. Fellowes ran the Manhattan office of a member of New York's congressional delegation. Sammy watched as Fellowes turned his back on Pye and took off down the beach, scattering white puffs of sand. Fellowes reached up, looking over his shoulder, and a short, accurate forward pass from Pye found his hands.
"This is so strange," said Sammy.
"Is it?"
"Yes."
"I guess it is," Bacon said. "I guess it must be."
"You wouldn't know."
"Well, I… maybe the reason I don't think so is that I always felt so strange, you know, before I found out that I wasn't the only one in the world-"
"That's not what I mean," Sammy said gently. He had not meant to sound argumentative. "That's not what feels strange to me, kid. Not because they're all a bunch of fairies, or because Mr. James Love the sock magnate is a fairy, or because you're a fairy or I'm a fairy."
"If you are," Bacon said with mock correctitude.
"If I am."
Bacon gazed at the ceiling, arms folded contentedly under his head. "Which you are."
"Which I might be."
In fact, the question of what a later generation would term Sammy's sexual orientation seemed, at least to the satisfaction of everyone who made up the party at Pawtaw on that first weekend of December 1941, to have largely been settled. In the weeks since their visit to the World's Fair and their lovemaking inside the dark globe of the Perisphere, Sammy had, along with his strapping young paramour, become a fixture in the circle of John Pye, considered at that time, and for long afterward in the mythos of gay New York, to be the most beautiful man in the city. At a spot in the East Fifties called the Blue Parrot, Sammy had experienced the novelty of seeing men doing the Texas Tommy and the Cinderella, close, in darkness, though his weak stems prevented him from joining in the fun. Tomorrow, as everyone knew, he and Tracy were leaving for the West Coast, to take up their new life together as scenarist and serial star.
"So what is strange, then?" said Tracy.
Sammy shook his head. "It's just, look at you. Look at them." He jerked a thumb toward the open window. "It's that they could all play the secret identity of a guy in tights. Your bored playboy, your gridiron hero, your crusading young district attorneys. Bruce Wayne. Jay Gar-rick. Lamont Cranston."
"Jay Garrick."
"The Flash. Blond, muscles, nice teeth, a pipe."
"I would never smoke a pipe."
"This one went to Princeton, that one went to Harvard, the other one went to Oxford…"
"Filthy habit."
Sammy wrinkled up his face to acknowledge that his attempts at rumination were being parried, then looked away. Down on the beach, Fellowes had tackled John Pye. They were rolling in the sand.
"A year ago, when I wanted to be around someone like you, I had to, you know, make you up. And now…" He looked across the broad, sere expanse of the lawn, past Pye and Fellowes. A signature of foam scrawled itself across the surface of the waves. How could he begin to say how happy he had been, this last month or so, in the radiant focus of Bacon's regard, how mistaken Bacon was in wasting that regard on him. No one as beautiful, as charming and poised and physically grand, as Bacon could possibly take an interest in him.
"If you're asking me if you can be my sidekick," Bacon said, "the answer's yes. We'll get you a mask of your own."
"Say, thanks."
"We'll call you, oh, how does 'Rusty' sound? Rusty or Dusty."
"Shut up."
"Actually, Musty would be more appropriate." When they were in bed together, Bacon was always sampling deep nostalgic drafts of Sammy's penis, claiming it gave off the precise odor of a pile of old tarpaulins in his grandfather's woodshed back in Muncie, Indiana. Once, the location of the shed had been given as Chillicothe, Illinois.
"I warn you…" Sammy said, head inclined menacingly to one side, arms jutting out to execute a couple of judo chops, legs coiled to spring.
"Or, given the state of your linens, young man," Bacon said, raising his arms to his face, already cringing, "maybe we ought seriously to consider Crusty."
"That does it," Sammy said, launching himself onto the bed. Bacon pretended to scream. Sammy scrambled on top of him and pinned his wrists to the bed. His face hung suspended twenty inches above Bacon's.
"Now I've got you," he said.
"Please," said Bacon. "I'm an orphan."
"This is what we used to do to wise guys in my neighborhood."
Sammy pursed his lips and allowed a long strand of saliva to dangle downward, tipped by a thick bubbled bead. The bubble lowered itself like a spider on its thread until it hung just over Bacon's face. Then Sammy reeled it back in. It had been years since he had last attempted the trick, and he was pleased to discover that his spittle retained its viscosity and he his pinpoint control of it.
"Ew," said Bacon. He thrashed his head from side to side and struggled under the weight of Sammy on his wrists, while Sammy dangled the silvery thread over him again. Then, abruptly, Bacon stopped struggling. He looked at Sammy, level, calm, and with a dangerous glint in his eye; of course he could have freed himself easily, if he so desired, from the puny grip of his lover. His look said so. He opened his mouth. The pearl of spit dangled. Sammy cut the thread. A minute later, they lay naked beneath the four piled blankets on the narrow bed, disporting themselves in the precise manner that Dr. Fredric Wertham, in his fatal book, would one day allege to be universal among costumed heroes and their "wards." They fell asleep holding each other, and were wakened by a smell, comforting and maternal, of boiled milk and salt water.
A number of fragmentary accounts survive of the events that transpired at Pawtaw on the sixth of December, 1941. The entry in James Love's journal for 6 December is characteristically terse. It notes that Bob Perina had gained eighty-two yards for Princeton that afternoon, and gives details of the menu and highlights of conversation at dinner, with the rueful annotation "in rtrspct mr trivial than usl." The guests, as always, are identified by their initials: JP, DF, TB, SC, RP, DD, QT. The entry ends with the single word DISASTER. Only the absence of any entry at all for the following day, and the preoccupation of Monday's entry, when there was so much else going on in the world, with a visit to his attorney, give any further hint of what transpired. Roddy Parks, the composer, in an entry in his famous diary, supplies the name of another guest (his lover at the time, the photographer Donald Davis), and agrees with Love that the principal subjects of conversation at the table were a large exhibition of Fauvist paintings at the Marie Harriman Gallery, and the king of Belgium's surprise marriage. He also notes that the oyster stew was a failure and that Donald had remarked earlier in the afternoon that something seemed to be troubling the housekeeper, whom Parks calls Ruth Appling. His account of the raid is nearly as terse as Love's: "The police were called."
A check of the report filed by the Monmouth County sheriff supplies the name of the final guest that weekend, a Mr. Quentin Towle, as well as a rather more detailed account of events that evening, including some insight into the impetus that sent Ruth, at long last, to the telephone. "Miss Ebling," the report reads, "was exaspirated [sic] by the recent imprisonment of her brother Carl and happened in a bedroom to stumble upon a comic strip book of a type which she held responsible for many of the brother's mental problems. At this point, having identified the author of said comic strip book as one of the suspects, she determined to notify the authorities of the activities taking place in the house."
It is interesting to note that in spite of the emphasis, that night and during the course of the largely inconclusive legal proceedings that followed, on the role of the comic book in triggering Ruth Ebling's act of retribution, the only guest at Pawtaw that evening for whom there is no existing arrest record is the book's author.
Sammy got drunk at dinner for the first time in his life. Drunkenness came over him so slowly that at first he mistook it for the happiness of sexual fatigue. It had been a long day, one that had left a bodily imprint in his memory: the chill outside the Mayflower that morning as they waited for Mr. Love and his friends to pick them up; the elbow in his ribs, the roar and ashy smell of the Cadillac's heater, the sharp shaft of December air blowing in through the car window on the way down; the burn of a shot of rye he accepted from John Pye's flask; the lingering mark of Bacon's teeth and the imprint of his thumbs on Sammy's hips. As he sat at the dinner table, eating his stew and looking around him with an expression he knew, without anxiety, to be a stupid one, the day enveloped him in a pleasant confusion of aches and images like the one that overwhelms someone on the verge of sleep who has spent the entire day out of doors. He sank back into it and watched as the men around him unfurled the bright banners of their conversation. The wine was a '37 Puligny-Montrachet, from a case that had been the gift, Jimmy Love said, of Paul Reynaud.
"So, when are you two leaving?"
"Tomorrow," Bacon said. "Arriving Wednesday. I have an appearance. Someone from Republic is supposed to be coming on the train at Salt Lake City with my costume so it can be the Escapist who gets off in L.A."
There followed some prolonged teasing of Tracy Bacon on the subject of tight pants, veering amid general amusement into the question of codpieces. Love expressed his satisfaction that Bacon would be able to keep doing the Escapist on the radio, with the broadcast originating in Los Angeles. Sammy sank deeper into his Burgundy-fueled reverie. There was a faint disturbance in the air to his back, a murmur, a muffled cry.
"But won't they miss you at your cartoon factory?"
"What's that?" Sammy sat up straight in his chair. "I think someone's calling you, Mr. Love. I hear someone saying your-"
"I'm truly sorry to do this, Mr. Love," said a clear flat voice behind Sammy. "But I'm afraid you and your ladyfriends are under arrest."
A brief rout followed this announcement. The room filled with a bewildering variety of sheriff's deputies, policemen from Asbury Park, state highway patrolmen, newspaper reporters, and a couple of vacationing G-men from Philly who had been drinking in the Fly Trap, a roadhouse in Sea Bright favored by representatives of coastal New Jersey law enforcement, when the word went around that they were going to flush a fairy nest out at the beach house of one of the richest men in America. When they saw how large and powerfully built many of the fairies appeared to be, not to mention how surprisingly ordinary-looking, they suffered a moment of hesitation during which Quentin Towle managed to slip out. He was later caught on the county road. Only the two big men put up any resistance at all. John Pye had been raided before, twice, and he was tired of it. He knew that in the end it would cost him, but before he could be subdued, he managed to bloody the nose of one sheriff and break a bottle of Montrachet over the head of a second. He also smashed the camera of a photographer who sold to the Hearst papers, an act for which all of his friends were later grateful. Love, in particular, never forgot this service, and after Pye was killed in North Africa, where he had gone to drive an ambulance because the army would not take homosexuals, saw to it that Pye's mother and sisters were provided for. As for Tracy Bacon, he did not give the question of fighting or not fighting the police a moment's thought. Without revealing too much of the true history that he had so assiduously labored to erase and reconstitute, it can be said that Bacon had been falling afoul of the police since the age of nine, and defending himself with his fists since well before that. He waded into the writhing knot of nightsticks and broad-brimmed hats and cowering men, and began swinging. It took four men to subdue him, which they did with considerable brutality.
While Sammy, too drunk and confused to move, watched his lover and John Pye go down in a sea of tan shirts, he was engaged in a fierce struggle of his own. Someone had gotten hold of his legs and would not let go, no matter how hard Sammy kicked and flailed away at whoever it was. In the end, however, his attacker got the best of him, and Sammy found himself dragged down under the table.
"Idiot!" said Dave Fellowes, his eye closed and his nose bleeding from where Sammy had kicked him. "Get down."
He forced Sammy to crouch beside him under the table, and together they watched the boots and bodies thudding against the carpet from beneath the lacy hem of the tablecloth. It was in this ignoble position that they were found, five minutes later, when the two vacationing FBI agents, schooled in thoroughness, made a last sweep through the house.
"Your friends are all waiting for you," said one of them. He smiled at the other, who took hold of the collar of Fellowes's shirt and dragged him out from under the table.
"Be right there," said the other agent.
"I know you will," said the one who was taking Dave Fellowes away, with a harsh laugh.
The G-man, down on one knee, gazed in at Sammy with mock tenderness, as if trying to lure a recalcitrant child out of hiding.
"Come on, sweetheart," he said. "I won't hurt you."
The reality of the situation had begun to penetrate the fog of Sammy's drunkenness. What had he done? How could he possibly tell his mother that he had been arrested, and why? He closed his eyes, but when he did, he was tormented by a vision of Bacon going down under a tide of fists and boot heels.
"Where's Bacon?" he said. "What did you do to him?"
"The big fella? He'll be all right. More of a man than the rest of you. You his girlfriend?"
Sammy blushed.
"You're a lucky girl. He's a good-looking piece of beef."
Sammy felt a strange ripple in the air between him and the policeman. The room, the entire house, seemed to have gotten very quiet. If the cop was planning to arrest him, it seemed to Sammy as if he ought to have done it by now.
"Myself, I'm partial to darker types. Little guys."
"What?"
"I'm a federal agent, did you know that?"
Sammy shook his head.
"That's right. If I mention to those eager pie-hats out there that they ought to let you go, they will."
"Why would you do that?"
The G-man glanced over his shoulder slowly, almost in a parody of a man checking to see if the coast were clear, then scrambled in under the table with Sammy. He put Sammy's hand on the fly of his suit pants.
"Why indeed," said the G-man.
Ten minutes later, the pair of vacationing federal agents were reunited in the foyer of the house. Dave Fellowes and Sammy, pushed along in front of their respective champions, could hardly look at each other, let alone at Ruth Ebling, who was supervising the cleanup efforts of her staff. The bitter taste of Agent Wyche's semen was in Sammy's mouth, along with the putrid sweet flavor of his own rectum, and he would always remember the feeling of doom in his heart, a sense that he had turned some irrevocable corner and would shortly come face-to-face with a dark and certain fate.
"They've all gone," Ruth said, sounding surprised to see them. "You missed them."
"These two men are not suspects," Fellowes's agent said. "They're merely witnesses."
"We need to interrogate them further," said Agent Wyche, not bothering to disguise his amusement at his own implicit meaning. "Thank you, ma'am. We have our own vehicle."
Sammy managed to raise his head and saw that Ruth was looking at him curiously, with the same faint air of pity he thought he had spotted there earlier that afternoon.
"I just want to know this," she said. "How does it feel, Mr. Clay, to make your living preying off the weak-minded? That's the only thing I want to know."
Sammy sensed that he ought to know what she was talking about, and he was sure that under ordinary circumstances he would have. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I have no idea what-"
"A boy jumped off a building, I heard," she said. "Tied a tablecloth around his neck and-"
A telephone rang in a nearby room, and she stopped. She turned and went to answer it. Agent Wyche yanked Sammy's collar and dragged him to the door, and they went out into the burning cold night.
"Just a minute," came the housekeeper's voice from within. "There's a call for a Mr. Klayman. That him?"
Afterward, Sammy would often wonder what might have become of him, what alley or ditch his broken and violated body might have ended up in, if his mother had not telephoned the house at Pawtaw with the news that Thomas Kavalier had died. Agent Wyche and his colleague looked at each other, their expressions no longer quite professionally blank.
"Aw, shoot, Frank," said Fellowes's agent. "How 'bout that. It's his mom."
When Sammy came out of the kitchen, Dave Fellowes stood slumped against the doorway, an arm over his red, damp face. The two G-men were gone; they had mothers of their own.
"I need to get back to the city right away," Sammy said.
Fellowes wiped at his face with his sleeve, then reached into his pocket and pulled out the key to his Buick.
Although the traffic was light, it took them nearly three hours to get back to New York. They did not say a word to each other from the moment Fellowes started the car until he dropped Sammy off in front of his apartment.
AFTER he ran out of the Hotel Trevi, Joe became merely one of the 7,014 drowned men out stumbling through the streets of New York that night. He carried a pint of rye that he had bought in a bar on Fifty-eighth Street. His hair froze into icicles on his head and his blue tuxedo turned to cold granite, but he felt nothing. He kept walking, sipping from his bottle. The streets were alight with taxis, the theaters were emptying, the windows of restaurants were haloed with candlelight and the vapor of their patrons' breathing. He recalled with shame the elation that had seized him as he walked to the subway earlier that evening, the rattling ride underground with everyone staring at the magician in their car, the general love of poodles and car horns and the tooth marks of the Essex House on the face of the moon that had suffused him as he walked in his top hat from the subway to the Trevi. If he had not drowned an hour ago, he thought, the memory of this vanished happiness might have been enough to make him hate himself. Good thing I'm dead, he thought.
Somehow he ended up in Brooklyn. He rode the train all the way out to Coney Island and then fell asleep and woke up in a place called Gravesend, with a policeman's rough hand on his shoulder. Sometime around two o'clock in the morning, more drunk than he had been since the night he had appeared on the stairs in Bernard Kornblum's house on Maisel Street, he showed up at 115 Ocean Avenue, at the door of apartment 2-B.
Ethel answered the door almost immediately. She was fully dressed and made up, and her hair was tied neatly in a bun. If she was at all surprised to see her nephew at her door, frozen stiff, bleary-eyed, in full evening dress, she did not betray it. Without a word, she put her arm around him and helped him to her kitchen table. She poured him a cup of coffee from a blue pot enameled with white flecks. It was dreadful, thin as the water in which he cleaned his brushes and sour as turned wine, but it was fresh and painfully hot. Its effect on him was devastating. As soon as it hit his throat, all the facts and contingencies he had held under the water, until it seemed to him that they had finally stopped struggling, now bobbed back up to the surface, and he knew that he was alive, and that his brother, Thomas, lay dead at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
"We should turn on the radio" was all he could think of to say.
Ethel sat down across from him with her own cup of coffee. She took a handkerchief from the pocket of her black cardigan and handed it to him. "First cry," she said.
She gave him a gummy piece of honey cake and then, as she had on the night of his arrival, handed him a towel.
While he was showering, his grandmother shuffled into the bathroom, lifted the skirt of her nightgown, and, apparently unaware of Joe's presence, lowered her pale blue behind onto the pot.
"You don't listen to me, Yecheved," she said in Yiddish, calling him by his aunt's old-country name. "From the first day, I said I don't like this boat. Didn't I say it?"
Joe spoke English. "I'm sorry," he said.
His grandmother nodded and got off the toilet. Without a word, she turned out the light and shuffled back out. Joe finished his shower in darkness.
After he had warmed himself into an uncontrollable spasm of weeping, his aunt wrapped him in a bathrobe that had once been Sammy's father's, and led him to Sammy's old bed.
"All right," she said. "All right." She put a dry hand to his cheek and kept it there until he had stopped crying, and then until he stopped shaking, and then until he caught his stuttering breath. He lay still and snuffled. The hand on his cheek remained cool as brick.
He woke up a few hours later. It was still night outside the window, without a trace of morning. He ached in his joints and his chest, his lungs, burned as if he had been breathing smoke or poison. He felt hollow and flattened and quite unable to cry.
"She's coming," said his aunt. She was standing in the doorway to the room, outlined in wan blue light by the fixture over the kitchen sink. "I called her. She was out of her mind worrying."
Joe sat up, and rubbed his face, and nodded. He wanted nothing to do with Rosa, with Sammy, with his aunt or his parents or anyone who could tie him, through any bond of memory or affection or blood, to Thomas. But he was too tired to do anything about it, and he had, in any case, no idea of what he should do. His aunt found him some old clothes, and he dressed quickly in the polar light from the sink. The clothes were much too small, but they were dry and would do until he could change them. While they waited for Rosa, she made another pot of coffee, and they sat in silence, sipping at their cups. Three quarters of an hour later, with a trembling, all but invisible hint of blue light in the air, there was the sound of a car horn from the street below. He washed out his coffee cup, laid it in the drying rack, wiped his hands on the towel, and kissed his aunt goodbye.
Ethel hurried to the window, in time to see the girl step out of a taxi-cab. She threw her arms around him, and Joe held on to her for so long that Ethel found herself regretting, with an intensity that surprised her, that she had neglected to take her nephew into her arms. It seemed just then to be the worst mistake she had ever made in her life. She watched Joe and Rosa get into the taxi and drive away. Then she sat down in a chair, with its festive pattern of pineapples and bananas, and covered her face with her hands.
Joe and Rosa crawled into her bed at six-thirty in the morning, and she held on to him until he fell asleep, lying there, the unknown mysterious product of their love growing in the space between them. Then she slept herself. When she woke, it was past two o'clock in the afternoon, and Joe was gone. She looked in the bathroom, then went downstairs to the black kitchen, where her father was standing with the most peculiar expression on his face.
"Where's Joe?" she said.
"He left."
"Left? Where did he go?"
"Well, he said something about enlisting in the navy," said her father. "But I don't imagine he'll be able to do that until tomorrow."
"The navy? What are you talking about?"
That was how she learned of the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. According to her father, it was very likely that the United States would soon find itself at war with Germany, too. That was what Joe was banking on.
The doorbell played its weird tune, Raymond Scott's shortest composition, "Fanfare for the Fuller Brush Man." She ran to the door, certain that it was going to be Joe. It was Sammy; he looked as if he had been in a fight. There were abrasions on his cheek and a cut by his eye. Had he been fighting with Bacon? She knew that Sammy was supposed to have left with his friend for Los Angeles today-she and Joe had planned originally to go down to the train station and see them off. Had the two men quarreled? A guy of Bacon's size might be dangerous, though it was difficult to imagine him doing anything to hurt Sammy.
She noticed the frayed seam of the right sleeve of Sammy's shirt, where it met the shoulder.
"Your shirt is torn," she said.
"Yeah," he said. "I tore it. That's what you do when you're, you know. In mourning." Rosa had a dim memory of this custom from some long-ago funeral of a great-uncle. The widowed great-aunt had also covered all the mirrors in the house with dish towels, giving the place a disturbing air of having been blinded.
"Want to come in?" she said. "Joe's not here."
"Not really," Sammy said. "Yeah, I know. I saw him."
"You saw him?"
"He came by the apartment to get his things. I guess he woke me up. I guess I had kind of a rough night last night."
"Here," she said, sensing an odd note in his voice. She grabbed an old sweater of her father's from the hat stand, put it around her, and stepped out into the courtyard. It was good to get out into the cold air. She felt some order being restored to her thoughts. "Are you all right?" she said. She noticed that he winced when she touched him, as if his arm or his shoulder were sore. "What's the matter with your arm?"
"Nothing, I hurt it."
"How?"
"Playing football on the beach, how else?"
They sat down on the stone steps, side by side.
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. He's gone. He left."
"What are you doing here, anyway?" she asked him. "Aren't you supposed to be on a train for Hollywood? Where's Bacon?"
"I told him to go ahead without me," Sammy said.
"Oh?"
He shrugged. "I never really wanted… I don't know. I think I got a little carried away with the whole thing."
That morning, at Penn Station, Sammy had said goodbye to Tracy Bacon, in the compartment that had been reserved for them both aboard the Broadway Limited.
I don't understand," Bacon said. They were awkward and clumsy with each other, in the closeness of the first-class compartment, a couple of men, one so intent on not touching the other, the second devoting each movement and gesture to not being touched, that their careful maintenance of a charged and shifting distance between them had itself been a kind of bleak contact. "You didn't even get arrested. Jimmy's lawyers are going to make the whole thing go away."
Sammy shook his head. They were sitting opposite each other on the twin upholstered banquettes, which they would have, somewhere around Fostoria that night, unfolded into a pair of beds.
"I just can't do it anymore, Bake," Sammy said. "It's just-I don't want to be like this."
"You don't have a choice."
"I think I do."
Bacon had gotten up, then, and crossed the three feet of space between them, and sat down on the banquette beside Sammy.
"I don't believe that," he said, reaching for Sammy's hand. "Something like you and me is not a question of choosing or not choosing. There's nothing you can do about it."
Sammy jerked his hand away. Regardless of what he felt for Bacon, it was not worth the danger, the shame, the risk of arrest and opprobrium. Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.
"Just watch me," he said.
In his haste to exit the compartment before Bacon could see him break down, he had collided with an elderly woman making her way down the corridor, and reopened the nasty cut over his eye.
"I'm glad you're still here," Rosa said now. "Sammy, listen to me. I need help."
"I'll help you. What is it?"
"I think I need to get an abortion."
Sammy lit a cigarette and smoked half of it before he replied. "Joe is the father," he said.
"Yes. Of course."
"And you told him and he said?"
"I didn't tell him. How could I tell him? Last night he tried to kill himself."
"He did?"
"I think he did."
"But Rosa, you know, he's joining the navy, he said."
"Right."
"He's just going to go off and enlist in the navy without knowing that you are pregnant with his baby."
"Also right."
"Even though you've known about this for…"
"Say a week."
"Why didn't you tell him? Really, I mean."
"I was afraid," said Rosa. "Really."
"Afraid that what? No, I know," he said. He sounded almost bitter about it. "That he would just tell you to get the thing. And not want to marry you."
"There you have it."
"And now you-"
"Just couldn't possibly ever, in a million years, tell him."
"Because he would certainly tell you-"
"Right. He wants to go kill them, Sam. I don't think anything I tell him could stop him now."
"So now you have to-"
"As I was trying to explain."
Sammy turned to look at her, his eyes bright, wild with an idea that Rosa grasped at once, in all its depths and particulars, in all the fear and hopelessness on which it fed.
"I get you," he said.
<a l:href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a>Radio, All Doll, and Freedom.
<a l:href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a> The Freedoms, whose sales, during the war years, came to rival those of the Escapist himself, were four teenage boys, Kid Einstein, Knuckleduster (known affectionately as "Knuck") O'Toole, Tommy Gunn, and Mumbles, a reformed gang of "Dead-End Hooligans" who had abandoned street fighting and pinked derbies in favor of the Axis menace and matching suits of tricolor long underwear.
<a l:href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a> Thirty years later, when this work was first reprinted, The Weird Worlds of Luna Moth (Nostalgia Press, 1970; second edition, Pure Imagination, 1996) quickly became a head-shop bestseller.
<a l:href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a> Lost.