When Sammy went in to wake Tommy for school, he found the boy already up and modeling his eye patch in the bedroom mirror. The bedroom furniture, a set from Levitz-bed, dresser, the mirror, and a hutch with drawers-had a nautical theme: the back wall of the hutch was lined with a navigation chart for the Outer Banks, the brass drawer pulls shaped like pilot's wheels, the mirror trimmed in stout hawser rope. The eye patch did not look all that out of place. Tommy was trying different kinds of piratical scowls on himself.
"You're up?" Sammy said.
Tommy nearly jumped out of his skin; he had always been an easy child to startle. He yanked the patch up over his dark, tousled head and turned, blushing deeply. He was in possession of both his eyes; they were bright blue, with a slight puffiness of the lower lids. There was, in fact, nothing at all wrong with his vision. His brain was something of a puzzle to Sammy, but there wasn't any problem with his eyes.
"I don't know what happened," Tommy said. "I just somehow woke up."
He stuffed the eye patch into the pocket of his pajama top. The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa's idea of fostering a sense of connection between lather and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.
"That's unusual," Sammy said.
"I know." Usually I have to set off a charge of dynamite to get you up."
"That's true."
"You're like your mother that way." Rosa was still in bed, buried under an avalanche of pillows. She suffered from insomnia and rarely managed to fall asleep before three or four, but once she had gone under, it was nearly impossible to rouse her. It was Sammy's job to get Tommy out of the house on school mornings. "In fact, the only time you ever get yourself up early," Sammy continued, allowing a note of prosecutorial insinuation to enter his voice, "is for something like your birthday. Or when we're leaving for a trip."
"Or if I have to get a shot," Tommy said helpfully. "At the doctor."
"Or." Sammy had been hanging from the doorjamb, half in, half out of the room, but now he went over to stand behind Tommy. He was aware of an impulse to put his hand on the boy's shoulder, to let it lie there with the admonitory weight of a father's, but in the end, he just folded his arms and looked at the reflection of Tommy's serious face in the mirror. It pained Sammy to acknowledge it, but he was no longer comfortable around the boy whom, for the past twelve years, he had been obliged and delighted to call his son. Tommy had always been a tractable, moonfaced, watchful little boy, but lately, as his soft chestnut hair turned to black wire loops and his nose struck boldly out on its own, there began to gather around the features of his face some trouble that promised to develop into outright handsomeness. He was already taller than his mother, and nearly as tall as Sam. He took up greater mass and volume in the house, moved in unaccustomed ways, and gave off unfamiliar odors. Sammy found himself hanging back, giving ground, keeping out of Tommy's way. "You don't have something… planned for today?"
"No, Pop."
He was jocular. "No trips to the 'eye doctor'?"
"Ha," the boy said, wrinkling his freckled nose in a base simulation of amusement. "Okay, Pop."
"Okay, what?"
"Well, I'd better get dressed. I'm going to be late for school."
"Because if you were."
"I'm not."
"If you were, I would have to chain you to the bed. You realize that."
"I was only playing with an eye patch. Jeez."
"All right."
"I wasn't going to do anything bad." His voice put quotation marks around the last word.
"I'm glad to hear it," Sammy said. He didn't believe Tommy, but he tried to conceal his doubts. He didn't like to antagonize the boy. Sammy worked five long days a week in the city, and brought work home on the weekends. He could not bear to waste, in arguing, the brief hours he spent with Tommy. He wished that Rosa were awake, so that he could ask her what to do about the eye patch. He grabbed hold of Tommy's hair and, in an unconscious tribute to a favorite parental mannerism of his mother, vigorously shook Tommy's head from side to side. "A roomful of toys, you play with a ten-cent eye patch from Spiegelman's."
Sammy padded down the hall, scratching at his bottom, the bandylegged captain of his own strange frigate, to make Tommy his lunch. It was a trim enough little tub, their house in Bloomtown. Its purchase had followed a string of ill-advised investments in the forties, among them the Clay Associates advertising firm, the Sam Clay School of Magazine Writing, and an apartment in Miami Beach for Sam's mother, in which she had died of a brain aneurysm after eleven days of retired discontentment, and which was then sold-six months after purchase-at a considerable loss. The last irreducible nut that remained from the palmy days at Empire Comics had been just enough for a down payment here in Bloomtown. And for a long time, Sammy had loved the house, the way a man was supposed to love his boat. It was the one tangible reminder of his brief success, and by far the best thing that had ever come of his money.
Bloomtown had been announced in 1948, with ads in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and all the big New York papers. A fully functioning three-bedroom Cape Cod house, complete down to the ringing bottles of milk in the refrigerator, had been erected on the showroom floor of a former Cadillac dealership near Columbus Circle. The struggling young families of the Northeast-the white ones-were invited to visit the Bloomtown Idea Pavilion, tour the Bloomtown Home, and learn now an entire city of sixty thousand people was to be planted amid the potato fields west of Islip; a city of modest, affordable houses, each with own yard and garage. An entire generation of young fathers and mothers raised in the narrow stairways and crowded rooms of the rust-and-brick boroughs of New York, Sammy Clay among them, showed up to flick the model light switches, bounce on the model mattresses, and recline for just a moment in the pressed metal chaise longue on the cellophane lawn, tilting their chins upward to catch the imaginary rays of the suburban Long Island sun. They sighed, and felt that one of the deepest longings in their hearts might one day soon be answered. Their families were chaotic things, loud and distempered, fueled by anger and the exigencies of the wise-guy attitude, and since the same was true of New York City itself, it was hard not to believe that a patch of green grass and a rational floor plan might go a long way to soothing the jangling bundles of raw nerves they felt their families had become. Many, Sammy Clay once again among them, reached for their checkbooks and reserved one of the five hundred lots to be developed in the initial phase of construction.
For months afterward, Sammy carried around in his wallet a little card that had come with the packet of documents of sale and read simply:
THE CLAYS
127 LAVOISIER DRIVE
BLOOMTOWN, NEW YORK, U.S.A.
(All the streets in their neighborhood were to be named after eminent scientists and inventors.)
That feeling of pride had long since dissipated. Sammy no longer paid very much attention at all to his own Cape Cod, a Number Two or Penobscott model, with bay window and miniature-golf-sized widow's walk. He adopted the same policy with regard to it that he followed with his wife, his employment, and his love life. It was all habit. The rhythms of the commuter train, the school year, publishing schedules, summer vacations, and of his wife's steady calendar of moods had inured him to the charms and torments of his life. Only his relationship with Tommy, in spite of the recent light frost of irony and distance, remained unpredictable, alive. It was thick with regret and pleasure. When they did get an hour together, planning a universe on loose-leaf paper, or playing Ethan Allen's All-Star Baseball, it was invariably the happiest hour of Sammy's week.
When he walked into the kitchen, he was surprised to find Rosa sitting at the table with a cup of boiled water. On the surface of the water floated a canoe of sliced lemon.
"What's going on?" Sammy said, running water into the enameled coffeepot. "Everybody's up."
"Oh, I've been up all night," Rosa said brightly. – "Not a wink?"
"Not that I recall. My brain was going crazy."
"Get anything?"
Rosa had a lead story due for Kiss Comics in two days. She was the second-best illustrator of women in the business (he had to give the nod to Bob Powell) but a terrible procrastinator. He had long since given up trying to lecture her on her work habits. He was her boss in name only-they had settled that question years before, when Rosa first came to work for him, in a yearlong series of skirmishes. Now they were, more or less, a package. Whoever hired Sammy to edit his line of comics knew that he would be obtaining the valuable services of Rose Saxon (her professional name) as well.
"I have some ideas," she said in a guarded tone. All of Rosa's ideas sounded bad at first; she adapted them from a messy compound of her dreams, sensational newspaper articles, and things she picked up in women's magazines, and she was terrible at explaining them. It was always fascinating to see how they emerged under the teasing and topiary shapings of her pencil and brush.
"Something about the A-bomb?"
"How did you know?"
"I happened to be in the bedroom with you while you were talking out loud last night," he said. "Foolishly trying to sleep."
"Sorry."
Sammy broke a half-dozen eggs into a bowl, splashed them with milk, shook in pepper and salt. He rinsed one of the eggshells and tossed it into the coffeepot on the stove. Then he poured the eggs into a pan of foaming butter. Scrambled eggs was his only dish, but he was very good at it. You had to leave them alone; that turned out to be the secret. Most people stood there stirring them, but the way to do it was to them sit for a minute or two over a low flame and bother them no more than half a dozen times. Sometimes, for variety, he threw in some chopped fried salami; that was how Tommy liked them.
"He was wearing the eye patch again," Sammy said, trying not to make it sound too important. "I saw him trying it on."
"Oh, God."
"He swore to me that he wasn't planning anything."
"Did you believe him?"
"I guess. I guess I chose to. Where's the salami?"
"I'll put it on my list. I'm going to the store today."
"You have to finish that story."
"And so I shall." She took a loud sip of her lemon water. "He's definitely up to something."
"You think." Sammy took down the peanut butter and got the grape jelly from the Frigidaire.
"I don't know, I just think he's been a little jumpy."
"He's always jumpy."
"I'd better walk him to school, as long as I'm up anyway." It was much easier for Rosa to govern her son than it was for Sammy. She didn't seem to give the question nearly as much thought. She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves. But when, as frequently occurred, Tommy squandered that trust, she did not hesitate to clamp down. And Tommy never seemed to resent her heavy discipline in the way that he chafed under Sammy's lightest reproof. "You know, make sure he gets there."
"You can't walk me to school," Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. "Mom, you can't possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die."
"He would die," Sammy told Rosa.
"Which would be very embarrassing for me," Rosa said. "Standing there next to a dead body in front of William Floyd Junior High."
"How about I walk him instead? It's only ten minutes out of my way." Sammy and Tommy generally said goodbye to each other at the front gate before setting off in opposite directions for the station and the junior high school, respectively. From second through sixth grade, they had parted with a handshake, but that custom, a minor beloved landmark of Sammy's day for five years, had apparently been abandoned for good. Sammy was not sure why, or who had made the decision to abandon it. "That way you can stay here and, you know, draw my story"
"That might be a good idea."
Sammy gentled the steaming pudding of butter and eggs onto Tommy's plate. "Sorry," he said, "we're out of salami."
"It figures," Tommy said.. "I'll put it on my list," said Rosa.
They fell silent for a moment, Rosa in her chair behind her mug, and Sammy standing by the counter with a slice of bread in his hand, watching Tommy shovel it in. He was a trencherman, was Tom. The little stick of a boy had vanished under a mantle of muscle and fat; he was looking a little bit portly, in fact. After thirty-seven seconds, the eggs were gone. Tommy looked up from his plate.
"Why's everybody looking at me?" he said. "I didn't do anything."
Rosa and Sammy burst out laughing. Then Rosa stopped laughing, and focused on her son, always a little bit cross-eyed when she was making a point.
"Tom," she said. "You weren't planning to go into the city again?"
Tommy shook his head.
"Nevertheless," Sammy said, "I'll walk you."
"Drive me," Tommy said. "If you don't believe me."
"Why not?" Sammy said. If he took the car to the station, Rosa would not be able to drive to the grocery store, or to the beach, or to the library "for inspiration." She would be more likely to stay home and draw. "I might just take it all the way into the city. They opened a new lot around the corner from the office."
Rosa looked up, alarmed. "All the way into the city!" Even leaving their car, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, at the train station was not protection enough. Rosa had been known to walk to the station to fetch it, just so that she would be able to drive around Long Island doing things that were not drawing romance comics.
Just let me get dressed." Sammy handed the slice of bread to Rosa. "Here," he said, "you make his lunch."
Breakfast palaver at the Excelsior Cafeteria on Second Avenue, a favorite morning haunt of funny-book men, circa April 1954:
"It's a hoax."
"I just said that."
"Somebody's pulling Anapol's leg."
"Maybe it's Anapol."
"I wouldn't blame him if he did want to jump off the Empire State Building. I hear he's in all kinds of trouble over there."
"I'm in all kinds of trouble. Everybody is in all kinds of trouble. I challenge you to name me one house that isn't having problems. And it's only going to get worse."
"That's what you always say. Listen to you. Listen to this guy, he kills me. He's like a, a filling station of gloom. I spend ten minutes listening to him, I go away with a full tank of gloom, it lasts me all day."
"I'll tell you who's a fountain of gloom, Dr. Fredric Wertham. Have you read this book of his? What's it called? How to Seduce an Innocent?"
There was loud laughter at this. The men at the surrounding tables turned to look. The laughter had been a little too loud, certainly for the hour and the condition of their hangovers.
Dr. Fredric Wertham, a child psychiatrist with unimpeachable credentials and a well-earned sense of outrage, had for several years been trying to persuade the parents and legislators of America that the minds of American children were being deeply damaged by the reading of comic books. With the recent publication of the admirable, encyclopedic, and mistaken Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham's efforts had begun to bear real fruit; there had been calls for controls or outright bans, and in several southern and midwestern cities local governments had sponsored public comic book bonfires, onto which smiling mobs of American children with damaged minds had festively tossed their collections.
"No, I haven't read it. Have you read it?"
"I tried. It gives me a pain in the stomach."
"Has anybody read it?"
"Estes Kefauver has read it. Anybody get a summons yet?"
Now, word had it, the United States Senate was coming to town. Senator Kefauver of Tennessee and his Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency had determined to make a formal inquiry into the shocking charges leveled by Wertham in his book: that the reading of comic books led directly to antisocial behavior, drug addiction, sexual perversion, even rape and murder.
"That's it, maybe this guy got a summons. This guy on the Empire State. And that's why he's going to jump."
"You know who it just crossed my mind it could be. If it isn't a hoax, I mean. Hell, even if it is. In fact, if it's him, it definitely is a hoax."
"What is this, a game show? Tell us who he is."
"Joe Kavalier."
"Joe Kavalier, yes! That's exactly who I was thinking of."
"Joe Kavalier! Whatever happened to that guy?"
"I heard he's in Canada. Somebody saw him up there."
"Mort Meskin saw him at Niagara Falls."
"I heard it was Quebec."
"I heard it was Mort Segal, not Meskin. He took his honeymoon up there."
"I always liked him."
"He was a hell of an artist."
The half-dozen comics men gathered around a table at the back of the Excelsior that particular morning, with their bagels and soft-boiled eggs and steaming black coffee in cups with a red stripe around the rim-Stan Lee, Frank Pantaleone, Gil Kane, Bob Powell, Marty Gold, and Julie Glovsky-agreed that, before the war, Joe Kavalier had been one of the best in the business. They concurred that the treatment he and his partner had received at the hands of the Empire owners was deplorable, though hardly unique. Most could manage to supply a story, an instance of odd or eccentric behavior on Kavalier's part; but when these were added up, they did not, to any of the men, seem to predict something so rash and desperate as a death leap.
"What about that old partner of his," Lee said. "I ran into him here a couple of days ago. He looked pretty down in the mouth."
"Sammy Clay?"
"I don't know him very well. We've always been friendly. He never worked for us, but-"
"He's worked just about every place else."
"Anyway, the guy did not look good. And he barely gave me the time of day."
"He is not a happy man," Glovsky said. "Is old Sam. He is just not very happy over there at Pharaoh." Glovsky drew the violent Mack Granite feature for Pharaoh's Brass Knuckle.
"Frankly, he's never happy anywhere," Pantaleone said, and everyone agreed. They all knew Sammy's story, more or less. He had returned to the comic book business in 1947, covered in failure at everything else he had tried. His first defeat had been in the advertising game, at Burns, Baggot & DeWinter. He had managed to quit just before he was going to be asked to turn in his resignation. After that, he had tried going out on his own. When his advertising shop duly died a quiet and unremarked death, Sammy had found work in the magazine business, selling well-researched lies to True and Yankee and one miraculous short story to Collier's-it was about a crippled young boy's visit to a Coney Island steambath with his strong-man father, before the war-before settling into a deep and narrow groove at the third-tier magazine houses and what was left of the once-mighty pulps.
All along, there were regular offers from old funny-book friends, some of them seated around this table at the back of the Excelsior, which Sammy always refused. He was an epic novelist-that was a great thing to be, after the war-and though his literary career was not advancing as quickly as he would have liked, at least he could ensure that he was not moving backward. He swore, to anyone who would listen and even on his mother's then-fresh grave, that he was never going back to comic books. Everybody who visited the Clays was taken to see some draft or other of his amorphous and wandering book. By day, he wrote articles on psittacosis and proustite for Bird Lover and Gem and Tumbler. He tried his hand at industrial writing, and had even written catalog copy for a seed company. The pay was mostly abysmal, the hours long, and Sammy was at the mercy of editors whose bitterness, as Sammy said, made George Deasey look like Deanna Durbin. Then, one day, he heard of an editor's job opening up at Gold Star, a now-forgotten publisher of comic books on Lafayette Street. The line was tattered and derivative, the circulation low, and the pay far from wonderful, but the position, if he took it, would at least give him authority and room to maneuver. Sammy's correspondence school for writers had enrolled only three pupils, one of whom lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, and spoke almost no English. Sammy had bills and debts and a family. When the Gold Star job came along, he had at last thrown in the towel on his old caterpillar dreams.
"No, you're right," Kane said. "He's never been happy anywhere."
Bob Powell leaned forward and lowered his voice. "I always thought he seemed a little bit-you know…"
"I have to agree with that," said Gold. "He's got that thing with the sidekicks. It's like an obsession with him. Have you noticed that? He takes over a character, first thing he does, no matter what, he gives the guy a little pal. After he came back to the business, he was at Gold Star doing the Phantom Stallion. All of a sudden the Stallion's hanging around with this kid, what was his name? Buck something."
"Buck Naked."
"Buckskin. The kid gunslinger. Then he goes to Olympic, and what, now the Lumberjack has Timber Lad. The Rectifier gets Little Mack the Boy Enforcer."
"The Rectifier, that already sounds a little bit-"
"Then he comes to Pharaoh, all of a sudden it's the Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby. Christ, he even gave a sidekick to the Lone Wolf!"
"Yeah, but he's hired every one of you guys at one time or another, hasn't he?" Lee said. He looked at Marty Gold. "He's been very loyal to you over the years, Gold, God only knows why."
"Hey, shut up, already," said Kane. "That's him now coming through the door."
Sam Clay stepped into the moist, steam-table warmth of the Excelsior and was hailed from the table at the back. He nodded and waved, a little uncertainly, as if he didn't really care to join their party that morning. But after he had purchased his ticket for a cup of coffee and a doughnut he started toward them, head lowered a little in a bulldog way he had.
"Morning, Sam," Glovsky said.
"I drove in," he said. He was looking a little dazed. "It took two hours."
"Seen the Herald?"
Clay shook his head.
"Looks like an old friend of yours is back in town."
"Yeah? Who would that be?"
"Tom Mayflower," Kane said, and everybody laughed, and then Kane went on to explain that someone signing himself "The Escapist" had, in this morning's Herald-Tribune, publicly announced his intention to jump from the Empire State Building at five o'clock that very afternoon.
Pantaleone dug around in the pile of newspaper in the center of the big table and found a Herald-Tribune. " 'Numerous grammatical and spelling errors,' " he read aloud, skimming quickly through the article, to which were devoted three column inches on page 2. " 'Threatened to expose the "unfair robberies and poor mistreatments of his finest artists by Mr. Sheldon Anapol."' Huh. 'Mr. Anapol when reached refused to speculate publicly on the identity of the author. "It could be anyone," Mr. Anapol said. "We get a lot of nuts."' Well," Pantaleone finished, shaking his head, "Joe Kavalier never struck me as any kind of nut. A little eccentric, maybe."
"Joe," Clay said wonderingly. "You guys think it's Joe."
"Is he in town, Sam? Have you heard from him?"
"I haven't heard from Joe Kavalier since the war," Clay said. "It can't be him."
"I say it's a hoax," Lee said.
"The costume." Clay had begun to light a cigarette-he still had not sat down-but now he stopped with the flame halfway to the tip. "He'll want a costume."
"Who will?"
"The guy. If there really is a guy. He'll want a costume."
"He could make one."
"Yeah," Clay said. "Excuse me."
He turned, his cigarette still unlit in his fingers, and walked back toward the glass doors of the Excelsior.
"He just walked out of here with his meal ticket."
"He looked pretty upset," Julie Glovsky said. "You guys shouldn't have been teasing him."
He was already on his feet. He drained the last inch of coffee from his cup, then started after Sammy.
As fast as Sammy's pipe-stem legs could carry him, they headed over to the offices of Pharaoh Comics, in a loft on West Broadway, where Sammy was the editor in chief.
"What are you going to do?" Julie asked him. The fog that had lain over the city all morning had not lifted. Their breath issued from their mouths and seemed to be absorbed into the general gray gauziness of the morning.
"What do you mean? What can I do? Some kook wants to pretend he's the Escapist, he has a right."
"You don't think it's him?"
"Nah."
They rode up in the grinding iron cage of the elevator. When they walked into the offices, Sammy seemed to survey them with an ill-concealed shudder: the scarred cement floor, the bare white walls, the exposed, grease-blackened girders of the ceiling.
These were not the first headquarters of the company-those had been a suite of seven large rooms in the McGraw-Hill Building, all green lacquer and ivory Bakelite, with everything from the washroom fixtures to the team of buxom receptionists trimmed in chrome, and all of it paid for with the money Jack Ashkenazy had pocketed in 1943 when Sheldon Anapol had bought him out. Ashkenazy had next invested millions in a Canadian real estate venture predicated on his odd belief that, after the war, Canada and the United States would merge into one country. When, to his astonishment, this failed to pan out, he had gone back to the source of all his still-considerable wealth: the costumed hero. He had rented the gleaming offices on West Forty-second, hired away some of Empire's best writers and artists, and charged them with making a star out of a character of his own creation, the eponymous Pharaoh, a reincarnated Egyptian ruler, naturally, who sported an elaborate Tutankhamen headdress, metal armbands, and a loincloth made apparently of stiff cement, and went around thus, discreetly half-naked, foiling evil with the mystic power of his Scepter of Ra. The writers and artists had come up with a raft of even more unlikely heroes and heroines-Earthman (with his superhuman control over rocks and dirt), the Snowy Owl (with his "supersonic hoot"), and the Rolling Rose (with her shiny red skates)-to fill the pages of Pharaoh Comics' nine inaugural titles. Unfortunately, Jack Ashkenazy had bet heavily on the costumed superhero just as readers' interest in that genre was beginning to flag. The defeat of those actual world-devouring supervillains, Hitler and Tojo, along with their minions, had turned out to be as debilitating to the long-underwear hero trade as the war itself had been an abundant source of energy and plots; it proved to be hard for the cashiered captains and supersoldiers, on their return from tying Krupp artillery into half-hitches and swatting Zeros like midges over the Coral Sea, to muster the old pre-1941 fervor for busting up rings of car thieves, rescuing orphans, and exposing crooked fight promoters. At the same time, a new villain, the lawless bastard child of relativity and Satan, had appeared to cast its roiling fiery pall over even the mightiest of heroes, who could no longer be entirely assured that there would always be a world for them to save. The tastes of returning GIs, who had become hooked on the regular shipments of comic books provided them along with candy bars and cigarettes, turned to darker, more "adult-oriented" fare: true-crime comics had their vogue, followed by romances, horror tales, Westerns, science fiction; anything, in short, but masked men. Millions of unsold copies of Pharaoh Comics #1 and its eight companion titles came back from the distributors; after a year, none of the remaining six titles was making a profit. Ashkenazy, sensing catastrophe, had moved downtown, fired the expensive talent, and retrenched, overhauling his line through a program of cost-cutting and slavish imitation, transforming it into a modest success very like Racy Publications, the fourth-rate pulp-magazine house, home of retreads, copycats, and cheap imitations at which he had begun his career as a publisher in the lean Depression years before two foolish young men laid the Escapist in his lap. But his pride had never quite recovered from the blow, and it was generally felt that Pharaoh's failure, along with the Canadian debacle, had started him down the road to his decline and eventual death two years ago.
Sammy crossed the broad grimy expanse of the workroom to his office. Julie hesitated at the door before following him in. The prohibition against entering Sam Clay's office, except in the case of family emergency, was absolute and closely observed. He would admit no one if he was working, and he was always working. His bursts of fevered composition, during which he might knock out an entire year's worth of Brass Knuckle or Weird Date in a single night, were celebrated not only in the Pharaoh offices but throughout the small, collegial world of the New York comic book business. He unplugged his intercom, took the telephone off the hook, sometimes stuffed his ears with cotton, paraffin, gobbets of foam rubber.
He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years: costumed hero, romance, horror, adventure, true-crime, science fiction and fantasy stories, Westerns, sea yarns, and Bible stories, a couple of issues of Classics Illustrated* Sax Rohmer imitations, Walter Gibson imitations, H. Rider Haggard imitations, Rex Stout imitations, tales of both world wars, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Napoleonic Wars; every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish [12] antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay's heart. He was a furious, even romantic, typist, prone to crescendos, diminuendos, dense and barbed arpeggios, capable of ninety words a minute when under deadline or pleased with the direction his story was taking, and over the years his brain had become an instrument so thoroughly tuned to the generation of highly conventional, severely formalistic, eight-to-twelve-page miniature epics that he could, without great effort, write, talk, smoke, listen to a ball game, and keep an eye on the clock all at the same time. He had reduced two typewriters to molten piles of slag iron and springs since his return to comics, and when he went to bed at night his mind remained robotically engaged in its labor while he slept, so that his dreams were often laid out in panels and interrupted by surrealistic advertising, and when he woke up in the morning he would find that he had generated enough material for a full issue of one of his magazines.
Now he moved his latest Remington to one side. Julie Glovsky saw a little brass key lying in the center of a square patch of blotter that was free of ash and dust. Sammy took the key and went to a large wooden cabinet, dragged up from a defunct photographical processing lab on a lower floor of the building.
"You have an Escapist costume?" Julie said.
"Yeah."
"Where'd you get it?"
"From Tom Mayflower," Sammy said.
He rummaged around inside the cabinet until he came up with an oblong blue box stamped king fat hand laundry in crooked black letters. On the side, in grease pencil, someone had, for some reason, written the word bacon. Sammy gave the box a shake, and something rattled dryly within; he looked puzzled. He pulled the box open, and a small yellow card, about the size of a matchbook, fluttered out and corkscrewed to the floor. Sammy stooped over, picked it up, and read the legend printed on its face in brightly colored ink. When he looked up, his face was pinched, his jaw set, but Julie caught an unmistakable glint of amusement in his eyes. Sammy handed Julie the card. It featured a drawing of two ornate, old-fashioned skeleton keys, one on either side of the following brief text:
Welcome, faithful Foe of Tyranny, to the
LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY!!!
This card bestows on
(print name above)
all the rights and duties of a true-blue friend of Liberty and Humanity!
"It's him," Julie said. "Isn't it? He was here. He took it." "How do you like that," said Sammy. "I haven't seen one of those in years."
AT lunchtime, the police showed up. They were taking the letter to the Herald seriously, and the detective in charge had a few questions for Sammy about Joe.
Sammy told the detective, a man named Lieber, that he had not seen Joe Kavalier since the evening of December 14, 1941, at Pier 11, when Joe sailed for basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, aboard a Providence-bound packet boat called the Comet. Joe had never answered any of their letters. Then, toward the end of the war, Sammy's mother, as next of kin, had received a letter from the office of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy. It said that Joe had been wounded or taken ill in the line of duty; the letter was vague about the nature of the injury and the theater of war. It said also that he had, for some time, been recuperating at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but that he was now being given a medical discharge and a commendation. In two days, he would be arriving at Newport News aboard the Miskatonic. Sammy had gone down to Virginia on a Greyhound bus to meet him and bring him home. But somehow or other, Joe had managed to escape.
"Escape?" Detective Lieber said. He was a young man, surprisingly young, a fair-haired Jew with pudgy hands, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive but not at all flashy.
"It was a talent he had," Sammy said.
At the time, Joe's vanishing had been a loss in some ways more genuine than that which death represents. He was not merely dead-and thus, in a sense, always locatable. No, they really had managed to lose him. He had gotten on the boat in Cuba; of this fact there was documentary evidence in the form of signatures and serial numbers on a medical transport record. But when the Miskatonic docked in Newport News, Joe was no longer aboard. He had left a brief letter; though its contents were classified, one of the navy investigators had assured Sammy that it was not a suicide note. When Sammy returned from Virginia, after an interminable gray trip back up U.S. 1, he found their house in Midwood aflutter with bunting. Rosa had prepared a cake and a banner that welcomed Joe home. Ethel had bought a new dress and had her hair done, allowing the hairdresser to rinse out the gray. The three of them-Rosa, Ethel, and Tommy-were sitting in the living room, under the crepe-paper swags, crying. In the months that followed, they had generated all manner of wild and violent theories to explain what had happened to Joe, and pursued every lead and rumor. Because he had not been taken from them, they could not seem to let him go. Over the years, however, the intensity of Sammy's anger and of his shock over Joe's behavior had, inevitably, dwindled. The thought of his lost cousin was a sore one still; but it had, after all, been nearly nine years. "He was trained in Europe as an escape artist," he told Detective Lieber. "That's where we got the whole idea for the Escapist."
"I used to read it," Detective Lieber said. He coughed politely and looked around at the pages of art and framed covers of various Pharaoh titles that ornamented Sammy's office. On the wall behind Sammy hung the vastly blown-up image of a single frame, from a story that Rosa had done for Frontier Comics, the only superhero story that Rosa ever drew. It showed the Lone Wolf and Cubby, in tight coveralls of fringed buckskin and lupine headdresses, their arms around each other's shoulders. The blazing spokes of an Arizona sunrise reached out from behind them. Lone Wolf was saying, "WELL, PARDNER, IT LOOKS LIRE IT'S GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY!" Rosa had done the enlargement herself and gotten it framed for Sammy's last birthday. You could see the lithography dots-they were as big as shirt buttons-and somehow the scale of the image gave it a surreal importance. [13]
"I'm afraid I'm not as familiar with what you do here," Detective Lieber said, eyeing the big Lone Wolf with a look of faint puzzlement.
"Few people are," Sammy said.
"I'm sure it must be interesting."
"Don't be too sure."
Lieber shrugged. "Okay, so here's what I don't understand. Why would he want to 'escape,' as you put it? He just got out of the navy. He's been in some godforsaken place or other. From the sound of it, he's had it pretty tough. Why wouldn't he want to come home?"
Sammy didn't immediately reply. A possible answer had come to mind right away, but since it struck him as flippant, he held his tongue. Then he thought it over for a moment and saw that it might very well be the right answer to Detective Lieber's question.
"He didn't really have a home to come home to," Sammy said. "I guess maybe that's how it must have seemed to him."
"His family in Europe?"
"All dead. Every one of them, his mother, his father, his grandfather.
His kid brother's boat was torpedoed. Just a little kid, a refugee."
"Jesus."
"It was not good."
"And you've never heard from your cousin since? Not even-"
"Not a postcard. And I've made a lot of inquiries, Detective. I hired private detectives. The navy conducted a full investigation. Nothing."
"Do you think- You must have considered the possibility that he might be dead?"
"He might be. My wife and I have discussed it over the years. But somehow I think- I just think that he isn't."
Lieber nodded and tucked his little notebook back into the hip pocket of his sharp gray suit.
"Thank you," he said. He stood and shook Sammy's hand. Sammy walked him out to the elevator.
"You look awfully young to be a detective," Sammy said. "If you don't mind my saying."
"Yes, but I have the heart of a seventy-year-old man," Lieber said.
"You're Jewish, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I don't mind."
"I didn't know they were making detectives out of Jews."
"They just started," Lieber said. "I'm kind of the prototype."
The elevator thudded into place, and Sammy dragged the rattling cage to one side.
Sammy's father-in-law stood there in a tweed suit. The jacket had epaulets, and there was enough tweed in it to clothe at least two grouse-hunting Scotsmen. Four or five years earlier, Longman Harkoo had delivered a series of lectures at the New School on the intimate relations between Catholicism and Surrealism, entitled "The Superego, the Ego, and the Holy Ghost." They had been desultory, mumbling, and sparsely-attended, but since that time Siggy had abandoned his former caftans and magister's robes in favor of a more professorial attire. All of his enormous suits were made, badly, by the same Oxford tailor who ill-clothed the woolen flower of English academe.
"He's afraid you'll be angry with him," Saks said. "We told him you wouldn't be."
"You've seen him?"
"Oh, much more than see him." He smirked. "He's-"
"You've seen Joe, and you never said anything to me or Rosa?"
"Joe? You mean Joe Kavalier?" Saks looked dumbfounded. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Hmm," he said. Something seemed to be not quite adding up in his mind.
"This is my father-in-law, Mr. Harkoo," Sammy told Lieber. "Mr. Harkoo, this is Detective Lieber. I don't know if you've seen the Herald today, but there's-"
"Who's that behind you?" Lieber said, peering into the elevator, around the great dun bulk of Siggy Saks. The big man stepped deftly, and not without an air of happy anticipation, to one side, as though raising the curtain on a completed illusion. The bit of hocus-pocus produced an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas Edison Clay.
"I found him on the doorstep. Quite literally."
God damn it, Tommy," Sammy said. "I walked you into the building. I saw you go into your homeroom. How did you get out?"
Tommy didn't say anything. He just stood looking down at the eye Patch in his hands.
Another escape artist," Detective Lieber said. "It must run in the family."
A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction. Since its completion, the Empire State Building, a gigantic shard of the Hoosier State torn from the mild limestone bosom of the Midwest and upended, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria, in the midst of the heaviest traffic in the world, had been a magnet for dislocated souls hoping to ensure the finality of their impact, or to mock the bold productions of human vanity. Since its opening almost twenty-three years earlier, a dozen people had attempted to leap from its ledges or its pinnacle to the street below; about half had managed the trick. None, however, had ever before given such clear and considerate warning of his intentions. For the building's private police and firefighting squadrons, working in concert with their municipal brethren, there had been ample time to post officers at all the street entrances and points of ingress, at the stairwell doors and elevator banks. The twenty-fifth floor, where the offices of Empire Comics were still to be found, swarmed with building cops in their big-shouldered brass and wool uniforms, with those old-fashioned peaked caps designed, legend had it, by the late Al Smith himself. Alerts had been issued to the building's fifteen thousand tenants, warning them to be on the lookout for a lean, hawk-faced madman, perhaps dressed in a dark blue union suit, or perhaps in a moth-eaten blue tuxedo with extravagant tails. Firefighters in canvas coveralls ringed the building on three sides, from Thirty-third Street, around Fifth Avenue, to Thirty-fourth. They peered up through fine German binoculars, scanning the infinite planes of Indiana rock for any emerging hand or foot. They were ready, insofar as readiness was possible. Should the madman actually make it through a window and out into the darkening stuff of the evening, their course of action was less clear. But they were hopeful.
"We'll get him before he goes," predicted Captain Harley, still in command of the building's police force after all these years, his blighted eye glittering brighter and more irascible than ever. "We'll get the poor dumb mud-turk."
The daily circulation of the New York Herald-Tribune in 1954 was four hundred and fifty thousand. Of these readers, some two hundred had been drawn, by the letter printed in their newspaper that morning, to stand in wondering clumps behind police lines, gazing up. They were mostly men in their twenties and thirties, in jackets and ties, shipping clerks, commercial draftsmen, clothing and textile wholesalers working their way up in their fathers' businesses. Many of them were employed in the neighborhood. They checked their watches and made the hard-bitten remarks of New Yorkers at the prospect of a suicide-"I wish he'd do it already, I got a date"-but they did not take their eyes from the sides of the building. They had grown up on the Escapist, or had discovered him and his adventures in a foxhole in Belgium or in a transport off Bougainville. In some of these men, the name Joe Kavalier stirred long-dormant memories of reckless, violent, beautiful release.
Then there were the passersby, the shoppers and office workers headed for home, drawn by the flashing lights and uniforms. Word of the promised entertainment had spread quickly among them. Where the flow of information flagged or was retarded by tight-lipped policemen, the small but voluble contingent of comic book men was on hand to fill in and embellish the details of Joe Kavalier's misfortunate career.
"I hear it's all a hoax," said Joe Simon, who, with his own partner, Jack Kirby, had created Captain America. The rights to Captain America had earned, and in the future would continue to earn, great sums for their owner, Timely Publications, one day to be better known as Marvel Comics. "I heard that from Stan."
By five-thirty, when no one had been found skulking in the building or had inched himself out onto a windblown sill, Captain Harley began to come to the same conclusion. He was standing with some of his men just in front of the Thirty-third Street entrance, chewing on the end of a briar pipe. For the eighth time, he took out a gold pocket watch and consulted its face. He snapped it shut and chuckled.
"It's a hoax," he said. "I knew it all along."
"More and more I'm inclined to agree," said Detective Lieber.
"Maybe his watch stopped," Sammy Clay said almost hopefully. Lieber got the feeling that if the threat did turn out to be a hoax, Clay was going to be disappointed.
"Tell me this," Lieber said to Clay. As a family member, the little writer-that was how Lieber thought of him-had been permitted within the police cordon. In the event that Joe Kavalier appeared, his cousin would be on hand for last-minute pleas and counsel. There was also the boy. Ordinary procedure would have barred children from such an event, but experience had taught Lieber, who had spent nine years as a patrolman in Brownsville, that every so often the face of a child, or even its voice over a telephone, could draw a person in from the ledge. "Before today, how many people knew this whole story about how you and your cousin were robbed and cheated and taken advantage of?"
"I resent that, Detective," said Sheldon Anapol. The big man had come down from the Empire offices at five o'clock precisely. He was wrapped in a long black overcoat, a tiny gray tyrolean cap roosting on his head like a pigeon, its feather troubled by the breeze. The day was turning cold and bitter now. The light was failing. "You don't know enough about this matter to pass judgment like that. There were contracts involved, copyrights. Not to mention the fact that, while they were working for us, both Mr. Kavalier and Mr. Clay made more money than almost anyone in the business."
"I'm sorry," Lieber said, unapologetically. He turned back to Sammy. "But you see my point."
Sammy shrugged, nodding, mouth pursed. He saw the detective's point.
"Not a hell of a lot before today. A few dozen guys in the business. A lot of them jokers, I have to admit. Some lawyers, probably. My wife."
"Well, now, look at this."
Lieber gestured toward the swelling crowd, pushed back to the opposite sidewalk, the streets blocked off and filled with honking cabs, the reporters and photographers, everyone looking up at the building around which the untold Escapist millions had coalesced for so many years. They had been told the names of the principal players, Sam Clay, Sheldon Anapol; they gestured and murmured and scowled at the publisher in his funereal coat. The sum of money out of which the team of Kavalier & Clay had been cheated by Empire Comics, though no one had ever actually sat down and calculated it, was widely current in the crowd, and growing by the moment.
"You can't buy this kind of publicity." Lieber's experience with suicides was fairly extensive. There was a very small set of them who chose to do away with themselves publicly, and, within this group, an even smaller subset who would provide an exact time and place in advance. Of these-and he could think of perhaps two in all the years since he got his badge in 1940-none was ever late for his appointment. "Mr. Anapol here"-he nodded to the publisher-"through no fault of his own, naturally, ends up looking like the bad guy."
"Character assassination," Anapol agreed. "That's what it amounts to."
Again Captain Harley of the building police snapped the watch shut, this time with greater finality. "I'm going to send my boys home," he said. "I don't think any of you have anything to worry about."
Lieber winked at the boy, a sullen, staring kid who, for the last forty-five minutes, had been standing in the lee of his vast grandfather with a Finger in his mouth, looking as if he was going to vomit. When Lieber winked, the kid turned pale. The detective frowned. In his years as a beat cop on and off Pitkin Avenue, he had frightened children with a friendly wink or hello many times, but rarely one so old who did not have something on his conscience.
"I don't get it," said Sammy. "I mean, I see what you're saying. I thought the same thing. Maybe it is all just a stunt to get attention and he never had any intention of jumping at all. But then why did he steal the costume from my office?"
"Can you prove that he took the costume?" Lieber said. "Look, I don't know. Maybe he just got cold feet. Maybe he was run down by a pushcart or a taxicab. I'll check the hospitals, just in case."
He nodded to Captain Harley and agreed that it was time to pack up the show. Then he turned back to the boy. He didn't know exactly whathe was going to say; the chain of reasons and possibilities lay still unconnected in his mind. It was just a fleeting policeman's impulse, a nose for trouble, that prompted his question. He was one of those men who couldn't help giving a squirrelly little kid a hard time.
"I hear you've been skipping school, young man, to come into our fair city and be a gadabout," he said.
The boy's eyes widened. He was good-looking, a little overfed but with thick black curls and big blue eyes that now grew even larger. The detective wasn't sure yet whether the boy was dreading punishment or longing for it. Usually, with solemn little reprobates of this sort, it was the latter.
"I don't want to catch you loose in my town again, you hear me? You stay out on Long Island where you belong."
He winked at the father now. Sam Clay laughed.
"Thank you, Detective," he said. He grabbed a fistful of his son's hair and shook the boy's head back and forth in a way that looked quite painful to Lieber. "He's become quite the forger, this one. Does his mother's signature on his excuses better than she can."
Lieber felt the links of the chain beginning to reach toward each other.
"Is that so?" he said. "Tell me, do you have one of these little masterpieces all ready to go for tomorrow?"
With three swift, mute nods of his head, the boy confessed that he did. Lieber held out his hand. The boy reached into his satchel and took out a manila folder. He opened it. A single leaf of good paper lay within, neatly typed and signed. He handed the paper over to Lieber. His movements were precise and preternaturally careful, almost showily so, and Lieber remembered that the boy's father believed his son had been sneaking into the city to hang out with stage magicians at Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. Lieber scanned the boy's note.
Dear Mr. Savarese,
Please excuse Tommy's absence from school yesterday. Once again as I told you previously I believe he required ophthalmologic type treatments from his specialist in the city. Sincerely, Mrs. Rosa Clay
"I'm afraid your boy was responsible for all this," Lieber said, passing the letter to the boy's father. "He wrote the letter to the Herald-Tribune."
"I had a feeling," the grandfather said. "I thought I recognized the style."
"What?" Sam Clay said. "What makes you say that?"
"Typewriters have personalities," said the boy in a small voice, looking down at his feet. "Like fingerprints."
"That is very often the case," Lieber agreed.
Sammy examined the note, then gave the boy a queer look. "Tommy, is this true?"
"Yes, sir."
"You mean nobody is going to jump?"
Tommy shook his head.
"You made up this whole thing yourself?"
He nodded.
"Well," said Lieber. "This is a serious thing you've done, son. I'm afraid you may have committed a crime." He looked at the father. "I'm sorry about your cousin," he said. "I know you were hoping he had come back."
"I was," Sammy said, surprised, either by the realization or by the fact that Lieber had guessed it. "You know, I guess I really was."
"He has come back!" The boy shouted this, and even Lieber jumped a little. "He's here."
"In New York?" the father said. The boy nodded. "Joe Kavalier is here in New York." Another nod. "Where? How do you know? Tommy, god damn it, where is your cousin Joe?"
The boy muttered something, his voice nearly inaudible. Then, to their surprise, he turned and walked into the building. He went over to the banks of express elevators and pressed the button for those that went all the way to the top.
It all began-or had begun again-with the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box. Last July 3, his eleventh birthday, Tommy's father had taken him to The Story of Robin Hood at the Criterion, to lunch at the Automat, and to visit a reproduction, at the Forty-second Street Library, of Sherlock Holmes's apartment, complete with unopened letters addressed to the sleuth, a curl-toed slipper filled with tobacco, the paw print of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and a stuffed Giant Rat of Sumatra. All of this was by Tommy's request, and in lieu of the usual birthday party. Tommy's one friend, Eugene Begelman, had moved to Florida at the end of fourth grade, and Tommy had had no desire to fill the Clays' living room with antsy, sullen, eye-rolling kids whose parents had forced them, out of politeness to his own, to attend. He was a solitary boy, unpopular with teachers and students alike. He still slept with a stuffed beaver named Bucky. But he was, at the same time, proud-even belligerent in defense-of his estrangement from the world of the normal, stupid, happy, enviable children of Bloomtown. The mystery of his real father, who-he had decided, deciphering the overheard hints and swiftly hushed remarks of his parents and his grandmother before her death-had been a soldier killed in Europe, was at once a source of amour propre and of bitter yearning, a grand opportunity that he had missed out on but that nevertheless could have befallen only him. He always sympathized with young people in novels whose parents had died or abandoned them (as much to help them fulfill their singular destinies as future Emperors or Pirate Kings, as out of the general grinding cruelty toward children of the world). There was no doubt in his mind that such a destiny awaited him, perhaps in the Martian colonies or the plutonium mines of the asteroid belt. Tommy was a little pudgy, and small for his age. He had been the target of some standard-issue cruelty over the years, but his taciturnity and his spectacularly average performance in school had earned him a certain measure of safe invisibility. Thus, over time, he had won the right to opt completely out of the usual theaters of juvenile strategy and angst-the playground coups, the permanent floating card-flipping games, the Halloween and pool and birthday parties. These interested him, but he forbade himself to care. If he could not see his health drunk in the huge oaken banquet room of a castle, filled with the smell of spit-roasted boar and venison, by tankard-clinking stalwart bowmen and adventurers, then a day in New York City with his father would have to do.
The crux, the key element of the celebration, was a stop at Louis Tannen's Magic Shop, on West Forty-second Street, to buy the birthday present that Tommy had requested: the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box. At $17.95, it represented considerable largesse on his parents' part, but they had been from the first remarkably indulgent of his recent interest in magic, as if it accorded with some secret itinerary they had charted out for him in their minds.
Eugene Begelman had started the whole magic business after his father returned from a business trip to Chicago with an oblong box in playing-card colors that contained, its label claimed, "everything necessary to AMAZE and ASTOUND your friends and turn YOU into the life of every party." Naturally, Tommy had affected to scorn such an agenda, but after Eugene briefly caused most of a hard-boiled egg to disappear, and nearly succeeded in pulling a rather limp artificial mouse out of a supposedly normal lady's stocking, Tommy had grown impatient. Such impatience-a tightening in his chest, a tapping of his feet, a feeling like the need to urinate-unbearable at times, always seemed to come over him whenever he came across something he could not figure out. He had borrowed the Al-A-Kazzam! Junior Magic Kit from Eugene and taken it home; over one weekend he had mastered every trick. Eugene said he could keep the kit.
Next, Tommy had gone to the library and discovered a hitherto unsuspected shelf of books on card tricks, coin tricks, tricks with silks and scarves and cigarettes. His hands were large for a boy his age, with long fingers, and he had a capacity for standing in front of the mirror with a quarter or a book of matches, repeating the same tiny flexings of his fingers over and over again, that surprised even him. It soothed him, practicing his palmings and fades.
It had not been long before he discovered Louis Tannen's. The greatest supplier of tricks and supplies on the Eastern seaboard, it was, in 1953, still the unofficial capital of professional conjuring in America, a kind of informal magicians' club where generations of silk-hat men, passing through town on their way north, south, or west to the vaudeville and burlesque houses, the nightclubs and variety theaters of the nation, had met to exchange information, to cadge money, and to dazzle one another with refinements too artistic and subtle to waste on an audience of elephant gapers and leerers at sawn-in-two ladies. The Ultimate Demon Wonder Box was one of Mr. Louis Tannen's signature tricks, a perennial bestseller that he personally guaranteed to reduce an audience-not, surely, of card-flipping, stickball-playing fifth graders but, Tommy imagined, of tuxedo-wearing types smoking long cigarettes on ocean liners, and women with gardenias in their hair-to a layer of baffled jelly on the floor. Its name alone was enough to render Tommy breathless with impatience.
At the back of the shop, Tommy had noticed on prior visits, were two doorways. One, painted green, led to the stockroom where the steel rings, trick birdcages, and false-bottomed trunks were kept. The other door, painted black, generally was kept closed, but sometimes a man would come in from the street, greet Louis Tannen or one of the salesmen, and pass through it, giving a glimpse of the world beyond; or else a man might come out, waving to whomever he was leaving behind, tucking five dollars into his pocket or shaking his head in wonderment over whatever miracle he had just witnessed. This was Tannen's famous back room. Tommy would have given anything-he would have forgone the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box, The Story of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes's Baker Street digs, and the Automat-just to be able to get a peek back there, and to watch the old pros brandish the puzzling flowers of their art. While Mr. Tannen himself was giving Tommy's father a demonstration of the Wonder Box, showing him that it was empty, feeding it seven scarves, then opening it to show him that it was still empty, a man wandered in, said, "Hello, Lou," and went on through to the back. As the door opened and closed, Tommy caught a glimpse of some magicians, in sweaters and suits, standing with their backs to him. They were watching another magician at work, a tall, slender guy with a large nose. The man with the large nose looked up, smiling at whatever little stunt he had just pulled off, his deep-set, heavy-lidded blue eyes unimpressed with himself. The other magicians swore in appreciation of the trick. The sad blue eyes met Tommy's. They widened. The door closed.
"Amazing," Sammy Clay said, taking out his wallet. "Worth every penny."
Mr. Tannen handed the box to Tommy, and he took it, his eyes still on the door. He had focused his thoughts into a sharp diamond beam and aimed them at the doorknob, willing it to turn. Nothing happened.
"Tommy?" Tommy looked up. His father was staring down at him. He looked irritated, and his voice had a tone of false good humor. "Do you have even an iota of desire left in your body for that thing?"
And he nodded, though his father had guessed the truth. He looked at the blue lacquered wooden box for which he had ached only last night with a fervor that kept him awake till past midnight. But knowing the secrets of the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box would never get him through the door to Tannen's back room, where travel-hardened men concocted private wonders for their own melancholy amusement. He looked from the Wonder Box to the black door. It remained closed. The Bug, he knew, would have made a break for it.
"It's great, Dad," Tommy said. "I love it. Thanks."
Three days later, on a Monday, Tommy stopped in at Spiegelman's Drugs to arrange the comic books. This was a service he provided at no charge and, so far as he knew, unbeknownst to Mr. Spiegelman. The week's new comics arrived on Monday, and by Thursday, particularly toward the end of the month, the long rows of wire racks along the wall at the back of the store were often a jumble of disordered and dog-eared titles. Every week, Tommy sorted and alphabetized, putting the Nationals with the Nationals, the E.C.s with the E.C.s, the Timelys with the Timelys, reuniting the estranged members of the Marvel Family, isolating the romance titles, which, though he tried to conceal this fact from his mother, he despised, in a bottom corner. Of course he reserved the centermost racks for the nineteen Pharaoh titles. He kept careful count over these, rejoicing when Spiegelman's sold out its order of Brass Knuckle in a week, feeling a mysterious pity and shame for his father when, for an entire month, all six copies of Sea Yarns, a personal favorite of Tommy's, languished unpurchased on Spiegelman's rack. He did all of his rearranging surreptitiously, under the guise of browsing. Whenever another kid came in, or Mr. Spiegelman walked by, Tommy quickly stuffed back whatever errant stack he was holding, any old way, and engaged in a transparent bit of innocent whistling. He further concealed his covert librarianship-which arose chiefly out of loyalty to his father but was also due to an innate dislike of messes-by spending a precious weekly dime on a comic book. This even though his father regularly brought him home big stacks of "the competition," including many titles that Spiegelman's didn't even carry.
Logically, if Tommy were throwing his money away, it ought to have been on one of the lesser-read Pharaohs, such as Farm Stories or the aforementioned nautical book. But when Tommy walked out of Spiegelman's every Thursday, it was with an Empire comic book in his hand. This was his small, dark act of disloyalty to his father: Tommy loved the Escapist. He admired his golden mane, his strict, at times obsessive, adherence to the rules of fair play, and the good-natured grin he wore at all times, even when taking it on the chin from Kommandant X (who had quite easily made the transition from Nazi to Commie), or from one of the giant henchmen of Poison Rose. The Escapist's murky origins, in the minds of his father and their lost cousin Joe, chimed obscurely in his imagination with his own. He would read the entire book on the way home from Spiegelman's, going slow, savoring it, aware of the scrape of his sneakers against the fresh-laid sidewalk, the bobbing progress of his body through the darkness that gathered around the outer margins of the pages as he turned them. Just before he turned the corner onto Lavoisier Drive, he would toss the comic book into the D'Abruzzios' trash can.
Those portions of his walk to and from school that were not taken up with his reading-in addition to comics, he devoured science fiction,sea stories H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Buchan, and novels dealing with American or British history-or with detailed menta1 rehearsals of the full-evening magic shows by which he one day planned to dazzle the world, Tommy passed as scrappy Tommy Clay, All-American schoolboy, known to none as the Bug. The Bug was the name of his costumed crime-fighting alter ego, who had appeared one morning when Tommy was in the first grade, and whose adventures and increasingly involuted mythology he had privately been chronicling in his mind ever since. He had drawn several thick volumes' worth of Bug stories, although his artistic ability was incommensurate with the vivid scope of his mental imagery, and the resultant mess of graphite smudges and eraser crumbs always discouraged him. The Bug was a bug, an actual insect-a scarab beetle, in his current version- who had been caught, along with a human baby, in the blast from an atomic explosion. Somehow-Tommy was vague on this point-their natures had been mingled, and now the beetle's mind and spirit, armed with his beetle hardness and proportionate beetle strength, inhabited the four-foot-high body of a human boy who sat in the third row of Mr. Landauer's class, under a bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sometimes he could avail himself, again rather vaguely, of the characteristic abilities-flight, stinging, silk-spinning-of other varieties of bug. It was always wrapped in the imaginary mantle, as it were, of the Bug that he performed his clandestine work at the Spiegelman's racks, feelers extended and tensed to detect the slightest tremor of the approach of Mr. Spiegelman, whom Tommy generally cast in this situation as the nefarious Steel Clamp, a charter member of the Bug's Rogue's Gallery.
That afternoon, as he was smoothing back the flagged corner of a copy of Weird Date, something surprising occurred. For the first time that he could remember, he felt an actual twinge in the Bug's keen antennae. Someone was watching him. He looked around. A man was standing there, half-hidden behind a rotating drum spangled with the lenses of fifty-cent reading glasses. The man snapped his face away and Pretended that, all along, he had been looking at a tremble of pink and blue light on the back wall of the store. Tommy recognized him at once as the sad-eyed magician from Tannen's back room. He was not at all surprised to see the man there, in Spiegelman's Drugs in Bloomtown, Long Island; this was something he always remembered afterward. He even felt-maybe this was a little surprising-glad to see the man. At Tannen's, the magician's appearance had struck Tommy as somehow pleasing. He had felt an inexplicable affection for the unruly mane of black curls, the lanky frame in a stained white suit, the large sympathetic eyes. Now Tommy perceived that this displaced sense of fondness had been merely the first stirring of recognition.
When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense. For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced. He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward. Then the man smiled.
"Hello there," he said. His voice was soft and faintly accented.
"Hello," said Tommy.
"I've always wondered what they keep in those jars." The man pointed to the front window of the store, where two glass vessels, baroque beakers with onion-dome lids, contained their perpetual gallons of clear fluid, tinted respectively pink and blue. The late-afternoon sun cut through them, casting the rippling pair of pastel shadows on the back wall.
"I asked Mr. Spiegelman that," Tommy said. "A couple times."
"What did he say?"
"That it's a mystery of his profession."
The man nodded solemnly. "One we must respect." He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be.
"I'm your cousin," the man said. "Josef Kavalier."
"I know," said Tommy. "I saw your picture."
The man nodded and took another drag on his cigarette.
"Are you coming over to our house?"
"Not today."
"Do you live in Canada?"
"No," said the man. "I don't live in Canada. I could tell you where I live, but if I do, you must promise not to reveal my whereabouts or identity to any persons. It's top secret."
There was a gritty scratch of leather sole against linoleum. Cousin
Joe glanced up and smiled a brittle adult smile, eyes shifting uneasily to one side.
"Tommy?" It was Mr. Spiegelman. He was staring curiously at Cousin Joe, not in an unfriendly way, but with an interest that Tommy recognized as distinctly unmercantile. "I don't believe I know yourfriend."
"This… is… Joe," Tommy said. "I… I know him." The intrusion of Mr. Spiegelman into the comic book aisle rattled him. The dreamlike sense of calm with which he had reencountered, in a Long Island pharmacy, the cousin who had disappeared from a military transport off the coast of Virginia eight years before, abandoned him. Joe Kavalier was the great silencer of adults in the Clay household; whenever Tommy entered a room and everyone stopped talking, he knew they had been discussing Cousin Joe. Naturally, he had pestered them mercilessly for information on this man of mystery. His father generally refused to talk about the early days of the partnership that had produced the Escapist-"All that stuff kind of depresses me, buddy," he would say- but he could sometimes be induced to speculate on Joe's current location, the path of his wanderings, the likelihood of his ever coming back. Such talk, however, made Tommy's father nervous. He would reach for his cigarettes, a newspaper, the switch of the radio: anything to cut the conversation short.
It was his mother who had provided Tommy with most of what he knew about Joe Kavalier. From her he had learned the full story of the Escapist's birth, of the vast fortunes that the owners of Empire Comics had made off the work of his father and his cousin. His mother worried about money. The lost bonanza that the Escapist would have represented to the family if they had not been cheated by Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy haunted her. "They were robbed," she often said. Generally, she confined such statements to moments when mother and son were alone, but occasionally, when Tommy's father was around, she would drag up his sorry history in the comic book business, of which Cousin Joe had once formed a key part, to bolster some larger, more abstruse point about the state of their lives that Tommy, clinging fiercely to his childish understanding of things, every time managed to miss. His mother, as it happened, was in possession of all manner of interesting facts about Joe. She knew where he had gone to school in Prague, when and by what route he had come to America, the places he had lived in Manhattan. She knew which comic books he had drawn, and what Dolores Del Rio had said to him one spring night in 1941 ("You dance like my father"). Tommy's mother knew that Joe had been indifferent to music and partial to bananas.
Tommy had always taken the particularity, the enduring intensity, of his mother's memories of Joe as a matter of course, but then one afternoon the previous summer, at the beach, he had overheard Eugene's mother talking to another neighborhood woman. Tommy, feigning sleep on his towel, lay eavesdropping on the hushed conversation. It was hard to follow, but one phrase caught his ear and lodged there for many weeks afterward.
"She's been carrying a torch for him all these years," the other woman said to Helene Begelman. She was speaking, Tommy knew, of his mother. For some reason, he thought at once of the picture of Joe, dressed in a tuxedo and brandishing a straight flush, that his mother kept on the vanity she had built for herself in her bedroom closet, in a small silver frame. But the full meaning of this expression, "carrying a torch," remained opaque to Tommy for several more months, until one day, listening with his father to Frank Sinatra sing the intro to "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," its sense had become clear to him; at the same instant, he realized he had known all his life that his mother was in love with Cousin Joe. The information pleased him for some reason. It seemed to accord with certain ideas he had formed about what adult life was really like from perusing his mother's stories in Heartache, Sweetheart, and Love Crazy.
Still, Tommy didn't really know Cousin Joe at all, and he had to admit, seeing him through Mr. Spiegelman's eyes, that he looked kind of shady, loitering there in his wrinkled suit, several day's growth on his chin. The coils of his hair sprang upward from his head like excelsior. He had a pale, blinking aspect, as if he didn't get out into the light too often. It was going to be hard to explain him to Mr. Spiegelman without revealing that he was a relative. And why shouldn't he reveal this? Why shouldn't he tell everyone he knew-in particular his parents-that Cousin Joe had returned from his wanderings? This was big news. If it later emerged that he had kept this from his mother and father, he would certainly get into trouble.
"This is my-uh-" he stammered, seeing the look of mistrust in Mr. Spiegelman's mild blue eyes grow keener. "My-" He was just about to say "cousin," and was even considering prefixing it with the melodramatic novelty of "long-lost," when a far more interesting narrative possibility occurred to him: clearly Cousin Joe had come looking especially for him. There had been that moment when their eyes met across the counter at Louis Tannen's Magic Shop, and then, over the next few days, somehow or other, Joe had tracked Tommy down, observed his habits, even followed him around, waiting for the opportune moment. Whatever his reasons for concealing his return from the rest of the family, he had chosen to reveal himself to Tommy. It would be wrong and foolish, Tommy thought, not to respect that choice. The heroes of John Buchan's novels never blurted out the truth in these situations. For them, a word was always sufficient, and discretion was the better part of valor. The same sense of melodramatic cliche prevented him from considering the possibility that his parents knew all about Cousin's Joe's return and had merely, as was their habit with interesting news, kept it from him. "My magic teacher," he finished. "I told him I'd meet him here. The houses all look alike, you know."
"That is certainly true," Joe said.
"Magic teacher," said Mr. Spiegelman. "That's a new one to me."
"You have to have a teacher, Mr. Spiegelman," Tommy said. "All the great ones do." Then Tommy did something that surprised him. He reached out and took hold of his cousin's hand. "Well, come on, I'll show you the way. You just have to count the corners. The houses don't really all look alike. We have eight different models."
They started past the racks of comics. Tommy remembered that he had meant to pick up the Summer 1953 issue of Escapist Adventures, but he was afraid that to do so might offend or even anger his cousin. So Tommy just kept on going, pulling on Joe's hand. As they walked past it, Tommy glanced at the cover of Escapist Adventures #54, on which the Escapist, blindfolded and bound to a thick post with his hands behind his back, faced a grim-visaged firing squad. The signal to fire was about to be given by, of all people. Tom Mayflower, leaning on his crutch, one arm raised high, his face diabolical and crazed. "HOW CAN THIS BE?" the Escapist was crying out in an agonized, jagged word balloon. "I'M ABOUT TO BE EXECUTED BY MY OWN ALTER EGO!!!"
Tommy felt powerfully teased by this provocative illustration, even though he knew perfectly well that, in the end, when you read the story the situation on the cover would turn out to be a dream, a misunderstanding, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie. With his free hand, he stood fingering the dime in the pocket of his dungarees.
Cousin Joe gave his other hand a squeeze. "Escapist Adventures" he said, his tone light and mocking.
"I was just looking at it," said Tommy.
"Get it," Joe said. He plucked the four current Escapist titles from the rack. "Get them all. Go ahead." He waved at the wall, his gesture wild, his eyes flashing. "I'll buy you any ones you want."
It was hard to say why, but this extravagant offer frightened Tommy. He began to regret his buccaneering leap into the unknown plans of his first cousin once removed.
"No, thank you," he said. "My dad gets me them free. All except for the Empire ones."
"Of course," said Joe. He coughed into his balled fist, and his cheeks turned red. "Well then. Just the one."
"Ten cents," said Mr. Spiegelman, ringing it up at the cash register, still eyeing Joe carefully. He took the dime Joe offered him and then held out his hand.
"Hal Spiegelman," he said. "Mister…"
"Kornblum," said Cousin Joe.
They walked out of the store and stood on the sidewalk in front of Spiegelman's. This sidewalk, and the stores that fronted it, were the oldest built things in Bloomtown. They had been here since the twenties, when Mr. Irwin Bloom was still working in his father's Queens cement concern and there had been nothing around here but potato fields and this tiny village of Manticock, which Bloomtown had since overwhelmed and supplanted. Unlike the blinding fresh sidewalks of Mr. Irwin Bloom's Utopia, this one was cracked, grayish, leopard-spotted by years of spat-out chewing gum, trimmed with a fur of Island weeds. There was no oceanic parking lot in front, as there was at Bloomtown Plaza; State Road 24 rumbled right past. The storefronts were narrow, clad in clapboard, their cornices a ragged mess of telephone wires and power lines overgrown with Virginia creeper. Tommy wanted to say something about all this to his cousin Joe. He wished he could tell him how the churned-up sidewalk, the hectoring crows on the bare Virginia creeper, and the irritable buzzing of Mr. Spiegelman's neon sign made him feel a kind of premonitory sadness for adult life, as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns, and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself, from which this senescent hunk of the village of Manticock protruded like a wayward dark island. He felt as if there were a thousand things he wanted to tell Cousin Joe, the history of their lives since his disappearance, the painful tragedy of Eugene Begelman's departure for Florida, the origin of the mysterious Bug. Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness, but there was a look of forbearance in Cousin Joe's eyes that made him think it would be possible to tell this man things.
"I wish you could come over tonight," he said. "We're having Mexican chili."
"That sounds good. Your mother was always a very good cook."
"Come over." Suddenly, he felt that he would never be able to keep Joe's return a secret from his parents. The question of Joe's whereabouts had been a worry to them for Tommy's entire life. It would be unfair to hide the news from them. It would be wrong. What was more, he had an immediate sense, seeing his cousin for the first time, of the man's belonging to them. "You have to."
"But I can't." Every time a car went by, Joe turned to looked at it, peering into its interior. "I'm sorry. I came out here to see you, but now I have to go."
"Why?"
"Because I-because I am out of practice. Maybe next time I will come over to your house, but not now." He looked at his watch. "My train is in ten minutes."
He held out his hand to Tommy, and they shook, but then Tommy surprised himself and put his arms around Cousin Joe. The smell of ashes in the scratchy fabric of his jacket swelled Tommy's heart.
"Where are you going?" Tommy asked.
"I can't tell you. It would not be fair. I can't to ask you to keep my secrets for me. After I go, you should tell your parents that you saw me, okay? I don't mind. They won't be able to find me. But to be fair to you, I can't tell you where I go."
"I won't tell them," said Tommy. "I swear to God, honest, I won't."
Joe put his hands on Tommy's shoulders and pushed him back a little so that they could look at each other.
"You like magic, eh?"
Tommy nodded. Joe reached into his pocket and took out a deck of playing cards. They were a French brand of cards called Petit Fou. Tommy had an identical deck at home, which he had bought at Louis Tannen's. The continental cards were smaller in size, and thus easier for small hands to manipulate. The kings and queens had a lowering, woodcut air of medieval chicanery, as if they were out to rob you with their curving swords and pikes. Joe slid the cards out of their gaudy box and handed them to Tommy.
"What can you do?" he said. "Can you do a pass?"
Tommy shook his head, feeling his cheeks grow warm. Somehow, his cousin had managed to cut directly to the center of Tommy's weakness as a card manipulator.
"I'm no good at them," he said, shuffling morosely through the deck. "Whenever it says in a trick that you need to make a pass, I just skip that one."
"Passes are hard," Joe said. "Well, easy to do. But not easy to do well."
This was far from news to Tommy, who had devoted two futile weeks at the beginning of the summer to the spread, the half, the fan, and the Charlier pass, among others, but never had been able to finesse the various halves and quarters of the deck quickly enough to prevent the central deception of any pass-the invisible transposition of two or more portions of the deck-from being patent even to the least discerning eye, in Tommy's case that of his mother, who, during his final attempt before he abandoned the pass once and for all in disgust, had rolled her eyes and said, "Well, sure, if you're going to switch the halves like that."
Joe lifted Tommy's right hand, examined the knuckles, turned it over, and studied the palm, scrutinizing it like a palmist.
"I know I need to learn it," Tommy began, "but I-"
"They are a waste of your time," Joe said, letting go of the hand. "Don't bother until your hands are bigger."
"What?"
"Let me show you this." He took the deck of cards, opened them into a smooth, many-pleated fan, and offered Tommy his choice of them. Tommy glanced instantaneously at the three of clubs, then poked it resolutely back into the deck. He was intent on the movements of Joe's long digits, determined to spot the pass when it came. Joe opened his hands, palm upward. The deck seemed to tumble in two neat sections from the left to the right, in the proper order, and as Joe's fingers rippled with magicianly flair, there was a baffling suggestion of a further tumble, so brief as to leave Tommy questioning whether he had imagined it or been fooled into seeing more than was there by the artful anemone flutter of his cousin's fingers and thumbs. It seemed, on balance, as though nothing at all had happened to the cards beyond a simple lazy transfer from left hand to right. Then Tommy was holding a card in his hands. He turned it over. It was the three of clubs.
"Hey," Tommy said. "Wow."
"Did you see it?"
Tommy shook his head.
"You didn't see the pass?"
"No!" Tommy could not help feeling slightly irritated.
"Ah," Joe said, with a faint bass hint of theatricality in his voice, "but there was no pass. That is the False Pass."
" 'The False Pass.' "
"Easy to do, not so very hard to do well."
"But I didn't-"
"You were watching my fingers. Don't watch my fingers. My fingers are liars. I have taught them to tell pretty lies."
Tommy liked this. There was a sharp yank on the cord that kept his impatient heart tethered in his chest.
Could you-?" Tommy began, then silenced himself, "ere," said Joe. He walked behind Tommy and stood over him, arms reaching around, the way Tommy's father had once done when showing him how to knot a necktie. He notched the deck into Tommy's left hand, arranging his fingers, then took him slowly through the four simple motions, a series of flips and half-turns, that were all one needed to get the bottom of the deck onto the top, with the dividing line between portions, naturally, being the chosen card, invisibly marked with the tip of the tip of the left pinky. He stood behind Tommy, watching him imitate the movements, the vapor of his breath billowing steadily and bitter with tobacco around Tommy's head as the boy struggled to produce the effect. After the sixth try, though it was sloppy and slow, he could already sense that, in the end, he was going to get hold of it. He felt a softening in his belly, a feeling of happiness that was hollowed, somehow, with a small, vacant pocket, at its center, of loss. He laid his head back against his cousin's flat stomach and looked up at his inverted face. Joe's eyes looked bewildered, regretful, troubled; but Tommy had once read in a book on optical illusions that all faces looked sad when viewed upside down.
"Thank you," Tommy said.
Cousin Joe took a step backward, away from him, and Tommy lost his step and nearly fell over. He caught himself and turned to face his cousin.
"You really do have to know how to do a pass," Cousin Joe said. "Even if it's only a false one."
The following Monday, Tommy went swimming at the Bloomtown Community Swimming Pool and Recreation Center, which had just reopened following a polio scare. When he came home on his bike, he found a letter waiting for him, in a long business envelope whose printed return address was Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. He did not often receive mail, and he felt his mother watching him as he opened it.
"They're offering you a job," she guessed. She stood by the kitchen counter, pencil poised over a grocery list that she was making out. Sometimes it took his mother as long as an hour and a half to compose a relatively simple shopping list. He had his father's stoical tendency toward bullet-biting, but his mother was never one to hasten a task that she despised. "Louis Tannen died and left you the shop in his will."
Tommy shook his head, unable to smile at her jokes. He was so excited that the sheet of foolscap, with its typed mishmash of grandiose and exotic terms, rattled in his hands. He knew that the letter was all part of the plan, but for an instant he forgot what the plan was. He was baffled with delight.
"So what is it?"
Boldly, his stomach twisting, Tommy thrust the sheet of paper toward her. She lifted to the bridge of her nose the reading glasses she wore on a silver chain around her neck. These were a recent development, one that his mother hated. She never actually settled the glasses onto her nose, but merely held them up before her eyes, as though she wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.
Garden of Blooming Silks? Empire of Pennies? Haunted Fountain en?" She squinted a little as she read the last word.
"Tricks," Tommy said, pulling the paper back from her lest she study it too closely. "It's a price list."
"I see that," she said, eyeing him. "Pen is spelled wrong. Two N's."
"Hmm," Tommy said.
"How many tricks do you need, honey? We just got you that demonic box of yours."
"I know," he said. "It's just for wishing."
"Well, wish away," she said, lowering the glasses once more. "But don't take your coat off. We're going to the A &P."
"May I please stay home? I'm old enough."
"Not today."
"Please."
He saw that she was probably going to accede-they had been experimenting lately with leaving him by himself-and that the only thing giving her pause was her detestation of grocery shopping.
"You're going to make me go into the heart of darkness alone?"
He nodded.
"You'll be all right?"
He nodded again, afraid that if he said anything more, he would somehow give it all away. She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged one shoulder, picked up her purse, and went out.
He sat, holding the paper and envelope in his hands, until he heard the muttering of the Studebaker's engine and the scrape of its rear bumper as she backed out of the driveway. Then he got up. He got the scissors from the kitchen drawer, went to the kitchen cupboard, and took out a box of Post Toasties cereal. He saw that his mother, as she always did, had left without the grocery list. It was written, he noticed, on the back of a strip torn from a page of artwork-it looked like it might have been from Kiss-that she had given up on. A pretty blond girl hid behind an old beached rowboat, spying on something that was making her cry. It was probably her doctor boyfriend kissing her best friend the nurse, or something like that.
Tommy carried the scissors and the cereal to his room. There was half an inch of mostly crumbs left in the wax-paper bag, and he munched them dutifully. As he had done every morning for the last week, he studied the text printed on the back panel of the box, which described the scientifically formulated merits of the cereal in sober tones and which he now knew by heart. When he was through, he balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He picked up the scissors and carefully cut the back panel off the box. He laid it flat on his desk. With a pencil and a ruler, he drew a box around every instance of the words "Post Toasties." Then he took the scissors and cut on the lines he had marked. He took the panel, with its eleven rectangular holes, and fit it over the purported list of magic tricks from Tannen's.
That was how he learned that he was to catch the 10:04 train at the Bloomtown LIRR station on December 3, wearing an eye patch that would be supplied, under cover of constituting part of a spurious trick called Pieces o' Eight, in a second letter from Joe. Tommy was to sit in the last car, at the back, transfer at Jamaica, disembark at Penn Station, then walk the two long blocks to, of all places, the Empire State Building. He was to ride the elevator to the seventy-second floor, go to Suite 7203, and rap out his initials on the door in Morse code. If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, "Ophthalmologist."
Every Thursday for the next seven months, Tommy followed the routine established by that first secret letter from Joe. He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade. At the corner of Darwin Avenue, however, he turned left instead of right, slipped through the Marchettis' backyard, crossed Rutherford Drive, and then took his sweet time (unless it was raining) ambling across the half-built east side of Bloomtown toward the bland new cinder-block-and-steel structure that had replaced the old Manticock station. He spent the day with Cousin Joe, in his strange digs nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, and left at three o'clock. Then, again following Joe's original prescription, he stopped outside Reliant Office Supplies on Thirty-third Street and typed out an excuse to hand to the principal, Mr. Savarese, the next morning, on a piece of paper that Joe had already furnished with a perfect simulacrum of Rosa Clay's signature.
In the first months, Tommy loved everything about the trips into New York. The cloak-and-dagger protocols, the risk of capture, and the soaring view from the windows of Joe's home could not have been better designed to appeal to the mind of an eleven-year-old boy who spent large parts of every day pretending to pose as the secret identity of a super-powered humanoid insect. He loved, first of all, the ride into the city. As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air; teachers poking and wheedling with their facts and principles, when all he really needed was to be handed a stack of textbooks and left alone; and, worst of all, other children, who could not seem to play their games without including him if they were cruel ones or, if their games were innocent, pointedly keeping him out. Tommy's loneliness had found a strangely happy expression in the pitch and rumble of the LIRR trains, the stale breath of the heat blowers, the warm oatmeal smell of cigarettes, the sere featureless prospect from the windows, the hours given over entirely to himself, his book, and his imaginings. He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe's, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies' shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy was the Rug, on solitary patrol in New York City, soaring up from the underground like a cicada, hopping on his mighty hind legs along Fifth Avenue in hot pursuit of Dr. Hate or the Finagler, creeping unnoticed as an ant amid the hurrying black-and-gray herds of briefcase-carrying humans, whose crude mammalian existences he had sworn to protect and defend, before at last dropping in on the secret aerial lair of one of his fellow masked crime-fighters, whom he sometimes dubbed the Eagle but who went more generally, in Tommy's fancy, by the moniker Secretman.
Secretman lived in a two-room office suite with four windows that looked out toward Bloomtown and Greenland. He had a desk, a chair, a drafting table, a stool, an armchair, a floor lamp, a complicated multi-band radio array festooned with yards of rambling antenna, and a special little cabinet whose many shallow drawers were filled with pens, pencils, twisted tubes of paint, erasers. There was no telephone; nor was there any stove, icebox, or proper bed.
"It's illegal," Cousin Joe told Tommy, the first time he visited. "You're not allowed to live in an office building. That's why you can't tell anyone I'm here."
Even then, before he learned the depth and extent of Secretman's superhuman powers of self-concealment, Tommy did not entirely believe this explanation. He sensed from the first, though he could not have expressed it-at his age, both the name and the experience of grief were not so much foreign to as latent in him, and as yet undetected-that something was the matter with, or had happened to, Joe. But he was too thrilled with his cousin's style of life, and the opportunity it afforded, to think the problem over too carefully. He watched as Joe went to a door on the other side of the room and opened it. It was a supply closet. There were stacks of paper and bottles of ink and other supplies. There were also a folded cot, an electric hot plate, two boxes of clothes, a canvas garment bag, and a small porcelain sink.
"Isn't there a janitor?" Tommy asked him on the second trip, having given the question some consideration. "Or a guard?"
"The janitor comes at five minutes before midnight, and I make sure everything is all right before he gets here. The guard and I are old friends by now."
Joe answered all of Tommy's questions about the particulars of his life, and showed him all of the work he had done since leaving the comic book business. But he declined to tell Tommy how long he had been holed up in the Empire State Building, and why he stayed there, and for what reason he kept his return a secret. He would not say why he never left his rooms except to purchase those supplies that could not be delivered, often wearing a false beard and sunglasses, or to pay regular visits to Tannen's back room, or why, one afternoon in July, he had made an exception and gone all the way out to Long Island. These were the mysteries of Secretman. Such questions had occurred to Tommy, in any case, only in a fragmentary and inarticulate way. After the first two visits, and for a while thereafter, he just took the entire situation for granted. Joe taught him card tricks, coin tricks, bits with handkerchiefs and needles and thread. They ate sandwiches brought in from the coffee shop downstairs. They shook hands in greeting and farewell. And, month after month, Tommy kept Secretman's secrets, though they were always bubbling up on his lips and trying to escape.
Tommy was caught only twice before the day on which it all came out. The first time he attracted the attention of an LIRR conductor with nystagmus who soon plumbed the shallow surface of Tommy's cover story. Tommy spent much of November 1953, as a result, confined to his bedroom. But in school-he considered it part of his punishment that they continued to send him to school during the month he was grounded-he consulted with Sharon Simchas, who was nearly blind in one eye. He sent his cousin an explanatory letter in care of Louis Tannen. On the Thursday following the lifting of the punishment, he set off again for Manhattan, equipped this time with the name and address of Sharon's doctor, one of the doctor's business cards, and a plausible diagnosis of strabismus. The wobble-eyed ticket puncher, however, never reappeared.
The second time he was caught came a month before the leap of the Escapist. Tommy settled into his seat at the back of the last car and opened his copy of Walter B. Gibson's Houdini on Magic. Cousin Joe had given it to him the week before; it was signed by the author, the creator of the Shadow, with whom Joe still played cards from time to time. Tommy had his shoes off, his eye patch on, and half a pack of Black Jack in his mouth. He heard a clatter of heels and looked up in time to see his mother, in her sealskin coat, stumble into the train car, out of breath, mashing her best black hat down onto her head with one arm. She was at the opposite end of a relatively full car, and there was a tall man positioned directly in her line of sight. She sat down without noticing her son. This stroke of good fortune took a moment to sink in. He glanced down at the book in his lap. The dark gray wad of gum lay in a small pool of saliva on the left-hand page; it had fallen out of his mouth. He put it back in and lay down across the pair of seats in his row, his face hidden in the hood of his coat and behind the screen of his book. His sense of guilt was exacerbated by the knowledge that Harry Houdini had idolized his own mother and doubtless never would have deceived or hidden from her. At Elmont, the conductor came by to check his ticket, and Tommy scrabbled up onto one elbow. The conductor gave him a skeptical look, and though Tommy had never seen him before, he tapped the patch with a Fingertip and tried to echo the nonchalance of Cousin Joe.
"Ophthalmologist," he said.
The conductor nodded and punched his ticket. Tommy lay back down.
At Jamaica, he waited until the car emptied completely, then dashed out onto the platform. He got to the train for Penn Station just as the doors were closing. There was no time for him to try to guess which car his mother might have boarded. The idea of waiting for a later train did not occur to him until several minutes later, when-soon after she let go of his earlobe-it was suggested to him by his mother.
He ran right into her, almost literally, smelling her perfume an instant before a hard corner of her imitation-tortoiseshell handbag poked him in the eye.
"Oh!"
"Ouch!"
He stumbled backward. She grabbed him by the hood of his coat and dragged him toward her, then, tightening her grip, actually raised him half an inch off the ground, like a magician brandishing by the ears the rabbit he was about to dematerialize. His legs kicked at the pedals of an invisible bicycle. Her cheeks were rouged, her eyelids lined with black paint like a Caniff girl's.
"What are you doing? Why aren't you in school?"
"Nothing," he said. "I'm just… I was just…"
He glanced around the car. Naturally, all of the other passengers were staring at them. His mother lifted him a little higher and brought her face close to his. The perfume blowing off her was called Ambush.
It sat on a mirrored tray on her dresser, under a mantle of dust. He could not remember the last time he had smelled it on her.
"I can't-" she began, but then she couldn't finish her sentence because she had started to laugh. "Take off that damned eye patch," she said. She lowered him to the floor of the train and lifted the patch. He blinked. She flicked the patch back over his eye. Keeping her grip on the hood of his Mighty Mac, she dragged him down to the end of the car and pushed him into a seat. He was sure she was going to yell at him now, but once more she surprised him by sitting down beside him and putting her arms around him. She rocked back and forth, holding him tight.
"Thank you," she said, her voice throaty and rough, the way it sounded the morning after a bridge night when she had gone through a pack of cigarettes. "Thank you."
She nuzzled his head and he felt that her cheeks were wet. He sat back.
"What's the matter, Mom?"
She snapped open her purse and took out a handkerchief.
"Everything," she said. "What's the matter with you? How come you keep doing this? You were going to Tannen's again?"
"No."
"Don't lie, Tommy," she said. "Don't make this worse than it already is."
"Okay."
"You can't do this. You can't just skip school whenever you want to and go to Tannen's Magic Shop. You're eleven years old. You aren't a hoodlum."
"I know."
The train shuddered and the brakes screeched. They were pulling into Pennsylvania Station now. Tommy stood up and waited for her to get up and drag him off the train, across the platform, back out to Jamaica, and then home. But she didn't move. She just sat there, checking her eyes in the mirror of her compact, shaking her head ruefully at the mess her tears had made.
"Mom?" he said.
She looked up.
"I don't see any reason to waste these clothes and this hat just because you would rather saw a lady in half than learn fractions," she said.
"You mean I'm not punished?"
"I thought we could spend the day in the city. The two of us. Eat at Schrafft's. Maybe see a show."
"So you aren't going to punish me?"
She shook her head, once, dismissively, as if the question bored her. Then she took hold of his hand. "I don't see any reason to tell your father about any of this, do you, Tommy?"
"No, ma'am."
"Your father has enough to worry about without this."
"Yes, ma'am."
"We'll just keep this whole little incident to ourselves."
He nodded, though there was an eager look in her eyes that made him uneasy. He felt a sudden mad desire to be grounded again. He sat down.
"But if you ever do this again," she added, "I'll take all of your cards and wands and all that other nonsense and toss them into the incinerator."
He sat back and relaxed a little. As she promised, they lunched at Schrafft's, she on stuffed peppers, he on a Monte Cristo sandwich. They spent an hour in Macy's and then took in It Should Happen to You at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second. They caught the 4:12 for home. Tommy was asleep by the time his father came in, and said nothing the next morning when he came in to wake him for school. The encounter on the train was scattered in the cracks in their family. Once, long afterward, he summoned up the courage to ask his mother what she had been doing on that inbound train, dressed in her fanciest clothes, but she had merely put a finger to her lips and gone on struggling over another of the lists she always left behind.
On the day that everything had changed, Tommy and Cousin Joe were sitting in the outer room of the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, where there was a false receptionist's desk. Tommy was in the armchair, a big wingback covered in a rough fabric like burlap, pool-table green, legs dangling, drinking a can of cream soda. Joe was lying on the floor with his arms folded under his head. Neither of them had said anything for what felt to Tommy like several minutes. They often passed long periods of their visits without saying very much. Tommy would read his book, and Cousin Joe would work on the comic book that he had been drawing, he said, ever since taking up residence in the Empire State Building.
"How's your father?" Joe said abruptly.
"Fine," said Tommy.
"That's what you always say."
"I know."
"He is worried about this book by Dr. Wertham, I imagine? The Seduction of the Innocents?"
"Real worried. Some senators are coming from Washington."
Joe nodded. "Is he very busy?"
"He's always busy."
"How many titles is he putting out?"
"Why don't you ask him yourself?" Tommy said, with an unintended sharpness.
There was no reply for a moment. Joe took a long drag on his cigarette. "Maybe I will," he said. "Some of these days."
"I think you should. Everybody really misses you."
"Your father said that he misses me?"
"Well, no, but he does," Tommy said. Lately, he had begun to worry about Joe. In the months since his foray into the wilds of Long Island, he had by his own admission been leaving the building less and less frequently, as if Tommy's visits had become a substitute for regular experience of the external world. "Maybe you could come home with me, on the train. It's nice. There's an extra bed in my room."
"A 'trundle' bed."
"Yeah."
"Could I use your Brooklyn Dodgers bath towel?"
"Yeah, sure! I mean, if you wanted."
Joe nodded. "Maybe I will, some of these days," he said again.
"Why do you keep staying here?"
"Why do you keep asking me that?"
"Well, don't you-doesn't it bother you to be in the same building with them? With Empire Comics? If they treated you so bad and all?"
"It doesn't bother me at all. I like being near to them. To the Escapist. And you never know. Some of these days I could maybe bother them."
He sat up as he said this, rolling onto his knees brusquely.
"What do you mean?"
Joe waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. "Never mind."
"Tell me."
"Forget it."
"I hate it when people do that," said Tommy.
"Yeah," said Joe. "So do I." He dropped the cigarette on the bare cement floor and ground it under the toe of his rubber sandal. "To tell the truth, I've never quite figured out just what I'm going to do. I'd like to embarrass them somehow. Make that Shelly Anapol look bad. Maybe I will dress up as the Escapist and… jump off this building! I have only to figure out some way to make it look like I jumped and killed myself." He smiled thinly. "But, of course, without it actually killing myself."
"Could you do that? What if it didn't work and you were, like, smashed flat as a pancake on Thirty-fourth Street?"
"That would certainly embarrass them," Joe said. He patted his chest. "Where did I leave-ah."
That was the moment when everything had changed. Joe stepped toward his drawing table to get his pack of Old Golds and tripped over Tommy's satchel. He pitched forward, reaching for the air in front of him, but before he could catch hold of anything, his forehead, with a loud, disturbingly wooden knock, hit the corner of his drafting table. He uttered one broken syllable and then hit the ground, hard. Tommy sat, waiting for him to curse or roll over or burst into tears. Joe didn't move. He lay facedown with his long nose bent against the floor, hands splayed beside him, motionless and silent. Tommy scrambled out of the chair and went to his side. He grabbed one of his hands. It was still warm. He took hold of Joe's shoulders and pulled him, rocking him twice and then rolling him over like a log. There was a small cut on his forehead, beside the pale crescent-moon scar of an old wound. The cut looked deep, although there was only a small amount of blood. Joe's chest rose and fell, shallow but steady, and his breath came rattling through his nose. He was out cold.
"Cousin Joe," Tommy said, giving him a shake. "Hey. Wake up. Please."
He went into the other room and opened the tap. He wet a ragged washcloth with cool water and carried it back to Joe. Gently, he dabbed at the uninjured portion of Joe's forehead. Nothing happened. He lay the towel on Joe's face and rubbed it vigorously around. Still, Joe lay breathing. A constellation of concepts that were vague to Tommy, comas and trances and epileptic fits, now began to trouble him. He had no idea what to do for his cousin, how to revive or help him, and now the cut was beginning to bleed more freely. What should Tommy do? His impulse was to go for help, but he had sworn to Joe that he would never reveal his presence to anyone. Still, Joe was a tenant of the building, illegal or not. His name must appear on some lease or document The management of the building knew he was here. Would they be able or willing to help?
Then Tommy remembered a field trip he had taken here, back in the second grade. There was a large infirmary-a miniature hospital, the tour guide had called it-on one of the lower floors. There had been a pretty young nurse in white hat and shoes. She would know what to do. Tommy stood up and started for the door. Then he turned to look back at Joe lying on the floor. What would they do, though, once they had revived him and bandaged his cut? Would they put him in jail for sleeping in his office night after night? Would they think he was some kind of nut? Was he some kind of nut? Would they lock him up in a "nutbin"?
Tommy's hand was on the knob, but he couldn't bring himself to turn it. He was paralyzed; he had no idea of what to do. And now, for the first time, he appreciated Joe's dilemma. It was not that he did not wish further contact with the world in general, and the Clays in particular. Maybe that was how it had started out for him, in those strange days after the war, when he came back from some kind of secret mission- this was what Tommy's mother had said-and found out that his mother had been put to death in the camps. Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn't know how to do it. Tommy would never know how much effort it cost Joe to make that trip out to Long Island, how ardent his desire was to see the boy, speak to him, hear his thin reedy voice. But Tommy could see that Secretman was trapped in his Chamber of Secrets, and that the Bug was going to have to rescue him.
At that moment, Joe groaned and his eyes fluttered open. He touched a finger to his forehead and looked at the blood that came away. He sat up on one elbow, rolling toward Tommy by the door. The look on Tommy's face must have been easy to read.
"I'm fine," Joe said, his voice thick. "Get back in here."
Tommy let go of the doorknob.
"You see," Joe said, rising slowly to his feet, "goes to show you shouldn't smoke. It's bad for the health."
"Okay," Tommy said, marveling at the strange resolve that he had formed.
When he left Joe that afternoon, he went to the Smith-Corona typewriter that was chained to a podium in front of Reliant Office Supplies. He rolled out the sheet of typing paper that was there so that people could try out the machine. It featured its regular weekly fable, one sentence long, of the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, and exhorted him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. He rolled in the usual piece of stationery, at the bottom of which Joe had forged his mother's name. "Dear Mr. Savarese," he typed, using the tips of his index fingers. Then he stopped. He rolled out the paper and set it to one side. He looked up at the polished black stone of the storefront. His reflection looked back at him: He went over to open the chrome-handled door and was immediately intercepted by a thin, white-haired man whose trousers were belted at the diaphragm. This man often watched Tommy from the doorway of his shop as the boy typed out his excuses, and every week, Tommy thought the man was going to tell him to get lost. At the threshold of the store, which he had never crossed before, he hesitated. In the man's stiffened shoulders and the backward cant of his head, Tommy recognized his own manner when faced with a big strange dog or other sharp-toothed animal.
"Whaddaya want, sonny?" the man said.
"How much is a sheet of paper?"
"I don't sell paper by the sheet."
"Oh."
"Run along now."
"Well, how much for a box, then?"
"A box of what?"
"Paper."
"What kind of paper? What for?"
"A letter."
"Business? Personal? This is for you? You're going to write a letter?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, what kind of a letter is it?"
Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn't want to get the wrong kind of paper.
"A death threat," he said at last.
For some reason, this cracked the man up. He went around behind the sales counter and bent down to open a drawer.
"Here," he said, handing Tommy a sheet of heavy tan paper as smooth and cool to the touch as marzipan. "My best twenty-five-pound cotton rag." He was still laughing. "Make sure you kill them good, all right?"
"Yes, sir," said Tommy. He went back out to the typewriter, rolled in the sheet of fancy paper, and in half an hour typed the message that would eventually draw a crowd to the sidewalk around the Empire State Building. This was not necessarily the outcome he anticipated. He didn't know exactly what he was hoping for as he pecked out his missive to the editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. He was just trying to help Cousin Joe find his way home. He wasn't sure what it would all lead to, or if his letter, though it sounded awfully official and realistic to his own ears, would even be believed. When he finished, he carefully withdrew it from the typewriter and went back into the shop.
"How much for an envelope?" he said.
When they got out on seventy-two, the boy led them to the left, past the doorways of an import company and a wig manufacturer, to a door whose opaque glass light was painted with the words kornblum vanishing creams, inc. The boy turned to look at them, an eyebrow raised, seeing, the captain thought, if they got the joke, although Lieber wasn't sure just what the joke was supposed to be. Then the boy knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again.
"Where is he?" he said.
"Captain Harley."
They turned. A second building cop, Rensie, had joined them. He put a finger to his nose as if he was about to impart some delicate or embarrassing information.
"What is it?" Harley said warily.
"Our boy is up there," Rensie said. "The leaper. Up on the o.d."
"What?" Lieber stared at the kid, more bewildered than he considered it competent for a detective to be.
"Costume?" Harley said.
Rensie nodded. "Nice blue one," he said. "Big nose. Skinny. It's him."
"How'd he get there?"
"We don't know, Captain. Swear to God, we were watching everything. We had a man on the stairs, and another on the elevators. I don't know how he got in there. He just kind of showed up."
"Come on," Lieber said, already moving for the elevators. "And bring your son," he told Sammy Clay; you had to bring a cleat to lash them to. The boy's face had gone blank and bloodless with what looked to Lieber like astonishment. Somehow his hoax had come true.
They stepped into the elevator, with its elaborate chevrons and rays of inlaid wood.
"He's on the parapet?" said Captain Harley. Rensie nodded.
"Wait a minute," said Sammy. "I'm confused."
Lieber allowed as how he was a tiny bit confused himself. He had thought that the mystery of the letter to the Herald-Tribune was solved: it was a harmless if inscrutable stunt, pulled by an eleven-year-old boy. No doubt, he thought, he had been fairly inscrutable himself at that age. The kid was looking for attention; he was trying to make a point that no one outside the family could possibly understand. Then, somehow, it had appeared that this long-lost cousin whom Lieber had assumed until that point to be a dead man, run down on the shoulder of some godforsaken road outside of Cat Butt, Wyoming, was actually holed up, somehow or other, in an office suite on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State. And now it looked as if the kid was not the author of the letter after all; the Escapist had kept his grim promise to the city of New York.
They had gone fourteen stories-special express all the way-when Rensie said in a small, unwilling voice, "There are orphans."
"There are what?"
"Orphans," said Clay. He had his arm crooked around his kid's neck in a fatherly display of reproof masquerading as solicitude. It was an embrace that said Wait till I get you home. "Why are there-?"
"Yes, Sergeant," Harley said. "Why are there?"
"Well, it didn't look like the, uh, the gentleman in the, uh, the blue suit was going to show," Rensie said. "And the little brats came all the way down from Watertown. Ten hours on a bus."
"An audience. Of little children," Harley said. "Perfect."
"What about you?" Lieber said to the boy. "You confused, too?"
The boy stared, then nodded slowly.
"You want to have your wits about you, Tom," Lieber said. "We need you to talk to this uncle of yours."
"First cousin," Clay said. He cleared his throat. "Once removed."
"Maybe you could talk to your first cousin once removed about those rubber bands," Rensie said. "That's a new one on me."
"Rubber bands," Captain Harley said. "And orphans." He rubbed at the wrecked half of his face. "I'm guessing there's also a nun?" "A padre." "Okay," said Captain Harley. "Well, that's something."
Twenty-two orphans from the Orphanage of St. Vincent de Paul huddled on the windswept roof of the city, a thousand feet up. Gray light was smeared across the sky like ointment on a bandage. The heavy steel zippers of the children's dark blue corduroy coats-donated by a Watertown department store the previous winter, along with the twenty-two chiming pairs of galoshes-were zipped tightly against the April chill. The children's two keepers, Father Martin and Miss Mary Catherine Macomb, circled the children like a couple of nipping sheepdogs, trying to cinch them with their voices and hands. Father Martin's eyes watered in the sharp breeze, and Miss Macomb's thick arms were stippled with gooseflesh. They were not excitable people, but things had gotten out of hand and they were shouting.
"Stay back!" Miss Macomb told the children, several hundred times.
"For pity's sake, man," Father Martin told the leaper, "come down."
There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder. Nobody was smiling or laughing, though with children, entertainment often seemed to be a grave business.
Atop the thick concrete parapet of the eighty-sixth floor, like a bright jagged hole punched in the clouds, balanced a smiling man in a mask and a gold-and-indigo suit. The suit clung to his lanky frame, dark blue with an iridescent glint of silk. He had on a pair of golden swim trunks, and on the front of his blue jersey was a thick golden applique, like the initial on a letterman's jacket, in the shape of a skeleton key. He wore a pair of soft gold boots, rather shapeless, with thin rubber soles. The trunks were nubbly and had a white streak on the seat, as if their wearer had once leaned against a freshly painted doorjamb. The tights were laddered and stretched out at the knees, the jersey sagged badly at the elbows, and the rubber soles of the flimsy boots were cracked and spotted with grease. His broad chest was girdled by a slender cord, studded with thousands of tiny knots, looped under his armpits, then stretched across the open-air promenade some twenty feet to the steel prong of an ornamental sun ray that jutted from the roof of the observation lounge. He gave the knotted cord a tug, and it twanged out a low D-flat.
He was putting on a show for them, for the children and for the policemen who had gathered at his feet, cursing and cajoling and begging him to climb down. He was promising a demonstration of human flight of the sort still routinely found, even in this diminished era of super-heroism, in the pages of comic books.
"You will see," he cried. "A man can fly."
He demonstrated the strength of the elastic rope, woven out of eight separate strands, each strand made up of forty of the extra-long, extra-thick rubber bands he had picked up at Reliant Office Supplies. The policemen remained suspicious, but they were not sure what to believe. The midnight-blue costume, with its key symbol and its weird Hollywood sheen, affected their judgment. And then there was Joe's professional manner, still remarkably smooth and workmanlike after so many years of disuse. His confidence in his ability to pull off the trick of leaping from the roof, plunging to a maximum of 162 feet in the direction of the far-distant sidewalk, then reascending, tugged skyward by the enormous rubber band, to alight smiling at the feet of the policemen, appeared to be absolute.
"The children won't be able to see me flying," Joe said, the glint of misdirection in his eyes. "Let them come to the edge."
The children agreed, pressing forward. Horrified, Miss Macomb and Father Martin held them back.
"Joe!" It was Sammy. He and various policemen, uniformed and plainclothes, came stumbling in a confusion of waving arms out onto the windswept promenade. They were led by a wary-looking Tommy Clay.
When Joe saw the boy, his son, join the motley crowd that had convened on the observation deck to observe as a rash and imaginary promise was fulfilled, he suddenly remembered a remark that his teacher Bernard Kornblum had once made.
"Only love," the old magician had said, "could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks."
He had offered this observation toward the end of Joe's last regular visit to the house on Maisel Street, as he rubbed a dab of calendula ointment into the skin of his raw, peeling cheeks. Generally, Kornblum said very little during the final portion of every lesson, sitting on the lid of the plain pine box that he had bought from a local coffin maker, smoking and taking his ease with a copy of Di Cajt while, inside the box, Joe lay curled, roped and chained, permitting himself sawdust-flavored sips of life through his nostrils, and making terrible, minute exertions. Kornblum sat, his only commentary an occasional derisive blast of flatulence, waiting for the triple rap from within which signified that Joe had loosed himself from cuffs and chains, prized out the three sawn-off dummy screw heads in the left-hand hinge of the lid, and was ready to emerge. At times, however, if Joe was particularly dilatory, or if the temptation of a literally captive audience proved too great, Kornblum would begin to speak, in his coarse if agile German-always limiting himself, however, to shoptalk. He reminisced fondly about performances in which he had, through bad luck or foolishness, nearly been killed; or recalled, in apostolic and tedious detail, one of the three golden occasions on which he had been fortunate enough to catch the act of his prophet, Houdini. Only this once, just before Joe attempted his ill-fated plunge into the Moldau, had Kornblum's talk ever wandered from the path of professional retrospection into the shadowed, leafy margins of the personal.
He had been present, Kornblum said-his voice coming muffled through the inch of pine plank and the thin canvas sack in which Joe was cocooned-for what none but the closest confidants of the Handcuff Ring, and the few canny confreres who witnessed it, knew to be the hour when the great one failed. This was in London, Kornblum said, in 1906, at the Palladium, after Houdini had accepted a public challenge to free himself from a purportedly inescapable pair of handcuffs. The challenge had been made by the Mirror of London, which had discovered a locksmith in the north of England who, after a lifetime of tinkering, had devised a pair of manacles fitted with a lock so convoluted and thorny that no one, not even its necromantic inventor, could pick it. Kornblum described the manacles, two thick steel circlets inflexibly welded to a cylindrical shaft. Within this rigid shaft lay the sinister mechanism of the Manchester locksmith-and here a tone of awe, even horror, entered Kornblum's voice. It was a variation on the Bramah, a notoriously intransigent lock that could be opened-and even then with difficulty-only by a long, arcane, tubular key, intricately notched at one end. Devised by the Englishman Joseph Bramah in the 1760s, it had gone unpicked, inviolate, for over half a century until it was finally cracked. The lock that now confronted Houdini, on the stage of the Palladium, consisted of two Bramah tubes, one nested inside the other, and could be opened only by a bizarre double key that looked something like the collapsed halves of a telescope, one notched cylinder protruding from within another.
As five thousand cheering gentlemen and ladies, the young Kornblum among them, looked on, the Mysteriarch, in black cutaway and waistcoat, was fitted with the awful cuffs. Then, with a single, blank-faced, wordless nod to his wife, he retreated to his small cabinet to begin his impossible work. The orchestra struck up "Annie Laurie." Twenty minutes later, wild cheering broke out as the magician's head and shoulders emerged from the cabinet; but it turned out that Houdini wanted only to get a look at the cuffs, which still held him fast, in better light. He ducked back inside. The orchestra played the Overture to Tales of Hoffmann. Fifteen minutes later, the music died amid cheers as Houdini stepped from the cabinet. Kornblum hoped against hope that the master had succeeded, though he knew perfectly well that when the first, single-barreled Bramah was, after sixty years, finally picked, it had taken the successful lock-pick, an American master by the name of Hobbs, two full days of continuous effort. And now it turned out that Houdini, sweating, a queasy smile on his face, his collar snapped and dangling free at one end, had merely-oddly-come out to announce that, though his knees hurt from crouching in the cabinet, he was not yet ready to throw in the towel. The newspaper's representative, in the interests of good sportsmanship, allowed a cushion to be brought, and Houdini retreated to his cabinet once more.
When Houdini had been in the box for nearly an hour, Kornblum began to sense the approach of defeat. An audience, even one so firmly on the side of its hero, would wait only so long while the orchestra cycled, with an air of increasing desperation, through the standards and popular tunes of the day. Inside his cabinet, the veteran of five hundred houses and ten thousand turns could doubtless sense it, too, as the tide of hope and goodwill flowing from the galleries onto the stage began to ebb. In a daring display of showmanship, he emerged once again, this time to ask if the newspaper's man would consent to remove the cuffs long enough for the magician to take off his coat. Perhaps Houdini was hoping to learn something from watching as the cuffs were opened and then closed again; perhaps he had calculated that his request, after due consideration, would be refused. When the gentleman from the newspaper regretfully declined, to loud hisses and catcalls from the audience, Houdini pulled off a minor feat that was, in its way, among the finest bits of showmanship of his career. Wriggling and contorting himself, he managed to pluck from the pocket of his waistcoat a tiny penknife, then painstakingly transfer it to, and open it with, his teeth. He shrugged and twisted until he had worked his cutaway coat up over to the front of his head, where the knife, still clenched between his teeth, could slice it, in three great sawing rasps, in two. A confederate tore the sundered halves away. After viewing this display of pluck and panache, the audience was bound to him as if with bands of steel. And, Kornblum said, in the uproar, no one noticed the look that passed between the magician and his wife, that tiny, quiet woman who had stood to one side of the stage as the minutes passed, and the band played, and the audience watched the faint rippling of the cabinet's curtain.
After the magician had reinstalled himself, coatless now, in his dark box, Mrs. Houdini asked if she might not prevail upon the kindness and forbearance of their host for the evening to bring her husband a glass of water. It had been an hour, after all, and as anyone could see, the closeness of the cabinet and the difficulty of Houdini's exertions had taken a certain toll. The sporting spirit prevailed; a glass of water was brought, and Mrs. Houdini carried it to her husband. Five minutes later, Houdini stepped from the cabinet for the last time, brandishing the cuffs over his head like a loving cup. He was free. The crowd suffered a kind of painful, collective orgasm-a "Krise," Kornblum called it-of delight and relief. Few remarked, as the magician was lifted onto the shoulders of the referees and notables on hand and carried through the theater, that his face was convulsed with tears of rage, not triumph, and that his blue eyes were incandescent with shame.
"It was in the glass of water," Joe guessed, when he had managed to free himself at last from the far simpler challenge of the canvas sack and a pair of German police cuffs gaffed with buckshot. "The key."
Kornblum, massaging the bands of raw skin at Joe's wrists with his special salve, nodded at first. Then he pursed his lips, thinking it over, and finally shook his head. He stopped rubbing at Joe's arms. He raised his head, and his eyes, as they did only rarely, met Joe's.
"It was Bess Houdini," he said. "She knew her husband's face. She could read the writing of failure in his eyes. She could go to the man from the newspaper. She could beg him, with the tears in her eyes and the blush on her bosom, to consider the ruin of her husband's career when put into the balance with nothing more on the other side than a good headline for the next morning's newspaper. She could carry a glass of water to her husband, with the small steps and the solemn face of the wife. It was not the key that freed him," he said. "It was the wife. There was no other way out. It was impossible, even for Houdini." He stood up. "Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks." He wiped at his raw cheek with the back of his hand, on the verge, Joe felt, of sharing some parallel example of liberation from his own life.
"Have you-did you ever-?"
"That terminates the lesson for today," Kornblum said, snapping shut the lid of the box of ointment, and then managing to meet Joe's eyes again, not, this time, without a certain tenderness. "Now, go home."
Afterward, Joe found there was some reason to doubt Kornblum's account. The famous London Mirror handcuff challenge had taken place, he learned, at the Hippodrome, not the Palladium, and in 1904, not 1906. Many commentators, Joe's chum Walter B. Gibson among them, felt that the entire performance, including the pleas for light, water, time, a cushion, had been arranged beforehand between Houdini and the newspaper; some even went so far as to argue that Houdini himself had designed the cuffs, and that he had coolly whiled away his time of purported struggling in his cabinet, Kornblum-like, by reading the newspaper or by humming contentedly along with the orchestra down in the pit.
Nevertheless, when he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum's dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orchestra of air currents and violin winds, the trumpeting of foghorns and melancholy steamships, the plangent continuo of passing DC-3s. Like Harry Houdini, Joe had failed to get out of his self-created trap; but now the love of a boy had sprung him, and drawn him at last, blinking, before the footlights.
"It's a stunt!" cried an old blond trooper whom Joe recognized as Harley, chief of the building police force.
"It's a gimmick," said a thickset, younger man standing beside Sammy. A plainclothesman, by the look of him. "Is that what it is?"
"It's a great big pain in the ass," Harley said.
Joe was shocked to see how haggard Sammy's face had grown; he was pale as dough, and at thirty-two he seemed to have acquired at last the deep-set eyes of the Kavaliers. He had not changed much, and yet somehow he looked entirely different. Joe felt as if he were looking at a clever impostor. Then Rosa's father emerged from the observatory. With his dyed penny-red hair and the eternal youthfulness of cheek enjoyed by some fat men, he did not appear to have changed at all, though he was, for some reason, dressed like George Bernard Shaw.
"Hello, Mr. Saks," Joe said.
"Hello, Joe." Saks was relying, Joe noticed, on a silver-topped walking stick, in a way that suggested the cane was not (or not merely) an affectation. So that was one change. "How are you?"
"Fine, thank you," Joe said. "And you?"
"We are well," he said. He was the only person on the entire deck- children included-who looked entirely delighted by the sight of Joe Kavalier, standing on the high shoulder of the Empire State Building in a suit of blue long johns. "Still steeped in scandal and intrigue."
"I'm glad," Joe said. He smiled at Sammy. "You've put on weight?"
"A little. For Christ's sake, Joe. What are you doing standing up there?"
Joe turned his attention to the boy who had challenged him to do this, to stand here at the tip of the city in which he had been buried. Tommy's face was nearly expressionless, but it was riveted on Joe. He looked as if he was having a hard time believing what he saw. Joe shrugged elaborately.
"Didn't you read my letter?" he said to Sammy.
He threw out his arms behind him. Hitherto he had approached this stunt with the dry dispassion of an engineer, researching it, talking it over with the boys at Tannen's, studying Sidney Radner's secret monograph on Hardeen's abortive but thrilling Paris Bridge Leap of 1921. [14] Now, to his surprise, he found himself aching to fly.
"It said you were going to kill yourself," Sammy said. "It didn't say anything about doing a Human Yo-Yo act."
Joe lowered his arms; it was a good point. The problem, of course, was that Joe had not written the letter. Had he done so, he would not have promised, in all likelihood, to commit public suicide in a moth-eaten costume. He recognized the idea as his own, of course, filtered through the wildly elaborating imagination that, more than anything else-more than the boy's shock of black hair or delicate hands or guileless gaze, haunted by tenderness of heart and an air of perpetual disappointment-reminded Joe of his dead brother. But he had felt it necessary, in fulfilling the boy's challenge, to make a few adjustments here and there.
"The possibility of dying is small," Joe said, "but it is of course there."
"And it's just about the only way for you to avoid arrest, Mr. Kavalier," said the plainclothesman.
"I'll keep that in mind," Joe said. He threw his arms back again.
"Joe!" Sammy ventured a hesitant couple of inches toward Joe. "God damn it, you know damn well the Escapist doesn't fly!"
"That's what I said," said one of the orphans knowledgeably.
The policemen exchanged a look. They were getting ready to rush the parapet.
Joe stepped backward into the air. The cord sang, soaring to a high, bright C. The air around it seemed to shimmer, as with heat. There was a sharp twang, and they heard a brief, muffled smack like raw meat on a butcher block, a faint groan. The descent continued, the cord drawing thinner, the knots pulling farther apart, the note of elongation reaching into the dog frequencies. Then there was silence.
"Ow!" Captain Harley slapped the back of his head as if a bee had stung him. He looked up, then down, then jumped quickly to one side. Everybody looked at his feet. There, to one side, wobbly and distended, lay the elastic cord, tipped by the severed loop that had engirdled Joe Kavalier's chest.
All warnings and prohibitions were forgotten. The children and adults ran to the parapet, and those lucky or industrious enough to get themselves up onto it peered down at the man lying spread-eagled, a twisted letter K, on the projecting roof-ledge of the eighty-fourth floor.
The man lifted his head.
"I'm all right," he said. Then he lowered his head once more to the gray pebbled surface onto which he had fallen, and closed his eyes.
The bearers carried him down to the subterranean garage of the building, where an ambulance had been waiting since four o'clock that afternoon. Sammy rode down with them in the elevator, having left Tommy with his grandfather and the captain of the building police, who would not permit the boy to ride along. Sammy was a little hesitant about leaving Tommy, but it seemed crazy just to let Joe be taken away again like that, not ten minutes after his reappearance. Let the boy spend a few minutes in the hands of the police; maybe it would do him good.
Every time Joe shut his eyes, the bearers told him rather curtly to wake up. They were afraid that he might have a concussion.
"Wake up, Joe," Sammy told him.
"I am awake."
"How are you doing?"
"Fine," Joe said. He had bit his lip, and there was blood from it on his cheek and shirt collar. It was the only blood that Sammy could see. "How are you?"
Sammy nodded.
"I read Weird Date every month," Joe said. "It's very good writing, Sam."
"Thanks," Sammy said. "Praise means so much when it comes from a lunatic."
"Sea Yarns is also good."
"Think so?"
"I always learn something about boats or something."
"I do a lot of research." Sammy took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the bloody spot on Joe's lip, remembering the days of Joe's war against the Germans of New York. "It's all in my face, by the way," he said.
"What is?"
"The weight you mentioned. It's all in my face. I still swing the dumbbells every morning. Feel my arm."
Joe raised his arm, wincing a little, and gave Sammy's biceps a squeeze.
"Big," Joe said.
"You don't look so swell yourself, you know. In this ratty old getup."
Joe smiled. "I was hoping Anapol would see me in it. It was going to be like a bad dream coming true."
"I have a feeling a lot of his bad dreams are about to come true," Sammy said. "When did you take it, anyway?"
"Two nights ago. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind. I realize that it… has sentimental value for you."
"It doesn't mean anything special to me."
Joe nodded, watching his face, and Sammy looked away.
"I'd like a cigarette," Joe said.
Sammy fished one out of his jacket and stuck it between Joe's lips.
"I'm sorry," Joe said.
"Are you?"
"About Tracy, I mean. I know it was a long time ago but I…"
"Yeah," Sammy said. "Everything was a long time ago."
"Everything I'm sorry about, anyway," Joe said.
The view out the windows was pure cloud bank, a gray woolen sock pulled down over the top of the building. On the walls of Joe's strange apartment hung sketches of the head of a rabbi, a man with fine features and a snowy white beard. The studies were tacked up with pushpins, and they depicted this noble-looking gentleman in a variety of moods: rapturous, commanding, afraid. There were fat books on the tables and chairs; thick reference volumes and tractates and dusty surveys: Joe had been doing a little research himself. Sammy saw, stacked neatly in a corner, the wooden crates in which Joe had always kept his comics-only there were ten times as many as he remembered. Over the room lay the smell of long occupation by a solitary man: burned coffee, hard sausage, dirty linens.
"Welcome to the Bat Cave," Lieber said when Sammy came in.
"Actually," Longman Harkoo said, "it's apparently known as the Chamber of Secrets."
"Is it?" Sammy said.
"Well, uh, that's what I call it," said Tommy, coloring. "But not really."
You came into the Chamber of Secrets from a small anteroom that had been painstakingly decorated to simulate the reception area of a small but going concern. It had a steel desk and typist's table, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a telephone, a hat stand. On the desk stood a nameplate promising the daily presence behind it of a Miss Smyslenka, and a vase of dried flowers, and a photograph of Miss Smyslenka's grinning baby, played by a six-month-old Thomas E. Clay. On the wall was a large commercial painting of a sturdy-looking factory, luminous in the rosy glow of a New Jersey morning, chimneys trailing pretty blue smoke. kornblum vanishing creams, read the engraved label affixed to the bottom of the frame, ho-ho-kus, new jersey.
No one, not even Tommy, was quite sure how long Joe had been living in the Empire State Building, but it was clear that during this time he had been working very hard and reading a lot of comic books. On the floor stood ten piles of Bristol board, every sheet in each pile covered in neat panels of pencil drawings. At first Sammy was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of pages-there must have been four or five thousand-to look very closely at any of them, but he did notice that they seemed to be uninked. Joe had been working in a variety of gauges of lead, letting his pencils do the tricks of light and mass and shadow that were usually pulled off with ink.
In addition to the rabbis, there were studies of organ-grinders, soldiers in breastplates, a beautiful girl in a headscarf, in various attitudes and activities. There were buildings and carriages, street scenes. It didn't take Sammy long to recognize the spiky elaborate towers and crumbling archways of what must be Prague, lanes of queer houses huddled in the snow, a bridge of statues casting a broken moonlit shadow on a river, twisting alleyways. The characters, for the most part, appeared to be Jews, old-fashioned, black-garbed, drawn with all of Joe's usual fluidity and detail. The faces, Sammy noticed, were more specific, quirkier, uglier, than the lexicon of generic comic book mugs that Joe had learned and then exploited in all his old work. They were human faces, pinched, hungry, the eyes anticipating horror but hoping for something more. All except for one. One character, repeated over and over in the sketches on the walls, had barely any face at all, the conventional V's and hyphens of a comic physiognomy simplified to almost blank abstraction.
"The Golem," Sammy said.
"Apparently he was writing a novel," Lieber said.
"He was," Tommy said. "It's all about the Golem. Rabbi Judah Ben Beelzebub scratched the word 'truth' into his forehead and he came to life. And one time? In Prague? Joe saw the real Golem. His father had it in a closet in their house."
"It really does look marvelous," Longman said. "I can't wait to read it."
"A comic book novel," Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O'Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal. It had been two years now since his last crack at the thing, and until this very instant he would have sworn that his ancient ambitions to be something more than the hack scribbler of comic books for a fifth-rate house were as dead, as the saying went, as vaudeville. "My God."
"Come on, Mr. Clay," Lieber said. "You can ride over to the hospital with me."
"Why are you going to the hospital?" Sammy said, though he knew the answer.
"Well, I feel pretty strongly that I have to arrest him. I hope you understand."
" Arrest him?" Longman said. "What for?"
"Disturbing the peace, I suppose. Or maybe we'll get him for illegal habitation. I'm sure the building is going to want to press charges. I don't know. I'll figure it out on the way over."
Sammy saw his father-in-law's smirk shrink down to a hard little button, and his generally genial blue eyes went dead and glassy. It was an expression Sammy had seen before, on the floor of Longman's gallery, [15] when he was dealing with a painter who overvalued his own work or some lady with a title and most of a dead civet around her shoulders, who was better equipped with money than judgment. Rosa called it, in reference to her father's origins in retail, "his rug-merchant stare."
"We'll see about that," Longman said, with deliberate indiscretion and a sideways look at Sammy. "Surrealism has agents at every level of the machinery of power. I sold a painting to the mayor's mother last week."
Your father-in-law is kind of a blowhard, said Detective Lieber's eyes. I know it, Sammy's replied.
"Excuse me." There was a new visitor to the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams. He was young, good-looking in a featureless governmental way, wearing a dark blue suit. In one hand he held a long white envelope.
"Sam Clay?" he said. "I'm looking for Mr. Sam Clay. I was told I might find him-"
"Here." Sammy came forward and took the envelope from the young man. "What's this?"
"That is a congressional subpoena." The young man nodded to Lieber, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. "Sorry to disturb you gentlemen," he said.
Sammy stood for a moment, tap-tap-tapping the envelope against his hand.
"You better call Mom," said Tommy.
HOSE Saxon, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloomtown, New York, when her husband phoned from the city to say that, if it was all right with her, he would be bringing home the love of her life, whom she had all but given up for dead.
Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story, which she intended to begin laying out that night, after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of Kiss Comics. She planned to call it "The Bomb Destroyed My Marriage." The story would be based on an article that she had read in Redbook about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top-secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy's scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn't operate that way; she hated working from Sammy's scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance-storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood-shot by shot, as it were. Her scripts were a tightly numbered series of master shots, the shooting scripts for ten-cent epics that, in their sparse elegance of design, elongated perspectives, and deep focus, somewhat resemble, as Robert C. Harvey has pointed out, [16] the films of Douglas Sirk. She worked at a bulky Smith-Corona, typing with such intense slowness that when her boss and husband called, she did not at first hear the ringing phone.
Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy's return to the business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor's desk at Gold Star, Sammy's first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents and alcoholics who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary-step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.
Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic, with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of #3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages-it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip, The Human Grenade or The Phantom Stallion-and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.
Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen. Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode-whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded-but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.
Then one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could afford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they'd cooked up, based partly on teen features like Archie and A Date with Judy and partly on the old true-romance pulps (the last of the old pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics). It was called Young Romance. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been written and drawn by one of their own. Rosa had accepted Sammy's proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.
She knew what it had meant to Sammy to return to comics and take the editor's job at Gold Star. It was the one moment in the course of a long and interesting marriage when Sammy had stood on the point of following his cousin into the world of men who escaped. He had sworn, screamed, said hateful things to Rosa. He had blamed her for his penury and his debased condition and the interminable state of American Disillusionment. If there were not a wife and a child for him to support, a child not even his own… He had gone so far as to pack a suitcase, and walk out of the house. When he returned the next afternoon, it was as the editor in chief of Gold Star Publications, Inc. He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man. He had stayed. Years later, Rosa found a ticket in a dresser drawer, dating from around that terrible time, for a seat in a second-class compartment on the Broadway Limited: yet another train to the coast that Sammy had not been on.
The night he offered her the chance to draw "a comic book for dollies," Rosa felt, Sammy had handed her a golden key, a skeleton key to her self, a way out of the tedium of her existence as a housewife and a mother, first in Midwood and now here in Bloomtown, soi-disant Capital of the American Dream. That enduring sense of gratitude to Sammy was one of the sustaining forces of their life together, something she could turn to and summon up, grip like Tom Mayflower gripping his talisman key, whenever things started to go wrong. And the truth was that their marriage had improved after she went to work for Sammy. It no longer seemed (to mistranslate) quite as blank. They became colleagues, coworkers, partners in an unequal but well-defined way that made it easier to avoid looking too closely at the locked cabinet at the heart of things.
The more immediate result of Sammy's offer had been Working Gals, "shocking but true tales from the fevered lives of career girls." It debuted in the back pages of Spree Comics, at the time the lowest-selling title put out by Gold Star. After three months of steadily increasing sales, Sammy had moved Working Gals to the front of the book and allowed Rosa to sign it with her best-known pseudonym. [17] A few months after that, Working Gals was launched in its own title, and shortly thereafter, Gold Star, led by three "Rose Saxon Romance" books, began to show a profit for the first time since the heady early days of the war. Since then, as Sammy had moved on from Gold Star to editorships at Olympic Publications and now Pharaoh House, Rosa, in a tireless and (for the most part) financially successful campaign to portray the heart of that mythical creature, the American Girl, whom she despised and envied in equal measure, had filled the pages of Heartache, Love Crazy, Lovesick, Sweetheart, and now Kiss with all the force and frustration of a dozen years of lovelessness and longing.
After Sammy had hung up, Rosa stood for a moment holding the phone, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. Somehow-it was a little confusing-their truant son had managed to find the man who had fathered him. Joe Kavalier was being fetched back, alive, from his secret hideaway in the Empire State Building ("Just like Doc Savage," according to Sammy). And he was coming to sleep in her house.
She took clean linens from the built-in cupboard in the hall and carried them toward the couch on which, a few hours from now, Joe Kavalier would lay down his well-remembered, unimaginable body. Where the hallway met the living room, she passed a kind of star-shaped atomic squiggle with a mirror at its nucleus, and caught sight of her hair. She turned around, went into the bedroom she and Sammy shared, put down her fragrant armful of sheets, and yanked out the variety of junk, office supplies, and small bits of hardware she used to keep her hair out of her face when she was at home. She sat down on the bed, got up, went to her closet, and stood there, the sight of her wardrobe filling her with doubt and a mild sense of amusement that she recognized as, somewhat magically, Joe's. She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned. Now they struck her as, to a skirt, appallingly sensible and dull. She took off her sweatshirt and rolled dungarees. She lit a cigarette and walked into the kitchen in her underpants and brassiere, the bramble of her loosed hair flapping around her head like a crown of plumes.
In the kitchen she took out a saucepan, melted half a cup of butter, and thickened it with flour to a paste. To the paste she added milk, a little at a time, then salt, pepper, and onion powder. She took her roux off the stove and started a pot of water for noodles. Then she went into the living room and put a record on the hi-fi. She had no idea what record it was. When the music began she did not listen, and when it finished she took no notice. It puzzled her to see that there were no sheets on the couch. Her hair was in her face. When flakes of ash had fallen into her roux, she now perceived, she had stirred them right in, as if they were dried bits of parsley. She had, however, forgotten to add the actual dried parsley. And for some reason, she was walking around in her bra.
"All right," she told herself. "And so what?" The sound of her voice calmed her and focused her thoughts. "He doesn't know from suburbia." She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray that was shaped like an eyebrow arched in surprise. "Get dressed."
She went back into the bedroom and put on a blue dress, knee-length, with a white waistband and a collar of dotted swiss. Various contradictory and insidious voices arose within her at this point to say that the dress made her look stout, hippy, matronly, that she ought to wear slacks. She ignored them. She brushed out her hair till it shot from her head in all directions like the mane of a dandelion, then brushed it back and tucked it up at the nape and fastened it there with a silver clasp. A dazed hesitancy returned to her manner over the question of makeup, but she settled quickly on lipstick alone, two plum streaks not especially well applied, and went out to the living room to make up the bed. The pot in the kitchen was boiling now, and she shook a rattling box of macaroni into the water. Then she began to shred into a mixing bowl a block of school-bus-yellow cheese. Macaroni and cheese. It seemed, as a dish, to exist at the very center of her sense of embarrassment over her life; but it was Tommy's favorite, and she felt an impulse to reward her son for the feat he had performed. And somehow she doubted that Joe-had he really been cooped up in an office in the Empire State Building since the nineteen-forties?-would be sensitive to the socioeconomic message inherent in the bubbling brown-and-gold square, in its white Corning casserole with the blue flower on the side.
After she had slid the casserole into the oven, she returned to the bedroom to put on a pair of stockings and blue pumps with white buckles that were covered in the same glossy fabric as the waistband of the dress.
They would be here in two hours. She went back to her table and sat down to work. It was the only sensible thing she could think of to do. Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story. Though she had not told as many as Sammy over the years, working, as she did, exclusively in the romance genre, she had told them perhaps with greater intensity. For Rosa (who, from the first, and uniquely among the few women then working in the business, had not only drawn but, thanks to the indulgence of her editor husband, also written nearly all of her own texts), telling the story of pretty Nancy Lambert-an ordinary American girl from a small island in Maine who put all her foolish trust in the unstable hands of handsome and brilliant Lowell Burns, socialite and nuclear physicist-was an act that absorbed not merely the whole of her attention and craft but of her senses and memories as well. Her thoughts were Nancy's thoughts. Her own fingers turned white at the knuckles when Nancy learned that Lowell had lied to her again. And little by little, as she peopled and developed the world she was building out of rows and columns of blocks on sheets of eleven-by-fifteen Bristol board, Nancy's past was transformed into her own. The velvet tongues of tame Maine deer had once licked her childish palms. The smoke from burning piles of autumn leaves, fireflies writing alphabets against the summer night sky, the sweet jets of salt steam escaping from baked clams, the creaking of winter ice on tree limbs, all of these sensations racked Rosa's heart with an almost unbearable nostalgia as, contemplating the horrific red bloom of the bomb that had become her Other Woman, she considered the possible destruction of everything she had ever known, from kindly Miss Pratt in the old island schoolhouse to the sight of her father's old dory among the lobster boats returning in the evening with the day's catch. At such moments, she did not invent her plots or design her characters; she remembered them. Her pages, though neglected by all but a few collectors, retain an imprint of the creator's faith in her creation, the beautiful madness that is rare enough in any art form, but in the comics business, with its enforced collaborations and tireless seeking-out of the lowest common denominator, all but unheard of.
All this is by way of explaining why Rosa, who had been stricken with panic and confusion at the telephone call from Sammy, gave so little thought to Josef Kavalier once she had sat down to work. Alone in her makeshift studio in the garage, she smoked, listened to Mahler and Faure on WQXR, and dissolved herself in the travails and shapely contours of poor Nancy Lambert, as she would have on a day that included no reports of her son's wild truancy or revenants from the deepest-buried history of her heart. It was not until she heard the scrape of the Studebaker against the driveway that she even looked up from her work.
The macaroni and cheese turned out to be a superfluous gesture; Tommy was asleep by the time they got him home. Sammy struggled into the house with the boy in his arms.
"Did he have dinner?"
"He had a doughnut."
"That isn't dinner."
"He had a Coke."
He was deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, breath whistling through his teeth, mysteriously lost in an extra-large Police Athletic League sweatshirt.
"You broke your ribs," Rosa told Joe.
"No," Joe said. "Just a bad bruise." There was a fiery welt on his cheek, partially covered by a taped square of gauze. His nose looked luminous at the nostrils, as if it had recently been bleeding.
"Out of my way," Sammy said, through his teeth. "I don't want to drop him."
"Let me," Joe said.
"Your ribs-"
"Let me."
I want to see this, thought Rosa. In fact, there had been nothing in her life that she had ever wanted to see more.
"Why don't you let him?" she said to Sammy.
So Sammy, holding his breath, wincing in sympathy and wrinkling his brow, tipped the sleeping boy into Joe's arms. Joe's face tightened in pain, but he bore it and stood holding Tommy, gazing with alarming tenderness down at his face. Rosa and Sammy stood ardently watching Joe Kavalier look at his son. Then, at the same instant, they each seemed to notice that this was what the other was doing, and they blushed and smiled, awash in the currents of doubt and shame and contentment that animated all the proceedings of their jury-rigged family.
Joe cleared his throat, or perhaps he was grunting in pain.
They looked at him.
"Where is his room?" Joe said.
"Oh, sorry," said Rosa. "God. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"It's this way."
She led him down the hall and into Tommy's bedroom. Joe laid the boy on top of the bedspread, which was patterned with colonial tavern signs and with curl-cornered proclamations printed in a bumpy Revolutionary War typeface. It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids. She leaned over and untied his shoes, then pulled them off. His socks clung to his pale, perspired feet. Joe took the shoes and socks from her. Rosa unbuttoned Tommy's corduroy trousers and tugged them down his legs, then pulled up his shirt and the sweatshirt until his head and arms were a lost bundle within. She gave a kind of slow practiced tug, and the top portion of her boy popped free.
"Nicely done," Joe said.
Tommy had apparently been plied with ice cream and soda pop at the police station, to loosen his tongue. His face was going to have to be washed. Rosa went for a cloth. Joe followed her into the bathroom, carrying the shoes in one hand and the pair of socks, rolled into a neat ball, in the other.
"I have dinner in the oven."
"I'm very hungry."
"You didn't break a tooth or anything?"
"Luckily, no."
It was crazy; they were just talking. His voice sounded like his voice, orotund but with a slight bassoon reediness; the droll Hapsburg accent was still there, sounding doctoral and not quite genuine. Out in the living room, Sammy had turned over the record she'd put on earlier; Rosa recognized it now: Stan Kenton's New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm. Joe followed her back into the bedroom, and Rosa scrubbed the sweet epoxy from Tommy's baby-boy lips and fingers. An unwrapped Charms Pop that he had plunged, half-sucked, into his pants pocket had mapped out a sticky continent on the smooth hairless hollow of his hip. Rosa wiped it away. Tommy muttered and winced throughout her attentions; once, his eyes shot open, filled with alarmed intelligence, and Rosa and Joe grimaced at each other: they had woken him up. But the boy closed his eyes again, and with Joe lilting and Rosa pulling, they got him into his pajamas. Joe hefted him, groaning again, as Rosa peeled back the covers of the bed. Then they tucked him in. Joe smoothed the hair back from Tommy's forehead.
"What a big boy," he said.
"He's almost twelve," Rosa said.
"Yes, I know."
She looked down at his hands, by his sides. He was still holding on to the pair of shoes.
"Are you hungry?" she said, keeping her voice low.
"I'm very hungry."
As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. She closed the door behind them.
"Let's eat," she said.
It wasn't until the three of them were seated around the dinette in the kitchen that she got her first good look at Joe. There was something denser about him now. His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy's or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak.
As they ate, Sammy told Rosa the story of his day, from the time he had run into the boys at the Excelsior Cafeteria until the moment of Joe's leap into the void.
"You could have died," Rosa said in disgust, slapping gently at Joe's shoulder. "Very easily. Rubber bands."
"The trick was performed with success by Theo Hardeen in 1921, from the Pont Alexandre III," Joe said. "The elastic band was specially prepared in that case, but I studied, and the conclusion was that my own was even stronger and more elastic."
"Only it snapped," Sammy said.
Joe shrugged. "I was wrong."
Rosa laughed.
"I don't say I wasn't wrong, I'm just saying I didn't think there was much chance I was going to die at all."
"Did you think there was any chance they were going to lock you up on Rikers Island?" Sammy said. "He got arrested."
"You got arrested?" said Rosa. "What for? 'Creating a public nuisance'?"
Joe made a face, at once embarrassed and annoyed. Then he helped himself to another shovelful of casserole.
"It was for squatting," Sammy said.
"It's not anything." Joe looked up from his plate. "I have been in a jail before."
Sammy turned to her. "He keeps saying things like that."
"Man of mystery."
"I find it very irritating."
"Did you make bail?" said Rosa.
"Your father helped me."
"My father? He was helpful?"
"Apparently the elder Mrs. Wagner owns two Magrittes," Sammy said. "The mayor's mother. The charges were dropped."
"Two late Magrittes," said Joe.
The telephone rang.
"I'll get it," Sammy said. He went to the phone. "Hello. Uh-huh. Which paper? I see. No, he won't talk to you. Because he would not be caught dead talking to a Hearst paper. No. No. No, that isn't true at all." Apparently, Sammy's desire to set the record straight was greater than his disdain for the New York Journal-American. He carried the receiver into the dining room; they had just had an extra-long cord put on so that it could reach the dining table Sammy used as a desk whenever he worked at home.
As Sammy began to harangue the reporter from the Journal-American, Joe put down his fork.
"Very good," he said. "I haven't eaten anything like this in so long I can't remember."
"Did you get enough?"
"No."
She served him another chunk from the dish.
"He missed you the most," she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the Journal-American how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the window of Jerry Glovsky's bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. "He hired private detectives to try to find you."
"One of them did find me," Joe said. "I paid him off." He took a bite, then another, then a third. "I missed him, too," he said finally. "But I used to always imagine that he was happy. When I would be sitting there at night sometimes thinking about him. I would read his comic books-I could alwavs tell which ones were his-and then I would think, well, Sam is doing all right there. He must be happy." He washed down the last bite of his third helping with a swallow of seltzer water. "It's a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not."
"Isn't he?" Rosa said, not so much out of bad faith as from the enduring power of what a later generation would have termed her denial. "No. No, you're right, he really isn't."
"What about the book, the Disillusioned American? I have often thought of it, too, from time to time."
His English, she saw, had deteriorated during his years in the bush, or wherever he'd been.
"Well," Rosa said, "he finished it a couple of years ago. For the fifth time, actually, I think it was. And we sent it out. There were some nice responses, but."
"I see."
"Joe," she said. "What was the idea?"
"What was the idea of what? My jump?"
"Okay, let's start with that."
"I don't know. When I saw the letter in the newspaper, you know, I knew that Tommy wrote it. Who else could it be? And I just felt, well, since I am the one to mention to him about it… I wanted… I just wanted to have it be… true for him."
"But what were you trying to accomplish? Was the idea to shame Sheldon Anapol into giving you two more money, or…?"
"No," Joe said. "I don't guess that was ever the idea."
She waited. He pushed his plate back and picked up her cigarettes. He lit two at once, then passed one to her, just the way he used to do, long, long ago.
"He doesn't know," he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn't grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life?
"Who doesn't know what?" she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe's head.
"Tommy. He doesn't know… what I know. About me. And him. That I-"
The ashtray-red and gold, stamped with the words el morocco in stylish gold script-fell to the kitchen floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.
"Shit!"
"It's all right, Rosa."
"No, it isn't! I dropped my El Morocco ashtray, god damn it." They met on their knees, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the pieces of the broken dish between them.
"So all right," she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. "You know."
"I do now. I always thought so, but I-"
"You always thought so? Since when?"
"Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell."
"You have known since 1942 that you"-she lowered her voice to an angry whisper-"that you had a son, and you never-"
The rage that welled up suddenly felt dangerously satisfying, and she would have let it out, heedless of the consequences to her son, her husband, or their reputation in the neighborhood, but she was held back, at the very last possible moment, by the fiery blush in Joe's cheeks. He sat there, head bowed, stacking the pieces of the ashtray into a neat little cairn. Rosa got up and went to the broom closet for a dustpan and broom. She swept up the ashtray and sent the pieces jingling into the kitchen trash.
"You didn't tell him," she said at last.
He shook his bent head. He was still kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor. "We always never spoke very much," he said.
"Why does that not surprise me?"
"And you never told him."
"Of course not," Rosa said. "As far as he knows, that"-she lowered her voice and nodded again toward the dining room-"is his father."
"This is not the case."
"What?"
"He told me that Sammy adopted him. He overheard this or some such thing. He has a number of interesting theories about his real father."
"He… did he ever… do you think he…"
"At times I felt he might be leading up to asking me," Joe said. "But he never has."
She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.
"You still haven't said," she reminded him. "Why you did it. What was the point of it all?"
Sammy came back into the kitchen and hung up the phone, shaking his head at the profound journalistic darkness that he had just wasted ten minutes attempting to illuminate.
"That's what the guy was just asking me," he said. "What was the point of it?"
Rosa and Sammy turned to Joe, who regarded the inch of ash at the tip of his cigarette for a moment before tapping it into the palm of his hand.
"I guess this was the point," he said. "For me to come back. To end up sitting here with you, on Long Island, in this house, eating some noodles that Rosa made."
Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.
"Couldn't you have just called?" Rosa said. "I'm sure I would have invited you."
Joe shook his head, and the color returned to his cheeks. "I couldn't. So many times I wanted to. I would call you and hang up the phone. I would write letters but didn't send them. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to imagine. I just didn't know how to do it, you see? I didn't know what you would think of me. How you would feel about me."
"Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot," Sammy said. "We love you."
Joe put his hand on Sammy's shoulder and shrugged, nodding as if to say, yes, he had acted like an idiot. And that would be it for them, Rosa thought. Twelve years of nothing, a curt declaration, a shrug ofapology, and those two would be as good as new. Rosa snorted a jet of smoke through her nostrils and shook her head. Joe and Sammy turned to her. They seemed to be expecting her to come up with a plan of action for them, a nice tight Rose Saxon script they could all follow, in which they would all get just the lines they wanted.
"Well?" she said. "What do we do now?"
The silence that ensued was long enough for three or four of Ethel Klayman's proverbial idiots to enter this woebegone world. Rosa could see a thousand possible replies working themselves through her husband's mind, and she wondered which one of them he was finally going to offer, but it was Joe who finally spoke up.
"Is there any dessert?" he said.
With a sharpened Ticonderoga tucked behind his ear and a fresh yellow lawyer's pad pressed to his chest, Sammy got into bed with her. He wore a pair of stiff cotton pajamas-these were white with a thin lime stripe and a diagonal pattern of gold stags' heads-to which clung a sweet steam whiff of her iron. Normally he folded into the envelope of their bed an olfactory transcript of his day in the city, a rich record of Vitalis, Pall Mall, German mustard, the sour imprint of his leather-backed office chair, the scorched quarter-inch membrane of coffee at the bottom of the company urn, but tonight he had showered, and his cheeks and throat had a stinging mint smell of Lifebuoy. He transferred his relatively slight bulk from the floor of the bedroom to the surface of the mattress with the usual recitative of grunts and sighs. At one time Rosa would have inquired as to whether there was some general or specific cause for these amazing performances, but there never was-his groaning was either some involuntary musical response to the effects of gravitation, like the "singing" of certain moisture-laden rocks that she had read about in Ripley's, produced by the first shafts of morning sun; or else it was just the inevitable nightly release, after fifteen hours spent ignoring and repressing them, of all the day's frustrations. She waited out the elaborate process by which he effected a comprehensive rearranging of the mucus in his lungs and throat. She felt him settle his legs and smooth the covers over them. At last she rolled over and sat up on one arm.
"Well?" she said.
Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, "Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of Seduction of the Innocent." Or, for the thousandth time, with the usual admixture of wonder and hostility: "Your father is quite a character." Or-she dreaded and longed to hear it: "Well, you got him back."
But he just snuffled one last time and said, "I like it."
Rosa sat up a little bit more.
"Really?"
He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. "It's very disturbing," he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. "It's like the Bomb really is the Other Woman."
"The Bomb is sexy."
"That's what's disturbing," Sammy said. "Actually, what's disturbing is that you could think such a thing."
"Look who's talking."
"You gave the Bomb a figure. A womanly shape."
"That comes right out of Tommy's World Book. I didn't make that up."
Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.
"Is he out of his mind?" he said.
"Tommy or Joe?"
"He's been leading a secret life for the last ten years. I mean, but really. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived."
"Who knew?"
"A bunch of those magicians. That's where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen's."
"Louis Tannen's Magic Shop," she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy's attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed. He seems quite obsessed with the place, her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy's own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn't it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? "They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?"
"Misdirection."
"A lie to cover a lie."
"I asked Joe about Orson Welles," Sammy said. "He knew."
She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe's disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides-suffering from "survivor's guilt," as it was called-among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody's ill fate in the hinterlands-the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco-she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)-the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing-knowing-all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman's.
"No," she said. "I don't think he's out of his mind. You know? I just don't know if there's a sane reaction to what he… what happened to his family. Is your reaction, and mine… you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?"
"Good point," Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
"What is that?" she said.
"Weird Planet." He did not lift his pencil from the pad. "Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes." While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. "He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he's ever seen. And he's seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let's say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They're worried. They're afraid. There's one building, one immense palace he isn't allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It's all coming from the palace." He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. "The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him hemust have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He's an explorer. It's his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains."
She waited while he waited for her to ask.
"And?" she said finally.
"We're in heaven, this planet," said Sam.
"I'm not sure I-"
"It's God."
"Okay."
"God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe."
It was Rosa's turn to say, "I like it. Does He, what? I'm guessing he eats the spaceman?"
"He does."
"Peels him like a banana."
"You want to draw it?"
She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.
"Sam, come on. Stop for a minute," she said.
"I need to get this down."
She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.
"Sammy, how did you get him off?"
"I told you."
"My father called the mayor's mother," Rosa said. "Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of Rene Magritte."
"Apparently."
"Bullshit."
He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.
"How did you get him off?" Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.
"I talked to the arresting officer," Sammy said, looking steadily at her. "Detective Lieber."
"You spoke to him."
"He seemed like an all right kind of guy."
"That's lucky."
"We're going to have lunch."
Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa's consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy's-the only relations, since Joe's enlistment, that merited the name-went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.
"Well then, maybe Daddy can help you out with this Senate committee, too," Rosa said. "I'll bet Estes Kefauver is a terrific Max Ernst fan."
"Maybe we should just get hold of Max Ernst," Sammy said. "I need all the help I can get."
"Are they calling in everyone?" Rosa said.
Sammy shook his head. He was trying not to look worried, but she could tell that he was. "I made some calls," he said. "Gaines and I seem to be the only comics men that anyone knows they're calling."
Bill Gaines was the publisher and chief pontiff of Entertainment Comics. He was a slovenly, brilliant guy, excitable and voluble the way that Sammy was-when the subject was work-and, like Sammy, he harbored ambitions. His comic books had literary pretensions and strove to find readers who would appreciate their irony, their humor, their bizarre and pious brand of liberal morality. They were also shockingly gruesome. Corpses and dismemberments and vivid stabbings abounded. Awful people did terrible things to their horrible loved ones and friends. Rosa had never liked Gaines or his books very much, though she adored Bernard Krigstein, one of the E.C. regulars, refined and elegant in both print and person and a daring manipulator of panels.
"Some of your stuff is pretty violent, Sam," she said. "Pretty close to the limit."
"It might not be the stabbings and vivisections," Sammy said. And then, licking his lips, "At least not only that."
She waited.
"There's, well, there's, sort of a whole chapter on me in Seduction of the Innocent."
"There is?"
"Part of a chapter. Several pages."
"And you never told me this?"
"You said you weren't going to read the damn thing. I figured you didn't want to know."
"I asked you if Dr. Wertham mentioned you. You said…" She tried to remember what exactly he had said. "You said that you looked, and you weren't in the index."
"Well, not by name," Sammy said. "That's what I meant."
"I see," Rosa said. "But it turns out there is a whole, actual chapter about you."
"It's not about me personally. It doesn't even identify me by name. It just talks about stories I wrote. The Lumberjack. The Rectifier. But not just mine. There's a lot about Batman. And Robin. There's stuff about Wonder Woman. About how she's a little… a little on the butch side."
"Uh-huh. I see." Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it sometimes, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered. "Does the U.S. Senate know that you wrote these stories?"
"I seriously doubt it," Sammy said. "It was all nom de plume."
"Well, then."
"I'll be fine." He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil. But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, drumming with the eraser end on the pad.
"Think he'll stay for a while?" he said.
"No. Uh-uh. Maybe. I don't know. Do we want him to stay?" she said.
"Do you still love him?" He was trying to catch her off guard, lawyer-style. But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe.
"Do you?" she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, "Do you still love me?"
"You know I do," he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. "You don't have to ask."
"And you don't have to tell me," she said. She kissed him. It was a curt and sisterly kiss. Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall. The scratching of his pencil resumed. She closed her eyes, but she could not relax. It took her very little time to realize that somehow she had forgotten the one thing she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy.
"He knows that you adopted him," she said. "According to Joe." The pencil stopped. Rosa kept her face to the wall. "He knows that somebody else is really his dad. He just doesn't know who."
"Joe never told him, then."
"Would he?"
"No," said Sammy. "I guess he wouldn't."
"We have to tell him the truth, Sam," Rosa said. "The time has come. It's time."
"I'm working now," Sammy said. "I'm not going to talk about this anymore."
She knew from long experience to believe this. The conversation had officially come to an end. And she had not said anything that shewanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warm shoulder and left it there a little while. Again, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin.
"What about you?" she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep. "Are you going to stay for a while?"
But if there was a reply, she missed it.
AT thirty-five, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.
Sitting at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dust mop or a canvas bag of clothespins, her skirt straining to contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside him a violin string were being tightened on its key. Because, as it turned out, he was still in love with Rosa. His love for her had survived the ice age intact, like the beasts from vanished aeons that were always thawing out in the pages of comic books and going on rampages through the streets of Metropolis and Gotham and Empire City. This love, thawing, gave off a rich mastodon odor of the past. He was surprised to eneounter these feelings again-not by their having survived so much as by their undeniable vividness and force. A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again-finding himself once more in possession of this buried treasure, Joe saw more clearly than ever that for the past dozen years or so, he had been, more or less, a dead man. His daily fried egg and pork chop, his collection of false beards and mustaches, the hasty sponge-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the impressions left by a strange novel read under the influence of a high fever.
The return of his feelings for Rosa-of his very youth itself-after so long a disappearance ought to have been a cause for delight, but Joe felt terribly guilty about it. He did not want to be that twinkle-eyed, ascot-wearing, Fiat-driving mainstay of Rosa's stories, the home-wrecker. In the past few days, he had, it was true, lost all his illusions about Sammy and Rosa's marriage (which, as we tend to do with missed opportunities, he had, over the years, come to idealize). The solid suburban bond that he had, from a distance, half-ruefully and half-contentedly conjured to himself at night, proved, at close range, to be even more than ordinarily complicated and problematic. But whatever the state of things between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years. They were unmistakably a couple. They spoke alike, employing a household slang-"pea-bee and jay," "idiot box"- talking on top of each other, finishing each other's sentences, amiably cutting each other off. Sometimes they both went at Joe at the same time, telling parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation. Sammy made tea for Rosa and brought it to her in her studio. She ironed his shirt with grim precision every night before she retired. And they had evolved a remarkable system of producing comic books as a couple (though they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay & Clay). Sammy brought forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied him with at birth, and then Rosa talked him through a plot, supplying him with a constant stream of refinements that neither of them seemed to realize were coming from her. And Sammy went over the pages of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drawing when it got too elaborate, coaxing her into maintaining the simple strong line, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte. Rosa and Sam were not together much-except in bed, a place that remained a source of great mystery and interest to Joe-but when they were, they seemed to be very involved with each other.
So it was unthinkable that he should interpose himself and make the claim his reawakened love urged upon him; but he could think of nothing else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed embarrassment. In the hospital in Cuba, he had conceived a grateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis from Texas, and had spent an excruciating month in the arid heat of Guantanamo Bay trying to keep himself from getting an erection every time she came around to sponge him down. It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.
Furthermore, he sensed that she was avoiding him, shunning beforehand the unwelcome advances he could not bring himself to make, which caused him to feel like even more of a heel. After their initial conversation in the kitchen, he and Rosa seemed to find it hard to get a second one started. For a while, he was so preoccupied by his clumsy attempts at small talk that he failed to remark her own reticence whenever they were alone. When he finally did notice it, he attributed her silence to animosity. For days, he stood in the cold shower of her imagined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved. Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he might go off in a failed pursuit of an impossible revenge; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her-so he imagined that she imagined-in all those years away. The expanding gas of silence between them only excited his shame and lust the more. In the absence of verbal intercourse, he became hyperaware of other signs of her-the jumble of her makeups and creams and lotions in the bathroom, the Spanish moss of her lingerie dangling from the shower-curtain rod, the irritable tinkle of her spoon against her teacup from the garage, messages from the kitchen written in oregano, bacon, onions cooked in fat.
At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say something, but the only thing he could think of to say was Please forgive me. He would make a formal apology, as long and abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy. He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out.
"Look," he said, "I'm sorry."
"What did you do?"
"I'm sorry for everything, I mean."
"Oh. That," she said. "All right."
"I know you must be angry."
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, brow wide and smooth, lips compressed into a doubtful pout. He could not read the expression in her eyes-it kept changing. Finally, she looked down at her freckled arms, rosy and flushed.
"I have no right to be."
"I hurt your feelings. I abandoned you. I left Sammy to do my job."
"I don't hold that against you," she said. "Not at all. And neither does he, I don't think, not really. We both understand why you left. We understood then."
"Thank you," Joe said. "Maybe you can explain it to me sometimes."
"It was when you didn't come home, Joe. It was when you jumped overboard, or whatever it was you did."
"I'm sorry for that, too."
"That was something that was very hard for me to understand."
He reached for her hand, taken aback by his own daring. She let him hold it for nine seconds, then reclaimed it. Her eyes crossed a little with reproach.
"I didn't know how to come back to you," he said. "I was trying for years, believe me."
He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his. He put his hand on her heavy breast. They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klayman from its nail. Joe began to dig around inside the zipper fly of her jeans. The metal teeth bit into his wrist. He was sure that she was going to pull down her jeans and he was going to climb on top of her, right there in the hallway before Tommy came home from school. He had been wrong all along; it was not anger that she had interposed between them but the pane of an inexpressible longing like his own. Then the next thing he knew, they were standing up again in the middle of the hall, and the various sirens and air-raid beacons that had been going wild all around them seemed to have fallen silent abruptly. She replaced the various things he had left in disarray, zipped her trousers, smoothed her hair. The color on her lips had smeared all over her cheeks.
"Hum," she said. And then, "Maybe not yet."
"I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone.
"How did you do it, anyway?" she said. The tips of her teeth were stained with tea. "Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean."
"I was never on it," Joe said. "I went out on a plane the night before."
"There were orders. I don't know, medical certificates. Sammy showed me the photostats."
He put on a mysterious Cavalieri smile.
"Always true to the code," she said.
"It was very cleverly done."
"I'm sure it was, dear. You were always a clever boy."
He pressed his lips to the parting of her hair. It had an intriguing match-head smell of the Lapsang she preferred.
"What are we going to do?" he said.
She didn't answer at first. She let go and stepped away from him, head tilted to one side, arching a brow; a taunting look that he remembered very well from their previous time together.
"I have an idea," she said. "Why don't you try to figure out where we're going to put all your goddamned comic books?"
NINETY-FIVE, NINETY-SIX, N I N ET Y-S E VE N. NINETY-SEVEN." "A hundred and two."
"I count ninety-seven."
"You miscounted."
"We're going to need a truck."
"This is what I have been telling you."
"A truck and then a whole fucking warehouse."
"I've always wanted a warehouse," Joe said. "That's always been the dream of mine."
Though Joe preferred to remain vague on the subject of just how many comic books, crammed into pine crates of his own manufacture- complete runs of Action and Detective, Blackhawk and Captain America, of Crime Does Not Pay and Justice Traps the Guilty, of Classics Illustrated and Picture Stories from the Bible, of Whiz and Wow and Zip and Zoot and Smash and Crash and Pep and Punch, of Amazing and Thrilling and Terrific and Popular-he actually owned, there was nothing at all vague about the letter he had received from lawyers representing Realty Associates Securities Corporation, the owners of the Empire State Building. Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., had been evicted for violating the terms of its lease, which meant that the ninety-seven or one hundred and two wooden crates, filled with comic books, that Joe had amassed- along with all of his other belongings-must either be transported or disposed of.
"So toss 'em," Sammy said. "What's the big deal?"
Joe sighed. Although all the world-even Sammy Clay, who had spent most of his adult life making and selling them-viewed them as trash, Joe loved his comic books: for their inferior color separation, their poorly trimmed paper stock, their ads for air rifles and dance courses and acne creams, for the basement smell that clung to the older ones, the ones that had been in storage during Joe's travels. Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art. Comic books had sustained his sanity during his time on the psychiatric ward at Gitmo. For the whole of the fall and winter following his return to the mainland, which Joe spent shivering in a rented cabin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, with the wind whistling in through the chinks in the clapboard, half-poisoned by the burned-hair smell of an old electric heater, it was only ten thousand Old Gold cigarettes and a pile of Captain Marvel Adventures (comprising the incredible twenty-four-month epic struggle between the Captain and a telepathic, world-conquering earthworm, Mr. Mind) that had enabled Joe to fight off, once and for all, the craving for morphine with which he had returned from the Ice.
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history-his home-the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt-especially right after the war-a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waistedgoddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss-though he would never have spoken of it in these terms-was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic-not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world-the reality- that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
"I know you think it's all just crap," he said. "But you should not of all people think this."
"Yeah, yeah," Sammy said. "Okay."
"What are you looking at?"
Sammy had edged his way out into Miss Smyslenka's office and was untying one of the stacked portfolios. At nine o'clock that morning, on his way into the Pharaoh offices, he had dropped Joe off here, to begin the laborious process of clearing himself out. It was nearly eight p.m. now, and Joe had been dragging, packing, and repacking, without a break, all day. His shoulders ached, and his fingertips were raw, and he was feeling out of sorts. It had been disorienting to come back here and. find everything as he had left it-and then to have to begin to dismantle it. And he was stung by the look in Sammy's eye just now when he walked in and found Joe still at work, finishing the job. Sammy had looked pleasantly surprised-not that the job was finished, Joe thought, so much as to find that Joe was still there. They all thought-all three of them-that he was going to leave them again.
"I'm just taking another look at these pages of yours," Sammy said. "This is beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. I'm really looking forward to reading it all."
"I don't think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark."
"It does seem dark."
"Too dark for a comic book, I think."
"Is this the beginning? God, look at that splash." Sammy, his overcoat slung over one arm, sank to the floor beside the broad pile of black cardboard portfolios that they had bought this morning at Pearl Paints, so that Joe could pack up his five years of work. His voice turned dark and cobwebbed. "The Golem!" He shook his head, studying the first splash page-there were forty-seven splash pages in all-at the head of the first chapter of the 2,256-page comic book that Joe had produced during his time at Kornblum Vanishing Creams; he had just begun work on the forty-eighth and final chapter when Tommy gave him up to the authorities.
Joe had arrived in New York in the fall of 1949 with a twofold intention: to begin work on a long story about the Golem, which had been coming to him, panel by panel and chapter by chapter, in his dreams, in diners, on long bus rides all across the south and northwest, since he had set out from Chincoteague three years before; and, gradually, carefully, even at first perhaps stealthily, to see Rosa again. He had reestablished a few tentative connections to the city-renting an office in the Empire State Building, resuming his visits to the back room at Louis Tannen's, opening an account at Pearl Paints-and then settled in to implement his double plan. But while he had gotten off to a fine and rapid start on the work that would, he hoped at the time, transform people's views and understanding of the art form that in 1949 he alone saw as a means of self-expression as potent as a Cole Porter tune in the hands of a Lester Young, or a cheap melodrama about an unhappy rich man in the hands of an Orson Welles, it proved much harder for him to return himself, even a little at a time, to the orbit of Rosa Saks Clay. The Golem was going so well; it absorbed all of his time and attention. And as he immersed himself ever deeper into its potent motifs of Prague and its Jews, of magic and murder, persecution and liberation, guilt that could not be expiated and innocence that never stood a chance-as he dreamed, night after night at his drawing table, the long and hallucinatory tale of a wayward, unnatural child, Josef Golem, that sacrificed itself to save and redeem the little lamplit world whose safety had been entrusted to it, Joe came to feel that the work-telling this story-was helping to heal him. All of the grief and black wonder that he was never able to express, before or afterward, not to a navy psychiatrist, nor to a fellow drifter in some cheap hotel near Orlando, Florida, nor to his son,nor to any of those few who remained to love him when he finally returned to the world, all of it went into the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely minced panels of his monstrous comic book.
At some point, he had begun to tell himself that his plan was not merely twofold but two-step-that when he was finished with The Golem, then he would be ready to see Rosa again. He had left her- escaped from her-in grief and rage and a spasm of irrational blame. It would be best, he told himself-wouldn't it?-for him to return to her purged of all that. But while there might have been at first some merit in this rationalization, by 1953, when Tommy Clay had stumbled upon him in the magic shop, Joe's ability to heal himself had long since been exhausted. He needed Rosa-her love, her body, but above all, her forgiveness-to complete the work that his pencils had begun. The only trouble was that, by then, as he had told Rosa, it was too late. He had waited too long. The sixty miles of Long Island that separated him from Rosa seemed more impassable than the jagged jaw of one thousand between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, than the three blocks of London that lay between Wakefield and his loving wife.
"Is there even a script?" Sammy said, turning over another page. "Is it, what, is it like a silent movie?"
There were no balloons in any of the panels, no words at all except for those that appeared as part of the artwork itself-signs on buildings and roads, labels on bottles, addresses on love letters that formed part of the plot-and the two words the golem! which reappeared on the splash page at the start of each chapter, each time in a different guise, the eight letters and exclamation point transformed now into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into nine marionettes, nine spidery bloodstains, the long shadows of nine haunted and devastating women. Joe had intended eventually to paste in balloons and fill them with text, but he had never been able to bring himself to mar the panels in this way.
"There is a script. In German."
"That ought to go over big."
"It will not go over at all. It's not to sell." Something paradoxical had occurred in the five years he had worked on The Golem: the more of himself, of his heart and his sorrows, that he had poured into the strip-the more convincingly he demonstrated the power of the comic book as a vehicle of personal expression-the less willingness he felt to show it to other people, to expose what had become the secret record of his mourning, of his guilt and retribution. It made him nervous just to have Sammy paging through it. "Come on, Sam, hey? Maybe we'd better go."
But Sammy was not listening. He was flipping slowly through the pages of the first chapter, deciphering the action from the flow of wordless images across the page. Joe was aware of a strange warmth in his belly, behind his diaphragm, as he watched Sammy read his secret book.
"I-I guess I could try to tell you-" he began.
"It's fine, I'm getting it." Sammy reached into the pocket of his overcoat, without looking, and took out his wallet. He pulled out a few bills, ones and a five. "Tell you what," he said. "I think I'm gonna be here for a while." He looked up. "Could you eat?"
"You're going to read this now?"
"Sure."
"All of it?"
"Why not? I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius."
Joe rubbed at the side of his nose, feeling the warmth of Sammy's flattery spread to his legs and fill his throat. "Okay," he said at last. "So you can read it. But maybe you can wait till we get home?"
"I don't want to wait."
"I'm being evicted."
"Fuck them."
Joe nodded and took the money from Sammy. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had allowed his cousin to boss him around in this way. He found that, as in the past, he rather liked it.
"And, Joe," Sammy said, without looking up from the pile of pages. Joe waited. "Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it's okay, if you want to… that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you're his father."
"I see. Yes, I suppose you're… I will talk to him."
"We could all do it. Maybe we could sit him down. You. His mother. Me."
"Sammy," Joe said. "I don't know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But-thank you."
"For what?"
"I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don't deserve to have a friend like you."
"Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I'm such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn't want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew."
"Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew."
"It's that simple."
Joe shook his head. "That could be or is why you married her," he said. "But that doesn't explain how come you stayed. You are Tommy's father, Sammy. As much or really, I think, a lot more than I am."
"I did the easy thing," Sammy said. "Try it, you'll see." He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of golems through the ages. "So," he said, "they make a goat."
"Uh, yes," Joe said. "Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya."
"A goat golem."
"Out of earth."
"And then…" Sammy's finger traced the course of the episode down and across the page. "After they go to all this trouble. It looks like it's kind of dangerous, making a golem."
"It is."
"After all that, they just… they eat it?"
Joe shrugged. "They were hungry," he said.
Sammy said that he knew how they felt, and even though he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sammy and Rosa, kneeling together beside a flickering crucible, working to fashion something that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand.
He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Empire State Pharmacy, on his usual stool, though for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes. He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did. He sat back and cracked his knuckles. He saw the counterman giving him a look. Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, moved two stools down the line, so that he was sitting right beside the window that looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see him.
"Make that a cheeseburger," he said.
While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of meat on the grill, Joe looked out the window and mulled over the things that Sammy had just revealed. He had never given much consideration to the feelings that had, for a few months during the fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together. To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands. The suddenness with which Sammy had swooped in, following Joe's enlistment, to marry Rosa-as if all that time he had been waiting, racked by a sexual impatience at once barely suppressed and perfectly conventional, to get Joe out of the way-had seemed to Joe to mark decisively the end of Sammy's brief experiment in bohemian rebellion. Sammy and Rosa had a child, moved to the suburbs, buckled down. For years they had lived, vividly, in Joe's imagination, as loving husband and wife, Sammy's arm around her shoulders, her arm encircling his waist, framed in an arching trellis of big, red American roses. It was only now, watching the traffic stalled on Thirty-third Street, smoking his way through a cheeseburger and glass of ginger ale, that he grasped the whole truth. Not only had Sammy never loved Rosa; he was not capable of loving her, except with the half-mocking, companionable affection he always had felt for her, a modest structure, never intended for extended habitation, long since buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame. It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe's or for Rosa's or for Tommy's sake, but for his own: not a merely gallant gesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-immurement. Joe was appalled.
He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with the raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems- from Rabbi Loew's to Victor von Frankenstein's-lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these-Faustian hubris, least of all-were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something-one poor, dumb, powerful thing-exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.
"You need something else?" said the counterman, as Joe wiped his mouth and then threw his napkin to his plate.
"Yes, a fried-egg sandwich," Joe said. "With extra mayonnaise."
An hour after he had left, carrying a brown paper bag that contained the fried-egg sandwich and a package of Pall Malls, because he knew that by now Sammy would be out of cigarettes, Joe returned for the last time to Suite 7203. Sammy had taken off his jacket and his shoes. His necktie lay coiled around him on the floor.
"We have to do it," he said.
"Have to do what?"
"I'll tell you in a minute. I think I'm almost done. Am I almost done?"
Joe bent forward to see how far Sammy had gotten. The Golem appeared to have reached the twisting and jerry-built stairway, all splintered wood and protruding nails-it was almost, deliberately, like something out of Segar or Fontaine Fox-that would lead him to the tumbledown gates of Heaven itself.
"You're almost done."
"It goes faster when there aren't words."
Sammy took the bag from Joe, unrolled it, and peered inside. He took out the foil-wrapped sandwich, and then the pack of cigarettes.
"I worship at your feet," he said, tapping the pack with a finger. He ripped it open and drew one out with his lips.
Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down. Sammy lit up the cigarette and flipped-a bit carelessly, to Joe's mind-through the last dozen or so pages. He set his cigarette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio. He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chewing while he smoked.
"So?"
"So," Sammy said. "You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here."
"I know it."
"What's the matter with you, did you have a relapse?"
"I eat a pork chop every day." Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine.
"Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel," Sammy read. "By Angelo S. Rappoport." He flipped through the pages, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticism, as if he thought he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt. "You're into all this now?"
Joe shrugged. "It's all lies," he said mildly. "I guess."
"I remember when you first got here. That first day we went into Anapol's office. Do you remember that?"
Joe said that naturally he remembered that day.
"I handed you a Superman comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Golem. And I thought you were an idiot."
"And I was."
"And you were. But that was 1939. In 1954, I don't think the Golem makes you such an idiot anymore. Let me ask you something." He looked around for a napkin, then picked up his necktie and wiped his shining lips. "Have you seen what Bill Gaines is doing over there at E.C.?"
"Yes, of course."
"They are not doing kid stuff over there. They have the top artists. They have Crandall. I know you always liked him."
"Crandall is the top, no doubt."
"And the stuff they are doing, grown-ups are reading it. Adults. It's dark. It's also mean, I think, but look around you, this is a mean age we're living in. Have you seen the Heap?"
"I love the Heap."
"The Heap, I mean, come on, that's a comic book character? He's basically, what, a sentient pile of mud and weeds and, I don't know, sediment. With that tiny little beak. He breaks things. But he's supposed to be a hero."
"I see what you're saying."
"This is what I'm saying. It's 1954. You got a pile of dirt walking around, the kids think that's admirable. Imagine what they'll think of the Golem."
"You want to publish this."
"Maybe not quite like it is here."
"Ah."
"It is awfully Jewish."
"True."
"Who knew you knew all that stuff? Kabbalah, is that what it's called? All those angels and… and, is that what they are, angels?"
"Mostly."
"This is what I'm thinking. There's something to all this. Not just the Golem character. Your angels-do they have names?"
"There's Metatron. Uriel. Michael. Raphael. Samael. He's the bad one."
"With the tusks?"
Joe nodded.
"I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes."
"Well, it's a comic book."
"This is what I'm thinking."
"Jewish superheroes?"
"What, they're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Rent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."
Joe pointed to the stack of bulging portfolios on the ground between them. "But half the characters in there are rabbis, Sammy."
"All right, so we tone it down."
"You want us to work together again?"
"Well… actually… I don't know, I'm just talking off the top of my head. This is just so good. It makes me want to… make something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of."
"You can be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along."
"What do you mean, all along, you've been gone since Pearl Harbor."
"In my mind."
"No wonder I didn't get the message."
Then, startling both of them, there was a flat, tentative knock. Someone was rapping on the frame of the open door to the corridor.
"Anyone here?" said an oboe voice, tentative and oddly familiar to Joe. "Hello?"
"Holy Amazing Midget Radio," Sammy said. "Look who it is."
"I heard I might find you boys up here," said Sheldon Anapol. He came into the room and shook hands with Sammy, then shambled over and stood in front of Joe. He had lost almost all of his hair, though none of his bulk, and his jaw, more mightily jowled than ever, was set in a defiant scowl. But his eyes, it seemed to Joe, were shining, full of tenderness and regret, as if he were seeing not Joe but the twelve years that had passed since their last encounter. "Mr. Kavalier."
"Mr. Anapol."
They shook hands, and then Joe felt himself being enveloped in the big man's fierce and sour embrace.
"You crazy son of a bitch," he said after he let Joe loose.
"Yes," Joe said.
"You look good, how are you?"
"I'm not bad."
"What was all that narrishkeit the other day, eh? You made me look very bad. I should be furious with you." He turned to Sammy. "I should be furious with him, don't you think?"
Sammy cleared his throat. "No comment," he said.
"How are you?" Joe asked him. "How is business?"
"A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it's very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it's over they're going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town… you heard about that?"
"I heard."
"They served me," Sammy said.
"You got subpoenaed?" Anapol stuck out his lip. "I didn't get subpoenaed."
"An oversight," Joe suggested.
"Why would they subpoena you, you're just an editor at that fifth-rate house, pardon me for saying so?"
"I don't know," Sammy admitted.
"Who knows, maybe they've got something on you." He took out his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. "Jesus, what lunacy. I never should have let you two talk me out of the novelty business. Nobody ever made a big pile of whoopee cushions and lit them on fire, let me tell you." He went over to the lone chair. "Mind if I sit down?" He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness. "Let me tell you something else," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't come up here just because I wanted to say hello to Kavalier. I thought I ought to-I thought you might want to know."
"Know what?" Sammy said.
"You remember we had that lawsuit?" Anapol said.
The next day-the twenty-first of April, 1954-the Court of Appeals of the State of New York would finally hand down a ruling in the matter of National Periodical Publications, Inc. v. Empire Comics, Inc. The suit had, in that time, made its way in and out of the courts, with settlements proposed and rejected, weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages. National's case, in the business, was generally felt to be weak. Though both Superman and the Escapist shared skintight costumes, immense strength, and the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings, the same qualities and features were shared by a host of other characters who had appeared in the comic books since 1958; or had been shared, at any rate, until those characters, one by one or in wholesale lots, had met their demise in the great superhero burn-off that followed the Second World War. Though it was true that National had also pursued Fawcett's Captain Marvel and Victor Fox's Wonder Man through the courts, a raft of other strong men who favored performing their feats, including flying, while wearing some form of undergarment-Amazing Man, Master Man, the Blue Beetle, the Black Condor, the Sub-Mariner-had been allowed to go about their business unmolested, without any apparent loss of income to National. Many would argue, in fact, that greater inroads into the hegemony of Superman in the marketplace had been made by his successors and imitators at National itself-Hourman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Starman, the Green Lantern-many of whom were but distortions or pale reflections of the original. What was more, as Sammy had always argued, the character of Superman itself represented the amalgamation of "a bunch of ideas those guys stole from somebody else," in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Dann was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator; from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan, noble protector of a world of inferior beings; and from Lee Falk's newspaper comic strip The Phantom, whose eponymous hero had pioneered the fashion for colorful union suits among implacable foes of crime. In so many of his particulars, the Master of Elusion-a human showman, vulnerable, dependent on his team of assistants- bore very little resemblance to the Son of Krypton. Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term "superhero" had even been arrived at. [18] In the end, in its wisdom, the full panel of the Court of Appeals, overturning the ruling of the state Supreme Court, would side against the prevailing opinion in the comics trade and find in favor of the plaintiffs, sealing the Escapist's doom.
Like the news of the Treaty of Ghent to General Lambert at Biloxi, however, word of the court's ruling, when it came, already would have been overtaken by events.
"Today," Anapol said, "I killed the Escapist."
"What?"
"I killed him. Or let's say he's retired. I called Louis Nizer, I told him, Nizer, you win. As of today, the Escapist is officially retired. I give up. I'm settling. I'm signing his death warrant."
"Why?" Joe said.
"I've been losing money on the Escapist titles for a few years now. There was still some value in the property, you know, from various licensing arrangements, so I had to keep publishing him, just to keep the trademark viable. But his circulation figures have been in a nosedive for quite some time. Superheroes are dead, boys. Forget about it. None of our big hitters-Scofflaw, Jaws of Horror, Hearts and Flowers, Bobby Sox-none of them are superhero books."
Joe had gathered as much from Sammy. The age of the costumed superhero had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Rid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the great heroes of the forties, only the stalwarts at National-Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a few of their cohorts-soldiered on with any regularity or commercial clout, and even they had been forced to suffer the indignity of seeing their wartime sales cut in half or more, of receiving second billing in titles where formerly they headlined, or of having forced upon them by increasingly desperate writers various attention-getting novelties and gimmicks, from fifteen different shades and flavors of Kryptonite to Bat-Hounds, Bat-Monkeys, and a magical-powered little elf-eared nudnick known as the Bat-Mite.
"He's dead," Sammy said wonderingly. "I can't believe it."
"Believe it," Anapol said. "This whole industry is dead after these hearings. You heard it here first, boys." He stood up. "That's why I'm getting out."
"Getting out? You mean you're selling Empire?"
Anapol nodded. "After I called Louis Nizer, I called my lawyer and told him to start working on the papers now. I want to get some sucker in there before the roof falls in." He looked around at the stacks of crates. "Look at this place," he said. "You always were a slob, Kavalier."
"True," Joe said.
Anapol started to walk out, then turned back. "You remember that day?" he said. "You two came in with that picture of the Golem and told me you were going to make me a million bucks."
"And we did," Sammy said. "A lot more than a million."
Anapol nodded. "Good night, boys," he said. "Good luck."
When he had gone, Sammy said, "I wish I had a million dollars." He said it tenderly, watching something lovely and invisible before him.
"Why?" Joe said.
"I'd buy Empire."
"You would? But I thought you hate comic books. You are embarrassed by them. If you had a million dollars, you could do anything else you wanted."
"Yeah," Sammy said. "You're right. What am I saying? Only you got me all stirred up with this Golem thing of yours. You always did have a way of confusing my priorities like that."
"Did I? Do I?"
"You always used to make it seem okay to believe in all this baloney."
"I think it was okay," Joe said. "I don't think maybe neither of us should have stopped."
"You were frustrated," Sammy said. "You wanted to get your hands on some real Germans."
Joe didn't say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy.
"Huh," he said finally.
"You killed Germans?"
"One," Joe said. "It was an accident."
"Did you-did it make you feel-"
"It made me feel like the worst man in the world."
"Hmm," Sammy said. He had gone back over to the final chapter of The Golem and stood staring down at a panel in which the clapper in the porter's bell on the doorpost of Heaven's gate was revealed to be a grinning human skull.
"Funny about the Escapist," Joe said, feeling that he wanted to get a hug from Sammy but checked somehow by the thought that it was something he had never done before. "I mean, not funny, but."
"Isn't it, though."
"Do you feel sad?"
"A little." Sammy looked up from the last page of The Golem and pursed his lips. He seemed to be shining a light on some dark corner of his feelings, to see if there was anything in it. "Not as much as I would have thought. It's been such a, you know. A long time." He shrugged. "What about you?"
"Like you." He took a step toward Sammy. "It was a long time."
He laid an arm, awkwardly, around Sammy's shoulders, and Sammy hung his head, and they rocked back and forth a little, remembering aloud that morning in 1939 when they had borne the Escapist and his company of fellow adventurers into Sheldon Anapol's office in the Kramler Building, Sammy whistling "Frenesi," Joe filled with the rapture and rage of the imaginary punch he had just landed on the jaw of Adolf Hitler.
"That was a good day," Joe said.
"One of the best," said Sammy.
"How much money do you have?"
"Not a million, that's for sure." Sammy stepped out from under Joe's arm. His eyes narrowed, and he looked suddenly shrewd and Anapolian. "Why? How much do you have, Joe?"
"It isn't quite a million," Joe said.
"It isn't quite-you mean to say that you-oh. That money."
Every week for two years, starting in 1939, Joe had socked money into the fund that he intended for the support of his family when they reached America. He anticipated that their health might have suffered, and that it might be difficult for them to get work. Most of all, he wanted to buy them a house, a detached house on its own patch of grass somewhere in the Bronx or New Jersey. He wanted them never to have to share a roof with anyone again. By the end of 1941, he was putting in more than a thousand dollars at a time. Since then-apart from the ten thousand dollars he had spent to doom fifteen children to lie forever among the sediments of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge-he had barely touched it; in fact, the account had been swelled, even in his absence, by royalties from the Escapist radio program, which had aired well into 1944, and by the two largish lump payments he had received as his share of the Parnassus serial deal.
"Yes," he said. "I still have it."
"It's just."
"Sitting there," Joe said. "In the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Since… well, since the Ark of Miriam sank. On December 6, 1941."
"Twelve years and four months."
"Sitting there."
"That's a long time, too," Sammy said.
Joe agreed with this.
"I guess there really isn't any reason to leave it there," he said. The thought of working with Sammy again was very appealing. He had just spent five years drawing a comic book; all day, every day, taking a break every now and then, just long enough to read a comic book or two. He considered himself, at this point, to be the greatest comic book artist in the history of the world. He could dilate a crucial episode in the life of a character over ten pages, slicing his panels ever thinner until they stopped time completely and yet tumbled past with the irreversible momentum of life itself. Or he could spread a single instant across two pages in a single giant panel crammed with dancers, laboratory equipment, horses, trees and shadows, soldiers, drunken revelers at a wedding. When the mood called for it, he could do panels that were more than half shadow; pure black; and yet have everything visible and clear, the action unmistakable, the characters' expressions plain. With his un-English ear, he had made a study of, and understood, as the great comic artists always have, the power of written sound-effect words-of invented words like snik and plish and doit-appropriately lettered, for lending vividness to a jackknife, a rain puddle, a half-crown against the bottom of a blind man's empty tin cup. And yet he had run out of things to draw. His Golem was finished, or nearly so, and for the first time in years he found himself-as on every level of his life and emotions- wondering what he was going to do next.
"You'd think I would," he began. "You would think I'd be able to."
More than anything else, he wanted to be able to do something for Sammy. It shocked him to see just how beaten, how unhappy Sam had become. What a feat it would be, to reach into the dark sleeve of his past and pull out something that completely altered Sammy's condition; something that saved him, freed him, returned him to life. With a stroke of the pen, he would be able to hand Sammy, according to the ancient mysteries of the League, a golden key, to pass along the gift of liberation that he had received and that had, until now, gone unpaid.
"I know that I should," Joe continued. His voice thickened as he spoke, and his cheeks burned. He was crying; he had no idea why. "Oh, I should just get rid of it all."
"No, Joe." Now it was Sammy's turn to put his arm around Joe. "I understand you don't want to touch that money. I mean, I think I understand. I get that it… well, that it represents something to you that you don't want to ever forget."
"I forget every day," Joe said. He tried to smile. "You know? Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget."
"You just keep your money," Sammy said gently. "I don't need to own Empire Comics. That's the last thing I need."
"I… I couldn't. Sammy, I wish that I could, but I couldn't."
"I get it, Joe," Sammy said. "You just hold on to your money."
The day after the Escapist, Master of Elusion, whom no chains could hold nor walls imprison, was ruled out of existence by the New York State Court of Appeals, a white delivery van of modest dimensions pulled up in front of 127 Lavoisier Drive. On its panels, blue script like the writing on a beer bottle said bachelor button drayage inc. new york, arched over a painted nosegay of petite blue flowers. It was getting on toward five o'clock of a dull April afternoon, and though there was still plenty of daylight, the van's lights were turned on, as if for a funeral procession. It had been raining in fits all day, and with the approach of dusk, the heavy sky itself seemed to be settling, like a blanket, over Bloomtown, in gray folds and plaits among the houses. The slender trunks of the young maples, sycamores, and pin oaks on the neighbors' lawns looked white, almost phosphorescent, against the darker gray stuff of the afternoon.
The driver cut his engine, switched off the lights, and climbed down from the cab. He cranked the heavy latch at the back of the van, slid the bar to one side, and threw open the doors with a steely creak of hinges. He was an improbably diminutive man for his trade, thickset and bowlegged, in a bright blue coverall. As Rosa watched him through the front windows of the house, she saw him stare in at his payload with what appeared to be a puzzled expression. She supposed, given Sammy's description, that the hundred and two boxes of comic books and other junk that Joe had accumulated must make a strong impression even on a veteran mover. But perhaps the guy was only trying to decide how in the hell he was going to get all those boxes into the house by himself.
"What's he doing?" Tommy said. He stood beside her at the living-room window. He had just eaten three bowls of rice pudding, and he had a milky baby smell.
"Probably wondering how we're ever going to fit all of that crap into this shoe box," Rosa said. "I can't believe Joe contrived not to be here for this."
"You said 'crap.' "
"Sorry."
"Can I say 'crap'?"
"No." Rosa was wearing a sauce-spattered apron, and held a wooden spoon bloodied in the same red sauce. "I can't believe it all fits inside that one little truck."
"Ma, when is Joe coming back?"
"I'm sure he'll be back any minute." This was probably the fourth time she had said this since Tommy had come home from school. "I'm making chile con carne and rice pudding. He won't want to miss that."
"He really likes your cooking."
"He always did."
"He said if he never sees another pork chop again, it will be too soon."
"I would never cook a pork chop."
"Bacon is pork, and we eat bacon."
"Bacon is not actually pork. There are words in the Talmud to that effect."
They went out onto the front step.
"Kavalier?" the man called, trying to rhyme the name with its French cognate.
"As in Maurice," Rosa said.
"Got a package."
"That's kind of an understatement, isn't it?"
The man didn't reply. He climbed up inside his truck and disappeared for a while. First a wooden ramp emerged from the back, like a tongue, reaching toward the neighbors' Buick, then lolling on the ground. After that, there was a lot of banging and clamor, as though the man were in there rolling around a keg of beer. Presently he emerged, wrestling a hand truck down the ramp, under the weight of a large oblong wooden box.
"What is that?" Rosa said.
"I never saw that at Joe's," Tommy said. "Wow, it must be part of his equipment! It looks like a-oh my gosh-it's a packing crate escape! Oh, my gosh. Do you think he's going to teach me how to do it?"
I don't even know if he's ever coming back. "I don't know what he's going to do, honey," she said.
When Joe and Sammy had returned from the city last night with news of the Escapist's passing, they both seemed pensive, and said little before they each went to bed. Sammy seemed diffident, even apologetic, around Joe, scrambling up some eggs for him, asking him were they too runny, were they too dry, offering to fry some potatoes. Joe was monosyllabic, almost curt, Rosa would have said; he went to lie down on the couch without having exchanged more than a few dozen words with either Rosa or Sam. She saw that something had passed between the two men, but since neither of them said anything about it, she assumed it must have simply concerned the demise of their brainchild; perhaps they had engaged in recriminations over lost opportunities.
The news had certainly come as a shock to Rosa. Though she had not been a regular reader since the days of Kavalier & Clay-Sammy wouldn't have Empire books in the house-she still checked in with Radio and Escapist Adventures from time to time, killing a half hour at a Grand Central newsstand, or while waiting for a prescription at Spiegelman's. The character had long since slipped into cultural inconsequence, but the titles in which he starred had continued, as far as she knew, to sell. She'd assumed, more or less unconsciously, that the heroic puss of the Escapist would always be there, on lunch boxes, beach towels, on cereal boxes and belt buckles and the faces of alarm clocks, even on the Mutual Television Network, [19] taunting her with the wealth and the unimaginable contentment that, though she knew better, she could never help feeling would have been Sammy's had he been able to reap the fruits of the one irrefutable moment of inspiration vouchsafed him in his scattershot career. Rosa had stayed up very late trying to work, worrying about them both, and then slept in even later than usual. By the time she had woken up, both Joe and the Studebaker were gone. All his clothes were in his valise, and there was no note. Sammy seemed to feel these were good signs.
"He would leave a note," he said when she phoned him at the office. "If he were. Going to leave, I mean."
"There wasn't any note the last time," Rosa said.
"I really don't think he would steal our car."
Now here were all his things, and Joe was not. It was as if he had pulled a substitution trick on them, the old switcheroo.
"I guess we'll have to just cram it all into the garage," she said.
The stout little mover wheeled the crate up the walk to the front door, puffing and grimacing and nearly running off into the pansies. When he reached Rosa and Tommy, he tipped the hand truck forward onto its bracket. The crate tottered and seemed to consider pitching over before it settled, with a shiver, on its end.
"Weighs a ton," he said, flexing his fingers as if they were sore. "What's he got in there, bricks?"
"It's probably iron chains," Tommy explained in an authoritative tone. "And, like, padlocks and junk."
The man nodded. "A box of iron chains," he said. "Figures. Pleased to meetcha." He wiped his right hand down the front of his coverall and offered it to Rosa. "Al Button."
"Are you in fact a bachelor?" said Rosa.
"The name of the firm," Al Button said with an air of genuine regret, "is a little out-of-date." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of waybills and carbons, then took a pen from another breast pocket and uncapped it. "I'm going to need your John Hancock on this."
"Don't I need to sort of check everything off as you bring it in?" Rosa said. "That's how it worked when we moved out here from Brooklyn."
"You can go right ahead and check that off, if you want to," he said, with a nod to the crate as he handed the packet to Rosa. "That's all I have for you today."
Rosa checked the bill and found that it did itemize a single article, described pithily as Wood box. She paged through the other sheets of paper, but they were just carbon copies of the first.
"Where's the rest of it?"
"That's the only thing that I'm aware of," Button said. "Maybe you know better than me."
"There are supposed to be more than a hundred boxes coming out from the city. From the Empire State Building. Joe-Mr. Kavalier- arranged for the shipment yesterday afternoon."
"This didn't come from the Empire State Building, lady. I picked it up this morning at Penn Station."
"Penn Station? Wait a minute." She started to shuffle through the papers and carbons again. "Who is this from?" While the shipper's name was not quite legible, it did seem to begin with a R. The address, however, was a post-office box in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Rosa wondered if Joe had made it that far during his period of wandering, just after the war, and had left this box of whatever was in it behind.
"Nova Scotia," she said. "Who does Joe know in Nova Scotia?"
"And how did they know he was here?" Tommy said.
It was a very good question. Only the police and a few people at Pharaoh knew that Joe was staying with the Clays.
Rosa signed for the crate, and then Al Button jostled and cajoled it into the living room, where Rosa and Tommy helped him to walk it off of the dolly and onto the low-pile wall-to-wall.
"A box full of chains," Button repeated, his hand rough and dry against Rosa's. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."
After he left, closing up his truck and winding his funereal way back to the city, Rosa and Tommy stood there in the living room, studying the wood box. It was a good two feet taller than Rosa, and nearly twice as broad. It was made of solid pine, knotty and unvarnished except by the abrading rasp of its travels, dark yellow and stained like an animal's tooth. You could tell somehow, looking at it, that it had come a long way, suffered ill handling and exposure, had ignoble things spilled on it. It had been used as a table, perhaps, a bed, a barricade. There were black scuffs, and the corners and edges were tufted with splinters. If these were not suggestive enough of wide journeying, there was the incredible profusion of its labels: customs stamps and shipping-line decals, quarantine stickers and claim checks and certificates of weight. In places they were layered a few deep, bits of place-name and colorand handwriting all jumbled together. It reminded Rosa of a Cubist collage, a Kurt Schwitters. Clearly, Halifax was not the crate's point of origin. Rosa and Tommy tried to trace its history, peeling away at the layers of seal and sticker, timidly at first, then more carelessly as they were led backward from Halifax to Helsinki, to Murmansk, to Memel, to Leningrad, to Memel once more, to Vilnius, in Lithuania, and finally, scraping away now with the point of a kitchen knife at a particularly recalcitrant carbuncle of adhesive paper near the center of what appeared to be the crate's lid, to
"Prague," said Rosa. "What do you know."
"He's home," Tommy said, and Rosa didn't understand what he meant until she heard the sound of the Studebaker in the drive.
Joe had left the house very early that morning. For hours after saying good night to Rosa and Sammy, and long after they went to bed, Joe had lain awake on the couch in the living room, tormented by his thoughts and by the occasional brief giggle from the tank of the toilet down the hall. He had arranged for monthly withdrawals to pay the rent on the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., and had not permitted himself to consider the total sum of the money he had on deposit in a very long time. The variety of the grandiose and homely schemes it had once been intended to fund was extravagant-he had at one time lavishly overspent in his imagination-and after the war, the money always felt to him like a debt owed, and unrepayable. He had bankrupted himself on plans: a house for his family in Riverdale or Westchester, a flat for his old teacher Bernard Kornblum in a nice building on the Upper West Side. He saw to it, in his fantasies, that his mother obtained the services of a cook, a fur coat, the leisure to write and to see patients as little as she chose. Her study in the big Tudor house had a bay window and heavy timbering, which she painted white because she dreaded gloomy rooms. It was bright and uncluttered, with Navajo rugs and cacti in pots. For his grandfather, there were an entire wardrobe of suits, a dog, a Panamuse record player like Sammy's. His grandfather sat in the conservatory with three elderly friends and sang Weber songs to the accompaniment of their flutes. For Thomas, there were riding lessons, fencing lessons, trips to the Grand Canyon, a bicycle, a set of encylopedias, and-that most-coveted item for sale in the pages of comic books-an air rifle, so that Thomas could shoot at crows or woodchucks or (more likely given his tender feelings) tin cans, when they went out, at weekends, to the country house up in Putnam County that Joe was going to buy.
These designs of his embarrassed him almost as much as they saddened him. But the truth was that, as he lay there smoking, in his underpants, Joe was tormented, even more than by the ruins of his fatuous dreams, by the knowledge that even now, down in the mysterious manufactory of foolishness that was synonymous in some way with his heart, they were tooling up to bring out an entire new line of moonshine. He could not stop coming up with ideas-costume designs and backdrops, character names, narrative lines-for a series of comic books based on Jewish aggadah and folklore; it was as if they had been there all along, wanting only a nudge from Sammy to come tumbling out in a thrilling disorder. The notion of spending the $974,000 that was steadily compounding at the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union to float the recommissioned Kavalier & Clay agitated him so much that his stomach hurt. No, agitation was not the honest word for it. What he felt was excited.
Sammy had been right about long-underwear heroes in 1939; Joe had a feeling that he was right in 1954. William Gaines and his E.C. Comics had taken all but one of the standard comic book genres- romance, Western, war stories, crime, the supernatural, et cetera-and invested them with darker emotions, less childish plots, stylish pencils, and moody inks. The only genre they had ignored or avoided (except to ridicule it in the pages of Mad) was that of the costumed superhero. What if-he was not sure if this was what Sammy had in mind, but after all, it would be his money-the same kind of transformation were attempted on the superhero? If they tried to do stories about costumed heroes who were more complicated, less childish, as fallible as angels.
At last he ran out of cigarettes and gave up on sleep for the night. He pulled his clothes back on, took a banana from the bowl on the kitchen counter, and stepped outside.
It was not yet five o'clock in the morning, and the Bloomtown streets were deserted, the houses dark, furtive, all but invisible. A steady salt breeze blew in from the sea eight miles away. Later, it would bring fitful rain and the gloom that Mr. Al Button would attempt to relieve byturning on the wan headlights of his van, but for now there were no clouds, and the sky that, in this single-story town of stunted saplings and barren lawns, could seem, by day, as unbearably tall and immense as the sky over some blasted Nebraska prairie, was bestowing itself upon Bloomtown like a blessing, filling in the emptiness with dark blue velveteen and stars. A dog barked two blocks away, and the sound raised gooseflesh on Joe's arm. He had been on and around the Atlantic Ocean plenty of times since the sinking of the Ark of Miriam; the train of association linking Thomas, in Joe's mind, to the body of water that had swallowed him had long since worn away. But from time to time, especially if, as now, his brother was already in his thoughts, the smell of the sea could unfurl the memory of Thomas like a flag. His snoring, the half-animal snuffle of his breath coming from the other bed. His aversion to spiders, lobsters, and anything that crept like a disembodied hand. A much-thumbed mental picture of him at the age of seven or eight, in a plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, sitting beside the Kavaliers' big Philips, knees to his chest, eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth while, with all his might, he listened to some Italian opera or other.
That bathrobe, its lapels whipstitched in heavy black thread; that radio, its lines Gothic and its dial, like an atlas of the ether, imprinted with the names of world capitals; those leather moccasins with their beaded tepees on the vamps-these were all things that he was never going to see again. The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his expedience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday-but when?-he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there-somewhere-waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militar-und Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography-that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario-which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase. He realized now that this kind of hopeless but ineradicable conviction lay at the heart of his inability to let go of the money that he had banked all those years ago in the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Somewhere in his heart, or wherever it was that such errors are cherished and fed, he believed that someone-his mother, his grandfather, Bernard Kornblum-might still, in spite of everything, turn up. Such things happened all the time; those reported shot in Lodz Ghetto or carried off by typhus at the Zehlendorf DP camp turned up owning grocery stores in Sao Paulo or knocking on the front door of a brother-in-law in Detroit looking for a handout, older, frailer- altered beyond recognition or disarmingly unchanged-but alive.
He went back into the house, tied his necktie, put on a jacket, and took the car keys from their hook in the kitchen. He was not sure where he was going to go, not at first, but the smell of the sea lingered in his nose, and he had a vague notion of taking the car and driving down to Fire Island for an hour, returning before anybody even knew that he was gone.
The idea of driving excited him, too. From the moment he saw it, Sammy and Rosa's car had aroused his interest. The navy had taught Joe to drive, and he had taken to it with his usual aplomb. His happiest moments during the war had been three brief trips he had made behind the wheel of a jeep at Guantanamo Bay. That was a dozen years ago; he hoped he had not forgotten how.
He found his way out onto Route 24 without any problem, but somehow or other he missed the turn to East Islip, and before he quite recognized it, he was on his way into the city. The car smelled of Rosa's lipstick and Sammy's hair cream and a salt-and-wool residue of winter. There was almost no one on the road for a long time, and when he encountered other travelers, he felt a mild sense of pleasant kinship with them as they followed the light of their headlights into the western darkness. On the radio, Rosemary Clooney was singing "Hey There," and then when he gave the dial a spin she was there again, singing "This Ole House." He rolled down the window and sometimes there was a sound of grasses and night bugs and sometimes the lowing of a train. Joe loosened his grip on the wheel and lost himself in the string sections of the hit songs and the rumble of the Champion's straight-8. After a while he realized that a fair amount of time had gone by without his having thought of anything at all, least of all about what exactly he was going to do when he reached New York.
Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge-not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there-he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.
At Union Square West, he pulled up in front of the Workingman's Credit Building, home of the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Of course there was nowhere to park. Traffic piled up at the Studebaker's rear as Joe trolled for a space, and each time he slowed, the angry fanfare of horns started up again. A bus came roaring out from behind him, and the faces of its passengers glared down at him from the windows, or mocked him in his ineptitude with their blank indifference. On his third time around the block, Joe slowed once more in front of the building. The curb here was painted bright red. Joe sat, trying to decide what to do. Inside the grimy magnificent pile of the Workingman's Credit Building, in the gloomy transom-lit offices of the Crafts Union bank, the account lay slumbering under years of interest and dust. All he had to do was go in there and say that he wanted to make a withdrawal.
There was a rap on the window on his side of the car. Joe jumped, stepping on the gas as he did so. The car lurched forward a few inches before he scrabbled his foot onto the brake and brought it to a halt with a rude little burp of the tires.
"Whoa!" cried the patrolman, who had come to inquire as to just what Joe meant by holding up the traffic on Fifth Avenue like this, at the busiest hour of the morning. He jumped away from the car, hopping on one leg, clutching at his shining left shoe with both hands.
Joe rolled down the window.
"You just ran over my foot!" the policeman said.
"I'm so sorry," Joe said.
The policeman returned his shoe to the pavement, cautiously, then settled his considerable weight onto it a little at a time. "I think it's all right. You ran over the empty bit at the toe. Lucky for you."
"I borrowed this car from my cousin," Joe said. "I maybe don't know it as well as I should."
"Yeah, well, you can't sit here, bub. You've been here ten minutes. You have to move on."
"That's impossible," Joe said. It could not have been more than one or two at the most. "Ten minutes."
The patrolman tapped his wrist. "I had my watch on you the minute you pulled up."
"I'm sorry, Officer," Joe said. "I just can't to figure out what I'm supposed to do now." He gestured with a thumb toward the Workingman's Credit Building. "My money's in there," he said.
"I don't care if your left buttock is in there," the policeman said. "You'll have to get lost, mister."
Joe started to argue, but as he did he was aware that, from the moment the policeman rapped on the window, he had been feeling immensely relieved. It had been decided for him. He could not park here; he would not be able to get the money today. Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. He put the car in gear.
"Okay," he said. "I will."
In the course of trying to find his way back out to Long Island, he managed to get very effectively lost in Queens. He was nearly to the old World's Fair grounds before he realized his mistake and turned around.
After a while, he found himself driving alongside a vast green stretch of cemeteries, which he recognized as Cypress Hills. Tombstones and monuments dotted the rolling hills like sheep in a Claude Lorrain. He had been here once, years before, soon after his return to the city. It had been Halloween night, and a group of the boys from Tannen's back room had persuaded him to join them in their yearly visit to the grave of Harry Houdini, who was buried here in a Jewish cemetery called Machpelah. They had taken sandwiches and flasks and a thermos of coffee and spent the night gossiping about Mrs. Houdini's surprisingly involved love life after her husband's death and waiting for the spirit of the Mysteriarch to appear, as Houdini had promised that, should such a thing turn out to be feasible, it would. At the break of dawn on All Hallows' Day, they had joked and whistled and pretended to be disappointed at Houdini's failure to show, but in Joe's case at least-and he suspected it had been so for some of the others-the show of disappointment had only served to mask the actual disappointment that he felt. Joe did not in the least believe in an afterlife, but he genuinely wished that he could. An old Christian kook in the public library in Halifax had once attempted to comfort Joe by telling him, with an air of great assurance, that it was Hitler, and not the Allies, who had liberated the Jews. Not since his father's death-not since the day he had first heard a radio report about the wonder ghetto at Terezin-had Joe stood so near to consolation. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe.
He was able to find Machpelah again without too much trouble-it was marked by a large, rather gloomily splendid funerary building of vaguely Levantine design that reminded Joe of Rosa's father's house- and he drove through the gates and parked the car. Houdini's tomb was the largest and most splendid in the cemetery, completely out of keeping with the general modesty, even austerity, of the other headstones and slabs. It was a curious structure, like a spacious balcony detached from the side of a palace, a letter C of marble balustrade with pillars like serifs at either end, enclosing a long low bench. The pillars had inscriptions in English and Hebrew. At the center, above the laconic inscription houdini, a bust of the late magician glowered, looking as if he had just licked a battery. A curious statue of a robed, weeping woman was posed alongside the bench, sprawled against it in a kind of eternal grieving swoon; Joe found it quite gauche and disturbing. There were nosegays and wreaths scattered around in various states of decay, and many of the surfaces were littered with small stones, left by family, Joe supposed, or by Jewish admirers. Houdini's parents and siblings were all buried here: everyone but his late wife, Bess, who had been refused admission because she was an unconverted Catholic. Joe read the prolix tributes to the mother and the rabbi father that Houdini had quite obviously composed himself. He wondered what he would have put on his own parents' tombstones had he been given the opportunity. Names and dates alone seemed extravagance enough.
He started picking up the stones that people had left, and arranged them neatly atop the railing, as it were, of the balcony, in lines and circles and Stars of David. He noticed that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and there, wherever there was a seam or a crack. He took them out and unrolled the little strips and read what people had written. They all seemed to be messages left by various devotees of spiritualism and students of the next world who offered posthumous forgiveness to the great debunker for having oppugned the Truth that he had, by now, undoubtedly discovered. After a while, Joe sat down on the bench, a safe distance away from the statue of the woman crying out her eyes. He took a deep breath, and shook his head, and reached out some inward fingers, tentatively, to see if they brushed against some remnant of Harry Houdini or Thomas Kavalier or anyone at all. No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
Presently, he made a pillow of his coat and lay back on the cold marble bench. He could hear the rumbling surf of traffic on the Inter-borough Parkway, the intermittent sigh of airbrakes from a bus on Jamaica Avenue. The sounds seemed to correspond exactly to the pale gray sky that he was looking up at, intermittently bruised with blue. He closed his eyes for a moment, just to listen to the sky for a little while. At a certain point, he became aware of footsteps in the grass beside him. He sat up and looked out at the brilliant green field-the sun was shining now, somehow-and the hillsides with their flocks of white sheep, and saw, coming toward him, in his cutaway coat, his old teacher Bernard Kornblum. Kornblum's cheeks were raw and his eyes bright and critical. His beard was tied up in a net.
"Lieber Meister" Josef said, reaching toward him with both hands. They held on to each other across the gulf that separated them like the tzigane-dancing steeples of the Queensboro Bridge. "What should I do?"
Kornblum puffed out his peeling cheeks and shook his head, rolling his eyes a little as if this was among the more stupid questions he had ever been asked.
"For God's sake," he said. "Go home."
When Joe walked in the front door of 127 Lavoisier Drive, he was nearly knocked off his feet. Rosa dangled by one arm from his neck and, with the other, punched him on the arm, hard. Her jaw was set, and he could see that she was refusing to let herself cry. Tommy bumped up against him a couple of times, like a dog, then stepped awkwardly away, backing into the hi-fi cabinet and upsetting a pewter vase of dried marigolds. After that, they both started talking all at once. Where have you been? Why didn't you call? What's in the box? How would you like some rice pudding?
"I went for a drive," Joe said. "My goodness." He saw that they thought he had left them-had stolen the family car! He felt ashamed to be worthy, in their minds, of such suspicion. "I drove to the city. What box? What-"
Joe recognized it right away, with the ease and unsurprise of someone in a dream. He had been traveling inside of it, in his dreams, since the autumn of 1939. His traveling companion, his other brother, had survived the war.
"What's in there?" Tommy said. "Is it a trick?"
Joe approached the casket. He stretched out his hand toward it and gave it a little push. It tipped an inch and then settled again on its end.
"It's something pretty damned heavy," Rosa said. "Whatever it is."
That was how Joe knew that something was wrong. He remembered very well how light the box with the Golem inside had felt as he and Kornblum carried it out of Nicholasgasse 26, like a coffin full of birds, like a suit of bones. The dreadful thought that there might once again be a body nestled in there with the Golem dashed across his mind. He leaned his face in a little nearer to the box. At some point, he noticed, the hinged observation panel that Kornblum had contrived to misdirect the Gestapo and the border guards had been padlocked shut.
"Why are you smelling it?" Rosa said.
"Is it food?" said Tommy.
Joe did not want to say what it was. He could see that they were half-insane with curiosity, now that they had witnessed his reaction to the box, and that quite naturally they expected him not only to tell them what was in the box but to show it to them, right now. This he was reluctant to do. The box was the same, of that he had no doubt, but as to its mysteriously heavy contents, they could be anything. They could be something very, very bad.
"Tommy told the delivery guy it was your chains," Rosa said.
Joe tried to think of absolutely the most dull substance or item the box could plausibly contain. He considered saying it was a load of old school exams. Then it struck him that there was nothing too interesting about chains.
"It's right," he said. "You must be clairvoyant."
"It's really your chains?"
"Just a bunch of iron."
"Wow! Can we open it now?" Tommy said. "I really want to see that."
Joe and Rosa went into the garage to look for Sammy's toolbox. Tommy started to come along, but Rosa said, "Stay here."
They found the toolbox right away, but she would not let him past her back into the house. "What's in the box?" she said.
"You don't believe it's chains?" He knew that he was not a good liar.
"Why would you smell chains?"
"I don't know what's in there," Joe said. "It's not what it used to be."
"What did it used to be?"
"It used to be the Golem of Prague."
It had always been rare to catch Rosa without a reply. She just stepped aside, looking up at him, to let him pass. But he did not go back into the house, not right away.
"Let me ask you this," Joe said. "If you had a million dollars, would you give it to Sammy so that he could buy Empire Comics?"
"Without the Escapist?"
"I guess that's the way it has to be."
She worked on an answer for a minute, during which he could see her spending the money a dozen different ways. Finally, she shook her head.
"I don't know," she said as though it hurt her to admit it. "The Escapist was kind of the crown jewels."
"That is what I was thinking."
"Why were you thinking about that?"
He didn't answer. He carried the toolbox back into the living room and, with help from both Rosa and Tommy, succeeded in lowering the coffin to the ground. He lifted the padlock, hefted it, tapped it twice with his index finger. The picks that Kornblum had given him-until now the only relic from that time which he still possessed-were in his valise. It was a cheap-enough lock, and with a little effort he would no doubt be able to get it off. He let the lock drop back against the hasp and took a crowbar out of the toolbox. As he did so, it occurred to him for the first time to wonder how the Golem had managed to find him. Its reappearance in the living room of a house on Long Island had seemed oddly inevitable at first, as if it had known all along that it had been following him for the past fifteen years, and now it had finally caught up to him. Joe studied some of the labels pasted to the box and saw that it had crossed the ocean only a few weeks before. How had it known where to find him? What had it been waiting for? Who could be keeping tabs on his movements?
He went around to the side opposite the padlock and dug with the teeth of the crowbar into the seam of the lid, just under a nail head. The nail whined, there was a snap like a joint popping, and then the entire lid sprang open as if pushed from inside. At once the air was filled with a heady green smell of mud and river scum, with a stench of summer rich with remembered tenderness and regret.
"Dirt," Tommy said, glancing anxiously at his mother.
"Joe," Rosa said, "that isn't-those aren't ashes.''
The entire box was filled, to a depth of about seven inches, with a fine powder, pigeon-gray and opalescent, that Joe recognized at once from boyhood excursions as the silty bed of the Moldau. He had scraped it from his shoes a thousand times and brushed it from the seat of his trousers. The speculations of those who feared that the Golem, removed from the shores of the river that mothered it, might degrade had been proved correct.
Rosa came over and knelt beside Joe. She put her arm around his shoulder. "Joe?" she said.
She pulled him closer, he let himself fall against her. He just let himself, and she held him up.
"Joe," she said, after a while. "Are you thinking of buying Empire Comics? Do you have a million dollars?"
Joe nodded. "And a box of dirt," he said.
"Dirt from Czechoslovakia?" Tommy said. "Can I touch it?"
Joe nodded. Tommy dabbed at the dirt with a fingertip, as at a tub of cold water, then plunged in his whole hand to the wrist.
"It's soft," he said. "It feels good." He began to move his hand in the dirt, as if feeling around for something. Clearly he was not yet ready to give up on this box of tricks.
"There's not going to be anything else in there," Joe said. "I'm sorry, Tom."
It was strange, Joe thought, that the box should weigh so much more, now, than it had when the Golem was still intact. He wondered if other dirt, extra dirt, had come to be added to the original load, but this seemed unlikely. Then he remembered how Kornblum, that night, had quoted some paradoxical wisdom about golems, something in Hebrew to the effect that it was the Golem's unnatural soul that had given it weight; unburdened of it, the earthen Golem was light as air.
"Oop," Tommy said. "Hey." His brow furrowed; he had found something. Perhaps the giant's clothes had settled to the bottom of the box.
He took out a small, stained rectangle of paper, with some words printed on one side. It looked familiar to Joe.
"Emil Kavalier," Tommy read. "Endikron-endikrono-"
"My father's," Joe said. He took his father's old calling card from Tommy, remembered its spidery typeface and vanished telephone exchange. It must have been secreted, long before, in the breast pocket of Alois Hora's enormous suit. He reached in and took a handful of the pearly silt, pondering it, sifting it through his fingers, wondering at what point the soul of the Golem had reentered its body, or if possibly there could be more than one lost soul embodied in all that dust, weighing it down so heavily.
The Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Senate Judiciary Committee was convened in New York City on April 21 and 22, 1954, to look into the role played by the comic book business in the manufacture of delinquent children. The testimony offered by witnesses on the first day is much the better known. Among the experts, publishers, and criminologists called on the twenty-first, three stand out-to the degree that the hearings are remembered at all- in the public memory. The first was Dr. Fredric Wertham, the considerable and well-intentioned psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent, who was, morally and popularly, a motive force behind the entire controversy over the pernicious effects of comic books. The doctor testified at great length, somewhat incoherently, but dignified throughout and alive, ablaze, with outrage. Immediately following Wertham was William Gaines, son of the acknowledged inventor of the comic book, Max Gaines, and publisher of E.C. Comics, whose graphic line of horror comic books he quite eloquently but with fatal disingenuity defended. Finally, that day, the subcommittee heard from a society of newspaper cartoonists, represented by Pogo's Walt Kelly and Sammy's old idol the great Milton Caniff, who, with humor, sarcasm, and witty disdain, completely sold out their brothers-in-ink, handing them up to Senators Hendrickson, Hennings, and Kefauver to be publicly and deservedly crushed, should the senators so deign to do.
The events of the second day of testimony, to which Sam Clay had been summoned, are less well known. It was Sammy's misfortune to follow two extremely reluctant witnesses. The first was a man named Alex Segal, the publisher of a line of cheap "educational" books that he advertised in the back pages of comics, who first denied and then admitted that his company had once-quite by accident-sold, to known pornographers, lists of the names and addresses of children who had responded to his company's ads. The second reluctant witness was one of the pornographers in question, an almost comically shifty-looking and heavily perspiring walleyed loser named Samuel Roth, who took the Fifth and then begged off with the excuse that he could not legally testify to anything since he was under indictment for smut-peddling by the State of New York. By the time that Sammy appeared, therefore, the mind of the subcommittee was even more than usually preoccupied with questions of vice and immorality.
The key portion of the transcript of the proceedings reads as follows:
senator hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with the comic book characters known as Batman and Robin?
MR. clay: Of course, Senator. They are very well known and successful characters.
hendrickson: I wonder, could you attempt to characterize their relationship for us?
clay: Characterize? I'm sorry… I don't…
hendrickson: They live together, isn't that right? In a big mansion. Alone.
clay: I believe there is a butler.
hendrickson: But they are not, as I understand it, father arid son, is that right? Or brothers, or an uncle and a nephew, or any relationship of that sort.
senator hennings: Perhaps they are just good friends.
clay: It has been some time since I read that strip, Senators, but as I recall, Dick Grayson, that is, Robin, is described as being Bruce Wayne's, or Batman's, ward.
hendrickson: His ward. Yes. There are a number of such relationships in the superhero comics, aren't there? Like Dick and Bruce.
clay: I don't really know, sir. I-
hendrickson: Let me see, I don't exactly recall which exhibit it was, Mr. Clendennen, do you-I thank you.
Executive Director Clendennen produces Exhibit 15.
hendrickson: Batman and Robin. The Green Arrow and Speedy. The Human Torch and Toro. The Monitor and the Liberty Kid. Captain America and Bucky. Are you familiar with any of these?
clay: Uh, yes, sir. The Monitor and Liberty Kid were my creation at one time, sir.
hendrickson: Is that so? You invented them.
clay: Yes, sir. But that strip was killed, oh, eight or nine years ago, I believe.
hendrickson: And you have created a number of other such pairings over the years, have you not?
clay: Pairings? I don't…
hendrickson: The-let me see-the Rectifier and Little Mack the Boy Enforcer. The Lumberjack and Timber Lad. The Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby.
clay: Well, those characters-the Rectifier, the Lumberjack, the Argonaut-they were already, they had been created by others. I just took over the characters, you see, when I went to work at the respective publishers.
hendrickson: And you immediately provided them, did you not, with wards?
clay: Well, yes, but that's standard procedure when you've got a strip that isn't, that maybe has lost a little momentum. You want to perk things up. You want to attract readers. The kids like to read about kids.
hendrickson: Isn't it true that you actually have a reputation in the comic book field for being particularly partial to boy sidekicks?
clay: I'm not aware-no one has ever-
hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham's theory, which he testified to yesterday, and to which, I must say, I am inclined to give a certain amount of credit, having paged through some of the Batman comic books in question last night, that the relationship between Batman and his ward is actually a thinly veiled allegory of pedophilic inversion?
clay: [unintelligible]
hendrickson: I'm sorry, sir, you'll have to-
clay: No, Senator, I must have missed that part of the testimony…
hendrickson: And you have not read the doctor's book, I take it.
clay: Not yet, sir.
hendrickson: So you have never been aware, personally, therefore, that in outfitting these muscular, strapping young fellows in tight trousers and sending them flitting around the skies together, you were in any way expressing or attempting to disseminate your own… psychological proclivities.
clay: I'm afraid I don't… these are not any proclivities which I'm familiar with, Senator. With all due respect, if I may say, that I resent-
senator kefauver: For Heaven's sake, gentlemen, let us move on.
In all his life up to this afternoon, Sammy had gotten himself loaded only once, in that big house on a windswept stretch of Jersey shoreline, on the night before Pearl Harbor was attacked, when he fell first among beautiful and then evil men. Then, as now, it was something that he did mostly because it seemed to be expected of him. After the clerk released him from his oath, he turned, feeling as if the contents of his head had been blown like the liquor of an Easter egg through a secret pinhole, to face that puzzled roomful of gawking Americans. But before he had a chance to see whether they-strangers and friends alike-would avert their eyes or stare him down, would drop their jaws in horror or surprise, or would nod, with Presbyterian primness or urbane complacency, because they had suspected him all along of harboring this dark youth-corrupting wish to pad around his stately manor home with a youthful sidekick, in matching smoking jackets; before, in other words, he got a chance to begin to develop a sense of who and what he was going to be from now on-Joe and Rosa bundled him up, in a kidnapperly combination of their overcoats and bunched newspapers, and hustled him out of Courtroom 11. They dragged him past the television cameramen and newspaper photographers, down the stairs, across Foley Square, into a nearby chophouse, up to the bar, where they arranged him with the care of florists in front of a glass of bourbon and ice, all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member's being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate.
"I'll have one of the same," Joe told the bartender.
"Make that three," Rosa said.
The bartender was looking at Sammy, an eyebrow arched. He was an Irishman, about Sammy's age, stout and balding. He looked over his shoulder at the television on its shelf above the bar; although it was showing only an ad for Ballantine beer, the set appeared to be tuned to 11, WPIX, the station that had been carrying the hearings. The bartender looked back at Sammy, a mean Irish twinkle in his eye.
Rosa cupped her hands on either side of her mouth. "Hello!" she said. "Three bourbons on the rocks."
"I heard you," the bartender said, taking three glasses from below the bar.
"And turn that TV off, why don't you?"
"Why not?" the bartender said, with another smile for Sammy. "Show's over."
Rosa snatched a package of cigarettes out of her purse and tore one from the pack. "The bastards," she said, "the bastards. The fucking bastards."
She said it a few more times. Neither Joe nor Sammy seemed to be able to think of anything to add. The bartender brought their drinks, and they drained them quickly and ordered another round.
"Sammy," Joe said. "I'm so sorry."
"Yeah," Sammy said. "Well. That's okay. I'm all right."
"How are you?" Rosa said.
"I don't know, I feel like I'm really all right."
Though he was inclined to attribute the perception to alcohol, Sammy noticed that there appeared to lie no emotion at all, none at least that he could name or identify, behind his shock at his sudden exposure and his disbelief at the way it had happened. Shock and disbelief: a pair of painted flats on a movie set, behind which lay a vast, unknown expanse of sandstone and lizards and sky.
Joe put an arm across Sammy's shoulders. On the other side of Sammy, Rosa leaned against him, and laid her head on Joe's hand, and sighed. They sat that way for a while, propping one another up.
"I can't help noticing that I'm not hearing a lot of astonishment from you two," Sammy said at last.
Rosa and Joe sat up, looked at Sammy, and then at each other behind his back. They blushed.
"Batman and Robin?" Rosa said, astonished.
"That's a dirty lie," Sammy said.
They drank one more round, and then someone, Sammy wasn't sure who, said that they had better be getting back out to Bloomtown, since Joe's boxes were coming today and Tommy was due home from school in less than two hours. There followed a general donning of coats and scarves, some slapstick with dollar bills and the spilled ice from a drink, and then at some point Rosa and Joe seemed to remark that they were headed out the door of the chophouse and that Sammy was not with them.
"You're both too drunk to drive anyway," Sammy told them when they returned for him. "Take the train from Penn Station. I'll bring the car home later."
Now came the first time that they looked at Sammy with something approaching the doubt, the mistrust, the pity that he had been dreading seeing in their faces.
"Give me a break," he said. "I'm not going to fucking drive into the East River. Or anything like that."
They didn't move.
"I swear to you, all right?"
Rosa looked at Joe again, and Sammy wondered if it wasn't just that they worried he might do something to hurt himself; perhaps they were worried that, as soon as they left him, he would head up to Times Square and try to cruise a sailor. And then Sammy realized that, after all, he could.
Rosa came back toward him and unfurled a big lurching hug that nearly sent Sammy tumbling off his bar stool. She spoke into his ear, her breath warm and with a burned-cork smell of bourbon.
"We'll be all right," she said. "All of us."
"I know," Sammy said. "Go on, you guys. I'm just going to sit here. I'm just going to sober up."
Sammy nursed his drink for the next hour, chin in his palms, elbows on the bar. The dark brown, sardonic taste of the bourbon, which at first he had found unpalatable, now seemed no different to him from that of the tongue in his mouth, the thoughts in his head, the heart beating imperturbably in his chest.
He wasn't sure what finally started him thinking about Bacon. Perhaps it was the revived memory of that alcoholic night at Pawtaw in 1941. Or maybe it was just the single pink wrinkle that creased the broad back of the barman's neck. Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk-his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world-as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil. Now he had been unmasked, along with Bruce and Dick, and Steve and Bucky, and Oliver Queen (how obvious!) and Speedy, and that security was gone for good. And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy's parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.
"Hey, Weepin' Wanda," said the bartender, in a tone of not quite mock menace. "We don't allow crying in this bar."
"Sorry," Sammy said. He wiped his eyes on the end of his necktie and sniffled.
"Saw you on the TV this afternoon," the bartender said. "Didn't I now?"
"Did you?"
The barman grinned. "You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin."
"Did you?"
"Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up."
"You," said a voice behind Sammy. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find himself looking into the face of George Debevoise Deasey. The ginger mustache had faded and dulled to the color of a turned slice of apple, and the eyes behind the thick lenses were rheumy and branched with pink veins. But Sammy could see that they were animated by the same old glint of mischief and indignation.
Sammy pushed back from his stool and half-fell, half-lowered himself to the floor. He was not quite as sober as he might have been.
"George! What are you-were you there? Did you see it?"
Deasey seemed not to hear Sammy. His gaze was leveled at the bartender.
"Do you know why they have to fuck each other?" Deasey asked the man. He had developed a slight tremor of his head, it seemed to Sammy, which gave him a more querulous air than ever.
"What's that?" the bartender said.
"I said, Do you know why Batman and Robin have to fuck each other?" He took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, nonchalant, building up to the punch.
The bartender shook his head, half-smiling, waiting for something good. "Now, why is that?" he said.
"Because they can't go fuck themselves." Deasey tossed the bill onto the bar. "The way you can. Now why don't you make yourself useful and bring me a rye and water, and another of what he's having?"
"Say," the bartender said, "I don't have to take that kind of talk."
"Then don't," said Deasey, abruptly losing interest in the discussion. He climbed up onto the stool beside Sammy's and patted the seat that Sammy had vacated. The bartender languished for a few seconds in the cold of the sudden conversational void that Deasey had left him to, then moved over and took two clean glasses from the back bar.
"Sit down, Mr. Clay," Deasey said.
Sammy sat, a little in awe of George Deasey, as ever.
"Yes, I was there, to answer your question," Deasey said. "I happened to be in town for a few weeks. I saw you were on the bill."
George Deasey had left the comics business during the war, never to return. An old school chum had recruited him into some kind of intelligence work, and Deasey had moved to Washington, remaining there after the war was over, doing things with men like Bill Donovan and the Dulles brothers, which, the few times that Sammy had run into him, he neither refused nor agreed to discuss. He was still dressed quaintly, in one of his trademark Woodrow Wilson suits, gray flannel with a parson collar and a clocked bow tie. For a few minutes, as they waited for the barman to bring them their drinks-he took his sweet time-and then sipped at them, Deasey said nothing. Finally, "It's a sinking ship," he said. "You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard."
"Only I can't swim," Sammy said.
"Ah, well," Deasey said lightly. He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. "Tell me, has my old friend Mr. Kavalier truly returned? Can the fantastic tale I heard possibly be accurate?"
"Well, he wasn't really going to jump," Sammy said. "If that's what you heard. And he didn't write the letter. It was all-my son-it's a long story. But he's living in my house now," Sammy said. "Actually, I think that he and my wife-"
Deasey held up a hand. "Please," he said, "I've heard enough unsavory details about your private life today, Mr. Clay."
Sammy nodded; he wasn't going to argue with that.
"It really was something, wasn't it?" he said.
"Oh, you were all right, I suppose. But I found the pornographer extremely touching." Deasey turned to Sammy and licked his lips, as if wondering whether he ought to drop the bantering tone. "How are you holding up?"
Sammy tried again to decide how he was feeling.
"When I'm sober," he said, "I'm probably going to want to kill myself?'
"Status quo for me," Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.
"I don't know," Sammy said. "I know I ought to feel really bad.
Ashamed, or what have you. I know I ought to be feeling what that asshole there"-he jerked a thumb toward the bartender-"was trying to make me feel. Which I guess is what I've more or less been feeling for the last ten years of my life."
"But you don't."
"No, I don't. I feel-I don't know what the word for it would be. Relieved, I guess."
"I have been in the secrets business for a long time now, Clay," Deasey said. "Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain. I don't cotton very well to these proclivities of yours. In fact, I find them fairly revolting, particularly when I picture you personally indulging in them."
"Thanks a lot."
"But I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key."
"My God," Sammy said, "I think you might be right."
"Of course I'm right."
Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.
"Mr. Deasey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?"
"Once. I sensed that I could be extremely happy there."
"Why don't you go back?"
"I'm much too old to be happy, Mr. Clay. Unlike you."
"Yeah," Sammy said. "L.A."
"And what would you do out there, I wonder?"
"I don't know. Try to get work in television, maybe."
"Television, yes," Deasey said with a show of distaste. "Yes, you'd be very good at that."
There were a hundred and twoafter all; the man from the moving company said so. He and his partner had just finished stacking the last of them in the garage, around and on top of and alongside the crate that contained the pearly residue of the Golem of Prague. Joe came out to the driveway to sign for everything; he looked a little funny to Tommy, windblown or something, red in the face. His shirttails were untucked, and he jumped from foot to foot in his socks. Tommy's mother watched from the front door. She had taken off all of her city clothes and returned to her bathrobe. Joe signed and initialed the forms wherever it was required, and the movers got into their truck and drove back to the city. Then Joe and Tommy went into the garage and stood looking around at the boxes. After a while, Joe sat down on one and lit a cigarette.
"How was school?"
"We watched Dad on TV," Tommy told Joe. "Mr. Landauer brought his TV into the class."
"Uh-huh," Joe said, watching Tommy with a strange expression on his face.
"He was, well, he was sweating a lot," Tommy said.
"Oh, he was not."
"The kids all said he looked sweaty."
"What else did they say?"
"That's what they said. Can I read your comic books?"
"By all means," Joe said. "They're yours."
"You mean I can have them?"
"You're the only one that wants them."
Looking at the crates stacked like masonry in the garage gave the boy an idea; he would build himself a Bug's Nest [20] When Joe went back into the house, Tommy started dragging and shoving the stacks here and there, and after an hour he had succeeded in transferring space from the edges to the center, hollowing out a shelter for himself at the heart of the pile; a hogan of splintery, knotholed pine, open at the top to let in light from the ceiling fixture, breached by a narrow passage whose mouth he disguised with an easily moved stack of three crates. When it was done, he dropped to his hands and knees, and scrambled on his belly through the Secret Access Tube to the Innermost Cell of the Bug's Nest. There he sat, chewing on a pencil, reading comic books, and paying unconscious tribute, in his igloo of solitude, to the ice tunnels in which his father had once come to grief.
As he sat, biting down on the ridged metal collar of his pencil, stirring a sour-tasting electromagnetic ache in the filling of a molar, the Bug noticed that one of the crates that made up the walls of his Nest was different somehow from the others: time-blackened, whiskered with splinters, more spindly-looking than the other crates in Joe's hoard. He rolled onto his knees and inched toward it. He recognized it. He had seen it a thousand times, in the years before the arrival of Joe's things; lying under a canvas tarp at the back of the garage, with a bunch of other old stuff-a fabulous but sadly defunct Capehart self-changing record player, an inexplicable box full of men's combs. The crate had a loose lid of slats, crudely hinged with loops of thick wire, and a clasp of the same crooked wire, tied with a length of green string. French words and the name of France were stamped, or maybe burned into, its sides; he guessed it had once held bottles of wine.
To any boy, but in particular to one whose chronicle was contained in the sound of a roomful of adults falling silent all at once, the contents of the wine crate, ossified by dust and weather into a kind of solid unit of oblivion, would have seemed a treasure. With the precision of an archaeologist, mindful that he would have to put everything back just as he had found it, he prized apart the layers, one by one, inventorying the chance survivals of his prehistory.
1) A copy of the first issue of Radio Comics, tucked inside a translucent green cellophane school folder. Its pages yellowed and, held in the hand, bulky and swollen. The very source, the beating heart of the old-blanket odor that the box exuded.
2) Another green cellophane folder, this one stuffed with old newspaper clippings, press notices, and publicity announcements about Tommy's grandfather, the famous vaudeville strong man called the Mighty Molecule. Clipped from newspapers all over the United States, the typography queer, the writing style clotted somehow and difficult to follow, filled with obscure slang and allusions to forgotten songs and celebrities. A few photographs of a tiny man in nothing but a breechclout, whose muscular body had a dense, upholstered look, like Buster Crabbe's.
3) A drawing, folded and crumbling, of the Golem, stouter, somehow more countrified-looking than the one in Joe's epic, wearing big hobnailed boots, striding down a moonlit street. The lines, though recognizably Joe's, sketchier, more tentative, nearer to Tommy's own.
4) An envelope containing the torn stub of a movie ticket and a grainy yellowed photograph, clipped from a newspaper, of the glamorous Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio.
5) A box of unused Kavalier & Clay stationery, left over from just before the war, the letterhead a charming group portrait of all the various characters, superpowered and otherwise-Tommy recognized for certain only the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth-that the team of Kavalier & Clay had come up with in those days.
6) A manila envelope containing a large black-and-white photograph of a handsome man with hair that shone like a sheet of molded chrome. The mouth a hard thin line, but the eyes holding a reserve of delight, as if he is about to break into a smile. His jaw square, chin cleft. In the lower right corner of the picture an inscription, signed Tracy Bacon, written in a large and looping hand: To the man who dreamed me up, with affection.
7) A pair of heavy woolen socks with orange toes, in a cardboard sleeve printed with two bright orange bands. Between the bands a conventionalized picture of a merry fire in a country hearth and the word ko-zee-tos in big orange letters.
And then, bent and twisted and adrift at the bottom of the box, a strip of four photographs, from a coin booth, of his mother and Joe-grinning, startled by the flash; all tongues and bug-eyes; with their cheeks and temples pressed together; and then kissing, a heroic and heavy-lidded kiss like two people on a movie poster. In the pictures, they looked absurdly skinny and young and so stereotypically in love that it was obvious even to Tommy, an eleven-year-old boy who had never before in his life looked at any two people and had the conscious thought: Those two people are in love. As if by magic, he heard their voices, their laughter, and then the knob turning, and the creaking hinges of the door. Quickly, he began replacing the things he had taken from the box.
He could hear their lips meeting and parting with a sticky sound; the clicking of their teeth or the buttons on their clothes.
"I have to work," his mother said at last. " 'Love Made a Monkey Out of Me.'"
"Ah," he said. "Autobiography."
"Shut up."
"How about if I make dinner," he said. "So you can keep on working?"
"Hey, that would be swell. Unheard of. Maybe you want to be careful, I could get used to that."
"Get used to it."
Those two people are in love.
"Have you talked to Tommy yet?" she said.
"Sort of."
"Sort of?"
"I haven't found the right moment."
"Joe. You have to tell him."
The folder filled with memorabilia of the Mighty Molecule's career slipped from Tommy's hand. Photographs and clippings fluttered everywhere, and as he tried to gather them up, he knocked against the crate, and its lid fell shut with a splintery crack.
"What was that?"
"Tommy? Oh, my God. Tommy, are you in here?"
He sat in the dim hollow of his sanctum, clutching the strip of photographs to his chest.
"No," he said, after a moment, knowing that it was, without question, the most pathetic thing he had ever said in his life.
"Let me," he heard Joe say. There was a scrape of crates and some grunting and then Joe's head poked into the Innermost Cell. He had wriggled his way through the passage on his belly. He propped himself on his elbows with his arms tucked under his chest. Up close, his face was blotchy, and his hair was all crabgrass and dandelions.
"Hey," he said. "Hi."
"Hi."
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"So," Joe said, "I guess maybe you heard a few things out there."
"Yeah."
"Can I come in?" It was his mother.
"I don't think there's room, Rosa."
"Sure there is."
Joe looked at Tommy. "What do you think?"
Tommy shrugged and nodded. So Joe pulled himself all the way in and crammed himself, hunched over, up against the side of the Cell, his hips pressed against Tommy's. Tommy's mother's head appeared, her hair hastily and imperfectly tied up in a scarf, her lips showing right through her lipstick. Tommy and Joe each reached out a hand and pulled her in with them, and she sat up and sighed and said, happily,
"Well," as if they had all settled down together on a blanket in the shade beside a sun-dappled stream.
"I was just about to tell Tom a story," Joe said.
"Uh-huh," Rosa said. "Go on."
"That isn't something I-I'm more used to doing it-with pictures, you know?" He swallowed, and cracked his knuckles, and took a deep breath. He smiled a weak little smile, and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket. "Maybe I should draw it, ha ha."
"I already saw the pictures," Tommy said.
His mother leaned forward to look with Joe at the two people they once had been.
"Oh, my God," she said. "I remember that. It was that night we took your aunt to the movies. In the lobby of the Loew's Pitkin."
They all moved a little closer together, and then Tommy lay down with his head in his mother's lap. She stroked his hair, and he listened while Joe went on unconvincingly for a while about the things that you did when you were young, and the mistakes that you made, and the dead brother for whom Tommy had been named, that unlucky, unimaginable boy, and how everything had been different then, because there was a war on, at which Tommy pointed out that there had also, until recently, been a war in Korea, and Joe replied that this was true, and it was then that he and Rosa both realized that the boy was no longer listening to anything they were telling him. He was just lying there, in the Bug's Nest, holding his father's hand, while his mother brushed the bangs from his forehead.
"I think we are okay," Joe said finally.
"Okay," said Rosa. "Tommy? Are you okay? Do you understand all this?"
"I guess so," the boy said. "Only."
"Only what?"
"Only what about Dad?"
His mother sighed, and told him they were going to have to see about that.
Sammy let himself into the house. It was past midnight, he was sober as a headstone, and in his pockets there were tickets for the Broadway Limited and the City of Los Angeles. There was a light on in the living room, and he saw that Joe had fallen asleep in the armchair with one of his dusty old books on Kabbalah or whatever it was-Volume IV of Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews-pitched like a tent on his lap. A half-empty bottle of Piels sat on a raffia coaster on the deal table beside him. When Sammy came in, Joe roused a little and shifted in the chair, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the bulb. He gave off a stale, drowsy smell of beer and ash.
"Hey."
"Hey," Sammy said. He went to Joe and put a hand on his shoulder. He kneaded the muscles there; they felt knotted and hard. "Everyone all right? Tommy all right?"
"Mmm." Joe nodded, then closed his eyes again. Sammy switched off the light. He went over to the sofa, picked up a peach-and-mustard afghan-one of the few things his mother had ever knit and the only visible remnant of her in his life-carried it to the armchair, and draped it over Joe, careful to cover the orange-tipped toes of Joe's stocking feet.
Next Sammy walked down the hall and entered Tommy's bedroom. In the bend of light from the hall, he could see that Tommy had wandered, in his sleep, to the far edge of the bed, and lay with his face mashed against the wall. He had kicked away all the bedclothes; he had on powder-blue pajamas with white piping at the lapels and cuffs (Sammy, naturally, owned an identical pair). Tommy was a very energetic sleeper, and even after Sammy pulled his head away from the wall, the boy went on snuffling, twitching, his breathing so rapid that it sounded almost like the panting of a dog. Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.
He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times-the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example-when it had been difficult. But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn't count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the "youthful wards" that he routinely assigned to his heroes-a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life-represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.
Dr. Fredric Wertham was an idiot; it was obvious that Batman was not intended, consciously or unconsciously, to play Robin's corrupter: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America. Sammy wished that he'd had the presence of mind to tell the subcommittee that adding a sidekick to a costumed-hero strip was guaranteed to increase its circulation by 22 percent.
But what did it matter? It was better not to have put up any fight at all; it was over now. He had no choice but to set himself free.
Yet he could not seem to get himself out of Tommy's bedroom. He stood there by the bed for a good five minutes, reviewing the history of sleep in this room, from the days of the baby who lay on his belly in the center of an enameled metal crib, legs tucked under him, his big diapered tuchis poking up into the air. He remembered a stretch of what Rosa had termed "the night jeebies," when Tommy was two or three, how the boy would wake, night after night, screaming as if he were being skinned, and blind from the horror of whatever he had just been looking at in his dreams. They had tried a night-light, a bottle, a song, but as it had turned out, the only thing that could soothe him was to have Sammy get into bed with him. Sammy would stroke the boy's hair until his own wrist ached, listening to the tumult of his breathing, until they both drifted off. That was the high point of his career as a father; it, too, had come in the middle of the night, when the boy was sleeping.
He took off his shoes and got into the bed. He rolled over and lay on his back, and folded his hands together under his head to make a pillow. Maybe he could just lie here for a while, before he went to find his suitcase in the garage. He recognized that there was some danger of his falling asleep-it had been a long day and he was bone-tired-which would spoil his plan of getting out tonight, before there could be any discussion of his leaving. And he was not sufficiently convinced of the rightness of his decision to give Rosa or Joe or anyone else the chance to try to dissuade him. Rut it felt very good to lie down beside Tommy and listen to him sleep again, after so long.
"Hi, Dad," Tommy said, groggy, sounding confused.
"Oh." Sammy jumped. "Hey, son."
"Did you catch the monkey?"
"What monkey is that, son?" Sammy said.
Tommy waved a hand in a circle, impatient at having to explain it all again. "The monkey with the thing. With the spatula."
"No," Sammy said. "I'm sorry. He's still at large."
Tommy nodded. "I saw you on TV," he said, sounding more awake now.
"Yeah?"
"You were good."
"Thanks."
"You looked a little sweaty, though."
"I was sweating like a pig, Tom."
"Dad?"
"Yeah, Tom?"
"You're kind of squooshing me."
"I'm sorry," Sammy said. He inched a little ways away from Tommy. They lay there; Tommy turned over with a little grunt of annoyance or exasperation.
"Dad, you're too big for this bed."
"Okay," Sammy said, sitting up. "Good night, Tom."
"G'night."
Sammy went down the hall to the bedroom. Rosa liked to sleep in a very dark room, with the blinds lowered and the curtains drawn, and it was not without a certain amount of stumbling and groping that Sammy found his way to the closet. He closed the door behind him and pulled the chain for the light. Quickly he took down a scarred white leather valise and filled it from the hanger rod and the built-in chest of drawers. He packed for warm weather: poplin shirts and tropicalweight suits, a vest, undershirts, boxers, socks and garters, neckties, a bathing suit, a brown belt and a black, stuffing everything into the valise with an indiscriminate and careless haste. When he was through, he yanked the light shut and stepped out into the bedroom, dazzled by the roiling Persian-carpet geometries that filled his eyes. He made his way back out to the hallway, congratulating himself on not having woken Rosa, and crept back down to the kitchen. He would just make himself a sandwich, he thought. His mind was already engaged in the composition of the note he planned to leave.
When he got within a few feet of the kitchen, however, he smelled smoke.
"You did it to me again," he said.
Rosa was sitting in her bathrobe, with her hot lemon water, her ashtray, and the ruins of an entire cake before her. The nocturnal luminescence of Bloomtown, compounded of streetlights, porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the luster of the state highway, and the diffused glow in the low clouds of the great city sixty miles distant, came in through the dotted-swiss curtains and settled ticking over the teakettle and the clock and dripping kitchen tap.
"You have a suitcase," Rosa said.
Sammy looked down at the valise, as if to confirm her report. "True," he said, sounding a little surprised even to his own ears.
"You're leaving."
He didn't answer.
"I guess that makes sense," she said.
"Doesn't it?" he said. "I mean, think about it."
"If that's what you want to do. Joe was going to try to talk you into staying. He has some plan or other. And, of course, there's Tommy."
"Tommy."
"You are going to break his heart."
"Is that cake?" Sammy said.
"For some reason I made a red velvet cake," Rosa said. "With sea-foam frosting."
"Are you drunk?"
"I had a bottle of beer."
"You like to bake when you're drunk."
"Why is that?" She slid across the kitchen table the tumbled remains of the red velvet cake, with sea-foam frosting. "For some reason," she said, "I also seem to have felt compelled to eat most of it."
Sammy went to the kitchen drawer and got a fork. He wasn't in the least hungry as he sat down, but then he took a bite of the cake and, before he could stop himself, had finished what was left. The sea-foam crunched and melted in his teeth. Rosa got up and poured him a glass of milk, then stood behind him while he drank it, ruffling the hair at the back of his neck.
"You didn't say," Sammy said.
"I didn't say what?"
"What you want me to do."
He leaned back into her, his head against her belly. He was tired suddenly. He had planned to leave right away, to make his departure easier, but now he wondered if he shouldn't just wait until the morning.
"You know I want you to stay," she said. "I hope you know that. God damn it, Sammy, I would love nothing more."
"To prove a point, is what you're saying."
"Yes."
"About how nobody can tell us how to live, and it takes all kinds, and mind your own damn business. Like that."
She stopped stroking his hair. He guessed she had heard a certain amount of sarcasm in his tone, though he was not feeling at all sarcastic, and in fact, he admired her for what she was and had always been willing to do for his sake.
"It's just," he said, "I think I have another point I need to prove."
There was a cough, and they turned and saw Joe standing in the doorway, hair standing up all over his head, mouth open, trying to blink away something he did not want to see.
"Is he-you aren't leaving?'"
"For a while," Sammy said. "At least."
"Where are you going to go?"
"I was thinking Los Angeles."
"Sammy," Joe said, taking a step toward Sammy that had something menacing about it. "Damn it, you can't.'"
Sammy drew back a little and raised his arm as if to ward off his old friend. "Take it easy, Joe. I appreciate the sentiment, but I-"
"It is not a sentiment, idiot. After I left you this morning, I went over there and made an offer for the Empire Comics. To buy it. And Shelly Anapol accepted."
"What? An offer? Joe, are you crazy?"
"You said you had some ideas. You said I got you stirred up again."
"Yeah, you did, but, I mean. Jesus, how could you just go and do that without asking me first?"
"It's my money," Joe said. "You have no say in the matter."
"Huh," Sammy said, and then again, "huh. Well." He stretched and yawned. "Maybe I could write the stories out there, and mail them to you. I don't know. We'll see. I'm too tired for this now, okay?"
"Well, you won't leave tonight, Sam, don't be crazy. It's too late. There isn't a train for you to leave with."
"Stay till the morning at least," Rosa said.
"I guess I could sleep on the couch," said Sammy.
Rosa and Joe looked at each other, startled, alarmed.
"Sammy, Joe and I aren't-this isn't because-we haven't been-"
"I know," Sammy said. "The couch is fine. You don't even need to change the sheets."
Rosa said that while Sammy might be fully prepared to embark on the life of a hobo, there was no way in hell that he would begin his new career in her house. She went to the linen closet and brought fresh sheets and a pillowcase. She moved aside the neat pile of Joe's used linens and spread the new ones, tucking, and smoothing, and pulling back the blanket to expose the reverse of the floral flat sheet in a neat diagonal fold. Sammy stood over her, making a fuss over how appetizing it all looked after the day he'd had. When she let him sit down, he bounced on the cushion, slipped off his shoes, and then lay back with the happy sigh of an aching man sliding into a nice hot bath.
"This is feeling very strange to me," Rosa said. She was gripping the pillowcase filled with Joe's old sheets in one hand, like a sack, and dabbing at the tears in her eyes with the other.
"It's been strange all along," said Sammy.
She nodded. Then she handed the sack of dirty linens to Joe and started down the hall. Joe stood beside the couch for a moment, looking at Sammy with a perplexed expression, as if trying to work his way backward, one at a time, through the steps of the clever feat of substitution that Sammy had just pulled off.
When the household woke the next morning, quite early, the couch had been stripped, the sheets left folded on the coffee table with the pillow balanced on top, and Sammy and his suitcase were long gone. In lieu of a note or other farewell gesture, he had left only, in the center of the kitchen table, the small two-by-three card that he had been given back in 1948, when he had purchased the lot on which the house now stood. It was wrinkled and dog-eared and dyed by the stain of long years spent in Sammy's wallet. When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.
<a l:href="#_ftnref12">[12]</a>Gargantua and Pantagruel, and possibly Vathek.
<a l:href="#_ftnref13">[13]</a> Sammy liked to tell a story about a hungry young artist named Roy Lichtenstein who had once wandered into his office at Pharaoh looking for a job. There is no evidence, however, that the story is true.
<a l:href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a>The Paris Bridge-Leap of 1921: A Memoir of Hardeen, New York; privately printed, 1935. Now in the collection of Prof. Kenneth Silverman.
<a l:href="#_ftnref15">[15]</a> Les Organes du Facteur moved to Fifty-seventh Street after the war, three doors down from Carnegie Hall, an inexorable journey uptown and into cultural irrelevance in the last moments before Surrealism was overwhelmed by the surging tribes of Action, Beat, and Pop.
<a l:href="#_ftnref16">[16]</a> In his excellent The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History.
<a l:href="#_ftnref17">[17]</a> Among some dozen she is believed to have employed over the years.
<a l:href="#_ftnref18">[18]</a> "A person of unprecedented physical prowess dedicated to acts of derring-do in the public interest."
<a l:href="#_ftnref19">[19]</a>The Escapist, starring a young Peter Graves in the title role, 1951-53.
<a l:href="#_ftnref20">[20]</a> At this time in the history of comic books, it was a mark of only the most successful heroes that they had a secret lair. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, Batman his Batcave, the Blackhawks their windswept Blackhawk Island, and the Escapist his posh digs under the boards of the Empire Palace. These redoubts would be depicted, from time to time, in panels mat showed detailed cutaway diagrams of the secret lair, each 3-D Televisor Screen, Retractable Helipad, Trophy Room, and Rogue's Gallery carefully labeled with arrows. Only one of these cross-section plans was ever published for the Keyhole, a special two-page drawing in the centerfold of Escapist Adventures #46.