It's Superman! A Novel (38 page)

Ceil’s stomach folds in half. Why is he telling
her
this? Surely he doesn’t think—

“Quite a problem. But then it dawned on me. Who is better at this very thing than Ceil Stickowski?”

“Mr. Luthor, I don’t—”

“You, dear lady, are going to christen the next human necessity. Come up with the next household name. Right here. Right now.
You.”

“Me?”
Her hands are clamped around the armrests. “But Mr. Luthor, I don’t know anything about—”

“Don’t be so modest—Mrs. Smokin’ Dynamite Fall Arsenal of Values!”

“But, sir, I didn’t—”

“Who could ever forget your Crown Prince, your Medley, your Hoopla, your Salvo, your
Trinitro-Delux
! Wonderful names, all of them—names so good, so
perfect
they emptied out an entire warehouse, Ceil.”

“But that was Herman, Mr. Luthor,
Herman
came up with all of those names. I just pasted up the catalogs.” Oh dear God dear God dear God . . .

“Please.” Luthor holds up a hand, palm toward Ceil. “Stop. I don’t appreciate false modesty.” And his abrupt change of expression underscores that: his eyes turn stony and terrifying.

In front of Ceil’s face appear red and black threads that drift and sizzle. She feels as if she might faint.

Luthor bends down and speaks softly into her ear. “So what do we call it? I’m expected next door in two minutes, Ceil. I need a product name. Give it to me.”

“Sir, please . . .”

“A name. The perfect name.”

“Mr. Luthor, I swear to you, Herman made up those names for the catalogs. He enjoyed it! He had nothing else to do!”

“Ceil. I think I know what Herman was and was not capable of.”

“He did the word scramble every day in the paper. Herman was very good with words. It was a hobby!”

“Oh Ceil, he was a common thug. He couldn’t even
spell medley.
”

It’s as if Lex Luthor just struck her in the stomach. She can’t catch her breath.

“Ceil, the perfect name, please. We have less than two minutes.
You
have less than two minutes.”

Ceil turns her head and looks at him dead-on.

And she knows—instantly she knows that her husband did not pass from his cancer.

Oh my God.

“Ceil? I’m
waiting.”

She shakes her head.

“Still waiting. The name that tens of millions of people will utter day after day for the next hundred years. I’m
waiting
.”

His hand touches her elbow, creeps slowly up to her shoulder toward her throat.

Herman, she prays. Help me!

She closes her eyes.

She opens them and looks at the mechanical . . . thing, that steely robot standing motionless on the tabletop. It seems to her now anything but benign. It’s something nasty, something dangerous. Something wicked. As nasty and dangerous and wicked as . . .

She mumbles something.

“I didn’t hear you, Ceil.”

Her eyes move to his face. “I said . . . call it the Lexbot.”

For a long time Lex remains crouched beside her, his hand painfully squeezing her shoulder.

Then he chuckles, his hand falls away, and he stands up.

“The Lexbot,” he says. “The Lexbot.
Lexbot
.”

Ceil is weeping, openly sobbing.

“The
Lexbot.
Did you hear that, gentlemen? It’s the Lexbot, the marvel of 1937!”

Ceil’s shoulders move helplessly up and down.

“Very good,” she hears him say, then watches him type L-E-X-B-O-T on a cramped keyboard attached to a small die-cut device. He yanks down hard on a side lever, and out shoots a small lozenge of metal. He holds it up between his thumb and forefinger. “Lexbot.” Then tossing down the metal tag as though it were a nickel for a newspaper, he says, “Thank you, Ceil. Mrs. O’Shea will show you out when you’ve composed yourself.”

Ten minutes later, as that horrid white-haired Irisher leads her from the office, Ceil glances through the oneway mirror and there is Luthor—not
Mister
Luthor,
Luthor
—gesturing expansively at the head of the conference table while the moneymen all write checks and the two robots, the two
Lexbots,
replenish their cocktails.

3

In addition to the torn sheets wrapped around his head, Willi’s disguise—his Halloween costume—includes dark glasses, leather gloves, and a black trench coat. Everyone they pass on the street or ride with on the IRT local identifies him immediately. Hey, look! It’s the Invisible Man! Whenever someone laughs or makes a friendly crack, Willi responds in a lousy British accent, playacting Claude Rains.

On the subway they see other grown men and women in costume—a black knight, a pilgrim, and a bum with a crushed hat and a wine bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. Oh. No. That
is
a bum.

A couple dressed up as Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd swings on straps all the way down the length of the car to invite Willi and Clark to a masquerade party on West End Avenue. Oh come on,
please
? It’ll be fun! You fellas look great!

Clark takes delight in how completely
emancipated
Willi seems to feel. Behind that linen wrapper he is laughing his head off. Why, the crazy nut even walks straight up to a transit cop when they get off the subway at 103rd Street and just for fun asks him if this is the right station for the Museum of the City of New York! “Up those stairs, boyo, and left to Fifth.” The cop grins at Willi’s getup, then tucks his double chin, taking a long scrutiny of Clark, giving an interrogative grunt. “And himself behind yeh? Who’s your caped friend there supposed to be?”

“The Saucer-Man,” says Willi. “From Saturn.”

Clark taps the toy ray gun stuck under his belt; if you turn a key on its side it clacks and sparks. He bought it earlier at the candy store on St. Mark’s Place. In that same place he also bought a black celluloid mask identical to the one the Lone Ranger wears. He’s wearing it for two reasons. It matches his belt, his boots, and the background color of his chest appliqué, giving his appearance a unified, even fashion-savvy touch. And it makes him appear like a genuine Halloween reveler. A guy on his way to a party.

An enormous five-story building faced with red brick and trimmed with white marble, the museum is—according to the free booklet Clark picks up—“the city’s attic,” a palatial depository of dioramas depicting events from the purchase of Manhattan Island to the construction of the Empire State Building, and galleries crammed with historical furniture, portraits, costumes, documents, and memorabilia. But Willi makes it clear that he’s not interested in any of “that old junk.” He is here for only one reason: to see Berenice Abbott’s photographs.

As they follow arrows to the proper gallery, Clark keeps stopping to admire things—a Dutch sleigh, a tallyho coach, the figurehead from an old clipper ship. He is powerfully affected by it all but couldn’t say why.

Following Willi down a long hall he notices a pair of open doors leading into a raked auditorium. Just inside the entrance a sign is still posted for a two o’clock lecture long since over: “From There to Here, From There to Home: The Immigrant Experience.”

“Would you get a
move
on?”

“I’m
coming,
” says Clark.

From there to here, from there to home.

His red cape sailing out in back of him, he puts on a little speed—just a
little
—and ends up beating Willi to the exhibition gallery.

“Think you’re funny? Well, you’re not.”

Clark slings an arm around Willi’s shoulder and together they go inside and look at pictures of the city. Willi’s city. And maybe, Clark thinks, his city too.

The name of the exhibition is
Metropolis.

4

It was a mistake to name her joint “Soda’s.” From the night it opened, people have been walking in expecting fountain service, wanting a strawberry milk shake, a chocolate malt. The name, and especially that fancy gold script she’d had painted on the front window—just a bad idea, a mistake. This here is a
club,
she has been saying for almost a year, telling squares, telling high school sweethearts, telling little kids tapping on the door with two bits apiece squeezed in their sweaty mitts. This here is a
jazz music club.
They always want to know so why’s it called
Soda’s
? And some people are downright
nasty
about it, like it’s
her
fault they can’t get a large root beer. Why is it called Soda’s? She’ll
tell
them why: because that’s my
name.
My name is Soda Wauters.

She was
Edith
Wauters before she joined Harry Seltzer’s Carbonated Rhythm Orchestra. It was a joke, of course, but the name stuck. What the heck. She likes it.

This afternoon in her club—formerly a “billiard hall for Coloreds” on South Orange Avenue in Newark, New Jersey—she sits alone drinking at the bar. Tipping the bottle of Seagram’s Pedigree whenever she notices that her glass has somehow gotten itself empty. Outside, neighborhood children pass by in pairs and bunches dressed up for Halloween. When Soda cabbed over here earlier from her apartment near Five Corners she brought along a twenty-four-count box of candy cigarettes, and for a while, the first hour or so, she got up and dispensed goodies whenever some trick-or-treaters tapped on the door. But even before the candy was depleted she quit answering, no longer trusting her legs. She is a large woman—nearly two hundred pounds—and if she falls she is liable to fall hard.

The club is closed until tomorrow night, and she just might sit here drinking till then. Who’s going to stop her? This is her joint.

Last night she had a gang of musicians she knew drop by on their way home to New York from a recording session for RCA Victor in Camden. She was glad to see everybody, and they were all genuinely congratulatory about her club. But almost to a man they asked her, Why so glum, chum? Doc Wershow even joshed her, saying, “You ain’t no blues singer, honey, you just a big ol’ canary, how come you wearin’ that long face?” She told him, she told everybody, she was just tired.

She’s tired, all right. Of everything.

It is half past three now as she tips the Seagram’s bottle again, avoiding her eyes in the mirror.

She’s never going to see him again. It’s been more than a month now, and it’s—he’s not coming back.

The first time she saw him was in late June, a week-night. He was sitting at a table by himself, and Soda was doing a set with the house band. She was, she recalls, singing “I’ll Get By.” He wasn’t especially good-looking—
not the kind of man that girls think of as handsome,
she thinks now and smiles—but he
had
something. And from across the room she could identify that something as decency. He looked about fifty and was dressed in a dark gray tropical worsted suit. Don’t be no copper, she thought. Please.

Soda didn’t talk to him that night. Or the next time he came in, either. Or the time after that.

But the time after that she bought him a drink. And no, he wouldn’t insist on beer if the lady was buying. Seagram’s Pedigree? He invited her to sit down. Told her he loved her voice and how she could put a song across. For the next forty-five minutes they talked about band singers. Helen Ward, Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, Connie Boswell. He knew his stuff, the man knew about popular music, that was for certain, and took delight in all of her stories about musicians she’d known, still knew. She told him about the times she’d had stage fright and the times she’d sung better, in her own humble opinion, than Billie Holiday on her best day. She talked about grilling steaks at a backyard cookout with Lester Young, playing horseshoes with Red Norvo. The man seemed to take delight in hearing
anything
Soda wanted to talk about, including her two marriages.

“Now you,” she said, meaning now you tell
me
something. “Wait, though. You’re not a policeman, right? Tell me you’re not?”

“That wouldn’t be good?”

“That wouldn’t be good.”

“And why is that?”

She smiled, ran a finger around in circles on some bar spill. “My daddy was a copper.”

“Sounds like a song.”

“It wasn’t no song, honey. So. You ain’t, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Now we’re cooking,” she said.

“Are we? I’d like to think so.”

“I’d like to think so, too.”

By that time, they were sitting together on the daybed in Soda’s private office at the rear of the club.

“So what
do
you do, honey?”

But with a small sad smile he shook his head again. “Can you wait on that one?”

“You on the lam?”

“No, I can swear to you that I’m not on the lam.”

“Married?”

“No.”

She kissed him.

“You’re the funniest guy I ever met.”

“I doubt it.”

“You a musician?”

He hesitated for a second, then said, “No.”

She kissed him again, and that time he kissed her back. He returned a week later and sat at his regular table and drank his usual beer and a half. When she’d finished both of her sets and the crowd thinned out she sent over a bottle of straight bourbon.

He stayed till the club shut down at two, then helped her upend chairs on the tables. He sat behind the drums and picked up two brushes and accompanied her while she sang “What Kind o’ Man Is You?”

He stayed the night.

Soda fell in love and he didn’t. Or maybe he did, she couldn’t tell.

But he was always decent to her, oh my God was he decent to her.

He was the nicest and the tenderest man she ever had met.

Told her his first name but not his last. “In time,” he said. “All in good time.”

But time had run out and her sweet lovin’ daddy was gone. Said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” then never came back . . .

The rim of the shot glass is touching Soda’s bottom lip and there it stops.

Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph.

The
package.
That fat envelope with the red flap string he left with Soda the last time they were together. Saying, “Honey”—by that time he was calling her that—“Honey, could you do me a big favor and keep this in your safe?”