It's Superman! A Novel (5 page)

In the dark he turns to her and smiles, knows she is smiling back.

He loves this woman so very much.

“Jonny.”

“Yes, Clark told me what’s bothering him and—”

“I worry so.”

“I know it.”

“I want him to be happy.”

“I know that too. And he is.”

“I wish I believed that. I’m so afraid Clark thinks . . . that he’s
always
thought, that he’s—”

“No.”

“Alone.”

“How could he possibly think that? He’s fine.”

“What did he tell you?”

Mr. Kent draws a long breath, lets it out. “It’s just . . . oh, it’s just as you said. The boy feels bad for going out when he could’ve stayed home and taken care of you.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“Yes,” says Mr. Kent, “he’s a very good boy, our son.”

6

Washed in moon glow, Clark Kent straddles his barn’s peaked roof, staring out into the middle distance, seeing insects, bats, and owls in the blackness, and wondering uneasily what he’s supposed to
do
with all of these crazy talents he just keeps finding out that he has. After a while he gets up jiggling that mashed wad of lead in his left hand. And flings it suddenly, hard as he can.

It climbs, keeps climbing, and doesn’t arc . . .

A disreputable profession. Temper tantrum.
The Berg family. A young man and his camera.
Breaking and entering.
●

1

Although she graduated college the previous June and was theoretically grown, Lois Lane (who skipped the fourth, sixth, eighth, and eleventh grades) still was only seventeen last August when she trained down to New York City from Monticello. She was moving there to take graduate journalism classes at Columbia University, and her father, concerned about her safety and virtue, had installed her in an oldfangled women’s residency hotel. The Dolly Madison on East Twenty-seventh Street. Quite a distance from Morningside Heights, but lord knows he didn’t want his daughter living in Harlem. Staying at the Dolly Madison was the one condition he’d set before giving her his grudging permission to pursue an ambition he felt was not just crazy and common, but dangerous.

Time and again Lois would remind him—gently, with a girlish smile; she knew how to handle the old man—that it was a journalist in Cuba directly responsible for making her father’s reputation, which led—remember, Daddy?—to practically everything good in his uncommonly good life. From his hero’s welcome home, to his Congressional Medal of Honor, to his rise in the marines and all of those plum postings, to his current position as first vice-president of the Hatlo Machine Company,
everything
had sprung from a newspaper reporter’s two-hundred-word cable about a wounded young sergeant heroically wigwagging a makeshift flag under ferocious gunfire at Cuzco.

To all of that “Captain” Lane—he would forever be the “captain,” though he’d retired from the corps in 1919—to all of that he would respond by saying yes, true enough, but Lois ought not to use Mr. Stephen Crane as a career model, the boy had been a brawling hothead and a drunkard, he’d smoked cigarettes like a fiend, married a divorced woman of questionable virtue, and died of consumption before he turned thirty.

Oh,
Dad,
she’d say, I don’t want to be a
war
correspondent, just a regular old reporter.

Regular old
reporters,
he’d scoff, are nothing more than Peeping Toms on a salary!

Oh,
Dad . . .

But if you simply
must,
I want you living at the Dolly Madison.

Which looked like a miniature Southern plantation and was run like a genteel sorority house with strict rules, including white gloves at dinner, a nine o’clock curfew, no smoking, no alcohol, and absolutely no gentlemen callers beyond the receiving parlor.

Lois stayed at the Hotel Dolly Madison, the dreaded Dolly, scarcely three months. Around the time she turned eighteen in late November, she checked out of there and into an automatic-elevator building on East Twenty-ninth Street, rooming with Betty Simon, an O.R. nurse at Roosevelt Hospital the boys had nicknamed Skinny because she was anything but.

When he found out about the move, the
fait accompli,
Lois’s father stopped taking her telephone calls.

For about a week.

Oh,
Dad,
she groaned long-distance, don’t be such a worrywart. Real people don’t live in
hotels.

Your voice sounds husky—have you been smoking?

Of course not, she told him, quickly rubbing out a Lucky Strike.

And I hope to God you haven’t started drinking.

Nope, she said, popping the
p
and then leaning over to peer into her cocktail shaker, chagrined to find it empty.

Lois, is that a
jazz
record I hear?

It’s coming from the building across the way, Dad, she said, carefully lifting the phonograph needle off Fletcher Henderson’s version of “Limehouse Blues.” There, she said, I’ve closed the window.

Now, you have to promise me you won’t let any men into your apartment.

Never, Lois said, meaning I’d never promise you
that,
then she pointed sternly at Willi Berg sprawled on the divan in his undershirt and boxer shorts, pointing at him so he wouldn’t
dare
bellow something like Baby, we’re out of gin.

I expect you to be a good girl, Lois, and behave yourself, said Captain Lane. I’m counting on that.

I won’t let you down, Daddy.

And in her heart of hearts she hadn’t. Maybe she drank a little, sometimes a little more than she ought to, but she could handle it. She never got
stewed.
Well. Once or twice. But the morning after she
always
remembered everything she’d done and said. And she smoked cigarettes, yes, but not every single
day.
Mostly she mooched, so that didn’t count. And she bought records and danced to them, but how was
that
letting anyone down, even a retired captain in the U.S. Marine Corps? And she never allowed Willi Berg to sleep in her bed. At least not overnight. She was still a good girl. Her conscience was clear. But she was a
modern
girl too. And she
liked
being modern, being aware, being curious, unafraid of the new or the exotic (Willi was
Jewish!).
And one of these days those same qualities would get her what she fully meant to have: her own byline, her own column, in one of the big dailies. If Dorothy Kilgallen, that old sourpuss, could do it, then Lois Lane, pretty
and
smart
and
clever
and
talented, could do it too. Even Willi Berg, who was
such
a cynic—even
he
said complimentary things about her news stories, which, okay, were only class assignments, not the real McCoy, but still, good is good, correct? Good is good.

2

“You call this good?” Willi is saying now. “What’s with ‘incalculable’? ‘The fire damage is
incalculable
’?” He tosses her class assignment down on the kitchen table. “Honey, the fire damage is ten thousand bucks or it’s ten million, but it ain’t
never
‘incalculable’!”

“All right,” says Lois, “point taken. But what do you think of the story
overall?”

“Dull. Dull, sister, dull.”

“I hate you, you know that?” Does she really need a boyfriend? Does she really need
this
one?

“Got any dessert?”

“There’s still some bread pudding, I think.”

“From the other night? Don’t you have anything fresh?”

At the sink counter she’s been drying dinner plates (they had macaroni and cheese, light on the cheese) when a sudden impulse prevails upon Lois to smack Willi in the head with the wet dish towel.

Now she reaches over and into his shirt pocket, helping herself to his package of Chiclets gum.

“You could ask,” he says.

She sticks out her tongue.

“But speaking of asking,” he says, “I got to ask you a big favor.”

“Oh, no . . .”

“I’ll pay you back tomorrow, I swear.”

“How much?”

“Thirty.”

“Rain on that! Where am
I
supposed to come up with thirty bucks? When I can’t meet the rent, thanks to your flat-leaving old girlfriend.”

“Skinny Simon is
not
my old girlfriend, she’s just a friend. Number one. Number two, it was your decision not to find another roommate. And number three, you shouldn’t blame the poor thing for falling in love—I never blamed you.”

“The boy is delirious.”

“Guaranteed you’ll have the cash back tomorrow. Swear to God. By noon. Could be sooner.”

“ ‘Could be sooner.’ Could be never, same as every other time I loaned you money like a real dope. No, Willi, and I mean it.”

“Come on, Lois, I gotta get my baby outta jail.”

“What?”

“I hocked my camera.”

“Willi, that’s how you make a living, you can’t just hock it every time you want to play poker.”

“How’d you know it was poker?” He gives her a loose grin.

“You’re impossible. And a lousy card player.”

“Not true.”

“You’re broke.”

“True.” He pushes back his cuff, glances at his wrist-watch. “Honey, I really hate to banter and run, but it’s ten past eight. If I don’t get to the pawnshop by nine it’ll be closed. So can I have that money? I’ll try to stop back here later, okay?”

“I don’t
have
thirty bucks.”

“Lois, I
need
my camera. There’s gonna be a factory fire in Canarsie.”

“Going
to be?”

“You know how it is with little birdies and such.”

“Then go mooch off one of your little birdies.”

“I know you can loan it to me.”

Lois shakes her head. “And if I don’t get it back, what do I do Saturday morning when the rent man comes?”

“You’ll have it, I promise. I can sell ten pictures of this stupid fire. It’s a
toy
factory, hon. With a
teddy
bear on the roof. Look, I’ll pay you back thirty-
five
bucks, just for your trouble.”

“Leave, okay? Just go.”

“Oh come on, don’t get mad. You mad?”

“Leave, I said.”

“You really not gonna let me have it?”

“I
can’t.”

“Why, ’cause you don’t trust me?”

Folding her arms below her breasts, she glowers at him across the kitchen table. “Right. I don’t trust you.”

That sets him off. Abruptly Willi bends over and sweeps an arm across the surface of the table, flinging the sugar bowl, the milk pitcher, an ashtray, the coffeepot, its trivet, and both of their cups and saucers through the air to shatter, splash, chip, and bounce on the linoleum tile. The pages of Lois’s typewritten manuscript scatter, flutter around, skate in all directions.

With her back pressed to the sink, Lois stands transfixed, pale, frightened. Excited.

When he storms out, the door strikes the wall with such force that it bounces back and slams shut behind him.

Half a minute later when he emerges through the iron-and-glass apartment-house doors, Lois—who flung up her bedroom window and is leaning halfway through it—shouts down at the top of her voice, “I don’t ever want to see you again, ever!”

Willi doesn’t stop walking and he doesn’t turn around and he doesn’t look up, but he does sputter the razzberry.

It’s Wednesday evening, the twelfth of June 1935.

3

Willi Berg grew up in cramped, dark, squalid apartments, always ones with dust-filmed windows, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Essex Street. Forsyth. Pike. Pelham. Division. He was the fifth of nine children (his parents actually produced twelve offspring, but—influenza, whooping cough, scarlet fever). Willi’s mother, the epitome of the buxom, wide-faced, irritable peasant who spoke the kind of Jewish broken English vaudeville comics loved to build skits around, was born in the United States, in Baltimore. It was Willi’s father who emigrated from a ghetto in central Europe, fleeing Russian-dominated Warsaw sometime in the mid-nineties.

During Willi’s childhood, Papa worked what seemed dozens of jobs, sometimes as a pressman or cutter in the garment district, sometimes as a meat dresser at the East River stockyards; for a couple of years he worked as a laundryman in a commercial bathhouse. He made tile and paving bricks, sold carpets, sewed piecework, did construction (he mixed cement for the Woolworth Building), and one summer he lived away in Hartford assembling revolvers for Colt. The old man was a regular sweat-of-your-brow laborer. Without complaint, but without any pride, either. It’s what you did. You worked. Hard.

Willi and his siblings were not close to each other or to their parents. On the other hand, friction at home was rare, but that might have been because once the boys were old enough—once they were of school age—they spent precious little time there. When Gene, Willi’s second-oldest brother, was fifteen, he neglected to come home one evening, then stayed away three or four days. The evening he did finally show up again, their mother gave him her usual greeting—the slightest toss of her head—and never asked him where he’d been, what he’d been doing.

That small event, that
non
-event, had a profound impact on eleven-year-old Willi. Its significance crashed inside him like dishes. Mama hadn’t been
indifferent
to Gene’s absence, she’d
never missed him!

Shortly after that, as a test, Willi took a weekend hiatus from the family, kicking around penny arcades and pool halls, sleeping overnight in Tompkins Square Park. And sure enough, no one missed him, either. He came back late on Sunday, sat down at the table, ate his reheated supper, and life went on.

Whenever he was present, he was taken into account, talked to, yelled at, and teased, but otherwise he was completely out of mind. How wonderful! How thrilling!
This,
Willi realized, was freedom, what “freedom” truly was, not that ponderous abstract stuff—Speech, Press, Religion, blah blah blah—that his boneheaded teacher Mr. Whoziwhatsis at P.S. whatever-the-number-was yammered about all the time in civics class.
This.
To vanish whenever you wanted, and return whenever—
if
ever—you felt like it. And nobody to give you grief for it. Suddenly the world seemed immensely more interesting, a better place, than it had before.