The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (17 page)

“You were so heavy to carry,” his father said, “I thought you have to be dead. Only also you were so hot against the hand. The doctor came and we put ice on you and when you woke up you couldn’t walk anymore. And then when you come back from the hospital I started taking you and I took you around, I carried you and I dragged you and I made you walk. Until your knees were scraped and bruised, I made you walk. Until you cried. First holding on to me, then on to the crutches, then not with crutches. All by yourself.”

“Jeez,” Sammy said. “I mean, huh. Mom never told me any of this.”

“What a wonder.”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“God is merciful,” the Molecule said dryly; he didn’t believe in God, as his son well knew. “You hated every minute. You just as good hated me.”

“But Mom lied.”

“I am shocked.”

“She always told me you left when I was just a little baby.”

“I did. But I came back. I am there when you come sick. Then I stay and teach you to help you walk.”

“And then you left again.”

The Molecule appeared to choose to ignore this observation. “That’s why I try to walk you around so much now,” he said. “To make your legs strong.”

This possible second motive for their walks—after his father’s inherent restlessness—had occurred to Sammy before. He was flattered, and believed in his father, and in the potency of long walks.

“So you’ll take me?” he said. “When you go?”

Still the Molecule hesitated. “What about your mother?”

“Are you kidding? She can’t wait to get rid of me. She hates having me around as much as she hates having you.”

At this the Molecule smiled. From all outward appearances, the renewed presence of her husband in her household was nothing but an annoyance to Ethel, or worse—a betrayal of principles. She criticized his habits, his clothing, his diet, his reading material, and his speech. Whenever he tried to escape the fetters of his awkward, obscene English and speak with his wife in the Yiddish in which both were fluent, she ignored him, pretended not to hear, or simply snapped, “You’re in America. Talk American.” Both in his presence and behind his back, she berated him for his coarseness, his long-winded stories of his vaudeville career and his childhood in the Pale of Settlement. She told him that he snored too loudly, laughed too loudly, simply lived too loudly, beyond the limit of tolerance of civilized beings. Her entire discourse with him appeared to consist solely of animadversion and invective. And yet the previous night, and every night since his return, she had invited him, in a voice that trembled with girlish shame, into her bed and allowed him to enjoy her. At forty-five, she was not very different than she had been at thirty, lean, ropy, and smooth, with skin the color of almond hulls and a neat soft tangle of ink-black hair between her legs, which he liked to grab hold of and pull until she cried out. She was a woman of appetite who had gone without the companionship of
a man for a decade, and on his unexpected return she granted him access to even those parts and uses of her that in their early life she had been inclined to keep to herself. And when they were finished, she would lie beside him in the darkness of the tiny room she had partitioned from the kitchen by a beaded curtain, and stroke his great hairy chest, and repeat into his ear in a low whisper all the old endearments and professions of her beholdenness to him. At night, in the dark, she did not hate to have him around. It was this thought that had made him smile.

“Don’t be so sure of it,” he said.

“I don’t care, Pop. I want to leave,” said Sammy. “Damn it, I just want to get away.”

“All right,” said his father. “I promise that I will take you when I go.”

The next morning, when Sammy woke up, his father had gone. He had found an engagement on the old Carlos circuit, in the Southwest, said his note, where he spent the rest of his career playing hot, dusty theaters from Kingman as far south as Monterrey. Though Sammy continued to receive cards and clippings, the Mighty Molecule never again passed within a thousand miles of New York City. One night, about a year before Joe Kavalier’s arrival, a telegram had come with word that, at a fairground outside Galveston, under the rear wheels of a Deere tractor he was attempting to upend, Alter Klayman had been crushed, and with him Sammy’s fondest hope, in the act of escaping from his life, of working with a partner.

T
HE TWO UPPERMOST FLOORS
of a certain ancient red row house in the West Twenties, in the ten years before it was pulled down along with all of its neighbors to make way for a gigantic, stepgabled apartment block called Patroon Town, were a notorious tomb for the hopes of cartoonists. Of all the many dozens of young John Helds and Tad Dorgans who had shown up, bearing fragrant, graduation-gift portfolios, mail-order diplomas from cartoonists’ schools, and the proud badge of ink under a ragged thumbnail, to seek lodging under its rotted timbers, only one, a one-legged kid from New Haven named Alfred Caplin, had gone on to meet with the kind of success they had all believed they would find—and the father of the Shmoo had spent only two nights there before moving on to better lodgings across town.

The landlady, a Mrs. Waczukowski, was the widow of a gagman for the Hearst syndicate who had signed his strips “Wacky” and on his death had left her only the building, an unconcealed disdain for all cartoonists veteran or new, and her considerable share of their mutual drinking problem. Originally, there had been six separate bedrooms on the top two stories, but over the years these had been recombined into a kind of ad hoc duplex with three bedrooms, a large studio, a living room in which there was usually an extra cartoonist or two lodged on a pair of cast-off sofas, and what was referred to, generally without irony, as the kitchen: a former maid’s room equipped with a hot plate, a pantry made from a steel supply cabinet stolen from Polyclinic Hospital, and a wooden shelf affixed with brackets to the ledge outside the window, on which, in the cool months, milk, eggs, and bacon could be kept.

Jerry Glovsky had moved in about six months earlier, and since then Sammy, in the company of his friend and neighbor Julie Glovsky, Jerry’s younger brother, had visited the apartment several times. Though he was largely ignorant of the details of the apartment’s past, Sammy had been sensitive to its thick-layered cigar-smoke allure of male fellowship, of years of hard work and sorrow in the service of absurd and glorious black-and-white visions. At the present time there were two other “permanent” occupants, Marty Gold and Davy O’Dowd, both of whom, like the elder Glovsky, shed sweat for Moe Shiflet, a.k.a. Moe Skinflint, a “packager” of original strips who sold his material, usually of poor quality, to the established syndicates and, more recently, to publishers of comic books. The place always seemed filled with ink-smirched young men, drinking, smoking, lying around with their naked big toes protruding from the tips of their socks. In the whole city of New York, there was no more logical hiring hall for the sort of laborers Sammy required to lay the cornerstone of the cheap and fantastic cathedral that would be his life’s work.

There was nobody home—nobody conscious, at any rate. The three young men pounded on the door until Mrs. Waczukowsi, her hair tied up in pink paper knots and a robe pulled around her shoulders, at last dragged herself up from the first floor and told them to scram.

“Just another minute, madam,” said Sammy, “and we shall trouble you no more.”

“We have left some valuable antiquities in there,” Julie said, in the same clench-jawed Mr. Peanut accent.

Sammy winked, and the two young men smiled at her with as many of their teeth as they could expose until finally she turned, consigning them all to hell with the eloquent back of her hand, and retreated down the stairs.

Sammy turned to Julie. “So where is Jerry?”

“Beats me.”

“Shit, Julius, we’ve got to get in there. Where is everybody else?”

“Maybe they went with him.”

“Don’t you have a key?”

“Do I live here?”

“Maybe we could get in the window.”

“Five stories up?”

“Damn it!” Sammy gave the door a feeble kick. “It’s past noon and we haven’t drawn a line! Christ.” They would have to go back to the Kramler Building and ask to work at the rutted tables in the offices of Racy Publications, a course that would inevitably bring them within the baleful circumference of George Deasey’s gaze.

Joe was kneeling by the door, running his fingers up and down the jamb, fingering the knob.

“What are you doing, Joe?”

“I could get us in, only I leave behind my tools.”

“What tools?”

“I can pick the locks,” he said. “I was trained to, to what, to get out of things. Boxes. Ropes. Chains.” He stood up and pointed to his chest. “
Ausbrecher
. Outbreaker. No, what it is? ‘Escape artist.’ ”

“You are a trained escape artist.”

Joe nodded.

“You.”

“Like Houdini.”

“Meaning you can get
out
of things,” Sammy said. “So you can get us
in
?”

“Normally. In, out, it’s only the same thing in the other direction. But sadly, I leaved my tools in the Flat Bush.” He pulled a small penknife from his pocket and began to probe the lock with its thin blade.

“Hold on,” Julie said. “Wait a second, Houdini. Sammy. I don’t think we ought to go breaking in—”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sammy said.

“You’re right,” Joe said. “We’re in a hurry.” He put the knife away and started back down the stairs. Sammy and Julie went after him.

In the street, Joe pulled himself up onto the newel that topped the right-hand baluster of the front steps, a chipped cement sphere onto which some long-vanished tenant had inked a cruel caricature of the querulous lunar face of the late Mr. Waczukowski. He pulled off his jacket and threw it to Sammy.

“Joe, what are you doing?”

Joe didn’t answer. He perched for a moment atop the pop-eyed newel, his long feet side by side in their rubber-soled oxfords, and studied
the retractable iron ladder of the fire escape. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a match. He let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, then fit the cigarette between his teeth and rubbed his hands together. Then he sprang from the top of Mr. Waczukowski’s head, reaching out. The fire escape rang against the impact of his palms, and the ladder sagged and with a rusted groan slid slowly downward, six woozy inches, a foot, a foot and a half, before jamming, leaving Joe to dangle five feet off the pavement. Joe chinned himself, trying to loosen it, and swung his legs back and forth; but it stayed latched.

“Come on, Joe,” said Sammy. “That won’t work.”

“You’ll break your neck,” said Julie.

Joe let go of the ladder with his right hand, snatched a puff from his cigarette, then replaced it. Then he took hold of the ladder again and swung himself, throwing his entire body into it, with each swing describing an increasingly wider arc. The ladder rattled and chimed against the fire escape. Suddenly he folded himself in half, let go of the ladder completely, and allowed his momentum to jackknife him out, up and over, onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, where he landed on his feet. It was a completely gratuitous performance, done purely for effect or for the thrill of it; he easily could have pulled himself up the ladder hand over hand. He easily could have broken his neck. He paused for a moment on the landing, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette.

At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon. The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over. Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.

“Look at him,” said Sammy. “Look what he can do.”

Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his
father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing—common enough among the inventors of heroes—to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.