The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (30 page)

It must be said at this point that a very large number of German New Yorkers were vehemently opposed to Hitler and the Nazis. They wrote outraged letters to the editors of the major dailies, condemning Allied and American inaction after the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland. They joined anti-fascist leagues, brawled with brown-shirts—Joe was far from the only young man who went out into the streets of New York that autumn spoiling for a fight—and vigorously supported the president and his policies when they took action against Hitler and his war. Nevertheless, there was a fair number of New York Germans who took open pride in the accomplishments, civil, cultural, sporting, and military, of the Third Reich. Among these was a smaller group that was regularly active in various patriotic, nationalistic, generally racist, and sometimes violent organizations sympathetic to the aims of the homeland. Joe frequently returned from Yorkville with anti-Jewish newspapers and tracts that he read through from front to back, stomach tight with fury, then stuffed into one of three peach crates that he used for a filing cabinet. (The other two held his letters from home and his comic books.)

One day, as he was haunting the streets of Yorkville, Joe noticed a sign painted in the window of a second-floor office:

Standing there, staring up at the window, Joe underwent a dark fantasy of running up to that office and bursting into that warren of snakes, feet flying right up at you out of the panel as jagged splinters of the door shot in all directions. He saw himself wading into a roiling tangle of brown-shirts, fists and boots and elbows, and finding, in that violent surf of men, triumph, or if not that then atonement, retribution, or deliverance. He watched the window for nearly half an hour, trying to catch a glimpse of an actual party member. No one entered the building or walked in front of the second-floor window. Joe soon gave up and went home.

Inevitably, he went back to Yorkville. There was a
konditorei
called Haussman’s across the street from the headquarters of the AAL, and
from a table by the window Joe had a good view of the door to the building’s lobby and of the window. He ordered a slice of the house’s excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited. Another slice and two cups later there was still no sign of any Aryan-American at work. He paid his tab and crossed the street. The building’s directory, as he had already observed, listed an optometrist, an accountant, a publisher, and the AAL, but none of these concerns appeared to have any patients, clients, or employees. The building—it was called the Kuhn Building—was a graveyard. When he climbed the stairs to the second floor, the door to the AAL offices was locked. Gray daylight through the frosted glass of the door suggested that there were no lamps turned on inside. Joe tried the knob. Then he got down on one knee to examine the lock. It was a Chubb, old and solid, but if he’d had his tools, it would have presented no problem. Unfortunately, his picks and wrench were in a drawer beside his bed down at Palooka Studios. He felt around in his pockets and found a mechanical pencil whose metal pocket clip, attached to the shaft with a two-pronged collar, would serve well enough, suitably deformed, as a tension wrench. But there was still the matter of a pick. He went back downstairs and walked around the block until he found a child’s bicycle chained to a window grate on East Eighty-eighth Street. It looked like a new bike, sugary red, its chrome parts bright as mirrors and its tires glossy and stubbled. He waited for a moment to make sure that no one was coming. Then he grasped the shiny handlebars and, with savage jabs of the heel of his shoe at the bike’s front wheel, managed to spring loose a spoke. He wiggled it free of the wheel rim and then ran back to the corner of Eighty-seventh and York. Using an iron railing as a crimping form and the sidewalk itself as a rough file, he was able to fashion a serviceable pick from the thin strong wire of the spoke.

When he got back up to the offices of the Aryan-American League, he knocked on the scarred oak frame of the door. There was no reply. He hitched up his trousers, knelt down, put his forehead to the door, and set to work. The crude tools, lack of practice, and pulsation of his own excitement in his arteries and joints made the work more difficult than it ought to have been. He took off his jacket. He rolled up his sleeves. He tipped his hat into his hands and set it on the floor beside him. Finally
he opened his collar and yanked his tie to one side. He cursed and sweated and listened so avidly for the sound of the door opening downstairs that he could not hear the lock through his fingers. It took him nearly an hour to get inside.

When he did, he found not the elaborate laboratory or manufactory of fascism he had been expecting but a wooden desk, a chair, a lamp, a typewriter, and a tall oak filing cabinet. The venetian blinds were dusty and crooked, and missing slats. The wooden floor was bare and spotted with cigarette burns. The telephone, when Joe lifted the receiver, was dead. On one wall was a framed color lithograph of the Führer in a romantic mood, chin held at a poetic angle, an alpine breeze stirring his dark forelock. Against another wall stood a shelf piled high with various publications, in English and in German, whose titles alluded to the aims and predictions of National Socialism and the pan-German dream.

Joe went over and stood behind the desk. He pulled out the chair and sat down. The blotter was lost amid a blizzard of notes and memoranda, some typed, some scrawled in a minute and angular hand.

There were bus transfers, candy wrappers, a ticket stub from the Polo Grounds. There was a copy of a book called
Thuggee
. There were numerous newspaper clippings and articles that had been torn from
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
. All of the magazine articles, Joe noticed, seemed to be concerned with the film star Franchot Tone. And larded throughout the layers of rubbish and cryptic notations were dozens of comic books:
Superman, Marvel Mystery, Flash, Whiz, Shield-Wizard
—as well as, Joe could hardly fail to notice, the latest issues of
Radio, Triumph
, and
The Monitor
. In spots, the drifts of paper grew positively mountainous. Paper clips, tacks, and pen nibs were scattered everywhere, like conventional features on a map. A jagged palisade of pencils bristled from an empty Savarin coffee can. Joe reached out and, with two quick sweeps of his arms, sent everything tumbling. The thumbtacks made a pattering sound as they hit the floor.

Joe went through the drawers. In one he found a statement from New York Telephone promising, reliably as it had turned out, to disconnect service if the AAL account continued unpaid; a typed manuscript; and, inexplicably, the menu from the recent wedding reception, at the Hotel Trevi, of Bruce and Marilyn Horowitz. Joe yanked out the drawer and tipped it over. The manuscript split into halves that sprawled like a dropped deck of cards. Joe picked up a page and read it. It appeared to be science fiction. Someone named Rex Mundy was taking aim with his ray pistol at the suppurating hide of a hideous Zid. Someone named Krystal DeHaven was dangling upside down from a chain above the yawning maw of a hungry tork.

He crumpled the page and resumed his raid on the desk drawers. One contained a framed photograph of Franchot Tone, in the lower left corner of which, tucked into the gap between the glass and the inner edge of the picture frame, was a panel that Joe recognized at once as having been cut from the pages of
Radio Comics
#1. It was a close-up shot of old Max Mayflower as a young man, rich and devil-may-care. His expression was dreamy, his cheeks were dimpled, and in the word balloon he was saying, “Oh, what do I care? The important thing is
having fun
.” Joe noticed that the angle of Max’s head, a certain wryness in his expression, and his chiseled nose were very similar, indeed identical, to those of Franchot Tone in the publicity photo. It was a resemblance that no one had ever noticed or remarked on before. Tone was not an actor whose work or face were especially familiar to Joe, but now, as he studied the slender, melancholy long face in the glossy photograph—it was signed
To Carl with all the best wishes of Franchot Tone
—he wondered if he could have unconsciously modeled the character on Tone.

In the last, bottom-right drawer, at the back, there was a small, leather-bound diary. On its flyleaf was an inscription dated Christmas 1939.
To Carl, someplace to put his brilliant thoughts in order, with love, Ruth
. For its first fifty pages or so the diary carried on a tiny and furious handwritten argument, the burden of which—insofar as Joe could make it out—seemed to be that Franchot Tone was a member of a secret league of assassins, funded by the company run by Tone’s father, American Carborundum, who were bent on eliminating Adolf Hitler. The revelation
stopped mid-sentence, and the remaining pages of the diary were taken up by several hundred variations on the words “Carl Ebling,” signed in an encyclopedia of styles from florid to scratchy, over and over again. Joe opened the diary to its center, gripped each half, and tore it down the spine into two pieces.

When he had finished with the desk, Joe went over to the bookcase. Coolly, methodically, he sent the stacks of books and pamphlets fluttering to the floor. He was afraid that if he allowed himself to feel anything, it would be neither rage nor satisfaction but merely pity for the mad, dusty nullity of Carl Ebling’s one-man league. So he proceeded without feeling anything, hands numb, emotions pinched like a nerve. He lifted the picture of Hitler from its hook, and it hit with a tinkle. Proceeding next to the file cabinet, he drew out the top drawer, A–D, upended it, and shook its contents loose, like the Escapist emptying soldiers from the turret of a tank. He yanked out E–J, and was about to send its contents spilling down atop the mound of A–D when he noticed the legend typed on the index tab of one of the very first files in the drawer: “Empire Comics, Inc.”

The rather swollen folder contained all ten issues of
Radio Comics
that had so far appeared; affixed by a paper clip to the first issue were some twenty-five sheets of onionskin, densely typed. It was a report, in the form of a memorandum to All League Members, from Carl Ebling, President of the New York Chapter, AAL. The subject of the memorandum was, of all things, the superpowered escape artist known as the Escapist. Joe sat down in the chair, lit a cigarette, and started to read. In the opening paragraph of Carl Ebling’s memorandum, the costumed hero, his publisher, and his creators, the “Jew cartoonists” Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, were all identified as threats to the reputations, dignity, and ambitions of German nationalism in America. Carl Ebling had read an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
^*
detailing the success and burgeoning circulation of Empire’s comic book line, and he expounded briefly on the negative effects such crass anti-German propaganda would have on the minds of those in whose hands rested the future of the Saxon peoples—America’s children. Next he drew his readers’ hypothetical
attention to the remarkable resemblance between the character of Max Mayflower, the original Misterioso, and the secret Allied agent Franchot Tone. After this, however, the sense of critical purpose seemed to abandon the author. In the paragraphs that followed, and for the remainder of the memorandum, Ebling contented himself—there was no better way of putting it—with summarizing and describing the adventures of the Escapist, from the first issue detailing his origins through the most recent issue to hit the newsstands. Ebling’s summaries were, on the whole, careful and accurate. But the striking thing was the way, as he went along, month by month adding another entry to his dossier on Empire, Ebling’s tone of dismissive scorn and outrage moderated and then vanished altogether. By the fourth issue, he had stopped larding his descriptions with terms like “outrageous” and “offensive”; meanwhile, the entries grew longer and more detailed, breaking down at times into panel-by-panel recitations of the action in the books. The final summary, of the most recent issue, was four pages long and so devoid of judgmental language as to be completely neutral. In the last sentence, Ebling seemed to realize how far he had strayed from his original project, and appended with unpunctuated haste that implied a certain shamefaced recovery of purpose, “Of course all this is the usual Jewish warmongering propiganda [
sic
].” But it was plain to Joe that there was no real purpose being served by the Ebling memorandum except the exegesis, the precisely annotated recording, of ten months of pure enjoyment. Carl Ebling was, in spite of himself, a fan.

Joe had received letters from readers over the past months, boys and girls—mostly boys—scattered all over the United States from Las Cruces to LaCrosse, but these were usually limited to rather simple expressions of appreciation and requests for signed pinups of the Escapist, enough that Joe had evolved a standard pinup pose, which at first he drew each time by hand but had recently had photostatted, complete with his signature, to save time. Reading the Ebling memorandum marked the first time that Joe became aware of the possibility of an adult readership for his work, and the degree of Ebling’s passion, his scholarly enthusiasm replete with footnotes, thematic analyses, and lists of dramatis personae, however reluctant and shamed, touched him strangely. He was aware—he could not deny it—of a desire to meet
Ebling. He looked around at the havoc he had created in the poor, sad offices of the Aryan-American League and felt a momentary pang of remorse.

Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman—Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death’s-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. For months he had been assuring himself, and listening to Sammy’s assurances, that they were hastening, by their make-believe hammering at Haxoff or Hynkel or Hassler or Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.