Professor Alphonse von Clay, the Mighty Molecule (born Alter Klayman in Drakop, a village in the countryside east of Minsk), had abandoned his wife and son soon after Sammy’s birth, though every week thereafter he sent a money order in the amount of twenty-five dollars. Sammy came to know him only from the embittered narratives of Ethel Klayman and from the odd, mendacious clipping or newspaper photo the Molecule would send along, torn from the variety page of the Helena Tribune, or the Kenosha Gazette, or the Calgary Bulletin, and stuffed, with a sprinkling of cigar ash, into an envelope embossed with the imprint of a drinking glass and the name of some demi-fleabag hotel. Sammy would let these accumulate in a blue velvet shoe bag that he placed under his pillow before he went to sleep each night. He dreamed often and intensely of the tiny, thick-muscled man with the gondolier mustachios who could lift a bank safe over his head and beat a draft horse in a tug-of-war. The plaudits and honors described by the clippings, and the names of the monarchs of Europe and the Near East who had supposedly bestowed them, changed over the years, but the essential false facts of the Mighty Molecule’s biography remained the same: ten lonely years studying ancient Greek texts in the dusty libraries of the Old World; hours of painful exercises performed daily since the age of five, a dietary regimen consisting only of fresh legumes, seafoods, and fruits, all eaten raw; a lifetime devoted to the careful cultivation of pure, healthy, lamblike thoughts and to total abstention from insalubrious and immoral behaviors.
Over the years, Sammy managed to wring from his mother scant, priceless drops of factual information about his father. He knew that the Molecule, who derived his stage name from the circumstance of his standing, in calf-high gold lamé buskins, just under five feet two inches tall, had been imprisoned by the Czar in 1911, in the same cell as a politically minded circus strong man from Odessa known as Freight Train Belz. Sammy knew that it was Belz, an anarcho-syndicalist, and not the ancient sages of Greece, who had schooled his father’s body and taught him to abstain from alcohol, meat, and gambling, if not pussy and cigars. And he knew that it was in Kurtzburg’s Saloon on the Lower East Side in 1919 that his mother had fallen in love with Alter Klayman, newly arrived in this country and working as an iceman and freelance mover of pianos.
Miss Kavalier was almost thirty when she married. She was four inches shorter than her diminutive husband, sinewy, grim-jawed, her eyes the pale gray of rainwater pooled in a dish left on the window ledge. She wore her black hair pulled into an unrelenting bun. It was impossible for Sammy to imagine his mother as she must have been that summer of 1919, an aging girl upended and borne aloft on a sudden erotic gust, transfixed by the vein-rippled arms of the jaunty homunculus who carried winking hundred-pound blocks of ice into the gloom of her cousin Lev Kurtzburg’s saloon on Ludlow Street. Not that Ethel was unfeeling—on the contrary, she could be, in her way, a passionate woman subject to transports of maudlin nostalgia, easily outraged, sunk by bad news, hard luck, or doctor’s bills into deep, black crevasses of despair.
“Take me with you,” Sammy said to his father one evening after dinner, as they were strolling down Pitkin Avenue, on their way out to New Lots or Canarsie or wherever the Molecule’s vagabond urges inclined him that night. Like a horse, Sammy had noticed, the Molecule almost never sat down. He cased any room he entered, pacing first up and down, then back and forth, checking behind the curtains, probing the corners with his gaze or the toe of a shoe, testing out the cushions in the chair or sofa with a measured bounce, then springing back onto his feet. If compelled to stand in one place for any reason, he would rock back and forth like someone who needed to urinate, worrying the dimes in his pocket. He never slept more than four hours a night, and even then, according to Sammy’s mother, with inquietude, thrashing and gasping and crying out in his sleep. And he seemed incapable of staying in any one place for longer than an hour or two at a time. Though it enraged and humiliated him, the process of looking for work, crisscrossing lower Manhattan and Times Square, haunting the offices of booking agents and circuit managers, suited him well enough. On the days when he stayed in Brooklyn and hung around the apartment, he drove everyone else to distraction with his pacing and rocking and hourly trips to the store for cigars, pens, a Racing Form, half a roast chicken—anything. In the course of their post-prandial wanderings, father and son ranged far and sat little. They explored the eastern boroughs as far as Kew Gardens and East New York. They took the ferry from the Bush Terminal out to Staten Island, where they hiked out of St. George to Todt Hill, returning well after midnight. When, rarely, they hopped a trolley or caught a train, they would stand, even if the car was empty; on the Staten Island Ferry, the Molecule prowled the decks like a character out of Conrad, uneasily watching the horizon. From time to time in the course of a walk, they might pause in a cigar shop or at a drugstore, where the Molecule would order a celery tonic for himself and a glass of milk for the boy and, disdaining the chrome stool with its Naugahyde seat, would down his Cel-Ray standing up. And once, on Flatbush Avenue, they had gone into a movie theater where The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was playing, but they stayed only for the newsreel before heading back out to the street. The only directions the Molecule disliked to venture were to Coney Island, in whose most evil sideshows he had long ago suffered unspecified torments, and to Manhattan. He had his fill of it during the day, he said, and what was more, the presence on that island of the Palace Theatre, the pinnacle and holy shrine of Vaudeville, was viewed as a reproach by the touchy and grudge-cherishing Molecule, who never had, and never would, tread its storied boards.
“You can’t leave me with her. It isn’t healthy for a boy my age to be with a woman like that.”
The Molecule stopped and turned to face his son. He was dressed, as always, in one of the three black suits that he owned, pressed and shiny with wear at the elbows. Though, like the others, it had been tailored to fit him, it nonetheless strained to encompass his physique. His back and shoulders were as broad as the grille of a truck, his arms as thick as the thighs of an ordinary man, and his thighs, when pressed together, rivaled his chest in girth. His waist looked oddly fragile, like the throat of an egg timer. He wore his hair cropped close and an anachronistic handlebar mustache. In his publicity photographs, where he often posed shirtless or in a skintight leotard, he appeared smooth as a polished ingot, but in street clothes he had an unwieldy, comical air and, with the dark hair poking out at his cuffs and collar, he looked like nothing so much as a pants-wearing ape, in a cartoon satirizing some all too human vanity.
“Listen to me, Sam.” The Molecule seemed taken aback by his son’s request, almost as though it dovetailed with his own thinking or, the thought crossed Sammy’s mind, he had been caught on the verge of skipping town. “Nothing makes me happier than I take you with me,” he continued, with the maddening vagueness his ill grammar permitted. He smoothed Sammy’s hair back with a heavy palm. “But then again, Jesus, what a crazy fucking idea.”
Sammy started to argue, but his father raised a hand. There was more to be said, and in the balance of his speech Sammy sensed or imagined a faint glimmer of hope. He knew that he had chosen a particularly auspicious night to make his plea. That afternoon, his parents had quarreled over dinner—literally. Ethel scorned the Molecule’s dietary regimen, claiming not only that the eating of raw vegetables had none of the positive effects her husband attributed to it but also that, every chance the man got, he was sneaking off around the corner to dine in secret on steak and veal chops and french-fried potatoes. That afternoon, Sammy’s father had returned to the apartment on Sackman Street (this was in the days before the move to Flatbush) from his afternoon of job hunting with a bag full of Italian squash. He dumped them out with a wink and a grin onto the kitchen table, like a haul of stolen goods. Sammy had never seen anything like these vegetables. They were cool and smooth and rubbed against one another with a rubbery squeak. You could see right where they had been cut from the vine. Their sliced-off stems, woody and hexagonal, imp
lied a leafy green tangle that seemed to fill the kitchen along with their faint scent of dirt. The Molecule snapped one of the squashes in two and held its bright pale flesh up to Sammy’s nose. Then he popped one in his mouth and crunched it, smiling and winking at Sammy as he chewed.
“Good for your legs,” he had said, walking out of the kitchen to shower away the failures of the day.
Sammy’s mother boiled the squash until it was a mass of gray strings.
When the Molecule saw what she had done, there were sharp and bitter words. Then the Molecule had grabbed brusquely for his son, like a man reaching for his hat, and dragged Sammy out of the house and into the heat of the evening. They had been walking since six. The sun had long since gone down, and the sky to the west was a hazy moiré of purple and orange and pale gray-blue. They were walking along Avenue Z, dangerously close to the forbidden precincts of the Molecule’s early sideshow disasters.
“I don’t think you got the picture what’s it like out there for me,” he said as they walked along. “You think it’s like a circus in the pictures. All the clowns and the dwarf and the fat lady sitting around a nice big fire eating goulash and singing songs with an accordion.”
“I don’t think that,” Sammy said, though there was stunning accuracy in this assessment.
“If I did to take you with me—and I am just saying now if—you will have to work very hard,” the Molecule said. “They will only accept you if you can work.”
“I can work,” Sammy said, holding out an arm toward his father. “Look at that.”
“Yeh,” the Molecule said. He felt very carefully up and down the stout arms of his son, very much in the way Sammy had fingered the zucchini squash that afternoon. “You have arms that are not bad. But your legs are not so good.”
“Well, jeez, I mean, I had polio, Pop, what do you want?”
“I know you had polio.” The Molecule stopped again. He frowned, and in his face Sammy saw anger and regret and something else that looked almost like wishfulness. He stepped on his cigar end, and stretched, and shook himself a little, as if trying to shrug out of the constricting nets that his wife and son had thrown across his back. “What a fucking day I have. Holy shit.”
“What?” Sammy said. “Hey, where are you going?”
“I need to think,” his father said. “I need to think about what you are asking me.”
“Okay,” Sammy said. His father had started walking again, taking a right on Nostrand Avenue, striding along on his thick little legs with Sammy struggling to keep up, until he came to a peculiar building, Arabic in style, or maybe it was supposed to look Moroccan. It stood in the middle of the block, between a locksmith’s stall and a weedy yard stacked with blank headstones. Two skinny towers, topped with pointy dollops of peeling plaster, reached into the Brooklyn sky at either corner of the roof. It was windowless, and its broad expanse was clad, with weary elaboration, in a mosaic of small square tiles, fly-abdomen blue and a soapy gray that once must have been white. Many of the tiles were missing, chipped, or picked or tumbled loose. The doorway was a wide, blue-tiled arch. In spite of its forlorn appearance and hokum Coney Island air of the Mysterious East, there was something captivating about it. It reminded Sammy of the city of domes and minarets that you could just get a glimpse of, faint and illusory, behind the writing on the front of a pack of Chesterfields. Alongside the arched doorway, in letters of white tile bordered in blue, was written BRIGHTON GRAND HAMMAM.
“What’s a ham-mam?” Sammy said as they went in. His nose was immediately assaulted by a pungent odor of pine, by the smell of scorched ironing, damp laundry, and something deeper underneath it all, a human smell, salty and foul.
“It’s a shvitz,” the Molecule said. “You know what a shvitz is?”
Sammy nodded.
“When it’s time for thinking,” said the Molecule, “I like to have a shvitz.”
“Oh.”
“I hate thinking.”
“Yeah,” said Sammy. “Me too.”
They checked their clothes in the dressing room, in a tall black iron locker that creaked and fastened shut with the loud clang of a torture instrument. Then they went slapping down a long tiled corridor into the main steam room of the Brighton hammam. Their footsteps echoed as if they were inside a fairly large room. It was painfully hot, and Sammy felt that he couldn’t fill his lungs with sufficient air. He wanted to run back out to the relative cool of the Brooklyn evening, but he crept along, feeling his way through the billowing garments of steam, a hand on his father’s bare back. They climbed onto a low tiled bench and sat back, and Sammy felt each tile as a burning square against his skin. It was very hard to see, but from time to time a rogue current of air, or the vagaries of the invisible, wheezing, steam-producing machinery, would produce a break in the cover, and he could see that they were indeed inside a grand space, ribbed with porcelain groins, set with white and blue faience that was cracked in places, sweating and yellowed with age. As far as he could see, there were no other men or boys in the room with them, but he couldn’t be sure, and he felt obscurely afraid of an unknown face or naked limb suddenly looming out of the murk.
They sat for a long time, saying nothing, and at some point Sammy realized, first, that his body was producing veritable torrents of sweat with an abandon it had never before in his life displayed, and, second, that all along he had been imagining his existence in vaudeville: carrying an armload of spangled costumes down a long dark corridor of the Royal Theatre in Racine, Wisconsin, past a practice room where a piano tinkled and out the back door to the waiting van on a Saturday in midsummer, the deep midwestern night rich with june bugs and gasoline and roses, the smell of the costumes fusty but animated by the sweat and makeup of the chorus girls who had just vacated them, envisioning and inhaling and hearing all this with the vividness of a dream, though he was, as far as he could tell, wide-awake.
Then his father said, “I know you had polio.” Sammy was surprised; his father sounded extremely angry, as though ashamed that he had been sitting there all this time when he was supposed to be relaxing, working himself into a rage. “I was there. I finded you on the steps of the building. You were pass out.”
“You were there? When I got polio?”
“I was there.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were a baby.”
“I was four.”
“So, you were four. You don’t remember.”
“I would remember that.”
“I was there. I carried you into the room we had.”
“In Brownsville, this was.” Sammy could not keep the skepticism out of his tone.
“I was there, god damn it.”
As if blown by a gust of anger, the curtain of steam that hung between Sammy and his father parted suddenly, and he saw, for the first time really, the great brown spectacle of his naked father. None of the carefully posed studio photographs had prepared him for the sight. His father glistened, massive, savagely furred. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were like dents and wheel ruts in an expanse of packed brown earth. The root systems of an ancient tree seemed to furcate and furrow the surface of his thighs, and where his skin was not covered in dark hair, it was strangely rippled with wild webs of some kind of tissue just beneath the skin. His penis lay in the shadow of his thighs like a short length of thick twisted rope. Sammy stared at it, then realized he was staring. He looked away, and his heart jumped. There was a man there with them. He was sitting, a yellow towel across his lap, on the other side of the room. He was a dark-haired, swarthy young man with a single long eyebrow and a perfectly smooth chest. His eyes met Sammy’s for a moment, then slid away, then back. It was as if a tunnel of clear air had opened between them. Sammy looked back at his father, his stomach awash in an acid of embarrassment, confusion, and arousal. Somehow the hirsute magnificence of him was too much. So he just looked down at the towel draped across his own two broomstick legs.
“You were so heavy to ca
rry,” 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.