“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.
THE 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.
At the same time, as he watched the reckless exercise of Joe’s long, cavalier frame, the display of strength for its own sake and for the love of display, the stirring of passion was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.
“Remarkable,” Julie said dryly, in a voice that suggested there was something funny, and not in the sense of humorous, about the expression on his old friend’s face. “Now if only he could draw.”
“He can draw,” said Sammy.
Joe ran clanking up the steps of the fire escape to the fourth-floor window, threw up the sash, and fell headfirst into the room. A moment later there was an impossibly musical Fay Wray scream from the apartment.
“Huh,” Julie said. “The guy might do all right in the cartoon business.”
A GIRL WITH WILD BROWN RINGLETS, looking like she was going to cry, came barreling into the stairwell. She was wearing a man’s herringbone overcoat. Joe stood in the middle of the apartment, his head hung at a comically sheepish angle, rubbing at the back of his neck. Sammy just had time to notice that the girl was carrying a pair of black engineer boots in one hand and a knot of black hose in the other before she brushed past Julie Glovsky, almost sending him over the banister, and went thumping bare-legged down the stairs. In her immediate wake, the three young men stood there looking at one another, stunned, like cynics in the wake of an irrefutable miracle.
“Who was that?” Sammy said, stroking his cheek where she had brushed against him with her perfume and her alpaca scarf. “I think she might have been beautiful.”
“She was.” Joe went to a battered horsehide chair and picked up a large satchel lying on it. “I think she forgot this.” It was black leather, with heavy black straps and complicated clasps of black metal. “Her purse.”
“That isn’t a purse,” said Julie, looking nervously around the living room, reckoning up the damage they had already done. He scowled at Sammy as if sensing another one of his friend’s harebrained schemes already beginning to fall apart. “That’s probably my brother’s. You’d better put it down.”
“Is Jerry transporting secret documents all of a sudden?” Sammy took the bag from Joe. “Suddenly he’s Peter Lorre?” He undid the clasps and lifted the heavy flap.
“No!” said Joe. He lunged to snatch the bag, but Sammy yanked it away. “It’s not nice,” Joe chided him, trying to reach around and grab it. “We should respect her privacies.”
“This couldn’t be hers,” said Sammy. And yet he found in the black courier’s pouch a pricey-looking tortoiseshell compact, a much-folded pamphlet entitled “Why Modern Ceramics Is the People’s Art,” a lipstick (Helena Rubinstein’s Andalucia), an enameled gold pillbox, and a wallet with two twenties and a ten. Several calling cards in her wallet gave her name, somewhat extravagantly, as Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and reported that she was employed in the art department at Life magazine.
“I don’t think she was wearing any panties,” said Sammy.
Julie was too moved by this revelation to speak.
“She wasn’t,” said Joe. They looked at him. “I came in through the window and she was sleeping there.” He pointed to Jerry’s bedroom. “In the bed. You heard her scream, yes? She put on her dress and her coat.”
“You saw her,” said Julie.
“Yes.”
“She was naked.”
“Quite naked.”
“I’ll bet you couldn’t draw it.” Julie pulled off his sweater. It was the color of Wheatena, and underneath it he wore another, identical sweater. Julie was always complaining that he felt cold, even in warm weather; in the wintertime he went around swelled to twice his normal bulk. Over the years, his mother, based only on knowledge gleaned from the pages of the Yiddish newspapers, had diagnosed him with several acute and chronic illnesses. Every morning she obliged him to swallow a variety of pills and tablets, eat a raw onion, and take a teaspoon each of Castoria and vitamin tonic. Julie himself was a great perpetrator of nudes, and was widely admired in Sammy’s neighborhood for his unclothed renditions of Fritzi Ritz, Blondie Bumstead, and Daisy Mae, which he sold for a dime, or, for a quarter, of Dale Arden, whose lovely pubic display he rendered in luxuriant strokes generally agreed to be precisely those with which Alex Raymond himself would have endowed her, if public morals and the exigencies of interplanetary travel had permitted it.
“Of course I could draw it,” said Joe. “But I would not.”
“I’ll give you a dollar if you draw me a picture of Rosa Saks lying naked in bed,” said Julie.
Joe took Rosa’s satchel from Sammy and sat down on the horsehide chair. He seemed to be balancing his material need against the desire he felt, as had Sammy, to hold on to a marvelous apparition and keep it for his own. At last he sighed and tossed the satchel to one side.
“Three dollars,” he said.
Julie was not happy with this, but nonetheless he nodded. He pulled off another sweater. “Make it good,” he said.
Joe knelt to grab a broken stub of Conte crayon lying on an overturned milk crate at his feet. He picked up an unopened overdue notice from the New York Public Library and pressed it flat against the milk crate. The long forefingers of his right hand, stained yellow at their tips, skated leisurely across the back of the envelope. His features grew animated, even comical: he squinted, pursed his lips and shifted them from side to side, grimaced. After a few minutes, and as abruptly as it had begun, his hand came to a stop, and his fingers kicked the crayon loose. He held up the envelope, wrinkling his forehead, as if considering the thing he had drawn and not simply the way he had drawn it. His expression grew soft and regretful. It was not too late, he seemed to be thinking, to tear up the envelope and keep the pretty vision all to himself. Then his face resumed its habitual mien, sleepy, unconcerned. He passed the envelope to Julie.
His short flight through the window had landed him on the floor of the bedroom, and Joe had chosen to draw Rosa Saks the way he’d first seen her, at eye level as he picked himself up from the floor, looking past a carved acorn that crowned the footboard of the bed. She was lying passed out on her belly, he
r sprawling right leg kicked free of the blankets and leaving exposed rather more than half of a big and fetching tuchis. Her right foot loomed large in the foreground, slender, toes curled. The lines of her bare and of her blanketed leg converged, at the ultimate vanishing point, in a coarse black bramble of shadow. In the distance of the picture, the hollows and long central valley of her back rose to a charcoal Niagara of hair that obscured all but the lower portion of her face, her lips parted, her jaw wide and perhaps a bit heavy. It was a four-by-nine-inch slice cut fresh from Joe’s memory but, for all its immediacy, rendered in clean, unhurried lines, with a precision at once anatomical and emotional: you felt Joe’s tenderness toward that curled little foot, that hollow back, that open, dreaming mouth drawing a last deep breath of unconsciousness. You wanted her to be able to go on sleeping, as long as you could watch.