Sometimes, when he was making arrangements with the parents beforehand, the name of Houdini came up, and Joe would be asked if he might (naturally with a commensurate increase in his fee) perform an escape; but here he drew the line.
“I escaped from Prague,” he would say, looking down at his bare wrists as if for the reddened trace of a manacle. “I think maybe that is enough.”
Here the parents, exchanging looks with Rosa, would invariably agree and write him out a check for a hundred dollars. It had never seemed to occur to Joe that the reason for his sudden popularity on the West Side bar mitzvah circuit was neither the erratic skill of his prestigious digits, nor the unwavering fervor of his young fans, but rather the sympathy those parents felt for a homeless Jewish boy who had somehow managed to get out from under the shadow of the billowing black flag that was unfurling across Europe, and who was known to donate his entire fee to the Transatlantic Rescue Agency.
“I’m not getting any better,” he said now, watching abstractly as he expanded in her hand. “Really, it’s embarrassing. At Tannen’s they all make fun of me.”
“You’re much better than you used to be,” she said, and then added, with just a hint of self-servingness: “Everything’s much better, isn’t it?”
“Much better,” he said, moving a little in her grasp. “Yes. Much.”
When she first met him, he had been such a forlorn, solitary figure, bruised and broken from all his street fighting, with the little fireplug, Sammy Clay, his lone prop and associate. Now he had friends, down at that magic shop of his, and in the New York art world. He had changed; she had changed him. In the pages of Radio Comics—Rosa was now a loyal reader—he and the Escapist continued to fight the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate. But the sad futility of the struggle, which Joe had sensed so early in his run on the magazine and which had been immediately apparent to Rosa, seemed to have begun to overtake the ingenuity of his pen. Month after month, the Escapist ground the armies of evil into paste, and yet here they were in the spring of 1941 and Adolf Hitler’s empire was more extensive than Bonaparte’s. In the pages of Triumph, the Four Freedoms* attained the orgasmically impossible goal of killing Hitler, only to learn in the next issue that their victim had been merely a mechanical double. Though Joe kept fighting, Rosa could see that his heart had gone out of the mayhem. It was in the pages of All Doll, in realms far from Zothenia or Prague, that Joe’s art now blossomed.
Luna Moth was a creature of the night, of the Other World, of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons, and defended all us unsuspecting dreamers against attack from the dark realms of sleep. Twice now she had flapped into battle against slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons, and while it was easy enough to see such plots as allegories of paranoia, invasion, and world war, and Joe’s work here as a continuation of the internecine conflict of Radio and Triumph, the art Joe turned in for Luna Moth was very different from his work on the other books. Rosa’s father, with his eye for native American sources of the Surrealist idea, had introduced Joe to the work of Winsor McKay. The urban dreamscapes, the dizzying perspectives, the playful tone, and the bizarre metamorphoses and juxtapositions of Little Nemo in Slumberland all quickly found their way into Joe’s pages for Luna Moth. Suddenly the standard three tiers of quadrangular panels became a prison from which he had to escape. They hampered his efforts to convey the dislocated and non-Euclidean dream spaces in which Luna Moth fought. He sliced up his panels, stretched and distorted them, cut them into wedges and strips. He experimented with benday dots, cross-hatching, woodcut effects, and even crude collage.* Through this bravura landscape of twilight flew a wisecracking, powerful young woman with immense breasts, fairy wings, and furry antennae. The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself. She could see Joe, in each new issue, contending with the conventions and clichés of Sammy’s more than usually literate stories, working his way toward some kind of breakthrough in his art. And she was determined to be there when he did. She had a feeling that she was going to be the only one to notice or appreciate it when it happened; to her, Joe had that authentic air of the solitary bricoleur, the potterer of genius, like the Facteur Cheval or that strange and diffident other Joe, Mr. Cornell, striking out toward the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised. Being there, supporting him in whatever way she could, at that moment of embarkation and on all the brilliant journey that would follow, had become a key element, along with helping him bring over his brother, and binding her to him and to America with unbreakable bonds, in her mission of love. As for the practice of her own art, that had always been less a matter of mission than of long, moody habit, a way of snatching at her emotions and ideas as they flitted past and pinning them, as it were, to canvas before they could elude her gaze. In the end, it would take far less time for the world, or at least that small portion of the world that read and thought about comic books, to acclaim Joe’s genius than it took for anyone—least of all Rosa—to acknowledge her own.
“I’d better start getting ready,” he said, though he did not move, and she redoubled her grip on his penis.
“What are you planning to do with this?” she asked him. “Maybe you could work it into your act. I could paint a little face on it.”
“I don’t work with puppets.”
There was a knock on the door. She let go of him, and he clambered over her to get underneath the coverlet, too. “Yes?” she called.
“Open up! I have a little gift for the Amazing.” It was her father. Rosa got up and pulled on a bathrobe. Then she picked up the cigarette that Joe had left burning on her dresser and went over to the door.
Her father stood in the hall, dressed for the reception in an enormous three-piece cocoa-brown seersucker suit, and carrying a canvas garment bag over one arm. He peered in curiously at Joe, who had sat up in bed, the blanket pulled up just high enough to cover himself. The question of this not being a convenient time to interrupt the young lovers, or of whether perhaps he ought to come back later, did not occur to her father. He just barreled right into her room.
“Josef,” he said, raising the garment bag. “We have noticed that every time you perform, you’re obliged to rent your tuxedo.” Her father was inclined to the imperial “we” when he felt he was being particularly magnanimous. “It seemed to us you really ought to have one of your own.” He unzipped the bag. “I had it made,” he said.
The jacket was the color of the sky over Prague Castle on a clear winter night. The trousers were also a glossy, coal-dark blue, piped with a bright gold stripe. And affixed to one of the satiny black lapels was a small golden pin in the shape of a skeleton key.
“I sort of thought,” her father said. “In honor of you-know-who.” He reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a domino mask of the same black satin as the jacket lapels, with long ties of black ribbon. “It couldn’t hurt to add a little bit of mystery to the act.”
Rosa was as surprised as Joe. She was smiling so hard that her ears started to hurt a little. “Joe,” she said, “look what he did.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, “I—” He made a show of wanting to stand up, trapped in the bed by his nakedness.
“For God’s sake, toss him a towel,” her father drawled. “So he can thank us properly.”
Joe climbed down from the bed, pulling the coverlet up around him. He knotted it around his waist and then took the blue tuxedo from Rosa’s father. A rather clumsy embrace followed, then her father brought out a flask and, after a bit of hopeless rummaging through the chaos of Rosa’s room, managed to find a glass that was only slightly smudged with lipstick prints.
“To the Amazing Cavalieri,” he said, raising the pink-tinged glass of w
hiskey. “Whom—dare I say it?”
“Dare it,” Rosa said, feeling herself blushing mightily.
“I’ll just say that, in a family as small as this, there is most certainly room for one more.” He drank.
Rosa was watching Joe’s face, feeling almost drunk on the happiness of the moment, and so she saw the look of pain that flickered across it at these words.
“I already have a family,” he said quietly.
“Oh, yes … Joe, for heaven’s sake, I know that. I just—”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said immediately. “That was very rude of me. Thank you so much, for everything. For this.” He held up the tuxedo. “For your kindness. For Rosa.”
He had nearly saved the moment, and they allowed him to think that he had. But her father fled the bedroom within the minute, and Rosa and her Joe were left alone, on the bed, naked, staring at the empty blue suit.
* The Freedoms, whose sales, during the war years, came to rival those of the Escapist himself, were four teenage boys, Kid Einstein, Knuckleduster (known affectionately as “Knuck”) O’Toole, Tommy Gunn, and Mumbles, a reformed gang of “Dead-End Hooligans” who had abandoned street fighting and pinked derbies in favor of the Axis menace and matching suits of tricolor long underwear.
* Thirty years later, when this work was first reprinted, The Weird Worlds of Luna Moth (Nostalgia Press, 1970; second edition, Pure Imagination, 1996) quickly became a head-shop bestseller.
THE LAST LETTER that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor’s pen across the text):
My dear son,
It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with hope. With Thomas gone we have nothing to live for, it seems, but the knowledge that he is on his way to be with you in that fortunate nation which has already so kindly received you in its bosom.
We are all as well as can be expected given Tante Lou’s fits of pique [“Tante Lou” was family code for the Nazi government of Prague]. Your grandfather has lost most of the hearing in his left ear due to an infection, and some of the use of his right ear as well. So now he dwells in a realm of shouted conversations and serene imperviousness to argument. The latter is a valuable skill to possess around our Dear Friends [i.e., the Katz family, with whom the Kavaliers shared their two-room flat], and indeed I am at times inclined to believe that Papa is simply pretending to be deaf, or at least that he arranged to become so on purpose. My wrist has not quite healed—it never may in the absence of diet—and is quite useless in poor weather but we have lately had a stretch of fine days, and I have continued to work on my Reinterpretation of Dreams* though paper [? smudged] is bother, and I am obliged to soak my old typewriter ribbons in .
Please, Josef, do not continue to trouble yourself or waste your time attempting to win for us what you have, with the help of your friends, been able to attain for your brother. It is enough; more than enough. Your late father, as you know, suffered from chronic optimism, but it is clear to me and to anyone not foolish or addled by deafness that we and that the present state of affairs will be as permanent as any of us shall require. You must make a life for yourself there, with your brother, and turn your thoughts from us and from .
I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music. But for you to waste another moment in worrying about us in this city of ! No.
I shall not write again unless I have news of which you cannot fairly be deprived. Until then you must know, dear one, that you are in my thoughts every instant of my waking life and in my (clinically quite uninteresting) dreams as well.
Fondly,
Mother
This letter was in the hip pocket of Joe’s new tuxedo as he entered the cream-and-gold Grand Ballroom of the Pierre. He had been carrying it around with him—unopened and unread—for days now. Whenever he paused to consider this behavior he found it quite shocking; but he never paused for very long. The burst of guilt that lit up the radiant nerves of his solar plexus when he handled or suddenly remembered the unopened letter was every bit as intense, he was sure, as whatever he would feel upon tearing its fragile seal and letting out the usual gray compound of bad dreams and pigeon feathers and soot. Every evening he took out the letter, without looking at it, and set it on his dresser. In the morning he transferred it to the pocket of the next day’s trousers. It would not be accurate to say that it weighed there like a stone, encumbering his progress through the city of freedom and swing, or that it caught like a bone in his throat. He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation. He loved, for example, her hair in all the forms it took on her body: the down on her lip, the fuzz on her buttocks, the recurrent brown feelers her eyebrows sent toward each other in between tweezings, the coarse pubic ruff that she had allowed him to shave into the outline of a moth’s wings, the thick smoke-fragrant curls of her head. When she worked on a canvas in her top-floor room, she had a habit, when pondering, of standing storklike on her left foot and lovingly massaging it with the big toe, its toenail painted aubergine, of the right. Somehow this shade of purple and the echo of contemplative childish masturbation in the way she rubbed at her ankle struck him every time as not merely adorable but profound. The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs—snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge—were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs. Only the embattled standards of a fundamentally restrained and sensible character prevented him from nattering constantly, to friends and strangers alike, about the capers she put in chicken salad (it was how her late mother had made it), the pile of dream words that accumulated by her bedside night after night, the lily-of-the-valley smell of her hand soap, et cetera. His portrayals of Judy Dark, in her up-to-the-minute gowns and bathing costumes cribbed from Vogue, and of her winged alter ego in streamlined bra and panties, grew ever more libidinous and daring—as if Luna Moth had received from the secret councils of Sex Itself an augmentation of powers like that granted to the Escapist at the outbreak of war—until she verged, in certain panels that took on a sacred and totemic significance for the boys of America, on total nakedness.
Thus, just as his mother begged him (though he did not know it), Joe had turned his thoughts from Prague, his family, the war. Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity. It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.