WHEN SAMMY WENT IN to wake Tommy for school, he found the boy already up and modeling his eye patch in the bedroom mirror. The bedroom furniture, a set from Levitz—bed, dresser, the mirror, and a hutch with drawers—had a nautical theme: the back wall of the hutch was lined with a navigation chart for the Outer Banks, the brass drawer pulls shaped like pilot’s wheels, the mirror trimmed in stout hawser rope. The eye patch did not look all that out of place. Tommy was trying different kinds of piratical scowls on himself.
“You’re up?” Sammy said.
Tommy nearly jumped out of his skin; he had always been an easy child to startle. He yanked the patch up over his dark, tousled head and turned, blushing deeply. He was in possession of both his eyes; they were bright blue, with a slight puffiness of the lower lids. There was, in fact, nothing at all wrong with his vision. His brain was something of a puzzle to Sammy, but there wasn’t any problem with his eyes.
“I don’t know what happened,” Tommy said. “I just somehow woke up.”
He stuffed the eye patch into the pocket of his pajama top. The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa’s idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.
“That’s unusual,” Sammy said.
“I know.”
“Usually I have to set off a charge of dynamite to get you up.”
“That’s true.”
“You’re like your mother that way.” Rosa was still in bed, buried under an avalanche of pillows. She suffered from insomnia and rarely managed to fall asleep before three or four, but once she had gone under, it was nearly impossible to rouse her. It was Sammy’s job to get Tommy out of the house on school mornings. “In fact, the only time you ever get yourself up early,” Sammy continued, allowing a note of prosecutorial insinuation to enter his voice, “is for something like your birthday. Or when we’re leaving for a trip.”
“Or if I have to get a shot,” Tommy said helpfully. “At the doctor.”
“Or.” Sammy had been hanging from the doorjamb, half in, half out of the room, but now he went over to stand behind Tommy. He was aware of an impulse to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, to let it lie there with the admonitory weight of a father’s, but in the end, he just folded his arms and looked at the reflection of Tommy’s serious face in the mirror. It pained Sammy to acknowledge it, but he was no longer comfortable around the boy whom, for the past twelve years, he had been obliged and delighted to call his son. Tommy had always been a tractable, moonfaced, watchful little boy, but lately, as his soft chestnut hair turned to black wire loops and his nose struck boldly out on its own, there began to gather around the features of his face some trouble that promised to develop into outright handsomeness. He was already taller than his mother, and nearly as tall as Sam. He took up greater mass and volume in the house, moved in unaccustomed ways, and gave off unfamiliar odors. Sammy found himself hanging back, giving ground, keeping out of Tommy’s way. “You don’t have something … planned for today?”
“No, Pop.”
He was jocular. “No trips to the ‘eye doctor’?”
“Ha,” the boy said, wrinkling his freckled nose in a base simulation of amusement. “Okay, Pop.”
“Okay, what?”
“Well, I’d better get dressed. I’m going to be late for school.”
“Because if you were.”
“I’m not.”
“If you were, I would have to chain you to the bed. You realize that.”
“I was only playing with an eye patch. Jeez.”
“All right.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything bad.” His voice put quotation marks around the last word.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Sammy said. He didn’t believe Tommy, but he tried to conceal his doubts. He didn’t like to antagonize the boy. Sammy worked five long days a week in the city, and brought work home on the weekends. He could not bear to waste, in arguing, the brief hours he spent with Tommy. He wished that Rosa were awake, so that he could ask her what to do about the eye patch. He grabbed hold of Tommy’s hair and, in an unconscious tribute to a favorite parental mannerism of his mother, vigorously shook Tommy’s head from side to side. “A roomful of toys, you play with a ten-cent eye patch from Spiegelman’s.”
Sammy padded down the hall, scratching at his bottom, the bandylegged captain of his own strange frigate, to make Tommy his lunch. It was a trim enough little tub, their house in Bloomtown. Its purchase had followed a string of ill-advised investments in the forties, among them the Clay Associates advertising firm, the Sam Clay School of Magazine Writing, and an apartment in Miami Beach for Sam’s mother, in which she had died of a brain aneurysm after eleven days of retired discontentment, and which was then sold—six months after purchase—at a considerable loss. The last irreducible nut that remained from the palmy days at Empire Comics had been just enough for a down payment here in Bloomtown. And for a long time, Sammy had loved the house, the way a man was supposed to love his boat. It was the one tangible reminder of his brief success, and by far the best thing that had ever come of his money.
Bloomtown had been announced in 1948, with ads in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and all the big New York papers. A fully functioning three-bedroom Cape Cod house, complete down to the ringing bottles of milk in the refrigerator, had been erected on the showroom floor of a former Cadillac dealership near Columbus Circle. The struggling young families of the Northeast—the white ones—were invited to visit the Bloomtown Idea Pavilion, tour the Bloomtown Home, and learn how an entire city of sixty thousand people was to be planted amid the potato fields west of Islip; a city of modest, affordable houses, each with its own yard and garage. An entire generation of young fathers and mothers raised in the narrow stairways and crowded rooms of the rust-and-brick boroughs of New York, Sammy Clay among them, showed up to flick the model light switches, bounce on the model mattresses, and recline for just a moment in the pressed metal chaise longue on the cellophane lawn, tilting their chins upward to catch the imaginary rays of the suburban Long Island sun. They sighed, and felt that one of the deepest longings in their hearts might one day soon be answered. Their families were chaotic things, loud and distempered, fueled by anger and the exigencies of the wise-guy attitude, and since the same was true of New York City itself, it was hard not to believe that a patch of green grass and a rational floor plan might go a long way to soothing the jangling bundles of raw nerves they felt their families had become. Many, Sammy Clay once again among them, reached for their checkbooks and reserved one of the five hundred lots to be developed in the initial phase of construction.
For months afterward, Sammy carried around in his wallet a little card that had come with the packet of documents of sale and read simply:
THE CLAYS
127 LAVOISIER DRIVE
BLOOMTOWN, NEW YORK, U.S.A.
(All the streets in their neighborhood were to be named after eminent scientists and inventors.)
That feeling of pride had long since dissipated. Sammy no longer paid very much attention at all to his own Cape Cod, a Number Two or Penobscott model, with bay window and miniature-golf-sized widow’s walk. He adopted the same policy with regard to it that he followed with his wife, his employment, and his love life. It was all habit. The rhythms of the commuter train, the school year, publishing schedules, summer vacations, and of his wife’s steady calendar of moods had inured him to the charms and torments of his life. Only his relationship with Tommy, in spite of the recent light frost of irony and distance, remained unpredictable, alive. It was thick with regret and pleasure. When they did get an hour together, planning a universe on loose-leaf paper, or playing Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball, it was invariably the happiest hour of Sammy’s week.
When he walked into the kitchen, he was surprised to f
ind Rosa sitting at the table with a cup of boiled water. On the surface of the water floated a canoe of sliced lemon.
“What’s going on?” Sammy said, running water into the enameled coffeepot. “Everybody’s up.”
“Oh, I’ve been up all night,” Rosa said brightly.
“Not a wink?”
“Not that I recall. My brain was going crazy.”
“Get anything?”
Rosa had a lead story due for Kiss Comics in two days. She was the second-best illustrator of women in the business (he had to give the nod to Bob Powell) but a terrible procrastinator. He had long since given up trying to lecture her on her work habits. He was her boss in name only—they had settled that question years before, when Rosa first came to work for him, in a yearlong series of skirmishes. Now they were, more or less, a package. Whoever hired Sammy to edit his line of comics knew that he would be obtaining the valuable services of Rose Saxon (her professional name) as well.
“I have some ideas,” she said in a guarded tone. All of Rosa’s ideas sounded bad at first; she adapted them from a messy compound of her dreams, sensational newspaper articles, and things she picked up in women’s magazines, and she was terrible at explaining them. It was always fascinating to see how they emerged under the teasing and topiary shapings of her pencil and brush.
“Something about the A-bomb?”
“How did you know?”
“I happened to be in the bedroom with you while you were talking out loud last night,” he said. “Foolishly trying to sleep.”
“Sorry.”
Sammy broke a half-dozen eggs into a bowl, splashed them with milk, shook in pepper and salt. He rinsed one of the eggshells and tossed it into the coffeepot on the stove. Then he poured the eggs into a pan of foaming butter. Scrambled eggs was his only dish, but he was very good at it. You had to leave them alone; that turned out to be the secret. Most people stood there stirring them, but the way to do it was to let them sit for a minute or two over a low flame and bother them no more than half a dozen times. Sometimes, for variety, he threw in some chopped fried salami; that was how Tommy liked them.
“He was wearing the eye patch again,” Sammy said, trying not to make it sound too important. “I saw him trying it on.”
“Oh, God.”
“He swore to me that he wasn’t planning anything.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I guess. I guess I chose to. Where’s the salami?”
“I’ll put it on my list. I’m going to the store today.”
“You have to finish that story.”
“And so I shall.” She took a loud sip of her lemon water. “He’s definitely up to something.”
“You think.” Sammy took down the peanut butter and got the grape jelly from the Frigidaire.
“I don’t know, I just think he’s been a little jumpy.”
“He’s always jumpy.”
“I’d better walk him to school, as long as I’m up anyway.” It was much easier for Rosa to govern her son than it was for Sammy. She didn’t seem to give the question nearly as much thought. She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves. But when, as frequently occurred, Tommy squandered that trust, she did not hesitate to clamp down. And Tommy never seemed to resent her heavy discipline in the way that he chafed under Sammy’s lightest reproof. “You know, make sure he gets there.”
“You can’t walk me to school,” Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. “Mom, you can’t possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die.”
“He would die,” Sammy told Rosa.
“Which would be very embarrassing for me,” Rosa said. “Standing there next to a dead body in front of William Floyd Junior High.”
“How about I walk him instead? It’s only ten minutes out of my way.” Sammy and Tommy generally said goodbye to each other at the front gate before setting off in opposite directions for the station and the junior high school, respectively. From second through sixth grade, they had parted with a handshake, but that custom, a minor beloved landmark of Sammy’s day for five years, had apparently been abandoned for good. Sammy was not sure why, or who had made the decision to abandon it. “That way you can stay here and, you know, draw my story.”
“That might be a good idea.”
Sammy gentled the steaming pudding of butter and eggs onto Tommy’s plate. “Sorry,” he said, “we’re out of salami.”
“It figures,” Tommy said.
“I’ll put it on my list,” said Rosa.
They fell silent for a moment, Rosa in her chair behind her mug, and Sammy standing by the counter with a slice of bread in his hand, watching Tommy shovel it in. He was a trencherman, was Tom. The little stick of a boy had vanished under a mantle of muscle and fat; he was looking a little bit portly, in fact. After thirty-seven seconds, the eggs were gone. Tommy looked up from his plate.
“Why’s everybody looking at me?” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”
Rosa and Sammy burst out laughing. Then Rosa stopped laughing, and focused on her son, always a little bit cross-eyed when she was making a point.
“Tom,” she said. “You weren’t planning to go into the city again?”
Tommy shook his head.
“Nevertheless,” Sammy said, “I’ll walk you.”
“Drive me,” Tommy said. “If you don’t believe me.”
“Why not?” Sammy said. If he took the car to the station, Rosa would not be able to drive to the grocery store, or to the beach, or to the library “for inspiration.” She would be more likely to stay home and draw. “I might just take it all the way into the city. They opened a new lot around the corner from the office.”
Rosa looked up, alarmed. “All the way into the city?” Even leaving their car, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, at the train station was not protection enough. Rosa had been known to walk to the station to fetch it, just so that she would be able to drive around Long Island doing things that were not drawing romance comics.
“Just let me get dressed.” Sammy handed the slice of bread to Rosa. “Here,” he said, “you make his lunch.”
BREAKFAST PALAVER at the Excelsior Cafeteria on Second Avenue, a favorite morning haunt of funny-book men, circa April 1954:
“It’s a hoax.”
“I just said that.”
“Somebody’s pulling Anapol’s leg.”
“Maybe it’s Anapol.”
“I wouldn’t blame him if he did want to jump off the Empire State Building. I hear he’s in all kinds of trouble over there.”
“I’m in all kinds of trouble. Everybody is in all kinds of trouble. I challenge you to name me one house that isn’t having problems. And it’s only going to get worse.”
“That’s what you always say. Listen to you. Listen to this guy, he kills me. He’s like a, a filling station of gloom. I spend ten minutes listening to him, I go away with a full tank of gloom, it lasts me all day.”
“I’ll tell you who’s a fountain of gloom, Dr. Fredric Wertham. Have you read this book of his? What’s it called? How to Seduce an Innocent?”
There was loud laughter at this. The men at the surrounding tables turned to look. The laughter had been a little too loud, certainly for the hour and the condition of their hangovers.
Dr. Fredric Wertham, a child psychiatrist with unimpeachable credentials and a well-earned sense of outrage, had for several years been trying to persuade the parents and legislators of America that the minds of American children were being deeply damaged by the reading of comic books. With the recent publication of the admirable, encyclopedic, and mistaken Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Wertham’s efforts had begun to bear real fruit; there had been calls for controls or outright bans, and in several southern and midwestern cities local governments had sponsored public comic book bonfires, onto which smiling mobs of American c
hildren with damaged minds had festively tossed their collections.
“No, I haven’t read it. Have you read it?”
“I tried. It gives me a pain in the stomach.”
“Has anybody read it?”
“Estes Kefauver has read it. Anybody get a summons yet?”
Now, word had it, the United States Senate was coming to town. Senator Kefauver of Tennessee and his Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency had determined to make a formal inquiry into the shocking charges leveled by Wertham in his book: that the reading of comic books led directly to antisocial behavior, drug addiction, sexual perversion, even rape and murder.
“That’s it, maybe this guy got a summons. This guy on the Empire State. And that’s why he’s going to jump.”
“You know who it just crossed my mind it could be. If it isn’t a hoax, I mean. Hell, even if it is. In fact, if it’s him, it definitely is a hoax.”
“What is this, a game show? Tell us who he is.”
“Joe Kavalier.”
“Joe Kavalier, yes! That’s exactly who I was thinking of.”
“Joe Kavalier! Whatever happened to that guy?”
“I heard he’s in Canada. Somebody saw him up there.”
“Mort Meskin saw him at Niagara Falls.”
“I heard it was Quebec.”
“I heard it was Mort Segal, not Meskin. He took his honeymoon up there.”
“I always liked him.”
“He was a hell of an artist.”
The half-dozen comics men gathered around a table at the back of the Excelsior that particular morning, with their bagels and soft-boiled eggs and steaming black coffee in cups with a red stripe around the rim—Stan Lee, Frank Pantaleone, Gil Kane, Bob Powell, Marty Gold, and Julie Glovsky—agreed that, before the war, Joe Kavalier had been one of the best in the business. They concurred that the treatment he and his partner had received at the hands of the Empire owners was deplorable, though hardly unique. Most could manage to supply a story, an instance of odd or eccentric behavior on Kavalier’s part; but when these were added up, they did not, to any of the men, seem to predict something so rash and desperate as a death leap.