“Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“So,” Joe said, “I guess maybe you heard a few things out there.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?” It was his mother.
“I don’t think there’s room, Rosa.”
“Sure there is.”
Joe looked at Tommy. “What do you think?”
Tommy shrugged and nodded. So Joe pulled himself all the way in and crammed himself, hunched over, up against the side of the Cell, his hips pressed against Tommy’s. Tommy’s mother’s head appeared, her hair hastily and imperfectly tied up in a scarf, her lips showing right through her lipstick. Tommy and Joe each reached out a hand and pulled her in with them, and she sat up and sighed and said, happily, “Well,” as if they had all settled down together on a blanket in the shade beside a sun-dappled stream.
“I was just about to tell Tom a story,” Joe said.
“Uh-huh,” Rosa said. “Go on.”
“That isn’t something I—I’m more used to doing it—with pictures, you know?” He swallowed, and cracked his knuckles, and took a deep breath. He smiled a weak little smile, and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket. “Maybe I should draw it, ha ha.”
“I already saw the pictures,” Tommy said.
His mother leaned forward to look with Joe at the two people they once had been.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “I remember that. It was that night we took your aunt to the movies. In the lobby of the Loew’s Pitkin.”
They all moved a little closer together, and then Tommy lay down with his head in his mother’s lap. She stroked his hair, and he listened while Joe went on unconvincingly for a while about the things that you did when you were young, and the mistakes that you made, and the dead brother for whom Tommy had been named, that unlucky, unimaginable boy, and how everything had been different then, because there was a war on, at which Tommy pointed out that there had also, until recently, been a war in Korea, and Joe replied that this was true, and it was then that he and Rosa both realized that the boy was no longer listening to anything they were telling him. He was just lying there, in the Bug’s Nest, holding his father’s hand, while his mother brushed the bangs from his forehead.
“I think we are okay,” Joe said finally.
“Okay,” said Rosa. “Tommy? Are you okay? Do you understand all this?”
“I guess so,” the boy said. “Only.”
“Only what?”
“Only what about Dad?”
His mother sighed, and told him they were going to have to see about that.
* At this time in the history of comic books, it was a mark of only the most successful heroes that they had a secret lair. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, Batman his Batcave, the Blackhawks their windswept Blackhawk Island, and the Escapist his posh digs under the boards of the Empire Palace. These redoubts would be depicted, from time to time, in panels that showed detailed cutaway diagrams of the secret lair, each 3-D Televisor Screen, Retractable Helipad, Trophy Room, and Rogue’s Gallery carefully labeled with arrows. Only one of these cross-section plans was ever published for the Keyhole, a special two-page drawing in the centerfold of Escapist Adventures #46.
SAMMY LET HIMSELF into the house. It was past midnight, he was sober as a headstone, and in his pockets there were tickets for the Broadway Limited and the City of Los Angeles. There was a light on in the living room, and he saw that Joe had fallen asleep in the armchair with one of his dusty old books on Kabbalah or whatever it was—Volume IV of Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews—pitched like a tent on his lap. A half-empty bottle of Piels sat on a raffia coaster on the deal table beside him. When Sammy came in, Joe roused a little and shifted in the chair, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the bulb. He gave off a stale, drowsy smell of beer and ash.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Sammy said. He went to Joe and put a hand on his shoulder. He kneaded the muscles there; they felt knotted and hard. “Everyone all right? Tommy all right?”
“Mmm.” Joe nodded, then closed his eyes again. Sammy switched off the light. He went over to the sofa, picked up a peach-and-mustard afghan—one of the few things his mother had ever knit and the only visible remnant of her in his life—carried it to the armchair, and draped it over Joe, careful to cover the orange-tipped toes of Joe’s stocking feet.
Next Sammy walked down the hall and entered Tommy’s bedroom. In the bend of light from the hall, he could see that Tommy had wandered, in his sleep, to the far edge of the bed, and lay with his face mashed against the wall. He had kicked away all the bedclothes; he had on powder-blue pajamas with white piping at the lapels and cuffs (Sammy, naturally, owned an identical pair). Tommy was a very energetic sleeper, and even after Sammy pulled his head away from the wall, the boy went on snuffling, twitching, his breathing so rapid that it sounded almost like the panting of a dog. Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.
He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times—the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example—when it had been difficult. But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn’t count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the “youthful wards” that he routinely assigned to his heroes—a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life—represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.
Dr. Fredric Wertham was an idiot; it was obvious that Batman was not intended, consciously or unconsciously, to play Robin’s corrupter: he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America. Sammy wished that he’d had the presence of mind to tell the subcommittee that adding a sidekick to a costumed-hero strip was guaranteed to increase its circulation by 22 percent.
But what did it matter? It was better not to have put up any fight at all; it was over now. He had no choice but to set himself free.
Yet he could not seem to get himself out of Tommy’s bedroom. He stood there by the bed for a good five minutes, reviewing the history of sleep in this room, from the days of the baby who lay on his belly in the center of an enameled metal crib, legs tucked under him, his big diapered tuchis poking up into the air. He remembered a stretch of what Rosa had termed “the night jeebies,” when Tommy was two or three, how the boy would wake, night after night, screaming as if he were being skinned, and blind from the horror of whatever he had just been looking at in his dreams. They had tried a night-light, a bottle, a song, but as it had turned out, the only thing that could soothe him was to have Sammy get into bed with him. Sammy would stroke the boy’s hair until his own wrist ached, listening to the tumult of his breathing, until they both drifted off. That was the high point of his career as a father; it, too, had come in the middle of the night, when the boy was sleeping.
He took off his shoes and got into the bed. He rolled over and lay on his back, and folded his hands together under his head to make a pillow. Maybe he could just lie here for a while, before he went to find his suitcase in the garage. He recognized that there was som
e danger of his falling asleep—it had been a long day and he was bone-tired—which would spoil his plan of getting out tonight, before there could be any discussion of his leaving. And he was not sufficiently convinced of the rightness of his decision to give Rosa or Joe or anyone else the chance to try to dissuade him. But it felt very good to lie down beside Tommy and listen to him sleep again, after so long.
“Hi, Dad,” Tommy said, groggy, sounding confused.
“Oh.” Sammy jumped. “Hey, son.”
“Did you catch the monkey?”
“What monkey is that, son?” Sammy said.
Tommy waved a hand in a circle, impatient at having to explain it all again. “The monkey with the thing. With the spatula.”
“No,” Sammy said. “I’m sorry. He’s still at large.”
Tommy nodded. “I saw you on TV,” he said, sounding more awake now.
“Yeah?”
“You were good.”
“Thanks.”
“You looked a little sweaty, though.”
“I was sweating like a pig, Tom.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah, Tom?”
“You’re kind of squooshing me.”
“I’m sorry,” Sammy said. He inched a little ways away from Tommy. They lay there; Tommy turned over with a little grunt of annoyance or exasperation.
“Dad, you’re too big for this bed.”
“Okay,” Sammy said, sitting up. “Good night, Tom.”
“G’night.”
Sammy went down the hall to the bedroom. Rosa liked to sleep in a very dark room, with the blinds lowered and the curtains drawn, and it was not without a certain amount of stumbling and groping that Sammy found his way to the closet. He closed the door behind him and pulled the chain for the light. Quickly he took down a scarred white leather valise and filled it from the hanger rod and the built-in chest of drawers. He packed for warm weather: poplin shirts and tropical-weight suits, a vest, undershirts, boxers, socks and garters, neckties, a bathing suit, a brown belt and a black, stuffing everything into the valise with an indiscriminate and careless haste. When he was through, he yanked the light shut and stepped out into the bedroom, dazzled by the roiling Persian-carpet geometries that filled his eyes. He made his way back out to the hallway, congratulating himself on not having woken Rosa, and crept back down to the kitchen. He would just make himself a sandwich, he thought. His mind was already engaged in the composition of the note he planned to leave.
When he got within a few feet of the kitchen, however, he smelled smoke.
“You did it to me again,” he said.
Rosa was sitting in her bathrobe, with her hot lemon water, her ashtray, and the ruins of an entire cake before her. The nocturnal luminescence of Bloomtown, compounded of streetlights, porch lights, the headlights of passing cars, the luster of the state highway, and the diffused glow in the low clouds of the great city sixty miles distant, came in through the dotted-swiss curtains and settled ticking over the teakettle and the clock and dripping kitchen tap.
“You have a suitcase,” Rosa said.
Sammy looked down at the valise, as if to confirm her report. “True,” he said, sounding a little surprised even to his own ears.
“You’re leaving.”
He didn’t answer.
“I guess that makes sense,” she said.
“Doesn’t it?” he said. “I mean, think about it.”
“If that’s what you want to do. Joe was going to try to talk you into staying. He has some plan or other. And, of course, there’s Tommy.”
“Tommy.”
“You are going to break his heart.”
“Is that cake?” Sammy said.
“For some reason I made a red velvet cake,” Rosa said. “With sea-foam frosting.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I had a bottle of beer.”
“You like to bake when you’re drunk.”
“Why is that?” She slid across the kitchen table the tumbled remains of the red velvet cake, with sea-foam frosting. “For some reason,” she said, “I also seem to have felt compelled to eat most of it.”
Sammy went to the kitchen drawer and got a fork. He wasn’t in the least hungry as he sat down, but then he took a bite of the cake and, before he could stop himself, had finished what was left. The sea-foam crunched and melted in his teeth. Rosa got up and poured him a glass of milk, then stood behind him while he drank it, ruffling the hair at the back of his neck.
“You didn’t say,” Sammy said.
“I didn’t say what?”
“What you want me to do.”
He leaned back into her, his head against her belly. He was tired suddenly. He had planned to leave right away, to make his departure easier, but now he wondered if he shouldn’t just wait until the morning.
“You know I want you to stay,” she said. “I hope you know that. God damn it, Sammy, I would love nothing more.”
“To prove a point, is what you’re saying.”
“Yes.”
“About how nobody can tell us how to live, and it takes all kinds, and mind your own damn business. Like that.”
She stopped stroking his hair. He guessed she had heard a certain amount of sarcasm in his tone, though he was not feeling at all sarcastic, and in fact, he admired her for what she was and had always been willing to do for his sake.
“It’s just,” he said, “I think I have another point I need to prove.”
There was a cough, and they turned and saw Joe standing in the doorway, hair standing up all over his head, mouth open, trying to blink away something he did not want to see.
“Is he—you aren’t leaving?”
“For a while,” Sammy said. “At least.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I was thinking Los Angeles.”
“Sammy,” Joe said, taking a step toward Sammy that had something menacing about it. “Damn it, you can’t.”
Sammy drew back a little and raised his arm as if to ward off his old friend. “Take it easy, Joe. I appreciate the sentiment, but I—”
“It is not a sentiment, idiot. After I left you this morning, I went over there and made an offer for the Empire Comics. To buy it. And Shelly Anapol accepted.”
“What? An offer? Joe, are you crazy?”
“You said you had some ideas. You said I got you stirred up again.”
“Yeah, you did, but, I mean. Jesus, how could you just go and do that without asking me first?”
“It’s my money,” Joe said. “You have no say in the matter.”
“Huh,” Sammy said, and then again, “huh. Well.” He stretched and yawned. “Maybe I could write the stories out there, and mail them to you. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m too tired for this now, okay?”
“Well, you won’t leave tonight, Sam, don’t be crazy. It’s too late. There isn’t a train for you to leave with.”
“Stay till the morning at least,” Rosa said.
“I guess I could sleep on the couch,” said Sammy.
Rosa and Joe looked at each other, startled, alarmed.
“Sammy, Joe and I aren’t—this isn’t because—we haven’t been—”
“I know,” Sammy said. “The couch is fine. You don’t even need to change the sheets.”
Rosa said that while Sammy might be fully prepared to embark on the life of a hobo, there was no way in hell that he would begin his new career in her house. She went to the linen closet and brought fresh sheets and a pillowcase. She moved aside the neat pile of Joe’s used linens and spread the new ones, tucking, and smoothing, and pulling back the blanket to expose the reverse of the floral flat sheet in a neat diagonal fold. Sammy stood over her, making a fuss over how appetizing it all looked after the day he’d had. When she let him sit down, he bounced on the cushion, slipped off his shoes, and then lay back with the happy sigh of an aching man sliding into a nice hot bath.
“This is feeling very strange to me,” Rosa said. She was gripping the pi
llowcase filled with Joe’s old sheets in one hand, like a sack, and dabbing at the tears in her eyes with the other.
“It’s been strange all along,” said Sammy.
She nodded. Then she handed the sack of dirty linens to Joe and started down the hall. Joe stood beside the couch for a moment, looking at Sammy with a perplexed expression, as if trying to work his way backward, one at a time, through the steps of the clever feat of substitution that Sammy had just pulled off.
When the household woke the next morning, quite early, the couch had been stripped, the sheets left folded on the coffee table with the pillow balanced on top, and Sammy and his suitcase were long gone. In lieu of a note or other farewell gesture, he had left only, in the center of the kitchen table, the small two-by-three card that he had been given back in 1948, when he had purchased the lot on which the house now stood. It was wrinkled and dog-eared and dyed by the stain of long years spent in Sammy’s wallet. When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am indebted to Will Eisner, to Stan Lee, and in particular to the late Gil Kane for sharing their reminiscences of the Golden Age, and also to Dick Ayers, Sheldon Moldoff, Martin “Green Lantern” Nodell, and to Marv Wolfman and Lauren Shuler Donner for providing introductions to some of those brilliant creators. Thanks also to Richard Bensam and Peter Wallace for their expert judgments. Roger Angell, Kenneth Turan, Cy Voris, Rosemary Graham, Louis B. Jones, Lee Skirboll, and the heroic Douglas Stumpf all kindly gave me the benefit of their generosity and intelligence by reading drafts or portions of this book along the way. I’m grateful as well to Eugene Feingold, Ricki Waldman, Kenneth Turan, and Robert Chabon for their memories of New York childhoods; to Russell Petrocelli, group rail-trip coordinator of N.J. Transit; and to the past and present members of the Kirby Mailing List (http://fantasty.com/kirby-l).