The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (29 page)

“Your poor mother,” Joe said. “And my poor mother.” The thought of his mother a widow started him crying all over again. Sammy came around from the other side of the table and slid into the booth alongside him. Then they just sat there for a while. Joe thought back to that morning, when he had stuck his head out into the day and felt as powerful as the Escapist, surging with the mystic Tibetan energies of his rage.

“Useless,” he said.

“What is?”

“I am.”

“Joe, don’t say that.”

“I’m worthless,” Joe said. He felt that he must leave the bar. He did not want to sit around drinking and crying anymore. He wanted to do something. He would find something that could be done. He grabbed Sammy by the sleeve and shoulder of his peacoat and gave him a push, nearly knocking him out of the booth.

“Out,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” Sammy said, rising to his feet.

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Work. I’m going to work.”

“But you just—all right,” Sammy said, looking into Joe’s face. “Maybe that isn’t a bad idea.” They left Longchamps and went down into the cool, foul gloom of the subway.

On the southbound platform, a few feet from the cousins, stood a dark, glowering gentleman—reading the cut of his topcoat, or some indefinable emission radiating from his chin or eyes or haircut, Joe felt certain that he was German. This man was giving them the fish-eye. Even Sammy had to agree afterward that the man had been giving them the fish-eye. He was a German right out of a panel by Joe Kavalier, massive, handsome in a prognathous, lupine way, wearing a beautiful suit. As the wait for the train dragged on, Joe decided that he did not like what he considered to be the superior manner in which the theoretically German man was looking at him. He considered a number of possible styles, in German and in English, of expressing his feelings about the man and his fish-eye. Finally opting for a more universal statement, he spat, as if casually, onto the platform between him and the man. Public spitting was common enough at the time in that city of smokers, and the gesture might have remained safely ambiguous if Joe’s missile had not overshot its mark. Spittle frosted the tip of the man’s shoe.

Sammy said, “Did you just spit at that man?”

“What?” said Joe. He was a little surprised himself. “Eh, yes.”

“He didn’t mean it, mister,” Sammy told the man. “He’s just a little upset right now.”

“Then he makes the apology,” the man suggested not unreasonably.
His accent was thick and unquestionably German. He waited for his apology with the air of one accustomed to receiving apologies when he asked for them. He took a step closer to Joe. He was younger than Joe had thought at first, and even more imposing. He looked as if he could more than handle himself in a fight.

“Oh, my God,” Sammy said in an undertone. “Joe, I think that man is Max Schmeling.”

There were other people waiting for the train, and they had taken an interest. They started to argue about whether the man whose shoes Joe had spat on was or was not Schmeling, the Black Bull of the Uhlan, former heavyweight champion of the world.

“I’m sorry,” Joe mumbled, sort of meaning it.

“What was that?” said the man, cupping a hand to his ear.

“Go to hell,” Joe said, this time with greater sincerity.

“Shit-head,” the man said, taking care with his English. With pugilistic quickness, he crowded Joe against an iron pillar, crooked an arm around Joe’s neck, and gave him a swift punch in the stomach. Joe’s breath deserted his body in a single hard gust and he pitched forward, striking his chin on the concrete platform. His eyeballs seemed to clang in their sockets. He felt as if someone had opened an umbrella inside his rib cage. He waited, flopped on his belly, unblinking as a fish, to see if he would ever again be able to draw a breath. Then he let out a long, low moan, a little at a time, testing the muscles of his diaphragm. “Wow,” he said finally. Sammy knelt beside him and helped him to one knee. Joe gulped up big lopsided gouts of air. The German man turned to the other people on the platform, one arm raised in challenge or, perhaps, it seemed to Joe, in appeal. Everyone had seen Joe spit on his shoe, hadn’t they? Then the big man turned and stalked off, way down to the far end of the platform. The train came, and the people all got on it, and that was the end of that. When they got back to Palooka Studios, Sammy, at Joe’s request, said nothing about Joe’s father. But he did tell everyone that Joe had gotten his ass kicked by Max Schmeling. Joe received their ironic congratulations. He was informed that he was lucky Schmeling had pulled his punch.

“Next time I see that guy,” Joe said, to his surprise, “I am going to hit him back.”

Joe never did encounter Max Schmeling, or his doppelgänger, again. In any case, there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.

T
HERE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN
more than a couple of thousand German citizens in New York at that time, but in the following two weeks, wherever Joe went in the city, he managed to run across at least one. He seemed to have acquired, as Sammy remarked, a superpower of his own: he had become a magnet for Germans. He found them in elevators, on buses, in Gimbel’s and at Longchamps restaurants. At first he would just watch them, or eavesdrop, sizing them up as good Germans or evil ones with sweeping certainty even if they were just talking about the rain or the taste of their tea, but it wasn’t long before he began to approach them and attempt to engage them in conversation that was menacingly bland and suggestive. Often enough, his advances were met with a certain amount of resistance.

“Woher kommen Sie?”
he asked a man he met buying a pound of steak at the butcher on Eighth Avenue, around the corner from Palooka Studios.
“Schwabenland?”

The man nodded warily. “Stuttgart,” he said.

“How is everything back there?” He could feel the note of intimidation creeping into his voice, of menacing innuendo. “Is everybody all right?”

The man shrugged, blushing, and made a mute appeal to the butcher with a raised eyebrow.

“Is there a problem?” the butcher asked Joe. Joe said that indeed there was not. But when he walked out of the butcher shop with his lamb chops, he felt strangely pleased with himself for having discomfited the man. He supposed that he ought to be ashamed of this feeling. He believed that on some level he was. But he could not seem to keep
himself from remembering with pleasure the furtive look and the flushed cheeks when he had addressed the man in his own language.

The following day, a Saturday—this was about a week after Joe had learned of his father’s death—Sammy took him to see a Brooklyn Dodgers football game. The idea was to get Joe out into the air and cheer him up a little. Sammy was partial to football, and seemed to have a particular fondness for the Dodgers’ star back, Ace Parker. Joe had seen English rugby played in Prague, and once he decided there was no great difference between it and American football, he gave up trying to pay attention to the game and just sat smoking and drinking beer in the sharp raw breeze. Ebbets Field had a faintly ramshackle air that reminded him of a drawing in a comic strip—
Popeye
or
Toonerville Trolley
. Pigeons wheeled in the dark spaces of the grandstands. There was a smell of hair oil and beer and a fainter one of whiskey. The men in the crowd passed flasks and muttered comically violent sentiments.

After a while, Joe realized two things. The first was that he was quite drunk. The second was that, two rows behind him and up a little to his left, there sat a pair of German men. They were drinking beer from big paper cups, grinning, fair, stolid-looking men, brothers perhaps. They kept up an excited commentary and, on the whole, seemed to be enjoying the game, though they did not seem to understand it any better than Joe. They cheered whenever a fumble was recovered, regardless of who recovered it.

“Just ignore them,” Sammy warned him, chary of his cousin’s aggressive good luck in turning up Germans.

“They are looking at me,” Joe said, fairly certain that this was so.

“They are not.”

“They are looking over here.”

“Joe.”

Joe kept glancing back over his shoulder, forcing himself into their consciousness, their experience of the game—practically into their laps. Presently, even in their drunken state, they became aware of his attention. A certain amount of scowling and leering ensued. One of the brothers—they had to be brothers—had a crooked nose and a scarred ear indicating that he was not unfamiliar with the use of his fists. At last, toward the end of the third quarter, Joe overheard what he was quite
certain was an anti-Semitic remark pass from the man who looked like a boxer to his brother or chum. It sounded to Joe as if the man had said, “Jew bastard.” Joe stood up. He clambered over the back of his seat. The row behind him was full, and in the course of clearing it, he elbowed one of his neighbors in the ear. He tumbled into the Germans’ row, nearly losing his balance. The Germans laughed, and the arm of a seat jabbed Joe in the side sharply, but he scrambled to his feet and, without a word, knocked the boxer’s hat off his head. It fell into a clotted puddle of spilled beer and a rubble of peanuts at the other man’s feet. The man with the cauliflower ear looked very surprised, and then astonished when Joe grabbed hold of his shirt collar. Joe yanked so hard that three buttons popped loose and shot off in all directions with audible whizzing sounds. But the man had a long reach, and he managed to get a hand around the back of Joe’s neck. He pulled Joe to him and, at the same time, with the other hand connected his fist to the side of Joe’s skull. While Joe was thus held, bent over the seat with his nose smashed against the man’s left knee, the brother pummeled Joe’s back over and over as if he were driving nails into a plank with two hammers. Before Sammy and some of the men sitting in the seats around them could pull the two Germans off, they had closed Joe’s right eye for him, chipped a tooth, bruised his rib cage, and ruined a new suit. Then an usher came and threw Joe and Sammy out of Ebbets Field. They went quietly, Joe holding a paper cup of ice to the tender orbit of his eye. The pain was keen. There was an odor of urinals along the ramp leading down to the gates of the ballpark, a masculine smell, bitter and bracing.

“What are you doing?” Sammy asked him. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I thought he said something.”

“Why are you smiling, god damn it?”

“I don’t know.”

That night, when he and Sammy went to dinner at Ethel Klayman’s, he bent down to pick up the napkin he had dropped, and when he sat up again, there was a bright exclamation mark of blood on his cheek.

“You need sutures,” said his aunt in her most inarguable tone.

Joe protested. He had given out to his friends that he was afraid of needles and doctors, but the truth was that he felt edified by the wound
to his head. It was not that he felt he deserved the pain so much as that it suited him. No matter how well he cleaned the cut, how tightly he compressed it, how thick the bandage he applied, within an hour or so, the first telltale freckle of red would have reappeared. It was like the memory of home, a tribute to his father’s stoical denial of illness, injury, or pain.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said.

His aunt took hold of his elbow with her five-pronged iron grapple and sat him down on the lid of the toilet in the bathroom. She had Sammy fetch a bottle of slivovitz that had been left behind by a friend of her late husband in 1935 and not touched since. Then she crooked his head under her left arm and sewed him up. The thread was dark blue, exactly the color of the Escapist’s uniform.

“Don’t go looking for trouble,” she begged him as she worked the long thin needle into his skin. “You’ll be getting plenty of trouble soon enough.”

After that, Joe went looking for trouble. For no good reason, he started going up, every day, to Yorkville, where there were numerous German beer halls, German restaurants, German social clubs, and German-Americans. Most of the time, he merely skulked around for a while and returned home from these forays without incident, but sometimes one thing led to another. The ethnic neighborhoods of New York have always been alert to the incursions of intemperate strangers. He got himself punched in the stomach yet again, on East Ninetieth Street, waiting for a bus, by a man who did not take kindly to the sneer that Joe armed himself with whenever he ventured uptown. Hanging around a candy store one afternoon, Joe attracted the attention of some little neighborhood boys, one of whom, for reasons having nothing to do with politics or racial theories, shot him in the back of the head with a big wet oyster of a spitball. These boys were all regular readers of the Escapist, and admirers of Joe Kavalier’s work. If they had known who it was, they would probably have felt very sorry for peashooting him. But they just didn’t like the way Joe looked. They had observed, with the ruthless acuity of boys, that there was something funny about Joe Kavalier, about his rumpled suit, his air of banked and smoldering testiness, the curly strands standing up from his imperfectly slicked-back hair
like an exploded clockworks. He looked like a patsy for pranksters and practical jokers. He looked like a man who was looking for trouble.