The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (60 page)

“Saw the smoke,” Mr. Love barked. “Fires lit. Very good, Ruth. How are you?”

“I’m sure I’ll live.”

The men all trooped up the steps, tossing their bright empty greetings in her direction, complimenting her on her hair, the style of which had not altered since 1923, her color, the smells emanating from the kitchen. She greeted them politely, with something of her usual wary wryness, like a schoolteacher welcoming the return from vacation of a group of smart alecks and cutups, and told them, one by one, which rooms would be theirs and how they could find them if they didn’t already know. The bedrooms had each been named by some early Love enthusiast after vanished local Indian tribes. One of the men, extraordinarily good-looking and with eyes the very color of the new Cadillac and a dimple in his chin, much taller and broader than any of the others, shook her hand and said that he had heard the most amazing things about her oyster stew. The spindly-legged Jew hung back, sheltering in the lee of the green-eyed giant. His only greeting to her was another crooked smile and a nervous cough.

“You’ll be in Raritan,” she told him, having held back especially for him this smallest and most cramped of the third-floor guest rooms, one with no porch and only a fragmentary view of the sea.

He looked almost fearful at this information, as if it were news of a grave responsibility she had placed upon him.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

Ruth would remember afterward that she was troubled by a brief, mild emotion that lay somewhere between affection and pity for the little snub-nosed Jewish boy; he seemed so out of place among all these tall and sporting daffodils. She had a hard time believing that he could really be one of them. She wondered if he had gotten here by some kind of mistake.

Ruth Ebling could not have known how nearly her speculations on Sam’s status and position coincided with his own.

“Jesus,” he said to Tracy Bacon, “what am I doing here?” He dropped his suitcase. It landed with a muffled thud on the thick carpet, one of several worn Oriental rugs with which the creaking floorboards of Raritan were patchworked. Tracy had already left his bags down in his second-floor room, which, in a striking access of precognition by that Indian-loving ancestor, had been designated Ramcock. He lay now across Sammy’s iron bed on his back, legs raised and crossed at the knee, arms folded beneath his head, picking with a fingernail at the peeling white enamel of the bedstead. Like many big, well-built men, he was an inveterate layabout who disdained physical exertion except in brief Red Grange bursts of frantic grace. He furthermore detested standing upright, which made his radio work particularly obnoxious to him; and he loathed being obliged to sit up straight. His inherent ability to feel at ease wherever he went was coupled powerfully with a bone-deep laziness. Whenever he entered a room, no matter how formal the occasion, he generally sought out a place where he could at least put his feet up. “I’ll bet I’m the first kike that’s ever set foot in this joint.”

“I don’t think I’ll take that bet.”

Sammy went to the little window, each of its panes smudged with a thumbprint of frost, in the narrow dormer that overlooked the back lawn. He cranked it open, letting in a cool blast of brine and chimney
smoke and the rumblings and fizzings of the sea. In the last quarter hour of the day, Dave Fellowes and John Pye were way down on the beach, tossing a football with a certain grim fervor, in dungarees and heavy sweatshirts but with their feet bare. John Pye was also a radio actor, the star of
Paging Dr. Maxwell
, and a friend of Bacon, who had introduced Pye to the sponsor of
The Adventures of the Escapist
. Fellowes ran the Manhattan office of a member of New York’s congressional delegation. Sammy watched as Fellowes turned his back on Pye and took off down the beach, scattering white puffs of sand. Fellowes reached up, looking over his shoulder, and a short, accurate forward pass from Pye found his hands.

“This is so strange,” said Sammy.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it is,” Bacon said. “I guess it must be.”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I … maybe the reason I don’t think so is that I always felt so strange, you know, before I found out that I wasn’t the only one in the world—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Sammy said gently. He had not meant to sound argumentative. “That’s not what feels strange to me, kid. Not because they’re all a bunch of fairies, or because Mr. James Love the sock magnate is a fairy, or because you’re a fairy or I’m a fairy.”

“
If
you are,” Bacon said with mock correctitude.

“If I am.”

Bacon gazed at the ceiling, arms folded contentedly under his head. “Which you are.”

“Which I might be.”

In fact, the question of what a later generation would term Sammy’s sexual orientation seemed, at least to the satisfaction of everyone who made up the party at Pawtaw on that first weekend of December 1941, to have largely been settled. In the weeks since their visit to the World’s Fair and their lovemaking inside the dark globe of the Perisphere, Sammy had, along with his strapping young paramour, become a fixture in the circle of John Pye, considered at that time, and for long afterward in the mythos of gay New York, to be the most beautiful man in
the city. At a spot in the East Fifties called the Blue Parrot, Sammy had experienced the novelty of seeing men doing the Texas Tommy and the Cinderella, close, in darkness, though his weak stems prevented him from joining in the fun. Tomorrow, as everyone knew, he and Tracy were leaving for the West Coast, to take up their new life together as scenarist and serial star.

“So what is strange, then?” said Tracy.

Sammy shook his head. “It’s just, look at you. Look at them.” He jerked a thumb toward the open window. “It’s that they could all play the secret identity of a guy in tights. Your bored playboy, your gridiron hero, your crusading young district attorneys. Bruce Wayne. Jay Garrick. Lamont Cranston.”

“Jay Garrick.”

“The Flash. Blond, muscles, nice teeth, a pipe.”

“I would never smoke a pipe.”

“This one went to Princeton, that one went to Harvard, the other one went to Oxford.…”

“Filthy habit.”

Sammy wrinkled up his face to acknowledge that his attempts at rumination were being parried, then looked away. Down on the beach, Fellowes had tackled John Pye. They were rolling in the sand.

“A year ago, when I wanted to be around someone like you, I had to, you know, make you up. And now …” He looked across the broad, sere expanse of the lawn, past Pye and Fellowes. A signature of foam scrawled itself across the surface of the waves. How could he begin to say how happy he had been, this last month or so, in the radiant focus of Bacon’s regard, how mistaken Bacon was in wasting that regard on him. No one as beautiful, as charming and poised and physically grand, as Bacon could possibly take an interest in him.

“If you’re asking me if you can be my sidekick,” Bacon said, “the answer’s yes. We’ll get you a mask of your own.”

“Say, thanks.”

“We’ll call you, oh, how does ‘Rusty’ sound? Rusty or Dusty.”

“Shut up.”

“Actually,
Musty
would be more appropriate.” When they were in bed together, Bacon was always sampling deep nostalgic drafts of Sammy’s
penis, claiming it gave off the precise odor of a pile of old tarpaulins in his grandfather’s woodshed back in Muncie, Indiana. Once, the location of the shed had been given as Chillicothe, Illinois.

“I warn you.…” Sammy said, head inclined menacingly to one side, arms jutting out to execute a couple of judo chops, legs coiled to spring.

“Or, given the state of your linens, young man,” Bacon said, raising his arms to his face, already cringing, “maybe we ought seriously to consider
Crusty
.”

“That does it,” Sammy said, launching himself onto the bed. Bacon pretended to scream. Sammy scrambled on top of him and pinned his wrists to the bed. His face hung suspended twenty inches above Bacon’s.

“Now I’ve got you,” he said.

“Please,” said Bacon. “I’m an orphan.”

“This is what we used to do to wise guys in my neighborhood.”

Sammy pursed his lips and allowed a long strand of saliva to dangle downward, tipped by a thick bubbled bead. The bubble lowered itself like a spider on its thread until it hung just over Bacon’s face. Then Sammy reeled it back in. It had been years since he had last attempted the trick, and he was pleased to discover that his spittle retained its viscosity and he his pinpoint control of it.

“Ew,” said Bacon. He thrashed his head from side to side and struggled under the weight of Sammy on his wrists, while Sammy dangled the silvery thread over him again. Then, abruptly, Bacon stopped struggling. He looked at Sammy, level, calm, and with a dangerous glint in his eye; of course he could have freed himself easily, if he so desired, from the puny grip of his lover. His look said so. He opened his mouth. The pearl of spit dangled. Sammy cut the thread. A minute later, they lay naked beneath the four piled blankets on the narrow bed, disporting themselves in the precise manner that Dr. Fredric Wertham, in his fatal book, would one day allege to be universal among costumed heroes and their “wards.” They fell asleep holding each other, and were wakened by a smell, comforting and maternal, of boiled milk and salt water.

A number of fragmentary accounts survive of the events that transpired at Pawtaw on the sixth of December, 1941. The entry in James Love’s journal for 6 December is characteristically terse. It notes that
Bob Perina had gained eighty-two yards for Princeton that afternoon, and gives details of the menu and highlights of conversation at dinner, with the rueful annotation “in rtrspct mr trivial than usl.” The guests, as always, are identified by their initials: JP, DF, TB, SC, RP, DD, QT. The entry ends with the single word DISASTER. Only the absence of any entry at all for the following day, and the preoccupation of Monday’s entry, when there was so much else going on in the world, with a visit to his attorney, give any further hint of what transpired. Roddy Parks, the composer, in an entry in his famous diary, supplies the name of another guest (his lover at the time, the photographer Donald Davis), and agrees with Love that the principal subjects of conversation at the table were a large exhibition of Fauvist paintings at the Marie Harriman Gallery, and the king of Belgium’s surprise marriage. He also notes that the oyster stew was a failure and that Donald had remarked earlier in the afternoon that something seemed to be troubling the housekeeper, whom Parks calls Ruth Appling. His account of the raid is nearly as terse as Love’s: “The police were called.”

A check of the report filed by the Monmouth County sheriff supplies the name of the final guest that weekend, a Mr. Quentin Towle, as well as a rather more detailed account of events that evening, including some insight into the impetus that sent Ruth, at long last, to the telephone. “Miss Ebling,” the report reads, “was exaspirated [
sic
] by the recent imprisonment of her brother Carl and happened in a bedroom to stumble upon a comic strip book of a type which she held responsible for many of the brother’s mental problems. At this point, having identified the author of said comic strip book as one of the suspects, she determined to notify the authorities of the activities taking place in the house.”

It is interesting to note that in spite of the emphasis, that night and during the course of the largely inconclusive legal proceedings that followed, on the role of the comic book in triggering Ruth Ebling’s act of retribution, the only guest at Pawtaw that evening for whom there is no existing arrest record is the book’s author.

Sammy got drunk at dinner for the first time in his life. Drunkenness came over him so slowly that at first he mistook it for the happiness of sexual fatigue. It had been a long day, one that had left a bodily imprint
in his memory: the chill outside the Mayflower that morning as they waited for Mr. Love and his friends to pick them up; the elbow in his ribs, the roar and ashy smell of the Cadillac’s heater, the sharp shaft of December air blowing in through the car window on the way down; the burn of a shot of rye he accepted from John Pye’s flask; the lingering mark of Bacon’s teeth and the imprint of his thumbs on Sammy’s hips. As he sat at the dinner table, eating his stew and looking around him with an expression he knew, without anxiety, to be a stupid one, the day enveloped him in a pleasant confusion of aches and images like the one that overwhelms someone on the verge of sleep who has spent the entire day out of doors. He sank back into it and watched as the men around him unfurled the bright banners of their conversation. The wine was a ’37 Puligny-Montrachet, from a case that had been the gift, Jimmy Love said, of Paul Reynaud.

“So, when are you two leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” Bacon said. “Arriving Wednesday. I have an appearance. Someone from Republic is supposed to be coming on the train at Salt Lake City with my costume so it can be the Escapist who gets off in L.A.”

There followed some prolonged teasing of Tracy Bacon on the subject of tight pants, veering amid general amusement into the question of codpieces. Love expressed his satisfaction that Bacon would be able to keep doing the Escapist on the radio, with the broadcast originating in Los Angeles. Sammy sank deeper into his Burgundy-fueled reverie. There was a faint disturbance in the air to his back, a murmur, a muffled cry.

“But won’t they miss you at your cartoon factory?”

“What’s that?” Sammy sat up straight in his chair. “I think someone’s calling you, Mr. Love. I hear someone saying your—”

“I’m truly sorry to do this, Mr. Love,” said a clear flat voice behind Sammy. “But I’m afraid you and your ladyfriends are under arrest.”

A brief rout followed this announcement. The room filled with a bewildering variety of sheriff’s deputies, policemen from Asbury Park, state highway patrolmen, newspaper reporters, and a couple of vacationing G-men from Philly who had been drinking in the Fly Trap, a roadhouse in Sea Bright favored by representatives of coastal New Jersey
law enforcement, when the word went around that they were going to flush a fairy nest out at the beach house of one of the richest men in America. When they saw how large and powerfully built many of the fairies appeared to be, not to mention how surprisingly ordinary-looking, they suffered a moment of hesitation during which Quentin Towle managed to slip out. He was later caught on the county road. Only the two big men put up any resistance at all. John Pye had been raided before, twice, and he was tired of it. He knew that in the end it would cost him, but before he could be subdued, he managed to bloody the nose of one sheriff and break a bottle of Montrachet over the head of a second. He also smashed the camera of a photographer who sold to the Hearst papers, an act for which all of his friends were later grateful. Love, in particular, never forgot this service, and after Pye was killed in North Africa, where he had gone to drive an ambulance because the army would not take homosexuals, saw to it that Pye’s mother and sisters were provided for. As for Tracy Bacon, he did not give the question of fighting or not fighting the police a moment’s thought. Without revealing too much of the true history that he had so assiduously labored to erase and reconstitute, it can be said that Bacon had been falling afoul of the police since the age of nine, and defending himself with his fists since well before that. He waded into the writhing knot of nightsticks and broad-brimmed hats and cowering men, and began swinging. It took four men to subdue him, which they did with considerable brutality.