The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (70 page)

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 children 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.

“What about that old
partner
of his,” Lee said. “I ran into him here a couple of days ago. He looked pretty down in the mouth.”

“Sammy Clay?”

“I don’t know him very well. We’ve always been friendly. He never worked for us, but—”

“He’s worked just about every place else.”

“Anyway, the guy did not look good. And he barely gave me the time of day.”

“He is not a happy man,” Glovsky said. “Is old Sam. He is just not very happy over there at Pharaoh.” Glovsky drew the violent
Mack Granite
feature for Pharaoh’s
Brass Knuckle
.

“Frankly, he’s never happy anywhere,” Pantaleone said, and everyone agreed. They all knew Sammy’s story, more or less. He had returned to the comic book business in 1947, covered in failure at everything else he had tried. His first defeat had been in the advertising game, at Burns, Baggot & DeWinter. He had managed to quit just before he was going to be asked to turn in his resignation. After that, he had tried going out on his own. When his advertising shop duly died a quiet and unremarked death, Sammy had found work in the magazine business, selling well-researched lies to
True
and
Yankee
and one miraculous short story to
Collier’s
—it was about a crippled young boy’s visit to a Coney Island steambath with his strong-man father, before the war—before settling into a deep and narrow groove at the third-tier magazine houses and what was left of the once-mighty pulps.

All along, there were regular offers from old funny-book friends, some of them seated around this table at the back of the Excelsior, which Sammy always refused. He was an epic novelist—that was a great thing to be, after the war—and though his literary career was not advancing as quickly as he would have liked, at least he could ensure that he was not moving backward. He swore, to anyone who would listen,
and even on his mother’s then-fresh grave, that he was never going back to comic books. Everybody who visited the Clays was taken to see some draft or other of his amorphous and wandering book. By day, he wrote articles on psittacosis and proustite for
Bird Lover
and
Gem and Tumbler
. He tried his hand at industrial writing, and had even written catalog copy for a seed company. The pay was mostly abysmal, the hours long, and Sammy was at the mercy of editors whose bitterness, as Sammy said, made George Deasey look like Deanna Durbin. Then, one day, he heard of an editor’s job opening up at Gold Star, a now-forgotten publisher of comic books on Lafayette Street. The line was tattered and derivative, the circulation low, and the pay far from wonderful, but the position, if he took it, would at least give him authority and room to maneuver. Sammy’s correspondence school for writers had enrolled only three pupils, one of whom lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, and spoke almost no English. Sammy had bills and debts and a family. When the Gold Star job came along, he had at last thrown in the towel on his old caterpillar dreams.

“No, you’re right,” Kane said. “He’s never been happy anywhere.”

Bob Powell leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I always thought he seemed a little bit—you know …”

“I have to agree with that,” said Gold. “He’s got that thing with the
sidekicks
. It’s like an obsession with him. Have you noticed that? He takes over a character, first thing he does, no matter what, he gives the guy a little pal. After he came back to the business, he was at Gold Star doing the Phantom Stallion. All of a sudden the Stallion’s hanging around with this kid, what was his name? Buck something.”

“Buck Naked.”

“Buckskin. The kid gunslinger. Then he goes to Olympic, and what, now the Lumberjack has Timber Lad. The Rectifier gets Little Mack the Boy Enforcer.”

“The
Rect
ifier, that already sounds a little bit—”

“Then he comes to Pharaoh, all of a sudden it’s the Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby. Christ, he even gave a sidekick to the
Lone
Wolf!”

“Yeah, but he’s hired every one of you guys at one time or another,
hasn’t he?” Lee said. He looked at Marty Gold. “He’s been very loyal to you over the years, Gold, God only knows why.”

“Hey, shut up, already,” said Kane. “That’s him now coming through the door.”

Sam Clay stepped into the moist, steam-table warmth of the Excelsior and was hailed from the table at the back. He nodded and waved, a little uncertainly, as if he didn’t really care to join their party that morning. But after he had purchased his ticket for a cup of coffee and a doughnut he started toward them, head lowered a little in a bulldog way he had.

“Morning, Sam,” Glovsky said.

“I drove in,” he said. He was looking a little dazed. “It took
two hours
.”

“Seen the
Herald
?”

Clay shook his head.

“Looks like an old friend of yours is back in town.”

“Yeah? Who would that be?”

“Tom Mayflower,” Kane said, and everybody laughed, and then Kane went on to explain that someone signing himself “The Escapist” had, in this morning’s
Herald-Tribune
, publicly announced his intention to jump from the Empire State Building at five o’clock that very afternoon.

Pantaleone dug around in the pile of newspaper in the center of the big table and found a
Herald-Tribune
. “ ‘Numerous grammatical and spelling errors,’ ” he read aloud, skimming quickly through the article, to which were devoted three column inches on page 2. “ ‘Threatened to expose the “unfair robberies and poor mistreatments of his finest artists by Mr. Sheldon Anapol.” ’ Huh. ‘Mr. Anapol when reached refused to speculate publicly on the identity of the author. “It could be anyone,” Mr. Anapol said. “We get a lot of nuts.” ’ Well,” Pantaleone finished, shaking his head, “Joe Kavalier never struck me as any kind of nut. A little eccentric, maybe.”

“Joe,” Clay said wonderingly. “You guys think it’s
Joe
.”

“Is he in town, Sam? Have you heard from him?”

“I haven’t heard from Joe Kavalier since the war,” Clay said. “It can’t be him.”

“I say it’s a hoax,” Lee said.

“The costume.” Clay had begun to light a cigarette—he still had not sat down—but now he stopped with the flame halfway to the tip. “He’ll want a costume.”

“Who will?”

“The guy. If there really is a guy. He’ll want a costume.”

“He could make one.”

“Yeah,” Clay said. “Excuse me.”

He turned, his cigarette still unlit in his fingers, and walked back toward the glass doors of the Excelsior.

“He just walked out of here with his meal ticket.”

“He looked pretty upset,” Julie Glovsky said. “You guys shouldn’t have been teasing him.”

He was already on his feet. He drained the last inch of coffee from his cup, then started after Sammy.

As fast as Sammy’s pipe-stem legs could carry him, they headed over to the offices of Pharaoh Comics, in a loft on West Broadway, where Sammy was the editor in chief.

“What are you going to do?” Julie asked him. The fog that had lain over the city all morning had not lifted. Their breath issued from their mouths and seemed to be absorbed into the general gray gauziness of the morning.

“What do you mean? What can I do? Some kook wants to pretend he’s the Escapist, he has a right.”

“You don’t think it’s
him
?”

“Nah.”

They rode up in the grinding iron cage of the elevator. When they walked into the offices, Sammy seemed to survey them with an ill-concealed shudder: the scarred cement floor, the bare white walls, the exposed, grease-blackened girders of the ceiling.

These were not the first headquarters of the company—those had been a suite of seven large rooms in the McGraw-Hill Building, all green lacquer and ivory Bakelite, with everything from the washroom fixtures to the team of buxom receptionists trimmed in chrome, and all of it paid for with the money Jack Ashkenazy had pocketed in 1943
when Sheldon Anapol had bought him out. Ashkenazy had next invested millions in a Canadian real estate venture predicated on his odd belief that, after the war, Canada and the United States would merge into one country. When, to his astonishment, this failed to pan out, he had gone back to the source of all his still-considerable wealth: the costumed hero. He had rented the gleaming offices on West Forty-second, hired away some of Empire’s best writers and artists, and charged them with making a star out of a character of his own creation, the eponymous Pharaoh, a reincarnated Egyptian ruler, naturally, who sported an elaborate Tutankhamen headdress, metal armbands, and a loincloth made apparently of stiff cement, and went around thus, discreetly half-naked, foiling evil with the mystic power of his Scepter of Ra. The writers and artists had come up with a raft of even more unlikely heroes and heroines—Earthman (with his superhuman control over rocks and dirt), the Snowy Owl (with his “supersonic hoot”), and the Rolling Rose (with her shiny red skates)—to fill the pages of Pharaoh Comics’ nine inaugural titles. Unfortunately, Jack Ashkenazy had bet heavily on the costumed superhero just as readers’ interest in that genre was beginning to flag. The defeat of those actual world-devouring supervillains, Hitler and Tojo, along with their minions, had turned out to be as debilitating to the long-underwear hero trade as the war itself had been an abundant source of energy and plots; it proved to be hard for the cashiered captains and supersoldiers, on their return from tying Krupp artillery into half-hitches and swatting Zeros like midges over the Coral Sea, to muster the old pre-1941 fervor for busting up rings of car thieves, rescuing orphans, and exposing crooked fight promoters. At the same time, a new villain, the lawless bastard child of relativity and Satan, had appeared to cast its roiling fiery pall over even the mightiest of heroes, who could no longer be entirely assured that there would always be a world for them to save. The tastes of returning GIs, who had become hooked on the regular shipments of comic books provided them along with candy bars and cigarettes, turned to darker, more “adult-oriented” fare: true-crime comics had their vogue, followed by romances, horror tales, Westerns, science fiction; anything, in short, but masked men. Millions
of unsold copies of
Pharaoh Comics
#1 and its eight companion titles came back from the distributors; after a year, none of the remaining six titles was making a profit. Ashkenazy, sensing catastrophe, had moved downtown, fired the expensive talent, and retrenched, overhauling his line through a program of cost-cutting and slavish imitation, transforming it into a modest success very like Racy Publications, the fourth-rate pulp-magazine house, home of retreads, copycats, and cheap imitations at which he had begun his career as a publisher in the lean Depression years before two foolish young men laid the Escapist in his lap. But his pride had never quite recovered from the blow, and it was generally felt that Pharaoh’s failure, along with the Canadian debacle, had started him down the road to his decline and eventual death two years ago.

Sammy crossed the broad grimy expanse of the workroom to his office. Julie hesitated at the door before following him in. The prohibition against entering Sam Clay’s office, except in the case of family emergency, was absolute and closely observed. He would admit no one if he was working, and he was always working. His bursts of fevered composition, during which he might knock out an entire year’s worth of
Brass Knuckle
or
Weird Date
in a single night, were celebrated not only in the Pharaoh offices but throughout the small, collegial world of the New York comic book business. He unplugged his intercom, took the telephone off the hook, sometimes stuffed his ears with cotton, paraffin, gobbets of foam rubber.