The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (79 page)

T
HE VIEW OUT THE WINDOWS
was pure cloud bank, a gray woolen sock pulled down over the top of the building. On the walls of Joe’s strange apartment hung sketches of the head of a rabbi, a man with fine features and a snowy white beard. The studies were tacked up with pushpins, and they depicted this noble-looking gentleman in a variety of moods: rapturous, commanding, afraid. There were fat books on the tables and chairs; thick reference volumes and tractates and dusty surveys: Joe had been doing a little research himself. Sammy saw, stacked neatly in a corner, the wooden crates in which Joe had always kept his comics—only there were ten times as many as he remembered. Over the room lay the smell of long occupation by a solitary man: burned coffee, hard sausage, dirty linens.

“Welcome to the Bat Cave,” Lieber said when Sammy came in.

“Actually,” Longman Harkoo said, “it’s apparently known as the Chamber of Secrets.”

“Is it?” Sammy said.

“Well, uh, that’s what I call it,” said Tommy, coloring. “But not really.”

You came into the Chamber of Secrets from a small anteroom that had been painstakingly decorated to simulate the reception area of a small but going concern. It had a steel desk and typist’s table, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a telephone, a hat stand. On the desk stood a nameplate promising the daily presence behind it of a Miss Smyslenka, and a vase of dried flowers, and a photograph of Miss Smyslenka’s grinning baby, played by a six-month-old Thomas E. Clay. On the wall was a large commercial painting of a sturdy-looking factory, luminous in the rosy glow of a New Jersey morning, chimneys trailing pretty blue
smoke.
KORNBLUM VANISHING CREAMS
, read the engraved label affixed to the bottom of the frame,
HO-HO-KUS, NEW JERSEY
.

No one, not even Tommy, was quite sure how long Joe had been living in the Empire State Building, but it was clear that during this time he had been working very hard and reading a lot of comic books. On the floor stood ten piles of Bristol board, every sheet in each pile covered in neat panels of pencil drawings. At first Sammy was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of pages—there must have been four or five thousand—to look very closely at any of them, but he did notice that they seemed to be uninked. Joe had been working in a variety of gauges of lead, letting his pencils do the tricks of light and mass and shadow that were usually pulled off with ink.

In addition to the rabbis, there were studies of organ-grinders, soldiers in breastplates, a beautiful girl in a headscarf, in various attitudes and activities. There were buildings and carriages, street scenes. It didn’t take Sammy long to recognize the spiky elaborate towers and crumbling archways of what must be Prague, lanes of queer houses huddled in the snow, a bridge of statues casting a broken moonlit shadow on a river, twisting alleyways. The characters, for the most part, appeared to be Jews, old-fashioned, black-garbed, drawn with all of Joe’s usual fluidity and detail. The faces, Sammy noticed, were more specific, quirkier, uglier, than the lexicon of generic comic book mugs that Joe had learned and then exploited in all his old work. They were human faces, pinched, hungry, the eyes anticipating horror but hoping for something more. All except for one. One character, repeated over and over in the sketches on the walls, had barely any face at all, the conventional V’s and hyphens of a comic physiognomy simplified to almost blank abstraction.

“The Golem,” Sammy said.

“Apparently he was writing a novel,” Lieber said.

“He was,” Tommy said. “It’s all about the Golem. Rabbi Judah Ben Beelzebub scratched the word ‘truth’ into his forehead and he came to life. And one time? In Prague? Joe saw the real Golem. His father had it in a closet in their house.”

“It really does look marvelous,” Longman said. “I can’t wait to read it.”

“A comic book novel,” Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel,
American Disillusionment
, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O’Hara, a bare-knuckles urban
Huckleberry Finn
. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal. It had been two years now since his last crack at the thing, and until this very instant he would have sworn that his ancient ambitions to be something more than the hack scribbler of comic books for a fifth-rate house were as dead, as the saying went, as vaudeville. “My God.”

“Come on, Mr. Clay,” Lieber said. “You can ride over to the hospital with me.”

“Why are you going to the hospital?” Sammy said, though he knew the answer.

“Well, I feel pretty strongly that I have to arrest him. I hope you understand.”

“
Arrest
him?” Longman said. “What for?”

“Disturbing the peace, I suppose. Or maybe we’ll get him for illegal habitation. I’m sure the building is going to want to press charges. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out on the way over.”

Sammy saw his father-in-law’s smirk shrink down to a hard little button, and his generally genial blue eyes went dead and glassy. It was an expression Sammy had seen before, on the floor of Longman’s gallery,
^*
when he was dealing with a painter who overvalued his own work or some lady with a title and most of a dead civet around her shoulders, who was better equipped with money than judgment. Rosa called it, in reference to her father’s origins in retail, “his rug-merchant stare.”

“We’ll see about that,” Longman said, with deliberate indiscretion and a sideways look at Sammy. “Surrealism has agents at every level of the machinery of power. I sold a painting to the mayor’s mother last week.”

Your father-in-law is kind of a blowhard, said Detective Lieber’s eyes. I know it, Sammy’s replied.

“Excuse me.”
There was a new visitor to the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams. He was young, good-looking in a featureless governmental way, wearing a dark blue suit. In one hand he held a long white envelope.

“Sam Clay?” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Sam Clay. I was told I might find him—”

“Here.” Sammy came forward and took the envelope from the young man. “What’s this?”

“That is a congressional subpoena.” The young man nodded to Lieber, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. “Sorry to disturb you gentlemen,” he said.

Sammy stood for a moment, tap-tap-tapping the envelope against his hand.

“You better call Mom,” said Tommy.

R
OSE
S
AXON
, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloomtown, New York, when her husband phoned from the city to say that, if it was all right with her, he would be bringing home the love of her life, whom she had all but given up for dead.

Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story, which she intended to begin laying out that night, after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of
Kiss Comics
. She planned to call it “The Bomb Destroyed My Marriage.” The story would be based on an article that she had read in
Redbook
about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top-secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy’s scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn’t operate that way; she hated working from Sammy’s scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance—storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood—shot by shot, as it were. Her scripts were a tightly numbered series of master shots, the shooting scripts for ten-cent epics that, in their sparse elegance of design, elongated perspectives, and deep focus, somewhat resemble, as Robert C. Harvey has pointed out,
^*
the films of Douglas Sirk. She worked at a bulky Smith-Corona, typing with such intense slowness that when her boss and husband called, she did not at first hear the ringing phone.

Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy’s return to the
business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor’s desk at Gold Star, Sammy’s first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents and alcoholics who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.

Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic, with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of #3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages—it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip,
The Human Grenade
or
The Phantom Stallion
—and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.

Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen. Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode—whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded—but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.

Then one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could afford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they’d cooked up, based partly on teen features like
Archie
and
A Date with Judy
and partly on the old true-romance pulps (the last of the old pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics). It was called
Young Romance
. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been
written and drawn
by one of their own. Rosa had accepted
Sammy’s proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.

She knew what it had meant to Sammy to return to comics and take the editor’s job at Gold Star. It was the one moment in the course of a long and interesting marriage when Sammy had stood on the point of following his cousin into the world of men who escaped. He had sworn, screamed, said hateful things to Rosa. He had blamed her for his penury and his debased condition and the interminable state of
American Disillusionment
. If there were not a wife and a child for him to support,
a child not even his own …
He had gone so far as to pack a suitcase, and walk out of the house. When he returned the next afternoon, it was as the editor in chief of Gold Star Publications, Inc. He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man. He had stayed. Years later, Rosa found a ticket in a dresser drawer, dating from around that terrible time, for a seat in a second-class compartment on the Broadway Limited: yet another train to the coast that Sammy had not been on.