The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (87 page)

I don’t even know if he’s ever coming back. “I don’t know what he’s going to do, honey,” she said.

When Joe and Sammy had returned from the city last night with news of the Escapist’s passing, they both seemed pensive, and said little before they each went to bed. Sammy seemed diffident, even apologetic, around Joe, scrambling up some eggs for him, asking him were they too runny, were they too dry, offering to fry some potatoes. Joe was monosyllabic, almost curt, Rosa would have said; he went to lie down on the couch without having exchanged more than a few dozen words with either Rosa or Sam. She saw that something had passed between the two men, but since neither of them said anything about it, she assumed it must have simply concerned the demise of their brainchild; perhaps they had engaged in recriminations over lost opportunities.

The news had certainly come as a shock to Rosa. Though she had not been a regular reader since the days of Kavalier & Clay—Sammy wouldn’t have Empire books in the house—she still checked in with
Radio
and
Escapist Adventures
from time to time, killing a half hour at a Grand Central newsstand, or while waiting for a prescription at Spiegelman’s. The character had long since slipped into cultural inconsequence, but the titles in which he starred had continued, as far as she knew, to sell. She’d assumed, more or less unconsciously, that the heroic puss of the Escapist would always be there, on lunch boxes, beach towels, on cereal boxes and belt buckles and the faces of alarm clocks, even on the Mutual Television Network,
^*
taunting her with the wealth and the unimaginable contentment that, though she knew better, she could never help feeling would have been Sammy’s had he been able to reap the fruits of the one irrefutable moment of inspiration vouchsafed him in his scattershot career. Rosa had stayed up very late trying to work, worrying about them both, and then slept in even later
than usual. By the time she had woken up, both Joe and the Studebaker were gone. All his clothes were in his valise, and there was no note. Sammy seemed to feel these were good signs.

“He would leave a note,” he said when she phoned him at the office. “If he were. Going to leave, I mean.”

“There wasn’t any note the last time,” Rosa said.

“I really don’t think he would steal our car.”

Now here were all his things, and Joe was not. It was as if he had pulled a substitution trick on them, the old switcheroo.

“I guess we’ll have to just cram it all into the garage,” she said.

The stout little mover wheeled the crate up the walk to the front door, puffing and grimacing and nearly running off into the pansies. When he reached Rosa and Tommy, he tipped the hand truck forward onto its bracket. The crate tottered and seemed to consider pitching over before it settled, with a shiver, on its end.

“Weighs a ton,” he said, flexing his fingers as if they were sore. “What’s he got in there, bricks?”

“It’s probably iron chains,” Tommy explained in an authoritative tone. “And, like, padlocks and junk.”

The man nodded. “A box of iron chains,” he said. “Figures. Pleased to meetcha.” He wiped his right hand down the front of his coverall and offered it to Rosa. “Al Button.”

“Are you in fact a bachelor?” said Rosa.

“The name of the firm,” Al Button said with an air of genuine regret, “is a little out-of-date.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of waybills and carbons, then took a pen from another breast pocket and uncapped it. “I’m going to need your John Hancock on this.”

“Don’t I need to sort of check everything off as you bring it in?” Rosa said. “That’s how it worked when we moved out here from Brooklyn.”

“You can go right ahead and check that off, if you want to,” he said, with a nod to the crate as he handed the packet to Rosa. “That’s all I have for you today.”

Rosa checked the bill and found that it did itemize a single article, described pithily as
Wood box
. She paged through the other sheets of paper, but they were just carbon copies of the first.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s the only thing that I’m aware of,” Button said. “Maybe you know better than me.”

“There are supposed to be more than a hundred boxes coming out from the city. From the Empire State Building. Joe—Mr. Kavalier—arranged for the shipment yesterday afternoon.”

“This didn’t come from the Empire State Building, lady. I picked it up this morning at Penn Station.”

“Penn Station? Wait a minute.” She started to shuffle through the papers and carbons again. “Who is this from?” While the shipper’s name was not quite legible, it did seem to begin with a K. The address, however, was a post-office box in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Rosa wondered if Joe had made it that far during his period of wandering, just after the war, and had left this box of whatever was in it behind.

“Nova Scotia,” she said. “Who does Joe know in Nova Scotia?”

“And how did they know he was here?” Tommy said.

It was a very good question. Only the police and a few people at Pharaoh knew that Joe was staying with the Clays.

Rosa signed for the crate, and then Al Button jostled and cajoled it into the living room, where Rosa and Tommy helped him to walk it off of the dolly and onto the low-pile wall-to-wall.

“A box full of chains,” Button repeated, his hand rough and dry against Rosa’s. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

After he left, closing up his truck and winding his funereal way back to the city, Rosa and Tommy stood there in the living room, studying the wood box. It was a good two feet taller than Rosa, and nearly twice as broad. It was made of solid pine, knotty and unvarnished except by the abrading rasp of its travels, dark yellow and stained like an animal’s tooth. You could tell somehow, looking at it, that it had come a long way, suffered ill handling and exposure, had ignoble things spilled on it. It had been used as a table, perhaps, a bed, a barricade. There were black scuffs, and the corners and edges were tufted with splinters. If these were not suggestive enough of wide journeying, there was the incredible profusion of its labels: customs stamps and shipping-line decals, quarantine stickers and claim checks and certificates of weight. In places they were layered a few deep, bits of place-name and color
and handwriting all jumbled together. It reminded Rosa of a Cubist collage, a Kurt Schwitters. Clearly, Halifax was not the crate’s point of origin. Rosa and Tommy tried to trace its history, peeling away at the layers of seal and sticker, timidly at first, then more carelessly as they were led backward from Halifax to Helsinki, to Murmansk, to Memel, to Leningrad, to Memel once more, to Vilnius, in Lithuania, and finally, scraping away now with the point of a kitchen knife at a particularly recalcitrant carbuncle of adhesive paper near the center of what appeared to be the crate’s lid, to

“Prague,” said Rosa. “What do you know.”

“He’s home,” Tommy said, and Rosa didn’t understand what he meant until she heard the sound of the Studebaker in the drive.

J
OE HAD LEFT THE HOUSE
very early that morning.

For hours after saying good night to Rosa and Sammy, and long after they went to bed, Joe had lain awake on the couch in the living room, tormented by his thoughts and by the occasional brief giggle from the tank of the toilet down the hall. He had arranged for monthly withdrawals to pay the rent on the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., and had not permitted himself to consider the total sum of the money he had on deposit in a very long time. The variety of the grandiose and homely schemes it had once been intended to fund was extravagant—he had at one time lavishly overspent in his imagination—and after the war, the money always felt to him like a debt owed, and unrepayable. He had bankrupted himself on plans: a house for his family in Riverdale or Westchester, a flat for his old teacher Bernard Kornblum in a nice building on the Upper West Side. He saw to it, in his fantasies, that his mother obtained the services of a cook, a fur coat, the leisure to write and to see patients as little as she chose. Her study in the big Tudor house had a bay window and heavy timbering, which she painted white because she dreaded gloomy rooms. It was bright and uncluttered, with Navajo rugs and cacti in pots. For his grandfather, there were an entire wardrobe of suits, a dog, a Panamuse record player like Sammy’s. His grandfather sat in the conservatory with three elderly friends and sang Weber songs to the accompaniment of their flutes. For Thomas, there were riding lessons, fencing lessons, trips to the Grand Canyon, a bicycle, a set of encylopedias, and—that most-coveted item for sale in the pages of comic books—an air rifle, so that Thomas could shoot at crows or woodchucks or (more likely given
his tender feelings) tin cans, when they went out, at weekends, to the country house up in Putnam County that Joe was going to buy.

These designs of his embarrassed him almost as much as they saddened him. But the truth was that, as he lay there smoking, in his underpants, Joe was tormented, even more than by the ruins of his fatuous dreams, by the knowledge that even now, down in the mysterious manufactory of foolishness that was synonymous in some way with his heart, they were tooling up to bring out an entire new line of moonshine. He could not stop coming up with ideas—costume designs and backdrops, character names, narrative lines—for a series of comic books based on Jewish
aggadah
and folklore; it was as if they had been there all along, wanting only a nudge from Sammy to come tumbling out in a thrilling disorder. The notion of spending the $974,000 that was steadily compounding at the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union to float the recommissioned Kavalier & Clay agitated him so much that his stomach hurt. No, agitation was not the honest word for it. What he felt was
excited
.

Sammy had been right about long-underwear heroes in 1939; Joe had a feeling that he was right in 1954. William Gaines and his E.C. Comics had taken all but one of the standard comic book genres—romance, Western, war stories, crime, the supernatural, et cetera—and invested them with darker emotions, less childish plots, stylish pencils, and moody inks. The only genre they had ignored or avoided (except to ridicule it in the pages of
Mad
) was that of the costumed superhero. What if—he was not sure if this was what Sammy had in mind, but after all, it would be his money—the same kind of transformation were attempted on the superhero? If they tried to do stories about costumed heroes who were more complicated, less childish, as fallible as angels.

At last he ran out of cigarettes and gave up on sleep for the night. He pulled his clothes back on, took a banana from the bowl on the kitchen counter, and stepped outside.

It was not yet five o’clock in the morning, and the Bloomtown streets were deserted, the houses dark, furtive, all but invisible. A steady salt breeze blew in from the sea eight miles away. Later, it would bring fitful rain and the gloom that Mr. Al Button would attempt to relieve by
turning on the wan headlights of his van, but for now there were no clouds, and the sky that, in this single-story town of stunted saplings and barren lawns, could seem, by day, as unbearably tall and immense as the sky over some blasted Nebraska prairie, was bestowing itself upon Bloomtown like a blessing, filling in the emptiness with dark blue velveteen and stars. A dog barked two blocks away, and the sound raised gooseflesh on Joe’s arm. He had been on and around the Atlantic Ocean plenty of times since the sinking of the
Ark of Miriam;
the train of association linking Thomas, in Joe’s mind, to the body of water that had swallowed him had long since worn away. But from time to time, especially if, as now, his brother was already in his thoughts, the smell of the sea could unfurl the memory of Thomas like a flag. His snoring, the half-animal snuffle of his breath coming from the other bed. His aversion to spiders, lobsters, and anything that crept like a disembodied hand. A much-thumbed mental picture of him at the age of seven or eight, in a plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, sitting beside the Kavaliers’ big Philips, knees to his chest, eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth while, with all his might, he listened to some Italian opera or other.

That bathrobe, its lapels whipstitched in heavy black thread; that radio, its lines Gothic and its dial, like an atlas of the ether, imprinted with the names of world capitals; those leather moccasins with their beaded tepees on the vamps—these were all things that he was never going to see again. The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday—but when?—he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there—somewhere—waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militär-und Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography—that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of
Ontario—which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase. He realized now that this kind of hopeless but ineradicable conviction lay at the heart of his inability to let go of the money that he had banked all those years ago in the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Somewhere in his heart, or wherever it was that such errors are cherished and fed, he believed that someone—his mother, his grandfather, Bernard Kornblum—might still, in spite of everything, turn up. Such things happened all the time; those reported shot in Lodz Ghetto or carried off by typhus at the Zehlendorf DP camp turned up owning grocery stores in São Paulo or knocking on the front door of a brother-in-law in Detroit looking for a handout, older, frailer—altered beyond recognition or disarmingly unchanged—but alive.