The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (88 page)

He went back into the house, tied his necktie, put on a jacket, and took the car keys from their hook in the kitchen. He was not sure where he was going to go, not at first, but the smell of the sea lingered in his nose, and he had a vague notion of taking the car and driving down to Fire Island for an hour, returning before anybody even knew that he was gone.

The idea of driving
excited
him, too. From the moment he saw it, Sammy and Rosa’s car had aroused his interest. The navy had taught Joe to drive, and he had taken to it with his usual aplomb. His happiest moments during the war had been three brief trips he had made behind the wheel of a jeep at Guantánamo Bay. That was a dozen years ago; he hoped he had not forgotten how.

He found his way out onto Route 24 without any problem, but somehow or other he missed the turn to East Islip, and before he quite recognized it, he was on his way into the city. The car smelled of Rosa’s lipstick and Sammy’s hair cream and a salt-and-wool residue of winter. There was almost no one on the road for a long time, and when he encountered other travelers, he felt a mild sense of pleasant kinship with them as they followed the light of their headlights into the western darkness. On the radio, Rosemary Clooney was singing “Hey There,” and then when he gave the dial a spin she was there again, singing “This Ole House.” He rolled down the window and sometimes there was a sound of grasses and night bugs and sometimes the lowing of a train. Joe loosened his grip on the wheel and lost himself in the string
sections of the hit songs and the rumble of the Champion’s straight-8. After a while he realized that a fair amount of time had gone by without his having thought of anything at all, least of all about what exactly he was going to do when he reached New York.

Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge—not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there—he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.

At Union Square West, he pulled up in front of the Workingman’s Credit Building, home of the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Of course there was nowhere to park. Traffic piled up at the Studebaker’s rear as Joe trolled for a space, and each time he slowed, the angry fanfare of horns started up again. A bus came roaring out from behind him, and the faces of its passengers glared down at him from the windows, or mocked him in his ineptitude with their blank indifference. On his third time around the block, Joe slowed once more in front of the building. The curb here was painted bright red. Joe sat, trying to decide what to do. Inside the grimy magnificent pile of the Workingman’s Credit Building, in the gloomy transom-lit offices of the Crafts Union bank, the account lay slumbering under years of interest and dust. All he had to do was go in there and say that he wanted to make a withdrawal.

There was a rap on the window on his side of the car. Joe jumped, stepping on the gas as he did so. The car lurched forward a few inches before he scrabbled his foot onto the brake and brought it to a halt with a rude little burp of the tires.

“Whoa!” cried the patrolman, who had come to inquire as to just what Joe meant by holding up the traffic on Fifth Avenue like this, at the busiest hour of the morning. He jumped away from the car, hopping on one leg, clutching at his shining left shoe with both hands.

Joe rolled down the window.

“You just ran over my foot!” the policeman said.

“I’m so sorry,” Joe said.

The policeman returned his shoe to the pavement, cautiously, then settled his considerable weight onto it a little at a time. “I think it’s all right. You ran over the empty bit at the toe. Lucky for you.”

“I borrowed this car from my cousin,” Joe said. “I maybe don’t know it as well as I should.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t sit here, bub. You’ve been here ten minutes. You have to move on.”

“That’s impossible,” Joe said. It could not have been more than one or two at the most. “Ten minutes.”

The patrolman tapped his wrist. “I had my watch on you the minute you pulled up.”

“I’m sorry, Officer,” Joe said. “I just can’t to figure out what I’m supposed to do now.” He gestured with a thumb toward the Workingman’s Credit Building. “My money’s in there,” he said.

“I don’t care if your left buttock is in there,” the policeman said. “You’ll have to get lost, mister.”

Joe started to argue, but as he did he was aware that, from the moment the policeman rapped on the window, he had been feeling immensely relieved. It had been decided for him. He could not park here; he would not be able to get the money today. Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. He put the car in gear.

“Okay,” he said. “I will.”

In the course of trying to find his way back out to Long Island, he managed to get very effectively lost in Queens. He was nearly to the old World’s Fair grounds before he realized his mistake and turned around.
After a while, he found himself driving alongside a vast green stretch of cemeteries, which he recognized as Cypress Hills. Tombstones and monuments dotted the rolling hills like sheep in a Claude Lorrain. He had been here once, years before, soon after his return to the city. It had been Halloween night, and a group of the boys from Tannen’s back room had persuaded him to join them in their yearly visit to the grave of Harry Houdini, who was buried here in a Jewish cemetery called Machpelah. They had taken sandwiches and flasks and a thermos of coffee and spent the night gossiping about Mrs. Houdini’s surprisingly involved love life after her husband’s death and waiting for the spirit of the Mysteriarch to appear, as Houdini had promised that, should such a thing turn out to be feasible, it would. At the break of dawn on All Hallows’ Day, they had joked and whistled and pretended to be disappointed at Houdini’s failure to show, but in Joe’s case at least—and he suspected it had been so for some of the others—the show of disappointment had only served to mask the actual disappointment that he felt. Joe did not in the least believe in an afterlife, but he genuinely wished that he could. An old Christian kook in the public library in Halifax had once attempted to comfort Joe by telling him, with an air of great assurance, that it was Hitler, and not the Allies, who had liberated the Jews. Not since his father’s death—not since the day he had first heard a radio report about the wonder ghetto at Terezin—had Joe stood so near to consolation. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian’s words, was to believe.

He was able to find Machpelah again without too much trouble—it was marked by a large, rather gloomily splendid funerary building of vaguely Levantine design that reminded Joe of Rosa’s father’s house—and he drove through the gates and parked the car. Houdini’s tomb was the largest and most splendid in the cemetery, completely out of keeping with the general modesty, even austerity, of the other headstones and slabs. It was a curious structure, like a spacious balcony detached from the side of a palace, a letter C of marble balustrade with pillars like serifs at either end, enclosing a long low bench. The pillars had inscriptions in English and Hebrew. At the center, above the laconic inscription
HOUDINI
, a bust of the late magician glowered, looking as if he had just licked a battery. A curious statue of a robed, weeping woman
was posed alongside the bench, sprawled against it in a kind of eternal grieving swoon; Joe found it quite gauche and disturbing. There were nosegays and wreaths scattered around in various states of decay, and many of the surfaces were littered with small stones, left by family, Joe supposed, or by Jewish admirers. Houdini’s parents and siblings were all buried here: everyone but his late wife, Bess, who had been refused admission because she was an unconverted Catholic. Joe read the prolix tributes to the mother and the rabbi father that Houdini had quite obviously composed himself. He wondered what he would have put on his own parents’ tombstones had he been given the opportunity. Names and dates alone seemed extravagance enough.

He started picking up the stones that people had left, and arranged them neatly atop the railing, as it were, of the balcony, in lines and circles and Stars of David. He noticed that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and there, wherever there was a seam or a crack. He took them out and unrolled the little strips and read what people had written. They all seemed to be messages left by various devotees of spiritualism and students of the next world who offered posthumous forgiveness to the great debunker for having oppugned the Truth that he had, by now, undoubtedly discovered. After a while, Joe sat down on the bench, a safe distance away from the statue of the woman crying out her eyes. He took a deep breath, and shook his head, and reached out some inward fingers, tentatively, to see if they brushed against some remnant of Harry Houdini or Thomas Kavalier or anyone at all. No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

Presently, he made a pillow of his coat and lay back on the cold marble bench. He could hear the rumbling surf of traffic on the Inter-borough Parkway, the intermittent sigh of airbrakes from a bus on Jamaica Avenue. The sounds seemed to correspond exactly to the pale gray sky that he was looking up at, intermittently bruised with blue. He closed his eyes for a moment, just to listen to the sky for a little while. At a certain point, he became aware of footsteps in the grass beside him. He sat up and looked out at the brilliant green field—the sun was shining now, somehow—and the hillsides with their flocks of white sheep,
and saw, coming toward him, in his cutaway coat, his old teacher Bernard Kornblum. Kornblum’s cheeks were raw and his eyes bright and critical. His beard was tied up in a net.

“
Lieber Meister
,” Josef said, reaching toward him with both hands. They held on to each other across the gulf that separated them like the tzigane-dancing steeples of the Queensboro Bridge. “What should I do?”

Kornblum puffed out his peeling cheeks and shook his head, rolling his eyes a little as if this was among the more stupid questions he had ever been asked.

“For God’s sake,” he said. “Go home.”

When Joe walked in the front door of 127 Lavoisier Drive, he was nearly knocked off his feet. Rosa dangled by one arm from his neck and, with the other, punched him on the arm, hard. Her jaw was set, and he could see that she was refusing to let herself cry. Tommy bumped up against him a couple of times, like a dog, then stepped awkwardly away, backing into the hi-fi cabinet and upsetting a pewter vase of dried marigolds. After that, they both started talking all at once. Where have you been? Why didn’t you call? What’s in the box? How would you like some rice pudding?

“I went for a drive,” Joe said. “My goodness.” He saw that they thought he had left them—had stolen the family car! He felt ashamed to be worthy, in their minds, of such suspicion. “I drove to the city. What box? What—”

Joe recognized it right away, with the ease and unsurprise of someone in a dream. He had been traveling inside of it, in his dreams, since the autumn of 1939. His traveling companion, his other brother, had survived the war.

“What’s in there?” Tommy said. “Is it a trick?”

Joe approached the casket. He stretched out his hand toward it and gave it a little push. It tipped an inch and then settled again on its end.

“It’s something pretty damned heavy,” Rosa said. “Whatever it is.”

That was how Joe knew that something was wrong. He remembered very well how light the box with the Golem inside had felt as he and Kornblum carried it out of Nicholasgasse 26, like a coffin full of birds, like a suit of bones. The dreadful thought that there might once again be
a body nestled in there with the Golem dashed across his mind. He leaned his face in a little nearer to the box. At some point, he noticed, the hinged observation panel that Kornblum had contrived to misdirect the Gestapo and the border guards had been padlocked shut.

“Why are you smelling it?” Rosa said.

“Is it food?” said Tommy.

Joe did not want to say what it was. He could see that they were half-insane with curiosity, now that they had witnessed his reaction to the box, and that quite naturally they expected him not only to tell them what was in the box but to show it to them, right now. This he was reluctant to do. The box was the same, of that he had no doubt, but as to its mysteriously heavy contents, they could be anything. They could be something very, very bad.

“Tommy told the delivery guy it was your chains,” Rosa said.

Joe tried to think of absolutely the most dull substance or item the box could plausibly contain. He considered saying it was a load of old school exams. Then it struck him that there was nothing too interesting about chains.

“It’s right,” he said. “You must be clairvoyant.”

“It’s really your chains?”

“Just a bunch of iron.”

“Wow! Can we open it now?” Tommy said. “I really want to see that.”

Joe and Rosa went into the garage to look for Sammy’s toolbox. Tommy started to come along, but Rosa said, “Stay here.”

They found the toolbox right away, but she would not let him past her back into the house. “What’s in the box?” she said.