The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (68 page)

When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense. For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced. He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward. Then the man smiled.

"Hello there," he said. His voice was soft and faintly accented.

"Hello," said Tommy.

"I've always wondered what they keep in those jars." The man pointed to the front window of the store, where two glass vessels, baroque beakers with onion-dome lids, contained their perpetual gallons of clear fluid, tinted respectively pink and blue. The late-afternoon sun cut through them, casting the rippling pair of pastel shadows on the back wall.

"I asked Mr. Spiegelman that," Tommy said. "A couple times."

"What did he say?"

"That it's a mystery of his profession."

The man nodded solemnly. "One we must respect." He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be.

"I'm your cousin," the man said. "Josef Kavalier."

"I know," said Tommy. "I saw your picture."

The man nodded and took another drag on his cigarette.

"Are you coming over to our house?"

"Not today."

"Do you live in Canada?"

"No," said the man. "I don't live in Canada. I could tell you where I live, but if I do, you must promise not to reveal my whereabouts or identity to any persons. It's top secret."

There was a gritty scratch of leather sole against linoleum. Cousin

Joe glanced up and smiled a brittle adult smile, eyes shifting uneasily to one side.

"Tommy?" It was Mr. Spiegelman. He was staring curiously at Cousin Joe, not in an unfriendly way, but with an interest that Tommy recognized as distinctly unmercantile. "I don't believe I know your friend."

"This ... is ... Joe," Tommy said. "I... I know him." The intrusion of Mr. Spiegelman into the comic book aisle rattled him. The dreamlike sense of calm with which he had reencountered, in a Long Island pharmacy, the cousin who had disappeared from a military transport off the coast of Virginia eight years before, abandoned him. Joe Kavalier was the great silencer of adults in the Clay household; whenever Tommy entered a room and everyone stopped talking, he knew they had been discussing Cousin Joe. Naturally, he had pestered them mercilessly for information on this man of mystery. His father generally refused to talk about the early days of the partnership that had produced the Escapist—"All that stuff kind of depresses me, buddy," he would say— but he could sometimes be induced to speculate on Joe's current location, the path of his wanderings, the likelihood of his ever coming back. Such talk, however, made Tommy's father nervous. He would reach for his cigarettes, a newspaper, the switch of the radio: anything to cut the conversation short.

It was his mother who had provided Tommy with most of what he knew about Joe Kavalier. From her he had learned the full story of the Escapist's birth, of the vast fortunes that the owners of Empire Comics had made off the work of his father and his cousin. His mother worried about money. The lost bonanza that the Escapist would have represented to the family if they had not been cheated by Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy haunted her. "They were robbed," she often said. Generally, she confined such statements to moments when mother and son were alone, but occasionally, when Tommy's father was around, she would drag up his sorry history in the comic book business, of which Cousin Joe had once formed a key part, to bolster some larger, more abstruse point about the state of their lives that Tommy, clinging fiercely to his childish understanding of things, every time managed to miss. His mother, as it happened, was in possession of all manner of interesting facts about Joe. She knew where he had gone to school in Prague, when and by what route he had come to America, the places he had lived in Manhattan. She knew which comic books he had drawn, and what Dolores Del Rio had said to him one spring night in 1941 ("You dance like my father"). Tommy's mother knew that Joe had been indifferent to music and partial to bananas.

Tommy had always taken the particularity, the enduring intensity, of his mother's memories of Joe as a matter of course, but then one afternoon the previous summer, at the beach, he had overheard Eugene's mother talking to another neighborhood woman. Tommy, feigning sleep on his towel, lay eavesdropping on the hushed conversation. It was hard to follow, but one phrase caught his ear and lodged there for many weeks afterward.

"She's been carrying a torch for him all these years," the other woman said to Helene Begelman. She was speaking, Tommy knew, of his mother. For some reason, he thought at once of the picture of Joe, dressed in a tuxedo and brandishing a straight flush, that his mother kept on the vanity she had built for herself in her bedroom closet, in a small silver frame. But the full meaning of this expression, "carrying a torch," remained opaque to Tommy for several more months, until one day, listening with his father to Frank Sinatra sing the intro to "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," its sense had become clear to him; at the same instant, he realized he had known all his life that his mother was in love with Cousin Joe. The information pleased him for some reason. It seemed to accord with certain ideas he had formed about what adult life was really like from perusing his mother's stories in
Heartache, Sweetheart,
and
Love Crazy.

Still, Tommy didn't really know Cousin Joe at all, and he had to admit, seeing him through Mr. Spiegelman's eyes, that he looked kind of shady, loitering there in his wrinkled suit, several day's growth on his chin. The coils of his hair sprang upward from his head like excelsior. He had a pale, blinking aspect, as if he didn't get out into the light too often. It was going to be hard to explain him to Mr. Spiegelman without revealing that he was a relative. And why shouldn't he reveal this? Why shouldn't he tell everyone he knew—in particular his parents—that Cousin Joe had returned from his wanderings? This was big news. If it later emerged that he had kept this from his mother and father, he would certainly get into trouble.

"This is my—uh—" he stammered, seeing the look of mistrust in Mr. Spiegelman's mild blue eyes grow keener. "My—" He was just about to say "cousin," and was even considering prefixing it with the melodramatic novelty of "long-lost," when a far more interesting narrative possibility occurred to him: clearly Cousin Joe had come looking especially for him. There had been that moment when their eyes met across the counter at Louis Tannen's Magic Shop, and then, over the next few days, somehow or other, Joe had tracked Tommy down, observed his habits, even followed him around, waiting for the opportune moment. Whatever his reasons for concealing his return from the rest of the family, he had chosen to reveal himself to Tommy. It would be wrong and foolish, Tommy thought, not to respect that choice. The heroes of John Buchan's novels never blurted out the truth in these situations. For them, a word was always sufficient, and discretion was the better part of valor. The same sense of melodramatic cliche prevented him from considering the possibility that his parents knew all about Cousin's Joe's return and had merely, as was their habit with interesting news, kept it from him. "My magic teacher," he finished. "I told him I'd meet him here. The houses all look alike, you know."

"That is certainly true," Joe said.

"Magic teacher," said Mr. Spiegelman. "That's a new one to me."

"You have to have a teacher, Mr. Spiegelman," Tommy said. "All the great ones do." Then Tommy did something that surprised him. He reached out and took hold of his cousin's hand. "Well, come on, I'll show you the way. You just have to count the corners. The houses don't really all look alike. We have eight different models."

They started past the racks of comics. Tommy remembered that he had meant to pick up the Summer 1953 issue of
Escapist Adventures,
but he was afraid that to do so might offend or even anger his cousin. So Tommy just kept on going, pulling on Joe's hand. As they walked past it, Tommy glanced at the cover of
Escapist Adventures
#54, on which the Escapist, blindfolded and bound to a thick post with his hands behind his back, faced a grim-visaged firing squad. The signal to fire was about to be given by, of all people. Tom Mayflower, leaning on his crutch, one arm raised high, his face diabolical and crazed. "HOW CAN THIS BE?" the Escapist was crying out in an agonized, jagged word balloon. "I'M ABOUT TO BE EXECUTED BY MY OWN ALTER EGO!!!"

Tommy felt powerfully teased by this provocative illustration, even though he knew perfectly well that, in the end, when you read the story the situation on the cover would turn out to be a dream, a misunderstanding, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie. With his free hand, he stood fingering the dime in the pocket of his dungarees.

Cousin Joe gave his other hand a squeeze.
"Escapist Adventures"
he said, his tone light and mocking.

"I was just looking at it," said Tommy.

"Get it," Joe said. He plucked the four current Escapist titles from the rack. "Get them all. Go ahead." He waved at the wall, his gesture wild, his eyes flashing. "I'll buy you any ones you want."

It was hard to say why, but this extravagant offer frightened Tommy. He began to regret his buccaneering leap into the unknown plans of his first cousin once removed.

"No, thank you," he said. "My dad gets me them free. All except for the Empire ones."

"Of course," said Joe. He coughed into his balled fist, and his cheeks turned red. "Well then. Just the one."

"Ten cents," said Mr. Spiegelman, ringing it up at the cash register, still eyeing Joe carefully. He took the dime Joe offered him and then held out his hand.

"Hal Spiegelman," he said. "Mister ..."

"Kornblum," said Cousin Joe.

They walked out of the store and stood on the sidewalk in front of Spiegelman's. This sidewalk, and the stores that fronted it, were the oldest built things in Bloomtown. They had been here since the twenties, when Mr. Irwin Bloom was still working in his father's Queens cement concern and there had been nothing around here but potato fields and this tiny village of Manticock, which Bloomtown had since overwhelmed and supplanted. Unlike the blinding fresh sidewalks of Mr. Irwin Bloom's Utopia, this one was cracked, grayish, leopard-spotted by years of spat-out chewing gum, trimmed with a fur of Island weeds. There was no oceanic parking lot in front, as there was at Bloomtown Plaza; State Road 24 rumbled right past. The storefronts were narrow, clad in clapboard, their cornices a ragged mess of telephone wires and power lines overgrown with Virginia creeper. Tommy wanted to say something about all this to his cousin Joe. He wished he could tell him how the churned-up sidewalk, the hectoring crows on the bare Virginia creeper, and the irritable buzzing of Mr. Spiegelman's neon sign made him feel a kind of premonitory sadness for adult life, as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns, and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself, from which this senescent hunk of the village of Manticock protruded like a wayward dark island. He felt as if there were a thousand things he wanted to tell Cousin Joe, the history of their lives since his disappearance, the painful tragedy of Eugene Begelman's departure for Florida, the origin of the mysterious Bug. Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness, but there was a look of forbearance in Cousin Joe's eyes that made him think it would be possible to tell this man things.

"I wish you could come over tonight," he said. "We're having Mexican chili."

"That sounds good. Your mother was always a very good cook."

"Come over." Suddenly, he felt that he would never be able to keep Joe's return a secret from his parents. The question of Joe's whereabouts had been a worry to them for Tommy's entire life. It would be unfair to hide the news from them. It would be wrong. What was more, he had an immediate sense, seeing his cousin for the first time, of the man's
belonging
to them. "You have to."

"But I can't." Every time a car went by, Joe turned to looked at it, peering into its interior. "I'm sorry. I came out here to see you, but now I have to go."

"Why?"

'Because I—because I am out of practice. Maybe next time I will come over to your house, but not now." He looked at his watch. "My train is in ten minutes."

He held out his hand to Tommy, and they shook, but then Tommy surprised himself and put his arms around Cousin Joe. The smell of ashes in the scratchy fabric of his jacket swelled Tommy's heart.

"Where are you going?" Tommy asked.

"I can't tell you. It would not be fair. I can't to ask you to keep my secrets for me. After I go, you should tell your parents that you saw me, okay? I don't mind. They won't be able to find me. But to be fair to you, I can't tell you where I go."

"I won't tell them," said Tommy. "I swear to God, honest, I won't."

Joe put his hands on Tommy's shoulders and pushed him back a little so that they could look at each other.

"You like magic, eh?"

Tommy nodded. Joe reached into his pocket and took out a deck of playing cards. They were a French brand of cards called Petit Fou. Tommy had an identical deck at home, which he had bought at Louis Tannen's. The continental cards were smaller in size, and thus easier for small hands to manipulate. The kings and queens had a lowering, woodcut air of medieval chicanery, as if they were out to rob you with their curving swords and pikes. Joe slid the cards out of their gaudy box and handed them to Tommy.