The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (83 page)

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.

"You don't believe it's chains?" He knew that he was not a good liar.

"Why would you
smell
chains?"

"I don't know what's in there," Joe said. "It's not what it used to be."

"What did it used to be?"

"It used to be the Golem of Prague."

It had always been rare to catch Rosa without a reply. She just stepped aside, looking up at him, to let him pass. But he did not go back into the house, not right away.

"Let me ask you this," Joe said. "If you had a million dollars, would you give it to Sammy so that he could buy Empire Comics?"

"Without the Escapist?"

"I guess that's the way it has to be."

She worked on an answer for a minute, during which he could see her spending the money a dozen different ways. Finally, she shook her head.

"I don't know," she said as though it hurt her to admit it. "The Escapist was kind of the crown jewels."

"That is what I was thinking."

"Why were you thinking about that?"

He didn't answer. He carried the toolbox back into the living room and, with help from both Rosa and Tommy, succeeded in lowering the coffin to the ground. He lifted the padlock, hefted it, tapped it twice with his index finger. The picks that Kornblum had given him—until now the only relic from that time which he still possessed—were in his valise. It was a cheap-enough lock, and with a little effort he would no doubt be able to get it off. He let the lock drop back against the hasp and took a crowbar out of the toolbox. As he did so, it occurred to him for the first time to wonder how the Golem had managed to find him. Its reappearance in the living room of a house on Long Island had seemed oddly inevitable at first, as if it had known all along that it had been following him for the past fifteen years, and now it had finally caught up to him. Joe studied some of the labels pasted to the box and saw that it had crossed the ocean only a few weeks before. How had it known where to find him? What had it been waiting for? Who could be keeping tabs on his movements?

He went around to the side opposite the padlock and dug with the teeth of the crowbar into the seam of the lid, just under a nail head. The nail whined, there was a snap like a joint popping, and then the entire lid sprang open as if pushed from inside. At once the air was filled with a heady green smell of mud and river scum, with a stench of summer rich with remembered tenderness and regret.

"Dirt," Tommy said, glancing anxiously at his mother.

"Joe," Rosa said, "that isn't—those aren't
ashes.''

The entire box was filled, to a depth of about seven inches, with a fine powder, pigeon-gray and opalescent, that Joe recognized at once from boyhood excursions as the silty bed of the Moldau. He had scraped it from his shoes a thousand times and brushed it from the seat of his trousers. The speculations of those who feared that the Golem, removed from the shores of the river that mothered it, might degrade had been proved correct.

Rosa came over and knelt beside Joe. She put her arm around his shoulder. "Joe?" she said.

She pulled him closer, he let himself fall against her. He just let himself, and she held him up.

"Joe," she said, after a while. "Are you thinking of buying Empire Comics? Do you have a million dollars?"

Joe nodded. "And a box of dirt," he said.

"Dirt from Czechoslovakia?" Tommy said. "Can I touch it?"

Joe nodded. Tommy dabbed at the dirt with a fingertip, as at a tub of cold water, then plunged in his whole hand to the wrist.

"It's soft," he said. "It feels good." He began to move his hand in the dirt, as if feeling around for something. Clearly he was not yet ready to give up on this box of tricks.

"There's not going to be anything else in there," Joe said. "I'm sorry, Tom."

It was strange, Joe thought, that the box should weigh so much more, now, than it had when the Golem was still intact. He wondered if other dirt, extra dirt, had come to be added to the original load, but this seemed unlikely. Then he remembered how Kornblum, that night, had quoted some paradoxical wisdom about golems, something in Hebrew to the effect that it was the Golem's unnatural soul that had given it weight; unburdened of it, the earthen Golem was light as air.

"Oop," Tommy said. "Hey." His brow furrowed; he had found something. Perhaps the giant's clothes had settled to the bottom of the box.

He took out a small, stained rectangle of paper, with some words printed on one side. It looked familiar to Joe.

"Emil Kavalier," Tommy read. "Endikron—endikrono—"

"My father's," Joe said. He took his father's old calling card from Tommy, remembered its spidery typeface and vanished telephone exchange. It must have been secreted, long before, in the breast pocket of Alois Hora's enormous suit. He reached in and took a handful of the pearly silt, pondering it, sifting it through his fingers, wondering at what point the soul of the Golem had reentered its body, or if possibly there could be more than one lost soul embodied in all that dust, weighing it down so heavily.

17

The Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Senate Judiciary Committee was convened in New York City on April 21 and 22, 1954, to look into the role played by the comic book business in the manufacture of delinquent children. The testimony offered by witnesses on the first day is much the better known. Among the experts, publishers, and criminologists called on the twenty-first, three stand out—to the degree that the hearings are remembered at all— in the public memory. The first was Dr. Fredric Wertham, the considerable and well-intentioned psychiatrist and author of
Seduction of the Innocent,
who was, morally and popularly, a motive force behind the entire controversy over the pernicious effects of comic books. The doctor testified at great length, somewhat incoherently, but dignified throughout and alive, ablaze, with outrage. Immediately following Wertham was William Gaines, son of the acknowledged inventor of the comic book, Max Gaines, and publisher of E.C. Comics, whose graphic line of horror comic books he quite eloquently but with fatal disingenuity defended. Finally, that day, the subcommittee heard from a society of newspaper cartoonists, represented by
Pogo's
Walt Kelly and Sammy's old idol the great Milton Caniff, who, with humor, sarcasm, and witty disdain, completely sold out their brothers-in-ink, handing them up to Senators Hendrickson, Hennings, and Kefauver to be publicly and deservedly crushed, should the senators so deign to do.

The events of the second day of testimony, to which Sam Clay had been summoned, are less well known. It was Sammy's misfortune to follow two extremely reluctant witnesses. The first was a man named Alex Segal, the publisher of a line of cheap "educational" books that he advertised in the back pages of comics, who first denied and then admitted that his company had once—
quite by accident
—sold, to known pornographers, lists of the names and addresses of children who had responded to his company's ads. The second reluctant witness was one of the pornographers in question, an almost comically shifty-looking and heavily perspiring walleyed loser named Samuel Roth, who took the Fifth and then begged off with the excuse that he could not legally testify to anything since he was under indictment for smut-peddling by the State of New York. By the time that Sammy appeared, therefore, the mind of the subcommittee was even more than usually preoccupied with questions of vice and immorality.