The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (84 page)

The key portion of the transcript of the proceedings reads as follows:

senator hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with the comic book characters known as Batman and Robin?

MR. clay: Of course, Senator. They are very well known and successful characters.

hendrickson: I wonder, could you attempt to characterize their relationship for us?

clay: Characterize? I'm sorry ... I don't...

hendrickson: They live together, isn't that right? In a big mansion. Alone.

clay: I believe there is a butler.

hendrickson: But they are not, as I understand it, father arid son, is that right? Or brothers, or an uncle and a nephew, or any relationship of that sort.

senator hennings: Perhaps they are just good friends.

clay: It has been some time since I read that strip, Senators, but as I recall, Dick Grayson, that is, Robin, is described as being Bruce Wayne's, or Batman's, ward.

hendrickson: His ward. Yes. There are a number of such relationships in the superhero comics, aren't there? Like Dick and Bruce.

clay: I don't really know, sir. I—

hendrickson: Let me see, I don't exactly recall which exhibit it was, Mr. Clendennen, do you—I thank you.

Executive Director Clendennen produces Exhibit 15.

hendrickson: Batman and Robin. The Green Arrow and Speedy. The Human Torch and Toro. The Monitor and the Liberty Kid. Captain America and Bucky. Are you familiar with any of these?

clay: Uh, yes, sir. The Monitor and Liberty Kid were my creation at one time, sir.

hendrickson: Is that so? You invented them.

clay: Yes, sir. But that strip was killed, oh, eight or nine years ago, I believe.

hendrickson: And you have created a number of other such pairings over the years, have you not?

clay: Pairings? I don't...

hendrickson: The—let me see—the Rectifier and Little Mack the Boy Enforcer. The Lumberjack and Timber Lad. The Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby.

clay: Well, those characters—the Rectifier, the Lumberjack, the Argonaut—they were already, they had been created by others. I just took over the characters, you see, when I went to work at the respective publishers.

hendrickson: And you immediately provided them, did you not, with wards?

clay: Well, yes, but that's standard procedure when you've got a strip that isn't, that maybe has lost a little momentum. You want to perk things up. You want to attract readers. The kids like to read about kids.

hendrickson: Isn't it true that you actually have a reputation in the comic book field for being particularly partial to boy sidekicks?

clay: I'm not aware—no one has ever—

hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham's theory, which he testified to yesterday, and to which, I must say, I am inclined to give a certain amount of credit, having paged through some of the Batman comic books in question last night, that the relationship between Batman and his ward is actually a thinly veiled allegory of pedophilic inversion?

clay: [unintelligible]

hendrickson: I'm sorry, sir, you'll have to—

clay: No, Senator, I must have missed that part of the testimony. ...

hendrickson: And you have not read the doctor's book, I take it.

clay: Not yet, sir.

hendrickson: So you have never been aware, personally, therefore, that in outfitting these muscular, strapping young fellows in tight trousers and sending them flitting around the skies together, you were in any way expressing or attempting to disseminate your own ... psychological proclivities.

clay: I'm afraid I don't... these are not any proclivities which I'm familiar with, Senator. With all due respect, if I may say, that I resent—

senator kefauver: For Heaven's sake, gentlemen, let us move on.

18

In all his life up to this afternoon, Sammy had gotten himself loaded only once, in that big house on a windswept stretch of Jersey shoreline, on the night before Pearl Harbor was attacked, when he fell first among beautiful and then evil men. Then, as now, it was something that he did mostly because it seemed to be expected of him. After the clerk released him from his oath, he turned, feeling as if the contents of his head had been blown like the liquor of an Easter egg through a secret pinhole, to face that puzzled roomful of gawking Americans. But before he had a chance to see whether they—strangers and friends alike—would avert their eyes or stare him down, would drop their jaws in horror or surprise, or would nod, with Presbyterian primness or urbane complacency, because they had suspected him all along of harboring this dark youth-corrupting wish to pad around his stately manor home with a youthful sidekick, in matching smoking jackets; before, in other words, he got a chance to begin to develop a sense of who and what he was going to be from now on—Joe and Rosa bundled him up, in a kidnapperly combination of their overcoats and bunched newspapers, and hustled him out of Courtroom 11. They dragged him past the television cameramen and newspaper photographers, down the stairs, across Foley Square, into a nearby chophouse, up to the bar, where they arranged him with the care of florists in front of a glass of bourbon and ice, all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member's being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate.

"I'll have one of the same," Joe told the bartender.

"Make that three," Rosa said.

The bartender was looking at Sammy, an eyebrow arched. He was an Irishman, about Sammy's age, stout and balding. He looked over his shoulder at the television on its shelf above the bar; although it was showing only an ad for Ballantine beer, the set appeared to be tuned to 11, WPIX, the station that had been carrying the hearings. The bartender looked back at Sammy, a mean Irish twinkle in his eye.

Rosa cupped her hands on either side of her mouth. "Hello!" she said. "Three bourbons on the rocks."

"I heard you," the bartender said, taking three glasses from below the bar.

"And turn that TV off, why don't you?"

"Why not?" the bartender said, with another smile for Sammy. "Show's over."

Rosa snatched a package of cigarettes out of her purse and tore one from the pack. "The bastards," she said, "the bastards. The fucking bastards."

She said it a few more times. Neither Joe nor Sammy seemed to be able to think of anything to add. The bartender brought their drinks, and they drained them quickly and ordered another round.

"Sammy," Joe said. "I'm so sorry."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "Well. That's okay. I'm all right."

"How are you?" Rosa said.

"I don't know, I feel like I'm really all right."

Though he was inclined to attribute the perception to alcohol, Sammy noticed that there appeared to lie no emotion at all, none at least that he could name or identify, behind his shock at his sudden exposure and his disbelief at the way it had happened. Shock and disbelief: a pair of painted flats on a movie set, behind which lay a vast, unknown expanse of sandstone and lizards and sky.

Joe put an arm across Sammy's shoulders. On the other side of Sammy, Rosa leaned against him, and laid her head on Joe's hand, and sighed. They sat that way for a while, propping one another up.

"I can't help noticing that I'm not hearing a lot of astonishment from you two," Sammy said at last.

Rosa and Joe sat up, looked at Sammy, and then at each other behind his back. They blushed.

"Batman and Robin?" Rosa said, astonished.

"That's a dirty lie," Sammy said.

They drank one more round, and then someone, Sammy wasn't sure who, said that they had better be getting back out to Bloomtown, since Joe's boxes were coming today and Tommy was due home from school in less than two hours. There followed a general donning of coats and scarves, some slapstick with dollar bills and the spilled ice from a drink, and then at some point Rosa and Joe seemed to remark that they were headed out the door of the chophouse and that Sammy was not with them.

"You're both too drunk to drive anyway," Sammy told them when they returned for him. "Take the train from Penn Station. I'll bring the car home later."

Now came the first time that they looked at Sammy with something approaching the doubt, the mistrust, the pity that he had been dreading seeing in their faces.

"Give me a break," he said. "I'm not going to fucking drive into the East River. Or anything like that."

They didn't move.

"I swear to you, all right?"

Rosa looked at Joe again, and Sammy wondered if it wasn't just that they worried he might do something to hurt himself; perhaps they were worried that, as soon as they left him, he would head up to Times Square and try to cruise a sailor. And then Sammy realized that, after all, he could.

Rosa came back toward him and unfurled a big lurching hug that nearly sent Sammy tumbling off his bar stool. She spoke into his ear, her breath warm and with a burned-cork smell of bourbon.

"We'll be all right," she said. "All of us."

"I know," Sammy said. "Go on, you guys. I'm just going to sit here. I'm just going to sober up."

Sammy nursed his drink for the next hour, chin in his palms, elbows on the bar. The dark brown, sardonic taste of the bourbon, which at first he had found unpalatable, now seemed no different to him from that of the tongue in his mouth, the thoughts in his head, the heart beating imperturbably in his chest.

He wasn't sure what finally started him thinking about Bacon. Perhaps it was the revived memory of that alcoholic night at Pawtaw in 1941. Or maybe it was just the single pink wrinkle that creased the broad back of the barman's neck. Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk—his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world—as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil. Now he had been unmasked, along with Bruce and Dick, and Steve and Bucky, and Oliver Queen (how obvious!) and Speedy, and that security was gone for good. And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy's parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.

"Hey, Weepin' Wanda," said the bartender, in a tone of not quite mock menace. "We don't allow crying in this bar."

"Sorry," Sammy said. He wiped his eyes on the end of his necktie and sniffled.

"Saw you on the TV this afternoon," the bartender said. "Didn't I now?"

"Did you?"

The barman grinned. "You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin."

"Did you?"

"Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up."

"You," said a voice behind Sammy. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find himself looking into the face of George Debevoise Deasey. The ginger mustache had faded and dulled to the color of a turned slice of apple, and the eyes behind the thick lenses were rheumy and branched with pink veins. But Sammy could see that they were animated by the same old glint of mischief and indignation.

Sammy pushed back from his stool and half-fell, half-lowered himself to the floor. He was not quite as sober as he might have been.

"George! What are you—were you there? Did you see it?"

Deasey seemed not to hear Sammy. His gaze was leveled at the bartender.

"Do you know why they have to fuck each other?" Deasey asked the man. He had developed a slight tremor of his head, it seemed to Sammy, which gave him a more querulous air than ever.

"What's that?" the bartender said.

"I said, Do you know why Batman and Robin have to fuck each other?" He took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, nonchalant, building up to the punch.

The bartender shook his head, half-smiling, waiting for something good. "Now, why is that?" he said.

"Because they can't go fuck themselves." Deasey tossed the bill onto the bar. "The way you can. Now why don't you make yourself useful and bring me a rye and water, and another of what he's having?"

"Say," the bartender said, "I don't have to take that kind of talk."

"Then don't," said Deasey, abruptly losing interest in the discussion. He climbed up onto the stool beside Sammy's and patted the seat that Sammy had vacated. The bartender languished for a few seconds in the cold of the sudden conversational void that Deasey had left him to, then moved over and took two clean glasses from the back bar.