The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (44 page)

He was just happy to see his friend happy
, he typed. It was an autobiographical novel, after all.
There was a hole in the man’s life that no one person ever would have been able to fill
.

The phone rang. It was his mother.

“I have the night off,” she said. “Why don’t you bring him and we’ll make Shabbes. He can bring that girlfriend of his, too.”

“She’s kind of picky about food,” Sammy said. “What are you burning?”

“All right, so don’t come.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I don’t want you.”

“I’ll be there. Ma?”

“What?”

“Ma?”

“What?”

“Ma?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“Big joker.” She hung up.

He put
American Disillusionment
back in the drawer and started to work on the script for
Kid Vixen
, the crime-fighting female boxer feature, with art by Marty Gold, that he had put in as a backup for
All Doll
, along with the Glovsky brothers’
Venus McFury
, about a hard-boiled girl detective who was the reincarnation of one of the classical Erinyes, and Frank Pantaleone’s
Greta Gatling
, a cowgirl strip. The first issue of
All Doll Comics
had sold out its entire run of half a million copies; #6 was in production now, and orders were extremely strong. Sammy had half of an idea for the latest
Vixen
story, involving a catfight between the Kid and a champion Nazi girl boxer whom he was thinking of calling Battling Brunhilde, but he could not seem to get his mind into it this morning. The funny thing was that, as hard as he had fought with Sheldon Anapol for them to be able to keep plugging away at the Nazis, fighting the funny-book war was getting tougher all the time; though futility was not an emotion Sammy was accustomed to experiencing, he had begun to be plagued by the same sense of inefficacy, of endless make-believe, that had troubled Joe from the first. Only there was nothing Sammy saw to do about it; he wasn’t about to start picking fights at ball games.

He kept at the script, starting over three times, drinking Bromo-Seltzer through a straw to keep down the pang of dread that had begun to gnaw at his belly. Much as Sammy did love his mother, and craved her approval, five minutes of conversation with her was all it took to induce a matricidal rage in his breast. The large sums of money he gave over to her, though she was gratifyingly astonished by them and always managed, in her curt way, to thank him, proved nothing to her about anything. To get paid vast sums for wasting one’s life, in her view, only added to the cosmic tallying of wastefulness. Most maddening of all to Sammy was the way that, in the face of the sudden influx of money, Ethel steadfastly refused to change any element of her life, except to shop for better cuts of meat, buy a new set of carving knives, and spend a relatively lavish amount on new underwear for Bubbie and herself.
The rest she socked away. She viewed each fat paycheck as the last, certain that eventually, as she put it, “the bubble gets popped.” Each month that the comic book bubble not only continued to float but expanded exponentially just confirmed Ethel’s belief that the world was insane and growing madder, so that when the pin finally went in, the pop would be all the more terrible. Yes, it was always loads of fun dropping in on old Ethel, to share in the revelry and good times, to banter and sing and sup on the delicious fruits of her kitchen. Bubbie would have baked one of her bitter, brittle Bubbie babkas that they all had to make a fuss over even though each tasted as if she had baked it in 1877 and then mislaid it in a drawer until yesterday.

The only bright prospect for the day was that he and Joe had also been invited to come down to the radio studio to meet the cast of
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist
, in run-throughs for the debut next Monday afternoon. Hitherto, Burns, Baggot & DeWinter, the advertising agency, had not involved Sammy or Joe or any of the Empire people in the production, though Sammy had heard that several of the first few episodes were being adapted directly from the comic books. Once, Sammy had met the show’s writers by chance, as they were coming out of Sardi’s. They knew him from the unflattering drawing that had run in the
Saturday Evening Post
, and stopped him to say hello and shed the gentle luster of their scorn upon him. They all seemed to Sammy like college-boy types, with pipes and bow ties. Only one would admit to ever having read a comic book, and probably all of them considered the form beneath contempt. One had written previously for
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons
, another for
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
.

But there was to be a party on Monday after the first broadcast, to which Sammy and Joe were invited; and on this balmy Friday, they went over to Radio City to get a look, if that was the right way to put it, at the vocal embodiments of their characters.

“Shabbes dinner,” Joe said, as they passed the Time-Life Building. Joe claimed to have once seen Ernest Hemingway coming out of it, and Sammy looked for the writer as they went by.

“I saw him, I tell you.”

“Sure you did. Yes, Shabbes dinner. At my mother’s. Bad food. House like an oven. You don’t want to miss that.”

“I have a date with Rosa,” Joe said. “I think we’re supposed to eat with her father at the house.”

“You do that almost every night! Come on, Joe, don’t make me go alone. I’ll go mad, mad, I tell you.”

“Rosa is right,” Joe said.

“As usual, but this time about what?”

“You need a girl.”

It was cool and dark in the lobby of the RCA Building. The soft knocking of shoe heels on stone floors and the somber, reassuring pomposity of the Sert and Brangwyn murals allowed Sammy to experience what he dimly recognized as tranquility for the first time all day. A chubby young fellow was waiting for them at the guard’s desk, nibbling on a manicured finger. He introduced himself as Larry Sneed, assistant to the producer George Chandler, and showed them how to sign in and pin passes to their jackets.

“Mr. Chandler’s really glad you could make it over,” Sneed said over his shoulder.

“It was nice of him to invite us.”

“Well, he’s become quite a fan of your work.”

“He reads it?”

“Oh, he studies it like the Bible.”

They got out of the elevator, went down a stairwell and across a hall into another stairwell, this one gray cinder-block and iron stairs, then into a dingy white corridor, past the closed door of a studio with the
ON AIR
light illuminated, left, and into another studio. It was cool and smoky and dim. At one end of the big yellow room, three casually dressed groups of actors, holding scripts, were loitering around a trio of microphones. In the middle of the room, two men sat at a small table, listening. Pages of script lay everywhere, scattered on the ground and blown into drifts in the corners. There was a gunshot. Sammy was the only one in the room who jumped. He looked wildly around. Three men stood off to the left in the midst of an assortment of kitchen utensils, lumber, and scrap metal. One of them was holding a gun. They were all sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning.

“Ooh, got me!” cried Larry Sneed. He clutched his silk-fronted potbelly
and spun around. “Ha ha ha.” He pretended to laugh. The actor who was delivering his line stopped talking, and everyone turned to look. They seemed to welcome the distraction, Sammy thought, except for the director, who scowled. “Hi, folks, I’m sorry to interrupt you. Mr. Chandler, here’s a couple of bright young fellows like me who want to meet our marvelous cast. Mr. Sam Clay and Mr. Joe Kavalier.”

“Hello, boys,” said one of the two men at the center table, rising from his chair. He was about the same age as Sammy’s father would have been, but tall and refined, with a trim Vandyke and extra-big black glasses that made him look, Sammy thought, like a man of science. He shook their hands. “This is Mr. Cobb, our director.” Cobb nodded. Like Chandler, he was wearing a suit and tie. “And this ragged bunch is our cast. Forgive their appearance, but they’ve been rehearsing all week.” Chandler pointed to the actors around the microphones, anointing each one from a distance with a momentary dab of his finger as he gave the name and role. “That’s Miss Verna Kaye, our Plum Blossom; Pat Moran, our Big Al; and Howard Fine as the evil Kommandant X. Over there may I present Miss Helen Portola, our Poison Rose; Ewell Conrad as Omar; Eddie Fontaine as Pedro; and our announcer, Mr. Bill Parris.”

“But Poison Rose is dead,” said Joe.

“We haven’t killed her on the radio yet,” said Chandler. “And that big, handsome fellow over there is our Escapist, Mr. Tracy Bacon.”

Sammy was too distracted just then to notice Mr. Tracy Bacon.

“Pedro?”
he said.

“The old Portuguese stagehand.” Chandler nodded. “For comic relief. The sponsor felt we ought to lighten things up a little.”

“Nize to mitts your ekwentinz,” said Eddie Fontaine, with a tip of his imaginary Portuguese hat.

“And old Max Mayflower?” Sammy wanted to know. “And the man from the League of the Golden Key? You aren’t having the League?”

“We tried it with the League, didn’t we, Larry?”

“Yes, we did, Mr. Chandler.”

“When you’re debuting a series, it’s better to get right down to business,” said Cobb. “Skip the preliminaries.”

“We take care of all that with the intro,” Chandler explained. “Bill?”

“Armed with superb physical and mental training,” Bill Parris began, “a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats—”

The whole cast chimed in for the tag.

“And coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains!”

“This—is—the Escapist!”

Everyone laughed, except Joe, who clapped his hands. But for some reason, Sammy was irritated.

“And what about Tom Mayflower?” he persisted. “Who’s going to be him?”

A cheerful, scratchy teenage voice rang out from the corner.

“I’m going to be Tom, Mr. Clay! And golly, I’m awful darn excited about it!”

That busted everybody up again. Tracy Bacon was looking right at Sammy, grinning, his cheeks flushed, mostly with pleasure, it seemed, at the astonished look on Sammy’s face. Bacon was such a perfect Escapist that one would have thought he had been cast to play the role in a film, not on the air. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a dimple in his chin and glossy blond hair fitted to the top of his head like a polished brass plate. He wore an oxford shirt unbuttoned over a ribbed undershirt, blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. His muscles were not as large, perhaps, as the Escapist’s, but they were distinctly visible. Clean-favored, thought Sammy, and imperially slim.

“Please, gentlemen, take a seat,” said Chandler. “Larry, find them a place to sit down.”

“That guy looks exactly like the Escapist,” said Joe. “It gives me the creep.”

“I know,” said Sammy. “And he sounds just like Tom Mayflower.”

They sat in the corner and watched the rehearsal. The script had been adapted—very freely—from Sammy’s third Escapist story, which had introduced the character of Miss Plum Blossom’s evil sister Poison Rose, a straight steal from Caniff’s Dragon Lady whom Sammy, embarrassed by the blatancy of his theft, had killed off in
Radio
#4. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, Rose had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi
agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. But the radio boys had revived her, and Sammy had to admit she certainly appeared to be well. Helen Portola was the only cast member not dressed casually, and in her bright green poplin dress she looked cool and refined and appetizing. When she growled her diabolical lines at the Escapist, whom she had rendered powerless with the stolen, legendary Eye of the Moon Opal, she looked at Tracy Bacon with accurate love in her eyes and made it sound like flirtation. Walter Winchell had already linked their names in his column.

On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed. It was all pretty much the same stuff—except for Pedro, of course—and yet somehow it was all totally different. It all seemed to have a lighter, more playful tone than in the comic books, no doubt in part because of the audible brilliance of Tracy Bacon’s smile. The dialogue sounded a lot like the dialogue on
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons
. This was logical, but somehow it, too, depressed Sammy. He had written dialogue as bad—although, at Deasey’s suggestion, he had been studying the work of snappy dialogue writers like Irwin Shaw and Ben Hecht—but spoken aloud, it sounded worse. All the characters seemed to be slow on the uptake, vaguely retarded. Sammy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Joe got lost in the proceedings for a while, but then abruptly seemed to snap out of it. He leaned over.

“Isn’t this great?” he said. He was whispering now, which meant that he was up to something. He looked at his watch. “Shit, five o’clock. I have to go, gate.”

“You have to go, ‘gate’?”

“Yes, ‘gate.’ It’s like ‘man.’ ‘What’s happening, gate?’ ‘Don’t be late, gate.’ You never say ‘gate’?”

“No, that’s something I never say,” Sammy said. “Only Negroes say that, Joe. Ethel’s expecting us around six.”

“Yes, okay. Six.”

“That’s in an hour.”

“Okay.”

“You’re coming, aren’t you?” said Sammy.

Mr. Cobb turned around in his chair and scowled at them again. They covered their mouths. Joe nodded his head toward the door. Sammy got up and followed him out into the hall. Joe closed the heavy studio door and leaned his shoulder against it.

“Joe, you said you’d come.”

“I was very careful not to say that.”

“Well, I don’t have the transcript handy, but that was how it sounded.”

“Sammy, please. Don’t make me. I don’t
want
to go. I want to go out with my girl. I want to have fun.” He blushed. Having fun was still a difficult thing for Joe to admit he was able to do. “It isn’t my fault that you don’t have anyone—”