The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (69 page)

“Or if I have to get a shot,” Tommy said helpfully. “At the doctor.”

“Or.” Sammy had been hanging from the doorjamb, half in, half out of the room, but now he went over to stand behind Tommy. He was aware of an impulse to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, to let it lie there with the admonitory weight of a father’s, but in the end, he just folded his arms and looked at the reflection of Tommy’s serious face in the mirror. It pained Sammy to acknowledge it, but he was no longer comfortable around the boy whom, for the past twelve years, he had been obliged and delighted to call his son. Tommy had always been a tractable, moonfaced, watchful little boy, but lately, as his soft chestnut hair turned to black wire loops and his nose struck boldly out on its own, there began to gather around the features of his face some trouble that promised to develop into outright handsomeness. He was already taller than his mother, and nearly as tall as Sam. He took up greater mass and volume in the house, moved in unaccustomed ways, and gave off unfamiliar odors. Sammy found himself hanging back, giving ground, keeping out of Tommy’s way. “You don’t have something
 … planned
for today?”

“No, Pop.”

He was jocular. “No trips to the ‘eye doctor’?”

“Ha,” the boy said, wrinkling his freckled nose in a base simulation of amusement. “Okay, Pop.”

“Okay, what?”

“Well, I’d better get dressed. I’m going to be late for school.”

“Because if you were.”

“I’m not.”

“If you were, I would have to chain you to the bed. You realize that.”

“I was only
playing
with an
eye patch
. Jeez.”

“All right.”

“I wasn’t going to do anything bad.” His voice put quotation marks around the last word.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Sammy said. He didn’t believe Tommy, but he tried to conceal his doubts. He didn’t like to antagonize the boy. Sammy worked five long days a week in the city, and brought work home on the weekends. He could not bear to waste, in arguing, the brief hours he spent with Tommy. He wished that Rosa were awake, so that he could ask her what to do about the eye patch. He grabbed hold of Tommy’s hair and, in an unconscious tribute to a favorite parental mannerism of his mother, vigorously shook Tommy’s head from side to side. “A roomful of toys, you play with a ten-cent eye patch from Spiegelman’s.”

Sammy padded down the hall, scratching at his bottom, the bandylegged captain of his own strange frigate, to make Tommy his lunch. It was a trim enough little tub, their house in Bloomtown. Its purchase had followed a string of ill-advised investments in the forties, among them the Clay Associates advertising firm, the Sam Clay School of Magazine Writing, and an apartment in Miami Beach for Sam’s mother, in which she had died of a brain aneurysm after eleven days of retired discontentment, and which was then sold—six months after purchase—at a considerable loss. The last irreducible nut that remained from the palmy days at Empire Comics had been just enough for a down payment here in Bloomtown. And for a long time, Sammy had loved the house, the way a man was supposed to love his boat. It was the one tangible reminder of his brief success, and by far the best thing that had ever come of his money.

Bloomtown had been announced in 1948, with ads in
Life
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, and all the big New York papers. A fully functioning three-bedroom Cape Cod house, complete down to the ringing bottles of milk in the refrigerator, had been erected on the showroom floor of a former Cadillac dealership near Columbus Circle. The struggling young families of the Northeast—the white ones—were invited to visit the Bloomtown Idea Pavilion, tour the Bloomtown Home, and learn how an entire city of sixty thousand people was to be planted amid the potato fields west of Islip; a city of modest, affordable houses, each with its own yard and garage. An entire generation of young fathers and mothers raised in the narrow stairways and crowded rooms of the rust-and-brick
boroughs of New York, Sammy Clay among them, showed up to flick the model light switches, bounce on the model mattresses, and recline for just a moment in the pressed metal chaise longue on the cellophane lawn, tilting their chins upward to catch the imaginary rays of the suburban Long Island sun. They sighed, and felt that one of the deepest longings in their hearts might one day soon be answered. Their families were chaotic things, loud and distempered, fueled by anger and the exigencies of the wise-guy attitude, and since the same was true of New York City itself, it was hard not to believe that a patch of green grass and a rational floor plan might go a long way to soothing the jangling bundles of raw nerves they felt their families had become. Many, Sammy Clay once again among them, reached for their checkbooks and reserved one of the five hundred lots to be developed in the initial phase of construction.

For months afterward, Sammy carried around in his wallet a little card that had come with the packet of documents of sale and read simply:

(All the streets in their neighborhood were to be named after eminent scientists and inventors.)

That feeling of pride had long since dissipated. Sammy no longer paid very much attention at all to his own Cape Cod, a Number Two or Penobscott model, with bay window and miniature-golf-sized widow’s walk. He adopted the same policy with regard to it that he followed with his wife, his employment, and his love life. It was all habit. The rhythms of the commuter train, the school year, publishing schedules, summer vacations, and of his wife’s steady calendar of moods had inured him to the charms and torments of his life. Only his relationship with Tommy, in spite of the recent light frost of irony and distance, remained unpredictable, alive. It was thick with regret and pleasure. When they did get an hour together, planning a universe on loose-leaf paper, or playing Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball, it was invariably the happiest hour of Sammy’s week.

When he walked into the kitchen, he was surprised to find Rosa sitting at the table with a cup of boiled water. On the surface of the water floated a canoe of sliced lemon.

“What’s going on?” Sammy said, running water into the enameled coffeepot. “Everybody’s up.”

“Oh, I’ve been up all night,” Rosa said brightly.

“Not a wink?”

“Not that I recall. My brain was going crazy.”

“Get anything?”

Rosa had a lead story due for
Kiss Comics
in two days. She was the second-best illustrator of women in the business (he had to give the nod to Bob Powell) but a terrible procrastinator. He had long since given up trying to lecture her on her work habits. He was her boss in name only—they had settled that question years before, when Rosa first came to work for him, in a yearlong series of skirmishes. Now they were, more or less, a package. Whoever hired Sammy to edit his line of comics knew that he would be obtaining the valuable services of Rose Saxon (her professional name) as well.

“I have some ideas,” she said in a guarded tone. All of Rosa’s ideas sounded bad at first; she adapted them from a messy compound of her dreams, sensational newspaper articles, and things she picked up in women’s magazines, and she was terrible at explaining them. It was always fascinating to see how they emerged under the teasing and topiary shapings of her pencil and brush.

“Something about the A-bomb?”

“How did you know?”

“I happened to be in the bedroom with you while you were talking out loud last night,” he said. “Foolishly trying to sleep.”

“Sorry.”

Sammy broke a half-dozen eggs into a bowl, splashed them with milk, shook in pepper and salt. He rinsed one of the eggshells and tossed it into the coffeepot on the stove. Then he poured the eggs into a pan of foaming butter. Scrambled eggs was his only dish, but he was very good at it. You had to leave them alone; that turned out to be the secret. Most people stood there stirring them, but the way to do it was to let them sit for a minute or two over a low flame and bother them no
more than half a dozen times. Sometimes, for variety, he threw in some chopped fried salami; that was how Tommy liked them.

“He was wearing the eye patch again,” Sammy said, trying not to make it sound too important. “I saw him trying it on.”

“Oh, God.”

“He swore to me that he wasn’t planning anything.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I guess. I guess I chose to. Where’s the salami?”

“I’ll put it on my list. I’m going to the store today.”

“You have to finish that story.”

“And so I shall.” She took a loud sip of her lemon water. “He’s definitely up to something.”

“You think.” Sammy took down the peanut butter and got the grape jelly from the Frigidaire.

“I don’t know, I just think he’s been a little jumpy.”

“He’s always jumpy.”

“I’d better walk him to school, as long as I’m up anyway.” It was much easier for Rosa to govern her son than it was for Sammy. She didn’t seem to give the question nearly as much thought. She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves. But when, as frequently occurred, Tommy squandered that trust, she did not hesitate to clamp down. And Tommy never seemed to resent her heavy discipline in the way that he chafed under Sammy’s lightest reproof. “You know, make sure he gets there.”

“You can’t walk me to school,” Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. “Mom, you can’t possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die.”

“He would die,” Sammy told Rosa.

“Which would be very embarrassing for
me
,” Rosa said. “Standing there next to a dead body in front of William Floyd Junior High.”

“How about
I
walk him instead? It’s only ten minutes out of my way.” Sammy and Tommy generally said goodbye to each other at the front gate before setting off in opposite directions for the station and the junior high school, respectively. From second through sixth grade, they
had parted with a handshake, but that custom, a minor beloved landmark of Sammy’s day for five years, had apparently been abandoned for good. Sammy was not sure why, or who had made the decision to abandon it. “That way you can stay here and, you know,
draw my story
.”

“That might be a good idea.”

Sammy gentled the steaming pudding of butter and eggs onto Tommy’s plate. “Sorry,” he said, “we’re out of salami.”

“It figures,” Tommy said.

“I’ll put it on my list,” said Rosa.

They fell silent for a moment, Rosa in her chair behind her mug, and Sammy standing by the counter with a slice of bread in his hand, watching Tommy shovel it in. He was a trencherman, was Tom. The little stick of a boy had vanished under a mantle of muscle and fat; he was looking a little bit portly, in fact. After thirty-seven seconds, the eggs were gone. Tommy looked up from his plate.

“Why’s everybody looking at me?” he said. “I didn’t
do
anything.”

Rosa and Sammy burst out laughing. Then Rosa stopped laughing, and focused on her son, always a little bit cross-eyed when she was making a point.

“Tom,” she said. “You weren’t planning to go into the city again?”

Tommy shook his head.

“Nevertheless,” Sammy said, “I’ll walk you.”

“
Drive
me,” Tommy said. “If you don’t believe me.”

“Why not?” Sammy said. If he took the car to the station, Rosa would not be able to drive to the grocery store, or to the beach, or to the library “for inspiration.” She would be more likely to stay home and draw. “I might just take it all the way into the city. They opened a new lot around the corner from the office.”

Rosa looked up, alarmed. “All the way into the city?” Even leaving their car, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, at the train station was not protection enough. Rosa had been known to walk to the station to fetch it, just so that she would be able to drive around Long Island doing things that were not drawing romance comics.

“Just let me get dressed.” Sammy handed the slice of bread to Rosa. “Here,” he said, “you make his lunch.”

B
REAKFAST PALAVER
at the Excelsior Cafeteria on Second Avenue, a favorite morning haunt of funny-book men, circa April 1954:

“It’s a hoax.”

“I just said that.”

“Somebody’s pulling Anapol’s leg.”

“Maybe it’s
Anapol
.”

“I wouldn’t blame him if he did want to jump off the Empire State Building. I hear he’s in all kinds of trouble over there.”

“I’m in all kinds of trouble. Everybody is in all kinds of trouble. I challenge you to name me one house that isn’t having problems. And it’s only going to get worse.”

“That’s what you always say. Listen to you. Listen to this guy, he kills me. He’s like a, a filling station of gloom. I spend ten minutes listening to him, I go away with a full tank of gloom, it lasts me all day.”

“I’ll tell you who’s a fountain of gloom, Dr. Fredric Wertham. Have you read this book of his? What’s it called?
How to Seduce an Innocent
?”