The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (75 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY
, Tommy went swimming at the Bloomtown Community Swimming Pool and Recreation Center, which had just reopened following a polio scare. When he came home on his bike, he found a letter waiting for him, in a long business envelope whose printed return address was Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop. He did not often receive mail, and he felt his mother watching him as he opened it.

“They’re offering you a job,” she guessed. She stood by the kitchen counter, pencil poised over a grocery list that she was making out. Sometimes it took his mother as long as an hour and a half to compose a relatively simple shopping list. He had his father’s stoical tendency toward bullet-biting, but his mother was never one to hasten a task that she despised. “Louis Tannen died and left you the shop in his will.”

Tommy shook his head, unable to smile at her jokes. He was so excited that the sheet of foolscap, with its typed mishmash of grandiose and exotic terms, rattled in his hands. He knew that the letter was all part of the plan, but for an instant he forgot what the plan was. He was baffled with delight.

“So what is it?”

Boldly, his stomach twisting, Tommy thrust the sheet of paper toward her. She lifted to the bridge of her nose the reading glasses she wore on a silver chain around her neck. These were a recent development, one that his mother hated. She never actually settled the glasses onto her nose, but merely held them up before her eyes, as though she wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.

“Garden of Blooming Silks? Empire of Pennies? Haunted Fountain Pen?” She squinted a little as she read the last word.

“Tricks,” Tommy said, pulling the paper back from her lest she study it too closely. “It’s a price list.”

“I see that,” she said, eyeing him. “Pen is spelled wrong. Two N’s.”

“Hmm,” Tommy said.

“How many tricks do you need, honey? We just got you that demonic box of yours.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s just for wishing.”

“Well, wish away,” she said, lowering the glasses once more. “But don’t take your coat off. We’re going to the A&P.”

“May I please stay home? I’m old enough.”

“Not today.”

“Please.”

He saw that she was probably going to accede—they had been experimenting lately with leaving him by himself—and that the only thing giving her pause was her detestation of grocery shopping.

“You’re going to make me go into the heart of darkness alone?”

He nodded.

“You’ll be all right?”

He nodded again, afraid that if he said anything more, he would somehow give it all away. She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged one shoulder, picked up her purse, and went out.

He sat, holding the paper and envelope in his hands, until he heard the muttering of the Studebaker’s engine and the scrape of its rear bumper as she backed out of the driveway. Then he got up. He got the scissors from the kitchen drawer, went to the kitchen cupboard, and took out a box of Post Toasties cereal. He saw that his mother, as she always did, had left without the grocery list. It was written, he noticed, on the back of a strip torn from a page of artwork—it looked like it might have been from
Kiss
—that she had given up on. A pretty blond girl hid behind an old beached rowboat, spying on something that was making her cry. It was probably her doctor boyfriend kissing her best friend the nurse, or something like that.

Tommy carried the scissors and the cereal to his room. There was half an inch of mostly crumbs left in the wax-paper bag, and he munched them dutifully. As he had done every morning for the last week, he studied the text printed on the back panel of the box, which
described the scientifically formulated merits of the cereal in sober tones and which he now knew by heart. When he was through, he balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He picked up the scissors and carefully cut the back panel off the box. He laid it flat on his desk. With a pencil and a ruler, he drew a box around every instance of the words “Post Toasties.” Then he took the scissors and cut on the lines he had marked. He took the panel, with its eleven rectangular holes, and fit it over the purported list of magic tricks from Tannen’s.

That was how he learned that he was to catch the 10:04 train at the Bloomtown LIRR station on December 3, wearing an eye patch that would be supplied, under cover of constituting part of a spurious trick called Pieces o’ Eight, in a second letter from Joe. Tommy was to sit in the last car, at the back, transfer at Jamaica, disembark at Penn Station, then walk the two long blocks to, of all places, the Empire State Building. He was to ride the elevator to the seventy-second floor, go to Suite 7203, and rap out his initials on the door in Morse code. If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, “Ophthalmologist.”

Every Thursday for the next seven months, Tommy followed the routine established by that first secret letter from Joe. He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade. At the corner of Darwin Avenue, however, he turned left instead of right, slipped through the Marchettis’ backyard, crossed Rutherford Drive, and then took his sweet time (unless it was raining) ambling across the half-built east side of Bloomtown toward the bland new cinder-block-and-steel structure that had replaced the old Manticock station. He spent the day with Cousin Joe, in his strange digs nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, and left at three o’clock. Then, again following Joe’s original prescription, he stopped outside Reliant Office Supplies on Thirty-third Street and typed out an excuse to hand to the principal, Mr. Savarese, the next morning, on a piece of paper that Joe had already furnished with a perfect simulacrum of Rosa Clay’s signature.

In the first months, Tommy loved everything about the trips into New York. The cloak-and-dagger protocols, the risk of capture, and the soaring
view from the windows of Joe’s home could not have been better designed to appeal to the mind of an eleven-year-old boy who spent large parts of every day pretending to pose as the secret identity of a superpowered humanoid insect. He loved, first of all, the ride into the city. As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air; teachers poking and wheedling with their facts and principles, when all he really needed was to be handed a stack of textbooks and left alone; and, worst of all, other children, who could not seem to play their games without including him if they were cruel ones or, if their games were innocent, pointedly keeping him out. Tommy’s loneliness had found a strangely happy expression in the pitch and rumble of the LIRR trains, the stale breath of the heat blowers, the warm oatmeal smell of cigarettes, the sere featureless prospect from the windows, the hours given over entirely to himself, his book, and his imaginings. He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe’s, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies’ shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy was the Bug, on solitary patrol in New York City, soaring up from the underground like a cicada, hopping on his mighty hind legs along Fifth Avenue in hot pursuit of Dr. Hate or the Finagler, creeping unnoticed as an ant amid the hurrying black-and-gray herds of briefcase-carrying humans, whose crude mammalian existences he had sworn to protect and defend, before at last
dropping in on the secret aerial lair of one of his fellow masked crime-fighters, whom he sometimes dubbed the Eagle but who went more generally, in Tommy’s fancy, by the moniker Secretman.

Secretman lived in a two-room office suite with four windows that looked out toward Bloomtown and Greenland. He had a desk, a chair, a drafting table, a stool, an armchair, a floor lamp, a complicated multiband radio array festooned with yards of rambling antenna, and a special little cabinet whose many shallow drawers were filled with pens, pencils, twisted tubes of paint, erasers. There was no telephone; nor was there any stove, icebox, or proper bed.

“It’s illegal,” Cousin Joe told Tommy, the first time he visited. “You’re not allowed to live in an office building. That’s why you can’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Even then, before he learned the depth and extent of Secretman’s superhuman powers of self-concealment, Tommy did not entirely believe this explanation. He sensed from the first, though he could not have expressed it—at his age, both the name and the experience of grief were not so much foreign to as latent in him, and as yet undetected—that something was the matter with, or had happened to, Joe. But he was too thrilled with his cousin’s style of life, and the opportunity it afforded, to think the problem over too carefully. He watched as Joe went to a door on the other side of the room and opened it. It was a supply closet. There were stacks of paper and bottles of ink and other supplies. There were also a folded cot, an electric hot plate, two boxes of clothes, a canvas garment bag, and a small porcelain sink.

“Isn’t there a janitor?” Tommy asked him on the second trip, having given the question some consideration. “Or a guard?”

“The janitor comes at five minutes before midnight, and I make sure everything is all right before he gets here. The guard and I are old friends by now.”

Joe answered all of Tommy’s questions about the particulars of his life, and showed him all of the work he had done since leaving the comic book business. But he declined to tell Tommy how long he had been holed up in the Empire State Building, and why he stayed there, and for what reason he kept his return a secret. He would not say why he never left his rooms except to purchase those supplies that could not
be delivered, often wearing a false beard and sunglasses, or to pay regular visits to Tannen’s back room, or why, one afternoon in July, he had made an exception and gone all the way out to Long Island. These were the mysteries of Secretman. Such questions had occurred to Tommy, in any case, only in a fragmentary and inarticulate way. After the first two visits, and for a while thereafter, he just took the entire situation for granted. Joe taught him card tricks, coin tricks, bits with handkerchiefs and needles and thread. They ate sandwiches brought in from the coffee shop downstairs. They shook hands in greeting and farewell. And, month after month, Tommy kept Secretman’s secrets, though they were always bubbling up on his lips and trying to escape.

Tommy was caught only twice before the day on which it all came out. The first time he attracted the attention of an LIRR conductor with nystagmus who soon plumbed the shallow surface of Tommy’s cover story. Tommy spent much of November 1953, as a result, confined to his bedroom. But in school—he considered it part of his punishment that they continued to send him to school during the month he was grounded—he consulted with Sharon Simchas, who was nearly blind in one eye. He sent his cousin an explanatory letter in care of Louis Tannen. On the Thursday following the lifting of the punishment, he set off again for Manhattan, equipped this time with the name and address of Sharon’s doctor, one of the doctor’s business cards, and a plausible diagnosis of strabismus. The wobble-eyed ticket puncher, however, never reappeared.

The second time he was caught came a month before the leap of the Escapist. Tommy settled into his seat at the back of the last car and opened his copy of Walter B. Gibson’s
Houdini on Magic
. Cousin Joe had given it to him the week before; it was signed by the author, the creator of the Shadow, with whom Joe still played cards from time to time. Tommy had his shoes off, his eye patch on, and half a pack of Black Jack in his mouth. He heard a clatter of heels and looked up in time to see his mother, in her sealskin coat, stumble into the train car, out of breath, mashing her best black hat down onto her head with one arm. She was at the opposite end of a relatively full car, and there was a tall man positioned directly in her line of sight. She sat down without noticing her son. This stroke of good fortune took a moment to sink in. He glanced
down at the book in his lap. The dark gray wad of gum lay in a small pool of saliva on the left-hand page; it had fallen out of his mouth. He put it back in and lay down across the pair of seats in his row, his face hidden in the hood of his coat and behind the screen of his book. His sense of guilt was exacerbated by the knowledge that Harry Houdini had idolized his own mother and doubtless never would have deceived or hidden from her. At Elmont, the conductor came by to check his ticket, and Tommy scrabbled up onto one elbow. The conductor gave him a skeptical look, and though Tommy had never seen him before, he tapped the patch with a fingertip and tried to echo the nonchalance of Cousin Joe.

“Ophthalmologist,” he said.

The conductor nodded and punched his ticket. Tommy lay back down.

At Jamaica, he waited until the car emptied completely, then dashed out onto the platform. He got to the train for Penn Station just as the doors were closing. There was no time for him to try to guess which car his mother might have boarded. The idea of waiting for a later train did not occur to him until several minutes later, when—soon after she let go of his earlobe—it was suggested to him by his mother.