The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (76 page)

He ran right into her, almost literally, smelling her perfume an instant before a hard corner of her imitation-tortoiseshell handbag poked him in the eye.

“Oh!”

“Ouch!”

He stumbled backward. She grabbed him by the hood of his coat and dragged him toward her, then, tightening her grip, actually raised him half an inch off the ground, like a magician brandishing by the ears the rabbit he was about to dematerialize. His legs kicked at the pedals of an invisible bicycle. Her cheeks were rouged, her eyelids lined with black paint like a Caniff girl’s.

“What are you doing? Why aren’t you in school?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just … I was just …”

He glanced around the car. Naturally, all of the other passengers were staring at them. His mother lifted him a little higher and brought her face close to his. The perfume blowing off her was called Ambush.
It sat on a mirrored tray on her dresser, under a mantle of dust. He could not remember the last time he had smelled it on her.

“I can’t—” she began, but then she couldn’t finish her sentence because she had started to laugh. “Take off that damned eye patch,” she said. She lowered him to the floor of the train and lifted the patch. He blinked. She flicked the patch back over his eye. Keeping her grip on the hood of his Mighty Mac, she dragged him down to the end of the car and pushed him into a seat. He was sure she was going to yell at him now, but once more she surprised him by sitting down beside him and putting her arms around him. She rocked back and forth, holding him tight.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice throaty and rough, the way it sounded the morning after a bridge night when she had gone through a pack of cigarettes. “Thank you.”

She nuzzled his head and he felt that her cheeks were wet. He sat back.

“What’s the matter, Mom?”

She snapped open her purse and took out a handkerchief.

“Everything,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? How come you keep doing this? You were going to Tannen’s again?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie, Tommy,” she said. “Don’t make this worse than it already is.”

“Okay.”

“You can’t do this. You can’t just skip school whenever you want to and go to Tannen’s Magic Shop. You’re eleven years old. You aren’t a hoodlum.”

“I know.”

The train shuddered and the brakes screeched. They were pulling into Pennsylvania Station now. Tommy stood up and waited for her to get up and drag him off the train, across the platform, back out to Jamaica, and then home. But she didn’t move. She just sat there, checking her eyes in the mirror of her compact, shaking her head ruefully at the mess her tears had made.

“Mom?” he said.

She looked up.

“I don’t see any reason to waste these clothes and this hat just because you would rather saw a lady in half than learn fractions,” she said.

“You mean I’m not punished?”

“I thought we could spend the day in the city. The two of us. Eat at Schrafft’s. Maybe see a show.”

“So you aren’t going to punish me?”

She shook her head, once, dismissively, as if the question bored her. Then she took hold of his hand. “I don’t see any reason to tell your father about any of this, do you, Tommy?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Your father has enough to worry about without this.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We’ll just keep this whole little incident to ourselves.”

He nodded, though there was an eager look in her eyes that made him uneasy. He felt a sudden mad desire to be grounded again. He sat down.

“But if you ever do this again,” she added, “I’ll take all of your cards and wands and all that other nonsense and toss them into the incinerator.”

He sat back and relaxed a little. As she promised, they lunched at Schrafft’s, she on stuffed peppers, he on a Monte Cristo sandwich. They spent an hour in Macy’s and then took in
It Should Happen to You
at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second. They caught the 4:12 for home. Tommy was asleep by the time his father came in, and said nothing the next morning when he came in to wake him for school. The encounter on the train was scattered in the cracks in their family. Once, long afterward, he summoned up the courage to ask his mother what she had been doing on that inbound train, dressed in her fanciest clothes, but she had merely put a finger to her lips and gone on struggling over another of the lists she always left behind.

On the day that everything had changed, Tommy and Cousin Joe were sitting in the outer room of the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, where there was a false receptionist’s desk. Tommy was in the armchair, a big wingback covered in a rough fabric like burlap, pool-table green, legs dangling, drinking a can of cream soda. Joe was lying
on the floor with his arms folded under his head. Neither of them had said anything for what felt to Tommy like several minutes. They often passed long periods of their visits without saying very much. Tommy would read his book, and Cousin Joe would work on the comic book that he had been drawing, he said, ever since taking up residence in the Empire State Building.

“How’s your father?” Joe said abruptly.

“Fine,” said Tommy.

“That’s what you always say.”

“I know.”

“He is worried about this book by Dr. Wertham, I imagine?
The Seduction of the Innocents
?”

“Real worried. Some senators are coming from Washington.”

Joe nodded. “Is he very busy?”

“He’s always busy.”

“How many titles is he putting out?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Tommy said, with an unintended sharpness.

There was no reply for a moment. Joe took a long drag on his cigarette. “Maybe I will,” he said. “Some of these days.”

“I think you should. Everybody really misses you.”

“Your father said that he misses me?”

“Well, no, but he does,” Tommy said. Lately, he had begun to worry about Joe. In the months since his foray into the wilds of Long Island, he had by his own admission been leaving the building less and less frequently, as if Tommy’s visits had become a substitute for regular experience of the external world. “Maybe you could come home with me, on the train. It’s nice. There’s an extra bed in my room.”

“A ‘trundle’ bed.”

“Yeah.”

“Could I use your Brooklyn Dodgers bath towel?”

“Yeah, sure! I mean, if you wanted.”

Joe nodded. “Maybe I will, some of these days,” he said again.

“Why do you keep staying here?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Well, don’t you—doesn’t it bother you to be in the same building with them? With Empire Comics? If they treated you so bad and all?”

“It doesn’t bother me at all. I like being near to them. To the Escapist. And you never know. Some of these days I could maybe bother
them
.”

He sat up as he said this, rolling onto his knees brusquely.

“What do you mean?”

Joe waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. “Never mind.”

“Tell me.”

“Forget it.”

“I hate it when people do that,” said Tommy.

“Yeah,” said Joe. “So do I.” He dropped the cigarette on the bare cement floor and ground it under the toe of his rubber sandal. “To tell the truth, I’ve never quite figured out just what I’m going to do. I’d like to embarrass them somehow. Make that Shelly Anapol look bad. Maybe I will dress up as the Escapist and … jump off this building! I have only to figure out some way to make it look like I jumped and killed myself.” He smiled thinly. “But, of course, without it actually killing myself.”

“Could you do that? What if it didn’t work and you were, like, smashed flat as a pancake on Thirty-fourth Street?”

“That would certainly embarrass them,” Joe said. He patted his chest. “Where did I leave—ah.”

That was the moment when everything had changed. Joe stepped toward his drawing table to get his pack of Old Golds and tripped over Tommy’s satchel. He pitched forward, reaching for the air in front of him, but before he could catch hold of anything, his forehead, with a loud, disturbingly wooden knock, hit the corner of his drafting table. He uttered one broken syllable and then hit the ground, hard. Tommy sat, waiting for him to curse or roll over or burst into tears. Joe didn’t move. He lay facedown with his long nose bent against the floor, hands splayed beside him, motionless and silent. Tommy scrambled out of the chair and went to his side. He grabbed one of his hands. It was still warm. He took hold of Joe’s shoulders and pulled him, rocking him twice and then rolling him over like a log. There was a small cut on his forehead, beside the pale crescent-moon scar of an old wound. The cut
looked deep, although there was only a small amount of blood. Joe’s chest rose and fell, shallow but steady, and his breath came rattling through his nose. He was out cold.

“Cousin Joe,” Tommy said, giving him a shake. “Hey. Wake up. Please.”

He went into the other room and opened the tap. He wet a ragged washcloth with cool water and carried it back to Joe. Gently, he dabbed at the uninjured portion of Joe’s forehead. Nothing happened. He lay the towel on Joe’s face and rubbed it vigorously around. Still, Joe lay breathing. A constellation of concepts that were vague to Tommy, comas and trances and epileptic fits, now began to trouble him. He had no idea what to do for his cousin, how to revive or help him, and now the cut was beginning to bleed more freely. What should Tommy do? His impulse was to go for help, but he had sworn to Joe that he would never reveal his presence to anyone. Still, Joe was a tenant of the building, illegal or not. His name must appear on some lease or document. The management of the building knew he was here. Would they be able or willing to help?

Then Tommy remembered a field trip he had taken here, back in the second grade. There was a large infirmary—a miniature hospital, the tour guide had called it—on one of the lower floors. There had been a pretty young nurse in white hat and shoes. She would know what to do. Tommy stood up and started for the door. Then he turned to look back at Joe lying on the floor. What would they do, though, once they had revived him and bandaged his cut? Would they put him in jail for sleeping in his office night after night? Would they think he was some kind of nut?
Was
he some kind of nut? Would they lock him up in a “nutbin”?

Tommy’s hand was on the knob, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn it. He was paralyzed; he had no idea of what to do. And now, for the first time, he appreciated Joe’s dilemma. It was not that he did not wish further contact with the world in general, and the Clays in particular. Maybe that was how it had started out for him, in those strange days after the war, when he came back from some kind of secret mission—this was what Tommy’s mother had said—and found out that his mother had been put to death in the camps. Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come
home. The problem was that he didn’t know how to do it. Tommy would never know how much effort it cost Joe to make that trip out to Long Island, how ardent his desire was to see the boy, speak to him, hear his thin reedy voice. But Tommy could see that Secretman was trapped in his Chamber of Secrets, and that the Bug was going to have to rescue him.

At that moment, Joe groaned and his eyes fluttered open. He touched a finger to his forehead and looked at the blood that came away. He sat up on one elbow, rolling toward Tommy by the door. The look on Tommy’s face must have been easy to read.

“I’m fine,” Joe said, his voice thick. “Get back in here.”

Tommy let go of the doorknob.

“You see,” Joe said, rising slowly to his feet, “goes to show you shouldn’t smoke. It’s bad for the health.”

“Okay,” Tommy said, marveling at the strange resolve that he had formed.

When he left Joe that afternoon, he went to the Smith-Corona typewriter that was chained to a podium in front of Reliant Office Supplies. He rolled out the sheet of typing paper that was there so that people could try out the machine. It featured its regular weekly fable, one sentence long, of the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, and exhorted him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. He rolled in the usual piece of stationery, at the bottom of which Joe had forged his mother’s name. “Dear Mr. Savarese,” he typed, using the tips of his index fingers. Then he stopped. He rolled out the paper and set it to one side. He looked up at the polished black stone of the storefront. His reflection looked back at him. He went over to open the chrome-handled door and was immediately intercepted by a thin, white-haired man whose trousers were belted at the diaphragm. This man often watched Tommy from the doorway of his shop as the boy typed out his excuses, and every week, Tommy thought the man was going to tell him to get lost. At the threshold of the store, which he had never crossed before, he hesitated. In the man’s stiffened shoulders and the backward cant of his head, Tommy recognized his own manner when faced with a big strange dog or other sharp-toothed animal.

“Whaddaya want, sonny?” the man said.

“How much is a sheet of paper?”

“I don’t sell paper by the sheet.”

“Oh.”

“Run along now.”

“Well, how much for a box, then?”

“A box of what?”

“Paper.”

“What kind of paper? What for?”

“A letter.”

“Business? Personal? This is for you? You’re going to write a letter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what kind of a letter is it?”

Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn’t want to get the wrong kind of paper.

“A death threat,” he said at last.

For some reason, this cracked the man up. He went around behind the sales counter and bent down to open a drawer.

“Here,” he said, handing Tommy a sheet of heavy tan paper as smooth and cool to the touch as marzipan. “My best twenty-five-pound cotton rag.” He was still laughing. “Make sure you kill them good, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Tommy. He went back out to the typewriter, rolled in the sheet of fancy paper, and in half an hour typed the message that would eventually draw a crowd to the sidewalk around the Empire State Building. This was not necessarily the outcome he anticipated. He didn’t know exactly what he was hoping for as he pecked out his missive to the editor of the New York
Herald-Tribune
. He was just trying to help Cousin Joe find his way home. He wasn’t sure what it would all lead to, or if his letter, though it sounded awfully official and realistic to his own ears, would even be believed. When he finished, he carefully withdrew it from the typewriter and went back into the shop.