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“Hello, Mr. Saks,” Joe said. “Hello, Joe.” Saks was relying, Joe noticed, on a silver-topped walking stick, in a way that suggested the cane was not (or not merely) an affectation. So that was one change. “How are you?”
“Joe!” Sammy ventured a hesitant couple of inches toward Joe. “God damn it, you know damn well the Escapist doesn’t
to get themselves up onto it peered down at the man lying spread-eagled, a twisted letter K, on the projecting roof-ledge of the eighty-fourth floor. The man lifted his head. “I’m all right,” he said. Then he lowered his head once more to the gray
“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “Are you?” “About Tracy, I mean. I know it was a long time ago but I …” “Yeah,” Sammy said. “Everything was a long time ago.” “Everything I’m sorry about, anyway,” Joe said.
“Welcome to the Bat Cave,” Lieber said when Sammy came in. “Actually,” Longman Harkoo said, “it’s apparently known as the Chamber of Secrets.” “Is it?” Sammy said.
“A comic book novel,”
“What a big boy,” he said. “He’s almost twelve,” Rosa said. “Yes, I know.”
“He missed you the most,” she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the Journal-American how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the
window of Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. “He hired private detectives to try to find you.”
“It’s a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not.”
“He doesn’t know,” he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn’t grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life? “Who doesn’t know what?” she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe’s head. “Tommy. He doesn’t know … what I know. About me. And him. That I—” The ashtray—red and gold, stamped with the words EL MOROCCO
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“So all right,” she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. “You know.” “I do now. I always thought so, but I—” “You always thought so? Since when?” “Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell.” “You have known since 1942 that you”—she lowered her voice to an angry whisper—“that you had a son, and you never—”
“Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot,” Sammy said. “We love you.”
“He seemed like an all right kind of guy.” “That’s lucky.” “We’re going to have lunch.” Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick.
“There’s, well, there’s, sort of a whole chapter on me in Seduction of the Innocent.” “There is?” “Part of a chapter. Several pages.” “And you never told me this?”
“Uh-huh. I see.” Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive.
“Do you?” she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, “Do you still love me?” “You know I do,” he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. “You don’t have to ask.”
THIRTY-FIVE, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes,
He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his. He put his hand on her heavy breast. They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klayman from its nail. Joe began to dig around inside the zipper fly of her jeans.
“Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it’s okay, if you want to … that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you’re his father.”
“Sammy,” Joe said. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But—thank you.” “For what?” “I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don’t deserve to have a friend like you.”
as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn’t want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew.” “Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew.”
in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Danner was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator;
Joe didn’t say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy. “Huh,” he said finally. “You killed Germans?” “One,” Joe said. “It was an accident.” “Did you—did it make you feel—” “It made me feel like the worst man in the world.”
The notion of spending the $974,000 that was steadily compounding
“Lieber Meister,” Josef said, reaching toward him with both hands. They held on to each other across the gulf that separated them like the tzigane-dancing steeples of the Queensboro Bridge. “What should I do?” Kornblum puffed out his peeling cheeks and shook his head, rolling his eyes a little as if this was among the more stupid questions he had ever been asked. “For God’s sake,” he said. “Go home.”
Milton Caniff,
The barman grinned. “You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin.” “Did you?” “Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up.”
George Debevoise Deasey.
Deasey held up a hand. “Please,” he said, “I’ve heard enough unsavory details about your private life today, Mr. Clay.” Sammy nodded; he wasn’t going to argue with that. “It really was something, wasn’t it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Sammy said. “I know I ought to feel really bad. Ashamed, or what have you. I know I ought to be feeling what that asshole there”—he jerked a thumb toward the bartender—“was trying to make me feel. Which I guess is what I’ve more or less been feeling for the last ten years of my life.”
“But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key.”
“We watched Dad on TV,” Tommy told Joe. “Mr. Landauer brought his TV into the class.”
glamorous Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio.
“Okay,” said Rosa. “Tommy? Are you okay? Do you understand all this?” “I guess so,” the boy said. “Only.” “Only what?” “Only what about Dad?” His mother sighed, and told him they were going to have to see about that.
He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little.
Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the “youthful wards” that he routinely assigned to his heroes—a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life—represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.
he was meant to stand in for his father, and by extension for the absent, indifferent, vanishing fathers of the comic-book-reading boys of America. Sammy
“You have a suitcase,” Rosa said. Sammy looked down at the valise, as if to confirm her report. “True,” he said, sounding a little surprised even to his own ears. “You’re leaving.” He didn’t answer. “I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Doesn’t it?” he said. “I mean, think
“You know I want you to stay,” she said. “I hope you know that. God damn it, Sammy, I would love nothing more.” “To prove a point, is what you’re saying.”
couch had been stripped, the sheets left folded on the coffee table with the pillow balanced on top, and Sammy and his suitcase were long gone. In lieu of a note or other farewell gesture, he had left only, in the center of the kitchen table, the small two-by-three card that he had been given back in 1948,
When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.
he and his ex-wife plied their yearly course along the circuit of comic book conventions, bickering, bantering, holding each other up when the sidewalks were icy or the stairs steep, Sam Clay found himself in Cleveland, Ohio, as a guest of honor at the 1986 ErieCon.
Rosa Kavalier—born Rosa Luxemburg Saks in New York City in 1919 and known to the world, if at all, as Rose Saxon, a queen
kept hold of the elbow of one of her ex-husband’s trademark loud blazers as they moved from curb to counter, from ballroom to elevator, from bar to dining room.
devoted to each other. Undoubtedly this was the case. They had known each other for over forty-five years, and though no one ...
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Sam Clay was a professionally (if not always convincingly) fierce man whose mighty shoulders and Popeye forearms attested to a lifelong regimen of push-ups, dumbbells, and the punching of speed bags.
Mr. Clay also does occasional work for his godson Ethan Kavalier, who is co-owner, with a group of five other artists, of his own independent company, Nuthouse Comics. “He’s no dummy,” said Mr. Clay.
