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.
He ran right into her, almost litera
lly, 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?