“Prague,” said Rosa. “What do you know.”
“He’s home,” Tommy said, and Rosa didn’t understand what he meant until she heard the sound of the Studebaker in the drive.
* The Escapist, starring a young Peter Graves in the title role, 1951–53.
JOE HAD LEFT THE HOUSE very early that morning.
For hours after saying good night to Rosa and Sammy, and long after they went to bed, Joe had lain awake on the couch in the living room, tormented by his thoughts and by the occasional brief giggle from the tank of the toilet down the hall. He had arranged for monthly withdrawals to pay the rent on the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., and had not permitted himself to consider the total sum of the money he had on deposit in a very long time. The variety of the grandiose and homely schemes it had once been intended to fund was extravagant—he had at one time lavishly overspent in his imagination—and after the war, the money always felt to him like a debt owed, and unrepayable. He had bankrupted himself on plans: a house for his family in Riverdale or Westchester, a flat for his old teacher Bernard Kornblum in a nice building on the Upper West Side. He saw to it, in his fantasies, that his mother obtained the services of a cook, a fur coat, the leisure to write and to see patients as little as she chose. Her study in the big Tudor house had a bay window and heavy timbering, which she painted white because she dreaded gloomy rooms. It was bright and uncluttered, with Navajo rugs and cacti in pots. For his grandfather, there were an entire wardrobe of suits, a dog, a Panamuse record player like Sammy’s. His grandfather sat in the conservatory with three elderly friends and sang Weber songs to the accompaniment of their flutes. For Thomas, there were riding lessons, fencing lessons, trips to the Grand Canyon, a bicycle, a set of encylopedias, and—that most-coveted item for sale in the pages of comic books—an air rifle, so that Thomas could shoot at crows or woodchucks or (more likely given his tender feelings) tin cans, when they went out, at weekends, to the country house up in Putnam County that Joe was going to buy.
These designs of his embarrassed him almost as much as they saddened him. But the truth was that, as he lay there smoking, in his underpants, Joe was tormented, even more than by the ruins of his fatuous dreams, by the knowledge that even now, down in the mysterious manufactory of foolishness that was synonymous in some way with his heart, they were tooling up to bring out an entire new line of moonshine. He could not stop coming up with ideas—costume designs and backdrops, character names, narrative lines—for a series of comic books based on Jewish aggadah and folklore; it was as if they had been there all along, wanting only a nudge from Sammy to come tumbling out in a thrilling disorder. The notion of spending the $974,000 that was steadily compounding at the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union to float the recommissioned Kavalier & Clay agitated him so much that his stomach hurt. No, agitation was not the honest word for it. What he felt was excited.
Sammy had been right about long-underwear heroes in 1939; Joe had a feeling that he was right in 1954. William Gaines and his E.C. Comics had taken all but one of the standard comic book genres—romance, Western, war stories, crime, the supernatural, et cetera—and invested them with darker emotions, less childish plots, stylish pencils, and moody inks. The only genre they had ignored or avoided (except to ridicule it in the pages of Mad) was that of the costumed superhero. What if—he was not sure if this was what Sammy had in mind, but after all, it would be his money—the same kind of transformation were attempted on the superhero? If they tried to do stories about costumed heroes who were more complicated, less childish, as fallible as angels.
At last he ran out of cigarettes and gave up on sleep for the night. He pulled his clothes back on, took a banana from the bowl on the kitchen counter, and stepped outside.
It was not yet five o’clock in the morning, and the Bloomtown streets were deserted, the houses dark, furtive, all but invisible. A steady salt breeze blew in from the sea eight miles away. Later, it would bring fitful rain and the gloom that Mr. Al Button would attempt to relieve by turning on the wan headlights of his van, but for now there were no clouds, and the sky that, in this single-story town of stunted saplings and barren lawns, could seem, by day, as unbearably tall and immense as the sky over some blasted Nebraska prairie, was bestowing itself upon Bloomtown like a blessing, filling in the emptiness with dark blue velveteen and stars. A dog barked two blocks away, and the sound raised gooseflesh on Joe’s arm. He had been on and around the Atlantic Ocean plenty of times since the sinking of the Ark of Miriam; the train of association linking Thomas, in Joe’s mind, to the body of water that had swallowed him had long since worn away. But from time to time, especially if, as now, his brother was already in his thoughts, the smell of the sea could unfurl the memory of Thomas like a flag. His snoring, the half-animal snuffle of his breath coming from the other bed. His aversion to spiders, lobsters, and anything that crept like a disembodied hand. A much-thumbed mental picture of him at the age of seven or eight, in a plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, sitting beside the Kavaliers’ big Philips, knees to his chest, eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth while, with all his might, he listened to some Italian opera or other.
That bathrobe, its lapels whipstitched in heavy black thread; that radio, its lines Gothic and its dial, like an atlas of the ether, imprinted with the names of world capitals; those leather moccasins with their beaded tepees on the vamps—these were all things that he was never going to see again. The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian stratum, was the expectation that someday—but when?—he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there—somewhere—waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militär-und Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography—that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario—which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase. He realized now that this kind of hopeless but ineradicable conviction lay at the heart of his inability to let go of the money that he had banked all those years ago in the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Somewhere in his heart, or wherever it was that such errors are cherished and fed, he believed that someone—his mother, his grandfather, Bernard Kornblum—might still, in spite of everything, turn up. Such things happened all the time; those reported shot in Lodz Ghetto or carried off by typhus at the Zehlendorf DP camp turned up owning grocery stores in São Paulo or knocking on the front door of a brother-in-law in Detroit looking for a handout, older, frailer—altered beyond recognition or disarmingly unchanged—but alive.
He went back into the house, tied his necktie, put on a jacket, and took the car keys from their hook in the kitchen. He was not sure where he was going to go, not at first, but the smell of the sea lingered in his nose, and he had a vague notion of taking the car and driving down to Fire Island for an hour, returning before anybody even knew that he was gone.
The idea of driving excited him, too. From the moment he saw it, Sammy and Rosa’s car had aroused his interest. The navy had taught Joe to drive, and he had taken to it with his usual aplomb. His happiest moments during the war had been three brief trips he had made behind the wheel of a jeep at Guantánamo Bay. That was a dozen years ago; he hoped he had not forgotten how.
He found his way out onto Route 24 without any problem, but somehow or other he missed the turn to East Islip, and before he quite recognized it, he was on his way into the city. The car smelled of Rosa’s lipstick and Sammy’s hair cream and a salt-and-wool residue of winter. There was almost no one on the road for a long time, and whe
n he encountered other travelers, he felt a mild sense of pleasant kinship with them as they followed the light of their headlights into the western darkness. On the radio, Rosemary Clooney was singing “Hey There,” and then when he gave the dial a spin she was there again, singing “This Ole House.” He rolled down the window and sometimes there was a sound of grasses and night bugs and sometimes the lowing of a train. Joe loosened his grip on the wheel and lost himself in the string sections of the hit songs and the rumble of the Champion’s straight-8. After a while he realized that a fair amount of time had gone by without his having thought of anything at all, least of all about what exactly he was going to do when he reached New York.
Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge—not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there—he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.
At Union Square West, he pulled up in front of the Workingman’s Credit Building, home of the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Of course there was nowhere to park. Traffic piled up at the Studebaker’s rear as Joe trolled for a space, and each time he slowed, the angry fanfare of horns started up again. A bus came roaring out from behind him, and the faces of its passengers glared down at him from the windows, or mocked him in his ineptitude with their blank indifference. On his third time around the block, Joe slowed once more in front of the building. The curb here was painted bright red. Joe sat, trying to decide what to do. Inside the grimy magnificent pile of the Workingman’s Credit Building, in the gloomy transom-lit offices of the Crafts Union bank, the account lay slumbering under years of interest and dust. All he had to do was go in there and say that he wanted to make a withdrawal.
There was a rap on the window on his side of the car. Joe jumped, stepping on the gas as he did so. The car lurched forward a few inches before he scrabbled his foot onto the brake and brought it to a halt with a rude little burp of the tires.
“Whoa!” cried the patrolman, who had come to inquire as to just what Joe meant by holding up the traffic on Fifth Avenue like this, at the busiest hour of the morning. He jumped away from the car, hopping on one leg, clutching at his shining left shoe with both hands.
Joe rolled down the window.
“You just ran over my foot!” the policeman said.
“I’m so sorry,” Joe said.
The policeman returned his shoe to the pavement, cautiously, then settled his considerable weight onto it a little at a time. “I think it’s all right. You ran over the empty bit at the toe. Lucky for you.”
“I borrowed this car from my cousin,” Joe said. “I maybe don’t know it as well as I should.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t sit here, bub. You’ve been here ten minutes. You have to move on.”
“That’s impossible,” Joe said. It could not have been more than one or two at the most. “Ten minutes.”
The patrolman tapped his wrist. “I had my watch on you the minute you pulled up.”
“I’m sorry, Officer,” Joe said. “I just can’t to figure out what I’m supposed to do now.” He gestured with a thumb toward the Workingman’s Credit Building. “My money’s in there,” he said.
“I don’t care if your left buttock is in there,” the policeman said. “You’ll have to get lost, mister.”
Joe started to argue, but as he did he was aware that, from the moment the policeman rapped on the window, he had been feeling immensely relieved. It had been decided for him. He could not park here; he would not be able to get the money today. Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. He put the car in gear.
“Okay,” he said. “I will.”
In the course of trying to find his way back out to Long Island, he managed to get very effectively lost in Queens. He was nearly to the old World’s Fair grounds before he realized his mistake and turned around. After a while, he found himself driving alongside a vast green stretch of cemeteries, which he recognized as Cypress Hills. Tombstones and monuments dotted the rolling hills like sheep in a Claude Lorrain. He had been here once, years before, soon after his return to the city. It had been Halloween night, and a group of the boys from Tannen’s back room had persuaded him to join them in their yearly visit to the grave of Harry Houdini, who was buried here in a Jewish cemetery called Machpelah. They had taken sandwiches and flasks and a thermos of coffee and spent the night gossiping about Mrs. Houdini’s surprisingly involved love life after her husband’s death and waiting for the spirit of the Mysteriarch to appear, as Houdini had promised that, should such a thing turn out to be feasible, it would. At the break of dawn on All Hallows’ Day, they had joked and whistled and pretended to be disappointed at Houdini’s failure to show, but in Joe’s case at least—and he suspected it had been so for some of the others—the show of disappointment had only served to mask the actual disappointment that he felt. Joe did not in the least believe in an afterlife, but he genuinely wished that he could. An old Christian kook in the public library in Halifax had once attempted to comfort Joe by telling him, with an air of great assurance, that it was Hitler, and not the Allies, who had liberated the Jews. Not since his father’s death—not since the day he had first heard a radio report about the wonder ghetto at Terezin—had Joe stood so near to consolation. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian’s words, was to believe.
He was able to find Machpelah again without too much trouble—it was marked by a large, rather gloomily splendid funerary building of vaguely Levantine design that reminded Joe of Rosa’s father’s house—and he drove through the gates and parked the car. Houdini’s tomb was the largest and most splendid in the cemetery, completely out of keeping with the general modesty, even austerity, of the other headstones and slabs. It was a curious structure, like a spacious balcony detached from the side of a palace, a letter C of marble balustrade with pillars like serifs at either end, enclosing a long low bench. The pillars had inscriptions in English and Hebrew. At the center, above the laconic inscription HOUDINI, a bust of the late magician glowered, looking as if he had just licked a battery. A curious statue of a robed, weeping woman was posed alongside the bench, sprawled against it in a kind of eternal grieving swoon; Joe found it quite gauche and disturbing. There were nosegays and wreaths scattered around in various states of decay, and many of the surfaces were littered with small stones, left by family, Joe supposed, or by Jewish admirers. Houdini’s parents and siblings were all buried here: everyone but his late wife, Bess, who had been refused admission because she was an unconverted Catholic. Joe read the prolix tributes to the mother and the rabbi father that Houdini had quite obviously composed himself. He wondered what he would have put on his own parents’ tombstones had he been given the opportunity. Names and dates alone seemed extravagance enough.
He started picking up the stones that people had left, and arranged them neatly atop the railing, as it were, of the balcony, in lines and circles and Stars of David. He noticed that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and t
here, wherever there was a seam or a crack. He took them out and unrolled the little strips and read what people had written. They all seemed to be messages left by various devotees of spiritualism and students of the next world who offered posthumous forgiveness to the great debunker for having oppugned the Truth that he had, by now, undoubtedly discovered. After a while, Joe sat down on the bench, a safe distance away from the statue of the woman crying out her eyes. He took a deep breath, and shook his head, and reached out some inward fingers, tentatively, to see if they brushed against some remnant of Harry Houdini or Thomas Kavalier or anyone at all. No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
Presently, he made a pillow of his coat and lay back on the cold marble bench. He could hear the rumbling surf of traffic on the Inter-borough Parkway, the intermittent sigh of airbrakes from a bus on Jamaica Avenue. The sounds seemed to correspond exactly to the pale gray sky that he was looking up at, intermittently bruised with blue. He closed his eyes for a moment, just to listen to the sky for a little while. At a certain point, he became aware of footsteps in the grass beside him. He sat up and looked out at the brilliant green field—the sun was shining now, somehow—and the hillsides with their flocks of white sheep, and saw, coming toward him, in his cutaway coat, his old teacher Bernard Kornblum. Kornblum’s cheeks were raw and his eyes bright and critical. His beard was tied up in a net.
“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?”