“I can’t help noticing that I’m not hearing a lot of astonishment from you two,” Sammy said at last.
Rosa and Joe sat up, looked at Sammy, and then at each other behind his back. They blushed.
“Batman and Robin?” Rosa said, astonished.
“That’s a dirty lie,” Sammy said.
They drank one more round, and then someone, Sammy wasn’t sure who, said that they had better be getting back out to Bloomtown, since Joe’s boxes were coming today and Tommy was due home from school in less than two hours. There followed a general donning of coats and scarves, some slapstick with dollar bills and the spilled ice from a drink, and then at some point Rosa and Joe seemed to remark that they were headed out the door of the chophouse and that Sammy was not with them.
“You’re both too drunk to drive anyway,” Sammy told them when they returned for him. “Take the train from Penn Station. I’ll bring the car home later.”
Now came the first time that they looked at Sammy with something approaching the doubt, the mistrust, the pity that he had been dreading seeing in their faces.
“Give me a break,” he said. “I’m not going to fucking drive into the East River. Or anything like that.”
They didn’t move.
“I swear to you, all right?”
Rosa looked at Joe again, and Sammy wondered if it wasn’t just that they worried he might do something to hurt himself; perhaps they were worried that, as soon as they left him, he would head up to Times Square and try to cruise a sailor. And then Sammy realized that, after all, he could.
Rosa came back toward him and unfurled a big lurching hug that nearly sent Sammy tumbling off his bar stool. She spoke into his ear, her breath warm and with a burned-cork smell of bourbon.
“We’ll be all right,” she said. “All of us.”
“I know,” Sammy said. “Go on, you guys. I’m just going to sit here. I’m just going to sober up.”
Sammy nursed his drink for the next hour, chin in his palms, elbows on the bar. The dark brown, sardonic taste of the bourbon, which at first he had found unpalatable, now seemed no different to him from that of the tongue in his mouth, the thoughts in his head, the heart beating imperturbably in his chest.
He wasn’t sure what finally started him thinking about Bacon. Perhaps it was the revived memory of that alcoholic night at Pawtaw in 1941. Or maybe it was just the single pink wrinkle that creased the broad back of the barman’s neck. Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk—his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world—as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil. Now he had been unmasked, along with Bruce and Dick, and Steve and Bucky, and Oliver Queen (how obvious!) and Speedy, and that security was gone for good. And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.
“Hey, Weepin’ Wanda,” said the bartender, in a tone of not quite mock menace. “We don’t allow crying in this bar.”
“Sorry,” Sammy said. He wiped his eyes on the end of his necktie and sniffled.
“Saw you on the TV this afternoon,” the bartender said. “Didn’t I now?”
“Did you?”
The barman grinned. “You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up.”
“You,” said a voice behind Sammy. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find himself looking into the face of George Debevoise Deasey. The ginger mustache had faded and dulled to the color of a turned slice of apple, and the eyes behind the thick lenses were rheumy and branched with pink veins. But Sammy could see that they were animated by the same old glint of mischief and indignation.
Sammy pushed back from his stool and half-fell, half-lowered himself to the floor. He was not quite as sober as he might have been.
“George! What are you—were you there? Did you see it?”
Deasey seemed not to hear Sammy. His gaze was leveled at the bartender.
“Do you know why they have to fuck each other?” Deasey asked the man. He had developed a slight tremor of his head, it seemed to Sammy, which gave him a more querulous air than ever.
“What’s that?” the bartender said.
“I said, Do you know why Batman and Robin have to fuck each other?” He took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, nonchalant, building up to the punch.
The bartender shook his head, half-smiling, waiting for something good. “Now, why is that?” he said.
“Because they can’t go fuck themselves.” Deasey tossed the bill onto the bar. “The way you can. Now why don’t you make yourself useful and bring me a rye and water, and another of what he’s having?”
“Say,” the bartender said, “I don’t have to take that kind of talk.”
“Then don’t,” said Deasey, abruptly losing interest in the discussion. He climbed up onto the stool beside Sammy’s and patted the seat that Sammy had vacated. The bartender languished for a few seconds in the cold of the sudden conversational void that Deasey had left him to, then moved over and took two clean glasses from the back bar.
“Sit down, Mr. Clay,” Deasey said.
Sammy sat, a little in awe of George Deasey, as ever.
“Yes, I was there, to answer your question,” Deasey said. “I happened to be in town for a few weeks. I saw you were on the bill.”
George Deasey had left the comics business during the war, never to return. An old school chum had recruited him into some kind of intelligence work, and Deasey had moved to Washington, remaining there after the war was over, doing things with men like Bill Donovan and the Dulles brothers, which, the few times that Sammy had run into him, he neither refused nor agreed to discuss. He was still dressed quaintly, in one of his trademark Woodrow Wilson suits, gray flannel with a parson collar and a clocked bow tie. For a few minutes, as they waited for the barman to bring them their drinks—he took his sweet time—and then sipped at them, Deasey said nothing. Finally, “It’s a sinking ship,” he said. “You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard.”
“Only I can’t swim,” Sammy said.
“Ah, well,” Deasey said lightly. He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. “Tell me, has my old friend Mr. Kavalier truly returned? Can the fantastic tale I heard possibly be accurate?”
“Well, he wasn’t really going to jump,” Sammy said. “If that’s what you heard. And he didn’t write the letter. It was all—my son—it’s a long story. But he’s living in my house now,” Sammy said. “Actually, I think that he and my wife—”
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.
“Oh, you were all right, I suppose. But I found the pornographer extremely touching.” Deasey turned to Sammy and licked his lips, as if wondering whe
ther he ought to drop the bantering tone. “How are you holding up?”
Sammy tried again to decide how he was feeling.
“When I’m sober,” he said, “I’m probably going to want to kill myself.”
“Status quo for me,” Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.
“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 you don’t.”
“No, I don’t. I feel—I don’t know what the word for it would be. Relieved, I guess.”
“I have been in the secrets business for a long time now, Clay,” Deasey said. “Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain. I don’t cotton very well to these proclivities of yours. In fact, I find them fairly revolting, particularly when I picture you personally indulging in them.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“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.”
“My God,” Sammy said, “I think you might be right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.
“Mr. Deasey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?”
“Once. I sensed that I could be extremely happy there.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“I’m much too old to be happy, Mr. Clay. Unlike you.”
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “L.A.”
“And what would you do out there, I wonder?”
“I don’t know. Try to get work in television, maybe.”
“Television, yes,” Deasey said with a show of distaste. “Yes, you’d be very good at that.”
THERE WERE A HUNDRED AND TWO after all; the man from the moving company said so. He and his partner had just finished stacking the last of them in the garage, around and on top of and alongside the crate that contained the pearly residue of the Golem of Prague. Joe came out to the driveway to sign for everything; he looked a little funny to Tommy, windblown or something, red in the face. His shirttails were untucked, and he jumped from foot to foot in his socks. Tommy’s mother watched from the front door. She had taken off all of her city clothes and returned to her bathrobe. Joe signed and initialed the forms wherever it was required, and the movers got into their truck and drove back to the city. Then Joe and Tommy went into the garage and stood looking around at the boxes. After a while, Joe sat down on one and lit a cigarette.
“How was school?”
“We watched Dad on TV,” Tommy told Joe. “Mr. Landauer brought his TV into the class.”
“Uh-huh,” Joe said, watching Tommy with a strange expression on his face.
“He was, well, he was sweating a lot,” Tommy said.
“Oh, he was not.”
“The kids all said he looked sweaty.”
“What else did they say?”
“That’s what they said. Can I read your comic books?”
“By all means,” Joe said. “They’re yours.”
“You mean I can have them?”
“You’re the only one that wants them.”
Looking at the crates stacked like masonry in the garage gave the boy an idea; he would build himself a Bug’s Nest.* When Joe went back into the house, Tommy started dragging and shoving the stacks here and there, and after an hour he had succeeded in transferring space from the edges to the center, hollowing out a shelter for himself at the heart of the pile; a hogan of splintery, knotholed pine, open at the top to let in light from the ceiling fixture, breached by a narrow passage whose mouth he disguised with an easily moved stack of three crates. When it was done, he dropped to his hands and knees, and scrambled on his belly through the Secret Access Tube to the Innermost Cell of the Bug’s Nest. There he sat, chewing on a pencil, reading comic books, and paying unconscious tribute, in his igloo of solitude, to the ice tunnels in which his father had once come to grief.
As he sat, biting down on the ridged metal collar of his pencil, stirring a sour-tasting electromagnetic ache in the filling of a molar, the Bug noticed that one of the crates that made up the walls of his Nest was different somehow from the others: time-blackened, whiskered with splinters, more spindly-looking than the other crates in Joe’s hoard. He rolled onto his knees and inched toward it. He recognized it. He had seen it a thousand times, in the years before the arrival of Joe’s things; lying under a canvas tarp at the back of the garage, with a bunch of other old stuff—a fabulous but sadly defunct Capehart self-changing record player, an inexplicable box full of men’s combs. The crate had a loose lid of slats, crudely hinged with loops of thick wire, and a clasp of the same crooked wire, tied with a length of green string. French words and the name of France were stamped, or maybe burned into, its sides; he guessed it had once held bottles of wine.
To any boy, but in particular to one whose chronicle was contained in the sound of a roomful of adults falling silent all at once, the contents of the wine crate, ossified by dust and weather into a kind of solid unit of oblivion, would have seemed a treasure. With the precision of an archaeologist, mindful that he would have to put everything back just as he had found it, he prized apart the layers, one by one, inventorying the chance survivals of his prehistory.
1) A copy of the first issue of Radio Comics, tucked inside a translucent green cellophane school folder. Its pages yellowed and, held in the hand, bulky and swollen. The very source, the beating heart of the old-blanket odor that the box exuded.
2) Another green cellophane folder, this one stuffed with old newspaper clippings, press notices, and publicity announcements about Tommy’s grandfather, the famous vaudeville strong man called the Mighty Molecule. Clipped from newspapers all over the United States, the typography queer, the writing style clotted somehow and difficult to follow, filled with obscure slang and allusions to forgotten songs and celebrities. A few photographs of a tiny man in nothing but a breechclout, whose muscular body had a dense, upholstered look, like Buster Crabbe’s.
3) A drawing, folded and crumbling, of the Golem, stouter, somehow more countrified-looking than the one in Joe’s epic, wearing big hobnailed boots, striding down a moonlit street. The lines, though recognizably Joe’s, sketchier, more tentative, nearer to Tommy’s own.
4) An envelope containing the torn stub of a movie ticket and a grainy yellowed photograph, clipped from a newspaper, of the glamorous Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio.
5) A box of unused Kavalier & Clay stationery, left over from just before the war, the letterhead a charming group portrait of all the various characters, superpowered and otherwise—Tommy recognized for certain only the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth—that the team of Kavalier & Clay had come up with in those days.
6) A manila envelope containing a large black-and-white photograph of a handsome man with hair that shone like a sheet of molded chrome. The mouth a hard thin line, but the eyes holding a reserve of delight, as if he is about to break into a smile. His jaw square, chin cleft. In the lower right corner of the picture an inscription, signed Tracy Bacon, written in a large and looping hand: To the man who dreamed me up, with affection.
7) A pair of heavy woolen socks with orange toes, in a cardboard sleeve printed with two bright orange bands. Between the bands a conventionalized picture of a merry fire in a country hearth and the word KO-ZEE-TOS in big orange letters.
And then, bent and twisted and adrift at the bottom of the box, a strip of four photographs, from a coin booth, of his mother and Joe—grinning, startled by the flash; all tongues and bug-eyes; with their cheeks and temples pressed together; and then kissing, a heroic and heavy-lidded kiss like two people on a movie poster. In the pictu
res, they looked absurdly skinny and young and so stereotypically in love that it was obvious even to Tommy, an eleven-year-old boy who had never before in his life looked at any two people and had the conscious thought: Those two people are in love. As if by magic, he heard their voices, their laughter, and then the knob turning, and the creaking hinges of the door. Quickly, he began replacing the things he had taken from the box.
He could hear their lips meeting and parting with a sticky sound; the clicking of their teeth or the buttons on their clothes.
“I have to work,” his mother said at last. “ ‘Love Made a Monkey Out of Me.’ ”
“Ah,” he said. “Autobiography.”
“Shut up.”
“How about if I make dinner,” he said. “So you can keep on working?”
“Hey, that would be swell. Unheard of. Maybe you want to be careful, I could get used to that.”
“Get used to it.”
Those two people are in love.
“Have you talked to Tommy yet?” she said.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I haven’t found the right moment.”
“Joe. You have to tell him.”
The folder filled with memorabilia of the Mighty Molecule’s career slipped from Tommy’s hand. Photographs and clippings fluttered everywhere, and as he tried to gather them up, he knocked against the crate, and its lid fell shut with a splintery crack.
“What was that?”
“Tommy? Oh, my God. Tommy, are you in here?”
He sat in the dim hollow of his sanctum, clutching the strip of photographs to his chest.
“No,” he said, after a moment, knowing that it was, without question, the most pathetic thing he had ever said in his life.
“Let me,” he heard Joe say. There was a scrape of crates and some grunting and then Joe’s head poked into the Innermost Cell. He had wriggled his way through the passage on his belly. He propped himself on his elbows with his arms tucked under his chest. Up close, his face was blotchy, and his hair was all crabgrass and dandelions.
“Hey,” he said. “Hi.”