“Did you see it?”
On the previous morning, the older man had been impelled, by the senior senator from Nevada, during the televised Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, to answer a series of humiliating questions about his tendency to write about relationships between man and boy superheroes.
“It was on the radio in the teachers’ lounge.”
“Jesus, were the teachers all, what, sitting around listening?”
“Some of them. The rest of them were off teaching.”
The man in the bow tie set down his coffee cup. He picked up his knife and fork, made three neat mouthfuls of the remainder of his hamburg steak, and dispatched them.
The older man began to rock again. His friend watched him, chewing. He seemed about to make a remark and then to change his mind.
“My brother, in Montreal,” the younger man said finally. “He says the Royals have this kid. From Puerto Rico. An outfielder. My brother saw him hit three triples in one game. Bobby, his name is. Bobby Clemente. Just a, you know, just a young kid.”
“A wunderkind.”
“A chico maravilloso.”
“Too bad there’s no room for him. Not with Robinson out there. And Furillo. And Snider.”
“True. You know, if you look at your watch one more time, so help me …” The young man’s tone sounded teasing, but his eyes pleated at the corners as if in pain or irritation.
“Sorry, sorry.” The older man looked up from his watch, blushing, and said wistfully, “Snider.”
“Snider,” the dapper man agreed, and then, “My God. Look at you.” His voice darkened, grew gentle and sardonic and, for the first time since they had come trysting over eggs and coffee, amid the smoke and the hats and the harsh light of the Culloden Diner, confidential. “You got a rocket in your pocket. That’s what my father would have said. You’re actually happy about this.”
“God knows why. It’s crazy, Felix. I ought to be ashamed.”
“But you aren’t.”
“Nope.”
“You feel great.”
“I feel—what’s the word.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I don’t think that’s the word.”
“I envy you, you know. I always have. Now I can just envy you more.”
“What have I got to envy?”
“A talent.”
“A talent for nonsense.”
“I’m perfectly serious. You don’t know how lucky you are. You forget,” said the younger man, “I teach fifth grade. I see the fantasy leaching out of them little by little every day. Narrowing its focus. Losing its complexity. Fifth grade, that’s the last year for a lot of them.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, the motion neat and almost dainty. Then he balled the napkin and threw it to his plate. “What am I saying, I ‘see’ it. I make it happen. It’s my job. That’s what I’m paid to do.”
His companion did not seem to know how to respond to this. Finally he said simply, “I should go.”
“Don’t let me keep you.” The pained look of mockery, more like a wince than a smile, returned to his face. “You’re already gone anyway.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted.”
“I’m sorry that I haven’t been more of a distraction,” said the dapper young man. Then he raised the fingers of one hand to his lips, as if he had said too much.
“You’re hard on yourself,” the older man said.
“You have your talent,” said his companion. “I have mine.”
They stood up, and put on their coats, and took their hats from the rack on the back wall. The dapper young man fitted his trilby, merino wool of a green between loden and fir, to the top of his close-cropped head, with the resolve of a train conductor snapping shut the cover of his watch. The two men waited side by side at the cash register for the owner and separately paid their checks. The older man went back and left six bits, a tip of 30 percent, for the daughter. Then they walked out into the gravel parking lot, and faced each other, and shook once, as if sealing yet again their unknown and inarticulable deal.
“So.”
“So.”
“What now?”
“Well, I don’t know.” They had not let go of each other’s hand. “I was thinking of taking a little trip. Maybe going out to California. That’s something I’ve—”
“A trip.” The younger man nodded blandly. A fine mist accumulated on the lenses of his eyeglasses.
“Yeah. Listen, Felix—you want to come with me?”
The younger man did not reply right away, as if considering the question carefully before answering. Then he smiled and gave a little snort, sending a blast of curling vapor from his nostrils. “I envy you,” he said. He withdrew his hand, turned, and went crunching through the gravel. Today he would be early for his train.
As Sammy watched Felix Landauer walk off, hoisting his trouser cuffs and picking a careful route through the puddles, he felt not sadness as much as a guilty sense of relief. There had been so many such handshakes over the years, with so many men; so many partnerships and partings like this one, so many theoretical, chaste affairs that posed as friendships and offered none of the satisfactions of either. Then he settled his own tweed homburg onto his head and set forth again from the world of men and their hats, men who shouldered up to a counter, in the wreckage of a house and a streetcar, to eat their eggs and talk baseball and cough like madmen into their fists.
THE RETURN OF THE AMAZING CAVALIERI
THE MAIN BUILDING OF WILLIAM FLOYD Elementary School, along with Mount Moriah Baptist Church, the old firehouse, the forlorn row of shops that included Spiegelman’s Drugs, and a few peeling clapboard houses at the eastern fringe of the Bloomtown city limits, formed part of the residuum of the extinct village of Manticock. William Floyd had been erected during the Depression to serve all the surrounding towns—though by now the children of Bloomtown had long since overwhelmed it—on land carved from the carcass of an old Island estate. It was a mansard-roofed institution of mottled brick, with high mullioned windows like those of a factory loft, sturdy, cheerless, and prepared to contend with the worst that a population of tiny lunatics, cripples, or hard cases could dish out. Joe had never been inside an American school building, but his own gymnasium memories were sufficiently carceral that he had a moment of sudden doubt, almost panic, as he followed Tommy up the front walk. He hung back, took a deep breath, looked around. The air was dense with a fine rain, a mist so heavy that the babble of the children, the radiant row of school buses, the glowing filaments of the daffodils around the flagpole, seemed to have been stirred into the morning and to hang all around them like a bright powder held suspended in a beaker. There was a phantasmic skeletal clattering all around them—the rattle of galoshes, of thermoses in lunch boxes, of satchel buckles—as children burst from the mist in their blazing slickers, in a jostle and drumming of umbrellas. As they bumped and stuttered past Joe and Tommy, some of the children turned back to look at the round, serious-faced boy, dressed as if for a wedding or a funeral, smaller than his classmates, unbeloved if not really disliked, tugging at the wrist of a skinny, wild-haired man in a neatly pressed white suit, carrying an oxblood leather valise.
“Come on, Joe,” Tommy was saying. For the grand occasion he wore, under his tan raincoat, a brown wool suit, too tight at the armpits and too short at the cuffs and, clipped to the collar of the white shirt that Rosa had also ironed that morning, a highly unlikely red bow tie. His brilliantined hair lay upon his head, as dark and shining as the uppers of his shoes, which he had worked over himself that morning with a chamois and brush, sitting out on the back steps of the house, whistling. Joe noticed now that Tommy’s fingers were blotched and his nails caked with cordovan polish. “Jeez, come on.”
“I’m coming, okay,” Joe said. “Let’s go.”
Joe brushed aside the misgiving—nothing more, surely, than the tiny fossil print of an ancient dread that the sight of the school had chipped loos
e inside him—and laid his free hand on the boy’s head. He smiled, anxious, as he had been all morning, to show Tommy that he was genuinely looking forward to Sharing Time. Though his eagerness was genuine, the display of it, the big unaccustomed smile, felt false, and presently the smile flickered and went out. Tommy let go of Joe’s wrist, blinking, looking puzzled. He had known Joe long enough, and knew him well enough by now, to be aware that he was not an especially smiling person.
Two matching redheaded boys in matching oilskin coats with corduroy collars and hunting caps, one blue plaid and one red plaid, pulled down to the tops of their eyebrows, stopped.
“Is that him?” said the boy in the blue hat.
“Are you going to jump off the school, mister?” said the boy in the red hat.
“Not today,” said Joe.
“Stupid,” the boy in the blue hat said to his twin. “He’s going to escape from a safe.” Under the flap of his hunting cap, his glinting orange eyebrows knit together. “Like Houdini. Did you know Houdini?”
“Not personally,” Joe said.
The boy in the blue hat looked at the valise, then leaned to one side, trying to see behind Joe. “Hey, mister, where is the safe?”
“I’m sure he would just be carrying it, goofus,” the boy in the red hat said. “A safe. I’m sure it’s in his suitcase.”
Joe looked at Tommy. Tommy was studying his brilliant shoes.
“How do you breathe inside it?”
“I take very small breaths.”
“How do you get out?”
“Do you expect me to tell you?”
The boys smiled as Joe had invited them to do at the ridiculousness of their question. Before they started up the front steps of the school, the boy in the red hat, squinting, face grave, as if aiming a pistol, turned back and landed a solid punch on Tommy’s upper arm. Tommy winced but said nothing. He stood, still looking down at his shoes.
“Frank and Jim Hazzard,” he said.
“You told them I was going to do an escape.”
“I just said that you could if you wanted to.”
“From a safe.”
“Just for example.” Tommy looked up. “You don’t have to do anything, you know,” he said. “You could just say hi. You could just shake hands with Mr. Landauer.”
“No, don’t be silly, Tommy. I don’t mind,” Joe said. “I’m looking forward.”
Mr. Landauer’s fifth-grade class was on the second floor of the school. It was an orderly place. The desks were arrayed like dark squares on a chessboard. The photographs, newspaper pages, posters, and examples of student artwork were hung with precision, fitted together like tiles in a mosaic, level, all their corners true. Mr. Landauer’s deliberate handwriting was everywhere. Joe was inclined to scorn Mr. Landauer for an anal-retentive perfectionist, but Sammy had spoken highly of Tommy’s teacher. “He’s ahead of the times,” Sammy had said. Looking more carefully, Joe noticed that the headlines on the newspaper articles dealt with the trial of the Rosenbergs, with protests against the atomic bomb, with the racial struggle going on down in Arkansas. Of the putative famous Americans whose pictures graced the back wall, on either side of a door marked UTILITY, Joe was able to recognize only Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Duke Ellington, though two more of the people depicted were Negroes.
“How do you do,” Mr. Landauer said. He got up from behind his desk at the front of the room and came to the classroom door with his hand extended. His palm was soft and his grip evanescent. He was slender and young, with small, fine features and a youthful quaver in his voice. He wore heavy-rimmed black spectacles, a plaid blazer, and, Joe noted, a red bow tie. “I’ve heard all about you. You don’t look like your cousin. Sammy. Mr. Clay, I mean.”
“He looks like his father, I understand.”
“The strongman.”
“Yes,” said Joe. He was a little surprised by the extent of the other man’s knowledge of Klayman family history, but it was clear that Tommy idolized the man, bow tie and all. God only knew what the boy had told him.
“Well,” Mr. Landauer said, coughing a little into his hand, as if to cover some slight embarrassment. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for inviting me,” Joe said. “Tommy tells us you’re going to do some magic?”
“If that’s all right.”
Joe felt Tommy brush against his leg. He looked down and saw that the boy was smiling hugely, his face flushed, his hands thrust into his pockets. Every child in the room was looking at him and at the cousin who had jumped off of the Empire State Building and into the morning newspapers. They were whispering. They were pointing at the valise.
“There has been some talk of a safe—” Mr. Landauer began, and then there was a loud click from the wall. As Joe looked up to the clock on the wall over the door, a bell rang loudly, startling him.
“All right, then,” Mr. Landauer said. The whispering and chatter stopped. “We’ll begin with Sharing Time today. I know we’re all particularly excited because of what Tommy Clay has brought to share with us this morning. I don’t know very much about show business, Mr. Kavalier,” he went on, looking at Joe, “but I believe the idea is always save the best for last, isn’t that right?”
“That is,” said Joe. “But there may be someone here with something better.”
Mr. Landauer looked skeptical, but he turned to the classroom, an eyebrow raised.
One of the children raised his hand. He was a large, big-cheeked, towheaded boy, crammed into a desk at the back of the room. He opened his desk and took out a cigar box. He gave it a shake, and something hard thudded against the inside of it. “I found a fossilized eyeball.”
A number of the girls expressed a certain unwillingness to see this item, but Mr. Landauer nodded, his lower lip pushed out as if he were impressed. Joe liked the way he spoke and dealt with the children, mocking but in an appreciative and straight-faced kind of way. One of the girls raised her hand.
“I have a menu from Lindy’s restaurant signed by Joe Louis and Al Lopez,” she said. “It’s my brother’s.”
Mr. Landauer turned to Joe. “Mr. Clay?”
“Kavalier.”
“I’m sorry, of course.”
“When I performed on the stage,” Joe said, “we used to always say start them out with the fossilized eyeball.”
Mr. Landauer nodded. “Why don’t you take your seat, Tommy,” he said. “Mr. Kavalier, you may sit at my desk if you like.”
Tommy and Joe took their seats. Mr. Landauer picked up a notebook and, clutching it to his chest, went to stand at the window, perched half-sitting on the wide sill. The boy with the fossilized eyeball, whose name was Elliot Ottoman, went to the front of the room, opened his cigar box, and took out a large mottled chunk of quartz, veined in pink, with a cloudy blue chip of something else embedded in one of its oblong sides.
“I think it came from a horse,” Elliot Ottoman said in a speculative tone. “Maybe it was a British horse during the Revolution.”
The eyeball was passed around, and the girls made an elaborate display of their collective unwillingness to touch it. When Elliot had returned it to its box, he sat down. He was followed by the girl with the menu, Betty Capolupo. Betty pointed to the scrawled signature of Al Lopez, who, Joe gathered, played catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and to the neat, careful signature of the great boxer. Then she read the names of several of the appetizers, explained—engendering a reprise of the petrified-eyeball response, in which many of the boys now joined—what sweetbreads were, and narrated lovingly in round tones the list of desserts. After Betty Capolupo sat down came Huey Nordhoff with a miraculous potato chip in the image of Ed Wynn, and Susan Kearny, who had brought her collection of glass dolls dressed in the typical costumes of many nations. As each child stood up, Mr. Landauer asked questions, prompted them when their commentary faltered, and took careful notes in his book. Finally he nodded to Tommy and Joe. “May I move your desk?” Joe said.
Mr. Land
auer helped him move the desk out from the corner and cleared away his blotter and basket of papers. Joe opened the valise, and quickly he and Tommy laid out a deck of cards, a water glass, a spoon, a piece of velvet cloth Rosa had given them for a blindfold, several sheets of tissue paper, and a small stack of one-dollar coins. Joe took off his jacket and hung it from the back of Mr. Landauer’s chair. He looked out at the roomful of children. All of the children, behind their spotless wooden desks, were staring at Joe, their faces blank and somehow menacing. Joe tried to gauge their potential responsiveness to the sleights and productions he and Tommy had planned. They were certainly old enough to know that a coin could not, say, pass through solid matter, and therefore, in theory, to be persuaded that somehow it had. The danger, he thought, was that these children had arrived at the brief interregnum between gullible, wondering childhood and the know-it-all watchfulness of adolescence; that they would view his act from the implacable middle stage where their own innocence and lack of understanding had begun to seem a burden to them, and a program of deceptions practiced upon them by a strange adult could inspire feelings of oppression.
“Good morning,” Joe said. “My name is Joe. Tommy asked me to come this morning and—”
Betty Capolupo raised her hand. Joe glanced at Mr. Landauer, then nodded to the girl, who addressed her question to Tommy. “Is he your uncle?” she said.
“Mr. Kavalier is Tommy’s cousin,” said Mr. Landauer. He looked at Joe as he said it, levelly, his brown eyes behind his thick lenses looking moist and oddly sympathetic. “His father’s first cousin. Do I have that right?” Joe looked at him. What was he saying? Why was he asking? What did he suspect? Had Tommy said something to him? “Mr. Kavalier and Mr. Clay were partners at one time. Do I have that right?” Joe nodded, telling himself to relax. Mr. Landauer was just trying to sort out the random bits of information that had been passed along to him by an eleven-year-old boy. “When Mr. Clay came up with the idea for the famous comic book character, which I’m sure you all know, the Escapist, it was Mr. Kavalier, here, who did the pictures.”