The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  MANY YEARS AFTERWARD, most of the aged boys at whose long-ago bar mitzvah receptions, in a vanished New York City, a young magician named Joe Kavalier had performed his brisk, lively, all but wordless act, could summon only fragmentary memories of the entertainer. Some of the men were able to recall a slender, quiet young man in a fancy blue cutaway who spoke accented English and seemed hardly older than they. Another, an avid reader of comic books, recalled that Joe Kavalier had invited him to drop by the Empire offices one day with his parents. Joe had given him a tour and sent him home with an armload of free comic books and a drawing, which he still had, of himself standing next to the Escapist. Yet another remembered that Joe worked with an entire menagerie of artificial animals: a collapsible fake-fur rabbit; goldfish carved from a carrot; a rather mangy stuffed parakeet that, to the surprise of spectators, remained perched on the magician’s hand while its cage vanished into thin air. “I saw him cutting up the carrots in the men’s room,” this gentleman recalled. “In the bowl of water, they really did look like little fish.” Stanley Konigsberg, however, whose bar mitzvah reception marked the last known appearance of the Amazing Cavalieri, retained for the rest of his life—like young Leon Douglas “Pipe Bomb” Saks—an ineradicable memory of our hero. An amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe’s natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser’s Dream, Rosini’s Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his own relatives and schoolmates at the Hotel Trevi two months later. And if Mr. Konigsberg’s youthful admiration, and the unfailing kindness shown him by its object, had not sufficed to preserve the Amazing Cavalieri in his memory for the next sixty years, then the singular performance Joe gave at the Hotel Trevi on the evening of December 6, 1941, undoubtedly would have been enough.

  Joe arrived an hour before the reception began, as was his habit, to check the disposition of the Trevi’s ballroom, salt a few aces and half-dollars, and go over the order of events with Manny Zehn, the bandleader whose fourteen Zehnsations, riotous in their mariachi shirts, were setting up on the bandstand behind them.

  “How are they hanging?” said Joe, trying out an expression he had just heard in the subway on his way uptown. He pictured a row of pages from a calendar, hanging on a shiny string. He was young, he was making money hand over fist, and his little brother, after six months of quarantine, bureaucratic dithering, and those terrible days last week when it seemed that the State Department might, at the last moment, cancel all the children’s entry visas, was on his way. Thomas would be here in three more days. Here, in New York City.

  “Hey, kid,” Zehn said, squinting a little mistrustfully at Joe, but finally shaking the hand Joe proffered. They had worked together twice before. “Where’s your sombrero?”

  “Sorry? I didn’t—?”

  “Our theme is ‘South of the Border.’ ” Zehn reached behind his head and lifted a black sombrero embroidered with silver thread up onto his balding pate. He was a good-looking, portly man with a pencil mustache. “Sid?” The trombonist had been chatting up one of the waitresses, in a pink beribboned dress with Latin flounces. Sid turned around, an eyebrow arched. Manny Zehn raised his hands in the air and threw his head back. “Number three.”

  The trombonist nodded. “Hit it,” he said to the band. The Zehnsations broke into a spirited bounce version of “The Mexican Hat Dance.” They played four bars and then Manny Zehn cut his throat with a finger. “So where’s your Mexican hat?”

  “No one told me,” said Joe. He smiled. “Beside to which I’m permitted only to use the topper,” he added, pointing to the “loaded” silk hat on his head, which he had purchased secondhand at Louis Tannen’s. “Or else maybe the Mexican magicians’ union will complain.”

  Zehn narrowed his eyes again. “You’re drunk,” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re acting goofy.”

  “My brother is coming,” said Joe, and then, just to see how it sounded, added, “and I am getting married. That is, I hope I am. I have decided I am going to ask her tonight.”

  Zehn blew his nose. “Mazel tov,” he said, giving the blot on his handkerchief a chiromantic squint. “Only I thought you guys were experts at getting out of chains.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Cavalieri?” said Stanley Konigsberg, appearing rather magically at Joe’s side. “But that’s what I wanted to ask you?”

  “You can call me Joe.”

  “Joe. Sorry. Okay, I was wondering. Do you ever do escapes?”

  “At one time,” said Joe. “But I had to give it up.” He frowned. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you hid a queen of hearts in the centerpiece of table seven,” said Stanley. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I did not do any such thing,” said Joe. He winked at Manny Zehn and, with a firm hand on Stanley’s shoulder, steered the boy out of the ballroom and into the gilded corridor. Guests were taking off their coats, shaking the rain from their umbrellas.

  “What kinds of things could you escape from?” Stanley wanted to know. “Chains? Ropes? Boxes? Trunks? Bags? Could you do it jumping off of a bridge? Or a building? What’s so funny?”

  “You remind me of someone,” Joe said.

  THAT SAME EVENING, Rosa shoved her paint box, a folded canvas tarp, a yardstick, and a small stepladder into the back of a taxi, and headed uptown to the apartment at the Josephine. The echoing emptiness of the place, a tin-plate rattle in the ears, unnerved her, and although with Joe’s approval she had hastily called Macy’s to order a dining table and chairs, some basic kitchen things, and bedroom furniture, there would be no time to furnish the rooms properly before Thomas arrived. It occurred to her that, having gone from the cramped jumble of a two-family flat on Dlouha Street, to the provisional pandemonium of a convent refectory, to the packed-in-oil tin of a stateroom on the Ark of Miriam, the boy might actually welcome a bit of space and emptiness, but all the same she wanted him to feel that the place at which he had arrived, at long last, was home, or a kind of home. She had tried to think of ways she could accomplish this. She knew enough about thirteen-year-old boys to be fairly certain that a plush bathrobe, a bouquet of flowers, or a ruffled canopy on the bed was not going to do the trick. She thought that a dog or a kitten might have been nice, but pets were not allowed in the building. She asked Joe about his brother’s favorite meal, color, book, song; but Joe had proven quite ignorant of such preferences. Rosa was irritated with him—she had said he was impossible—until she saw that he was, for once, pained by his ignorance. It was the mark not of his usual luftmensch obliviousness but of the chasm of strange separation that had opened up between the brothers in the last two years. She apologized at once and went on trying to think what she could do for Thomas, until finally she’d had the idea, which struck them both as a nice one, of painting the blank expanse of his bedroom with a mural. It was not just that she wanted Thomas to feel at home; she wanted him to like her—instantly, right away—and she hoped that the mural, whether it softened the edges of his arrival or not, would at the very least stand as an offer of friendship, as a hand extended in welcome from his American big sister. But intermingled with, secretly bubbling beneath, these other motives for the gesture was concealed a desire that had nothing to do with Thomas Kavalier. Rosa was practicing—beginning to dabble, on the walls of a boy’s bedroom, with the idea of becoming a mother. This morning, her doctor had called to confirm the tale of a missed period and of a week of sudden squalls and unexpected flare-ups of emotion such as the one that had sent her into hysterics over the loan of an old pocket square. Thomas was going to be an uncle. That was how she had decided that she was going to put it to Joe.

  When she got into the apartment, she first changed into a pair of dungarees and an old shirt of Joe’s, and put her hair back with a kerchi
ef. Then she went into the bedroom that was going to be Thomas’s and spread out the tarp on the floor. She had never painted a mural before, but she had talked it over with her father, who had been involved in the fracas over the Rivera murals at Rockefeller Center and who knew many artists who had worked on murals for the W.P.A.

  Rosa had wrestled for a long time with the proper subject. Characters from nursery rhymes, wooden soldiers, fairies and frog princes and gingerbread houses, such motifs would be considered hopelessly puerile by a boy of thirteen. She considered doing a New York scene—tall buildings, taxicabs, traffic cops, the Camel sign blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Or perhaps some corny American montage, with redwood trees and cotton plants and lobsters. She wanted it to be sort of generally American, but also to relate in some way to the specific life Thomas was going to be leading here. Then she had started thinking about Joe, and the kind of work that he did. She suspected that Thomas Kavalier was going to be learning a good deal of his English from the pages of Empire Comics. While she would not have felt comfortable doing a mural that featured the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, or—God knew—Luna Moth, the idea of heroes, American heroes, intrigued her. She went to the public library and checked out a big book, with impressive Rockwell Kent–style woodcuts, called Heroes and Legends of the American People. The larger-than-life figures of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Pecos Bill, Mike Fink, and the rest—her favorite was the original man of steel, Joe Magarac—struck her as perfectly suited to the mural form, and not beneath the contempt of a boy to whom they would probably be largely unknown. What was more, Rosa had taken to thinking of Joe himself as a hero—he had paid, out of his own pocket, for fifteen of the children who were now steaming across the Atlantic. Though she would not put Joe into the mural, she decided to include an image of Harry Houdini, that immigrant boy from Central Europe, just to connect the theme of the mural that much more directly to Thomas’s life.

  She had made dozens of preliminary sketches and a two-by-three cartoon of the mural, which she now set about transferring, by means of a simple grid, to the largest of the room’s walls. It was tricky work laying out the guidelines on the walls with the yardstick, first the horizontals, moving the stepladder across from left to right three feet at a hop, then the verticals, easy enough at the bottom but flirting more and more dangerously with wobbliness as she drew nearer to the top and was forced to go up on tiptoe. It required far more patience than she possessed, and several times she came close to abandoning the grid and just trying to sketch the thing out freehand on the wall. But she reminded herself that patience was a cardinal virtue in a mother—God knew her own mother had had little enough—and kept to her careful plan.

  By ten o’clock, she had finished laying out the guidelines. Her shoulders ached, and her neck, and her knees, and she felt that before she started in on transferring the gridded cartoon to the wall she would go for a walk around the block, for a sandwich or a cigarette. She might run into Joe; he ought to be through with his show by now and on his way up to meet her. So she pulled on her coat and took the elevator back down to the lobby. She walked up to the corner of Seventy-ninth Street, where there was a late-night grocery.

  Later, Rosa would imagine that, like a cat or a spirit camera trained on a dying person, she had seen her lost happiness at the instant of its passing. As she was paying for her Philip Morrises, she happened to glance down at the Sunday papers stacked in front of the counter, bulldog editions hot off the press. In the upper-right-hand corner of the Herald there was an extra, boxed in red. She read it five times, with all her heart and attention, but the tiny amount of information it conveyed never increased or—then or afterward—made any better sense. The ten lines of tentative, bland prose said only that a boat filled with refugees, many from Central Europe, most if not all of them believed to be Jewish children, was missing in the Atlantic off the Azores and believed lost. There was no mention, as there would not be for several more hours, of a U-boat, a forced evacuation, a sudden storm tearing in out of the northeast. Rosa stood there for a moment, her lungs filled with smoke, unable to exhale. Then she looked up at the storekeeper, who was watching her with interest. Evidently something quite engrossing was going on in her face. What should she do? Was he still at the Trevi? Was he on his way up to the Josephine, as they had planned? Had he heard the news?

  She drifted out to the curb and fretted for a moment longer. Then she decided she had better just go back to the apartment and wait for him. She was sure that he would eventually come looking for her there, whether in ignorance or grief. Just as she was coming to this decision, however, a taxicab pulled up and let out an elderly couple in evening clothes. Rosa brushed past them and climbed into the back of the cab.

  “The Trevi,” she said.

  She sat in a dark corner of the taxi. The light came and went, and in the mirror of her compact, her reflection was intermittently brave. She closed her eyes and tried to recite a snatch of Buddhist prayer her father had taught her, claiming it had a calming effect. It had little apparent impact on her father, and she wasn’t even sure she had the words right. Om mani padmi om. Somehow it did make her feel calmer. She said it all the way from Seventy-ninth Street to the curb outside the Trevi. By the time she stepped out of the cab, she had pulled herself fairly together. She came into the severe marble reception hall, with its icy chandeliers, and went up to the desk to inquire. From the lobby came the somehow baleful laughter of the famous fountain.

  “The magician was a friend of yours?” said the clerk with an unaccountably hostile air. “He cut out hours ago.”

  “Oh.” It hit her like a blow. He was supposed to come up to the apartment after the performance. The fact that he had not done so meant that something terrible had happened to him. And in its wake, in possession of this knowledge, he had not wanted to see her. “Are they—is anyone—”

  “There’s the bar mitzvah boy now,” the clerk said, pointing to a skinny little kid in a three-piece pink suit lolling on one of the watered silk couches in the lobby. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Rosa went over, and the boy introduced himself as Stanley Konigsberg. Rosa told him she was looking for Joe, that she had some very bad news to give him. Oh, she had some wonderful news, too, but how would she ever be able to tell him? He would think she was trying to make some horrible equivalency, when it was only one of the monstrous coincidences of life.

  “I think he already knows,” Stanley Konigsberg said. He was a squat boy, small for his age, with crooked spectacles and coarse brown hair. The suit was incredible, trousers trimmed with white braid, pockets and buttonholes with white frogs, precisely the color of humiliation itself. “Is it about that boat that sank?”

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “His little brother was on it. A boy about your age.”

  “Jeez.” He fidgeted with the end of his brown necktie, unable to make eye contact with Rosa. “That explains it, I guess.”

  That explains what, Rosa wanted to ask him, but she stuck to the more pressing question. “Do you know where he went?” she said.

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. He just—”

  “How long ago did he leave?”

  “Oh, two hours at least. Maybe even more.”

  “Wait here,” Rosa said. “Will you wait here, please?”

  “I guess I kind of have to.” He pointed to the doors of the Trevi’s ballroom. “My parents aren’t finished arguing.”

  Rosa went to a pay telephone and called Sammy and Joe’s apartment, but there was no answer, and that was when she remembered that Sammy had gone out of town for the weekend with Tracy Bacon. To the Jersey shore, of all places. She was going to have to try to track him down. Next she had the operator call the superintendent of the Josephine, Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey grumbled and warned her not to make a habit of it, but when she told him it was urgent, he went up and checked the apartment for her. No, he said when he returned to the phone, there was nobody there, and no note. Rosa hung up and went back to Stanley Ko
nigsberg.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “Well, I mean, I guess he was upset, but nobody knew. I mean, everybody else was pretty upset when they heard. My uncle Mort works for the J.T.A. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It’s a wire service.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he came in and told us the news, he heard it first.”

  “Did you see Joe leave, Stanley?” said Rosa.

  “Well, yeah, I mean, yes, everybody did.”

  “And he seemed to be upset?”

  Stanley nodded. “It was really quite strange,” he said.

  “What happened?” said Rosa. “What was strange?”

  “It was all my fault,” Stanley began. “I guess I was kind of nudzhing him, and he kept saying no, no, no, so then I went to my father and he said he’d give your friend another fifty dollars, and he still said no, so then I went to my mother.” He winced. “After that, I guess he didn’t really have any choice.”

  “Any choice about what?” Rosa said. She put her hand on Stanley’s shoulder. “What did you want him to do?”

  “I wanted him to do an escape,” said Stanley, twitching as she touched him. “He said he knew how. Maybe he was just joking, I don’t know. But he told my mother okay, he would. He said I was a nice kid and he would throw it in for no charge. But there was only about a half hour before he was supposed to go on, you know, so he had to rush it. He went down to the basement and got a big wooden packing crate that something, I think it was a filing cabinet, came in. And also a laundry bag. And a hammer and some nails. Then he went and talked for a while to the house detective, and he said no. My father had to go and give him fifty dollars, too. Then it was time for him, your friend, Joe, to go on. He did his show. He was really good. He did some card tricks, and some coin tricks, and he did some tricks with apparatuses. A little of everything, which is hard, which I know, see, because I’m a magician too, kind of. Most of them, when you see them … they have a specialty. Like I just do mostly stuff with cards. Then after maybe a half hour he, your friend, got us all to stand up, and we had to leave the ballroom, and he brought us down here. Over to that.” He pointed to the fountain out in the lobby, an exact replica of the famous one in Rome, all tritons and seashells and blue-lit cataracts. “Everyone. I think it was on the way down that Uncle Lou must have told him about the ship, you know, sinking and all, ’cause when we got down here he looked, uh, I don’t know. Like his mouth was kind of hanging crooked. And he kept putting his hand on my shoulder, like he was leaning on me. Then some waiters brought in the bag and the box. The hotel detective came over and put him in handcuffs. He got in the bag, and I got to tie it myself. We put him in the box, and I got to nail it shut. We dropped him into the fountain. He told us if he didn’t come out in three minutes to come in after him.”