The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “Oh my God,” said Rosa.

  Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds from the time of his immersion in the cool blue water of the Trevi’s fountain, the two waiters, the house detective, and Mr. Konigsberg in his best suit went splashing in after Joe. They had been watching the crate for signs of movement, a telltale shuddering, a visible straining in the planks that made up the crate. But there was no motion at all. The crate lay inert, covered up to within an inch of its nailed-on lid, in water. When Mrs. Konigsberg began to scream, though there were still a few seconds to go until the deadline, the men went in. They rolled the crate up and out of the water, but in their haste they lost their grip on it, and it shattered against the floor. The laundry sack rolled out and flopped wildly on the floor like a gasping fish. Joe was thrashing around so much on the carpet that the house detective couldn’t get the sack opened alone, and had to call on the other men to lend a hand. It took three of them to hold Joe down. When they peeled away the bag, his face was red as a fresh welt, but his lips were almost blue. His eyes rolled in their orbits, and he gagged and coughed as though fresh air were poison to him. They got him to his feet and the house detective removed the cuffs; when they were passed around afterward, it was plain they had not been tampered with. For a moment Joe wavered there, soaking wet, looking slowly across the two hundred faces ranged in an anxious and wondering ring around him. His face was twisted in an expression that most of the guests would later characterize as shame but that others, Stanley Konigsberg among them, saw as a terrible, inexplicable anger. Then, in a parody of the smooth courtliness he had exhibited toward them in the ballroom a bare twenty minutes before, he bowed deeply from the waist. His hair fell down over his face and then, as he snapped back upright, flung water across the bodice of Mrs. Konigsberg’s silk dress, leaving spots that proved to be ineradicable.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. Then he dashed across the lobby, through the revolving doors, and out into the street, shoes squeaking every step of the way.

  After Stanley had finished, Rosa went back to the telephone. If she was going to try to find Joe, she would need help, and the person whose help she most wanted was Sammy. She tried to think of who might be able to track him down. Then she picked up the phone and asked the operator if there was a listing for Klayman, in Flatbush.

  “Yes? Who is this?” The voice was a woman’s, deep, slightly accented. A little suspicious, perhaps, but not troubled.

  “This is Rosa Saks, Mrs. Klayman. I hope you remember me.”

  “Of course, dear. How are you?” She had no idea.

  “Mrs. Klayman. I don’t know how to tell you this.” All week she had been the slave to unpredictable torrents of sadness and rage, but from seeing that newspaper headline until now, she had remained remarkably calm, almost devoid of feeling apart from the urge to find Joe. Somehow the thought of poor, hardworking, sad-eyed Mrs. Klayman, in her tiny apartment in Flatbush, broke the ice. Rosa started to cry so hard that it was difficult for her to get the words out. At first Mrs. Klayman tried to soothe her, but as Rosa grew more incoherent, she lost her temper a little.

  “Dear, you must calm down!” she snapped. “Take a deep breath, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rosa said. She took a deep breath. “All right.”

  She related the little she knew. There was a long silence over there in Flatbush.

  “Where is Josef?” Mrs. Klayman said finally, her voice calm and measured.

  “I can’t find him. I was hoping Sammy might—might help—”

  “I’ll find Sammy,” Mrs. Klayman said. “You just go home. Back to your family’s house. He may come there.”

  “He doesn’t want to see me, I think,” Rosa said. “I don’t know why. Mrs. Klayman, I’m afraid he may try to kill himself! I think he already tried it once tonight.”

  “Don’t talk crazy. We just have to wait,” Mrs. Klayman said. “That’s all we can really do.”

  When Rosa wandered outside to get another cab, there was a boy selling papers, tomorrow’s Journal-American. This carried a more detailed, if not quite accurate, version of the sinking of the Ark of Miriam. A German U-boat assigned to one of the dreaded “wolf packs” that were tormenting Allied shipping in the Atlantic had set upon the innocent ship and sent it to the bottom with all hands.

  This account, it later developed, was not quite true. When, after the war, he was put on trial for this and other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Dönitz’s “Prize Regulations,” he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land—the island of Corvo in the Azores—and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam. The evacuation had proceeded in an orderly fashion, and the transfer of all passengers to the lifeboats might have been effected safely and without incident if, immediately after the firing of the torpedoes, a storm had not appeared out of the northeast, overwhelming the boats so quickly that the crew of U-328 had no time to help. It was only luck that had enabled Halse and his crew of forty to escape with their own lives. If he had known that the ship carried children, Halse was asked, a good many of them unable to swim, would he still have proceeded with the attack? Halse’s reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow.

  “They were children,” he said. “We were wolves.”

  WHEN THE LINE OF CARS pulled into the front drive of the house, Ruth Ebling, the housekeeper, who was watching from the great front porch as the chauffeur and Stubbs unloaded the guests and their baggage, noticed the little Jew at once. He was so much smaller and more spindly than the other men in the party—smaller, indeed, than any of the rangy, slouching, sandy-haired types, with their Brooks suits and their polished manners, who formed the usual complement of Mr. Love’s entertainments. Where the other fellows emerged from the cars with the lithe step of adventurers come to plant a conquering flag, the little Jewish boy scrambled out of the back of the second car—a monstrous new bottle-green Cadillac Sixty-one—like a man who had just fallen into a ditch. He looked as if he had spent the past several hours not so much sitting alongside the other fellows in the backseat as carelessly scattered in the spaces among them. He stood, fumbling with a cigarette, blinking and pale, eyes watering in the stiff wind, rumpled, vaguely misshapen, viewing the looming gables and mad cheminations of Pawtaw with unconcealed mistrust. When he saw Ruth watching him, he ducked his head and half-raised his hand in greeting.

  Ruth felt an uncharacteristic urge to avert her gaze. Instead, she fixed him with the cold level stare, cheeks immobile, jaw set, which she had heard Mr. Love refer to, when he thought her out of earshot, as her “Otto von Bismarck look.” An apologetic smile briefly creased the little Jew’s face.

  Though he could not have known it (and never did learn for certain just what went wrong that day), Sammy Clay’s bad luck was to have arrived on the very afternoon when the bubbling motor of Ruth Ebling’s hostility toward Jews was being fueled not merely by the usual black compound of her brother’s logical, omnivorous harangues and the silent precepts of her employer’s social class. She was also burning a clear, volatile quart of shame blended with unrefined rage. The previous morning, in New York City, she had stood with her mother, her sister-in-law, and her uncle George, on the sidewalk outside the Tombs, watching as the bus carrying her remaining brother, Carl Henry, off to Sing Sing disappeared in a thick cloud of exhaust.

  Carl Henry Ebling had pleaded guilty and been sentenced, by a judge named Cohn, to a term of twelve years for bombing the bar mitzvah reception of Leon Douglas Saks at the Pierre. Carl Henry, a fervent, dreamy, but never especially adroit or competent boy, had carried these traits with him into a passionate and shiftless manhood. But the formless and badly dented idealism with which he had returned from the battlefields of Belgium, curdling in the long indigni
ty of the Depression, had taken on new shape and purpose after 1936, when a friend had invited him to join a Yorkville social organization, the Fatherland Club, which by the outbreak of war in Europe had transmogrified or splintered off—she had never been able to follow it—into the Aryan-American League. While Ruth had never entirely agreed with Carl Henry’s views—Adolf Hitler made her nervous—or felt comfortable with her brother’s having taken such an active role in his party’s activities, she saw unquestionable nobility in his devotion to the cause of freeing the United States from the malevolent influence of Morgenthau and the rest of his cabal. And furthermore, it ought to have been as clear to the judge, to the prosecutor (Silverblatt), and to everyone as it was to Ruth herself that her brother, who had insisted, in spite of his lawyer’s advice, on pleading guilty, and who much of the time seemed to be under the impression that he was a costumed villain in a comic book, was clearly out of his mind. He belonged in Islip, not Sing Sing. That the bomb her brother had made—in the shape of a trident, how could they not see the craziness in that?—had somehow managed to explode, injuring only him, Ruth blamed on the bad luck and fumbling nature that had never deserted her brother. As for the harsh sentence he had received, this she blamed, as did Carl Henry, not only on the workings of the Jewish Machine but, with an unwillingness that wrenched her heart, on her employer, Mr. James Haworth Love himself. James Love had, from the early thirties, been extremely vocal in his opposition to Charles Lindbergh, to the America Firsters, and above all to the German-American Bund and other pro-German groups in this country, which in speeches and newspaper editorials he typically characterized as “fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs,” attacks that had climaxed, at least in Ruth’s view, with the prosecution and imprisonment of her brother. Thus was the dull dislike that Ruth ordinarily would have borne for Sammy made keen by her suppurating detestation of his host for the weekend, of the way Mr. James Haworth Love conducted his affairs, both political and social. Witnessing this relaxation of the ban, unarticulated yet absolute, on the presence of Jews at Pawtaw, hitherto among the few traditions of his parents and empire-building grandparents that Mr. Love had continued to respect, seeing it as a final proof of the man’s shamelessness and debility, her heart rebelled. It would require only one further outrage to push Ruth into taking steps to alleviate the pressure that had been building in her breast for so long.

  “Saw the smoke,” Mr. Love barked. “Fires lit. Very good, Ruth. How are you?”

  “I’m sure I’ll live.”

  The men all trooped up the steps, tossing their bright empty greetings in her direction, complimenting her on her hair, the style of which had not altered since 1923, her color, the smells emanating from the kitchen. She greeted them politely, with something of her usual wary wryness, like a schoolteacher welcoming the return from vacation of a group of smart alecks and cutups, and told them, one by one, which rooms would be theirs and how they could find them if they didn’t already know. The bedrooms had each been named by some early Love enthusiast after vanished local Indian tribes. One of the men, extraordinarily good-looking and with eyes the very color of the new Cadillac and a dimple in his chin, much taller and broader than any of the others, shook her hand and said that he had heard the most amazing things about her oyster stew. The spindly-legged Jew hung back, sheltering in the lee of the green-eyed giant. His only greeting to her was another crooked smile and a nervous cough.

  “You’ll be in Raritan,” she told him, having held back especially for him this smallest and most cramped of the third-floor guest rooms, one with no porch and only a fragmentary view of the sea.

  He looked almost fearful at this information, as if it were news of a grave responsibility she had placed upon him.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

  Ruth would remember afterward that she was troubled by a brief, mild emotion that lay somewhere between affection and pity for the little snub-nosed Jewish boy; he seemed so out of place among all these tall and sporting daffodils. She had a hard time believing that he could really be one of them. She wondered if he had gotten here by some kind of mistake.

  Ruth Ebling could not have known how nearly her speculations on Sam’s status and position coincided with his own.

  “Jesus,” he said to Tracy Bacon, “what am I doing here?” He dropped his suitcase. It landed with a muffled thud on the thick carpet, one of several worn Oriental rugs with which the creaking floorboards of Raritan were patchworked. Tracy had already left his bags down in his second-floor room, which, in a striking access of precognition by that Indian-loving ancestor, had been designated Ramcock. He lay now across Sammy’s iron bed on his back, legs raised and crossed at the knee, arms folded beneath his head, picking with a fingernail at the peeling white enamel of the bedstead. Like many big, well-built men, he was an inveterate layabout who disdained physical exertion except in brief Red Grange bursts of frantic grace. He furthermore detested standing upright, which made his radio work particularly obnoxious to him; and he loathed being obliged to sit up straight. His inherent ability to feel at ease wherever he went was coupled powerfully with a bone-deep laziness. Whenever he entered a room, no matter how formal the occasion, he generally sought out a place where he could at least put his feet up. “I’ll bet I’m the first kike that’s ever set foot in this joint.”

  “I don’t think I’ll take that bet.”

  Sammy went to the little window, each of its panes smudged with a thumbprint of frost, in the narrow dormer that overlooked the back lawn. He cranked it open, letting in a cool blast of brine and chimney smoke and the rumblings and fizzings of the sea. In the last quarter hour of the day, Dave Fellowes and John Pye were way down on the beach, tossing a football with a certain grim fervor, in dungarees and heavy sweatshirts but with their feet bare. John Pye was also a radio actor, the star of Paging Dr. Maxwell, and a friend of Bacon, who had introduced Pye to the sponsor of The Adventures of the Escapist. Fellowes ran the Manhattan office of a member of New York’s congressional delegation. Sammy watched as Fellowes turned his back on Pye and took off down the beach, scattering white puffs of sand. Fellowes reached up, looking over his shoulder, and a short, accurate forward pass from Pye found his hands.

  “This is so strange,” said Sammy.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it is,” Bacon said. “I guess it must be.”

  “You wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, I … maybe the reason I don’t think so is that I always felt so strange, you know, before I found out that I wasn’t the only one in the world—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Sammy said gently. He had not meant to sound argumentative. “That’s not what feels strange to me, kid. Not because they’re all a bunch of fairies, or because Mr. James Love the sock magnate is a fairy, or because you’re a fairy or I’m a fairy.”

  “If you are,” Bacon said with mock correctitude.

  “If I am.”

  Bacon gazed at the ceiling, arms folded contentedly under his head. “Which you are.”

  “Which I might be.”

  In fact, the question of what a later generation would term Sammy’s sexual orientation seemed, at least to the satisfaction of everyone who made up the party at Pawtaw on that first weekend of December 1941, to have largely been settled. In the weeks since their visit to the World’s Fair and their lovemaking inside the dark globe of the Perisphere, Sammy had, along with his strapping young paramour, become a fixture in the circle of John Pye, considered at that time, and for long afterward in the mythos of gay New York, to be the most beautiful man in the city. At a spot in the East Fifties called the Blue Parrot, Sammy had experienced the novelty of seeing men doing the Texas Tommy and the Cinderella, close, in darkness, though his weak stems prevented him from joining in the fun. Tomorrow, as everyone knew, he and Tracy were leaving for the West Coast, to take up their new life together as scenarist and serial star.

  “So what is strange, then?”
said Tracy.

  Sammy shook his head. “It’s just, look at you. Look at them.” He jerked a thumb toward the open window. “It’s that they could all play the secret identity of a guy in tights. Your bored playboy, your gridiron hero, your crusading young district attorneys. Bruce Wayne. Jay Garrick. Lamont Cranston.”

  “Jay Garrick.”

  “The Flash. Blond, muscles, nice teeth, a pipe.”

  “I would never smoke a pipe.”

  “This one went to Princeton, that one went to Harvard, the other one went to Oxford.…”

  “Filthy habit.”

  Sammy wrinkled up his face to acknowledge that his attempts at rumination were being parried, then looked away. Down on the beach, Fellowes had tackled John Pye. They were rolling in the sand.