The crux, the key element of the celebration, was a stop at Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop, on West Forty-second Street, to buy the birthday present that Tommy had requested: the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box. At $17.95, it represented considerable largesse on his parents’ part, but they had been from the first remarkably indulgent of his recent interest in magic, as if it accorded with some secret itinerary they had charted out for him in their minds.
Eugene Begelman had started the whole magic business after his father returned from a business trip to Chicago with an oblong box in playing-card colors that contained, its label claimed, “everything necessary to AMAZE and ASTOUND your friends and turn YOU into the life of every party.” Naturally, Tommy had affected to scorn such an agenda, but after Eugene briefly caused most of a hard-boiled egg to disappear, and nearly succeeded in pulling a rather limp artificial mouse out of a supposedly normal lady’s stocking, Tommy had grown impatient. Such impatience—a tightening in his chest, a tapping of his feet, a feeling like the need to urinate—unbearable at times, always seemed to come over him whenever he came across something he could not figure out. He had borrowed the Al-A-Kazzam! Junior Magic Kit from Eugene and taken it home; over one weekend he had mastered every trick. Eugene said he could keep the kit.
Next, Tommy had gone to the library and discovered a hitherto unsuspected shelf of books on card tricks, coin tricks, tricks with silks and scarves and cigarettes. His hands were large for a boy his age, with long fingers, and he had a capacity for standing in front of the mirror with a quarter or a book of matches, repeating the same tiny flexings of his fingers over and over again, that surprised even him. It soothed him, practicing his palmings and fades.
It had not been long before he discovered Louis Tannen’s. The greatest supplier of tricks and supplies on the Eastern seaboard, it was, in 1953, still the unofficial capital of professional conjuring in America, a kind of informal magicians’ club where generations of silk-hat men, passing through town on their way north, south, or west to the vaudeville and burlesque houses, the nightclubs and variety theaters of the nation, had met to exchange information, to cadge money, and to dazzle one another with refinements too artistic and subtle to waste on an audience of elephant gapers and leerers at sawn-in-two ladies. The Ultimate Demon Wonder Box was one of Mr. Louis Tannen’s signature tricks, a perennial bestseller that he personally guaranteed to reduce an audience—not, surely, of card-flipping, stickball-playing fifth graders but, Tommy imagined, of tuxedo-wearing types smoking long cigarettes on ocean liners, and women with gardenias in their hair—to a layer of baffled jelly on the floor. Its name alone was enough to render Tommy breathless with impatience.
At the back of the shop, Tommy had noticed on prior visits, were two doorways. One, painted green, led to the stockroom where the steel rings, trick birdcages, and false-bottomed trunks were kept. The other door, painted black, generally was kept closed, but sometimes a man would come in from the street, greet Louis Tannen or one of the salesmen, and pass through it, giving a glimpse of the world beyond; or else a man might come out, waving to whomever he was leaving behind, tucking five dollars into his pocket or shaking his head in wonderment over whatever miracle he had just witnessed. This was Tannen’s famous back room. Tommy would have given anything—he would have forgone the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box, The Story of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street digs, and the Automat—just to be able to get a peek back there, and to watch the old pros brandish the puzzling flowers of their art. While Mr. Tannen himself was giving Tommy’s father a demonstration of the Wonder Box, showing him that it was empty, feeding it seven scarves, then opening it to show him that it was still empty, a man wandered in, said, “Hello, Lou,” and went on through to the back. As the door opened and closed, Tommy caught a glimpse of some magicians, in sweaters and suits, standing with their backs to him. They were watching another magician at work, a tall, slender guy with a large nose. The man with the large nose looked up, smiling at whatever little stunt he had just pulled off, his deep-set, heavy-lidded blue eyes unimpressed with himself. The other magicians swore in appreciation of the trick. The sad blue eyes met Tommy’s. They widened. The door closed.
“Amazing,” Sammy Clay said, taking out his wallet. “Worth every penny.”
Mr. Tannen handed the box to Tommy, and he took it, his eyes still on the door. He had focused his thoughts into a sharp diamond beam and aimed them at the doorknob, willing it to turn. Nothing happened.
“Tommy?” Tommy looked up. His father was staring down at him. He looked irritated, and his voice had a tone of false good humor. “Do you have even an iota of desire left in your body for that thing?”
And he nodded, though his father had guessed the truth. He looked at the blue lacquered wooden box for which he had ached only last night with a fervor that kept him awake till past midnight. But knowing the secrets of the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box would never get him through the door to Tannen’s back room, where travel-hardened men concocted private wonders for their own melancholy amusement. He looked from the Wonder Box to the black door. It remained closed. The Bug, he knew, would have made a break for it.
“It’s great, Dad,” Tommy said. “I love it. Thanks.”
Three days later, on a Monday, Tommy stopped in at Spiegelman’s Drugs to arrange the comic books. This was a service he provided at no charge and, so far as he knew, unbeknownst to Mr. Spiegelman. The week’s new comics arrived on Monday, and by Thursday, particularly toward the end of the month, the long rows of wire racks along the wall at the back of the store were often a jumble of disordered and dog-eared titles. Every week, Tommy sorted and alphabetized, putting the Nationals with the Nationals, the E.C.s with the E.C.s, the Timelys with the Timelys, reuniting the estranged members of the Marvel Family, isolating the romance titles, which, though he tried to conceal this fact from his mother, he despised, in a bottom corner. Of course he reserved the centermost racks for the nineteen Pharaoh titles. He kept careful count over these, rejoicing when Spiegelman’s sold out its order of Brass Knuckle in a week, feeling a mysterious pity and shame for his father when, for an entire month, all six copies of Sea Yarns, a personal favorite of Tommy’s, languished unpurchased on Spiegelman’s rack. He did all of his rearranging surreptitiously, under the guise of browsing. Whenever another kid came in, or Mr. Spiegelman walked by, Tommy quickly stuffed back whatever errant stack he was holding, any old way, and engaged in a transparent bit of innocent whistling. He further concealed his covert librarianship—which arose chiefly out of loyalty to his father but was also due to an innate dislike of messes—by spending a precious weekly dime on a comic book. This even though his father regularly brought him home big stacks of “the competition,” including many titles that Spiegelman’s didn’t even carry.
Logically, if Tommy were throwing his money away, it ought to have been on one of the lesser-read Pharaohs, such as Farm Stories or the aforementioned nautical book. But when Tommy walked out of Spiegelman’s every Thursday, it was with an Empire comic book in his hand. This was his small, dark act of disloyalty to his father: Tommy loved the Escapist. He admired his golden mane, his strict, at times obsessive, adherence to the rules of fair play, and the good-natured grin he wore at all times, even when taking it on the chin from Kommandant X (who had quite easily made the transition from Nazi to Commie), or from one of the giant henchmen of Poison Rose. The Escapist’s murky origins, in the minds of his father and their lost cousin Joe, chimed obscurely in his imagination with his own. He would read the entire book on the way home from Spiegelman’s, going slow, savoring it, aware of the scrape of his sneakers against the fresh-laid sidewalk, the bobbing progress of his body through the darkness that gathered around the outer margins of the pages as he turned them. Just before he turned the corner onto Lavoisier Drive, he would toss the comic book into the D’Abruzzios’ trash can.
Those portions of his walk to and from school that were not taken up with his reading—in addition to comics, he
devoured science fiction, sea stories, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Buchan, and novels dealing with American or British history—or with detailed mental rehearsals of the full-evening magic shows by which he one day planned to dazzle the world, Tommy passed as scrappy Tommy Clay, All-American schoolboy, known to none as the Bug. The Bug was the name of his costumed crime-fighting alter ego, who had appeared one morning when Tommy was in the first grade, and whose adventures and increasingly involuted mythology he had privately been chronicling in his mind ever since. He had drawn several thick volumes’ worth of Bug stories, although his artistic ability was incommensurate with the vivid scope of his mental imagery, and the resultant mess of graphite smudges and eraser crumbs always discouraged him. The Bug was a bug, an actual insect—a scarab beetle, in his current version—who had been caught, along with a human baby, in the blast from an atomic explosion. Somehow—Tommy was vague on this point—their natures had been mingled, and now the beetle’s mind and spirit, armed with his beetle hardness and proportionate beetle strength, inhabited the four-foot-high body of a human boy who sat in the third row of Mr. Landauer’s class, under a bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sometimes he could avail himself, again rather vaguely, of the characteristic abilities—flight, stinging, silk-spinning—of other varieties of bug. It was always wrapped in the imaginary mantle, as it were, of the Bug that he performed his clandestine work at the Spiegelman’s racks, feelers extended and tensed to detect the slightest tremor of the approach of Mr. Spiegelman, whom Tommy generally cast in this situation as the nefarious Steel Clamp, a charter member of the Bug’s Rogue’s Gallery.
That afternoon, as he was smoothing back the flagged corner of a copy of Weird Date, something surprising occurred. For the first time that he could remember, he felt an actual twinge in the Bug’s keen antennae. Someone was watching him. He looked around. A man was standing there, half-hidden behind a rotating drum spangled with the lenses of fifty-cent reading glasses. The man snapped his face away and pretended that, all along, he had been looking at a tremble of pink and blue light on the back wall of the store. Tommy recognized him at once as the sad-eyed magician from Tannen’s back room. He was not at all surprised to see the man there, in Spiegelman’s Drugs in Bloomtown, Long Island; this was something he always remembered afterward. He even felt—maybe this was a little surprising—glad to see the man. At Tannen’s, the magician’s appearance had struck Tommy as somehow pleasing. He had felt an inexplicable affection for the unruly mane of black curls, the lanky frame in a stained white suit, the large sympathetic eyes. Now Tommy perceived that this displaced sense of fondness had been merely the first stirring of recognition.
When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense. For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced. He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward. Then the man smiled.
“Hello there,” he said. His voice was soft and faintly accented.
“Hello,” said Tommy.
“I’ve always wondered what they keep in those jars.” The man pointed to the front window of the store, where two glass vessels, baroque beakers with onion-dome lids, contained their perpetual gallons of clear fluid, tinted respectively pink and blue. The late-afternoon sun cut through them, casting the rippling pair of pastel shadows on the back wall.
“I asked Mr. Spiegelman that,” Tommy said. “A couple times.”
“What did he say?”
“That it’s a mystery of his profession.”
The man nodded solemnly. “One we must respect.” He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be.
“I’m your cousin,” the man said. “Josef Kavalier.”
“I know,” said Tommy. “I saw your picture.”
The man nodded and took another drag on his cigarette.
“Are you coming over to our house?”
“Not today.”
“Do you live in Canada?”
“No,” said the man. “I don’t live in Canada. I could tell you where I live, but if I do, you must promise not to reveal my whereabouts or identity to any persons. It’s top secret.”
There was a gritty scratch of leather sole against linoleum. Cousin Joe glanced up and smiled a brittle adult smile, eyes shifting uneasily to one side.
“Tommy?” It was Mr. Spiegelman. He was staring curiously at Cousin Joe, not in an unfriendly way, but with an interest that Tommy recognized as distinctly unmercantile. “I don’t believe I know your friend.”
“This … is … Joe,” Tommy said. “I … I know him.” The intrusion of Mr. Spiegelman into the comic book aisle rattled him. The dreamlike sense of calm with which he had reencountered, in a Long Island pharmacy, the cousin who had disappeared from a military transport off the coast of Virginia eight years before, abandoned him. Joe Kavalier was the great silencer of adults in the Clay household; whenever Tommy entered a room and everyone stopped talking, he knew they had been discussing Cousin Joe. Naturally, he had pestered them mercilessly for information on this man of mystery. His father generally refused to talk about the early days of the partnership that had produced the Escapist—“All that stuff kind of depresses me, buddy,” he would say—but he could sometimes be induced to speculate on Joe’s current location, the path of his wanderings, the likelihood of his ever coming back. Such talk, however, made Tommy’s father nervous. He would reach for his cigarettes, a newspaper, the switch of the radio: anything to cut the conversation short.
It was his mother who had provided Tommy with most of what he knew about Joe Kavalier. From her he had learned the full story of the Escapist’s birth, of the vast fortunes that the owners of Empire Comics had made off the work of his father and his cousin. His mother worried about money. The lost bonanza that the Escapist would have represented to the family if they had not been cheated by Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy haunted her. “They were robbed,” she often said. Generally, she confined such statements to moments when mother and son were alone, but occasionally, when Tommy’s father was around, she would drag up his sorry history in the comic book business, of which Cousin Joe had once formed a key part, to bolster some larger, more abstruse point about the state of their lives that Tommy, clinging fiercely to his childish understanding of things, every time managed to miss. His mother, as it happened, was in possession of all manner of interesting facts about Joe. She knew where he had gone to school in Prague, when and by what route he had come to America, the places he had lived in Manhattan. She knew which comic books he had drawn, and what Dolores Del Rio had said to him one spring night in 1941 (“You dance like my father”). Tommy’s mother knew that Joe had been indifferent to music and partial to bananas.
Tommy had always taken the particularity, the enduring intensity, of his mother’s memories of Joe as a matter of course, but then one afternoon the previous summer, at the beach, he had overheard Eugene’s mother talking to another neighborhood woman. Tommy, feigning sleep on his towel, lay eavesdropping on the hushed conversation. It was hard to follow, but one phrase caught his ear and lodged there for many weeks afterward.
“She’s been carrying a torch for him all these years,” the other woman said to Helene Begelman. She was speaking, Tommy knew, of his mother. For some reason, he thought at once of the picture of Joe, dressed in a tuxedo and brandishing a straight flush, that his mother kept on the vanity she had built for herself in her bedroom closet, in a small silver frame. But the full meaning of this expression, “carrying a torch,” remained opaque to Tommy for several more months, until one day, listening with his father to Frank Sinatra sing the intro to “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” its sense had become clear to him; at the same instant, he realized he had known all his life that his mother was in love with Cousin Joe. The information pleased him for some reason. It seemed to a
ccord with certain ideas he had formed about what adult life was really like from perusing his mother’s stories in Heartache, Sweetheart, and Love Crazy.
Still, Tommy didn’t really know Cousin Joe at all, and he had to admit, seeing him through Mr. Spiegelman’s eyes, that he looked kind of shady, loitering there in his wrinkled suit, several day’s growth on his chin. The coils of his hair sprang upward from his head like excelsior. He had a pale, blinking aspect, as if he didn’t get out into the light too often. It was going to be hard to explain him to Mr. Spiegelman without revealing that he was a relative. And why shouldn’t he reveal this? Why shouldn’t he tell everyone he knew—in particular his parents—that Cousin Joe had returned from his wanderings? This was big news. If it later emerged that he had kept this from his mother and father, he would certainly get into trouble.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Page 54