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All this is by way of explaining why Rosa, who had been stricken with panic and confusion at the telephone call from Sammy, gave so little thought to Josef Kavalier once she had sat down to work. Alone in her makeshift studio in the garage, she smoked, listened to Mahler and Faure on WQXR, and dissolved herself in the travails and shapely contours of poor Nancy Lambert, as she would have on a day that included no reports of her son's wild truancy or revenants from the deepest-buried history of her heart. It was not until she heard the scrape of the Studebaker against the driveway that she even looked up from her work.
The macaroni and cheese turned out to be a superfluous gesture; Tommy was asleep by the time they got him home. Sammy struggled into the house with the boy in his arms.
"Did he have di
"He had a doughnut."
"That isn't di
"He had a Coke."
He was deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, breath whistling through his teeth, mysteriously lost in an extra-large Police Athletic League sweatshirt.
"You broke your ribs," Rosa told Joe.
"No," Joe said. "Just a bad bruise." There was a fiery welt on his cheek, partially covered by a taped square of gauze. His nose looked luminous at the nostrils, as if it had recently been bleeding.
"Out of my way," Sammy said, through his teeth. "I don't want to drop him."
"Let me," Joe said.
"Your ribs-"
"Let me."
I want to see this, thought Rosa. In fact, there had been nothing in her life that she had ever wanted to see more.
"Why don't you let him?" she said to Sammy.
So Sammy, holding his breath, wincing in sympathy and wrinkling his brow, tipped the sleeping boy into Joe's arms. Joe's face tightened in pain, but he bore it and stood holding Tommy, gazing with alarming tenderness down at his face. Rosa and Sammy stood ardently watching Joe Kavalier look at his son. Then, at the same instant, they each seemed to notice that this was what the other was doing, and they blushed and smiled, awash in the currents of doubt and shame and contentment that animated all the proceedings of their jury-rigged family.
Joe cleared his throat, or perhaps he was grunting in pain.
They looked at him.
"Where is his room?" Joe said.
"Oh, sorry," said Rosa. "God. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"It's this way."
She led him down the hall and into Tommy's bedroom. Joe laid the boy on top of the bedspread, which was patterned with colonial tavern signs and with curl-cornered proclamations printed in a bumpy Revolutionary War typeface. It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids. She leaned over and untied his shoes, then pulled them off. His socks clung to his pale, perspired feet. Joe took the shoes and socks from her. Rosa unbuttoned Tommy's corduroy trousers and tugged them down his legs, then pulled up his shirt and the sweatshirt until his head and arms were a lost bundle within. She gave a kind of slow practiced tug, and the top portion of her boy popped free.
"Nicely done," Joe said.
Tommy had apparently been plied with ice cream and soda pop at the police station, to loosen his tongue. His face was going to have to be washed. Rosa went for a cloth. Joe followed her into the bathroom, carrying the shoes in one hand and the pair of socks, rolled into a neat ball, in the other.
"I have di
"I'm very hungry."
"You didn't break a tooth or anything?"
"Luckily, no."
It was crazy; they were just talking. His voice sounded like his voice, orotund but with a slight bassoon reediness; the droll Hapsburg accent was still there, sounding doctoral and not quite genuine. Out in the living room, Sammy had turned over the record she'd put on earlier; Rosa recognized it now: Stan Kenton's New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm. Joe followed her back into the bedroom, and Rosa scrubbed the sweet epoxy from Tommy's baby-boy lips and fingers. An unwrapped Charms Pop that he had plunged, half-sucked, into his pants pocket had mapped out a sticky continent on the smooth hairless hollow of his hip. Rosa wiped it away. Tommy muttered and winced throughout her attentions; once, his eyes shot open, filled with alarmed intelligence, and Rosa and Joe grimaced at each other: they had woken him up. But the boy closed his eyes again, and with Joe lilting and Rosa pulling, they got him into his pajamas. Joe hefted him, groaning again, as Rosa peeled back the covers of the bed. Then they tucked him in. Joe smoothed the hair back from Tommy's forehead.
"What a big boy," he said.
"He's almost twelve," Rosa said.
"Yes, I know."
She looked down at his hands, by his sides. He was still holding on to the pair of shoes.
"Are you hungry?" she said, keeping her voice low.
"I'm very hungry."
As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. She closed the door behind them.
"Let's eat," she said.
It wasn't until the three of them were seated around the dinette in the kitchen that she got her first good look at Joe. There was something denser about him now. His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy's or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak.
As they ate, Sammy told Rosa the story of his day, from the time he had run into the boys at the Excelsior Cafeteria until the moment of Joe's leap into the void.
"You could have died," Rosa said in disgust, slapping gently at Joe's shoulder. "Very easily. Rubber bands."
"The trick was performed with success by Theo Hardeen in 1921, from the Pont Alexandre III," Joe said. "The elastic band was specially prepared in that case, but I studied, and the conclusion was that my own was even stronger and more elastic."
"Only it snapped," Sammy said.
Joe shrugged. "I was wrong."
Rosa laughed.
"I don't say I wasn't wrong, I'm just saying I didn't think there was much chance I was going to die at all."
"Did you think there was any chance they were going to lock you up on Rikers Island?" Sammy said. "He got arrested."
"You got arrested?" said Rosa. "What for? 'Creating a public nuisance'?"
Joe made a face, at once embarrassed and a
"It was for squatting," Sammy said.
"It's not anything." Joe looked up from his plate. "I have been in a jail before."
Sammy turned to her. "He keeps saying things like that."
"Man of mystery."
"I find it very irritating."
"Did you make bail?" said Rosa.
"Your father helped me."
"My father? He was helpful?"
"Apparently the elder Mrs. Wagner owns two Magrittes," Sammy said. "The mayor's mother. The charges were dropped."
"Two late Magrittes," said Joe.
The telephone rang.
"I'll get it," Sammy said. He went to the phone. "Hello. Uh-huh. Which paper? I see. No, he won't talk to you. Because he would not be caught dead talking to a Hearst paper. No. No. No, that isn't true at all." Apparently, Sammy's desire to set the record straight was greater than his disdain for the New York Journal-American. He carried the receiver into the dining room; they had just had an extra-long cord put on so that it could reach the dining table Sammy used as a desk whenever he worked at home.