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"I'm just taking another look at these pages of yours," Sammy said. "This is beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. I'm really looking forward to reading it all."
"I don't think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark."
"It does seem dark."
"Too dark for a comic book, I think."
"Is this the begi
Joe had arrived in New York in the fall of 1949 with a twofold intention: to begin work on a long story about the Golem, which had been coming to him, panel by panel and chapter by chapter, in his dreams, in diners, on long bus rides all across the south and northwest, since he had set out from Chincoteague three years before; and, gradually, carefully, even at first perhaps stealthily, to see Rosa again. He had reestablished a few tentative co
At some point, he had begun to tell himself that his plan was not merely twofold but two-step-that when he was finished with The Golem, then he would be ready to see Rosa again. He had left her- escaped from her-in grief and rage and a spasm of irrational blame. It would be best, he told himself-wouldn't it?-for him to return to her purged of all that. But while there might have been at first some merit in this rationalization, by 1953, when Tommy Clay had stumbled upon him in the magic shop, Joe's ability to heal himself had long since been exhausted. He needed Rosa-her love, her body, but above all, her forgiveness-to complete the work that his pencils had begun. The only trouble was that, by then, as he had told Rosa, it was too late. He had waited too long. The sixty miles of Long Island that separated him from Rosa seemed more impassable than the jagged jaw of one thousand between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, than the three blocks of London that lay between Wakefield and his loving wife.
"Is there even a script?" Sammy said, turning over another page. "Is it, what, is it like a silent movie?"
There were no balloons in any of the panels, no words at all except for those that appeared as part of the artwork itself-signs on buildings and roads, labels on bottles, addresses on love letters that formed part of the plot-and the two words the golem! which reappeared on the splash page at the start of each chapter, each time in a different guise, the eight letters and exclamation point transformed now into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into nine marionettes, nine spidery bloodstains, the long shadows of nine haunted and devastating women. Joe had intended eventually to paste in balloons and fill them with text, but he had never been able to bring himself to mar the panels in this way.
"There is a script. In German."
"That ought to go over big."
"It will not go over at all. It's not to sell." Something paradoxical had occurred in the five years he had worked on The Golem: the more of himself, of his heart and his sorrows, that he had poured into the strip-the more convincingly he demonstrated the power of the comic book as a vehicle of personal expression-the less willingness he felt to show it to other people, to expose what had become the secret record of his mourning, of his guilt and retribution. It made him nervous just to have Sammy paging through it. "Come on, Sam, hey? Maybe we'd better go."
But Sammy was not listening. He was flipping slowly through the pages of the first chapter, deciphering the action from the flow of wordless images across the page. Joe was aware of a strange warmth in his belly, behind his diaphragm, as he watched Sammy read his secret book.
"I-I guess I could try to tell you-" he began.
"It's fine, I'm getting it." Sammy reached into the pocket of his overcoat, without looking, and took out his wallet. He pulled out a few bills, ones and a five. "Tell you what," he said. "I think I'm go
"You're going to read this now?"
"Sure."
"All of it?"
"Why not? I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius."
Joe rubbed at the side of his nose, feeling the warmth of Sammy's flattery spread to his legs and fill his throat. "Okay," he said at last. "So you can read it. But maybe you can wait till we get home?"
"I don't want to wait."
"I'm being evicted."
"Fuck them."
Joe nodded and took the money from Sammy. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had allowed his cousin to boss him around in this way. He found that, as in the past, he rather liked it.
"And, Joe," Sammy said, without looking up from the pile of pages. Joe waited. "Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it's okay, if you want to… that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you're his father."
"I see. Yes, I suppose you're… I will talk to him."
"We could all do it. Maybe we could sit him down. You. His mother. Me."
"Sammy," Joe said. "I don't know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But-thank you."
"For what?"
"I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don't deserve to have a friend like you."
"Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I'm such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn't want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew."
"Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew."
"It's that simple."
Joe shook his head. "That could be or is why you married her," he said. "But that doesn't explain how come you stayed. You are Tommy's father, Sammy. As much or really, I think, a lot more than I am."