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She stopped stroking his hair. He guessed she had heard a certain amount of sarcasm in his tone, though he was not feeling at all sarcastic, and in fact, he admired her for what she was and had always been willing to do for his sake.
"It's just," he said, "I think I have another point I need to prove."
There was a cough, and they turned and saw Joe standing in the doorway, hair standing up all over his head, mouth open, trying to blink away something he did not want to see.
"Is he-you aren't leaving?'"
"For a while," Sammy said. "At least."
"Where are you going to go?"
"I was thinking Los Angeles."
"Sammy," Joe said, taking a step toward Sammy that had something menacing about it. "Damn it, you can't.'"
Sammy drew back a little and raised his arm as if to ward off his old friend. "Take it easy, Joe. I appreciate the sentiment, but I-"
"It is not a sentiment, idiot. After I left you this morning, I went over there and made an offer for the Empire Comics. To buy it. And Shelly Anapol accepted."
"What? An offer? Joe, are you crazy?"
"You said you had some ideas. You said I got you stirred up again."
"Yeah, you did, but, I mean. Jesus, how could you just go and do that without asking me first?"
"It's my money," Joe said. "You have no say in the matter."
"Huh," Sammy said, and then again, "huh. Well." He stretched and yawned. "Maybe I could write the stories out there, and mail them to you. I don't know. We'll see. I'm too tired for this now, okay?"
"Well, you won't leave tonight, Sam, don't be crazy. It's too late. There isn't a train for you to leave with."
"Stay till the morning at least," Rosa said.
"I guess I could sleep on the couch," said Sammy.
Rosa and Joe looked at each other, startled, alarmed.
"Sammy, Joe and I aren't-this isn't because-we haven't been-"
"I know," Sammy said. "The couch is fine. You don't even need to change the sheets."
Rosa said that while Sammy might be fully prepared to embark on the life of a hobo, there was no way in hell that he would begin his new career in her house. She went to the linen closet and brought fresh sheets and a pillowcase. She moved aside the neat pile of Joe's used linens and spread the new ones, tucking, and smoothing, and pulling back the blanket to expose the reverse of the floral flat sheet in a neat diagonal fold. Sammy stood over her, making a fuss over how appetizing it all looked after the day he'd had. When she let him sit down, he bounced on the cushion, slipped off his shoes, and then lay back with the happy sigh of an aching man sliding into a nice hot bath.
"This is feeling very strange to me," Rosa said. She was gripping the pillowcase filled with Joe's old sheets in one hand, like a sack, and dabbing at the tears in her eyes with the other.
"It's been strange all along," said Sammy.
She nodded. Then she handed the sack of dirty linens to Joe and started down the hall. Joe stood beside the couch for a moment, looking at Sammy with a perplexed expression, as if trying to work his way backward, one at a time, through the steps of the clever feat of substitution that Sammy had just pulled off.
When the household woke the next morning, quite early, the couch had been stripped, the sheets left folded on the coffee table with the pillow balanced on top, and Sammy and his suitcase were long gone. In lieu of a note or other farewell gesture, he had left only, in the center of the kitchen table, the small two-by-three card that he had been given back in 1948, when he had purchased the lot on which the house now stood. It was wrinkled and dog-eared and dyed by the stain of long years spent in Sammy's wallet. When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I am indebted to Will Eisner, to Stan Lee, and in particular to the late Gil Kane for sharing their reminiscences of the Golden Age, and also to Dick Ayers, Sheldon Moldoff, Martin "Green Lantern" Nodell, and to Marv Wolfman and Lauren Shuler Do
I would like to thank the MacDowell Colony for providing the magical gifts of space, time, and quiet, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund for its support.
The research for this novel was undertaken primarily at the Doheny Memorial Library at U.S.C., the U.C.L.A. College Library, the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, the McHenry Library at U.C. Santa Cruz, and the New-York Historical Society.
I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with regret, ignored them.
I have relied on the prior labor of many writers here, but above all on that of the collective authors of the 1959 W.P.A. New York City Guide (John Cheever and Richard Wright among them), and on the work of E. J. Kahn, Jr., Brendan Gill, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway, and all the other great urban portraitists, many of them anonymous, who never failed me when I went searching for their lost city in dusty old bound back issues of The New Yorker. Other helpful or indispensable books were: Letters from Prague: 1939-1941, compiled by Raya Czerner Schapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg, The Nightmare of Reason, by Ernst Pawel, and Elder of the Jews, by Ruth Bondy; The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1941 edited by E. Eastman Irvine, No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester, The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter, and Delivered from Evil, by Robert Leckie; The Secrets of Houdini, by J. C. Ca