The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (42 page)

"Josef sends you a kiss," he said in Yiddish.

"I'm glad," Bubbie said in English. "And how is Samuel?"

"Samuel? Oh, he's fine," Sammy said.

"She kicked me out." Bacon emerged from the kitchen wearing a little dishwashing apron patterned with pale blue soap bubbles. "I guess I was getting in the way."

"Oh, you don't want to do that," Sammy said. "I got in the way of a dinner roll once and required nine stitches."

"Funny," said Ethel, stepping into the living room. She untied her apron and threw it at Sammy. "Come and eat."

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef—flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments. Tracy Bacon took three helpings. He cleaned his plate with a piece of challah. His cheeks were rosy with the intensity of his pleasure in the meal. It was either that or the horseradish.

"Whew!" he said, laying down his napkin at last. "Mrs. K., I never had better in my life."

"Yes, but better what?" Sammy said.

"Did you get enough to eat?" Ethel said. She looked pleased but, it seemed to Sammy, a little taken aback.

"Did you save room for my babka?" Bubbie said.

"I
always
save room for dessert, Mrs. Kavalier," Bacon said. He turned to Sammy. "Is babka dessert?"

"An eternal question among my people," Sammy said. "There are some who argue that it's actually a kind of very small hassock."

Ethel got up to make coffee. Bacon stood up and started to clear away the dishes.

"Enough already," Sammy said, pushing him back down into his chair. "You're making me look very bad here." He gathered up the dirty plates and utensils and carried them into the tiny kitchen.

"Don't stack them," his mother said by way of thanks. "It gets the bottoms dirty."

"I'm just trying to be helpful."

"Your kind of help is worse than no help." She set the percolator on the ring and turned on the gas. "Stand back," she said, striking a match. She must have been lighting gas stoves for thirty years, but each time it was as if entering a burning building. She ran water in the sink and slid the dishes in. Steam rose from the bubbles of Lux; the dishwater must of course be antibacterially hot. "He looks just like Josef draws him," she said.

"Doesn't he, though."

"Is everything all right with your cousin?"

Sammy guessed that her feelings were hurt. "He really wanted to come, Ma," he said. "But it was short notice, you know?"

"It doesn't make any difference to me."

"I'm just saying."

"Is there news? What does the man at the agency say?"

"Hoffman says the kids are still in Portugal."

"With the nuns." As a girl, during the first war, Ethel had been sheltered briefly by Orthodox nuns. They had treated her with a kindness that she had never forgotten, and Sammy knew that she would have preferred her little nephew to remain with these Portuguese Carmelites, in the relative safety of a Lisbon orphanage, rather than to set off across a submarine-haunted ocean in a thirdhand steamer with a rickety name. But the nuns were apparently under pressure from the Catholic Church in Portugal not to make harboring Jewish children from Central Europe a permanent thing.

"The boat is on its way over there now," Sammy said. "To get them. It got itself into one of these convoy things, you know, with five U.S. Navy destroyers. Thomas ought to be here in a month, Joe said."

"A month. Here." His mother handed him a dishtowel and a dish. "Dry."

"Yeah, so Joe's happy about that. He seems happy with Rosa, too. He's not working those crazy hours like he used to anymore. We're making enough money now that I was able to talk him into dropping all the books he was working on but three.
[8]
^[8]
I had to hire
five
guys to replace him."

"I'm glad he's settling down. He was getting wild before. Fighting. Getting hurt on purpose."

"The thing is, I think he likes it here," Sammy said. "I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to stay, even after the war's over."

"Kayn ayn hora,"
his mother said. "Let's hope he has a choice."

"That's a cheerful thought."

"I don't know this girl very well. But she seemed ..." She hesitated, unwilling to go so far as to bestow actual praise on Rosa. "I got the feeling she has a good head on her shoulders." The previous month, Joe and Rosa had taken Ethel to see
Here Comes Mr. Jordan;
Ethel was partial to Robert Montgomery. "He could do much worse."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "Rosa's all right."

Then, for a minute, he just dried the dishes and forks she passed to him and set them, under his mother's scrutiny, in the rack. There was no sound but the squeak of the dishtowel, the chiming of the dishes, and the steady trickling of hot water into the sink. Bacon and Bubbie seemed, in the dining room, to have run out of things to say to each other. It was one of those prolonged silences that meant, Ethel always used to say, that somewhere an idiot had just been born.

"I'd
like to meet someone, you know," Sammy said at last. "I mean, I've been thinking. Just recently. Meet someone nice."

His mother shut off the tap and pulled the stopper from the drain. Her hands were bright red from the scalding water.

"I'd like that, too," she said. She opened another drawer and took out the box of waxed paper. She tore off a piece, spread it on the zinc counter, and took a dish from the rack.

"So how was he?" she asked him, setting the dish upside down on the sheet of waxed paper.

"Who's that?"

She nodded toward the dining room. "That one." She folded the ends of the sheet of paper up over the dish and smoothed them down. "At the rehearsal today."

"He was all right," Sammy said. "He was good. Yeah, I think he'll do fine."

"Will he?" she said, and, lifting the wrapped dish, she looked him in the eye for the first time all evening.

Though it would recur often enough in his memory in later years, he would never know exactly what she had meant by that look.

3

The following day, a wealthy young New Yorker named Leon Douglas Saks followed in the footsteps of his grandfathers and was called before the Torah to become a bar mitzvah. He was a second cousin of Rosa's, and although she had never met the boy, she managed without too much trouble to wangle an invitation to the reception at the Pierre as the date of one of the entertainers on the bill, the performing magician known as the Amazing Cavalieri.

When she woke from a post-coital nap that Saturday afternoon, in her bedroom under the eaves, the Amazing Cavalieri was standing in front of her scarf-draped mirror, looking with remarkable interest at his own naked reflection. Rosa pulled a pillow over her head and lay very still so that she could watch him watching himself. She could smell the trace of his breath in her own exhalations, the indeterminate but distinctive flavor of his lips, somewhere between maple and smoke. At first, as she watched him, she thought that he was engaging in rank self-admiration, and since she considered his lack of vanity about his appearance—his ink-stained shirtfronts, rumpled jackets, and ragged trouser cuffs—to be itself a kind of vanity, one for which she loved him, she was amused. She wondered if he could see how much weight he had added to his long, spare frame over the last several months. When they had first started going out, he was so absorbed by his work that he rarely took time for meals, existing quite mysteriously on coffee and bananas, but as Rosa herself, to her considerable satisfaction, had begun to absorb Joe more and more, he had become a regular guest at her father's dinner table, where there were never fewer than five courses and three different varieties of wine. His ribs no longer stuck out, and his skinny little-boy's behind had taken on a manlier heft. It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean. She wondered if this could be what he was looking at now—this evidence of his irrefutable existence here, on this shore, in this bedroom, as her Joe. For a while she lay staring at the gloved knuckles of his spine, the stippled pale stone of his shoulders. Presently, however, she became aware of the way he kept narrowing and widening his blue eyes, tightening them at the corners and then opening them into a pop-eyed stare, over and over again. As he did so he moved his lips constantly, engaging in some kind of patter or incantation. From time to time he gestured broadly, flourishing his fingers around a handful of empty air, pointing proudly at some invisible wonderful thing.

Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and threw off the pillow.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He jumped and knocked his cigarette from the ashtray on her dressing table. He retrieved it, brushing ash from the carpet, then came over and sat on the bed. "How long were you watching?"

"An hour," she lied.

He nodded. Had he really been standing there like that for an hour, giving himself the evil eye and marveling at nothing?

"You looked like you were trying to hypnotize yourself or something."

"I guess I was. I guess I'm a little nervous," he said. As he spent night after night in the company of inveterate and literate talkers, his English had improved considerably. "Performing in front of your family. Your father." Rosa's father had not appeared at a Saks family event in years, but he was attending the reception tonight just to see Joe perform. He had been invited to the religious portion of the proceedings that morning, too, at B'nai Jeshurun, but God forbid. He hadn't been inside a synagogue, he calculated, since 1899. "Right now he thinks I'm the best magician in New York," Joe continued. "Because he's never seen me. After tonight, maybe he'll think I'm a palooka."

"He'll love you," she said. She was touched to see that her father's opinion meant so much to him. She interpreted it as further evidence of his belonging to her. "Don't worry."

"Mm-hmm," he said. "You already think I'm a palooka."

"Not me," she said, running a hand up his thigh and taking hold of his penis, which at once began to show renewed interest in her. "I know you're magic."

She had seen his act twice now. The truth was that Joe was a talented but careless performer, liable to bite off more than he could chew. He had renewed his career, as promised, with the Hoffman reception at the Hotel Trevi the previous November, and had gotten off to a rather shaky start when—forgetting the disdain in which his teacher Bernard Kornblum had held such "mechanisms," and succumbing to his fatal weakness, from which he suffered all his life, for acts of daring and the beau geste—he became hopelessly entangled in the Emperor's Dragon, an elaborate set-piece trick that he had purchased, on credit, from Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. It was a hoary bit of mock-Chinese flummery from the heyday of Ching Ling Foo, in which a silk "dragon" in a brass cage was made to breathe fire, then lay a number of colored eggs, each presented to the inspection of a witness for signs of seams or apertures before it was cracked with a silver wand, disgorging some personal item belonging to a member of the audience who, up to this point, had not been aware of his watch's or lighter's disappearance from his or her person. Picking pockets had never been Joe's great strength, however, and he was long out of practice. In the Trevi's lobby, before the show, there was an unpleasant incident with the bar mitzvah boy's aunt Ida, involving her beaded handbag, which had to be hastily smoothed over by Hermann Hoffman; and, during the performance, Joe singed off his own right eyebrow. He had moved quickly into cards and coins after that, and here his renewed training and the native gifts of his fingers served him well. He caused half-dollars and queens to behave in bizarre ways, endowed them with sentience and emotions, transformed them into kinds of weather, raising storms of aces and calling down nickel lightning from the sky. After Joe finished his act, young Maurice Hoffman brought over a friend who was having his own bar mitzvah in two weeks and had determined to impel his parents to hire Joe for the affair. More bookings followed: all at once Joe discovered that he had become the fashionable entertainer among the wealthy, male Jewish adolescents of the Upper West Side, many of them, of course, loyal readers of Empire comic books. They didn't seem to care that from time to time an ace dropped from his watchband or that he misread their minds. They adored him, and he accepted their adoration. In fact, he seemed actively to seek out the company of thirteen-year-old boys, not so much because it gratified his ego, Rosa thought, as because he longed to see his brother again so badly. And because their company— respectful, sardonic, willing to be awed, stubborn in their desire to get to the bottom of each trick—seemed to promise good things for Thomas on his arrival: friends of raucous intelligence, at once innocent and hard-edged, homely or handsome but uniformly well dressed, their faces free of all shadow save those of acne or an incipient beard. These were boys who lived free of the fear of invasion, occupation, cruel and arbitrary laws. With Rosa's encouragement, Joe began, tentatively at first and then with great ardor, to envision the transformation of his brother into an American boy.