Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"You're up?" Sammy said.

Tommy nearly jumped out of his skin; he had always been an easy child to startle. He yanked the patch up over his dark, tousled head and turned, blushing deeply. He was in possession of both his eyes; they were bright blue, with a slight puffiness of the lower lids. There was, in fact, nothing at all wrong with his vision. His brain was something of a puzzle to Sammy, but there wasn't any problem with his eyes.

"I don't know what happened," Tommy said. "I just somehow woke up."

He stuffed the eye patch into the pocket of his pajama top. The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa's idea of fostering a sense of connection between lather and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.

"That's unusual," Sammy said.

"I know." Usually I have to set off a charge of dynamite to get you up."

"That's true."

"You're like your mother that way." Rosa was still in bed, buried under an avalanche of pillows. She suffered from insomnia and rarely managed to fall asleep before three or four, but once she had gone under, it was nearly impossible to rouse her. It was Sammy's job to get Tommy out of the house on school mornings. "In fact, the only time you ever get yourself up early," Sammy continued, allowing a note of prosecutorial insinuation to enter his voice, "is for something like your birthday. Or when we're leaving for a trip."

"Or if I have to get a shot," Tommy said helpfully. "At the doctor."

"Or." Sammy had been hanging from the doorjamb, half in, half out of the room, but now he went over to stand behind Tommy. He was aware of an impulse to put his hand on the boy's shoulder, to let it lie there with the admonitory weight of a father's, but in the end, he just folded his arms and looked at the reflection of Tommy's serious face in the mirror. It pained Sammy to acknowledge it, but he was no longer comfortable around the boy whom, for the past twelve years, he had been obliged and delighted to call his son. Tommy had always been a tractable, moonfaced, watchful little boy, but lately, as his soft chestnut hair turned to black wire loops and his nose struck boldly out on its own, there began to gather around the features of his face some trouble that promised to develop into outright handsomeness. He was already taller than his mother, and nearly as tall as Sam. He took up greater mass and volume in the house, moved in unaccustomed ways, and gave off unfamiliar odors. Sammy found himself hanging back, giving ground, keeping out of Tommy's way. "You don't have something… planned for today?"

"No, Pop."

He was jocular. "No trips to the 'eye doctor'?"

"Ha," the boy said, wrinkling his freckled nose in a base simulation of amusement. "Okay, Pop."

"Okay, what?"

"Well, I'd better get dressed. I'm going to be late for school."

"Because if you were."

"I'm not."

"If you were, I would have to chain you to the bed. You realize that."

"I was only playing with an eye patch. Jeez."

"All right."

"I wasn't going to do anything bad." His voice put quotation marks around the last word.

"I'm glad to hear it," Sammy said. He didn't believe Tommy, but he tried to conceal his doubts. He didn't like to antagonize the boy. Sammy worked five long days a week in the city, and brought work home on the weekends. He could not bear to waste, in arguing, the brief hours he spent with Tommy. He wished that Rosa were awake, so that he could ask her what to do about the eye patch. He grabbed hold of Tommy's hair and, in an unconscious tribute to a favorite parental mannerism of his mother, vigorously shook Tommy's head from side to side. "A roomful of toys, you play with a ten-cent eye patch from Spiegelman's."

Sammy padded down the hall, scratching at his bottom, the bandylegged captain of his own strange frigate, to make Tommy his lunch. It was a trim enough little tub, their house in Bloomtown. Its purchase had followed a string of ill-advised investments in the forties, among them the Clay Associates advertising firm, the Sam Clay School of Magazine Writing, and an apartment in Miami Beach for Sam's mother, in which she had died of a brain aneurysm after eleven days of retired discontentment, and which was then sold-six months after purchase-at a considerable loss. The last irreducible nut that remained from the palmy days at Empire Comics had been just enough for a down payment here in Bloomtown. And for a long time, Sammy had loved the house, the way a man was supposed to love his boat. It was the one tangible reminder of his brief success, and by far the best thing that had ever come of his money.

Bloomtown had been announced in 1948, with ads in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and all the big New York papers. A fully functioning three-bedroom Cape Cod house, complete down to the ringing bottles of milk in the refrigerator, had been erected on the showroom floor of a former Cadillac dealership near Columbus Circle. The struggling young families of the Northeast-the white ones-were invited to visit the Bloomtown Idea Pavilion, tour the Bloomtown Home, and learn now an entire city of sixty thousand people was to be planted amid the potato fields west of Islip; a city of modest, affordable houses, each with own yard and garage. An entire generation of young fathers and mothers raised in the narrow stairways and crowded rooms of the rust-and-brick boroughs of New York, Sammy Clay among them, showed up to flick the model light switches, bounce on the model mattresses, and recline for just a moment in the pressed metal chaise longue on the cellophane lawn, tilting their chins upward to catch the imaginary rays of the suburban Long Island sun. They sighed, and felt that one of the deepest longings in their hearts might one day soon be answered. Their families were chaotic things, loud and distempered, fueled by anger and the exigencies of the wise-guy attitude, and since the same was true of New York City itself, it was hard not to believe that a patch of green grass and a rational floor plan might go a long way to soothing the jangling bundles of raw nerves they felt their families had become. Many, Sammy Clay once again among them, reached for their checkbooks and reserved one of the five hundred lots to be developed in the initial phase of construction.

For months afterward, Sammy carried around in his wallet a little card that had come with the packet of documents of sale and read simply:

THE CLAYS

127 LAVOISIER DRIVE

BLOOMTOWN, NEW YORK, U.S.A.

(All the streets in their neighborhood were to be named after eminent scientists and inventors.)

That feeling of pride had long since dissipated. Sammy no longer paid very much attention at all to his own Cape Cod, a Number Two or Penobscott model, with bay window and miniature-golf-sized widow's walk. He adopted the same policy with regard to it that he followed with his wife, his employment, and his love life. It was all habit. The rhythms of the commuter train, the school year, publishing schedules, summer vacations, and of his wife's steady calendar of moods had inured him to the charms and torments of his life. Only his relationship with Tommy, in spite of the recent light frost of irony and distance, remained unpredictable, alive. It was thick with regret and pleasure. When they did get an hour together, planning a universe on loose-leaf paper, or playing Ethan Allen's All-Star Baseball, it was invariably the happiest hour of Sammy's week.

When he walked into the kitchen, he was surprised to find Rosa sitting at the table with a cup of boiled water. On the surface of the water floated a canoe of sliced lemon.

"What's going on?" Sammy said, running water into the enameled coffeepot. "Everybody's up."