Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Has anybody read it?"

"Estes Kefauver has read it. Anybody get a summons yet?"

Now, word had it, the United States Senate was coming to town. Senator Kefauver of Tennessee and his Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency had determined to make a formal inquiry into the shocking charges leveled by Wertham in his book: that the reading of comic books led directly to antisocial behavior, drug addiction, sexual perversion, even rape and murder.

"That's it, maybe this guy got a summons. This guy on the Empire State. And that's why he's going to jump."

"You know who it just crossed my mind it could be. If it isn't a hoax, I mean. Hell, even if it is. In fact, if it's him, it definitely is a hoax."

"What is this, a game show? Tell us who he is."

"Joe Kavalier."

"Joe Kavalier, yes! That's exactly who I was thinking of."

"Joe Kavalier! Whatever happened to that guy?"

"I heard he's in Canada. Somebody saw him up there."

"Mort Meskin saw him at Niagara Falls."

"I heard it was Quebec."

"I heard it was Mort Segal, not Meskin. He took his honeymoon up there."

"I always liked him."

"He was a hell of an artist."

The half-dozen comics men gathered around a table at the back of the Excelsior that particular morning, with their bagels and soft-boiled eggs and steaming black coffee in cups with a red stripe around the rim-Stan Lee, Frank Pantaleone, Gil Kane, Bob Powell, Marty Gold, and Julie Glovsky-agreed that, before the war, Joe Kavalier had been one of the best in the business. They concurred that the treatment he and his partner had received at the hands of the Empire owners was deplorable, though hardly unique. Most could manage to supply a story, an instance of odd or eccentric behavior on Kavalier's part; but when these were added up, they did not, to any of the men, seem to predict something so rash and desperate as a death leap.

"What about that old partner of his," Lee said. "I ran into him here a couple of days ago. He looked pretty down in the mouth."

"Sammy Clay?"

"I don't know him very well. We've always been friendly. He never worked for us, but-"

"He's worked just about every place else."

"Anyway, the guy did not look good. And he barely gave me the time of day."

"He is not a happy man," Glovsky said. "Is old Sam. He is just not very happy over there at Pharaoh." Glovsky drew the violent Mack Granite feature for Pharaoh's Brass Knuckle.

"Frankly, he's never happy anywhere," Pantaleone said, and everyone agreed. They all knew Sammy's story, more or less. He had returned to the comic book business in 1947, covered in failure at everything else he had tried. His first defeat had been in the advertising game, at Burns, Baggot & DeWinter. He had managed to quit just before he was going to be asked to turn in his resignation. After that, he had tried going out on his own. When his advertising shop duly died a quiet and unremarked death, Sammy had found work in the magazine business, selling well-researched lies to True and Yankee and one miraculous short story to Collier's -it was about a crippled young boy's visit to a Coney Island steambath with his strong-man father, before the war-before settling into a deep and narrow groove at the third-tier magazine houses and what was left of the once-mighty pulps.

All along, there were regular offers from old funny-book friends, some of them seated around this table at the back of the Excelsior, which Sammy always refused. He was an epic novelist-that was a great thing to be, after the war-and though his literary career was not advancing as quickly as he would have liked, at least he could ensure that he was not moving backward. He swore, to anyone who would listen and even on his mother's then-fresh grave, that he was never going back to comic books. Everybody who visited the Clays was taken to see some draft or other of his amorphous and wandering book. By day, he wrote articles on psittacosis and proustite for Bird Lover and Gem and Tumbler. He tried his hand at industrial writing, and had even written catalog copy for a seed company. The pay was mostly abysmal, the hours long, and Sammy was at the mercy of editors whose bitterness, as Sammy said, made George Deasey look like Deanna Durbin. Then, one day, he heard of an editor's job opening up at Gold Star, a now-forgotten publisher of comic books on Lafayette Street. The line was tattered and derivative, the circulation low, and the pay far from wonderful, but the position, if he took it, would at least give him authority and room to maneuver. Sammy's correspondence school for writers had enrolled only three pupils, one of whom lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, and spoke almost no English. Sammy had bills and debts and a family. When the Gold Star job came along, he had at last thrown in the towel on his old caterpillar dreams.

"No, you're right," Kane said. "He's never been happy anywhere."

Bob Powell leaned forward and lowered his voice. "I always thought he seemed a little bit-you know…"

"I have to agree with that," said Gold. "He's got that thing with the sidekicks. It's like an obsession with him. Have you noticed that? He takes over a character, first thing he does, no matter what, he gives the guy a little pal. After he came back to the business, he was at Gold Star doing the Phantom Stallion. All of a sudden the Stallion's hanging around with this kid, what was his name? Buck something."

"Buck Naked."

"Buckskin. The kid gunslinger. Then he goes to Olympic, and what, now the Lumberjack has Timber Lad. The Rectifier gets Little Mack the Boy Enforcer."

"The Rectifier , that already sounds a little bit-"

"Then he comes to Pharaoh, all of a sudden it's the Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby. Christ, he even gave a sidekick to the Lone Wolf!"

"Yeah, but he's hired every one of you guys at one time or another, hasn't he?" Lee said. He looked at Marty Gold. "He's been very loyal to you over the years, Gold, God only knows why."

"Hey, shut up, already," said Kane. "That's him now coming through the door."

Sam Clay stepped into the moist, steam-table warmth of the Excelsior and was hailed from the table at the back. He nodded and waved, a little uncertainly, as if he didn't really care to join their party that morning. But after he had purchased his ticket for a cup of coffee and a doughnut he started toward them, head lowered a little in a bulldog way he had.

"Morning, Sam," Glovsky said.

"I drove in," he said. He was looking a little dazed. "It took two hours."

"Seen the Herald?"

Clay shook his head.

"Looks like an old friend of yours is back in town."

"Yeah? Who would that be?"

"Tom Mayflower," Kane said, and everybody laughed, and then Kane went on to explain that someone signing himself "The Escapist" had, in this morning's Herald-Tribune, publicly announced his intention to jump from the Empire State Building at five o'clock that very afternoon.

Pantaleone dug around in the pile of newspaper in the center of the big table and found a Herald-Tribune. " 'Numerous grammatical and spelling errors,' " he read aloud, skimming quickly through the article, to which were devoted three column inches on page 2. " 'Threatened to expose the "unfair robberies and poor mistreatments of his finest artists by Mr. Sheldon Anapol."' Huh. 'Mr. Anapol when reached refused to speculate publicly on the identity of the author. "It could be anyone," Mr. Anapol said. "We get a lot of nuts."' Well," Pantaleone finished, shaking his head, "Joe Kavalier never struck me as any kind of nut. A little eccentric, maybe."

"Joe," Clay said wonderingly. "You guys think it's Joe."