Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The events of the second day of testimony, to which Sam Clay had been summoned, are less well known. It was Sammy's misfortune to follow two extremely reluctant witnesses. The first was a man named Alex Segal, the publisher of a line of cheap "educational" books that he advertised in the back pages of comics, who first denied and then admitted that his company had once- quite by accident -sold, to known pornographers, lists of the names and addresses of children who had responded to his company's ads. The second reluctant witness was one of the pornographers in question, an almost comically shifty-looking and heavily perspiring walleyed loser named Samuel Roth, who took the Fifth and then begged off with the excuse that he could not legally testify to anything since he was under indictment for smut-peddling by the State of New York. By the time that Sammy appeared, therefore, the mind of the subcommittee was even more than usually preoccupied with questions of vice and immorality.

The key portion of the transcript of the proceedings reads as follows:

senator hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with the comic book characters known as Batman and Robin?

MR. clay: Of course, Senator. They are very well known and successful characters.

hendrickson: I wonder, could you attempt to characterize their relationship for us?

clay: Characterize? I'm sorry… I don't…

hendrickson: They live together, isn't that right? In a big mansion. Alone.

clay: I believe there is a butler.

hendrickson: But they are not, as I understand it, father arid son, is that right? Or brothers, or an uncle and a nephew, or any relationship of that sort.

senator hennings: Perhaps they are just good friends.

clay: It has been some time since I read that strip, Senators, but as I recall, Dick Grayson, that is, Robin, is described as being Bruce Wayne's, or Batman's, ward.

hendrickson: His ward. Yes. There are a number of such relationships in the superhero comics, aren't there? Like Dick and Bruce.

clay: I don't really know, sir. I-

hendrickson: Let me see, I don't exactly recall which exhibit it was, Mr. Clendennen, do you-I thank you.

Executive Director Clendennen produces Exhibit 15.

hendrickson: Batman and Robin. The Green Arrow and Speedy. The Human Torch and Toro. The Monitor and the Liberty Kid. Captain America and Bucky. Are you familiar with any of these?

clay: Uh, yes, sir. The Monitor and Liberty Kid were my creation at one time, sir.

hendrickson: Is that so? You invented them.

clay: Yes, sir. But that strip was killed, oh, eight or nine years ago, I believe.

hendrickson: And you have created a number of other such pairings over the years, have you not?

clay: Pairings? I don't…

hendrickson: The-let me see-the Rectifier and Little Mack the Boy Enforcer. The Lumberjack and Timber Lad. The Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby.

clay: Well, those characters-the Rectifier, the Lumberjack, the Argonaut-they were already, they had been created by others. I just took over the characters, you see, when I went to work at the respective publishers.

hendrickson: And you immediately provided them, did you not, with wards?

clay: Well, yes, but that's standard procedure when you've got a strip that isn't, that maybe has lost a little momentum. You want to perk things up. You want to attract readers. The kids like to read about kids.

hendrickson: Isn't it true that you actually have a reputation in the comic book field for being particularly partial to boy sidekicks?

clay: I'm not aware-no one has ever-

hendrickson: Mr. Clay, are you familiar with Dr. Fredric Wertham's theory, which he testified to yesterday, and to which, I must say, I am inclined to give a certain amount of credit, having paged through some of the Batman comic books in question last night, that the relationship between Batman and his ward is actually a thinly veiled allegory of pedophilic inversion?

clay: [unintelligible]

hendrickson: I'm sorry, sir, you'll have to-

clay: No, Senator, I must have missed that part of the testimony…

hendrickson: And you have not read the doctor's book, I take it.

clay: Not yet, sir.

hendrickson: So you have never been aware, personally, therefore, that in outfitting these muscular, strapping young fellows in tight trousers and sending them flitting around the skies together, you were in any way expressing or attempting to disseminate your own… psychological proclivities.

clay: I'm afraid I don't… these are not any proclivities which I'm familiar with, Senator. With all due respect, if I may say, that I resent-

senator kefauver: For Heaven's sake, gentlemen, let us move on.

In all his life up to this afternoon, Sammy had gotten himself loaded only once, in that big house on a windswept stretch of Jersey shoreline, on the night before Pearl Harbor was attacked, when he fell first among beautiful and then evil men. Then, as now, it was something that he did mostly because it seemed to be expected of him. After the clerk released him from his oath, he turned, feeling as if the contents of his head had been blown like the liquor of an Easter egg through a secret pinhole, to face that puzzled roomful of gawking Americans. But before he had a chance to see whether they-strangers and friends alike-would avert their eyes or stare him down, would drop their jaws in horror or surprise, or would nod, with Presbyterian primness or urbane complacency, because they had suspected him all along of harboring this dark youth-corrupting wish to pad around his stately manor home with a youthful sidekick, in matching smoking jackets; before, in other words, he got a chance to begin to develop a sense of who and what he was going to be from now on-Joe and Rosa bundled him up, in a kidnapperly combination of their overcoats and bunched newspapers, and hustled him out of Courtroom 11. They dragged him past the television cameramen and newspaper photographers, down the stairs, across Foley Square, into a nearby chophouse, up to the bar, where they arranged him with the care of florists in front of a glass of bourbon and ice, all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member's being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate.

"I'll have one of the same," Joe told the bartender.

"Make that three," Rosa said.

The bartender was looking at Sammy, an eyebrow arched. He was an Irishman, about Sammy's age, stout and balding. He looked over his shoulder at the television on its shelf above the bar; although it was showing only an ad for Ballantine beer, the set appeared to be tuned to 11, WPIX, the station that had been carrying the hearings. The bartender looked back at Sammy, a mean Irish twinkle in his eye.

Rosa cupped her hands on either side of her mouth. "Hello!" she said. "Three bourbons on the rocks."

"I heard you," the bartender said, taking three glasses from below the bar.

"And turn that TV off, why don't you?"

"Why not?" the bartender said, with another smile for Sammy. "Show's over."

Rosa snatched a package of cigarettes out of her purse and tore one from the pack. "The bastards," she said, "the bastards. The fucking bastards."

She said it a few more times. Neither Joe nor Sammy seemed to be able to think of anything to add. The bartender brought their drinks, and they drained them quickly and ordered another round.

"Sammy," Joe said. "I'm so sorry."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "Well. That's okay. I'm all right."

"How are you?" Rosa said.

"I don't know, I feel like I'm really all right."

Though he was inclined to attribute the perception to alcohol, Sammy noticed that there appeared to lie no emotion at all, none at least that he could name or identify, behind his shock at his sudden exposure and his disbelief at the way it had happened. Shock and disbelief: a pair of painted flats on a movie set, behind which lay a vast, unknown expanse of sandstone and lizards and sky.