Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Joe arrived an hour before the reception began, as was his habit, to check the disposition of the Trevi's ballroom, salt a few aces and half-dollars, and go over the order of events with Manny Zehn, the bandleader whose fourteen Zehnsations, riotous in their mariachi shirts, were setting up on the bandstand behind them.

"How are they hanging?" said Joe, trying out an expression he had just heard in the subway on his way uptown. He pictured a row of pages from a calendar, hanging on a shiny string. He was young, he was making money hand over fist, and his little brother, after six months of quarantine, bureaucratic dithering, and those terrible days last week when it seemed that the State Department might, at the last moment, cancel all the children's entry visas, was on his way. Thomas would be here in three more days. Here, in New York City.

"Hey, kid," Zehn said, squinting a little mistrustfully at Joe, but finally shaking the hand Joe proffered. They had worked together twice before. "Where's your sombrero?"

"Sorry? I didn't-?"

"Our theme is 'South of the Border.' " Zehn reached behind his head and lifted a black sombrero embroidered with silver thread up onto his balding pate. He was a good-looking, portly man with a pencil mustache. "Sid?" The trombonist had been chatting up one of the waitresses, in a pink beribboned dress with Latin flounces. Sid turned around, an eyebrow arched. Manny Zehn raised his hands in the air and threw his head back. "Number three."

The trombonist nodded. "Hit it," he said to the band. The Zehnsations broke into a spirited bounce version of "The Mexican Hat Dance." They played four bars and then Manny Zehn cut his throat with a finger. "So where's your Mexican hat?"

"No one told me," said Joe. He smiled. "Beside to which I'm permitted only to use the topper," he added, pointing to the "loaded" silk hat on his head, which he had purchased secondhand at Louis Tannen's. Or else maybe the Mexican magicians' union will complain."

Zehn narrowed his eyes again. "You're drunk," he said.

"Not at all."

"You're acting goofy."

"My brother is coming," said Joe, and then, just to see how it sounded, added, "and I am getting married. That is, I hope I am. I have decided I am going to ask her tonight."

Zehn blew his nose. "Mazel tov," he said, giving the blot on his handkerchief a chiromantic squint. "Only I thought you guys were experts at getting out of chains."

"Excuse me, Mr. Cavalieri?" said Stanley Konigsberg, appearing rather magically at Joe's side. "But that's what I wanted to ask you?"

"You can call me Joe."

"Joe. Sorry. Okay, I was wondering. Do you ever do escapes?"

"At one time," said Joe. "But I had to give it up." He frowned. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you hid a queen of hearts in the centerpiece of table seven," said Stanley. "If that's what you're worried about."

"I did not do any such thing," said Joe. He winked at Manny Zehn and, with a firm hand on Stanley's shoulder, steered the boy out of the ballroom and into the gilded corridor. Guests were taking off their coats, shaking the rain from their umbrellas.

"What kinds of things could you escape from?" Stanley wanted to know. "Chains? Ropes? Boxes? Trunks? Bags? Could you do it jumping off of a bridge? Or a building? What's so funny?"

"You remind me of someone," Joe said.

That same evening, Rosa shoved her paint box, a folded canvas tarp, a yardstick, and a small stepladder into the back of a taxi, and headed uptown to the apartment at the Josephine. The echoing emptiness of the place, a tin-plate rattle in the ears, unnerved her, and although with Joe's approval she had hastily called Macy's to order a dining table and chairs, some basic kitchen things, and bedroom furniture, there would be no time to furnish the rooms properly before Thomas arrived. It occurred to her that, having gone from the cramped jumble of a two-family flat on Dlouha Street, to the provisional pandemonium of a convent refectory, to the packed-in-oil tin of a stateroom on the Ark of Miriam, the boy might actually welcome a bit of space and emptiness, but all the same she wanted him to feel that the place at which he had arrived, at long last, was home, or a kind of home. She had tried to think of ways she could accomplish this. She knew enough about thirteen-year-old boys to be fairly certain that a plush bathrobe, a bouquet of flowers, or a ruffled canopy on the bed was not going to do the trick. She thought that a dog or a kitten might have been nice, but pets were not allowed in the building. She asked Joe about his brother's favorite meal, color, book, song; but Joe had proven quite ignorant of such preferences. Rosa was irritated with him-she had said he was impossible-until she saw that he was, for once, pained by his ignorance. It was the mark not of his usual luftmensch obliviousness but of the chasm of strange separation that had opened up between the brothers in the last two years. She apologized at once and went on trying to think what she could do for Thomas, until finally she'd had the idea, which struck them both as a nice one, of painting the blank expanse of his bedroom with a mural. It was not just that she wanted Thomas to feel at home; she wanted him to like her-instantly, right away-and she hoped that the mural, whether it softened the edges of his arrival or not, would at the very least stand as an offer of friendship, as a hand extended in welcome from his American big sister. But intermingled with, secretly bubbling beneath, these other motives for the gesture was concealed a desire that had nothing to do with Thomas Kavalier. Rosa was practicing - beginning to dabble, on the walls of a boy's bedroom, with the idea of becoming a mother. This morning, her doctor had called to confirm the tale of a missed period and of a week of sudden squalls and unexpected flare-ups of emotion such as the one that had sent her into hysterics over the loan of an old pocket square. Thomas was going to be an uncle. That was how she had decided that she was going to put it to Joe.

When she got into the apartment, she first changed into a pair of dungarees and an old shirt of Joe's, and put her hair back with a kerchief. Then she went into the bedroom that was going to be Thomas's and spread out the tarp on the floor. She had never painted a mural before, but she had talked it over with her father, who had been involved in the fracas over the Rivera murals at Rockefeller Center and who knew many artists who had worked on murals for the W.P.A.

Rosa had wrestled for a long time with the proper subject. Characters from nursery rhymes, wooden soldiers, fairies and frog princes and gingerbread houses, such motifs would be considered hopelessly puerile by a boy of thirteen. She considered doing a New York scene- tall buildings, taxicabs, traffic cops, the Camel sign blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Or perhaps some corny American montage, with redwood trees and cotton plants and lobsters. She wanted it to be sort of generally American, but also to relate in some way to the specific life Thomas was going to be leading here. Then she had started thinking about Joe, and the kind of work that he did. She suspected that Thomas Kavalier was going to be learning a good deal of his English from the pages of Empire Comics. While she would not have felt comfortable doing a mural that featured the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, or-God knew-Luna Moth, the idea of heroes, American heroes, intrigued her. She went to the public library and checked out a big book, with impressive Rockwell Rent-style woodcuts, called Heroes and Legends of the American People. The larger-than-life figures of Paul Bun-van, John Henry, Pecos Bill, Mike Fink, and the rest-her favorite was the original man of steel, Joe Magarac-struck her as perfectly suited to the mural form, and not beneath the contempt of a boy to whom they would probably be largely unknown. What was more, Rosa had taken to thinking of Joe himself as a hero-he had paid, out of his own pocket, for fifteen of the children who were now steaming across the Atlantic. Though she would not put Joe into the mural, she decided to include an image of Harry Houdini, that immigrant boy from Central Europe, just to connect the theme of the mural that much more directly to Thomas's life.