Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Carl Henry Ebling had pleaded guilty and been sentenced, by a judge named Conn, to a term of twelve years for bombing the bar mitzvah reception of Leon Douglas Saks at the Pierre. Carl Henry, a fervent, dreamy, but never especially adroit or competent boy, had carried these traits with him into a passionate and shiftless manhood. But the formless and badly dented idealism with which he had returned from the battlefields of Belgium, curdling in the long indignity of the Depression, had taken on new shape and purpose after 1936, when a friend had invited him to join a Yorkville social organization, the Fatherland Club, which by the outbreak of war in Europe had transmogrified or splintered off-she had never been able to follow it-into the Aryan-American League. While Ruth had never entirely agreed with Carl Henry's views-Adolf Hitler made her nervous-or felt comfortable with her brother's having taken such an active role in his party's activities, she saw unquestionable nobility in his devotion to the cause of freeing the United States from the malevolent influence of Morgenthau and the rest of his cabal. And furthermore, it ought to have been as clear to the judge, to the prosecutor (Silverblatt), and to everyone as it was to Ruth herself that her brother, who had insisted, in spite of his lawyer's advice, on pleading guilty, and who much of the time seemed to be under the impression that he was a costumed villain in a comic book, was clearly out of his mind. He belonged in Islip, not Sing Sing. That the bomb her brother had made-in the shape of a trident, how could they not see the craziness in that?-had somehow managed to explode, injuring only him, Ruth blamed on the bad luck and fumbling nature that had never deserted her brother. As for the harsh sentence he had received, this she blamed, as did Carl Henry, not only on the workings of the Jewish Machine but, with an unwillingness that wrenched her heart, on her employer, Mr. James Haworth Love himself. James Love had, from the early thirties, been extremely vocal in his opposition to Charles Lindbergh, to the America Firsters, and above all to the German-American Bund and other pro-German groups in this country, which in speeches and newspaper editorials he typically characterized as "fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs," attacks that had climaxed, at least in Ruth's view, with the prosecution and imprisonment of her brother. Thus was the dull dislike that Ruth ordinarily would have borne for Sammy made keen by her suppurating detestation of his host for the weekend, of the way Mr. James Haworth Love conducted his affairs, both political and social. Witnessing this relaxation of the ban, unarticulated yet absolute, on the presence of Jews at Pawtaw, hitherto among the few traditions of his parents and empire-building grandparents that Mr. Love had continued to respect, seeing it as a final proof of the man's shamelessness and debility, her heart rebelled. It would require only one further outrage to push Ruth into taking steps to alleviate the pressure that had been building in her breast for so long.

"Saw the smoke," Mr. Love barked. "Fires lit. Very good, Ruth. How are you?"

"I'm sure I'll live."

The men all trooped up the steps, tossing their bright empty greetings in her direction, complimenting her on her hair, the style of which had not altered since 1923, her color, the smells emanating from the kitchen. She greeted them politely, with something of her usual wary wryness, like a schoolteacher welcoming the return from vacation of a group of smart alecks and cutups, and told them, one by one, which rooms would be theirs and how they could find them if they didn't already know. The bedrooms had each been named by some early Love enthusiast after vanished local Indian tribes. One of the men, extraordinarily good-looking and with eyes the very color of the new Cadillac and a dimple in his chin, much taller and broader than any of the others, shook her hand and said that he had heard the most amazing things about her oyster stew. The spindly-legged Jew hung back, sheltering in the lee of the green-eyed giant. His only greeting to her was another crooked smile and a nervous cough.

"You'll be in Raritan," she told him, having held back especially for him this smallest and most cramped of the third-floor guest rooms, one with no porch and only a fragmentary view of the sea.

He looked almost fearful at this information, as if it were news of a grave responsibility she had placed upon him.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said.

Ruth would remember afterward that she was troubled by a brief, mild emotion that lay somewhere between affection and pity for the little snub-nosed Jewish boy; he seemed so out of place among all these tall and sporting daffodils. She had a hard time believing that he could really be one of them. She wondered if he had gotten here by some kind of mistake.

Ruth Ebling could not have known how nearly her speculations on Sam's status and position coincided with his own.

"Jesus," he said to Tracy Bacon, "what am I doing here?" He dropped his suitcase. It landed with a muffled thud on the thick carpet, one of several worn Oriental rugs with which the creaking floorboards of Raritan were patchworked. Tracy had already left his bags down in his second-floor room, which, in a striking access of precognition by that Indian-loving ancestor, had been designated Ramcock. He lay now across Sammy's iron bed on his back, legs raised and crossed at the knee, arms folded beneath his head, picking with a fingernail at the peeling white enamel of the bedstead. Like many big, well-built men, he was an inveterate layabout who disdained physical exertion except in brief Red Grange bursts of frantic grace. He furthermore detested standing upright, which made his radio work particularly obnoxious to him; and he loathed being obliged to sit up straight. His inherent ability to feel at ease wherever he went was coupled powerfully with a bone-deep laziness. Whenever he entered a room, no matter how formal the occasion, he generally sought out a place where he could at least put his feet up. "I'll bet I'm the first kike that's ever set foot in this joint."

"I don't think I'll take that bet."

Sammy went to the little window, each of its panes smudged with a thumbprint of frost, in the narrow dormer that overlooked the back lawn. He cranked it open, letting in a cool blast of brine and chimney smoke and the rumblings and fizzings of the sea. In the last quarter hour of the day, Dave Fellowes and John Pye were way down on the beach, tossing a football with a certain grim fervor, in dungarees and heavy sweatshirts but with their feet bare. John Pye was also a radio actor, the star of Paging Dr. Maxwell, and a friend of Bacon, who had introduced Pye to the sponsor of The Adventures of the Escapist. Fellowes ran the Manhattan office of a member of New York's congressional delegation. Sammy watched as Fellowes turned his back on Pye and took off down the beach, scattering white puffs of sand. Fellowes reached up, looking over his shoulder, and a short, accurate forward pass from Pye found his hands.

"This is so strange," said Sammy.

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"I guess it is," Bacon said. "I guess it must be."

"You wouldn't know."

"Well, I… maybe the reason I don't think so is that I always felt so strange, you know, before I found out that I wasn't the only one in the world-"

"That's not what I mean," Sammy said gently. He had not meant to sound argumentative. "That's not what feels strange to me, kid. Not because they're all a bunch of fairies, or because Mr. James Love the sock magnate is a fairy, or because you're a fairy or I'm a fairy."

" If you are," Bacon said with mock correctitude.

"If I am."

Bacon gazed at the ceiling, arms folded contentedly under his head. "Which you are."