Part 45 (2/2)
”And, Joe,” Saes Joe waited ”Rosa and I were talking And she, uh, we think it's okay, if you want tothat is, we think that Toht to know that you're his father”
”I see Yes, I suppose you'reI will talk to him”
”We could all do it Maybe we could sit him down You His mother Me”
”Sa to say, or what the right way to say it is But-thank you”
”For what?”
”I knohat you did I kno it cost you so I don't deserve to have a friend like you”
”Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I'ood friend But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa I married her because I didn't want to, well, to be a fairy Which, actually, I guess I am Maybe you never knew”
”Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew”
”It's that simple”
Joe shook his head ”That could be or is why you married her,” he said ”But that doesn't explain how come you stayed You are Tommy's father, Sammy As much or really, I think, a lot ,” Sammy said ”Try it, you'll see” He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of goleoat”
”Uh, yes,” Joe said ”Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya”
”A goat goleer traced the course of the episode down and across the page ”After they go to all this trouble It looks like it's kind of dangerous, olem”
”It is”
”After all that, they just they eat it?”
Joe shrugged ”They were hungry,” he said
Sah he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sa crucible, working to fashi+on so that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand
He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Eh for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did He sat back and cracked his knuckles He saw the counter him a look Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, ht beside thethat looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see hier,” he said
While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of rill, Joe looked out theand s that Saiven s that had, for a fewthe fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together To the sht at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands The suddenness hich Sa Joe's enlist, racked by a sexual impatience at once barely suppressed and perfectly conventional, to get Joe out of the way-had seemed to Joe to mark decisively the end of Sammy's brief experiment in bohemian rebellion Sammy and Rosa had a child, moved to the suburbs, buckled down For years they had lived, vividly, in Joe's i husband and wife, Sa his waist, fra, red A the traffic stalled on Thirty-third Street, ser ale, that he grasped the whole truth Not only had Sa her, except with the half-, companionable affection he always had felt for her, asince buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe's or for Rosa's or for Toesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-iht of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sa with the raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his oay, atteolenificance and the fascination of golems- from Rabbi Loew's to Victor von Frankenstein's-lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuth, in theirhu ease hich they passed beyond the control of their horrified and ad creators But it seemed to Joe that none of these-Faustian hubris, least of all-were a the true reasons that ioleesture of hope, offered against hope, in a ti that a few -one poor, du strictures, froreater Creation It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiuo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoation into co the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on youngthe desire to escape As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life
”You need so else?” said the counterman, as Joe wiped his mouth and then threw his napkin to his plate
”Yes, a fried-egg sandwich,” Joe said ”With extraa brown paper bag that contained the fried-egg sandwich and a package of Pall Malls, because he knew that by now Saarettes, Joe returned for the last time to Suite 7203 Sammy had taken off his jacket and his shoes His necktie lay coiled around him on the floor
”We have to do it,” he said
”Have to do what?”
”I'll tell you in a minute I think I'm almost done Am I alotten The Gole and jerry-built stairway, all splintered wood and protruding nails-it was alar or Fontaine Fox-that would lead hiates of Heaven itself
”You're aloes faster when there aren't words”
Sa from Joe, unrolled it, and peered inside He took out the foil-wrapped sandwich, and then the pack of cigarettes
”I worshi+p at your feet,” he said, tapping the pack with a finger He ripped it open and drew one out with his lips
Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down Saarette and flipped-a bit carelessly, to Joe's arette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chehile he smoked
”So?”
”So,” Sammy said ”You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here”
”I know it”
”What's the matter with you, did you have a relapse?”
”I eat a pork chop every day” Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine
”Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel,” Saes, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticisht he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt ”You're into all this now?” Saes, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticisht he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt ”You're into all this now?”
Joe shrugged ”It's all lies,” he said ot here That first day ent into Anapol's office Do you remember that?”
Joe said that naturally he remembered that day
”I handed you a Superman Superman comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Goleht you were an idiot” comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Goleht you were an idiot”
”And I was”
”And you were But that was 1939 In 1954, I don't think the Gole” He looked around for a napkin, then picked up his necktie and wiped his shi+ning lips ”Have you seen what Bill Gaines is doing over there at EC?”