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Tommy is named after Thomas Edison and somebody his father never met, a boy who drowned before Tommy was born. He was Sam Clay's first cousin, from Czechoslovakia, and he died in the war, or just before the war began, the day before Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was thirteen years old. Tommy is ten, but he can count backward, and it occurs to him that this was the month after he, Tommy, was conceived.
He is not convinced that this is the whole story, because there's a third Thomas, one his old man knows better than anyone else. The Escapist.
He sits in his bedroom, in the crow's nest, and thinks about this. His mother gets her ideas from books and magazine stories and sometimes, she says, from people she has met. "That's what a story is," she tells Tommy. "It's organizing what you know about the world into something that makes sense in nine panels. You want the reader to recognize what he sees. Even if the plot is supernatural horror or a romance comic or something, the people should still look familiar." Occasionally, there are boys in her scripts that look or act the way he does, and this is comforting to Tommy and somewhat flattering.
Tom Mayflower was born in the inaugural issue of Midget Radio Comics in 1939, already a man, ready to take up the golden key and the fight against evil. Tommy doesn't mind sharing, but he wants to have come first. The real human ought to come have come first.
On Christmas, they go into the city to the Cloisters, just the two of them. Tommy's father says they have a collection of swords, maces, iron maidens and other medieval armaments and instruments of torture, but when pressed, admits that he has never actually been inside the museum before. It just seems like the right kind of day to go. They get up early and take an empty commuter train into Penn; everything is off-peak. On the subway uptown, Tommy insists that they ride in the first car. He cups his hand against the glass of the front window so that he can see beyond his own reflection to the tracks ahead, fading into the dark long before they meet a vanishing point. There are signals that he doesn't understand, turns that they don't take. "Are there really people who live down here?"
"Yes," his father says without hesitation, a sign, Tommy knows, that he is probably lying.
"Have you ever seen them?"
Sam gets to his feet and moves slowly, thoughtfully to the door of the train, holding onto one of the vertical bars. "Come here, look out the side for a minute." Tommy joins him. All he can see is the wall of the tunnel moving past in the dim. "Can you make out those alcoves? They're man-sized. Anyone out walking in the tunnels who hears a train coming can duck in there to be safe until it passes."
Tommy squints and presses closer to his curled shielding hands, hoping to see a person, a face.
* * *
They ride the IND Eighth Avenue Line all the way up to the top of Manhattan. The outside temperature is only about ten degrees above freezing, but the journey somehow has the expeditionary feel of summer excursions from Tracy's boyhood. Sam seems to be thinking similar thoughts; as the subway takes them under midtown, he produces a Mounds bar from somewhere and hands over one of the pieces, like this is a picnic.
The 190th Street station, where they get off, is dug right into a cliff, the tracks deep, deep underground. An old man in an overcoat dozes on a bench with a Journal-American covering the lower part of his face. The only other people on the platform are a Negro woman with a vacant baby carriage, holding onto the pink mitten of her small daughter, who insists on walking by herself, tongue poking out from between rosebud lips as she places one deliberate foot in front of the other. Tracy bodily blocks the door of the elevator to give the mother time to help her stagger inside. He likes kids.
"Is this still Harlem?" he asks Sam on the long trip to the surface. As familiar as he is with the Mt. Morris Turkish Baths and Lucky's and some of the other neighborhood hot-spots, his sense of uptown geography is uncertain; he isn't sure he has ever been north of 150th Street except once, to go to the drag ball they hold at Rockland Palace. The mother in the elevator with them shakes her head silently, as if in sympathetic disapproval at what he is thinking about, and hoists her child onto her hip.
"We're further north than Harlem, I think," Sam says. "Come on. Let's go get some culture."
They spill out into the pale daylight. "Jeez," Tracy says. "I feel like a coal miner or something, dying for fresh air." The entrance to Fort Tryon Park is right in front of them.
The paths all seem to curve uphill. He shortens his steps to match Sammy's, and they walk at a leisurely pace. The trees are nearly naked. Puffs of his warm breath are visible in the air alongside the smoke from Sam's cigarette. There's a museum in here somewhere, the ostensible goal of their journey uptown, but neither of them knows exactly where it is, and Tracy isn't exactly champing at the bit to see tapestries or reliquaries. He thinks this is enough for a Sunday afternoon, crackle of leaves, pressed shoulder to shoulder, walking into the wind.
* * *
There weren't any swords after all, just Christian religious art, but Tommy is not surprised enough to be disappointed. He likes the stained glass and the slippery marble floors better than the paintings and stuff. It's fun to pretend this is a real castle and he lives here. His favorite part of the museum is the narrow windows of the building itself, where it is easy to imagine drawing back a bow and taking aim at the siege engine that is really a green-painted hotdog cart outside, beyond the parking lot.
After a while, the magic wears off. "Let's go," his father says, at exactly the right time. "A person can only take so much of this type of thing." Tommy was just turning away from a frieze of Saint Lawrence being martyred on a griddle, feeling a little sick and wishing they could leave. Sam is good at things like that.
Outside, it has gotten colder. "Want a glove?"
"Sure," Tommy says and jams both of his hands into the one his father tosses him. Sam puts his now-naked left hand in his coat pocket. "Too bad we didn't bring a ball to throw around."
"It's December, Pop. Besides, I think it's starting to snow."
"OK. We'll get something to eat, shall we?"
Money is tight, as Tommy understands from eavesdropping on his parents' conversations. This is a treat. They exit the park and walk down Broadway until they find a diner with lighted OPEN neon in the window.
They sit down at the counter, though the four booths in front are empty. The waitress pours Tommy a glass of milk without asking and tells them Merry Christmas. He sits on the last stool, nearest the front windows, swinging his legs. He is blocking some of the view; his father holds onto the counter and leans back a little to look around him. There's not much to see – the threatening sky dimming, the rare passerby hurrying home. Christmas Day is a big deal in this part of Manhattan, not like on Long Island, in Bloomtown, where almost everybody is Jewish. A tumbleweed wouldn't look out of place here, blowing down the middle of the deserted street, between the parked cars.
They both order the breakfast special. Tommy asks for his eggs over hard; he only likes scrambled at home. The waitress puts the order in and begins to argue behind the counter with an older man in black-framed eyeglasses, who must be her boss. Two Catholic medals show outside his shirt, threaded onto the same chain as a good-sized gold crucifix, but there is a hand-lettered sign next to the register: Attention everyone must work the Holidays No exceptions! The Management. The man's voice is quiet and low, the same pitch as the grind of the heating system and the occasional traffic outside on Broadway, but hers is bright and loud. If they weren't speaking Spanish, Tommy would be able to make out at least her half of the conversation.
The waitress is young and pretty. He imagines her as a character in Kiss Comics. She has drawn the short straw for New Year's Eve too, but she has a date. She is threatening to quit if he doesn't get someone else to take her shift.
"Did you ever go in a subway tunnel?"
"Not in Manhattan," Sam says, and then immediately looks like he regrets it.
"In Brooklyn?" Tommy asks excitedly. "With cousin Joe?" He has found that Joe, brother of the dead Thomas for whom he is named, is often the cause of this particular look on his father's face.
"In Brooklyn," Sam says. "Alone."
* * *
At the top of the hill Tracy spies the Cloisters, a pile of stone with slits for windows, turreted like something out of a comic book – the stronghold of Wotan the Wicked or Kapitan Evil and his Razi henchmen. "Wow," he says. He can see from here that the heavy wooden doors are closed.
They keep going up the curving drive anyway, and Sam tries them. They are locked.
"Sign says they open at one PM today."
"Shit." Sam checks his wristwatch, then drives his fists deep into the pockets of his trousers. "I'm sorry, Bake."
Without speaking, they retreat downhill a ways and climb up a rock pitched at a 45 degree angle or maybe steeper, from which they can almost see the George Washington Bridge through the trees but not the highway that they know lies next to the green-gray October river. They sit there, where the wind makes it seem to Tracy like everything is building to a crescendo of some kind, for close to an hour, clinging to their perch by the soles of their shoes. No one passes on the path below them the whole time, but they do not kiss, because Tracy is fairly sure that Sammy wouldn't like it, not out in the open like this. He is waiting for something, but he's not sure what.
He isn't the sort of actor who usually troubles himself much about what his character would do in a particular situation, but sometimes he wonders – if he understood the Escapist, would he understand Sam better? Tracy knows what's behind Empire Comics' persistent two-man war on fascism. Is the superhero only Joe Kavalier's shadow-twin, the reverse-projection cast by the light of Sammy's ideas on the shape of his cousin's history? Is that all there is to him?
After a while, their hands and bottoms get cold. They climb down from the rock.
Tracy proposes that they have lunch somewhere nearby to kill time until the museum opens, but Sam resists; he is too serious a tightwad and anyway has lost the courage of his conviction now that his first big plan for the day has failed. They have a quick argument on the path which Tracy allows him to win. He wants to take Sam back downtown, after all, wants him on top the bedspread at the Mayflower Hotel, scrawny legs and dark hair, liver-colored nipples and BVDs. He finds endearing the way Sam slips, afterward, into the tightly tucked sheets like a letter opener into the corner of a sealed envelope, like he's afraid of disarranging anything too much. Tracy will rip the bedclothes out of their hospital corners and rest his ear on that furry chest, tangle his legs with Sammy's under the covers.
They are alone in the elevator back down to the 190th Street station. Sam grabs a handful of Tracy's shirt and presses his body against him and everything is all right, everything is going according to plan.
It's cold underground, but at least they are sheltered from the wind. Tracy bounds out onto the platform, full of an energy he can't contain. There is no sound of a train coming, no lights from either direction. "Come on! Let's walk to the next station. What is it, 181st Street?" He drops into a crouch onto the cool cement and swings himself easily down onto the track. As far as he knows, the Escapist has never ventured into the subway tunnels -- Luna Moth and her rogues' gallery pretty much has the monopoly on underground exploits in Empire City – but if he did, Tracy is sure he would do it just like this.
"Bacon, are you out of your mind?" Sam's scuffed shoes are now at the level of his chest. He stares down pop-eyed, incredulous. "Hey! You could get electrocuted!"
"The third rail is way over there on the other side."
"You're standing in a goddamn puddle! That's a conductor, stupid! Besides, you could get run over! Just, get out now, OK?"
He might be right about the water. Tracy repositions his feet on the trestles. "It's not really dangerous. There's these niches built all along the tunnels, for workmen. All you have to do is get in one and let the train pass you by." He's done this before. He's even done it drunk, and everything turned out fine, but that doesn't seem like the thing to say just now. "It'll be fun," he tries, grinning up at Sam. "Come on, I'll help you get down."
"No way! You're crazy!" Sometimes, when he says this, he doesn't sound all that convinced himself, but this is not one of those times. He is genuinely upset. "Please, Tracy. Come back."
"Fine, fine." He boosts himself up onto the platform. "I'm coming."
* * *
Tommy tries to picture it, his bandy-legged father on the tracks like a hobo in the dark. "What was it like?"
"Filthy. Dark. It was the Culver line, the Express track that cuts under Prospect Park. I just walked until I got tired, for I don't know. An hour maybe. Then I got out at a station when no one was looking and took the train home."
"Why did you do it?" He does not know if he thinks of his father as brave. He never considered the question before. He has never known him to do anything dangerous.
"It was the week after your cousin Thomas died."
"The one I'm named for."
"Right."
"But you didn't know him."
"No. That week, your cousin Joe joined the Navy. He sailed for basic training – I said goodbye to him on the pier on South Street. Then there was this other friend of mine. He got on a train to California a couple days before that. He did the voice for the Escapist on the radio. But I guess you never – well, you would have liked him." Tommy's father does not know about his secret reading of Empire Comics at the newsstand. "Anyway. Everyone I knew was going somewhere else. So I took the BMT to Coney Island."
Tommy picks at his eggs. "Oh."
His father stares over Tommy's head out the window of the diner. The snow is ticking by like seconds. "The train goes aboveground for two stops over the Gowanus Canal on this viaduct, and you can see Brooklyn spread out beneath you, all the apartment buildings and warehouses and the clock tower at One Hanson Place. It was sort of like this ride at the 1939 World's Fair, but smaller. Or bigger, I guess. Not the City of the Future, but now. Then the train turns and slides you back underground. I got off the train at the next stop and just waited until the coast was clear." He stops talking and looks at Tommy very seriously. "You're not going to try this, are you buddy?"
"Definitely not," Tommy assures him. "Were you scared?"
"The whole time." He smiles a little smile. "I could feel my heart beating all through my jaw and in my ears. You wouldn't think it was possible to be terrified for an hour straight, but it is, believe me. Also, there were rats."
"I hate rats," says Tommy comfortably.
"Yeah. I know."
"Would the Escapist go underground, if he had to? If someone was tied up on the tracks or something?" Tommy has forgotten for the moment that he's not supposed to really know much about the Escapist, or care what he would do. Sam doesn't seem to notice.
"The Escapist might go underground just because he wanted to. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea. The rules for people in comic books are different. You know that."
Indeed, this is one of the main tenets on which life in the Clay household is built. "Why did you come back out?"
"Well, your mother wasn't going anywhere," Sam says. "Although she's generally more intrepid than I am, living in a subway tunnel wouldn't have suited her. Like I said, it was dark and dirty. And she doesn't particularly care for rats either." He reaches over and takes a forkful of eggs from Tommy's plate. "What about the Bug? Would he go into a tunnel?"
Tommy thinks about it. "Only if it was absolutely necessary."
"That's smart," his father says.
* * *
They sit on the empty C train together thigh to thigh, the way lovers do, or strangers at rush hour. Tracy wonders if all is forgiven. It's hard to tell. He's watching the tunnel walls pass them by, the lighted car shooting through darkness like a submarine at the bottom of the sea.
Tom, his Tom, is not a wiseguy. He is tall and handsome and has a physical courage that Sam lacks, but Tracy looks at him and sees Sam's curiosity, his weird innocence. It would be easy to say that the Escapist is what Sam Clay would like to be. Maybe it's true.
Tracy is not usually in the truth business. If an actor is good at his work, no one examining it can know anything about who he is. That's a way Sammy's brave – he seems accidentally to have given Tom some of his better qualities. Knowing Sam, you can tell. He has it in him to step up and do the right thing.
There is that button from the World's Fair that Sammy keeps in a dish on his dresser with his spare change and spare keys and the only pair of cufflinks he owns: I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. Tracy doesn't know what will happen when they go to Hollywood, but he hopes he's right about the next few hours, the Mayflower, the bed.
"I'm sorry," he says. "About the tapestries. We'll do it some other time, huh?"
Carefully, Sam puts his hand on Tracy's knee. "It's all right, Bake. Some other time."
THE END.