It's Superman! A Novel Page 4

  Time and again Lois would remind him—gently, with a girlish smile; she knew how to handle the old man—that it was a journalist in Cuba directly responsible for making her father’s reputation, which led—remember, Daddy?—to practically everything good in his uncommonly good life. From his hero’s welcome home, to his Congressional Medal of Honor, to his rise in the marines and all of those plum postings, to his current position as first vice-president of the Hatlo Machine Company, everything had sprung from a newspaper reporter’s two-hundred-word cable about a wounded young sergeant heroically wigwagging a makeshift flag under ferocious gunfire at Cuzco.

  To all of that “Captain” Lane—he would forever be the “captain,” though he’d retired from the corps in 1919—to all of that he would respond by saying yes, true enough, but Lois ought not to use Mr. Stephen Crane as a career model, the boy had been a brawling hothead and a drunkard, he’d smoked cigarettes like a fiend, married a divorced woman of questionable virtue, and died of consumption before he turned thirty.

  Oh, Dad, she’d say, I don’t want to be a war correspondent, just a regular old reporter.

  Regular old reporters, he’d scoff, are nothing more than Peeping Toms on a salary!

  Oh, Dad …

  But if you simply must, I want you living at the Dolly Madison.

  Which looked like a miniature Southern plantation and was run like a genteel sorority house with strict rules, including white gloves at dinner, a nine o’clock curfew, no smoking, no alcohol, and absolutely no gentlemen callers beyond the receiving parlor.

  Lois stayed at the Hotel Dolly Madison, the dreaded Dolly, scarcely three months. Around the time she turned eighteen in late November, she checked out of there and into an automatic-elevator building on East Twenty-ninth Street, rooming with Betty Simon, an O.R. nurse at Roosevelt Hospital the boys had nicknamed Skinny because she was anything but.

  When he found out about the move, the fait accompli, Lois’s father stopped taking her telephone calls.

  For about a week.

  Oh, Dad, she groaned long-distance, don’t be such a worrywart. Real people don’t live in hotels.

  Your voice sounds husky—have you been smoking?

  Of course not, she told him, quickly rubbing out a Lucky Strike.

  And I hope to God you haven’t started drinking.

  Nope, she said, popping the p and then leaning over to peer into her cocktail shaker, chagrined to find it empty.

  Lois, is that a jazz record I hear?

  It’s coming from the building across the way, Dad, she said, carefully lifting the phonograph needle off Fletcher Henderson’s version of “Limehouse Blues.” There, she said, I’ve closed the window.

  Now, you have to promise me you won’t let any men into your apartment.

  Never, Lois said, meaning I’d never promise you that, then she pointed sternly at Willi Berg sprawled on the divan in his undershirt and boxer shorts, pointing at him so he wouldn’t dare bellow something like Baby, we’re out of gin.

  I expect you to be a good girl, Lois, and behave yourself, said Captain Lane. I’m counting on that.

  I won’t let you down, Daddy.

  And in her heart of hearts she hadn’t. Maybe she drank a little, sometimes a little more than she ought to, but she could handle it. She never got stewed. Well. Once or twice. But the morning after she always remembered everything she’d done and said. And she smoked cigarettes, yes, but not every single day. Mostly she mooched, so that didn’t count. And she bought records and danced to them, but how was that letting anyone down, even a retired captain in the U.S. Marine Corps? And she never allowed Willi Berg to sleep in her bed. At least not overnight. She was still a good girl. Her conscience was clear. But she was a modern girl too. And she liked being modern, being aware, being curious, unafraid of the new or the exotic (Willi was Jewish!). And one of these days those same qualities would get her what she fully meant to have: her own byline, her own column, in one of the big dailies. If Dorothy Kilgallen, that old sourpuss, could do it, then Lois Lane, pretty and smart and clever and talented, could do it too. Even Willi Berg, who was such a cynic—even he said complimentary things about her news stories, which, okay, were only class assignments, not the real McCoy, but still, good is good, correct? Good is good.

  2

  “You call this good?” Willi is saying now. “What’s with ‘incalculable’? ‘The fire damage is incalculable’?” He tosses her class assignment down on the kitchen table. “Honey, the fire damage is ten thousand bucks or it’s ten million, but it ain’t never ‘incalculable’!”

  “All right,” says Lois, “point taken. But what do you think of the story overall?”

  “Dull. Dull, sister, dull.”

  “I hate you, you know that?” Does she really need a boyfriend? Does she really need this one?

  “Got any dessert?”

  “There’s still some bread pudding, I think.”

  “From the other night? Don’t you have anything fresh?”

  At the sink counter she’s been drying dinner plates (they had macaroni and cheese, light on the cheese) when a sudden impulse prevails upon Lois to smack Willi in the head with the wet dish towel.

  Now she reaches over and into his shirt pocket, helping herself to his package of Chiclets gum.

  “You could ask,” he says.

  She sticks out her tongue.

  “But speaking of asking,” he says, “I got to ask you a big favor.”

  “Oh, no …”

  “I’ll pay you back tomorrow, I swear.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Rain on that! Where am I supposed to come up with thirty bucks? When I can’t meet the rent, thanks to your flat-leaving old girlfriend.”

  “Skinny Simon is not my old girlfriend, she’s just a friend. Number one. Number two, it was your decision not to find another roommate. And number three, you shouldn’t blame the poor thing for falling in love—I never blamed you.”

  “The boy is delirious.”

  “Guaranteed you’ll have the cash back tomorrow. Swear to God. By noon. Could be sooner.”

  “ ‘Could be sooner.’ Could be never, same as every other time I loaned you money like a real dope. No, Willi, and I mean it.”

  “Come on, Lois, I gotta get my baby outta jail.”

  “What?”

  “I hocked my camera.”

  “Willi, that’s how you make a living, you can’t just hock it every time you want to play poker.”

  “How’d you know it was poker?” He gives her a loose grin.

  “You’re impossible. And a lousy card player.”

  “Not true.”

  “You’re broke.”

  “True.” He pushes back his cuff, glances at his wristwatch. “Honey, I really hate to banter and run, but it’s ten past eight. If I don’t get to the pawnshop by nine it’ll be closed. So can I have that money? I’ll try to stop back here later, okay?”

  “I don’t have thirty bucks.”

  “Lois, I need my camera. There’s gonna be a factory fire in Canarsie.”

  “Going to be?”

  “You know how it is with little birdies and such.”

  “Then go mooch off one of your little birdies.”

  “I know you can loan it to me.”

  Lois shakes her head. “And if I don’t get it back, what do I do Saturday morning when the rent man comes?”

  “You’ll have it, I promise. I can sell ten pictures of this stupid fire. It’s a toy factory, hon. With a teddy bear on the roof. Look, I’ll pay you back thirty-five bucks, just for your trouble.”

  “Leave, okay? Just go.”

  “Oh come on, don’t get mad. You mad?”

  “Leave, I said.”

  “You really not gonna let me have it?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why, ’cause you don’t trust me?”

  Folding her arms below her breasts, she glowers at him across the kitchen table.
“Right. I don’t trust you.”

  That sets him off. Abruptly Willi bends over and sweeps an arm across the surface of the table, flinging the sugar bowl, the milk pitcher, an ashtray, the coffeepot, its trivet, and both of their cups and saucers through the air to shatter, splash, chip, and bounce on the linoleum tile. The pages of Lois’s typewritten manuscript scatter, flutter around, skate in all directions.

  With her back pressed to the sink, Lois stands transfixed, pale, frightened. Excited.

  When he storms out, the door strikes the wall with such force that it bounces back and slams shut behind him.

  Half a minute later when he emerges through the iron-and-glass apartment-house doors, Lois—who flung up her bedroom window and is leaning halfway through it—shouts down at the top of her voice, “I don’t ever want to see you again, ever!”

  Willi doesn’t stop walking and he doesn’t turn around and he doesn’t look up, but he does sputter the razzberry.

  It’s Wednesday evening, the twelfth of June 1935.

  3

  Willi Berg grew up in cramped, dark, squalid apartments, always ones with dust-filmed windows, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Essex Street. Forsyth. Pike. Pelham. Division. He was the fifth of nine children (his parents actually produced twelve offspring, but—influenza, whooping cough, scarlet fever). Willi’s mother, the epitome of the buxom, wide-faced, irritable peasant who spoke the kind of Jewish broken English vaudeville comics loved to build skits around, was born in the United States, in Baltimore. It was Willi’s father who emigrated from a ghetto in central Europe, fleeing Russian-dominated Warsaw sometime in the mid-nineties.

  During Willi’s childhood, Papa worked what seemed dozens of jobs, sometimes as a pressman or cutter in the garment district, sometimes as a meat dresser at the East River stockyards; for a couple of years he worked as a laundryman in a commercial bathhouse. He made tile and paving bricks, sold carpets, sewed piecework, did construction (he mixed cement for the Woolworth Building), and one summer he lived away in Hartford assembling revolvers for Colt. The old man was a regular sweat-of-your-brow laborer. Without complaint, but without any pride, either. It’s what you did. You worked. Hard.

  Willi and his siblings were not close to each other or to their parents. On the other hand, friction at home was rare, but that might have been because once the boys were old enough—once they were of school age—they spent precious little time there. When Gene, Willi’s second-oldest brother, was fifteen, he neglected to come home one evening, then stayed away three or four days. The evening he did finally show up again, their mother gave him her usual greeting—the slightest toss of her head—and never asked him where he’d been, what he’d been doing.

  That small event, that non-event, had a profound impact on eleven-year-old Willi. Its significance crashed inside him like dishes. Mama hadn’t been indifferent to Gene’s absence, she’d never missed him!

  Shortly after that, as a test, Willi took a weekend hiatus from the family, kicking around penny arcades and pool halls, sleeping overnight in Tompkins Square Park. And sure enough, no one missed him, either. He came back late on Sunday, sat down at the table, ate his reheated supper, and life went on.

  Whenever he was present, he was taken into account, talked to, yelled at, and teased, but otherwise he was completely out of mind. How wonderful! How thrilling! This, Willi realized, was freedom, what “freedom” truly was, not that ponderous abstract stuff—Speech, Press, Religion, blah blah blah—that his boneheaded teacher Mr. Whoziwhatsis at P.S. whatever-the-number-was yammered about all the time in civics class. This. To vanish whenever you wanted, and return whenever—if ever—you felt like it. And nobody to give you grief for it. Suddenly the world seemed immensely more interesting, a better place, than it had before.

  When he turned fourteen and it was legally permitted, Willi quit school to work. His parents approved. He would, he agreed, fork over three-quarters of whatever he earned. He found a two-dollar-a-day job pearl diving at a Village restaurant, but his hands got so chapped he quit after a month and found another one—general assistant at a passport-photo studio.

  That was the first time Willi Berg ever had been around camera equipment, and it was love at first sight.

  Ingratiating himself like crazy, Willi soon traded in his push broom and dustpan for an 8x10 view camera and tripod, spending his days touching off loads of flash powder, developing glass plates, making proofs by running outside and exposing paper to the sun. I can do this! he’d think. And in a short time he did it far more skillfully than his boss.

  He moved on to a commercial house where he took pictures of merchandise for mail-order catalogs—pianos, brass beds, chandeliers, caskets. Occasionally he would rent one of his employer’s 5x7 cameras for the weekend, lug it up to Central Park, and earn some money photographing children at Rowboat Lake, Belvedere Castle, Bethesda Fountain, the zoo. He had cards printed that read: Willi the Great/“Photography like life.” He gave them to parents, who were instantly charmed by his cockiness and subsequently pleased by the quality of his work.

  Late one Saturday afternoon on his way back to the subway, Willi saw a man who’d just been shot dead lying half on the sidewalk, half in the curb, and a big Pontiac whizzing away. He set up his tripod and waited for a cop. When at last one came along, Willi took a picture of him stooped beside the body. He sold it that evening to the Star, and next day it ran on the front page, first three editions. That earned him ten bucks and a photo credit. He was flush, he was happy, and later that same week he turned fifteen. It was autumn 1929.

  Crash!

  It took a few months for the photography studio to fail, but eventually it did, and then Willi couldn’t find more work. Who could? His father still had his job—rolling a push-boy through the Garment District—but he’d had to take a severe pay cut. Two of Willi’s big brothers (Harry and Gene) continued to contribute to the family, but rarely more than three bucks a week. Freddy was an invalid by then, thanks to a fall from a scaffold, and half off his rocker. His older sister Ida could sew like the dickens, so she did all right, working a Singer machine. She gladly forked over eighty cents of every dollar she earned, but the rest she deposited into a piggy bank heavy as a cinder block that her fiancé “Murph” Silverman had won for her at Luna Park.

  That damn piggy bank.

  Using the edge of a butter knife to pry open the tin plug on the pig’s underbelly, Willi started helping himself to a few dimes and nickels, a quarter, or a dollar bill now and then, then every day, using the money to rent a German Ica and buy darkroom time to develop his plates. Happening upon that freshly dead gangster on Central Park West had steered him to his specialty, showed him his true calling—he and the city’s picture newspapers, the tabloids, were meant for each other.

  Nights, he trawled the boroughs of New York, photographing auto wrecks and blazing tenements, husbands in bracelets grieving for wives they’d just murdered, the occasional live baby in an ash can. Rubouts in spaghetti joints, lady burglars being led from Central Booking, always between a robust matron and a grinning detective. He loitered around police headquarters, local precincts. He’d sell a picture and replace the money he’d “borrowed” from Ida. But then he’d borrow it back the next day, and maybe a little extra.

  He rented a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic, faster, lighter, and no more plates. No more of that explosive flash powder, either! But then of course he had to buy flashbulbs and sheet film. Wouldn’t it be great if he didn’t have to rent his camera—if he could buy one? By then he’d saved up some money of his own, just not quite enough.

  That damn piggy bank.

  So with more of Ida’s coins and cash, he purchased a secondhand Speed that the first owner—a Romanian who worked at the Empire City racetrack—had ingeniously adapted to use roll film. As soon as he’d sold some pictures that he took with it, he put the money right back into his sister’s bank. Well, he couldn’t put it all back, not yet. But he would. Eventually. Long before she need
ed it.

  When he finally got his comeuppance (and Willi never denied he didn’t deserve it) should have been a night to celebrate. In one twelve-hour shift he’d sold a picture of the vice-president of the United States picking his nose outside the Waldorf, a barge collision, a killer’s old mother weeping at his arraignment, and a safecracker who’d been worked over plenty by the most vicious plainclothes cop in Brooklyn. He was whistling “Stardust” when he came home around six in the morning, walking on air. But as soon as he opened the door, it was uh-oh.

  In the kitchen Willi’s mother stood planted with her arms folded like the Golem of Prague. By the window, looking out as if contemplating a jump, his father pressed the heel of a hand against his forehead. His older brothers, even Freddy on his crutches, milled around drinking coffee. Quickly they all put down their cups. The little ones were either holding hands with great solemnity, or else bawling their heads off somewhere in a corner. And Ida, poor plain Ida, looked stricken. She sat at the table with her piggy bank in front of her, a measly pile of coins beside it.

  Lucky for Willi he’d left his camera, as he always did, in a rented locker. Otherwise he might have had his head dented in with that too, not just the piggy bank. Harry did the honors. And then, except for his father, everybody kicked him while he was lying on the floor curled like a shrimp.

  4

  It takes some doing, but at last Willi convinces a cracksman friend named Patsy Cudhy to loan him a good set of picks, but under two conditions: that Willi is gone no longer than half an hour, and that he brings Patsy back a Buescher saxophone, preferably a True-Tone model. Tenor, not alto. And with the satin-gold finish, if he can find one in the dark. Patsy fancies himself quite the virtuoso on a gobble-pipe; his little apartment off Times Square is full of them.