In a corner, Briscoe introduced Beverly Starr to Forrest. The older man’s eyes were glassy, but he seemed alert and amused.
— Are you related to Brenda, the great reporter? Forrest said.
— In a way, yes.
— I always liked her stuff.
— So did I, Beverly said. And yours too. I have a print of Chelsea Hotel, Evening in my studio.
— No kidding?
He smiled in a pleased way and then turned to the political couple. Parties are always like that. You start a conversation, but almost never finish it. Beverly did like the people, or as much as she could learn about them, which wasn’t much. They all had good faces, character digging into their flesh, and she slipped away to the john twice to jot sketches on index cards when the light was too dim for her use of the blink. She was still smoking then and slipped onto Briscoe’s terrace for a fast Marlboro Light, looking out at the city and the dark river and the moving line of cars on the Jersey shore. That night she felt that New York and its buildings and its people and its nervous style would last forever. Before they sat down to dinner, Briscoe showed her around, and Beverly saw the way he had organized his library, New York, Italy, Mexico, and so on, and the next day she started doing the same here in her house on 8th Street in Brooklyn. The house that was not yet paid off. The house purchased with her work.
So tonight, three years later, the house paid off, cracking her back, doing sets, she can see each section rising from floor to ceiling, covering the entire wall. The Collection. Her collection. The first section on the left, near the draped window, has the early classics in hardcover reprints, old comic books, or in retrieved pages from ancient newspapers, all covered in protective plastic. Winsor McCay and Little Nemo in Slumberland or Dream of the Rarebit Fiend; Herriman and Krazy Kat; Milt Gross and Count Screwloose of Tooloose along with Nize Baby; Max and Moritz from Germany; Mutt and Jeff; Happy Hooligan; Bringing Up Father, with the amazing George McManus holding the pen. Briscoe even had a McManus original on his wall. They invented comics, those guys, and, in a way, the movies, since comic strips are really frozen movies. At the party at Briscoe’s she asked Lew Forrest if he ever knew the painter Lyonel Feininger, who once drew a knockoff version of The Katzenjammer Kids.
— I did, he said. He was a wonderful painter. But as a comics artist, I liked Harold Gray better. Daddy Warbucks! Punjab and the Asp! What blacks! What a sense of… night. All the communists I knew just loved Orphan Annie. How could the Daily Worker have invented a better epitome of savage capitalism than Daddy Warbucks?
Momma would have agreed. To her, every rich guy was Daddy Warbucks. She hated the communists too, because she hated anyone who believed in the future. And every one of her own kids was an orphan, even when they lived at home. Kids not like Annie, with a rich protector to watch her back. But kids like me, who found work at sixteen, clerking in a Walgreen’s, then took a furnished room for twenty-five bucks a week, and started drawing comics. Nobody watched my back, not even the young dummies I fell in love with.
The second book tower holds Sickles, when he was doing Scorchy Smith, and all of Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, almost all of The Spirit. She thinks of them as the books of the Gold Testament. Even Briscoe, who loved newspaper strips and hated comic books, knew how good The Spirit was. Then the superheroes, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, Batman, Sheena, the Young Allies, and, above all, Captain America. No Superman, who was a fucking bore, living in Metropolis, where there were no shadows. At least Batman lived in Gotham, which was all shadows, put there by Jerry Robinson even if signed by Bob Kane. Metropolis was Minneapolis. Gotham was New York. But this tower of shelves is really Muscle Beach, and the star is Jack Kirby. He came crashing off the page, the toughest Jew on the Lower East Side, making his heroes do things nobody had ever done before. Baroque, full of violent power. Punching, heaving, in mortal combat with the Red Skull, that filthy Nazi saboteur. The first American heroes on steroids. All before Beverly Starr was born.
Forget all this childish crap, Momma said that time. Learn to type. To take shorthand. Then get a job in an office!
Until the day Ruthie Rosenberg came home from high school, and her comic book collection was gone, bundled up, hauled away by Momma. The girl went bawling to the street, searching in garbage cans, and the lots, and never did find her treasures. And knew she had to get out of there, go off on her own, because if she didn’t she was sure to kill Momma, and make page 1 of the Daily News.
She built up her collection in the furnished room, started her life in the comics business, and now thinks: Who was that guy took me home that time? Some kind of banker. He looked around the studio, and said, You read comics? She said, I write comics. I draw comics. Lawyers read law books, right? He never came back. Ah, well… Gotta get a Depression story going. Put Momma in it too. Find some way to forgive her…
Beverly is in the second set of the back crunchers when she hears through the rain the sound of the F train moving on the trestle over the Gowanus. Kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh, pock, kudda-kuh kudda-kuh. Pock. The wheels sounding hollow, warm, not steel on steel. Lionel trains. The pock like a drummer’s rim shot. An accent. High above the steel girders of the Kentile sign and the one from Eagle Outfitters. Brooklyn’s Eiffel Towers. Thinking: Roy Crane wrote the best sound. Caniff never tried. And Eisner was best on cities, on shadows, on nights slick with rain. Nights like this. Nights when Denny Colt rose from the mausoleum in Wildwood Cemetery. Which she knows must be the Green-Wood, the most beautiful of all cemeteries. Right here in Brooklyn. Hell, with a little effort, she can walk there from this house. My house.
She knows the Green-Wood is beautiful, because she’s walked among its tombstones on summer afternoons. Leonard Bernstein is there, and Fred Ebb, and George Bellows, and William Merritt Chase, and George Catlin, and Lola Montez, and Joey Gallo, and, what’s his name? Boss Tweed… and yeah: Denny Colt. Gotta do a comic about the place someday. A girl dies too young. She wakes up in the Green-Wood. Calls it “The New Neighborhood.” She meets all of them, even Denny Colt… In real life, Beverly never did find Denny Colt, although she tried, and slept with three guys who looked like him, even asking each of them to wear the fedora and little mask that changed Denny Colt into the Spirit. She even made love to one of them under the stars in the Green-Wood, for Chrissakes. Life never does imitate art.