In the basement, Oscar still fiddled with his comic books, had in fact borrowed from my library (which had borrowed it from another, more cosmopolitan library in Boston) a book on drawing the things, and so he pasted up and used faint pencil for guide marks and wrote careful block-lettered dialogue in squared-off balloons that floated over his characters. Except that his characters rarely said anything. Unlike Oscar, unlike anyone in Brewsterville, they simply acted, no announcements or negotiation. One becaped man punched his enemies in the jaw without benefit of the smallest kerpow or kaboom. Another swam in the bay that granted his powers (he had none in the ocean itself), underwater for miles, not even a soft thought bubble carbonating the water above his head.
And, of course, Rocket Bride. She threw rosebud grenades at single criminals; when confronted by a gang of thieves, she cast her veil over them, and they struggled against one another like minnows beneath it. When she took them thus wrapped to the police station, she let them file out singly, looking for the face of her missing husband, that one bad man who knew everything about her: secret identity, dreamed-up names for future children, ring size, how she looked in a bathing suit, best friends. She might find him in any group of no-goodniks.
Rocket Bride was inclined to overlook mistakes. Sometimes, if a crook was very small or very young, she’d let him go. She treated the worst of them with understanding; you knew that she brought down evil for its own good. Even when a thug lay at the back of an alley, his tweed-capped head surrounded by birds, or stars, or any swarming celestial indication of concussion, Rocket Bride saw and smiled sadly. This was any mother’s son, any wife’s misplaced no-good lovable husband. This man, in his cap and gray jacket (always with three fastened buttons) is not so bad: somewhere, there is a good woman waiting to take him back.
And the same for every woman who schemed against Rocket Bride — despite the villainess’s tight black outfit (always black and tight, because Rocket Bride was bell-shaped and pale, and Oscar had perfected only one female face) — that bad girl was forgiven, too. Rocket Bride’s strength was righteous anger, but her weakness was The Extenuating Circumstance, which, unlike kryptonite, was everywhere.
I always thought she looked less like a superheroine than a medieval saint. Like any saint, she was caught at the moment of her martyrdom. Not run through with swords, not offering her eyes or heart or tongue on a tray, no bloody miraculous wound; instead, she was tragically physically intact, martyred as she was by heartbreak.
And then Rocket Bride, still husbandless, acquired a baby. Oscar showed me the panel, Rocket Bride and Rocket Girl, both in what were wedding dresses or christening gowns.
“Who’s the proud father?” I asked.
“There isn’t one. I figure, Superman has X-ray vision, nobody gave it to him. Rocket Girl is part of Rocket Bride’s superpowers.”
The baby nestled in her Rocket Mama’s arms. Whether Oscar was thinking of the one historical precedent and His powerful mother, I didn’t know. But I did see that Rocket Girl looked like Alice, with her blond sugary hair and slightly squinty eyes, and I knew that this was part of Oscar’s dream, to put Alice in such a place that, with help, she could soar into the ether away from harm. She was a baby; he knew she couldn’t do it without help. With her new responsibilities Rocket Bride avoided almost all confrontations.
“Tell me,” Oscar asked me once. “What do you think caused Jim’s height?”
“His pituitary gland,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“But what caused that? There has to be a book that explains those things.”
“No, not yet,” I said.
Now the shady genetic side to his wife’s family bothered Oscar. He hadn’t thought to worry about it until his child arrived, and while he was inclined to blame Mrs. Sweatt for the inheritance that had turned James into what he called, “The Rockefeller of Height,” who knew? Could have been Caroline’s brother, could be his wife — and therefore his daughter — had some of the same genes.
Oscar watched Alice, waiting for her to get big. Maybe it wouldn’t be all of her. Maybe just one leg, or an organ, or most likely her head; one little isthmus would start to balloon and fill like all of James. I saw Oscar with his hands on either side of Alice’s head, as if he could discern growth by touch, as if he could hold it back with his loving strength. Had Oscar lived in another country, he would have been the first father to advocate foot- and head-binding. Get to the root of the problem and stop it.
“Oscar,” I said. “Alice is fine. By the time James was her age, he was already growing.”
“I know.” Still, it seemed possible to him, her head expanding without the permission of the rest of her body. Like the comic books of the time, maybe, which he read: babies exposed to radiation who grew not only large but scaly and bug-eyed. One day he might wake up to find himself the father of the Turtle Girl of Cape Cod. Jimmy Olsen was always getting in scrapes like that, and when he did, he never recognized Superman.
The summer tourists didn’t help. If Alice were around, they’d say, “Is this his little sister? She big for her age? She gonna be a giantess?”
“No,” Oscar would say. “She’s just an ordinary height. And she’s his cousin, not sister.”
“But still growing,” a tourist would say, smiling, making it sound like a dark prediction.
Even though Oscar hated it, the visitors kept coming. All day long people showed up at the cottage. The locals would knock shyly. The tourists knocked raucously or not at all. They ignored my Do Not Disturb sign.
“Is this the place—” they’d say, opening the door. “Whoops! Guess it must be.”
Mostly they didn’t have questions, unless, of course, it was whether there were any souvenirs to be had.
“This is someone’s house,” I told them. “It is not a tourist trap.”
“You could make some money,” they said. “Think about it.”
Most of the tourists were meltingly the same: families with one, two, or three children; portions of church tours (the tours themselves always had the sense not to come all at once, or else did not know about us); couples of which one member was an eager reader of the newsmagazines that occasionally profiled James as if he were a celebrity. They took his picture, had me take his picture with them, and sometimes sent a print when they’d returned home, as if he, too, would want a memento of the meeting.
A few of the visitors I remember with more clarity. A classics professor who’d come into the library, wanting to read town records (he’d mistakenly believed that one of his forebears had passed through Brewsterville), followed me after work and presented James with an ancient pen and pencil set, inscribed with the name of a bank. A middle-aged lady with dyed-black hair, a wide painted mouth, and an artificial beauty mark told stories of being a silent movie starlet; there was something Egyptian about her, and her ears were unfashionably pierced and hung with thick gold hoops. I did not believe her stories of the Sisters Gish and Mister Griffith, but when she died a year later, the Boston Globe carried her obituary with a photograph: the same black hair and dark lips, the same beauty mark more artfully applied, the gold earrings, and a cheroot brandished between her tiny fingers. The copy below said that records were so unclear, she might have been fifty-nine, sixty-nine, or eighty at the time of her death.