The Funnies Page 4

  Oddly, FunnyFest seemed to be my father’s great joy in life, despite the fact that, as he grew older, he grew to hate more and more people with greater and greater intensity. Generally he spoke to nobody in town except during FunnyFest, when he became glib and effusive, shaking hands and patting shoulders like a politico. This annual appearance ensured, I suppose, that he would continue to be regarded as a charming eccentric in Riverbank, rather than the arrogant bastard people probably suspected he was.

  But now, of course, he was dead. I’d always connected FunnyFest exclusively with his enthusiasm for it; as a result it seemed absurdly gratuitous to hold it ever again. Now it appeared to have been a sort of heritage festival all along, a small community’s flailing attempt to invent a history to supplant the actual one, the one in which the reeking pulp mill attracts the working class at slave wages, and they gentrify in spite of themselves.

  By all means, I thought, throw yourselves a party. But I’m not going to “appear” at it.

  I loaded a paper plate with food: greasy Italian sausages simmered to the color of shoe leather; steaming spinach pies in a crumbling, buttery crust; tepefied Waldorf salad. I pulled a canned beer from a cooler of half-melted ice. A table away, Bobby touched Nancy’s shoulder, then whispered something in her ear. Her face crumpled like a Dixie cup, and she glided, holding back tears, through the back door of the house. Bobby crossed his arms and resumed her vigil over the food in a more dignified manner.

  “What’s up?” I said to him.

  “What, what’s up?”

  “Nancy. Is something wrong?”

  He shot me that judging look again. “You saw her. She’s making…it isn’t good for her, behaving like that.”

  I knew what he meant. She’s making a fool of herself, he was going to say. Once, he walked out of a play I was in at my high school, very loudly, while I was onstage delivering my handful of lines. My mother told me he got sick, but later he told me the truth: he couldn’t stand to watch me make a fool of myself.

  I swallowed a bite of sausage and watched my brother as he scanned the yard, looking for foolishness. Fresh hatred blossomed in me like a bulb after a long, dull winter. I felt curiously vital.

  * * *

  “Tim,” said my sister, “this is Mike Maas. I guess you sort of met at the…you know, earlier.”

  Mike took his arm from around Bitty and dangled his hand in front of me. I shook it, but already Mike’s attention was elsewhere, on the beer I had carelessly stashed under my dinner arm, and which was now splashing copiously onto my remaining spinach pie.

  “Hey, yeah,” he said, still clenching my hand. “Where’d you get that?”

  I gestured with my head. He released me, patted Bitty gamely on the arm and angled for the cooler.

  “Nice fella,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “He’s a private kind of person,” Bitty said, crossing her arms.

  “So! Married!”

  “Married.”

  “And now that makes you…”

  She nodded. “Bitty Maas. It’s not bad. I wasn’t too attached to Bitty Mix. If I had any monograms, I could still use them.” She picked at her lip, then moued the lipstick back over it. “So you are dating…”

  “Amanda. Living with, actually. Same old place.”

  “Wedding bells?”

  “Uh, not anytime soon, I’m afraid.” I noticed, over her shouder, the gristly man from earlier peeking in the windows of my father’s drawing studio. The windows were made of frosted glass. My father once told me, while drinking, that he dreamt only in diffused light, that nothing in a perfect world would cast sharp shadows. I remember misunderstanding this and thinking that all the objects were fuzzy in his dreams. I tried without success to draw this dream world many times as a child.

  “Do you know that guy?” I said.

  She turned. “The squirt from the front row? I was wondering about him.”

  Here, from across the yard, came Mike Maas. I took a swig of beer. “I think I’ll go check him out,” I said.

  I carried my teetering plate over to the studio door, which the man was pushing against with both hands.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He didn’t turn around. “Mm-hmm.” His hair was the sickly color of newsprint, and I could see stringy muscles jerking at the back of his neck.

  “I don’t think I know you. I’m Tim Mix.”

  The man straightened himself—he was maybe five-six, a couple inches below me—and turned slowly, like a horror flick victim. He had a tiny head and clunky tinted glasses with invisible frames, from behind which beady green eyes were cannily bulging. He stuck a hand out, amiably enough, and said something that sounded like “Tandoori.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ken Dorn,” he said. He smiled. “I am a big fan of your dad’s work. I came down from New York for the funeral.”

  “How’d you know about it?” I said. I tried not to sound wary, but was genuinely curious.

  He half-smiled and raised his eyebrows. “I have connections with the syndicate.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re a cartoonist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you here with Susan?” I pointed to my father’s editor, who was standing in the center of the yard, squinting into the birdbath.

  He shook his head no. “I know her,” he said. He advanced another half-smile. I felt like I was supposed to be in on something.

  “So what strip do you draw?”

  He shrugged. “I ink in some of the biggies. ‘Whiskers,’ ‘Nuts and Bolts,’ ‘The Deep.’”

  I was impressed. “The Deep” had long been one of my favorites on the comics page. It took place on the ocean floor, where a variety of aquatic characters exchanged trenchant and witty observations on life in the sea, which naturally were really about the foibles of everyday human life. For a mainstream strip, it was pretty funny.

  I’d never met any comic strip inkers. These were people who apprenticed themselves to the popular cartoonists, and did the finishing work on daily strips. How much effort this entailed depended on the cartoonist. Some did much of the inking themselves, and the inkers simply filled in large dark patches, like the night sky repeated from panel to panel. Other cartoonists barely outlined the strips in pencil, and left the detail work to their inkers. Some even let the inkers in on their “jam sessions” with other cartoonists, where gags were conceived. Most inkers did a lot of the grunt work, like doing drawings for merchandise and answering fan letters with approximations of the cartoonist’s signature. My father was a bit of a maverick, though: he had never hired them. He did all his work himself. For this reason, he was a prime target for dissatisfied inkers; they were more likely to land their own strips someday if they attached themselves to somebody famous. I wondered if Ken Dorn had ever pestered my father for a job. I imagined that he had, and for a moment felt bad for him.

  “Look,” I said, setting my food down in the grass. “Did you want to see the studio?”

  His shoulders fairly pitched forward, toward the door, before he caught himself and translated the gesture into an expansive fake shrug. “Why not?”

  I reached up into the eaves, expecting to find the key my father had hidden there for the past twenty-five years. The hook was still there, but the key was gone. I looked down at the door, hoping it might have been left unlocked, but instead I found a typed message on slick cream-colored letterhead. It read:

  This property has been temporarily sealed by the executor of the owner’s estate, until such time the owner’s will has been read and the new owner established. Said will shall be read at 9:00 am EST, July 10, at the offices of Silvieri, Earheart and Caldwell, 1430 Market Street, Trenton, New Jersey.

  I said, “Well, that’s interesting.”

  Ken Dorn rubbed his elbow. “That’s business,” he said.

  * * *

  Of course I had known about the will. Malcolm Earheart was my father’s lawyer, executor and college buddy, his partner in the
old days for golf and tennis. As a child I called him Uncle Mal. He was a tall, willowy, buttoned-down man with a mildly pompous affect that I didn’t recognize as such until I went to college myself. Was he here now? I hadn’t seen him in years, so I mentally added white hair to the picture I already had and browsed the begrieved: a gently churning sea of penguinesques in their mourning dress, their dinner plates bobbing before them. But none of them was Mal. Ken Dorn, meanwhile, had vanished.

  Hard as it may seem to believe, I hadn’t given the will a lot of thought. For one thing, I wasn’t sure how much money Dad actually had; for all I knew he had been giving it all away as quickly as it came in. He was not a spendthrift, anyway, as the squalid house had confirmed.

  More significantly, I had, since leaving home, mounted the bandwagon of a subculture in which money was supposed to be meaningless—the world of art. Money was said to corrupt, of course, and all anecdotal evidence pointed to the ultimate truth of this maxim; the work of artists who had “sold out” lost favor instantly among their peers, even as it garnered increasing public attention. Relative poverty was a matter of pride to my friends, and much of our talk about art revolved around the emptiness of work made to sell.

  Lately, however, I’d begun to have a problem with this. Most of my unease came from a creeping conviction that my work was irrelevant and insular at best, simply awful at worst. I used found objects from the streets of West Philadelphia as my materials, and assembled them in our apartment’s extra room to evoke scenes easily accessible in their original form not thirty feet from where I worked. I was, in other words, making little outsides indoors. I had never sold a single piece.

  And so I was, as etiquette demanded, perpetually poor. I made money from odd jobs; Amanda put food on the table with a coffee shop shift and the faux-primitive jewelry-making business she’d begun to supplement her painting. I worried about things like excessive long-distance phone calls and sudden rent increases. I panicked regularly about the car (justifiably, it turned out). These little stresses kept uneasy company with the minor scrapes and contusions of my relationship with Amanda. Consequently our lives were not romantic. We were mildly unhappy. We had very little sex.

  Of course it was easy to blame money, easy to slaver over the thought of a giant inheritance that would free us from humiliating employment and let us concentrate on what really mattered: our work, our relationship. But, as you can see, I was beginning to wonder what kind of life might come from total immersion in those two things, neither of which I appeared to be very good at.

  All the same, it is a rare man who is immune to the American Dream, and I was not that man. Thus, I banished, with a deftness only possible after long experience, all thoughts of fabulous wealth from my mind. If there was one thing all my siblings agreed on when we were children, it was that low expectations were always appropriate, in any situation.

  * * *

  That night I found an extra key to the studio in the junk drawer at the corner of our kitchen, and went out for a look around. I turned on the lights and found a scene utterly familiar, yet peculiarly changed: the objects that had been so mysteriously charged for the young me were now dispiritingly inert and literal. The flat files, after art school, were no more exceptional than a chest of drawers; the pencils and pens seemed so mundane that for a moment I could not picture my father using them. The room was long and thin like a chicken coop; you could have parallel parked three cars comfortably inside. At the very back was a makeshift kitchen: a mini-fridge and a coffee maker, several half-drunk bottles of liquor and a glittering stonehenge of glasses balanced on a card table. A bookshelf was filled from top to bottom with spiral notebooks. I knew that these were filled with rough pencil drawings for the Family Funnies. My father eschewed the hardbound sketchbooks favored by some artists; he found them pretentious.

  Elsewhere was a small iron safe, nearly buried under a stack of magazines (National Geographic, American Cartoonist, Playboy). I tugged on the handle. It was locked. I made a mental note to try cracking it. There was a filing cabinet filled with accounting papers, correspondence, and newspaper and magazine articles, and a huge bulletin board covered exclusively with FF drawings sent to my father by admiring children. I spent long minutes staring at the board, and remembered feeling intense jealousy at it as a child, even recalled vandalizing an earlier version of it with a felt-tipped marker. I wasn’t punished. Dad just put up new ones.

  And there was the drawing board, the one he was said to have died at. It was an adjustable architect’s drafting table, tilted at a twenty-degree angle. Someone had taken the papers away and wiped it perfectly clean, save for the years-old scratches and faded ink stains.

  I pulled open a flat file drawer at random and found an unfinished cartoon. It was, like almost all my father’s cartoons, a single large frame. It took place in the kitchen. My mother was standing, cooking something in a skillet, and a child was behind her, pointing at the stove. My mother’s face, though distorted as all our faces were (my father drew our heads as elongated ovals, for some reason tilted on their sides, so that it looked like we were all carrying watermelons on our shoulders), bore a sleepy impatience as familiar to me as my own reflection.

  But the child was unfinished, only an outline without a head or clothes, and the cartoon had no caption. What, I wondered, could it have been about? And why did he abandon it? The background—a cleaner, less quirky version of our kitchen—was fully drawn. Perhaps he couldn’t decide on a child. Or maybe that weirdly accurate expression on my mother’s face was too much for him to set loose in the papers. Where did he draw the line with Mom? What was too true to print?

  I was closing the studio door behind me when I got a funny feeling, like I had left something inside. I opened the door and switched the lights back on. What was it? I rubbed my eyes over every flat surface. Keys? A wallet?

  I found myself back at the bulletin board. The drawings were mostly awful: awkward and disproportionate in ways even cartoon characters shouldn’t be. There was our family with Superman flying overhead, a picture of Lindy/Rose wearing, for some reason, an Indian headdress.

  But one was almost exactly right, so right that I thought at first that my father had drawn it himself. It was a picture of the whole family, pre-me, pre-Bitty, playing tug-of-war, Mom and Lindy on one side, Dad and Bobby on the other. The girls were winning. It was done very professionally in ink, and the background of trees and grass was very much in my father’s minimal style. Even the mud puddle in the middle of the two groups had something of his line to it—that slapdash, abbreviated naturalism so effortless it melts from the page—and the situation—the tug-of-war—was peculiarly appropriate, though my father never drew anything like it, to my knowledge.

  When I looked at the signature, I knew it was what I had been looking for. It read, in a surprisingly mature slanted script, “Kenny Dorn, age 15.”

  five

  Neither Pierce nor I was in any mood for wrestling our father’s Caddy to Trenton for the reading of the will, so I called Bobby for a ride. Samantha answered and said he and Nancy had already gone, leaving her behind with a neighbor. “I wanted to go,” she complained. “Uncle Pierce said I could sit with him.” Next I tried Bitty at her place in Frenchtown. I got Mike Maas.

  “Hi,” I said. “Mike. This is Bitty’s brother Tim.”

  Mike Maas cleared his throat. “Yeah, hey.”

  “Listen, is she around?”

  “She’s in the bathroom,” he said. He had a phlegmy voice that sounded much older than it was. For a moment I entertained the notion that I had dialed the wrong number, and the middle-aged stranger on the other end was playing along, deadpan.

  “Well, I don’t really need to talk to her. I’m just wondering if you guys could swing by for Pierce and me on your way to the reading. Of the will.”

  “It’s not exactly on the way,” said Mike Maas.

  I said nothing. This was something Amanda had taught me. When you asked somebody for a fav
or, and that person said something that strongly resembled no but was not quite no, you just waited silently until that person broke down and said yes.

  “But, you know,” he said, “no problem.”

  “Oh, great. See you around eight-thirty, then.” I hung up. Already I didn’t like Mike Maas very much. I wondered briefly why my sister had married him, then decided that I didn’t know my sister well enough to reckon such a thing. This realization saddened me and I thought that maybe it could somehow be set right, somehow we could get to be friends. With a heavy heart I went down the hall to find Pierce.

  The previous night, I had turned in as soon as I returned from the studio. I remembered tiptoeing through the house, so as not to wake the many guests I assumed were staying there too. But it had become clear, in the groggy minutes after my travel alarm went off in the morning, that there was nobody around but Pierce and me. Rose and Andrew must have gone back to New York, and dropped my mother off at the home; no cousins or uncles or aunts appeared to have come at all. The house felt weirdly desolate, and in my childhood bed, cluttered with the ghosts of every nightmare I’d ever had, I did too.

  It was ten after eight. I knocked on Pierce’s door. I could hear him in there, breathing, and decided to just go in.

  “Howdy,” he said with factitious cheer.

  “Bitty and Maas are picking us up in twenty minutes,” I said. “Are you getting dressed?”