It's Superman! A Novel by Tom De Haven Read Free Book Online

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