The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000

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Part 4, Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “The Golden Age”

Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary

Ruth Ebling watches as a line of cars pull up to the house of James Haworth Love, where she is a housekeeper. All of the men accompanying Love appear confident, though one stands out; Ruth notices “the little Jew at once” (402). Sam could never have known, and would never find out, what went wrong that day, that Ruth Ebling’s hostility toward Jews was:

being fueled not merely by the usual black compound of her brother’s logical, omnivorous harangues and the silent precepts of her employer’s social class. She was also burning a clear, volatile quart of shame blended with unrefined rage (403).

Carl Ebling pleaded guilty to his charges and was sentenced by a judge with the Jewish name of Cohn to 12 years imprisonment. Ruth had never fully agreed with Carl’s views on Hitler, but she saw nobility in her brother’s devotion to freeing America from “Morgenthau and the rest of his cabal” (403). However, it seems to Ruth painfully obvious that Carl needed to be in a psychiatric facility and not Sing. All of this, coupled with her new-found animosity toward her employer, Mr. Love—who she felt was behaving shamelessly by being vocally opposed to Charles Lindbergh, to the America Firsters, and the German American Bund, and also allowing, for the first time ever, Jews in Pawtaw—has caused her to rebel.

Sam and Tracy enter the house. Sam is nervous about being at the house with Tracy and all the others, not only because of the nature of the get-together—they are all gay men—but also because he feels so inferior to all the rest of the men. Tracy does his best to calm Sam’s apprehensions. On top of his feelings of inferiority, Sam is still struggling with the idea of being gay. Tracy goes back and forth with Sam on the topic for a while. Eventually, Sam wrestles with Tracy on the bed, and the two end up making love.

Later, downstairs at dinner, as all the men sit around the table with their respective lovers, they are interrupted by the Monmouth County Sheriff. Ruth has called the police and informed them of Mr. Love’s “gathering.” In the ensuing raid, Tracy Bacon, who has had run-ins with law enforcement in his past, fights back and is only taken down with considerable force. Sam witnesses Tracy being beaten while hiding under the table. The police leave with the others, leaving Sam and another man behind. However, the coast is not yet clear. The two FBI agents come back to do one last sweep and discover Sam and Dave under the table. The agents rape Sam and Dave.

Afterward, the two men lead Dave and Sam out of the house. Ruth asks Sam about how he feels preying on the weak-minded; Sam doesn’t understand what she means. Ruth then tells Sam about a boy who jumped off a roof with a tablecloth tied around his neck and died. Sam still doesn’t know what she is talking about. Just then the phone rings: It’s a call for Sam, from his mother.

Sam would wonder later about that incident and what would have happened had his mother not called just as the officers were about to lead them away. In the end, no more harm is done to Dave and Sam.

Part 4, Chapter 16 Summary

After Joe left the Trevi, he wandered around, feeling as if he’d already died. He eventually found himself in Brooklyn and then rode the train out to Coney Island. He fell asleep and wound up in a place called Gravesend. Around two o’clock in the morning, more drunk than he’s ever been, Joe arrives at his aunt’s house.

Ethel answers the door and invites Joe in. She sits down across from him and gives him a tissue, telling him the first thing he should do is cry. Ethel also gives Joe some honey cake and a towel, just like on the first day he arrived there from Europe.

While Joe is taking a shower, his grandmother comes into the bathroom, unaware of Joe’s presence, and sits down on the toilet. “You don’t listen to me, Yecheved” (416), she says to Joe, calling him by Ethel’s old name back home in Europe. She adds, “From the first day, I said I don’t like this boat. Didn’t I?” (416). She then exits the bathroom and turns out the light. Joe has to finish showering in the dark.

After he emerges from the shower, sobbing, Ethel wraps him in one of Sam’s father’s old bathrobes and leads him to Sam’s old bed. Joe falls asleep but wakes up a few hours later. Ethel informs Joe that Rosa is on her way. Joe has no desire to see anyone. Forty-five minutes later, Rosa honks the horn and Joe leaves.

Ethel rushes to the window to see Rosa step out of the car and throw her arms around Joe:

Joe held on to [Rosa] for so long that Ethel found herself regretting, with an intensity that surprised her, that she had neglected to take her nephew into her arms. It seemed just then to be the worst mistake she had ever made in her life (417).

Part 4, Chapter 17 Summary

Joe and Rosa crawl into her bed at 6:30 in the morning. Rosa holds Joe tightly while they fall asleep. She awakens at four o’clock in the afternoon and finds Joe has left. When she goes downstairs, her father tells her that Joe has left to join the navy.

The doorbell rings. It is Sam, looking like he has been in a fight. She wonders if Sam and Tracy have fought but can’t imagine Tracy hurting Sam physically. Rosa asks Sam about his torn shirt sleeve. Sam informs her that he tore it himself. Rosa remembers hearing that this act is a sign of mourning for Jews. She asks Sam if he wants to come in, which he doesn’t, and informs him that Joe isn’t there. Sam knows Joe is gone, having seen him earlier when Joe came by to get some of his things. Rosa then asks Sam why he’s there and learns Sam broke up with Tracy earlier at the station before they were scheduled to leave for Los Angeles together. Even though Sam loves Tracy, he has decided that he can’t live life as a gay man.

Rosa tells Sam that she thinks she needs an abortion. Sam learns about Rosa’s pregnancy, that Rosa hasn’t told Joe, and now, in light of the situation, that she has no plans of ever telling him. Sam wonders why Rosa never told Joe. She tells him she was afraid to. Sam understands that what she feared was that Joe would tell her to get an abortion and never marry her. She agrees that that was indeed the case: “Sammy turned to look at her, his eyes bright, wild with an idea that Rosa grasped at once, in all its depths and particulars, in all the fear and hopelessness on which it fed” (421).

Part 4, Chapters 15-17 Analysis

Ruth Ebling emerges as Sam’s arch nemesis, calling the police to raid a gathering of gay men in which Sam finally has sex with Tracy for the first time, but she also brings back the idea of going too far with comic books or with fantasy. Her anger with Sam has much less to do with his Jewish identity—even though she is obviously antisemitic—and more with the fact that she blames Sam and Joe for her brother’s predicament, feeling that, without The Escapist, Carl would never have been pushed over the edge. Ruth, then, represents a butterfly effect in the story, showing how the actions of one can have repercussions for another and suggesting that one can never evaluate actions without taking into account their possible ramifications. Ruth also supplies the force that pushes Sam to make a life-altering decision when he decides that life as a gay man in 1940s America is not what he wants. The suggestion at the end of Chapter 17 is that Sam has decided to marry Rosa. Sam yearns for a sense of normalcy and, considering the environment for a pregnant, unwed woman during that time period, Rosa could use a husband.

The scene of the raid is a mirroring of fascist raids in Europe. At one point during the fracas, while Dave and Sam are under the table, the uniforms of the law enforcement officers are described as “tan.” The notorious Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung, aka storm troopers), the prequel to the SS, were known as “brown shirts” because of the color of their uniforms. The fact that American officers are wearing a shade of brown and are violently repressing a group of men deemed “criminal” because of their orientation is not coincidental in a novel rife with the struggle against racism, hatred, and fascism.

Joe’s grandmother calls her daughter, Ethel (a name derived from the Old English word for “noble”), by her original, Jewish name. “Yecheved” is likely a derivation of the name more commonly written as Yocheved, or Jochebed. Jochebed was the mother of Moses, the prophet who led the Israelites out of bondage in ancient Egypt. That Ethel is Sam’s mother seems to indicate that Sam has, at some point further along in the novel, a role to play as a savior for the enslaved. It has already been suggested that Sam is going to provide Rosa a way out of the chains imposed by conservative 1940s American society by marrying her, which would allow her to keep her and Joe’s child. This act of self-sacrifice suggests that Escape and Freedom for one person sometimes come at the cost of someone else’s freedom.

As a person and as a mother, Ethel is emotionally and physically distant, but when she witnesses Rosa embrace Joe, she realizes that she has missed the opportunity to be the loving, comforting mother that Joe desperately needed at that exact moment.