The Hellfire Club(12)
“I’m glad you asked,” said Kefauver. “We’re holding hearings on juvenile delinquency this spring. Maybe April. Wertham is our key witness. The hearings will be in New York, in your congressional district, and we’d like you to help host and arrange a venue. We’d also like you to participate.” He glanced at Wertham.
“Estes here feels we need some youth on the panel,” Wertham said.
“I’m thirty-three,” said Charlie. “Hardly young.”
“For Congress, you’re an infant,” said Wertham. “This place is practically a museum exhibit of sarcophagi.”
“These are going to be big, Charlie,” said Kefauver. “We’re going to tear the lid off one of the most pernicious influences in our culture today. There will be a lot of press coverage; it will be a stellar opportunity to establish yourself. When folks hear you’re part of my next project, my guess is they’ll be more inclined to treat you with the respect you clearly feel you deserve.”
“And what are we going after?” Charlie asked, ignoring the gibe. “What exactly is the pernicious influence?”
Wertham smiled; it was the moment he’d been waiting for.
“Comic books,” he said.
Chapter Five
Monday, January 18, 1954
Maryland Rural Route 32/U.S. Capitol
“Comic books?” asked Margaret. “So did you laugh in his face?”
Margaret was using the desk phone at Polly’s Lodging, a motel about five miles from the Nanticoke Island campsite where she’d been conducting her research for the last two days. She’d volunteered to drive back to the mainland to buy some batteries and bread for the group, and she’d seized the opportunity to phone Charlie at work. She’d asked the long-distance operator to call back after their conversation was done and tell her the charges so she could give that amount to the motel owner, a dour older woman, presumably Polly.
“You should have seen their faces,” said Charlie. He was sitting behind the desk in his congressional office staring at a framed photograph of Margaret from their wedding day, one that captured her laughing uproariously, her head thrown back. He reached for a cigarette. “It was as if they were revealing that milk causes cancer. But it was about goddamn Batman.”
Charlie looked out his office window. Being the most junior member of the Eighty-Third Congress, he had a view of the air-conditioning unit of the second-most-junior member.
“Right after the meeting, Kefauver couriered over a package. Wertham has a book coming out in a few months…what’s it called—” He leafed through the manila folder. “Seduction of the Innocent.”
“Sounds very dangerous,” she said. “Innocent people shouldn’t be seduced!”
“This is no joke, Margaret!” Charlie protested in mock horror. “Kefauver sent me an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal from last November. On the front of the magazine: ‘What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books.’” He paused to read dramatically: “‘Here is the startling truth about the ninety million comic books America’s children read each month.’ He argues that comic books are literally instruction manuals for children to become hardened criminals.”
“It sounds…kind of silly,” Margaret said.
“Yes, and Kefauver wants to hold goddamn hearings on this in Manhattan in April!”
Margaret paused and Charlie had a feeling he knew why. She probably didn’t care to hear him discuss doing something he didn’t want to do, something he thought was an idiotic distraction. Their lives until now had been refreshingly free of any need for compromise. They were academics, idealists who’d participated in fund-raisers to fight polio and to foster better education for poor children. For the first time, they were facing choices they didn’t like.
“More important,” she finally said, “how’s the Goodstone fight?”
“Nothing since we last spoke, really. Kefauver cautioned me to be careful; Miss Leopold is against my doing it. I’m going to a poker game for veterans in Congress tonight. I’ll see if I can get them on board.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said.
“So how are the ponies?”
“They’re grand,” said Margaret. “About an hour after we arrived on Nanticoke, we saw some of the ponies literally frolicking in the surf.”
“So one research team’s on Nanticoke and the other is on Susquehannock?”
“Yes, I’m with Louis and one of his research assistants from Wisconsin.”
“And,” he said, hesitating, “when will I get to see you again?”
“Probably Saturday. It’s so nice being back in the field, and if this is my last project for a while because of the baby, I don’t want to leave too soon.”
“Sounds like wild horses couldn’t drag you away,” he muttered.
“Ugh, awful,” she chided him. “You know, you shouldn’t make bad dad puns until you actually become a dad.”
“But you won’t really need to return to the field after the baby,” Charlie said. “If you want to make this book project a reality, you can work from home, right?”
“Sure,” said Margaret. “And I suppose we could set up a situation where I just squeeze out baby after baby between edits? Maybe one per project?”