Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  It was on Vine Street that Franklin discovered one day a five-story building called Klein’s Wonder Palace, an old dime museum that had flourished in the nineties and now, in 1910, housed a movie theater, Madama Zola’s palmist parlor, and an array of faded exhibits and aging curiosities, such as a sickly two-headed chicken, a tired-looking counting pig, and a tattooed man so ancient that he continually fell asleep with his head hanging down. Franklin wandered the old halls with delight. He made his way through a dusty mirror maze and followed arrows to a dim-lit room with roped-off alcoves in which he saw Jenny Scott the Armless Wonder, Dee-Dee the Dog-Faced Boy, and the Missing Link. There was an old wax museum showing tableaux of famous murders, an historical collection that included the bloody neckerchief of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington’s childhood ax, and a stage for performers where you could see John Blake the Contortionist, who could squeeze through a crack no wider than a finger, or Little Ellie Trinker, who played popular tunes by cracking her bones. In a corner of the surprisingly crowded second floor, not far from the Bearded Lady, Franklin saw a young man with very pale skin who stood at an easel and made startlingly swift and accurate charcoal portraits for twenty-five cents apiece. Franklin fell into conversation with the quick-sketch artist, who said he made a dime for each sketch but was planning to quit at the end of the month to join his brother in a printing plant in Ypsilanti. He showed Franklin, who was amused by quickness but didn’t much admire it, a few tricks of the trade. Ten days later Franklin was hired to work three afternoons a week and all day Saturday in Klein’s Wonder Palace. He divided his time between the Commercial Academy and the Wonder Palace until, one day a few months later, the manager offered him a full-time job making advertising posters; and Franklin, after thinking it over for a week, withdrew from the Commercial Academy and moved into a small studio at the back of the upper floor of the Wonder Palace.

  His advertising posters, in flamboyant colors, at first showed simple portraits of the Bearded Lady, or Jenny Scott the Armless Wonder, or Dee-Dee the Dog-Faced Boy, but soon they began to include perspective backgrounds and small secondary figures, real and fanciful, arranged artfully within the total design. Backgrounds became filled with meticulous detail, the decorative titles began to include minute fantastic creatures with tails and wings; and before six months had passed, Franklin received a raise.

  One day after he had been living for nearly a year in the Wonder Palace, Franklin was sketching in his room when there was a knock at the door. “Just a,” he said, and looked up from his drawing to see a man in a white linen suit with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and a diamond stickpin in his cravat. The stranger introduced himself as Montgomery Nash, glanced negligently at Franklin’s sketches, and offered him a job in the art department of the Cincinnati Daily Crier. Franklin’s hand paused in midstroke before continuing along the curve of a handsome handlebar mustache. He had heard of Montgomery Nash, the dandyish business manager of the Daily Crier; the offer was so tempting, so exactly in line with his secret ambition, that he felt an odd, melancholy desire to refuse it. Instead he began to ask precise questions and to insist clearly on his lack of training, his lack of suitability for the job. Nash gave him a shrewd look, pulled at the brim of his fawn fedora, and told him to report to work the following Monday.

  In his office on the sixth floor of the Daily Crier, Franklin’s favorite piece of furniture was the high-backed oak swivel chair, which allowed him to tilt back and, with a slight pressure of one foot, swing away from his desk to the sunny window with its raised Venetian blind. He liked to look across at the commercial building with its arched windows in the upper stories and its ground-floor row of small shops and restaurants, all with fringed awnings and plate-glass windows, before pushing with his foot and swinging back to his drawing board.

  At first Franklin drew decorative borders, elaborate titles, and miscellaneous illustrations, while using his spare hours to learn the art of the editorial cartoon; and as his editorial cartoons began to appear regularly, showing France and Germany glaring at each other across a table while a Japanese waiter looked on with a smile, or Civilization, crowned with vine leaves, walking away with bowed head from the bench of Judicial Vice, he tried his hand at occasional gag cartoons, which he drew slowly and in loving detail. The success of these single-panel cartoons, as well as his ability to summon up a wealth of images from his childhood in Plains Farms, from his long walks in Cincinnati, and from his year in the Wonder Palace, led him to try his hand at a comic strip, which he set in a phantasmagoric dime museum on Vine Street. “Dime Museum Dreams,” a six-panel black-and-white strip that appeared weekly, was an immediate success. The format was invariable: in the first panel, an unnamed boy was seen holding his mother’s hand—nothing was shown of the mother except her hand and forearm—and staring at an exhibit in the dime museum: a bearded lady, or a two-headed chicken, or a man shaped like a pretzel. In the next three panels the freakish creature became more and more frightening—the pretzel man began to wrap himself around the boy’s legs, the bearded lady became entirely covered with thick long hair—until in the fifth, climactic panel the height of horror was reached and the boy shrieked out in terror. In the last panel the exhibit had returned to its original shape, while the boy sobbed against his mother’s leg and listened to her words of comfort. The success of the strip led Franklin to attempt another; and by the end of his second year at the Daily Crier, in the summer of 1913, he was drawing three daily strips and a color strip for the Sunday supplement, in addition to editorial cartoons and spot illustrations.

  One afternoon in July, as Franklin stepped out into the reception room of the Daily Crier on his way to lunch, he saw a handsome young woman in a straw hat with a bunch of fresh cherries on the brim. Her straight nose, her broad shoulders, the squiggle of pale hair falling along one temple, above all the faint shine on the skin beneath both eyes, all this struck him as vaguely familiar, and with an apology for intruding he asked her whether they had met. Slowly she raised her head and said, with nostrils tight-drawn: “I was under the impression that this was a newspaper office, not a dance hall,” and lowered her face decisively. Later he learned from a reporter in the newsroom that the haughty young woman was Cora Vaughn, daughter of Judge James Rowland Vaughn of the City Court; she was a schoolteacher who occasionally stopped by to look through the files in connection with school projects. Franklin, who had never heard of Cora Vaughn, was certain he had seen her somewhere: the quivering nostrils, the slight flush, the cherries trembling on the hat brim, all this made a deep impression on him, and when, the following summer, he sat all night by his father’s sickbed in the house in Plains Farms, remembering the tire swing and the grave voice in the darkroom, he suddenly thought of those quivering nostrils, those cherries trembling on the hat-brim. The crisis passed, though the mild apoplectic seizure seemed to have aged his father ten years. Two weeks later Franklin sat in his office, gazing out the window at reflections of passersby in the window of a restaurant and wondering if he could capture the effect in the next installment of his Sunday strip, when he saw Cora Vaughn step into the street. A moment later he saw that it was a different woman—he had been misled by the straw hat—but he remembered where he had first seen the real Cora: he had sketched her portrait in Klein’s Wonder Palace.

  His courtship of Cora Vaughn was the most difficult thing he had ever set out to do. At first she refused to speak to him when he presented himself at the elementary school after the last bell had rung, and when he began sending her cartoons drawn especially for her, she promptly returned them. In the long winter nights, in the boarding house two blocks from his office, he brooded over Cora Vaughn until she seemed as familiar as his own childhood and at the same time mysterious and ungraspable. One Sunday afternoon when he was walking in Eden Park he saw her skating on the pond; she wore a blue wool coat and a white scarf, plumes of breath streamed out behind her, he felt strangely drowsy and heavy headed yet sharply alert. He turn
ed away and stood looking down at the Ohio River, bordered by greenish ice. He thought of the war in Europe and wondered if the Marne ever iced over in winter. Men his own age were dying in battle every day. When he turned back she was no longer there, and he wondered if he had imagined it all: the white scarf, the plumes of bluish breath, the dark blades of the skates lifting and falling, the distant war. Slowly the ice in the river melted, the magnolias put out their waxy flowers, and one day as he was rounding the corner of Walnut and Sixth he looked up into the smiling face of Cora Vaughn. And all at once, just like that, he was sitting on her warm front porch with the tall pillars, inhaling a heavy odor of lilacs and speaking of the house in Plains Farms and his father’s voice in the darkroom. Evening after evening he sat on Judge Vaughn’s porch, watching the fireflies come out in the lavender dark and listening to the creak of the porch glider, and one August night in a riot of crickets that reminded him of the meadow behind his house in Plains Farms he proposed to Cora. She looked at him in troubled surprise, as if he had failed to understand something, and refused him brusquely. Suddenly she burst into tears and fled into the parlor.

  After three sleepless nights Franklin returned to her street but dared not approach the porch. In the office the next day he found a brief, impatient note from Cora, asking where he had been. That evening she said that although she enjoyed his friendship, she could never marry a man who drew comic strips—the whole idea was unthinkable and impossible. Franklin opened his mouth to defend his trade, suddenly saw himself through her eyes, a ridiculous childish man who made silly pictures, and sank into silence. Cora Vaughn played Schubert sonatas on the piano and liked to talk about the contrasting methods of Delacroix and Ingres—how could she marry someone who thrilled to the life of a seedy dime museum and spent ten hours a day drawing for the funny papers? He thoroughly understood her distaste for what he did, and at the same time he obscurely felt that she herself didn’t understand something. She didn’t understand that his funny drawings were his path to a necessary place—a place that could never be expressed in words or pictures but that somehow was the vital center of things. He felt a confused pity for Cora Vaughn, and was shocked at his pity. He rose, tried to say something, and left in silence. That night he vowed to forget her and live in solitude; the next day he found an irritable note from Cora in his office, and eight months later they left on their honeymoon for New Orleans.

  In Cincinnati Cora found a large house with bay windows and bracketed eaves, four blocks from Judge Vaughn’s mansion. Franklin would have liked to live farther from Cora’s old neighborhood, for she liked to spend the evenings at her father’s house; the judge was a grave but amicable man who seemed slightly puzzled by the presence of his son-in-law in the parlor and sometimes gave the impression that he had forgotten his daughter was a married woman. Franklin loved to watch Cora play the piano: she sat very straight, half closed her eyes, and allowed her head to sway and bow slightly; the mixture of stern control and dreamy abandon filled him with tenderness and longing. Sometimes he felt that he longed for her too much, that he was crude and disgusting in his desire; for he never knew whether Cora would welcome him or turn her face away and complain of tiredness. She had insisted on having her own bedroom, and although Franklin had agreed without protest, the arrangement left him feeling a perpetual guest. Once, in the first weeks of their marriage, Cora had come to him late at night. The sight of her standing by the bed in her pink silk nightgown trimmed with lace and small ribbons, her hair unbound, her eyes looking down at him with a kind of solemn tenderness, filled him with such pride and happiness that he suddenly became afraid, as if he had been given something he did not deserve and would not be allowed to keep.

  Their daughter, Stella, was born the following spring. Franklin liked to warm her feet by pulling her tiny socks on, placing his mouth on the sole of a sock, and blowing until his lips felt hot. Sometimes at night he woke up, fearful that she had died in her sleep. Then he would creep into her room and bend down to hear her breathing, and after that he would stare at her a long time before pulling the blanket up to her chin and returning to his room.

  He thought about blowing on her feet as he stood one night leaning against the wall of a barracks building in Waco, Texas, and stared up at the blue-black sky. He was dressed in olive drab. The sky reminded him of long boyhood summer evenings—the kind of evening he might never spend with his daughter. The armistice was signed three weeks later, and he was home for Thanksgiving, but for a long time he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was somehow responsible for neglecting precious weeks of his daughter’s life and that he must now be more attentive to her than ever.

  That winter his father died, of a lingering cold that developed into influenza. He had never been the same since his stroke before the war, and Franklin, staring at the gaunt and white-haired man lying in bed with closed eyes, was carried violently back to the other father, the one who had raised and lowered his hand in the darkroom as he gravely counted out the numbers. It was as if this elderly stranger had usurped his father’s place and now, in death, was permitting the real father to return. After the funeral Franklin tried to find something of his father’s to bring back with him—an ivory-handled penknife, a photograph of the sweet-gum tree—but it all seemed flat and dead, and he returned to Cincinnati empty-handed, but with the real father alive inside him.

  When Stella was two years old a syndicate purchased one of Franklin’s daily strips. He hurried home to surprise Cora with the news, but found her pacing irritably. Dr. Stanton had just left; Stella was trembling and her temperature had risen to 105. In the next two days, as Stella’s life seemed to hang in the balance, and Cora, who needed her sleep, grew more and more irritable, Franklin remembered the picture of Jehovah on the cover of his child’s illustrated Bible, and prayed to the bearded man in the robe to save his daughter. The fever lessened, Dr. Stanton said Stella had croup; and as the days passed and life returned to normal, Franklin never found the right moment to announce his news to Cora. One night after Stella was in bed he told Cora in an offhand way that one of his strips had been syndicated. “I’m glad for you, Franklin,” she said, “but you know I never understand these things.” He waited for her to ask a question, but she said no more, not a word, and he never mentioned it again.

  He was given a raise and promoted to assistant director of the art department; and one day a letter came from a New York editor, offering him the position of staff artist in the art department of the New York World Citizen at a startling salary.

  Cora greeted the news coldly, with quivering nostrils. She said she could no more think of moving to New York City than she could think of moving to the dark side of the moon. Franklin dropped the matter but lay awake at night wondering if he was to spend the rest of his life living four blocks from his distinguished and slightly disapproving father-in-law. He knew the offer was a good one; it would permit him to cut back on editorial cartooning and devote his energy to the daily strips that had begun to attract national attention—and quite apart from all that was the sense of a challenge, an invitation to adventure that he felt it would be harmful to ignore. The idea of moving excited him: New York was the center of the newspaper world. But more than that, he wanted Cora to choose him decisively; after three years of marriage she still half lived in her childhood home.

  When, a week later, Franklin announced that he had accepted the job, Cora drew back as if he had struck her in the face. Then she turned on her heel, marched into Stella’s room, picked up the sleeping child, and carried her out of the house. Franklin went to his desk and thrust a letter into his pocket before following Cora to her father’s house, where he found her weeping in her old room. Downstairs he showed the judge the letter from New York. The judge promised to speak to his daughter; Franklin had known he would recognize a good offer if he saw one.