Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  At the train station Franklin was thrilled by the names of cities on the board above the grated windows of the ticket sellers, the bustle of porters, the squeak of luggage, the rows of high windows in the passenger cars, the big iron wheels of the engine rising higher than Stella’s head; but when he looked at Cora in her red velvet hat with the black osprey feather, flinching at the sound of grating steel and hissing steam, and gazing about as if she were looking for someone she had lost, he longed to throw himself at her feet and beg forgiveness for the squeaking bags, the shine of sweat on the cheeks of the Negro porter, the little girl in a kerchief, crying on a brown wooden bench, the sides of the passenger cars rising up like the flanks of a bull.

  At first they rented an apartment in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, on a shady street lined with maples and sycamores. Franklin walked to the city each morning over the promenade of the noble bridge with its churchlike double arches that seemed to rise higher than skyscrapers, its four suspension cables sweeping up into the sky, its rumble of electric trolleys and elevated trains, its secret evocation of the old bridge over the Ohio. It deeply pleased him that both bridges had been designed by the same engineer, as if his choice had obeyed a hidden design. On Sundays he went for walks with Stella around his new neighborhood, showing her street signs that bore the names of fruits—Pineapple Street, Orange Street, Cranberry Street—and pointing to brilliant glimpses of the river at the sunny ends of shady streets. Sometimes he sat with Cora and Stella on a slatted bench under a tree at the end of Montague Street and pointed at the giant bridge rising over the mansard tower of the old ferry house, at the barges and tugboats passing on the river, at the wharves and shipping factories and tall buildings rising on the other shore. Then he told Stella about his other life, when he sat on a bench in Kentucky and looked across the river at the Cincinnati waterfront. But Cora seemed confused by the new streets, the strange buildings rising across the river, the sound of foghorns at night and of doors shutting in other apartments. Often he would come home from work to find her sitting pensively in her mahogany rocking chair with the lion’s head finials, staring through the bow window at the street below; and one day, hearing by chance of a house in a village north of the city, one hour by train from Grand Central Station, he asked Cora whether she would like to move to Mount Hebron. At first sight of the many-gabled old house with the two towering sugar maples flanking the front path, set halfway up the slope of the village on the river, Cora placed a hand on Franklin’s forearm and, with the wind blowing back her hair, tightened her grip as if she were climbing a stairway. The house on the hill was a little more than Franklin could readily afford, and a part-time housekeeper proved to be an absolute necessity, but seated in his tower study two floors above the front porch, separated from the ordinary life of the house but feeling that he drew secret strength from the floors below, Franklin worked far into the night, unable to sleep through sheer exhilaration. He had begun work on two new strips that were as unlike each other as possible, and these experiments had led directly to his recent adventure with rice paper.

  THREE

  The offices of the New York World Citizen occupied four floors and the basement of a commercial building on Thirty-second Street off Sixth Avenue, two blocks from Herald Square. Although the business and executive offices on the fourth floor were arranged in an orderly way, on both sides of dim-lit hallways, the corridors of the floors below had a tendency to go astray, as old walls were knocked down and new ones erected to make space for additional rooms. The second floor, where the art department had its offices, was nicknamed The Warren, for in the course of three separate efforts at expansion the halls had begun to take odd, surprising turns, new rooms had sprung up unexpectedly behind suddenly appearing doors, and one day an old Linotype machine from the composing room in the basement had been discovered in a cramped room between the offices of two political cartoonists; and rumor had it that several members of the department were entombed in rooms accidentally sealed off during a recent bout of construction. The dim, abruptly turning corridors, the maze of brownish offices, the smell of printer’s ink and floor wax, the racket of typewriters and ringing telephones in the newsroom on the first floor, and, underneath it all, the rumble of the web-fed rotary presses, all this excited Franklin, who had a small office with half-open, yellowed Venetian blinds, a framed and faded newspaper photograph from 1905 showing dignitaries seated at a table in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, and an old rolltop desk entirely covered with cracker boxes, cedarwood penholders, rough-sketched cartoons, and scientific gadgets picked up here and there: a dusty gyroscope, a radiometer with slowly turning black-and-silver vanes, and a model steam engine with a brass boiler, a firebox, a working piston, and a flywheel. The office contained an old mahogany armchair upholstered in a pattern of faded pink cabbage roses, but Franklin preferred to sit at his desk for eight to ten hours a day, composing comic strips and single-panel cartoons on a drawing board that slanted from the desk edge to his lap.

  On the morning after his moonlit escapade, shortly before eleven o’clock, as Franklin sat frowning down at his drawing board and slowly stroking his left temple with two fingers of his left hand, there was a sharp, quick rap at the door, which instantly swung open with a clatter of blinds.

  “I met a man the other night,” Max Horn said, flinging himself into the faded armchair and stretching out his legs, “who asked me whether I considered myself an expressionist. He wasn’t kidding. Now what do you say to a guy in a silk tie who wants to know whether you consider yourself an expressionist? I told him I’d started out as an expressionist but dropped it at age sixteen. You look awful, by the way. So he blinks at me through his specs and asks whether I think the comic strip is the art of the future. There’s no stopping this gent. I tell him the art of the future is the American billboard. He asks me what exactly I mean by that. I invent a theory on the spot, dragging in cave art and primitive masks. Finally I can’t take it anymore and try to beat a retreat. He grabs my arm and hands me his card—J. Bateson: Bathroom Accessories. I saw the light, Franklin. The American bathroom and the avant garde walking hand in hand into the future. Cubist paintings on shower curtains, free verse printed on rolls of toilet paper in violet ink. An expressionist in every tub. I’ll be there around one.”

  “Good,” Franklin said. “I’ll meet you at the station.”

  “Later it struck me Bateson might be right. The art of the future is American art, and what is American art? I’ll tell you what it is. American art is efficient art—quick art. We’re busy, we want something that doesn’t take up too much time, something we can throw out. The art of the future is throwaway art: the comic strip, ads for Cracker Jack, the architecture of the tin can.”

  “You missed your calling, Max.”

  “You bet your sweet life I did. I should’ve been an adman. Brush your teeth with Zippo and you’ll never grow old. Do you know what my father did for a living? He sold coal. When I was a kid he talked to me about the virtues of anthracite. So what did I do? I took pieces of soft coal and drew pictures on brick walls. Story of my life. The Troll’s been hounding me again.”

  “You know how he is,” Franklin said. “He’ll get over it.”

  “Says my work hasn’t been up to the mark. I like that: up to the mark. What mark? Whose mark? I’d rather sell bathtubs for J. Bateson. Drawing for the funny papers. Is this a life? I’ll see you on Saturday.”

  When Max left in a rattle of blinds, Franklin lowered his eyes to the slanted drawing board and continued rough-sketching the third panel of a strip, in which a monkey in baggy pants was hanging from the top of the frame.

  Because the Cincinnati Daily Crier held the copyright to “Dime Museum Dreams,” Franklin had been forced to draw the strip for the World Citizen under a new title, while the original strip continued appearing in the Daily Crier under the original title, though drawn by a different artist. The unsatisfactory new name (“Danny in t
he Dime Museum”), the sense that he was duplicating a strip appearing elsewhere, the need to distinguish his new strip from his old one while keeping it the same, all this constricted Franklin’s imagination and seemed boring and worthless, so that he had begun to introduce new settings while keeping the invariable format: Danny at the Circus, Danny at the Bronx Zoo, Danny in Central Park. But these variations, though at first they amused him, failed to excite his deepest attention, and in searching for new ideas he had suddenly invented two entirely new strips.

  The first one, called “Phantom of the City,” grew directly out of the unsatisfactory Danny series and permitted Franklin to express his detailed love for his new city while at the same time it gave his imagination fuller rein. The eight-panel strip was less rigid in format than “Danny in the Dime Museum,” which ceased appearing within a month, though the new strip followed a definite pattern in its black-and-white daily version and later in Sunday color. The Phantom, a mysterious stranger from a distant city who had ghostlike powers, penetrated a new place in each strip: the halls of Egyptian antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum at midnight, the tunnels under Grand Central Station, a loft in a shirtwaist factory where pale women sat at receding rows of sewing machine tables, the helical stairway leading to the crown of the Statue of Liberty, a smoky Bowery saloon; each time he discovered someone who was suffering and who expressed a wish, which the Phantom instantly granted. What excited Franklin wasn’t the crude fairy tale but the elaborately drawn settings for each strip. He visited each place with sketchpad in hand, recording impressions, noting odd perspectives, rapidly copying bridge piers with their patterns of reflected light, cast-iron lampposts decorated with iron leaves, gigantic bells in bell towers, the underside of the Second Avenue el, the ceilings of movie palaces, the structure of elevator cables and subway straps, the views of receding avenues from the top floors of mid-town hotels. His hymn to the city, in panels of rich, meticulous detail, combined with a mystery phantom and an invariable happy ending, struck a responsive chord; readers were enchanted, and sales of the World Citizen notably increased.

  The second strip, which sprang into his mind within days of “Phantom of the City,” though it took much longer to assume a workable shape, was so different that Franklin wondered whether he was two people—two people who shared the same house, exchanged amicable remarks at breakfast, and departed down two different streets ending in mist. If the Phantom strip emphasized precision of detail, including carefully drawn perspective views, and required Franklin to walk out into the city with sketchbook in hand, the second strip rejected the very notion of realistic settings and insisted on its own artifice. It took the form of a six-panel Sunday strip called “Figaro’s Follies,” and week after week it was a variation on a single theme: the frame of the panel was drawn into the adventure of the strip’s only character, a sinister but smiling little monkey dressed in baggy pants and a jacket with big buttons. In the first panel of the first strip, Figaro was shown in jail. In the next four panels, the monkey sawed through the frame of the panel and escaped; in the last panel, he stood on top of the cartoon frame. In another strip, Figaro used the frame as a jungle gym; in another, he drew the sides of successive panels closer and closer together, until in the sixth panel he was thin as a pencil. In Franklin’s favorite of the series, the monkey opened a door in each panel and entered a new panel with a different shape: the first panel led into a circle, the circle led to a tall, thin tube, the tube opened onto a stairway, the stairway led to a small box, and a door in the box opened to a hot-air balloon with a basket, in which the monkey stood with a spyglass trained on the reader.

  Although “Figaro’s Follies” was less successful than “Phantom of the City,” Franklin knew that each one drew its strength from the other. For when he had labored over the view of a pier of Brooklyn Bridge as seen from a barge passing beneath the bridge, and checked his drawing by standing in a coal barge and observing the structure of shadows and the play of water-reflected light on stone, then he felt the need to escape from the constriction of physical things into a world entirely of his own devising; but when he had entered a world of four black lines, which he broke apart and reassembled in any way he liked, so that his impish monkey seemed the very expression of his longing to break free of some inner constraint, then he felt a craving for the lines and shadows of the actual world, as if the imaginary world threatened to carry him off in a hot-air balloon on a voyage from which he might never return.

  Franklin never talked about such passions and contradictions to his colleagues in the art department, a hard-pressed and hardworking group through whom erratic gusts of whimsy blew, and he rarely put such questions even to himself, preferring instead to feel his way with his fingers. Sometimes he had a sense of groping in the dark—and suddenly he would feel something that made him snatch his hand away. With his fellow cartoonists he was content to discuss deadlines, editorial policy, the news of the day; they were busy and friendly and had formed a complicated network of alliances and social habits that made him feel, without rancor or surprise, a little on the outside. The exception was Max Horn, a cartoonist two years older than Franklin who wore stylish hats and white duck pants, smoked small thin cheroots that he tapped flamboyantly in the direction of ashtrays, and gestured emphatically with his long, slender, carefully manicured hands. Horn drew with astonishing swiftness, claimed never to correct his work, and had the ability to imitate any style without having formed a distinct style of his own. He seemed to take an interest in the newcomer from Ohio, a state he said he hadn’t heard of—was it west of Brooklyn? He always stopped when he saw Franklin in the halls, firing at him witty remarks, baseball scores, and office gossip, and he took to stopping by Franklin’s office once or twice a week, where he would throw himself into the faded armchair, stretch out his legs and cross his ankles, tip back his head, and blow a stream of plump and slowly turning smoke rings that he studied intently for a few moments before scattering his ash and launching into a shrewd analysis of office politics or Franklin’s style. Although the visits sometimes interrupted a bout of work, which Franklin had to make up at night in Mount Hebron, he looked forward to the sound of Max Horn’s quick, decisive rap on the door. Franklin understood that the flamboyant Horn enjoyed playing to Franklin’s presumed innocence, but he recognized that beneath the brashness was a sharp, restless intelligence, as well as a surprisingly clear grasp of Franklin’s work. Franklin in turn admired Horn’s worldliness, felt the pull of his mocking mind, and enjoyed his own slightly absurd role as greenhorn from the frontier.

  At one o’clock on Saturday afternoon, under a brilliant blue sky that held a single white cloud resembling a puff of chimney smoke in a color comic strip, a train trembling with sun and leaf-shade pulled into the small Victorian station one township south of Mount Hebron.

  Franklin, who had been standing in the hot shade of the platform for twenty minutes, was startled to see Max coming down the iron steps of the train. It was as if he had expected Max not to show up.

  Or no, he explained as they drove in the open Packard along a dirt road bordered by pine woods, that wasn’t it exactly. It was as if Max was so much a part of that other world that Franklin hadn’t been able to imagine him in this one at all. It happened a lot: you failed to imagine something, and suddenly found yourself amazed, whereas if you’d imagined it to begin with—but here Franklin lost the direction of his thought. He glanced at Max, who seemed not to be paying attention. “Trees,” Max said, pointing over the side of the car. “We have them up here,” Franklin said. Max continued to stare at the passing woods. “I’ve read about them,” he said after a while, as Franklin turned onto the shady road that ran along the river.

  When Max climbed the steps of the unscreened front porch he turned to take in the view, and Franklin turned with him. He tried to see with Max’s eyes the front lawn sloping down to the towering maples, the wooden rope-swing hanging from a high branch, the tall hedge bordering the unpaved road, the
tree-shaded roofs and backyards below, the riverside street of small stores, and an abandoned knitting mill on the sunny brown river. When he turned back he saw Cora standing in the doorway. Max took off his hat and looked at Franklin as if in surprise.

  “Franklin,” he said reproachfully, “you should have told me you were married.”

  Cora looked at Max coolly. “Franklin,” she said, “you should have told me you were bringing a friend.”

  Max burst into high, nervous laughter; and suddenly sweeping out his arm he made a low, graceful bow.

  “And you must be Stella,” he added at the bottom of his bow, and dropped quickly to a squat. From behind Cora, Stella looked out uncertainly, holding her mother’s dress with one fist. “Here,” Max said, patting a pocket of his suit jacket. “I think there’s something in here.” Stella glanced up at her mother, then stepped forward and reached into Max’s pocket. She drew out a gray tin mouse and held it upside down by its leather tail. “I couldn’t resist,” Max said, still crouching at Cora’s feet. He took the mouse gently from Stella and wound it up; Stella watched intently as the mouse moved in zigzags along the boards of the porch.

  Franklin knew that Max Horn had a quality that for lack of a better word might be called charm, though the word seemed to obscure something more complex and interesting in Max’s nature: a combination of energy and sympathy, an energy that continually and subtly adapted itself to the sensed mood of another person. It was less an art than a faculty he exercised helplessly. That afternoon, as something relaxed in Franklin, he realized he had been secretly fearful of Max’s making a bad impression on Cora, and he felt grateful to his friend for knowing how to please her, how to draw her into the center of things instead of keeping her on the sidelines as a wife. Max asked her questions about Cincinnati, which he imagined to be a lazy river town where pigs roamed the rutted dirt roads, hay wagons with big wooden wheels drove down Main Street, and women in bustles went to square dances and quilting bees. Cora said that the description was so exact he surely must have been there. Even Stella, shy and wary Stella, clutching her tin mouse but refusing to play with it, succumbed to the stranger after watching him for a long time, and finally permitted herself to be lifted onto Max’s shoulders and carried about the yard. Only when Max had let her down did he reach into his other pocket and produce a shiny red apple. “You see,” Max said, “we have apples in the city, but they’re not exactly like yours.” Stella looked at it doubtfully. “Look, I’ll show you.” Sitting on his heels, Max held the apple carefully at top and bottom and suddenly pulled it into two hollow halves. Inside sat a smaller apple. Then he pulled apart the second apple—and as the apples grew smaller and smaller, Stella stared in enchantment until, opening a little apple the size of an acorn, Max held out to her, on the long palm of his hand, a tiny apple tree.