FOUR
“You’ve always been impossible,” Max said as they walked down the stairs into the arcade, “but this, my friend, takes the all-time impossible cake.”
“Oh, you’ll see I’m right, you’ll see. Walk or cab? Look: that barber’s just committed a murder.” The barber stood smoothing a white towel over the face of a man who lay with his head tipped far back, his chin pointed at the ceiling. Franklin, who carried the can of film in his coat pocket, was amused by Max’s dismay but also disappointed: didn’t Max realize that several sequences had to be redrawn entirely? There could be no talk of deals and distribution until the entire thing was fixed up and rephotographed.
“Easy come, easy go,” Max said with a shrug. He glanced at a passing girl, who glanced back, and Franklin, who had assumed he’d been speaking of the man in the white towel, suddenly wondered whether Max had meant the girl, or Dime Museum Days, or something else entirely.
But he had to admit, as the world vanished behind his study in swirls of falling snow, that Max might have been right. To the clack of a rented projector Franklin watched his moving pictures night after night on a wall of the tower study while snow fell steadily, and the repeated viewings revealed new flaws. It wasn’t simply a matter of occasional irritating technical lapses, as when, for instance, despite his system of crossmarks, he had failed to register the drawings precisely; rather it was a question of whole sequences needing to be reimagined. Max thought he was being overly fussy, and Max was probably right. But just outside his window Nature was being far more fussy, far more finicky and precise. The swirling lines of snow were composed of separate flakes, and each flake was a cluster of separate ice crystals—scientists had counted over a hundred of them in a single flake. Under the microscope each minuscule crystal, colorless and transparent, revealed a secret symmetry: six sides, the outward expression of an inward geometry of frozen molecules of water. But the real wonder was that no two crystals were precisely alike. In one of his father’s camera magazines he had seen a stunning display of photomicrographs, and what was most amazing about the enlarged crystals was that each contained in its center a whole world of intricate six-sided designs, caused by microscopic air pockets. For no conceivable reason, Nature in a kind of exuberance created an inexhaustible outpouring of variations on a single form. A snowstorm was a fall of jewels, a delirium of hexagons—clearly the work of a master animator. Max, mocking his endless labor, would have done better to direct his scorn at the falling snow. But Max had made Franklin thoughtful as well as irritable. Why this obsessive fiddling, when after all he was a professional used to working quickly under the pressure of rigorous deadlines? Perhaps the answer was this, that for once in his life he preferred to be an amateur. In this realm, at any rate, he was one whether he liked it or not. But there was also something else, something more elusive that he couldn’t quite get at but that had to do with entering a place that made you feel you were somehow at the center—though at the center of what, Franklin wasn’t sure.
The snow stopped, leaving great drifts that covered the porch steps and swept up to the parlor windowsills; and again the snow came down, burying the world in billions of glittering but invisible six-sided designs. On the cold kitchen windows Franklin showed Stella elegant frost-drawings: spines and needles of ice, ice ferns and ice feathers, ice filings flung over the field of an unseen magnet. Then the sun came out, and there was a great melting and dripping: artful icicles two feet long hung from the porch eaves, transforming the storm-darkened porch into a sunny cavern of glistening and transparent stalactites, all dripping into the snow, all lengthening stealthily as each falling drop partially froze on the gleaming tips. Suddenly an icicle fell, plunging point-first into the snow and vanishing. A small dark bird, startled, flew into the brilliant blue sky and melted away. And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart—a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there—and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples. Franklin delivered the 4,236 drawings, of which nearly 2,000 were entirely new, to Vivograph himself, then screened the film alone. Only after that did he invite Max to a viewing—and now it was Max’s turn to confess that Franklin had been right all along, that the reworked version was superior in every way. “Though I suppose you’ll want to take it back and redo it again,” he added. Franklin was startled. “Well, no. No. Why? Is there something wrong?”
Dime Museum Days, animated by J. Franklin Payne, produced by the Vivograph Company, and distributed by National Pictures, opened on 1 May in theaters across the country, from Grauman’s in Los Angeles to the Rialto in New York, as part of a weekly news-travelogue-cartoon supplement. Franklin and Max watched it in the Strand, where the audience burst into applause, and reports from the Abe Blank theaters in Nebraska, from the Karlton in Philadelphia, from the Finkelstein and Reuben chain in Minneapolis and St. Paul, all confirmed the sense of a heady success. Reviews in the film trade journals did not know which to praise more, the meticulous artistry or the haunting fantasy; and with amusement Franklin showed Max a review that, after summarizing the plot, declared that Payne’s scrupulous draftsmanship in the service of a grotesque dream-vision separated his animated cartoon from the ephemeral products of the day and lifted it into the region of art.
Three days after the opening Franklin was asked to report to the office of Alfred Kroll, managing editor and chief editorial writer of the New York World Citizen. Kroll’s office was located at the end of a darkening corridor on the fourth floor, behind a dingy door whose upper glass pane was covered on the inside by perpetually closed Venetian blinds. Franklin, walking along the darkening corridor, wondered whether the darkening effect was accidental or, as he preferred to think, a brilliant strategy meant to summon up deep childhood fears. Kroll, who had signed the letter that had brought Franklin from Cincinnati, was second in command to the invisible owner of the paper, Charles Harlan Hanes, whose office was located at the end of an even darker corridor behind an even dingier door, and who was said by Max to be one hundred ten years old and to be composed entirely of artificial parts. Hanes, according to Max, had hired Kroll to keep a tight grip on the World Citizen in all its departments, to express Hanes’s views in editorials and their attendant cartoons, and to fire anyone who slacked off, was uncooperative, or seemed lukewarm in the service of World Citizen ideals. Exactly what those ideals were, it was difficult to say, since the paper regularly attacked both big business and government while remaining violently patriotic, and advocated an isolationist foreign policy while asserting the moral responsibility of the United States in the wake of the new world order. According to Max, Kroll was Hanes’s flunkey pure and simple, but Franklin’s sense of the man was more complex: he believed that Kroll had been hired because he had strong views of his own, which happened to be exactly those of Charles Harlan Hanes. He might shade an opinion slightly in deference to his boss, but he was never required to express an opinion in which he did not believe; and it was precisely his belief that gave his editorials a kind of crude passion they would otherwise have lacked, and made him a force to be reckoned with in his own right. Kroll was also known to enjoy certain freedoms in return for his loyal service, among them virtual control over the comic strips of the daily editions and the color comics of the Sunday supplement. Approval by Kroll could mean for a strip a chance it might otherwise not have.
As Franklin continued along the always-darkening corridor, he tried to foresee his meeting with Kroll, which almost certainly had to do with his animated cartoon. He felt both uneasy and cautiously hopeful—uneasy because a summons from Kroll usually, though not invari
ably, meant trouble, and cautiously hopeful because his cartoon had been a success, and Kroll liked success—and as he pushed open the door, rattling the blinds, he was surprised once again by the perpetual twilight of the reception room, with its one window covered by closed blinds, its tarnished brass floor lamp with a tasseled shade, and its faded secretary with sharp shoulders and thin, reddish nostrils, who looked up at Franklin and then at Kroll’s door as if a disturbing connection between the two were slowly dawning on her. Franklin, who had expected to wait, was told to enter immediately.
Kroll sat in his gloomy office behind a cluttered desk with a small neat space in the center, under a yellow bulb that hung from a chain. He was a big broad-shouldered man with a heavy fleshy face and melancholy eyes. His sparse black hair was combed sideways across the top of his head and seemed to match the dark hairs on his fingers, which looked as if they had been combed carefully sideways. Franklin had never seen Kroll except behind his desk, and he wondered, as he sat down on a wheezing leather chair, whether Kroll ended in a straight line where the desk cut him off.
For all Kroll’s air of heaviness, of rueful immobility, Franklin knew he was not a man to waste time. Kroll began by saying that he had waited to see the cartoon himself before speaking with Mr. Payne, who might for that matter have informed him of a project that was bound to be of interest to the World Citizen. The little film was admirable—he had expected no less from a man of Mr. Payne’s undoubted abilities—and well deserved the attention it had been getting. But he hadn’t called Mr. Payne to his office in order to discuss the craft of animated drawings, despite the interest such a discussion would hold for him; for as a matter of fact, he had been following the work of the animation studios for some time. No, what he wished to discuss with Mr. Payne was the subject of his little film. He had to confess that he had become—what was the word?—thoughtful, very thoughtful, upon hearing that a member of the art department had chosen to animate a strip no longer published in the World Citizen but still published in the Cincinnati Daily Crier and imitated in a number of New York papers. He had assumed that the report must have been mistaken; but now that he had seen the cartoon himself there could no longer be room for doubt. During the time of his association with the World Citizen, Mr. Payne had shown himself to be a loyal member of the staff. It was therefore difficult to understand his motives for engaging in an enterprise that could serve only to benefit the circulation of rival papers. He did not at this time wish to discuss the issue of motives; he wished simply to inform Mr. Payne that he was to cease at once all professional activities not calculated to advance the interests of the World Citizen, that he was to keep the editorial office apprised of all future projects relating to the animation of comic strips, and that, in order to take advantage of the attention aroused by his film, he was immediately to revive his old strip, under the new title “Dime Museum Days.” He trusted there would be no misunderstandings in the future, and wished Mr. Payne a good day.
As Franklin coolly reported the interview to Max, he realized that what had most upset him about it had been Kroll’s crass assumption that he had animated his old strip. Of course he had drawn on “Dime Museum Dreams,” but there had been no attempt to drag his old strip out of the attic, brush off the cobwebs, and present it to the public all over again. Rather he had sunk into a familiar place in his mind and emerged with something entirely new, something mysteriously connected with his father’s grave voice in the kitchen darkroom. At the same time Max’s savage attack on Kroll, who he said had the look of a debauched Humpty-Dumpty, struck Franklin as wide of the mark, for he recognized with a kind of irritation that he did not entirely disagree with Kroll’s position. Kroll was by no means the corrupt buffoon Max made him out to be; his alertness to possible injuries to the World Citizen was surely proper. Franklin hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the possible consequences of his animated cartoon, his kingdom of shadows, and his carelessness seemed to him blameworthy. His next cartoon would give Kroll no grounds for concern, since it would have nothing whatever to do with any of his strips. Meanwhile he intensely disliked the idea of reviving the old strip, which no longer interested him; but he supposed he could stand it for a few months.
Perhaps it was the talk with Kroll, perhaps it was the sense of having completed a long and arduous task, in any case Franklin felt tired—very tired—tired deep in his bones. In the mornings when he heard the rattle of milk bottles in the wire box on the front porch he lay in a heavy stupor of half waking, thinking how nice it would be to lie there a little longer, only a little longer; and the heaviness, the sense of being bound to his bed, made him think of his child’s illustrated Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver was shown lying on his back with disturbingly thick, taut bolts of hair tied to little stakes in the ground. In the graying light of late afternoons, on the commuter train that made its way along the river toward the Victorian station one township south of Mount Hebron, Franklin sat back with half-closed eyes and listened to the soft squeak of the conductor’s shoes, the soothing click-click of the ticket punch; and in the lamplit evenings, sitting in the soft armchair in the parlor, he listened to Cora practice her Czerny exercises while Stella bent frowningly over sheets of paper at her round worktable or played on the rug with her little wooden wash set: her washtub, her clothes wringer, her clotheshorse, her washboard. Sometimes he read aloud to Stella while she sat in his lap with her hair tickling his cheek. He read The Young Folks’ Story Book, Shining Hours, Grimm’s Household Fairy Tales, and a boxed set of four small books called Polly’s Jewel Case, which included Fireside Fancies, Very Pretty, Dear Little Buttercup, and Miss Mugglewump and the Thugglebump (“Just kidding, Stel”). Later, when Stella had been put to bed, he would sit at the kitchen table with Cora and play one of the board games she sometimes enjoyed, like Innocence Abroad, or Steeplechase, or The Game of Life. Then he would retire to his armchair, where he would sit heavy-lidded and heavy-limbed, weary but not sleepy, while Cora sat reading on the couch. Sometimes he thought of his tower study, which seemed as remote and inaccessible as a tower in a fairy tale: to reach it he would have to climb innumerable flights of stairs, only to find, behind a moldering door, in an old room so thick with cobwebs that he would have to part them like layers of gauze, an old clock with a rusted key, a pile of yellowed pages, a cracked bottle of dried ink.
On a Saturday house visit to Stella, who lay in bed with a sore throat, Dr. Shawcross lingered to examine Franklin. In a grave voice that reminded Franklin of his father in the darkroom, Dr. Shawcross said that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork. He recommended rest, a curtailed work schedule, and as much time as possible in the fresh country air. Franklin, struck by the kindness in the doctor’s voice, thought how odd it was that this kind man, the very opposite of a Kroll, nevertheless reminded him somehow of the harsh editor, and later that night, as he lay in the dark staring up at the black ceiling that was the floor of his forbidden study, he suddenly made the connection: both Kroll and Shawcross had issued warnings, and both had exacted from him promises of obedience—as if they had secretly conspired, though for different reasons, to punish him for straying.
As the weather grew warmer and the leaves of the sugar maples, spreading their elegant designs into sunlight, cast broad patches of shade, Franklin played outside with Stella after supper under the still-light sky. On weekends he liked to explore with her the two acres of woods that were part of his property and rose up behind the deep backyard. He showed her little tight-coiled ferns that hadn’t yet unfurled, birch bark and beech bark, hickory nuts that looked like small green pumpkins, the striking shapes of maple leaves: sugar maple and red maple and silver maple. Each leaf looked as if it had been cut from a pattern with a pair of scissors. It struck him that leaves were the snowflakes of summer, each tree a storm of slight variations on a form. Sometimes he walked with Stella down to the village to buy seed packets and balls of twine at the general store. From there he liked to co
ntinue down to the river and sit quietly with her on the bank: he leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched out, she sitting with her arms around her raised knees. He was a little concerned about his daughter, who was very quiet, seemed sullen around Cora, hid when anyone except Max came to the house, and preferred staying indoors with Mrs. Henneman or taking walks with Franklin to playing with children her own age. Across the sunny brown water rose long low hills of pine woods with a scattering of blue spruce, oak, and birch. There were a few houses among the trees, and a patch of bare earth on which sat a brilliant yellow bulldozer. “When I die,” Stella said, hugging her knees and staring out across the water, “I’m going to keep my eyes open.” “Look,” Franklin said. “Over there: do you know what that is? It’s a blue jay. It looks a little like the kingfisher in your book, but take it from me, it’s a jay. I bet he’s not thinking about dying. Why would you want to keep your eyes open?” “Because that way it won’t be too dark. I hate the dark. When people die, do they come back again?” “Well,” Franklin said, and cleared his throat. Stella said vehemently, “They do come back again. They do.” She paused. “But not always.”
On weekends when Max visited, he and Cora and Franklin and Stella took long walks on country paths, had picnics in the woods, played croquet in the front yard, and drove to a landing ten minutes away, from which they took a small ferry across the river to the wooded hills on the other side.
Little Kingdoms Page 5
