“Stel’s been talking about death,” Franklin said one night. “I think she’s lonely. I’m away all day, and she doesn’t really have any kids her own age to play with.” He and Cora and Max were sitting on the open porch, despite a chill in the air.
“Death,” Max said. “A woman after my own heart. You know, I’ve seen two new bulldozers in those hills since my last visit. People are buying land up and down the river. In twenty years you’ll be living across from Chicago.”
“God, I love it up here sometimes,” Cora said, shaking back her hair and drawing her sweater close.
“The only land I’ve ever owned,” Max said mournfully, “is in a flowerpot on a window ledge on East Twenty-third Street.”
“Well,” Cora said, “we’ve all got to start somewhere,” and Max burst into high, nervous laughter.
The weekend outings, the lazy evenings, the hours in the sun, the self-banishment from the tower study: Franklin had to admit that it was all having an effect, that he had never felt better in his life. In the mornings he rose before the rattle of the milk bottles and, filled with a kind of energetic serenity, went downstairs in the bird-loud dark, showing its first streak of gray, to put up a pot of coffee and prepare fresh orange juice. He sliced the plump Florida oranges in half on the breadboard, pressed the juicy halves firmly against the upthrust knob of the juicer, and carefully checked for pips. Freight cars loaded with slatted boxes of oranges picked from sun-drenched trees in orchards in Florida had rushed through the night at sixty miles an hour, through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, all the way to the state of New York, where husky men with bulging veins in their upper arms had loaded the boxes onto trucks and driven them to country stores in northern villages, solely in order that he, Franklin Payne, could buy one dozen sun-ripened oranges and stand in his kitchen to make fresh orange juice for his wife and daughter. It was all astonishing, as astonishing as the milk that arrived in clear glass bottles every morning, with the cream clinging to the top, or the brightening air that poured through the large windows in their solid oak frames—yes, the whole world was simply pouring in on him. Soon he would make a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, sputtering bacon, and toast with butter and apple jelly, and later, in his office, he would work hard, but not too hard, so that he would finish by the end of the day; and in the warm evenings he would walk with long strides, taking in the dark green scents of early summer. His body was trim, his step light, the skin of his cheeks and neck radiant with weekend sun and air; and at night he had begun to visit Cora in her room again.
As his health returned, as his energy increased, Franklin sometimes felt a touch of restlessness. In the warm summer evenings, sitting on the front porch as the last light drained from the sky and the green hills turned black beyond the darkening river, he would feel a vague regret, a wistfulness; and somewhere far back in his mind he would have the sense of an inner itching, as if he were on the verge of remembering a word that kept eluding him. Then he would get up from the porch glider and go inside, letting the wooden screen door slam behind him; and in the lamplit parlor he would look at the mantelpiece clock, flanked by a glass-covered oval photograph of Cora’s parents and a glass-covered photograph of Stella, in matching pewter frames.
One night Franklin woke beside Cora and sat up in bed. His heart was beating rapidly; the remnant of a dream floated just beyond his inner sight and vanished. The muscles of his legs itched. Through the screen beneath the raised shade the night sky was deep blue. Franklin slipped out of bed, glanced at Cora, and stepped out of the room. He walked down the hall, opened a door, and began climbing the stairs to his tower study. On the dark landing he paused; his heart was beating wildly; his temples felt damp. Somewhere a floorboard creaked. For a long time he stood on the landing before turning back down the stairs.
“No no no,” Max said a few days later. It was a hot blue Sunday afternoon. “My lips are sealed. Not a word until we’re there.” The wheels of the Packard made snapping and crunching sounds as they passed over pinecones on the rutted dirt path. Through overhanging branches, sunlight fell in trembling patterns, rippling over Cora’s straw hat, glinting on bits of mica in granite rocks, sliding over foot-high tufts of grass that sprang from the dirt between the ruts. The ferry had carried the car across the river, and Max had guided them onto a hard dirt road that became narrower and bumpier, sprouting ferns, buttercups, clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. “This will do,” Max said, “this is fine, stop right here. Now follow me, one and all.” He led them along the vanishing dirt path, looking back impatiently. Suddenly he stopped and stepped into the woods. “Come on, come on, you lazy city slickers, get a move on, shake a leg. Watch it, we’re coming to a stream. Easy now. Easy does it.” After a while he stopped and held out his arms. “Well? What’s the verdict?”
“A nice spot for a picnic,” Franklin said. “We could sit in that oak tree.” Through the trees he could see the river below and, half a mile downriver, the village of Mount Hebron.
“Humble,” Max said, placing a hand over his heart, “but mine own. Three and a half acres of pinecones and fungus.”
Cora clapped her hands. “You’re not serious, Max! You’re not serious!”
Franklin said, “Do you mean to tell me—”
“It cost me an arm and a leg, let me tell you.” Max shrugged. “But I figure I’ve got two of each. I think of it as an investment. A larger flowerpot. Hey, Stella Bella, look: see this pebble? I own it. That leaf’s mine.”
“This calls for a celebration,” Franklin said, patting his pockets over and over again, as if he expected to find a corkscrew.
Two days later Max sat in Franklin’s office, his legs outstretched, his left arm hooked over the back of the chair, his right hand rippling through the air. “I feel like a kid with a new train set, Franklin—only my trains are trees. Is this crazy? It’s not even Wednesday and I’m counting the hours till the weekend. This place doesn’t help. Monday morning I don’t even have my hat off and already there’s a note on my desk. From the Troll himself. You know who Alfred the Fat is? I’ll tell you who he is. He’s the fat little drip-nose kid we all knew in the third grade, the one whose pants were always getting stuck in his behind. Now he’s sitting behind a desk and making us pay for knowing what we know about him. I’m telling you, one of these days—one of these godforsaken days—and take a look at this place, will you? Look at it. It’s like working in a loony bin designed by one of the resident loonies. Christ, I’m raving. I’ve got a deadline.” He stood up. “You have a good life, Franklin.” He turned abruptly and left, rattling the blinds.
Franklin disliked being told that he had a good life—for some reason it made him feel that he didn’t have a good life at all—and he disliked Max’s abuse of Kroll because it had the effect of making him rise secretly to Kroll’s defense, and he preferred not to be nudged into Kroll’s camp against his will. His own work for Kroll was going well. For the revived Cincinnati strip, now called “Dime Museum Days” in honor of the popular animated cartoon, Franklin changed Danny to a girl and brashly borrowed incidents he had invented for the film. There was a daily black-and-white version and a separate Sunday one in color. Moreover, the daily strip was no longer closed, but continuous: a long adventure, each day’s installment ending in a suspenseful sixth panel, with an occasional small resolution and the introduction of secondary characters, who replaced the rather passive heroine from time to time in adventures of their own that took them to new rooms of the museum. Franklin worked swiftly, scarcely revising a line; the strip proved popular, although he knew that the drawing was inferior to that of the original strip, the situations less surprising and original, the whole thing hopelessly uninspired. Kroll had canceled “Figaro’s Follies” and rejected each of the new strips Franklin had invented to replace it; he was urging Franklin to create a strip in a more realistic vein to replace the old “Phantom of the City.” After several failed attempts, including a humorous domestic strip in which the husband st
ayed home with the baby while the wife worked as a newspaper reporter, and a mischievous-kid strip in which the real culprit was the cute little dog, Franklin returned to an idea in one of the late Phantom strips, replaced the Phantom with a likable street urchin with a patch on his pants, and set the strip entirely underground, in the subway and its tunnels. It was a continuous strip, in which the boy had a series of menacing adventures in subway cars and in the system of tunnels under the city; the settings were precise but verged on the fantastic. Kroll was pleased, though he insisted that Franklin name the boy Sammy and the strip itself “Subway Sammy.” Franklin had suggested “Adventures in Underland.”
But for the most part, Franklin spent his time drawing the editorial cartoons that were Kroll’s particular passion. Kroll wrote a daily editorial, seven days a week, in which he thundered at an abuse, attacked a senator or a budget proposal, turned his attention to the Allied war debts or German reparations, raised questions about the advisability of naval limitations, and for each of his editorials he required a striking one-panel cartoon. At first Franklin experienced the daily assignment as a punishment, but he soon became adept at seizing the central point in a Kroll editorial and teasing it out into the skillfully exaggerated lines of a cartoon. Kroll, a severe and fussy critic, was pleased with his work; and on the first of September Franklin opened his pay envelope to discover that he had been given a handsome raise.
Sometimes, poring over a Kroll editorial, Franklin would feel a sudden impatience. Then taking up his pencil he would begin making tiny sketches all over the margins: funny noses, grinning gnomes sitting under toadstools, little people stuck upside down in mustard jars and sugar bowls, pieces of broccoli with arms and legs, snarling creatures with spiked tails and spotted wings.
One December morning about eleven o’clock there was a familiar knock at Franklin’s door. “Enter,” Franklin called curtly; he had a busy day before him and was irked at being interrupted by Max, who was wearing his hat and an open coat. “I won’t stay long,” Max said, throwing himself into the faded armchair, stretching out his legs, and setting his hat on his knees. “I have to run down to the corner and pick up a couple of ribbons for Helen and be back in time for what’s-his-name, the typewriter repair guy—her ribbon stopped reversing and it’s driving her crazy. There’s a little wheel in there, but I can’t get at it. Incidentally, I quit a few minutes ago. I showed Helen how to take the front off and move the lever with her finger, but she says, and I quote: ‘I can’t live like that.’”
“I assume you’re not serious.”
“Dead serious. ‘I can’t live like that’: her very words.”
“But what’ll you do?” said Franklin, who had stood up and begun to pace. “You can’t just quit like that.”
“You sound like my wife,” Max said, “if I had a wife. Congratulate me, dammit all.”
“Congratulations,” Franklin said quickly.
Max explained that from time to time he had made discreet inquiries at rival papers, but nothing had turned up. Then, about two months ago, an idea had come to him, a bold and stunning idea that at first he had dismissed as mere daydreaming but that had refused to leave him alone. Despite his impulsive nature, he insisted he was cautious when it came to business, and he hadn’t thrown in the towel before making certain he knew what he was doing. And now he was ready: ready to quit the newspaper business entirely and go to work for Vivograph. They liked his art, business was brisk, and there was money to be made. His plan was to start at the bottom, as an inker, though at the same salary as his present one, and work his way up. Then one day, when the time was ripe, he’d strike out on his own.
“What does that mean—strike out on your own?”
Max shrugged. “Start my own studio. Run the whole show.” He put on his hat and stood up. “I’ve got to pick up a couple of ribbons for Helen. Listen, I’ll be around till the end of the week. Lunch tomorrow?”
On the weekend Franklin and Cora celebrated Max’s new job with a roast leg of lamb, ginger ale, and a bottle of bootleg gin supplied by Max; and as Max spoke of the studio system of animation, with its division of labor among inkers, in-betweeners, and animators, as he spoke of production and promotion and distribution, of press releases, full-page ads, and the European market, Cora listened closely and asked precise questions.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that one of these cartoon films can be made every two weeks?”
“That’s right,” Max said. “There’s a man at Vivograph—”
“So if you had a good distributor,” Cora said, “you could make quite a lot of money.”
“Exactly. Always assuming, of course, that your product satisfies a demand. And that means understanding your audience.”
“I see,” Cora said. “And how do you learn to understand this audience of yours?”
Max looked at the ash of his cheroot and raised his eyes. “You give ten years of your life to Alfred Kroll. That refines you. That sharpens the old sense of smell.”
Max’s absence from the second floor of the World Citizen at first confused Franklin: it seemed a kind of trick. In the long hours at his desk, with the drawing board slanted down against his lap, he kept listening for the sound of sudden footsteps outside his door, the impatient rap, the door swinging open with a clatter of blinds. His relations with his colleagues remained amicable and playful but somewhat distant; once he had lunch with Max’s office mate, Mort Riegel, who suffered from asthma and, when he breathed, made soggy sounds that reminded Franklin of shoes pressing into waterlogged sod, and who spent the entire lunch hour complaining bitterly of having to share an office after eight years of service. For the most part Franklin stayed alone in his office, sketching in pencil on white bristol board, carefully going over the finished drawings in India ink, and erasing unwanted pencil lines—and as he fell into the soothing rhythms of his work he imagined, not without pleasure, the days of his life moving steadily toward him, passing through him, and coming out the other side.
Sometimes once a week, sometimes once every two weeks, Franklin had lunch with Max, who was frantically busy. As Franklin had foreseen, Max was soon complaining about his new job. It was boring, it was burdensome, it provided him with paychecks mysteriously lower than he had been led to expect; but to Franklin’s surprise, the disgruntlement only fed Max’s ambition. Max wouldn’t hear of returning to newspaper work, despite an attractive opening at a rival paper; he was determined, as he repeatedly put it, to strike out on his own. Besides, the work wasn’t all bad; he was learning something new about the business every day. The Vivograph system of studio production saved time but was also stupidly makeshift and haphazard: to save time they did a little of one thing and a little of another, and failed to see that the consistent application of a single method would be far more efficient. Franklin began to argue that efficiency wasn’t everything, that the Ford system as applied to the commercial cartoon had certain drawbacks, since each car was supposed to be identical to the others whereas each cartoon—but he let the argument slide, Max looked irked, it had been a long week for both of them, and besides, Franklin had other things on his mind.
In late March Stella had come down with a low fever that kept her in bed and refused to go away. She had no sore throat, no cough, no cold symptoms of any kind, and only a very slight decrease in appetite, for which her inactivity could be held accountable. What puzzled Dr. Shawcross and disturbed Franklin was her weariness and languor. So long as she continued eating well, the doctor had assured him, there was no cause for alarm; Franklin wasn’t so certain. Stella was a quiet and moody sort of girl, but she had her own sense of fun, which anyone could recognize; and it was the absence of this sense of quiet delight, of secret inner glee, that worried Franklin. Cora was impatient with what she called Stella’s moodiness and was herself too restless to spend much time at a bedside, especially of someone who refused to speak a word or even look at her. But Stella liked Franklin to sit with her while she lay drows
ily in her bed with her dark eyes half-closed. He would read to her and tell her long stories that never really stopped, but only reached suspenseful resting points, and one evening he took up her box of colored pencils and began drawing pictures on a small pink pad. “Now look at this, Stelly Bumbalelly,” he said, holding out the pad close to her and flipping it with his thumb: a kangaroo hopped headfirst into a barrel, kicked its legs wildly, and hopped out again. “Again,” Stella said, watching earnestly, crawling up onto her elbow. “You see,” Franklin explained after the sixth time, “it’s really very simple. You draw the pictures in sequence: see? One after the other. Then when you flip them, your eye puts them all together. I can’t believe I’ve never showed you this stuff. Do you have any more of these little pads?” On a plain white pad he drew swiftly, bent over his knee. Then leaning toward Stella, he watched her watching: a turtle dived off a rock and went down, down, passing startled fish until he came to a small house with a smoking chimney; and swimming through the door, he floated onto a bed and went to sleep. Stella was enchanted. Franklin made four more flipbooks for her before she fell asleep, and that night, after Cora had gone to bed, Franklin rose from the armchair in the parlor and climbed the two long flights of stairs to his tower study. Nothing had changed: the bottle of India ink sat on his desk beside two Gillott 290 pens, the little reapers on the faded wallpaper still slept among their faded haystacks. Franklin was calm, but his mind was streaming with images, and when he rose from his desk at four in the morning he had filled an entire sketchpad and had in his brain, in vivid detail, the structure of a new animated cartoon.
As he sat by Stella in the evenings, turning the upper sheet back to form a smooth border over her blanket, or holding his palm against her slightly warm forehead, he felt, beneath his anxiety, an odd tenderness for her illness; and he was grateful to his daughter, for releasing him into a sweet, intoxicating realm of freedom.
Little Kingdoms Page 6
