Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  On the second day of his vigil Franklin walked about the house, looking in every room, as if he were searching for something, as if he were trying to solve a mystery.

  On the third night of his vigil he returned to the tower and looked at the little yellow windows in the far trees and the wavering lights on the water. His temples pounded, his chest hurt, he felt heavy as a bag of loam but light, very light, as if at any moment he might float away, and when the lights in the house went out there appeared in his mind a journey to the moon: he saw terrifying ice caverns, haunting crevasses and fissures, white cities, melancholy moonfolk—and then the dangerous journey to the dark side of the moon, where the cartoon would burst into images of startling freedom and terror. He did not know exactly how it would end, but he knew already that it would be called Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon and that it would be his longest effort—perhaps thirty minutes, which was to say, some 30,000 drawings.

  Before dawn of the third night of his vigil, the details of the new cartoon were clear in his mind. Toward morning Franklin drew the shade over the window that looked toward Max’s house, went down to his room, and fell into deep, dreamless sleep.

  His new life, once he had settled into it, was surprisingly like the old. It struck him that Cora had withdrawn from him gradually, so that her absence was merely the last step of a series to which he had almost grown accustomed. He hired Mrs. Henneman as a full-time housekeeper, whose primary duty was to look after Stella: to be in the house when Stella came home from school each day, to take care of Stella when she was sick, and to be with her during school holidays. She shopped and did the laundry, had charge of the groundskeeper, and prepared dinner five days a week, Monday through Friday. She combed Stella’s hair, tied her ribbons, sewed on her buttons and mended her petticoats; and she was given a special allowance for the purchase of Stella’s clothes. Sometimes on the weekends he hired her to be in the house for Stella, while he worked in the tower, but Stella preferred to sit with him in the high room, drawing quietly at a small table—keeping an eye on him, he sometimes thought.

  For although she was still his grave and brooding daughter, he was aware of a change in her. Cora, even at her most distant, had a large and dramatic temperament; she filled doorways, swept into rooms, flung her head onto the backs of chairs in utter exhaustion. Stella had grown up warily, a little off to one side, where it was safe; she guarded her gestures, walked quietly as if to escape notice, led a secret, hidden life. Cora’s escape across the river had left the house lighter as well as emptier, and Stella, who at first had crept into some dark corner of herself, quickly felt the attractions of lightness and began to move about more freely. She expressed opinions clearly, told pointed anecdotes about school, and asked precise questions about Franklins work at the World Citizen, the management of household expenses, the operation of the furnace, the reason for the little holes at the side of a strip of film. Above all she asked technical questions about animated cartoons. Why did he fasten the sheets of paper with pegs instead of using the old crossmarks? Was it possible to make cartoons in color, like the Sunday comics? What about cartoons that talked? She invented an eight-panel comic strip of her own that she carried through six adventures, coloring the panels carefully with her pastel pencils and printing the words in the speech balloons in small capital letters; she overcame her fear of roller skates; and one day she asked for piano lessons. At first the sound of the piano made Franklin desperately unhappy, but he grew used to her simple tunes, her finger-strengthening exercises, her versions of “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” In the mornings she checked to make certain his socks matched, since once he had worn a maroon and a brown, and to see that his vest was buttoned properly; at dinner she asked questions about his work at the office and listened attentively to his answers. Sometimes he detected in her a primness, a slight maternal fussiness, that secretly annoyed him, as if she were growing a little askew. Then he would pretend to be drunk and stagger around the room until she whooped with laughter. And once, stepping into the parlor, he saw her sitting motionless in the armchair, staring out the window; and when she turned to him he saw for a moment, before she leaped up to greet him, her grave eyes, stricken with sorrow.

  His work for the World Citizen was going well. For some time Kroll had been obsessed by the issue of German reparations; at first he had insisted on immediate and unconditional payment as the one assurance of stability in postwar Europe, but the French occupation of the Ruhr had roused his indignation, and in a sharp reversal he had argued that Germany should pay at a fluctuating rate determined by her degree of economic prosperity. His opposition to the French adventure in the Ruhr led him to thunder against the dangers of French militarism, but at the same time he began to question the strength of the French armed forces and to hint that all was not well. Franklin had become adept at picturing a cruel, powerful, and vindictive France, setting its heel on a prostrate Germany, but he had also begun to reveal a talent for inventing variations on the theme of a weak, boastful, decadent, doddering France, concealing its impotence behind gestures of ridiculous vainglory. In a scribbled note, Kroll himself commended Franklin’s recent version of The Emperor’s New Clothes: in front of the Arc de Triomphe the gigantic, effeminate Emperor, with rings on his fingers and a long curly wig, marched naked before a stream of soldiers, while crowds along the Champs Élysées looked on doubtfully and a little boy in one corner pointed his finger. In front of the Emperor marched two tiny generals, who held up long poles between which was stretched a banner than concealed the Emperor’s genitals and read: CLOTHES PROVIDED BY PETAIN.

  At home he hurled himself into Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon. On weekday evenings he climbed to his tower study at half-past eight after reading Stella a bedtime story and came down at half-past midnight or one in the morning, and on the weekends he stayed shut up in the tower, coming down only to take an afternoon walk. Stella, who liked to be with him for much of the day, did not sit idly while he worked. It was her job to number the finished drawings, to erase carefully the pencil lines that showed through the India ink, to fasten each drawing to a cardboard backing, to attach the cardboard to the metal drum of the viewing machine, and to check carefully through the window of the machine for flickering due to faulty alignment. Franklin had modified his animation board: directly above the rectangle of glass he had screwed two pegs into the wood for exact registration of the drawings. In addition to his rice paper he had purchased a supply of transparent sheets of celluloid, which he used for moving figures during certain sequences. With a paper cutter he trimmed each piece of paper or celluloid to the proper size; then with a punch he carefully made two holes at the top, to fit over the pegs. He had arrived quickly at the moon, but the early lunar landscapes, with their mixture of enchantment and menace, were coming along slowly. His characters, a boy and his pet monkey, had to be led through three adventures, including a crash through the lunar surface and the discovery of an ancient underground civilization of Selenites, before he could bring them to the shore of the river that separated the white side of the moon from the dark side.

  The long hours of work, the four to five hours of restless sleep, the strain of an immense task requiring rigorous concentration, the sense of some menace lying in wait for him if he should relax his will for one second, all this began to tell on Franklin’s health, and by midwinter he fell sick. His arms felt heavy, he could barely hold up his head, the thermometer recorded a low, persistent fever; and after ten days of increasing exhaustion he called Dr. Shawcross, who found nothing more than a viral infection that was making the rounds but who warned of nervous exhaustion and ordered two weeks of bed rest. For one week Franklin lay in a stupor of mild fever, burning eyelids, and bone-deep weariness, during which Mrs. Henneman brought him bowls of soup and turkey sandwiches. Stella, as soon as she came home from school, sat on a chair by the side of his bed and from time to time took his temperature, carefully shaking down the mercury in
the glass rod, telling him to be sure to keep the thermometer under his tongue, and timing him for three minutes by the second hand of his gold pocket watch. On the eighth day Franklin took the train to work. At his desk, with the drawing board sloped against his lap, he felt as if his brain were wrapped in cotton wool that itself was wrapped in crinkly blue paper; when he stood up he had an attack of dizziness and stood bent over his desk, supported on a trembling arm. He spent three more days at home before returning to work again; the fever had lifted, he was no longer dizzy, but he felt tired, always tired.

  One night in the tower study Franklin looked up and saw through the unshaded window that it had begun to snow. The thick white flakes looked like shavings of wax from a candle. The snow lay in white lines on the black branches of the maples, it stood heaped on the wooden swing like the top of a loaf of bread. Only on the black river, gleaming faintly like dark tin, did it leave no trace. Color was coming to the world of animated cartoons, experiments had been made by more than one studio, and someone had already invented a workable sound track that produced synchronized sound effects, but Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

  Night after night in the black-and-white winter, in the silent tower high over the house, Franklin sat bent over his silent black-and-white world, raising his eyes only to rest them before sinking back into his waking dream, and once, raising his eyes after a long and particularly stubborn sequence that left his neck aching and his temples throbbing, he was amazed to see the light of early morning shining in the window and there, outside, clusters of tender green-yellow flowers hanging from the branches of the maples. Butter-yellow and blood-red tulips glowed in the flower beds. Sunlight trembled on the green-brown river.

  She had never called, never tried to visit the house, never asked for her clothes, her piano music, her oval photograph of Judge Vaughn and her mother. Her absence was absolute—she had crossed the river and vanished away. Franklin gradually stopped expecting her. A dull anger glimmered in him, like the shine of old tin. The rigor of her absence struck him as cold and unnatural, the result of a hard will. Once, relaxing his anger, he permitted himself to wonder whether the completeness of her absence, far from being a sign of contempt for her former life, might not be a sign of doubt, of secret shame, of midnight fear—a fear of seeing Stellas eyes, a fear that her romantic flight had been not daring but banal; but a moment later he imagined her throwing back her head to laugh in the sun—happy, flourishing, indifferent.

  One summer midnight Franklin looked up from the drawing of a moon waterfall plunging into a chasm to see a piece of moon in the window. The moon, the luminous blue sky, the hot summer night reminded him of his roofwalk ten thousand years ago. He stood up and looked through the window; the world was blue and still, only the dark river shimmered with trembling points of light. He felt no boyish desire to walk through the window into the sky, but he was restless and needed a breath of night air.

  On the second floor he stopped to look in at Stella, who lay fast asleep beside a book on her pillow. He moved the book away from her cheek and pushed up the fallen shoulder of her nightshirt. Then swiftly he descended the second stairway, opened the front door, and stepped into the radiant summer night.

  Shadows of porch balusters lay sharp against the moon-bright floorboards. He walked down the porch steps. The night sky was flame blue. A memory came to him: as a child he had liked to look at the world through one of the dark blue circles of glass that his father removed from a little leather pouch to screw into the camera in front of the lens. The night sky was like that: a dark, transfigured day. Franklin wanted to walk; and after passing down the front path past the great maples to the hedge dividing the front yard from the road, he glanced back once at the house, dark except for the light in the tower, and continued on his way.

  He knew and refused to know where he was going. He turned down several familiar lanes, breathing the smell of mown grass, loam, manure, the sudden sharp scent of some unknown flower. After a while he came to the deserted main street, lit by two street lamps. In the dark window of the general store he saw the reflection of a maple tree and a clapboard storefront and, through the reflection, a shadowy pyramid of soup cans. On the other side of the street he passed between two stores so close together that he could have touched the shingled walls on both sides. At the back of the stores was a weed-grown lot in which a rusty wheel lay aslant against the side of a rotting hay wagon, and a moment later he found himself on the bank of the river.

  A few old rowboats and peeling oars lay outside the boat shed. Franklin pushed a boat into the water and began rowing upstream. Moonlight shone on the back steps of the drugstore, on iron-hooped barrels and piles of lumber; in a backyard garden a scarecrow wearing an old straw hat threw a long shadow across a stand of corn. Franklin was soon past the abandoned knitting mill that marked the end of the village. The water near the river’s edge was thick with grass and rushes, and he had to swing away from the bank. The woods on both sides were broken by an occasional dark house; here and there he saw a clearing with a bulldozer, and after a time he came to a well-lit house. It was set halfway up the hill, on the other shore. The house was obscured by the thick woods; from the rowboat he could hear the sound of voices, laughter. A party appeared to be in progress; Franklin could hear the chink of glasses. “Oh, absolutely!” a voice said, very sharply and clearly, before dropping back into the murmur. Through the dark Crosshatch of woods he could see patches of lamplit leaves and pieces of people moving in light on the front porch. A burst of high laughter seized his attention, aroused his deepest interest, but in fact he didn’t know, he couldn’t be certain. Something plopped lightly into the water—a frog?—and sent out ripples that began in shadow and, slowly widening, suddenly trembled in the brightness of the moon. After a while Franklin took up his oars and rowed home.

  He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer’s trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible—indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible—therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise—well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon. In the long nights the thoughts came to him, streamed in on him, though mostly he merely watched them, a little distrustfully, out of the corner of one eye.

  He was moving ahead: by midwinter he had completed more than 20,000 drawings. It took him another month to complete the difficult episode of the vanishing palace, the last adventure before the eruption onto the dark side of the moon. The palace, located on an island in the river that separated the white side of the moon from the dark side, had the property of fading away as you advanced through it. It was necessary not simply to invent a detailed dream-palace, a palace with long corridors and arched doorways, soaring halls and mirrored chambers, but also to make drawings that were lighter and lighter until the passageway or chamber seemed to fade away—and turning his head the boy saw, in perfect perspective, another detailed a
nd alluring corridor, which began to fade as he passed along. At the end of the episode the entire palace faded away, like the Cheshire cat, leaving the boy and the monkey alone in blank whiteness. The monkey, removing a piece of charcoal from his pocket, quickly drew a spit of land, a rowboat, some waves; and as the monkey rowed them across the river toward the dark side of the moon, the boy looked over his shoulder and saw, clearly in the distance, the palace on the island, sharp and clear, growing smaller and smaller.

  But it was the dark side of the moon that drew on Franklin’s deepest energies, for here he rigorously released himself into a realm of absolute cartoon freedom. Although he continued to draw in India ink on rice paper, he imagined the images in reverse, for he planned to instruct the cameraman to make a negative print, in order to create the effect of white drawings on a black background. In this black world the hero was to undergo a series of phantasmagoric metamorphoses, of dream dissolutions and hallucinatory recombinations. A radical shift in drawing style indicated the change: gone was the intricate perspective background with its preference for the unusual angle, and in its place was a flat picture plane with deliberately simplified figures. The instant the boy set foot on the dark side of the moon he began to unravel, until he was a single wavering line that gradually assumed the form of a spinning top. The top became a clown’s yawning face; inside the yawn was a fantastic garden, where the boy reappeared and was at once transformed into a tree hung with many apples, each of which gradually assumed the shape of his head. The faces grew bodies, and a crowd of boys ran off in many directions as each turned into a different animal ridden by a monkey; the animals collided and became a boy surrounded by tall, wavering, menacing figures, who pursued him into a black rock that contained a cobwebbed parlor. Slowly the parlor became an amusement park where the carousel horses grew larger and larger and began to eat the roller coaster, the fun house, the Ferris wheel until there was nothing left—at which point the fat horses melted together and became an open umbrella, beneath which the boy and his monkey floated down, down, down—and as the episodes of metamorphosis multiplied, becoming more dangerous, more sinister, incorporating apparently random images like toasters, icebergs, and blast furnaces whose shapes were cunningly drawn from earlier parts of the cartoon, beyond the edges of the paper Franklin noticed an occasional hard image that swiftly melted away: an edge of window, the hand of Mrs. Henneman holding out a glass, the yellowing slats of the partially open Venetian blinds, but already he had sunk back into the dark side of the moon. In a narrow valley he was surrounded by mountains with mouths, somewhere a phone was ringing, his temples were about to burst. A moon bird melted into a river of demon birds. “You have to decide,” someone was saying, “whether to build or buy,” and when he looked up he saw his own face reflected in a dark train window, through which he saw a passing landscape. Slowly the landscape became a sewing machine that stitched the silently screaming boy onto the sleeve of a shirt. The last snow melted under the spirea bushes by the steps of the front porch, green leaves hung from the maples, and one rainy hot day Franklin saw that he was done. Somewhere the notes of a piano sounded: Stella practicing. A drop of sweat trickled along his cheek. Several sequences needed to be reworked, the voyage was riddled with minor flaws, but he could fix things in a month or two. He wanted to hand it over to the cameraman, he wanted to throw it on a white screen in the dark of his study; and a day came when Franklin began carrying boxes up to Vivograph, which still operated in its old offices in the arcade building, but with an entirely new set of faces.