Little Kingdoms

ONE

One warm blue night toward the middle of July, in the year 1920, John Franklin Payne, a newspaper cartoonist by trade, looked up from his desk in the third-floor study of his home in Mount Hebron, New York, and saw with surprise that it was three o’clock in the morning. The world was absolutely still. Through the windows the sky was a deep, glowing blue, as if there must be a bright moon somewhere, and Franklin felt a sudden desire to burst through the window into the blue night sky. The desire startled him, for he liked to work alone in his tower study late into the night. The study was warm, uncomfortably warm; despite the new screen in the lower half of the center window, the small room held the heat of the roof.

In the hot stillness Franklin took off his vest and looked again at the glass-cased clock on top of his high-backed desk. The glass door with the brass handle, the lacy clock-hands, the exposed cogwheels, the big metal key lying under the swinging pendulum, all this seemed strange and unseen before, though the clock had stood on the mantelpiece of his parents’ home in Ohio since his earliest childhood; and the familiar, strange clock, the glowing sky, the mysterious hour, all seemed connected with something inside him that was about to burst. As he stared at the pendulum he began to notice that the stillness of the hour was really a secret riot of sound: the dark tick of the clock, like drops of water dripping from an eave, the shrill of crickets beyond the screen, and under it all, clearer and clearer, the gentle rasp of his wife’s breathing as it came through the open window of the second-floor bedroom. He had told Cora he would be done in an hour or so, but the six-panel strip had proved unexpectedly stubborn. And then he had laid aside his drawing board, that smooth-worn dark board with a faint shine that reminded him of the shine of a well-handled pipe, and with a sense of excitement he had brought out the packet of carefully trimmed rice paper, set up his other board with its glass window, pulled over his jar of Venus pencils and a fresh bottle of black drawing ink, and set to work on his secret, exhilarating project.

What to do? If he went down to his bedroom next to Cora’s on the second floor, and fell asleep instantly, he would get only two and a half hours of sleep before the rattle of milk bottles in the wire box on the front porch announced his five-thirty rising. But Franklin was too excited to sleep. He was excited by the glowing blue sky, by the clamorous silence, by his lamplit tower room high above the rest of the house, by the sense that he was creating a world far more enchanting than the world of his comic strips, which had already brought him a certain notoriety. He was bursting with energy. He thought how nice it would be to creep downstairs and slip into bed with Cora — but she would be angry if he woke her. For though Cora was given to passionate whims of her own, she did not like to be surprised. Franklin remembered that a colleague was coming up for a visit on Saturday, and he had a sudden misgiving about Max: suppose Cora — but there was no use worrying about it now. He decided to work straight through the night. Immediately he decided not to. His eyes ached, his temples throbbed, his hand had become slightly unsteady — the last drawing had almost been spoiled.

Franklin numbered the piece of rice paper carefully in the lower right-hand corner and added it to the pile of thirty-two new drawings, each of which had been traced over the preceding drawing and exactly resembled it except for a small departure. Each of the separate drawings still had to be gone over in ink and then mounted on a piece of cardboard in order to be examined in his viewing machine. He now had 1,826 India-ink drawings, which had taken him almost three months to complete. At sixteen frames per second he would need nearly 4,000 drawings for a four-minute animated cartoon.

Franklin pushed back his chair carefully, for Cora complained that she could hear his chair scrape even though her room was not directly below the tower study, and walked over to the center window. He had inserted the adjustable screen only three weeks ago, after a hard-shelled insect had come in at night through the raised sash and struck his drawing hand like a piece of flying tin. Down below, the shadow of the house fell halfway across the sloping lawn. He saw plainly the elongated tower with the pointed roof, from which he was looking down into the yard, and for a moment he had the odd sensation that he was down there, strewn across the lawn — at any moment his shadow-form would emerge from the shadow-tower and pass into the brightness of the moon. Under one of the high old maples a child’s table, set with cups and saucers and teapot, lay half in light and half in shade: one chair, pulled back slightly, glowed almost white, while the other chair lay in black shadow. The brilliant spout of the teapot looked like the raised trunk of an elephant. He would have to remind Stella to bring in her toys before dark — or maybe the dolls had come out to have a tea party under the summer moon. In his childhood home in Plains Farms, Ohio, he had heard things come alive at night: dolls woke from their daylight spell, teapots poured tea, dishes came down from their cupboards and walked about the house, clowns in jigsaw puzzles rose up and danced, the little boy in the wallpaper caught a fish with his yellow fishing pole. Franklin had lain very still, listening to the secret life in the house, and twenty years later he had put it all in a Sunday color strip — but in the last panel the boy had wakened from his dream. And one summer night in Ohio, Franklin himself had sat up in bed and pushed aside the curtain and the stiff, heavy shade to stare at the brilliant backyard. He had longed to pass through the window into the dark enchantment of the summer night; and in the morning when he opened his eyes he found he had fallen asleep with his head against the window frame. Franklin was restless. The tower study was unbearably hot. All at once he had a marvelous idea.

With a thrust of his palms he pushed up the half-open lower sash. The adjustable screen, framed in maple, fit snugly against the vertical parting-strips that ran the length of the window frame and separated the upper and lower sashes. He released the stiff spring, carefully removed the screen, and placed it on the floor against the side of his desk. Then with dream-ease he stepped out into the blue summer night.

A narrow roofslope lay directly beneath the window. On his knees, backward, Franklin made his way to the edge. There, as if he knew what he was doing, he slid over the roof edge and swung down; for a moment he hung wildly before dropping to the wide and nearly flat roof of the front porch.

He was standing beside the tall window of his own bedroom, directly beneath his tower study. The shade was pulled down all the way, as if he were inside, fast asleep. And for a moment he imagined himself lying fast asleep in his bed, dreaming this other Franklin, who had stepped out of a tower into the sky. Franklin strode past the window, noticing himself passing jauntily in the dark pane of the upper sash — and how easy it was to walk this way, along the shingles of a roof, with one’s hands in one’s pockets at the magic hour of three in the morning; he felt like kicking up his heels. But he slowed as he drew near Cora’s window.

Through the adjustable screen he saw Cora lying on her back with her unbound hair strewn over the pillow. He could make out the proud line of her forehead and thought he could see, escaping from her thick pale tumble of hair, the bottom of an ear. Franklin felt a little sharp burst of longing, and with a feeling of dream-freedom he released the steel spring that held the screen tight against the window frame. At that moment Cora turned slightly in her sleep, half opened an eye, and seemed to look at him.

“I’m only a dream,” Franklin whispered, and held his breath. The eye closed. Franklin adjusted the screen and tiptoed away along the porch roof.

The roof turned with the wraparound porch, and as he stepped around the corner Franklin walked into the brightness of the moon. The moon startled him: it was much larger than it ought to be. It seemed to be growing bigger and bigger — at any moment it would engulf him and he would dissolve in an exhilaration of whiteness. In an old strip he had shown the moon setting on top of a saloon on Vine Street, rolling drunkenly across rooftops, toppling into the Ohio River with a splash. Franklin continued around the corner and came to a moon-flooded window. In the room his three-year-old daughter lay sleeping on her back. One leg rested on top of the covers and one arm was flung back on the pillow and bent over her head, as if she had fallen asleep suddenly in the midst of an ecstatic dance.

Franklin eased out the screen and climbed inside. At the bed he pulled the sheet and bedspread over Stella’s legs, removed a lump that turned out to be a white one-eyed bear, and lay down beside Stella with his hands clasped behind his head. “It’s a wonderful night,” he said. “I think the moon’s going to land on the roof in a few minutes. We can climb up on it and have moon pie. Won’t that be fun?” Stella stirred in her sleep and slowly rolled against him. “Shhh, now,” Franklin said. “Just another dream.” He kissed her forehead and sat up. Creatures with moon-glittering eyes looked at him from shelves and chairs, watched him as they leaned against each other’s shoulders. “I’m surprised at you,” Franklin said. “This is no time for loafing.” He rose from the bed and began gathering up the dolls and animals, which he placed on the floor in two lines facing Stella’s bed. In the center of the front row sat a Raggedy Ann doll, a kangaroo, a ballerina in silver slippers, and a donkey with one ear. “Night,” Franklin said to no one in particular, then climbed out the window onto the porch roof. The moon had returned to its proper size. Franklin bent into the room and replaced the screen.

He continued to the end of the porch roof, where he came to a projecting bay formed by an empty guest room. Above the bay rose a third-floor gable. The roofline was above his reach, but a brilliant white downspout, gleaming as if the paint were still wet, climbed a corner of the bay. Franklin placed one toe on the louver of a shutter and one toe on a brace of the rainspout, grasped the roof edge, and pulled himself up onto a steep slope.

Slowly, bent over to his fingertips, he made his moonlit way along the peaks and valleys of his jumbled roof, passing through gable-shadows and bursts of brightness. He felt as if he had come down from the moon, an enchanted visitor, to walk on the bumpy top of a town. Once he slipped on a strip of flashing, once he sat straddling a crest of roof, and once he passed a tall, thin chimney that widened at the top and made him think of a pedestal with a missing bust. In a burst of high spirits he imagined chimney statues: a bust of Homer with his bald head gleaming under the moon, a Civil War general with raised sword on a rearing horse, a white marble Venus stepping out of her bath. He had become quite used to his up-and-down journey under the spell of the moon when he found himself in a sudden valley beside a polygonal tower.

Dreamily he made his way down to the skirt of roof beneath the open window and entered his warm study.

Nothing had changed. The mahogany desk-chair with its padded leather seat was turned slightly from the desk, the pendulum swung slowly above the key in the glass-cased clock, a collection of cedarwood penholders standing in a square jar looked like a handful of pick-up-sticks about to fall. On the faded wallpaper with its pattern of repeated haystacks, the little reapers lay asleep with their hats over their eyes. Franklin laid his last drawing on top of the glass rectangle in the sloping animation board. He turned on the light bulb beneath the glass, placed a blank piece of rice paper over the drawing, and lined up the two pieces of glowing paper by matching the crossmarks in the four corners. He tried to recall his mood of moonlit exhilaration, but it all seemed to have happened long ago. Choosing a blunt-tipped Venus pencil from his pencil jar, Franklin began to trace the background for drawing number 1,827 as the first little ache of tiredness rippled along his temples and began to beat softly with the beat of his blood.

TWO

When Franklin summoned up his childhood in Plains Farms, Ohio, he always remembered three things: the warm, sunbaked smell of the tire that hung from the branch of the sweet-gum tree, the opening in the backyard hedge that led out into the tall meadow grass where he was forbidden to go, and the sound of his father’s voice counting slowly and gravely in the darkened kitchen as he bent over the piece of magic paper under the light of the enlarger. Franklin loved the darkroom: the four trays on the sink, each with its pair of tongs; the separate smells of the developer, the stop bath, and the hypo; the red light glowing in the darkness; the dark hump of the enlarger on the kitchen table. It was his job to remove a piece of magic paper from one of the yellow-and-black packages and seal the package carefully so that the rest of the paper wouldn’t be exposed when his father clicked on the enlarger light. He remembered the feel of the paper: smooth on both sides, but smoother on one side than the other: that was the side that had a shine to it in the dark-red light. His father placed the paper in the metal rectangle with adjustable sides, which somehow reminded Franklin of the funny metal tray the man in the shoe store made him place his foot on, and when everything was ready his father clicked on the enlarger light and began to count. He counted in a slow, grave voice, and as he counted he slowly lowered and raised one hand, with the long finger held out. Franklin could see light shining through the negative, throwing the black-and-white picture onto the glowing paper. The moving hand, marking the rhythm of the numbers, had a red sheen in the red-lit dark. Suddenly the light clocked off. Quickly his father removed the paper and brought it over to the sink, where he slipped it into the developer pan and allowed Franklin to hold it down with the tongs. This was the part Franklin liked best: the paper was blank, but as he watched, tense with expectation, he became aware of a slight motion on the paper, as of something rising to the surface, and from the depths of whiteness the picture would begin to emerge — an edge here, a gray bit there, a ghostly arm reaching out of a shirt sleeve. More and more the darkness rose up out of the white, faster and faster, a great bursting forth of life — and suddenly he saw himself on the living room rug, reaching out to put a piece in his ship puzzle, but already he was lifting an edge of the photograph with the tongs, in order to slip the picture into the second tray, where the developer would be washed off and the picture would stop getting darker. His father had shown him once what happened if you didn’t stop the action of the developer: the picture grew darker and darker until it was completely black. Black was nothing, and white was nothing too, but in between — in between was the whole world. After the stop-bath tray came the hypo tray, to fix the picture in place and keep it from changing in light. From there the picture went into the water tray, and then it was laid facedown on a towel to dry. But Franklin’s interest had already begun to slacken when the picture rose dripping from the first tray, for the excitement was always in the sudden emergence of life from the whiteness of the paper.

He felt the same excitement when he drew on white paper with crayon or pencil. As far back as he could remember he had liked to make lines on paper, and from the age of five or six he liked to draw everything: the tire swing, the state of Ohio with a cow in it, his mother with her bag of yarn balls and knitting needles, his spoon and fork. In elementary school his teachers praised the drawings and hung them up in the back of the room. He drew pictures of school desks, carefully shaded bottles of ink, colorful cereal boxes with precisely reproduced words and faces, but he also kept returning to old, familiar things, improving them each time, so that his tire swing became mottled with skillfully drawn shadows of leaves and hung from a meticulously rendered rope that showed all of its intertwisted strands, while the state of Ohio, copied from his father’s atlas instead of from his childish jigsaw map, showed all the counties, every curve in the Ohio River, and the letters and numbers of the superimposed grid. In the sixth grade he began copying his favorite comic strips from the Cincinnati Enquirer and inventing strips of his own.

In high school he was an indifferent student but continued drawing; somewhat to his surprise his sketches took a satirical turn. One summer he wrote away to a correspondence school whose advertisement he had seen on the inside cover of a matchbook. He followed three lessons before giving it up with an inner shrug, but the sense of something to be learned, of rules to be mastered and broken, stayed with him. In his senior year his father told him that he was being sent to a Commercial Academy in Cincinnati, nearly two hours by buckboard and train from Plains Farms, in order to prepare for a career in business. Franklin agreed to go without protest, as he agreed to most things, while inwardly withdrawing to a quiet corner of his mind. In the tall-windowed rooms of the Commercial Academy, with the sound of automobile engines and voices coming from the street below, he took notes faithfully and did his best to pay attention. But he preferred to wander about the exciting city on the river, with its German shopkeepers and crowded sidewalks, its horse-drawn cabs and handsome automobiles, its sudden glimpses of the river, of the suspension bridge with its soaring towers, of the green hills of Kentucky. At the entrance to the suspension bridge stood the sheds of apple and peanut vendors, and Franklin liked to walk across the river with his pockets full of peanuts and sit on a bench in Kentucky and look at the city of Cincinnati rising up at the river’s edge. On the broad city streets he liked to look in the plate-glass windows at displays of cameras with black leather bellows and automatic shutters; stem-winding pocket watches with silver-plated cases engraved with train engines or antlered stags; mustached mannequins in striped suits and Panama hats, with walking sticks tucked under their arms; phonographs with shiny brass horns or the new cabinet models in oak and mahogany that concealed the horn and had room for one hundred records; stylish women’s boots with glossy patent-leather vamps and creamy calf tops; gleaming white-enameled sinks and bathtubs. He liked the big-city drugstores with their window displays of dental creams, hair pomades, self-stropping safety razors in plush-lined cases, and bottles of perfume with exotic scents: fleur d’orange, new-mown hay, night-blooming cereus, ylang-ylang, opoponax, patchouly. His favorite haunt was Vine Street, which ran down to the river at one end and up into the hills at the other and was crowded with shops, hotels, and every variety of saloon, from shabby riverfront grogshops to the palatial cafés in the business district, with their wrought-iron doorways flanked by marble columns, and their interiors of carved mahogany and onyx and great mirrors that reflected bronze statues — and farther away from the river, the comfortable saloons of the German neighborhood, with their sitting rooms and shady outdoor gardens.

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 turned 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.

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 the 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.

After dinner, on the dark front porch lit only by the yellow glow of the shade-drawn parlor windows, Max and Franklin and Cora sat talking and drinking lemonade. The porch looked down across the lawn to the looming dark maples, the yellow squares of windows seen through a trembling blackness of leaves, and the wavering lines of light on the black river. Max, opening a slender tin box and removing a cheroot wrapped in crinkly pale-blue tissue paper, said he was no drinker, but he objected to the anti-booze amendment on principle: it was an effort by politicians to prolong the childhood of Americans. Besides, it would never work — anyone could buy medicinal whiskey at the local drugstore with a doctor’s prescription. Franklin looked over at Cora, and after a while he went down to the cellar and brought back one of the six bottles of wine they had kept on hand since the amendment had passed. “Ah, you gay dog, you,” Max said, and blew a stream of perfect little smoke rings the size of half dollars; and as Franklin poured the wine into the lemonade glasses he felt a gaiety come over things. The festive wine, the warm summer night, the sense of sharing in a secret violation — it was all peaceful and exhilarating, like riding home at night in the buckboard after long Sunday picnics on the river. Cora, who had been laughing at one of Max’s stories so that she had to wipe one eye with the back of her fingers, grew suddenly serious and began to speak about her girlhood in Cincinnati: ice-skating on the pond in Eden Park in late afternoons as the yellow sky turned darker and darker, the rows of long icicles hanging from porch eaves, wax angels with glass wings on the Christmas tree and real candles burning on the branches — and when Max asked if it was always winter in Ohio, she looked up in confusion, as if she had sunk into a winter dream, and spoke of long summer evenings composed of two sounds: the notes of mazurkas and nocturnes coming through the open window onto the darkening lawn as her mother sat at the piano after dinner, and the deeply satisfying sound of a jar-top coming down on a jar as another lightning bug was snatched out of the dark. Then she told Max how, when they’d first arrived in Brooklyn Heights, the thing that most made her feel she was in a foreign place was the way people spoke of standing on line, instead of in line; and people had smiled at each other when she said things like “Golly Moses.” Later, when Cora stood up to go to the kitchen, she walked into the arm of the porch glider; and she let the wooden screen door bang loudly when she stepped inside.

When Cora returned, holding a tray of cheese and crackers, she bumped open the screen door with her hip. The slight immodesty of her suddenly outthrust hip, the momentary awkwardness of her body, the lamplight from the front hall around her darkening form as she stepped onto the porch, all this excited Franklin and made him impatient for Max to go up to bed, or dissolve into mist, but he kept sitting there and sitting there; and after midnight, when they had all moved into the parlor, Cora at last rose with a look of weariness and said decisively: “Now I want you and Max to stay up and talk, you hear?”

Franklin, who had begun to rise, looked for a sign from Cora, who had already turned away. A warm, drowsy feeling came over him, as if he had not slept for a long time. “I’ll be up in a few minutes,” he said, sinking into the soft armchair; and the yellow lamp shade, the cry of the crickets, the shadowy wallpaper with its trellises of pink roses, his friend sitting in a chair with one leg hooked over the arm, all seemed part of some drowsy, peaceful mystery he was on the verge of understanding. He looked at Max and felt an odd burst of gratitude that he should be sitting there, far from the city, in the dead of night, and all at once he began telling Max about his father’s grave voice in the darkroom, the pictures emerging mysteriously from the paper in the developer tray. He spoke of the dime museum, the strangeness and odd comfort of it, and about the advertising posters and how it was all somehow connected with the magic of the darkroom. Suddenly Franklin felt a wild thrill of exhilaration, mixed with fear, and standing up he said, “I want to show you something.”

The two stairways, each with its landing, seemed much too long, as if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere, but when he pushed open a door he saw the familiar study, the jar of penholders on the desk, the glass-cased clock. Max bent intently over the rice-paper drawings and asked precise questions. Franklin then showed him a little invention that he had modeled after a penny-arcade mutoscope: a metal cylinder, turned by a crank, was fitted with slots that held the cardboard-backed drawings. When you turned the crank, the drum of drawings turned. A metal rod was attached in such a way that each drawing struck it and was held for an instant before being released. And in the viewer the pictures moved — at first too quickly before he found the right rhythm of cranking, then flickeringly, waveringly, but unmistakably. In a hall of the dime museum the knife-thrower with his cape and mustache was lifting the little girl with the big, frightened eyes from the circle of spectators. The words HELP!! HELP!! appeared on a title card. Franklin invited Max to look through the viewer, and as he continued turning he saw the pictures moving in his mind: the knife-thrower tied the struggling child to a wheel and with a single sharp finger set the wheel spinning. Reaching back for a row of knives he began flinging them at the blurred wheel as Franklin stopped turning.

“Golly Moses,” Max said, shaking his head admiringly as he took the crank and continued to turn.

“That wheel cost me a month of work,” Franklin said.

Max looked sharply at him. “You realize you’re out of your mind, don’t you? A raving madman in a padded cell. You do know that, don’t you? You do all the drawings yourself? I know a man who—”

“I’d rather be out of my mind than in my mind,” Franklin said, and felt suddenly tired and immensely unhappy and exhilarated all at the same time. If he spent four hours a night six nights a week he ought to be able to finish the drawings by late fall or perhaps December at the latest, assuming that his comic strips didn’t spill over into the evenings, which they often did. The animated cartoon was about to enter a new sequence, in a new hall of the dime museum, where the tattoos on the tattooed man came to life and danced a wild dance around the terrified girl, and he would need all his powers of concentration to get the motions exactly right. “You see,” he said to Max, who for some reason had climbed onto the desk and then onto the top of the door frame, where he sat crouched like a gnome as dark wings grew from his shoulders; and opening his eyes Franklin could not understand the bright dawnlight pouring through the windows of his bedroom, while somewhere far away a cup was rattling on a dish.

“I understand that the motions have to be exactly right,” Max was saying a few days later in the faded armchair in Franklin’s office. “You’ll grant I’m not precisely an idiot. I’m arguing that you can get them exactly right and also save a devil of a lot of time. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life working on a four-minute cartoon, do you? Or do you? This new process—”

“But I don’t want to save time,” Franklin said irritably, although as he spoke he realized it wasn’t entirely the truth. The mechanical retracing of every drawing was utterly exhausting, and if he could draw each stationary background only once, placing over it a transparent sheet of celluloid on which only the moving portions were drawn, then he had no objection to the new technique. But the cartoons he occasionally went to see did not inspire confidence. It seemed to Franklin that the new studio-produced cartoons were all too intent on saving time; the cel system didn’t seem to encourage the kinds of detailed background one might have expected, but instead produced simple backgrounds consisting of a few boring props: a horizon line, a rock, a bushy tree. Besides, his own backgrounds were themselves continually changing in small ways — his dime museum was alive in all its parts, and in the climactic sequence an entire hall, with its pillars and archways, was going to come alive. Besides, the cel process was patented and required a license, and the public nature of applying for a license violated his desire for absolute secrecy. Besides, though Max was trying to be helpful, Franklin didn’t want to be helped. Besides, he had a splitting headache.

“You own a telephone,” Max was saying. “You insist on drawing with a Gillott 290 pen point. To be consistent you ought to bang out messages on a drum and draw cartoons with the sharpened tip of a goose feather. No, don’t bother to defend yourself, I don’t have time. The Troll’s been riding me again. He called me in for a little chat the other day. ‘Good work,’ says he. ‘But look here, Horn — in this corner — is it a dog, or is it a cat?’ I look at the corner. It’s a cat, with whiskers. I ponder. Scratch my head. Try to see a dog. It’s still a cat. Always was a cat. It’s pure essence of cat. I look old Alfred straight in the eye. ‘I believe it’s an elephant, sir.’ Really, sometimes I think old puddingface fails to appreciate my sense of humor. If he wants me to draw his damn cats for him then let him pay me a living wage. I’d rather fix drains in Flatbush. Tell your daughter I’m madly in love with her.”

Toward the end of the summer Franklin again invited Max to Mount Hebron, this time with a new misgiving: he feared that the second visit could never equal the freshness and surprise of the first. Cora, too, seemed to anticipate disaster. She was restless and fretful, wondered what she could possibly serve for dinner, changed her dress twice before lunch, asked Mrs. Henneman, the housekeeper, to clean the mirrors and polish the silver, and scolded Stella for always being underfoot. Franklin, who had been staying up till midnight to work on his newspaper strips, now saw the weekend as a lost stretch of time for his animated drawings and cursed his bad luck, and Max, and life in general, and above all his exasperating shirt collar, which kept riding up on his neck — and then, as if he had arrived unexpectedly, Max was there, sweeping them all into his gust of talk, rescuing them, it seemed, from a ruined afternoon. Cora had planned a picnic at the top of the wooded slope above Mount Hebron. Sitting in the sun-speckled shade of the picnic table, biting into his cold chicken leg with eyes closed in pleasure, raising his glass of red wine into the brightness of the sun, Max looked down at the town, at the sunny brown river, at the wooded hills of the far shore, and said that his idea of bliss would be to own a piece of land on those hills, across from Mount Hebron. “Matter of fact,” Franklin said, stretching out one arm in a long, slow yawn, “there’s land for sale. People buy, sometimes build.” Cora said there was a real estate agent on River Street and two more in the next township. Max asked if they would accept an IOU, and wondered if a real estate agent could supply him with a wife. After lunch, Max proposed a hike in the woods; and as he led them along leaf-strewn paths he stopped from time to time to point at something and say to Stella, “Is that a lion?” or “Those are very peculiar-looking telephone poles.”

That evening, when Cora came down to the front porch after getting Stella ready for bed, Franklin went up to tell her the next installment of a continuing bedtime story about a little girl who discovered in her dark attic a bright country of dolls. When he returned to the porch he sat for a while jiggling an ankle and then rose and said he’d be back in two minutes. Two hours later he returned guiltily from his study and was relieved to find Max talking easily with Cora; and throwing himself down on the cushion of a wicker chair Franklin felt a burst of gratitude to Max for getting on so well with Cora, for being such an easy and undemanding guest.

One afternoon toward the end of September, Franklin was working in his office at the World Citizen when Max entered and announced that he had found a distributor. “A what?” Franklin asked, looking up from a page covered with sketches of noses. He was pleased with his latest strip, which in certain ways was the best thing he had ever done, but Kroll had not been enthusiastic. “We’ve got to have a more appealing hero,” he had written in a long memo, “someone the public can take to their hearts,” and although Franklin understood exactly what Kroll meant, he was disappointed and even shocked — couldn’t Kroll see that what he was doing had an appeal of its own? Kroll liked domestic strips with strongly developed gags, as well as the working-girl strips that had recently come into vogue; he had never really cared for “Figaro’s Follies,” which he had tolerated solely for the sake of the more popular “Phantom of the City.” For that matter the Phantom strip had begun to edge its way toward the fantastic, as Franklin sought out increasingly unlikely though carefully researched and scrupulously rendered settings — the insides of vast sewer pipes, abandoned subway excavations deep under city streets, the hollow caissons buried beneath the bed of the East River under the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge — and as Franklin studied wood engravings in old newspapers that showed the ingenious structure of the caissons, with their limelit shadowy chambers, their air locks and supply shafts, he could tell that Kroll was hoping for a really popular strip of a more familiar kind. The new strip, called “Harvey” and already cast in doubt by Kroll’s memo, showed a boy with a pen who drew his own world, which he then entered; the world turned more and more threatening until, at the climactic moment, Harvey took out his pen and devised his own escape.

“A distributor,” Max said. “You can have the photography done at Vivograph in that arcade building up on Fifty-third Street and they’ll pass it on to their distributor, National Pictures — all very reasonable, very legit. Vivograph will charge you ten percent of whatever they can get from National. They distribute all over the States and in what our sainted editor calls ‘Yurp.’”

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” Franklin said.

Max widened his eyes in feigned astonishment and, looking about at an imaginary audience, said: “You heard what he said, folks. I think it’s a remarkable development.” He dialed an imaginary telephone. “Hello. Horn here. Listen, he thinks he knows what I — what I — hell. Lousy connection.” He hung up.

Franklin, who liked Max’s enthusiasm but was also wary of it, began to explain that despite a good recent bout of work he had been forced to spend the last week doing editorial cartoons for Kroll, who was disappointed in the latest strip and seemed to take pleasure in loading him with plebeian work, but in the middle of his explanation he had an idea for a brand-new strip, which might be just the sort of thing Kroll had in mind. He began sketching rapidly in a blank corner of the page, and when he looked up he stared in confusion at the pendulum swinging in the glass case, the wallpaper with its faded haystacks where drowsy reapers lay with their hats over their eyes.

There now began a long, blissful period of work, when Franklin was able to throw himself nightly into his dime museum drawings and daily into editorial cartoons and three strips: a new and uninspired one for Kroll about office life at a magazine publisher, the old Phantom strip with its new decor, and a recent one that had sprung up in the shadow of “Harvey,” about a boy who stood on his pillow each night and climbed into his dreams — and beyond the images that flowed from the tip of his Gillott 290 pen point he would be aware of dimmer images, like a yellow leaf lying on the porch rail or a black grackle shimmering with purple as it shrieked from a bare maple branch, and one day he noticed with surprise that long, sharp icicles hung shining from a roof edge, casting slanted black stripes against the bright white wood.

One morning in mid-December Franklin laid aside his drawing board, put on his hat and coat, and made his way along the warren of brown rooms to an old door with a frosted-glass pane, behind which Max shared an office with a melancholy sports-page cartoonist called Mort Riegel. Franklin rapped with the knuckles of two fingers and opened the door. Max, alone with his feet up on the desk, looked over his shoulder with raised eyebrows and placed a hand on his chest in a parody of surprise. “Put on your coat and come with me,” Franklin said. “Ask no questions.” He led Max out into the sunny cold day and hailed a cab, which came to a stop five minutes later before an old arcade building lined with shops. Between a barbershop and a shoeshine parlor a flight of dark stairs with a loose handrail led up to the offices of the Vivograph Company. “I delivered it nine days ago,” Franklin said as he turned a dented doorknob. The Vivograph studio, he had learned, turned out its own biweekly animated shorts, as well as travelogues and educational features, but rented its camera, an antiquated machine that had been supplied with a motor and could be set to shoot one frame at a time, to anyone willing to pay. In a small projection room whose single window was darkened with a crooked Venetian blind that let in shafts of dusty light, Franklin and Max sat straddling a pair of folding chairs with their arms resting on the backs as they watched the four minutes and twelve seconds of Dime Museum Days by J. Franklin Payne. The title cards (HELP!! HELP!!) struck Franklin as superfluous, the bearded lady sprouting bushels of hair was funnier but less frightening than he had expected, here and there the flickering caused by faulty alignment was irritating, but on the whole it seemed to work: the long perspective shots into the depths of the museum were effective, and the final sequence, in which an entire hall came to life and kept changing into sinister figures who pursued the terrified girl down dream perspectives and nightmare corridors, was very satisfying, despite one or two small details that needed attending to. When it was over he turned to Max to ask about the bearded lady sequence and was surprised to hear applause in the back of the room, which came from the projectionist and two studio employees who had crept in to watch, and when he turned back to Max he was startled to see Max staring at him with a glitter of wild excitement in his eyes.

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 invariably, 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 continue 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.

“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 stayed 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 drowsily 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.

A week later the fever vanished as mysteriously as it had come, and as Franklin worked long into the night, he wondered whether he had somehow drawn Stella’s fever into himself, where it flared up into images. The new animated cartoon or fever-vision was likely to be ten or even twelve minutes long, which meant ten thousand or twelve thousand separate drawings; and Franklin let himself sink into his night world with deep and secret joy.

The secrecy was crucial, he felt it in his bones: he must never let Kroll know what he was doing, never speak of it even to Max, who would suggest shortcuts, give well-meant advice, surround him with an air of reproach and expectation that would only get in his way. Cora, who knew he was back at work in his study, chose not to speak of it — and Franklin was glad, for he knew that his work irritated and exasperated her, as if it were a form of secret disobedience. Only to Stella did he sometimes speak of the growing piles of rice paper, the slow and loving work of retracing each drawing and inking over the pencil lines, and one evening when Cora had a headache and retired to her room after dinner, he took Stella up to the tower study and showed her his pile of inked drawings and his handmade viewing machine. Stella turned the crank carefully and made the pictures move: a doll with large, wondering eyes was walking through a moonlit department store. Stella watched to the end of the sequence, which broke off abruptly as the doll discovered the top step of an escalator. Then Franklin started at the beginning, with all the dolls waking in the toy department — the fluttering dance of the paper dolls had cost him a week of nights and lasted ten seconds. Stella watched all the way to the top of the escalator and started from the beginning again. Franklin sat down at his desk, and when he raised his head he was startled to find Stella fast asleep on the floor. It was past midnight. He carried her down in his arms and went back up to work.

The cartoon had presented itself to him in part as a series of formal problems to be solved. In Dime Museum Days he had introduced his girl into a strange world of scrupulously drawn settings and realistic freaks, both of which gradually assumed the distortion of nightmare. The girl herself had remained a frightened visitor from the sane, outside world. In Toys at Midnight the protagonist was a doll who magically came to life and would herself undergo a series of physical transformations that called for continually changing perspectives. Franklin felt the desire to accept a certain challenge posed by the artificial world of animated drawings: the desire to release himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible. But this desire stimulated in him an equal and opposite impulse toward the mundane and plausible, toward precise illusionistic effects. As the violations of the real became more marked, the perspective backgrounds became fuller and more detailed; and as he gave way to impulses of wild, sweet freedom, he found himself paying close attention to the look of things in the actual world: the exact unfolding of metal steps at the top of a down escalator, the precise pattern of reflections in the panes of a revolving door seen from inside. One morning before entering the World Citizen he went down the steps of a nearby subway entrance and squatted beside a turnstile with sketchpad in hand, recording the turnstile arms viewed from below, while busy people looked at him with amusement or indignation. And one dark afternoon during a sudden storm he left his office and stood under a grocer’s awning, recording the distorted reflections of stoplights and store lights in the wet black avenue, the halos of rain-haze about the street lamps, the wavelike sweeps of rain blowing across the street like the bottom of a blown curtain.

The doll went round and round in the revolving door and was flung out onto the sidewalk: he had the complex sequence of motions exactly right. For some reason the simple descent into the subway was more difficult, and the nightmare subway ride, with carefully exaggerated perspectives of looming seats and menacing faces, was causing him a lot of trouble — and as Franklin felt himself falling deeper and deeper under the spell of his cartoon, as he patiently traced backgrounds over and over again on the thin, crackly rice paper, throwing away entire sequences and studying the results in his viewing machine, he had the sense that he was living in the rain-haze of his shadow world, through which objects showed themselves waveringly, with an occasional hard edge peeping through. Somewhere beyond the rain-haze he and Stella and Max and Cora were walking in checkered sunlight on a green, wooded path, but when he arrived home he had to drag his feet through piles of red and yellow leaves; the wind howled as he climbed the stairs to his study; from the high windows he could see the ice skaters on the river, turning round and round, faster and faster, until they were a whirling blur — and emerging from their spin they sat back lazily in sun-flooded rowboats, their straw hats casting blue shadows over their eyes.

“The Coca-Cola bottle,” Max was saying as he pulled the oars, “is instantly recognized by a wheat farmer in Iowa, an adman in Manhattan, and a housewife in Wyoming. It’s the most powerful image of a civilization since the pyramid. And what is its secret? I’ll tell you its secret.” Stella sat with one arm over the side of the rowboat, letting her fingertips drag through the water. Cora, leaning back on a cushion with her straw hat pulled low, brushed at a fly on her shoulder.

“What, Max?” Cora said. “What’s its secret?”

“The Coca-Cola bottle is shaped like a woman. That’s its secret.”

“Oh, Max,” Cora said, “I can’t believe that. Do you really think I look like a Coca-Cola bottle?”

“In a general way, yes. I mean it strictly as a compliment, of course.”

“Did you hear that, Franklin? Max says I look like a Coca-Cola bottle.”

“I read the other day,” Franklin said, “that a woman found a mouse in her bottle of Coca-Cola.”

“Really, Franklin,” Cora said. “How disgusting.”

“When she complained to the company, they apologized and sent her a free case of bottles. You see? It had a happy ending.”

“That’s what I mean about them,” Max said. “They always satisfy the customer.”

“What about the mouse?” Franklin said.

“I don’t think anyone,” Cora said, “has ever compared me to a Coca-Cola bottle. Y’all say the sweetest l’l ol’ things.”

“The mouse,” Stella said, “turned into a giant rat. Then she ate the lady up.”

“Stella,” Cora said, “please don’t interrupt when we’re trying to talk.”

Under overhanging branches Max brought them to shore. He pulled the boat onto a strip of sandy earth and held out his forearm for Cora, who seized it with one hand while holding onto her hat with the other. Franklin lifted Stella out and followed Max and Cora through the trees. “All this stays the way it is,” Max was saying. “The road will be in back of the property. Watch your step. Up there — on the other side of the stream — that’s where things will begin to look different.” On the other side of the stream they passed through more woods and came to a clearing. Sawed-off branches lay about, and here and there stood a few smooth stumps. On one of the stumps someone had left a tin mug. “You see how private it is,” Max said solemnly, narrowing his eyes as he stared down through the trees at the river.

He had established himself quickly at Vivograph, passing through the ranks and revealing a talent for direction and organization that had not gone unnoticed. When the head of the studio, a former animator who had become increasingly preoccupied with matters of business and was spending more and more time away from Vivograph, began to look about for someone to stand in for him and oversee daily operations, Max was the clear choice. His transition to virtual studio head was immediately successful. He hired three new animators and increased the production schedule from a biweekly to a weekly cartoon. But his particular talent was for detecting and eliminating wasteful steps in the animation process itself, while at the same time insisting on a high level of technical accomplishment. To this end he divided his animators into two ranks based on talent, limited the drawing of his chief animators to complex gestures, and introduced among his group of assistant animators a new and unheard of degree of specialization, assigning one man to avalanches, collapsing bridges, and storms at sea, another to mill wheels, stagecoaches, and windblown hats, a third to snowflakes and swarms of bees.

“Even so,” Max said as he rowed them back across the river, “my hands are tied. The big decisions are made by the high-muckety-mucks who pay for my meat loaf and mashed potatoes while they serve T-bone steaks to their pet poodles.”

“What you need,” Cora said, “is a studio of your own.”

“Exactly. I’ve talked to most of the guys about it and they’re with me to a man. Frankly, I’ve been nosing around for low-rent office space. Putting out feelers. Waiting for the right moment to jump ship.”

“Not now!” said Franklin, placing a hand on his chest and looking at the water in alarm.

As the excavation got under way, Max took to coming up each weekend in order to keep an eye on things. Franklin, whose weekends were devoted to work, was at first irritated at the prospect of weekend visits, and annoyed at his own irritation — what kind of friend was he, anyway? — but quickly felt a rush of gratitude to Max, who sternly insisted that everyone do what they wanted to do without fussing over him and who spirited Cora away for day-long outings, leaving Franklin free to bend over his animation board in the tower study, while Stella drew pictures of cartoon animals with her box of pastel pencils. Through the tower windows he could see down to the sunny brown river and, if he stood to the left of the right-hand window and looked out to the right, he could see, far up the river, Max’s pale new house rising among the dark trees.

Perhaps because he could see the house rising, perhaps because he was moving forward swiftly after several wrong turns, Franklin had the odd sensation that Max’s house and his own animated cartoon were springing up together under the rich blue summer sky. As the first-floor joists were laid and long floorboards began to be nailed diagonally over them, Franklin brought the doll up the stairs of the subway station onto the moonlit avenue. Under the oppressive height of skyscrapers, depicted in nightmare perspective, the doll seemed to grow smaller and smaller. A sudden storm burst out, driving the doll to huddle in a doorway as partition studs with door openings were raised and braced in place. Waves of rain blew along the avenue, halos of rain-haze glowed about the street lamps; and as the rain cleared and Franklin began the crucial scene in which the terrified doll slipped through the keyhole of a candy store and in the presence of tiny candy animals felt herself growing larger, the corner posts and outside wall studs began to rise among the dark trees.

“A perfect place for a picnic,” Max said, half-sitting on a sawhorse with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles as he carefully salted the top of a hard-boiled egg. Franklin and Stella sat on barrels facing a board set across two sawhorses. On the board sat plates of sandwiches, bowls of strawberries and purple grapes, a dish of hard-boiled eggs. Cora sat in a window opening, leaning back against the window stud with half-closed eyes and slowly raising to her lips a single plump grape. Through the second-floor joists shone slices of brilliant blue sky. The floorboards were striped with crisscross patterns of joist shadows and stud shadows. Curled wood shavings lay in a little heap beside Max’s sawhorse, and here and there lay a few shiny nails.

“Tell them to stop work,” Franklin said. “The rest is superfluous. Look, Stel, some pigs have lost their tails.”

“And this is the living room,” Max said. “Open, free — plenty of light. Exposed timber, everything simple and straightforward — none of your Queen Anne quaintness for Uncle Max. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the shut-in family parlor has had its day. That’s the dining room over there, and through there’s the kitchen, big as a barn. I plan to cram it full of every up-to-date gadget on the market. And that room over there — it’s the American dream. I refer of course to the noble bathroom. I’m installing a tub the size of Grand Central Station, oak tank, siphon-jet bowl, brass trim, the works. Tell me a man’s house is his castle and I say hear, hear: but his bathroom is his church.”

“It might be a bit drafty,” Franklin said. “You might want to add walls.”

“How did they lose their tails?” Stella said.

Cora, stretching her arms slowly into sunlight, said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Hey,” Max said. “Off of there, buster. This is private property.” A squirrel, scampering along an overhead joist, stopped abruptly, its head erect, its front paws raised, as if it had been turned to stone.

“You haven’t lived,” Cora said, “till you have squirrels in the attic.”

“The workmen took off the tails by mistake,” Franklin said. “It happens sometimes. But luckily they left some nails behind.”

Something about the picnic disturbed Franklin, and that night in his tower study it came to him: he hadn’t looked back at the squirrel, which in his mind remained fixed forever on the joist, caught in an evil spell. His own work was progressing nicely. Out on the street the doll continued to grow, higher than the candy-store awning, higher than the candy store, while far up the river, horizontal boards rose along the walls and the outline of the roof took shape: king post and ridgepole and rafters. And still the doll continued to grow: higher than the Flatiron Building, higher than the Woolworth Building, until, placing one foot in the East River and one foot in the Hudson, she loomed above the island of Manhattan. Bending over, she picked up the little Brooklyn Bridge as tiny cars and trains spilled from the edges. She set the bridge down in Central Park, placed the Statue of Liberty on top of Grand Central Station, picked up the Flatiron Building and used it to smooth a wrinkle in her dress. Stella awaited each stage of the cartoon with quiet excitement; she had become quite skilled at detecting slight waverings caused by faulty alignment. Looking up, the gigantic doll saw the moon not far away. She removed it from the sky and began tossing it back and forth between her hands. Then she began to bounce it on rooftops like a white rubber ball, while through the right-hand tower window the house assembled itself as if it were the work of a skillful animator: red shingles spread across the roof-boards, a chimney rose into the blue sky. The final sequence was difficult: as the first light of dawn became visible the doll shrank swiftly down to her proper size and hurried back to the department store, to take her place on the shelf with her head leaning against the side of a puppet theater — lifeless as each of the drawings that composed an animated cartoon but, like them, irradiated by a secret. Max spoke of moving in by the first of September. Franklin, bothered by the subway sequence, began it over again.

One hot night toward the end of August, when heat lightning flickered in the blue-black sky and the chirr of crickets through the adjustable screen sounded like the tense hum of electric wires, Franklin placed a pen in his box of penholders, screwed the cap onto his bottle of drawing ink, and sat back in his leather desk-chair with his arms hanging heavily over the sides. The lacy black hands of the glass-covered clock showed 12:55. He was tired; the front of his neck felt wet; the back of his shiny brown vest stuck against the leather chairback. Everything was still, as still as in his father’s darkroom when the enlarger light clicked on and shone down through the negative onto the magic paper. His father had counted slowly, in a grave voice, marking each number by the slow downward motion of his index finger, reddish in the light of the darkroom lamp. The enlarger light clicked off; the cream-colored paper, empty of images but charged now with secret life, slipped into the developer tray; he was allowed to hold it under with the tongs. He watched very closely in the light of the red lamp. Now in the white paper a shadow appeared, and another, a hardening edge, a hazy foot, a face, a tree — and there he was, darkening, smiling up at himself in the developer tray, as clear as life, but motionless, hardening: spellbound. And as he grasped the edge of paper carefully with the tongs in order to lift it from the developer into the stop bath, in his mind he saw the boy in the photograph walking across the picture, one foot after the other, through trembling spots of sun and shade. And he had done it; now he had done it; and scraping back carefully in his desk chair, Franklin began pacing about the room, his heart beating wildly, and in his temples a ripple of headache. He had done it, and he needed to tell his father. But his father was dead. What did it mean? The clock tick-tocked. Hearts ran down and you couldn’t wind them up again. Time was passing — even here. Franklin, filled with exhilaration and a kind of wild melancholy, stepped to the door of the tower room. He began to hurry — quietly, quietly — down the stairs.

At Cora’s door he stopped and placed his hand on the fluted glass knob. The handle squeaked as it turned; through a sliver of door-opening he saw Cora asleep on her back, her head turned to one side. Heat lightning flickered beyond the screen, showing a glimmer of branches. “Cora,” he whispered; he heard the gentle rasp of her breathing, a racket of crickets. Quietly he closed the door. He made his way down the hall and placed his hand on another fluted glass knob. The door opened with a squeak: he would have to remember to oil the bottom hinge. Stella lay on her side in a wildness of bedclothes. Franklin knelt by the bed. “Stella,” he whispered, “are you awake? Stella.” He shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes and looked at him gravely. “Stella,” he whispered, “I just wanted to tell you: I’m done. Now go back to sleep.”

Stella sat up and gave a shuddering yawn. A ripple of slepton hair fell across her cheek and touched the corner of her yawning mouth; she swept it back as if she were brushing at a fly. Then she pulled up a shoulder of her short-sleeved nightshirt, which slipped down again, and held out her thin arms. “Carry me,” she said, and reached quickly for her bear.

Franklin carried her up the stairs to his tower study. On the floor he sat with her on his lap and turned the handle of his viewing machine. In the department store at midnight, the toys woke to life. The nightmare flight through a world of giant furniture, the revolving door, the menacing subway ride, the looming buildings, the night storm — all was calculated to make the doll smaller and smaller until, in the candy store, came the turn: then larger and larger she grew, as the scrupulously reduced world grew smaller and smaller, and at last she straddled Manhattan. The coda was swift: the return to her proper size, the flight back to the department store, the stiffening of the toys as the city woke from its dream. It had taken him seventeen months. He had seen it all a hundred times, five hundred times, his back ached and his temples were throbbing, but he knew that nothing like it had ever been done before. He glanced down. Stella, faithful and exhausted, was asleep in his lap. Her one-eyed bear lay on his back on the floor. “Thank you,” Franklin whispered. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Easy does it,” Franklin said, scooping them both up in his arms as joy leaped in him and headache, like heat lightning, flickered across the back of his brain.

FIVE

In the arcade building, cool and shadowy after the hot sunlight of the avenue, Franklin passed a flower shop, a cigar store, a shoemaker’s shop where a sad-eyed man in a leather apron sat staring at an upside-down red high-heeled shoe, a newsstand, and a barbershop where a man lay with a towel over his face. Franklin wondered whether it was the same man the barber had murdered almost three years ago. Next came an archway that contained a dim-lit staircase with a rattly handrail. At the top of the dark stairs he entered the Vivograph studio, where he was told that Max had gone down for his morning shave. In the barbershop, empty except for the man with the towel over his face and a barber shaking out an apron, Franklin was surprised that he hadn’t recognized Max, though even now there was something a little unfamiliar about the look of his legs and the shiny black leather shoes. He sat down in the barber chair next to Max and leaned back against the adjustable neck-rest as a second barber rose heavily from a chair in the corner. To the soothing sound of the blade slapping against the strop — the swing of the blade and the steady slap-slap reminded him of the pendulum in the glass-cased clock — Franklin closed his eyes and settled into the soft leather seat. “I’m done,” he said to Max. “Twelve thousand three hundred twenty-four drawings — over twelve minutes. I want Vivograph to shoot it. I wonder whether I can screen it early next week? Do you do this every day?” The barber began lathering his cheeks; the warm thick soap, the soft bristles of the brush, the smell of scented oils, the barber’s firm plump stomach pressing against his elbow, all this soothed him deeply. He was very tired. “Max,” he said quietly, “are you asleep?” He opened his eyes and glanced at Max as the first barber leaned over and slowly removed the towel. He saw flushed red cheeks, bristly gray eyebrows, and a pencil-line gray mustache. “So there you are,” called a familiar voice, and Max strode into the barbershop. “They told me I’d find you here. I had to pick up a few things.” He sat down in the empty chair on the other side of Franklin. “So what brings you to my neck of the woods? Give him the spray job, Benny. Make a new man of him. Irwin, I’d like you to meet Franklin Payne: friend of mine. Irwin Marcus.” Still leaning back in the barber chair, the man with brick-red cheeks and a gray mustache solemnly extended a hand.

In a booth in an arcade coffee shop Max agreed to photograph the drawings, which sat in twelve cartons in the trunk of Franklin’s Packard; he had driven into the city and parked around the corner from the arcade building. Two young men from Vivograph, with identical vests and four white shirt-sleeves rolled up above the elbows, helped Max and Franklin carry up the boxes and set them on the floor of Max’s small office. Franklin eyed the growing pile ruefully. Individual drawings flashed in his mind, but he could not put them together. They were lifeless — boxes of corpses. He had wasted a year and a half of his life. “Don’t worry,” Max said, “I’ll guard them with my life,” and as Franklin stepped past the flower shop into hot sunshine, he was so startled by the loud car horns, the explosion of jackhammers, the flash of sun on black and red and green cars, the reflections of striding people in plate-glass windows, the sharp smell of gasoline and baked cookies, that his visit to Max seemed to have taken place under the ground, in a dark burrow, long ago, in some other life.

A week later he recalled that other life as he sat in his office at the World Citizen, his drawing board slanting from the edge of the desk to his stomach. He was sketching another cartoon for one of Kroll’s editorials, in which he showed a German housewife buying a single egg with a wheelbarrow full of money sacks. The idea was hopelessly trite. A trapped fly buzzed between the half-open Venetian blinds and the window. Franklin wondered how long it took to photograph 12,324 drawings, and for some reason he remembered the sad-eyed shoemaker staring at the red high-heeled shoe. He wondered whether flies ever died of boredom. Perhaps he should turn the housewife into a witch trying to purchase a toad for her pot. There was a knock on the door, and Franklin looked up. He was about to say “Come in” when the door opened and Max entered.

“You look as if you haven’t moved for two years,” Max said.

“I haven’t,” said Franklin.

Max sat down on the edge of the desk and drummed his fingers on a pad of paper.

“You could have saved three hundred to five hundred hours if you’d used cels. Our inkers could have saved you another two-three hundred hours, our in-betweeners ditto. At a conservative estimate I’d say you threw away four to six months of your working life making unnecessary wiggles. The alignment’s shaky — there’s a flicker — strictly amateur stuff. A kid of seventeen without a scrap of talent can align perfectly using the peg system. Now listen to me. Here’s what I propose. Last month we decided to ditch National Pictures and distribute through Cinemart, where we can cut a much better deal. This one needs to be handled a little differently because of the length, and Cinemart is the best in the business when it comes to special angles. They can get it out there like nobody’s business and once it’s in the theaters we think it will draw. We’ll work with them on publicity and we’ll supply the art for the lobby poster. You don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll have Milt draw up a contract. Don’t forget the housewarming on Saturday. By the way, congratulations. It’s a masterpiece. The boys are gaga over it.”

“The reason I don’t like cels,” Franklin began, but Max had already put on his hat. The door shut behind him. Franklin pulled over his drawing board, picked up his pencil, and did not draw. Had he wasted four to six months of his life through sheer stupid stubbornness? He had no dislike of technological progress, of up-to-the-minute systems and methods. He was fascinated by the latest advances in the art of home refrigeration, by recent developments in camera shutters and the steering mechanisms of automobiles. Above all he loved the machinery of newspaper production, from the zinc plates with their dots of blue or red or yellow ink for printing Sunday comics in color to the automatic cutters and folders that transformed the long rolls of paper into thick, perfectly folded newspapers. In the early days in Cincinnati he had taken time to visit the composing room and watch the Linotype operators at work, and observe the splendid machine itself as it dropped the correct brass matrix in place after each key was pressed and, after the slug was cast, distributed the individual matrices back to their original locations in the magazine. His objection to the cel system wasn’t that it saved labor, or that it represented a technological advance; his objection was that it encouraged stable backgrounds, whereas his experiments in changing perspective required continual slight shifts in the entire background image. The cel system also encouraged a split between background and animation, expressed in the studio as a division of labor among different kinds of artists, whereas for him the image was a single complex unit of interconnected lines. Moreover, he had seen dozens of Vivograph cartoons, he had followed the cartoons of other studios, and he had passed judgment: the sequences were smooth, the motions fluid, the gags clever, but the drawing — the drawing was mediocre. And there was another thing, something he had no name for but felt in his mind’s fingertips: the cartoons lacked something, they left him restless and disenchanted; and this thing that they lacked, that had no name, was the only thing that mattered, and was somehow connected with his father’s grave voice in the darkroom and the mystery of the developer tray. And yet — and yet. He had to admit to himself that Max’s words had disturbed him. After all, it wasn’t true that every one of his backgrounds was different from the others; there was a great deal of repetition, of mechanical and laborious retracing. In the future he would have to consider adopting a partial cel system. And one more thing bothered him: the flickers from faulty alignment. If he ever made another animated film, he would use pegs instead of crosses. And at the thought of making another cartoon, tiredness rippled in his temples like a flutter of headache.

On Saturday afternoon Cora went into town to pick out a present for Max’s party and try on hats, while Franklin took Stella rowing on the river. It was a sunny blue day in September. The pines and oaks at the river’s edge, the blue sky, the lifted white oars, all showed clearly in the shiny dark water; here and there the green was streaked with red and yellow. Franklin rowed downriver, away from Max’s house. Mount Hebron ended and hilly farms came down to the water. Strands of green cornstalks edged with brown lay burning in the September sun. Stella, in her straw hat with the brilliant red wooden cherries, sat trailing her hand in the water. In the shade of a spreading oak, seven cows resting on their stomachs all raised their heads and stared at the passing rowboat. “They’ve never seen cows like us,” Franklin said. Stella looked at him with a faint smile; her grave beauty was a darker version of Cora’s. The shadows of branches rippling across the straw hat, the brilliant blue air, the sudden orange and yellow of a turning sugar maple, the distant barns, the lazy amble of cows — all this filled Franklin with delight and a gentle, yellow-orange melancholy. Their first summer in Mount Hebron, he and Cora and Stella had gone picnicking on the riverbank every Sunday. Was it so long ago? Cora had told him about family outings on the banks of the Ohio when she was a child: from the picnic basket had come wineglasses and a bottle of wine and a silver cream pitcher and silver bowls and fresh strawberries. “I wish Mom was here,” Franklin said, watching drops of water fall from the oars. He too remembered childhood picnics by a river, not far from Plains Farms: a willow had trailed its branches in the water. “Mom hates going anywhere with us,” Stella said sharply. Panic flared in his chest. “Well now,” he said, “I wouldn’t exactly say that,” and kept on rowing.

Back at the house he found a note from Cora on the kitchen table. “Ran into Max all jittery in town. Agreed to help set up for party. Meet us there 5:30—yes? Stella can wear her new patent leathers. Don’t let her wear the blue dress — it’s a fright. C.” It was half-past three. For the next hour Franklin played croquet with Stella and then went inside to change for the party: a dress-up affair, for which he chose his tuxedo jacket. Stella wore her red party dress with the white lace collar and her white straw hat with the black velvet band. Franklin drove to the ferry and missed the five o’clock crossing by two minutes; he stood on the dock and watched three yellow-green leaves bobbing in the ferry’s wake. Half an hour later he stood with Stella at the rail and looked down the river toward Mount Hebron as they crossed. The warm air had an underlayer of chill; a tang of autumn filled the late afternoon. On the other side, dusk had fallen; he drove on a dirt road through a gloom of pines. A new road ran behind the house, but Franklin preferred the old one, which grew gradually impassable and stopped in the middle of the woods. Through the trees he could see the house, its lights burning in the green dusk. He and Stella walked through the underbrush and came out of the trees onto a path leading to the long front porch. The porch and sloping lawn were crowded with guests in pale dresses and summer suits; Max and Cora stood with drinks in their hands, talking to a young couple both dressed in white.

“Ah, there they are!” cried Max, breaking away and bounding down the steps. Cora, in a shimmering green sleeveless dress with a long transparent scarf flowing down her side, followed slowly. Max seized Franklin by the elbow. “We thought you’d drowned. Everyone’s here. And who’s this? Please introduce me to the princess. No — I don’t believe it. You don’t mean to tell me. It can’t be … Stella?

Stella

You’re so bella

You make a guy feeeel

Like one heck of a fella.

Oh Cora, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine: Franklin Payne. You’ve met? Over here, Milt, over here. Milt Crane: man who drew up your contract. There’s not a thing he doesn’t know about the business. We’re very hopeful, Franklin, very hopeful. Drinks are on the porch. Lemonade or strawberry punch for the princess, and you can water yours down with a little high-class hooch. Excuse me. A little crisis over there. Cora, would you mind? Excuse us for just a second.”

Franklin wandered onto the porch with Stella, where he poured lemonade for her from a big pitcher into a tall glass. An expressionless man in a red dinner jacket and black pants held out a silver tray of little triangular sandwiches with toothpicks in them as a man with wavy gray hair, wearing a white dinner jacket, said, “Franklin Payne, isn’t it? Max introduced us.” “I’m afraid I,” Franklin said, looking for his drink and remembering that he’d forgotten to pour one, and all at once recalling the man under the towel. “Not the Franklin Payne?” a woman said; she had bare shoulders and on one shoulder lay a tiny shimmering drop of liquid. “The other one, I think,” Franklin said. He looked about for Stella, who seemed to have disappeared. He heard a shriek and turned violently; down on the crowded lawn a woman was brushing furiously at her dress as a man held out a handkerchief. Through the trees he could see glimpses of river and, far downstream, the village of Mount Hebron and his tiny house with its tiny tower. “Excuse me,” Franklin said, “I’ve misplaced someone.” She wasn’t on the porch; on the lawn he saw a green dress and made his way down to it. “I can’t find Stella.” Cora said, “I thought she was with you.” With a swift glance she took in the lawn and porch. “I’m sure she’ll be all right, Franklin. I’ll help you look for her in just a minute.”

He found her in the depths of the house, in a large leather chair in a dark study. Through the partly open blinds was a darkness of trees and patches of dusky sky. “I’ve been looking for you,” Franklin said. “Well,” Stella said, “here I am.” “Yes, you are. What’re you doing in the dark? Don’t you like the party?” “I’m just sitting here. You’re not supposed to ask two questions, you know. Can we go home soon?” “Pretty soon,” Franklin said, sitting down on the floor and leaning back against the side of the chair. He felt a hand shaking his shoulder and opened his eyes to see Max bending over him in bright electric light. “We’ve been looking all over for you,” Max said. Franklin said, “Is this a dream?” His neck hurt; Stella was asleep in the chair. Then he was handing Cora her shawl and Max was holding a flashlight as he led them to the car. The ferry had stopped running an hour ago, and while Stella slept in the backseat and Cora sat with closed eyes in the front seat, Franklin drove slowly over a bumpy dirt road to the nearest bridge crossing, ten miles away.

Despite Max’s assurance that Toys at Midnight was perfect — perfect — Franklin insisted on a screening. The flicker was unmistakable, but except for one short sequence that needed fixing, oddly satisfactory: the effect of a slight continual tremor, of a black-and-white shot-silk iridescence, charged the images with the shimmer of dream. Franklin was pleased with the episode in the nightmare subway when the enlarging train appeared to be coming out of the dark directly at the audience, closer and closer, until it seemed ready to burst from the screen, though he was now bothered by the transformation in the candy store. On the whole he was less disappointed than he had expected to be, and hoped to iron out the rough spots in a few months.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Max said. “All right, all right: now listen to me. You can have one month — thirty days — and not a billionth of a second more. We’ve got a tight production schedule and you’ll gum up the works with your crazy fussing. Christ almighty, Franklin. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in ten minutes on the back of a grocery list and Beethoven wrote the entire Ninth Symphony while eating a bowl of Post Toasties Corn Flakes, and you need two years to tinker with a cartoon. Is this just? Thirty days: I’m warning you.”

Franklin, who had been feeling idle and restless since delivering up his boxes of drawings, took up Max’s challenge almost gratefully. On weekday nights he worked four-hour stretches in the tower study, coming down only to read Stella a bedtime story at half-past nine; and on the weekends, which Max now spent at his new house, Franklin was able to work in the mornings and afternoons, while Stella sat sketching in a corner of the study and Cora and Max went shopping or rode through the countryside in Max’s new Peerless. Sometimes Franklin stopped work and, turning to Stella, offered to take a walk down to the river or play croquet; but she, looking at him gravely, said that he wasn’t allowed to play until he finished his work. Then Franklin, tired and joyful, returned to his task; and at dinner, which took place sometimes at his house and sometimes at Max’s, he had the sense that he had fallen asleep at his desk and was dreaming this moment, with its steaming ears of buttered corn, its big shining pots in the kitchen, its summer sky darkening to dusk outside the windows and the shadows rising on the sun-topped trees.

Franklin finished in twenty-nine days; on the thirtieth, a Sunday, he took Stella to the circus in a nearby town. He had hoped to make it a family outing, but Cora begged off with a headache. The clown with his three tufts of orange hair jumped from the burning building, the tightrope walker in spangled blue tights rode a unicycle across the high wire, the balloon man and the popcorn man and the man selling live chameleons walked up and down the steep aisles between the wooden benches stretching up and up, while Stella watched with tense, held-in excitement and Franklin watched Stella watching and worried about Cora’s headache. She had been having a lot of them recently, but she refused to see Dr. Shawcross, and that night after dinner, as he handed three new boxes of drawings over to Max, who agreed to let Franklin view it one more time but refused to allow a single additional change, he saw, in the smooth space between Cora’s eyebrows, two shadowy lines of strain.

In the morning Cora laughed her old laugh and said that her headache had lifted. Franklin, despite her laughter, seemed to see the same shadowy lines between her eyebrows, and on a Saturday afternoon two weeks later when he happened to glance at her, seated between him and Max in a darkening movie theater, he thought he saw the same shadowy lines, as if she had a slight perpetual frown. The newsreel and travelogue barely held his attention, though he found Toys at Midnight interesting enough. He noted several flaws, was pleased by the night storm and the rings of rain-haze about the lampposts, and in general had the slightly confusing but not unpleasant sense that, thrown up on the big screen before an audience, none of it any longer had anything to do with him. They left after the first film of the double feature, a cloak-and-sword adventure, and as Franklin pushed open the heavy doors he stopped in confusion as he saw not the dark autumn night but the brilliant afternoon sunlight shining through the glass doors, flashing on the glass-covered lobby posters, polishing the silver posts, lying in warm parallelograms on the crimson rug.

The reviews in the film trade journals were lengthy and laudatory, though several critics complained that the deliberate rejection of studio techniques, the elaborate detail, the painstaking finish, set the cartoon so radically apart from its contemporary rivals that it existed in a world by itself and could exert no influence. One critic, attempting to define its baffling quality, said that it was at once daring and old-fashioned, casting one eye boldly toward a realm of animation that had not yet come into being and the other eye back to the comfort and stability of a vanished past. “I wonder what sort of eyeglasses he’d recommend,” Franklin remarked, while Max reported that the overall marketing strategy he’d discussed with Cinemart and the jazzy promotional posters in particular had been so successful, so very successful, that other studios were already beginning to copy them and the head of Cinemart had paid him a personal compliment.

On Wednesday morning, four days after he had sat in the darkening movie theater and seen shadowy lines between Cora’s eyebrows, Franklin was asked to report to the office of Alfred Kroll. As he walked down the darkening corridor toward the dingy door whose glass pane was covered by perpetually closed Venetian blinds, he wondered vaguely what possible cause for complaint Kroll might have against Toys at Midnight, if indeed that was the reason for the unusual summons; for although the cartoon bore Franklin’s name, it was an entirely original creation that made no use of any comic strip and could in no way injure the World Citizen. His relations with Kroll had been coolly cordial since the summons three years ago, for Kroll practiced among all his employees a kind of cryptic amiability, and as Franklin pushed open the rattling door and stepped into the twilight of the reception room he had the sudden sense that no time ever passed in this realm of gloom, with its tarnished floor lamp and its faded, barely visible secretary.

In his dim-lit office Kroll sat immobile behind his desk, looking out from melancholy and intelligent eyes above their dark pouches. Franklin, as he sat down across from him, had the sensation that Kroll had been deftly sketched by a cunning hand: the large head boldly indicated by three or four strokes, the powerful plump body roughly outlined, here and there a few skillful shadings. His large, soft hands lay folded on the desk before him. Without moving, Kroll spoke.

In no way, he said, did he wish to meddle in the private affairs of his employees, except, to be sure, when those private affairs affected the fortunes of the World Citizen. For some time he had sensed a — what should he say? — a slight falling off, a lack of verve, a loss of passion or energy in Mr. Paynes editorial cartoons. He had not known whether to attribute this puzzling deficiency to general fatigue, to overzealousness in the performance of his other newspaper duties, to a failure to engage imaginatively with the crucial issues of the day, or to some other cause. It had now come to his attention that Mr. Payne had been engaging in an activity that in no way concerned the World Citizen—an activity that, however admirable it undoubtedly was in itself, was bound to consume considerable time and energy. He had no wish to go into the matter, which he had had the pleasure of discussing with Mr. Payne on another occasion. He did however wish to insist, indeed he was incapable of not insisting, that workers in the employ of the World Citizen devote their full energy to the business of the World Citizen and refrain from any activities that might detract from or diminish that energy. In a word, he was forced to order Mr. Payne to cease immediately to occupy himself with animated films, on pain of severing his happy association with the World Citizen. In addition, he was taking it upon himself to cancel two of Mr. Payne’s three comic strips so that he might devote himself with full energy to the editorial cartoons for which in the past he had demonstrated so great an aptitude. If there were no questions, he wished Mr. Payne a good morning.

The cool brashness of it impressed Franklin, even as the gray meaning of it, like an exhalation of Kroll’s gloomy cave, came over him in a thickening drizzly fog. The sense of clouds and chill was still with him at lunch the next day in the arcade building, where he told Max that he felt as if his hands had been cut off at the wrists. Max, saying that he’d recently thrown out a rotten eggplant that looked better than Kroll, leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.

“I have news, Franklin: big news. It’s not official yet, so your lips are sealed, but listen to me now. I’m leaving Vivograph next week. I’ve got the office space lined up two blocks away and all the guys are coming with me. I’m calling it Maxograms, Inc. — don’t laugh. It’s a surefire thing. In a week I’ll be a corporation. I’m sick of working for clowns like Kroll, and so are you. Franklin, listen to me. Tell fatso you’re kissing the old dump goodbye. Tell him thanks for the buggy ride but it’s time you rode your own jalopy. Franklin: listen. Come to work at Maxograms. I’ll give you the freedom you need to do the work you want to do and I’ll put my staff at your disposal — inkers, in-betweeners, all the little guys who can take care of the dreck while you take care of the art. Franklin: forget Kroll. You need him like a hole in the head. He’s nothing but a five-and-dime Buddha. Ask yourself what you’d rather do with your life: have free run of Maxograms and do what you want to do, or spend the rest of your life drawing funny faces for the likes of Alfred Kroll, who sits there drowning in his own butterfat scribbling trash about the fate of the nation and jiggling his wienie under the desk.”

Franklin told Max he’d think the offer over, but even as he spoke he knew he would say no. At night he lay awake, trying to understand what was wrong with him. To work every day on animated drawings, to be paid for his work as he did it, to have at his disposal the camera, the projection room, the help of skilled assistants, the practical advice of professional animators, to watch his work take shape under an expectant and well-wishing communal gaze, above all to have time: all this was not to be refused lightly. But even as he felt the temptation of it he was aware of an inner recoil. For the flaw was this: even if Max should remain true to his word, and an unlikely freedom should in fact be granted to Franklin within the strictly run studio, his work, for better or worse, had always originated and flourished in secrecy. Whatever Max thought he was offering — perhaps a room of Franklin’s own, with a locked door, at the farthest end of the studio — Franklin knew that Max could never prevent himself from following each day’s work, making suggestions, urging one direction rather than another. For the spirit of a studio was communal, and it was precisely this public and open spirit, which in one sense was a temptation, that in another was sheer death to the solitary, secretive, perhaps unhealthy, but utterly necessary spirit in which he did his work. There was one more thing. Kroll might be harsh, Kroll might be pompous and cold, Kroll might enjoy exercising power to the point of tyranny, but he wasn’t corrupt, he wasn’t self-serving, and he was in no sense a fool. His passion was not for himself but for the World Citizen, and his fanatical demand for total devotion to the paper was not in itself ignoble. And Kroll’s instinct, when all was said and done, had been entirely right: Franklin had in fact been slacking off, even the comic strips no longer engaged his deepest interest, his passion lay elsewhere. Kroll’s decision had been ruthless, but not unreasonable — or if it had been unreasonable, it had at any rate been understandable. Kroll’s fanaticism ran deeper than Max’s; in some black corner of Franklin’s brain, he felt an odd kinship with Kroll, even as he raged at his punishment.

Max received his refusal wryly, as if he had thrown a drowning man a rope that the poor devil refused to take because it felt a little rough to the touch, and Franklin bent to the task of seeing exactly how things stood with him. Kroll had canceled “Dime Museum Days,” which had long ago played itself out and was dragging a shadowy half-life through the dailies for no conceivable reason. He had assigned “Subway Sammy” to another artist, and he had asked Franklin to revive one of his old Cincinnati strips, about a likable hobo whose dreams were continually shattered by reality but who kept on dreaming anyway. But Franklin’s real task was to supply Kroll with editorial cartoons — not only for Kroll’s daily column but for other news articles as well. Franklin threw himself into the task, intent on making amends for his halfhearted work in the past; and as the days flowed by, and his editorial cartoons grew more accomplished, he found a kind of contentment in his work, marred only by sudden sharp bursts of irritation or restlessness.

Two weeks after his refusal of Max’s offer, Franklin received in his office mail a three-color circular announcing the birth of Maxograms, Inc., and including a scribbled line from Max: “Think it over. It’s never too late.” The next day Max called to say that the whole staff had gone with him, leaving Vivograph on the brink of collapse. Since Vivograph was under contract to supply their popular cartoon series to Cinemart, Max had been forced to abandon the series, which he himself had mostly created. But he had signed a fat two-year contract with Cinemart for a spectacular new series, which would make the rival studio look like a bunch of bush leaguers. Meanwhile Vivograph had refused to go under and had hired a whole new staff to churn out the old stuff. But since the copyrights to all the cartoons were held not by the studio but by the distributor, Cinemart was under no obligation to renew the contract with Vivograph, and had given Max to understand that the old series would revert to Maxograms when the contract with Vivograph expired. Cinemart had insisted on holding onto Toys at Midnight, which was still attracting bookings, but Max had worked out a deal that gave Maxograms the option of purchasing the distribution rights twelve months down the road. All this was part of a larger plan to combine production and distribution and leave the other studios choking in his dust. In the meantime Max wanted Franklin to know he had faith in his work. He hoped Franklin would rethink his offer and keep Maxograms in mind when it came time for the next cartoon. Franklin said he was miles away from even thinking about a cartoon. “That’s okay,” Max said quickly. When Max hung up, Franklin had the sensation that Max had been talking to someone else, whom Franklin had been impersonating for obscure reasons.

Again he avoided his tower study, which seemed the haunt of a mad scientist with a foaming beaker; again he sank into family life as into his soft armchair. The sharp sense he sometimes had of falling into a pattern was blunted by the equally sharp sense of a difference, for if Cora was present at these family occasions she was also somehow absent. Often she complained of headaches and went to bed early, leaving Franklin to put Stella to bed. One evening she sat down at the piano and played a few bars, but suddenly stood up, raising a hand to her temple and shutting her eyes. She refused to see Dr. Shawcross; and once, trying to raise a window in the parlor, she kept banging her palms against the upper rail, over and over again, while a muscle worked in her cheek and the hair on her forehead grew damp.

He was often alone with Stella. In the evenings, after dinner, she seemed content to sprawl in a lamplit corner of the sofa reading Anne of Avonlea, or to sit at her old worktable cutting out paper costumes that she designed herself and fitted to her paper dolls. Franklin drew a series of hats for her: a dashing cloche to go with her flapper’s dress, a broad-brimmed straw hat with fruit and flowers, a checkered beret, a cowgirl’s hat with a picture of a steer on it. Max, obsessed with his new studio, was rarely visible on weekends; and while Cora went on errands or sat practicing scales to the click of a metronome, that eerie clock without a face, Franklin and Stella took long walks on autumn trails or went rowing on the river.

At the office he was spending more and more time on editorial cartoons, fussing over details, making small adjustments, adding minute refinements; and holding out a sketch at arm’s length he would examine it carefully, searching for defects of composition.

One darkening autumn day when Franklin drove home from the station he walked up the porch steps and saw through the window Stella reading Chronicles of Avonlea on the lamplit sofa. In the front hall he hung his hat on the coatrack and was about to call out to her through the partly open parlor door when he noticed a pale blue envelope on the hall table. It was Cora’s stationery. On it she had printed his first name. Franklin opened the envelope, unfolded the pale blue piece of paper, and read: “Dear Franklin, I can no longer live a lie. Max and I”—he crumpled the letter, thrust it into his jacket pocket, hung up his coat, took out the letter and scanned it wildly, then thrust it into his pocket again and walked into the parlor. “Dad’s home. Did you have a good day at school? Your mother won’t be having dinner with us tonight, something came up — did she say anything about the lamb chops?” In the kitchen he uncrumpled the letter and tried to read it through, but his brain was pounding, something was wrong with his vision, the words kept splitting apart and falling into fragments—“six mon,” “unf,” “tter for ev,” “nbear”—and later that night, after he had put Stella to bed early and, evading her sharp gaze, explained that Mom was visiting friends far away and might not be back for a day or two, he went down to the parlor and unfolded the letter, but the words were crisscrossed by hundreds of little creases and kept falling into cracks, abysses.

He turned off the lamp and sat in the dark, staring through the windows at the night and waiting for Cora. His temples throbbed, his stomach trembled and rippled, his eyelids felt burning hot. At two o’clock in the morning he heard a car approaching on the road below. He felt his mouth open, as if to emit a cry, but the car slowly passed. Toward three he heard footsteps on the stairs, and suddenly he realized it was all a hideous joke, Cora had been punishing him, he would forgive her despite her cruelty, and when the parlor door opened he saw Stella staring at him gravely, her eyes heavy with sleep and her hair wild. Without a word she sat down next to him and fell asleep against his arm. In the morning he made her breakfast and drove her to school. All day he sat in the parlor, closing his eyes from time to time but not sleeping. Stella came up the walk at four, and that night after he had put her to bed he climbed the stairs to his tower study. In the dark room he stood to the left of the right-hand window It was a clear night, and he could see far up the river. Max’s toy house was well lit. Through the dark pines the yellow lights seemed to tremble like candleflames and on the black river they lay in wavering lines.

He became aware of the glass-cased clock on his desk. The pendulum, immobile, hung down heavily over the slumbering key. And an irritation came over him: it was not right; someone should have wound the clock. In a burst of anger he opened the glass door, seized the clumsy key, and wound the clock tightly. Then he took out his pocket watch and set the clock hands to the precise hour. He pushed the pendulum to one side, releasing it into its arc. The clock ticked. His father had once shown him what made a clock tick: it was the sound of a toothed wheel escaping from first one and then another little hook. The sound of time was the sound of a continual effort to escape from something that held you back. He replaced the key on the mirrory floor beneath the pendulum and the exposed gears and closed the glass door. The clock ticked, the pendulum swung back and forth. And he felt soothed, soothed deep in his bones, as the clock ticked and the pendulum swung back and forth. Slowly the pendulum swung back and forth. The clock ticked.

Toward eleven the last light went out in the little house far up the river. Then pictures streamed in his mind: Cora in her lavender nightgown, Max and Cora laughing in the rowboat, Cora frowning and running a hand through her hair, Cora as a girl of ten in the Vaughn family album, wearing a white dress and straw hat and reaching up to pick a rose from the rose trellis. Then he imagined, in careful detail, Max making love to Cora; and when she reached her three short sharp cries, he began again from the beginning, more slowly, as if he had been a little hasty the first time, a little careless and irresponsible.

A sound startled him. When he turned his head sharply toward the door he felt a dizziness seize him, as if he had turned and stopped his head while his brain, unattached, continued to turn slowly. A dark form stood in the doorway.

“It’s late,” Franklin said. “You should be in bed.”

“You should be in bed too. She’s not coming back, you know.”

Toward dawn he stumbled and lay on the floor with a fiercely beating heart. Pictures streamed through the deep blue of the room: the façade of Klein’s Wonder Palace, his father’s finger rising and falling slowly as he counted out the numbers, the green leather chair in Judge Vaughn’s study, Cora’s hip bumping open the wooden screen door, a mouse scampering across the back of his hand in the cellar of his home in Plains Farms, Max’s tin mouse moving along the boards of the porch. He remembered his moonlit walk across the roof; and suddenly he longed to be out of this world entirely, up there on the cool white moon, far from his heavy body lying in blue light.

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 and 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.

That evening he felt heavy-limbed and light-headed and went to bed early. When he lay down his heart began to beat very quickly, as if he were running; and he lay alert and exhausted as moon drawings streamed in his mind, with their two peg holes at the top, their numbers in the lower right-hand corner, their hundreds of thousands of carefully drawn little black lines.

As he waited for the drawings to be photographed, he began to fear that something had happened to them, something Vivograph was attempting to conceal. He saw his 32,416 drawings fluttering slowly to the floor, a snowstorm of spilled pages, each flake slightly different from the others; he saw a black footprint, like one of the footprints in a dance manual, stamped in the center of each clean white moonscape; and he saw, rising along the sides of high piles of crisp white paper, little red-and-yellow flames darting higher and higher.

The day came when his reels of film were ready. At once a new worry sprang up in him: suppose Kroll were to discover what he had done? The revelation of an immense secret life, of vast energies directed away from the World Citizen, could strike Kroll only as a criminal violation of their agreement; punishment would be harsh and swift. Caution was crucial. At Vivograph a man with a sharp chin and thin pink lips kept plying him with questions, but Franklin, slyly avoiding his gaze, said that he knew nothing about it, he was just there to pick up the cans of film and the boxes. At home he decided to make it a surprise for Stella. He had rented a projector earlier in the week and purchased a portable screen attached to a collapsible tripod. Mrs. Henneman served dinner and left at seven-thirty; she would return at seven-thirty in the morning. “A good night to you, Mr. Payne,” she said, and he was startled: surely she couldn’t know about the trip to Vivograph, the night’s screening? “That’s all right, Mrs. Henneman,” he said, waving. “I’ll be just fine. Don’t you worry about me.” In the kitchen he played a game of Parcheesi with Stella, who liked each of them to take two colors. At eight-thirty she went upstairs to get ready for bed and Franklin crept up to the study to set up the screen and load the first reel in the projector. By the time she had finished brushing her teeth he was back in the parlor, pacing. In Stella’s room he read to her a chapter of Anne of the Island, then closed the book and said, “I have a surprise for you: upstairs.” He placed a finger over his lips. Stella sat up at once, her dark hair falling over one shoulder, her lips parted slightly, her large, dark eyes grave in their excitement.

She followed him up the stairs and entered the tower room quietly, taking in the projector and screen without a word. On one side of the projector Franklin had placed his leather desk-chair, on the other Stella’s small wooden chair from her old worktable. She sat down quietly on the childish chair with her hands in her lap, then slid forward until her shoulders pressed against the chair-top. Raising a hand she began to wind her hair round and round a finger. Franklin turned out the light and started the projector. There was a flickering blankness on the screen, then a briefly flashed numeral J, a few scratchy lines, and suddenly the title, in carefully drawn black letters. Franklin shifted the projector slightly; the cartoon began. In the darkroom he had stared at the white paper, waiting. From the depths of whiteness black shapes had come. But the pictures had not moved. On the white screen the black pictures moved — the old mystery made new. Dark and light: night and moon: dark theater and bright screen. In the dark he could see the shaft of light thrown by the projector. It looked like a moonbeam in some old painting of a forest. It struck him that the projector beam was the true modern moonbeam, the ray of light from a new realm of mystery and enchantment that outmoded the poor old moon. And it was good: he saw that it was good, that he hadn’t lost his touch. Stella sat rigid, spellbound, tense with attention.

It was shortly after the landing on the moon that a deep excitement seized Franklin, for he realized that something extraordinary was going to happen — and yet, was it really so surprising, after all? The footsteps on the stairs were light but not to be mistaken. Stella, screen-enchanted, noticed nothing. The stairs creaked once, then were still; after a while the door opened. She was wearing a spring dress, one that he remembered, and a white flower in her hair. She looked at him questioningly, a little shyly; he was grateful that she said nothing. A flicker of light from the projector played on one sleeve and on her collarbone. She looked about for a moment or two, then stepped to the back of the room, not far from Stella, and silently watched the shimmering screen.

And he was touched that she had come: after all, she had never much cared for his cartoons. That was only proper, for she played Schubert on the piano and had once talked to him on the porch of her father’s house in Cincinnati about the difference between Ingres and Delacroix. He hoped she would like this one, for it was the best he was able to do.

And again he heard a footstep on the stair: he was not surprised. It was a firm step, a confident step — the step of someone who had no doubt about where he was going. After a while the door opened, and Max stood there with a hand in his pocket, the other hand gripping a suit jacket flung over his shoulder. His tie was loosely knotted and his top shirt button undone, and he looked at Franklin with affection and a touch of wryness. Then he removed the hand from his pocket and touched the fingertips lightly to his forehead in salute. He looked quietly about, then stepped to the back of the room, near Cora but not directly beside her.

The first reel came to an end; quickly Franklin removed it and put in the second reel. Max would like this one: he would understand what Franklin had done.

But hardly had the second reel begun when there was another sound on the stair. It was a heavier tread, the tread of someone not accustomed to climbing flights of stairs, and Franklin listened anxiously to the slow, relentless, gradually approaching steps. For although he had not expected anyone else, on this special occasion, still his little group seemed incomplete. Outside the closed door came the sound of labored breaths and a faint asthmatic wheeze. Then slowly the door opened, and in the doorway, wiping his forehead with a large pocket handkerchief, stood Kroll. Yes, it was Kroll — how could it be otherwise? — Kroll with his melancholy, intelligent eyes, Kroll with his chocolate-brown suit jacket stretched to the breaking point across his great shoulders and massive belly, Kroll with a big polka-dot bow tie, evidently purchased for the occasion, for it still had its price tag. It sat a little askew over a triangle of rumpled shirt. Kroll stepped into the room and closed the door softly behind him. And Franklin was grateful that he had come: he wanted Kroll to see what he could do. Kroll had brought with him a metal folding chair with a leather seat, and after a quick glance he set up his chair in the dark between Stella, seated in front of him, and Cora and Max, standing behind him at the back of the room.

Even as Kroll sat down on his chair, allowing his broad hands, with their little black hairs that looked as if they had been combed carefully to one side, to sink gradually into the dark, Franklin became aware of yet another sound on the stairs. It was a pair of footsteps this time, and Franklin felt a sharp tug of curiosity and excitement, for he had thought his little party complete. And although he was not entirely surprised, for nothing surprised him on this special occasion, even so he could not still the violence of his heart as the footsteps reached the top of the stairs. The door opened and the couple entered, first the woman and then the man, their figures a little more stooped than he had imagined, their faces unclear in the dark. But he recognized the bag of knitting with its faded pink flowers that the woman carried over one shoulder, and the old man’s darkroom apron was deeply familiar to him. Arm in arm they made their way to the back of the room, where they stood on the other side, apart from Cora and Max, though Cora, just for a moment, stepped over with a child’s wooden chair and helped the woman sit down. Once seated, she took out her knitting needles but watched the screen without looking away; and his father, standing bent beside her with the fingertips of his left hand resting on the back of the little chair, his cheeks waxy smooth and reddened with rouge, his father, giving off a sweet, disturbing odor of lilies, raised and lowered the extended index finger of his right hand, counting silently as he watched the screen.

And it was good: Franklin was touched that they had come. For they were all gathered now, those for whom his work mattered at all; and what difference did it make if he had to shut it all up in a box, so long as they were here to see it, on this special occasion. They had all been very quiet — Stella had noticed nothing, but sat transfixed beside the projector, her face tense with delight — and as Franklin put in the third reel he was pleased that they would see it to the end. For the voyage was not a collection of separate adventures but a gradual accumulation, a pressure in a direction, culminating in the rhythmic release of the dark side of the moon. And as the cartoon entered its last phase, he felt it was working, despite a few adjustments that would be necessary here and there. He could feel the silent excitement in the room. The end was coming: after a nightmare pursuit through melting moonscapes, by creatures who kept changing their shapes, the boy seized a moon bird that changed into a chalk eraser, and with it he began to erase. He erased the fluttering white moongirl with long moon hair, the moon fountains, the line of moon hills, the white horizon line — and at last he and the monkey stood alone in a black world. Then he turned to the monkey and began to erase him, in quick strokes that sent up puffs of chalk dust. He paused for only a moment before he began to erase himself: first his legs, then his body, next his head. He erased both arms, and now there was nothing left but the fingers grasping the eraser. And so it was nearly done. He had made the voyage to the dark side of the moon, from which no traveler returned. Quickly the eraser extracted itself from the fingers and erased them. Now the eraser began to spin: faster and faster it spun, growing larger and larger, vanishing in a blur, erasing the blackness itself, until there was only a white, blank world, on which the words THE END swiftly wrote themselves. And it was good: he had done what he set out to do. Perhaps he could rest now, for he was very tired.

The reel of film continued to click through the projector as the applause began. It was light at first, a spatter of appreciative claps. But it did not stop: led by Max the applause grew louder, Franklin could distinguish Cora’s swift vigorous claps and Kroll’s little persistent ones, muffled as if he were wearing gloves, but tireless for all that. His mother, standing now, clapped slowly, while his father, still raising and lowering his right hand gravely, struck his left palm against the top of the chair in time to the rhythm of his counting. They were all standing, even Kroll had risen to applaud him in the warm and intimate dark. “Please,” Franklin said, holding up his hands, “this is really, this is really.” Tears of gratitude ran down his cheeks; and as he bowed his head, for he was very tired, the applause grew louder and louder until it was one continuous roar.