Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  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 ant
iquated 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.