Little Kingdoms (2 page)

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.

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.