Little Kingdoms (8 page)

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.