Little Kingdoms (6 page)

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.

“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.