Little Kingdoms (9 page)

“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.