Authors: Steven Millhauser
Despite Max’s assurance that
Toys at Midnight
was perfect—perfect—Franklin insisted on a screening. The flicker was unmistakable,
but except for one short sequence that needed fixing, oddly satisfactory: the effect of a slight continual tremor, of a black-and-white shot-silk iridescence, charged the images with the shimmer of dream. Franklin was pleased with the episode in the nightmare subway when the enlarging train appeared to be coming out of the dark directly at the audience, closer and closer, until it seemed ready to burst from the screen, though he was now bothered by the transformation in the candy store. On the whole he was less disappointed than he had expected to be, and hoped to iron out the rough spots in a few months.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Max said. “All right, all right: now listen to me. You can have one month—thirty days—and not a billionth of a second more. We’ve got a tight production schedule and you’ll gum up the works with your crazy fussing. Christ almighty, Franklin. Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet
in ten minutes on the back of a grocery list and Beethoven wrote the entire Ninth Symphony while eating a bowl of Post Toasties Corn Flakes, and you need two years to tinker with a cartoon. Is this just? Thirty days: I’m warning you.”
Franklin, who had been feeling idle and restless since delivering up his boxes of drawings, took up Max’s challenge almost gratefully. On weekday nights he worked four-hour stretches in the tower study, coming down only to read Stella a bedtime story at half-past nine; and on the weekends, which Max now spent at his new house, Franklin was able to work in the mornings and afternoons, while Stella sat sketching in a corner of the study and Cora and Max went shopping or rode through the countryside in Max’s new Peerless. Sometimes Franklin stopped work and, turning to Stella, offered to take a walk down to the river or play croquet; but she, looking at him gravely, said that he wasn’t allowed to play until he finished his work. Then Franklin, tired and joyful, returned to his task; and at dinner, which took place sometimes at his house and sometimes at Max’s, he had the sense that he had fallen asleep at his desk and was dreaming
this moment, with its steaming ears of buttered corn, its big shining pots in the kitchen, its summer sky darkening to dusk outside the windows and the shadows rising on the sun-topped trees.
Franklin finished in twenty-nine days; on the thirtieth, a Sunday, he took Stella to the circus in a nearby town. He had hoped to make it a family outing, but Cora begged off with a headache. The clown with his three tufts of orange hair jumped from the burning building, the tightrope walker in spangled blue tights rode a unicycle across the high wire, the balloon man and the popcorn man and the man selling live chameleons walked up and down the steep aisles between the wooden benches stretching up and up, while Stella watched with tense, held-in excitement and Franklin watched Stella watching and worried about Cora’s headache. She had been having a lot of them recently, but she refused to see Dr. Shawcross, and that night after dinner, as he handed three new boxes of drawings over to Max, who agreed to let Franklin view it one more time but refused to allow a single additional change, he saw, in the smooth space between Cora’s eyebrows, two shadowy lines of strain.
In the morning Cora laughed her old laugh and said that her headache had lifted. Franklin, despite her laughter, seemed to see the same shadowy lines between her eyebrows, and on a Saturday afternoon two weeks later when he happened to glance at her, seated between him and Max in a darkening movie theater, he thought he saw the same shadowy lines, as if she had a slight perpetual frown. The newsreel and travelogue barely held his attention, though he found
Toys at Midnight
interesting enough. He noted several flaws, was pleased by the night storm and the rings of rain-haze about the lampposts, and in general had the slightly confusing but not unpleasant sense that, thrown up on the big screen before an audience, none of it any longer had anything to do with him. They left after the first film of the double feature, a cloak-and-sword adventure, and as Franklin
pushed open the heavy doors he stopped in confusion as he saw not the dark autumn night but the brilliant afternoon sunlight shining through the glass doors, flashing on the glass-covered lobby posters, polishing the silver posts, lying in warm parallelograms on the crimson rug.
The reviews in the film trade journals were lengthy and laudatory, though several critics complained that the deliberate rejection of studio techniques, the elaborate detail, the painstaking finish, set the cartoon so radically apart from its contemporary rivals that it existed in a world by itself and could exert no influence. One critic, attempting to define its baffling quality, said that it was at once daring and old-fashioned, casting one eye boldly toward a realm of animation that had not yet come into being and the other eye back to the comfort and stability of a vanished past. “I wonder what sort of eyeglasses he’d recommend,” Franklin remarked, while Max reported that the overall marketing strategy he’d discussed with Cinemart and the jazzy promotional posters in particular had been so successful, so very successful, that other studios were already beginning to copy them and the head of Cinemart had paid him a personal compliment.
On Wednesday morning, four days after he had sat in the darkening movie theater and seen shadowy lines between Cora’s eyebrows, Franklin was asked to report to the office of Alfred Kroll. As he walked down the darkening corridor toward the dingy door whose glass pane was covered by perpetually closed Venetian blinds, he wondered vaguely what possible cause for complaint Kroll might have against
Toys at Midnight
, if indeed that was the reason for the unusual summons; for although the cartoon bore Franklin’s name, it was an entirely original creation that made no use of any comic strip and could in no way injure the
World Citizen.
His relations with Kroll had been coolly cordial since the summons three years ago, for Kroll practiced among all his employees a kind of cryptic amiability, and as
Franklin pushed open the rattling door and stepped into the twilight of the reception room he had the sudden sense that no time ever passed in this realm of gloom, with its tarnished floor lamp and its faded, barely visible secretary.
In his dim-lit office Kroll sat immobile behind his desk, looking out from melancholy and intelligent eyes above their dark pouches. Franklin, as he sat down across from him, had the sensation that Kroll had been deftly sketched by a cunning hand: the large head boldly indicated by three or four strokes, the powerful plump body roughly outlined, here and there a few skillful shadings. His large, soft hands lay folded on the desk before him. Without moving, Kroll spoke.
In no way, he said, did he wish to meddle in the private affairs of his employees, except, to be sure, when those private affairs affected the fortunes of the
World Citizen.
For some time he had sensed a—what should he say?—a slight falling off, a lack of verve, a loss of passion or energy in Mr. Paynes editorial cartoons. He had not known whether to attribute this puzzling deficiency to general fatigue, to overzealousness in the performance of his other newspaper duties, to a failure to engage imaginatively with the crucial issues of the day, or to some other cause. It had now come to his attention that Mr. Payne had been engaging in an activity that in no way concerned the
World Citizen
—an activity that, however admirable it undoubtedly was in itself, was bound to consume considerable time and energy. He had no wish to go into the matter, which he had had the pleasure of discussing with Mr. Payne on another occasion. He did however wish to insist, indeed he was incapable of not insisting, that workers in the employ of the
World Citizen
devote their full energy to the business of the
World Citizen
and refrain from any activities that might detract from or diminish that energy. In a word, he was forced to order Mr. Payne to cease immediately to occupy himself with animated films, on pain of severing his happy association with the
World Citizen.
In addition, he was taking
it upon himself to cancel two of Mr. Payne’s three comic strips so that he might devote himself with full energy to the editorial cartoons for which in the past he had demonstrated so great an aptitude. If there were no questions, he wished Mr. Payne a good morning.
The cool brashness of it impressed Franklin, even as the gray meaning of it, like an exhalation of Kroll’s gloomy cave, came over him in a thickening drizzly fog. The sense of clouds and chill was still with him at lunch the next day in the arcade building, where he told Max that he felt as if his hands had been cut off at the wrists. Max, saying that he’d recently thrown out a rotten eggplant that looked better than Kroll, leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.
“I have news, Franklin: big news. It’s not official yet, so your lips are sealed, but listen to me now. I’m leaving Vivograph next week. I’ve got the office space lined up two blocks away and all the guys are coming with me. I’m calling it Maxograms, Inc.—don’t laugh. It’s a surefire thing. In a week I’ll be a corporation. I’m sick of working for clowns like Kroll, and so are you. Franklin, listen to me. Tell fatso you’re kissing the old dump goodbye. Tell him thanks for the buggy ride but it’s time you rode your own jalopy. Franklin: listen. Come to work at Maxograms. I’ll give you the freedom you need to do the work you want to do and I’ll put my staff at your disposal—inkers, in-betweeners, all the little guys who can take care of the dreck while you take care of the art. Franklin: forget Kroll. You need him like a hole in the head. He’s nothing but a five-and-dime Buddha. Ask yourself what you’d rather do with your life: have free run of Maxograms and do what you want to do, or spend the rest of your life drawing funny faces for the likes of Alfred Kroll, who sits there drowning in his own butterfat scribbling trash about the fate of the nation and jiggling his wienie under the desk.”
Franklin told Max he’d think the offer over, but even as he spoke he knew he would say no. At night he lay awake, trying to
understand what was wrong with him. To work every day on animated drawings, to be paid for his work as he did it, to have at his disposal the camera, the projection room, the help of skilled assistants, the practical advice of professional animators, to watch his work take shape under an expectant and well-wishing communal gaze, above all to have time: all this was not to be refused lightly. But even as he felt the temptation of it he was aware of an inner recoil. For the flaw was this: even if Max should remain true to his word, and an unlikely freedom should in fact be granted to Franklin within the strictly run studio, his work, for better or worse, had always originated and flourished in secrecy. Whatever Max thought he was offering—perhaps a room of Franklin’s own, with a locked door, at the farthest end of the studio—Franklin knew that Max could never prevent himself from following each day’s work, making suggestions, urging one direction rather than another. For the spirit of a studio was communal, and it was precisely this public and open spirit, which in one sense was a temptation, that in another was sheer death to the solitary, secretive, perhaps unhealthy, but utterly necessary spirit in which he did his work. There was one more thing. Kroll might be harsh, Kroll might be pompous and cold, Kroll might enjoy exercising power to the point of tyranny, but he wasn’t corrupt, he wasn’t self-serving, and he was in no sense a fool. His passion was not for himself but for the
World Citizen
, and his fanatical demand for total devotion to the paper was not in itself ignoble. And Kroll’s instinct, when all was said and done, had been entirely right: Franklin had in fact been slacking off, even the comic strips no longer engaged his deepest interest, his passion lay elsewhere. Kroll’s decision had been ruthless, but not unreasonable—or if it had been unreasonable, it had at any rate been understandable. Kroll’s fanaticism ran deeper than Max’s; in some black corner of Franklin’s brain, he felt an odd kinship with Kroll, even as he raged at his punishment.
Max received his refusal wryly, as if he had thrown a drowning
man a rope that the poor devil refused to take because it felt a little rough to the touch, and Franklin bent to the task of seeing exactly how things stood with him. Kroll had canceled “Dime Museum Days,” which had long ago played itself out and was dragging a shadowy half-life through the dailies for no conceivable reason. He had assigned “Subway Sammy” to another artist, and he had asked Franklin to revive one of his old Cincinnati strips, about a likable hobo whose dreams were continually shattered by reality but who kept on dreaming anyway. But Franklin’s real task was to supply Kroll with editorial cartoons—not only for Kroll’s daily column but for other news articles as well. Franklin threw himself into the task, intent on making amends for his halfhearted work in the past; and as the days flowed by, and his editorial cartoons grew more accomplished, he found a kind of contentment in his work, marred only by sudden sharp bursts of irritation or restlessness.
Two weeks after his refusal of Max’s offer, Franklin received in his office mail a three-color circular announcing the birth of Maxograms, Inc., and including a scribbled line from Max: “Think it over. It’s never too late.” The next day Max called to say that the whole staff had gone with him, leaving Vivograph on the brink of collapse. Since Vivograph was under contract to supply their popular cartoon series to Cinemart, Max had been forced to abandon the series, which he himself had mostly created. But he had signed a fat two-year contract with Cinemart for a spectacular new series, which would make the rival studio look like a bunch of bush leaguers. Meanwhile Vivograph had refused to go under and had hired a whole new staff to churn out the old stuff. But since the copyrights to all the cartoons were held not by the studio but by the distributor, Cinemart was under no obligation to renew the contract with Vivograph, and had given Max to understand that the old series would revert to Maxograms when the contract with Vivograph expired. Cinemart had insisted on holding onto
Toys at Midnight
, which was still attracting
bookings, but Max had worked out a deal that gave Maxograms the option of purchasing the distribution rights twelve months down the road. All this was part of a larger plan to combine production and distribution and leave the other studios choking in his dust. In the meantime Max wanted Franklin to know he had faith in his work. He hoped Franklin would rethink his offer and keep Maxograms in mind when it came time for the next cartoon. Franklin said he was miles away from even thinking about a cartoon. “That’s okay,” Max said quickly. When Max hung up, Franklin had the sensation that Max had been talking to someone else, whom Franklin had been impersonating for obscure reasons.