Authors: Steven Millhauser
His courtship of Cora Vaughn was the most difficult thing he had ever set out to do. At first she refused to speak to him when he presented himself at the elementary school after the last bell had rung, and when he began sending her cartoons drawn especially for her, she promptly returned them. In the long winter nights, in the boarding house two blocks from his office, he
brooded over Cora Vaughn until she seemed as familiar as his own childhood and at the same time mysterious and ungraspable. One Sunday afternoon when he was walking in Eden Park he saw her skating on the pond; she wore a blue wool coat and a white scarf, plumes of breath streamed out behind her, he felt strangely drowsy and heavy headed yet sharply alert. He turned away and stood looking down at the Ohio River, bordered by greenish ice. He thought of the war in Europe and wondered if the Marne ever iced over in winter. Men his own age were dying in battle every day. When he turned back she was no longer there, and he wondered if he had imagined it all: the white scarf, the plumes of bluish breath, the dark blades of the skates lifting and falling, the distant war. Slowly the ice in the river melted, the magnolias put out their waxy flowers, and one day as he was rounding the corner of Walnut and Sixth he looked up into the smiling face of Cora Vaughn. And all at once, just like that, he was sitting on her warm front porch with the tall pillars, inhaling a heavy odor of lilacs and speaking of the house in Plains Farms and his father’s voice in the darkroom. Evening after evening he sat on Judge Vaughn’s porch, watching the fireflies come out in the lavender dark and listening to the creak of the porch glider, and one August night in a riot of crickets that reminded him of the meadow behind his house in Plains Farms he proposed to Cora. She looked at him in troubled surprise, as if he had failed to understand something, and refused him brusquely. Suddenly she burst into tears and fled into the parlor.
After three sleepless nights Franklin returned to her street but dared not approach the porch. In the office the next day he found a brief, impatient note from Cora, asking where he had been. That evening she said that although she enjoyed his friendship, she could never marry a man who drew comic strips—the whole idea was unthinkable and impossible. Franklin opened his mouth to defend his trade, suddenly saw himself through her eyes, a ridiculous childish man who made silly pictures,
and sank into silence. Cora Vaughn played Schubert sonatas on the piano and liked to talk about the contrasting methods of Delacroix and Ingres—how could she marry someone who thrilled to the life of a seedy dime museum and spent ten hours a day drawing for the funny papers? He thoroughly understood her distaste for what he did, and at the same time he obscurely felt that she herself didn’t understand something. She didn’t understand that his funny drawings were his path to a necessary place—a place that could never be expressed in words or pictures but that somehow was the vital center of things. He felt a confused pity for Cora Vaughn, and was shocked at his pity. He rose, tried to say something, and left in silence. That night he vowed to forget her and live in solitude; the next day he found an irritable note from Cora in his office, and eight months later they left on their honeymoon for New Orleans.
In Cincinnati Cora found a large house with bay windows and bracketed eaves, four blocks from Judge Vaughn’s mansion. Franklin would have liked to live farther from Cora’s old neighborhood, for she liked to spend the evenings at her father’s house; the judge was a grave but amicable man who seemed slightly puzzled by the presence of his son-in-law in the parlor and sometimes gave the impression that he had forgotten his daughter was a married woman. Franklin loved to watch Cora play the piano: she sat very straight, half closed her eyes, and allowed her head to sway and bow slightly; the mixture of stern control and dreamy abandon filled him with tenderness and longing. Sometimes he felt that he longed for her too much, that he was crude and disgusting in his desire; for he never knew whether Cora would welcome him or turn her face away and complain of tiredness. She had insisted on having her own bedroom, and although Franklin had agreed without protest, the arrangement left him feeling a perpetual guest. Once, in the first weeks of their marriage, Cora had come to him late at night. The sight of her standing by the bed in her pink silk nightgown
trimmed with lace and small ribbons, her hair unbound, her eyes looking down at him with a kind of solemn tenderness, filled him with such pride and happiness that he suddenly became afraid, as if he had been given something he did not deserve and would not be allowed to keep.
Their daughter, Stella, was born the following spring. Franklin liked to warm her feet by pulling her tiny socks on, placing his mouth on the sole of a sock, and blowing until his lips felt hot. Sometimes at night he woke up, fearful that she had died in her sleep. Then he would creep into her room and bend down to hear her breathing, and after that he would stare at her a long time before pulling the blanket up to her chin and returning to his room.
He thought about blowing on her feet as he stood one night leaning against the wall of a barracks building in Waco, Texas, and stared up at the blue-black sky. He was dressed in olive drab. The sky reminded him of long boyhood summer evenings—the kind of evening he might never spend with his daughter. The armistice was signed three weeks later, and he was home for Thanksgiving, but for a long time he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was somehow responsible for neglecting precious weeks of his daughter’s life and that he must now be more attentive to her than ever.
That winter his father died, of a lingering cold that developed into influenza. He had never been the same since his stroke before the war, and Franklin, staring at the gaunt and white-haired man lying in bed with closed eyes, was carried violently back to the other father, the one who had raised and lowered his hand in the darkroom as he gravely counted out the numbers. It was as if this elderly stranger had usurped his father’s place and now, in death, was permitting the real father to return. After the funeral Franklin tried to find something of his father’s to bring back with him—an ivory-handled penknife, a photograph of the sweet-gum tree—but it all seemed flat and dead, and he returned
to Cincinnati empty-handed, but with the real father alive inside him.
When Stella was two years old a syndicate purchased one of Franklin’s daily strips. He hurried home to surprise Cora with the news, but found her pacing irritably. Dr. Stanton had just left; Stella was trembling and her temperature had risen to 105. In the next two days, as Stella’s life seemed to hang in the balance, and Cora, who needed her sleep, grew more and more irritable, Franklin remembered the picture of Jehovah on the cover of his child’s illustrated Bible, and prayed to the bearded man in the robe to save his daughter. The fever lessened, Dr. Stanton said Stella had croup; and as the days passed and life returned to normal, Franklin never found the right moment to announce his news to Cora. One night after Stella was in bed he told Cora in an offhand way that one of his strips had been syndicated. “I’m glad for you, Franklin,” she said, “but you know I never understand these things.” He waited for her to ask a question, but she said no more, not a word, and he never mentioned it again.
He was given a raise and promoted to assistant director of the art department; and one day a letter came from a New York editor, offering him the position of staff artist in the art department of the New York
World Citizen
at a startling salary.
Cora greeted the news coldly, with quivering nostrils. She said she could no more think of moving to New York City than she could think of moving to the dark side of the moon. Franklin dropped the matter but lay awake at night wondering if he was to spend the rest of his life living four blocks from his distinguished and slightly disapproving father-in-law. He knew the offer was a good one; it would permit him to cut back on editorial cartooning and devote his energy to the daily strips that had begun to attract national attention—and quite apart from all that was the sense of a challenge, an invitation to adventure that he felt it would be harmful to ignore. The idea of moving excited
him: New York was the center of the newspaper world. But more than that, he wanted Cora to choose him decisively; after three years of marriage she still half lived in her childhood home.
When, a week later, Franklin announced that he had accepted the job, Cora drew back as if he had struck her in the face. Then she turned on her heel, marched into Stella’s room, picked up the sleeping child, and carried her out of the house. Franklin went to his desk and thrust a letter into his pocket before following Cora to her father’s house, where he found her weeping in her old room. Downstairs he showed the judge the letter from New York. The judge promised to speak to his daughter; Franklin had known he would recognize a good offer if he saw one.
At the train station Franklin was thrilled by the names of cities on the board above the grated windows of the ticket sellers, the bustle of porters, the squeak of luggage, the rows of high windows in the passenger cars, the big iron wheels of the engine rising higher than Stella’s head; but when he looked at Cora in her red velvet hat with the black osprey feather, flinching at the sound of grating steel and hissing steam, and gazing about as if she were looking for someone she had lost, he longed to throw himself at her feet and beg forgiveness for the squeaking bags, the shine of sweat on the cheeks of the Negro porter, the little girl in a kerchief, crying on a brown wooden bench, the sides of the passenger cars rising up like the flanks of a bull.
At first they rented an apartment in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, on a shady street lined with maples and sycamores. Franklin walked to the city each morning over the promenade of the noble bridge with its churchlike double arches that seemed to rise higher than skyscrapers, its four suspension cables sweeping up into the sky, its rumble of electric trolleys and elevated trains, its secret evocation of the old bridge over the Ohio. It deeply pleased him that both bridges had been designed by the same engineer, as if his choice had obeyed a hidden design. On Sundays he went for walks with Stella around his new
neighborhood, showing her street signs that bore the names of fruits—Pineapple Street, Orange Street, Cranberry Street—and pointing to brilliant glimpses of the river at the sunny ends of shady streets. Sometimes he sat with Cora and Stella on a slatted bench under a tree at the end of Montague Street and pointed at the giant bridge rising over the mansard tower of the old ferry house, at the barges and tugboats passing on the river, at the wharves and shipping factories and tall buildings rising on the other shore. Then he told Stella about his other life, when he sat on a bench in Kentucky and looked across the river at the Cincinnati waterfront. But Cora seemed confused by the new streets, the strange buildings rising across the river, the sound of foghorns at night and of doors shutting in other apartments. Often he would come home from work to find her sitting pensively in her mahogany rocking chair with the lion’s head finials, staring through the bow window at the street below; and one day, hearing by chance of a house in a village north of the city, one hour by train from Grand Central Station, he asked Cora whether she would like to move to Mount Hebron. At first sight of the many-gabled old house with the two towering sugar maples flanking the front path, set halfway up the slope of the village on the river, Cora placed a hand on Franklin’s forearm and, with the wind blowing back her hair, tightened her grip as if she were climbing a stairway. The house on the hill was a little more than Franklin could readily afford, and a part-time housekeeper proved to be an absolute necessity, but seated in his tower study two floors above the front porch, separated from the ordinary life of the house but feeling that he drew secret strength from the floors below, Franklin worked far into the night, unable to sleep through sheer exhilaration. He had begun work on two new strips that were as unlike each other as possible, and these experiments had led directly to his recent adventure with rice paper.
The offices of the New York World Citizen
occupied four floors and the basement of a commercial building on Thirty-second Street off Sixth Avenue, two blocks from Herald Square. Although the business and executive offices on the fourth floor were arranged in an orderly way, on both sides of dim-lit hallways, the corridors of the floors below had a tendency to go astray, as old walls were knocked down and new ones erected to make space for additional rooms. The second floor, where the art department had its offices, was nicknamed The Warren, for in the course of three separate efforts at expansion the halls had begun to take odd, surprising turns, new rooms had sprung up unexpectedly behind suddenly appearing doors, and one day an old Linotype machine from the composing room in the basement had been discovered in a cramped room between the offices of two political cartoonists; and rumor had it that several members of the department were entombed in rooms accidentally sealed off during a recent bout of construction. The dim, abruptly turning corridors, the maze of brownish offices, the smell of printer’s ink and floor wax, the racket of typewriters and ringing telephones
in the newsroom on the first floor, and, underneath it all, the rumble of the web-fed rotary presses, all this excited Franklin, who had a small office with half-open, yellowed Venetian blinds, a framed and faded newspaper photograph from 1905 showing dignitaries seated at a table in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, and an old rolltop desk entirely covered with cracker boxes, cedarwood penholders, rough-sketched cartoons, and scientific gadgets picked up here and there: a dusty gyroscope, a radiometer with slowly turning black-and-silver vanes, and a model steam engine with a brass boiler, a firebox, a working piston, and a flywheel. The office contained an old mahogany armchair upholstered in a pattern of faded pink cabbage roses, but Franklin preferred to sit at his desk for eight to ten hours a day, composing comic strips and single-panel cartoons on a drawing board that slanted from the desk edge to his lap.