Steven Millhauser - Little Kingdoms

Franklin never talked about such passions and contradictions to his colleagues in the art department, a hard-pressed and hardworking group through whom erratic gusts of whimsy blew, and he rarely put such questions even to himself, preferring instead to feel his way with his fingers. Sometimes he had a sense of groping in the dark — and suddenly he would feel something that made him snatch his hand away. With his fellow cartoonists he was content to discuss deadlines, editorial policy, the news of the day; they were busy and friendly and had formed a complicated network of alliances and social habits that made him feel, without rancor or surprise, a little on the outside. The exception was Max Horn, a cartoonist two years older than Franklin who wore stylish hats and white duck pants, smoked small thin cheroots that he tapped flamboyantly in the direction of ashtrays, and gestured emphatically with his long, slender, carefully manicured hands. Horn drew with astonishing swiftness, claimed never to correct his work, and had the ability to imitate any style without having formed a distinct style of his own. He seemed to take an interest in the newcomer from Ohio, a state he said he hadn’t heard of — was it west of Brooklyn? He always stopped when he saw Franklin in the halls, firing at him witty remarks, baseball scores, and office gossip, and he took to stopping by Franklin’s office once or twice a week, where he would throw himself into the faded armchair, stretch out his legs and cross his ankles, tip back his head, and blow a stream of plump and slowly turning smoke rings that he studied intently for a few moments before scattering his ash and launching into a shrewd analysis of office politics or Franklin’s style. Although the visits sometimes interrupted a bout of work, which Franklin had to make up at night in Mount Hebron, he looked forward to the sound of Max Horn’s quick, decisive rap on the door. Franklin understood that the flamboyant Horn enjoyed playing to Franklin’s presumed innocence, but he recognized that beneath the brashness was a sharp, restless intelligence, as well as a surprisingly clear grasp of Franklin’s work. Franklin in turn admired Horn’s worldliness, felt the pull of his mocking mind, and enjoyed his own slightly absurd role as greenhorn from the frontier.

At one o’clock on Saturday afternoon, under a brilliant blue sky that held a single white cloud resembling a puff of chimney smoke in a color comic strip, a train trembling with sun and leaf-shade pulled into the small Victorian station one township south of Mount Hebron.

Franklin, who had been standing in the hot shade of the platform for twenty minutes, was startled to see Max coming down the iron steps of the train. It was as if he had expected Max not to show up.

Or no, he explained as they drove in the open Packard along a dirt road bordered by pine woods, that wasn’t it exactly. It was as if Max was so much a part of that other world that Franklin hadn’t been able to imagine him in this one at all. It happened a lot: you failed to imagine something, and suddenly found yourself amazed, whereas if you’d imagined it to begin with — but here Franklin lost the direction of his thought. He glanced at Max, who seemed not to be paying attention. “Trees,” Max said, pointing over the side of the car. “We have them up here,” Franklin said. Max continued to stare at the passing woods. “I’ve read about them,” he said after a while, as Franklin turned onto the shady road that ran along the river.

When Max climbed the steps of the unscreened front porch he turned to take in the view, and Franklin turned with him. He tried to see with Max’s eyes the front lawn sloping down to the towering maples, the wooden rope-swing hanging from a high branch, the tall hedge bordering the unpaved road, the tree-shaded roofs and backyards below, the riverside street of small stores, and an abandoned knitting mill on the sunny brown river. When he turned back he saw Cora standing in the doorway. Max took off his hat and looked at Franklin as if in surprise.

“Franklin,” he said reproachfully, “you should have told me you were married.”

Cora looked at Max coolly. “Franklin,” she said, “you should have told me you were bringing a friend.”

Max burst into high, nervous laughter; and suddenly sweeping out his arm he made a low, graceful bow.

“And you must be Stella,” he added at the bottom of his bow, and dropped quickly to a squat. From behind Cora, Stella looked out uncertainly, holding her mother’s dress with one fist. “Here,” Max said, patting a pocket of his suit jacket. “I think there’s something in here.” Stella glanced up at her mother, then stepped forward and reached into Max’s pocket. She drew out a gray tin mouse and held it upside down by its leather tail. “I couldn’t resist,” Max said, still crouching at Cora’s feet. He took the mouse gently from Stella and wound it up; Stella watched intently as the mouse moved in zigzags along the boards of the porch.

Franklin knew that Max Horn had a quality that for lack of a better word might be called charm, though the word seemed to obscure something more complex and interesting in Max’s nature: a combination of energy and sympathy, an energy that continually and subtly adapted itself to the sensed mood of another person. It was less an art than a faculty he exercised helplessly. That afternoon, as something relaxed in Franklin, he realized he had been secretly fearful of Max’s making a bad impression on Cora, and he felt grateful to his friend for knowing how to please her, how to draw her into the center of things instead of keeping her on the sidelines as a wife. Max asked her questions about Cincinnati, which he imagined to be a lazy river town where pigs roamed the rutted dirt roads, hay wagons with big wooden wheels drove down Main Street, and women in bustles went to square dances and quilting bees. Cora said that the description was so exact he surely must have been there. Even Stella, shy and wary Stella, clutching her tin mouse but refusing to play with it, succumbed to the stranger after watching him for a long time, and finally permitted herself to be lifted onto Max’s shoulders and carried about the yard. Only when Max had let her down did he reach into his other pocket and produce a shiny red apple. “You see,” Max said, “we have apples in the city, but they’re not exactly like yours.” Stella looked at it doubtfully. “Look, I’ll show you.” Sitting on his heels, Max held the apple carefully at top and bottom and suddenly pulled it into two hollow halves. Inside sat a smaller apple. Then he pulled apart the second apple — and as the apples grew smaller and smaller, Stella stared in enchantment until, opening a little apple the size of an acorn, Max held out to her, on the long palm of his hand, a tiny apple tree.

After dinner, on the dark front porch lit only by the yellow glow of the shade-drawn parlor windows, Max and Franklin and Cora sat talking and drinking lemonade. The porch looked down across the lawn to the looming dark maples, the yellow squares of windows seen through a trembling blackness of leaves, and the wavering lines of light on the black river. Max, opening a slender tin box and removing a cheroot wrapped in crinkly pale-blue tissue paper, said he was no drinker, but he objected to the anti-booze amendment on principle: it was an effort by politicians to prolong the childhood of Americans. Besides, it would never work — anyone could buy medicinal whiskey at the local drugstore with a doctor’s prescription. Franklin looked over at Cora, and after a while he went down to the cellar and brought back one of the six bottles of wine they had kept on hand since the amendment had passed. “Ah, you gay dog, you,” Max said, and blew a stream of perfect little smoke rings the size of half dollars; and as Franklin poured the wine into the lemonade glasses he felt a gaiety come over things. The festive wine, the warm summer night, the sense of sharing in a secret violation — it was all peaceful and exhilarating, like riding home at night in the buckboard after long Sunday picnics on the river. Cora, who had been laughing at one of Max’s stories so that she had to wipe one eye with the back of her fingers, grew suddenly serious and began to speak about her girlhood in Cincinnati: ice-skating on the pond in Eden Park in late afternoons as the yellow sky turned darker and darker, the rows of long icicles hanging from porch eaves, wax angels with glass wings on the Christmas tree and real candles burning on the branches — and when Max asked if it was always winter in Ohio, she looked up in confusion, as if she had sunk into a winter dream, and spoke of long summer evenings composed of two sounds: the notes of mazurkas and nocturnes coming through the open window onto the darkening lawn as her mother sat at the piano after dinner, and the deeply satisfying sound of a jar-top coming down on a jar as another lightning bug was snatched out of the dark. Then she told Max how, when they’d first arrived in Brooklyn Heights, the thing that most made her feel she was in a foreign place was the way people spoke of standing on line, instead of in line; and people had smiled at each other when she said things like “Golly Moses.” Later, when Cora stood up to go to the kitchen, she walked into the arm of the porch glider; and she let the wooden screen door bang loudly when she stepped inside.