Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

Nanny had straight gray hair and no lipstick. She had a stern face with wide cheekbones and she talked with an accent. Edwin tried to like her but he was afraid of her; when she bent down to kiss him he thought she was going to scold him. She had pale cool cheeks full of fine wrinkles, and although Edwin was surprised at the smoothness of her skin, he preferred the thick pink powder on Grandma’s cheeks. Nanny wore little hats and little pins without pictures. She wore tight black shoes with thick heels, and her thick ankles came over the top. When she wore a kerchief she called it a babushka. She wore dark clothes and looked much older than Grandma Mullhouse; later Edwin was amazed to learn that she was five years younger. Whenever she came, Edwin knew he would have to eat red soup for dinner; and she always told him to rub his nose up, not down. Sometimes she brought him special foot-long pretzels or brown bags of peanuts, but usually she brought gifts for the whole family: chocolate cakes in white boxes tied with white string; and sometimes she brought nothing. She spent most of her time with Edwin’s mother, helping with dinner or sitting stiffly with her hands in her lap. There was a faint holiday feeling when she came, but Edwin was relieved when she went away.

The most important thing about the grandmothers was their connection with the railroad station. Twice a visit Edwin and I accompanied Mr. Mullhouse by bus or cab to the vast brown waiting room with its rows of black wooden seats where tired people sat among shopping bags and suitcases while lively people strode up and down or pushed in and out the doors that opened onto the dangerous tracks. There were glass machines full of pistachio nuts, free piles of blue and red and green timetables arranged neatly in wooden compartments (Edwin always took two of each), and round red seats on silver poles, where you could turn round and round and see the shiny counter, the ticket windows, the doors, the shiny counter, the ticket windows, the doors, the shiny counter, the ticket windows, the doors. And of course there was the train itself: the loud voice shouting, the people standing up, the rush outdoors onto the wooden platform with its carts full of mailbags and the safe tracks right in the wood and the nearby deadly tracks with wires overhead and black bridges in the sky, and at last the train in the distance getting closer and closer and louder and louder until the wind of its passing almost knocked you over and you stared at the vast iron wheels with the white steam shooting out. But better than the timetables, better than the turning seats, better than the snorting train itself was a certain corner of the waiting room near the photograph booth. There, standing in two rows, were the tall brown machines with footstools in front of them and colored pictures at the top. We were still too short for the stools to be of any use and so Mr. Mullhouse had to hold each of us up in turn. Edwin placed a nickel in the silver tongue and I quickly leaned forward, placing my face carefully against the cold metal of the viewer and shading the sides with my hands. Edwin pushed in the tongue and pulled it out, and I knew without looking that the nickel had disappeared. A buzzing began; and suddenly in the viewer I saw brightness, and words, and then a gang of cowboys was galloping silently toward me on white and black horses with great clouds of dust coming up behind. Whenever the words appeared I quickly drew back to let Mr. Mullhouse look in and read them aloud; then I rushed back, bitterly disappointed if the picture had already reappeared. I liked the Hopalong Cassidy pictures, but Edwin liked the cartoons.

A black cat, wearing goggles, stepped into the cockpit of a small white airplane. Reaching forward, he spun the propeller with his paw. White puffs came out the back; the plane shook and at last began to move forward. But it failed to go up in the air: continuing along the smooth airstrip it passed onto a bumpy field, where disappearing into a haystack it still moved forward, carrying the hay along. The moving haystack startled a man with a pitchfork, whose hat rose in the air. It frightened a cow, who lay down on her stomach and covered her eyes with her hooves. Another haystack opened its eyes, lifted its skirts, and ran away. The moving haystack hit a bump and shot into the air, revealing the cat in the plane; loaves of bread began to fall from the sky. The plane continued along the field, chasing cows and scattering chickens and coming at last to a big barn; it crashed through and came out the other side, leaving a plane-shaped hole. As a farmer came running out of his house the plane rose into the air with a chicken on each wing. It tipped to the left and one chicken fell off; it tipped to the right and the other chicken fell off; it turned upside down but the cat remained seated. The plane bumped into an eagle and with its propeller gave the bird a haircut so that its head resembled an egg with a few hairs sticking up. Still upside down, the plane began a long curving nosedive and turned rightside up as it skimmed the ground, knocking over the farmer and again rising into the air. The farmer ran into his house and came out with a shotgun; he shot twice into the sky, falling over backward each time. Two birds landed at his feet. At last he shot one wing off the plane and the plane began to perform wild looping spins until it plunged straight down, spinning like a top. The cat leaped out, holding his nose, and the plane crashed through the roof of the farmer’s house as the cat landed on a large haystack. The farmer shot the haystack; an angry bull emerged; and as the circle closed the farmer ran zigzagging into the distance, becoming smaller and smaller, pursued by the bull.

One machine was different from all the others. It stood by itself, dark and old, and advertised the same picture week after week in the faded announcement at the top. This machine had a crank on one side; when you put a nickel in, the crank could be turned, and you could make the movie go faster or slower. If you turned very fast the motions were speeded up and the brown-and-white lady pushed the brown-and-white man onto the brown-and-white bed and the man bounced up and the lady pushed the man and the man bounced up and the lady pushed the man and the man bounced up and the lady flung up her hands, looked at the ceiling, and then reached for the chair; if you turned at a medium speed the motions were jerky so that the lady seemed to lift the chair over her head in many stages, with pauses between each stage; and if you stopped turning altogether you saw the lady standing motionless with the chair breaking on the man’s head over the frozen beginnings of a grimace, and beyond the margin of the picture you saw a whole pile of cards reaching down underneath, and if you turned very carefully you could make a single new card come down, with everything looking exactly like before except that one of the lady’s elbows now touched a corner of the photograph hanging on the wall, and the jagged crack in the breaking chairleg was wider.

TIME PASSED. I suppose it comes to that, in the end. If I were directing a movie I would now show one of those calendars with the pages being torn away one by one against a changing background: September October November December (popped cork, shouts of Happy New Year!) January 1947 February March April May June July August (the 1 is circled). At the very end I would introduce a headline effect: superimposed against a background of clattering printing presses you see a small turning pinwheel which gets larger and larger as it comes closer and closer and reveals itself to be a newspaper — and stops (to an orchestral blare), enabling you to read in big black letters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDWIN. If I were writing a novel … but time is passing, the reader is growing older, we wake from green dreamed islands to drown in the dark. Lights!