There now began a long, blissful period of work, when Franklin was able to throw himself nightly into his dime museum drawings and daily into editorial cartoons and three strips: a new and uninspired one for Kroll about office life at a magazine publisher, the old Phantom strip with its new decor, and a recent one that had sprung up in the shadow of “Harvey,” about a boy who stood on his pillow each night and climbed into his dreams — and beyond the images that flowed from the tip of his Gillott 290 pen point he would be aware of dimmer images, like a yellow leaf lying on the porch rail or a black grackle shimmering with purple as it shrieked from a bare maple branch, and one day he noticed with surprise that long, sharp icicles hung shining from a roof edge, casting slanted black stripes against the bright white wood.
One morning in mid-December Franklin laid aside his drawing board, put on his hat and coat, and made his way along the warren of brown rooms to an old door with a frosted-glass pane, behind which Max shared an office with a melancholy sports-page cartoonist called Mort Riegel. Franklin rapped with the knuckles of two fingers and opened the door. Max, alone with his feet up on the desk, looked over his shoulder with raised eyebrows and placed a hand on his chest in a parody of surprise. “Put on your coat and come with me,” Franklin said. “Ask no questions.” He led Max out into the sunny cold day and hailed a cab, which came to a stop five minutes later before an old arcade building lined with shops. Between a barbershop and a shoeshine parlor a flight of dark stairs with a loose handrail led up to the offices of the Vivograph Company. “I delivered it nine days ago,” Franklin said as he turned a dented doorknob. The Vivograph studio, he had learned, turned out its own biweekly animated shorts, as well as travelogues and educational features, but rented its camera, an antiquated machine that had been supplied with a motor and could be set to shoot one frame at a time, to anyone willing to pay. In a small projection room whose single window was darkened with a crooked Venetian blind that let in shafts of dusty light, Franklin and Max sat straddling a pair of folding chairs with their arms resting on the backs as they watched the four minutes and twelve seconds of Dime Museum Days by J. Franklin Payne. The title cards (HELP!! HELP!!) struck Franklin as superfluous, the bearded lady sprouting bushels of hair was funnier but less frightening than he had expected, here and there the flickering caused by faulty alignment was irritating, but on the whole it seemed to work: the long perspective shots into the depths of the museum were effective, and the final sequence, in which an entire hall came to life and kept changing into sinister figures who pursued the terrified girl down dream perspectives and nightmare corridors, was very satisfying, despite one or two small details that needed attending to. When it was over he turned to Max to ask about the bearded lady sequence and was surprised to hear applause in the back of the room, which came from the projectionist and two studio employees who had crept in to watch, and when he turned back to Max he was startled to see Max staring at him with a glitter of wild excitement in his eyes.
FOUR
“You’ve always been impossible,” Max said as they walked down the stairs into the arcade, “but this, my friend, takes the all-time impossible cake.”
“Oh, you’ll see I’m right, you’ll see. Walk or cab? Look: that barber’s just committed a murder.” The barber stood smoothing a white towel over the face of a man who lay with his head tipped far back, his chin pointed at the ceiling. Franklin, who carried the can of film in his coat pocket, was amused by Max’s dismay but also disappointed: didn’t Max realize that several sequences had to be redrawn entirely? There could be no talk of deals and distribution until the entire thing was fixed up and rephotographed.
“Easy come, easy go,” Max said with a shrug. He glanced at a passing girl, who glanced back, and Franklin, who had assumed he’d been speaking of the man in the white towel, suddenly wondered whether Max had meant the girl, or Dime Museum Days, or something else entirely.
But he had to admit, as the world vanished behind his study in swirls of falling snow, that Max might have been right. To the clack of a rented projector Franklin watched his moving pictures night after night on a wall of the tower study while snow fell steadily, and the repeated viewings revealed new flaws. It wasn’t simply a matter of occasional irritating technical lapses, as when, for instance, despite his system of crossmarks, he had failed to register the drawings precisely; rather it was a question of whole sequences needing to be reimagined. Max thought he was being overly fussy, and Max was probably right. But just outside his window Nature was being far more fussy, far more finicky and precise. The swirling lines of snow were composed of separate flakes, and each flake was a cluster of separate ice crystals — scientists had counted over a hundred of them in a single flake. Under the microscope each minuscule crystal, colorless and transparent, revealed a secret symmetry: six sides, the outward expression of an inward geometry of frozen molecules of water. But the real wonder was that no two crystals were precisely alike. In one of his father’s camera magazines he had seen a stunning display of photomicrographs, and what was most amazing about the enlarged crystals was that each contained in its center a whole world of intricate six-sided designs, caused by microscopic air pockets. For no conceivable reason, Nature in a kind of exuberance created an inexhaustible outpouring of variations on a single form. A snowstorm was a fall of jewels, a delirium of hexagons — clearly the work of a master animator. Max, mocking his endless labor, would have done better to direct his scorn at the falling snow. But Max had made Franklin thoughtful as well as irritable. Why this obsessive fiddling, when after all he was a professional used to working quickly under the pressure of rigorous deadlines? Perhaps the answer was this, that for once in his life he preferred to be an amateur. In this realm, at any rate, he was one whether he liked it or not. But there was also something else, something more elusive that he couldn’t quite get at but that had to do with entering a place that made you feel you were somehow at the center — though at the center of what, Franklin wasn’t sure.
The snow stopped, leaving great drifts that covered the porch steps and swept up to the parlor windowsills; and again the snow came down, burying the world in billions of glittering but invisible six-sided designs. On the cold kitchen windows Franklin showed Stella elegant frost-drawings: spines and needles of ice, ice ferns and ice feathers, ice filings flung over the field of an unseen magnet. Then the sun came out, and there was a great melting and dripping: artful icicles two feet long hung from the porch eaves, transforming the storm-darkened porch into a sunny cavern of glistening and transparent stalactites, all dripping into the snow, all lengthening stealthily as each falling drop partially froze on the gleaming tips. Suddenly an icicle fell, plunging point-first into the snow and vanishing. A small dark bird, startled, flew into the brilliant blue sky and melted away. And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart — a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there — and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples. Franklin delivered the 4,236 drawings, of which nearly 2,000 were entirely new, to Vivograph himself, then screened the film alone. Only after that did he invite Max to a viewing — and now it was Max’s turn to confess that Franklin had been right all along, that the reworked version was superior in every way. “Though I suppose you’ll want to take it back and redo it again,” he added. Franklin was startled. “Well, no. No. Why? Is there something wrong?”