As his health returned, as his energy increased, Franklin sometimes felt a touch of restlessness. In the warm summer evenings, sitting on the front porch as the last light drained from the sky and the green hills turned black beyond the darkening river, he would feel a vague regret, a wistfulness; and somewhere far back in his mind he would have the sense of an inner itching, as if he were on the verge of remembering a word that kept eluding him. Then he would get up from the porch glider and go inside, letting the wooden screen door slam behind him; and in the lamplit parlor he would look at the mantelpiece clock, flanked by a glass-covered oval photograph of Cora’s parents and a glass-covered photograph of Stella, in matching pewter frames.
One night Franklin woke beside Cora and sat up in bed. His heart was beating rapidly; the remnant of a dream floated just beyond his inner sight and vanished. The muscles of his legs itched. Through the screen beneath the raised shade the night sky was deep blue. Franklin slipped out of bed, glanced at Cora, and stepped out of the room. He walked down the hall, opened a door, and began climbing the stairs to his tower study. On the dark landing he paused; his heart was beating wildly; his temples felt damp. Somewhere a floorboard creaked. For a long time he stood on the landing before turning back down the stairs.
“No no no,” Max said a few days later. It was a hot blue Sunday afternoon. “My lips are sealed. Not a word until we’re there.” The wheels of the Packard made snapping and crunching sounds as they passed over pinecones on the rutted dirt path. Through overhanging branches, sunlight fell in trembling patterns, rippling over Cora’s straw hat, glinting on bits of mica in granite rocks, sliding over foot-high tufts of grass that sprang from the dirt between the ruts. The ferry had carried the car across the river, and Max had guided them onto a hard dirt road that became narrower and bumpier, sprouting ferns, buttercups, clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. “This will do,” Max said, “this is fine, stop right here. Now follow me, one and all.” He led them along the vanishing dirt path, looking back impatiently. Suddenly he stopped and stepped into the woods. “Come on, come on, you lazy city slickers, get a move on, shake a leg. Watch it, we’re coming to a stream. Easy now. Easy does it.” After a while he stopped and held out his arms. “Well? What’s the verdict?”
“A nice spot for a picnic,” Franklin said. “We could sit in that oak tree.” Through the trees he could see the river below and, half a mile downriver, the village of Mount Hebron.
“Humble,” Max said, placing a hand over his heart, “but mine own. Three and a half acres of pinecones and fungus.”
Cora clapped her hands. “You’re not serious, Max! You’re not serious!”
Franklin said, “Do you mean to tell me—”
“It cost me an arm and a leg, let me tell you.” Max shrugged. “But I figure I’ve got two of each. I think of it as an investment. A larger flowerpot. Hey, Stella Bella, look: see this pebble? I own it. That leaf’s mine.”
“This calls for a celebration,” Franklin said, patting his pockets over and over again, as if he expected to find a corkscrew.
Two days later Max sat in Franklin’s office, his legs outstretched, his left arm hooked over the back of the chair, his right hand rippling through the air. “I feel like a kid with a new train set, Franklin — only my trains are trees. Is this crazy? It’s not even Wednesday and I’m counting the hours till the weekend. This place doesn’t help. Monday morning I don’t even have my hat off and already there’s a note on my desk. From the Troll himself. You know who Alfred the Fat is? I’ll tell you who he is. He’s the fat little drip-nose kid we all knew in the third grade, the one whose pants were always getting stuck in his behind. Now he’s sitting behind a desk and making us pay for knowing what we know about him. I’m telling you, one of these days — one of these godforsaken days — and take a look at this place, will you? Look at it. It’s like working in a loony bin designed by one of the resident loonies. Christ, I’m raving. I’ve got a deadline.” He stood up. “You have a good life, Franklin.” He turned abruptly and left, rattling the blinds.
Franklin disliked being told that he had a good life — for some reason it made him feel that he didn’t have a good life at all — and he disliked Max’s abuse of Kroll because it had the effect of making him rise secretly to Kroll’s defense, and he preferred not to be nudged into Kroll’s camp against his will. His own work for Kroll was going well. For the revived Cincinnati strip, now called “Dime Museum Days” in honor of the popular animated cartoon, Franklin changed Danny to a girl and brashly borrowed incidents he had invented for the film. There was a daily black-and-white version and a separate Sunday one in color. Moreover, the daily strip was no longer closed, but continuous: a long adventure, each day’s installment ending in a suspenseful sixth panel, with an occasional small resolution and the introduction of secondary characters, who replaced the rather passive heroine from time to time in adventures of their own that took them to new rooms of the museum. Franklin worked swiftly, scarcely revising a line; the strip proved popular, although he knew that the drawing was inferior to that of the original strip, the situations less surprising and original, the whole thing hopelessly uninspired. Kroll had canceled “Figaro’s Follies” and rejected each of the new strips Franklin had invented to replace it; he was urging Franklin to create a strip in a more realistic vein to replace the old “Phantom of the City.” After several failed attempts, including a humorous domestic strip in which the husband stayed home with the baby while the wife worked as a newspaper reporter, and a mischievous-kid strip in which the real culprit was the cute little dog, Franklin returned to an idea in one of the late Phantom strips, replaced the Phantom with a likable street urchin with a patch on his pants, and set the strip entirely underground, in the subway and its tunnels. It was a continuous strip, in which the boy had a series of menacing adventures in subway cars and in the system of tunnels under the city; the settings were precise but verged on the fantastic. Kroll was pleased, though he insisted that Franklin name the boy Sammy and the strip itself “Subway Sammy.” Franklin had suggested “Adventures in Underland.”
But for the most part, Franklin spent his time drawing the editorial cartoons that were Kroll’s particular passion. Kroll wrote a daily editorial, seven days a week, in which he thundered at an abuse, attacked a senator or a budget proposal, turned his attention to the Allied war debts or German reparations, raised questions about the advisability of naval limitations, and for each of his editorials he required a striking one-panel cartoon. At first Franklin experienced the daily assignment as a punishment, but he soon became adept at seizing the central point in a Kroll editorial and teasing it out into the skillfully exaggerated lines of a cartoon. Kroll, a severe and fussy critic, was pleased with his work; and on the first of September Franklin opened his pay envelope to discover that he had been given a handsome raise.