At home he hurled himself into Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon. On weekday evenings he climbed to his tower study at half-past eight after reading Stella a bedtime story and came down at half-past midnight or one in the morning, and on the weekends he stayed shut up in the tower, coming down only to take an afternoon walk. Stella, who liked to be with him for much of the day, did not sit idly while he worked. It was her job to number the finished drawings, to erase carefully the pencil lines that showed through the India ink, to fasten each drawing to a cardboard backing, to attach the cardboard to the metal drum of the viewing machine, and to check carefully through the window of the machine for flickering due to faulty alignment. Franklin had modified his animation board: directly above the rectangle of glass he had screwed two pegs into the wood for exact registration of the drawings. In addition to his rice paper he had purchased a supply of transparent sheets of celluloid, which he used for moving figures during certain sequences. With a paper cutter he trimmed each piece of paper or celluloid to the proper size; then with a punch he carefully made two holes at the top, to fit over the pegs. He had arrived quickly at the moon, but the early lunar landscapes, with their mixture of enchantment and menace, were coming along slowly. His characters, a boy and his pet monkey, had to be led through three adventures, including a crash through the lunar surface and the discovery of an ancient underground civilization of Selenites, before he could bring them to the shore of the river that separated the white side of the moon from the dark side.
The long hours of work, the four to five hours of restless sleep, the strain of an immense task requiring rigorous concentration, the sense of some menace lying in wait for him if he should relax his will for one second, all this began to tell on Franklin’s health, and by midwinter he fell sick. His arms felt heavy, he could barely hold up his head, the thermometer recorded a low, persistent fever; and after ten days of increasing exhaustion he called Dr. Shawcross, who found nothing more than a viral infection that was making the rounds but who warned of nervous exhaustion and ordered two weeks of bed rest. For one week Franklin lay in a stupor of mild fever, burning eyelids, and bone-deep weariness, during which Mrs. Henneman brought him bowls of soup and turkey sandwiches. Stella, as soon as she came home from school, sat on a chair by the side of his bed and from time to time took his temperature, carefully shaking down the mercury in the glass rod, telling him to be sure to keep the thermometer under his tongue, and timing him for three minutes by the second hand of his gold pocket watch. On the eighth day Franklin took the train to work. At his desk, with the drawing board sloped against his lap, he felt as if his brain were wrapped in cotton wool that itself was wrapped in crinkly blue paper; when he stood up he had an attack of dizziness and stood bent over his desk, supported on a trembling arm. He spent three more days at home before returning to work again; the fever had lifted, he was no longer dizzy, but he felt tired, always tired.
One night in the tower study Franklin looked up and saw through the unshaded window that it had begun to snow. The thick white flakes looked like shavings of wax from a candle. The snow lay in white lines on the black branches of the maples, it stood heaped on the wooden swing like the top of a loaf of bread. Only on the black river, gleaming faintly like dark tin, did it leave no trace. Color was coming to the world of animated cartoons, experiments had been made by more than one studio, and someone had already invented a workable sound track that produced synchronized sound effects, but Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.
Night after night in the black-and-white winter, in the silent tower high over the house, Franklin sat bent over his silent black-and-white world, raising his eyes only to rest them before sinking back into his waking dream, and once, raising his eyes after a long and particularly stubborn sequence that left his neck aching and his temples throbbing, he was amazed to see the light of early morning shining in the window and there, outside, clusters of tender green-yellow flowers hanging from the branches of the maples. Butter-yellow and blood-red tulips glowed in the flower beds. Sunlight trembled on the green-brown river.
She had never called, never tried to visit the house, never asked for her clothes, her piano music, her oval photograph of Judge Vaughn and her mother. Her absence was absolute — she had crossed the river and vanished away. Franklin gradually stopped expecting her. A dull anger glimmered in him, like the shine of old tin. The rigor of her absence struck him as cold and unnatural, the result of a hard will. Once, relaxing his anger, he permitted himself to wonder whether the completeness of her absence, far from being a sign of contempt for her former life, might not be a sign of doubt, of secret shame, of midnight fear — a fear of seeing Stellas eyes, a fear that her romantic flight had been not daring but banal; but a moment later he imagined her throwing back her head to laugh in the sun — happy, flourishing, indifferent.
One summer midnight Franklin looked up from the drawing of a moon waterfall plunging into a chasm to see a piece of moon in the window. The moon, the luminous blue sky, the hot summer night reminded him of his roofwalk ten thousand years ago. He stood up and looked through the window; the world was blue and still, only the dark river shimmered with trembling points of light. He felt no boyish desire to walk through the window into the sky, but he was restless and needed a breath of night air.
On the second floor he stopped to look in at Stella, who lay fast asleep beside a book on her pillow. He moved the book away from her cheek and pushed up the fallen shoulder of her nightshirt. Then swiftly he descended the second stairway, opened the front door, and stepped into the radiant summer night.
Shadows of porch balusters lay sharp against the moon-bright floorboards. He walked down the porch steps. The night sky was flame blue. A memory came to him: as a child he had liked to look at the world through one of the dark blue circles of glass that his father removed from a little leather pouch to screw into the camera in front of the lens. The night sky was like that: a dark, transfigured day. Franklin wanted to walk; and after passing down the front path past the great maples to the hedge dividing the front yard from the road, he glanced back once at the house, dark except for the light in the tower, and continued on his way.
He knew and refused to know where he was going. He turned down several familiar lanes, breathing the smell of mown grass, loam, manure, the sudden sharp scent of some unknown flower. After a while he came to the deserted main street, lit by two street lamps. In the dark window of the general store he saw the reflection of a maple tree and a clapboard storefront and, through the reflection, a shadowy pyramid of soup cans. On the other side of the street he passed between two stores so close together that he could have touched the shingled walls on both sides. At the back of the stores was a weed-grown lot in which a rusty wheel lay aslant against the side of a rotting hay wagon, and a moment later he found himself on the bank of the river.