Little Kingdoms Read online

  Acclaim for STEVEN MILLHAUSER’s

  LITTLE KINGDOMS

  “Irresistible…. Steven Millhauser is, all in all, a wonderfully appropriate writer for our very own fin de siècle.”

  —Washington Post

  “Steven Millhauser is one of the best, most exhilarating writers in the United States today.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “As Gothic as Poe and as imaginative as Fantasia, Millhauser’s deceptive fables are funny and warm. But they’re dark as dungeons, too—unsettling and possibly dangerous. He bewitches you.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “[Steven Millhauser] creates a world that is exquisite in its tortures and terrors, a world which only the heightened consciousness of an artist or a dreamer could inhabit.”

  —William Kennedy, Washington Post Book World

  “Mr. Millhauser possesses a bountiful imagination, and an ability to catch his perceptions in a bright butterfly net of prose.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “What a pleasure it is to read a writer this good—Millhauser seems sometimes to return us to the original sources of art, the awe and wonder before the untrustworthy but beautiful force of existence…. I love this writer.”

  —Peter Straub

  To Jonathan and Anna

  CONTENTS

  The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne

  The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon

  Catalogue of the Exhibition:

  The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810–1846)

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Books by Steven Millhauser

  The Little Kingdom

  of

  J. Franklin Payne

  ONE

  One warm blue night toward the middle of July, in the year 1920, John Franklin Payne, a newspaper cartoonist by trade, looked up from his desk in the third-floor study of his home in Mount Hebron, New York, and saw with surprise that it was three o’clock in the morning. The world was absolutely still. Through the windows the sky was a deep, glowing blue, as if there must be a bright moon somewhere, and Franklin felt a sudden desire to burst through the window into the blue night sky. The desire startled him, for he liked to work alone in his tower study late into the night. The study was warm, uncomfortably warm; despite the new screen in the lower half of the center window, the small room held the heat of the roof.

  In the hot stillness Franklin took off his vest and looked again at the glass-cased clock on top of his high-backed desk. The glass door with the brass handle, the lacy clock-hands, the exposed cogwheels, the big metal key lying under the swinging pendulum, all this seemed strange and unseen before, though the clock had stood on the mantelpiece of his parents’ home in Ohio since his earliest childhood; and the familiar, strange clock, the glowing sky, the mysterious hour, all seemed connected with something inside him that was about to burst. As he stared at the pendulum he began to notice that the stillness of the hour was really a secret riot of sound: the dark tick of the clock, like drops of water dripping from an eave, the shrill of crickets beyond the screen, and under it all, clearer and clearer, the gentle rasp of his wife’s breathing as it came through the open window of the second-floor bedroom. He had told Cora he would be done in an hour or so, but the six-panel strip had proved unexpectedly stubborn. And then he had laid aside his drawing board, that smooth-worn dark board with a faint shine that reminded him of the shine of a well-handled pipe, and with a sense of excitement he had brought out the packet of carefully trimmed rice paper, set up his other board with its glass window, pulled over his jar of Venus pencils and a fresh bottle of black drawing ink, and set to work on his secret, exhilarating project.

  What to do? If he went down to his bedroom next to Cora’s on the second floor, and fell asleep instantly, he would get only two and a half hours of sleep before the rattle of milk bottles in the wire box on the front porch announced his five-thirty rising. But Franklin was too excited to sleep. He was excited by the glowing blue sky, by the clamorous silence, by his lamplit tower room high above the rest of the house, by the sense that he was creating a world far more enchanting than the world of his comic strips, which had already brought him a certain notoriety. He was bursting with energy. He thought how nice it would be to creep downstairs and slip into bed with Cora—but she would be angry if he woke her. For though Cora was given to passionate whims of her own, she did not like to be surprised. Franklin remembered that a colleague was coming up for a visit on Saturday, and he had a sudden misgiving about Max: suppose Cora—but there was no use worrying about it now. He decided to work straight through the night. Immediately he decided not to. His eyes ached, his temples throbbed, his hand had become slightly unsteady—the last drawing had almost been spoiled.

  Franklin numbered the piece of rice paper carefully in the lower right-hand corner and added it to the pile of thirty-two new drawings, each of which had been traced over the preceding drawing and exactly resembled it except for a small departure. Each of the separate drawings still had to be gone over in ink and then mounted on a piece of cardboard in order to be examined in his viewing machine. He now had 1,826 India-ink drawings, which had taken him almost three months to complete. At sixteen frames per second he would need nearly 4,000 drawings for a four-minute animated cartoon.

  Franklin pushed back his chair carefully, for Cora complained that she could hear his chair scrape even though her room was not directly below the tower study, and walked over to the center window. He had inserted the adjustable screen only three weeks ago, after a hard-shelled insect had come in at night through the raised sash and struck his drawing hand like a piece of flying tin. Down below, the shadow of the house fell halfway across the sloping lawn. He saw plainly the elongated tower with the pointed roof, from which he was looking down into the yard, and for a moment he had the odd sensation that he was down there, strewn across the lawn—at any moment his shadow-form would emerge from the shadow-tower and pass into the brightness of the moon. Under one of the high old maples a child’s table, set with cups and saucers and teapot, lay half in light and half in shade: one chair, pulled back slightly, glowed almost white, while the other chair lay in black shadow. The brilliant spout of the teapot looked like the raised trunk of an elephant. He would have to remind Stella to bring in her toys before dark—or maybe the dolls had come out to have a tea party under the summer moon. In his childhood home in Plains Farms, Ohio, he had heard things come alive at night: dolls woke from their daylight spell, teapots poured tea, dishes came down from their cupboards and walked about the house, clowns in jigsaw puzzles rose up and danced, the little boy in the wallpaper caught a fish with his yellow fishing pole. Franklin had lain very still, listening to the secret life in the house, and twenty years later he had put it all in a Sunday color strip—but in the last panel the boy had wakened from his dream. And one summer night in Ohio, Franklin himself had sat up in bed and pushed aside the curtain and the stiff, heavy shade to stare at the brilliant backyard. He had longed to pass through the window into the dark enchantment of the summer night; and in the morning when he opened his eyes he found he had fallen asleep with his head against the window frame. Franklin was restless. The tower study was unbearably hot. All at once he had a marvelous idea.

  With a thrust of his palms he pushed up the half-open lower sash. The adjustable screen, framed in maple, fit snugly against the vertical parting-strips that ran the length of the window frame and separated the upper and lower sashes. He released the stiff spring, carefully removed the screen, and placed it on the floor against the side of his desk. Then with dream-ease he stepped out into the blue summer night.

  A narrow roofslope lay directly beneath
the window. On his knees, backward, Franklin made his way to the edge. There, as if he knew what he was doing, he slid over the roof edge and swung down; for a moment he hung wildly before dropping to the wide and nearly flat roof of the front porch.

  He was standing beside the tall window of his own bedroom, directly beneath his tower study. The shade was pulled down all the way, as if he were inside, fast asleep. And for a moment he imagined himself lying fast asleep in his bed, dreaming this other Franklin, who had stepped out of a tower into the sky. Franklin strode past the window, noticing himself passing jauntily in the dark pane of the upper sash—and how easy it was to walk this way, along the shingles of a roof, with one’s hands in one’s pockets at the magic hour of three in the morning; he felt like kicking up his heels. But he slowed as he drew near Cora’s window.

  Through the adjustable screen he saw Cora lying on her back with her unbound hair strewn over the pillow. He could make out the proud line of her forehead and thought he could see, escaping from her thick pale tumble of hair, the bottom of an ear. Franklin felt a little sharp burst of longing, and with a feeling of dream-freedom he released the steel spring that held the screen tight against the window frame. At that moment Cora turned slightly in her sleep, half opened an eye, and seemed to look at him.

  “I’m only a dream,” Franklin whispered, and held his breath. The eye closed. Franklin adjusted the screen and tiptoed away along the porch roof.

  The roof turned with the wraparound porch, and as he stepped around the corner Franklin walked into the brightness of the moon. The moon startled him: it was much larger than it ought to be. It seemed to be growing bigger and bigger—at any moment it would engulf him and he would dissolve in an exhilaration of whiteness. In an old strip he had shown the moon setting on top of a saloon on Vine Street, rolling drunkenly across rooftops, toppling into the Ohio River with a splash. Franklin continued around the corner and came to a moon-flooded window. In the room his three-year-old daughter lay sleeping on her back. One leg rested on top of the covers and one arm was flung back on the pillow and bent over her head, as if she had fallen asleep suddenly in the midst of an ecstatic dance.

  Franklin eased out the screen and climbed inside. At the bed he pulled the sheet and bedspread over Stella’s legs, removed a lump that turned out to be a white one-eyed bear, and lay down beside Stella with his hands clasped behind his head. “It’s a wonderful night,” he said. “I think the moon’s going to land on the roof in a few minutes. We can climb up on it and have moon pie. Won’t that be fun?” Stella stirred in her sleep and slowly rolled against him. “Shhh, now,” Franklin said. “Just another dream.” He kissed her forehead and sat up. Creatures with moon-glittering eyes looked at him from shelves and chairs, watched him as they leaned against each other’s shoulders. “I’m surprised at you,” Franklin said. “This is no time for loafing.” He rose from the bed and began gathering up the dolls and animals, which he placed on the floor in two lines facing Stella’s bed. In the center of the front row sat a Raggedy Ann doll, a kangaroo, a ballerina in silver slippers, and a donkey with one ear. “Night,” Franklin said to no one in particular, then climbed out the window onto the porch roof. The moon had returned to its proper size. Franklin bent into the room and replaced the screen.

  He continued to the end of the porch roof, where he came to a projecting bay formed by an empty guest room. Above the bay rose a third-floor gable. The roofline was above his reach, but a brilliant white downspout, gleaming as if the paint were still wet, climbed a corner of the bay. Franklin placed one toe on the louver of a shutter and one toe on a brace of the rainspout, grasped the roof edge, and pulled himself up onto a steep slope.

  Slowly, bent over to his fingertips, he made his moonlit way along the peaks and valleys of his jumbled roof, passing through gable-shadows and bursts of brightness. He felt as if he had come down from the moon, an enchanted visitor, to walk on the bumpy top of a town. Once he slipped on a strip of flashing, once he sat straddling a crest of roof, and once he passed a tall, thin chimney that widened at the top and made him think of a pedestal with a missing bust. In a burst of high spirits he imagined chimney statues: a bust of Homer with his bald head gleaming under the moon, a Civil War general with raised sword on a rearing horse, a white marble Venus stepping out of her bath. He had become quite used to his up-and-down journey under the spell of the moon when he found himself in a sudden valley beside a polygonal tower.

  Dreamily he made his way down to the skirt of roof beneath the open window and entered his warm study.

  Nothing had changed. The mahogany desk-chair with its padded leather seat was turned slightly from the desk, the pendulum swung slowly above the key in the glass-cased clock, a collection of cedarwood penholders standing in a square jar looked like a handful of pick-up-sticks about to fall. On the faded wallpaper with its pattern of repeated haystacks, the little reapers lay asleep with their hats over their eyes. Franklin laid his last drawing on top of the glass rectangle in the sloping animation board. He turned on the light bulb beneath the glass, placed a blank piece of rice paper over the drawing, and lined up the two pieces of glowing paper by matching the crossmarks in the four corners. He tried to recall his mood of moonlit exhilaration, but it all seemed to have happened long ago. Choosing a blunt-tipped Venus pencil from his pencil jar, Franklin began to trace the background for drawing number 1,827 as the first little ache of tiredness rippled along his temples and began to beat softly with the beat of his blood.

  TWO

  When Franklin summoned up his childhood in Plains Farms, Ohio, he always remembered three things: the warm, sunbaked smell of the tire that hung from the branch of the sweet-gum tree, the opening in the backyard hedge that led out into the tall meadow grass where he was forbidden to go, and the sound of his father’s voice counting slowly and gravely in the darkened kitchen as he bent over the piece of magic paper under the light of the enlarger. Franklin loved the darkroom: the four trays on the sink, each with its pair of tongs; the separate smells of the developer, the stop bath, and the hypo; the red light glowing in the darkness; the dark hump of the enlarger on the kitchen table. It was his job to remove a piece of magic paper from one of the yellow-and-black packages and seal the package carefully so that the rest of the paper wouldn’t be exposed when his father clicked on the enlarger light. He remembered the feel of the paper: smooth on both sides, but smoother on one side than the other: that was the side that had a shine to it in the darkred light. His father placed the paper in the metal rectangle with adjustable sides, which somehow reminded Franklin of the funny metal tray the man in the shoe store made him place his foot on, and when everything was ready his father clicked on the enlarger light and began to count. He counted in a slow, grave voice, and as he counted he slowly lowered and raised one hand, with the long finger held out. Franklin could see light shining through the negative, throwing the black-and-white picture onto the glowing paper. The moving hand, marking the rhythm of the numbers, had a red sheen in the red-lit dark. Suddenly the light clocked off. Quickly his father removed the paper and brought it over to the sink, where he slipped it into the developer pan and allowed Franklin to hold it down with the tongs. This was the part Franklin liked best: the paper was blank, but as he watched, tense with expectation, he became aware of a slight motion on the paper, as of something rising to the surface, and from the depths of whiteness the picture would begin to emerge—an edge here, a gray bit there, a ghostly arm reaching out of a shirt sleeve. More and more the darkness rose up out of the white, faster and faster, a great bursting forth of life—and suddenly he saw himself on the living room rug, reaching out to put a piece in his ship puzzle, but already he was lifting an edge of the photograph with the tongs, in order to slip the picture into the second tray, where the developer would be washed off and the picture would stop getting darker. His father had shown him once what happened if you didn’t stop the action of the developer: the picture grew darker and darker until it was compl
etely black. Black was nothing, and white was nothing too, but in between—in between was the whole world. After the stop-bath tray came the hypo tray, to fix the picture in place and keep it from changing in light. From there the picture went into the water tray, and then it was laid facedown on a towel to dry. But Franklin’s interest had already begun to slacken when the picture rose dripping from the first tray, for the excitement was always in the sudden emergence of life from the whiteness of the paper.

  He felt the same excitement when he drew on white paper with crayon or pencil. As far back as he could remember he had liked to make lines on paper, and from the age of five or six he liked to draw everything: the tire swing, the state of Ohio with a cow in it, his mother with her bag of yarn balls and knitting needles, his spoon and fork. In elementary school his teachers praised the drawings and hung them up in the back of the room. He drew pictures of school desks, carefully shaded bottles of ink, colorful cereal boxes with precisely reproduced words and faces, but he also kept returning to old, familiar things, improving them each time, so that his tire swing became mottled with skillfully drawn shadows of leaves and hung from a meticulously rendered rope that showed all of its intertwisted strands, while the state of Ohio, copied from his father’s atlas instead of from his childish jigsaw map, showed all the counties, every curve in the Ohio River, and the letters and numbers of the superimposed grid. In the sixth grade he began copying his favorite comic strips from the Cincinnati Enquirer and inventing strips of his own.

  In high school he was an indifferent student but continued drawing; somewhat to his surprise his sketches took a satirical turn. One summer he wrote away to a correspondence school whose advertisement he had seen on the inside cover of a matchbook. He followed three lessons before giving it up with an inner shrug, but the sense of something to be learned, of rules to be mastered and broken, stayed with him. In his senior year his father told him that he was being sent to a Commercial Academy in Cincinnati, nearly two hours by buckboard and train from Plains Farms, in order to prepare for a career in business. Franklin agreed to go without protest, as he agreed to most things, while inwardly withdrawing to a quiet corner of his mind. In the tall-windowed rooms of the Commercial Academy, with the sound of automobile engines and voices coming from the street below, he took notes faithfully and did his best to pay attention. But he preferred to wander about the exciting city on the river, with its German shopkeepers and crowded sidewalks, its horse-drawn cabs and handsome automobiles, its sudden glimpses of the river, of the suspension bridge with its soaring towers, of the green hills of Kentucky. At the entrance to the suspension bridge stood the sheds of apple and peanut vendors, and Franklin liked to walk across the river with his pockets full of peanuts and sit on a bench in Kentucky and look at the city of Cincinnati rising up at the river’s edge. On the broad city streets he liked to look in the plate-glass windows at displays of cameras with black leather bellows and automatic shutters; stem-winding pocket watches with silver-plated cases engraved with train engines or antlered stags; mustached mannequins in striped suits and Panama hats, with walking sticks tucked under their arms; phonographs with shiny brass horns or the new cabinet models in oak and mahogany that concealed the horn and had room for one hundred records; stylish women’s boots with glossy patent-leather vamps and creamy calf tops; gleaming white-enameled sinks and bathtubs. He liked the big-city drugstores with their window displays of dental creams, hair pomades, self-stropping safety razors in plush-lined cases, and bottles of perfume with exotic scents: fleur d’orange, new-mown hay, night-blooming cereus, ylang-ylang, opoponax, patchouly. His favorite haunt was Vine Street, which ran down to the river at one end and up into the hills at the other and was crowded with shops, hotels, and every variety of saloon, from shabby riverfront grogshops to the palatial cafés in the business district, with their wrought-iron doorways flanked by marble columns, and their interiors of carved mahogany and onyx and great mirrors that reflected bronze statues—and farther away from the river, the comfortable saloons of the German neighborhood, with their sitting rooms and shady outdoor gardens.