Their daughter, Stella, was born the following spring. Franklin liked to warm her feet by pulling her tiny socks on, placing his mouth on the sole of a sock, and blowing until his lips felt hot. Sometimes at night he woke up, fearful that she had died in her sleep. Then he would creep into her room and bend down to hear her breathing, and after that he would stare at her a long time before pulling the blanket up to her chin and returning to his room.
He thought about blowing on her feet as he stood one night leaning against the wall of a barracks building in Waco, Texas, and stared up at the blue-black sky. He was dressed in olive drab. The sky reminded him of long boyhood summer evenings — the kind of evening he might never spend with his daughter. The armistice was signed three weeks later, and he was home for Thanksgiving, but for a long time he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was somehow responsible for neglecting precious weeks of his daughter’s life and that he must now be more attentive to her than ever.
That winter his father died, of a lingering cold that developed into influenza. He had never been the same since his stroke before the war, and Franklin, staring at the gaunt and white-haired man lying in bed with closed eyes, was carried violently back to the other father, the one who had raised and lowered his hand in the darkroom as he gravely counted out the numbers. It was as if this elderly stranger had usurped his father’s place and now, in death, was permitting the real father to return. After the funeral Franklin tried to find something of his father’s to bring back with him — an ivory-handled penknife, a photograph of the sweet-gum tree — but it all seemed flat and dead, and he returned to Cincinnati empty-handed, but with the real father alive inside him.
When Stella was two years old a syndicate purchased one of Franklin’s daily strips. He hurried home to surprise Cora with the news, but found her pacing irritably. Dr. Stanton had just left; Stella was trembling and her temperature had risen to 105. In the next two days, as Stella’s life seemed to hang in the balance, and Cora, who needed her sleep, grew more and more irritable, Franklin remembered the picture of Jehovah on the cover of his child’s illustrated Bible, and prayed to the bearded man in the robe to save his daughter. The fever lessened, Dr. Stanton said Stella had croup; and as the days passed and life returned to normal, Franklin never found the right moment to announce his news to Cora. One night after Stella was in bed he told Cora in an offhand way that one of his strips had been syndicated. “I’m glad for you, Franklin,” she said, “but you know I never understand these things.” He waited for her to ask a question, but she said no more, not a word, and he never mentioned it again.
He was given a raise and promoted to assistant director of the art department; and one day a letter came from a New York editor, offering him the position of staff artist in the art department of the New York World Citizen at a startling salary.
Cora greeted the news coldly, with quivering nostrils. She said she could no more think of moving to New York City than she could think of moving to the dark side of the moon. Franklin dropped the matter but lay awake at night wondering if he was to spend the rest of his life living four blocks from his distinguished and slightly disapproving father-in-law. He knew the offer was a good one; it would permit him to cut back on editorial cartooning and devote his energy to the daily strips that had begun to attract national attention — and quite apart from all that was the sense of a challenge, an invitation to adventure that he felt it would be harmful to ignore. The idea of moving excited him: New York was the center of the newspaper world. But more than that, he wanted Cora to choose him decisively; after three years of marriage she still half lived in her childhood home.
When, a week later, Franklin announced that he had accepted the job, Cora drew back as if he had struck her in the face. Then she turned on her heel, marched into Stella’s room, picked up the sleeping child, and carried her out of the house. Franklin went to his desk and thrust a letter into his pocket before following Cora to her father’s house, where he found her weeping in her old room. Downstairs he showed the judge the letter from New York. The judge promised to speak to his daughter; Franklin had known he would recognize a good offer if he saw one.
At the train station Franklin was thrilled by the names of cities on the board above the grated windows of the ticket sellers, the bustle of porters, the squeak of luggage, the rows of high windows in the passenger cars, the big iron wheels of the engine rising higher than Stella’s head; but when he looked at Cora in her red velvet hat with the black osprey feather, flinching at the sound of grating steel and hissing steam, and gazing about as if she were looking for someone she had lost, he longed to throw himself at her feet and beg forgiveness for the squeaking bags, the shine of sweat on the cheeks of the Negro porter, the little girl in a kerchief, crying on a brown wooden bench, the sides of the passenger cars rising up like the flanks of a bull.
At first they rented an apartment in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, on a shady street lined with maples and sycamores. Franklin walked to the city each morning over the promenade of the noble bridge with its churchlike double arches that seemed to rise higher than skyscrapers, its four suspension cables sweeping up into the sky, its rumble of electric trolleys and elevated trains, its secret evocation of the old bridge over the Ohio. It deeply pleased him that both bridges had been designed by the same engineer, as if his choice had obeyed a hidden design. On Sundays he went for walks with Stella around his new neighborhood, showing her street signs that bore the names of fruits — Pineapple Street, Orange Street, Cranberry Street — and pointing to brilliant glimpses of the river at the sunny ends of shady streets. Sometimes he sat with Cora and Stella on a slatted bench under a tree at the end of Montague Street and pointed at the giant bridge rising over the mansard tower of the old ferry house, at the barges and tugboats passing on the river, at the wharves and shipping factories and tall buildings rising on the other shore. Then he told Stella about his other life, when he sat on a bench in Kentucky and looked across the river at the Cincinnati waterfront. But Cora seemed confused by the new streets, the strange buildings rising across the river, the sound of foghorns at night and of doors shutting in other apartments. Often he would come home from work to find her sitting pensively in her mahogany rocking chair with the lion’s head finials, staring through the bow window at the street below; and one day, hearing by chance of a house in a village north of the city, one hour by train from Grand Central Station, he asked Cora whether she would like to move to Mount Hebron. At first sight of the many-gabled old house with the two towering sugar maples flanking the front path, set halfway up the slope of the village on the river, Cora placed a hand on Franklin’s forearm and, with the wind blowing back her hair, tightened her grip as if she were climbing a stairway. The house on the hill was a little more than Franklin could readily afford, and a part-time housekeeper proved to be an absolute necessity, but seated in his tower study two floors above the front porch, separated from the ordinary life of the house but feeling that he drew secret strength from the floors below, Franklin worked far into the night, unable to sleep through sheer exhilaration. He had begun work on two new strips that were as unlike each other as possible, and these experiments had led directly to his recent adventure with rice paper.