After dinner, on the dark front porch lit only by the yellow glow of the shade-drawn parlor windows, Max and Franklin and Cora sat talking and drinking lemonade. The porch looked down across the lawn to the looming dark maples, the yellow squares of windows seen through a trembling blackness of leaves, and the wavering lines of light on the black river. Max, opening a slender tin box and removing a cheroot wrapped in crinkly pale-blue tissue paper, said he was no drinker, but he objected to the anti-booze amendment on principle: it was an effort by politicians to prolong the childhood of Americans. Besides, it would never work — anyone could buy medicinal whiskey at the local drugstore with a doctor’s prescription. Franklin looked over at Cora, and after a while he went down to the cellar and brought back one of the six bottles of wine they had kept on hand since the amendment had passed. “Ah, you gay dog, you,” Max said, and blew a stream of perfect little smoke rings the size of half dollars; and as Franklin poured the wine into the lemonade glasses he felt a gaiety come over things. The festive wine, the warm summer night, the sense of sharing in a secret violation — it was all peaceful and exhilarating, like riding home at night in the buckboard after long Sunday picnics on the river. Cora, who had been laughing at one of Max’s stories so that she had to wipe one eye with the back of her fingers, grew suddenly serious and began to speak about her girlhood in Cincinnati: ice-skating on the pond in Eden Park in late afternoons as the yellow sky turned darker and darker, the rows of long icicles hanging from porch eaves, wax angels with glass wings on the Christmas tree and real candles burning on the branches — and when Max asked if it was always winter in Ohio, she looked up in confusion, as if she had sunk into a winter dream, and spoke of long summer evenings composed of two sounds: the notes of mazurkas and nocturnes coming through the open window onto the darkening lawn as her mother sat at the piano after dinner, and the deeply satisfying sound of a jar-top coming down on a jar as another lightning bug was snatched out of the dark. Then she told Max how, when they’d first arrived in Brooklyn Heights, the thing that most made her feel she was in a foreign place was the way people spoke of standing on line, instead of in line; and people had smiled at each other when she said things like “Golly Moses.” Later, when Cora stood up to go to the kitchen, she walked into the arm of the porch glider; and she let the wooden screen door bang loudly when she stepped inside.
When Cora returned, holding a tray of cheese and crackers, she bumped open the screen door with her hip. The slight immodesty of her suddenly outthrust hip, the momentary awkwardness of her body, the lamplight from the front hall around her darkening form as she stepped onto the porch, all this excited Franklin and made him impatient for Max to go up to bed, or dissolve into mist, but he kept sitting there and sitting there; and after midnight, when they had all moved into the parlor, Cora at last rose with a look of weariness and said decisively: “Now I want you and Max to stay up and talk, you hear?”
Franklin, who had begun to rise, looked for a sign from Cora, who had already turned away. A warm, drowsy feeling came over him, as if he had not slept for a long time. “I’ll be up in a few minutes,” he said, sinking into the soft armchair; and the yellow lamp shade, the cry of the crickets, the shadowy wallpaper with its trellises of pink roses, his friend sitting in a chair with one leg hooked over the arm, all seemed part of some drowsy, peaceful mystery he was on the verge of understanding. He looked at Max and felt an odd burst of gratitude that he should be sitting there, far from the city, in the dead of night, and all at once he began telling Max about his father’s grave voice in the darkroom, the pictures emerging mysteriously from the paper in the developer tray. He spoke of the dime museum, the strangeness and odd comfort of it, and about the advertising posters and how it was all somehow connected with the magic of the darkroom. Suddenly Franklin felt a wild thrill of exhilaration, mixed with fear, and standing up he said, “I want to show you something.”
The two stairways, each with its landing, seemed much too long, as if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere, but when he pushed open a door he saw the familiar study, the jar of penholders on the desk, the glass-cased clock. Max bent intently over the rice-paper drawings and asked precise questions. Franklin then showed him a little invention that he had modeled after a penny-arcade mutoscope: a metal cylinder, turned by a crank, was fitted with slots that held the cardboard-backed drawings. When you turned the crank, the drum of drawings turned. A metal rod was attached in such a way that each drawing struck it and was held for an instant before being released. And in the viewer the pictures moved — at first too quickly before he found the right rhythm of cranking, then flickeringly, waveringly, but unmistakably. In a hall of the dime museum the knife-thrower with his cape and mustache was lifting the little girl with the big, frightened eyes from the circle of spectators. The words HELP!! HELP!! appeared on a title card. Franklin invited Max to look through the viewer, and as he continued turning he saw the pictures moving in his mind: the knife-thrower tied the struggling child to a wheel and with a single sharp finger set the wheel spinning. Reaching back for a row of knives he began flinging them at the blurred wheel as Franklin stopped turning.
“Golly Moses,” Max said, shaking his head admiringly as he took the crank and continued to turn.
“That wheel cost me a month of work,” Franklin said.
Max looked sharply at him. “You realize you’re out of your mind, don’t you? A raving madman in a padded cell. You do know that, don’t you? You do all the drawings yourself? I know a man who—”
“I’d rather be out of my mind than in my mind,” Franklin said, and felt suddenly tired and immensely unhappy and exhilarated all at the same time. If he spent four hours a night six nights a week he ought to be able to finish the drawings by late fall or perhaps December at the latest, assuming that his comic strips didn’t spill over into the evenings, which they often did. The animated cartoon was about to enter a new sequence, in a new hall of the dime museum, where the tattoos on the tattooed man came to life and danced a wild dance around the terrified girl, and he would need all his powers of concentration to get the motions exactly right. “You see,” he said to Max, who for some reason had climbed onto the desk and then onto the top of the door frame, where he sat crouched like a gnome as dark wings grew from his shoulders; and opening his eyes Franklin could not understand the bright dawnlight pouring through the windows of his bedroom, while somewhere far away a cup was rattling on a dish.
“I understand that the motions have to be exactly right,” Max was saying a few days later in the faded armchair in Franklin’s office. “You’ll grant I’m not precisely an idiot. I’m arguing that you can get them exactly right and also save a devil of a lot of time. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life working on a four-minute cartoon, do you? Or do you? This new process—”