Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life Part 3

Mac smiled and waved a hand in deprecation. "I feel like a drowned duckling. I just want to go upstairs and get out of these clothes and warmed up. Maybe I'll come down after that. But I've got to warn you, Charlie, I'm pretty tired. I'll probably just write a letter to Maude and go to bed. Tell you what, why don't you give me a pull on your bottle to fight off the chill?"

He gagged at the taste and noticed that the bottles lined up and waiting were all moonshine. They'd drunk the town dry of the good stuff.

Up in the room, Mac worked quickly. He packed all his art gear together, wrapping it tightly in the oil skin bag that was part of his standard equipment. Then he shoved his cot up against the far window.

He bundled the bed clothes loosely and draped them slightly over the edge of the pillow. He turned out the lamp and opened the door to the room slowly, studying the way the wedge of light from the hall played across the tableau he'd constructed. A few minor adjustments to the bedding and he was satisfied. It should easily fool a more than half-drunk Charlie that Mac was curled up on the cot fast asleep. His efforts were just precaution: from past experiences with Charlie, he'd bet the man would barely make it to the bed before pa.s.sing out.

Mac loaded himself up with the oilskin bag and his smaller suitcase. He stood for a moment in the shadows at the top of the stairs to be sure that the boys were all still roaring away down in the lobby, then sidled silently down and let himself out the back door. He was glad now that Charlie had shaken him down for his share of the room payment when he'd first arrived.

He grinned to himself. It would take a while, but he knew eventually Charlie would forgive him. What was it that kid juggler had said? One does what one must to survive Mac hunkered down in the caboose. He'd spread out his overcoat to dry, but he was more miserable from impatience than the cold. Under the swaying erratic light of a kerosene lantern he twitched under the amused glances of the brakeman and the guard. They'd been happy to split the cost of a pa.s.senger ticket between them. It was only fifteen miles to Nelsonville, but the train inched along, the smell of the cattle wafting back over them.

The leg to Jackson was longer and slower. At one point the train stopped. Mac looked up at the brakeman.

"Probably water on the tracks," the railroader said.

Mac's heart sank. Then the train lurched and began crawling forward. Mac's heart followed suit. "Let's have a look," the guard said, taking the lantern down from its hook. The three of them stood at the back of the car as he swung the lamp over the tracks. On one side a stream, black as spilled ink, rose to lap at the very edge of the railroad bed. It threatened with the ominousness of dark, silent, secret theft.

In Jackson Mac found both the telegraph lines and the main track to Cincinnati clear. While the livestock was unloaded Mac wired ahead to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune's night desk. Hold column s.p.a.ce for text and pictures afternoon edition. Scoop on lynching. "What time is it?" he asked the stationmaster.

"Twelve fifteen precisely," the man replied after pulling a watch from his waistcoat and consulting it. It had taken four hours to travel forty miles.

"When will the next train make it to Cincinnati?" Mac asked.

"Can't say for sure. If the tracks stay clear, sometime early in the morning."

Will try to wire arrival time further along route. Mac finished his message.

He continued onward as "freight." There were no pa.s.senger cars running this late. At least the pace was up, the train now clicking along in time to Mac's twitching.

Just before four they stopped to take on fuel and water. "Peebles Station," the brakeman informed Mac. The name tickled at Mac's memory. That's right a" Charlie had said there was a Serpent Mound near here. And there was something else. What?

"Anyone here who could run off a telegram for me?"

"Night clerk could. He's resting on a cot in the back. I'll fetch him."

Mac paced while he waited. The night clerk wasn't the only one napping. A single stranded pa.s.senger curled up miserably on one of the hard wooden benches, his back to Mac. A battered portmanteau stood guard before him. Mac, who never forgot anything once seen, remembered it.

He shook the traveller's shoulder gently. "Whitey? What are you doing here? Where's the rest of the troupe?"

The boy woke fast, in the manner of one used to having to sleep and run. He sat up, spine-straight, and stared at Mac. "Zenas Winsor McCay, as I live and breathe. The penman of most prodigious talent. How felicitous to run into you here." He patted the bench beside him as if he were inviting Mac to take comfort in the most sumptuous of parlors. "Have a seat, my good man. You have the look of one who has been travelling long and hard," he rasped.

"I have been," Mac said. "I'm scooping a story." He filled Whitey in briefly, studying the boy as he did so. In spite of his habitual bravado the young juggler's face looked drawn. His voice sounded even more ruined, if that was possible. He held himself tightly, but every once and a while a shiver escaped him.

"I'd never have guessed from your mild, honest demeanor that you could contrive to such elegant duplicity," the youth said on the completion of Mac's story. The admiring gleam in Whitey's eye indicated that Mac had risen a notch further in his estimation. Just then the night clerk emerged from the back, grumpy and groggy. Mac excused himself to Whitey and sent off another telegram. Will arrive Cincinnati station 7:30 a.m. Have cab waiting. Have plates prepared and ready. He'd get in hours too late for the morning edition. But by the time his hungover colleagues woke up back in Logan his story would be well on its way to being printed up for the afternoon edition, and a terse, brief version would have been wired to the national syndicates.

He returned to the juggler. "Whitey, my train leaves in five minutes. So quick, tell me what the h.e.l.l you're doing here."

The youth sighed. "As I prophesied, our blackguard of a manager deserted us, absconding with all the funds. Not as any honest malefactor would, in urban plent.i.tude where we might find sufficient interim employment to make our way back to New York, but instead yesterday evening in Fincastle, a hamlet even smaller than this one."

"What are you going to do? Are you heading back to New York?"

"No. I can't keep doing this. The last time a tour I was working on was abandoned, in Wheeling, I rode the rods. The boxcar I was in was open. We hit a flooded spot and I got soaked. I almost froze to death. As it was, my hands got stuck to the metal siding. At the next stop some kind yardmen pried me loose and thawed me out." He looked at his scarred fingers. "It ruined my hands for months. I thought I'd never be able to juggle again.

"No, this is the termination of my career. I'm tired of being hungry and cold and robbed and prevaricated to. Somehow I'll make my way back to Philadelphia, probably go back to the poolhall." His despair was so complete that Mac, teetering on the brink of success, felt ashamed of his own high spirits.

"How much money do you have?" Mac asked.

"Eight dollars," muttered Whitey.

"After buying your ticket?"

"The ticket I'm traveling on now takes me as far as Jackson."

"Whitey, eight dollars isn't going to get you to Philadelphia. The ticket has to cost more than that."

"Costs twelve," the boy mumbled.

"What are you going to do?"

"Well, I guess I'm stuck. I'll see if the weather turns warmer in a day or two and then hitch a ride on the rails." The boy's eyes were full of dread.

The brakeman appeared in the doorway. He nodded his head at Mac and jerked his head toward the train.

Mac thought for a second. After all the graft and extra expenses in Logan he didn't have much cash left. But he didn't really need any. He was paid through to Cincinnati, where he'd be met by a cab hired by his office. And his office would send out for coffee and a full breakfast to keep him happy while he rushed his story and drawings to press.

He pulled out his wallet and gave Whitey a ten-dollar bill. "Don't ride the rails."

Whitey turned away, opened his bag and scuffled through it. Mac realized that he was trying not to cry and trying to hide it. Any doubts Mac might have had that the boy was exaggerating his plight and trying to swindle him evaporated.

The juggler finally turned to him, his eight dollars in his hand. He separated six dollars out and handed them to Mac. "That's the change I can give you now. I'll mail the other four dollars to you when I can."

Mac folded the money back into Whitey's hand. "Keep it. It's a long ride to Philadelphia, or back to New York, which is where I hope you'll go. You'll need to eat and to rent a room when you get there. Pay me back whenever you can."

This was finally too much for the boy. As Mac walked out of the station behind the brakeman he looked back to see the young juggler huddled on the bench, crying, all bravado gone.

A few miles past Peebles Mac saw Charlie's Serpent Mound. The storm clouds had cleared somewhat, allowing the almost full moon to escape. Its light struck and reflected off the water-glazed landscape with washes of gleaming silver so bright they hurt Mac's eyes. The mountainside the barrow had been erected on tilted toward Mac so that he could see the pattern of the undulating earthen snake clearly.

It was enormous. Compared to it Logan's hill-sized turtle mound was a child's terrapin.

After Charlie's discourse Mac would have expected it to appear hoop-like like Ouroborous, or consist of a simple spiral coil. Instead it formed an intricate, elegant knot. The logic of the interweavings of its complex folds was impenetrable. It appeared to shift before Mac's eyes as his perspective changed with the movement of the train. Nonetheless, from every angle the beautifully sculpted head emerged from the middle of the coils to grasp its own tail firmly in its mouth. And from every angle it seemed to be watching Mac.

Mac turned to draw the two railroad men's attention to the landmark. The brakeman was asleep and the guard must have climbed forward to the engine, so Mac had the grace of that moment all to himself.

As an artist he felt humbled. What were his petty scratchings compared to the artistry of the vanished Indians? They had moved thousands of tons of rock and dirt and produced a masterpiece that would last thousands of years.

Mac remembered what Charlie had said about the region of the Turtle mound a" that it was a peaceful, prosperous, slow, long life area. He could easily imagine the placid calm tribes who had constructed that barrow.

What about the Indians here? What would the people have been like who could have thought up and executed such a monstrous miracle of tangled beauty? Mac shivered, and the great viper suddenly seemed sinister in its transformative splendor. Those who made it would have known too many secrets, would have had too much power. Mac imagined a nation of shape-shifters and skin-shedders. Like hypnotized prey he could not drop his gaze from it until it pa.s.sed from view behind the back of the train.

It did take Charlie several years to forgive Mac. But when he did, he did so fully, admitting he was jealous that he hadn't been alert enough to figure out that there was an alternate train route himself.

By that time much had changed in Mac's life. He had returned to Cincinnati not only with a journalistic feather in his cap, but to find that Maude had gone into labor. She bore him a son, Robert, a magical child with Maude's shining, black, swirling hair and innocently sensual features.

In 1989 Mac's exhausted and aging parents gave up the struggle of caring for Mac's brother Arthur and inst.i.tutionalized him in the Traverse City State Hospital. Mac was finally able to bring his small but expanding family a" Maude was pregnant with their second child, who would prove to be a girl a" home to visit at last. Over the next few years, before his father died, Mac had the pleasure of seeing his parents' faces light at last to pure and unclouded children's laughter.

Mac continued to make a good living at the newspaper ill.u.s.tration business. He went everywhere; ill.u.s.trating fires, covering sporting events and accidents, caricaturing politicians, drawing advertis.e.m.e.nts and small cartoons. At the turn of the century he was lured away from the Tribune by The Cincinnati Enquirer.

He had been working there several months, settling in nicely, when he received an envelope forwarded to him from his old job. He opened it up to find two creased worn ten dollar bills and knew instantly who had sent them. There was no letter accompanying the money, nor a return address. But when Mac examined the envelope he found that it bore a Philadelphia, not New York, postmark, and that the bills, when he tucked them into his billfold, had a slightly chalky feel to them.

Mac felt overwhelmed with sadness. After all of Whitey's hard work and sacrifices for his art, it seemed such a small thing to ask for a" to sleep on clean sheets every night. It was cruel of life not to grant that modest wish.

It was at about this time that Mac's own wishes began to come true. He had already been allowed to draw a series of caricatured, battling vegetables to ill.u.s.trate the poems of Jack Appleton. Now he at last realized his dream of a full-color Sunday page comic: Tales of the Jungle Imps.

In 1903 Mac, ever prepared to be lured to greener, more lucrative pastures, allowed himself to be wooed and won by the New York Times and Evening Telegram, even though he loved and would miss Cincinnati. It was just as well. Maude, as she matured into full womanhood, had also matured into the sort of individual who believed that money was no object in the pursuit of a comfortable and luxurious life. In this, as in all things, they were well matched. Mac was equally extravagant.

In 1904 they celebrated the commencement of Mac's first continuous strip, Mr. Goodenough, by moving to a fine home in Sheepshead Bay out on Long Island. Mac identified strongly with his cartoon character: Mr. Goodenough, a millionaire, continually desired a more active, adventurous life. This always led, panel by panel, to discomfort, peril and injury. In the last panel Mr. Goodenough gratefully returned to his safe, propserous and sedentary existence.

Other strips followed: Hungry Henrietta, Sammy Sneeze, Pilgrim's Progress, and, most notably, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. This last strip portrayed hideous, fantastical situations which were resolved in the last panel with the individual portrayed waking up to find it had all been a nightmare.

Since his brother's inst.i.tutionalization Mac hadn't allowed himself to think about Arthur. Now these images of terror, persecution, and pain flowed helplessly from Mac's pen, as if from some compressed source finally erupting from subterranean origins; a creative spring that smelled of spent sulphur, cold fire, musty porridge, the stale hard sheets of sanitariums. Fearful that Arthur was somehow trying to make contact and emerge, Mac let the drawings come, hoping that this regurgitation of anguish and fear would serve as sufficient release.

To Mac's great surprise the strip hit a deep chord with the audience at large and was immensely popular. This caused Mac to wonder if Arthur had slipped all that far over the border delineating the realms of sanity and madness. Either that, or the rest of the world itself was pushing close to the edge of that boundary. If that was true, Mac thought with a shudder, what might happen as the world embarked into the twentieth century?

In 1905 Mac thought of a way to offer a gentle counterbalance to the Rarebit Fiend's nightmares and the comic strip Little Nemo was born. In this strip a young boy, Little Nemo a" who Mac modeled after his son Robert a" upon falling asleep each night is whisked away to the fabulous and beautiful Slumberland.

Exactly the opposite of the Rarebit Fiend, the greatest nightmare in Little Nemo is the child's falling out of bed each morning and waking into everyday reality, with the attendant loss of Slumberland. Upon creating Little Nemo Mac felt an easing of pressure, a welcome serenity. He wondered if Arthur had calmed and was resting more peacefully in his dim, constrained, controlled existence.

Arthur was not the only person besieging Mac's thoughts. He thought often of Whitey, although this was a gentler haunting. He wished he had been able to do more for the boy. In March 1906 he introduced the character of the bad boy Flip into Slumberland.

As if he were a caveman painting bison and deer on stone walls, forcing the desired result into existence through sympathetic magic, Mac used an image of Whitey for the form of Flip. He gave Flip a lumpy reddened nose. Remembering Whitey's stated fondness for cigars, Mac perpetually balanced one on Flip's lips. Instead of Whitey's battered bowler and shabby clothes, Flip wore a fine coat, vest and top hat. Whitey had been gaunt with hunger. Flip, no matter what his misadventures in Slumberland, was always satisfyingly plump.

And Flip had plenty of misadventures. He was always causing and getting into trouble. Yet over the course of the strip his lot improved. The kindhearted Nemo always forgave his trespa.s.ses and rescued him from his difficulties, sympathizing with Flip's hard life. Flip eventually changed from the poor outsider and Nemo's adversary to privileged insider and Nemo's friend. Every time Mac drew Flip he wondered if in some anonymous poolhall in Philadelphia a blond young man was feeling luck rub off on him.

1906 marked another landmark in Mac's life. In June he became a performer. F. F. Proctor of vaudeville fame had pursued him avidly, wanting Mac to moonlight for him on vaudeville tours doing blackboard sketches. "Chalk-talk" artists had been a popular entertainment since Victorian times. The only flaw marring Mac's pleasure in his new avocation was that in this, as in everything else, his old rival Outcault had preceded him.

The evening before his first performance Mac sat nervously in his backstage dressing room. The room would have been tiny by any one else's standards, but it fit Mac's small form like a custom tailored suit. His makeup was already applied, so that he resembled, just a little, a ventriloquist's dummy.

Mac whiled away the time before his curtain call sketching on one of his Little Nemo deadlines. Mac thought about Whitey as he drew. The young juggler had worked his way up from dime museums and city circuses to burlesque. This is where he should have ended up, not in some dusty billiard parlor in Philadelphia. Mac set the Little Nemo sketches aside and began to draw a very different scene, scribbling with furious intent, as if he could indeed invest the art with life.

In June of 1906 in a small vaudeville dressing room a "chalk talk" artist waits nervously for the curtain call which will summon him to his very first performance. He's unable to control his twitching. He feels his much-needed energy leaching away, though he knows he isn't scheduled for at least another half hour.

There is a knock at the door and he jumps in fright. "Come in," he quavers and is terrified at the weakness in his voice. How ever will he speak before the vast audience filling the theater?

The door opens and it is not the cue boy who looks in, but a dapper young man in his mid-twenties. "Aaah yaas, my good fellow. Allow me to introduce myself to you, esteemed colleague in the arts of diversion and entertainment," the young man growls around a Havana cigar clenched between his teeth as he strides into the room. "I am William Duke, most royal of jugglers."

And royal he indeed appears, in an impeccable silver gray morning coat and brocade vest. His pale blond hair is slicked back in tonsorial splendor and his corrugated voice and rough-hewn nose give him an unusual air of distinction. An ebony cane with a rosewood head carved in the shape of a coiled serpent is tucked jauntily under his arm.

"I appear on the billing just before you. I understand this is the occasion of your first public appearance in the illusory arts. I thought it would be ungentlemanly of me not to drop by and inquire after your comfort."

The artist leaps to his feet. "I'm Zenas Winsor McCay. Thanks for coming by." He thrusts out his hand and watches in detached horror as it trembles there before him fitfully as a dying fish.

"McCay, eh?" the resplendent juggler muses, looking critically at Mac's palsied hand before grasping it firmly with his own. Then he draws a silver flask from an inner pocket of the evening coat. "A certain hypersensitivity of the nervous system is to be expected before a first performance. I believe what is called for here is a little scotch for my little Scotch friend."

Mac takes a long draught from the flask, pulling the smoky liquid deep inside, where its heat gently spreads out to his fingers, relaxing them. "Thank you. That's much better."

The juggler winks, then takes a swig himself.

"But what you said before . . . I'm just a drawing-type artist, not an illusory artist. I'm not a magician," Mac explains humbly.

William Duke waves his cigar in an airy gesture. "It's all the same thing, my good man a" drawing, juggling, magicking. Does not the term 'ill.u.s.trate' share a close linguistic ancestor with the word 'illusion'?

"One of the great nearly ungraspable Truths is the realization of to how great a degree Reality is a pliable, malleable thing. Our skill and our task a" nay, our duty! no matter what our chosen medium a" is to pique and tease the audience's perceptions; to compel them to always chase along behind us until the boundaries between illusion and reality blur. Until those boundaries fuse and merge and in a brief, elusive instant of blinding insight they experience the realization that dream is truer and more concrete than reality, and reality no more substantial than smoke."

At this the debonair juggler takes his cigar out of his mouth and blows out a circle of smoke to ill.u.s.trate his point. The circle winds and coils and changes, becoming snakier, becoming a snake, until it perfectly resembles the head of William Duke's cane. At the same time the cane becomes transparent and insubstantial.

Mac's mouth gapes open. William Duke winks. The snake grasps its tail in its mouth and spins slow hoops through the air.

"Now pay attention, my little Scotch friend. This is very important. It's done like this: first you . . ."

There was a loud knocking at the door; Mac's reverie was broken. A young boy peeked around the edge of the door. "Your cue, Mr. McCay. Five minutes to showtime."

"Thank you. I'll be out right away."

Mac stared down at his drawings. What would he have done next? What wonderful tricks could he have drawn for Whitey to perform? He put the sketches away regretfully. Perhaps he would get back to them another time, when he'd caught up with his deadlines.

Mac's "chalk-talk" performance was called The Seven Ages of Man. An enormous blackboard had been set up. The chalk and erasers were waiting. Mac introduced himself and with no further ado began. He drew first the heads of two babies, a boy and a girl, facing each other. Then he rapidly erased lines and redrew, subtly aging them, telling the stories of their lives, till he had taken them all the way from infancy to death. In the background the orchestra softly played that old favorite tune, "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life."

The act was an enormous success. Over a period of several years Mac performed it at all the great vaudeville houses in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Toledo, Boston, and even Philadelphia. He loved vaudeville and found that he loved performing.

Yet it was only on that very first night when he first drew the little boy and girl that he felt as if he truly controlled their fates, that their destination was completely in his hands and at the service of his imagination.

Mac's life kept climbing. In 1908 a musical comedy, Little Nemo, based on the strip, opened to great acclaim on Broadway.

Mac continued with new strips, continued drawing political cartoons for the editorial page, and entered into what he believed to be the culminating medium of his career a" animation. And not just animated cartoon strips (Outcault had beaten him into this territory, too), but that which was uniquely Mac's own a" the first true interfacing between the drawn, animated universe and reality.

Mac invented a lovely animated dinosaur a" Gertie the Brontosaurus.

He did not draw her and then send her off on a reel of film on her own into the world. Instead, he accompanied her on tour. When Gertie was hungry, Mac was waiting at the front of the bright-lit screen with an apple in hand. Which, to the audience's amazement and delight, she took. At the end of the performance Mac would realize his most secret desire a" to enter into the world of his drawings. He stepped behind the screen and then reappeared within it. He mounted up, and off he and Gertie rode. Mac knew that he had moved even closer to mastering the fusion between illusion and reality.

The last part of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth witnessed an unprecedented wave of immigration into the United States. And for the first time, the majority of the immigrants were desperately poor and semi-literate at best. Brilliant as Mac was, his rising star had as much to do with the newspaper magnates' use of ill.u.s.trations and cartoons as key weapons in the battle to attract an unlettered clientele as with his talent.

In June, 1911, William Randolph Hearst stretched forth his mephistophelean arm to beckon Mac with that which the artist had never been able to refuse: a more prestigious job at better pay. Faust-like, Mac took it.

For a few years Little Nemo continued and Mac was allowed to develop new strips. But Hearst had a very different agenda for his star ill.u.s.trator than the one Mac had set for himself. He wanted Mac to focus on editorial and political cartoons. He discouraged Mac's creative efforts, pulling out his contract to prevent the artist from wandering, thus curtailing and finally stopping Mac's vaudeville touring. The strips became fewer and fewer. Hearst piled on the workload so that it became more and more difficult for Mac, tieless as he was, to find the hours necessary to develop his animation. The final blow came when Hearst put Mac under the yoke of the humorless and caustic editor Arthur Brisbane.

This was a battle for Mac's very soul. He fought back desperately but clandestinely. Comic strips drawn "in the manner of Winsor McCay" started to appear in backwater newspapers. Their artists' names were Silas, Hieronymous Oglethorpe, Dr. Otis Guelpe, Harry McSneed. Generally they were short-lived, lasting only a few months, too brief a time for Hearst to notice and investigate them.

One, however, lasted for years. It was published in an obscure Cincinnati periodical that had been taken over by one of Mac's old friends from the Commercial Tribune. Like the gracious queen she was, Cincinnati seemed to protect this small artwork from Hearst's jealous, proprietary eyes. The strip portrayed the story of a poor but talented juggler Over the years Mac had continued to think about Whitey a" to wonder what had happened to him, to wonder what Whitey's life would have, could have been like with a bit more good fortune.