They stared at the painting for a while. Samuel looked at the technique, thinking the old man really was a good painter, the old man looked at the son he never had.
"Hey," Lyman said, "I think I've got a box of colored pencils I can spare. The things are fifty years old, but it's not like colored pencils dry out."
"But, sir, I can't afford to pay for them."
"Don't worry about it. You're a trained artist. I can tell from what you were trying to do with the watercolors. When I finish the current canvas, you can help me stretch another. I've never had to do that.
"There isn't an art supply store in town. So I'll have to stretch the next one myself. And, when I run out of oils, you can teach me how to make them. But take my advice. If you are going to work with a sketch pad, then do what it says and sketch. Otherwise, go back to canvas and oils."
"What I want to do is animation like what was on the TV the other night."
The old man snorted dismissively, "Son, that ain't art. That's just commercial doodling. Why would a real artist want to waste his time doing something like that?"
"Sir, it does what painters have been wanting to do for centuries. It makes paintings come alive."
"I won't say it ain't true," Lyman admitted. "But, it's still not real art."
****
A week or so later, Lyman stopped by the table where Melle had just sat down. Samuel was working on a five-by-eight file card with the colored pencils. There was an open pack to his left and a short stack to his right. Melle was going through the short stack which, at a glance, seemed to be all the same.
"Why, Safwyl, they're all me, and ain't I dressed grand?"
Lyman took a look. His first thought was that the boy had drawn his dead wife, except it wasn't her. She had never owned that much jewelry. On top of that, the ruffled blouse was more like the top half of a down-time dress than anything worn in the twentieth century. Yes, the long, luscious hair, and clear skin, could be Melle's. Lyman chuckled and figured the only reason Samuel hadn't "enhanced" her teeth and breasts as well was because the picture wasn't smiling and Melle needed no help filling out her uniform.
"Why are they all the same?" Melle asked.
He put the pencil down and took the drawings out of her hands. After squaring them up he flipped through them causing her head in the painting to start to turn.
"The research I did at the library said it's called a flip book. It shows movement."
"You mean like the little wizard mouse."
"Exactly."
"Oh," she said.
"Melle," the bartender called out. "Quit bothering the customers and get back to work." Waiting tables was Melle's second job. Making ends meet in Grantville was not easy. But then, making ends meet anywhere was not easy. Yet leaving Grantville was scary, more so for some than others, especially when you didn't have anywhere to go or any way of making a living when you got there.
Lyman looked at the cards. "Are you going to make a peep show machine?"
"What's that?"
"When I was a boy, some of them were still around. There was a slot to look through, a peep hole, and inside were a stack of pictures, each one just a little different from the next. You put a nickel in and turned a crank and watched the show, like a silent movie. It was usually a woman. She was usually getting undressed."
Samuel blushed as only a redhead can. He glanced at Melle across the room.
Lyman changed the subject.
"Melle thinks it's her. Is it?" Lyman asked.
"Well, sort of. I guess. She was here working when I started the first one, but I was more interested in getting the movement right than I was in capturing a particular person."
Lyman took note of how deeply the boy blushed and jumped to a conclusion which was fully justified by his West Virginian way of thinking. "If it's even just sort of her, you could have done a better job of it."
****
The flipbook of the woman turning her head took half of the stack of file cards and it was near the end of October before Samuel had them done and sewn together into a book. But he was not at all happy with the results. There was something absolutely wrong about the way she moved. One young up-timer who saw it made the comment, "Cool, but why did you make such a good-looking zombie?"
Samuel showed it to the art teacher at the high school and asked, "What did I do wrong?
She flipped it, looked at a few cards, and flipped it a few more times before saying, "Huh . . . short answer? I'm not really sure what you did wrong."
She shrugged. "I know animation up-time is always cartoony-looking. Maybe you just discovered the reason why."
Samuel groaned and slumped down on the desk. The teacher laughed and said "Don't worry. There is sure to be a how-to book around here somewhere."
She went to a shelf where she kept her private reference books. "Yeah, here it is." She handed him a copy of The Illusion of Life. "You're welcome to look at it here on Wednesday evenings. I open the room up at seven for a self-help support group. It's strictly by invitation and it's limited to serious artists only." She opened the flip book and looked at one of the drawings. "That's you."
When she shut the group down around nine or ten, more often than not some of them would end up in a bar for a beer or two. It wasn't until the third meeting that she was comfortable enough with Samuel to let him take the book home.
A bar in Grantville, late 1631
The old man walked up to the red-headed couple and waited for them to notice him. After a while he cleared his throat.
"I don't mean to intrude on your courtship, but if I buy a round can I join you if I promise to leave when it's done?" Lyman asked.
"Um . . . sure," Samuel replied.
"What did he say? I do not know all those words." For some people languages come easily. Melle was not one of them. She was still learning English. Samuel told her and she started laughing.
"Why are you laughing?" Lyman asked.
"Because, you are funny," Melle answered. "He is not old enough. And he can not support a family. When he does marry, it will be someone with dowry and connections, not a penniless camp whore."
With Melle's self-deprecation, Lyman's joke turned to ashes in his mouth.
"Sam, I want to hire you. I've decided to start selling off my art collection."
"Why would you do that!?" a startled Samuel blurted. "You've been collecting those paintings your whole life. Why get rid of them now?"
"Because son, whoever dies with the most toys is still dead. This way I can make sure they go to people who appreciate them." Lyman paused to take a swallow of beer. "And the money won't hurt, I plan to spend my end days living in the lap of luxury."
Melle wrinkled her forehead, "Are you dying? You don't look like sick."
Lyman laughed. "I'm eighty-three years old. I could drop dead tomorrow. It's not like I expect to, but it is gonna happen sooner or later.
"Anyway, I've rented a store front downtown for a gallery. It ain't professional to have strangers traipsing in and out of the house all day and I like my privacy.
"But I need someone else selling them since all I speak is English. I've heard you talkin' French, Italian, Spanish, German, and some others I don't recognize. Hell, you're translating for Melle right now! You know enough about art to answer any questions and you can charm a babe from its mother's teat."
At this praise, Samuel blushed and fudged his translation slightly. Melle didn't call him on it. Her English was good enough to get the important bits.
"I'll pay you a commission. And you can set up an easel and paint while waiting for customers to come in and you can hang what you paint.
"We can move the old couch and coffee table down to the gallery. It might be sixty years old but it ain't hardly ever been sat on.
"Now I can't pay you much in the way of an advance on commissions, but you can crash there on the couch until we start selling something.
"Up-time paintings ought to be worth something as a novelty, don't you think, ev
en if they ain't any of them by anyone famous.
"Do you want the job managing the gallery or not? Like I said, you can do some painting and hang your works."
Samuel stopped to think and hesitantly said, "Are you sure you want a mere apprentice running your store? After all, there are more artists coming every day."
Melle reached over and smacked him upside the head. "Idiot, take the job before he hires another."
****
Just after the 1632 calendar was hung, the gallery opened, next to a dress shop in the old downtown business district. Lyman only rented the front showroom with its giant glass window and a break room with a bathroom and lunch table. He didn't need the stock room, so the shop next door rented it for production space.
The dress shop's business was almost exclusively tourists. For genteel women coming to Grantville, a new dress always seemed to be on their must-have list. This meant the gallery got a fair amount of traffic, providing gentlemen something to do during a wife's fitting. Not to mention the flow of women stopping in after their dressmaker visit.
Up-timers who wandered in looked at the prices for up-time original art and staggered out muttering. Down-timers took it in stride. Sales were slow and when someone did buy something, they wanted letters of authenticity with witnesses, a notary, and seals. But they didn't bat an eye at the price. The paintings were all to Lyman's taste, of course, and Lyman liked traditional works, which seemed to suit the down-timers just fine.
Samuel spent a goodly amount of time working on a new flip book. When it was done he proudly showed it to Lyman.
Lyman flipped through it and nodded. It featured a ball with little round ears on the top and even smaller nubbin feet on the bottom and still smaller eyes and nose in between. The creature bounced out of the fold and hopped off of the page. "Cute," he grunted. "But the other one was better art. This is just line drawing with no color."
"There was something wrong with the way the first one moved. The book the art teacher loaned me said to start working with basic shapes to get movement down."
"Oh, that makes sense. But you still need to work on painting before you do any more doodling."
When he showed it to Melle, she chuckled. "What did you do with the one of me?"
Samuel blushed, "After I was told the way you moved made you look like a monster, I burned it."
Melle's mouth opened to take a deep breath. Samuel knew he was about to face a gale force tirade. "But he said you were a beautiful monster."
Melle's hissy fit turned into laughter. "But, Safwyl, I was dressed so grand! Couldn't you have saved me at least one of the cards?"
At that point Samuel knew what he was going to paint first. He set about making paints in the break room and then set up an easel in the showroom. The first time he stood before the canvas, pencil in hand to sketch the well-remembered pose, he stood there frozen while the off white of the canvas grew whiter and turned into a roaring glare to rival the sun. The glare, the roar, the pounding icepick in his head, caused him to drop the pencil, stagger to the door to turn the "open" sign and retreat to the windowless break room, where he turned out the light and sat in the dark.
Samuel had no idea how long he sat there before he heard Lyman's voice calling from the gallery.
"Hello? Anyone home?" Lyman frowned at the sight of Franklin's jacket hanging on the coat hook and the art supplies scattered around the easel. When he opened the break room door and saw Samuel huddled in the corner he stilled. Gently, softly, he closed the door and leaned against the far wall. "Sam? Are you okay?"
"No," Samuel growled. "My head is killing me."
"You set up your easel. What happened?"
"The canvas turned as white as the sun, it roared and then savaged me."
"I see." Lyman cocked his head and thought a moment. "I don't know if it counts as post-traumatic stress or some other problem, but you sit right here until Melle comes to fix supper. I'll hold the fort until she's due. Then tomorrow when I come, you can try and edge into painting sideways."
The next afternoon Franklin sat on the couch and, without any trouble at all, sketched Melle in her favorite fantasy dress.
Lyman looked over the boy's shoulder and objected, "That's some of your doodlings."
"Melle's upset that I burned it. I thought I'd give this to her when it's done."
"Well, you don't want the lass mad at you," Lyman agreed. "I guess it's okay, but when you finish this, we are gonna try a real canvas."
****
"Now," Lyman as he set a canvas on the easel, "don't even think about putting paint to canvas unless I'm here."
It took a while to nibble at the job while Lyman chatted and distracted and called frequent halts. But by and by, Samuel, mostly, got over it and was able to paint.
When the painting was well on its way to being done, the nightmare of losing his hand in battle came to him as he slept on the couch. But this time when the shell, still in slow motion, approached his hand, he simply moved aside and watched it pass him by without a scratch.
Finally, the canvas was finished and a delighted Melle asked, "Do I get anything when you sell it?"
Samuel blinked and tried to hide his disappointment. "I thought you'd want to keep it."
"Safwyl, it's too grand for the likes of me to keep. Just knowing that I am somewhere in the world dressed like that is enough."
For his next canvas, as per his training, he sketched what he saw. The words "Twentieth Century Art" appeared predominately in mirror writing on the canvas. An uptime neon beer sign across the wide street was the second most prominent item. When the painting was near completion a "silver buttons" rang the electric bell by opening the door.
Samuel classed his visitors by the buttons on their coats. Plastic buttons, up-timers, came, shook their heads, and left. Leather buttons looked around and left, usually without a word. Silver buttons lingered longer. They occasionally wanted to ask questions about a particular painting, but they almost never bought anything. Gold buttons talked more and they were the ones who ended up buying. The first thing the fellow did was to stop to look over Samuel's shoulder. He looked at the canvas then he looked out the window. He nodded and wandered off to make the rounds of the walls. In the end he was back at the easel. By then Lyman had wandered in for his daily chat and was looking at the work in progress, making comments.
Mr. Silver Buttons waited for a break in Lyman's critique which mostly consisted of, "You can do better than that," said in at least four different ways.
"My wife, who is next door being fitted," Silver Buttons said, "wants an impressive work of art to hang in our eingang to prove we've been to Grantville. As if a new dress at three times what the seamstress back home charges isn't enough." He sighed. "I don't see anything here which tells that tale any better than this does. It's not from up-time, but it proves we've been here." It had the added benefit of being something Mr. Silver Buttons might be able to afford.
"When will it be done and how much will you want for it?"
Samuel said, "Tomorrow or the next day," and named a substantial price for an apprentice level work.
Silver Buttons nodded. "How much more to paint my wife looking in through the window?"
Lyman named a price, also substantial.
"Sold," Silver Buttons said. "What time do you want her here to pose?"
Early the next day, Lyman brought in an easel and started painting the street scene. He left a vaguely man-shaped empty spot where he wrote the words, your portrait here. He had Samuel take something else down so he could hang it on the wall and then he immediately started another one. "It will sell, Sammy. Just you wait a few days." He was right. After that it was a rare day Lyman wasn't in the gallery, or out in the street, painting more street scenes.
Selling his current works sparked a renewed discussion on selling his earlier works.
As a satisfied customer left the gallery with his portrait, Samuel said to the old man, "Lyman, I want some of your old works
hanging on the walls here. Don't tell me they aren't good enough. And don't tell me they won't sell. People are more than willing to buy your current works. I can get as much for your twentieth-century canvases as I can for the ones you bought in New York."
The old man hunched his shoulders and stubbornly glared at the wall. "Don't need to, son. Right now we've still got plenty of paintings to sell." Samuel dropped it and resolved to argue the point again later. It didn't matter. Lyman never did bring in any of his older works. He was quite content selling portraits, and worked on them pretty much daily.
One rainy autumn day in 1632, Lyman and Samuel were painting away when a gold buttons customer with his gold-buttoned little boy came in. He'd been in earlier, alone, when Lyman alone was painting. Samuel's canvas was covered and he hadn't seen it. That day he had spent a great deal of time looking at the collection. Today he looked at the works on the easels.
"You're both painting the same thing."
Samuel pointed to an empty spot on the couch in front of the window. "See this space here? That's where you get painted in."
"James?" he asked his son, "You said you thought Grantville was fun. If I have them put you into the picture will you sit still for them?"
The boy smiled and nodded.
"Then hop up on the divan."
"But, this one is commissioned." Samuel said.
"So? You've got electric lights. Stay up nights, use his as your source and paint another one."
"I want that one and that one." He pointed at two spots on the wall. Then he pointed at the easel, "And that one."
Samuel sighed. He'd be missing his evening at the bar and his Wednesday night meetings until he was caught up. But they needed the sales.
The next day the boy grew ever more fidgety. Samuel handed him a flip book. The animation was done and it was the first he'd ever taken to a bookbinder. But because he'd only decided to color it after it was bound the coloring was still in progress.
In the book a round-faced, pointy-eared, squat, little fellow with a curved sword almost as big as he was, rode a saber-toothed dog out of the fold of the book and reeled back after bouncing off of the edge of the page as if he ran into a wall. The flip book amused the boy and kept him if not still, then at least stiller. When the sitting was done Papa Gold Buttons asked, "How much for the toy?"