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make the boy Farnham and his flip pals laugh. Yet it was the ride toward Smokeville that lingered sentimentally in his memory.
    For several years he delivered free movie-circulars for the Wenrich’s Corner Movie Theatre, walking up and down the rectilinear maple-shaded streets on Saturday mornings, darting up cement walks and tossing the leaflets onto porches as if playing Halloween pranks in broad daylight. The leaflets announced the week’s coming attractions and were distributed not just throughout Wenrich’s Corner but in the neighboring towns as well. Some Saturdays, Farnham was assigned Smokeville and given the two dimes’ trolley fare there and back by the tall bald man, the town’s only Jew, who owned the movie theatre. The shows changed three times a week, with B-movie double features on Mondays and Tuesdays, free dishes to the ladies on Thursday nights, and free Hershey bars to children after the Saturday matinée. All Hollywood’s produce poured through that little theatre, with its slanted cement floors and its comforting smells of steam heat and bubble gum. There were some minimal wall decorations in what Farnham thought of as Egyptian style but he now knew to have been Art Deco, reduced at this remote provincial level to a few angular stripes of beige and silver paint.
    Farnham was eleven, twelve. He believed in the movies, and in the Sunday-night radio shows broadcast from Hollywood, where Jack Benny would drop by at Ronald Colman’s house to borrow a cup of sugar, just like neighbors in Wenrich’s Corner. The boy Farnham’s simple joy in the Jack Benny program was only slightly troubled by certain paradoxes. If Benny and Mary Livingstone were married, as the newspapers all said, why didn’t they live together and why was her last name different? And why, when Dennis Day sang his song, was it always to show Jack and Rochester what it
would
sound like when he did it
really
on the Sunday-night show, which they all admitted existed but which never, on the air, arrived, except in the form of rehearsal? These were mysteries, like what girls were thinking and why all heroes in comic books wore capes.
    The movies as well as trolley cars and comic books cost a dime, if you were twelve or under. When admission went up by a penny tax for the war effort, this tiny increase drove Farnham, whose weekly allowance was thirty-five cents, to deliver circulars in exchange for a week’s free pass. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a nickel for the Sunday-school collection. He often went to the movies three times a week, walking, unaccompanied by a parent, in these far-off days before television and R ratings, when Hollywood’s fantasies were as safe as the family living room.
    On the way to Smokeville, the tracks rounded the eponymous but no longer central corner—the town had grown east, toward Alton. Wenrich’s Inn had stood here until Prohibition. Throughout Farnham’s boyhood, the building, stuccoed sandstone with a long second-story porch rimmed in peeling jigsaw carpentry, had been dismally boarded up; after the war, it opened as a camera store at one entrance and a bakery at the other, with two dentists and a chiropractor upstairs. On his last sentimental visit to the town, Farnham, an art historian who had found tenure in southern California, saw that the inn had been re-established as an eating place, with exposed beams and fancy prices. The streetcars had negotiated this corner with much plaintive friction of metal on metal and sometimes a shower of sparks that indicated the trolley had lost its electrical connection overhead. The motorman, generally a rude and overweight Pennsylvania Dutchman, would shove off from his high metal stool, let himself out of the clattery folding doors, step on a step that flopped magically into place, and run to the rear of the stalled car, where with a single angry thump he would set things right. The motor resumed its throb, that incessant mechanical pulsing as of a heart