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Part One

Jonathan Carroll

The Land Of Laughs

 

Jonathan Carroll

The Land Of Laughs

 

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

 

 

For June, who is the best of all New Faces, and for Beverly – The Queen of All

 

 

Be regular and orderly in your life like a

bourgeois, so that you may be violent and

original in your work.

– Flaubert

 

Part One

 

 

"Look, Thomas, I know you've probably been asked this question a million times before, but what was it really like to be Stephen Abbey's –"

"– Son?" Ah, the eternal question. I recently told my mother that my name isn't Thomas Abbey, but rather Stephen Abbey's Son. This time I sighed and pushed what was left of my cheesecake around the plate. "It's very hard to say. I just remember him as being very friendly, very loving. Maybe he was just stoned all the time."

Her eyes lit up at that. I could almost hear the sharp little wheels clickety-clicking in her head. So he was an addict! And it came straight from his kid's mouth. She tried to cover her delight by being understanding and giving me a way out if I wanted it.

"I guess, like everyone else, I've always read a lot about him. But you never know if those articles are true or not, you know?"

I didn't feel like talking about it anymore. "Most of the stories about him are probably pretty true. The ones I've heard about or read are." Luckily the waitress was passing, so I was able to make a big thing out of getting the bill, looking it over, paying it – anything to stop the conversation.

When we got outside, December was still there and the cold air smelled chemical, like a refinery or a tenth-grade chemistry class deep into the secrets of stink. She slipped her arm through mine. I looked at her and smiled. She was pretty – short red hair, green eyes that were always wide with a kind of happy astonishment, a nice body. So I couldn't help smiling then too, and for the first time that night I was glad she was there with me.

The walk from the restaurant to the school was just a little under two miles, but she insisted on our hiking it both ways. Over would build up our appetites, back would work off what we'd eaten. When I asked her if she chopped her own wood, she didn't even crack a smile. My sense of humor has often been lost on people.

By the time we got back to the school we were pretty chummy. She hadn't asked any more questions about my old man and had spent most of the time telling me a funny story about her gay uncle in Florida.

We got back to Founder's Hall, a masterpiece of neo-Nazi architecture, and I saw that I had stopped us on the school crest laid into the floor. Her arm tightened in mine when she noticed this, and I thought I might as well ask then as anytime.

"Would you like to see my masks?"



She giggled a giggle that sounded like water draining from a sink. Then she shook her finger at me in a no-no-naughty-boy! way.

"You don't mean your etchings, do you?"

I had hoped that she might he half-human, but this dirty little Betty Boop routine popped that balloon. Why couldn't a woman be marvelous for once? Not winky, not liberated, not vacuous…

"No, really, you see, I have this mask collection, and –"

She squeezed me again and cut off the circulation in my upper arm.

"I'm just kidding, Thomas. I'd love to see it."

Like all tight-fisted New England prep schools, the apartments that they gave their teachers, especially single teachers, were awful. Mine had a tiny hallway, a study that was painted yellow once but forgot, a bedroom, and a kitchen so old and fragile that I never once thought of cooking there because I had to pay all of the repair costs.

But I had sprung for a gallon of some top-of-the-line house paint so that at least the wall that the collection was on would have a little dignity.

The only outside door to the place opened onto the hallway, so coming in with her was okay. I was nervous, but I was dying to see how she'd react. She was cuddling and cooing the whole time, but then we went around the corner into my bed-living room.

"Oh, my God! Wha… ? Where did you get… ?" Her voice trailed off into little puffs of smoke as she went up to take a closer look. "Where did you get, uh, him?"

"In Austria. Isn't it a great one?" Rudy the Farmer was brown and tan and beautifully carved in an almost offhand way that added to his rough, piggy-fat, drunken face. He gleamed too, because I had been experimenting that morning with a new kind of linseed oil that hadn't dried yet.

"But it's… it's almost real. He's shining!"

At that point my hopes went up up up. Was she awed? If so, I'd forgive her. Not many people had been awed by the masks. They got many points from me when they were.

I didn't mind when she reached out to touch some of them as she moved on. I even liked her choice of which ones to touch. The Water Buffalo, Pierrot, the Krampus.

"I started buying them when I was in college. When my father died, he left me some money, so I took a trip to Europe." I went over to the Marquesa and touched her pink-peach chin softly. "This one, the Marquesa, I saw in a little side-street store in Madrid. She was the first one I bought."

My Marquesa with her tortoiseshell combs, her too-white and too-big teeth that had been smiling at me for almost eight years. The Marquesa.

"And what's that one?"

"That's a death mask of John Keats."

"A death mask?"

"Yes. Sometimes when famous people die, they'll make a mold of their faces before they bury them. Then they cast copies…" I stopped talking when she looked at me as if I were Charles Manson.

"But they're just so creepy! How can you sleep in here with them? Don't they scare you?"

"No more than you do, my dear."

That was that. Five minutes later she was gone and I was putting some of the linseed oil on another mask.

 

 

My father used to say whenever he finished making a movie that he'd never do it again as long as he lived. But like most of the other things he said, it was bullshit, because after a few weeks of rest and a fat deal cooked up for him by his agent, he'd go back under the lights for a forty-third triumphant return.

After four years of teaching I was saying the same thing. I had had my fill of grading papers, faculty meetings, and coaching ninth-grade intramural basketball. There was enough money from my inheritance to do what I wanted, but to he honest, I had no real idea of what to do instead. Correction: I had a very specific idea, but it was a pipe dream. I wasn't a writer, I didn't know the first thing about doing research, and I hadn't even read all the things that he'd written – not that there were that many of them.

My dream was to write a biography of Marshall France, the very mysterious, very wonderful author of the greatest children's books in the world. Books like The Land of Laughs and The Pool of Stars that had helped me to keep my sanity on and off throughout my thirty years.

That was the one wonderful thing that my father did for me. On my ninth birthday – momentous day! – he gave me a little red car with a real engine in it that I instantly hated, a baseball that was signed "From Your Daddy's Number One Fan, Mickey Mantle," and as an afterthought I'm sure, the Shaver-Lambert edition of The Land of Laughs with the Van Walt illustrations. I still have it.

I sat in the car because I knew that was what my father wanted me to do and read the book from cover to cover for the first time. When I refused to put it down after a year, my mother threatened to call Dr. Kintner, my hundred-dollar-a-minute analyst, and tell him that I wasn't "cooperating." As always in those days, I ignored her and turned the page.

"The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one's seen."

I expected everyone in the world to know that line. I sang it constantly to myself in that low intimate voice that children use to talk-sing to themselves when they're alone and happy.

Since I never had any need for pink bunnies or stuffed doggies to ward off night spooks or kid gobblers, my mother finally allowed me to carry the book around with me. I think she was hurt because I never asked her to read it to me. But by then I was so selfish about The Land of Laughs that I didn't even want to share it with someone else's voice.

I secretly wrote France a letter, the only fan letter I've ever written, and was ecstatic when he wrote back.

 

 

Dear Thomas,

The eyes that light The Land of Laughs

See you and wink their thanks.

Your friend,

Marshall France

 

 

I had the letter framed when I was in prep school and still looked at it when I needed a shot of peace of mind. The handwriting was a kind of spidery italic with the Y's and the G's dropping far below the line, and many of the letters of the words weren't connected. The envelope was postmarked Galen, Missouri, which is where France lived for most of his life.

I knew little things like that about him. I couldn't resist some amateur sleuthing. He died of a heart attack at forty-four, was married, and had a daughter named Anna. He hated publicity, and after the success of his book The Green Dog's Sorrow, he pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth. A magazine did an article on him that had a picture of his house in Galen. It was one of those great old Victorian monsters that had been plopped down on an average little street in the middle of Middle America. Whenever I saw houses like that, I remembered my father's movie where the guy came home from the war, only to be killed by cancer at the end. Since most of the action seemed to take place in the living room and on the front porch, my father called the movie Cancer House. It made a fortune and be was nominated for another Oscar.

In February, the month when suicide always looks good to me, I taught a class in Poe that helped me to decide at least to apply for a leave of absence for the following fall before something dangerous happened to my brain. A normal lunkhead named Davis Bell was supposed to give a report to the class on "The Fall of the House of Usher." He got up in front of us and said this. I quote. " 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' by Edgar Allan Poe, who was an alcoholic and married his younger cousin." I had told them all that several days before in hopes of stimulating their curiosity. To continue. "… married his younger cousin. This house, or I mean this story, is about this house of ushers…"

"Who fall?" I prompted him, at the risk of giving the plot away to his classmates, who hadn't read the story either.

"Yeah, who fall."

Time to leave.

Grantham gave me the news that my application had been approved. As always, smelling of coffee and farts, he hung his arm across my shoulder, and pushing me toward the door, asked what I was going to do with my "little vacation."

"I was thinking of writing a book." I didn't look at him because I was afraid his expression would be the same I'd have if someone like me had just said that he was going to write a book.

"That's great, Tom! A biography of your dad, maybe?" He put a finger to his bps and looked dramatically from side to side as if the walls were listening. "Don't worry about me. I won't tell a soul, I promise. Those things are very in these days, you know. What it was really like on the inside, and all that. Don't forget, though, that I'll want an autographed copy when it comes out."

It was really time to leave.

The rest of the winter trimester passed quickly, and Easter break came almost too soon. Over the holiday I was tempted to back out of the whole thing several times, because leaping into the unknown with a project I didn't even know how to begin, much less complete, was not at all inspiring. But they'd hired my replacement, I'd bought a new little station wagon for the trip out to Galen, and the students certainly weren't pulling on my coattails to stay. So I thought that no matter what happened, getting away from the likes of Davis Bell and Farts Grantham would do me good.

Then some strange things happened.

I was browsing through a rare-book store one afternoon when I saw on the sales desk the Alexa edition of France's Peach Shadows with the original Van Walt illustrations. The book had been out of print for years for some reason, and I hadn't read it.

I staggered over to the desk and, after wiping my hands on my pants, picked it up reverently. I noticed a troll who looked as if he had been dipped in talcum powder watching me from the corner of the store.

"Isn't that a superb copy? Someone walked right in out of the blue and plunked it down on the desk." He had a Southern accent and reminded me of some character who lives with his dead mama in a rotting mansion and sleeps under a mosquito net.

"Its great. How much is it?"

"Oh, well, you see, it's already sold. It's a rare one. Do you know why it's not around anymore? Because Marshall France didn't like it and refused to let them reprint after a certain time. Now, he was a strangey, that Mr. France."

"Could you tell me who bought it?"

"No, I've never seen her before, but you're in luck, because she said she'd he in to pick it up" – he looked at his wristwatch, which I noticed was a gold Cartier – "around now, eleven or so, she said."

She. I had to have that book, and she was going to sell it to me, no matter what the cost. I asked him if I could look at it until she came, and he said that he didn't see why not.

As with everything Marshall France had written, I fell into the book and left the world for a while. The words! "The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs at each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day." The way all of the characters were so completely new, but once you'd met them you wondered how you'd ever gotten along without them in your life. Like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that go right in the middle.

I finished and quickly went back to passages that I'd particularly liked. There were a lot of them, so when I heard the bell over the front door ring and someone come in, I tried to ignore whoever it was. If it was she, it could end up that she wouldn't sell it and I wouldn't have another chance to see the book again, so I wanted to eat as much of it as I could before the big showdown.

For a couple of years I collected fountain pens. Once when I was at a flea market in France I was walking around and saw a man in front of me pick up a pen from a seller's table and look at it. I saw immediately from the white six-pointed star on its cap that it was a Montblanc. An old Montblanc. I stopped in my tracks and started a chant inside of me: PUT IT DOWN, DON'T BUY IT! But it did no good – the guy kept looking more and more intently at it. Then I wanted him to die right there on the spot so that I could pull it out of his lax hand and buy it myself. His back was still to me, but my loathing was so intense that it must have pierced him somehow, because all of a sudden he put the pen down, looked fearfully over his shoulder at me, and scurried away.

The first thing that I saw when I looked up from the France book was a nice denim-skirted fanny. It had to be her. PUT IT DOWN, DON'T BUY IT! I tried to cut my look straight through the denim and skin underneath all the way to her soul, wherever it was. GO AWAY, LADY! I WHAMMY YOU TO GO AWAY AND LEAVE THIS BOOK HERE HERE HERE!

"The gentleman over there is looking at it. I didn't think that you'd mind."

I suddenly had this wild romantic hope that she would be lovely and smiling. Lovely and smiling because she had the world's best taste in books. But she was neither. The smile was only partly there – a little confusion and beginning anger mixed together – and her face was pretty/plain. A clean, healthy face that was raised on a farm or out in the country someplace, but never in the sun that much. Straight brown hair but for a small upward flip when it reached her shoulders, as if it were afraid to touch them. A sprinkle of light, light freckles, straight nose, wide-set eyes. More plain than pretty the more you looked at her, but the word "healthy" kept going through my mind.

"I wish you hadn't."

I didn't know which one of us she was talking to. But then she marched over and pulled it out of my hand like my mother catching me with a dirty magazine. She brushed the light-green cover twice, and only then did she look directly at me. She had thin, rust-colored eyebrows that curved up at the ends, so that even when she was frowning she didn't look too mad.

The dealer came dancing up and whisked my beloved out of her hands with a "May I?" and moved back behind the desk, where he started wrapping it in beige tissue paper. "I've been right here on this corner for twelve years, and sometimes I've had quite a few Frances, but usually it's a drought with him, just an absolute desert drought. Certainly Land of Laughs in the first edition is easy enough to find, because he was so popular by then, but The Green Dog's Sorrow in a first or any edition is as hard to find as the Hydra's teeth. Say, listen, I think I have a Land of in the back of the store if either of you'd be interested." He looked at us, eyes atwinkle, but I already had a first that I'd paid a fortune for in New York, and my opponent was digging around for something in her handbag, so he shrugged off the No Sale and went back to wrapping. "That'll be thirty-five dollars, Ms. Gardner."

Thirty-five! I would have paid… "Uh, Ms. Gardner? Uh, would you be willing to sell the book to me for a hundred? I mean, I can pay you right now for it, cash."

The guy was standing behind her when he heard my price, and I saw his lips move up and down like two snakes in pain.

"A hundred dollars? You'd pay a hundred dollars for this?"

It was the only France book that I didn't have, much less in the first edition, but somehow the tone of her voice made me feel dirty-rich. But only for a moment, only for a moment. When it came to Marshall France, I'd be dirty all day, so long as I could have the book. "Yes. Will you sell it?"

"I'm really not one to interfere, Ms. Gardner, but one hundred dollars is quite an extraordinary price even for this France."

If she was tempted and if the book meant as much to her as it did to me, then she was feeling pain. I almost felt sorry for her in a way. Finally she looked at me as if I'd done something nasty to her. I knew she was going to say yes to my offer and disappoint herself.

"There's a color Xerox machine in town. I want to have it copied first, then I'll… then I'll sell it to you. You can come over and pick it up tomorrow night. I live at 189 Broadway, the second floor. Come at… I don't know… Come at eight."

She paid for it and left without saying anything more to either of us. When she was gone, the man read the little slip that had been in the book and told me that her name was Saxony Gardner and that besides Marshall France books she'd told him to keep an eye out for any old books on puppets.

She lived in a section of town where you rolled your windows up in the car as soon as you drove into it. Her apartment was in a house that must have once been pretty snazzy – lots of gingerbread and a big comfortable porch that wrapped around the whole front of the place. But now all that it looked out on was the singed skeleton of a Corvair that had been stripped of everything but the rearview mirror. An old black guy wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, and because it was dark, it took me a moment to see that he had a black cat on his lap.

"Howdy doody, partner."

"Hi. Does Saxony Gardner live here?"

Instead of answering my question, he brought the cat up to his face and crooned, "Cat-cat-cat" to it, or at it, or something. I don't like animals too much.

"Uh, I'm sorry, but could you tell me if –"

"Yes. Here I am." The screen door swung open and there she was. She walked over to the old man and touched him on the top of his head with her thumb. "It's time for bed, Uncle Leonard."

He smiled and handed her the cat. She watched him go and then vaguely motioned me to his chair with a wave of her hand.

"Everyone calls him Uncle. He's a nice man. He and his wife live on the first floor, and I have the second." She had something under her arm, which after a while she took out and shoved at me. "Here's the book. I never would have sold it to you if I didn't need the money. You probably don't care about that, but I just wanted to tell you. I sort of hate you and am grateful to you at the same time." She began to smile, but then she stopped and ran her hand through her hair. It was a funny trait that was hard to get used to at first – she rarely did more than one thing at a time. If she smiled at you, then her hands were still. If she wanted to brush the hair away from her face, she stopped smiling until she'd brushed.

After I had the book I noticed that it had been neatly rewrapped in a piece of paper that must have been a copy of some old handwritten sheet music. It was a nice touch, but all I wanted to do was tear it off and begin reading the book again. I knew that'd be rude, but I was thinking about how I'd do it when I got home. Grind some beans in the Moulinex, make a fresh pot of coffee, then settle in the big chair by the window with the good reading light…

"I know it's none of my business, but why on earth would you pay a hundred dollars for that book?"

How do you explain an obsession? "Why would you pay thirty-five? From everything you've said so far, you can't afford that."

She pushed off the post she'd been leaning on and stuck her chin out, tough-guy style. "How do you know what I can afford and what I can't? I don't have to sell it to you, you know. I haven't taken your money yet or anything."

I got up from Leonard's tired chair and dug into my pocket for the fresh hundred-dollar bill I always carry hidden in a secret compartment of my wallet. I didn't need her, and vice versa, and besides, it was getting cold and I wanted to be out of that neighborhood before the jungle war drums and tribal dancing began on the hood of the Corvair. "I've, uh, really got to go. So here's the money, and I'm very sorry if I was rude to you."

"You were. Would you like a cup of tea?"

I kept flashing the snappy new bill at her, but she wouldn't take it. I shrugged again and said okay to the tea, and she led me into the House of Usher.

A three-watt brown-yellow bug light burned in the hall outside what I took to be Uncle Leonard's door. I had expected the place to smell like low tide, but it didn't. In fact it smelled sweet and exotic; I was sure it was some kind of incense. There was a staircase just past the light. It turned out to be so steep that I thought it might lead to the base camp on El Capitan, but I finally made it up in time to see her going through a door, saying something over her shoulder that I didn't catch.

What she probably said was watch your head, because the first thing I did when I walked through her door was wrap myself in a thousand-stringed spiderweb, which gave me a minor heart attack. It turned out to be puppet strings, or I should say one of the puppets' strings, because they were hanging all around the room in elaborately different macabre poses that reminded me of any number of dreams I'd had.

"Just please don't call them puppets. They're all marionettes. What kind of tea would you like, apple or chamomile?"

The nice smell came from her apartment, and it was incense. I saw several sticks burning in a little earthenware bowl full of fine white sand on her coffee table. There were also a couple of strange, brightly colored rocks on it and what I assumed to be the head of one of the marionettes. I had it in my hand and was checking it out when she came back into the room with the tea and a loaf of banana bread she'd baked.

"Do you know anything about them? That one's a copy of the evil spirit Natt from the Burmese Marionette Theater."

"Is that what you do for a living?" I swept the room with my hand and almost dropped Natt on the banana bread.

"Yes, or I did until I got sick. Do you take honey or sugar in your tea?" She didn't say "sick" like I was supposed to ask what kind of sick, or was she feeling better now?

After I drank what had to be the foulest cup of hot liquid I've ever consumed – apple or chamomile? – she took me on a guided tour of the room She talked about Ivo Puhonny and Tony Sarg, Wajang figures and Bunraku, as if we were all best friends. But I liked the excitement in her voice and the incredible similarity between some of the puppet faces and my masks.

When we were sitting down again and I liked her about a hundred times more than at first, she said she had something to show me that I'd like. She went into another room and came back with a framed photograph. I had seen only one picture of France before, so I didn't recognize this one until I saw his signature in the lower-left-hand corner.

"Holy Christ! Where'd you get this?"

She took it back and looked at it carefully. When she spoke again her voice was slow and quiet. "When I was little I was playing with some kids near a pile of burning leaves. Somehow I tripped and fell into it, and the burns on my legs were so bad that I had to be in the hospital for a year. My mother brought me his books and I read them until the covers came off. Marshall France books, and books on puppets and marionettes."

I wondered then for the first time if France really appealed only to weirdos like us: puppet-obsessed little girls in hospitals and analyzed-since-five boys whose fathers' shadows were stronger than the kids'.

"But where did you get this? I've seen only one picture of him, and that was when he was young, the one without his beard."

"You mean the one in Time magazine?" She looked at hers again. "You know when I asked you why you'd be willing to spend so much money for Peach Shadows? Well, do you know how much I spent for this thing? Fifty dollars. I'm one to talk, huh?"

She looked at me and swallowed so hard that I heard the grumph in her throat. "Do you love his books as much as I do? I mean… having to give this to you actually makes me almost sick to my stomach. I've been searching for a copy for years." She touched her forehead and then ran her fingertips down the side of her pale face. "Maybe you should take it now and just go."

I shot up off the couch and put the money on the table. Before I left, I wrote my name and address on a slip of paper. I handed it to her and jokingly said that she could come and visit the book whenever she wanted. Fateful decision.

 

 

About a week later I stayed up one night to get some reading done. For once it was nice to be in my mouse-hole apartment because one of those winter storms was blowing outside that go back and forth between mean, hard rain and wet snow. But I've always liked the changes in Connecticut weather after having lived in California, where every day is the sunny same.

Around ten o'clock the doorbell rang and I got up, thinking some clown had probably torn a sink off the wall in the boys' bathroom or thrown his roommate out the window. Living in the dormitory of a boarding school is maybe the third or fourth circle of hell. I opened the door with a halfhearted snarl ready on my lips.

She was wearing a black poncho that hooded her head and then went all the way down to her knees. She reminded me of an Inquisition priest, except that her robe was rubber.

"I came to visit. Do you mind? I brought some things to show you."

"Great, great, come on in. I was wondering why Peach Shadows was so excited today."

She was in the midst of pulling the hood off her head when I said that. She stopped and smiled up at me. It was the first time I realized how short she was. Against the black, rain-shiny poncho, her face glowed wet white. A kind of strange pink-white, but nice and sort of babylike at the same time. I hung up the dripping coat and pointed her toward the living room. At the last moment I remembered her puppets and that she hadn't seen my masks yet. I thought about the last woman who'd come to see them.

Saxony took a couple of steps into the room and stopped. I was behind her, so I didn't get to see the first expression on her face. I wish I had. After several seconds she moved toward them. I stood in the doorway wondering what she would say, wondering which ones she'd want to touch or take down off the wall.

None of them. She spent a long time looking, and at one point reached out to touch the red Mexican devil with the great blue snake winding down his nose and into his mouth, but her hand stopped halfway and fell to her side.

Still with her back to me, she said, "I know who you are."

I leveled one of my best smirks at her lower back. "You know who I am? You mean you know who my father is. It's no big secret. Turn on the television any night to The Late Show."

She turned around and slid her hands into the little patch pockets of the same blue denim dress she'd worn in the bookstore that day. "Your father? No, I mean you. I know who you are. I called the school the other day and asked about you. I told them I was from a newspaper and was doing a story about your family. Then I went to an old Who's Who and some other books and looked up things about you and your family." She two-fingered a little square of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. "You're thirty and you had a brother, Max, and a sister, Nicolle, who were both older than you. They were killed in the same plane crash with your father. Your mother lives in Litchfield, Connecticut."

I was stunned both by the facts and by her chutzpah in so calmly admitting what she'd been doing.

"The school secretary said that you went to Franklin and Marshall College and graduated in 1971. You've taught here for four years, and one of the kids in your American literature class that I talked to said that you're 'all right' quote-unquote as a teacher." She folded the paper up again and slid it back into her pocket.

"So what's with the investigation? Am I under suspicion?"

She kept her hand in her pocket. "I like to know about people."

"Yeah? And?"

"And nothing. When you were willing to pay all that money for a book on Marshall France, I wanted to know more about you, that's all."

"I'm not used to people getting up dossiers on me, you know."

"Why are you quitting your job?"

"I'm not quitting. It's called a leave of absence, J. Edgar. What's it to you, anyway?"

"Look at what I brought to show you." She reached behind her and pulled something out from beneath her gray pullover sweater. Her voice was very excited as she handed it to me, "I knew it existed but I never thought I'd be lucky enough to find a copy. I think only a thousand of them were printed. I found it at the Gotham in New York. I had been hunting for it all over for years."

It was a small, very thin book printed on beautifully thick, rough-textured paper. From the illustration on the cover (a Van Walt, as always), I knew that it was something by France, but I had no idea what. It was titled The Night Races into Anna, and what first surprised me was that unlike all of his other books, the only illustration was the one on the cover. A simple black-and-white pen-and-ink of a little girl in farmer's overalls walking toward a railroad station at sunset.

"I've never even heard of this. What… when was it done?"

"You didn't? Really? You've never… ?" She gently pulled it out of my greedy hands and brushed her fingers across the cover, as if reading braille. "It was the novel he was working on when he died. Isn't that incredible? A novel by Marshall France! He even supposedly finished it, but his daughter, Anna, won't release it. This" – her voice was angry, and she stabbed her finger accusingly at it – "is the only part anyone's ever seen. It's not a children's book. You almost can't believe that he wrote it, because it's so different from his other things. It's so eerie and sad."

I slid it back out of her hand and opened it gently.

"It's only the first chapter, you see, but even so, it's really long – almost forty pages."

"Do you, uh, do you mind if I sort of look at it alone for a minute?"

She smiled nicely and nodded. When I looked up again, she was coming into the room with a tray loaded down with cups, my brass tea kettle puffing steam, and all of the English muffins I'd planned to eat the next two mornings for breakfast.

She put the tray on the floor. "Do you mind ahout these? I haven't eaten anything all day, and I'm starved. I saw them in there…."

I closed the book and sat back in my chair. I watched her devour my muffins. I couldn't help smiling. Then without knowing how or why, I blurted out my plan about the France biography.

I knew that if I talked to anyone before I began this book it should be her, but when I finished I was embarrassed by all of my enthusiasm. I got up and walked to the mask wall and pretended to straighten the Marquesa.

She didn't say anything and she didn't say anything, and finally I turned from the wall and looked at her. But her eyes slid away from mine, and for the first time since we met, she spoke without looking at me. "Could I help you? I could do your research for you. I did it for one of my professors in college, but this would be so much better, because it'd he looking into his life. Marshall France's. I'd do it really cheaply. Really. Minimum wage – what is it now, two dollars an hour?"

Uh-oh. A very nice girl, as my mother used to say when she introduced me to another of her "finds," but I didn't need or want anybody helping me on this, even if she knew a lot more about France than I did. If I was really going to go through with it, then I didn't want to have to worry about someone else, especially a woman who struck me as potentially bossy or selfish or, worst of all, moody. Yes, she had her good points, but it was just the wrong place at the wrong time. Sooo, I hmmm'd and haaa'd and nibbled around the edges, and it wasn't long before she got the point, thank God.

"You're basically saying no."

"I… basically… You're right."

She looked at the floor and crossed her arms over her chest. "I see."

She stayed there for a minute, then turned on her heel, and picking up the France book, made for the front door.

"Hey, look, you don't have to go." I had this terrible picture in my mind of her slipping that book back up under her sweater. The thought of that woolen bulge broke my heart.

Her arms were spread high to let the still-wet poncho slide down onto them. For a moment she looked like a rubber Bela Lugosi. In fact, she kept her arms up like that when she spoke.

"I think you're making a really big mistake if you're serious about doing this book. I truly think that I could help you."

"I know what… uh, I…"

"I mean, I could really help you. I don't see at all… Oh, forget it." She opened the door and closed it very quietly behind her.

A couple of days later I came back to my place after a class and found a note stuck to the door. The writing was in thick Magic Marker, and I didn't recognize it at all.

I'M GOING TO DO THIS ANYWAY. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. CALL ME WHEN YOU GET IN#####I'VE FOUND SOME GOOD STUFF. SAXONY GARDNER.

All I needed was for one of my goody students to read that note and instantly interpret "stuff" as "dope" and start to spread the word about old Mr. Abbey's behind-the-closed-door follies. I didn't even know Saxony's telephone number and I wasn't about to look it up. But she called me that night and sounded angry the whole time we talked.

"I know you don't want me in on this, Thomas, but you should have called anyway. I was in the library a long time getting all of this for you."

"Really? Well, I really appreciate that. I mean, I do!"

"Then you'd better get a pencil and paper for this, because there's quite a lot."

"Go ahead. I have one here." Whatever her reasons for doing it, I had no intention of turning off Radio Free Information.

"Okay. First of all, his name wasn't really France – it was Frank. He was born Martin Emil Frank in Rattenberg, Austria, in 1922. Rattenberg is a little town about forty miles from Innsbruck, in the mountains. His father's name was David, his mother's name was Hannah, with an H."

"Wait a minute. Go ahead."

"He had an older brother, Isaac, who died at Dachau in 1944."

"They were Jewish?"

"There's no question about it. France arrived in America in 1938 and moved to Galen, Missouri, sometime after that."

"Why Galen? Did you find out?"

"No, but I'm still looking. I like this stuff. It's fun working in the library and trying to pull out things on someone you love."

After she hung up I stood there holding the receiver and then scratched my head with it. I didn't know whether I felt good or bad about the fact that she'd call again when she found out more.

According to her (a couple of days later), France went to Galen because his Uncle Otto owned a little printing business out there. But before he went west, our man lived in New York for a year and a half. For some reason she couldn't discover what he did there. She got a little nutty about it, and her calls got angrier and angrier.

"I can't find it. Ooo, it drives me crazy!"

"Take it easy, Sax. The way you've been digging around, you will."

"Oh, don't patronize me, Thomas. You sound just like your father in that movie I saw last night. Old James Vandenberg, good-hearted farmer."

My eyes narrowed and I tightened my grip on the phone. "Look, Saxony, you don't have to be insulting."

"I'm not… I'm sorry." She hung up. I called her right back but she didn't answer. I wondered if she'd called from some little phone booth out in the middle of nowhere. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I went down to a florist and bought her a Japanese bonsai tree. I made sure that she wasn't home before I left it in front of her apartment door.

I thought that it was time I did something for a change instead of letting her do all the chasing around, so when the school had a long weekend at the end of April, I decided to go down to New York to talk to France's publisher about doing the biography. I didn't tell her that I was going until the night before I left, and then she was the one who called, all aglow.

"Thomas? I found it! I found out what he did in New York when he lived there!"

"Great! What?"

"Are you ready for this? He worked for an Italian undertaker named Lucente. He was his assistant or something. It didn't say what he did for him, though."

"That's pleasant. But do you remember that scene in Land of Laughs when the Moon Jester and Lady Oil die? He'd have to know something about death to have written that part."

 

 

I always have the same feeling when I go to New York. There was a bad joke about a man who married a beautiful woman and couldn't wait for the wedding night to get to her. But then when the time came, she pulled a blond wig off her bald head, unscrewed her wooden leg, and took the false teeth out that made her smile so alluring. She turned to him coyly and said, "I'm ready now, darling." That's me and New York. Whenever I come into the place – be it in a plane, train, or car – I can't wait to get there. The Big Apple! Shows! Museums! Bookstores! The Most Beautiful Women in the World! It's all there and has been waiting for me all this time. I zoom out of the train and there's Grand Central Station or Port Authority or Kennedy Airport – the heart of it all. And my heart's doing a conga: Look at the speed! The women! I love it! Everything! But that's where the trouble begins, because everything includes the bum wobbling into a corner to vomit and an obnoxious fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican kid on transparent rocket-ship high heels asking (threatening) me for a dollar. On and on and on. There's no need to elaborate on it, but I never seem to get it through my head about the place because every time I come, I half-expect to see Frank Sinatra come dancing by me in a sailor suit, singing "New York, New York." And in fact a man who looked vaguely like Sinatra did dance by me once in Grand Central. Danced right by and started to pee on the wall.

So now I've got it down to a science. I get off the train in high spirits. Then until the first terrible thing happens I'm great and loving every minute of the place. As soon as the terrible arrives, I let all of my hate and disappointment come flying out of me, and then I go on about my business.

This time it was a cabdriver. I flagged him down when I got out of the station and gave him the Fifth Avenue address of the publisher.

"Parade on Fift' tudday."

"Yes? So?" His license card said that his name was Franklin Tuto. I wondered how he pronounced it.

I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror sizing me up. "So I gotta go down Park."

"Oh, that's all right. Excuse me, but do you pronounce your last name Toot-o or Tut-o?"

His eyes were in the mirror instantly, drawing a head on me before he answered this dangerous question.

"What's it to you, hey?"

"Nothing. I was just interested." Fool that I am, I thought I'd try to be funny. "I thought you might be related to the Egyptian Tuts."

"Like hell you did. You were checking me out, weren't you?" He grabbed hold of the bill of his checkered golf cap and pulled it around and down farther onto his head.

"No, no, you see, I saw your name there on the card –"

"You're another inspector! God damn you guys! I got the friggin' renewal already, so what the hell else do you want from me, blood?" He pulled over to the curb and told me that he didn't want me in his fucking cab – that I could fucking suspend him if I wanted, but that he was sick of "us guys." So we all got out of his cab, waved good-bye to Franklin Tuto as he screeched away, and sighing, hailed another.

The pilot of this one was named Kodel Sweet. I'm a great one for reading the names of cabdrivers. Scenery usually bores me. He had on one of those funky black velvet hats that look like something fell out of the sky onto his head and decided to stay. For better or worse he didn't say anything the whole trip except "Check it out" when I again gave the address of the publisher. But then when I was getting out of the car he said, "Have a nice day," and it sounded like he meant it.

The building was one of those all-glass Brave New World things like a huge swimming pool turned up on end without the water flowing out. The only time I've ever liked architecture like that is when it's one of those brilliantly sunny days in the spring or fall and the million windows reflect light everywhere.

I was surprised to find that a number of the floors of the building were offices of this publisher. Floors and floors of people working on books. I liked that idea. I liked the fact that Kodel Sweet had told me to have a nice day. There was a nice smell in the elevator, of some woman's sexy perfume…. New York's okay.

As I went up in the elevator, I felt a funny jump in my stomach to think that in a few minutes I'd be talking to someone who actually knew Marshall France. I've been plagued all my life with people asking me what my father was like, and I've always hated it, but now I had fifty zillion questions that I wanted to ask about France. As I came up with a zillion more, the elevator doors slid open and I walked out in search of David Louis's office.

Louis was no Maxwell Perkins, but he had a big enough reputation so that you'd hear about him now and then. When I reread the articles on France, they said that Louis had been one of the few people France was in contact with when he was ahve. He had also edited all of the France books and had been made executor of the writer's will. I knew nothing about will executors (when my father died I went into total hibernation and didn't come out again until the battleground was cleared of rubble and bodies), but I assumed that Louis had to mean something to France to be made final overseer of his possessions.

"Help you?"

The secretary had on – I swear to God – a gold lamé T-shirt with gold sequin letters spelling out "Virginia Woolf" across her nice chest. There was a copy of The Super Secs facedown on her desk.

"I have an appointment with Mr. Louis."

"Are you Mr. Abbey?"

"Yes." I looked away because all of a sudden she had that "Aren't you… ?" glint in her eye, and I wasn't in the mood for her questions.

"One minute and I'll see…" She picked up the receiver and dialed an extension.

On one wall of the waiting room was a display ease of the books the house had recently published. I started looking at the fiction, but what caught my eye was a gigantic coffee-table book, The World of Puppets. It cost twenty-five dollars but seemed so thick through the glass window that it had to have every photograph ever taken of a wooden head or string. I decided to buy it for Saxony for all the work she'd been doing. I knew that the gesture would mean something more to her than I probably wanted it to, but the hell with that. She deserved it.

"Mr. Abbey?"

I turned, and there was Louis. He was short and squat, probably around sixty, sixty-one years old, well groomed. He had on this very dapper tan suit with wide lapels, and a sea-blue herringbone shirt with a maroon ascot tucked down into the neck instead of a tie. Silver metal-frame glasses that made him look like a French movie director. Semi-bald, he gave me a semi-dead-fish handshake.

He led me into his office, and just before he closed the door, I heard his secretary snap her gum. The place was wall-to-wall books, and sneaking a glance at some of the titles, I realized how important he must be if he edited even half of these people.

He smiled apologetically and stuck his hands into his pants pockets. "Do you mind if I join you on the couch? Please, please sit down. I hurt my back playing racketball last week, and it hasn't been the same since."

Ted Lapidus suit, sequin secretary, racketball… Whether or not I approved of his style, he was my strongest link to Marshall France at the moment.

"You said that you wanted to talk about Marshall, Mr. Abbey." He was smiling a little wearily, I thought. He'd been over this territory before? "You know, it's interesting – ever since the colleges started teaching courses in children's literature, and people like George MacDonald and the Grimm Brothers have been established and made quote literary unquote, the interest in France's work has gone way up again. Not that the books haven't always sold. But now a number of schools have his things on their reading lists."

Next he'd be telling me that there were twelve people about to publish definitive biographies of France next month. I was afraid to ask the question but knew that I had to.

"Then why hasn't a biography of him ever been written if the time is so ripe?"

Louis turned his head slowly so that he was looking at me face-on. Until then he'd been gazing straight ahead at something fascinating on the floor in front of us. I couldn't see his face too well because the glasses were reflecting light from the window, but the rest of his face seemed impassive.

"Is that why you're here, Mr. Abbey? You want to write a biography?"

"Yes. I'd like to try."

"All right." He took a deep breath and went back to looking at the floor. "Then I'll tell you what I've told the others. I personally would love to see a biography written of the man. From what little I know, he led a fascinating life. Not so much so when he got older and lived in Galen… but every literary figure should have his portrait done. But when Marshall became famous, he loathed the notoriety that went along with it. I've always been convinced that that was part of what killed him so early – people from all over hounded him, and he just wasn't able to handle it. At all. Anyway, his daughter…" He stopped and licked his lips. "His daughter, Anna, is a very strange woman. She's never really forgiven the rest of the world for the fact that her father died so early. He was only forty-four, you know. She lives alone now, out in that big awful house in Galen, and refuses to talk to anyone about anything that has to do with him. Do you know how long I've tried to wangle the manuscript of his novel out of her? Years, Mr. Abbey. You know about his novel, don't you?"

I nodded. The learned hiographer.

"Yes, well, good luck. Besides the fact that it would make her a small mountain of money – not to sound mercenary – I think that whatever he wrote should be printed and read. He was the only full-fledged genius I ever came up against in this business, and you can quote me. For God's sake, his fans are so devoted to him that some book dealer downtown told me the other day that he sold a copy of Peach Shadows for seventy-five dollars!"

Ahem.

"No, Mr. Abbey, she won't listen to me or to anyone else. Marshall never told her before he died that the book was finished, although in his letters to me he implied that it was. But to her it's unfinished, i.e. unpublishable. So I've begged her to let me put it out with a long note saying that it's incomplete, but she just closes her little bee-stung eyes and disappears back into Baby Anna Land, and that's the end of it.

"But I must also tell you that Marshall never wanted a biography written, so naturally she's obeyed that request too. I sometimes think that she's trying to hoard what's left of the man from the rest of the world. She'd probably take all of his books off people's shelves if she could." He scratched his white, steel-wool hair. "But really – not publishing the novel, not allowing a biography, never talking to the journalists who've gone out there to write articles on him… She's trying to squirrel him away from the rest of the world, for Christ's sake!" He shook his head and looked at the ceiling. I looked at it too and didn't see anything. It was quiet and comfortable, and both of us were thinking about this remarkable man who was such a big part of both of our lives.

"What about the possibility of writing a biography that wasn't authorized, Mr. Louis? I mean, there must be ways to find out about him without having to go through her. Anna."

"Oh, it's been tried. A couple of years ago an eager-beaver grad student from Princeton came through here on his way out to Galen." He smiled a private smile and took his glasses off. "He was an outrageously pompous ass, but that was all right. I was interested to see how he'd fare up against the mighty Anna. I asked him to write if anything happened out there, but I never heard from him again."

"And what did Anna say?"

"Anna? Oh, her usual. Wrote me a venomous letter telling me to stop sending snoopers out to dig around in her father's life. Nothing new, believe me. In her eyes, I'm that New York Jew who exploited her father right into his grave." He turned both hands palms up and shrugged.

I waited for him to say something more, but he didn't. I rubbed my hand on the coarse canvas arm of the couch and tried to think of another question. Here was the man who had known Marshall France – talked with him, read his manuscripts – so where were all of my questions? Why was I suddenly at a loss?

"I'll tell you a little about Anna, Thomas. Maybe it will give you an idea of what you'd be up against if you tried this book. I'll tell you just one instance in my never-ending love affair with the lovely Anna." He pushed off the couch and went over to his desk. He opened a small black lacquer box – the kind you see in Russian gift shops – and took out a cigar that looked like the twisted roots of a tree.

"Years ago I went out to Galen to talk with Marshall about a book he was working on. It turned out that it was The Night Races into Anna and that he was right in the middle of it. I read what he had and liked it, but there were parts that needed work. He'd never done a novel before, and it was turning out to be much more serious than any of his other work." He puffed his cigar and watched the tip grow orange. He was one of those people who like to tell a story in fits and starts – always stopping just when they've reached a crucial point and know their audience is panting for them to go on. In this case, Louis had his intermission just after he said that he told Marshall France that something he wrote "needed work."

"Did he mind hearing that?" I scrunched around in my seat and tried to act as if I could wait all day for his answer. I was also framing in my mind a part of the biography where I would say, "When asked if France minded editorial suggestion, his long-time editor, David Louis, chuckled around his De Nobili cigar and said…"

Puff. Puff. A long look out the window. He tapped the ashes into the ashtray and took a final look at the cigar, held out at arm's length. "Did he mind? Criticism, you mean? Absolutely not at all. I never knew how much he listened to me, but I never had any hesitation telling him when I thought that something was wrong or needed work."

"And was that often?"

"No. In almost every case, his manuscripts came in to me as finished products. I did very little editing on Marshall's work after the first book. Usually just some punctuation mistakes and sentence shifting.

"But let me get back to this novel. When I was out there, I took a couple of days to read it carefully and take notes. Anna was about… oh, maybe twenty or twenty-two by then. She had just dropped out of Oberlin and was staying home most of the time, in her room. From what Marshall said, she had gone there for their music school because she had had the makings of a concert pianist, but somewhere along the line she gave that up and scuttled back to Galen."

His tone of voice was hard to describe – objective but with little bits of anger sprinkled throughout.

"Now, the interesting thing is, she'd been involved in some sort of mysterious goings-on in college, and something had gone wrong or someone…" He rubbed his ear and sucked in one of his cheeks. "That's right! Someone had died, I think. Her boyfriend? I'm not sure. Naturally Marshall wasn't any too clear about it, because it was his daughter in the middle of it. Anyway, she was home on the next train.

"When I was out there, I'd see her flit around through the house in her black silk dresses and hair down her back. She'd be hugging a copy of Kafka or Kierkegaard to her chest. I kept getting the impression that she carried them title out so that whoever looked her way would be sure to see what she was reading.

"Marshall had these three cats named One, Two, and Three. He'd had them in the house only a short time, but they owned the place. They'd walk across his desk when he was working, jump up on the table when we were eating. I never knew whom he liked more, Anna or them. His wife, Elizabeth, had died a couple of years before, so it was just the two of them and those three cats in that monstrous old house together.

"One night after dinner I was sitting out on their porch reading. Anna came out with a cat under each arm."

Louis got off the couch again and sat on an edge of his desk, facing me, about six or seven feet away.

"I have to act this out or you won't get the full effect. Now, I'm sitting where you are, Thomas, and Anna's where I am, okay? She's got the two cats up under her arms, and all three of them are glowering at me. I tried to smile, but they didn't react, so I went back to the book. All of a sudden I heard the cats screech and hiss. I looked up, and Anna was looking at me as if I were the bubonic plague. I'd always thought she was eccentric, but this was insanity." He was standing and had curved his arms out from his body, as if he were holding something. The cigar was clenched in his teeth, and his forehead and eyes were screwed up. "Then she came over to me and said something like, 'We hate you! We hate you!'"

"What did you do?"

An ash fell on his lapel and he brushed it away. His face relaxed.

"Nothing, because that was the strangest part of all. I could just make out Marshall standing behind the screen door. He had obviously seen and heard everything. I kept looking at him, naturally expecting him to do something. But all he did was stand there for another minute, and then he turned and went back into the house."

After that strange little nugget, Louis asked if I wanted coffee. The girl with the Virginia Woolf T-shirt came and went, and in the meantime we chit-chatted about nothing. His Anna story had been so odd and unbelievable that for a time I was stymied for something to say. I was glad for the coffee diversion.

"Who was Van Walt?"

He stirred some honey into his coffee. "Van Walt. Van Walt was another Marshall France mystery. According to him, the man was a recluse who lived in Canada and didn't want to be disturbed by anyone. Marshall made that so clear that we finally said all right, and as a result, whatever dealings we had with him were worked through France."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing else. When a writer as important as Marshall says to leave him alone, we leave him alone."

"Did he ever talk about his childhood, Mr. Louis?"

"Please call me David. No, he rarely said anything about his past. I know that he was born in Austria. A little town called Rattenstein."

"Rattenberg."

"Yes, right, Rattenberg. Years ago, I was curious about it, so one time when I was in Europe I went there.

"The whole town is on a river that rushes by, and it's nice because just off in the distance are the Alps. It's all very gemütlich."

"And what about his father? Did he ever say anything about his father or his mother?"

"No, not a thing. He was a very secretive man."

"Well, what about his brother, Isaac – the one that died at Dachau?"

Louis was about to take a drag when I said that, but he stopped the cigar inches from his lips. "Marshall didn't have any brothers. That's one thing I certainly know. No, no brothers or sisters. I distinctly remember his telling me that he was an only child."

I got out my little pocket notebook and flipped through it until I got to the information that Saxony had given me.

"'Isaac Frank died in – '"

"Isaac Frank? Who's Isaac Frank?"

"Well, you see, the person who does research for me" – I knew that if Saxony ever heard me refer to her like that, she would kill me – "found out that the family name was Frank, but that he changed it to France when he came to America."

Louis smiled at me. "Somebody led you down the garden path on that, Thomas. I probably knew the man better than anyone outside of his immediate family, and his name was always Marshall France." He shook his head. "And he didn't have any brothers. Sorry."

"Yes, but –"

He raised his hand to cut me off. "Really. I'm telling you this so that you won't waste your time on it. You can spend the rest of your life in the library, but you won't find what you're looking for, I promise you. Marshall France was always Marshall France, and he was an only child. I'm sorry to say that it's as simple as that."

We talked a little longer, but his obvious disbelief of what I'd said cast a pall over further conversation. A few minutes later we were standing in the door. He asked me if I thought I'd try writing the book anyway. I nodded but didn't say anything. He halfheartedly wished me luck and told me to stay in touch. A few seconds later I was going down in the elevator, staring off into space, and wondering about everything. France/Frank, David Louis, Anna… Saxony. Where the hell had she gotten that stuff on Martin Frank and a dead brother who never lived in the first place?

 

 

"Do you think I'm lying?"

"Of course not, Saxony. It's just that Louis was so damned adamant about there not being any brother and France's name not being Frank."

I was at a booth on Sixty-fourth Street that had no door and smelled suspiciously like bananas. I'd called Saxony long distance after getting four thousand quarters in a drugstore. She listened quietly to my adventures with Louis. She never got angry when I hinted at the possibility that her information was all bullshit. In fact it seemed that she was almost relaxed. She was talking in a new low, sexy voice.

I was a little wary of her calmness. There was a long silence while I watched a cabdriver throw a newspaper out the window of his cab.

When she spoke again her voice was even quieter. "There's one way that you can check on this Martin Frank part, Thomas."

"How's that?"

"The undertaker he worked for – Lucente. He's still in business downtown. I checked a Manhattan telephone directory a few days


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 524


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