Part Three 3 page

Marshall France began The Night Races into Anna to make his daughter feel better. One of the main characters in the book was his good friend Dorothy Lee, only he changed her name to Dorothy Little. After he accidentally "killed" her and the cats came to tell him, he realized what he was capable of doing. He stopped writing The Night Races and began The Galen Journals. For months he researched, wrote, and rewrote. Since he was a perfectionist, he would sometimes do twenty drafts of a book before he felt that it was right, so it isn't hard to imagine how long he worked and "prepared" for Galen.

The first person he created after Dorothy Lee was a man named Karl Tremmel. An innocuous plumber from Pine Island, New York, who brought his wife and two little girls out to Galen in a silver Airstream trailer. There hadn't been a plumber in Galen in years.

Then came a barber named Sillman, a mortician named Lucente (I tried to smile at the in joke, but I didn't have it in me)… and the parade of Marshall France characters was on.

They lived quiet, uneventful lives except for a post-office clerk named Bernard Stackhouse, who got drunk one night and accidentally blew his head off with a shotgun.

Et cetera, et cetera. A small factory outside of town that employed five hundred people caught fire mysteriously in the middle of the night, and after the insurance claims were settled, the owners decided to relocate a hundred miles closer to St. Louis.

"In a few years the only ones left here were Father and I, Richard, and 'Father's people.'"

"Why did he let Richard stay?"

"Oh, because we needed to have at least a couple of normal people in case some kind of emergency ever came up and one of us would have to leave here for a while. Remember, the others will die if they leave for more than a week."

"How did he get the rest of the 'normal' people to go? The ones who didn't work at the factory?"

"Father wrote it so that some of them – some of the normal Galeners – wanted to move on. One person was convinced that his house was haunted, another man's natural-gas tank exploded when he was away on vacation and he decided to move to Illinois… Do you want me to go on?"

"And none of them suspected anything?"

"No, of course not. Father wrote it so that everything would look totally natural and acceptable. He didn't want anyone to come around asking questions."

"Did he ever… ?" One of my fear-yawns took over. "Did he ever use, uh, violence?"

"No. No one was hurt when the factory burned down. But it depends on what you would call violence. He did cause the fire and he did make that man's gas tank explode. But he never hurt anyone. He didn't need to, Thomas. He could write anything he wanted."

France went on creating, but he didn't know how long it would last. That's why Anna had had me read that one notebook entry. In the end, he decided that the only thing he could do was to get down as much about each character as he could and then take it as far into the future as he could go. Then hope for the best to happen after he died.

"It will probably be explained in the notebooks, Anna, but just how much of people's lives did he control? I mean, does it say things like, 'Eight-twelve Joe Smith woke up and yawned for three seconds. Then he – '"

She shook her head. "No, no. He found that he could leave most of their lives up to them. Later on, he decided only about the big things in their lives, the big events – who they were to marry, how many children each of them would have, when they died and how…. He wanted them to have –"

"Don't you dare say free will!"

"No, no, I won't. But in a way it was. Look at what happened to Gert and Wilma Inkler: he let them go and do what they wanted with their son. When it got to be too much, he changed them into dogs."

"Our God is a jealous God, eh?"

"Don't say that, Thomas." Two nasty matches lit up in her eyes.

"Don't say what, that he played with them? Look, I don't want to piss you off, Anna, but if all this is true, then your father was the most…" I tried to think of appropriate words that would encompass what he had done, but there weren't any. "I don't know – he was the most amazing human being that ever lived. I'm not even talking about him as an artist either. The man put a pen to paper and actually made people come alive?" I realized that I was talking more to myself than to Anna, but I didn't care. "No, it's impossible." All at once it flooded over me thick and heavy and impossibly gluey. What the hell kind of idiot was I, believing this crap? But then again there was Nails, who had talked to me. And Petals, who had talked to me. And what little I'd read in the notebooks that coincided with what had happened. And Anna knowing that the little boy would die after he got hit by the truck..

"Why was it so important for people to know if the little Hayden boy was laughing, Anna? How does that all fit in?"

"Because he was supposed to be killed that day. He was supposed to be laughing and happy right up to the moment when he got hit by the truck. The problem was that the wrong person was driving the truck. That's what Joe Jordan and all of the others were so upset about. He wasn't laughing, and he was killed by the wrong man."

As long as things went according to France's plans, Anna and the Galeners had little contact with the outside world. Once in a while one of them went shopping or to a movie in a nearby town, and the Galen stores were constantly being replenished by trucks from St. Louis and Kansas City, but that was about all. For appearance's sake, there was a real-estate office in town, but the only things for sale there were in other towns. What wasn't privately owned belonged to the town of Galen, and nothing was ever for sale. Nothing for rent either.

"But what about Mrs. Fletcher's? What about – ?"

"You and Saxony are the first new people to live in Galen since my father died."

"So that's why she didn't mind our not being married that first day that we rented it! She must have told us ten times that she didn't care about that kind of thing. You set us up, didn't you, Anna? It was all a big plan!"

She nodded. "The moment I heard that you were coming out here from David Louis, I called Goosey Fletcher and told her to move upstairs in that big house. Then I sent Nails over to live with her."

"And I thought that she did it for the money."

"Goosey is a very good actress."

"Was she really in the insane asylum?"

"No."

"Just no? Nothing more?"

"How could she he in an insane asylum, Thomas, if she was one of Father's people? You can learn everything, Thomas, as soon as you start reading the journals."

I was right about the biographer from Princeton when I said that he came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of its secret, Galen was shut up tight then and nobody was about to tell the guy nuthin' about nuthin'. According to Anna, he stayed a few weeks and then fumed off toward California, where he said that he was going to write the definitive biography of R. Crumb.

But then it started happening. In the last two years, things started going wrong in Galen. A man who was supposed to live to be ninety and die peacefully in his sleep was electrocuted by a high-tension wire that broke and fell on him as he was passing. He was forty-seven. A child who was supposed to adore corn couldn't look at it without throwing up. A woman who had been changed into a bull terrier suddenly bore a litter of nine puppies. None of the dogs had ever done that before: none of them were supposed to.

I put my hands under my armpits to warm them. I yawned for the umpteenth time. "So what went wrong?"

Anna held her empty cup in her hand and tinked a fingernail against it. "Father's powers started to fade. They started to wear off. In one of the journals he wrote about the possibility. You can read it, but I'll just tell you the essence of it now. He said that two things might happen after he died. One was that everything he had created would disappear immediately."

"I read that part." I still had his journal in my hand and held it up for her to see.

"Yes. The second possibility was that everything would be all right afterward because he had filled them with such…" She tightened her lips and hesitated a moment. "He had filled them with such life spirit that they would continue to function even after he was dead."

"And they did. They have, haven't they?"

"Yes, Thomas, they have until two years ago. Until then everything had gone perfectly. But suddenly things were wrong – I told you about some of them. But Father saw this as a possibility too. He wrote about it in the same notebook that you have there."

"Just tell me about it, Anna. I'm really not in the mood to read right now."

"All right." She looked at the cup as if she didn't know how it had gotten into her hands. She put it down on the coffee table and shoved it brusquely away. "He was convinced that since he had been able to create the people in Galen, then if he died, someone somewhere would be able to recreate him."

"What?" Little freezing lizards ran up and down my back.

"Yes, he believed that his biographer" – she stopped and raised her eyebrows at me, his biographer – "if his biographer was good enough, then he could bring Father back to life if he wrote the story of Father's life the right way."

"Anna, Jesus Christ, you're saying that that's me? You're comparing pigs to swine! I mean pearls to swine! Your father was… was… I don't know, God. Who the hell am I?"

"Do you know why I've let you go this far, Thomas?"

"I don't know if I want to know. All right, all right, how come?"

"Because you have the first quality that Father said was necessary: you are obsessed with him. All you ever do is talk about how important his books are to you. His work is almost as important to you as it is to all of us."

"Oh, come on, Anna, it isn't the same thing!"

"Thomas, stop." She held her hand up like a traffic cop. "You don't know this, but since you wrote that first chapter, everything has gone right again in Galen. Things that he wrote to happen in the journals have happened, just as before. Everything – Nails's death was just the latest."

I looked at her and opened my mouth to speak, but there wasn't anything to say. I had just been paid the most outrageous compliment of my life. My mind was stuck in an elevator halfway between green-bile fear and total, life-hugging elation. For God's sake, what if she was right?

We continued working, only now Saxony wouldn't have anything to do with the biography. She carved three marionettes, and when she wasn't doing that, she read Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.

I still went to Anna's, but only during the day and no later than five-thirty. Then I packed my little brown briefcase and toddled home.

One of my great problems was in deciding whether or not to tell Saxony the truth about France and Galen. At times I couldn't stand it, holding it in like that, keeping it from her. But then I knew that people had been committed to the insane asylum for less nutty views than mine, so I reasoned that it was best to wait and see what happened before I let the cat out of the bag.

A snowstorm whipped through town and painted everything thick white. I went out for a walk one afternoon and came across three cats romping it up in someone's open field. They were having so much fun that I stopped and watched. They went on leaping after each other for a couple of minutes, until one of them spotted me and stopped dead in his tracks. All of them looked my way, and unconsciously I raised my hand to wave. Very faintly, very whispery across the snow, I heard them mewing. It took several seconds for it to dawn on me that it was their way of saying hello.

But then everyone in town had begun to open up to me now. What they told me would have made me run the other way a few months before, but now all I did was nod and shake my head and have another of Debby's (or Gretchen's or Mary Ann's…) oatmeal-raisin cookies.

They inevitably went on in one of two directions: accusatory or beseeching. I'd goddamned better get the book written or else a lot of people were going to be in trouble, or, thank God I had happened along when I did, and would it be long before I was done? Depending on the day and the person, I felt either like the messiah or the telephone repairman. As to whether or not my finished book would bring Marshall France back, the thought went around and around in my brain like a kid's marble in a clothes dryer. Sometimes I stopped and laughed at everything because it was all so crazy and absurd. At other times, my fear lizards went walking on my skin and I tried to push it all out of my head.

"Uh, Larry, what does it feel like to be… uh, created?"

Larry farted and smiled at me. "Created? What d'ya mean, created? Look, man, you shot out of your old man, right?" I nodded and shrugged. "Well, I just shot out of someplace else. You want another beer?"

Catherine petted her gray rabbit as gently as if it were made of glass. "Created? Hmm. That's a funny word to use. Created." She rolled it around her tongue and smiled down at the rabbit. "I don't really think about it, Thomas. There's always so much else on my mind."

If I was expecting answers from the Inner Sanctum, I didn't get them. Galen was a lower-middle-class town in the heart of Missouri, made up of hardworking people who went bowling on Wednesday night, loved The Bionic Woman, ate ham sandwiches, and were saving up to buy new Roto-tillers or a vacation cottage out on Lake Tekawitha.

The most interesting anecdote I heard was from a guy who accidentally shot his brother in the face with a police revolver. The trigger pulled, the gun exploded, smoke, lots of noise… but nothing happened to the brother, Nothing.

But people talked and talked. Now that I was "one of them," they told me all kinds of things – about their lumbago, their sex lives, recipes for catfish. Not much of it had to do with my research, but they had talked to each other for so long about the same things that it was nice to have a fresh ear to tell it to again.

"Do you know what I don't like about what's going on now, Abbey? Not knowin' nothing. I used to be able to walk down the street and not worry about no fuckin' aeroplanes falling on my head. You understand what I'm talking about? When you know, you know. You don't have to worry about nothin' happening to you. Look at this goddamned what's-his-name – Joe Jordan. He goes out to pick up a fucking pack of cigarettes, and the next thing he knows, he's run over a little kid. No sir, thank you, I want to know when my time's coming. That way, I don't have to worry a bit about it until the time comes."

"But what will you do then? When your time comes."

"Piss in my fuckin' pants!" The old man laughed and laughed at his own joke.

The more people I asked, the more it seemed that the vast majority were content with France's "way," and horrified that suddenly, cruelly, they had been turned over to the clumsy hands of fate.

But there were a few who didn't want to know what would happen to them. That was all right. The way it had been arranged, years ago, was that the oldest member of each family was responsible for a detailed copy of the history and future history of his family that had been given to him by France. Anyone over eighteen who wanted to know what was going to happen could go to the "elder" and ask any question.

A man who worked in the supermarket looked at me as if I were crazy when I asked him if he wouldn't like to live more than the fifty-one years France had given him.

"Why? I can do everything I want now. What can't a man accomplish in fifty years?"

"But it's so… it's so locked in. I don't know, it's claustrophobic."

His arthritic hands pulled a black Ace comb out of an overall pocket and slid it through equally black hair.

"No, look, Tom, I'm thirty-nine now, right? I know for sure that I've got twelve more years to go. I never worry about any of that stuff – about dying and all. But you do, don't you? Sometimes you probably get up in the morning and say to yourself, 'Today might be the day I die,' or 'Today I might get crippled or busted up for life.' Things like that. But we never think two seconds about it, you know? I got some arthritis in my hands and I'll die of cancer when I'm fifty-one. So who's better off now, you or me? Be honest."

"Can I ask you one more question?"

"Sure, fire away."

"Let's say that I'm a Galener and I find out that I'm supposed to die tomorrow, that you're going to run me over in your truck. What if I go home and I never come out of the house tomorrow. What if I hide in my closet all day and I make it impossible for you to run me over?"

"You'll die in the closet at the same time you were supposed to be run over by me."

In my father's film Cafй de la Paix, there is a scene that I've always liked and which kept ringing in my head when I made my rounds in Galen.

Richard Eliot, aka "Shakespeare," who just happens to be England's most effective secret agent in Nazi-occupied France, has been found out. He sends his wife away via the underground, and then goes to the Cafй de la Paix to wait for the Krauts to come and get him. He orders a cafй crиme, takes a small book out of his pocket, and starts reading. Cool as a cucumber. The coffee comes, but the waiter serves it as fast as he can and gets the hell out of there because he knows what is about to happen. The street is empty and some dead leaves move ever so slowly by the table legs. The director of the film was ingenious, because he didn't let anything happen for three minutes. By the time the black Mercedes comes screeching up, you've been pulling your hair out and are glad that they've arrived. Doors slam, and the camera follows two highly shined pairs of jackboots across the street.

"Herr Eliot?" The German officer is one of those good/bad guys (I think Curt Jurgens played it) who's been clever enough to track down Shakespeare, but along the way has grown to respect the man he's about to arrest.

My father looks up from his book and smiles. "Hello, Fuchs."

The other Nazi moves to get him, but Fuchs grabs the guy by the arm and orders him back to the car.

Father pays the bill and the two men walk slowly across the street.

"If it had been successful, Eliot, what would you have done when you returned home?"

"Done?" Father laughs and looks at the sky for a long time. "I don't know, Fuchs. Sometimes that possibility scared me more than being caught. Isn't that funny? Maybe in the back of my mind I have hoped all along that this would happen so that I would never have to worry about my future. Have you ever thought about what you'll do when Germany loses the war?"

How many bull sessions had I been in in my life where at three o'clock in the morning I was desperately trying to explain what life was about to a sleepy college roommate or lover? I got so caught up in all of the conflicting answers and possibilities that finally I'd end up either going to sleep or making love or being totally depressed because I realized that I didn't know anything at all.

The Galeners didn't have that problem. Theirs was the purest kind of Calvinism, except that they didn't have to worry about what happened to them on the other side of death. They couldn't change who they were or what would happen to them, but knowing that they would definitely get a B or a C on their final exam made all the difference in the world as far as their moment-to-moment living was concerned.

Saxony finally got the cast off, and although she limped around for a while because her leg was thin and weak, her spirits rose greatly.

The leaves had all parachuted from the trees and were slicked to the roads now. The days were short and either wet or gray or both. Galen went inside. The basketball team began playing on Friday nights and the gym was always packed. The movie theater, the stores – all the inside things were once again popular. You could smell the heavy winter dinners cooking in the houses, the damp wool of coats, the dusty closeness of gloves and socks and stocking caps left on a radiator to dry.

I thought of all the other little Galens everywhere else that were getting ready for winter. Chains for the car, oil for the heater, new sleds, bird food for the outdoor feeder, storm windows, rock salt for the driveway.

All of the little Galens were making the same preparations, only "out there," a man was getting into his car to go to the store. He didn't know that halfway there he would skid off the road and crash and die. His wife wouldn't think anything was wrong for hours. Then maybe one of his friends would discover the wreck, a gray plume of exhaust smoke still puttering out of the back end, melting the dirt-specked snow beneath it.

Or an old man in Maine would put on his L. L. Bean cardigan sweater and green corduroy pants and not know that in two hours he would have a heart attack while clipping the leash onto his pet dachshund's collar.

Mrs. Fletcher found out about my birthday and made me a huge, inedible carrot cake. I got a lot of presents too. Whenever I walked into people's houses they either had a cake or a present for me. I got a stuffed badger, ten hand-tied fishing flies, and a first edition of None Dare Call It Treason. When I came home from interviewing, Saxony stood at the door smiling and shaking her head long before I had even brought out my newest treasure to show and tell.

"You're a real hit here, aren't you?" She held the stereopticon from Barney and Thelma up to her eyes and looked at Dobbs Ferry, New York.

"Hey, look, that thing is worth a lot of money, Sax. Those people were really nice to have given it to me."

"Don't be so sensitive, Thomas. I was just saying that it must be very nice to be so wanted."

I didn't know whether she was being honest or facetious, but if I had had to answer her then, I would have agreed – it was nice. Sure, I knew why a lot of the Galeners did it – I wasn't that naпve – but I got to know what it was like to be respected and liked and held in awe: it was damned pleasant. It was a small taste of what both my father and Marshall France had known for most of their lives.

France had taken the cargo ship Arthur Bellingham from Liverpool to New York. On board he made friends with a Jewish couple and had a small romance with their nineteen-year-old daughter. He later dated the girl in New York, but nothing ever came of their relationship. He got the job with Lucente and rented a room in a transients' hotel a block away from the funeral home.

"Anna, how come you lied to me before when I asked you how long your father worked for Lucente?"

She was eating a bowl of Rice Krispies at the dining-room table, and I could hear the little snapping sounds inside her bowl.

"I don't want to get into a big discussion with you on it – it's just that I'd like to know why you lied."

She chewed up the mouthful she had taken and wiped her lips with a paper napkin.

"I wanted to see how good a writer you were before I really let you get going. That makes sense, doesn't it? That's why I gave you everything up until his immigration to the United States. That way, if you were good, then it would show in whatever first chapter you wrote. If you were bad, then I would just send you away and you would never have known anything. She plowed her spoon back into the cereal and went back to the magazine she had been reading.

"Anna? One more question: how come you never talk about your mother?"

"My mother was a lovely, quiet, Midwestern girl who made me join the Brownies when I was little and the Girl Scouts when I was big. She was a wonderful cook and she made my father's life very pleasant. I think he loved her and was happy with her because she was just the opposite of him – everything about her was down-to-earth. She admired people with great imaginations or artistic drive, but I think she was secretly pleased that she didn't have either. She once told me, secretly, that she thought Father's books were goofy. Isn't that a great word for them? Goofy?"

France's uncle, Otto Frank, was never very successful as a printer. He had moved to Galen from Hermann, Missouri, because he liked the location and because there was a printing shop for sale there cheap. He printed wedding invitations, business brochures, posters for church fairs and farm auctions. At one time he had had high hopes for starting a county newspaper (that's why he had written his brother in Austria and told him to send over one of the boys), but he had no money and found no one interested in staking him to his dream.

Martin arrived (having by then changed his name to Marshall France, much to Otto's dismay), and his uncle put him to work in the shop as an apprentice. Apparently France liked the work, and he stayed there until Otto died in 1945, the year A Pool of Stars was published.

The book didn't do very well when it came out, but the publisher liked it enough to offer France a thousand-dollar advance for his next work, which turned out to be the equally unsuccessful Peach Shadows. However, a critic named Charles White wrote a long back-of-the-magazine article about France in the Atlantic Monthly. He compared the author to both Lewis Carroll and Lord Dunsany, and it was one of the things that turned the corner for France's reputation. Anna had almost all of the letters he had ever gotten in Galen, as well as carbons of his replies to them; he had had no idea that White had written the article until months after it came out. He wrote the critic and thanked him. They corresponded for years, until White died.

Two years after Peach Shadows, The Green Dog's Sorrow appeared and almost immediately made the best-seller lists. White began a funny letter to France: "Dear Mr. France, sir: I never knew a famous author before. Are you one now? If so, can I borrow a hundred dollars? If not, thank God…" Suddenly the first two books were back in print, he was asked to do an anthology of favorite children's stories, Walt Disney had an idea for how to make Peach Shadows into a movie… Marshall France was a big shot.

But he wrote a nice letter to Disney and told him to buzz off. The same to the publisher of the children's anthology. He said no to just about everything, and after a while he didn't even write back; he had a card printed up that said Marshall France thanks you, but regrets… It looked like a form rejection slip from a magazine. Anna gave me a framed one for my birthday with a picture of a bull terrier on it that he had doodled.

Over the years literally hundreds of proposals came in. They wanted to do a series of rubber dolls depicting the characters in The Land of Laughs, Green Dog pencils, a radio patterned after the Cloud Radio in Peach Shadows. According to Anna and based on what I later saw, many of these companies went ahead with their products even after her father had rejected them. She said that he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because he refused to get involved in any kind of lawsuit. David Louis had legal experts ready to pounce on these manufacturers, but France said no every time. He didn't want the trouble, he didn't want to be bothered, he didn't want the notoriety, he didn't want to leave Galen. Finally, even Louis gave up pestering him, but retaliated by sending him, over the years, example after example of these pirated dolls, flashlights, and whatnot, just to show him how much he was losing. We spent an afternoon in the basement pulling them out of musty, collapsing cardboard boxes that had been stowed away in corners years ago.

"If David Louis only knew, he would have been furious." Anna took a Green Dog coloring book out of the box. "These were half of my toys when I was growing up." She opened the book and turned it to me. There was a picture of Krang and the Green Dog walking down a windy road together, Krang's string tied to the dog's collar in a bow. The picture had been half colored-in. The dog was blue, Krang completely gold, the road wavy red.

"What would your father have said if he saw that you had colored the dog blue?"

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 511