The Land of Laughs (11 page)

“So who are you, Mr. Abbey? Besides Stephen Abbey’s son.”

“Who
am
I?”

“Yes, who are you? Where are you coming from now, what do you do … ?”

“Oh, I see. Well, I’ve been teaching at a prep school in Connecticut …”

“Teaching? You mean that you are not an actor?”

I took one of my deep breaths and crossed one leg over the other. A bit of hairy ankle showed between the cuff and the top of my gray sock, so I covered it with my hand. I tried to laugh off her question/statement. “Ha, ha, no, one actor in the family was enough.”

“Yes,
genug
. I feel the same way. I could never be a writer.”

She looked at me calmly. Again, that kind of unspoken, just-between-us intimacy was there. Or was I fantasizing? I pulled on my shoelace and undid the bow. I was tying it again when she spoke.

“Which of Father’s was your favorite book?”

“
The Land of Laughs
.”

“Why?” She picked an oblong glass paperweight off an end table and rolled it around in her hands.

“Because no one else ever got that close to my world.” I uncrossed my leg and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else’s world. If it’s a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what’s going to happen to you there, what’ll be around the next corner. But if it’s a lousy book, then it’s like going through Secaucus, New Jersey — it smells and you wish you weren’t there, but since you’ve started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you’re done.”

She laughed and bent down to pet Petals, who was resting her chunky head on Anna’s foot. “You mean that you finish every book that you start?”

“Yes, it’s this terrible habit that I have. Even if it’s the worst thing that was ever written, once I get started with it, then I’m hooked until I find out what happens.”

“That is very interesting, because my father was the same way. As soon as he picked up anything — even the phone book — he would read it until the bitter end.”

“Didn’t they make a great movie out of that?”

“Out of what?”

“The phone book.” I knew it was a terrible joke as soon as I said it, but Anna didn’t even attempt a smile. I wondered if she judged future biographers on their sense of humor.

“Excuse me for a minute, will you? I have to go look at the dinner.” She left the room to Saxony and me. Petals looked up and wagged her tail but stayed where she was on the floor. Naturally I jumped up and poked around. France or someone in the house liked biographies and autobiographies, because there were so many of them around, the pages bent over and whole sections marked off. It was a strange assortment, too — Richard Halliburton’s
The Magic Carpet
, the notebooks of Max Frisch (in German), Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff’s
Meetings with Remarkable Men
, a French priest who fought for the underground in WW II,
Mein Kampf
(in German), the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,
Three on a Toothbrush
by Jack Paar.

A cardboard shoebox with Buster Brown on the side contained a collection of old postcards. When I thumbed through them, I noticed that many were of European train stations. I flipped one of the Vienna Westbahnhof over and got the shivers when I looked at the signature printed across the bottom — “Isaac.” The date on it was 1933. I couldn’t read the German, but I was sorely tempted to steal the card and send it to David Louis in New York. “Dear Mr. Louis: I thought you might like to see a postcard to Marshall France from his nonexistent brother, Isaac.”

“Dinner is ready! Come and eat everything before it gets cold.”

I didn’t realize how hungry I was until we walked in and saw big steaming platters of fried chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes.

“Because this is your first time here, I thought that I would make you my father’s favorite meal. When he was alive he was very mad if this wasn’t made for him at least once a week. If it had been his choice, we would have had it every day. Please, sit down.”

It was a small oval table with three straw place mats. I sat on Anna’s right, Saxony on her left. The food smells were driving me crazy. Anna served, loading down my plate with two fat legs, a pile of peas, and a heavy yellow cloud of mashed potatoes. I was on the verge of licking my lips and diving right into them when I picked up my knife and fork and looked at them.

“Yipes!”

Anna looked over, and seeing what was happening, smiled. “I was waiting to see how long it would take you to react. Aren’t they crazy? They were Father’s too. He had a silversmith in New York make them.”

My fork was a silver clown. His head was bent back and the tines of the fork came out of his open mouth. My knife was a long-muscled arm holding a kind of paddle. Not Ping-Pong or anything like that; more sinister-looking — the sort of thing they smack kids with in English public schools. Saxony held hers up to the light, and they were completely different. Her fork was a witch riding a broom. The tines were the brush part, the shaft the broomstick.

“They’re incredible!”

“There are enough for six place settings. I’ll show you the others after dinner.”

As soon as I started eating, I knew it was going to be a long, long meal. I wondered why I was damned to eat horrible food from the hands of interesting women.

Halfway through the unspeakable coffee, she put her napkin down and started talking about France. Now and then she’d pick up her fork and play with it, running it through her fingers as if practicing to be a magician. She watched her hands most of the time, although once in a while she would pause and look at one of us to see, by our expressions, if we understood what she was talking about.

“My father loved living in Galen. His parents sent him to America before the war because they were Jews and they were afraid of Hitler long before most people. Father’s brother, Isaac, was killed in one of the concentration camps.”

“David Louis told me that your father was an only child.”

“Do you speak German, Mr. Abbey? No? Well, there is a little German saying that suits David Louis perfectly. ‘
Dreck mit zwei augen
.’ Do you understand that? ‘Garbage with two eyes.’ Some people would translate it ‘Shit with two eyes,’ but I am feeling charitable tonight.” She ran the edge of her fork back and forth over the edge of the table several times. Until then her tone had been calm and amiable, but the “shit” stopped it short. I didn’t see her as a woman who cursed much. What came to mind was a picture of Louis in his office, sitting on the canvas couch telling me that bizarre story about Anna and her cats hissing at him with hatred. Her cats. There were no cats. I thought it would be a harmless enough question to ask to clear the air of the “shit” that was still hanging there.

“Don’t you have cats?”

“Cats? No, never! I hate cats.”

“Did your father have any?”

“No, He hated most animals. Bull terriers were the only kind of furry beasts that he could stand.”

“Really? But then how did he know animals so well for his books?”

“Would you like some more coffee?”

I shook my head so hard it almost fell off. She didn’t offer Saxony more tea. I was beginning to think that she wasn’t crazy for Sax. But was it because of Saxony’s personality or because she was another woman? Competing for me? Afraid not. Sometimes you meet a person and as soon as you touch hands with her there’s instant dislike, or vice versa She can be brilliant or beautiful or sexy but you
don’t like
her. If that was the case here, then it was going to make things very difficult. I decided not to think about it until Anna agreed to let us do the biography.

We stood up, and Saxony led the way into the other room. It was dark now except for whatever came through the windows from the street. It caught edges and half-shapes of the masks, mannequin, and other things, and was, uh, spooky, to say the least. Anna was just in front of me with her hand on the light switch, but she didn’t click it on.

“Father loved the room like this. I used to catch him standing here in the doorway, looking at all of his things in this cat light.”

“‘Cat light,’ eh?
Green Dog’s Sorrow
, eh?”

“That’s right. You do know your France, don’t you?” She turned on the light, and the things that went bump in the night went back to being things, thank God. I do not like: horror movies, horror stories, nightmares, black things. I teach Poe only because I’m told to by my department chairman, and it takes me two weeks to get over “The Telltale Heart” every time I read it. Yes, I like masks and things that are different and fantastic, but enjoying the almost-real and fearing the monstrous are very difierent things. Remember, please, that I’m a coward.

Saxony sat on the couch and crossed her legs. Petals put a paw up next to her and then looked at Anna for couch approval. When nothing was said, she took it as a “yes” and worked her way up, one slow leg at a time.

“When he arrived in New York, he went to work for an undertaker. Oh, I’m sorry — would either of you like a brandy or drink of some kind? Some Kahlúa or Tia Maria? I’ve got everything over there.”

We both said no, and she sank back down into her chair.

“All of this is a big secret, though. Very few people know about my father’s first job.”

I looked at Saxony, but Saxony looked at Anna. Then she spoke for the first time since dinner. “How long did he work for this undertaker?”

It was a loaded question, because Lucente himself had told me the answer when I saw him. Nine months.

“Two years.” She had the paperweight in her hands again and was rolling it around and around.

I looked at Saxony, but Saxony looked at Anna.

“What did he do for him?”

“Do?” Anna shrugged and smiled at me as if the question wasn’t worth answering and wasn’t my friend dumb for asking it.

“Well, he didn’t do any normal things because he got sick every time he saw one of the bodies. Really! He said that whenever they called him into the rooms where they did their work, he would take one look and run out for the bathroom! Poor Father, he was never meant to take care of the dead. No, do you know what he did? He cooked. He took care of the kitchen and cleaning the place.”

“He never did any work for the man? Not even after he’d been there awhile?”

She smiled warmly at me and shook her head. “
Never
. My father had trouble looking at an animal killed in the road. But you know, I’ll tell you a funny story for your biography, Mr. Abbey. Once in a while he would go with them to drive the truck when they picked up a body. This time they got a call to pick up a man whose apartment was on the sixth floor of a walk-up building. There was no elevator. When they got up there they opened the door and the body turned out to be three hundred pounds!”

“Three hundred? What did they use to get him out of there — a forklift?” Despite the fact that she was probably lying about this too, the idea fascinated me.

She liked my forklift. She snorted and actually slapped her knee. “No, not quite. What they did was send Father downstairs to make sure that no one was on the stairs or coming into the building. Then when he called out to them that it was all clear, he started back up. Suddenly he heard this big
bump
. Then
bump bump
. He looked up through the stairwell and saw them rolling the body down the stairs with the toes of their shoes. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine opening the door to that apartment building and seeing a three-hundred-pound body come bumping down toward you?”

“You can’t be serious.”

She held up the three middle fingers of her right hand, palm-out, and shook her head. “Girl scout’s honor,”

“They
rolled
him down the stairs? Down
six flights
of stairs?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, what’d they do when they got him there? Wasn’t he all damaged and everything?”

“Yes, of course, but then they took him back to the funeral parlor and fixed him with makeup and those things they use. The next day at the funeral, Father said he looked as good as new.”

Baloney or not, it was a good story, and I could detect a bit of her father’s narrative flair.

She put the paperweight back down on the side table. “Would you like to see his study? I think you might be interested.”

“Ms. France, you don’t
know
how much I’d like to see his study!” I was already halfway out of my chair.

She led the way, Petals second, Saxony, then me. Always the gentleman.

When I was a boy I used to sit with my brother and sister at the top of our red-carpeted staircase and watch my parents get ready to go out for the evening. We would be in our pajamas and fuzzy brown Roy Rogers slippers and the hall light would touch just the tips of our warm toes. The parents were too far away for us to hear what they were saying to each other, but we were cozy and sleepy and they looked so sleek and beautiful. That was about the only time that I ever saw my father as anything more than just “my pop,” who wasn’t there most of the time and tried to love us too much when he was. I hadn’t thought about that in years — one of those little Proustian memories that are so easy to forget but so cherished when you happen across them again. Hiking up the staircase to France’s office brought it all back so clearly that I had a momentary urge to sit down on the steps and feel what it was like again. I wondered if Anna had ever done the same thing with her parents.

A light went on before I got to the top. Just as I arrived, I caught sight of the three of them disappearing around a dark corner.

A voice called out, “Are you still there?”

I quickened my step and called back, “Yes, yes, I’m right behind you.”

The floor was a blond, bare wood that had been carefully stripped and sealed and reminded me of houses in Scandinavia. No tables or chairs or sideboards here, no pictures on the walls. The house seemed to have separate upstairs and downstairs personalities: pure up, cluttered and crazy down. I turned the corner and saw light spilling out of a narrow doorway. No sound of voices or bodies moving around. I came up to it and walked through and was instantly disappointed. There was literally nothing in the room but a large oak rolltop desk and a swivel chair tucked into the leg hole. There was a green blotter on the desk and an old orange Parker “Lucky Curve” fountain pen. Nothing else.