The Land of Laughs (17 page)

“And what happens if I like the first chapter the way it is?”

“Then I get to write the whole thing my way and bring it to you when I’m done.”

How much fairer could I be? If she hated my first chapter, we would work together from the very beginning. If she hated the final product, then she would have the right to — gasp — throw it all out and have either me or someone else start it again. I didn’t want to think about that prospect.

“All right.” She picked up the black felt eraser and disappeared Saxony’s drawing in two sharp swipes.

“All right, Thomas, but I am going to give you a time limit: one month. One month to work completely on your own, and then the first chapter has to be done. There isn’t much time to spare these days.”

Saxony spoke before I had a chance to. “Okay, but then you’ve got to give us access to everything we want. No more holding back and no more lying about things.”

Anna arched an eyebrow at that one. I half-admired, half-despaired at Saxony’s bluntness.

“If you are going to do it chronologically … I assume you are? I will give you everything about him until his arrival in America. You won’t be covering more than that in your first chapter.”

And that was that. True to her word, books and diaries, letters and postcards poured out of the France house. It was all we could do to keep track of them in the beginning, much less make sense of them.

France had apparently saved everything, or else someone did it for him and gave it to him later in his life. There was a manila envelope bulging with uninteresting children’s drawings of horseys and cows. The master, age four. A notebook with ratty-looking old wildflowers and weeds pressed in the pages, which all fell out when you held the book at any kind of angle. In a child’s unsteady script, all of the remaining weeds and petrified petunias were labeled in German. One shoebox contained old gold-and-red cigar bands, matchboxes, canceled boat and train tickets. Another had more of those old picture postcards that he seemed to like so much. Lots of them were of the mountains and old
hüttes
where the climbers stayed. It was amazing to see the kind of clothes they wore then for hiking — the women in long, Daisy Miller dresses and fruit-salad hats, men in tweed knickers that ballooned at the knees and comical Tyrolean hats with swooping feathers on the side. All of them looked at the camera with either maniacal smiles or my-wife-just-died frowns. Never the in-between expression that you so often get in modern photographs.

The postcards were from school friends and family, according to Anna. In the shoebox was a little brown school notebook which on further inspection turned out to be a record of postcards received. It was hilarious, especially when you remembered that it was being kept by an eight-or nine-year-old kid. From whom, from where, the date, even the places where he was when he got each one.

“Anna, why
did
he change his name from Martin Frank to Marshall France?”

“Didn’t you see the address on some of those old postcards? ‘Marshall France in care of Martin Frank’? When he was about eight years old he made up this character named Marshall France. He was a combination of D’Artagnan, Beau Geste, and The Virginian. He told me that he refused to be called by any other name for years. Everyone he knew had to call him Marshall or else he refused to answer.” She chuckled. “He must have been an obsessive little boy, huh?”

“Yes, well, that’s fine and all, but why did he make that his name when he came to America?”

“To tell you the truth, Thomas, I don’t really know for sure. You must remember though that he was a Jew running from the Nazis. Maybe he thought that if they ever got around to invading the United States, with a Gentile name like France there was less of a chance that he would he caught.” She bent over to tie one of her shoelaces. I could barely hear her when she spoke. “Whatever the reason, it’s perfect for you, isn’t it? He became one of his own characters, right?
Very symbolic
, Doctor.” She tapped her temple with a finger and told me that she would see me later.

Saxony and I spent at least a week looking over everything. We talked for a long time afterward, and although we argued over a couple of things, we did agree that France had been one strange little boy.

We talked about the best way to go at writing the test chapter. I had had a creative-writing instructor in college who brought a small child’s doll to class the first day. He held it up in front of him and said that most people would describe the doll from only the most obvious angle if they were asked to do it. He drew an invisible horizontal line from his eye to the doll. But the real writer, he went on, knew that the doll could be described from any number of different, more interesting angles — from above, below — and that that was where good creative writing began. I told the story to Sax and said that one of those strange angles was what I was looking for here. She agreed with that too, but we ended up having a gigantic fight about what strange angle. She said that if she were writing the book, she would begin by describing a funny little boy sitting in his room in an Austrian Alpine town making careful entries in his postcard book. Then she would have him go out and pick flowers for his flower book, draw a picture of a cow,
etc.
An indirect way of saying that the kid was artistic, eccentric, and sensitive from Day One of his life.

I thought it was an okay idea, but since Anna had pooh-poohed mine about coming down the stairs to begin
The Land of Laughs
, I was afraid that she would torpedo Saxony’s for being too “clever” too. Sax growled but then agreed that it might be too creative for Anna.

I wasted a few more days being tired and confused and depressed. Saxony steered clear of me and hung around out in the garden with Mrs. Fletcher. She liked the old woman a lot more than I did. Where she saw good old Missouri honesty, I saw a lot of hot air and conservatism. We didn’t talk about her because we knew that the subject would cause a fight. So suffice it to say that Hot Air Fletcher gave me the idea for the first line of the book.

I had given up one morning and was sitting on the top step of the porch watching the two women fool around with the tomato plants. The day was cloudy and thick, and I was hoping for a monster thunderstorm to come through and clean off the world.

Good old Nails ambled up the stairs and sat down next to me, panting out a kind of quick “Kaa-kaa-kaa” sound. We watched the tomato pickers and I put my hand on his rock head. Bull terriers have rocks for heads; they only pretend that they are skin and bones.

“Do you like tomatoes, Tom?”

“Excuse me?”

“I asked ya if ya liked tomatoes?” Mrs. Fletcher straightened up slowly and, shading her eyes, looked over toward Nails and me.

“Tomatoes? Yes, I like them very much.”

“Well, you know Marshall? He hated ‘em. Said that his father made him eat them all the time when he was a boy, and ever since then, he wouldn’t touch one. Wouldn’t eat ketchup, tomato sauce, nothin’!” She dropped a handful of fat red ones into a wooden bushel basket that Saxony was holding for her.

Suddenly I knew that I had the first sentence and an idea for the chapter.

Saxony came into the bedroom an hour later and, sliding her hands over my shoulders, leaned down and asked what I was doing. Although it was totally unnecessary and theatrical, I snatched the first page that I’d written out of my notebook and handed it to her without stopping my scribbling.

“‘He didn’t like tomatoes.’ That’s going to be the beginning of your book?”

“Read on.” I kept writing.

“‘He didn’t like tomatoes. He collected picture postcards of railroad stations. He found names for his characters in a small Missouri graveyard. He began his books on a school-size blackboard in a musty room in his basement. He kept everything he had ever accumulated as a child, and when he came to America from Europe, changed his name to that of an imaginary character he had created when he was a boy. He spent his free time working in a grocery store as a clerk at the cash register… .’”

She stopped, and after a moment’s silence as deep as a canyon, I stopped pretending to write.

“Do you see what I’m trying to do? Put it all in a gun and blast it straight out at the readers. Let them catch whatever they want from that first shot and then I’ll go over all of it slowly and carefully in the chapters that follow. I’ll tell Anna all that, but why not let this chapter grab the readers by the neck and literally drag them into France’s life? That’s what we’ve been avoiding the whole time, Sax. Sure, we said that he was a strange kid, but he was also a goddamned strange man! He’s the perfect eccentric artist. Look at his house, this little town he loved, the books he wrote! We have been dancing clear of that fact all along because we didn’t want to admit to ourselves that our man was a weirdo. But what an incredible weirdo!”

“How do you think Anna will react to your calling her father that, Thomas? She would put him on Mount Olympus if you gave her half a chance.”

“Yes, I know that there’s that too, but I think that if I do it right, she’ll understand what I’m trying to get at.”

“You’re willing to take that kind of chance?”

“Hey, Sax, you were the one who said that it had to be my book above anyone else’s!”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, then, this is the way I want to do my book. I know it now, and I’ve got to write it this way.”

“Until Anna sees it.”

“Come on, Sax. A little moral support now and then, huh?”

The thunderstorm that I wanted came through and decided to stay. For the next week it rained on and off. Saxony went to the library and brought back an armload of famous children’s books. She said that the librarian had told her to tell me, “I told you so.”

We had decided to read and reread as many of the classics as we could in case there was anything there for comparison or contrast with the work of the King, as I called him.

The Hobbit
,
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
,
Through the Looking Glass
… Half of our time was spent out on the porch reading in Mrs. Fletcher’s damp wicker chairs. The rain was mild and pleasant and turned everything either blue or shiny green.

Our landlady must have known how involved we were, because she wasnt around much. For that matter, neither was Anna, whom we didn’t see at all after she delivered the boxes of France memorabilia. She had told me to call her if I needed her, but I didn’t.

Between the reading, writing, the rain, and fooling around with Saxony (she said that bad weather made her feel sexy, and so our sex life got better and better), the days were full and passed like an express. Before I knew it, I had finished
The House at Pooh Corner
,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
,
The King of the Golden River
, and the first draft of my chapter. It had taken a little over two weeks. We celebrated that evening with Shake ‘n Bake chicken, a bottle of Mateus rosé, and my father’s
Train Through Germany
on television, which was one of his better flicks.

The next day I woke up and felt so good that I leaped out of bed and did twenty push-ups on the floor. For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t need a map to see where I was going. It was damned nice.

After my push-ups I sneaked over to the desk and flicked on the little Tensor lamp that I’d bought at Wade’s Hardware Store in town. There were the pages.
My
pages! I knew that I would end up rewriting them a dozen times, but that didn’t matter. I was doing exactly what I wanted with whom I wanted, and maybe, just maybe, Anna France would actually like them and … I didn’t want to think about that part yet. I would do it first and see.

I heard sniffing sounds from the other side of the door. It creaked open and Nails came in. He jumped up on the bed and lay down. He usually joined us now for his last forty winks before getting up for good in the morning. Mrs. Fletcher had a nice old battered love seat for him out in the hallway, but since we had arrived he’d taken to spending more and more time with us, both day and night. One night we were just about to make love when he jumped up and ran his freezing nose up my bare leg. I banged my head on the side of the bed and lost my erection somewhere between fury and laughter.

I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had once again perched on Saxony’s chest. She was smiling and trying to push him off, but he wasn’t having any of it. He made no attempt to move. He closed his eyes. Out to lunch. I walked over from the desk to the bed.

“Beauty and the Beast, huh?” I patted his head. “Hi, Beautiful.”

“Very funny. Don’t just stand there like that. He’s crushing me!”

“Maybe he’s a sex maniac and is really giving you some kind of nasty dog caress.”

“Thomas, will you please just get him off me? Thank you.”

After he had been shifted-wrestled over to my side of the bed (his head right on my pillow, no less), Saxony locked her hands behind her neck and looked at me. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking?”

“No, Petunia, what have you been thinking?”

“That after you finish this book you should do a biography of your father.”

“My father? Why would I want to do a book about him?”

“I just think that you should.” Her gaze shifted away from me up to the ceiling.

“That ain’t no reason.”

Her eyes slid back to mine. “Do you really want me to tell you?”

“Yes, of course I do. You’ve never said anything about this before.”

“I know, but I’ve been thinking recently about how important he is in your life, whether you know it or not. Look, do you realize how often you talk about him?” She held up her hand to stop me from saying anything. “I know, I know — he drove you crazy and most of the time he wasn’t even around. Okay. But he’s
in
you, Thomas. More so than any kid-parent relationship that I’ve ever known. Whether you like it or not, he’s staked out a big part in your guts, and I think it would be very important for you to sit down sometime soon and just write about him. It doesn’t matter if it turns out to be an actual biography or just your memoirs…