The Land of Laughs (3 page)

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.