The Land of Laughs (5 page)

“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.”

“Ratten_berg_.”

“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 ago. Why don’t you go and ask him about Martin Frank? See what he has to say about it.”

Her voice was so smooth and sure of itself that I obediently asked her for the Lucente address like a good little boy and hung up.

Things like
The Godfather
and
The American Way of Death
make the job of undertaker sound profitable, if not pleasant, but one look at “Lucente and Son Funeral Home” and you’d have second thoughts.

It was down in a corner pocket of the city near Little Italy. It was next to a store that sold fluorescent madonnas and stone saints that you put in your garden to give it a taste of Italy. When I first walked by Lucente’s I missed it completely because the doorway was small and there was only a tiny sign in the lower corner of the front window announcing the family business.

When I opened the door I heard a dog yapping way off in the back somewhere, and the place was lit by a yellow light from the street that cut in through the half-drawn venetian blinds. A green metal chair and desk — the kind you see in an Army recruiting offlee — a chair facing the desk, a year-old calendar announcing August from the Arthur Siegel Oil Company of New York — that was all. No soft music for the bereaved, no muted Oriental carpets to hush the sound of feet, no professional ghouls gliding around, trying to make you more “comfortable.” It all came back to me from the days of my father’s funeral.

“Ah! Zito!”

The only other door in the room flashed open and an old man came out in a hurry. He flung both arms up in the air, and looking back over his shoulder into the room he’d just come from, kicked the door shut.

“What can I do for
you?
”

For a moment I asked myself how I’d feel if my mother had just died and I was coming to this place to make the arrangements for her. A crazy old man comes flying out, cursing … Some funeral home. But later when I thought about it, I had to admit that I sort of liked it. It wasn’t fake-y or put-on.

Lucente was short and wiry. His face was tobacco brown and he had white hair cut in a to-the-bone crew cut. No nonsense there. His eyes were powder blue and bloodshot. I thought that he must be in his seventies or eighties, but he looked strong enough and still full of beans. When I didn’t say anything, he looked annoyed. He sat down behind the desk.

“You wanna sit down?”

I sat, and we looked at each other for a while. He clasped his hands in the middle of the desk and nodded, more to himself than to me. I watched his eyes and realized that they were too small to contain all the life that was behind them.

“Yes now, sir, so what can I do for you?” He slipped open a desk drawer and brought out a long yellow pad and a yellow Bic pen with a black cap.

“Nothing, Mr. Lucente. I, uh, I mean, nobody’s died in my family. I’m here to ask you a few questions, if I may. About someone who once worked here for you.”

He uncapped the pen and began drawing lazy circles on the top of the paper, one overlapping the next. “Questions? You wanna ask me about someone who worked for me?”

I sat up straight in my chair and couldn’t find anyplace to put my hands. “Yes, you see, we’ve discovered that a man named Martin Frank worked here for you years ago. Around 1939 or so? I know that that’s quite a long time, but I was wondering if you’d remember him or anything about him. If it’s of any help, not long after he was here he changed his name to Marshall France and later became a very famous writer.”

Lucente stopped drawing his circles and tapped the pen on the pad. He looked up once, expressionless, then turned in his chair and yelled over his shoulder.

“Hey, Violetta!”

When there was no answer, he scowled, dropped the pen on the desk, and got up.

“My wife’s so old now she don’t even hear the water running no more. I gotta turn it off for her half the time. Wait a minute.” He scuffled to the door, and I saw for the first time that he was wearing a pair of plum-colored corduroy bedroom slippers. He opened the door but didn’t go into the room. Instead he screamed for Violetta again.

A steel-wool voice rasped back, “Wha’? Whadya want?”

“You remember Martin Frank?”

“Martin who?”

“Martin
Frank!
”

“Martin Frank? Ah ha ha ha!”

Lucente was smiling crazily when he turned again and looked at me. He pointed off into the dark room and shook his hand as if he’d just burned it on something.

“Martin Frank. Yeah, sure, we remember Martin Frank.”

The long train ride back gave me a lot of time to think about Lucente’s story. Violetta, who I assumed was his wife, never came out of the other room, but that didn’t keep her from yelling things to the old man. “Tell him about those two midgets and the trains!” … “Don’a forget the butterflies and that cookie!”

Apparently the first day on the job, Lucente brought in some man who’d jumped off a building and who’d been scraped up with a shovel and shoved in a box. According to the undertaker, his new employee took one look at the body and threw up. They tried it a few more times, but the same thing happened. However, Mrs. Lucente was a cripple, so they put him to work in their apartment cleaning and cooking and doing the laundry. Needless to say, it pretty depressing at first to hear that the author of my favorite book in the world was kept on at the job because he cooked a mean lasagne.

But then one day Lucente was working on a beautiful young girl who had killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was halfway through the job when he stopped for lunch. When he returned, the woman’s arm was on her stomach and she held a big chocolate-chip cookie in her hand. Next to her on a small side table was a glass of milk. Lucente thought it was a great joke — this kind of black humor was traditional in the funeral business. A few weeks later, a mean old woman from down the block died in her sleep. A big yellow-and-black butterfly was taped to her nose the morning after they brought her to the funeral home. Lucente laughed again, but I felt differently: perhaps Marshall France had been creating his first characters.

The new apprentice not only got over his nausea, but he soon became a highly valued assistant. He bought a copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
and studied it constantly. Lucente said that after six months Frank developed an extraordinary ability to model an expression on a face that was as lifelike as any the old man had ever seen.

“That’s the hardest thing, you see. Making them look alive is the hardest thing there is. Did you ever look in a casket? Sure, one look and you know they’re dead. Big deal. But Martin had it, if you know what I mean. He had something that made even me jealous. You looked at one of his jobs and you’d wonder why the hell the guy was lying down in there!”

While he was in New York, Frank spent most of his time with the Lucentes, either at work or in their apartment behind the funeral home. But on Sunday, every Sunday, he went out with the Turtons. The Turtons were midgets. He met them when he happened into their candy store one day. The three of them loved trains and fried chicken, so every week they’d have a big fried-chicken dinner at a restaurant and then go over to Grand Central or Penn Station and get on a train to somewhere nearby. The Lucentes never went with them on these jaunts, but when Frank returned in the evening he would tell them about where they’d gone and what they’d seen.

Lucente never really understood why Frank quit. The longer he worked, the more fascinated he seemed by the job, but one day he came in and said that he’d be leaving at the end of the month. Said that he was going out to the Midwest to live with his uncle.

One of the kids on the hall was standing in front of my apartment when I got home. “There’s a woman in your apartment, Mr. Abbey. I think she got Mr. Rosenberg to let her in.”

I opened the door and dropped my briefcase on the floor. I kicked the door shut and closed my eyes. The whole place smelled of curry. I hate curry.

“Hello?” a voice called.

“Hi. Uh, hi. Saxony?”

She came around the corner carrying my old wooden stirring spoon. it had a few kernels of rice stuck to it. She was smiling a little too hard and her face was very flushed. I guessed it was half from cooking, half from nervousness.

“What are you up to, Sax?”

The spoon had moved slowly down to her side, and she stopped smiling. She looked at the floor.

“I thought that since you were in the city all day, you probably didn’t have much to eat, with all that racing around …” Her voice petered out, although the spoon came up again and she waved it around in the air like a sad magic wand. Maybe she wanted it to finish her sentence for her.

“Oh, God, look, never mind. It’s really nice of you!”