The Land Of Laughs Read online

  "Oh, yes?" I wasn't sure I knew what she was talking about. Her voice had fallen back to its front-desk whisper.

  "Do you mean Anna?"

  "Yes, yes. Please don't talk so loud. I'd put money on it that she'll let you try."

  It was heartening news even if it did come from such a strange source. What I couldn't understand was why we had to come all the way back here for her to tell me that she thought Anna was going to let me write the book.

  Somebody came around the corner and looked at us. The librarian reached out and took a book about railroad stations off the shelf.

  "This is the one I've been looking for! Here you are." She opened the back cover of the book, and sure enough, France had taken it out five or six times. Very few other names were on the card. When the other person got the book he wanted and left, the librarian closed the train-station book and slid it under my arm. "Walk out with it like this. That way no one will suspect that we've been talking back here." She looked around and peered through a shelf to the next aisle before speaking again. "It's Anna's decision is all I know. We all know that. But it's hard not to be impatient. Ever since –" The sound of approaching feet stopped her in mid– sentence again. This time for good, because a young woman with a little girl in tow came up and asked for a book on raising goldfish that she hadn't been able to find.

  I took my book back to the table in the magazine room and skimmed through it. Picture after picture of American railroad stations.

  The guy who wrote the accompanying text was a little overenthusiastic about things like the "grandeur" of the Wainer, Mississippi, "antebellum masterpiece," with its three ticket windows instead of one. But I spent some time with my nose in the book because I could envision France doing it and because, for whatever reason, it was a subject that interested him. I remembered Lucente talking about his Sunday train rides and the postcards of train stations at his house. On my third time through I flipped past Derek, Pennsylvania. A half-second later my eyes widened and I frantically turned back, almost afraid that it might not he there when I got to it. But it was. Someone had penciled extensive notes all along the border of the page. I had seen France's handwriting only a couple of times, but this was it. The same careful up and down letters. The notes had nothing to do with either Derek, Pennsylvania, or its train station. In true artistic fashion, it looked like my man had been inspired and had written his inspiration down on the first scrap of paper he could find.

  It was a description of a character named Inkler. I couldn't make out some of the words, but essentially Inkler was an Austrian who decided to walk around the world. To raise money for his journey, he had picture postcards printed up of himself and the white bull terrier he would take along for company. Underneath the picture it stated Inkler's name, where he came from, what he intended on doing, how far it was (60,000 kilometers), that it would take four years, and that the card was his way of raising money for the trip. Would you please donate a little to this worthy cause?

  There were notes on what he would look like, the name of the dog and what it looked like, which places they would pass through, and some of their adventures along the way. The entry was dated June 13, 1947.

  I copied all of it down on my pad. For the first time, I felt I had really come across buried treasure. There was no Inkler in any of the France books, so I was one of the only people in the world who knew about this particular France creation. I was so greedy about it that for a moment or two I deliberated on whether or not to tell Saxony. It was mine and Marshall France's. Marshall's and mine…. But goodness prevailed and I told her. She was excited too, and we spent a happy second day in the library poring over all of the other books that he liked, according to the librarian. We made no other discoveries, but little friend Inkler would end up being quite enough to handle.

  The next day, we were in the kitchen having breakfast when I wondlered out loud where France got the names for his characters. It was something I especially liked in his books.

  Saxony was halfway through a piece of toast smothered in orange marmalade. She took another bite and mumbled, "The graveyard."

  "What are you talking about?" I got up and poured myself another cup of the hideous chamomile tea she'd bought. My mother used to soak her feet in chamomile tea. But it was either drink that or else some kind of decaffeinated health-food coffee from Uranus that Saxony had gotten on Mrs. Fletcher's suggestion.

  She brushed her hands together and a hail of breadcrumbs flew everywhere. "Yes, from the graveyard here. I took a walk through town the other day to get the lay of the land. There's a very nice church down past the post office that reminded me of one of those old English churches that you see in calendar pictures or on postcards. You know the kind – dark and dignified, a stone wall going around it…. I got interested, so I wandered up and noticed a small graveyard behind it. When I was a child I used to do a lot of gravestone rubbings, so I'm always interested in them."

  Sitting down at the table, I wiggled my eyebrows up and down like Peter Lorre. "Hee… Hee. Heeee! So am I, my dear. Rats and spiders! Spiders and rats!"

  "Oh, stop it, Thomas. Haven't you ever done stone rubbings? They're beautiful. Thomas, will you stop drooling? Your imitation is marvelous, okay? You're a wonderful vampire. Do you want to hear about this or not?"

  "Yes, my dear."

  She put two more pieces of whole-wheat bread into the toaster. The way she ate, I sometimes wondered if she had been starved in a previous existence.

  "I was wandering around, but something was wrong, you know? Just off, or wrong, or not right. Then I realized what. All of the names that I saw there on the stones, or almost all of them, were the names of characters in The Night Races into Anna."

  "Really?"

  "That's right. Leslie Baker, Dave Miller, Irene Weigel… All of them were there."

  "You're kidding."

  "Nope. I was going to go back with a pad and write all the names down, but then I thought that you would probably want to go too, so I waited."

  "Saxony, that is fantastic! Why didn't you tell me about it sooner?"

  She reached over the table and took my hand. The longer we were together, the more it seemed that she liked to touch and be touched. Not always a sexy or loving touch, but just contact. A little electrical connection for a second or two to let the other know that you're there. I liked it too. But business was business and France business was big stuff, so I made her gulp down what was left of her toast and we headed out to the graveyard.

  Fifteen minutes later we were standing in front of St. Joseph's Church. When I was little I had a lot of Catholic friends who crossed themselves whenever they went past their church. I didn't feel like being left out, so they taught me how, and I did it too whenever we went by the church together. I was with my mother one day in the car. She drove by St. Mary's, and like the good little Catholic I wasn't, I unconsciously crossed myself in full view of her horrified Methodist eyes. My analyst went crazy for weeks after that trying to dig out of me where the impulse came from.

  While Saxony and I stood there, the front door opened and a priest came out of the building. He moved quickly down the steep stone steps and, giving us a clipped, formal nod, moved on by in a hurry. I turned and watched him slide into a burgundy Oldsmobile Cutlass.

  Saxony started toward the church and I followed. It was an especially nice day. The air was cool and a strong wind had been gusting and whipping through the trees, raising summer dust everywhere. Overhead, it zipped all of the clouds by as if they were in a speeded-up movie. The sun was a sharp and clear seal in the middle of a cobalt-blue envelope.

  "Are you coming? Don't worry, the little men under the graves won't bite you."

  "Yes, ma'am." I caught up with her and took her hand.

  "Look." She pointed to a gravestone with her foot.

  "Hah! Brian Taylor. How do you like that! And look – Anne Megibow. Boy, they are all here. Why don't you start taking names down, Sax, and I'll have a look around."


  To tell the truth, I wasn't happy with the discovery. Romantic or not, I wanted my heroes to be struck by inspiration in every aspect of their work. Stories, settings, characters, names… I wanted it all to be completely their own – to have come only from them; not a graveyard or a phone book or a newspaper. This somehow made France look too human.

  Once in a while some crazily devoted fan got by the security guard at our house in California. My father's favorite story was the "Woman Who Rang the Doorbell." She rang it so long and hard that my old man thought that there was some kind of emergency. He made it a point never to answer the door, but this time he did. The woman, holding an eight-by-ten photo of him, took one look at her god and staggered back off the front step. "But why are you so short?" she wailed, and was dragged away in tears.

  Saxony was right about the gravestones: they were intriguing and lovely in a sad way. The inscriptions told the stories of so much pain – babies born August 2, died August 4. Men and women whose children all died long before they did. It was so easy to envision a middle-aged couple sitting in a dumpy gray house somewhere, never talking to each other, pictures of all their dead sons and daughters on the mantelpiece. Maybe the woman even called her husband "Mister" for all the years that they were married.

  "Thomas?"

  I was setting a squat glass jar of flowers straight on someone's headstone when Saxony called. I guess that they had been orange marigolds once, but now they looked like tired little crepe-paper balls.

  "Thomas, come here."

  She was off on the other side of the graveyard, which sloped downward in her direction. She was squatting by one of the graves and balancing herself with one hand flat on the ground behind her. I got up from where I was, and my knees cracked like dry sticks of wood. Mr. Physical Fitness.

  "I don't know if you're going to be very happy about this. Here's your friend Inkler."

  "Oh no."

  "Yes. Gert Inkler. Born 1913, died 19… Wait a second." She reached out and rubbed her hand across the face of the gray-pink stone. "Died in 1964. He wasn't that old."

  "That's what you get from walking around the world. Dammit! I was sure that we'd made this great discovery. A Marshall France character that never appeared in any of his books. Now all he turns out to be is some stiff in the local graveyard."

  "You sound like Humphrey Bogart when you talk like that. 'Some stiff in the graveyard.'"

  "I'm not trying to sound like him, Saxony. Excuse me for being so unoriginal. We're not all great creators, you know."

  "Oh, be quiet, Thomas. Sometimes you pick fights just to see if I'll snap at your bait."

  "Mixed metaphor." I stood up and rubbed my hands on my legs to get the dirt off them.

  "Sorry, Mr. English Teacher."

  We threw halfhearted insults back and forth until she saw something behind me and stopped. In fact, she not only stopped, her whole face shut down like an airport in a snowstorm.

  "This is a nice place to have a picnic."

  I knew who it was. "Hiya, Anna."

  This time she wore a white T-shirt, brand-new tan khakis, and her scruffy sneakers: a cutie.

  "Why are you two out here?"

  How did she know that we were there? Chance? As far as I knew, the only one who had seen us was the priest, and that was only a few minutes before. Even if he had called her and told her, how had she gotten there so quickly – by rocket ship?

  "We're doing some research. Thomas discovered where your father got the names for the characters in The Night Races into Anna. He brought me out here to show me."

  My head swiveled around on my neck like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. I discovered?

  "And were you surprised?"

  "Surprised? Oh, at this? Yeah. No. Uh, yeah, I guess so." I was trying to figure out why Saxony had lied. Was she trying to make me look good in Anna's cool eyes?

  "Who are you visiting? Gert Inkler? Father never used him in a book."

  "Yes, we know. The man who walked around the world. Did he ever do it?"

  The smile slid right off her face. And Christ, could her eyes get small and mean. "Where did you hear about that?"

  "Railroad Stations of America."

  My answer didn't bring the sunshine back. Her look reminded me of the way she had treated Richard Lee in the woods the other day. It wasn't the same kind of fire-and-brimstone fury that David Louis had portrayed, but kind of a turn-to-ice, stone-cold anger.

  "The librarian in town gave me a book that your father liked. The one on train stations in America? I skimmed through it and found a description of Inkler in one of the margins. I have it at home if you'd like to see it."

  "You two are really doing your homework on this already, aren't you? But what if I don't authorize the biography?"

  She looked straight at me first, then flicked her eyes over my shoulder to Saxony.

  "If you weren't going to let us do it, then why have you been so nice to us all this time? David Louis said that you were a monster."

  Good old Saxony. Tactful, sensitive, always there with the right compliment at the right time. The born diplomat.

  I was tempted to put my hands over my head to protect myself against the Battle of the Titans, but astonishingly it never came. Instead, Anna sniffed, shoved her hands down into her pockets, and nodded like a doll with its head on a spring. Up and down and up and down.

  "Saxony, you are right. I must admit that I do enjoy taunting people sometimes. I wanted to see how long you would wait before you became annoyed with my little games and just asked if you could do it."

  "Okay, can we do it?" I wanted the question to sound forceful, convinced, but it crawled out of my throat as if afraid of the daylight.

  "Yes, you can. The book is all yours if you want to write it. If you aren't too mad at me, I'll help you in whatever ways I can. I'm sure that there are ways that I can help."

  I felt a surge of triumph. I turned to Saxony to see how she'd taken it. She smiled, picked up a little white pebble, and threw it at my knee.

  "Well, Miss Sporty?"

  "Well what?" She picked up another pebble and threw it.

  "Well, I guess we're all set." I reached out and took her hand again. She squeezed it and smiled. Then she turned and smiled at Anna. France's daughter stood there in all of her adorableness, but that moment was for Saxony and me, and I wanted her to know how happy I was that it had come and that she was there with me.

  8

  "Be careful that you don't break your neck going down these stairs. One of Father's favorite unkept promises was that he would fix them one day."

  Anna had the flashlight, but she was in front of Saxony, who was in front of me. As a result, all I saw of the weak yellow beam was a straight snake of it here and there as it darted around their legs.

  "Why do all basements smell the same?" I reached out to touch the wall for balance. It was crumbly and damp. I remembered the smell out at the Lee house in the woods.

  "What's the smell?"

  "Like a funky locker room after the team has taken a lot of showers."

  "No, that's a clean smell. Basements smell secretive and hidden."

  "Secretive? How can something smell secretive?"

  "Well, I know it doesn't smell like a locker room!"

  "Wait a minute, here is the light."

  A click and then the same kind of piss-yellow light illuminated the large square room.

  "Be careful of your head, Thomas, the ceiling is low in here."

  I hunched down and looked at the room. An army-green furnace loomed over in a corner. The walls were rough plaster and uneven. The floor was a step away from being dirt. There weren't many things down there besides some tied bundles of old magazines. Pageant, Coronet, Ken, Stage, Gentry. I'd never heard of any of them.

  "What did your father do down here?"

  "Wait a minute and I'll show you. Follow me."

  When she moved, I noticed for the first time an open doorway that apparently led to ano
ther room. A snick of a light switch and we went in.

  There was a school blackboard on the wall about three feet high and maybe six feet long A chalk holder was attached to one end of it, and it was filled with long, brand-new sticks of' white chalk. It made me feel right at home. I had to restrain a mad urge to go up there and diagram a sentence.

  "This is where he began all of his books." Anna picked up a piece of chalk and started to doodle in the middle of the hoard. A kind of crude, not very good rendition of Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip.

  "I thought that you said he worked upstairs?"

  "He did, but only after he had mapped out all of his characters here on his board."

  "He did it for every book?"

  "Yes. He would hide down here for days and create his next universe."

  "How? In what way?"

  "He said that he always had a main character in mind. For The Land of Laughs it was the Queen of Oil, Richard Lee's mother, He would put her name at the top of the board and start listing other people's names under it."

  "Names of real people, or ones that he had made up?"

  "Real people. He said that if he thought of the real people first, then the things he wanted to use from their personalities came right to his mind."

  She wrote "Dorothy Lee" on the board and then "Thomas Abbey" under it. She drew arrows from both of our names out to the right. Then she wrote "The Queen of Oil" next to the first, "Father's Biographer," next to mine. Her handwriting was nothing like her father's – –it was squiggly and wide and messy, the kind I'd comment on at the bottom of an essay after I'd read it.

  Then under "Thomas Abbey – Father's Biographer," she wrote: "Famous father, English teacher, Clever, Insecure, Hopeful, the Power?"

  I frowned. "What do you mean by 'the Power?'"

  She waved the question away. "Wait. I'm doing it the way he did it. The things that he didn't know about, or didn't know if he wanted to use, he would put a question mark next to."