The Land Of Laughs Read online

  Thirty-five! I would have paid… "Uh, Ms. Gardner? Uh, would you be willing to sell the book to me for a hundred? I mean, I can pay you right now for it, cash."

  The guy was standing behind her when he heard my price, and I saw his lips move up and down like two snakes in pain.

  "A hundred dollars? You'd pay a hundred dollars for this?"

  It was the only France book that I didn't have, much less in the first edition, but somehow the tone of her voice made me feel dirty-rich. But only for a moment, only for a moment. When it came to Marshall France, I'd be dirty all day, so long as I could have the book. "Yes. Will you sell it?"

  "I'm really not one to interfere, Ms. Gardner, but one hundred dollars is quite an extraordinary price even for this France."

  If she was tempted and if the book meant as much to her as it did to me, then she was feeling pain. I almost felt sorry for her in a way. Finally she looked at me as if I'd done something nasty to her. I knew she was going to say yes to my offer and disappoint herself.

  "There's a color Xerox machine in town. I want to have it copied first, then I'll… then I'll sell it to you. You can come over and pick it up tomorrow night. I live at 189 Broadway, the second floor. Come at… I don't know… Come at eight."

  She paid for it and left without saying anything more to either of us. When she was gone, the man read the little slip that had been in the book and told me that her name was Saxony Gardner and that besides Marshall France books she'd told him to keep an eye out for any old books on puppets.

  She lived in a section of town where you rolled your windows up in the car as soon as you drove into it. Her apartment was in a house that must have once been pretty snazzy – lots of gingerbread and a big comfortable porch that wrapped around the whole front of the place. But now all that it looked out on was the singed skeleton of a Corvair that had been stripped of everything but the rearview mirror. An old black guy wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, and because it was dark, it took me a moment to see that he had a black cat on his lap.

  "Howdy doody, partner."

  "Hi. Does Saxony Gardner live here?"

  Instead of answering my question, he brought the cat up to his face and crooned, "Cat-cat-cat" to it, or at it, or something. I don't like animals too much.

  "Uh, I'm sorry, but could you tell me if –"

  "Yes. Here I am." The screen door swung open and there she was. She walked over to the old man and touched him on the top of his head with her thumb. "It's time for bed, Uncle Leonard."

  He smiled and handed her the cat. She watched him go and then vaguely motioned me to his chair with a wave of her hand.

  "Everyone calls him Uncle. He's a nice man. He and his wife live on the first floor, and I have the second." She had something under her arm, which after a while she took out and shoved at me. "Here's the book. I never would have sold it to you if I didn't need the money. You probably don't care about that, but I just wanted to tell you. I sort of hate you and am grateful to you at the same time." She began to smile, but then she stopped and ran her hand through her hair. It was a funny trait that was hard to get used to at first – she rarely did more than one thing at a time. If she smiled at you, then her hands were still. If she wanted to brush the hair away from her face, she stopped smiling until she'd brushed.

  After I had the book I noticed that it had been neatly rewrapped in a piece of paper that must have been a copy of some old handwritten sheet music. It was a nice touch, but all I wanted to do was tear it off and begin reading the book again. I knew that'd be rude, but I was thinking about how I'd do it when I got home. Grind some beans in the Moulinex, make a fresh pot of coffee, then settle in the big chair by the window with the good reading light…

  "I know it's none of my business, but why on earth would you pay a hundred dollars for that book?"

  How do you explain an obsession? "Why would you pay thirty-five? From everything you've said so far, you can't afford that."

  She pushed off the post she'd been leaning on and stuck her chin out, tough-guy style. "How do you know what I can afford and what I can't? I don't have to sell it to you, you know. I haven't taken your money yet or anything."

  I got up from Leonard's tired chair and dug into my pocket for the fresh hundred-dollar bill I always carry hidden in a secret compartment of my wallet. I didn't need her, and vice versa, and besides, it was getting cold and I wanted to be out of that neighborhood before the jungle war drums and tribal dancing began on the hood of the Corvair. "I've, uh, really got to go. So here's the money, and I'm very sorry if I was rude to you."

  "You were. Would you like a cup of tea?"

  I kept flashing the snappy new bill at her, but she wouldn't take it. I shrugged again and said okay to the tea, and she led me into the House of Usher.

  A three-watt brown-yellow bug light burned in the hall outside what I took to be Uncle Leonard's door. I had expected the place to smell like low tide, but it didn't. In fact it smelled sweet and exotic; I was sure it was some kind of incense. There was a staircase just past the light. It turned out to be so steep that I thought it might lead to the base camp on El Capitan, but I finally made it up in time to see her going through a door, saying something over her shoulder that I didn't catch.

  What she probably said was watch your head, because the first thing I did when I walked through her door was wrap myself in a thousand-stringed spiderweb, which gave me a minor heart attack. It turned out to be puppet strings, or I should say one of the puppets' strings, because they were hanging all around the room in elaborately different macabre poses that reminded me of any number of dreams I'd had.

  "Just please don't call them puppets. They're all marionettes. What kind of tea would you like, apple or chamomile?"

  The nice smell came from her apartment, and it was incense. I saw several sticks burning in a little earthenware bowl full of fine white sand on her coffee table. There were also a couple of strange, brightly colored rocks on it and what I assumed to be the head of one of the marionettes. I had it in my hand and was checking it out when she came back into the room with the tea and a loaf of banana bread she'd baked.

  "Do you know anything about them? That one's a copy of the evil spirit Natt from the Burmese Marionette Theater."

  "Is that what you do for a living?" I swept the room with my hand and almost dropped Natt on the banana bread.

  "Yes, or I did until I got sick. Do you take honey or sugar in your tea?" She didn't say "sick" like I was supposed to ask what kind of sick, or was she feeling better now?

  After I drank what had to be the foulest cup of hot liquid I've ever consumed – apple or chamomile? – she took me on a guided tour of the room She talked about Ivo Puhonny and Tony Sarg, Wajang figures and Bunraku, as if we were all best friends. But I liked the excitement in her voice and the incredible similarity between some of the puppet faces and my masks.

  When we were sitting down again and I liked her about a hundred times more than at first, she said she had something to show me that I'd like. She went into another room and came back with a framed photograph. I had seen only one picture of France before, so I didn't recognize this one until I saw his signature in the lower-left-hand corner.

  "Holy Christ! Where'd you get this?"

  She took it back and looked at it carefully. When she spoke again her voice was slow and quiet. "When I was little I was playing with some kids near a pile of burning leaves. Somehow I tripped and fell into it, and the burns on my legs were so bad that I had to be in the hospital for a year. My mother brought me his books and I read them until the covers came off. Marshall France books, and books on puppets and marionettes."

  I wondered then for the first time if France really appealed only to weirdos like us: puppet-obsessed little girls in hospitals and analyzed-since-five boys whose fathers' shadows were stronger than the kids'.

  "But where did you get this? I've seen only one picture of him, and that was when he was
young, the one without his beard."

  "You mean the one in Time magazine?" She looked at hers again. "You know when I asked you why you'd be willing to spend so much money for Peach Shadows? Well, do you know how much I spent for this thing? Fifty dollars. I'm one to talk, huh?"

  She looked at me and swallowed so hard that I heard the grumph in her throat. "Do you love his books as much as I do? I mean… having to give this to you actually makes me almost sick to my stomach. I've been searching for a copy for years." She touched her forehead and then ran her fingertips down the side of her pale face. "Maybe you should take it now and just go."

  I shot up off the couch and put the money on the table. Before I left, I wrote my name and address on a slip of paper. I handed it to her and jokingly said that she could come and visit the book whenever she wanted. Fateful decision.

  3

  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 bef
ore 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.