The Land Of Laughs Read online

  "Can I join you people?" Her voice was on my left shoulder like a leaf. I could easily have reached back and touched her.

  "'Course you can, Anna. These people here have been dying to meet you, from what they say. They came all the way out here from Connecticut."

  I heard Saxony slide over on the bench to make way for her. The two of them mumbled hello. I had to look.

  It was the woman who'd been carrying the boxes of hamburger rolls. She had short black, glossy-clean hair cut in a kind of monk's bowl that came down over her ears, although the rather large lobes could still be clearly seen. A small nice nose that peaked up a little at the end, eyes that were almost Oriental and either gray or dusty green. Her lips were full and purplish and I was sure that that was their natural color, although sometimes they got so dark you would have thought that she'd been eating some kind of grape candy. She had on a pair of white carpenter's overalls, a black T-shirt, no jewelry at all, and black rubber flip-flop thongs on her feet. All in all, she was great-looking in a kind of hip, clean, youngish Midwestern housewife way. Where the hell was the Charles Addams character David Louis had referred to? This woman looked like she'd just had the family station wagon washed at the Shell station.

  She offered me her hand, and it was soft and cool, not sweaty at all, like mine.

  "Are you Thomas Abbey?" She smiled and nodded like she already knew I was. She kept hold of my hand. I'd almost jerked it away when she said my name.

  "Yes, uh, hello. How'd you – ?"

  "David Louis wrote and told me that you were coming."

  I frowned at that one. Why had he done that? If she was the Medusa he'd made her out to be, knowing what I was here for would only make her seal off whatever cracks into her father's life I might have been able to find snooping around on my own, incognito. I vowed to send Louis a ten-page hate letter at the first opportunity. No wonder no biographer had ever had any luck with her. With him running interference, she had a twenty-mile head start.

  "Do you mind if I sit down? I've been hopping around here so today in this crazy heat…." She shook her head, and her monk's cut flipped back and forth like a tight little grass skirt.

  I realized that I hadn't properly introduced her to Saxony.

  "Ms. France, this is my colleague, Saxony Gardner." Colleague? When was the last time I'd used that word?

  They smiled at each other and shook hands, but I noticed that their shake was short and barely touching.

  "You're a writer too, Miss Gardner?"

  "No, I do the research and Thomas will do the writing."

  Why didn't she say "Thomas does the writing," rather than put it in the future tense? It would have sounded so much more professional.

  I looked at their two faces and tried not to think that Anna was lovely and Saxony was wholesome. Maybe it was just my momentary anger at Sax.

  "You want to write a book about my father? Why is that?"

  I thought that by now the best thing to do was give it to her straight and see how she reacted. "Because he's the best there is, Ms. France. Reading his books was the only time in my entire life when I was totally gone into the world of the story. Not that it makes any difference, but I teach English at a boy's prep school, and even all of the so-called 'greats' have never affected me the way The Land of Laughs does."

  She seemed pleased by the compliment but squinted up her eyes and touched me briefly on the hand. "I have told you a million times not to exaggerate, Mr. Abbey." She smiled like a little girl absolutely delighted with herself. The joke and the smile made me delighted with her too.

  What the hell was David Louis talking about when he pictured her as some kind of shrewy weirdo who vamped around in black dresses with a candle in her hand? She was pretty and funny and wore Dee-Cee overalls, and from what I'd seen so far, everyone in town knew and liked her.

  "It's true, Miss France." Saxony said it so ardently that we all stopped and looked at her.

  "Did David tell you, though, how I felt about a biography of my father?"

  Saxony spoke. "He said that you were very much against one being written."

  "No, that is not quite true. I've been against it because the people who have wanted to write about him have come out here to our town for all of the wrong reasons. They would all like to become the authority on Marshall France. But when you talk to them, it is easy to see that they aren't interested in what kind of man he was. To them he is just a literary figure."

  A kind of low-level bitterness moved in over her voice like a cloud bank. She was facing Saxony, so I only saw her in profile. Her chin was angular and sharp. When she spoke, her white teeth came out from under those dark, heavy lips in sharp contrast, but then they went back into hiding as soon as she stopped. She had long sparse eyelashes that looked recently curled. Her neck was long and white and incredibly vulnerable and held the only wrinkles on her face. I guessed that she was either in her forties or late thirties, but everything about her looked firm and healthy, and I could picture her living to a very old age. Unless she had the same weak heart as her father.

  She turned to me and started playing with the blue plastic fork they'd given me for my spareribs. "If you had known my father, Mr. Abbey, you would understand why I'm so sensitive about this. He was a very private person. The only real friends he had outside of my mother and Mrs. Lee were Dan" – she smiled and nodded up toward the grocer; he shrugged and looked modestly at his spatula – "and only a few others in town. Everybody knew him and liked him, but he hated being in the public eye and worked very hard to avoid it."

  Dan spoke, but only to Anna, not any of us. "The thing he liked to do best was come into my store and sit behind the butcher counter with me on those little wood-stump stools that I keep back there, you know? Once in a while he'd work at the cash register if one of my regular people didn't come in."

  What a great beginning for my biography! Open it with France working at the cash register of Dan's store in Galen…. Even if the possibility of the book was gone, it was a joy to be sitting here with these people who had been so much a part of his life. I envied all of them incredibly.

  "And I could tell when he was back there with ya, Dan. There'd never be no service up front!"

  Dan scratched his head and winked at us. There was a thought in my mind that wouldn't disappear. Here was this nice little fat guy, a grocer, who'd probably spent what amounted to years in the company of my hero. What could they have talked about? Baseball? Women? Who got drunk at the firehouse last night? It was an obnoxious and condescending attitude to have, but why couldn't I have switched places with him for even one of those afternoons behind the butcher counter? One afternoon shooting the bull with Marshall France and maybe talking about books and fantasy… about the characters in his books.

  "Hey, now, Marshall, how did you ever come up with ((fill in the blank))?"

  He would lean back against a couple of legs of lamb and say something like, "I knew this sword swallower when I was a kid…."

  Then we'd turn on the radio and listen to the ball game in that sleepy and calm way that men get when they're bullshitting and looking off into space. We'd talk about Stan Musial's batting average or Fred's new tractor..

  I was off in my dream world chatting with France when I heard Saxony say "something-something-something Stephen Abbey." That brought me around, and when my eyes locked back into the scene, Mrs. Fletcher was staring at me with her mouth wide open.

  "Your father was Stephen Abbey?"

  I shrugged and wondered why the hell Saxony had let that cat out of the bag. Oh, we were going to have a lovely talk later on.

  The soft chain-saw whine of a crying baby cut through the air and covered the halt in conversation.

  "The man's father was Stephen Abbey."

  That did it. Eyes came up, hamburgers went down, the baby stopped crying. I looked at Saxony with instant death in my eyes. Her face fell and she looked away. She tried to get out of it by saying to Anna that since we both had fam
ous fathers, we probably had quite a bit in common.

  "If that's true, then my father wasn't in the same league as Mr. Abbey's." Anna looked at me while she said this. Her eyes moved freely over my face. I half-liked, half-didn't-like the inspection.

  "Then it is true? Your father was Stephen Abbey?"

  I picked up a cold sparerib and took a bite. I wanted to play down my answer as much as possible, so I thought that a mumble through a mouthful of meat would be a good place to start.

  "Yes." Chomp chomp. "Yes, he was." I looked hypnotically at the rib and my greasy fingers. Chewing was easy, swallowing wasn't. I ulked it down with half a can of Coke.

  "Do you remember when me and your father took you to see The Beginners, Anna?"

  "You did?"

  "What do you mean, 'You did?' Of course we did. We went over to that theater in Hermann and you had to go to the bathroom the whole time."

  "What was it like, Mr. Abbey?"

  "You tell me, Ms. France." I gave a two-second nasty-sly smile that she picked up and shot back at me.

  "Two people with famous fathers right at the table with us, Dan." Mrs. Fletcher clapped her hands, then, laying them flat on the table, rubbed them back and forth as if sanding it.

  "Anna, you gotta get me more rolls again!"

  She stood straight up, looked down the front of her overalls, and brushed off some crumbs. "Why don't we talk about this some more, okay? Would you two like to come over to my house for dinner tonight? Around seven-thirty? Eddie told you the address and how to get there, didn't he?"

  I was stunned. We all shook hands and she went off. Dinner tonight at Marshall France's house? Eddie? The hippie kid we'd given the ride to? There was no way he could have gotten to that barbecue before we did.

  We drove Mrs. Fletcher over to her house, which was on the other side of town. It was great. To get there you went up a flagstone walk that cut through a garden of six-foot-high sunflowers, chestnut-size pumpkins, watermelons, and tomato vines. According to her, the only kind of garden she could see was one that you ate. She didn't hold with roses and honeysuckle, no matter how good they smelled.

  You climbed four broad wooden steps to the kind of shaded porch you dream of drinking iced tea on in the middle of August. Real Norman Rockwell stuff. There was a white hammock big enough for ten people, two white rocking chairs with green cushions on the seats, and an all-white dog that looked like a baby pig.

  "Now, that there's Nails. He's a bull terrier, if you don't know the breed."

  "Nails?"

  "Yeah – doesn't his head look like one of those wedging nails? Marshall France gave him that name."

  I've never been crazy for either dogs or cats, but one look at Nails and it was love at first sight. He was so ugly, so short and tight-skinned – like a sausage about to burst its casing. Eyes on either side of his head like a lizard's.

  "Does he bite?"

  "Nails? Lord, no. Nails, come here, boy."

  He got up and stretched, and his skin got even tighter. He walked stiff-leggedly over to us and lay right down again as if the effort to get there had done him in.

  "They raise these dogs in England for fighting. Put 'em in a pen or a pit together and let them tear each other up. People do crazy things, hah, Nails?"

  The dog's face was expressionless, although his eyes were following everything. Little brown coal eyes stuck deep into a white snowman's face.

  "Go ahead and pet him, Tom. He likes people."

  I reached out and hesitantly tapped him twice on the head as if he were a bell at the front desk of a hotel. He moved his noggin up to my hand and pushed into it. I scratched him behind an ear. I got such a kick out of that that I put my bag down and sat down next to him on the porch. He got up, climbed halfway into my lap, and plopped down again. Saxony handed me her wicker basket and went back down the steps into the garden to look at the tomato vines.

  "Why don't you two stay out here for a couple of minutes while I go in and straighten things up?" She moved across the porch and went inside. Nails raised his head but decided to stay in my lap.

  After Anna had left us at the barbecue, I told Mrs. Fletcher that we'd like to take her "downstairs" for a few days, and that if things worked out we'd rent it from her by the week. She agreed and told us again that she didn't mind our not being married. I gave her fourteen dollars in advance.

  Next to her house was a huge yellow, turn-of-the-century icehouse. It was both ominous and pleasing to look at. Solid and unmoving, yet so out-of-place eyen in a sleepy little town like Galen, where I was sure you could still get some kind of candy for a penny. The old lady said that they had been using it for storage right up until a few years before, when a couple of rafters rotted through and fell, killing two workmen from town. A "bunch of fags" from St. Louis came down to look at it to see if it would be possible to convert it into an antique shop, but the people in Galen let them know that they didn't want them there or their icehouse converted, thank you very much.

  As far as my feelings toward Saxony went, I was so buzzed out by the things that had happened that I didn't think about asking her why she'd revealed so much. But while I sat there petting Nails and looking at the icehouse, I made an assessment of what had been accomplished, and I had to admit that we'd gotten a hell of a lot further in one afternoon in Galen than I'd have ever thought possible. We'd arrived, found a place to stay, met some of the townspeople and Anna France in one swoop, and – wonder of wonders – were going to her house for dinner that night. So how wrong had Saxony been? Or was it all luck that had landed us so firmly on our feet in the Land of France?

  4

  "That's a picture of my husband, Joe. I hope you two don't mind pictures of the dead around you. I'll take it down if you want me to."

  Mrs. Fletcher had her hands on her hips and was squinting scornfully at Joe. He looked like Larry of the Three Stooges. I could easily imagine what their life together had been like.

  "This was his study, see, when he was alive. That's why I got his picture in here. There's his little TV set, his radio, the desk where he wrote all his policies and letters…." She swept across the room and pointed out his TV, radio, desk. There were diplomas and certificates on the walls, photographs of him holding up a big fish, touching his son's shoulder at the boy's graduation, being made an Elk. There was a green waist-high bookcase against one green wall which was filled with copies of The Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics, Boy's Life, and a few books. One of the certificates on the wall thanked him for being a scoutmaster in 1961. A circular red-and-green rug covered most of the floor, but Nails lay down near me on the exposed part of the dark wood as soon as we entered the room. He and I were getting along like old pals. There was another comfortable-looking rocking chair by the window. Standing there, I could easily see being very content in a room like that. The bay window looked out on the still-sunlit vegetable garden in front.

  There were three other rooms besides the study. A bedroom where everything was white as a glacier and smelled like lavender, a parlor with giant old Victorian furniture that hulked everywhere and would probably make me depressed sometime, and a combined kitchen-dining room that was big enough to hold the Democratic Convention. For thirty-five dollars a week, I wondered if they had any openings in English at Galen High School. Move in here with Saxony, get my Missouri teaching certificate, and teach days at the school, research and write the book at night if things finally did work out with Anna…. Nails put his head on my foot and brought me back down to earth.

  I realized that while dreaming, I had been staring at the bookcase. Suddenly I saw what it was I was staring at, and I hotfooted it over there and started reaching for the book before I arrived.

  "Saxony! The Night Races into Anna. Look at this!" I had the book and thumbed through it, back to front. "Hey, hey, will you look at this! It has three more chapters than your edition, Sax!"

  That brought her over. She snatched it out of my hand.

  "You're right,
but I don't understand." She turned to ask Mrs. Fletcher, but the old woman was gone. We looked at each other and then I looked out the window, which was just over Sax's shoulder. Dwarfed by the nodding and swaying yellow-and-black sunflowers, our new landlady moved across the garden. She was looking toward the window, toward us.

  Saxony sat on the high white bed and kicked off her loafers. "Do you mind if I read it first? I won't he long."

  "No, go ahead. I want to take a shower."

  But there was no shower. Only one of those seven-or eight-foot-long bathtubs with white lion claws holding white balls for legs. I didn't mind a good soothing soak in tepid water – in fact, after everything that had happened today, it sounded good. There was even a brand-new chunky bar of Ivory soap in the metal tray and a thick purple towel and washcloth slung over the side of the tub.

  I was soaping my head and singing a Randy Newman song when she came in. She had the book in her hand and, without saying anything, sat down on the top of the white wicker clothes hamper.

  "Are you okay, Sax?"

  "Yes. I just didn't feel like reading. I thought I did. Are you mad at me?"

  "No. Yes. Yes, I guess I was, back there, before, but everything's worked out so well that I can't be mad any longer."

  "Was it because I mentioned your father?"

  "Partly. Partly that, and then when you told them about the biography."

  She got off the hamper and walked to the sink. She looked at herself in the medicine-chest mirror.

  "I thought so. Are you excited about going to this dinner with her?"

  She spoke in a monotone that I wasn't used to. She normally had a voice for every mood, and it was easy to tell how she was feeling by the way she spoke. Since she came into the bathroom, though, she'd sounded like a talking computer.