The Land Of Laughs

by Jonathan Carroll

  "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."

  4

  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.

  I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror sizing me up. "So I gotta go down Park."

  "Oh, that's all right. Excuse me, but do you pronounce your last name Toot-o or Tut-o?"

  His eyes were in the mirror instantly, drawing a head on me before he answered this dangerous question.

  "What's it to you, hey?"

  "Nothing. I was just interested." Fool that I am, I thought I'd try to be funny. "I thought you might be related to the Egyptian Tuts."

  "Like hell you did. You were checking me out, weren't you?" He grabbed hold of the bill of his checkered golf cap and pulled it around and down farther onto his head.

  "No, no, you see, I saw your name there on the card –"

  "You're another inspector! God damn you guys! I got the friggin' renewal already, so what the hell else do you want from me, blood?" He pulled over to the curb and told me that he didn't want me in his fucking cab – that I could fucking suspend him if I wanted, but that he was sick of "us guys." So we all got out of his cab, waved good-bye to Franklin Tuto as he screeched away, and sighing, hailed another.

  The pilot of this one was named Kodel Sweet. I'm a great one for reading the names of cabdrivers. Scenery usually bores me. He had on one of those funky black velvet hats that look like something fell out of the sky onto his head and decided to stay. For better or worse he didn't say anything the whole trip except "Check it out" when I again gave the address of the publisher. But then when I was getting out of the car he said, "Have a nice day," and it sounded like he meant it.

  The building was one of those all-glass Brave New World things like a huge swimming pool turned up on end without the water flowing out. The only time I've ever liked architecture like that is when it's one of those brilliantly sunny days in the spring or fall and the million windows reflect light everywhere.

  I was surprised to find that a number of the floors of the building were offices of this publisher. Floors and floors of people working on books. I liked that idea. I liked the fact that Kodel Sweet had told me to have a nice day. There was a nice smell in the elevator, of some woman's sexy perfume…. New York's okay.

  As I went up in the elevator, I felt a funny jump in my stomach to think that in a few minutes I'd be talking to someone who actually knew Marshall France. I've been plagued all my life with people asking me what my father was like, and I've always hated it, but now I had fifty zillion questions that I wanted to ask about France. As I came up with a zillion more, the elevator doors slid open and I walked out in search of David Louis's office.

  Louis was no Maxwell Perkins, but he had a big enough reputation so that you'd hear about him now and then. When I reread the articles on France, they said that Louis had been one of the few people France was in contact with when he was ahve. He had also edited all of the France books and had been made executor of the writer's will. I knew nothing about will executors (when my father died I went into total hibernation and didn
't come out again until the battleground was cleared of rubble and bodies), but I assumed that Louis had to mean something to France to be made final overseer of his possessions.

  "Help you?"

  The secretary had on – I swear to God – a gold lamй T-shirt with gold sequin letters spelling out "Virginia Woolf" across her nice chest. There was a copy of The Super Secs facedown on her desk.

  "I have an appointment with Mr. Louis."

  "Are you Mr. Abbey?"

  "Yes." I looked away because all of a sudden she had that "Aren't you… ?" glint in her eye, and I wasn't in the mood for her questions.

  "One minute and I'll see…" She picked up the receiver and dialed an extension.

  On one wall of the waiting room was a display ease of the books the house had recently published. I started looking at the fiction, but what caught my eye was a gigantic coffee-table book, The World of Puppets. It cost twenty-five dollars but seemed so thick through the glass window that it had to have every photograph ever taken of a wooden head or string. I decided to buy it for Saxony for all the work she'd been doing. I knew that the gesture would mean something more to her than I probably wanted it to, but the hell with that. She deserved it.

  "Mr. Abbey?"

  I turned, and there was Louis. He was short and squat, probably around sixty, sixty-one years old, well groomed. He had on this very dapper tan suit with wide lapels, and a sea-blue herringbone shirt with a maroon ascot tucked down into the neck instead of a tie. Silver metal-frame glasses that made him look like a French movie director. Semi-bald, he gave me a semi-dead-fish handshake.

  He led me into his office, and just before he closed the door, I heard his secretary snap her gum. The place was wall-to-wall books, and sneaking a glance at some of the titles, I realized how important he must be if he edited even half of these people.

  He smiled apologetically and stuck his hands into his pants pockets. "Do you mind if I join you on the couch? Please, please sit down. I hurt my back playing racketball last week, and it hasn't been the same since."

  Ted Lapidus suit, sequin secretary, racketball… Whether or not I approved of his style, he was my strongest link to Marshall France at the moment.

  "You said that you wanted to talk about Marshall, Mr. Abbey." He was smiling a little wearily, I thought. He'd been over this territory before? "You know, it's interesting – ever since the colleges started teaching courses in children's literature, and people like George MacDonald and the Grimm Brothers have been established and made quote literary unquote, the interest in France's work has gone way up again. Not that the books haven't always sold. But now a number of schools have his things on their reading lists."

  Next he'd be telling me that there were twelve people about to publish definitive biographies of France next month. I was afraid to ask the question but knew that I had to.

  "Then why hasn't a biography of him ever been written if the time is so ripe?"

  Louis turned his head slowly so that he was looking at me face-on. Until then he'd been gazing straight ahead at something fascinating on the floor in front of us. I couldn't see his face too well because the glasses were reflecting light from the window, but the rest of his face seemed impassive.

  "Is that why you're here, Mr. Abbey? You want to write a biography?"

  "Yes. I'd like to try."

  "All right." He took a deep breath and went back to looking at the floor. "Then I'll tell you what I've told the others. I personally would love to see a biography written of the man. From what little I know, he led a fascinating life. Not so much so when he got older and lived in Galen… but every literary figure should have his portrait done. But when Marshall became famous, he loathed the notoriety that went along with it. I've always been convinced that that was part of what killed him so early – people from all over hounded him, and he just wasn't able to handle it. At all. Anyway, his daughter…" He stopped and licked his lips. "His daughter, Anna, is a very strange woman. She's never really forgiven the rest of the world for the fact that her father died so early. He was only forty-four, you know. She lives alone now, out in that big awful house in Galen, and refuses to talk to anyone about anything that has to do with him. Do you know how long I've tried to wangle the manuscript of his novel out of her? Years, Mr. Abbey. You know about his novel, don't you?"

  I nodded. The learned hiographer.

  "Yes, well, good luck. Besides the fact that it would make her a small mountain of money – not to sound mercenary – I think that whatever he wrote should be printed and read. He was the only full-fledged genius I ever came up against in this business, and you can quote me. For God's sake, his fans are so devoted to him that some book dealer downtown told me the other day that he sold a copy of Peach Shadows for seventy-five dollars!"

  Ahem.

  "No, Mr. Abbey, she won't listen to me or to anyone else. Marshall never told her before he died that the book was finished, although in his letters to me he implied that it was. But to her it's unfinished, i.e. unpublishable. So I've begged her to let me put it out with a long note saying that it's incomplete, but she just closes her little bee-stung eyes and disappears back into Baby Anna Land, and that's the end of it.

  "But I must also tell you that Marshall never wanted a biography written, so naturally she's obeyed that request too. I sometimes think that she's trying to hoard what's left of the man from the rest of the world. She'd probably take all of his books off people's shelves if she could." He scratched his white, steel-wool hair. "But really – not publishing the novel, not allowing a biography, never talking to the journalists who've gone out there to write articles on him… She's trying to squirrel him away from the rest of the world, for Christ's sake!" He shook his head and looked at the ceiling. I looked at it too and didn't see anything. It was quiet and comfortable, and both of us were thinking about this remarkable man who was such a big part of both of our lives.

  "What about the possibility of writing a biography that wasn't authorized, Mr. Louis? I mean, there must be ways to find out about him without having to go through her. Anna."

  "Oh, it's been tried. A couple of years ago an eager-beaver grad student from Princeton came through here on his way out to Galen." He smiled a private smile and took his glasses off. "He was an outrageously pompous ass, but that was all right. I was interested to see how he'd fare up against the mighty Anna. I asked him to write if anything happened out there, but I never heard from him again."

  "And what did Anna say?"

  "Anna? Oh, her usual. Wrote me a venomous letter telling me to stop sending snoopers out to dig around in her father's life. Nothing new, believe me. In her eyes, I'm that New York Jew who exploited her father right into his grave." He turned both hands palms up and shrugged.

  I waited for him to say something more, but he didn't. I rubbed my hand on the coarse canvas arm of the couch and tried to think of another question. Here was the man who had known Marshall France – talked with him, read his manuscripts – so where were all of my questions? Why was I suddenly at a loss?

  "I'll tell you a little about Anna, Thomas. Maybe it will give you an idea of what you'd be up against if you tried this book. I'll tell you just one instance in my never-ending love affair with the lovely Anna." He pushed off the couch and went over to his desk. He opened a small black lacquer box – the kind you see in Russian gift shops – and took out a cigar that looked like the twisted roots of a tree.

  "Years ago I went out to Galen to talk with Marshall about a book he was working on. It turned out that it was The Night Races into Anna and that he was right in the middle of it. I read what he had and liked it, but there were parts that needed work. He'd never done a novel before, and it was turning out to be much more serious than any of his other work." He puffed his cigar and watched the tip grow orange. He was one of those people who like to tell a story in fits and starts – always stopping just when they've reached a crucial point and know their audience is panting for them to go on. In this case, Louis h
ad his intermission just after he said that he told Marshall France that something he wrote "needed work."

  "Did he mind hearing that?" I scrunched around in my seat and tried to act as if I could wait all day for his answer. I was also framing in my mind a part of the biography where I would say, "When asked if France minded editorial suggestion, his long-time editor, David Louis, chuckled around his De Nobili cigar and said…"

  Puff. Puff. A long look out the window. He tapped the ashes into the ashtray and took a final look at the cigar, held out at arm's length. "Did he mind? Criticism, you mean? Absolutely not at all. I never knew how much he listened to me, but I never had any hesitation telling him when I thought that something was wrong or needed work."

  "And was that often?"

  "No. In almost every case, his manuscripts came in to me as finished products. I did very little editing on Marshall's work after the first book. Usually just some punctuation mistakes and sentence shifting.

  "But let me get back to this novel. When I was out there, I took a couple of days to read it carefully and take notes. Anna was about… oh, maybe twenty or twenty-two by then. She had just dropped out of Oberlin and was staying home most of the time, in her room. From what Marshall said, she had gone there for their music school because she had had the makings of a concert pianist, but somewhere along the line she gave that up and scuttled back to Galen."

  His tone of voice was hard to describe – objective but with little bits of anger sprinkled throughout.

  "Now, the interesting thing is, she'd been involved in some sort of mysterious goings-on in college, and something had gone wrong or someone…" He rubbed his ear and sucked in one of his cheeks. "That's right! Someone had died, I think. Her boyfriend? I'm not sure. Naturally Marshall wasn't any too clear about it, because it was his daughter in the middle of it. Anyway, she was home on the next train.

  "When I was out there, I'd see her flit around through the house in her black silk dresses and hair down her back. She'd be hugging a copy of Kafka or Kierkegaard to her chest. I kept getting the impression that she carried them title out so that whoever looked her way would be sure to see what she was reading.