The Land Of Laughs

by Jonathan Carroll

  "Of course I'm excited! Do you know that if she quote accepts us unquote, we'll he halfway there?"

  "Yes, I know. What do you think of the town?"

  "Saxony, will you please tell me what's wrong with you? You sound like The Night of the Living Dead. What are you, half asleep? You don't seem to realize that we have been invited to dinner tonight by Anna France, as in the Anna France." I guess I was angry and my voice showed it. I caught her eye in the mirror, and she gave me a weak smile. Then she turned around and looked at me and I felt like some sort of dope there in the bathtub with my knees up under m chin and a head full of shampoo suds.

  "I know." She kept looking at me and then said it again. "I know." She moved over to the hamper, picked up the book, and left the room.

  "What the hell was that supposed to mean?" I asked the tub. The soap squiggled out of my hand and fell into the water with a plop.

  I finished my bath only half-conscious of what I was doing, because I was trying to figure out what was going on. But when I was done and had dripped my way back into the bedroom, she was up and at 'em again, so I decided to keep quiet.

  We wanted to walk to the France house. Mrs. Fletcher was out on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, shucking corn. Nails was lying next to her, guarding but not eating a big pink-and-white bone. She gave us careful walking directions to Anna's, which turned out to be about six blocks away. Going down the porch steps, I was sure that she was watching our every move, but I didn't turn around to check. It would have been too obvious, and I didn't want to be on bad terms with her. If we decided to stay awhile, her house was too nice and comfortable (and cheap) to make me want to throw it away simply because she was odd and nosy.

  The sun was setting on the top of the icehouse, but it looked pale compared to the deep lemon of the building. There were the ghosts of once-black letters on the side of the place that we hadn't seen when we first passed it.

  "Hey, will you look at that? 'Fletcher and Family.' I wonder why she didn't tell us before that she owned it?"

  "Maybe she was embarrassed to admit to her wealth?" Sax looked at me and squinched up her eyes against the sun.

  "What wealth? She rents rooms in her house and owns a closed-up icehouse? I think she didn't want to 'fess up to owning a place where people got killed because of owner neglect."

  That idea held the floor for a few silent minutes of walking.

  It was the beginning of the evening, and the sky had cleared to cobalt blue with a streak of sharp white airplane exhaust vapor through its center. A lawnmower whined somewhere and the air smelled of cut grass, and of oil and gasoline when we passed Bert Keener's Exxon Station. A guy was sitting in front of the office in a red aluminum lawn chair with a can of beer propped on a pile of old worn tires nearby. Another Norman Rockwell painting, this one titled "Bert's Exxon Station in June." A new white Volkswagen pulled into the station and rolled up to the pumps. The man inside rolled down his window and stuck his head out.

  "Get your ass over here, Larry. You gettin' paid to drink beer or what?"

  Larry, in the lawn chair, made a face and looked at us before he got up. "These guys that buy these little Kraut cars all get to thinking that they're Hitler, you know?"

  We walked past a closed grocery store with particolored stickers all over the windows announcing the weekly specials. I noticed that the prices were cheaper than in Connecticut.

  A drive-in hamburger joint was next, with a lot of bright orange everywhere and rock music piped out over its dirt parking lot via a speaker on the roof of the squat, square building. A late-sixties Chevrolet was the only car there, and I noticed that everyone in it was eating big soft-ice-cream cones.

  Without knowing it, we had arrived at Anna's street. My stomach, which had been pretty calm until then, said "contact" to the rest of my system, and within milliseconds I was jumpy and scared.

  "Thomas…"

  "Come on, Sax, let's just go. Let's get it over with." I was revving up and knew that I had to keep going or else my knees would start shaking and I'd become tongue-tied.

  "Thomas…"

  "Come on!" I took her limp hand from the crook of my elbow and dragged her down the street.

  Everyone must have been either eating dinner or out because no one was in sight as we walked toward Anna's. It was almost a little eerie. The houses were mostly white Midwest-solid. Picket fences and aluminum siding and some metal statues on the lawn. Mailboxes with names like Calder and Schreiner, and my favorite – "The Bob and Leona Burns Castle." I could imagine Christmas-tree lights on these places in December. Christmas-tree lights hung over the front doors, and big light-up Santa Clauses on the roofs.

  And then there it was. It wasn't hard to make out the house, because I had looked at the magazine picture enough times. Huge, brown, Victorian, full of intricate gingerbread woodwork, and on closer view, small stained-glass windows. Hedges in front that were full and carefully trimmed. Even though it was a kind of dark cocoa brown, the house looked freshly painted.

  My grandmother lived in a house like that. She lived to be ninety-four in Iowa and refused to see any of her son's movies. When she died and they went through her belongings, they found eleven leather scrapbooks on his career that went back to his first film. She had wanted him to be a veterinarian. She kept lots of animals in and around her big farmhouse, including a donkey and a goat. Whenever we visited her, the donkey always bit me and then laughed.

  "… go?"

  Saxony was in the crook of my arm again and peering at me.

  "Excuse me?"

  Her expression was tight and flushed, and I assumed that she was as nervous about this as I was.

  "Don't you think we should go? I mean, I think it's time, isn't it?"

  I looked at my watch without really seeing it, and nodded.

  We crossed the street and went up the walk to the house. A screen door, a natural-wood mailbox with just the name in white block letters (what incredible mail must have been in there at one time!), and a black doorbell that was as big as a checker. I pressed it and a deep chiming went off in the back of the house. A dog barked and then abruptly stopped. I looked at the floor and saw a matching brown mat that said "GO AWAY!" I nudged Saxony and pointed to it.

  "Do you think she means us?"

  That's all I needed. I had thought the mat was a funny idea, and then she had to make it into something else to worry about. What if Anna really didn't want us –

  "Hi. Come in. I'd better not shake hands with you. I'm a little greasy from the chicken."

  "Hey, look, it's Nails!"

  It was. A white bull terrier had shoved its head between Anna's knees and was checking us out with those hilariously tight, slanty eyes.

  Anna closed her legs tighter and held its head between them like a punishment stock. The dog didn't move, but I could see its tail wagging behind Anna.

  "No, this one is Petals; she's Nails's girlfriend." Anna let her go and Petals came right over to say hello. She was as friendly as the other one. I had never seen bull terriers before today, and then the two of them within a few hours. But it made sense, with Nails just down the street.

  A wide hallway led straight to a flight of stairs. Halfway up them, above the landing, two big stained-glass windows beamed Technicolor light across some of the lower steps and the last part of the hall. The walls were white. On the left as you walked in was a big gold fish-eye mirror next to a bentwood hat rack with two slouchy men's hats on them. His hats? Had Marshall France actually worn them? To the right of the rack were eighteenth– and nineteenth-century ascension balloon and zeppelin prints in expensive modern silver frames. Next to them, and a big surprise to me because I'd pictured France as a modest man, were framed mock-ups of the Van Walt covers to all of his books. I didn't want to appear too snoopy, so I stopped peeking at the pictures. Maybe later, when we were all more comfortable with each other (if there was going to be a later after tonight). I began playing with Petals, who kept jumping
up and down by herself in the middle of the hallway. Then she started jumping on me.

  "These dogs are incredible. I neyer really knew of them before today, but now I think I want one!"

  "You'll see a lot of them around here. We're a little bull-terrier enclave. They were the only dogs my father ever liked. If she gets to be too much for you, just push her away. They are the world's greatest dogs, but all of them have a tendency to get a little crazy sometimes. Come on, let's go into the living room."

  I wondered what she was like in bed but suppressed the thought, since it seemed sacrilegious to do it with the daughter of France. The hell with it – she was sexy and had a great deep voice and she wore the kind of jeans-and-T-shirt clothes that showed she still had a very nice, full figure. Walking into the living room, I pictured her in a Paris atelier living with a crazy Russian painter whose eyes glowed like Rasputin's and who took her fifty times a day in between painting nude portraits of her and drinking absinthe.

  In the incredible France living room my first amazed inventory took in: a hand-carved olive-wood Pinocchio with moving arms and legs, six-foot-tall department store mannequin from the 1920's that was painted silver and looked like Jean Harlow with her hair swept up on her head, Navaho rug. Hand puppets and marionettes. Masks! (Mostly Japanese, South American, and African on first glance.) Peacock feathers stuck in an earthenware pitcher. Japanese prints (Hokusai and Hiroshige). A shelf full of old alarm clocks with painted faces, metal banks, and tin toys. Old leather-bound books. Three square wood boxes from a Shanghai tea exporter with yellow, red, and black flowers and fans and women and sampans. A stereo somewhere was playing the score to Cabaret. A ceiling fan with wooden blades hung unmoving.

  We stood in the doorway and gasped. He wrote the books, and this was his living room, and it all made perfect sense.

  "People either love this room when they first come in or they are horrified." Anna pushed between us and went in. We stayed frozen in the doorway, looking. "My mother was very conservative. She liked antimacassars and doilies and tea cozies. All of her things are boxed up in the attic now, because as soon as she died, Father and I transformed this room. We did it over into what we'd envisioned for years. Even when I was very young, I liked the same things that he did."

  "But it's great! When I think of all the books and the characters, and then all of this…" I spread both arms toward the room. "It's all him. It's completely Marshall France."

  She liked that. She stood in the middle of the room, beaming, and told us to come in and sit down. I say "told" because whatever she said sounded either like an order or a definitive statement. She was not an insecure person.

  Saxony, however, went right over to a hand puppet that was hanging from a hook on the wall.

  "May I try it?"

  I didn't think that that was the sort of thing to ask right after you'd come in, but Anna said that it was okay.

  Sax reached for it, then stopped and stepped back. "It's a Klee!"

  Anna nodded but didn't say anything. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

  "But it's a Paul Klee!" Saxony looked from the puppet, to Anna, to me, totally flabbergasted. "How did you… ?".

  "You're very good, Miss Gardner. Not many people know how rare that is."

  "She's a puppeteer," I said, trying to get into the act.

  "But it's a Klee!"

  I wondered if she was trying to imitate a parrot. She took it off the wall and handled it like the Holy Grail. She started talking, but it was so quietly that it was either to herself or to the puppet.

  "Sax, what are you saying?"

  She looked up. "Paul Klee made fifty of these for his son, Felix. But twenty of the originals were destroyed when the town of Dessau was bombed during the war. The rest of them are supposed to be at a museum in Switzerland."

  "Yes, they are in Bern. But Father and Klee had a great correspondence going between them for years. Klee wrote first to tell him how much he liked The Green Dog's Sorrow. When Father later told him about his collection, KIee sent him that one."

  To me the puppet looked like something from a fourth-grade arts-and-crafts class.

  Sax sank into a nearby leather chair and went on communing with the Klee. I looked at Anna and smiled, and Anna looked at me and smiled. For two seconds it was as if Saxony wasn't in the room with us. For two seconds I felt how easy and nice it would be to be Anna's lover. The feeling passed, but its echoes didn't.

  "So who are you, Mr. Abbey? Besides Stephen Abbey's son."

  "Who am I?"

  "Yes, who are you? Where are you coming from now, what do you do… ?"

  "Oh, I see. Well, I've been teaching at a prep school in Connecticut…"

  "Teaching? You mean that you are not an actor?"

  I took one of my deep breaths and crossed one leg over the other. A bit of hairy ankle showed between the cuff and the top of my gray sock, so I covered it with my hand. I tried to laugh off her question/statement. "Ha, ha, no, one actor in the family was enough."

  "Yes, genug. I feel the same way. I could never be a writer."

  She looked at me calmly. Again, that kind of unspoken, just-between-us intimacy was there. Or was I fantasizing? I pulled on my shoelace and undid the bow. I was tying it again when she spoke.

  "Which of Father's was your favorite book?"

  "The Land of Laughs."

  "Why?" She picked an oblong glass paperweight off an end table and rolled it around in her hands.

  "Because no one else ever got that close to my world." I uncrossed my leg and leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey – it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done."

  She laughed and bent down to pet Petals, who was resting her chunky head on Anna's foot. "You mean that you finish every book that you start?"

  "Yes, it's this terrible habit that I have. Even if it's the worst thing that was ever written, once I get started with it, then I'm hooked until I find out what happens."

  "That is very interesting, because my father was the same way. As soon as he picked up anything – even the phone book – he would read it until the bitter end."

  "Didn't they make a great movie out of that?"

  "Out of what?"

  "The phone book." I knew it was a terrible joke as soon as I said it, but Anna didn't even attempt a smile. I wondered if she judged future biographers on their sense of humor.

  "Excuse me for a minute, will you? I have to go look at the dinner." She left the room to Saxony and me. Petals looked up and wagged her tail but stayed where she was on the floor. Naturally I jumped up and poked around. France or someone in the house liked biographies and autobiographies, because there were so many of them around, the pages bent over and whole sections marked off. It was a strange assortment, too – Richard Halliburton's The Magic Carpet, the notebooks of Max Frisch (in German), Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, a French priest who fought for the underground in WW II, Mein Kampf (in German), the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Three on a Toothbrush by Jack Paar.

  A cardboard shoebox with Buster Brown on the side contained a collection of old postcards. When I thumbed through them, I noticed that many were of European train stations. I flipped one of the Vienna Westbahnhof over and got the shivers when I looked at the signature printed across the bottom – "Isaac." The date on it was 1933. I couldn't read the German, but I was sorely tempted to steal the card and send it to David Louis in New York. "Dear Mr. Louis: I thought you might like to see a postcard to Marshall France from his nonexistent brother, Isaac."

  "Dinner is ready! Come and eat everything before it gets cold."

  I didn't real
ize how hungry I was until we walked in and saw big steaming platters of fried chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes.

  "Because this is your first time here, I thought that I would make you my father's favorite meal. When he was alive he was very mad if this wasn't made for him at least once a week. If it had been his choice, we would have had it every day. Please, sit down."

  It was a small oval table with three straw place mats. I sat on Anna's right, Saxony on her left. The food smells were driving me crazy. Anna served, loading down my plate with two fat legs, a pile of peas, and a heavy yellow cloud of mashed potatoes. I was on the verge of licking my lips and diving right into them when I picked up my knife and fork and looked at them.

  "Yipes!"

  Anna looked over, and seeing what was happening, smiled. "I was waiting to see how long it would take you to react. Aren't they crazy? They were Father's too. He had a silversmith in New York make them."

  My fork was a silver clown. His head was bent back and the tines of the fork came out of his open mouth. My knife was a long-muscled arm holding a kind of paddle. Not Ping-Pong or anything like that; more sinister-looking – the sort of thing they smack kids with in English public schools. Saxony held hers up to the light, and they were completely different. Her fork was a witch riding a broom. The tines were the brush part, the shaft the broomstick.

  "They're incredible!"

  "There are enough for six place settings. I'll show you the others after dinner."

  As soon as I started eating, I knew it was going to be a long, long meal. I wondered why I was damned to eat horrible food from the hands of interesting women.

  Halfway through the unspeakable coffee, she put her napkin down and started talking about France. Now and then she'd pick up her fork and play with it, running it through her fingers as if practicing to be a magician. She watched her hands most of the time, although once in a while she would pause and look at one of us to see, by our expressions, if we understood what she was talking about.

  "My father loved living in Galen. His parents sent him to America before the war because they were Jews and they were afraid of Hitler long before most people. Father's brother, Isaac, was killed in one of the concentration camps."