The Land of Laughs (26 page)

I still went to Anna’s, but only during the day and no later than five-thirty. Then I packed my little brown briefcase and toddled home.

One of my great problems was in deciding whether or not to tell Saxony the truth about France and Galen. At times I couldn’t stand it, holding it in like that, keeping it from her. But then I knew that people had been committed to the insane asylum for less nutty views than mine, so I reasoned that it was best to wait and see what happened before I let the cat out of the bag.

A snowstorm whipped through town and painted everything thick white. I went out for a walk one afternoon and came across three cats romping it up in someone’s open field. They were having so much fun that I stopped and watched. They went on leaping after each other for a couple of minutes, until one of them spotted me and stopped dead in his tracks. All of them looked my way, and unconsciously I raised my hand to wave. Very faintly, very whispery across the snow, I heard them mewing. It took several seconds for it to dawn on me that it was their way of saying hello.

But then everyone in town had begun to open up to me now. What they told me would have made me run the other way a few months before, but now all I did was nod and shake my head and have another of Debby’s (or Gretchen’s or Mary Ann’s …) oatmeal-raisin cookies.

They inevitably went on in one of two directions: accusatory or beseeching. I’d goddamned better get the book written or else a lot of people were going to be in trouble, or, thank God I had happened along when I did, and would it be long before I was done? Depending on the day and the person, I felt either like the messiah or the telephone repairman. As to whether or not my finished book would bring Marshall France back, the thought went around and around in my brain like a kid’s marble in a clothes dryer. Sometimes I stopped and laughed at everything because it was all so crazy and absurd. At other times, my fear lizards went walking on my skin and I tried to push it all out of my head.

“Uh, Larry, what does it feel like to be … uh, created?”

Larry farted and smiled at me. “Created? What d’ya mean, created? Look, man, you shot out of your old man, right?” I nodded and shrugged. “Well, I just shot out of someplace else. You want another beer?”

Catherine petted her gray rabbit as gently as if it were made of glass. “Created? Hmm. That’s a funny word to use. Created.” She rolled it around her tongue and smiled down at the rabbit. “I don’t really think about it, Thomas. There’s always so much else on my mind.”

If I was expecting answers from the Inner Sanctum, I didn’t get them. Galen was a lower-middle-class town in the heart of Missouri, made up of hardworking people who went bowling on Wednesday night, loved
The Bionic Woman
, ate ham sandwiches, and were saving up to buy new Roto-tillers or a vacation cottage out on Lake Tekawitha.

The most interesting anecdote I heard was from a guy who accidentally shot his brother in the face with a police revolver. The trigger pulled, the gun exploded, smoke, lots of noise … but nothing happened to the brother, Nothing.

But people talked and talked. Now that I was “one of them,” they told me all kinds of things — about their lumbago, their sex lives, recipes for catfish. Not much of it had to do with my research, but they had talked to each other for so long about the same things that it was nice to have a fresh ear to tell it to again.

“Do you know what I don’t like about what’s going on now, Abbey? Not knowin’ nothing. I used to be able to walk down the street and not worry about no fuckin’ aeroplanes falling on my head. You understand what I’m talking about? When you know, you know. You don’t have to worry about nothin’ happening to you. Look at this goddamned what’s-his-name — Joe Jordan. He goes out to pick up a fucking pack of cigarettes, and the next thing he knows, he’s run over a little kid. No sir, thank you, I want to
know
when my time’s coming. That way, I don’t have to worry a bit about it until the time comes.”

“But what will you do then? When your time comes.”

“Piss in my fuckin’ pants!” The old man laughed and laughed at his own joke.

The more people I asked, the more it seemed that the vast majority were content with France’s “way,” and horrified that suddenly, cruelly, they had been turned over to the clumsy hands of fate.

But there were a few who didn’t want to know what would happen to them. That was all right. The way it had been arranged, years ago, was that the oldest member of each family was responsible for a detailed copy of the history and future history of his family that had been given to him by France. Anyone over eighteen who wanted to know what was going to happen could go to the “elder” and ask any question.

A man who worked in the supermarket looked at me as if I were crazy when I asked him if he wouldn’t like to live more than the fifty-one years France had given him.

“Why? I can do everything I want now. What can’t a man accomplish in fifty years?”

“But it’s so … it’s so locked in. I don’t know, it’s claustrophobic.”

His arthritic hands pulled a black Ace comb out of an overall pocket and slid it through equally black hair.

“No, look, Tom, I’m thirty-nine now, right? I know for sure that I’ve got twelve more years to go. I never worry about any of that stuff — about dying and all. But you do, don’t you? Sometimes you probably get up in the morning and say to yourself, ‘Today might be the day I
die
,’ or ‘Today I might get crippled or busted up for life.’ Things like that. But we never think two seconds about it, you know? I got some arthritis in my hands and I’ll die of cancer when I’m fifty-one. So who’s better off now, you or me? Be honest.”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“Sure, fire away.”

“Let’s say that I’m a Galener and I find out that I’m supposed to die tomorrow, that you’re going to run me over in your truck. What if I go home and I never come out of the house tomorrow. What if I hide in my closet all day and I make it impossible for you to run me over?”

“You’ll die in the closet at the same time you were supposed to be run over by me.”

In my father’s film
Café de la Paix
, there is a scene that I’ve always liked and which kept ringing in my head when I made my rounds in Galen.

Richard Eliot, aka “Shakespeare,” who just happens to be England’s most effective secret agent in Nazi-occupied France, has been found out. He sends his wife away via the underground, and then goes to the Café de la Paix to wait for the Krauts to come and get him. He orders a
café crčme
, takes a small book out of his pocket, and starts reading. Cool as a cucumber. The coffee comes, but the waiter serves it as fast as he can and gets the hell out of there because he knows what is about to happen. The street is empty and some dead leaves move ever so slowly by the table legs. The director of the film was ingenious, because he didn’t let anything happen for three minutes. By the time the black Mercedes comes screeching up, you’ve been pulling your hair out and are
glad
that they’ve arrived. Doors slam, and the camera follows two highly shined pairs of jackboots across the street.

“Herr Eliot?” The German officer is one of those good/bad guys (I think Curt Jurgens played it) who’s been clever enough to track down Shakespeare, but along the way has grown to respect the man he’s about to arrest.

My father looks up from his book and smiles. “Hello, Fuchs.”

The other Nazi moves to get him, but Fuchs grabs the guy by the arm and orders him back to the car.

Father pays the bill and the two men walk slowly across the street.

“If it had been successful, Eliot, what would you have done when you returned home?”

“Done?” Father laughs and looks at the sky for a long time. “I don’t know, Fuchs. Sometimes that possibility scared me more than being caught. Isn’t that funny? Maybe in the back of my mind I have hoped all along that this would happen so that I would never have to worry about my future. Have you ever thought about what you’ll do when Germany loses the war?”

How many bull sessions had I been in in my life where at three o’clock in the morning I was desperately trying to explain what life was about to a sleepy college roommate or lover? I got so caught up in all of the conflicting answers and possibilities that finally I’d end up either going to sleep or making love or being totally depressed because I realized that I didn’t know anything at all.

The Galeners didn’t have that problem. Theirs was the purest kind of Calvinism, except that they didn’t have to worry about what happened to them on the other side of death. They couldn’t change who they were or what would happen to them, but knowing that they would definitely get a B or a C on their final exam made all the difference in the world as far as their moment-to-moment living was concerned.

Saxony finally got the cast off, and although she limped around for a while because her leg was thin and weak, her spirits rose greatly.

The leaves had all parachuted from the trees and were slicked to the roads now. The days were short and either wet or gray or both. Galen went inside. The basketball team began playing on Friday nights and the gym was always packed. The movie theater, the stores — all the inside things were once again popular. You could smell the heavy winter dinners cooking in the houses, the damp wool of coats, the dusty closeness of gloves and socks and stocking caps left on a radiator to dry.

I thought of all the other little Galens everywhere else that were getting ready for winter. Chains for the car, oil for the heater, new sleds, bird food for the outdoor feeder, storm windows, rock salt for the driveway .

All of the little Galens were making the same preparations, only “out there,” a man was getting into his car to go to the store. He didn’t know that halfway there he would skid off the road and crash and die. His wife wouldn’t think anything was wrong for hours. Then maybe one of his friends would discover the wreck, a gray plume of exhaust smoke still puttering out of the back end, melting the dirt-specked snow beneath it.

Or an old man in Maine would put on his L. L. Bean cardigan sweater and green corduroy pants and not know that in two hours he would have a heart attack while clipping the leash onto his pet dachshund’s collar.

Mrs. Fletcher found out about my birthday and made me a huge, inedible carrot cake. I got a lot of presents too. Whenever I walked into people’s houses they either had a cake or a present for me. I got a stuffed badger, ten hand-tied fishing flies, and a first edition of
None Dare Call It Treason
. When I came home from interviewing, Saxony stood at the door smiling and shaking her head long before I had even brought out my newest treasure to show and tell.

“You’re a real hit here, aren’t you?” She held the stereopticon from Barney and Thelma up to her eyes and looked at Dobbs Ferry, New York.

“Hey, look, that thing is worth a lot of money, Sax. Those people were really nice to have given it to me.”

“Don’t be so sensitive, Thomas. I was just saying that it must be very nice to be so wanted.”

I didn’t know whether she was being honest or facetious, but if I had had to answer her then, I would have agreed — it
was
nice. Sure, I knew why a lot of the Galeners did it — I wasn’t that naďve — but I got to know what it was like to be respected and liked and held in awe: it was damned pleasant. It was a small taste of what both my father and Marshall France had known for most of their lives.

France had taken the cargo ship
Arthur Bellingham
from Liverpool to New York. On board he made friends with a Jewish couple and had a small romance with their nineteen-year-old daughter. He later dated the girl in New York, but nothing ever came of their relationship. He got the job with Lucente and rented a room in a transients’ hotel a block away from the funeral home.

“Anna, how come you lied to me before when I asked you how long your father worked for Lucente?”

She was eating a bowl of Rice Krispies at the dining-room table, and I could hear the little snapping sounds inside her bowl.

“I don’t want to get into a big discussion with you on it — it’s just that I’d like to know why you lied.”

She chewed up the mouthful she had taken and wiped her lips with a paper napkin.

“I wanted to see how good a writer you were before I really let you get going. That makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why I gave you everything up until his immigration to the United States. That way, if you were good, then it would show in whatever first chapter you wrote. If you were bad, then I would just send you away and you would never have known anything. She plowed her spoon back into the cereal and went back to the magazine she had been reading.

“Anna? One more question: how come you never talk about your mother?”

“My mother was a lovely, quiet, Midwestern girl who made me join the Brownies when I was little and the Girl Scouts when I was big. She was a wonderful cook and she made my father’s life very pleasant. I think he loved her and was happy with her because she was just the opposite of him — everything about her was down-to-earth. She admired people with great imaginations or artistic drive, but I think she was secretly pleased that she didn’t have either. She once told me, secretly, that she thought Father’s books were goofy. Isn’t that a great word for them? Goofy?”

France’s uncle, Otto Frank, was never very successful as a printer. He had moved to Galen from Hermann, Missouri, because he liked the location and because there was a printing shop for sale there cheap. He printed wedding invitations, business brochures, posters for church fairs and farm auctions. At one time he had had high hopes for starting a county newspaper (that’s why he had written his brother in Austria and told him to send over one of the boys), but he had no money and found no one interested in staking him to his dream.

Martin arrived (having by then changed his name to Marshall France, much to Otto’s dismay), and his uncle put him to work in the shop as an apprentice. Apparently France liked the work, and he stayed there until Otto died in 1945, the year
A Pool of Stars
was published.