The Land of Laughs (27 page)

The book didn’t do very well when it came out, but the publisher liked it enough to offer France a thousand-dollar advance for his next work, which turned out to be the equally unsuccessful
Peach Shadows
. However, a critic named Charles White wrote a long back-of-the-magazine article about France in the
Atlantic Monthly
. He compared the author to both Lewis Carroll and Lord Dunsany, and it was one of the things that turned the corner for France’s reputation. Anna had almost all of the letters he had ever gotten in Galen, as well as carbons of his replies to them; he had had no idea that White had written the article until months after it came out. He wrote the critic and thanked him. They corresponded for years, until White died.

Two years after
Peach Shadows
,
The Green Dog’s Sorrow
appeared and almost immediately made the best-seller lists. White began a funny letter to France: “Dear Mr. France, sir: I never knew a famous author before. Are you one now? If so, can I borrow a hundred dollars? If not, thank God …” Suddenly the first two books were back in print, he was asked to do an anthology of favorite children’s stories, Walt Disney had an idea for how to make
Peach Shadows
into a movie … Marshall France was a big shot.

But he wrote a nice letter to Disney and told him to buzz off. The same to the publisher of the children’s anthology. He said no to just about everything, and after a while he didn’t even write back; he had a card printed up that said Marshall France thanks you, but regrets … It looked like a form rejection slip from a magazine. Anna gave me a framed one for my birthday with a picture of a bull terrier on it that he had doodled.

Over the years literally hundreds of proposals came in. They wanted to do a series of rubber dolls depicting the characters in
The Land of Laughs
,
Green Dog
pencils, a radio patterned after the Cloud Radio in
Peach Shadows
. According to Anna and based on what I later saw, many of these companies went ahead with their products even after her father had rejected them. She said that he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because he refused to get involved in any kind of lawsuit. David Louis had legal experts ready to pounce on these manufacturers, but France said no every time. He didn’t want the trouble, he didn’t want to be bothered, he didn’t want the notoriety, he didn’t want to leave Galen. Finally, even Louis gave up pestering him, but retaliated by sending him, over the years, example after example of these pirated dolls, flashlights, and whatnot, just to show him how much he was losing. We spent an afternoon in the basement pulling them out of musty, collapsing cardboard boxes that had been stowed away in corners years ago.

“If David Louis only knew, he would have been furious.” Anna took a
Green Dog
coloring book out of the box. “These were half of my toys when I was growing up.” She opened the book and turned it to me. There was a picture of Krang and the Green Dog walking down a windy road together, Krang’s string tied to the dog’s collar in a bow. The picture had been half colored-in. The dog was blue, Krang completely gold, the road wavy red.

“What would your father have said if he saw that you had colored the dog blue?”

“Oh, but that was all his fault! I remember it very clearly. I asked him if the Green Dog had ever been another color. He said that before the book was written he had been blue, but that I mustn’t ever tell anyone because it was a big secret.” She rubbed her hand lovingly over the blue body as if she was trying to pet either the dog or her father’s memory.

I looked at her and tried to figure out what was going to happen with us. She was thirty-six (I had finally gotten up the nerve one day to ask, and she told me without batting an eye), and I was thirty-one, not that that made any difference. If I wanted her, then I would have to spend the rest of my life in Galen. But was that so bad? I could write books — maybe my father’s book next — teach English at Galen High School, travel once in a while. We would always have to come back here, but that wasn’t such a terrible thought. Live in my hero’s house, make love to his daughter, be someone to the Galeners because in a funny way I might end up being their savior.

“You know that Saxony will have to leave soon, Thomas.”

I came up out of my thought-fog and coughed. The cellar was damp and cold, and I had left my heavy sweater upstairs in the bedroom.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I said that she will have to leave soon. Now that you know everything about us here in Galen, you’ll stay and write the book, but she has nothing to do with it anymore. She has to go.”

Her voice was so calm and indifferent. She said all this while she flipped through the pages of the coloring book.

“Why, Anna?” I whined. What the hell was I whining for? I snatched it back and replaced it with some good, strong indignation. “What are you talking about?” I tossed the doll that I was holding back into the box.

“I told you before, Thomas: no one lives here but Father’s people. It’s all right now for you to stay, but not Saxony. She doesn’t belong here anymore.”

I gave my head a dramatic slap and tried to laugh it off. “Come on, Anna, you’re beginning to sound like Bette Davis in
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
.” I slipped into a stupid Southern belle accent. “‘I’m sorry, Gilbert, but it’s time now for Jeanette to go.’” I laughed again and made a face like a nut. Anna smiled back sweetly.

“Come on, Anna! What are you talking about? You’re just kidding me, right? Huh? Well, come on, why? What the hell difference does it make if she’s here or not? I haven’t told her anything. You know that.”

She put the coloring book in the box and stood up. She closed the top and sealed it with some brown tape she had brought down with her. She started to shove the box back into the corner with her foot, but I grabbed her wrist and made her look at me.

“
Why?
”

“You know why, Thomas. Don’t waste my time asking.” The same anger flashed at me that I’d seen that day in the woods with Richard Lee.

She iced the cake ten minutes later by telling me that I had to leave because she had to go see Richard.

As soon as I got home that night Saxony and I had a huge fight. It centered around an idiotic errand that I had forgotten to do for her. Naturally the crazy anger that reared up out of both of us stemmed from everything that we had been suppressing all along. A few minutes into it she had turned poppy-red, and I caught myself clenching and unclenching my fists like an exasperated husband in a situation comedy.

“I keep saying this to you, Thomas, but if it’s so bad around here, then why don’t you just go?”

“Saxony, will you please take it easy? I didn’t say —”

“Yes you did. If everything is so great over there, then go! Do you think I love your little soft-shoe back and forth from her to me?”

I tried to stare her down, but at the moment I didn’t have the guts to go one-on-one with her for very long. I looked away and then back. She was still smoldering.

“What do you want me to do, Sax?”

“Stop asking me that question! You sound so helpless. You want me to answer it for you, and I refuse to. You want me to order you out or to tell you to leave her and come back to me. But I won’t, Thomas. You’re the one who has caused all of this. You’re the one who wanted it, so now you can decide how you’re going to handle it. I love you, and you know that very well. But, I’m not going to be able to put up with it for much longer. I think that you had better decide something fast.” Her voice was almost a whisper when she finished, and I had to lean forward to catch the last words. The next ones came out in a blast, and I jumped back. “I can’t get over how damned stupid you are, Thomas! You make me want to strangle you. How dumb can you be? Don’t you know what a great time we would have together? Once you finish this book, we could go off somewhere and live a hundred different, wonderful lives. Can’t you see what Anna is doing to you? She’s pulling you down to worship in front of her horrible little altar to her father —”

“Hey, look, Saxony, what about your interest in Fr —”

“I know, I know, me too. But I don’t want Marshall France anymore, Thomas. I don’t want to be lovers with a book or a puppet now. I want to be lovers with you. All of those other things, we can do in our spare time, but the rest is for us. Wait! Wait a minute!” She got up from her chair and limped off to the kitchen. She was back in two seconds with a few marionettes in her hand. “Do you see these? Do you know why I carved them? To take my mind off everything. That’s right, it’s the truth. It’s so pathetic the way I dig-dig-dig at the wood all afternoon, trying not to think too hard about where you are or what you’re doing. When we were driving out here in the car, that was the first time in my life that I haven’t worked every single day. And I loved it! I didn’t care about these things. There was too much to do with you. I know how important your book is to you, Thomas. I know how important it is that you finish it… .”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Sax.”

“Okay, all right. Look, do you remember that first day that we got here? The barbecue that they were having downtown?”

I bit my top lip in and nodded.

“Do you remember that the first thing I did when I started talking to Goosey was to tell her about the book?”

“You’re damn right I remember! I wanted to kill you. Why did you do that after all we’d talked about?”

She put the puppets down on the couch and ran both hands through her hair. I realized from the gesture how much longer it had grown. I had never told her how nice it looked. “Do you know about women’s intuition? Don’t start making faces, Thomas, because it’s true. There is something there a lot of the time. Another sense or something. Remember I told you that I knew when you and Anna started sleeping together? Anyway, whether you believe me or not, I was sure almost from the moment that we got here that somehow things between us were going to go wrong if you started to do that book. I was trying to get them to throw us out of here that day. I’m sorry, but I was. I thought that if I told them what we wanted to do, they wouldn’t let us get within three feet of Anna France.”

“Sabotage.”

“Yes, that’s right. I was trying to sabotage this whole thing. I didn’t want it to happen after how strong we’d become in just those few days together. I knew that once you got involved here, everything would go bad. And I was right, wasn’t I?” She picked up her puppets and walked out of the room. We didn’t talk any more that night.

Two days later I bumped into Mrs. Fletcher outside the market. Her metal cart was filled with a fifty-pound bag of potatoes and about ten quart bottles of prune juice.

“Well, hello there, stranger. I haven’t seen much of you lately. Working hard?”

“Hi, Mrs. Fletcher. Yes, pretty hard.”

“Anna tells me that the book is going along fine now.”

“Yes, it’s good.” My mind was on a million things, and I had no desire to shoot the breeze with her.

“You’ve got to get Saxony out of here soon, Tom. You know that?”

A dog barked, and I heard a car start up. The cold air filled with exhaust smoke.

A chunk of anger and despair moved up through me and stopped in my chest. “What the hell difference does it make if she stays or goes? Christ almighty, I’m getting goddamned
tired
of being told what to do. What the hell difference does it make if Saxony stays?”

Her smile fell. “Anna didn’t tell you?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “She really didn’t tell you anything?”

Her tone of voice scared me. “No, nothing. What is it? Come on, what are you talking about?” Cars and people moved around us like fish in an aquarium.

“Did you see … ? No, you couldn’t have. Look, Tom, if I really say anything to you about this, I could get into some real trouble. I’m not kidding. All of this is very dangerous. I’ll tell you this much, though …” She pretended to straighten some things in her cart while she spoke. “I’ll tell you this — if you don’t get your Saxony out of here, she’ll get sick. She’ll get so sick that she dies. That was part of the journals. That was how Marshall kept Galen away from everything else.”

“But what about me? Why won’t I get sick too? I’m from the outside.”

“You’re the biographer. You’re protected. That’s the way Marshall wrote it. There’s no way to change it.”

“But, Mrs. Fletcher, what about the journals? The things in them haven’t been happening for a long time. Everything is out of whack here.”

“No, you’re wrong, Tom. Ever since you started writing, everything’s gone right again, that’s the point.” She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “You have to get her out, Tom. You listen to me. Even if the journals are screwed up and she doesn’t get sick, Anna don’t want her around. That’s what you’ve got to worry about most of all. Anna is a strong woman, Tom. You don’t ever want to play games with her.” She hurried away, and I heard the shivering rattle of her metal cart as it moved away across the parking lot.

“Do you have a minute?”

She was chopping celery on a small wooden butcher-block square I’d bought her.

“You look like you’re sick, Thomas. Are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah, sure, I’m fine, Sax. Look, I don’t want to lie to you anymore, okay? I want to tell you exactly how I feel about all of this and then let you decide.”

She put her knife down and walked to the sink to wash her hands. She came back to the table drying them on a yellow dish towel I had never seen before.

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Sax, you are incredibly important to me. You’re the only person that I’ve ever been with who sees the world almost exactly the same way that I do. I’ve never experienced that before.”

“What about Anna? Doesn’t she see things your way?”

“No, she’s totally different. My relationship with her is totally different. I think I pretty much know what would happen if you and I stayed together.”

She dried her hands slowly, carefully. “And is that what you want?”

“That’s what I don’t know, Sax. I think I do, but I don’t know yet. What I am sure of is that I want to finish this book. It’s amazing that at the same time of my life I’ve come across two things that are so important to me. I wish that it could have happened a different way, but it hasn’t. So now I’ve got to try to do it the right way, even though it will probably end up stupid and wrong.