The Land of Laughs Read Online Free PDF

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 lamé 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