The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

Author:Jonathan Carroll
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biographers, Masterwork, Children's stories, Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Biography as a Literary Form, Missouri, Authorship, Horror Fiction, General, Children's Stories - Authorship
ISBN: 9780312873110
Publisher: ORB
Published: 1980-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

9

And that was that. True to her word, books and diaries, letters and postcards poured out of the France house. It was all we could do to keep track of them in the beginning, much less make sense of them.

France had apparently saved everything, or else someone did it for him and gave it to him later in his life. There was a manila envelope bulging with uninteresting children’s drawings of horseys and cows. The master, age four. A notebook with ratty-looking old wildflowers and weeds pressed in the pages, which all fell out when you held the book at any kind of angle. In a child’s unsteady script, all of the remaining weeds and petrified petunias were labeled in German. One shoebox contained old gold-and-red cigar bands, matchboxes, canceled boat and train tickets. Another had more of those old picture postcards that he seemed to like so much. Lots of them were of the mountains and old hüttes where the climbers stayed. It was amazing to see the kind of clothes they wore then for hiking — the women in long, Daisy Miller dresses and fruit-salad hats, men in tweed knickers that ballooned at the knees and comical Tyrolean hats with swooping feathers on the side. All of them looked at the camera with either maniacal smiles or my-wife-just-died frowns. Never the in-between expression that you so often get in modern photographs.

The postcards were from school friends and family, according to Anna. In the shoebox was a little brown school notebook which on further inspection turned out to be a record of postcards received. It was hilarious, especially when you remembered that it was being kept by an eight-or nine-year-old kid. From whom, from where, the date, even the places where he was when he got each one.

“Anna, why did he change his name from Martin Frank to Marshall France?”

“Didn’t you see the address on some of those old postcards? ‘Marshall France in care of Martin Frank’? When he was about eight years old he made up this character named Marshall France. He was a combination of D’Artagnan, Beau Geste, and The Virginian. He told me that he refused to be called by any other name for years. Everyone he knew had to call him Marshall or else he refused to answer.” She chuckled. “He must have been an obsessive little boy, huh?”

“Yes, well, that’s fine and all, but why did he make that his name when he came to America?”

“To tell you the truth, Thomas, I don’t really know for sure. You must remember though that he was a Jew running from the Nazis. Maybe he thought that if they ever got around to invading the United States, with a Gentile name like France there was less of a chance that he would he caught.” She bent over to tie one of her shoelaces. I could barely hear her when she spoke. “Whatever the reason, it’s perfect for you, isn’t it? He became one of his own characters, right? Very symbolic, Doctor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.