The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Page A

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