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"… go?"
Saxony was in the crook of my arm again and peering at me.
"Excuse me?"
Her expression was tight and flushed, and I assumed that she was as nervous about this as I was.
"Don't you think we should go? I mean, I think it's time, isn't it?"
I looked at my watch without really seeing it, and nodded.
We crossed the street and went up the walk to the house. A screen door, a natural-wood mailbox with just the name in white block letters (what incredible mail must have been in there at one time!), and a black doorbell that was as big as a checker. I pressed it and a deep chiming went off in the back of the house. A dog barked and then abruptly stopped. I looked at the floor and saw a matching brown mat that said "GO AWAY!" I nudged Saxony and pointed to it.
"Do you think she means us?"
That's all I needed. I had thought the mat was a fu
"Hi. Come in. I'd better not shake hands with you. I'm a little greasy from the chicken."
"Hey, look, it's Nails!"
It was. A white bull terrier had shoved its head between A
A
"No, this one is Petals; she's Nails's girlfriend." A
A wide hallway led straight to a flight of stairs. Halfway up them, above the landing, two big stained-glass windows beamed Technicolor light across some of the lower steps and the last part of the hall. The walls were white. On the left as you walked in was a big gold fish-eye mirror next to a bentwood hat rack with two slouchy men's hats on them. His hats? Had Marshall France actually worn them? To the right of the rack were eighteenth– and nineteenth-century ascension balloon and zeppelin prints in expensive modern silver frames. Next to them, and a big surprise to me because I'd pictured France as a modest man, were framed mock-ups of the Van Walt covers to all of his books. I didn't want to appear too snoopy, so I stopped peeking at the pictures. Maybe later, when we were all more comfortable with each other (if there was going to be a later after tonight). I began playing with Petals, who kept jumping up and down by herself in the middle of the hallway. Then she started jumping on me.
"These dogs are incredible. I neyer really knew of them before today, 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 ma
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." A
"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 A
Sax reached for it, then stopped and stepped back. "It's a Klee!"
A
"But it's a Paul Klee!" Saxony looked from the puppet, to A
"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 wrote first to tell him how much he liked The Green Dog's Sorrow. When Father later told him about his collection, KIee sent him that one."
To me the puppet looked like something from a fourth-grade arts-and-crafts class.
Sax sank into a nearby leather chair and went on communing with the Klee. I looked at A
"So who are you, Mr. Abbey? Besides Stephen Abbey's son."
"Who am I?"
"Yes, who are you? Where are you coming from now, what do you do… ?"
"Oh, I see. Well, I've been teaching at a prep school in Co
"Teaching? You mean that you are not an actor?"
I took one of my deep breaths and crossed one leg over the other. A bit of hairy ankle showed between the cuff and the top of my gray sock, so I covered it with my hand. I tried to laugh off her question/statement. "Ha, ha, no, one actor in the family was enough."
"Yes, genug. I feel the same way. I could never be a writer."
She looked at me calmly. Again, that kind of unspoken, just-between-us intimacy was there. Or was I fantasizing? I pulled on my shoelace and undid the bow. I was tying it again when she spoke.