"Are all the rest of the things up there me too? Insecure, hopeful…"

"If I were my father, I would write down what I felt about you and what I thought was interesting enough to use. These things are just my own impressions. You aren't angry with me, are you?"

"Who, me? Nooo. Not at all. Nooo. Not a –"

"Okay, Thomas, you made your point."

"Nooo. Not –"

"Thomas!"

Anna looked at Saxony. I guess she didn't believe me. "Is he mad at me?"

"No. It's just the 'insecure' and 'famous-father' parts that got him, I think."

"You have to remember too that I'm me and not my father. If he were going to use you, he might have seen totally different things about you."

"Seriously, Anna, I think this would be a really nice beginning to the book. In the prologue, I'd simply describe your father coming down those creaky stairs by himself, turning on the lights, and starting to work on one of the books by doing this thing at the blackboard. The whole first few pages are both the beginning of his book and the beginning of mine. What do you think?"

She put the chalk down for the first time and erased Snoopy with the flat of her hand. "I don't like it."

"I think it's an excellent idea, Thomas." I didn't know whether Sax said it because she did like it or because she wanted to pick a fight with Anna.

"But you don't like it, Anna."

She turned from the board and dusted her hands against each other. "You don't really know anything yet, Thomas, and you're already trying to come up with all of these clever little tricks to use…."

"I wasn't trying to be clever, Anna. I honestly thought that –"

"Let me finish. If I am going to let you do this book, you have got to do it carefully and beautifully. Do you know how many terrible biographies I've read that don't even begin to bring their subject back to life, much less make them interesting or intriguing? You cannot imagine how important it is that this book be well done, Thomas. I'm sure that you care enough about my father to want to do it right, so any kind of cleverness is out. Any kind of cleverness or shortcuts or paragraphs that begin with 'Twenty years later…' There can't be any of that. Your book has to have it all, or else he won't…"

Her tirade had been so kooky and heartfelt and loud that I was taken off-guard when she stopped in mid-sentence.

I swallowed. "Anna?"

"Yes?"

Saxony interrupted. "Anna, are you sure that you want Thomas to write this book? Are you really sure?"

"Yes, now I am. Positive."

I took a deep breath and let it out loudly, hoping it would somehow break the tension that was hovering in the air up around A-bomb level.

Saxony went to the blackboard, picked up some chalk, and began drawing a cartoon near where our names – Mrs. Lee's and mine – were written. I knew she was a good artist from the sketches I had seen of her puppets, but she outdid herself with this one.

The Queen of Oil – a very good, quick rendering of the famous Van Walt illustration – and I stood over the gravestone of Marshall France. Up above us, France looked down from a cloud and worked puppet strings that were attached to both of us everywhere. It was certainly well done, but it was also a disturbing picture in light of what Anna had been saying.

"I don't think you are positive, Anna." Saxony finished sketching and put the chalk back in the holder at the end of the board.

"Oh, you don't?" Anna's voice was low. She watched Sax intently.

"No, I don't. I think a biography is very much a writer's interpretation of his subject's life. It shouldn't just be 'he did this and he did that.'"

"Did I ever say that it should be?" Anna's voice dropped its urgency and sounded… amused.

"No, but you have already made it pretty clear that you want to call all the shots on it. I get the distinct feeling already that you want Thomas to write your version of the life of Marshall France, and not Thomas Abbey's."

"Come on, Sax…."

"No, you come on, Thomas. You know that I'm right."

"Did I say anything?"

"No, but you were about to." She licked her lips and then rubbed the side of her nose. Her nose got itchy when she got really angry.

"That's a rather rude thing to say, Saxony, considering who I am and how much I have at stake in this matter, wouldn't you say? Yes, of course I am biased. I do think the book should he done in a certain way…."

"What'd I tell you?" Saxony looked at me and nodded ruefully.

"I did not mean it that way. Don't misinterpret what I'm saying."

Both of them had their arms crossed, locked, over their chests.

"Hey look, ladies, cool it. I haven't even started on page one yet, and you're already at battle stations." They wouldn't look at me, but they were listening. "Anna, you want the book with everything in it, right? So do I. Sax, you want me to write it my way. So do I. So will someone please tell me what the big problem is here? Huh? What is it?"

While I talked, I kept thinking that it was the kind of scene my father would play. Maybe a little too hammy, but enough to stop their attacks.

"All right? Okay, look, I want to make a proposal. May I have the floor? Yes? Okay, here it is: Anna, you give me all the information I need to write the first chapter of the book my way. However long it takes me, you can't look at it – any of it – until I'm finished and satisfied with it. When I'm done, I'll give it to you and you can do whatever you want with it. Cut it, rearrange it, throw it out… I don't know, maybe you'll even like the way I've done it. Anyway, if you don't, and end up hating it, then I promise I'll work as closely with you as you want after that. I won't tape you or anything, but it'll be a collaborative effort of the three of us from start to finish. I'm sure this idea is totally unprofessional and any publisher would pull out his hair if he heard about it, but I don't care. If you agree to it, then that's the way we'll do it."

"And what happens if I like the first chapter the way it is?"

"Then I get to write the whole thing my way and bring it to you when I'm done."

How much fairer could I be? If she hated my first chapter, we would work together from the very beginning. If she hated the final product, then she would have the right to – gasp – throw it all out and have either me or someone else start it again. I didn't want to think about that prospect.

"All right." She picked up the black felt eraser and disappeared Saxony's drawing in two sharp swipes.

"All right, Thomas, but I am going to give you a time limit: one month. One month to work completely on your own, and then the first chapter has to be done. There isn't much time to spare these days."

Saxony spoke before I had a chance to. "Okay, but then you've got to give us access to everything we want. No more holding back and no more lying about things."

Anna arched an eyebrow at that one. I half-admired, half-despaired at Saxony's bluntness.

"If you are going to do it chronologically… I assume you are? I will give you everything about him until his arrival in America. You won't be covering more than that in your first chapter."

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 hьttes 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.