Happyland Read online

  Happyland

  J. Robert Lennon

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One

  1. A germ of an idea wriggling to life

  2. Weirdly real

  3. Too precious for words

  4. Imaginary people

  5. An almost perfect contentment

  6. The messenger of death

  7. Instruments of patriarchal tyranny

  8. Like a murder of crows

  9. The field of poppies

  Part Two

  10. So much for honor

  11. A disturbing fervor

  12. We don’t recycle around here

  13. The neurophysiology of the frog

  14. Things you have to sneak around after dark doing

  15. Gingerbread cottages and sparkling waters

  16. A hole in the ground

  17. Evidence

  18. Put on something pretty

  19. Control the agenda

  20. Hideous Happycrap

  21. The screams of local preservationists

  22. Excalibur

  23. Made to be ruined

  24. Poise like a statue of Stalin

  25. If a hermit lives in ecstasy

  26. Rampant liberalism, radical feminism, and intellectual torpor

  Part Three

  27. Happy Thanksgiving and good riddance

  28. Every child should be so lucky

  29. Walking backwards

  30. Sob sister

  31. As if nothing unusual were happening

  32. An incomprehensible and very annoying rasp

  33. It’s your funeral

  34. The Future

  Introduction

  If you’d told me in 2003 that this novel wouldn’t be read in its entirety for the first time until 2013, I would probably have stopped writing it—and if you’d told me why, I might have sought out, at least for a while, a less heartbreaking profession than novel writing. Happyland was written, rewritten, abandoned, and resumed at least ten times. It has been bought, edited, cancelled, unbought, rebought, and re-edited. People have offered money for it, then abruptly rescinded their offers; editors have expressed their affection for it one day, then refused to answer their phones the next. Lawyers have conference-called one another about it, sometimes with me listening in—at one point, one told me that “all you have to do” was to move the story to Massachusetts and make it be about, not a doll company, but a chocolate company. “Everyone loves chocolate!” she helpfully elaborated. Needless to say, I declined. When the book finally found its intermediate form, as a somewhat truncated serial published in Harper’s in 2006, more drama ensued, including a parade and many vexing phone calls.

  I didn’t mean to write anything remotely controversial. A former doll and children’s book mogul started buying up property in a small town, and the town got mad. Wouldn’t this make a good novel? people kept asking me. You should write it, people kept telling me. I had to admit, I liked the idea—but I would do it my own way. I asked my friends from the town not to tell me anything more about the situation. I would make up my own doll mogul. Indeed, to this day, I still know nothing about the real one that I didn’t learn over the phone, from lawyers. Happy is my own creation, and so is everybody else in this book. But there’s nothing like the appearance of making fun of rich people to bring out the cowardice in others. My original publisher, fearing imaginary, unthreatened lawsuits, pulled the book in the eleventh hour and refused to pay me for the work I’d spent nine months doing under their editorial direction. My British publisher, catching wind of the non-situation, dropped the book as well. As for the mogul everyone was afraid of, her attitude was clear. Did she intend to sue? “Oh, absolutely not,” she told the New York Times, through a spokesperson, “he said it’s all fictional.”

  The mogul was right, and still is. If you happen to be familiar with the real town, you will doubtless recognize certain similarities: an inn, a women’s college, a market, an Indian massacre. But rest assured, nobody in this book is supposed to be you, or anyone you know. That twitch at the corner of somebody’s mouth is not yours. That harelip is not your cousin-in-law’s. That goiter isn’t your great-uncle’s. It’s fiction—just ask the ex-doll-mogul.

  For a long time, I couldn’t stand the sight of this damned thing. But now I like it—I think it might be a lot of fun. It is, at times, rather nasty, in keeping with its real inspiration, the 2004-era Bush administration that I reviled, and that distracted me from everything in my life that I loved. (Read Mayor Archie, for instance, as Colin Powell.) Going through it one more time for this 2013 Dzanc edition, I was tempted to update a few of its mustier elements. But no, it’s already a period piece, an artifact from the era of videotape, cell phones with buttons on them, and the imprisonment of Martha Stewart. Let it stay there.

  I want to thank Dan Wickett from Dzanc for giving the unabridged edition an audience at last, and Roger Hodge and Lewis Lapham, formerly of Harper’s, for their fearlessness and editorial acumen back in 2006. And you, of course, for reading now. Readers have sent me more emails and letters about this unpublished book than about anything else I’ve ever written, and I am delighted to be able to give them this edition at last. Enjoy!

  With affection and gratitude,

  J. Robert Lennon.

  Part One

  1. A germ of an idea wriggling to life

  One brilliant summer afternoon, a woman in a black dress drove into town. She was stocky, muscular, pretty, her blond hair streaked with gray and recently cut; her features, crowded into the center of a round, cream-colored face, were small, precise, and symmetrical, as if deliberately arranged there by careful hands. She wore makeup recently reapplied, for less than an hour ago she had been crying—her gray eyes were ringed with the pink of spent emotion. They squinted against the sunshine, regarding the road ahead from underneath eyelashes as precise and dramatic as strokes from a painter’s brush. The expression on her face was one of exhausted distraction, as if some long trial had just come to an end, giving way to a period of rest from which the next phase of her life would soon emerge.

  The woman drove a cherry red sport utility vehicle, a giant car made to appear even larger by her small frame. She parked it at a curb near the center of town, backing briskly into a tiny space with the thoughtless mastery of an urbanite, and she stepped out onto the sun-baked macadam. A forlorn town, a dilapidated town: barely a town at all, just a few blocks clustered around a handful of cracked and dirty streets. With her hands on her hips and her feet spread apart, the woman might have seemed to stand in judgment; despite her size, she carried herself with an insouciantly confident air that marked her as a person of some consequence, or at least some money. This was not the kind of impression that many residents of this town would have found attractive or reassuring, had they been watching; but, for all that, the woman did not seem the sort of person who concerned herself with what other people thought. She appeared, on the whole, to be from somewhere else. Her name was Happy Masters.

  The town was called Equinox: Equinox, New York. It lay 37 miles south-southwest of Syracuse, where Happy had just attended a funeral. Orphaned at six, she had been raised by a bitter, alcoholic aunt, and had spent years enduring the inventive maliciousness of two older cousins. The elder cousin, Betty, had died of a heart attack three years ago. Now the younger, Wanda, had succumbed as well, having drunkenly piloted her truck into a tree half a mile from the forlorn subdivision where she had conducted a loveless marriage. Happy was a successful woman, but few of her successes had ever satisfied her like the sight of poor fat Wanda, her body ravaged by hard living and windshield glass, wedged into her narrow, cut-rate coffin. That this woman, this horrible woman who, along with her older sister, had on
ce held Happy down and forced her to eat a chocolate bar that each girl had first shoved into her own vagina, was once and for all erased from the earth, made Happy want to shout in triumph.

  Their mother, Aunt Missy, was a different matter. She had mourned loudly, ostentatiously, but with a sort of paranoid detachment, glancing from side to side as though checking to see if the other members of the mourning party were paying adequate attention. Her sagging cheeks, sunken eyes, and brittle hair implied an impending physical breakdown, as did her mortifying bulk, which necessitated the kind of stumping, swiveling locomotion that one might employ in moving a mahogany bureau across a room. Her mourning dress was billowing and black and appeared, from the pattern of spots across the belly, to have previously have been worn during a session of deep-fat frying.

  Happy had tried to dodge her, showing up when the funeral (a squalid affair at a clapboard church beside the rail yard) was already in progress, and leaving her sunglasses on. But there was no avoiding the receiving line. She air-kissed Aunt Missy’s musty cheek, avoiding the ruby wen caked over with makeup, and found her hair gripped by pudgy, nicotine-stained fingers. Her aunt’s boozy odor, her clammy touch, flayed away the years; Happy felt her body shrink, her confidence retreat.

  “How can you let me live like this,” came the rank whisper, “after all I did for you?”

  She tried to pull away, but the old woman held on tightly. Happy knew what would happen if she forced the issue: Aunt Missy would collapse to the ground, screaming, the way she did in grocery stores she intended to wrongfully sue. “Let me go,” Happy groaned.

  “Pay up,” was the reply. The fingers tightened, and pain blossomed on her scalp.

  She found the strength to say: “I owe you nothing.”

  “You’d be nothing without me.”

  “Let go of my hair.”

  “Selfish cunt,” Aunt Missy said, and spat in her ear before releasing her.

  Freed, Happy stood before her horrible aunt, daubing her ear with a tissue, shaking with barely contained rage. Her fingers curled into fists and her teeth ground together. Aunt Missy closed her eyes and tilted up her face, waiting to be struck.

  She almost did it. In front of all those people, Happy nearly socked her elderly aunt in the jaw. There were plenty present who would have enjoyed it, too. But she resisted. She was bigger than that, she told herself. It was true that Aunt Missy had assumed an almost mythical malevolence; it was a role the woman relished, perhaps the only thing she had left to live for, which she had arrived at after enduring years of suffering that dwarfed Happy’s own under her care. There had been, and probably still were, diabetes, cancer, migraines and piles. There had at one time been an Uncle Jim, and his legacy of fractures, lacerations, and miscarriages. There had been a third daughter, raped and murdered in a vacant lot at the age of ten. And so Happy held back: her aunt was all horn, bone, and scar tissue, a mountain of calcified pain, and would only welcome blows thrown in anger. Instead, she spun and stamped away, climbed into her SUV and burned rubber out of town.

  * * *

  Happy was married to James Masters, scion of a filthily rich diamond mining family, and was herself independently and fantastically wealthy, as founder, CEO, and creative mastermind of Happy Girls, Inc. Indeed, it could be said, and often was, that she was a woman of unusual talent, power, and luck. She lived at several locations in and around New York City, and had driven to Syracuse on her own, intending to use the drive time to contemplate the future of her company: it had been some years since four hours of quiet had made themselves available to her. But the journey upstate was consumed by conference calls to Sweden and the Netherlands, and a flood of unpleasant memories was clouding her return. Nevertheless, there was something about this July day—the pitiless sun, the motionless air—that made driving an air-conditioned car through it singularly gratifying, like the tines of a fork perforating a thick slice of lemon-meringue pie; and as she drove, the day took on a calm momentousness, a stunning incipience, that, purified by anger and elation, she was poised to apprehend. It was Saturday; nobody expected her anywhere. She would drive until the moment arrived.

  She meandered along country roads, following the SUV’s digital compass rather than her map, moving south at a leisurely pace, pulling aside to allow unmufflered beaters and burly pickups to pass. She moved through backwood and burg, through hamlet and heath, until she had to pee, and then she pulled over and got out. She had seen the sign, EQUINOX, POP. 410. Now she noticed the town hall, squat and flat and slightly crooked, its brick façade a sad attempt to obscure its cheap construction and Eisenhower-era profile. The houses that flanked it bespoke a modest wealth that had been gone for a century; though stately, their paint peeled and clapboards cracked, and the porches were littered with furniture and plastic toys. Between them the lake was visible, a glittering prairie of blue unsullied by time; and overlooking it, on the hill across the road, stood a little college. Trim, tidy, its buildings spaced far apart as if to create the illusion of size, it occupied the hill with the unquiet tentativeness of a retreating army. The town’s main street (“Main Street,” read a sign), where Happy now stood beside the open door of her car, had the washed-out quality of an old postcard. From gaps in the sidewalk sprung maple trees, their leaves in gentle sway and bristling with sparrows. Small-town America: the calm eye of the hurricane that was western civilization. She could feel, in her enervated soul, a germ of an idea wriggling to life.

  One block ahead stood an inn, a bed and breakfast really, and she entered it to use the toilet. Was the dining room open? No, not until five, but she could have a cup of coffee, if she wanted, out on the veranda. That’s the word that the chubby and over-gregarious innkeeper used, “veranda,” though it looked to Happy like more of a deck, a pressure-treated pine deck. Still, she was relieved when she lowered herself into a molded plastic chair and gazed out over the lake, above which mallards glided, scraping their toes against the surface, and where rowboated fishermen, their hats tipped back on their heads, cast for bass, and insects swarmed. She was protected from the sun by a sycamore, from the heavy air by a breeze gently tinged with the scent of algae and mud. Between her and the water lay a grassy slope, and upon it a little girl of about five was playing, running in dizzy circles and laughing.

  Happy studied the girl for some minutes, sipping her coffee and worrying at a spot on her neck where a bug had bit her in the night. The eyes, large and dark and joyful; the face round like a peach. The brown curls that the sun shone through, and the little round knees and thighs it revealed beneath the white dress. To evening mass: that’s where the girl must be going. Soon her mother would call her in, warn her not to get herself dirty. And so now this expulsion of energy, this outburst before the stifling minutes ahead. Church was where the girl would learn about the wrong that could be done in the world, about the weakness of the flesh. In the discomfort of the church pew, she would become aware of her own skin, would catalog her body’s every itch and twinge, little thinking that someday it would be lusted after, or made love to, or damaged, or violated. That one day it would betray her, it would wither and die.

  No, if the girl was lucky, if she was loved, her innocence was in no great danger. It would be years before she gave it up, or it was taken from her. Until then, her heart, her imagination, her very girlhood, belonged to Happy Masters. For Happy was a manufacturer of dolls, and a publisher of books for girls. Not just regular dolls, not just regular books. Special dolls. Special books.

  It had been twenty-five years ago, in an antique shop on Nantucket, that she became acquainted with her first doll, the one that would change the course of her life. She had been browsing—half-heartedly, for she was bored there, in that quiet place, in the middle of a vacation from a life that was itself a permanent vacation, as far removed from her miserable childhood as a life could be. Twenty-seven years old, married five and already weary of her duties as a bride of privilege, she wanted a change—and she wondered if the chan
ge might be to no longer be married. She was wondering this in the antique store—picking up knickknack after tchotchke, contemplating divorce, or at least an affair—when she spied, through a half-open door in the back of the shop, a single gleaming eye staring up at her from a tiny, broken face. She moved closer, pushing the door open upon a small cluttered office—EMPLOYEES ONLY—and knelt on the floor beside the doll.

  It had been shattered and messily glued back together. A crack ran under the ear, across the bridge of the nose, through an empty eye-hole. A chip was missing from the chin, and a piece at the base of the neck had been replaced by a crude hunk of molded cement. Yet the damage couldn’t conceal the face’s exquisite beauty: the painted china, delicately shaded from cream to pale brown; the rosy lips behind which tiny white teeth were concealed; the nose’s gentle slope and the calligraphic precision of every black eyelash. She reached out and touched the cheek, soft and delicately grained as the skin of a real child. The single eye gazed up at her, gray and lifelike.

  “This is a private area,” came a stony voice—the proprietor’s, a woman in her seventies with a high white forehead and giant eyeglasses. She had materialized out of nowhere, like a ghost, and held a half-eaten granola bar in one gnarled hand.

  “What is she?” Happy asked from the floor.

  “That? That’s a Kestner. It’s broke. I couldn’t put it out, it’s not worth anything.”

  “I want her.”

  A frown, as if some scam were being perpetrated. “Okay,” came the slow reply. “But come out of there, that’s private.”

  She bought the doll for five dollars. The woman packed it into a cardboard box padded with crumpled newspapers, which Happy carried out to her car. She sat in the driver’s seat and studied the broken face, running her fingers across its smooth contours and horrible jagged edges, and in her imagination it became whole. German bisque, the woman had told her. 1880s. The wig was mohair, pinned to a crumbling plaster pate. Kid-leather body, stuffed with sawdust. The dress, a shabby cotton nightgown, wasn’t original, the woman said, somebody had made it, probably some girl. The woman seemed offended—a whole store full of perfectly good merchandise and all this lady wanted was a piece of busted junk. But all Happy could think was: she’s mine.