'Yeah. I must have been here twenty, thirty times by now. This is a real shrine, you know.'
'You think it's well done?' 'Oh, for sure.'
'Would you say the house is just like Twain described it in his books?'
'I don't know,' the man said thoughtfully. 'I've never read one of his books.'
Next door, attached to the house, was a small museum, which was better. There were cases of Twain memorabilia--first editions, one of his typewriters, photographs, some letters. There was precious little to link him to the house or the town. It is worth remembering that Twain got the hell out of both Hannibal and Missouri as soon as he could, and was always disinclined to come back. I went outside and looked around. Beside the house was a white fence with a sign saying, TOM
SAWYER'S FENCE. HERE STOOD THE BOARD FENCE WHICH TOM SAWYER
PERSUADED HIS GANG TO PAY HIM FOR THE PLEASURE OF WHITEWASHING. TOM
SAT BY AND SAW THAT IT WAS WELL DONE. Really wakes up your interest in literature, doesn't it? Next door to the Twain house and museum-and I mean absolutely right next to it-was the Mark Twain Drive-In Restaurant and Dinette, with cars parked in little bays and people grazing off trays attached to their windows. It really lent the scene a touch of class. I began to understand why Clemens not just left town but also changed his name.
I strolled around the business district. The whole area was a dispiriting combination of auto parts stores, empty buildings and vacant lots. I had always thought that all river towns, even the poor ones, had something about them-a kind of faded elegance, a raffish air-that made them more interesting than other towns, that the river served as a conduit to the larger world and washed up a more interesting and sophisticated brand of detritus. But not Hannibal. It had obviously had better days, but even they couldn't have been all that great. The Hotel Mark Twain was boarded up. That's a sad sight-a tall building with every window plugged with plywood. Every business in town appeared to trade on Twain and his books-the Mark Twain Roofing Company, the Mark Twain Savings and Loan, the Tom 'n' Huck Motel, the Injun Joe Campground and Go-Kart Track, the Huck Finn Shopping Center. You could even go and be insane at the Mark Twain Mental Health Center-a possibility that would, I imagine, grow increasingly likely with every day spent in Hannibal. The whole place was sad and awful. I had been planning to stay for lunch, but the thought of having to face a Tom Sawyer Burger or Injun Joe Cola left me without any appetite for either food or Hannibal.
I walked back to the car. Every parked car along the street had a license plate that said, MISSOURI-THE SHOW ME STATE. I wondered idly if this could be short for 'Show Me the Way to Any Other State.' In any case, I crossed the Mississippi-still muddy, still strangely unimpressive-on a long, high bridge and turned my back on Missouri without regret. On the other side a sign said, BUCKLE UP. ITS THE LAW IN ILLINOIS. Just beyond it another said, AND WE STILL CANT
PUNCTUATE.
I plunged east into Illinois. I was heading for Springfield, the state capital, and New Salem, a restored village where Abraham Lincoln lived as a young man. My dad had taken us there when I was about five and I thought it was wonderful. I wondered if it still was. I also wanted to see if Springfield was in any way an ideal town. One of the things I was looking for on this trip was the perfect town. I've always felt certain that somewhere out there in America it must exist. When I was small, WHO-TV in Des Moines used to show old movies every afternoon after school, and when other children were out playing kick-the-can or catching bullfrogs or encouraging little Bobby Birnbaum to eat worms (something he did with surprising amenability), I was alone in a curtained room in front of the TV, lost in a private world, with a plate of Oreo cookies on my lap and Hollywood magic flickering on my eyeglasses. I didn't realize it at the time, but the films WHO
showed were mostly classics--The Best Years of Our Lives, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, It Happened One Night. The one constant in these pictures was the background. It was always the same place, a trim and sunny little city with a tree-lined Main Street full of friendly merchants ('Good morning, Mrs. Smith!') and a courthouse square, and wooded neighborhoods where fine houses slumbered beneath graceful arms. There was always a paperboy on a bike slinging papers onto front porches, and a genial old fart in a white apron sweeping the sidewalk in front of his drugstore and two men in suits striding briskly past. These two background men always wore suits, and they always strode smartly, never strolled or ambled, but strode in perfect synchrony. They were really good at it. No matter what was going on in the foreground-Humphrey Bogart blowing away a bad guy with a .45, Jimmy Stewart earnestly explaining his ambitions to Donna Reed, W. C. Fields lighting a cigar with the cellophane still on it-the background was always this timeless, tranquil place. Even in the midst of the most dreadful crises, when monster ants were at large in the streets or buildings were collapsing from some careless scientific experiment out at State U, you could still generally spot the paperboy slinging newspapers somewhere in the background and those two guys in suits striding along like Siamese twins. They were absolutely imperturbable.
And it wasn't just in the movies. Everybody on TV-Ozzie and Harriet, Wally and Beaver Cleaver, George Burns and Gracie Allen-lived in this middle-class Elysium. So did the people in the advertisements in magazines and on the commercials on television and in the Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. In books it was the same. I used to read Hardy Boys mysteries one after the other, not for the plots, which even at the age of eight I could see were ridiculously improbable ('Say, Frank, do you suppose those fellows with the funny accents that we saw at Moose Lake yesterday weren't really fisherman, but German spies, and that the girl in the bottom of their canoe with the bandage around her mouth wasn't really suffering from pyorrhea but was actually Dr. Rorshack's daughter? I've got a funny feeling those fellows might even be able to tell us a thing or two about the missing rocket fuel!'). No, I read them for Franklin W. Dixon's evocative, albeit incidental, descriptions of Bayport, the Hardy Boys' hometown, a place inexpressibly picturesque, where houses with porch swings and picket fences peeked out on a blue sweep of bay full of sailboats and skimming launches. It was a place of constant adventures and summers without end.
It began to bother me that I had never seen this town. Every year on vacation we would drive hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country, in an insane pursuit of holiday happiness, toiling over blue hills and brown prairies, through towns and cities without number, but without ever going through anywhere even remotely like that dreamy town in the movies. The places we passed through were hot and dusty and full of scrawny dogs, closed- down movie theaters, grubby diners and gas stations that looked as if they would be grateful to get two customers a week. But I felt sure that it must exist somewhere. It was inconceivable that a nation so firmly attached to small-town ideals, so dedicated in its fantasies to small-town notions, could not have somewhere built one perfect place-a place of harmony and industry, a place without shopping malls and oceanic parking lots, without factories and drive-in churches, without Kwik-Kraps and Jiffi-Shits and commercial squalor from one end to the other. In this timeless place Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on a bike and those two smartly striding men. The place I was looking for would be an amalgam of all those towns I had encountered in fiction. Indeed, that might well be its name-Amalgam, Ohio, or Amalgam, North Dakota. It could exist almost anywhere, but it had to exist. And on this trip, I intended to find it.
I drove and drove, through flat farming country and little towns devoid of life: Hull, Pittsfield, Barry, Oxville. On
