The boy runs toward his house. As it comes in sight, he sees a tall man in a multicolored patchwork greatcoat knocking on the door. The man’s head is thick with black hair, and trailing from beneath the hem of the coat is a long, elegant black tail. He enters the house before Ivo reaches it.
The last scene is the door of the house (a red door with a lion’s head for a knocker) opening wide. The doorway is filled with a prismlike explosion of color.
The final page is, like the first, black, but the paragraph printed on it is, this time, in a rainbowed font. The page resembles those old-fashioned drawings made by scrubbing a thick layer of black crayon over a field of colored markings, then scratching through the waxy scrim.
Ivo’s mother hugged and hugged him. To his amazement, the rooms were as perfect as ever: the sofa, the rug, the lamps, the potted ivy, everything in its place. Only this was different: Ivo’s mother was in love, and she was also in love with Ivo’s art. On the walls, instead of the perfectly framed perfect paintings by the perfect but long-ago artists, hung Ivo’s pictures: birds and butterflies and grasshoppers. Ivo ate a big dinner with his mother and her true love, the man with the black hair and tail, and then he went back to the cellar.
Everything was just as he left it, but…wait…where was his panther?
And if the reader turns to the endpaper, there stands Ivo, facing the reader directly, a silencing finger raised to his lips, laughter in his eyes, a bright blue butterfly sitting on top of his head.
Single mothers must love this story, Nick thinks, setting the book aside to gaze out the window. The car speeds along now, unimpeded, beneath a blur of trees. Green signs with rusticated borders announce exits leading to towns with an ethnic hotchpotch of names, some American Indian, some Anglo nostalgic, others just plain odd (is Mount Kisco an actual mountain?).
Nick’s own single mum had little time to read to him; she was too busy trying to scramble a living to support three children whose two fathers had each, in succession, gone his merry, scoundrely way. When all three of them were old enough to sit still at a table, their grandfather took them to lunch once a month—somewhere posh, with stiff napkins and stiff-backed waiters (and, for Grandfather, stiff drinks). He would lecture them on manners, money, and the importance of attending university (which, somewhat miraculously, all three of them did). He made a show of planting seed money in trusts for each of them, which they were told they would inherit when they were “too old to be as foolish as your mother was.” As for helping Mum directly, he did so only through the stingiest of loans, never enough to alleviate her air of suppressed panic, artificial cheer, and almost unrelenting fatigue. Nick wonders if, as the youngest, he was the only one home often enough to overhear the arguments Mum and Grandfather had on the telephone—though of course he had no idea what life had been like when Nigel and Annabelle were small and their father had yet to decamp. Was Grandfather more or less condemning back then?
Children do not try to make sense of their grandparents’ actions. Whether they behave endearingly or tyrannically, grandparents, like dinosaurs and Vikings, are outmoded and illogical beings, exempt from the rules of physics or decent modern behavior. Any eccentric or even brutal actions they perpetrate are excused by their being so ancient. (Perhaps in their time it was normal to shame your children, just as it was normal in the era of the Norse gods to pillage and burn.) Not until Nick came into his trust, at thirty, did he realize how cruel his grandfather had been not only to his daughter but to her children as well, by refusing to give her enough support to spend more time with them.
Or maybe that was the point. Maybe Grandfather, more than punishing Nick’s mother for her impulsive bohemian couplings (no legal strings attached), wanted to ensure that she had scant opportunity to expose the carriers of his genes to her possibly contagious and definitely intemperate romanticism. Poor Mum outlived Grandfather by little more than a year. She died of breast cancer, her unfavorable spot in the chemotherapy queue no doubt abetting its fatal metastasis. Grandfather had expired while snoozing in a leather chair at his club one afternoon. Nick despairs at the injustice, not just at the loss of the years his mother might have had—enough to see him up for an Olivier or cast in that BBC docudrama as Sir Walter Raleigh (she was reading history at Cambridge when her affair with Nigel and Annabelle’s father led her astray)—but at the inequitable distribution of the physical pain: all of it, and plenty, suffered by his mother alone.
By the time Mum died, Nick’s brother and sister—Nigel now a barrister in Glasgow, Annabelle a wife and mother in Dorset—had established workaday lives of their own, quite separate from Nick’s. They were eight and six years older. He invited them to an “intimate reception” (was there such a thing?) that his agency arranged the week after the BAFTA win. By post, each of them declined, their notes congratulatory but brief. Nick’s disappointment was overshadowed by guilt; their courteous snubs only served him right. What efforts had he made through his scrabbling, hand-to-mouth years, before the trust kicked in? (He hasn’t laid eyes on his niece, Fiona, since her christening. She must be four or five by now.) Their formal regrets arrived on the same day, reminding him how much closer they are to each other than to him. Not only are they full siblings, but they can remember the early rows between Mum and her parents; they can even remember Grandmother, who died the year Nick was born. (Anyone could guess that Grandfather blamed her demise on Mum.)
Well, this is rich. He’s managed to work himself into a cavelike funk just as the road signs are beginning to herald the town where Lear lives—or lived: Orne, a curious name that comes out like an utterance forced through a mouthful of cotton wool at the dentist’s.
As if to reassure himself that it’s all real—these woods, this car, the visit he’s been anticipating for months—he lays a hand on the beribboned box beside him. It contains a basket of blood-red pears, fancy chocolates, and—two weeks too late—a slim red volume of tributes written to Charles Dickens by other great writers, some of them modern, others his peers. Silas is to thank. He, too, has done his homework.
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