Pay attention, she tells herself. Stop pining like a groupie.
Resisting the urge to tell him I told you so, she types a mollifying reply to Stu. As it’s going out, up springs a message from Scott, asking her how the countdown is going, whether she’s remembering to eat, whether she’s able to sleep. She will phone him when she gets home, even if it’s not till midnight. He’s usually up that late grading papers or tests, and he’s kind about letting her vent when she’s anxious.
She kicks off her shoes and massages her toes. She eyes the much more demanding stilettos, on a shelf, that she will put on, like Cinderella, before the circus begins. Already, her dress for tomorrow night hangs on the hook behind her door.
In stocking feet, she wanders back into the gallery space, unable to stay away from Mort’s work—and from Mort. He is eminently present, in the form of a five-foot-square photograph, his face many times larger than life. Beneath it is a quote from the PBS documentary: No, I do not qualify as a storyteller. A storyteller is a raconteur, a Homeric bard, a performer. I can’t even tell a decent joke. I think of myself as a storymaker—a builder, a mason. Every choice my characters make is a brick, every relationship a layer of mortar. The pictures I draw? Windows and doors. If, when I’m all done, the lights go on and the roof doesn’t leak, I’m in luck. I’m home.
Merry took the photograph. A few years ago, she put together a group show for which she asked five author-illustrators to choose a bygone role model. (Cleverly, perhaps too cleverly, Mort chose Edward Lear.) In the photo, he is looking directly at Merry, smiling that confiding smile, the one that always made her feel as if, in some parallel life, they would certainly be lovers. She turns away from his gaze before she can let it take her down.
“No, you don’t,” she says quietly, firmly. “Oh no you don’t.” She returns to her office, reminding herself that everything she’s made here, this sublime oasis of books and art and stories suffused with the wonder particular to children, she has made (she, too, is a maker) despite Mort and his intentions. Even if there is no genuine consolation for his betrayal, she has won.
—
She promised to buy sandwiches on the way. Only now, almost there, does she remember. The past few months, she has been so preoccupied with reading up on the legal ins and outs of artistic estates, Franklin feeding her one article or case study after another, that it’s the everyday details, the easy ones, she tends to forget. Next week they will look for an office to rent: something small, but they agree it’s got to have a good view. Probably, also, an expensive couch, probably from Milan. Aesthetics will matter to the clients they hope to attract. Until their enterprise takes off—the starship, Dani calls it—Franklin will commute between the city and his practice in Stamford. Tommy will visit galleries and publishers and theaters, advertising their counsel.
The road that cuts north into the park is inexplicably closed, and the driver turns east. Knowing that this will mean an expensive, byzantine detour, Tommy asks him to drop her at the Plaza.
She loves this entrance to the park. The path dips down into a horseshoe cleft containing a pond, then traces the contour of the water’s reedy edge. Maybe it reminds her a little of Orne, its woodsy trails and pocket ponds, though she hasn’t had a moment of remorse since selling the house—or not about giving up the house itself. To empty the studio was the only task that gave her pause. Removing the last vestiges of Morty’s working presence felt like a far greater act of treason than taking the furniture out of the house. The buyer is an architect who plans to make her office in this space. Tommy envisions the surfaces monopolized by computers, scanners, and printers—after the woman has scrubbed away all the ink stains, absentminded notations (phone numbers penciled by Morty on doorframes), and the ubiquitous scorings, like ski tracks in snow, left by X-Acto knives. Or she’ll simply gut the space, pry loose the counters, discard the fixtures, replace the drafty casement windows.
A friend of Morty’s who works at the Met advised Tommy to sell the Greek vase to a museum in Athens whose curator had access to private money. Fine, Tommy said, and the friend made it happen. The money (an astonishing sum) went toward the growing fund for Ivo’s House. Perfect, Tommy said. Wow, yes! she exclaimed when the auction house relayed the generous bid for the Arizona drawings, taking them off the block. She likes it now when the answers she gives are affirmative and plain. Sometimes she wills them to overrule the more complicated, querulous answers that would normally come to mind (But what if…Aren’t you worried that…I’m not sure it’s exactly ethical to…).
Morty’s correspondence and sketchbooks went to the library at Tempe, the university eager to claim him as an “indigenous son.” After the auction of his Dickensiana and Wonderlandia, his ordinary books went, in dozens of shopping bags and cartons, to the Orne Public Library, which held a special sale to fund a new roof. As Franklin put it, Morty’s estate scored major community goodwill and a big fat tax deduction.
But it is the gushing stream of royalties—more like a waterfall, a Niagara of revenue—that, on top of Morty’s ample savings, will continue to fund the home he chose as the mark he wanted to leave on the world. And, as he expected, his gesture drew in other benefactors. Tommy can see herself attending the opening of Ivo’s House, but beyond that, and beyond her gratitude for the sale of the Orne property, her dedicated inheritance, she will have stepped away from all things Mort Lear.
Despite his self-assurance, Morty underestimated what he was worth—literally and yet, Tommy thinks, perhaps on a human scale as well. Only after his memorial service, seeing all the tears, hearing all the memories, did Tommy remember how many younger writers and artists he had nurtured decades before. If he had withdrawn from those relationships, for that he could be forgiven. Maybe Shine wasn’t the only talented young Turk who stirred in Morty the complex anguish of envy. Had he recognized in it the longing toward an earlier life of his own?