A House Among the Trees

“Linus,” she says, “please tell me your day was better than mine.”

On days when she’s lingered in the apartment for hours, to read a good book or make a meal for friends, Merry has noticed how Linus follows a particular swatch of sunlight that migrates across the living room rug and up onto the couch. That patch of warmth, to him, is utterly sublime. For a few years, her marriage to Benjamin felt like that. Being with him at the end of a long workday, or through a lazy weekend, was like following a slice of sun across a soft, richly patterned carpet. Was she selfish to want a child so badly? Benjamin had told her, toward the end, that it didn’t matter to him whether or not they became parents.

Did she always want too much? Or was she beating herself up merely for her own perfectly respectable longings?

Merry met Mort ten years ago, when both she and the book museum were ingenues in their world: bright-eyed, yearning, optimistic. She had conceived of a small but gemlike show based on beloved child protagonists from illustrated children’s books: a gallery filled with original images, one each, of Eloise, Harold, Homer Price, Fern Arable, Harriet the Spy, and their literary compatriots. No animals (sorry, Frog and Toad, Horton and Lyle) and no adults (ditto, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Miss Poppins, Doctor Dolittle). Some of the illustrators were long dead, but a few contemporary characters were crucial, and Merry had her heart set on Ivo.

Her boss, the museum’s original director, was skeptical that Lear would cooperate. He was at the height of his fame and yet, perhaps not so ironically, in retreat from the social limelight. He also seemed to have retreated from picture books. The Inseparables trilogy continued to ride a wave of conspicuous favor. To Lear, the director told Merry, Ivo was surely a relic of his past, no matter how immortal that book might become.

A return letter from Lear’s assistant, expressing cordial regret, confirmed this speculation—which only deepened Merry’s resolve. So she took the train to Orne on the following Saturday, a festive October day of splintered sun and skittering leaves. From the station, she walked the two miles to Lear’s house. She felt absurd as she walked along the driveway, carrying a shopping bag containing a gardenia plant—what was she thinking?—and she half expected some alarm to go off. But she reached the house without deterrence or even apparent notice. She was about to follow the walk to the front door when she saw the building out back, clearly an artist’s studio. Through the window, she could just see the artist himself, working.

What would he do, shoot her? Call the police? She did not have to summon the courage to knock, because he opened the door.

“A visitor,” he said, sounding neither pleased nor disapproving. He glanced at her bag. “Bearing gift, it would appear. Was I expecting you?”

“Not really,” she said. “No.”

He did not invite her in, but he did not close the door. She noticed, first and foremost, the horizontal smudge of charcoal across the pale blue shirt, bisecting his subtle paunch, a mark left by a table’s edge. He wore loose jeans and a pair of ramshackle moccasins.

“I’m Meredith Galarza. I’m from the museum that wants you to lend us a drawing of Ivo. I know you said no, you turned us down, but I thought that maybe, if I could just talk to you, tell you how much it would mean to us, to me, then…” Then you might say yes, she couldn’t quite say. Really, how ludicrous.

“Come in,” he said. “I happen to be in search of distraction. You’ll keep me from eating another candy bar. Would you like a candy bar?” He waved at a bowl of miniature chocolate Hershey’s bars.

She took one and thanked him. But then she felt too self-conscious to take off the wrapper. “Go ahead and eat it,” he said. “I like that you didn’t assume the safe stance of refusal.”

Had she been a child and told that she was in Santa’s workshop, she wouldn’t have been half as enchanted and amazed as she felt stepping into this room, not large, low-ceilinged, but impossibly, exquisitely cluttered and crowded with sketches, constructions, jars of brushes and pencils….There were even sketches taped to the ceiling above a drafting table. Sketches of clouds, washed over in pale blues and pinks.

“Tell me about your show,” he said. “After you finish your little chocolate bar. And please eat more. I stole these from the ammo supply for Halloween. I love chocolate. I loathe Halloween.”

“Oh, I hate it, too,” she said, relieved that she could mean it.

He took her tiny crumpled wrapper and pointed to a rolling stool in the middle of the floor. He asked her what she had in the bag.

“It’s a plant. I was brought up to bring something when you go for a visit.”

He took the bag and removed the gardenia. He pulled away the tissue, closed his eyes, and inhaled the fragrance of the forced blossoms. “Heavenly.” He set the plant on a wide windowsill. Then he settled in a large leather armchair and regarded her, waiting.

She told him about the characters so far featured in her show—as if they were the artists, not the creations. “So I want Ivo,” she said, finally. “I want him very badly. I want him as the star.”

Mort Lear smiled casually through her gushing, inane soliloquy. After a pause, he stood up and walked past her. Was he going to kick her out, just like that?

He disappeared behind a half wall toward the back of the room. Listening astutely, Merry trembled with anticipation when she heard him opening drawers to a flat file. She knew that precise sound, that soft rolling grumble, from life in a museum. To Merry, a flat file was a treasure chest. She loved the casual privilege she had to slide open such drawers, whenever she liked, to take out and marvel at any of the works they contained.

Lear came back around the wall cradling a broad sheaf of papers, which he set down at the edge of a vast wooden table that was filled, from end to end, with manuscript pages and sketches, along with two stained mugs and a plate peppered with bread crumbs. He cleared a large space in the center and then, as she watched, laid out three of the drawings from Colorquake.

“Clever of you, showing up in person,” he said. “Also, coming while my assistant is out on errands. I won’t ask if you lurked at the foot of the driveway until the coast was clear.”

Would one drawing suffice? She could pick from the three that lay before her.

She shot up from her stool to join him at the table. The stool rolled a foot away. Quick, she thought, before the assistant returns.

Julia Glass's books