A House Among the Trees

Why was she cooperating?

“Will you let me come in without blowing the whistle on me?” Mort Lear said in a low voice. He reached through the fence to take back his sketch pad.

“Do what you like,” said Tommy. “I don’t really care.”

When he came around through the gate, he walked up to her and said, “So let me try this again. Clean slate.” He held out his hand. “I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Mort Lear, and I live over on Greenwich Avenue and Bank Street, and I like drawing kids because I like making up stories for kids. And I’m lucky enough to have a publisher, even if they don’t pay me a whole lot.”

Reluctantly, she shook his hand. “Tomasina Daulair.”

“Ah. Well, it is pronounced the same way.”

Dani’s friend’s mother was watching her now. “Everything cool, Tommy?”

“Sure!” she said.

She handed the sketch pad and the picture book back to Mort Lear, but he wouldn’t take the book. “That’s for your brother. But you might like it, too. I don’t think anybody ever outgrows a good story.” He glanced at the book in her lap. “I’m pretty sure Thomas Hardy would agree. Is that your first of his? I’m partial to Tess. Dickens is much better, though. Or try Middlemarch. That’s a masterpiece.”

“Look,” said Tommy, who had never read another word of Hardy, or a single word of Dickens, though all these names were familiar to her from the classics shelves at the library. “Okay. You can stop trying to make me like you. Draw Dani if you really want to. But only when we’re here. We are not going anywhere with you. And I’m not saying anything to him, because believe me, somehow I’ll get in trouble.”

“That’s perfect.” And just like that, he opened the sketch pad, took a pencil box from the pocket of his paisley jacket, and started to draw. After a moment, when she hadn’t stopped staring at him, he said, “Back to your Victorians, Tomasina Daulair.”

As the trees in the playground grew leafier and the sun leaned in closer and jackets were shed, Mort Lear was a frequent (if barely conversational) companion, as close yet indifferent as a shadow. Dani began to notice him, but when he asked his sister, “Who’s that man?” she said, “Oh, a friend of my art teacher.” This satisfied Dani, whose current obsession was learning to swing as fast as possible, chimpanzee-style, from rung to rung on the overhead bars.

The book Mort Lear had given her, she kept to herself. If she gave it to Dani, their parents would ask where it came from. It was a strange story, about a boy who was so cautious toward the world around him—so fearful of running into things that might scare him—that his parents didn’t know what to do. Finally, they arranged for him to spend time with different adults who did jobs that most people would find pretty scary: a beekeeper, a cave explorer, a mountain climber, a helicopter pilot, and a firefighter. Hardly ever were the adults pictured; only the boy. But the captions to the pictures—in which he wore an odd headdress and gathered golden honey (which he then spread on toast); discovered a glowing underwater cavern with beautiful fish; scaled a cliff to visit a family of mountain goats; flew over a city made rosy at sunset; and quelled a forest fire (from which flocks of birds rose in gratitude, spelling their thanks on the sky)—were the words of the wise people who did these jobs every day. Somehow they were always offstage—or tiny figures, way in the distance.

Being brave, said the firefighter, the last of the boy’s mentors, doesn’t mean never being afraid. There’s no such thing as never being scared. Being brave means knowing your fear, even being friends with your fear. You want it to tell you when to push past it and go on ahead, when to hold its hand and walk side by side, or when you’re better off following, walking in its footsteps. All you could see of the firefighter were the toes of his large rubber boots.

One day, sitting on the bench beside Mort Lear, bored silly with math yet again, Tommy said, “Can I ask you something about the book you gave us?”

“Sure.”

“How come you didn’t include a soldier?”

Mort Lear had paused in his drawing, but he kept looking at it. He didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know what book she meant.

“The book about the boy who’s afraid. I mean, a soldier is somebody who has to do something scarier than anything. Kill people. Maybe even get killed.”

“Why do you think about that?” he said.

“Well, like duh, there’s a war right now. My dad says he’s lucky, being the age he is, or he could have been drafted. He says he would have died of fright before he could even get to the fighting.”

Mort Lear seemed to ponder this for so long that Tommy wished she had kept her mouth shut. Then he said, “I’m lucky like your father. I was the wrong age for all the wars in my lifetime. I don’t want any children to think about that before they have to. I don’t want to make anybody have nightmares.”

“My social studies teacher says nobody wants to talk about the war and that’s why we’re still there when we shouldn’t be. Silence is a cop-out. It’s just as bad as fear.”

“She’s right,” Mort Lear said quietly.

“He,” said Tommy. “He drove an ambulance in Korea. Another war.”

Mort Lear went back to drawing. Tommy thought she saw tears in his eyes. Had she made him feel ashamed?

“I liked the pictures in the book. Your drawings are good.”

“I treasure that compliment.” He smiled at her briefly. “I do.”

Suddenly, summer arrived. The last day she and Dani went to the playground before their two-week family vacation (this time on Cape Cod, where Tommy knew they would hop and skip from one place to another, to sample “getaways” for her parents’ clients), it occurred to her that she should tell Mort Lear they wouldn’t be around for a while. But it happened to be one of the days he didn’t show up. At dinner, their mother announced that Tommy would be going to a sleepaway camp in Massachusetts right after their vacation. “You will love it. All art and drama and books. Even books! At a camp!”

“So who’ll be with Dani?” asked Tommy.

Her father laughed. “You’ll miss that? Spending your precious time with, and I quote, ‘the little monster’?”

“Well no. I suppose I won’t,” she said, feeling cornered.

“We’re going to hire a sitter to take Dani to day camp in Central Park,” her mother said. “Business is picking up! People are going places! And so are we! Your father and I are going to find us a bigger apartment. Maybe in Brooklyn. How about a room of your own, Miss Virginia Woolf?”

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