A House Among the Trees

Scott asked her if her parents weren’t pressuring her to do something practical. “My dad totally rides my case. He told me literature is fine to wallow in if you’re rich.”

Tommy told him how her parents prided themselves on never pressuring their children to do anything other than what they loved. She knew that her father’s true passion was songwriting, that making music with friends was the work he lived for. She also knew that her parents’ business wasn’t what it used to be—thanks in part to the computer nerds who were taking over not just the libraries but the so-called travel industry (as if “travel” were a manufactured commodity, churned out on conveyor belts). She could never ask them to help with graduate school.

Scott got into Stanford Law. His father told him that for the summer he had to buckle down and make money, so he went home to Chicago and waited tables at a tourist café near the art museum. “Maybe you could visit, take the train out?” he suggested while she watched him pack, but his tone made it clear that he didn’t expect this to happen. Tommy wished she had chosen a Jane Austen scholar for her first boyfriend, but she understood, objectively, that they were still so young. He was leaving her for another place, another way of living: for another chapter in his no-longer-literary life, not for another girl.

Worse than breaking up with Scott was having to move back into her old bedroom in Brooklyn. Dani was working for their parents at the agency (his penalty for a dismal report card), and they didn’t have another job for Tommy.

She walked up Court Street to see whether she could work at the bookstore.

What block was the bookstore on? Wasn’t it supposed to be just…here?

The bookstore had vanished. The space had been divided up into a bank branch with nothing but a pair of ATMs, an overilluminated Thai restaurant, and a cosmetics shop. She walked farther uptown.

The Italian bakery was gone. So was the shop where a father and son had sold fresh mozzarella, twisting and knotting it right before their customers’ eyes, as if the cheese were rope.

When her parents came home that night, Tommy expressed her astonishment at how much had changed—and how fast.

Her mother took on a mournful look. “Oh, the gentry wave has hit.”

Her father said, “Look who’s talking. We were the wedge, you realize that.”

“I’m Italian,” protested Mom.

“Half,” said Dad. “Half Italian, half bohemian. Bohemians are deadly to a neighborhood like this. We are the toe in the door, the canary in the coal mine, the nip in the air.” Out came the guitar.

That week, walking the streets just for the sake of staying away from the house, Tommy saw that the ethnic community her parents had chosen for the safety of its Mediterranean coziness (and nosiness) was dissipating. Looking through row-house windows, she saw funky patterned curtains in place of metal blinds; in front yards, the stucco saints were vanishing one by one, along with the lawn chairs where Italian women had smoked or crocheted, gossiping about their husbands, who worked as longshoremen or butchers or hung out too much at the social club on Court (now a Laundromat).

Tommy’s father reassured her that she deserved a little vacation after doing so well in school, time to “find her feet.” She did the shopping and vacuuming and some of the cooking, but mostly she walked and she read, plunging into long, heavily plotted novels. On random afternoons, she took the F train to Manhattan, getting off at West Fourth to wander the streets in her first neighborhood as well. Everything in the Village was changing, too. There were perfume stores where there had been dry cleaners, video stores in place of musty caverns selling tools and paint or yellowed maps and botanical prints. Her parents had moved the agency to Brooklyn Heights; the rent, not the commute, had driven them out. On Bleecker Street, a wine-tasting bar occupied the storefront where they had started the business twenty years before.

But there were still plenty of bookstores. In them, Tommy found refuge from the heat and consolation from all the unsettling changes; new books might arrive daily, but none would displace Hardy or Eliot or Tolstoy. She tried to summon the nerve to ask for work, but she failed.

She was in the basement of the Strand, leaning against a table looking at a cut-rate art book, a volume filled with glossy reproductions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when someone leaned across the table and murmured, “Tomasina Daulair?” Jolted, she raised her eyes to meet those of Mort Lear. He was short-haired, clean shaven, and he wore a pair of owlish tortoiseshell glasses, but she knew him instantly.

“It is you, isn’t it?”

“It’s me,” she said.

“You’re all grown up. Now you really are a Miss Daulair. Pardon me; a Ms. Daulair.”

Stupidly, all she could do was stare.

“Do you still live in the neighborhood?”

She closed the art book. “No.”

“You disappeared on me.”

“We moved. I didn’t realize…” I was just a child, she wanted to say, except that it would sound pathetic. “I saw your book. Your drawings of Dani.”

“I probably owe you a princely sum.”

What did he mean by that?

“That book bought me my apartment,” he said. “And things of greater if less definable value.”

Still she was mystified. Clearly, he wasn’t going to leave her alone—though she didn’t want him to leave her alone. How odd it felt to stand nearly eye to eye with him now. They were no closer in age than they had been on the playground, but while she felt eons older than twelve, the changes she could see in him were mostly a matter of altered fashions. If anything, he looked younger, like a photograph brought into better focus. Had he always been so handsome?

“I would like to have met your family, you know—properly.”

“The book is beautiful,” she said.

He looked at her intently, as if he were judging a contest. “I wonder if you realize…” He laughed. “Come with me. I mean, I want to show you something. Here in the store.”

So she followed him through the heedlessly book-littered aisles of the basement, past the desk where a pair of sour-smelling employees were slitting open cartons of battered, has-been books, to a part of the store she didn’t know: the children’s section.

It was clear, from the Siberian location of these overflowing, underlit shelves, that the store did not cater much to children. There would be no Saturday Story Circle here, no tiny tables and chairs encouraging patrons to bring their toddlers. But right away she saw it: the small bookcase dedicated to Mort Lear’s books, crowned with a display of Dani’s book. She also saw, right away, the two gold medals affixed to its jacket. And here was a copy in Spanish, another in…Hebrew? On a shelf below was a gift box containing two cloth dolls: the Dani doll, like the one she had seen on the subway six or seven years ago, and a panther doll. She picked up the box. “Wow.”

“I’m practically a franchise,” said Mort Lear, “and sometimes I think that your not turning me in to the playground police led to my being a rich man.”

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