“You’re rich?” she said, immediately regretting it.
“Yes,” he said, in a surprisingly straightforward way. “Well, by normal standards. And fortunate. And, you know, even happy. Which children’s authors are not supposed to be. Trust me on that.”
They faced each other, Tommy holding the gift box to her chest.
“So what can I do to repay you, Ms. Tomasina Daulair? Name a favor and it’s yours. Something more than a triple ice-cream cone.”
Before she could stop herself, she said, “Help me find a job?”
Four
FRIDAY
She and Franklin sit side by side at Morty’s desktop computer, an expensive machine, both brawny and sleek, that he used for e-mail, record keeping, and late-stage design decisions, once his finished drawings and stories came together as books. He used it to tinker with fonts, make color adjustments to page proofs, record additions to his collections, and—Tommy notes the folder labeled Book Museum—track loans of his work and his most valuable antique editions. The Cadillac, he called it—or the Commandant, on days he felt resentful toward technology for the ways in which it had shanghaied the making of a book.
Franklin has opened a virtual folder called NFP DOCS, which contains pdf files of forms related to obtaining not-for-profit status. Franklin clicks on Mission Statement, a one-page draft of a proposal to create a residential and social-services center for homeless boys….Ideally, we want to repurpose a large (industrial?) building in a high-needs neighborhood. (U of AZ collaboration??) We would engage a local architecture firm to gut and retrofit (etc. etc.). A garden space, preferably enclosed, is essential….
“Did he write this?” Tommy cannot imagine Morty using the word retrofit.
“I gave him some advice,” says Franklin. “I thought he could…explore it. See what his intentions would entail, practically speaking.”
Tommy notices his evasiveness. “You knew more about all this than you are letting on.”
Franklin turns in his chair. “Two months ago, he dropped by my office and said he wanted to talk. I’m paraphrasing by a long shot, but he told me he’d decided that if he was going to be remembered for something, put on some kind of Mount Rushmore, he’d rather have it be for ‘doing good’ than ‘being good.’ For making things happen, not just making things up. He seemed agitated. It wasn’t my job to ask why.”
“Morty made lots of things happen. Good things.” She needs to think about this before she can say anything more to Franklin. Morty was upset. He was unreasonably upset. But she did not expect him to act on it—not on a scale like this. She says, “Let’s get started on these files.”
Together they read, Tommy aware of Franklin’s citrus cologne, the comforting heat of his body through his pale-green cotton shirtsleeve; for the moment, she isn’t alone in this mess. She never noticed before that Franklin is left-handed—which surprises her, considering that he’s eaten with them on and off for five years. For a decade before that, it was Bruce, who bequeathed his boutique firm to Franklin when he retired. It’s still small, its clients entirely local—Morty the whale among the minnows (or maybe not, considering the rumored ballooning of wealth behind Orne’s hedges). Morty defected from his large, multipartnered big-city firm after having a ten-minute conversation with a total stranger, in the Orne village drugstore, about how to find decent firewood. The stranger was Bruce.
Franklin slides the open file up and aside on the screen, opens two more, one a scanned letter from a child-welfare agency in Phoenix, the other a letter from the director of Eagle Rest, the resort (once rugged, now refined) where Morty and his mother lived when their names were still Frieda and Mordecai Levy. Both letters are dated about a month ago. One pledges counsel and assistance, the other money (though neither writer gives specifics).
“All of this,” says Tommy, “is…it’s just that he told me nothing.” In the letter attached to the will, one of the dictates that makes her heart sink is the paragraph that directs her to auction off my collections and to sell and widely disperse my work as necessary with the express intent of funding the Mort Lear Foundation and the social service facility, as described below, that I would like to call Ivo’s House (unless some fat-cat do-gooder offers a hefty sum to attach his or her name).
“I’m sorry.”
Franklin is in his late fifties or early sixties. Like Bruce before him, he’s been a frequent adviser to Morty. Tommy knows, from joining the two men during the meetings that turned into meals, that Franklin has two grown sons, both married. He’s been divorced from their mother since the boys were in their teens. Is he attractive? she wonders as they breathe quietly side by side, taking in the documents and their contents. She has never looked at him like that before; why now? Now that Morty is gone, will she begin to think of herself—or worry that others see her—as a spinster? Does anybody think in those terms anymore?
“I knew this was why he established the new trust,” Franklin says. “And, of course, the new will. I told him I thought he should look into it further before putting it down on parchment. But that was Morty: seize an idea first—run with it—then do the research later. I’m sure you know that much.”
Tommy thinks of Ivo, heading into the forest without his mother’s permission (not that his mother is around to ask). “Do you think…he was doing this rationally?”
Franklin hesitates. “Are you asking me if he was in his right mind?”
“I don’t suppose you’d answer that.”
“Not my job, assessing people’s mental fitness.” He smiles at Tommy, meeting her eyes over the glint of his reading glasses. “But I had no reason to think he wasn’t. I did offer to talk to a law school classmate who helps bankroll safe houses for teens in trouble. He pointed me to the director of a place in Portland. We had a brief conversation, and I passed the woman’s number to Morty. That’s a kind of mecca for runaways. The railyards…There’s a whole subculture of kids on their own. You can imagine what goes on, what they resort to.”
“Oh God,” says Tommy. “I don’t want to.”
“Nobody does, right? So it’s heroic when somebody wants to do something about it other than put them in juvy. You have to guess that Morty was thinking about his ‘legacy.’?”