Silas gestures that this is a call he has to take and carries his phone away from the booth, into the alcove by the coat check. Nick signals the waiter through the thickening crowd of weekend celebrants. Maybe it really is time for that personal assistant, someone as devoted to Nick as Tomasina Daulair was to Mort Lear.
Tomasina—he’s simply started to use her first name, cheeky though it may be—has agreed to let him stay at the house for a couple of nights. Nick persuaded her that to know Mort Lear well enough—now absent the chance to spend a few hours with him in person—and to portray him more than superficially, Nick needs (or would dearly love) to spend two or three days among the man’s belongings, eating off his dishes, paging through his books, greeting the day as he had done. He promised to “keep a low profile,” to provide for himself, to observe any boundaries she sets.
She seemed skeptical (in point of fact, she looked briefly as if her heart had stopped), but when he described his intensive correspondence with Lear, told her some of the stories they had shared (the innocent ones), she went silent for quite a few long seconds. They were standing in the studio, where she had shown him Lear’s collection of Alice in Wonderland novelties (and that rather lasciviously illustrated antique vessel), and finally she said, “I had no idea.”
Nick said, “That we connected?”
“That you were writing to each other.”
“Well…I suppose it just…you know, to be honest? It surprised me. I can’t claim that we became friends—that would be an exaggeration—but I was devastated when I heard the news. It felt…personal. Does that sound ridiculous?”
Again he seemed to have robbed her of words. Much as the silence tempted piercing, he waited.
“I’ll think about it, and I’ll phone you this evening,” she said. “Though you probably won’t give me your number, will you?” She smiled slyly.
“You bloody bet I will,” he said.
She rang him while he was still in the car returning to the city. “I may be out of my mind,” she said, “but this is what Morty would have wanted. And I have to warn you, nobody but you. Same as today. I won’t have people tramping through the bushes again. And don’t let your director think that I would ever—”
“I am perfectly clear on all that,” said Nick. “Crystal clear. Thank you.”
Silas returns to the table. “Sorry. Misha. Listen—you’re sure about this?”
“Sure as rain and fog,” says Nick. “And I’ll catch up with Andrew tonight.”
“I’ll have Linda book your flights. Out Monday, back Thursday?” Silas slides his card into the wallet containing the check.
“Brilliant. Thank you.”
“But while you’re out there—at Lear’s—you’ll stay in touch?”
“Goes without saying,” says Nick, and once again he feels as if decades have slipped from his age. His mother has given him permission to venture alone, just a few blocks, to buy himself a sweet. A kind son, an attentive son, he offers to buy her one, too. No, she says; she’s watching her figure. She denied herself so much—and, in the end, for what?
—
From the moment Colorquake won the Caldecott—an event that took place entirely outside Tommy’s narrow adolescent consciousness—Mort Lear became a revered and envied figure in the domain of children’s books. More than that, however, the sudden prestige of his book (and all the intellectual suppositions flocking around it like crows or gulls, a lot of inconsequential flap and clamor) seemed to empower that entire domain, as if authors who wrote for children had been a small army lying dormant, waiting for their moment to conquer the world’s attention.
Well, perhaps that would be an overstatement, but when Tommy started to work for Morty, she sometimes spent her idle time browsing through the file folders (everything stored on paper back then) in which he had saved the numerous clippings, citations, fan letters, and invitations that filled his mailbox daily following the publication of Colorquake. That first year, he had been invited to give commencement speeches at half a dozen institutions (accepting none, though later he would learn to tolerate wearing a robe and mortarboard over a suit in the heat of early summer). He had been invited to visit teachers’ colleges in Australia and Poland; he had been offered the use of a summer house on Lake Geneva. That was, she sleuthed between the lines, the year of the wealthy boyfriend on Mykonos. She has never seen pictures—surely there were pictures, perhaps torn to shreds in jealousy or rage?—but she knows his name was Panos. The one other souvenir of that liaison is a far less valuable cultural artifact, hanging in the back of the pantry: a facsimile icon of Saint Phanourios (his name printed, in English, on the back). It’s a tourist keepsake, but Morty did not like the idea of discarding a saint, no matter how cheap his incarnation. “He’s one of those guys you pray to when you’ve lost stuff—your car keys, your contact lenses, your faith in humanity—and God knows what would happen if you tossed him out or gave him away. You just might lose everything.”
Morty’s success was the most dangerous kind, he liked to say, because it was intoxicatingly sudden and fierce. “The kind of success that causes spiritual nosebleeds,” he said at one dinner party during the Soren years. “The kind that bucks you off and breaks your bones.”
But he was old enough to stay on that horse, to breathe at that altitude. He spent the first windfall on his duplex in the Village. He learned how to tell the useful invitations from the frivolous, how to say no cheerfully enough that he would not make enemies but firmly enough to make it clear that he understood the value of time.
When Morty wrote Tommy her first paycheck, which he did in her presence, ripping it from a black ledger he pulled from a desk drawer, she noticed right away the name of a major investment bank embossed on the cover. But in most ways, even if he bought his shirts at Paul Stuart and ate twice a week at Raoul’s, he was still the sneaker-shod beatnik artist she’d met when she was twelve, the man to whom she had given a brave if ingenuous scold about the importance of telling children the hard truths they need to know. (He would tease her about that for years.) Once, hanging her coat in his closet, she spotted the paisley jacket. Sun had faded the fabric across the shoulders. He no longer wore it, and one day it simply wasn’t there anymore.