The crowd erupts, a sweet mélange of voices young and old. Even Merry, as damp and cranky as she feels, is moved. She stands between Sol and Stu, off to one side of the podium. Stu is holding a piece of paper—is he scheduled to speak?
“Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter were all great inspirations to Mort, so it’s only fitting we invited them to join us,” says Katelyn, sweeping an arm toward the statue, “but Mort had many living friends, admirers, and colleagues as well, and they’ll have memories to share. First, however, a reading of everyone’s favorite, iconic, never-to-be-rivaled storybook, Colorquake. And by the way, if you don’t own a copy, they’ll be for sale later on.” After pointing to a table stacked with books, she pulls from her pocket a pair of pink cat’s-eye glasses and slips them on. She begins to read not from a book but from a typescript.
“Ivo’s mother kept a perfect house, a house among the trees.”
Stu steps up next to Katelyn and, a few sentences on, joins her in the reading; they are alternating pages. To Merry’s knowledge, Stu hardly knew Mort. (Now she knows why Stu’s latest book is for sale on Katelyn’s table, along with Lear’s greatest hits.) Meanwhile, the wind becomes insistent, tossing and tangling the balloons, pilfering napkins and cups. Many of the adults glance up at the heavens, look at one another for cues, then begin to corral their belongings, ready to flee.
How long the story seems in words alone. Where was Lear’s true talent? wonders Merry as the story flows along. Is the persistent popularity of that slim book in the union of language and image? Or, had it been published three years earlier, or later, would it have been nothing more than a passing entertainment? Did it strike some kind of Cold War, post-Watergate cultural chord? Not that Mort was a literary fluke, another Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee. Or a coloratura, like Virginia Lee Burton or Margaret Wise Brown, working in a range that was vivid but narrow. No, Mort was a writer of staying power and versatility. (Good Lord, what in the world is she doing, writing wall copy for an exhibit?)
She surveys the audience. There is the brother, standing against a tree, still searching the crowd.
Could Merry even find Tomasina Daulair in such a cacophony of faces? She has encountered the woman three or four times but only in the context of galas and openings where Merry’s primary task is to condense and focus all her verve and vigor on anyone who might become a benefactor. She becomes a heat-seeking laser. (Someone ought to invent a pair of party-vision goggles that would reveal not just the richest occupants in a room but the ones most likely to share their wealth.) Sadly, the artists—the people with whom she wants to drink and dance and share the festivities—are all beside the point at such events. Their escorts? Less important than the waiters bearing trays of tiny crab cakes. Less important than the crab cakes.
Stu, in his sonorous baritone, reads, “Everything was just as he left it, but…wait…where was his panther?” With his lips nearly touching the microphone, he hisses the last four words, as if he’s reading Edgar Allan Poe, as if the final note of Mort’s book is one of foreboding, not delight.
Every single person under the roiling sky knows this book so well that hardly a beat of silence passes before they applaud. Stu bows. Katelyn steps to the mike and says, “In case you don’t know him, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, meet Shine.”
Compared with the roar that rises from the audience now, the applause for Mort and his book was anemic. Stu raises his tattooed arms like a football player who’s just made a touchdown.
Stu is now Merry’s ace in the hole, but she does not join the adulation. What is he doing, hijacking Mort’s memorial? She leans over and takes him by the arm, gently pulling him toward the side. (“Beautiful, Stu. Beautiful,” she says, feeling just how phony her smile must look. Ambiguously, he answers, “Just giving it up for The Man.”)
And now the ruggedly elegant Peter Sís steps to the microphone and tells the story of how he met Mort in the Village, some thirty years ago. His voice is gratifyingly soft, reminiscent, his delicate accent underscoring his role as an elder statesman of sorts. Stu’s problem, thinks Merry, is that he wants to turn everything into a rock concert. Well, maybe that’s the flow with which she’ll have to go from now on. Maybe she should have one of Shine’s characters tattooed on her chest, the way his oldest fans have done. She listens to Peter and resolves to write him a note. She’s heard rumors that his work is ultimately headed for that greedy archive at UT Austin—which seems to suck up way too many literary estates, relegating them to every sensible person’s least favorite part of the country—but rumors are just rumors.
A loud crack of thunder sets off a collective shriek among the children. A significant number of adults leap to their feet and start stuffing things into backpacks and diaper bags.
Katelyn comes over to Merry. “What do we do?”
“Didn’t you have an indoor alternative?”
“Yes, but it’s blocks away,” says Katelyn. “It was for if the day was rainy from the start. No one’s going to go there now.”
Flight is contagious, of course, so more than half the audience is leaving, most of them rushing toward Fifth Avenue.
“It’s not actually raining, so let’s just soldier on,” says Merry.
“But lightning!” Katelyn protests.
“Mort would have enjoyed the drama,” Merry says. “And it’s not like we’re in an open field.” (Which, paradoxically, is the sort of setting that ought to have been chosen for a gathering of this size.)
“The trees don’t make us any safer, you know.”
Ignoring Katelyn, Merry steps to the mike and introduces the next guest, who seems gratifyingly undeterred. Charlotte is the editor who has worked with Mort since Rose died. The first book she edited was volume one of The Inseparables. This is the book she’s holding now and from which, without preamble, she begins to read.
To look back at their beginning, their unity almost from birth, is to marvel at how an arbitrary confluence of geography and timing may determine the course of history, the fate of an entire species: ours, to be exact. And their beginning was as simple as could be.