They were neighbors, meeting only because their six parents, almost simultaneously, happened to have chosen this plain but deliciously shady street as the best place to make a life—and because their three mothers, all new to the job, were lonely and desperate for comrades with whom to share the particular raptures and fears of caring for a baby. This is how, looking back from later, they came to be best friends from so long ago that they couldn’t even remember the first time they had played together. Was it digging moats in Greta’s sandbox…bombardiering down Boris’s slide? Or maybe they had joined forces when Stinky was the first to get a trike. Stinky’s name was Stanley, but nobody called him that. He liked Stinky. He said so even when they moved up to the middle school, when it would have been easy to leave his nickname behind. But he refused, claiming it gave him “panache.”
“Whatever that is, you can keep it to yourself,” said Boris.
Stinky was the word nerd.
Merry wonders how much Charlotte plans to read. She reminds herself that she isn’t the one in charge here; perhaps she should have been. She fantasizes briefly about an alternate scenario in which the Times obituary included the announcement that Mort Lear had bequeathed his entire literary estate to…Stop. She glances at Sol. He is whispering something to Stu.
Charlotte is now through the part of the narrative identifying Boris as the science nerd, the trombone player Greta as the music nerd. The first chapter is a swift summary of the protagonists’ shared childhood, their uneventful passage toward the sudden crisis that kicks the plot into surreal motion by Chapter Two.
“You know what we are? We’re a phalanx,” said Stinky.
Boris asked what a phalanx was. Greta told him that, in their case, it meant a chemical union so stable that to threaten any change, to remove a single atom, could lead to the implosion of the cosmos.
“Sort of like the Hadron Collider.”
The others looked at him suspiciously.
“Do you guys ever listen?” Boris rolled his eyes. “That tunnel I told you about, the one in Switzerland.”
“Precisely,” said Stinky. “We are the force they are trying to create in that tunnel.”
Charlotte reads the part about how, in high school, they end every day by e-mailing one another their last thoughts, often sitting at their desks in the dark, in their pajamas, their parents and younger siblings long asleep. Does it matter to teenage readers now that the ways they keep in touch have changed so dramatically in just a decade? Secretly, Merry has never loved The Inseparables. She understands why the books were and still are iconic, but they’re so melancholy, so fatalistic, the humor so chilly….
The year they would all turn sixteen (Greta first, then Stinky, then Boris), one by one, they fell sick. First they were tired, then they had headaches, and then they didn’t want to eat. One by one, they were taken to their family doctors by their parents, and all of them, one by one, were told that they had the same rare malignancy.
Boris and Greta did not need Stinky to tell them the meaning of that word.
The three afflicted friends overheard their mothers weeping together, their fathers making lists of specialists and world-class hospitals in other parts of the country. Weary though they were, they went on Stinky’s computer—he’d been the first to get his own, just like that trike—and they did their own research.
“We’ll be cured together,” said Greta.
“Or die together,” grumbled Boris.
“Don’t get all creepy and morbid,” said Stinky. “Remember: we are a phalanx.”
“Inseparable,” said Greta.
It occurs to Merry that the smaller children in the audience (actually, very few of the smallest ones remain, since their parents would be the most protective) might be extremely disturbed by the beginning of this older book. Ultimately, there would be a bittersweet, mostly happy ending—at least to this book—but not before a great deal of peril, catastrophe, and heroism (the Hadron Collider a crucial factor).
Charlotte sets down the book to tell the audience how surprised she was to find out, after reading this book before it was even published, that Mort was a funny man. She does a rather credible impersonation, and she talks about his love of Lewis Carroll’s famous book and how he collected eccentric, silly objects related to Alice and her fellow Wonderlanders. “One day he hoped to illustrate a new edition of Alice. It would have been, I know, his crowning achievement.”
Just as Charlotte reaches toward the bronze Alice, as if to invite her for a hug, rain falls in a rush, like the breaking of a dam. Even those who have readied umbrellas leap to their feet and dash away in search of better shelter than the trees can offer.
Katelyn and her husband, who clutches his guitar case against his body like a wounded child, rush to the book table, covering it clumsily with a large sheet of plastic.
Only the poor audio guy—scrambling to pack up the microphone and speakers—and Sol, who stands impassively by, under a wide black umbrella, do not run. Nor does Merry, who feels that it’s her responsibility to take over. At the very least, she can bring this bloated ceremony to a merciful close. “I’m sorry,” she calls out to the few diehards, shouting to be heard over the rain. “Mort must be telling us he’s too modest for us to make this big a fuss on his behalf.”
Mort, modest? Well, that’s amusing.
She is soaked, and her shoes are ruined. Exasperated, angry, she leans over, pulls them off, and tosses them into the pond. Too late, she realizes that she’ll never find a cab in this downpour. She turns to ask Sol if he has a car, but he’s gone; in the distance, she sees him leaving the park, sharing his umbrella with Stu.
—
“Turn on your TV. CBS.”
Tommy hurries to the den. Remote in one hand, phone in the other, she is looking at a red-carpet promenade, the milling about of a chosen tribe in finery and jewels: the women absurdly gorgeous, the men more diverse in their looks (some of them downright toads).
But in the foreground, here he is, leaning toward a microphone held by a woman’s hand. The camera zooms in until, for a moment, his face nearly fills the screen, far larger than life, and then withdraws to include a shapely reporter in a tight pink dress, though her prettiness is nothing to the luster of the women gliding along behind her.
He smiles gamely at the reporter. “I am indeed!” he says forcefully. “And I am over the moon about it—though at the same time I am crushed by the news. It’s such a terrible, terrible loss, his death.”
“Yes, just last month. Tragic.” She nods emphatically and tries to look sad.
“So I feel as if my responsibility to get it precisely right, to do him honor, is all that much more serious now. I owe Mr. Lear the performance of my life. But of course, it’s not all me, not by a long shot. Andrew’s vision for this film is genius. His mind is like a bonfire.”
“A bonfire! Absolutely.” The reporter giggles. “But hang on a minute, Nick. We’re here tonight to celebrate the stage, to which you are no stranger. So will we be seeing you on the boards again anytime soon?”
“Oh, I’m a homing pigeon,” says the actor. “Always return to my roots—my roost? Bad joke there—sorry. But, honestly? Whatever else I’m doing, the theater’s where I go to find myself again. Replenish my soul.”
“Absolutely! Are you presenting tonight?”
“I am!” He presses a hand to his chest.