CB: But her burden—by extension, it had to be yours.
ML: Daydreamers are generally pretty oblivious. It would be a mistake to see those children as logically empathic. “Sensitivity”—that old cliché—is not the same as compassion.
CB: It’s obvious you’re pretty hard on your youngest self.
ML: No. I endured plenty. I had every reason to grow a coat of armor, and after we moved from Tucson, I made a conscious decision to do that. I had to.
CB: Okay. So I know we talked about the gardening shed—the gardener who took advantage of you.
ML: I guess we did say we’d cover that ground.
CB: Just for the record, you told me the story. This man you believed to be a friend. Even a mentor? I was stunned.
ML: I still am. If I let myself think about it. Because, yes, he was a kind of mentor to me—someone who encouraged my art life. My mother neither encouraged nor discouraged me there, simply because she worked so hard. She had so little energy, I realized decades later….So here was this man, who seemed to be, at least from a child’s limited perspective…a good guy. A smart guy. Friendly. An expert at what he did. He had a family, but they didn’t live on the grounds. And this place we shared—the hotel, the fantastical gardens where I was free to roam and dream and draw—was a place of trust. Or it was elegant—“classy” was my mother’s word. And protected—literally surrounded by walls. You’d never dream there were dangers.
CB: Like what went on in the shed, once he befriended you. That man.
ML: I’ve begun to think that my general mistrust of older people, of authority figures, started right there. All my adult life, I’ve preferred the company of people younger than me. Sometimes a lot younger. Ha. You know, I genuinely enjoy being surrounded by children. Which, believe me, isn’t something you can assume about authors who write for children.
CB: But so…your mother found out.
ML: She was devastated. She knew she had to get us out of there, and not just a town or two over. It was a huge risk. She didn’t know anyone in New York. It just seemed to make sense to her, a place to disappear.
CB: This was in the late 1940s, right? So the economy was in good shape.
ML: She can’t have been so coolheaded. She just knew we had to go somewhere earthshakingly different. What happened to me in that shed would never happen again: I knew at least that much when our final train reached the farthest coast. No room for garden sheds in the neighborhood we moved to. That much was certain! What I didn’t know was that this did not mean I could leave it behind. But then, at the same time, I learned about worse things.
CB: Worse than—
ML: Than my personal shake-up, my “trauma.”
CB: You’re not going to dismiss it.
ML: Of course not. It turned my life, and my mother’s life, upside down. But our life in Tucson had been strangely isolated…insulated. In Brooklyn, solitude took more effort. Which wasn’t bad. For a change, I had neighborhood friends. This boy Adam, who lived upstairs, shared my aversion to anything involving teams or physical exertions. The first time I went up to his apartment, this man was there—an uncle, some older relative—and I happened to see him roll up his sleeves for a task in the kitchen. I saw the number. I was smart enough to wait and ask my mother. The camps weren’t something people talked about, least of all to children. The entire concept of being a Holocaust survivor wasn’t…I mean, look, “survivorship” wasn’t pinned on people like some societal badge of honor, the way it is now. But my mother, when I asked her about that number, she pulled no punches. For a while, I looked obsessively at all the adults’ arms. I looked for those numbers. I decided maybe the cause of my nightmares was of a lower order.
CB: But you had nightmares about it.
ML: Who wouldn’t?
CB: Would you call it a driving force behind your stories? Are they redemptions?
ML: I don’t analyze my work. That would be to challenge the gods. Nor have I ever let myself be analyzed—not on the couch, at least. I don’t tell you this to seem brave or stoic. I’m simply of a certain generation. Younger people presume a choice: Is it better just to suck up the pain and endure—or to share it, assuming somehow that will weaken its hold?
CB: You are sharing it right now, aren’t you?
ML: Okay, yes, you have me there.
CB: Why now?
ML: I write for children, which makes me part child if I do it well. Or maybe all child, God knows! People say children’s book authors are kids who still haven’t figured out what they want to be when they grow up. But it means I act more on instinct than maybe even you—and I’d say you’re easily half my age. Something—I call it my inner imp—tells me it’s time to bring up this story. You happen to be the receiver, all because you, or your editors, decided it was time for a puff piece on Mort Lear. Not sure you got the puff piece, did you?
CB: Well. No. I would say definitely no puff.
ML: In any case, timing is everything. In love. In war. In telling your history.
He went on to say how lucky he felt to have escaped when he did. He speculated mournfully about children who never get away, whose abuse goes undiscovered or unchallenged.
When the story came out, Morty did seem surprised to see it in the blunt form of a transcribed interview. He had spoken with the magazine’s fact-checker, who relayed to him only paraphrased details.
Immediate response from readers was dissonant and loud, the loudest voices those of the child-welfare advocates, the people who felt that any disclosure of such terrifying cruelty could only serve to help others come forward, shed light on evil and strip it of power. And then, as Morty predicted, the tide of attention receded—or came to a full stop for reasons of timing that Morty could not have predicted: the story came out in the summer of 2001.
A few years later, however, Calum Bonaventura called Morty to tell him that a movie director had optioned the story. When Morty came into the kitchen that night and told Tommy about the call, she said, “Andrew Zelinsky? You know who he is, right?”
“Rings a foggy bell,” said Morty. “I could have asked for details, but I was writing. Shouldn’t even have answered. I told my reporter pal congratulations, but I’m sure he knows the deal—or the no-deal. He gets to buy a car. Used. More likely a couch. Option goes up like a cinder when Zelinsky decides he’d rather make the next big overlarded action movie. No superheroes in my tawdry tale.”
“Zelinsky’s movies aren’t big—or not big budget. He doesn’t do superheroes. In fact, they’re more sad than heroic. He’s not exactly Ron Howard.”