In a guest appearance on a children’s television show, Morty talked about making up stories. At one point, he leaned close to the camera and said, “A story is just like a road. It’s got to take you somewhere. Somewhere fun, somewhere new! But you don’t want the trip to be boring. You don’t want to be driving along, flat flat flat, nothing but cornfields on either side for miles. Iowa,” he whispered, as if the entire state were a secret, and held up a photo of said agricultural bounty stretching to infinity. “A few cornfields are well and good, but you’ll also want some very steep hills…Scotland!” Now, a snapshot of an absurdly vertiginous road somewhere in the Highlands, with a road sign that bore only a large exclamation point. “Throw in cliffs for a little suspense….” Photo of that famous Mediterranean coastal road—the Corniche?—favored by Hitchcock. “And the trip would be dull indeed without some unexpectedly sharp corners.”
So Morty would have appreciated this moment, a hairpin turn if ever there was one, worthy of that Scottish road sign. Here sits Tommy, at her own table, looking at a computer holding the private correspondence of a dead man (does death negate privacy?) and an old-fashioned key, while this houseguest (a stranger) keeps glancing at the clock, as if he’s got to be somewhere else. Wasn’t she supposed to be conducting the show-and-tell this weekend?
Now he says, leaning toward her just the way Morty leaned in to his young viewers in that television show, “I’m going to ask you a mammoth favor that you are free, even completely sane, to refuse. But the bank is open only two more hours between now and Monday, and I’m wondering if we could get at a lockbox there. I promise to explain everything, but I’m desperate to get there before it closes. I know it’s not my business, but somehow…”
How could he explain to Tomasina that it’s happening, the thing he strives for: he’s slipping inside Lear’s skin. He needs, metabolically, to know as much as he can. He needs this answer.
With one hand on the computer, the other reaching for the key, Tommy says, “You’re losing me.” The important thing, she tells herself, is to act as if she’s in complete control of the situation. Even though she clearly isn’t.
Morty, you idiot, you ass, she thinks, but what’s the point of scolding a man whose ego’s gone up in smoke, whose body is nothing but a mahogany box of ashes sitting on a windowsill in the studio?
Tommy examines the key, reads the tag. “Right here in town.” She keeps her checking account there, but Morty’s finances are still handled by a big-name city bank with a staff of sleekly suited acolytes in charge of “private wealth management.”
“My bet is it contains a stash of his childhood drawings,” says Nick.
Tommy sees his determination toward calm, his concern that she thinks he’s gone crazy. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t.
“You want me to open that box, today.”
“I have no earthly right, but—”
“But yes.” She looks at the key again. “I’m not even going to ask—yet—where you got this key.”
Had Morty sent the actor this key? How does he know what the box contains—and why would it contain drawings? The fact is, Tommy wants to open the box, immediately, as badly as he does.
She knows the posthumous rituals by now. “I’ll need a death certificate,” she says. “Wait here.”
She goes out to the studio to get the paperwork she needs. On impulse, she makes a call.
“Franklin, did you know about a safe-deposit box at Pequot?”
“Nope,” he says. “No idea.”
“Maybe Bruce did?”
“I wouldn’t know. You found a key?”
Tommy hesitates. “Yes.”
“But where? We scoured those drawers.”
“Never mind. Could you do me a favor and call Bruce in Florida? If that’s okay?”
From a file folder, she takes one of the dozen certificates she ordered attesting to Morty’s demise, along with the notarized proof of her status as Morty’s executor. Everyone on the tiny provincial staff at Pequot knows Tommy, but they’ll still need to go through the formalities.
Nick insists that they go with Serge, not in Tommy’s car. As she gets in, the sensation of sinking back onto the smooth, supple leather reminds her of so many departures, with Morty, from awards ceremonies and numbingly speech-heavy tributes. Slipping away, into whatever hired car Morty’s publisher had arranged, they would revel in the collusive pleasure of escape. “Home, James,” Morty would say in a bad pompous British accent, not terribly remote from the way in which Nick says, “Serge, back to that bank, if you please.”
—
Tommy removes the drawings from their cardboard folio and lays them out one by one. She does so slowly, not out of reverence but almost out of repulsion. The markings on these sheets of paper are all that remain of Mort Lear’s childhood—they ought to be precious to her; they deserve her tenderness and awe—yet their very existence feels like a reprimand. You were always to be trusted, but not that much. And to have their existence uncovered by someone who never even met Morty? The more she tries to reason back her anger, the more her fingers fumble with the archival tissue that Morty (surely not the satanic Leonard) placed between the drawings.
She must remind herself what good news these drawings represent, in part because they provide literal illustration to Morty’s early years—which otherwise threaten to be summarized as little more than trauma…coming to a cinema near you!
After she fills the surface of the dining room table, she clears the candlesticks and silver bowls from the sideboard and begins there, dealing them out like cards from a deck. The final three go on chairs. Some are speckled faintly with mildew—collectively, they fill the room with a dank, atticky odor—but most are in decent shape. What surprises her is how many were done on high-quality stock, not the throwaway composition paper on which Morty claimed he made all his juvenile jottings.
Tommy knows she should be unveiling this discovery with Angelica, or even Franklin, not Nicholas Greene, though without the actor’s meddling, these pictures, the likes of which no one has seen, might have remained indefinitely hidden, emerging from the lockbox only when that stalwart little bank went out of existence—or Morty’s preemptive rental fee ran dry.
She has been stunned into silence since leaving the bank, but Nick, as he hovers and watches, exclaims at practically every image. “The cactuses are fabulous!” “Will you look at this bird—is it meant to be, what, a phoenix?” “Oh these leaves, the rendering is brilliant, how can a child this young capture sunlight with crayon? And this cat, the way his tail—”
“Nick, please. I need to be able to think.” Did she have to sound so harsh?
He apologizes. He retreats to the edge of the dining room and watches from a distance. Dimly, it occurs to her that there is a childlike fragility to Nick, a Peter Pan aura that might help explain why Morty fell so hard for him. Because that’s the truth: Morty had a crush on Nick. Innocent, not precisely sexual…or maybe she’s na?ve.
But Tommy is too preoccupied by the mystery behind this folio of drawings to follow that train of thought. All of them are unmistakably Morty’s, only in part because they are signed. M. Levy 1948—the y trailing into a curlicued flourish. In the lower left of a few, he wrote Drawn From Life. But then there are the fantastical pictures: a salamander as dragon, with a tiny knight drawn awkwardly before it, flame blasting from the lizard’s mouth. A potted plant becomes a tree filled with fanciful birds.