A House Among the Trees



Reading back and forth between the computer and the paper letters, Tommy feels more sad than appalled. The jocularity in the note from Morty to Bruce, Franklin’s predecessor, feels offensive when juxtaposed against the cold, impersonal tone Morty used with the creepy but probably harmless Reg.

“Morty, you owe me,” she says as she drags the entire folder labeled Leonard (not, she notices, Reginald) to the computer’s virtual trash can. She does the same with the folder containing Morty’s correspondence with Nicholas Greene. Let the actor do what he likes with his own computer files, but for at least a few more days and weeks, Tommy will be completely if not unquestioningly loyal to her boss. That’s how she thinks of him now, the way she thought of him at the very beginning: as her boss.

She is stiff from too much sitting, too much hunching over computer screens and balance sheets and price lists. She closes the laptop.

It’s dark, even moonless, but she needs the air. Tommy takes the flashlight from beside the door.

She was twenty-nine when Morty bought the house. She remembers how impatient he was, as soon as he closed on the purchase, to drive her out from the city and show her.

“I’m going to walk you around the outside of the property first, just the way the broker did,” he said. “The house is going to be great when I’m done with it, but this is about the landscape. I think I’ve always wanted a house in the woods. I just didn’t know it. And wait till you see the funny little club house I’m turning into my studio. But the trees are the kind that take years, centuries, to grow. Money can’t buy you a maple tree that was planted before the Civil War.”

She follows the same journey now, the flashlight alerting her to the roots that meander searchingly away from the hornbeams, sycamores, oaks, and birches. The south side of the property is a long, sumptuous hedge of old white lilac bushes. Tommy and Morty took a pruning class together at the garden center, the spring after she moved in. Morty was confident that they could maintain these and the hundreds of other shrubs and small trees on their own; for the most part, they did. At the end of the lilacs, where the property line turns back toward the house, stands Tommy’s favorite tree, the Stewartia. It’s an understory tree, lorded over yet also mothered by a magnificent copper beech on the adjoining property. The flashlight confirms that its tiny camellialike blossoms will open soon; she’ll see them one more time.

Not long after Tommy moved in, a new neighbor to that side contemplated taking down the beech. If Tommy hadn’t seen the tree surgeon’s truck pull in next door, they might not have known until it was too late. When she told Morty the news—“He was there to give them his bid; if they take it, the job happens tomorrow”—he dropped his work. That evening he delivered (to the neighbors they had yet to meet) a broadside titled “Humble Petition for Clemency From the Celestial Society of Arboreal Samaritans and Busybody Citizen Tree Huggers.” It was covered with inked sketches of various trees and the “signatures” of individuals with names like Elmira Dutch, Leif E. Japonicus, Sumac Limbly, and Gnarleigh Spurgess Knott IV. They invented the names together, at the kitchen table, breathless with laughter. Morty tied it into a scroll with a green ribbon and delivered it with a bottle of champagne nested in a basket of fir fronds.

Here the tree still stands. Were it human, cognizant of how Morty saved its life, it would probably beg to deliver a eulogy at Sunday’s gathering—and Tommy would have to say yes, since Morty trusted trees far more than he did people. “You know what a tree can and cannot give you,” he said in one interview. “It’s very straightforward that way. And I am not talking about that cruel Silverstein book, one of the only children’s books I’ve ever thought ought to be banned.”

The next swatch of the property was, when Tommy first saw it, a small meadow. It is now filled with the fruit trees they planted together. And looming over the return route toward the house are the biggest trees: two maples, an oak, and a colossal willow whose trailing fronds murmur like a waterfall whenever a wind kicks up. Out front, halfway between the house and the road, stands a katsura, the kind of tree that begs for a swing—or for a child to climb brazenly high into its boughs. In his books, Morty gave these trees a second life in which he fulfilled such anthropomorphic wishes.

But Tommy curtails her loop at the foot of the granddaddy maple, the one that imposes itself over the back of the house, the one whose branch Morty was trying to dislodge from the roof when he fell.

She shines the beam of the flashlight straight up. To her surprise, she can still see the raw, pale lozenge of inner tree where the limb broke off. Has it really been less than a month?

When she left the house that morning, Morty had just come downstairs, an hour later than usual. He blamed the champagne they had shared the night before. Tommy poured him a cup of coffee, then told him she wanted to get to the copy shop when it opened. “I’m going to be hogging the machines, as usual,” she said. Angelica had asked to see the first of the finished full-color drawings for Love Beneath a Watermelon Moon, Morty’s first original picture book in a couple of years. Most of it was still in early sketch form, and he had yet to finalize the text.

“Let’s splurge on a color copier,” said Morty. “One of our own.”

“You mean, could I research color copiers and find out which one’s the best and the most consumer-friendly—maybe the most eco-friendly too—and talk to the customer reps, and do all the footwork and phonework so you can splurge on it, right?”

“Tommy, you are so clever,” he said, beaming. “I do not deserve you.”

“No comment,” she said, and she left him alone with his coffee.

As she drove off, she acknowledged yet again how tiresome the ritual was: her doing whatever task was required; his lavishing her with praise; his saying he didn’t deserve her (or couldn’t function without her). She, according to script, would agree. But if it was irritating, it was effortless, like the redundant avowals of ordinary love passed back and forth between spouses. She knew she would never leave this job, because at some point it had simply become a life, and who would opt to leave a life?

Exactly two weeks ago today, she waited for Nicholas Greene’s first visit with such fearful, protective anxiety. The peonies were on the cusp of blooming; already, they are done. The short, fierce heat wave hastened their end.

She returns to the house, puts the flashlight in its place beside the kitchen door. She is about to go upstairs when she remembers something. Leaning over the table, she reopens the laptop. She clicks on the trash can, finds the menu she wants, clicks again.

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