Also by Julia Glass
And the Dark Sacred Night
The Widower’s Tale
I See You Everywhere
The Whole World Over
Three Junes
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Julia Glass
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Glass, Julia, [date] author.
Title: A house among the trees / Julia Glass.
Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043794 (print). LCCN 2016055002 (ebook). ISBN 9781101870365 (hardcover : acid-free paper). ISBN 9781101870372 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Inheritance and succession—Fiction. Self-realization—Fiction. Artists—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.L37 H68 2016 (print). LCC PS3607.L37 (ebook). DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016043794
Ebook ISBN 9781101870372
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover images: (top) Jeff Cottenden / Millennium Images, U.K.; (bottom) Sally Gilles / EyeEm / Getty Images
Cover design by Kelly Blair
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Contents
Cover
Also by Julia Glass
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
To the high school teachers whose voices still resonate:
Mr. McFarland
Miss Mendenhall
Mr. Perkins
Mrs. Shannon
Mr. Shohet
In the theatre, the tendency for centuries has been to put the actor at a remote distance, on a platform, framed, decorated, lit, painted, in high shoes—so as to help to persuade the ignorant that he is holy, that his art is sacred. Did this express reverence? Or was there behind it a fear that something would be exposed if the light were too bright, the meeting too near?
—Peter Brook, The Empty Space
Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.
—Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character
One
WEDNESDAY
Today, the actor arrives.
Awake too early, too nervous for breakfast (coffee alone makes her more nervous still), fretful over what to wear (then irritated at caring so much), Tommy patrols the house that is now hers, shockingly and entirely hers—not just her bedroom and all it contains but everything she can see from its two windows: seven acres of gardens and grass and quickening fruit trees, fieldstone walls and stacks of wood, shed and garage and hibernating pool. The sky above: does she own that, too? Owning the sky would be easy. The sky would be a gift. The sky weighs nothing. The sky is unconditional.
She roams and circles through rooms she knows by heart: living room, dining room, kitchen, den, mudroom, pantry, porch. She cannot enter a room these days without beginning a mental inventory: What to keep? What to give away? (Worse, far worse, how much of it will she sell?) She goes to and from the studio, back and forth between this world and that—in that one, he simply must be alive—so many times that her skirt is now damp from brushing against the tight-fisted buds of the peonies flanking the path.
Will she have to change again?
The birds are in prime song, the sun beyond a promise, the day upon them all. Five hours to fill, and Tommy has no idea how.
She still finds it hard to believe that Morty agreed to this. But he did. He spoke to the actor more than willingly—to Tommy’s embarrassed ears, unctuously—only a few days before his fall. His eager remarks punctuated by a forced, nasal laughter, he said that he looked forward to welcoming the actor to his home and studio, showing him “everything—well, almost everything!”
Unlike many women around the civilized world, Tommy does not yearn to meet or spend time with or even catch sight of Nicholas Greene. That she will be alone with him—if he complies with her conditions, and he must (Yes, Morty, you are not the only one with conditions!)—is even more unsettling, but one thing she knows is that she will not allow a wolf pack of movie people to poke around the premises. It was bad enough letting the art director visit last month. “Just a walkabout to soak up the spirits,” he claimed. He arrived with a photographer and two assistants, who managed to trample flat a swath of crocuses emerging from the lawn. Morty behaved like a puppy, tagging along rather than leading them through, setting no limits to their invasion.
She has seen Nicholas Greene’s face on the racks at the CVS checkout (though a year ago, Americans hadn’t a clue who he was), and she did share Morty’s excitement when they watched the Academy Awards and saw the actor hoist his trophy aloft, thank his costars, his director, his agent, and (tearfully) his “courageous, unforgettable mum.” Even then, barely three months ago, Tommy was confident that this proposed “biopic” of Morty would, like countless other movie projects, wither on the vine. (How many books of Morty’s had been optioned yet never come close to the screen?) She has to wonder if Nicholas Greene’s Oscar galvanized the project, to which the actor had already been “attached”—as if he were a garage adjoining a house or a file appended to an e-mail.
There is something shamefully alluring to Americans about a British accent, whether it’s cockney or sterling-silver Oxbridge. Even Tommy is not immune. Given the choice, who wouldn’t rather listen for hours to Alec Guinness or Hugh Grant, over Johnny Depp or even a velvety vintage Warren Beatty? But why in the world, with all the platoons of hungry, gifted, handsome actors out there (Morty was handsome in his youth), would anyone sensible pick an Englishman to play a guy who grew up in Arizona and working-class Brooklyn? Maybe that’s why Morty was so enthralled. Maybe he couldn’t resist the flattery of seeing his life story told through the medium of a boyishly sexy, upper-crusty-sounding younger man who had been nurtured, almost literally, on Shakespeare and Dickens. Morty had a passion for Dickens. (She will certainly show the actor the glass-front cases containing Morty’s book collection; no harm there.)
Once Morty learned that Nicholas Greene had signed on, he asked Tommy to do a little research. As he leaned toward the computer over her shoulder, taking in the googled stills of the actor playing Ariel at the Globe, Sir Gawain in a defunct but cultishly admired TV series, and of course the doomed son in the film that just won him a slew of prizes, Morty’s face shed years in expressing his naked delight. It was a face he might have drawn for five-year-olds, a face to be duplicated millions of times, seen by children who spoke and sang and shared their secrets in two or three dozen languages.
Maybe it’s because Tommy lived with Morty for twenty-five years and knew him better than anyone else possibly could (even Soren) that she cannot actually s
ee why he would be chosen as the subject of a feature film; not a documentary, which made sense—there were two of those already, one for children, one for adults—but the kind of movie you watch in order to be swept away by crisis or intrigue or menace or laughter or the conquering power of love. Maybe she’s too close to Morty’s everyday life—“the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation,” he mused aloud in the PBS series—to see it as a source of entertainment. At the same time, she is dead sure that Morty would not want certain details of his life offered up as fodder for strangers’ titillation or tears. God forbid they should delve into the mercifully obscured months of his clubbing binge, for instance, the breakdown that led to Soren. Maybe that’s why she can’t stop rushing about, as if she’s taken some kind of mania-inducing drug, fretfully scanning shelves of mementos and knickknacks, walls crowded with framed photos and cartoons and letters, searching for anything that might expose unnecessary personal matters to a curious stranger passing through.
Morty’s lawyer, Franklin, has passed through several times, as well as Morty’s agent, Angelica, who is still in shock over the will. Franklin has always treated Tommy as an equal and seems to like her—or at least he’s done a convincing job of pretending. What upsets her (though logically, why should it?) is that Franklin knew about Morty’s latest will for weeks. He assures her that Morty meant to sit down with her and explain the reasons for the seismic shift in his intentions. He was simply waiting for the right time—because time, he had good reason to assume, was something of which he still had plenty.
Tommy never doubted that Morty would be generous to her, but she had no idea he would leave her the house and the surrounding property outright; even less than no idea that he would name her his literary executor, assigning her a series of detailed responsibilities as variously remote from her experience as foraging for mushrooms or Olympic diving. And some of them will be deeply unpleasant: first and foremost, telling the people at the museum in New York that no, he will not be leaving them the bulk of his artwork and letters and collections and idiosyncratic belongings, as Tommy knows he led them to believe he would do. Now, she must somehow repossess the drawings, manuscripts, and annotated book proofs that have been on loan with the general understanding that the loan was a prelude to a gift…a very large gift. Tommy has yet to answer the e-mails and phone messages from the distressed director. Even though Franklin is confident that the museum has no legal grounds for challenging the will, Tommy herself is the one who will have to face up to those messages. She can only hope she won’t have to tell the woman why Morty turned sour on them. She doesn’t like remembering how easily his ego was bruised these past few years.
She wishes that somewhere among all the legal surprises, Morty had also left directions to cease cooperation with the movie people. But up through the very last night of his life, he was beyond delighted; he was as close to rapturous as Tommy ever saw him. Silly of her not to have realized that as he aged, his ego was as readily inflated as it was bruised.
As usual, he spent that afternoon working and napping in the studio, then joined Tommy in the kitchen at six. And, as had become his habit in the few days since his second transatlantic conversation with Nicholas Greene, he wanted to talk not about the story or drawings in which he was immersed (how deeply Tommy already misses seeing new images, listening to Morty read out loud new constellations of words—to her before anyone else) but about what it would mean, what it would feel like, to be the subject of a “real-deal movie.” Morty never cared much for drink, but that night he went to the back fridge, the extra one they had installed in the early years of Soren (the party years), and rooted out a bottle of true champagne, then stood on a stool to reach a pair of dusty flutes. Tenderly, he soaped and rinsed and polished the glasses, insisting that he and Tommy share a “properly classy toast.”
After Tommy returned to sautéing garlic for the linguini with clam sauce that neither of them knew would constitute Morty’s last supper, he sat at the table, refilled his glass, and rambled on in earnest wonder about the prospect of being played (“Like an instrument!” he exclaimed, miming a violinist) by an actor who had won both an Oscar and whatever the British equivalent was. “Tommy,” Morty said—uttering her name with such gravity that she turned away from the stove—“just think: you’ll be on my arm at the premiere…or I suppose, considering my infirmities, I’ll be on yours, my dear.” He raised a second toast, to her.
“What infirmities?” she said.
“You know how long these projects take. I’ll be eighty by then.”
Tommy still saw Morty as essentially youthful, but she had become aware that his agility and sense of balance were diminishing, that he should hire younger men to climb tall ladders or scrunch down into a crawl space. He did not agree. (Last fall she caught him on the phone, trying to cancel the handyman she had hired to clean the gutters.) And so, the next morning, while Tommy was off at the UPS Store, copying and shipping a batch of color sketches for Angelica, Morty climbed out an upstairs window onto the steeply pitched roof above the screened porch, intent on removing a limb that had fallen from the granddaddy maple, his favorite of all the fine old trees for which he had bought this property—a tree whose likeness he had rendered in his books again and again. Tommy knows he waited until her car was out of sight.
Far too often now, she must force her mind to detour sharply away from the predictable ambush of her suffocating sorrow (not guilt, because she was away doing her job, and he was being foolish) whenever she imagines Morty lying on the flagstones for God knows how long before she reached the end of the driveway and saw him there, out cold—the bough having tumbled down after, landing across his legs. He was already dead, she would learn, but for the time she sat beside him on the damp frigid stone, wishing she could just hold his head in her lap, and for the time the EMTs tried to bring him to consciousness, she had a wish that generally only a wife or a parent would have: Take me instead.
When had she crossed that line, from being the big sister of his favorite model, the boy whose doppelgänger put him on the literary map, and then his indispensable helper, his fifth limb (maid, cook, driver, party escort, website warden, proxy on difficult phone calls, repository of names), to finding herself so inescapably devoted to the man, the porcupine as well as the genius, the hermit as well as—something surprisingly new, perhaps even to him—the starstruck fan?
—
Breakfast. Please let this mean breakfast, he thinks as he wakes to the ringing telephone on the side table in the unfamiliar wash of radiance across the unfamiliar ceiling above the unfamiliar bed. Another hotel room, that much is certain. The needle of his inner compass spins, quivers….Right, yes: New York again.
He rolls over and grapples the receiver to his ear.
“Nick, your cell phone’s off.”
He yawns and clears his throat. “The object is not to be reached. Even by you, Silas. Especially by you.”
“That’s not an option, I’m afraid.”
“Si, please. No lists or lectures.”
“I know: don’t be a mum. But listen. We’re to be picked up in an hour.”
“We?”
“We have to allow three hours to get there.”
“There is no ‘we’ today, Silas. She said no people.”
“Last I heard, Nick, you are still a people.”
“Hilarious, Si. You know what I mean. No entourage. Just me. That’s what her note says. You get a day off. Go shopping. Drinking. Or sleep! You’re always moaning you never sleep. And blaming it on me.”
The note from Lear’s assistant, delivered by Silas, lies beside the telephone, barely ajar from its single, stalwart fold, embodying the cautiousness, the protectiveness, of its scribe. Her handwriting is equally guarded, each line straight, each eminently legible character discrete from its neighbors: no lazy loopings or punctured margins. If Nick is good at what he does, it’s not because he’s a born mimic or a chameleon or a pra
cticed show-off but because he reads other people well. (Or so he believes; it is, in the dizzying moment of all this attention, sometimes hard to know what he believes anymore, especially about himself.) Two months ago, one brief phone conversation with the assistant—through which he gained access to Lear—told him everything he needed to know about what he is dealing with here. Whom he is dealing with. Though he could not have known, back then, how important she would be. This relationship—the one he hopes to have with a woman he has yet to meet in person—matters a great deal more than his manager or the shifting posse of clammy-handed handlers and smartly suited producers understand. They see her as a potentially cantankerous guard dog; Nick sees her as a daughter, mother, gatekeeper, and amanuensis merged into one grief-stricken, probably lonely, possibly frightened woman. She is certainly in mourning, likely still in shock.
“You really want to take time for this visit?” says Silas. “If he were still alive—”
“Yes, I do,” says Nick. “This is unfinished business for me. Research. Besides which, it’s only courteous. She mustn’t think we’ve abandoned her.” Nick is now seriously hungry. For a proper breakfast; also for time to think.
“She isn’t a widow,” says Silas.
“I’m not sure you’re right about that. Figuratively speaking.”
Clear as anything, Nick remembers the man’s voice, the gruffness of age tinged with a robust yet honeyed cynicism, the specter of a backstreet childhood irrepressible in his accent (classic Brooklyn, a vernacular Nick will somehow crack). Forget all the piles of honors, awards, black-tied ovations: the man was still the fragile, struggling, striving boy—and, to fall back on current euphemizing, he was still the survivor.
Was. And there’s the rub.