What am I going on about?! Myself. Ah yes. Again. Is Ivo ME? Note the boy’s navel-gazing initial I: aha! Can you believe I never saw that until some forensic bookworm brought it up in the New York Review of Books or some such rarefied rag? Honest Injun, as my Brooklyn street chums used to say. And is the panther a ped-oh-phial? My answer is that cats were the animals I could draw with the most confidence back then. I could never have managed an anteater or a bison or even a monkey. I drew boys, girls, plants, and cats (and birds and insects and lizards). I employed the menagerie I knew best.
Well, who doesn’t believe in the unconscious and its sly-dog tricks these days?
TELL THE STORY, you are thinking as you peer into your screen. Just tell the bloody story, old man. Thus:
My mother is a laundress at a stately, remote inn, the sort of place called a retreat, where senators and stars of the silver screen meet their mistresses—sent ahead in large, plush-upholstered automobiles, thus allowing them to greet their illicit lovers already posed in swimsuits by the rose-bordered pool or lying in opulent wait on a large dark-wood bed, possibly fashioned by my own father. Discretion is a costly but plentiful commodity here.
My mother is treated kindly, paid decently. But also, she is lonely. She has a girlfriend or two among the other staff, but they go home to husbands—or go out to find one.
The staff is legion. Among those who tend the outdoors, there is a head gardener. Perhaps he is called a groundskeeper. He contemplates the proper irrigation, trains the men who prune and weed and make sure the fountains drain well. He wields a certain power.
He has a wife and two children, but they live in a real home “out there,” beyond the walls of the hotel. Let’s say his name is Leonard.
I am seven. The war is well over—which makes just about everyone happier, even if it doesn’t make them richer. I remember, more than once, men in uniform walking through the gardens of the hotel, how heads turned, nodding with approval or admiration. I think about what I know of my father, the way he died. My mother did have one picture of him in uniform, before he went to his own, earlier war, which she brought from a drawer when I asked. Already he looked miserable. (Of course he was.) His war has been gratefully pushed out of memory by the newer war, the one any simpleton on the street can justify, at least in retrospect.
One thing I know at age seven is that I will grow up to be anything but a man in uniform. In the library of the hotel hang beautiful dark paintings, mostly landscapes and still lifes. (One, which mystifies and spooks me, is of a dead rabbit lying on a stone next to a stalk of wilting roses.) In the hotel’s small chapel, there are also dark paintings. There are Madonnas and saints, but there are also flowers and fruits and landscapes with fraught, tempestuous skies. I tell my mother I want to make pictures. She spares me a frugal supply of the cheap buff-colored paper she uses to package the pressed table linens, to protect them from the red dust that drifts invisibly everywhere and settles on everything. (When I bathe after playing outside, the water turns a rusty pink.) Sometimes she gives me a pad of lined paper from the hotel office. For Christmas, she gives me watercolor paints: a box containing six disks of color and two brushes. I can still see it clearly; my fingers remember gripping those spindly shafts.
I begin to paint the cactuses and flowers around the grounds. I try to memorize birds I see in passing, to paint them, too. Leonard, as he makes his rounds in this horticultural paradise, often stops to admire my work. Leonard also takes care of the one cat on the grounds, kept here to ward off mice. It’s an elusive creature, that cat, though I try to draw it whenever I find it resting from its predatory labors. For the most part, everyone else ignores me in a benevolent way. Guests smile blandly as they pass me. A woman might touch my head, as if to bless me.
The hottest months, when school is out, are the ones I spend mostly outdoors. My mother makes me wear a hat, but still my skin burns. At night she scolds me, tells me to sit in the shade, rubs white salve over my nose and cheeks and knees. “If this happens again,” she warns me, “I’ll have to keep you cooped up inside.” An empty threat, because she does not have the time to police my comings and goings.
One day Leonard spots me, huddled in the shade of an awning by the pool, my face probably peeling. He tells me that there’s a place I could work in his shed—and there are resting plants that would love to have their portraits drawn. “You understand the value of drawing from life more than most children your age,” he says. “I am very impressed.” I blush at the flattery, which works wonders.
I’ve passed the shed a hundred times but never been inside. It’s a large structure on the edge of the property, under a big cottonwood that grows by a trickle of a stream, and it’s larger than your average potting shed. The demands of this beautiful garden would be many and complex. Inside, it’s dim—though only at first—and cool, a rackety fan moving the air in circles. Dozens of tools—clippers and scythes and machetes and saws with slim but sturdy blades—hang on hooks across a wall. Shelves hold burlap sacks of fertilizers, pesticides, lime, birdseed, and peat moss; cans bleeding dark rust-tainted oils; terra-cotta pots in tall snug stacks. “My kingdom,” says Leonard.
Oddly, there’s a weary couch against a wall. The cat, caught shirking, jumps off and dashes out the door.
“Sometimes I sneak a nap,” Leonard says, then holds a finger to his lips.
A skylight and one side window facing a hedge illuminate the space, along with a few suspended bulbs. Anyone who’s been to the movies enough would see the place as sinister. I see it as a laboratory, a library, a place to do as one pleases in privacy and peace. I like the idea that the cat might keep me company here.
“And how about this.” Leonard points to a door, opens it, ushers me in. It leads into a smaller room with a workbench and stool, a gooseneck lamp. Leonard uses a hand to sweep sawdust off the rough wood surface. “You can work here.”
The room is stuffy and smells of sulfur and dirt, but it’s sumptuously quiet. Several potted plants, in varying states of prosperity, languish on a shelf beneath a purple light.
“The convalescent ward,” Leonard tells me. “Plants on probation.” He’s tall, his head nearly brushing the unpainted ceiling. “And now…wait, my friend…there’s this.”
He bends down and opens a drawer in the workbench. He pulls out a flat box and slides it open: it’s a set of pastels in two dozen colors. In a book, I’ve seen pictures of ballet dancers by Degas in pastel, and in the schoolroom we have colored chalk, but these are a luxury. CARAN D’ACHE, says the box in a scarlet flourish. I wonder what the word “ache” has to do with the alluring contents, but I don’t ask. I do know I ache to use them.
From the magic drawer, he also hands me a tablet of thick, toothy paper, white as powdered lime. “Yours,” says Leonard.
And it begins. With no schoolwork to take me away from my pictures, I go to the shed as often as I can. All I tell my mother is that I’ve found a way to stay out of the sun. This makes her happy. As long as I’m on the hotel grounds, she knows I’ll be safe, watched over. And as long as I read—which I do, every night after dinner, while she listens to the radio and presses our own clothes—I am free to do as I like all day long.
Sometimes she’ll say she is spoiling me, that if my father were still alive, I’d be learning his craft—or “whatever men teach their sons,” she says, sounding sad but also dismissive. I can tell she feels sorry for me.
The hotel stands at the edge of the town, and though there are a few other boys with parents who live on or near the grounds, they prefer athletic pastimes. That summer I’m left to my own devices, and at first I am content. Sometimes I do wonder whether, if my father were alive, I might have brothers and sisters. I wouldn’t have to entertain myself. On the other hand, I begin to realize that I like entertaining myself.
Nick scrolled quickly ahead, just to see how long the e-mail would be. Interminable, it seemed. He was knackered and, though he felt ashamed (hadn’t he asked for the
full-on saga?), impatient. For a children’s writer, the man was anything but concise.
And yet it was ominously gripping. Lear wrote about the plants he chose to draw, how he imagined entire landscapes around them, with wild creatures and birds. Once he found a sun-baked lizard on a walkway. It was stiff, brittle as a dead leaf. He carried it carefully to the shed and drew it several times over. He turned its likeness into a dragon, a prickly succulent into a fantastical forest. He found ways to use pencil, chalk, and his Christmas watercolors (nearly gone) along with the velvet pastels, which loved the heat, turning soft and slick in his sweaty hands. He found the right blue-violet mix for shadows, the most convincing blend of ochers and greens for the desert grasses. He began to sign his work, the way artists had signed the paintings inside the hotel, even the weird painting of the dead rabbit.
And one afternoon I am lost in my shadings, speaking silently to the colors, commanding them to do my bidding as another boy might have commanded toy platoons, when I hear the outer door open—not unusual, as Leonard comes and goes with some regularity, mostly ignoring my presence, humming to himself. But the murmurings I hear aren’t his alone: his whisperings are mixed up with those of a girl, high-pitched giggling and shushing. At first I tell myself that I’m mistaken, that the rackety fan is the source of these noises. Maybe something’s caught in the blades and Leonard will fix it. Or maybe the cat is playing with a mouse.
But no.
I am unsure whether to speak—Leonard greeted me just an hour ago and surely knows I am there—but I wouldn’t dare, because the girl’s giggling quickly becomes something else: groaning and sighing. I hear the scrape of furniture legs and the wheezing give and take of old upholstery, stiffened springs.
I hold my colored stick above the paper and listen. I know, though I don’t want to know, that the deeper groans I’m hearing are Leonard’s. I hold extremely still. The sounds might be sounds of pain, but I know that they aren’t. I know, by instinct, that this is pleasure I’m hearing, however alien a pleasure it is. I imagine that I am not supposed to know about it, but I do, and that only deepens my alarm and shame.
A silence arrives, followed by quick shallow breathing and, again, giggling, whispering.
I hear Leonard say, his voice a rasp, “You’d better go, baby.”
The sound of scraping furniture legs. The outside door opens and closes. I wait for a time I cannot possibly quantify, until I know I am alone in the shed. I pack my pastels into their box. I put it, with my drawings, into the drawer. I go out into the main room, surprised that sun is still streaming through the dusty skylight, the sun stained pink like everything else. I go home and am relieved that my mother isn’t there.
Whether because he was too stunned or too cold (the temperature in the flat, on an icy April night, dropping swiftly), Nick set aside the laptop and reached for a jumper slung across a nearby chair. Some noise in the street drew him to the window. For a moment, he wished he had never started this correspondence; would Olivier or Guinness have considered it necessary, or even desirable, to know the flesh-and-blood counterpart to any of their creations? Would Peter O’Toole have longed to get pissed with T. E. Lawrence, soak up tales of his rugged beginnings? Maybe Nick was in over his head. And yet, at the same time, he realized how badly he wanted back in: to work, to public exposure, to what just might be the role of his career.
When he entered his flat after dark, sometimes he was startled at the alien glitter of his trophies lined up on a shelf that fell within a bar of streetlight projected through a window. They caught his attention often by day as well (too often, really), but at night they threatened to come alive, a quartet of eccentrically handicapped friends. Top dog—yet clearly of questionable intelligence—would have to be the opulently body-conscious Oscar, his sidekick the anguished, hollow-eyed BAFTA bloke. Here, too, was Mr. Verdigris from SAG, incapable of speech, caught eternally and nakedly in a moment of sartorial indecision: comedy or tragedy, oh what to wear! Finally, the stalwart G.G., odd man out (because he wasn’t a man at all), his domed, columnar silhouette undeniably akin to that robot in Star Wars.
Clearly, Nick had too much time on his hands.
He needed to embed himself anew, burrow deep. And The Inner Lear would be nothing like Lawrence of Arabia. Andrew wasn’t interested in the spectacle history could make of a man; the spectacular, to Andrew, lay within the soul. He had said to Nick that what he wanted to make was not so much a film as a kaleidoscope: a prismatic portrait of Lear’s childhood, love life, and art, how a great artist’s fully recognized existence is a mosaic, its sundry components entirely interdependent. The best actors, said Deirdre, become both engorged and engulfed by a role, containing and carrying it all at once. “A hack impersonates,” she said. “A master inhabits.”
Nick went to his kitchen and flicked the switch on the electric kettle. He took a mug from the sink and rinsed it, reached for the cannister of tea. He had a feeling that, inhabiting Lear already, he would be awake long beyond the owl and the fox.
Five
SUNDAY
Has spring ended before it’s even begun? The first Sunday in June and it must be ninety degrees in the park.
Children with white balloons weave among the trees behind Alice and her cohorts; some of the children are dressed like Ivo in Colorquake. Adults mill about awkwardly, trying to find places to settle on the wooded slopes that surround the small plaza carved out for the sculpture. Three women confer beside it, holding folders; she recognizes Katelyn. The ceremony is set to start in twenty minutes. Factoring in the probable delay, Merry isn’t eager to spend half an hour making tense small talk. She is fairly sure that the news about Lear bolting from his commitment to the museum isn’t out yet, but Katelyn is as connected as anyone in their parochial world—and even if everything were humming along the way Merry would have assumed as recently as last month, she finds that working with Katelyn always sets her teeth on edge.
Katelyn is the manager of Tumnus and Friends, the last independent retailer in the city devoted entirely to children’s books. Lear almost always staged his first appearances there whenever a new book launched. One has to assume that Katelyn is smart, simply because she’s still in business, but she speaks in a helium falsetto that, whenever she’s talking to anyone “important,” takes on a painfully affected British edge, giving her a voice that calls to mind the innkeeper’s wife on Fawlty Towers.
Katelyn has masterminded the ceremony (for which Merry should be grateful, under the circumstances). She wants to begin with a reading of Colorquake in its entirety—which seems ill judged to Merry, even aside from the soul-parching heat. Several children have already scrambled onto and then quickly off of the statue, scalded by the sun-baked bronze. And who exactly is this gathering for? Not Lear’s closest associates and friends, who are invited to the private memorial at the Met—as is Merry, to her simultaneous gratification and chagrin. Perhaps this one is mainly for all the adults who fell in love with Lear’s various books at various times in their younger lives and look back on them with a foggy, nostalgic wonder. But then, there are all these children—many merely towed along—and Katelyn doesn’t seem to realize that they are not going to sit happily through endless recitations without pictures.
Katelyn has also enlisted a trustee from the New York Public Library, an older woman named Hannah who claims to have known Mort “intimately” yet isn’t on the list for the Met.
I am turning into a platinum-grade bitch, thinks Merry as she listens to the two other women going over the program. But who wouldn’t, with perspiration trickling down the channel of her spine and slowly soaking the waistband of her linen skirt? She has determined to go with the flow, just follow directions: read what she’s told to read, introduce the guest speakers, even lead the singing of “Ivo’s Serenade,” a song written by a Sesame Street composer for an after-school special featuring a Muppet tea party at which Mort was the guest of honor.
“I am strictly against the rele
asing of the balloons,” Katelyn is telling Hannah. “It is dangerous for the birds.”
Hannah argues that a few balloons sent nobly aloft will be much more inspiring to the children than they will be hazardous to a bunch of pigeons, which are little more than airborne rats.
“Ivo would not approve,” says Katelyn, standing her ground.
“We have fifteen minutes to get our ducks in a row,” says Merry. “Speaking of birds.”
“And in fact, Ivo is here in person,” says Katelyn.
Merry and Hannah stare at her wordlessly.
Katelyn beams. “My assistant found a costume to rent! Can you believe it? Mask and everything. He’ll lead the singing, so you don’t have to worry about that, Meredith. Cool?”
“Perfectly.” Merry glances at the bronze Mad Hatter, said to be a caricature of the publishing tycoon who commissioned the statue in memory of his wife. Suddenly she’s thinking, mournfully and covetously, of Mort’s Alice collection: the Victorian playing cards, the letter from Dodgson to Rossetti, the shoes allegedly worn by Tenniel’s model for the title character, a sewing box that belonged to the actual, inspirational Alice….“Really,” says Merry, “I’m here to help out. You just boss me around.”
“And I’ll do you the same favor at the opening for the new museum!” Katelyn clasps her hands together.
“Excuse me a moment,” says Merry. She wants to find Sol, who promised to make an appearance—as did Stu and a few other authors. As she looks around, she notices a middle-aged man pacing at the periphery of the convergence. The small arc of benches facing the statue filled up half an hour ago; newcomers are struggling to find space for their blankets and beach towels in the midst of the grove spreading north from the statue. Some are laying out picnics. (As usual, Katelyn’s planning, though well intentioned, is maddeningly impractical.) But the pacing man seems uncomfortable in a different, possibly worrisome way. He is searching, frowning. That creepy mantra If you see something, say something drifts through her brain.