Bull by the horns, she thinks, heading toward him. “Are you looking for someone? You’re here for the Lear memorial, yes?”
He looks startled. “Yes,” he says, “and yes.”
“It’ll start in a few minutes. Sorry there’s so little room to sit.”
“Are you running this show?” he asks.
“Helping.”
He’s quite tall, this broody man, and she has to look up to meet his eyes. After a moment of peering around, scanning the assembly, he says, “Do you know Tommy Daulair?”
Merry sounds hoarse when she speaks. “Do you?”
“She’s my sister.”
“Your sister!” Of course she must be here. “You’re meeting her?”
“No,” he says. “Or I don’t know. I just figured she’d come, and I’d…find her.”
“I’ve met your sister.”
They regard each other uncertainly.
“Actually, I’d like to reconnect with her,” Merry says. “Do you see her?”
“No, not yet.” He sounds impatient. “I didn’t think…”
Merry hears an electronic screech; the audio technician is testing the mikes. “I have to get ready. Will you stay till after? I, actually”—why does she keep saying actually, as if insisting on some suspect reality?—“in fact, I should introduce myself.”
He tells her his name is Danilo. They shake hands awkwardly.
“When you find your sister, would you ask her to stick around, too?”
“If I can,” he says. “I don’t know if she’s coming.”
“Well, look,” says Merry, and she hands him one of her cards. “In case we don’t see each other later. Please tell Tomasina I’d love to meet up.”
The man’s anxiety is obvious and unsettling—but perhaps he really did know Mort, through his sister, and is genuinely mourning. Merry notices that he’s probably her age, his thick dark hair subsiding toward the same degree of gray that would overtake her own head if she were to give up the costly dye job.
Now Katelyn is waving at her, both arms beckoning grandly, as if Merry is a plane being guided toward a gate. As she heads for the podium someone has positioned right beside the pond, facing the statue, she spots Sol and Stu, just arriving. Together? She is pondering the unlikelihood of their companionship when she also becomes aware of a tangible atmospheric shift, a sluicing of mercifully cool air through the heat—but it comes with an inrush of clouds, drawn over the blue sky as deftly as a curtain over a window. Thunder mutters in the distance.
“Really?” she says to the sky. Rain was not in the forecast as of this morning.
The guitarist (Katelyn’s husband) begins playing something Spanish, heartfelt, verging on flamenco, then downshifts toward Bach, that famous piece about the safely grazing sheep. Even the children settle down, reeling in their balloons as a breeze rises. Each one is etched with Ivo’s likeness: Ivo in the forest, with his entourage of butterflies and bugs. The drawing in Merry’s bedroom.
“We are here to celebrate the colorful life and the even more colorful work of Mort Lear,” Katelyn chirps into the mike. “Does anyone out there love him as passionately as I do? Give a joyful cheer for yes!”
The crowd erupts, a sweet mélange of voices young and old. Even Merry, as damp and cranky as she feels, is moved. She stands between Sol and Stu, off to one side of the podium. Stu is holding a piece of paper—is he scheduled to speak?
“Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter were all great inspirations to Mort, so it’s only fitting we invited them to join us,” says Katelyn, sweeping an arm toward the statue, “but Mort had many living friends, admirers, and colleagues as well, and they’ll have memories to share. First, however, a reading of everyone’s favorite, iconic, never-to-be-rivaled storybook, Colorquake. And by the way, if you don’t own a copy, they’ll be for sale later on.” After pointing to a table stacked with books, she pulls from her pocket a pair of pink cat’s-eye glasses and slips them on. She begins to read not from a book but from a typescript.
“Ivo’s mother kept a perfect house, a house among the trees.”
Stu steps up next to Katelyn and, a few sentences on, joins her in the reading; they are alternating pages. To Merry’s knowledge, Stu hardly knew Mort. (Now she knows why Stu’s latest book is for sale on Katelyn’s table, along with Lear’s greatest hits.) Meanwhile, the wind becomes insistent, tossing and tangling the balloons, pilfering napkins and cups. Many of the adults glance up at the heavens, look at one another for cues, then begin to corral their belongings, ready to flee.
How long the story seems in words alone. Where was Lear’s true talent? wonders Merry as the story flows along. Is the persistent popularity of that slim book in the union of language and image? Or, had it been published three years earlier, or later, would it have been nothing more than a passing entertainment? Did it strike some kind of Cold War, post-Watergate cultural chord? Not that Mort was a literary fluke, another Margaret Mitchell or Harper Lee. Or a coloratura, like Virginia Lee Burton or Margaret Wise Brown, working in a range that was vivid but narrow. No, Mort was a writer of staying power and versatility. (Good Lord, what in the world is she doing, writing wall copy for an exhibit?)
She surveys the audience. There is the brother, standing against a tree, still searching the crowd.
Could Merry even find Tomasina Daulair in such a cacophony of faces? She has encountered the woman three or four times but only in the context of galas and openings where Merry’s primary task is to condense and focus all her verve and vigor on anyone who might become a benefactor. She becomes a heat-seeking laser. (Someone ought to invent a pair of party-vision goggles that would reveal not just the richest occupants in a room but the ones most likely to share their wealth.) Sadly, the artists—the people with whom she wants to drink and dance and share the festivities—are all beside the point at such events. Their escorts? Less important than the waiters bearing trays of tiny crab cakes. Less important than the crab cakes.
Stu, in his sonorous baritone, reads, “Everything was just as he left it, but…wait…where was his panther?” With his lips nearly touching the microphone, he hisses the last four words, as if he’s reading Edgar Allan Poe, as if the final note of Mort’s book is one of foreboding, not delight.
Every single person under the roiling sky knows this book so well that hardly a beat of silence passes before they applaud. Stu bows. Katelyn steps to the mike and says, “In case you don’t know him, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, meet Shine.”
Compared with the roar that rises from the audience now, the applause for Mort and his book was anemic. Stu raises his tattooed arms like a football player who’s just made a touchdown.
Stu is now Merry’s ace in the hole, but she does not join the adulation. What is he doing, hijacking Mort’s memorial? She leans over and takes him by the arm, gently pulling him toward the side. (“Beautiful, Stu. Beautiful,” she says, feeling just how phony her smile must look. Ambiguously, he answers, “Just giving it up for The Man.”)
And now the ruggedly elegant Peter Sís steps to the microphone and tells the story of how he met Mort in the Village, some thirty years ago. His voice is gratifyingly soft, reminiscent, his delicate accent underscoring his role as an elder statesman of sorts. Stu’s problem, thinks Merry, is that he wants to turn everything into a rock concert. Well, maybe that’s the flow with which she’ll have to go from now on. Maybe she should have one of Shine’s characters tattooed on her chest, the way his oldest fans have done. She listens to Peter and resolves to write him a note. She’s heard rumors that his work is ultimately headed for that greedy archive at UT Austin—which seems to suck up way too many literary estates, relegating them to every sensible person’s least favorite part of the country—but rumors are just rumors.
A loud crack of thunder sets off a collective shriek among the children. A significant number of adults leap to their feet and start stuffing things into backpacks and diaper bags.
Katelyn
comes over to Merry. “What do we do?”
“Didn’t you have an indoor alternative?”
“Yes, but it’s blocks away,” says Katelyn. “It was for if the day was rainy from the start. No one’s going to go there now.”
Flight is contagious, of course, so more than half the audience is leaving, most of them rushing toward Fifth Avenue.
“It’s not actually raining, so let’s just soldier on,” says Merry.
“But lightning!” Katelyn protests.
“Mort would have enjoyed the drama,” Merry says. “And it’s not like we’re in an open field.” (Which, paradoxically, is the sort of setting that ought to have been chosen for a gathering of this size.)
“The trees don’t make us any safer, you know.”
Ignoring Katelyn, Merry steps to the mike and introduces the next guest, who seems gratifyingly undeterred. Charlotte is the editor who has worked with Mort since Rose died. The first book she edited was volume one of The Inseparables. This is the book she’s holding now and from which, without preamble, she begins to read.
To look back at their beginning, their unity almost from birth, is to marvel at how an arbitrary confluence of geography and timing may determine the course of history, the fate of an entire species: ours, to be exact. And their beginning was as simple as could be.
They were neighbors, meeting only because their six parents, almost simultaneously, happened to have chosen this plain but deliciously shady street as the best place to make a life—and because their three mothers, all new to the job, were lonely and desperate for comrades with whom to share the particular raptures and fears of caring for a baby. This is how, looking back from later, they came to be best friends from so long ago that they couldn’t even remember the first time they had played together. Was it digging moats in Greta’s sandbox…bombardiering down Boris’s slide? Or maybe they had joined forces when Stinky was the first to get a trike. Stinky’s name was Stanley, but nobody called him that. He liked Stinky. He said so even when they moved up to the middle school, when it would have been easy to leave his nickname behind. But he refused, claiming it gave him “panache.”
“Whatever that is, you can keep it to yourself,” said Boris.
Stinky was the word nerd.
Merry wonders how much Charlotte plans to read. She reminds herself that she isn’t the one in charge here; perhaps she should have been. She fantasizes briefly about an alternate scenario in which the Times obituary included the announcement that Mort Lear had bequeathed his entire literary estate to…Stop. She glances at Sol. He is whispering something to Stu.
Charlotte is now through the part of the narrative identifying Boris as the science nerd, the trombone player Greta as the music nerd. The first chapter is a swift summary of the protagonists’ shared childhood, their uneventful passage toward the sudden crisis that kicks the plot into surreal motion by Chapter Two.
“You know what we are? We’re a phalanx,” said Stinky.
Boris asked what a phalanx was. Greta told him that, in their case, it meant a chemical union so stable that to threaten any change, to remove a single atom, could lead to the implosion of the cosmos.
“Sort of like the Hadron Collider.”
The others looked at him suspiciously.
“Do you guys ever listen?” Boris rolled his eyes. “That tunnel I told you about, the one in Switzerland.”
“Precisely,” said Stinky. “We are the force they are trying to create in that tunnel.”
Charlotte reads the part about how, in high school, they end every day by e-mailing one another their last thoughts, often sitting at their desks in the dark, in their pajamas, their parents and younger siblings long asleep. Does it matter to teenage readers now that the ways they keep in touch have changed so dramatically in just a decade? Secretly, Merry has never loved The Inseparables. She understands why the books were and still are iconic, but they’re so melancholy, so fatalistic, the humor so chilly….
The year they would all turn sixteen (Greta first, then Stinky, then Boris), one by one, they fell sick. First they were tired, then they had headaches, and then they didn’t want to eat. One by one, they were taken to their family doctors by their parents, and all of them, one by one, were told that they had the same rare malignancy.
Boris and Greta did not need Stinky to tell them the meaning of that word.
The three afflicted friends overheard their mothers weeping together, their fathers making lists of specialists and world-class hospitals in other parts of the country. Weary though they were, they went on Stinky’s computer—he’d been the first to get his own, just like that trike—and they did their own research.
“We’ll be cured together,” said Greta.
“Or die together,” grumbled Boris.
“Don’t get all creepy and morbid,” said Stinky. “Remember: we are a phalanx.”
“Inseparable,” said Greta.
It occurs to Merry that the smaller children in the audience (actually, very few of the smallest ones remain, since their parents would be the most protective) might be extremely disturbed by the beginning of this older book. Ultimately, there would be a bittersweet, mostly happy ending—at least to this book—but not before a great deal of peril, catastrophe, and heroism (the Hadron Collider a crucial factor).
Charlotte sets down the book to tell the audience how surprised she was to find out, after reading this book before it was even published, that Mort was a funny man. She does a rather credible impersonation, and she talks about his love of Lewis Carroll’s famous book and how he collected eccentric, silly objects related to Alice and her fellow Wonderlanders. “One day he hoped to illustrate a new edition of Alice. It would have been, I know, his crowning achievement.”
Just as Charlotte reaches toward the bronze Alice, as if to invite her for a hug, rain falls in a rush, like the breaking of a dam. Even those who have readied umbrellas leap to their feet and dash away in search of better shelter than the trees can offer.
Katelyn and her husband, who clutches his guitar case against his body like a wounded child, rush to the book table, covering it clumsily with a large sheet of plastic.
Only the poor audio guy—scrambling to pack up the microphone and speakers—and Sol, who stands impassively by, under a wide black umbrella, do not run. Nor does Merry, who feels that it’s her responsibility to take over. At the very least, she can bring this bloated ceremony to a merciful close. “I’m sorry,” she calls out to the few diehards, shouting to be heard over the rain. “Mort must be telling us he’s too modest for us to make this big a fuss on his behalf.”
Mort, modest? Well, that’s amusing.
She is soaked, and her shoes are ruined. Exasperated, angry, she leans over, pulls them off, and tosses them into the pond. Too late, she realizes that she’ll never find a cab in this downpour. She turns to ask Sol if he has a car, but he’s gone; in the distance, she sees him leaving the park, sharing his umbrella with Stu.
—
“Turn on your TV. CBS.”
Tommy hurries to the den. Remote in one hand, phone in the other, she is looking at a red-carpet promenade, the milling about of a chosen tribe in finery and jewels: the women absurdly gorgeous, the men more diverse in their looks (some of them downright toads).
But in the foreground, here he is, leaning toward a microphone held by a woman’s hand. The camera zooms in until, for a moment, his face nearly fills the screen, far larger than life, and then withdraws to include a shapely reporter in a tight pink dress, though her prettiness is nothing to the luster of the women gliding along behind her.
He smiles gamely at the reporter. “I am indeed!” he says forcefully. “And I am over the moon about it—though at the same time I am crushed by the news. It’s such a terrible, terrible loss, his death.”
“Yes, just last month. Tragic.” She nods emphatically and tries to look sad.
“So I feel as if my responsibility to get it precisely right, to do him honor, is all t
hat much more serious now. I owe Mr. Lear the performance of my life. But of course, it’s not all me, not by a long shot. Andrew’s vision for this film is genius. His mind is like a bonfire.”
“A bonfire! Absolutely.” The reporter giggles. “But hang on a minute, Nick. We’re here tonight to celebrate the stage, to which you are no stranger. So will we be seeing you on the boards again anytime soon?”
“Oh, I’m a homing pigeon,” says the actor. “Always return to my roots—my roost? Bad joke there—sorry. But, honestly? Whatever else I’m doing, the theater’s where I go to find myself again. Replenish my soul.”
“Absolutely! Are you presenting tonight?”
“I am!” He presses a hand to his chest.
“Well, we look forward to that, Nick. And congratulations on all your success this year. You are the man. It is,” she says, looking hungrily into the camera, “the Year of Nicholas Greene.” And then, in a gesture that would be rude in any other context, she pivots her mike toward the next aggressively good-looking person in line.
“Franklin?” Tommy is still holding the phone to her ear. “Where are we?”
He laughs. “The Tonys. Come on, Tommy.”
“I’ve never watched the Tonys in my life, Franklin. Well, okay, maybe when Morty designed that set. You watch the Tonys?”
“Without fail. I love the theater. It’s part of why I sold out, why I like making money. I’m a front-of-the-orchestra snob. You don’t like plays?”