“Good. If I lose Toby, there’ll be hell to pay, but we’ll pay it.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
“It’s not about you, forget it. Gotta run. Hey. We’ll houdini our way around it.”
That’s Andrew, sure of a way out before a crisis has even taken hold. And that is so not Nick.
“I am a fucking blighter, a scoundrel,” he says to the blank face of the telly.
The bedeviling phone tells him it’s barely nine o’clock. He could take a shower, try to calm down, but he’s already dressed and experiencing the surge of panicky adrenaline that strikes whenever he feels guilty of even a microscopic misdemeanor. This time it’s a capital crime. Or is it?
He has an idea.
He rings Serge, then rummages in his suitcase for one of the half dozen baseball caps Si gave him after the Oscars—gift-wrapped, with a card that read, For the new, conspicuous you. This one tells the world he’s a fan of the San Francisco Giants. He snatches his shades off the dressing table and goes out to wait in the driveway.
Tommy looks up from her sorting and stacking at the sound of tires on gravel (a surface Morty chose over asphalt for its telltale nature). From a corner window of the studio, she can just see the turnaround by the kitchen door, where Nick Greene is climbing into the Town Car, Serge closing the door behind him.
Is he leaving already? She sees no baggage, but she feels remorseful; has she done something to drive him away? She will not go back to the house just to check if the actor’s things are still in the den.
She cannot believe how many, many papers Morty kept: everything from expense receipts gathered on tour (all tallied and packaged by Tommy) to correspondence with his mother’s physicians, from bookmarks advertising every bookstore he’d ever set foot in to faded scribbles he made on memo pads in hotel rooms around the world. Some of it is well organized, but much of it isn’t. In a single folder she found an orphaned brokerage statement, an illustrated thank-you letter written by a first-grade class in Hartford, a shopping list (in Tommy’s handwriting) on which he’d sketched a parade of insects, and the receipt for a Navajo weaving he bought in Santa Fe. Only the dates, all in the spring of 2007, unify these items.
The studio was, of course, Morty’s personal kingdom. Tommy expressed no opinions on its tendency toward bedlam and spent very little time here. But the file cabinets devoted to Morty’s personal and professional correspondence with editors, agents, educators, academics, and fellow authors—including significant e-mails printed out on paper—were the domain where he wanted Tommy’s hand, her imposition of order. They were both well aware that one day these papers would be valuable to archivists and scholars of children’s literature, and until recently, Tommy envisioned turning it all over to Meredith Galarza. Now it is Tommy’s to do with as she deems fit, so long as she keeps in mind the goal of financing Ivo’s House. Franklin has already found a candidate for the directorship. Tommy will have to fly out and meet with the woman.
She stops for a moment just to look at Morty’s drafting table, so far untouched. What will become of this space? Did Morty expect her to stay on here, alone, indefinitely? It occurs to her that the Tommy he envisioned as his executor and heir would have been at least ten years older. And she would have been prepared for all this. Or she would have talked him out of it.
—
“The place we’re headed,” Nick says, leaning over the front seat, “should be up there, on the left…yes! There’s a space just…Exactly. Brilliant.”
As the laconically obedient Serge backs into the parking space, Nick pulls the key from his pocket and reads the name on the manila tag again, as if he might have imagined it: Pequot Trust & Savings. The same words chiseled in granite beneath the pediment of the faux Greek temple across the street.
Oh God, that word: trust! A virtue spiraling swiftly down the drain.
Serge kills the motor and gets out.
“I’ll be in there a bit, I think,” says Nick as Serge opens his door (a gesture Nick has given up on trying to deter). “You have coins for the meter?”
Serge nods.
Nick sprints across the street and up the steps of the bank. Yes, it’s open on Saturday. Till noon. Plenty of time. Before opening the door, he fills his lungs and hums slightly, to steady his voice.
Once inside, he feels a good deal less sure of his mission. He stands in the center of the reassuringly old-fashioned space—marble floor, fluted columns, walls muralized with primitive scenes of bucolic goings-on—until a young woman in a camel-colored suit approaches him and asks if she can be of service.
“Why, yes, thanks so much,” he says, instantly removing his hat and shades, as Grandfather taught him, before remembering—as the young woman’s recognition lights up her face—that this courtesy is one he’s lately been advised to ignore.
But she’s a game professional and says calmly, “How may I help you, sir?”
“I have a key to a lockbox I’d like to visit.” He hands her the key.
“Come this way,” she instructs.
She leads him into a blessedly secluded cubicle, where she takes a ledger from a shelf and opens it on her desk. Once she arrives at the desired page, she looks back and forth, three times, between the key and the tiny number on the page at the tip of her frosted-lavender fingernail.
She looks up at him and, for another long moment, is evidently struggling at what to say. “This box belongs to Mr. Lear,” she says. “I know he’s recently deceased, and I imagine it falls to his executor to claim the contents of the box. Do you by any chance have…a letter, or…”
Her expression is one of sheer muddlement—and Nick is confident that the one on his face isn’t much different.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let someone visit Mr. Lear’s box without proof of claim or permission. And I’m afraid I know you’re not Mr. Lear.” She blushes profoundly.
“Well, gosh, how obvious is that,” says Nick. “I’m the sorry party here.” Crikey, will she call the coppers? Did he sound sarcastic just now?
“I’m sorry,” she says again, “but aren’t you Nicholas Greene?”
He whispers, “I am, and I’d be so very grateful if you’d keep that to yourself. I am gobsmackingly mortified here, and I’m hoping you can just forget that I ever so much as walked into your establishment.”
She whispers back, “No problem. Wow. I am a really big fan.”
“Thank you. That’s kind of you. I…well, I’m just going to go out the way I came.”
She’s still holding the key. Will she confiscate it? But she passes it back to him. “Okay,” she says. “We’re cool.”
“You are an angel,” he says.
She sees him to the door; outside, he dashes across the street to the car. “Bloody, bloody hell, what the bloody hell was I thinking?” he says as Serge opens the door. Nick throws the hat and shades onto the seat and climbs in as quickly as he can.
“I cannot answer that, sir,” Serge answers, barely repressing a smile.
—
Tommy sees the car pull up to the house not twenty minutes after it left. She forces herself to continue making her piles; the actor’s errands are none of her business. One constructive thing she has managed to do is to give the heave to dozens of envelopes containing receipts and canceled checks that are twenty, even thirty, years old. “Morty, you pack rat,” she’s muttering when the door to the studio opens.
Nick Greene stands in the doorway, looking even more unkempt and sounding out of breath.
“I’ve gone completely round the bloody bend,” he says to her, “and I have a ghastly confession to make.”
She’s unsure what to say. She knows what he’s going to confess—his nocturnal snoopfest—but what difference does it make? Or perhaps he’s broken something in the house? She wonders if he’s been drinking.
“Can you please come into the house with me? Please.”
Now Tommy feels unnerved. People say that all actors—all good actors—h
ave to be unhinged to some extent, and suddenly she’s not sure that the idea of being alone with him was such a good one. Not that she feels in danger, but she hasn’t a single mote of energy to spare for somebody else’s mental instability.
Over his shoulder, she sees Serge standing in the driveway beside that grandiose car. Supposing Nicholas Greene wanted to kidnap her? She envisions Serge tying her up, duct-taping her mouth, bundling her trussed-up body in the trunk. (In the presence of an actor, maybe drama is contagious.)
“Please,” he says again.
She follows him. In the kitchen, he asks her to sit, to wait for just a minute. He leaves the room but comes back carrying a silver notebook computer.
“You’re probably going to give me the boot, but I honestly can’t bear this much longer.” Sighing heavily, he sits across from her at the table, both hands flat on the computer, as if she might reach over and snatch it. “So,” he says, then eyes the ceiling.
“Tomasina”—and here are his famous eyes, focused imploringly on her—“you know that I had a correspondence humming along with Mr. Lear before he died. I can’t quite figure out why—or yes, perhaps there was something simpatico about our boyhoods that drew him out, I was hoping to solve that mystery by meeting him—but the thing is, he told me a great deal about…Arizona, that gardener, the shed…things that weren’t quite…well, not the same as the story in the film we’re making. Or the story people take from that interview.”
Tommy waits through a silence. What’s the fuss here? Morty was starstruck. His back-and-forth with Nicholas Greene was a platonic fling of sorts. That much she has figured out. She says, “Morty surprised a lot of people, even me, when he said what he did in that interview. It changed how I saw him—I mean, the way he decided to tell the whole world.”
“I doubt we’d be making this film if he hadn’t! But listen. Because—so last night I went into his bedroom, just to…you know, to soak it all in, to inhabit what’s left of him there. I couldn’t sleep and I thought it might not be so bad if—”
“It’s fine, really,” says Tommy. “I get it.”
“What’s not fine”—he pushes the laptop toward her—“is that I spent a good two hours going through his personal files. I wanted to see our e-mails again, because I’d deleted a lot of them, his, which he asked me to do, but then I just had to look at some others that—”
“Wait.” Tommy looks at the computer sitting in the center of the table, their four hands extended toward it as if it might be a Ouija board, ready to offer an oracular answer to all their concerns. “Is that Morty’s machine?”
“Yes.”
“I forgot about that.”
She has never looked at this computer. Sometime after Soren’s death, she noticed it in Morty’s bedroom; she assumed he got it to keep himself occupied through the insomnia particular to mourning. Whenever he started typing at three or four a.m., she would awaken, then drift back to sleep, more reassured than worried. She should have remembered this computer, looked for it, already.
“I want you to look at some of what he wrote to me,” says Nick, “if just to corroborate. I’m letting it fuck with my psyche, and I’ve gone widdershins about the disparity between…” He groans. “But there’s more.” Now he fumbles beneath the table and produces a key attached to a tag, which he slides across the table.
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 naïve.