“Is saying the truth more of a sin than knowing it and keeping mum?”
She looked miserably tired all of a sudden. Why was he arguing, needling her? The emotions stirred up were mostly his.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But the more you succeed in what you’ve chosen to do, the more I worry you’ll be…Americanized. Do you know what I mean?”
“I don’t.” He did his best to look receptive. As much as he loved her, Mum hadn’t a clue what his work entailed, what distortions and deceptions—nor what abasements and fawnings. Perhaps he had inherited his father’s knack for opportunistic flattery.
“What I mean is, keep the right parts of yourself to yourself. Contain yourself when it’s tempting to let too much out. Don’t go and…” She closed her eyes.
“Mum, we don’t need to talk about this. Let’s not.”
“No,” she said. “I’m glad we are. I’m trying to say that the values of your grandparents, if I’d paid closer attention and had more respect, would have served me better. Keeping more of myself to myself. Well. I guess it’s true that you grow more conservative as you age.” She started to laugh, but her laughter subsided toward coughing.
Nick put down his teacup and stood.
She held up a hand and whispered, “I am fine.”
The phone rang; Nick answered it in the kitchen. He turned on the tap to screen his words, and he whispered, “Tell her your news. She already knows it. No, not from me. What do you take me for?”
Then he turned off the tap and called out, “It’s Annie. I’ll bring her in there.”
He handed the phone to his mother and took the tea tray into the kitchen. He could hear the delight in her voice. He might have liked to sit close to her while she seemed so joyful—whatever her flaws and follies, Mum knew how to be genuinely happy for her children—but he left the two women alone and went to the loo. He washed the air-travel grime from his face and neck, and he checked to see if he reeked: crikey. After a quick rinse with the flannel, he went into his room to find a clean shirt.
When he came out, he noticed through the nearest window that dusk had fallen. The flat was silent. In the dim living room, he could just make out Mum, sitting where he’d left her, the phone in her lap. Nick turned on a lamp and said her name.
“I’m here, Nick. I’m fine. Don’t worry so much. You young people worry more than we did. Do you know, your sister was holding out on me because she wanted to ‘make it through’ the first few months, in case she lost the baby? As if pregnancy’s a foot race. She says it’s customary, among her friends, to keep it a secret till then. So you’re compelled to be not just knackered and queasy but fearful.” Mum shook her head, but she was smiling.
“So you were right.”
Her smile tightened. “You knew, Nick.”
He sat beside her. “Caught.”
“From reel to creel,” she said.
“A bounder of a flounder.”
“Which makes you my supper.” She leaned over, opening her mouth as if to take a bite, then kissed him on the cheek—all of it the routine they’d had years ago when any of them, as children, told an innocent fib.
“So you know, too, that they’re in touch with their father.”
Nick took this in, tempted to fib again. But he said, “I didn’t.”
Mum was silent for a moment. “I suppose it’ll take some time to sort it all out, whatever relationship they want to have. It’s good for Annie, with the baby. Babies make for easy reconciliations.” She considered this. “Well, sometimes.”
“How long?” He tried to sound casual.
“Six months or so.”
“Did you…?”
“Nick,” she scolded. “I have no desire. He was around long enough that I can’t forgive how short a time it was. Your father, on the other hand, never came close to a promise of sticking around. Him I might forgive—never trust, mind you.”
“Mum, you’re wise despite yourself.”
“Sheer survival does that. To a degree.”
The word survival hung between them, a dark flag held high.
“Now look,” she said. “You’ve come to care for me, and all you’ve done is wear me out. So help me to bed, will you?” She spoke from her throat, tightly, in a way that conveyed the onset of pain.
“Won’t you take something?” he asked.
“Let’s get to the bedroom and see, shall we?”
He stayed with her through the next day and night and another day, of which he spent an absurd amount of time cajoling her to eat. He bought Cadbury bars at the news shop, toffee biscuits and trifle from a posh new confectioner down the street. He made macaroni swimming in butter, eggs with cheese, toad-in-the-hole—the food she’d made for her children when they were out of sorts. Most of it she hardly touched. She did drink the orange squash he squeezed by hand, even after his palms cramped up.
He succeeded in holding back from asking anything more about his siblings’ dad. He was less successful at convincing himself not to mind their keeping that news to themselves.
A scant month later, he was back, rushing to the airport the very minute the director released him, the first season wrapped. (And his instincts were right: Men of the Table would run for only the one season, though what a boon it was for Nick.) Mum was in hospital by then. By happenstance, only Nick was in her room the morning when the cancer, or the soul-stealing opiates, brought her heart to an unexpectedly sudden halt.
Late that afternoon, all the urgent formalities divided and done, the three siblings shared a meal, neither lunch nor dinner, at an empty curry house. When they parted ways, Annabelle and Nigel in a taxi, Nick alone on foot, it occurred to him that he was now the only orphan. His siblings had gained a father, as if to exchange one parent for another. He went to Mum’s flat, abandoned for days, and opened all six of its windows. He fell asleep on her bed, lulled by the incessant surf of traffic in the streets below.
Thirteen
SATURDAY EVENING
The kitchen looks, as it did on the odd occasion when Soren offered to cook for friends, like an epicurean war zone: spattered saucepans and stockpots colonizing the stove; plates, bowls, and glasses well outnumbering the people present; several dish towels cast aside, an oven mitt and a wooden spoon marooned in the pantry—and five empty or almost empty wine bottles scattered hither and yon. Strangely, Tommy doesn’t care (possibly because of the wine).
All three of her guests insisted on “helping.” Patching together leftovers from the fridge, greens and early peas from the garden, the canned soups Morty had insisted they stock for “blackouts and bombing raids,” the small chicken she’d bought to roast for dinner, the expensive cheeses and two layer cakes Nick had picked up on his way to Orne, they found themselves with an accidental surfeit of food. Nick christened it a “petit bourgeois bouffe.”
She and Dani are the only ones left in the kitchen. Merry is poring (or swooning) over the drawings still laid out in the dining room—more important to put away, Tommy reminds herself, than any of these wayward dishes. Nick excused himself first of all, and she’s guessing he is holed up in the den, on the phone with one of his minions. Tommy is both tired of him and enthralled by him—tired of his somersaultingly effortful courtesies (though they do feel genuine), enthralled by his attention and his enthusiasm (which also feel authentic). The inescapably mournful look on his face during any talk of family makes her wonder how much there is to envy about the life he leads. And yet, she thinks—now that she and Dani are alone, with no more excuses to avoid their reunion—the actor is easier to be with than her own brother. Dani has finally confessed, though it’s no surprise, how much he’s resented Mort Lear for decades. He is convinced there would be no Ivo without the boy that Dani was. And without Ivo, there would be, he’s certain, no Mort Lear Empire, no estate in the country, no movie, no ridiculous, petty tug-of-war over reams of paper (which Merry seems to have filled him in on, no bias spared).
“And,” he says, ?
??no sister enslaved to his greatness. Yes, I know this all reeks of self-pity, and I’m just like a kid who thinks the world should be fair, but fuck it, sometimes the world can be fair. Sometimes people are fair. Do you know what I mean, Tommy?”
“Dani, we’ve had way too much to drink.”
“So what? I speak the truth, and I will not regret any of what I am saying tomorrow, even if I do have a splitting headache. I am sick of being pathetic.”
“You are not pathetic.”
“Oh, fuck you, Tommy. You of all people know I am. For a nanosecond there, I had a respectable business, but I chose to share it with a guy who turned out to be an embezzler. An embezzler and an addict. Our loan payments went straight into his veins. Great judge of character, that’s me.”
Tommy wants a respite from conversation of any kind—is it too early to go to bed?—but this confrontation has been sitting off the horizon, like a freighter of a storm cloud, for years, though she has refused to look in that direction.
“Did he ever, ever acknowledge any kind of, even, gratitude for the stroke of fortune I was?” asks Dani. “Can I just ask that?”
Tommy wonders how much truth to tell. “If Morty felt he owed anybody, I think he saw Ivo as my gift to him.”
“Yours?”
“I’m the one who let him draw you. I was your…watcher, I guess. Gatekeeper. Guardian. Whatever. But this is a pointless topic!” Once more, she takes in the chaos of her kitchen. As Dani would say, fuck it. “I should tell you, Dani, that I’m the one who couldn’t forgive you, or thought I couldn’t, for what happened last fall. When you were here. Morty would have let it go.”
“Of course he would. That only proves he felt guilty. But I was an asshole. I’m sorry. I was desperate. More proof of pathetic. Look at me calling somebody else an embezzler, a thief.”
“I don’t think you’d have gone through with it—trying to sell the book. Which I don’t think you could’ve done, by the way.”
“Stupid as well as desperate.”
“Dani! Listen! We both know you got the short end. With Mom and Dad—”
“They loved me; what do you mean?”
“Yes, but they worried about you from the start. In that self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of way. They loved you with all these warnings attached, about all the things you would and wouldn’t be if you did or didn’t do this or that. Behave. Do well in school. Practice your guitar. Stay away from the wrong crowd. They made your life look like an obstacle course. At least that’s how I see it. Now; looking back.”
Dani rotates his empty tumbler, tilts it sideways to watch a drop of red wine roll around the bottom. “I thought they were liberal. Loose. For parents. They let us be us.”
“That’s not really true, Dani. I think what they wanted was for us to be them. Whether they knew it or not.”
“That’s ludicrous, Toms.”
It strikes Tommy that Dani must be thinking a great deal about their parents—because now he is one.
“You’re a father,” she says, and she means it in wonder. This is the first time they’ve seen each other since Joe was born. Dani is leaner, and he does look older.
He returns her stare, defiantly. “I hope I know that.”
“Do you have some crazy notion,” she says, “that when Mom and Dad had me, their lives were all pulled together?”
“No. But they were younger than we are.”
“They didn’t figure out how to support themselves till after I was born, even though they were in their thirties. They had to support themselves because I was born. They were still trying to make a life of performing, that bohemian coffeehouse life. Hand to mouth and proud of it. If Mom had believed in a god, it would have been Joan Baez. Boy did I ever tie them down.”
“What difference does all this make?”
“You’re getting there, is what I’m saying.”
“Thanks for the condescension.”
“Stop it, Dani. Stop protecting yourself with bitterness. I don’t think you’d be with Jane, or have Joe, if you meant it.”
The silence settles for long enough that Tommy hears a slow drip from the kitchen spigot, its faint repetitive plink on something metallic.
“Earlier,” she says, “I was going to say that you got the short end from Morty, too. He was always kind to you—do you remember how much he enjoyed it when I brought you over to Twelfth Street, back when you were living with me half the time? He liked seeing you do your homework at his kitchen table. You remember when he showed you the drawings. When he told you about Ivo. He didn’t have to, and I didn’t ask him to. I wouldn’t have dared. It was a burst of conscience…and then he didn’t know where to take it. Whatever favor I might have imagined I did for him, he paid me back ten times over by making that job up for me out of thin air.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No one does. But then it turned out he needed someone. And there I was. He became grateful, and then he became dependent. No one likes being dependent. Not for so long anyway.”
“Tell me about it,” says Dani. “I owe way too much to Jane. She’s kept her cool through all the shit. She’s probably going to have to support us, if I can’t get a job better than the one I have.”
“What job?” she says.
“I’m a porter. Fancy word for janitor at a big-ass apartment building. I mop the halls. I do the garbage. How did I know about Lear dying? Tying up the newspapers, putting them out on the curb. I can’t believe Jane hasn’t left me.”
“She won’t do that. I know you think I don’t know her, and I don’t, not the way I should, but I can see this: she made room for you. Happily.”
Dani is hunched over, looking at the surface of the table, his glass shoved aside.
“Like I have to make for Joe. I mean, want to.”
“You already have.”
Dani rises and walks to the sink. “Jesus, what a mess.”
“Don’t touch it. And don’t think you’re going back to the city tonight. Not unless I put the two of you on a train.” She looks at her watch. On a Saturday, the last train into the city leaves in less than an hour.
“I can’t stay.”
“Yes, you can. Call Jane. She’ll be fine. Merry probably wants to stay. I don’t think I can tear her away from those drawings.”
For once, Dani doesn’t argue. “I told her about Ivo. Merry, I mean. That book…it’s like a mythic thing to her—so she was kind of blown away, I think.”
Before sharing the long, boozy meal with Merry—and, before that, the brief drama with Serge, the policeman, and the stalkers in search of the famous actor—Tommy would have been distressed to hear this. It would have been something Merry “had” on her; because without ever having discussed it, neither Morty nor Tommy had told anyone how they met. Or Tommy hadn’t. And why would anyone ask? She was his employee; surely she’d answered an ad.
Now she wonders why. Interviewers must have asked Morty about the origin of that alluring boy—so different from the others that came before—yet by the time Tommy worked for him, he was beyond the first thunderclap of fame, the early acclaim for Colorquake itself. What was Morty’s trademark line? Ivo is the archetypal boy all grown men wish they had been…and wish they could be still. But Ivo wasn’t an archetype, not physically. He was, at his inception, a very particular boy.
Dani turns around. “But what’s the big deal, right? It’s not as if it ought to have made a difference to my life, right?”
“Practically, no.”
“You know, I think about Joe and that book. What it will be like for me when he comes to it. In preschool, wherever.”
“I wouldn’t blame you for banning it.”
“You know what’s so weird?”
He smiles at her with an unaccustomed tenderness.
“The building where I work? It’s right near that playground. I walk past it, and it’s like looking in some kind of distorted mirror, only backward….Wow. I really am wrecked,” he says, sitting d
own.
“Call Jane,” says Tommy. “I’ll make up the guest room. Or wait.” Where will she put Merry? “I’m going to put you in Morty’s room,” she says to Dani. “I’ll give you sheets. Really—call Jane now. I am going upstairs, and I’ll be back.”
She hands him the kitchen phone. “Better connection out here than your cell. I’m going to watch you punch in the number.”
In the dining room, Merry is bent down so close to the table that tendrils of her dark hair rest on one of the drawings.
She stands up quickly when she hears Tomasina enter. The last thing she needs is to annoy the woman who controls the fate of this unburied treasure—which, in Merry’s state of inebriated overwhelm and geographic dislocation, feels like her very own fate.
“Will you please, will you please tell me where in the world they came from, I mean why a bank box, why wouldn’t he have shared them? For God’s sake. Not that I understand the man. Not anymore. I should want to rip these up.”
“Merry, I don’t know the whole story, but listen. You’re staying here tonight. Nobody’s driving, not even me. I could call a cab, but I don’t know if you’d make the last train. There’s a guest room upstairs.”
“Thank you,” says Merry, surprised by the emotion in her voice. “God, thank you. And could you please…could you promise that tomorrow we can discuss these drawings? Please.”
Tomasina reassures her that they can—probably just to get rid of Merry, and why not?—and then says something about towels.
Merry follows her up to the second floor and another flight of stairs, this one dauntingly steep. “Yikes,” she says, and she takes off her heels. Tomorrow, she is going to be mortified. And her head is going to feel like a kettledrum in a Russian symphony.
When they reach the attic room, Tomasina asks, “Should I lend you something to sleep in?”
“No, God no,” says Merry. “Terrible things happen in fairy tales when you lend somebody your pj’s. Enchantments and such. You sleep for a hundred years.”
“Until the prince shows up.”
“Can’t rely on princes these days. They don’t make princes like they used to.”