“Stop right there. What’s scary is that I remember all the words to those songs. So do not get me started.” Dani stands up. “Take a ride in my truck? I have to go downtown. I’ll drop you.”
“Sure.”
Heading back east, they walk without speaking until they reach the avenue.
“Dani, can I ask you something?”
“If I say no, will that stop you?”
They wait at a crosswalk. “Dani, do you ever think of visiting Mom and Dad? Where they’re buried?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean? You don’t know if you ever think of it?”
The light changes; it offers up that newfangled countdown for crossing. Modern life, at least in the city, seems designed to minimize suspense.
For an instant, Tommy has the impulse to reach for her brother’s hand. He spares her this embarrassment by stepping off the curb ahead of her. Glancing back, he answers, “No, smart-ass. What I mean is that I feel like I should, but I don’t know what I’d do when I got there. Lay down flowers? Sit on the grass and contemplate their lives? Like that? They didn’t bring us up to believe they’d be hovering around in some kind of limbo, waiting for us to join them.”
“Let’s just go. Sometime.”
“Time is what I don’t have much of these days. Which is okay!” he exclaims joyfully. “I am not complaining. I am done with complaining.” He sees her look. “Well, for now. So I’m not saying no, but it’s not happening tomorrow. But sure. Let’s do it sometime. Just us.”
“That’s all I wondered.”
As they walk north, the broad Fifth Avenue sidewalk takes them past awning after awning, designed to keep the sun and snow off the rich tenants’ heads. Uniformed doormen idle attentively at their posts; it’s funny to imagine these men, many of them portly or older, none of them armed, as effective guards against any sort of intrusion or assault.
She can’t help remembering Dani’s stinging remark that she had been Lear’s “human moat.” But unlike these doormen, Tommy shared the life of the man she stood guard for. She was a companion.
So much in her life is still so unfamiliar that sometimes she mistakes fear or uncertainty for regret. Not that she can pretend she has no regrets.
She took the buyer for a final walk-through of the house in December, just before Christmas. All the furniture was gone, but across the wooden floors, dark, well-defined imprints remained of every bookcase and rug; every picture had left its mark on the walls. Had Tommy not spent so much time and care finding the right new place for each and every thing out in the wider world, she might have seen their phantom shapes as a collective scold.
She watched the woman’s eyes scan the empty rooms with a triumphant hunger, the child’s rapacious Mine, all mine. Even this did not give Tommy pause. But when they climbed to the second floor and the architect’s gaze (and it was an architect’s gaze) traveled in an arc, once, twice, and more from end to end of the long hallway, Tommy knew that she ought to have let the broker she used for the contract act as the buyer’s escort on this final inspection. They stood where the telephone table once lived, at the single window lighting this in-between space. Its view is the one Tommy faced on countless occasions while receiving momentous news of one kind or another: news of another award, of an illness or a death, of an elite invitation; even, from her father, a song or two. As Tommy took in that view for the last time, the woman said, “I am totally going to respect the bones of this great old house, but I was thinking that up here—”
“Wait,” Tommy said, her heart in a minor panic. “You know, I think let’s leave it there. I’m glad you love the house the way we—the way I did. But the changes you make are…they’re yours.”
The woman looked puzzled; Tommy’s expression was probably unkind. “Really, I’m glad you’re the one who’s moving in,” she said. They lingered in the hall for a few seconds and then, in awkward silence, went downstairs. Only after driving away, as she merged onto the parkway pointing toward the city, did it occur to Tommy that perhaps the woman’s passion was a ruse; perhaps she would hollow out and “upgrade” the house till it was unrecognizably symmetrical and spacious, and then she would sell it for twice the price.
Tommy nearly drove onto the shoulder when another thought struck her: the woman could probably sell off the back half of the property; there is enough land for a second house, a “buildable lot,” as the broker put it. To imagine the orchard leveled is painful enough, but what’s worse, the orchard is where, after much agonizing, she laid Morty to rest, burying the box of his ashes side by side with the box containing his mother’s. Tommy asked Franklin to be her witness; she had already dug the hole. “Is this cruel or weird?” she asked him.
“Maybe weird,” he said. “Probably illegal. But Morty was pathological about not expressing his final wishes—about the fate of his body. I asked him, obviously. He was sure that making that decision would hasten his end.”
Late at night, she can tunnel herself into a state of thinking that all her actions in the past year have been aimed, unconsciously, at punishing Morty. Franklin assures her that the choices she’s made have been fundamentally faithful to Morty’s desires. But she cannot ignore that fundamentally, even granting that hair-splitting modifiers are a lawyer’s stock in trade.
More than once, Soren has appeared in her dreams. He doesn’t speak; all he has to do is level at her his most disdainful look and she is suffused with guilt. Never Morty; always Soren. As if he’s a proxy for Morty—for Morty’s darker, less reasonable side. Waking recently from one of these visitations, she found herself reliving the evening on which Morty received the call from Soren’s father. It hadn’t been hard, once Soren was no longer there to object, for Morty to use his social security number to unearth Soren’s hometown, his parents’ address and telephone number. After much vacillation—was there a “proper” way to tell parents their child has died?—he decided to write them a letter with the sad news. Soren’s father called a few days later.
Tommy left the kitchen after handing Morty the phone, but she went no farther than the living room. So she knew that Morty hardly spoke, uttering only a few monosyllabic responses to the man on the other end of the line, and that it lasted no more than five minutes.
Morty came into the living room and stared at her, his expression blank. “That was brutal.”
He sat at the opposite end of the couch and addressed the fireplace. “He thanked me for seeing their son out of this world, but they fear for his soul in the next one. They will pray for him, and so will their congregation—and they hope I will, too! Christ. Then that son of a bitch asked if I needed money for ‘burial expenses.’ I said I’d had his son cremated, and then came this…black pit of silence. So I asked if they wanted me to send…” Tommy watched Morty struggle not to break. She just waited. “ ‘No, thank you,’ he said. That’s all he said, that S.O.B. No, thank you. Jesus. Soren wasn’t exaggerating. For once.” That’s when Morty cried, finally really cried. And Tommy did no more than put a hand on his knee as they sat near each other on the couch. She was, in that moment, no more effectual than one of these overweight, brass-buttoned doormen, a functionary.
Hadn’t Tommy been, essentially, as coldhearted toward Soren as that father was? It didn’t matter what she had done, how much she had “helped” while he was dying. If she had been so irreplaceably devoted to Morty, she ought to have been loving to Soren, especially at the end. Did she need to believe that she was the only one who loved Morty enough to deserve his love in return?
But that’s the netherland of night distorting what she knows by day, which is that she is back in the middle of life, the roiling, muddled middle, and it’s hers. Mine, all mine. She is grateful to Morty for leaving her all that he did, and she will think of him every day from now on, that much is certain, but none of what she embodies or owns or watches over is his anymore. Not even his secrets.
Six months ago, when she flew to Arizona to mee
t with the woman who would oversee the creation of Ivo’s House, Tommy carried with her, in a pocket of her purse, Reginald’s street address. After lunch and a long afternoon with Juanita and her colleagues—including the contractor who would convert an old rope factory into a rec center and bunkhouse, the social worker who would design the programs, even the grad student from Tempe hired to write grant proposals—Tommy climbed into her rental car and punched the address into the GPS. It was her third and final day in this unfamiliar city, and still it surprised her that a place could be so warm yet fall beneath the blanket of such a dark night so early in the evening. And the Christmas decorations—poinsettias and pine wreaths against the dusty pink adobe walls—still made her laugh.
So the sky was a vivid striation of coral and cobalt when she pulled up across from the ranch house. A compact mouse-colored car was parked in the driveway. Enough light remained that she could see how the stucco hide of the house was cracking and crumbling, the ground out front little more than bare dirt. Blunt-roofed and low, this house and its nearly identical neighbors all looked as if they were struggling against an unseen force from above, a great invisible hand attempting to bully them down into their arid, colorless yards.
Through several windows along the street, lights were coming on. Tommy saw Christmas trees, no different from those she would see through the windows of Orne or Manhattan.
The tree in Reginald’s house was aglow. If someone comes into that room, she told herself, I will go up to the door.
She stared so hard that her eyes began to water. Lights strung along the eaves of two other houses blinked on as she waited. Five minutes went by, and then someone—was it a man or a woman?—entered the front room. His or her back to the window, the person stopped to face the tree for a moment, perhaps admiring its ritual glitter.
Tommy got as far as opening her door. But what was the point of this meeting? Was there anything she needed to know? And what good could possibly come of it? She did not have to reread those letters to know that she would be reopening a wound for the man who might or might not be the person standing in front of that tree. She did not need to learn one more unpleasant thing about the life Morty had buried for so long and then, seemingly on impulse, revealed in such a public way. But now she knows why he did: because the time had come to take control of that past, to write and illustrate the story as he wanted it to appear before the world—because if he didn’t, someone else might. Morty was always one step ahead of the people around him, even when they didn’t know it. He was never going to be duped again, not by fate, not by family, not by lovers or friends or caretakers. Was there anyone he ever really trusted?
At Seventy-ninth Street, Dani cocks his head to the right. “We’re thisaway,” he says, using his dad voice, and now he’s the one to reach back for her hand, whether he means to or not. Tommy takes it as they veer east. After crossing Madison, they stop, in unison.
It’s impossible to miss, the poster framed behind glass on the wall of the bus shelter: Nicholas Greene’s profile sharp against a cerulean sky, his bronzed hair swept back, tangling with the vines and foliage and fanciful flowers of Morty’s imaginary jungle, which looms mysteriously, alluringly, behind him. Out of the trees, straight toward the viewer, bounds Ivo, as if he’s escaping the confines of the actor’s brain, about to burst through the glass and careen down the street toward the park. The poster is so large that Ivo is nearly the size of an actual boy.
Tommy saw a smaller version of this poster at the screening, but to see it like this, out in the bustling world, in broad daylight, comes as a shock. The reflections on its glass face—passing taxis, a jogger with a dog, the splintered dazzle of sunlight—create the illusion of movement, the possibility that art will burst out into life. She isn’t sure if Dani has seen it anywhere. She is reminded of the day, long ago, when she was returning home from school and first saw Colorquake, copy after copy filling the bookstore window.
“Look,” Dani says. “It’s your other boyfriend.”
“Right,” says Tommy. “Not even in my dreams.”
“And me, there’s me. Famous all over again.” Before Tommy has time to deflect whatever bitter remark might come next, he says, “Secretly famous. Which is the best kind of famous, believe me.” Releasing her hand, he launches into a series of Ivo-inspired leaps. Half a block away, he halts and pivots to face her. “Hey, slowpoke. I don’t have all the time in the world. Do you?”
“I do not.” Tommy’s left hand burrows into her bag, just to touch the actor’s delicious scarf. Then she turns away from the poster and catches up with her brother. The sun is so high overhead that their hastening figures cast but the shortest of shadows.
Acknowledgments
I begin, as always, by wondering what I would ever do without Gail Hochman and Deb Garrison. They have steered me through the publication of every book I’ve written so far and cheered me on through all the months and years between. The generous and insightful Marianne Merola, Michiko Clark, Altie Karper, Maria Massey, and Kristen Bearse have been loyal allies, too. And this time around, I am equally indebted to David Ebershoff, an essential reader—wise and kind and funny—at the stage when I felt as if I could no longer see straight.
Thank you to the members of the Stonington Village Improvement Association, who take such tender loving care of the James Merrill House and welcome writers to live and work in its uniquely inspiring rooms. I wrote a hundred pages of this novel during the exquisite October I spent there as a solo resident. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am nonetheless grateful to the poet and his companion, David Jackson, whose passions and idiosyncratic tastes linger among the furnishings and books in that colorful sanctuary.
Thank you also, yet again, to Will Conroy, whose history of the Arizona Inn sparked a key subplot of this novel—with apologies for any shadows my wholly fictional characters may cast on that glorious refuge and the integrity of its staff.
So many friends give me encouragement, advice, and the occasional necessary scold each time I wrestle with a new story. Dear Kate Howe, Mark Danielewski, Loraine Despres, Carleton Eastlake, Tobin Anderson, Laura Mathews, Charlie Clark, Gregory Maguire, Barney Karpfinger, Mary Stuart Masterson, Jeremy Greenberg, Cheryl Tan, Wilson Kidde, Maria Mileaf, Elene Catrakilis, and Patty Woo: In different ways, each of you enriched this book. At home, where the love of my family is the oxygen of my working life, I thank Dennis for, among countless other things, catching my clam-sauce gaffe. I thank Alec and Oliver (and Lucy White!) for making me pay far too much attention to the Oscars—or, rather, to the actors and films they elevate.
Gayle Grader, you too. You gave me the best mantra any writer (or anybody at all) could wish for: Amaze yourself.
A Note About the Author
Julia Glass is the author of five previous books of fiction, including the best-selling Three Junes, winner of the National Book Award, and I See You Everywhere, winner of the Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Other published works include the Kindle Single Chairs in the Rafters and essays in several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Glass is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
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Julia Glass, A House Among the Trees
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