Being brave, said the firefighter, the last of the boy’s mentors, doesn’t mean never being afraid. There’s no such thing as never being scared. Being brave means knowing your fear, even being friends with your fear. You want it to tell you when to push past it and go on ahead, when to hold its hand and walk side by side, or when you’re better off following, walking in its footsteps. All you could see of the firefighter were the toes of his large rubber boots.
One day, sitting on the bench beside Mort Lear, bored silly with math yet again, Tommy said, “Can I ask you something about the book you gave us?”
“Sure.”
“How come you didn’t include a soldier?”
Mort Lear had paused in his drawing, but he kept looking at it. He didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know what book she meant.
“The book about the boy who’s afraid. I mean, a soldier is somebody who has to do something scarier than anything. Kill people. Maybe even get killed.”
“Why do you think about that?” he said.
“Well, like duh, there’s a war right now. My dad says he’s lucky, being the age he is, or he could have been drafted. He says he would have died of fright before he could even get to the fighting.”
Mort Lear seemed to ponder this for so long that Tommy wished she had kept her mouth shut. Then he said, “I’m lucky like your father. I was the wrong age for all the wars in my lifetime. I don’t want any children to think about that before they have to. I don’t want to make anybody have nightmares.”
“My social studies teacher says nobody wants to talk about the war and that’s why we’re still there when we shouldn’t be. Silence is a cop-out. It’s just as bad as fear.”
“She’s right,” Mort Lear said quietly.
“He,” said Tommy. “He drove an ambulance in Korea. Another war.”
Mort Lear went back to drawing. Tommy thought she saw tears in his eyes. Had she made him feel ashamed?
“I liked the pictures in the book. Your drawings are good.”
“I treasure that compliment.” He smiled at her briefly. “I do.”
Suddenly, summer arrived. The last day she and Dani went to the playground before their two-week family vacation (this time on Cape Cod, where Tommy knew they would hop and skip from one place to another, to sample “getaways” for her parents’ clients), it occurred to her that she should tell Mort Lear they wouldn’t be around for a while. But it happened to be one of the days he didn’t show up. At dinner, their mother announced that Tommy would be going to a sleepaway camp in Massachusetts right after their vacation. “You will love it. All art and drama and books. Even books! At a camp!”
“So who’ll be with Dani?” asked Tommy.
Her father laughed. “You’ll miss that? Spending your precious time with, and I quote, ‘the little monster’?”
“Well no. I suppose I won’t,” she said, feeling cornered.
“We’re going to hire a sitter to take Dani to day camp in Central Park,” her mother said. “Business is picking up! People are going places! And so are we! Your father and I are going to find us a bigger apartment. Maybe in Brooklyn. How about a room of your own, Miss Virginia Woolf?”
—
Tommy was walking back from school on Court Street when she first saw the book. For over a year, they had been living in Brooklyn, where they rented a tall, skinny limestone house, and Tommy had found what Dad called her quotidian groove. She liked to stop at the Italian bakery, halfway home, and buy a bag of pignoli cookies. The bookstore, a block closer to home, was another favorite stop, though it meant holding off on eating the cookies, which was awfully hard when the smells of the bakery still lingered in her nostrils, especially if the cookies had just been baked and their warmth had spread through the waxed-paper bag in her hand.
She was already devouring the cookies, her fingers coated with nutty oil, when she stopped in front of the bookshop, brought to an involuntary halt by the display: the same book again and again, stacked up, lined up, fanned open. The little boy on the cover, facing the prospective reader, meeting your gaze directly, was Dani. He wore his most mischievous smile, the one that made Tommy (when she was in charge) worry what on earth he had just done and whether she’d be in trouble because of it. He wore denim overalls and a white T-shirt. His bare feet were dirty. At his side, he held a fistful of paintbrushes, an artist’s bouquet.
Above the many copies of the book, a board hung from the ceiling on fishing line. MEET THE AUTHOR! SATURDAY STORY CIRCLE, 10 TO NOON. ALL AGES WELCOME!
Tommy rolled up the top of the cookie bag and stuffed it in her book bag. She wiped her oily fingers on her skirt and walked into the store, where the girl at the counter greeted her by name.
Tommy realized that she was shaking slightly as she reached for one of the copies on the display table.
“For your brother?” said the girl at the counter. “Maybe a little young for him.”
“No,” said Tommy. “I just—just like the drawing.” She wished, for the first time, that she were a stranger here. And couldn’t the girl see that the boy on the jacket was Tommy’s brother? Wouldn’t anyone see that?
She carried the book to the back of the store, where there were tiny chairs and tables. She set her book bag on the floor and squished herself down onto one of the kiddie chairs. She heard the bell at the door, grateful the girl would be distracted.
Ivo. The boy was named Ivo. Watching him move from page to page—climbing, reaching, crouching, then running, wrestling with a panther, swinging from branches, sleeping in the grass…Tommy felt as if she were being transported back to the playground near their old apartment in Greenwich Village. Here was Dani in a pose he took at the top of the slide—or concentrating on digging a hole—or racing through the sprinkler the first day the park lady turned on the jets.
After closing the book, she sat for several minutes, uncomfortably, at the miniature table. Why did she feel as if she had committed a crime? She hadn’t done anything wrong. No—she had helped Mort Lear make this book. Shouldn’t she be proud?
But what she felt was the fear of being discovered. Of her parents seeing the book in the window of this or another store and recognizing Dani. Because they would. And then they would wonder. And they would ask.
And what about Dani himself, once he saw his own face on the cover of a book? Or maybe Dani would be pleased.
Tommy went through the next few days waiting for the discovery. She only half absorbed the books she was reading, the history she was supposed to be learning, her lessons at the piano. Her heart would accelerate the minute she heard a parent’s key in the front-door lock.
On Saturday, Tommy stayed inside all morning; to even step outside would have been to risk running into Mort Lear, going to or from his time at Story Circle.
As the days and weeks passed, and other books took the place of Dani’s book in the shopwindow, Tommy began to feel strangely angry. It wasn’t as if she’d gotten away with something; it was as if Mort Lear had gotten away with something.
But all these feelings faded as another summer loomed, the welcome return to the arts camp where Tommy could fully become her obstinate self (the Most Different Girl), away from her father’s homegrown folk songs and her brother’s burgeoning muscularity, the loudmouth antics of his friends in the room next to hers.
By sophomore year she had an after-school job shelving books at the library, and she started a club she called Plays for Non-Actors, where students who didn’t want to be one of the show-offy theater kids could read plays aloud together. She had forgotten all about Mort Lear—until one afternoon, on the subway, she saw a little girl clutching a cloth doll whose features were printed to look like Ivo’s. Tommy changed seats to get a closer look. She had the sensation that the doll was looking right at her from across the rackety car. She thought, My brother became a drawing and then a book and now a doll.
The weird thing was, nobody seemed to know except Tommy.
Not long after, she w
ent away to college in Vermont, where she majored in English literature and spent so much time reading novels and poetry and plays that at first she forgot to have much of a social life. Her friends were the students she studied with, most of them girls. At last, in September of her senior year, she let a boy (one who read as much as she did) kiss her. His name was Scott, and his favorite writer was Henry James—which meant, she warned herself, that he wouldn’t know much about happy endings. But Scott, like Tommy, had thus far neglected to listen to his hormones, and so—in the age of sex-for-all-and-all-for-sex—they took shelter in their mutual shyness. For two months, they did little more than kiss. They moved beyond their bruised faces to necks, shoulders, arms, even ankles. They kissed in library stacks and common rooms, along wooded paths and in sandwich shops, behind a white clapboard church, beside a Civil War plaque inside a domed memorial, and finally, finally, Tommy let him undress her in his dorm room and do what they had both wanted to do all along. After the first time, they laughed at each other on and off for hours, at how silly yet how sensible they’d been to hold off.
That’s when Tommy realized she had to wake up and find something to do after college—as if having sex introduced the idea of intercourse with the wide world itself. “What are you planning to do next?” she asked Scott. “After they kick us out of here.”
“Law school,” he said. “What about you? Graduate school? I can see you teaching. You’re patient that way.”
Did Tommy want to teach? She didn’t think so. Nor did she see herself as patient; cautious wasn’t the same as patient. “Maybe library science?”
Scott shook his head. “Librarians are going high-tech. Have you had a good look at the library here? Those people are glued to their computers all day.”
Scott asked her if her parents weren’t pressuring her to do something practical. “My dad totally rides my case. He told me literature is fine to wallow in if you’re rich.”
Tommy told him how her parents prided themselves on never pressuring their children to do anything other than what they loved. She knew that her father’s true passion was songwriting, that making music with friends was the work he lived for. She also knew that her parents’ business wasn’t what it used to be—thanks in part to the computer nerds who were taking over not just the libraries but the so-called travel industry (as if “travel” were a manufactured commodity, churned out on conveyor belts). She could never ask them to help with graduate school.
Scott got into Stanford Law. His father told him that for the summer he had to buckle down and make money, so he went home to Chicago and waited tables at a tourist café near the art museum. “Maybe you could visit, take the train out?” he suggested while she watched him pack, but his tone made it clear that he didn’t expect this to happen. Tommy wished she had chosen a Jane Austen scholar for her first boyfriend, but she understood, objectively, that they were still so young. He was leaving her for another place, another way of living: for another chapter in his no-longer-literary life, not for another girl.
Worse than breaking up with Scott was having to move back into her old bedroom in Brooklyn. Dani was working for their parents at the agency (his penalty for a dismal report card), and they didn’t have another job for Tommy.
She walked up Court Street to see whether she could work at the bookstore.
What block was the bookstore on? Wasn’t it supposed to be just…here?
The bookstore had vanished. The space had been divided up into a bank branch with nothing but a pair of ATMs, an overilluminated Thai restaurant, and a cosmetics shop. She walked farther uptown.
The Italian bakery was gone. So was the shop where a father and son had sold fresh mozzarella, twisting and knotting it right before their customers’ eyes, as if the cheese were rope.
When her parents came home that night, Tommy expressed her astonishment at how much had changed—and how fast.
Her mother took on a mournful look. “Oh, the gentry wave has hit.”
Her father said, “Look who’s talking. We were the wedge, you realize that.”
“I’m Italian,” protested Mom.
“Half,” said Dad. “Half Italian, half bohemian. Bohemians are deadly to a neighborhood like this. We are the toe in the door, the canary in the coal mine, the nip in the air.” Out came the guitar.
That week, walking the streets just for the sake of staying away from the house, Tommy saw that the ethnic community her parents had chosen for the safety of its Mediterranean coziness (and nosiness) was dissipating. Looking through row-house windows, she saw funky patterned curtains in place of metal blinds; in front yards, the stucco saints were vanishing one by one, along with the lawn chairs where Italian women had smoked or crocheted, gossiping about their husbands, who worked as longshoremen or butchers or hung out too much at the social club on Court (now a Laundromat).
Tommy’s father reassured her that she deserved a little vacation after doing so well in school, time to “find her feet.” She did the shopping and vacuuming and some of the cooking, but mostly she walked and she read, plunging into long, heavily plotted novels. On random afternoons, she took the F train to Manhattan, getting off at West Fourth to wander the streets in her first neighborhood as well. Everything in the Village was changing, too. There were perfume stores where there had been dry cleaners, video stores in place of musty caverns selling tools and paint or yellowed maps and botanical prints. Her parents had moved the agency to Brooklyn Heights; the rent, not the commute, had driven them out. On Bleecker Street, a wine-tasting bar occupied the storefront where they had started the business twenty years before.
But there were still plenty of bookstores. In them, Tommy found refuge from the heat and consolation from all the unsettling changes; new books might arrive daily, but none would displace Hardy or Eliot or Tolstoy. She tried to summon the nerve to ask for work, but she failed.
She was in the basement of the Strand, leaning against a table looking at a cut-rate art book, a volume filled with glossy reproductions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when someone leaned across the table and murmured, “Tomasina Daulair?” Jolted, she raised her eyes to meet those of Mort Lear. He was short-haired, clean shaven, and he wore a pair of owlish tortoiseshell glasses, but she knew him instantly.
“It is you, isn’t it?”
“It’s me,” she said.
“You’re all grown up. Now you really are a Miss Daulair. Pardon me; a Ms. Daulair.”
Stupidly, all she could do was stare.
“Do you still live in the neighborhood?”
She closed the art book. “No.”
“You disappeared on me.”
“We moved. I didn’t realize…” I was just a child, she wanted to say, except that it would sound pathetic. “I saw your book. Your drawings of Dani.”
“I probably owe you a princely sum.”
What did he mean by that?
“That book bought me my apartment,” he said. “And things of greater if less definable value.”
Still she was mystified. Clearly, he wasn’t going to leave her alone—though she didn’t want him to leave her alone. How odd it felt to stand nearly eye to eye with him now. They were no closer in age than they had been on the playground, but while she felt eons older than twelve, the changes she could see in him were mostly a matter of altered fashions. If anything, he looked younger, like a photograph brought into better focus. Had he always been so handsome?
“I would like to have met your family, you know—properly.”
“The book is beautiful,” she said.
He looked at her intently, as if he were judging a contest. “I wonder if you realize…” He laughed. “Come with me. I mean, I want to show you something. Here in the store.”
So she followed him through the heedlessly book-littered aisles of the basement, past the desk where a pair of sour-smelling employees were slitting open cartons of battered, has-been books, to a part of the store she didn’t know: the children’s section.
/> It was clear, from the Siberian location of these overflowing, underlit shelves, that the store did not cater much to children. There would be no Saturday Story Circle here, no tiny tables and chairs encouraging patrons to bring their toddlers. But right away she saw it: the small bookcase dedicated to Mort Lear’s books, crowned with a display of Dani’s book. She also saw, right away, the two gold medals affixed to its jacket. And here was a copy in Spanish, another in…Hebrew? On a shelf below was a gift box containing two cloth dolls: the Dani doll, like the one she had seen on the subway six or seven years ago, and a panther doll. She picked up the box. “Wow.”
“I’m practically a franchise,” said Mort Lear, “and sometimes I think that your not turning me in to the playground police led to my being a rich man.”
“You’re rich?” she said, immediately regretting it.
“Yes,” he said, in a surprisingly straightforward way. “Well, by normal standards. And fortunate. And, you know, even happy. Which children’s authors are not supposed to be. Trust me on that.”
They faced each other, Tommy holding the gift box to her chest.
“So what can I do to repay you, Ms. Tomasina Daulair? Name a favor and it’s yours. Something more than a triple ice-cream cone.”
Before she could stop herself, she said, “Help me find a job?”
Four
FRIDAY
She and Franklin sit side by side at Morty’s desktop computer, an expensive machine, both brawny and sleek, that he used for e-mail, record keeping, and late-stage design decisions, once his finished drawings and stories came together as books. He used it to tinker with fonts, make color adjustments to page proofs, record additions to his collections, and—Tommy notes the folder labeled Book Museum—track loans of his work and his most valuable antique editions. The Cadillac, he called it—or the Commandant, on days he felt resentful toward technology for the ways in which it had shanghaied the making of a book.