A House Among the Trees Read online

  ML: I guess we did say we’d cover that ground.

  CB: Just for the record, you told me the story. This man you believed to be a friend. Even a mentor? I was stunned.

  ML: I still am. If I let myself think about it. Because, yes, he was a kind of mentor to me—someone who encouraged my art life. My mother neither encouraged nor discouraged me there, simply because she worked so hard. She had so little energy, I realized decades later….So here was this man, who seemed to be, at least from a child’s limited perspective…a good guy. A smart guy. Friendly. An expert at what he did. He had a family, but they didn’t live on the grounds. And this place we shared—the hotel, the fantastical gardens where I was free to roam and dream and draw—was a place of trust. Or it was elegant—“classy” was my mother’s word. And protected—literally surrounded by walls. You’d never dream there were dangers.

  CB: Like what went on in the shed, once he befriended you. That man.

  ML: I’ve begun to think that my general mistrust of older people, of authority figures, started right there. All my adult life, I’ve preferred the company of people younger than me. Sometimes a lot younger. Ha. You know, I genuinely enjoy being surrounded by children. Which, believe me, isn’t something you can assume about authors who write for children.

  CB: But so…your mother found out.

  ML: She was devastated. She knew she had to get us out of there, and not just a town or two over. It was a huge risk. She didn’t know anyone in New York. It just seemed to make sense to her, a place to disappear.

  CB: This was in the late 1940s, right? So the economy was in good shape.

  ML: She can’t have been so coolheaded. She just knew we had to go somewhere earthshakingly different. What happened to me in that shed would never happen again: I knew at least that much when our final train reached the farthest coast. No room for garden sheds in the neighborhood we moved to. That much was certain! What I didn’t know was that this did not mean I could leave it behind. But then, at the same time, I learned about worse things.

  CB: Worse than—

  ML: Than my personal shake-up, my “trauma.”

  CB: You’re not going to dismiss it.

  ML: Of course not. It turned my life, and my mother’s life, upside down. But our life in Tucson had been strangely isolated…insulated. In Brooklyn, solitude took more effort. Which wasn’t bad. For a change, I had neighborhood friends. This boy Adam, who lived upstairs, shared my aversion to anything involving teams or physical exertions. The first time I went up to his apartment, this man was there—an uncle, some older relative—and I happened to see him roll up his sleeves for a task in the kitchen. I saw the number. I was smart enough to wait and ask my mother. The camps weren’t something people talked about, least of all to children. The entire concept of being a Holocaust survivor wasn’t…I mean, look, “survivorship” wasn’t pinned on people like some societal badge of honor, the way it is now. But my mother, when I asked her about that number, she pulled no punches. For a while, I looked obsessively at all the adults’ arms. I looked for those numbers. I decided maybe the cause of my nightmares was of a lower order.

  CB: But you had nightmares about it.

  ML: Who wouldn’t?

  CB: Would you call it a driving force behind your stories? Are they redemptions?

  ML: I don’t analyze my work. That would be to challenge the gods. Nor have I ever let myself be analyzed—not on the couch, at least. I don’t tell you this to seem brave or stoic. I’m simply of a certain generation. Younger people presume a choice: Is it better just to suck up the pain and endure—or to share it, assuming somehow that will weaken its hold?

  CB: You are sharing it right now, aren’t you?

  ML: Okay, yes, you have me there.

  CB: Why now?

  ML: I write for children, which makes me part child if I do it well. Or maybe all child, God knows! People say children’s book authors are kids who still haven’t figured out what they want to be when they grow up. But it means I act more on instinct than maybe even you—and I’d say you’re easily half my age. Something—I call it my inner imp—tells me it’s time to bring up this story. You happen to be the receiver, all because you, or your editors, decided it was time for a puff piece on Mort Lear. Not sure you got the puff piece, did you?

  CB: Well. No. I would say definitely no puff.

  ML: In any case, timing is everything. In love. In war. In telling your history.

  He went on to say how lucky he felt to have escaped when he did. He speculated mournfully about children who never get away, whose abuse goes undiscovered or unchallenged.

  When the story came out, Morty did seem surprised to see it in the blunt form of a transcribed interview. He had spoken with the magazine’s fact-checker, who relayed to him only paraphrased details.

  Immediate response from readers was dissonant and loud, the loudest voices those of the child-welfare advocates, the people who felt that any disclosure of such terrifying cruelty could only serve to help others come forward, shed light on evil and strip it of power. And then, as Morty predicted, the tide of attention receded—or came to a full stop for reasons of timing that Morty could not have predicted: the story came out in the summer of 2001.

  A few years later, however, Calum Bonaventura called Morty to tell him that a movie director had optioned the story. When Morty came into the kitchen that night and told Tommy about the call, she said, “Andrew Zelinsky? You know who he is, right?”

  “Rings a foggy bell,” said Morty. “I could have asked for details, but I was writing. Shouldn’t even have answered. I told my reporter pal congratulations, but I’m sure he knows the deal—or the no-deal. He gets to buy a car. Used. More likely a couch. Option goes up like a cinder when Zelinsky decides he’d rather make the next big overlarded action movie. No superheroes in my tawdry tale.”

  “Zelinsky’s movies aren’t big—or not big budget. He doesn’t do superheroes. In fact, they’re more sad than heroic. He’s not exactly Ron Howard.”

  “Now there’s a thought, Tommy. My story as told by Opie.”

  They laughed at the absurdity—a life told in two hours or less; really?—and sat down to another meal at the kitchen table, followed by another bout of Scrabble or an early parting, each to read or catch up on e-mail or have a look at the news, always fraught with war and disease, fateful weather, unscrupulous bankers, and yet another TV show concerning zombies or vampires or aliens bent on colonizing our planet.

  Years went by before Tommy answered her work phone and found herself speaking to someone in the office of a movie studio on the opposite coast.

  —

  Silas hovers, both peevish and deferential, as Nick climbs into the Town Car.

  “I could stay in the car while you pay your visit.”

  “You’d go mad,” says Nick. “This is not some charity drive-by. I plan on overstaying my welcome as long as I can. This woman knew him better than anyone else in the world. That’s obvious from all the tributes and rehashings.”

  He practically wrenches the door from Silas’s hand in order to pull it shut. Once the car is moving uptown and turns a corner, Nick leans back on the barricade of black leather and sighs, twice, with deliberate volume. The driver, thank God, ignores him.

  He brought along the big book, the lap-flattener published five years ago now: Chiaro Scuro, Childhood Hero: The Art of Mort Lear. Silly title, forgettably fawning text, but the pictures are sumptuous, and Nick has nearly memorized the annotated chronology at the back. From it he knows that Mort Lear hired Tomasina Daulair to be his assistant in 1982. She was twenty-two and had just finished university; Lear was forty-two, wealthy, revered, and turning out one successful, striking picture book after another. A few years later, with his lorryloads of royalties, he would buy the country house.

  That was one of the many things Nick and Lear had e-mailed about, with surprising fluidity and frequency, in the month between their two conversations: how being showered with pr
izes does and does not change you; how it invigorates and imperils your work; how it leads to privilege yet also to the threat of paralysis; how even the oldest of alliances shift, like boats at the turn of a tide. (Ah, dear gifted young man, just you wait, Lear had written—his words and his tone, Nick now sees, echoing Deirdre’s.) Of course, they had touched on a great deal else—and it’s this, the “else,” that Nick can’t help wanting, needing, to pursue. The only person to whom he can turn is the cryptic Tomasina…although, unless the man was flattering Nick with false confessions, even she does not know the extent of the perversity Lear endured as a boy. Nor do the readers of the splashy profile that Andrew optioned, along with the rights to Colorquake.

  According to the chronology in the book, Tomasina worked for Lear in the city, maintaining his office there until 1989, when she moved out to Lear’s Connecticut house to care for the author after surgery for an abdominal infection. Whether the living arrangement was meant to be temporary or permanent at the time is unclear, but Daulair stayed on and remains Lear’s closest professional affiliate to this day. (Leaving aside that Lear’s closest physical affiliate, for nigh on ten years, was one Soren Kelly, the younger lover who died of AIDS—or, correctly, of course, its “complications,” as the book duly notes—in 1999.)

  The late eighties and early nineties were a time when Lear seemed infallibly productive, hoovering up the awards and becoming a household name—at least in households including a nursery. But sometime in the midnineties, Lear began work on Diagnosis, the first book in his trilogy, The Inseparables, aimed at a much older audience than the one he usually wrote for. Around the same time his lover’s health was failing, it won every conceivable prize for “young people’s literature” and was optioned by Disney, although it never rose from the cruel flames of development hell (flames that have scorched Nick himself from time to time). The critical consensus is that helplessly watching the love of his life dwindle and die somehow stoked Lear’s creative fires into a conflagration.

  The first and last books of the trilogy are dedicated to the doomed and then deceased Kelly. In the first, a blank page bears simply the lover’s name, Soren, floating in the center like a lone boat on a vast sea. In the third, Remission, it reads To Soren, at peace. The middle volume, Metastasis, is dedicated to the memory of Lear’s mother.

  Nick has done his homework—or, actually, he’s in the midst of it, having given himself a clear two months before the first day of shooting (which will probably be delayed while they decide whether Lear’s death necessitates another rewrite, even though the current narrative ends soon after Soren Kelly dies). These biopics of living geniuses are all the rage now, but they’re complicated by the very livingness of the geniuses in question—or of people who knew them well. Geniuses may have susceptible egos, debilitating vices, wicked tempers, any number of base afflictions, but they are not pushovers, nor do they suffer fools. Which is why, when Nick heard about Lear’s accident, his shock and sadness were followed by a spasm of shameful relief.

  Lear was not a scientist or a politician; he was an artist. But you’d have to be daft to believe this made him less complicated than, say, that Nobel-winning fertility doctor who’d been the subject of Amar’s last film or Benazir Bhutto or Bill Gates. (And what was the deal with two films about the barely departed Steve Jobs?)

  Then there’s the tricky bit of the backstory, the child actor who has to look enough like the storybook Ivo and enough like the flesh-and-blood Nick and be able to do a convincing job of portraying Lear as the boy in that shed. (For the most agonizing scenes, clever Andrew has dreamed up a half-animated sequence, inspired by Colorquake, that should bypass the demand for graphic sexuality and might even hold the rating at a palatable PG-13.)

  And here is the problem for Nick. Before Lear’s unexpected disclosure to him about what really happened in that shed, Nick saw his primary challenge as interpreting the lifelong ripple effect of the trauma as depicted in the script, the one everybody talked about after the interview in the magazine…but now—he can’t block it out—that trauma has been swapped for another. In fact, if you read the interview closely—which Nick has done countless times—the “darkness in the shed,” as he thinks of it, is never described in any detail. Certain conventional assumptions were made about the nature of the violation that turn out not to be true.

  It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It bothers him. And he has to wonder whether he should complicate matters by telling Andrew the different story—because Nick would, in effect, be asking for a rewrite. The last thing anybody wants is further delay.

  Nick was moved by Lear’s forthrightness in their correspondence—and doubly glad that they had dismissed any notion of a go-between. The level of trust, without intermediaries, was, by the end, staggering. Lear had asked that Nick delete his e-mails after reading them and, though his cursor finger had paused as the quivering arrow approached the little dustbin, he had done so. Could you honestly portray a man with whom you hadn’t been honest?

  “You’ll learn to be the wily fox soon enough, and you’ll have to, baby,” Kendra said to him, the day after the Oscars. She lay on their hotel bed, in nothing but her pink lace knickers, reading aloud to him samples of how the papers, tweeters, and blog-floggers had variously praised and mocked the sincerity of his speech, even questioned his tears (which, let the world think otherwise, erupted against his will) as he dedicated the hefty golden chap to single mothers who scrimped and saved for their children to follow their passions (not that Nick’s mother would have had to scrimp so much if she’d exercised common sense—though if she’d done that, Nick would not exist). At any rate, that remark of Kendra’s was the beginning of their end. Kendra’s edges are too sharp.

  For advising Nick to hold off a marriage proposal till after awards madness waned, Silas deserves every green dollar he earns and then some. Which is why Nick tolerates his American manager’s tendency to meddle in bloody everything now that Nick has to worry about encounters with the sort of people who make their living by popping out from behind the shrubs wielding a camera—or, these days, any old anybody whipping out a phone in a tube station (not that his way of making a living is really any less peculiar).

  In dense traffic, the car inches north on the motorway skirting the river. The George Washington Bridge looms to the left. Nick heaves the book into his lap and opens it to the introduction, which he could practically recite by heart. It’s illustrated with pretentiously sepiaed photos of Lear: as a teenager in a school play, brandishing a wooden sword; as a striving young illustrator bent over a drafting table, his hair long and flaxen; with Soren Kelly and Tomasina Daulair at a posh party in New York sometime in the nineties; as a much older man, leaning against the door of his brick farmhouse. In this final image, only fugitive traces remain of his youthful beauty, but the triumphs of his long career are evident in his cocksure smile and, metaphorically, in the voluminous blooms of a rose trained in an arc around the fanlight over the door.

  Flipping deeper into the book, Nick finds himself at the chapter devoted to Colorquake, the book that launched Lear like a NASA space shot. It wasn’t his first, though most people wouldn’t know that now, not even the thousands of women who have named their sons Ivo, after the impish, stout-limbed lad at the center of the story. Quietly, doggedly, over the crucial years many would consider a young man’s prime, Lear published a handful of earnest storybooks aimed at children with the usual aversions: to manners, to sleep, to the dark, to vegetables, to the sermonizing of grown-ups. All were quirky and finely drawn, but the young heroes and heroines had a bland, generic appearance a little like the children of Edward Gorey, as if drawn by an adult who had never enjoyed being a child and certainly wouldn’t want to raise one. All that changed with the perennially beloved Ivo.

  Nick turns a page and starts reflexively at the image that once terrified him (though he would never have admitted it to whichever sibling was reading aloud at the time): Ivo standing in the forest clear
ing, barefoot, his clothing in tatters, his eyes closed. He stands with his arms stretched out to either side, and from every direction, birds, butterflies, and insects alight on his body as if he were a tree, while squirrels and moles convene at his feet. To young Nick, it wasn’t just the squeamish notion of having grasshoppers and crickets perched along his arms that gave him the willies; it was the way the boy’s pose reminded him of the crucifix he’d glimpsed on the wall of a playmate’s house. His mother had explained the Easter story to him, but not till he left home for school would he come to realize how odd his religious ignorance was.

  Nick has always wondered whether Colorquake appeals more to the adults who read it aloud than it does to their children. In the forty years since its publication, endless theses have been published on the allegorical power of the story, claiming allusions to the Holocaust, to Saint Francis, to sexual awakening, even to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Lately, there have been murmurings that Lear was even, presciently, writing about the potential disaster of climate change. Good Lord, how could Lear have tolerated all that lily gilding, that cerebral fuss? That is one of the questions Nick would have asked him today.

  His mobile hums. Andrew. He cannot ignore Andrew, whose faith in Nick won him the role over far more bankable actors—and, notably, before the awards. Now Andrew buzzes with glee, gloating to the formerly fretful execs that he knew all along; he knew Nick would prove his mettle, would go fucking platinum. Andrew could practically have cast a random nutter plucked from the street; that’s the clout of three Oscars (one of which he won as a young actor, two as a director). Back in more barbaric times, he would have had a gold-tasseled casting couch, the exclamation point concluding an epic line of women stretching from his sentried gate on Mulholland clear to Venice Beach.

  A text: Can Nick fly out for a meeting tomorrow?

  Impossible. So sorry. Heading out to Lear’s house. Speak tonight?