Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Under mysterious moonlight (much like Lucy’s taper girl, but wearing a Y’s bis LIMI box-coat) she made her way to the broken tower. The wind blew wild and the yews’ brushy applause made her hair stand on end, a commotion that covered the startled exhalation of a man in pressed bib overalls; he saw she wasn’t a trespasser and hung back, charting her progress from the blind of a myrtle ball. She entered the column, snubbed by the lonely groups of dusty white tents within, then clambered up a corkscrew stairwell to the fourth-floor bed. Everywhere was mildew, and bad smells; weeks ago, a possum died up there, seeping fluids into the faded, hand-printed Indian-patterned toile de Jouy.

She got into bed, drew the cold cover to her collarbone and fell quickly to sleep.

We should leave the Trotters awhile; they’ll do well enough alone. An essential part of our story takes place downtown — the jump from riches to rags, admittedly shopworn, cannot be helped.

The buttery treats Bluey favored herself at hospital could only be found at Frenchie’s, a homely shop on Temple Street. They were something relatively new, made from pomegranate grains dressed with almonds by the affable, rail-thin Gilles Mott, Mrs. Trotter’s longtime confectionary confidant. She’d met him years ago, detouring from a museum walkabout; a sugary courtship had begun.

But this isn’t the moment to speak of the exuberance with which the baker donated fresh pastries to local missions and shelters (his favorite being St. Vincent’s, called Misery House by habitués) or of the 255-pound homeless schizophrenic named Will’m, who asserted a steady appreciation for those donated goods, not to mention a profoundly nuanced affinity for baking them too — who lived beneath an overpass in a customized dwelling made from wedded squads of GE refrigerator boxes etched and blotted with finely wrought ink-and-Crayola murals — Will’m (for that is how he pronounced it, and those around him followed suit), who spoke fluently of a Victorian circle of friends and lovers in a voice that could boom, if he chose, which rarely he did, like a god’s or beast’s among men. It is time to speak of Amaryllis, age eleven, toffee-colored, ravenous, rapturous nail-biter, leonine head of hair, self-taught and more than capable of reading the entire Los Angeles Times in a two-and-a-half-hour go; who keeps a cigar box, its thin trapdoor-mouth shut by straight pins, filled with favorite clippings; whose tiny breasts, beneath vintage tatterdemalion Natalie Imbruglia sweatshirt, are discolored by burns and scarified by cutting — one ruined nipple chronically leaking clear fluid — whose thighs and buttocks are blistered by a shiny field of keloids: all this, one way or another, courtesy of her mother, Geri, who not so long ago stopped being thirty-three. Dark-skinned, ash-blond and ashen, she lies with broken larynx on the mattress, having hemorrhaged into the strap muscles of her neck, with attendant fracture of the greater cornu of the left hyoid bone. So the coroner’s report later said.

Amaryllis sits at Geri’s bedside (not too close) four or five times a day. She peers at the body, looks away, then back; away — listening to the Muzak of everyday life, the shouts, coughs, thumps, canned TV laughs — then back, watching a whirligig of light and shadow on her mother’s sparkless face, torso propped awkwardly in death almost a week now. A knotted sheet loops under chin and the corpse endures the prop with dignity, like a vaudevillian undergoing a zany toothache cure. Staring thus, Amaryllis is sometimes unsure of what she sees, as when finding a word in the paper she cannot decipher, though it be goadingly familiar. Young siblings sleep in kitchen on flattened cardboard while she sprays 409 around the body, already draped in extra sheets and anchored by pillows to stanch the smell.

Friday, when Amaryllis first discovered her, she knew something irrevocable had happened. Yet if she called 911 or brought someone to look and it turned out Geri was only sleeping, she would dearly pay. So the girl sat and stared instead, thinking: If she doesn’t wake up for my birthday, she’s really dead . The time for commemoration came and went.

The sheet snakes over headboard and catches the neck before returning whence it came. During her vigil, kneeling like a supplicant before the bed, Amaryllis contemplates the creamy cable of linen whose underbed origins are too spooky to imagine, let alone investigate. What, exactly, did this sheet want with her mom? It was like something out of that movie she saw on TV — alarm clocks, blankets and dustpans flying around behind bedroom doors as if they had minds of their own (that little midget woman came to save the day). But Amaryllis is busy enough hushing and feeding and changing the babies to dwell: been busy like that for years. The babies are good and beautiful and she loves them with all her heart. She sings made-up lullabies, and, when they finally sleep, goes out to forage.

The giant gave her food and pastries. At first, she thought he wanted to touch her, but he never did. Topsy — that’s what Will’m wished her to call him — was a scavenger himself and provided the girl with cooked meals in hard plastic containers covered with aluminum foil, courtesy, he said, of chefs at the Biltmore. Sometimes the unlikely couple ate high-end spoils under the 4th Street Bridge, where he lived; he threw scraps to a confederate’s dog, a mangled pit bull called Half Dead. He spoke British and the sound of the words was rich and full and coarse and it seemed to her he’d shatter the air itself if ever he gave full voice.

Topsy hailed from a village called Essex, a place “now terribly Cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder.” The house he was evicted from had been (might still be) called Woodford Hall, and he said he longed to go back — though he sometimes referred to the childhood seat as Elm House or Red House, Kelmscott Manor or Horrington; Bexleyheath in Kent, the Retreat at Hammersmith, Queen’s Square or Merton Abbey on the River Wandle near Wimbledon. Among many peculiar things he spoke of were his “beastly, wondrous” adventures in Iceland, his beloved wife, Jane, and Jenny, their epileptic daughter; and a current labor of love, the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. Topsy loathed anything modern, and it seemed to Amaryllis he had the impression the year— this year of Our Lord — was 1840 or ’60 or ’80 or sometime “bigly twixt.” He used words she read in the newspaper but had never understood, and took the time to tell her what they meant (she thought that explaining the English language was all part of being an Englishman).

He lived in a box on which he’d painstakingly drawn a colorful woodsy scene. Underbridge denizens had dubbed this nomadic place the Cadillac because of its capacious dimensions and luxury; Topsy called it the Manor. She had never seen such a lovely thing — graced by a mural filled with bounteous trees and birds and fruits, leaves and blossoms, flying insects and little branches. On sallow windblown trompe l’oeil banners, Topsy had inscribed

i once a king and chief

now am the tree bark’s thief

ever twixt trunk and leaf

chasing the prey.

He never asked her inside, and of that she was almost glad, but Amaryllis heard its sturdy corrugated cardboard furnishings had been fashioned by his able craftsman’s hands. When visiting, Topsy made sure they sat out of sight of the street; the police, he said, mostly left the encampment unbothered, but the presence of a young girl was something they’d be forced to look into. The underbridge wasn’t gloomy — airy as Union Station, its hilly carpet of dirt was packed clean and firm. On sunny days, a breeze like the sigh of a secret garden blew through. There were sleepy dogs (other than Half Dead, who never seemed to sleep at all), well-behaved “town-birds”—that’s what Topsy called them — and bleached white dishrags that on closer inspection showed themselves to be large rats the English colossus had poisoned and deposited by the gray concrete stanchions like so many houseplants. Most of the time, the two didn’t take a formal meal; he gave her the boxes to bring home, offering samples from each, along with simple, civilized lectures about their individual ingredients as she tasted. He knew something about her, because she’d told him things over the months. He knew about her brother and sister and gave food for them that was easy to chew: butter-squash soups, marmalade and mashed potatoes. (She always made certain to bring the containers back, neatly scrubbed.) Lately, when he asked after her mother, Amaryllis lied.