Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

With a doctor’s close supervision, Lani weaned Amaryllis off the residual drugs prescribed during her final stint at MacLaren and reestablished regular visits with the girl’s brother and sister, who lived in a modest home overshadowed by tall electrical towers (the kind favored in fifties alien-invasion flicks) in the city of Lawndale. Amaryllis was enrolled in a progressive district school and in short time won kudos for her special project on saints, with its gold-flecked illuminated text, laminated articles on Sister Benedicta née Edith Stein and an ingeniously imagined diorama of the inner sanctum of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. She made new friends and, aside from the occasional tantrum and teacher-bidden time-out, her recovery was remarkably swift. After school, Amaryllis liked to sit on a stone pillar of the Shakespeare Bridge, overlooking a gully filled with quaint houses. (A generously proportioned lady hanging clothes on the line invariably reminded her of Jane Scull.)

As it happened, Lani and Gilles had tried for several months to stage a reunion between themselves and Marcus Weiner but were stonewalled by his attorneys. Said counsel, protective of their client’s recovery, to say the least, could not have cared less about personal relationships formed during that particular era of Mr. Weiner’s troubled life. Phone calls to Detective Dowling went unreturned in kind, though in all fairness Samson was swamped by cases old and new, and found nothing pressing about the resolute couple’s nostalgic urges. At Montecito, Marcus had asked after the baker (and Amaryllis too), but the detective was chary about starting an egg hunt; there was enough omelette on his old friend’s plate as it was. He did go so far as to discuss the matter with Mr. Trotter, who thoughtfully turned things over to the crack psychotherapeutic team. It was their continued and vaunted opinion that the patient should remain focused on reconstructing his life via insights attained through examination of childhood events — the memories of which were now surfacing nicely — and that it would be premature and counterproductive to revisit street bonds formed while in full delusion.

After a series of long talks with her husband, Lani finally caved. When she handed over Toulouse’s e-mail address, Amaryllis nearly fainted. The child instantly set to composing a trial response in longhand but found the composition as difficult as her suitor had, and as torturous too, for both possessed an elastic sense of time and keenly believed that every minute that passed without them somehow communicating exponentially decreased the chance they would ever see each other again. (So it goes with the very young.) Fortunately, girls are bolder; Amaryllis wrote everything out by suppertime, and her foster mother agreed to let her sit before the keyboard in privacy — though not before a forthright discussion about Master Trotter and his cousins, whose rescue efforts, she reminded, certainly helped in the short term but had had more dubious results as her respite stretched on. For Lani, the bottom line was that Bel-Air was a seductive place, but “you’ve got to keep it real.” She borrowed that phrase from Trinnie, who had dropped it during their chat.

We will not divulge the content of that first e-mail offering or summarize Toulouse’s reply, nor hers after that, nor his that followed — what soon became a deliriously ungrammatical outpouring of gossip, jokes and sweet nothings. But all those nothings added up, and Lani soon curfewed her use of the iMac.

The sudden death of Edward Trotter obliterated upcoming birthday festivities and cast an apocalyptic pall over both Bel-Air houses.

The body was found by a gardener on a far-side Stradella path, leaning on the seat of the buggy that, without fanfare, had lumbered into a stand of hawthorn. Doctor and nurse reached him within minutes but were of no use. Dodd was 45,000 feet in the air when informed; Joyce had to be hospitalized for two days, for she could not catch her breath. Trinnie was at her best during such adversity and would not allow herself to feel the loss, because there were myriad details to which no one else possessed the sobriety to attend. Assured by her steeliness, the old man retreated to the Withdrawing Room in private grief. Bluey, of course, would not be told.

When Toulouse first saw Lucy after the event, she embraced him, then broke away and screamed. She ran off, and he took after her — they fell to the ground and locked on to each other, breath fetid, as if the caverns of their mouths held Edward’s beating heart. Pullman yelped and groaned and for two days was seen near the Boar’s Head Inn retching like a drunk.

The two cousins would not leave each other’s side, and grew giddy with the endless looping catharsis of horror and tears: they kissed hotly and deeply, laughing and sobbing in between, plumbing each other’s depths for their beloved boy. Adults came and went. Lucy and Toulouse hid awhile in the coolness of the Majestyk — they could not yet bear to enter the workshop, with its masks and cowls and bolts of fabric, let alone Edward’s apartments, which they felt should be decreed sacred ground and fenced in like La Colonne. Who would ever have the courage to go up there? Trinnie would, of course (and found a sheaf of papers in the bedroom whose striking contents will shortly be disclosed).

When she stepped from the Inn, the children huddled expectantly, as if she might tell them it was all a mistake; that Edward was resting comfortably in a toile caftan. Instead, she glided forward and held out her arms, which they took to like lost babes and promptly began another round of tremors and tears, the crowns of their heads now smacked by the salty droplets of Trinnie’s own. All she said was, “I know, I know,” and she really did — she knew, and they were glad— everyone was glad — that she knew and that she was there.

The cousins spent the next few days watching grown-ups emerge from the house to embrace or smoke or chat among themselves in low tones, or merely to meditate. First would come Dodd, with Trinnie, who held him; then Epitacio and kin, respectfully scurrying on this or that errand; and Grandpa Lou, with private sector — types, whom they did not recognize. Still others — old money and vanished new new money (and just plain money too); fashion mavens and designers who had loved Edward so; a cadre of their grandfather’s funerary architects (Mr. Koolhaas included); sundry politicians; imperishable icons (Bluey’s dear friend Rosamond Bernier), socialites and blue bloods — famous of themselves who went mostly unrecognized too.

One time they even saw Joyce. She was hugging Trinnie, and while they thought it unnatural, they were glad nonetheless, for she didn’t look at all well. She was led back to the house by poor Winter, who, since the death, had been shuttling between Saint-Cloud and Alzheimer’s World, and whom the children had never seen demonstrate such quintessentially Icelandic reserve. Ushered into the darkness of the tomb-like master bedroom, Lucy visited with her mother ten minutes at a time. Few words were spoken and a uniformed nurse was always present, tucked into a shadowy niche like some kind of low-caste devil.

There was some trouble over the funeral. The papers Trinnie found in Edward’s apartments were copies of those in the packet he’d given his grandfather months before: etchings and photo montages of memorials, ancient and modern. But there was something else — a letter addressed to his aunt. For a change of heart had taken place in the time since he first made his desires known to the old man.

During long baths, mother and son spoke of many things. Joyce told him how she had bought land in Westwood for the abandoned babies, an incursive notion that suddenly appealed to Edward immensely, but for reasons other than charitableness. He thought there was something gorgeously heretical about it; he had found his new “gang.” His grandfather, he reasoned (and all this he carefully set down in the letter TO MY AUNTIE), would be injured by his decision, yet still he’d forever be just a stone’s throw away, so to speak, from that kindly old digger … It was the perfect anonymity of it that had enraptured him and bloomed during his ablutions; he, who had always been stared at and singled out, in wealth and infirmity — he, who had been surrounded by untold riches, would now make his home in the unglamorous swales of the park’s Siberia, surrounded by unnamed discards — the very ones he used to mock!