Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Toulouse was still in love. It was unnecessary to remind her of the pledge he had made — she knew full well his feelings. She did love him, but could not jump, as Lucy had with Travis Tryeferne; perhaps, thought Amaryllis gloomily, that was her flaw. The truth was, too much had happened in her young life for her to ever have a passionate, clear-cut feeling. Eroticism and emotions had been commingled, and mangled too, and ghosts conspired to put a governor on her ability to sort it all out. Things had been done to her of which she never told a soul. Eventually, she would, thus opening a door to the world; it can be assumed that Toulouse Trotter would be standing there, first in line, in forthright, timorous fashion, holding a slender stalk of honeysuckle and passionflowers. She would let him in. But that time was not now, nor would it be for some years. There would be other loves and other heartaches for both, the lesser ones which they’d share as best friends do. By that time (the time they found each other), Amaryllis would have consecrated a Westside Frenchie’s, hard by Le Marmiton, and its wafery creations would make her name — and bake it too.

What was Toulouse Trotter doing while the door to her heart remained closed (or at least secured against entry of all but an occasional breeze of sweet nothings)? Well, he was doing the things that young people do while casting about for “meaning.” Taking a leaf from Lucy’s earliest Smythson, he attempted to write what he thought to be a touching absurdist play about his cousin, called Prince Headward (after careful consideration, the somewhat sacrilegious title was revised to Edward the First ). Sadly, the title was its high point. He traveled the world, notching this and that power spot on his belt, taking care to avoid places visited during the famous Four Winds holiday — not an altogether easy task. He became enamored of Cambodia and New Guinea, Java and Madagascar, Abu Dhabi and the Maldives, Zanzibar and Nepal, and kept the river on his right during the requisite near-death, near-homosexual experiences of an inveterate adventurer; he had dalliances with nymphomaniacal girls who spoke pidgin English; he sometimes stayed with families who thought him a poor vagabond — in short, got up to all the normal mischief that could be expected of any self-respecting scion.

He never stayed away too long (whenever home, he bunked at Cañon Manor), and sent his parents a raft of letters, which Trinnie thought so wonderful she threatened to have published under the title Off the Road . Particularly savored was the antic account of Toulouse’s re-enactment of his father’s legendary walk from Oxford to the great earthwork of Silbury Hill, a path William Morris himself had once trod as an undergrad. He called his dispatches “News from Anywhere,” a nod to the log Marcus kept all those years and had long ago given him for safekeeping — a gesture so intimate that his son had immediately handed it over to Harry and Ruth.

The young man at last fell upon the career of medical doctor, with a specialty in maxillofacial reconstruction; he had no stomach for blood, so it didn’t pan out. His studies did get him writing again, penning thoughts on morbidity and mortality (which had become a clichéd literary genre in itself) — but the trenchant, tender quality of Dr. Trotter’s observations proved anomalous, and anomalously marketable at that. Now wisely engaged in dermatological pursuits, he wrote as elegantly of lupus as he did of childhood acne, though readers generally conceded his finest essay to date concerned a dog — his own.

Toulouse had meant to meditate on his cousin’s infirmity but wound up memorializing Pullman instead. In “A Harlequin Romance,” he wrote how as a boy his mother had tried to put him off Great Danes, owing to the breed’s short life-span, and recounted that tragicomic year of vicarious hypochondria wherein Pullman was needled, massaged and therapized. But the dog turned eight, then ten, then twelve, then fourteen … an age thought impossible for the breed.

Then he disappeared.

At first, Toulouse thought that in a misguided act of charity, his mother and the Monasterios had taken it upon themselves to incinerate the finally dead creature and concoct a story of his mysterious departure. But they withered under his interrogations — he had after all inherited the digger’s formidable “nose”—and the young man concluded that if they had been responsible, they’d have surely come clean under his assault.

He had gory theories galore: someone had struck the dog with a car then buried him in a literal cover-up — or that Pullman had collapsed and fallen into a street-maintenance dugout, where the body was inadvertently mutilated by pipe cutters or whatnot, then simply buried by workers out of sheer expediency. Awakening in the middle of the night from a dream, he was certain the dog was in the maze, but would then remember it had been uprooted and that the house on Saint-Cloud was no more.

About a year after Marcus moved to Cañon Manor, Trinnie began taking lovers again, as she had all those years he was absent. If Marcus knew, he kept his feelings close; she was a good mother and a good friend and he had no right to tell her anything. Their own lovemaking had come and gone like a freakish meteorological event that would never recur. (She had been wrong when she thought she conceived in the tower on their return; the doctors said she was now barren.) Katrina Berenice Trotter Weiner made excuses, telling herself they just needed time. He was having relapses — an accent had crept back to his voice, and the tailor Montalvo called to say that Marcus had ordered a dozen suits in “the bespoke Victorian cut.” The bill was to be sent to a certain W. Morris of Kelmscott Manor. But the details of his infirmity no longer seduced — once the stained glass was broken, the rebuilt church could not allure. When she left for Slovakia (Ralph Mirdling and Ms. Keaton had since broken up and he was directing a film there) and stayed six weeks, husband and wife spoke twice a day, and that gave Marcus great joy. Sometimes when she returned from her travels, she was so exhausted that he nursed her. Once she almost needed to be hospitalized again, and he brought her to Cañon Manor because she couldn’t sleep. She paced like a wraith at all hours, muttering in a fugue state, “I killed him! I killed him — it was my blow that killed him!” He shushed and kissed and rocked her in his arms; it was so beautiful and so awful that the boy could hardly watch.

La Colonne Détruite outlived all the Trotter residences. Ironically, it was Marcus who exhorted for its preservation, as had William Morris for the preservation of cathedrals “and other ancient buildings.” (He had in fact been acting as a kind of informal curator for the structures in his brother-in-law’s shrinking portfolio of skeletal landmarks.) He argued that the broken tower was simply too grand a curiosity to demolish. But there was another, far more compelling, reason not to tear it down.

Marcus Weiner continued to frequent the Westwood cemetery — why beat about the bush? It may now be said that with the dotty Ms. Campbell’s blessing, Mr. Weiner eventually took over the duties of Sling Blade, who, as the result of a small inheritance left him by Louis Trotter, renounced his career as park caretaker. (Mr. Blade was unsure of his future and needed time to lay fallow; he was, as he put it, “on sabbatical.” More certain of their path were the indomitable Monasterios: Epitacio, Eulogio and Candelaria. With money bequeathed them by Edward — who, aside from having feelings of great affection, had harbored a residuum of guilt for having forced them to betray their employers in the matter of the AWOL orphan — the hardworking family bought a fleet of Town Cars and founded a livery company, which they christened, in eccentric yet poignant homage, E. A. Trotter & Sons.) He raked and watered and polished, pointing tourists toward celebrity stones — but never got over a gnawing sense of incompletion during his “unquiet” peregrinations of the digger’s monumentless greens.