Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

On a day in which the Santa Ana winds lived up to all the morose and mystical things ever written about them, Marcus called a meeting between himself, Dodd and his “Katy” in which he made a proposition so startling and bizarre it could not be ignored. After much thought, much agonizing thought, he said, he’d come to conclude that the body of Louis Trotter should be exhumed and reburied on the grounds of La Colonne — or better still, burned there and thrown to the winds.

Brother and sister thought he’d gone mad yet again. But as the minutes ticked on, then the hours and the days, they realized it was the most sound and gorgeous of proposals. Louis Trotter would finally have a memorial that was fitting, or, to put a finer point on it, fit for the digger’s grandiose, quixotic imaginings.

And so it was achieved — the hows and whens and legalities thereof have no import here. A small service was performed on what was now most assuredly Carcassone Way. In years thereafter, only one family member would ever set foot upon those strange and hallowed grounds again.

When he turned twenty-eight, Dr. Trotter made the trip to Redlands. Ruth had died the year before, and Harry was looked after by around-the-clock nurses, their salaries paid by the estate of Louis Trotter. He was frail but comfortable.

Suddenly, the journal was back in his hands. He went to the swinging couch on the porch and opened it. The pages were empty of handwritten text but filled with aged clippings and photos: Variety blurbs, rare-book-auction announcements, Oxfordiana, SRO rooming-house vouchers, Frenchie’s receipts for payment of services rendered (signed by “G. Mott”) — that sort of sad miscellany. For years, the son had had his own ideas of what was between the covers of News from Nowhere , fueled in part by Marcus’s occasional references to “the work,” something of high literary merit, a tour de force with bravura passages offering insights of a life hard lived, hard fought and hard-won. Like an archaeologist in virgin tombs, he expected to uncover whole sections of cramped cursive — the cacoëthes scribendi that is the hallmark of any schizophrenic worth his salt — and had already envisioned himself in New York while his father took the stage amid thunderous applause to collect his National Book Award from Philip Roth. As a parting gift, Harry gave him a manila envelope of photographs, some of which he’d looked at more than fifteen years ago while sitting on the couch beside Grandma Ruth — and again, in his father’s boyhood bedroom.

With the ragtag anthology on the seat beside him, the doctor drove directly to La Colonne. He ducked through the privet as he once did with Pullman (he had ordered the illicit entry never to be repaired). Approaching the tower, he pretended to see the great speckled jowl of that “continental gentleman” jut neatly from the ocular penthouse window. He could hear chuffing in the air; the ashes of his grandfather — and Bluey too — had long since been scattered through the meadow, and God-knew-what innumerable castle niches that sweet-soul’d couple had found, white-gray smudges on the cracked stones of eternity. He imagined them all inside: Edward coquettishly swathed in tulle, Trinnie and Marcus on their wedding, and Amaryllis and his boyhood self, awkwardly groping. The property was eventually to be given to the city as a public park maintained in perpetuity by the family trust, and he did not think he would visit until then, when its history would be softened by time and the impersonal mass of the world.

He reached into the envelope and pulled out a photo of his parents standing before the tower throwing rice on departing guests. As he left La Colonne, he brushed the tiny blossoms from his coat, thinking how much they looked like the celebratory grains of farewell.

Yes, his accent had returned full-blown, as had most of his bulk and prodigious physical energy — he did the work of ten men around the graveyard, and it had never looked better. He supervised new plantings (some at the suggestion of his wife) and carved beautiful flowers into the wooden benches, painting them so subtly that their effect was visible only at close inspection. In other words, he was mindful of the visitors, whether tourists or mourners, and would do nothing to intrude upon or upset the spirit of place. The caretaker would not disturb or senselessly upgrade that which was already aesthetically pleasing; he would, as he put it, “have no part of grimthorpery.”

He still hung his hat at Cañon Manor — though its quietus would never be the same. The Beverly Vista neighborhood had begun to thrive again, as the courts had forced Quincunx to divest its residential holdings. And though Dot discouraged it, sometimes Will’m (or Topsy, if you like; either will do) stayed in a small shed on the edge of the Candlelighters’ plot, one he’d done up in trompe l’oeil so that it looked like a modest Gothic church. (Mr. John Ruskin might have approved.) The gregarious and immensely knowledgeable “Big Will’m” was sought out by those who came to visit the park’s more famous dead, and was given a generous write-up in the Times that did not allude to his provenance. He was especially beloved by children, who found him a rowdy, eccentric delight. In that role alone, Dot found him a terrific asset.

One day he saw a familiar face by the columbaria. It was Winter. He hadn’t seen her in a while and asked how she’d been. Well, said the nanny, she’d done “a bang-up job with my Ketchum,” who now happened to be off raising hell at some Swiss boarding school or other — then she smiled wistfully and said he really had turned out to be a brilliant, considerate, wonderful boy. She said she was going home. She looked older but was still elegant, and the crystal blue of her eyes made one think that most of her had already departed for northern climes. He spoke animatedly of her imminent return to Iceland and of the great sagas born there — how he, William Morris, longed to go back and translate more of its epics. (The first publication, he said, had met with great success.) Aside from those assertions, for which she’d been prepared by Toulouse, she found him eminently sane, if eminently Victorian too.

He wondered what she was doing over by the tall drawers of the dead. The caretaker assumed she was here to see the boy, since her employers had been scattered to the Bel-Air winds. Yet Edward lay some forty yards off from the place that held her attention. Perhaps, he thought, she was meditating and wandering a bit as she did, girding herself for the approach to his grave.

“I’m thinking of selling mine,” she said, out of nowhere.

“Selling? What do you mean, woman?”

“When she died, Mrs. Trotter left me a crypt. I knew about it for years — sort of. She always called it a ‘condominium.’ ” Marcus laughed, without meanness. “ ‘I’ve got a wonderful condo for you!’ she said. And Mr. Trotter — dear man — confirmed it. I thought it was some three-bedroom high-rise in Century City, but it turned out to be something else entirely, didn’t it? Well … that’s what you get when you start thinking grand.” She looked at one of the upper slots. “Dot said someone might give me a hundred and fifty thousand for it.”

“I think it’s a damn fine idea, ma’am — sell it! Otherwise it’s here, waiting on you. Sell it. And when it’s your time, have ’em hurl you into a crevasse in the motherland! That’s what I’d do.”

“Maybe so, Marcus. Maybe so.”

“It’s Will’m,” he said kindly. “If you please.”

They strolled over to the Candlelighters’ land.