Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Thomas Aquinas wrote,” said the pastor, “ ‘It is me who Jesus was looking for — not water. It is me .’ ” He crossed his hands over his chest. “It is you ”—he nodded to the mourners. “It is the seven buried children Jesus was looking for when he sat at the well.”

There were seven now — seven anonymous babes she had helped bury in as many months. Today’s child, Joyce had named Jakob. It still tore at her to know that in the eyes of the law, the new christenings were only symbolic; the interred must remain Jane and John Does, forever.

They stood listening to the indifferent fountain of the freeway while a young girl walked forward with a basket and released a dove, for Jakob. It hovered there, taking Joyce’s breath away. Another basket released six more that soared above as the mourners arched their necks. The lone dove rocketed to the others — as if choreographed by a maudlin god, they moved this way and that in unison, a school of wondrous flying fishes in a topsy-turvy sea before erasing themselves in the smog of infinity.

As Joyce drove back to Bel-Air, it occurred to her with a shudder: she had never named him. Fourteen weeks in the ICU and her son had had no name. Then one day, her husband suggested Edward. Depressed and spent, she acquiesced.

Dodd Trotter was, as his precocious daughter averred, the eighteenth-richest person in the world — or thereabouts, given market fluctuations. †If his total worth, as construed by available SEC filings, were divided by America’s GNP (a financial monthly had merrily done the math), his estimated personal wealth would equal a rough 0.19 percent of the U.S. economy. That is how this sort of money multiplies: it rises and converges, thunders, pelts and showers, then, like a perfect storm, leaves rainbows all around.

He became another poorly groomed, badly dressed coverboy of the money rags— Fortune, Portfolio, Tycoon —though one especially beloved, for it was Dodd’s spectacular feat to have made the greatest amount of dollars in the shortest amount of time in the pecuniary history of man. This centerfold anomaly, comely string of ciphers beneath silky spreadsheets, was responsible for the birth of Forbes ’s infamous MPH graph, where IPO booty is half-whimsically measured in “millions per hour.” Like geeky campfire tales, bizarre analogies and goosebumpy stats abounded: such as how the man’s annual take matched the incomes of a hundred thousand blue-collar workers combined — or how it wasn’t even worth his time to stoop to pick up a $20,000 bill, if there were such a thing, because he’d make more than that in the seconds wasted by the effort.

When Dodd met his wife (Joyce Gilligan was his father’s “second” secretary, a sad sack resigned to spinsterhood) he was still working for Trotter Waste Systems. To get out from under, he invested $13 million in the fledgling start-up of a once high-flying industry, which the reader has by now surely inferred. He renamed the company Quincunx, at the suggestion of his sister — the golden calf could have been called ePiss or iShit for all anyone cared — and within three years he was Dodd Trotter the Eighteenth and we’ll leave it at that. Once, details of the acquisition of vast personal fortune were revelatory, offering insight and inspiration; those times are no more.

Now he walks through a building, earbud wire slacking to a phone hidden in his pocket. He does not have the fashion sense of his dad; balding since he was thirty, he shaves his own head, usually missing meadowy patches of hair at the base of the skull. He is in the mood to buy an empty shell of a structure, another in the strange series his daughter Lucy already avouched. Today, his real estate consultant has steered him to a Beaux Arts husk: the Higgins Building at 2nd and Main.

What was it about vacant buildings that captivated him? He shared the idiosyncrasy with his father — both engaged in epic searches, one seeking new edifices for the dead, the other dead edifices once for the living. For Dodd, it had begun with a magazine article about an abandoned nineteenth-century asylum in Connecticut. He’d bought it sight unseen, then moved on to rusted refineries, desecrated churches, ghostly downtown movie palaces — all of which he determinedly refused to develop. Consortiums built private prisons in hopes of landing government contracts; when that didn’t happen, the bankrupted jails still stood. Dodd had already snapped up three such institutions and had no other plans but to let them sit.

He obeyed Joyce’s command to see a specialist, who immediately prescribed Prozac for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, 100 mg, once a day; BuSpar, also for OCD, 15 mg, twice a day; Seroquel (an anti-psychotic he took for sleep), 100 mg, once at night; Tegretol (mania), 200 mg, three times a day; Neurontin (mania), 300 mg, twice in the morning, once at noon, twice at night; and Lamictal, for “rapid cycling” between poles of mania and depression, one tablet, twice a day. He cheated with Prozac, adding 100 mg in the afternoons. The specialist said Prozac tended to “elate” a manic.

“I’ll get you archive photos,” said the consultant, shuffling through lobby debris. “Everything’s from the thirties,” he said. “It was all marble — before the scavengers got to it … make a great loft building.” He pointed to the ceiling. “All this was copper conduit. Brass doorknobs everywhere, engraved with HB. Clarence Darrow used to rent a whole floor.”

“Hello?”

“Clarence Darrow used to have offices—”

“Hi, Mom.”

“I’m not disturbing you, Doddy?”

“Not at all,” he said, continuing his walkabout. Realizing that Mr. Trotter was taking a call, the consultant moved away to give him privacy. Dodd pushed the earbud further in as he spoke into thin air. “Just looking at property.”

“What else is new?” said Bluey, sardonically.

“How are you feeling?”

He knew she was calling to discuss the day’s obits.

“Well, Winter told me a marvelous joke.”

“Is Winter doing stand-up now?”

“Don’t you be silly,” she laughed. “Would you like to hear, Doddy?”

“I would. Yes, I would, Mother, very much.”

The consultant cautioned him to take care as Dodd poked around at the base of the stairs. A solitary pigeon watched their lazy progress.

“We were going over my album and Winter suddenly says, ‘God was sobbing on a cloud.’ Well, her delivery was so natural, Doddy, that I had no idea what she was saying. I said, ‘Winter, what on earth are you talking about?’ ‘God was sobbing on a cloud,’ she said, cool as can be, ‘when an angel floated up and said, “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” And God says, “I’m in love with an atheist — but she doesn’t even know I exist!” ’ Isn’t that marvelous, Doddy?”

“Wonderful.”

“I thought it a delightful thing. And Winter — well, I never knew her to tell a joke. And she doesn’t know where she heard it, but it must be Thurber or Wilde. It does sound like Wilde, doesn’t it, Doddy?”

“It’s very witty.”

“Oh, Doddy, did you read about the poor little girl killed in Brentwood?”

A fifteen-year-old who went to school in the Palisades had been struck by a car in a Montana Avenue crosswalk; Lucy had already told him, but he didn’t let on.

“Tell me what happened.”

“The father saw her get hit — how awful! How could you ever get over seeing something like that? An old man, who shouldn’t have been driving. Ninety-four years old! They showed the shrine on the news. That’s what they do now, the friends and neighbors tape letters and flowers to telephone poles until they rot away. Do you remember the Deutschmans?”