Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Howard and Lillian.”

“Well, Howard just dropped dead — at a hundred and three! At St. John’s. Born in St. Petersburg. Did you know he played bridge? The article says he was an expert, even wrote a couple books. Now that, to me, is marvelous … the things you find out, Doddy, after they’re gone! Howard was a great friend of Sybil Brand— there’s a jail you could probably have for a song! It’s closed now, did you know? Where do they put all the prisoners, that’s what I wonder about. What do they do with them? You know, your father and I used to see the Deutschmans all the time at the Hilton, for the benefits. In the grand ballroom — oh, that was long before Merv moved in. Long before. Howard had a degenerative hip. And you’d better believe Lillian’s still cutting a rug, at ninety-one! Who did the Deutschmans know? The Bloomingdales, the Darts, the Jorgensens — now, there’s another one! Earle just died, at a hundred and one. Didn’t I read you that? Do you know what the paper said, Doddy? That he was working out with a personal trainer three times a week and playing tennis before he died. At a hundred and one! It said that Earle Jorgensen spent three days on a schooner watching San Francisco burn after the earthquake — in 1906! Now, that’s old. Did you know Marion — Earle’s wife — did you know that Marion’s son is Donald Bren? He’s got almost as much money as you do, Doddy. Land in Orange County: the Irvine Ranch. And of course Howard and Lillian knew the Annenbergs— everyone knew the Annenbergs. The Deutschmans were very much a part of the Sunnylands Christmas crowd. Walter always called Sunny ‘Mother’—ugh! Don’t you ever call Joyce that, Doddy, don’t you ever!”

She went on like that while he made his way to the sidewalk. The consultant followed and they climbed into the Arnage.

His mother was on to another obituary, and he let her talk all the way to Beverly Hills. It was comforting to hear her chattily cogent, because of late there had been some reason to worry. A few days after the release from Cedars, Winter had found her standing in the hall in frozen repose. Startled, Bluey pretended she was trying to recall where she misplaced a book, but it was clear to Winter that the old woman was literally lost. Dodd phoned their dear friend Dr. Kindman, who suggested she be evaluated for Aricept; the billionaire had seen the Alzheimer’s drug promoted in National Geographic , next to an ad for a pill that was supposed to help your dog remember better when he began having trouble responding to his name. He thought that odd.

He eased his mother off the phone as they neared Beverly Vista, the grade school he had attended as a boy.

Back in the sixties, the Trotters lived on Bellagio Road (they always seemed to live on a road), just outside the eligibility zone of the Beverly Hills school system. Louis could have sent his kids to Buckley or Oakwood or Westlake — could have sent them anywhere — but wanted them in public school instead. So he bought a house on Roxbury, south of Wilshire, and Winter stayed there with the children during the week. Dodd and Trinnie could walk to grade school; that way, when they graduated, they could walk to high school too, even closer but in the other direction. His father liked the unpretentious small-town feel of that. Hadn’t Beverly High’s “trapdoor” swimming pool been famously filmed in It’s a Wonderful Life ?

His alma mater had turned to him for help. BV had been badly damaged in the Northridge quake; since then, the lovely orange-brick California Romanesque revivalist-style buildings were entirely fenced-in, with students housed in “temporary” school-yard bungalows. The district wanted to demolish the school and build state-of-the-art facilities, but there was opposition, both nostalgic and fiscal.

The Board of Education came up with an Environmental Impact Report that provided four suggestions. The first was to do nothing — they called it the No Project Alternative, meaning the bungalows would remain. The second was the Auditorium Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; the third, a Partial Historic Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; and last, a Historic Rehabilitation Alternative — restoration of the school as in its heyday. The fight was between the PTA, who wanted to tear the thing down, and the preservationists, who reminded that all schools in the precious Beverly Hills system were official historic landmarks. The feud had lasted years.

Marcie Millard, former treasurer of their eighth-grade class and now honorary president of the PTA, had charmingly approached Dodd at a scleroderma fund-raiser. She looked the same as he had always pictured her, hair upswept and old-fashioned, as it had been in the school production of The Music Man . She made sure to refer to such shared touchstones — long-ago plays, outings, cultural ephemera — when they spoke, yet Dodd had the perverse sense she didn’t really remember him, and had found out by chance (or the Internet) that he was an alumnus. Sometimes her words and manner seemed too scripted and eager, but maybe that was just her way. Marcie’s kids were now at BV and she expressed her disgust and contempt for “the scandal of district politics” that had caused the near seven-year delay in renovations. The children, she said, were the ones who suffered. She wanted to know if Dodd would be interested in funding a new campus, ballsily suggesting the school might even bear his name as a result of his largesse.

So there he was again, walking through another shell, this time retracing smaller steps taken more than thirty years before. The group — Marcie and her carefully selected PTA brethren: architect, dentist, restaurateur — wore hardhats and missionary smiles, as if the mere presence of Dodd Trotter, their Dodd Trotter, class of ’71, completed— sanctified —the dream team. Their billion-dollar angel.

Passing through the condemned halls spooked him. He went to the rest room, and Marcie called after, “Not sure the equipment’s working too well in there!” He stood on the spidery-fissured diamond-patterned tiles and peered through the wire-cage windows. The architect came in, trying a faucet, which erupted in a rusty geyser. When the water cleared, he washed his hands and reminisced about a field trip they’d taken to Paradise Cove. Dodd said he’d never been to Paradise Cove and the architect had to admit he’d confused him with Tim Gaspard, a brainy boy who played the harp.

Before he left, Marcie made a final plea. She hoped, she said, they could create an environment as creative and technologically sophisticated as the campus at Four Winds, where Dodd’s children were enrolled. Oh, she’s good , he thought.

The consultant waited in the car while Dodd took a slow walk around the school’s circumference, ringed by stucco’d condominiums and duplexes in the French Normandy or Spanish Colonial style, their attractive leaded-glass bay windows presiding over tiny lawns like great dark open mouths. His attention turned to the playground. The prefab bungalows were hideous; how bizarre that parents had tolerated them all these years. A bell rang and children poured out. He was startled how a generation had changed the complexion of the student body from garden-variety Jew to Benetton: Korean, Latino and Persian.

They all looked happy enough.

Earlier, had Mr. Trotter looked back through the Bentley’s smoky rear window as it pulled away from the historic Higgins Building — had he had cause to look back — he might have seen a fiftyish detective in a serge suit rounding the corner. The gentleman had a homeless man in tow, or rather was towed by the homeless man; they’d just come from the St. George, where only yesterday the badly decomposed body of a woman had been found in bed, strangled by her own sheets.