Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Meanwhile, the boy around whom these rapids swirled couldn’t be bothered. He became irascible, and refused to pay homage to Lucy’s night-surfing or the double-clicks of her anxious heart. Whenever she made the mistake of alluding to her ongoing detective work, he lashed out, leaving a jellyfish sting of hurt. She forgave him everything.

He raged. He plastered bumper stickers — MY KID SHOT YOUR HONOR STUDENT — on faculty cars. He stole hard-boiled eggs and batteries from 7-Eleven and a Schwinn from outside Borders on the Promenade. He provoked fights with stronger, wilier boys and for the first time felt the exhilarating, nauseous pain of hard knuckles against cheekbone, sinus, gut. He was winded and bruised, snide and weepy. He was all over the place. When Mr. Hookstratten beckoned him into his office, Tull said go to hell. At home, on the labyrinth’s cold stone benches or in the narcotized darkness of the cavernous living room, enfolded by walls with shutters of macassar ebony, sprawled on the Jean Royère sofa between Ming-style cabinets of gold-leafed wenge wood, under the Chardin or black-gold Rembrandt, he let his mother stroke his tousled hair, smelling her skin and clothes while he cried all over the fine bushy hairs of her arm.

But no one took him seriously, not even himself — his anger being merely a plot development of The Wounded Boy , Act Two. When a Four Winds Care Team suggested the boy be medicated (they’d carefully interviewed him after a rumor spread that he had a “hit list”), his mother went ballistic. Half the school was on Zoloft, Effexor or Serzone; Tull knew a twelve-year-old who’d been on Prozac since age five. Trinnie was of a mind to pull him out of there. Lackadaisical assholes! With their much-hyped zero-tolerance policy for drugs (whenever a child was caught using, power parents brought in attorneys and the school caved) — Hypocrites! Pushers! Sleazy fucks —she knew all about their fund-raising tactics too: a mom whose kid had been rejected told her how she and her husband were taken out to lunch as part of the “enrollment process” and hit up for half a million because a TRW on an estranged relative had shown income in the high nines. That’s how much the Care Team cared!

With what then besides a fresh delinquency was he left? The idea of a newly minted father, at first intriguing, now disgusted. King of dead-beat dads, a man who’d botched visitation on a heroic scale … Tull conjured a face floating in the air like a newsprint terrorist’s: Marcus the Jackal. He watched the sadistic groom flee in white tux and tails from that strange cracked column while his martyred mother slept. The jackal had ruined her, and Tull would make him pay. As he gamboled with Pullman through the sculpted grounds of Saint-Cloud, he imagined his father blowing up Buddhas with the Taliban — then, in a weaker moment, as the subject of an A&E hagiography — speedily supplanted by a careering, poorly lit chase and capture on America’s Wildest Police Videos . Authorities would usher the boy like a dignitary to his father’s cell. There, shackled, Marcus X (Lucy had not yet vouchsafed the last name) stood cowering in his dirty formal wear and sleepless coward’s eyes as the boy sent a gob of spit his way. The guards laughed approvingly and steered him out by his small shoulders while dearest Dad sank in supplication, old cold hands on cold steel bars.

“An amazing feat,” crowed Edward from the quaint, cozy middle of the Black Lantern Book Shoppe. “Replicating a folly as complex as that — and all in a year’s time! Look! Look here—”

He motored excitedly toward the reticent Tull, a pristine volume of the Amazon FedExed history of Le Désert de Retz in his gloved hand. La Colonne itself graced the cover, while the tower of Edward’s own head wore a blousy façade of red silk; his face the delicate half-mask of a raccoon-like beast he’d fashioned out of feathers and bamboo.

“But what I find so truly weird is how you found your way there! I mean, before knowing any of this.”

“And why you didn’t ever tell us,” whined Lucy.

“Pullman took me,” said Tull, his casualness a bit contrived.

The magnificent animal could be heard cavorting on the streets of the small European-style village where Edward lived. His father had built the fantasia for his son’s convenience and amusement — Edward called it Olde CityWalk — on an acre or so tucked behind the property on Stradella Road. The mobile invalid thought the corny “village” conceit trying, yet its ramps and customized dimensions did make it extraordinarliy livable. A full-time nursing staff was housed in a cobbler’s storefront; the workshop where Edward designed vizards and prosthetics from clay, wood and papier-mâché occupied the Boar’s Head Inn, with his private apartments above. Black Lantern was the perfect model of an English den of antiquities, its shelves stocked with both contemporary fare and volumes two centuries old.

“I mean, Pullman found it.”

“And you kept it all to yourself. Rather elitist, no?”

“How could you, Tull? I hate you!” said Lucy, unconvincingly.

“Still,” said Edward, “it is an astonishing coincidence.”

“There are no accidents,” said Lucy, sagely peering over from her celery-green Smythson steno pad. One thing was certain: she was thrilled to see her brother excited again, about anything— until the discovery of the broken Bel-Air column and its French counterpart, he’d been inscrutable and queerly unenthusiastic about the business of hunting for Mr. Marcus Weiner. “All is predetermined.”

“Then it’s settled,” Edward said, snatching the book from Tull’s hands. “You have to take us.”

“Vive La Colonne!” shouted Lucy.

“A major field trip is in order.”

“Fine,” said Tull, his languidness sounding more staged than he would have liked. If it weren’t his cousin who was asking, he’d have flat-out refused.

“You don’t really have a choice — this whole father thing has you backed into a square corner. That’s a phrase pilots use: it’s when you run out of ideas at the same time you run out of experience. No bueno! ”

“I’m not afraid to go,” Tull said, “but it won’t be easy for you . It’s not exactly wheelchair-friendly.”

Edward stared at the picture book a moment, like a preacher absorbed in a favorite verse before looking up at the flock. “La Colonne Détruite …” he mused, practically licking his chops. “Created on the eve of the Revolution by François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville, gentleman of fashion. The most extraordinary folly in Europe, visited by everyone from Marie-Antoinette to Thomas Jefferson to famed Surrealist André Breton. Vive l’ancien régime! Nestled within a vast park of sycamores and chestnuts, lindens and blue cedars — oh! and let us not forget the imported Virginia tulips! The ‘shattered column’: an image common to the iconography of late-eighteenth-century Freemasonry. And who do we have to thank for this relocated heaven on earth? Why, none other than Grandpa Lou! Our very own Grandpa Lou! How crazy is that! Oh! How absurd! I knew Grandpa was a genius, but this! And kept secret all these years! Hidden! From even the architectural cognoscenti! How, how, how? I tell you, nothing short of astonishing!”

While the children made their plans, Bluey’s birthday was celebrated in the main house. The honoree, in her beloved Oscar de la Renta sequined jacket, sported a vintage Frances Whitney millinery mobile spiraling neatly off her head like a junior Guggenheim, from which it was inspired.