Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

In time Joyce returned to Pierce Brothers with Father de Kooning, whose blessings she required. The Bel-Air matron needed confirmation that her crusade didn’t smack of dilettantism, that what she was considering was real and mighty and good.

The pastor mentioned meeting her sister at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital, and Joyce testily corrected him: sister- in - law . It seemed like she could never escape Trinnie — well, she could, but only on Trinnie’s terms … those would be whenever she decided to leave the country or go into rehab (usually doing both at once). And when she returned, the men of this family still dropped everything to pend upon her every move. Now, here Joyce was with Father Tim, her Father Tim, whom she’d first met while doing selfless service at a godforsaken graveyard in Castaic, something Trinnie Trotter would be too stoned or bored or grandiose to ever do, and here he was serving her up just like that! Your sister-in-law , he said, was kind enough to be donating her services in designing a garden for the hospital (“kind” because even in her dereliction she was expensively renowned) — with a coy smile he called ministering at the hospital his “day job,” meaning, thought Joyce, the real place he worked, the place that paid and sustained him, the place with a tangible, needy, dying parish, the place a thousand leagues above whatever after-school volunteer eulogizing he happened to do for dumpster babies on behalf of vainglorious society women with too much time on their hands. Her gorgeous, drug-addicted sister-in-law was donating her time, which was precious — precious, priceless Time and Service, making a beautiful, deathless “wandering garden”—whereas she, Joyce, the drab, laughable, very old in-law, the one who had to work her ass off to even look half decent, the one who cruelly brought a crippled genius into the world, was out there burying the discarded dead.

A few visits later, Joyce let it be known to Ms. Campbell that she was in fact a Trotter. She handed her a check for $50,000 as a deposit on a deposit — which Dot happily though confusedly accepted, noting that her father-in-law, “Mr. Louis,” already had a plot and rather famously at that. Joyce said she was well aware, but the space she’d become interested in was for a “different” family, one she was quite close to and for which she wished to make this gift. That melted Dot’s heart, triggering a lengthy, somewhat inappropriate monologue of how her sister Ethel told her of a “great scandale —a horrible woman bought up all the remaining cemetery space in the Hamptons — for her own family of course, not for others . A hundred and ten plots! The selfishness!” Joyce listened and clucked along before making it exceptionally clear that she did not wish her visits or intentions passed on to the Trotter patriarch; she would tell him in time. She assumed Ms. Campbell gossiped with employees, so took it upon herself to reiterate as much to the character we know as Sling Blade, who was surprised and impressed that she and the old man were related. For his part, he couldn’t help wondering if Joyce would soon put him to work. The possibility caused him some anxiety, what with Dot being not at all shy about expressing her dissatisfaction with his growing absenteeism. The clan had him moving around so much — as occasional night watchman at various properties, for which he was on the Quincunx payroll, and sometime Mauck chauffeur, whereupon the old man tipped him lavishly — that under his breath he called them not Trotters but Gallops. He was not without his own brand of humor.

But have we gone off-trail? Then let us speed the pace.

The billionaire has been steadily adding to his ghost portfolio of empty tenements, and it bothered his wife not a little. Outlaid moneys were not the issue; such a burden Dodd Trotter could easily bear. It wasn’t the cost of the forays that disturbed her but the compulsive behavior surrounding them.

As private wealth increases, cities and states struggle for revenue. Structures once deemed historic are sold off; that is how Dodd came to own the oldest government building in Newark, the Essex County Jail (put up in 1837, it was made by the designer of the Tombs). Mr. Trotter also traveled to Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, to purchase the four-hundred-acre High Victorian Italianate Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane. He is now landlord of the crenellated asylum on the hill in Binghamton, with its trefoil-embossed stair treads and floors embedded with glass blocks; he has bought a somber, elegant bluestone palace with fifty-foot Doric columns, once the Utica State Hospital for the Mentally Ill. He acquired the Traverse City asylum (1885), too, in Michigan, another turreted affair high on the preservationist list.

Dodd Trotter leaves Detroit. From the 40,000-foot-high cocoon of his bed, he daydreams of Beverly Vista School’s vast tarry playground and early-morning fog, where boys floated toward him from the mist like foretellers of doom and misfortune — wrong answers in a novelty eight ball. It strikes him as ironic that he’s helping Marcie Millard and her committee refurbish the edifice, the only vacant building he has ever actually restored.

He notices a blinking light on the console. A steward peeks in and, seeing he’s resting, discreetly begins to exit. The fitful sleeper inquiringly raises his head. It’s your mother, says the steward, and Dodd picks up.

She is calling with today’s deaths.

We’ve almost come full circle.

Bluey too is in bed, happy to have reached her son, imperfect as the satellite connection may be. There’s a little Cessna crash in the local Times —a CEO and his three children — because Dodd is airborne, the item is bypassed in favor of the New York paper’s listing of a one-hundred-year-old “socialite-turned-big-game-hunter and prisoner of war”; then, a famous singer Bluey never heard of, dead at forty from “total organ failure.” She thinks it suspect; sounds like AIDS.

Winter sullenly pastes notices into the suede memory album. Since Pullman’s birthday gala, the Icelander has been somewhat “off,” so grumpy that Bluey calls her “the Winter of my discontent”—which only exacerbates her mood.

After lunch, they walk to the maze and Bluey sits on the granite bench at its entrance. (Trinnie likes that spot, too.) There, she decides to tell the helpmeet she’s going to leave her something in the will. Winter scowls, but the old woman with will-o’-the-wisp hair and translucent bluish temples persists, calm and imperious enough so the younger must listen. She is going to leave her a condo, she says. It is already paid for. Winter gasps as the words sink in — and cries, because no one ever gave her anything, ever, not even the Trotters, not in the thirty-five years she has served them.

Bluey turns to stare down a wall of boxwood leading to the maze’s center. She remembers reading how slaughterhouses were designed with curves so the animals couldn’t see where they were heading. Panicking, she lifts her head to the sky and searches for the plane. “Dodd? Dodd? Doddie!”

Chastened, Winter walks her to the house.

Her daughter, at an AA meeting in an old wooden church on Ohio Avenue.

A homely woman stands to say she turned everything over to God and that meant “antidepressants and nicotine patches, too”—a tacit indictment of the weak hypocrites in the room who cannot do without. She says she isn’t going to celebrate her AA birthday this year (Trinnie thinks: as if anyone cares ) because her home group “forces women to put on dresses” to accept their sobriety cakes. She says she won’t put on a dress for anyone.