Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Tull put his hand on hers, and the simple gesture meant all the world. “Did you ever hear from him?” he asked.

“No.” Her husband stood up, excusing himself. He used the walker this time.

“But we did hear from Mr. Dowling — the detective who was looking for our son. In the early days he used to call at least once a week. Sometimes we even saw men sitting down the block in their cars. Just sitting. Waiting. I half expected to see Jack Webb! We were worried for Marcus if he did show up, what they’d do — Harry almost called the police on them . But they were decent men. I went out there and gave them pastries. Sometimes Mr. Dowling sent over tickets for a game; Mr. Weiner used to like to go to the Forum. Little gifts, too — nothing too costly. I wasn’t sure if they came from your grandfather … I hoped they hadn’t. Harry and I felt like criminals, but we didn’t do anything wrong! I wouldn’t have told Mr. Dowling even if I had heard from my son. There was not much goodwill left.” Tears caught in her throat, and she apologized. “Such powerful people. Up until a few years ago, Mr. Dowling still called — usually right around the holidays. But no more gifts. I think he felt sorry for us.”

Harry returned with a box. Handing it to Tull, he said it had come in the mail a long while back, without a note. Ruth uncomfortably pooh-poohed it, asking Harry why he’d even bothered. Lucy (and Edward, much as he could) craned their necks while Tull took the lid off to reveal the copy of a book — the very same stolen from Tabori & Co. some fourteen years ago.

Tull lay down on the bed — the bed that was his father’s as a boy — and stared at the ceiling much as he did in his room at Saint-Cloud, realizing Marcus would have done just that at his age: stared at this ceiling, these walls.

He heard the voices of the others, like wavelets lapping — Lucy helping Ruth in the kitchen, Edward and Mr. Weiner having a tête-à-tête. News From Nowhere ’s ex libris proclaimed its sheaves to be PROPERTY OF MARCUS WEINER. Tull delicately fingered the book’s gilt edges and felt its “prenatal calfskin” heft; he sensed the imprint of his father’s hands on the blue-black vellum. He flipped through it — this place called Nowhere seemed to contain an awful lot of news. One of the photo albums piled next to him was cracked open to a portrait of the psycho-prodigal bridegroom in top hat, tails and brocaded vest, his bride in tulle and classic veil, wildly throwing rice at a Bugatti. That’s what his parents had storiedly done, with playful surrealism: thrown rice at departing guests. If that were so, it meant someone would have tossed his parents a bouquet — his father would have caught it, no doubt.

His lame attempt to nap a failure, the boy sat groggily at table while the rest ate desserts: pastries made of pomegranate and almond — a specialty of the old shop, said Harry. Tull thought it the saddest, sweetest thing he’d ever tasted.

Summer — El Monte at eventide. The desiccated wings of insects make for a thin layer of heavenly blisters on the high battlements of MacLaren Children’s Center. The fragrance of sage, jasmine and honeysuckle fans over Mac’s dusky campus grounds past a waterless pool donated by Barbra Streisand; a mural of seagull and ocean spray, insipidly anodyne; the campus boutique wherein misbegotten children trade goodness points for CDs, T-shirts and donated effluvia — locked down tight.

Eventide at Mac — dinner is done.

The volunteer grannies have all gone home.

The floors are waxed. Meds dispensed. Order all around.

The children, secure in their units.

The orphan — all orphans here! — is ensconced in Pixie cottage. That is her domain. For those her age, there are Pixies (girls) and there are Tigers (boys). Last week a Tiger huffed a hairstyling foam aerosol and died; grievous news for United Friends of the Children, who’d recently donated a batch to the brand-new beauty salon. But that’s a rare thing at Mac. This is no Tunga Canyon. No Jilbos or Woolerys to be seen, at least not so far.

The orphan child— our orphan child — half lies on her bed, nail-bitten waif of sun-bleached hair and indomitable will, a “rainbow” child now nearly recovered from visible wounds. Syphilis has retreated from the assault of penicillin infantries; still-tender maceration of breast has drained, with only a dainty Wild Thornberrys Band-Aid as evidence. Her cough is tolerable and there is no rank discharge from between fattening legs, whose calves and thighs now bear the heartening black-and-blue memoranda of normal girlish activity. The face is filling out nicely, ruddy cheeks made ripe by the chopping off of six licey inches. She sleeps in a room with two others, only two, because most Pixies insist on keeping their mattresses in the hall. They can’t handle bedrooms — any bedrooms.

Amaryllis is fully, securely, deeply in the “pop.”

And sleeping without meds.

Tonight she reads in bed as in days of yore, small flashlight gripped in smaller hand. She’s uninterested in the mess of library books Dézhiree (her staffer) brought to the Cottage from the library: Alex, the Kid with AIDS, My Body Is Private, The House That Crack Built .

This is the baby with nothing to eat

Born of the girl who’s killing her brain

Smoking the crack that numbs the pain

Who lives in the House That Crack Built.

She begged a volunteer grannie to find back issues of Time and Newsweek . Amaryllis then made a tricked-out cradle for the scissored magazine articles, bigger than her old cigar boxes, gluing photos to its sides.

Tonight she’s in a transport, for, scanning the articles before her, Amaryllis knows she will soon see her babies. She always had a feeling she would find them here, from the moment the detective announced their destination — when she saw Mac’s inviolable stone walls, she was certain. And, besides, the baker’s wife had told her it would soon come to pass. †

Among a plethora of fresh clippings, the Royal Kumari and even dare it be said Amaryllis’s protectress Sister Benedicta, née Edith Stein, began to fade from memory. Voraciously, she carved out the text at hand: the pope had held a candlelight vigil for thousands of twentieth-century martyrs at the Colosseum in Rome. “There are so many of them!” he exclaimed. “Men and women of every land, of all ages and callings.” In another scrap, she read how John Paul beatified 108 Poles who died at the hands of the Nazis, then turned around and did the same with 110 martyrs — a hundred and ten! — in a thunderstorming Warsaw mass for over a million pilgrims. How she loved this pope! On top of it, the Vatican said they were about to canonize three blacks; Vanessa Williams had already played one in a miniseries (her TV Guide picture graced one whole side of Amaryllis’s reliquary). After all his exertions, John Paul still found the time to make twenty-seven new Mexican saints — before his decree, poor Mexico had had merely one.

Even popes themselves were busy being promoted. (When Amaryllis mentioned that, Dézhiree laughed and said it was like when the Academy Awards got nominated for an Emmy. Then the staffer agreed it was probably a good thing, and that John Paul would make a wonderful saint, because she really did like him, especially after he got shot, which, surprisingly, was news — and not good news — to Amaryllis. Seeing her long face, Dézhiree rushed to add that he’d long since recovered, and forgiven the man who attacked him.) For example, it was acknowledged that John XXIII had heroic virtues, but the Congregation wouldn’t yet declare him worthy of veneration. Pius XII was on a fast track too, but there was a snag because the Jewish weren’t happy — Amaryllis didn’t think that boded well for her own cause. She didn’t understand; why should the Jewish be unhappy, knowing that the Church had so proudly elevated their own Edith Stein? The Jewish were always unhappy, said Dézhiree. Amaryllis wondered if her father was that way.