Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

After moments of furied search-party strategizing, Toulouse discovered the note scrawled on Edward’s intagliated Francis-Orr stationery:

My Dearest Edward, Lucie and Tulouse,

I shuold never have come to see you and feel so terrible that you may now be in truoble now on accuont of me. You have done so much and lavvished such attention and moneys on me. I have been only greedy and have not given even much of a thouhgt to the brother and sister I left behind. I was not able to say goodbye to Pull-Man and wish you would tell him how sorry I am that I couold not show him the respekt he deserves and not thank him for the many rides he gave me on his strong and lovely back. You will always be in my memorrie. Edward, I know you will get better and be everr-thing you can be. Lucie you will be a famuos writer and I hope that when I am old you will remmeber I was some help to you along the way.

And Tulose — please forgive!

Your friend,

Amaryllis Kornfeld the Venerable

“She’s going to kill herself!” cried Lucy.

“No,” said her brother. “She wouldn’t do that before finding ‘the babies.’ ”

“That’s what we should have been doing,” said Toulouse, fairly frothing at the mouth, “instead of dressing her up like … some fucking doll . We should have been doing something to reunite them—”

“It’s not too late for that,” said the cousin.

“Bullshit! It is —it’s always too late!”

With that, he stormed out. Lucy went after, but Edward shouted for her to let him be; and that some “fissiparousness” was to be expected.

Dusk fell as Toulouse left the main gate. Eulogio offered to drive him home, but the boy refused. The diligent servant shadowed him in a Town Car as he strode the serpentine road to Saint-Cloud.

The moon was full, and he had never felt such sorrow. The cold air stung his cheeks, but he walked so hard and fast that he soon sweatily removed his coat. She was out there somewhere alone — gone, as his father was and as his mother would be. And that was how the world ended, if you were lucky: with the jottings of your beloved’s farewell. Grandma Bluey sure had it right: the world (even that of the living) was nothing but scraps of paper, an album of death notices blown hither and thither by a careless, uncaring wind. Around and around they blew, and where they landed no one knew …

That was how the world ended — in a parade of shredded paper raining down. The miserable confetti of Good-bye.

The pomegranate, or Punica granatum , belongs to a small tree native to Persia, where it still grows wild. Moses assured the wandering Israelites that they would one day find the fruit, along with honey, fig trees and brooks of clear water, in the Promised Land. There is, of course, the famous myth having to do with the abduction of Persephone to the underworld, whereby the winter season is born. Demeter, Hades and six pomegranate seeds play their part — but we’ll leave that to various Four Winds mentors (and future professors of Dodd Trotter Middle School), for this book cannot include everything.

It is well known that the pomegranate does not easily give up its seeds and for that reason has never attained the popularity it deserves. But for William (who was not yet Marcus), such was the allure. He had always extolled the exotic fruit, staining his fingers with its scarlet juices at an early age as William Morris had stained his with inks and dyes; unlike Persephone, the suburban boy swallowed seeds in bulk.

Along this theme, another place (that had nothing to do with Mr. Morris’s England) had begun to intrude on William’s geographical consciousness — a place called the Red Lands. He could remember a woman making grenadine from the fruit, and syrup for cooking, and a kind fellow he thought to be his father showing him how to roll the pomegranate around the sidewalk and pierce its skin with a straw to suck the nectar. William smiled to himself, thinking he’d do the same for Jane Scull; it would make her gleeful, for like a child she was.

When he returned to the shelter in the afternoon, Janey wasn’t there. He took up supper duties, then set about preparing a special dessert for her alone. William heated sugar in a saucepan until it was pale gold, then swirled the caramel; whilst adding juice from the pomegranate, the caramel steamed and hardened and he stirred until it dissolved. He made a separate bowl of arrowroot and water and ruffled that into the mix. He cooked the whole sauce until it boiled and thickened, before covering it to let it cool. At about ten that night, he blended in the carefully shucked ruby-colored seeds of the ancient fruit, and when someone said Janey’d come back, he spooned the caramel sauce over three scoops of vanilla Häagen-Dazs.

Bowl in hand, he was suddenly disquieted — he had been so preoccupied with pith and pip and memories of the Red Lands that he hadn’t given proper weight to her uncustomary absence. Earlier, he had taken one of the counselor’s casual asides (that Janey was at a sobriety meeting at Clare) at face value, knowing full well she refused to attend those peculiar, mandatory gatherings with anyone but him. William found her sitting on a bench inside the shelter’s chain-link enclosure and saw immediately that she was in no mood for treats. She was pale and drawn, and drawn in on herself too.

“Janey, what is it? Are you unwell?” Her body shook, and she could not get a word out. “Shall I call a doctor?”

Her dress had a smear of crimson, as if one of his fruits had been crushed down there, and William, in his naïveté, thought her embarrassed by some menstrual clumsiness. But in fact she had come from her chores with Please-Help.-Bless, who was particularly indifferent to her frailties that night and had made her suffer greatly.

She glanced at the dessert offering, then stood up, kissed William’s cheek and took to her bed until morning.

Bluey came home. A conspiracy of sophisticated scans revealed the disease to be at an alarmingly advanced stage, the brain under siege by a riot of dementia; memories and faces had begun their anarchic stampede from tear-gas clouds of vanishing or misbegotten cells, while moods and emotions cowered, blackjacked in the rainy, atrophied back alleys of the cavum septum pellucidum (which was not so pellucid, or even lucid, anymore). Toulouse wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about — Grandma was still Grandma, more or less. At least, to him.

He strolled with the old woman along the perimeter of the maze (a metaphor too tidy by half, yet unavoidable when inviting a faddish archetype into one’s backyard). Those with the disease of forgetting enjoyed their wanderings, as monks had done in meditation labyrinths of old — though enlightenment was not the thing awaiting Bluey Trotter at puzzle’s end.

“The strange thing is, I remember everything— from half a century ago. Though sometimes I can’t remember my name ,” she said, and smiled. “But I do recall the oddest details. San Francisco, 1947. A piece of jade I bought at Gump’s — clear as a bell. The amazing thing is, I haven’t thought about that jade or Gump’s in a hundred years. Vic Bergeron — that was ‘Trader Vic’—and George Mardikian … the restaurants , Toulouse. I’m so glad you’ve started calling yourself that! Baghdad by the Bay — oh, Tull, it was just … creamy , like those pastries I love. Or a late de Kooning — do you know who that is? The painter, not the pastor. He had a rough time of it mentally, too. Do you know what San Francisco was like back then? There seemed to be no people there — just women in long white gloves. Swans … like the movie Vertigo . Oh, but Kim Novak was a beauty. But you’ve never seen Vertigo , have you, Tull? Of course you haven’t. Your mother loved that city; that wasn’t until so much later. But then! 1947! Oh good Lord, it was heaven —it was all heaven. And Capri!” she gasped. “How can I describe for you Capri? I remember the little chalk scribblings the boys made on the cliffside rocks, boys just your age. See them clear as day. You’ve heard of Capri? Well of course you have! My world traveler! Good Lord, you’ve been to more places than I have.”