I'll Let You Go

Coda

With some reluctance, the author concedes that he has reached the end of his story. The garden will be frozen in time and yet, paradoxically, grow wild outside these pages. Some last trimmings are in order.

At the age of eighteen, Lucille Rose Trotter gave her hand to the son of Lord Tryeferne, thereby becoming the fairest component of that entity known in English society sheets as the Hon Travis and Lucille Rose Tryeferne. Through an unfortunate act of terrorism, she somewhat prematurely became Lady Tryeferne and Lady Tryeferne she would remain, through miscarriage and divorce and romantic entanglements thick and thin. Our dear cousin, who wore braids when we first met, would not settle down until her mid-twenties, when, after the usual diversions — stints at fashion and auction houses, jewelry designing, handbag making, hospice working and even finally a passing stab at children’s-book authoring — she regained her senses and went to work for her dad. Taking to Quincunx like koi to water, she quickly proved herself to be more than a nepotistic adornment, and those who doubted her talents certainly suffered, though not for long; Mrs. Tryeferne (she detached the aristocratic handle in the workplace) had a way of wielding a blade so that its business was done before there was time to notice a spot of blood. She had always gotten on well with Frances-Leigh, who was endeared by the girl’s bossiness, especially after a star turn as the former secretary’s maid-of-honor at the most spectacular Scottish castle anyone in the world had ever seen. (Her father had bought it especially for the wedding ceremony and the three-day gala that followed.) Lady Tryeferne — or Our Lady of the Tryeferne, as Trinnie liked to call her — was also keen on South Sea pearls, and looked more and more like her auntie each day: lanky, freckle-flecked, willowy and red, red, red, with a keen look in her eye that made one fear she knew, or at least had known, too much. Now, whether the lady would one day have children — she had no hankering to marry again, nor did she pine for the patter of little feet upon marble — is not for us to guess; though she did take the loss of the child she had conceived with Travis as an omen, and was sorely reminded of the bittersweet genes that had ushered her brother into the world. (It mattered little that she’d been told she was no likelier to have a child with Apert than anyone else.) While Lucille Rose could not imagine another Edward in spirit, she could conjure one in body; that would have been a terrible thing to inflict upon anyone. So she put off thoughts of childbearing for a while and told herself she was doing the responsible thing. But time is on her side. Her life, we can say with certainty, shall be a long one, with never a use for a wandering garden.

She found her mother’s adoption of the McDonald’s baby galling. In her mind, he hadn’t so much been adopted as co-opted — a fledgling, deputized into Edward’s memory posse. It was just so blatant and, as she put it to friends, “unattractive”; happily, such judgments coincided with the arrival of that age when a young girl cultivates her innate desire to cannibalize or at least crucify the woman who bore and raised her (the very woman who, in therapists’ undying jargon, “had done the best she could”). Well, Lucille Rose did her best to loathe her put-upon mom. Yet each time she saw Ketchum, he was a little bit bigger and a little bit older, and a bit more affectionate, too, until Lucy (that’s what she let him call her) began to see him as a person in his own right rather than a substitute for the loveliest, most poetic soul she’d ever known. Watching Joyce with the boy, watching her chide and correct, hold and fuss, watching her love in a way the woman had never been able to with Edward (not to mention Lucy herself), she grew to respect and forgive, and to imagine her mother anew. It brought her close to godliness, for she finally untied what up till then had been the banal knot of Christian charity: that to save a life — such as Ketchum’s had been saved — to love for love’s sake alone created a chain reaction that truly changed the world. During yoga, or in moments of repose, Lady Tryeferne felt herself on the receiving end of her mother’s selfless act and was invigorated to start her own “chain”—when and where and whatever that might be. Her heart overflowed with hope and abundance.

It was true that Joyce had never been happier. When Dodd came to town, they caught up over drinks at swank Brentwood hideaways, a routine Frances-Leigh lobbied for and was immensely satisfied to see take hold. The amazing thing was, they even flirted. Yet on the romantic front, Joyce had no time or desire. Her life was filled by Ketchum and the others — her Westwood children. Men fluttered around like butterflies, but she was no collector; she took her leave from fancy fund-raisers on the arm of Father de Kooning, her walker and biggest fan, and that was just fine.

Shortly after his move to Cañon Manor, Marcus Weiner spent many a Saturday at Frenchie’s, refining and embellishing his prodigious gifts. The first thing he did was re-create the Persephone, the original pastry that had drawn Bluey in years ago, making sure it was delivered to her cottage at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills. According to Winter, whenever the old woman partook of that favored treat, she broke lustily into song and a certain woodenheaded Mr. Jones was invariably invoked.

One person who particularly benefited from Marcus’s drop-ins was none other than the proprietor’s daughter. Amaryllis Kornfeld-Mott proved herself a studious yet inventive helper, with the knack of being one step ahead of her tutor, even when at his most unpredictably daring. Sometimes he challenged her — threw down the gauntlet and stood back, hands clasped behind him like a Russian maestro commanding a scherzo to be played at speeds beyond human capability — in this case, the prodigy pulled it off and then some. They simply took over, relegating Gilles to the front register, and the only thing left for him was to get coffee and cupcakes for the old folks who shuffled in. During lulls, the poor baker tried to small-talk, but so involved was the pair that they wouldn’t even notice; if they did, he was shooed away forthwith. Back at his post, he heard Marcus roar at his pupil or clap with delight upon tasting her morsels, and the coffee-sipping pensioners wondered what the hell was going on. The pâtissier got carried away enough that he often forgot to remove his old-style tweed coat, which became dusted with confectionary powders as a field by snow. Even when Amaryllis was enrolled in Pitzer College, she came home on weekends to see Cody and Saffron, and to attend master classes with the man she loved as a father — the man who had once fed her and the babies and who carried her on his back, where she would forever in both their eyes remain.

Toulouse was still in love. It was unnecessary to remind her of the pledge he had made — she knew full well his feelings. She did love him, but could not jump, as Lucy had with Travis Tryeferne; perhaps, thought Amaryllis gloomily, that was her flaw. The truth was, too much had happened in her young life for her to ever have a passionate, clear-cut feeling. Eroticism and emotions had been commingled, and mangled too, and ghosts conspired to put a governor on her ability to sort it all out. Things had been done to her of which she never told a soul. Eventually, she would, thus opening a door to the world; it can be assumed that Toulouse Trotter would be standing there, first in line, in forthright, timorous fashion, holding a slender stalk of honeysuckle and passionflowers. She would let him in. But that time was not now, nor would it be for some years. There would be other loves and other heartaches for both, the lesser ones which they’d share as best friends do. By that time (the time they found each other), Amaryllis would have consecrated a Westside Frenchie’s, hard by Le Marmiton, and its wafery creations would make her name — and bake it too.

What was Toulouse Trotter doing while the door to her heart remained closed (or at least secured against entry of all but an occasional breeze of sweet nothings)? Well, he was doing the things that young people do while casting about for “meaning.” Taking a leaf from Lucy’s earliest Smythson, he attempted to write what he thought to be a touching absurdist play about his cousin, called Prince Headward (after careful consideration, the somewhat sacrilegious title was revised to Edward the First). Sadly, the title was its high point. He traveled the world, notching this and that power spot on his belt, taking care to avoid places visited during the famous Four Winds holiday — not an altogether easy task. He became enamored of Cambodia and New Guinea, Java and Madagascar, Abu Dhabi and the Maldives, Zanzibar and Nepal, and kept the river on his right during the requisite near-death, near-homosexual experiences of an inveterate adventurer; he had dalliances with nymphomaniacal girls who spoke pidgin English; he sometimes stayed with families who thought him a poor vagabond — in short, got up to all the normal mischief that could be expected of any self-respecting scion.

He never stayed away too long (whenever home, he bunked at Cañon Manor), and sent his parents a raft of letters, which Trinnie thought so wonderful she threatened to have published under the title Off the Road. Particularly savored was the antic account of Toulouse’s re-enactment of his father’s legendary walk from Oxford to the great earthwork of Silbury Hill, a path William Morris himself had once trod as an undergrad. He called his dispatches “News from Anywhere,” a nod to the log Marcus kept all those years and had long ago given him for safekeeping — a gesture so intimate that his son had immediately handed it over to Harry and Ruth.

The young man at last fell upon the career of medical doctor, with a specialty in maxillofacial reconstruction; he had no stomach for blood, so it didn’t pan out. His studies did get him writing again, penning thoughts on morbidity and mortality (which had become a clichéd literary genre in itself) — but the trenchant, tender quality of Dr. Trotter’s observations proved anomalous, and anomalously marketable at that. Now wisely engaged in dermatological pursuits, he wrote as elegantly of lupus as he did of childhood acne, though readers generally conceded his finest essay to date concerned a dog — his own.

Toulouse had meant to meditate on his cousin’s infirmity but wound up memorializing Pullman instead. In “A Harlequin Romance,” he wrote how as a boy his mother had tried to put him off Great Danes, owing to the breed’s short life-span, and recounted that tragicomic year of vicarious hypochondria wherein Pullman was needled, massaged and therapized. But the dog turned eight, then ten, then twelve, then fourteen … an age thought impossible for the breed.

Then he disappeared.

At first, Toulouse thought that in a misguided act of charity, his mother and the Monasterios had taken it upon themselves to incinerate the finally dead creature and concoct a story of his mysterious departure. But they withered under his interrogations — he had after all inherited the digger’s formidable “nose”—and the young man concluded that if they had been responsible, they’d have surely come clean under his assault.

He had gory theories galore: someone had struck the dog with a car then buried him in a literal cover-up — or that Pullman had collapsed and fallen into a street-maintenance dugout, where the body was inadvertently mutilated by pipe cutters or whatnot, then simply buried by workers out of sheer expediency. Awakening in the middle of the night from a dream, he was certain the dog was in the maze, but would then remember it had been uprooted and that the house on Saint-Cloud was no more.

About a year after Marcus moved to Cañon Manor, Trinnie began taking lovers again, as she had all those years he was absent. If Marcus knew, he kept his feelings close; she was a good mother and a good friend and he had no right to tell her anything. Their own lovemaking had come and gone like a freakish meteorological event that would never recur. (She had been wrong when she thought she conceived in the tower on their return; the doctors said she was now barren.) Katrina Berenice Trotter Weiner made excuses, telling herself they just needed time. He was having relapses — an accent had crept back to his voice, and the tailor Montalvo called to say that Marcus had ordered a dozen suits in “the bespoke Victorian cut.” The bill was to be sent to a certain W. Morris of Kelmscott Manor. But the details of his infirmity no longer seduced — once the stained glass was broken, the rebuilt church could not allure. When she left for Slovakia (Ralph Mirdling and Ms. Keaton had since broken up and he was directing a film there) and stayed six weeks, husband and wife spoke twice a day, and that gave Marcus great joy. Sometimes when she returned from her travels, she was so exhausted that he nursed her. Once she almost needed to be hospitalized again, and he brought her to Cañon Manor because she couldn’t sleep. She paced like a wraith at all hours, muttering in a fugue state, “I killed him! I killed him — it was my blow that killed him!” He shushed and kissed and rocked her in his arms; it was so beautiful and so awful that the boy could hardly watch.

La Colonne Détruite outlived all the Trotter residences. Ironically, it was Marcus who exhorted for its preservation, as had William Morris for the preservation of cathedrals “and other ancient buildings.” (He had in fact been acting as a kind of informal curator for the structures in his brother-in-law’s shrinking portfolio of skeletal landmarks.) He argued that the broken tower was simply too grand a curiosity to demolish. But there was another, far more compelling, reason not to tear it down.

Marcus Weiner continued to frequent the Westwood cemetery — why beat about the bush? It may now be said that with the dotty Ms. Campbell’s blessing, Mr. Weiner eventually took over the duties of Sling Blade, who, as the result of a small inheritance left him by Louis Trotter, renounced his career as park caretaker. (Mr. Blade was unsure of his future and needed time to lay fallow; he was, as he put it, “on sabbatical.” More certain of their path were the indomitable Monasterios: Epitacio, Eulogio and Candelaria. With money bequeathed them by Edward — who, aside from having feelings of great affection, had harbored a residuum of guilt for having forced them to betray their employers in the matter of the AWOL orphan — the hardworking family bought a fleet of Town Cars and founded a livery company, which they christened, in eccentric yet poignant homage, E. A. Trotter & Sons.) He raked and watered and polished, pointing tourists toward celebrity stones — but never got over a gnawing sense of incompletion during his “unquiet” peregrinations of the digger’s monumentless greens.

On a day in which the Santa Ana winds lived up to all the morose and mystical things ever written about them, Marcus called a meeting between himself, Dodd and his “Katy” in which he made a proposition so startling and bizarre it could not be ignored. After much thought, much agonizing thought, he said, he’d come to conclude that the body of Louis Trotter should be exhumed and reburied on the grounds of La Colonne — or better still, burned there and thrown to the winds.

Brother and sister thought he’d gone mad yet again. But as the minutes ticked on, then the hours and the days, they realized it was the most sound and gorgeous of proposals. Louis Trotter would finally have a memorial that was fitting, or, to put a finer point on it, fit for the digger’s grandiose, quixotic imaginings.

And so it was achieved — the hows and whens and legalities thereof have no import here. A small service was performed on what was now most assuredly Carcassone Way. In years thereafter, only one family member would ever set foot upon those strange and hallowed grounds again.

When he turned twenty-eight, Dr. Trotter made the trip to Redlands. Ruth had died the year before, and Harry was looked after by around-the-clock nurses, their salaries paid by the estate of Louis Trotter. He was frail but comfortable.

Suddenly, the journal was back in his hands. He went to the swinging couch on the porch and opened it. The pages were empty of handwritten text but filled with aged clippings and photos: Variety blurbs, rare-book-auction announcements, Oxfordiana, SRO rooming-house vouchers, Frenchie’s receipts for payment of services rendered (signed by “G. Mott”) — that sort of sad miscellany. For years, the son had had his own ideas of what was between the covers of News from Nowhere, fueled in part by Marcus’s occasional references to “the work,” something of high literary merit, a tour de force with bravura passages offering insights of a life hard lived, hard fought and hard-won. Like an archaeologist in virgin tombs, he expected to uncover whole sections of cramped cursive — the cacoëthes scribendi that is the hallmark of any schizophrenic worth his salt — and had already envisioned himself in New York while his father took the stage amid thunderous applause to collect his National Book Award from Philip Roth. As a parting gift, Harry gave him a manila envelope of photographs, some of which he’d looked at more than fifteen years ago while sitting on the couch beside Grandma Ruth — and again, in his father’s boyhood bedroom.

With the ragtag anthology on the seat beside him, the doctor drove directly to La Colonne. He ducked through the privet as he once did with Pullman (he had ordered the illicit entry never to be repaired). Approaching the tower, he pretended to see the great speckled jowl of that “continental gentleman” jut neatly from the ocular penthouse window. He could hear chuffing in the air; the ashes of his grandfather — and Bluey too — had long since been scattered through the meadow, and God-knew-what innumerable castle niches that sweet-soul’d couple had found, white-gray smudges on the cracked stones of eternity. He imagined them all inside: Edward coquettishly swathed in tulle, Trinnie and Marcus on their wedding, and Amaryllis and his boyhood self, awkwardly groping. The property was eventually to be given to the city as a public park maintained in perpetuity by the family trust, and he did not think he would visit until then, when its history would be softened by time and the impersonal mass of the world.

He reached into the envelope and pulled out a photo of his parents standing before the tower throwing rice on departing guests. As he left La Colonne, he brushed the tiny blossoms from his coat, thinking how much they looked like the celebratory grains of farewell.

Yes, his accent had returned full-blown, as had most of his bulk and prodigious physical energy — he did the work of ten men around the graveyard, and it had never looked better. He supervised new plantings (some at the suggestion of his wife) and carved beautiful flowers into the wooden benches, painting them so subtly that their effect was visible only at close inspection. In other words, he was mindful of the visitors, whether tourists or mourners, and would do nothing to intrude upon or upset the spirit of place. The caretaker would not disturb or senselessly upgrade that which was already aesthetically pleasing; he would, as he put it, “have no part of grimthorpery.”

He still hung his hat at Cañon Manor — though its quietus would never be the same. The Beverly Vista neighborhood had begun to thrive again, as the courts had forced Quincunx to divest its residential holdings. And though Dot discouraged it, sometimes Will’m (or Topsy, if you like; either will do) stayed in a small shed on the edge of the Candlelighters’ plot, one he’d done up in trompe l’oeil so that it looked like a modest Gothic church. (Mr. John Ruskin might have approved.) The gregarious and immensely knowledgeable “Big Will’m” was sought out by those who came to visit the park’s more famous dead, and was given a generous write-up in the Times that did not allude to his provenance. He was especially beloved by children, who found him a rowdy, eccentric delight. In that role alone, Dot found him a terrific asset.

One day he saw a familiar face by the columbaria. It was Winter. He hadn’t seen her in a while and asked how she’d been. Well, said the nanny, she’d done “a bang-up job with my Ketchum,” who now happened to be off raising hell at some Swiss boarding school or other — then she smiled wistfully and said he really had turned out to be a brilliant, considerate, wonderful boy. She said she was going home. She looked older but was still elegant, and the crystal blue of her eyes made one think that most of her had already departed for northern climes. He spoke animatedly of her imminent return to Iceland and of the great sagas born there — how he, William Morris, longed to go back and translate more of its epics. (The first publication, he said, had met with great success.) Aside from those assertions, for which she’d been prepared by Toulouse, she found him eminently sane, if eminently Victorian too.

He wondered what she was doing over by the tall drawers of the dead. The caretaker assumed she was here to see the boy, since her employers had been scattered to the Bel-Air winds. Yet Edward lay some forty yards off from the place that held her attention. Perhaps, he thought, she was meditating and wandering a bit as she did, girding herself for the approach to his grave.

“I’m thinking of selling mine,” she said, out of nowhere.

“Selling? What do you mean, woman?”

“When she died, Mrs. Trotter left me a crypt. I knew about it for years — sort of. She always called it a ‘condominium.’ ” Marcus laughed, without meanness. “ ‘I’ve got a wonderful condo for you!’ she said. And Mr. Trotter — dear man — confirmed it. I thought it was some three-bedroom high-rise in Century City, but it turned out to be something else entirely, didn’t it? Well … that’s what you get when you start thinking grand.” She looked at one of the upper slots. “Dot said someone might give me a hundred and fifty thousand for it.”

“I think it’s a damn fine idea, ma’am — sell it! Otherwise it’s here, waiting on you. Sell it. And when it’s your time, have ’em hurl you into a crevasse in the motherland! That’s what I’d do.”

“Maybe so, Marcus. Maybe so.”

“It’s Will’m,” he said kindly. “If you please.”

They strolled over to the Candlelighters’ land.

“My, look how full it is.”

“Over two hundred babes now,” he said.

She looked down at Edward’s plaque, void of his name. “How did that happen?”

“Something fell on it, years ago. Broke it in two. I told Joyce to leave it be — t’was an omen. I think she felt funny at first, but now she has left it. As she should! A very busy woman, Joyce — a good woman. But I don’t think Edward would have wished to stand out, no? He’d want to be just like the rest. ‘No favored treatment for me!’ he’d say.”

There was indeed a whirligig stuck in the dirt, with Edward brushed upon it in delicate script, along with the names of legions of others.

They walked toward the gate where her car was parked, and stared at Louis Trotter’s former plot. It was wide and green.

“Is it going to stay empty?”

“I’ve been talking to Katrina,” said Will’m. “Had a marvelous thought. What if the Westwood land is simply donated to those Candlelighters? For, God knows, there will never be enough space for the poor kiddies.” A gleam came into his eye. “And then I set to cogitating: wouldn’t it be wondrous to have another little parkland for these babes? If it were up to me, I’d stash the whole lot of ’em up at La Colonne — how many thousands of small souls might we there set at rest! I think it sits pretty well with Mr. Trotter now; I mean, having them here in the Westwood. Wouldn’t spring them on him up there just yet — no, ma’am! Might have ’imself a sore fit … but I do think he wouldn’t begrudge ’em that, not here, anyway. I think all’s forgiven — or is on its way to being — all round!”

She smiled and shook his hand, but he embraced her instead. He smelled like some great musky elf, and Winter’s heart leapt in her chest for the mysteries of the world. She watched him a long time in her mirror, waving as she pulled away. Then some children tugged at him, Lilliputians at Gulliver, and he went along.

Winter laughed as she sped toward the 405. It was an extraordinary idea, but she wasn’t as confident as Marcus that Mr. Trotter would approve — oh but to hell with it! Maybe she’d sign her condo over to the Candlelighters. They could probably fit a dozen in there.

She laughed again with wet eyes, imagining the entire cemetery, and broken tower too, overrun with tiny bodies — invaded by those holy homeless souls, thrown out before they were ever named.