by Bruce Wagner
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 jo
b 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.
to my mother
Also by Bruce Wagner
Force Majeure
I’m Losing You
About the Author
BRUCE WAGNER is a novelist and film director. He lives in Los Angeles. I’ll Let You Go is the middle book of Wagner’s “Cellular Trilogy.”
