I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  Tell me the story simply, as to a little child.

  For I am weak and weary, and helpless and defiled.…

  Tell me the story always, when you have cause to fear,

  That this world’s empty glory, is costing me too dear

  —a scale model of Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds (appropriated for the cover of his grandchildren’s private school’s literary magazine), a similarly scaled version of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Notre-Dame-du-Haut that he’d picked up while in Paris with Trinnie and her fiancé, a shrunken eighteenth-century Louis XVI mahogany armchair, a sixty-year-old potted two-foot-high grove of bonsai juniper trees ($23,000, from Dimson Homma in Manhattan), an original pilaster from the Pantheon and a minuscule copy of the Bacchus Room at Villa Barbaro. Among gaudy torchères were a clutter of miniature “stairways to heaven,” their atheistic steps ending as abruptly as a hangman’s scaffolding. Mr. Trotter commissioned such a spiral for his grave; the cabinetmaker David Linley did a mock-up, delivering it with a Carlton House–style writing desk, gratis. Knowing his client’s taste for follies, he painstakingly built a detailed replica of the famed Russian grotto at Kuskovo to span the tabletop’s length.

  Which brings us to the finely detailed tomb fantasias—twenty-five to date, on pedestals—and he walked among them, chuffing and musing. The idea came to him after visiting the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Gower. The handsome young midwesterner who owned the place told Trotter that a family mausoleum could be had for around two hundred thousand “off the shelf,” though available models were rather wretched. It was then that the old man recalled a contest in Copenhagen, a kind of peacock affair, in which architects submitted plans for a series of shed-size garden pavilions, and luminaries such as Graves, Botto and Isozaki had applied. The concept was a bit precious (like those books that feature celebrity doodles), but when he saw photographs of the eclectic, somber, spirited results, he heard his calling and came closer to solving an endgame puzzle too; he would make a contest to design his grave.

  In short order, the “Trotter Funerary” became one of architecture’s hot cynosures—handling the big themes on a small, elegiac scale was a natural for the vanity portfolio, even if the designs remained unbuilt. Mr. Trotter personally contacted the world-class talents whose aesthetic captured his fancy. He would have them create miniatures of projected works—temple, sculpture, earthwork—the only requisite being that each was no larger than 300 square feet. Anything could be submitted: a pile of “sacred” rocks would do. He remembered the megalithic slabs of Avebury, in the bare, chalky downs of southern England’s Wiltshire … let the tourists troop down Westwood’s Wilshire to see the Trotter Stones, a ring of nineteen just like those at Penzance, waist-high in broom sedge and gorse, hard by the graves of Marilyn and Burt, Dean and Natalie and John (Cassavetes). Oh, he liked it. Let there be tors and barrows, hollows and cairns! It had all gone swimmingly, even though he couldn’t for the death of him make up his mind: so far, the only entry taken out of the running was Richard Meier’s; Trinnie gibed that selected future wags would call his crypt “a Getty gift shop adjunct.” There it sat, withdrawn in the Withdrawing, a small, slick white-tiled elephant.

  Here they were, then: Gehry’s neoclassical bowl-shaped marble carp, an homage to Louis XIV’s obsession as much to the gefilte fish of his youth; George Hargreaves’s loamy waves of rattlesnake- and blue-grass; a tiny replica of the incestuous tomb of Halicarnassus (built for Mausolus and Artemisia, a married brother and sister); a pistachio-colored room built by Renzo Piano, its floating roof’s aluminum petals powdered and powered by the sun; a Frank Stella “Dresden” folly with entrance through a berm; a copper barrel-vaulted “dwelling” by Bartholomew Voorsanger from a drawing by Mies, with climate control, olive wood interiors and walls of gneiss hewn from one of Mr. Trotter’s own quarries; Charles Jencks’s Alice in Wonderland miniature golf course plot of sliced ponds, carved crescent tumuli and grassy ziggurats; a “mouth of Hell” martyrium; Len Brackett’s mortise-and-tenon teahouse, inspired by the Pine-Lute Pavilion (wood planed so smoothly it required no sealant); a cunning replica of the James Smith–designed mausoleum at Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh; Rafael Moneo’s stone ruin of a seventeenth century–style cloister, with echoes of his own Our Lady of the Angels still taking shape in downtown L.A.; Rem Koolhaas’s stainless-steel cage and huge rusty oculi with ghostly elevator that silently motored to the roof; another stairway to nowhere from Predock, made of water and riverstone; Herzog and de Meuron’s nod to their famed Yountville winery, with more gneiss, ground up and held together by signature mesh—the old man loved the way the light filtered through the arrowhead shards into the sanctum; two curved walls that formed parentheses, after a children’s area conceived by Noguchi for a park on the island of Hokkaido; Robert A. M. Stern’s playful Palladian villa (the only one Trotter had had built to scale, for chez Pullman); a Hellenistic pyramid, typical of those found in Constantine and Tripolitania, stretching skyward into obelisk sleekness; a sixth-century Palmyrene tower-tomb, four stories tall, with burial compartments on each level; various bronze maidens weeping over TROTTER-emblazoned sarcophagi; an angel leading a downcast naked man of formidable physique into a stained-glass tomb; Tadao Ando’s Gordian sluice of bamboo-shaped aqueducts; Lauretta Vinciarelli’s classic enfilade of slick aluminum sheds; Zaha Hadid’s symbolic, mournful tekton bridge; Daniel Libeskind’s zinc-clad bunker, stabbed eerily by unframed window openings (you peered in and saw empty vitrines, as if in an abandoned museum. Dodd liked this one best); Shodo Suzuki’s Zen garden of pine, bamboo, irises and azaleas; and Trinnie’s favorite, after a tomb at cobblestoned Lachaise—a painted couple staring out from the crypt’s window frame with a kind of haunted, remonstrating indifference.

  That was the image he turned over while drifting to sleep in the master bedroom of the main house. The California king felt good; he hadn’t slept on it in years. What brought him back there tonight? His wife would be home from Cedars tomorrow. Tomorrow, like a mad scientist, he would return to the “bespoke” Murphy bed that sprang from the vast study’s muraled wall.

  We have described how Louis Trotter and the boy closed the night. But what of Trinnie?

  Ron Bass had, in fact, been at the gala. Inadvertently introduced to Ralph Mirdling, he was most gracious and kind, even correctly pronouncing his name. Thus charmed, the fledgling screenwriter unraveled.

  Home from the Animal CAT-scan Ball, she sent the boyfriend back to his Koreatown single and promptly went to bed. Couldn’t sleep. Threw on clothes and raced down the hill, tucking the old chocolate-brown Cabriolet beneath a suppurating magnolia. Through a bosk of cottonwoods was a hillock with a culvert, but the drain wasn’t real. There was a wad of chain link deep inside the baffle, and a lock for which only she had the key.

  Under mysterious moonlight (much like Lucy’s taper girl, but wearing a Y’s bis LIMI box-coat) she made her way to the broken tower. The wind blew wild and the yews’ brushy applause made her hair stand on end, a commotion that covered the startled exhalation of a man in pressed bib overalls; he saw she wasn’t a trespasser and hung back, charting her progress from the blind of a myrtle ball. She entered the column, snubbed by the lonely groups of dusty white tents within, then clambered up a corkscrew stairwell to the fourth-floor bed. Everywhere was mildew, and bad smells; weeks ago, a possum died up there, seeping fluids into the faded, hand-printed Indian-patterned toile de Jouy.

  She got into bed, drew the cold cover to her collarbone and fell quickly to sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Song of the Orphan Girl

  We should leave the Trotters awhile; they’ll do well enough alone. An essential part of our story takes place downtown—the jump from riches to rags, admittedly shopworn, cannot be helped.

  The buttery treats Bluey favored herself at hospital could only be found at Frenchie’s, a homely shop on Temple Street. They were something relatively new, made from pomegranate grains dressed with almonds b
y the affable, rail-thin Gilles Mott, Mrs. Trotter’s longtime confectionary confidant. She’d met him years ago, detouring from a museum walkabout; a sugary courtship had begun.

  But this isn’t the moment to speak of the exuberance with which the baker donated fresh pastries to local missions and shelters (his favorite being St. Vincent’s, called Misery House by habitués) or of the 255-pound homeless schizophrenic named Will’m, who asserted a steady appreciation for those donated goods, not to mention a profoundly nuanced affinity for baking them too—who lived beneath an overpass in a customized dwelling made from wedded squads of GE refrigerator boxes etched and blotted with finely wrought ink-and-Crayola murals—Will’m (for that is how he pronounced it, and those around him followed suit), who spoke fluently of a Victorian circle of friends and lovers in a voice that could boom, if he chose, which rarely he did, like a god’s or beast’s among men. It is time to speak of Amaryllis, age eleven, toffee-colored, ravenous, rapturous nail-biter, leonine head of hair, self-taught and more than capable of reading the entire Los Angeles Times in a two-and-a-half-hour go; who keeps a cigar box, its thin trapdoor-mouth shut by straight pins, filled with favorite clippings; whose tiny breasts, beneath vintage tatterdemalion Natalie Imbruglia sweatshirt, are discolored by burns and scarified by cutting—one ruined nipple chronically leaking clear fluid—whose thighs and buttocks are blistered by a shiny field of keloids: all this, one way or another, courtesy of her mother, Geri, who not so long ago stopped being thirty-three. Dark-skinned, ash-blond and ashen, she lies with broken larynx on the mattress, having hemorrhaged into the strap muscles of her neck, with attendant fracture of the greater cornu of the left hyoid bone. So the coroner’s report later said.

  Amaryllis sits at Geri’s bedside (not too close) four or five times a day. She peers at the body, looks away, then back; away—listening to the Muzak of everyday life, the shouts, coughs, thumps, canned TV laughs—then back, watching a whirligig of light and shadow on her mother’s sparkless face, torso propped awkwardly in death almost a week now. A knotted sheet loops under chin and the corpse endures the prop with dignity, like a vaudevillian undergoing a zany toothache cure. Staring thus, Amaryllis is sometimes unsure of what she sees, as when finding a word in the paper she cannot decipher, though it be goadingly familiar. Young siblings sleep in kitchen on flattened cardboard while she sprays 409 around the body, already draped in extra sheets and anchored by pillows to stanch the smell.

  Friday, when Amaryllis first discovered her, she knew something irrevocable had happened. Yet if she called 911 or brought someone to look and it turned out Geri was only sleeping, she would dearly pay. So the girl sat and stared instead, thinking: If she doesn’t wake up for my birthday, she’s really dead. The time for commemoration came and went.

  The sheet snakes over headboard and catches the neck before returning whence it came. During her vigil, kneeling like a supplicant before the bed, Amaryllis contemplates the creamy cable of linen whose underbed origins are too spooky to imagine, let alone investigate. What, exactly, did this sheet want with her mom? It was like something out of that movie she saw on TV—alarm clocks, blankets and dustpans flying around behind bedroom doors as if they had minds of their own (that little midget woman came to save the day). But Amaryllis is busy enough hushing and feeding and changing the babies to dwell: been busy like that for years. The babies are good and beautiful and she loves them with all her heart. She sings made-up lullabies, and, when they finally sleep, goes out to forage.

  The giant gave her food and pastries. At first, she thought he wanted to touch her, but he never did. Topsy—that’s what Will’m wished her to call him—was a scavenger himself and provided the girl with cooked meals in hard plastic containers covered with aluminum foil, courtesy, he said, of chefs at the Biltmore. Sometimes the unlikely couple ate high-end spoils under the 4th Street Bridge, where he lived; he threw scraps to a confederate’s dog, a mangled pit bull called Half Dead. He spoke British and the sound of the words was rich and full and coarse and it seemed to her he’d shatter the air itself if ever he gave full voice.

  Topsy hailed from a village called Essex, a place “now terribly Cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder.” The house he was evicted from had been (might still be) called Woodford Hall, and he said he longed to go back—though he sometimes referred to the childhood seat as Elm House or Red House, Kelmscott Manor or Horrington; Bexleyheath in Kent, the Retreat at Hammersmith, Queen’s Square or Merton Abbey on the River Wandle near Wimbledon. Among many peculiar things he spoke of were his “beastly, wondrous” adventures in Iceland, his beloved wife, Jane, and Jenny, their epileptic daughter; and a current labor of love, the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. Topsy loathed anything modern, and it seemed to Amaryllis he had the impression the year—this year of Our Lord—was 1840 or ’60 or ’80 or sometime “bigly twixt.” He used words she read in the newspaper but had never understood, and took the time to tell her what they meant (she thought that explaining the English language was all part of being an Englishman).

  He lived in a box on which he’d painstakingly drawn a colorful woodsy scene. Underbridge denizens had dubbed this nomadic place the Cadillac because of its capacious dimensions and luxury; Topsy called it the Manor. She had never seen such a lovely thing—graced by a mural filled with bounteous trees and birds and fruits, leaves and blossoms, flying insects and little branches. On sallow windblown trompe l’oeil banners, Topsy had inscribed

  i once a king and chief

  now am the tree bark’s thief

  ever twixt trunk and leaf

  chasing the prey.

  He never asked her inside, and of that she was almost glad, but Amaryllis heard its sturdy corrugated cardboard furnishings had been fashioned by his able craftsman’s hands. When visiting, Topsy made sure they sat out of sight of the street; the police, he said, mostly left the encampment unbothered, but the presence of a young girl was something they’d be forced to look into. The underbridge wasn’t gloomy—airy as Union Station, its hilly carpet of dirt was packed clean and firm. On sunny days, a breeze like the sigh of a secret garden blew through. There were sleepy dogs (other than Half Dead, who never seemed to sleep at all), well-behaved “town-birds”—that’s what Topsy called them—and bleached white dishrags that on closer inspection showed themselves to be large rats the English colossus had poisoned and deposited by the gray concrete stanchions like so many houseplants. Most of the time, the two didn’t take a formal meal; he gave her the boxes to bring home, offering samples from each, along with simple, civilized lectures about their individual ingredients as she tasted. He knew something about her, because she’d told him things over the months. He knew about her brother and sister and gave food for them that was easy to chew: butter-squash soups, marmalade and mashed potatoes. (She always made certain to bring the containers back, neatly scrubbed.) Lately, when he asked after her mother, Amaryllis lied.

  When she tired of Geri’s bedside and the babies were napping or settled and there was no more gathering to be done, Amaryllis sorted through her treasured “classifieds”—the cigar box of pages torn from yellowing newsprint and magazines. There was a sheaf about the child-goddesses of Nepal that told of a Special Council of Selectors, who went from village to village looking for little girls. If the parents agreed, the child was plucked from the family house and put in a palace. Her face was painted and her body adorned with golden robes and she was then called the Royal Kumari. The Royal Kumari was allowed out only during holy festivals. The Royal Kumari couldn’t play with other children, because if she cut herself, her godly powers seeped away with the blood. Amaryllis thought she would like to be chosen, but when she read that the Special Selectors wanted a child with unblemished skin, she cried. They would probably want the girl to be virginal, too.

  She reread another brittle bundle—this one about Audrey, the Massachusetts girl who’d been asleep with open eyes for the past eleven years. She had fallen into a backyard
swimming pool when she was three and had been in a magical coma ever since. Audrey never spoke, but seemed aware of her surroundings; when the family said mass in the house, they noticed that blood sometimes appeared on communion wafers and light-colored oil dripped down statuary. Soon, people made pilgrimages to gaze at her through a big window. Audrey had become a “victim soul,” who took on the suffering of those who came to ask for intercession with God to hear their pleas. Though she would be performing a valuable service without having to do much—without having to do anything, really—Amaryllis didn’t relish the idea of being half asleep, stared at by strangers all day. She looked up at her mother, imagining for a moment that Geri was Audrey and they were separated by candles and a pane of glass.

  She kept her very favorite at the bottom of the pile: the dossier on Sister Benedicta, formerly known as Edith Stein, a “Jewish” who converted to Catholicism and was killed at a place called Auschwitz. The article said that Edith Stein was on a “fast track” to sainthood. When she first read about her, Amaryllis didn’t understand. For one thing, she didn’t even know saints came from people; she thought they came from angels or myths. When she read about this mere girl, this Jewish who the pope wanted to canonize—which, to Amaryllis, meant shot into sainthood—whole worlds opened up. The orphan was smart enough to know there wasn’t such a thing as a Jew saint (her mom had told her), so when she learned Edith was “eligible,” it was confusing. But then she grew hopeful; she wanted in. If a Jewish who died not so long ago—a girl—could officially become a saint, why not Amaryllis Kornfeld, a half-Jewish herself? Was not the name of their very motel—corner of 4th and Los Angeles—the St. George? Was this not a sign and a wonder? (St. Amaryllis Motel would have been more of a sign, but it was still something.) A quotation read in a Reader’s Digest left in the lobby clinched it: If they, why not I? If these men and women could become saints, why cannot I with the help of him who is all-powerful? A man named Saint Augustine had said it, obviously before he’d been shot through the canon. Amaryllis’s father was a Jewish and her mother, part African, but maybe none of it even mattered.