I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  One of the Times religion articles was long and detailed, and she set about learning the rules and regulations by heart. Inside the Vatican lived a Congregation for the Causes of Saints, somewhat like the Special Selectors for the Royal Kumari. In the Congregation for the Causes of Saints there was a “postulator,” who did the nominating. The postulator was the one who needed to come up with evidence of the holiness of whoever was elected. He needed to find examples of what they called heroic virtue and did that by interviewing people who knew the nominee. Once the person was found to have heroic virtue, they received a declaration from the pope allowing them to be called Venerable. They could then be venerated in their local community. Amaryllis thought the Congregation could interview Topsy, who would attest to her overall humility and general hardships, and made a mental note that if she received a declaration, she would be in a stronger position to nominate the charitable Englishman himself. But first things first: if all went well, she might eventually be allowed to carry the title of Venerable Amaryllis Kornfeld of Los Angeles. The Congregation usually waited until the person to be sainted actually died, but this pope had waived all that and in the case of Mother Teresa already had an archbishop working on beatification—this pope seemed to be in such a hurry that the rules were constantly changing or being broken. Anyhow, Amaryllis didn’t think it was important if, when crowned, she was dead or alive, but thought it would probably be more fun to be alive, at least for a little while.

  Some people said Pope John Paul II was hurrying to make new saints because he didn’t think he had long to live and wanted to spread the Gospel of Christ far and wide. Because he moved with such dispatch, the clippings spoke of his sacred mandate as if it were an evangelical car race—the process had been “streamlined” and “overhauled,” becoming altogether “speedy.” Things certainly were moving along at a fast clip. For example, in olden days there used to be a Promoter of the Faith, whose entire job was to argue against new nominees to ensure that no one unworthy became a saint. The Promoters were called Devil’s Advocates, but John Paul, in all his streamlining, had sent them packing. Another example of speediness was the beatification. After a person was declared Venerable, the next step to being crowned was beatification, which used to require two miracles, but now you only needed one unless you were a martyr, in which case you didn’t need a miracle at all (they never explained what a martyr was, but Amaryllis reasoned it must be something good). It had to be what they called a “healing” miracle, something science couldn’t explain.

  After beatification, all that was left was to be canonized, which also used to require two miracles, but because of John Paul, the Congregation for the Causes said they’d be happy with just one: now it was one miracle for each step, plus no Devil’s Advocate! Amaryllis hadn’t yet come across any child saints, but this pope was a maverick and anything seemed possible. He had already beatified something like a thousand people, “eclipsing the 20th-century record of Pius XII, who only beatified twenty-three.” Nominees were pouring in every day. One of the articles even said the next pope might be from Mexico or Vietnam.

  She stared at the picture of the Blessed Edith Stein, dark and sad, her long handsome face framed by a halftone wimple. She’d been beatified a few years before Amaryllis was born, on the basis of the 1987 case of the daughter of a pastor, who overdosed on Tylenol samples she’d thought were candy. When the girl fell into her magical coma, the family prayed for Blessed Edith to intercede with God on their behalf; when she awakened, her Jew doctor was surprised. He was summoned to the Vatican to be interrogated by the Congregation for the Causes. The doctor said he didn’t believe in miracles per se—reading aloud, Amaryllis pronounced it “percy”—and that in his heart he had never expected her to recover. (Amaryllis thought that wishing patients the worst was maybe the way of Jew doctors.) There was a photo of the saved girl, with big features like Amaryllis’s but lily-white.

  Before going out, the novitiate knelt by her mother, a demon who had sold her for drugs and held her down to be raped and burned by a tubercular woman. Amaryllis shut her nose to the putrescence and closed her eyes, willing Geri to come alive; she would perform a healing miracle that the Congregation would need acknowledge “percy.” She would make her mother live. And if she didn’t rise, there were other “proofs” science could not explain—wasn’t Amaryllis’s survival a miracle in itself? The Congregation for the Causes of Saints would come and see that the babies were well cared for; under her hand they had bloomed, with defiant unruly innocence, like succulents in hell. There were manifest miracles from which the Congregation could choose.

  She closed the door behind her and made sure the Korean busybody manager wasn’t in the hall. She stooped to stuff paper under the door, damming the fumes. Her heart swelled as she left the St. George, soaking in the light. She clung to the rosary of words People magazine said had been so dear to the Blessed Edith Stein: Secretum meum mihi.

  This is my secret …

  CHAPTER 8

  Concentric Circles

  Amaryllis set out for the bridge. She’d been thinking that if she told Topsy about her mother, he might have an idea what to do. She passed a mission, then cut down Winston Street—sometimes he loitered on the sidewalk outside Misery House and made cardboard begging signs for the men in his distinctive calligraphic hand. He wasn’t there. The orphan kept a darting, furtive lookout as she moved; she didn’t want to be picked up for truancy.

  On Grand Avenue, trucks and trailers lined the curb. Pedestrians gathered in curious clumps to watch, but there was nothing to see, at least so it seemed. Amaryllis slowed, wending her way toward the blaze of lights that came from the desiccated lobby of the Coronation, one of the bigger SROs. A distant shout of “Quiet!” and a baffled roundelay followed, each voice handing off to the next, all coming closer, some electronically enhanced—“Quiet!” Then another cavalcade. But instead of “Quiet!” this time they yelled, “Speed!” A girl with purple hair and a ring through her nose like a bull glared fiercely at Amaryllis, gesturing her to be silent. She froze. A voice crackled over a radio: “We! Are! Rolling!” Then, the final chorus: Rolling!—Rolling!—Rolling! The little girl quaked, waiting for a bomb to go off, certain that’s what was happening. Under her breath, she beseeched: Benedicta Benedicta Benedicta … and the world stood still. She prayed that if she died then and there, an angel’s emissary would get to the babies and keep them from harm. She even wondered what a person who’d been blown to bits looked like in heaven. Then, the crackling voice tore into her reverie: “And … cut!”

  The woman with the bull ring echoed, with great purpose but to no one in particular, “Cut!”—then turned on her heel, leaving Amaryllis to fend for herself.

  There was much coming and going and people laughing, and she was certain the bomb had been defused. The blinding lights still shone in the window and she made her way toward them. As she threaded the crowd, it was as if she were invisible. She passed a bum, who smoked and wore sunglasses. He rested a hand on his leg in regal fashion and guffawed, phlegmy and herniated, while a smiling, serious boy with headphones handed him a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “All right!” someone yelled. “Here we go! Last looks!”

  When Amaryllis got very close to the Coronation lobby lights, she hid behind a truck and watched a strange scene: a beautiful girl of about thirteen sat on an upturned wooden crate, hair brushed and combed by two bizarre-looking women with beehives and tattoos. The beautiful girl chattered with someone the orphan couldn’t readily see. Then a man came along to powder her face while another smoothed the pleats of her dress and primped a collar. It seemed to Amaryllis everyone around the beautiful girl was polite and reserved and happy and the beautiful girl had made them so—just as she imagined life among the entourage of the Royal Kumari. Then she saw with whom the girl was gossiping: two friends sitting opposite on a shared milk crate, only theirs was horizontal to make them closer to the ground than she who was illuminated. Her compa
nions were a boy and girl, both fair, red and pretty, and the girl’s braids dangled so they nearly touched the grotty, gum-flattened sidewalk.

  “Is that part of the movie?” asked the boy of the beautiful girl.

  “Is what?” she said.

  “The snot.” He pointed to her nose. “Are you supposed to have snot?”

  The beautiful girl grew serious as finger flew to nostril; then she looked at the boy with narrowed, beady eyes and he laughed. “I hate you, Tull! I hate you!” she said, but she wasn’t really mad and the man powdering her backed off to fetch a Kleenex, which he then applied to the beautiful girl’s upper lip until she seized it, completing the job herself. The other adults continued to brush and fluff and straighten and comb—the finishing touches of merry, manic elves.

  “Qui—et!” came an anonymous voice.

  And another: “Quiet, everyone!”

  “First team!”

  More scurrying. More commands, and the adjusting of machines.

  “And … roll sound!”

  “We—are—speeding!”

  “Roll camera!”

  “Rolling.”

  “And … We! Are! Rolling!”

  The voices made their way to the outer reaches, where Amaryllis had stood in frozen repose only minutes before. Within an instant, the beautiful girl had stopped laughing and risen from the crate, which was neatly whisked away; her helpers lingered like bees reluctant to leave a flower. A gangly man stood by, listening to someone through headphones while holding a long pole, the end of which wobbled over the beautiful girl as she smoothed her own skirt. Then, a sudden, perfect silence. A man with long, stringy hair said: “Action, Boulder!”

  At which the beautiful girl took a deep breath before walking determinedly toward the lobby door. A short muscleman type followed her with a camera strapped to a thick belt on some sort of hinged pivot; trailed by the man with stringy hair and then by the other man, gangly and serious-looking, the long pole held high over his head, along with assiduous minions who crouched and slinked noiselessly beside the beefy one with the pivoting camera, some holding aloft cables in his wake as if attending a rubbery bridal train—but the actress’s entrance to the hotel was blocked by the bum Amaryllis had seen earlier. This time his dark glasses were gone. He carried a bottle of brown-bagged wine instead of a Styrofoam cup.

  “Out of my way!” she shouted.

  “Your way!” said the bum, hissing. “You’ve always had it your way, haven’t you, Missy?”

  “I’m looking for my mother!”

  More stumblebums appeared.

  “Hear her, boys? She’s looking for Mother!”

  They cackled and howled, rolling over the word in their mouths like pirates molesting a treasure chest.

  In the midst of all this, the redheaded boy on the crate caught Amaryllis’s eye. She grimaced and later regretted not softening her features when he smiled. As if aware of her discomfort, he turned back to the scene at hand. The beautiful girl vigorously pushed aside the lead bum, then stormed into the SRO. Apparently, this was the funniest thing in the world, because the bums let loose with an explosion of rollicking huzzahs; the man with the stringy hair watched like a giddy child at a puppet show, then yelled, “And … cut it!” They repeated the exact same sequence at least five times, the spaces between “Cut!” and “Action!” filled with a kind of wild yet militarily controlled commotion.

  Finally, the stringy-haired one spoke animatedly to the sweat-soaked muscleman, who tried to listen but was mostly interested in the progress of those unburdening him of the camera, which they finally did, lifting it off like the saddle of a tired and finicky mule. A voice called out, “Checking the gate!” while the gangly man peered into the lens. Then someone said, “Gate is clear!” and there were bursts of laughter all around. A familiar chorus of voices called “Lunch!” in the same staticky, concentric, fading circles. The girl with the long braids leapt up to join her beautiful friend, already set upon by the bees or elves or what have you, each of whom seemed to have bottomless pockets filled with small, significant items for every possible need. The redheaded boy—more orange-headed, really—turned again to catch Amaryllis’s eye before she walked slowly backward, fading into the general disorder.

  Tull, Lucy and Boulder were escorted to Edward’s MSV by the second assistant director.

  The Mauck Special Vehicle was built in Ohio with the cousin’s needs in mind, at a cost of $275,000. Its gull-wing front doors rose up with frank, freakish efficiency. Within, calfskin recliners sat upon a walnut Hokanson carpet, telephones graced Corian countertops and a huge flat-screen panel downloaded DirecTV from a rooftop dish. Concealed abaft was a state-of-the-art hydraulic docking berth for Edward’s golf cart—he could drive right in.

  Lunch awaited the guests as they clambered aboard the orchid-filled cabin. Edward was already enthroned in his custom Donghia captain’s chair watching soundless CNN, a vast linen nappie tucked between chin and brace. He wore his gloves and “Mauck mask,” a lounge-around hood made of festive yellow silk lightly embroidered by his own hand. The cousin sipped leek-and-potato soup with sautéed langoustines and black truffles, FedExed frozen from Lespinasse’s 55th Street kitchen, while trays brought by craft-services sprites stood on individual teak stands in readiness; under straining cellophane, industrial-strength paper plates were heaped with standard Friday film-set fare—barbecued chicken, biscuits and beans, blackened swordfish and black-eyed peas, yams and limp salads smeared with yogurty dressing, happy fruit and less happy cottage cheese. Still another tray was filled solely with desserts: Joyce’s precious lemon tarts from Ladurée (Edward had swiped them from the Stradella freezer), Häagen-Dazs’d brownies, American apple pie and Everyman’s peach cobbler. All in all, not too bad a spread. In his wisdom, the ever cordial host had adorned placemats with tiny brown La Maison du Chocolat hatboxes from Neiman’s, each one tied with their distinctive satiny, dark-brown ribbons.

  “Oh my God!” said Boulder as she bounded in, wide-eyed at the cornucopia. “Edward, you are amazing!”

  “I was going to bring food from home but for some reason it didn’t happen.”

  “It happened for you,” said Tull, raising a gentle eyebrow at the cousin’s non-communal meal—minimalist though it was.

  “It’s just soup.” He brought a spoonful to his tiny mouth then wiped a trickle from the titanium, patting down the protuberant chin with the bib. Tull thought the veil made him look like a deranged harem girl.

  “And who’s that for?” asked Lucy. She referred to a tray that sat by itself, with food maturely arranged.

  “Mr. Hookstratten.”

  “He’s coming?” called Boulder with a full mouth, cross-legged on the Hokanson. “Doesn’t he teach today?”

  “He’s tutoring Dad,” said Edward.

  At the mention of Uncle Dodd, Tull’s heart fluttered—this was the Forbes coverboy who not only knew unthinkable secrets about his father but had dared blurt them out to his gossipy girl-child. Of all the people he could have told! If Lucy knew, it was likely everyone did. The thought jolted him. She smugly watched him squirm; he could tell their tacit agreement not to discuss the recent revelation was near unraveling and that gave him another hideous frisson. Tull switched to conversational autopilot.

  “What do you mean, tutoring?” he said blandly.

  “The fact is,” said Lucy (and it seemed to Tull she was at this moment savoring life to the fullest), “that Father maintains a bit of an inferiority complex about his abysmal high school GPA. So Mr. Hookstratten comes over and they read the classics. I think it’s sweet.”

  Boulder dabbed at some barbecue sauce that had found its way to the woolen weave.

  “Like which classics?” offered Tull. The tension surrounding Lucy and the potential public airing of his uncle’s disclosure had the effect of both zombifying and nauseating him, at once.

  “I’m sure they’ll be taking a look at one of Lucy’s faves,” laughed Edward. “Whe
n a Grandparent Dies!”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  Tull winced, remembering how he had upbraided Lucy for her journalistic methods. It was now his prime objective to keep her displeasure at a minimum; he didn’t want her provoked by anyone, and present company was a volatile mix—Boulder liked to jump on Lucy with as much relish as did Edward. Tull’s morbid fear was that if the redhead was teased too much, she might suddenly spill the beans about his father, merely to deflect negative attention—not that Tull could be sure it still was a secret. Lucy had always had a crush on him, and that was the only bit of leverage he had in terms of her doing the right and decent thing: keeping her trap shut.

  “Seriously, Edward,” said Tull, rushing to Lucy’s aid with delusional chivalry. “Who are they studying?”

  “Oh, you know—Tolstoy, Chaucer … Steve Martin’s Shopgirl … all the heavy texts. Daddy pores over it, then Professor Hookstratten deconstructs. Hookstratten gets busy!”

  Boulder asked if the teacher was going to Europe.

  “Europe? For what?” wondered Tull, overeager.

  Edward squinted at his friend, annoyed. “You’re awfully inquisitive today.”

  He would have to watch himself; the cousin was onto him. He could smell Tull’s fear. “Dad’s taking Third-Tier Honors on holiday,” sneered Lucy. “Well his plane is, anyway—the Boeing.” She gave Tull a contemptuous once-over. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Boulder flipped through a teen girl’s fanzine called All About You!—ironically, she was on the cover. “I really want to go to that beach in Belgium,” she said, bored with the “Star Poll Picks.” Boulder said there was a beach in Belgium where if a person wanted to face the sun, they had to turn their back to the ocean; apparently, it was the only beach like that in the world. Lucy said that was weird and Pullman farted. Everyone burst out laughing. At the end of the jag, something caught Tull’s eye through the Mauck window.