I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  “Choices,” added Randoll sunnily.

  The old fabulist did not dawdle; like young Theseuses, they followed the thread of his erudition as best they could and in a short while found themselves within a “see-through” maze of espaliered apple and pear trees. Finally, five hundred yards farther, they traipsed amid the whimsical “Imprint of Man,” an enormous boxwood footprint, the great toe of which resided on a specially created Coatesian island of an adjacent river. Ms. Keaton nearly expired with delight; it was she, with Dexter at one hand and the intoxicated Lucille Rose at the other (for, at least while on the larger Isle, that is what the braided girl demanded to be called), who spearheaded the successful search-and-rescue of a disoriented and embarrassed Mr. Hookstratten—his verdant explorations of Randoll’s more complex outgrowths having been more labyrinthine than expected.

  They were all put up at Leaf House, the marquess of Went’s little spread in the country. It was a lovely sight to see at dusk the caravan of children and caretakers moving swiftly over roads of packed gravel on bicycles retrieved from the belly of the Boeing, vintage Schwinns and Trussardi Classics, the latter trimmed in Napa leather.† Edward took over the bathroom suite. Tended by a host of country elves, he soaked to heart’s content in the marquess’s $42,000 hand-crafted Archeo copper tub while Lucy fork-fed him grilled white peaches sprinkled with cardamom and sugar. For dinner, there were hamburgers and Black Sphinx dates; fresh sheep’s-milk ricotta with warmed lemon-lime marmalade; french fries and fragile fraises des bois dipped in crème fraîche.

  The next few days were occupied with incursions to sundry frescoed palazzi and Palladian villas along the Riviera del Brenta, between Padua and Venice. A canal side trip to the deserted fourteenth-century private chapels of Abruzzo, Ovid’s birthplace, provided the occasion for a filibuster by their very own medievalist on the subject of architecture, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and “The First House—Myth, Paradigm and the Task of Architecture,” to be more exacting. Half those present nearly fainted from boredom.

  But we wouldn’t wish such doldrums to overtake us here; for time is precious and must be moved along, and there are pressing concerns in the County Los Angeles.

  To summarize, these are the places the silver BBJ bullet alit, though not necessarily in the order presented: the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka (resting place of the sacred molar of Buddha, snatched from the flames of his funeral pyre in 483 B.C.); the Londolozi game preserve in South Africa (where children sat on pearwood-and-leather folding chairs from Hermès under Missoni maharajah’s tents, drinking Diet Pepsi from Asprey steel flasks while adults, engorged with satiny Bresse chicken, truffles en gelée and lavender sorbet, lazily confined themselves to Henry Beguelin chaises on faux Aubusson rugs); the Old City of Jerusalem (where Boulder, within a stone’s throw of the Wailing Wall, was actually asked to sign autographs—prompting Tull to make a crack on the Via Dolorosa about the “Shroud of Tourists” which so convulsed the First Cousin that his anxious handlers began plotting routes to the nearest hospital); two sprawling villas in Marrakesh (one of which, informed Mr. Hookstratten, happened to be built by the descendants of Tolstoy; Mr. Giorgio Armani and his party had decamped only the night before), the base from which they sallied forth to souks, Berber villages and desert camelback excursions in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains—though Edward, hard at work weaving a “bespoke djellaba,” spent most of his time sipping blood-orange juice and soaking in the tadelakt bath—returning late in the afternoon, where, surrounded by palm groves, yellow roses, periwinkles and plum trees, all sat on the terrace of a place called Orchard of the Shooting Star, and partook of partridge soup and swathed jellies on cloth-covered dough that had baked all night buried in sand.†(One evening they ate in the heart of the medina, scant tables away from King Mohamed VI.)

  At each stop, they endeavored to give food and alms to the poor, and Tull always imagined to espy the face of the girl called Amaryllis, and wondered why the feeling of her had stayed with him so long.

  Their last destination fittingly brought them to one of the navels of the world, where Tull underwent a great trial.

  About fifteen years earlier, NASA had been kind enough to provide Easter Island with an emergency shuttle landing strip—more than commodious for the trusty 737. At descent, the children gathered excitedly by the windows to view the stone moai, which, poised upon ahu altar shelves, looked more like Polynesian-themed salt and pepper shakers than icons of mysterium. Everything smelled of sea and horses when they deplaned, and it seemed the entire town and not a few travelers had appeared to observe the peculiar invaders, of which Edward and his AirBuggy—a Sun King and his golden chariot—were the prime attraction. They took over the four-star Hanga Roa as planned.

  That very day, our constituents visited the crater that provided tuff, the dense volcanic stone of the famous stoic statuary (the right tuff indeed), and it was agreed that Rano Raraku was most certainly a quarry to give the normally unflappable Grandpa Lou meditative pause. Edward was amazed and delighted to find the place littered with hundreds of discarded, unfinished moai, some without eyes, ears, mouths or arms. Lucy pronounced it all “Très Olde CityWalk—Workshop of the Gods!” Boulder was bored and had to be sweet-talked by Tull, which Lucy liked not a bit, into tagging along to the lapidarian caves of Orongo, anticlimactic site of the ancient Bird Man cult. (The young star’s spirits sagged then rose again with Edward’s allowance of a call to her theatrical agent via his Thrane & Thrane TT-3060A satphone.) Mr. Hookstratten said they used to pick clan chiefs by having warriors swim to the rock that jutted a mile offshore; the first to come back with a tern’s egg strapped to his forehead became Boss Man until nesting season. It was immediately proposed that a new Four Winds principal should thus be selected, and much urging of Mr. Hookstratten to hit the drink followed. He refused. When it looked as if Slouching Tiger and the chess-master-cum-alpinist might dive for competing honors, the children lost interest and began whining for supper.

  It was a good thing the Boeing was well stocked, because all the island could offer were pastries, bananas, grocery-store meats and the ubiquitous pollo con agregado. Mutiny nearly ensued when the taciturn chefs proceeded to whip up bisque de homard and tournedos Rossini, along with braised Swiss chard, bone marrow and cardoons and what looked to be an obscene quantity of squid garnished with whorled, warty celeriac. The brave Mr. Hookstratten (one could almost see egg of tern on his brow), backed by troupes of loyal students and faculty, protested they’d all had enough and would like hamburgers and hot dogs instead. A heretofore timid, rubicund sommelier stepped forward to testily note how “the goose foie gras is from Ducasse family flocks in the Landes!”—a response which made the protesters think the cooks had lost their minds. Even Reed was discomfitted. With the latter’s help (and this endeared him to the students, at least for the night), Mr. Hookstratten staged an intervention involving female staff. The women promptly got stoned. In short order, the cooks were lured to tents deliberately pitched in the shadows of what the medievalist deemed “fertility moai” and over the course of a few otherworldly hours, six bottles of blended L’Esprit de Courvoisier were consumed, along with Laura Scudder’s ridged chips, Southern-fried chicken and a pot-brownie baker’s dozen.

  Around midnight, Tull fell into sweat-soaked sleep. A rapping at the door of his room slowly brought him to awareness. When he answered, the bully whom Lucy had once stood up to on Tull’s behalf appeared at the door with a half-platoon of pint-size soldiers behind him. They bade him throw on some clothes, which he did in a fugue state before following them to the towering head that overlooked the cooks’ bacchanal with a kind of remonstrating hauteur.

  They crept up a grassy slope and peered downward at this tableau: most of the adults had disbanded, while a few still spoke softly from within the same candlelit tent that only a week ago had been pitched over South African soil. The detritus of plates, dishware, foodstuffs and empty bottles was all around. A body—perhaps it was Slouchi
ng Tiger’s, perhaps one of the pilots’, perhaps Professor Hookstratten’s—lay fifty paces from the ahu, snoring vigorously. Attention was elsewhere drawn, though a wobbly Tull did not immediately join his scampering guides. What did comfort him was the sight of Lucy squatting nearby like a bushgirl and watching along with everyone else while a couple, half dressed, were “doing it.” It scarcely mattered who they were—steward or nurse, maven or techie—it was what they did that entranced. Tull slunk to his cousin, who acknowledged him with a glance before turning back to the dark, primitive spectacle. The woman moaned and seemed, like a crab, to scuttle away. She muttered a few words in low, anguished tones, which slowly grew louder until the phrase “fuck it” was vaguely discernible; a phrase repeated in varying stages of dishabille (“it” became “me” and “me” became “you” and “you” became “me” again—and so forth). At a certain point, her demands grew so furied that those in the tent grew silent, then burst into a hail of guttural laughter before going back about their sociable business.

  Perhaps it was the pork pâté or boudin noir, or maybe the blood sausage too hastily combined with six frozen mini–Milky Ways—but the world began to spin and Tull along with it. His cousin helped him return to his hotel room, a phantasmagoric journey the boy hoped never again to be forced to repeat. Luckily, the teetotaling Dr. Raff had long since turned in; Lucy summoned him; after the required palpations, acute gastroenteritis was diagnosed. Nothing was to be done. Tull emptied bowels and stomach of all they had while Lucille Rose—martyr, author, girl detective—laid on cold compresses as he lurched through the maze of his delirium. Pullman was there, and he was glad about that. They stood before the puzzle his mother had designed at Saint-Cloud and which Mr. Randoll Coate (who in his dream bore Reed’s supercilious countenance) now perfunctorily dismissed. His nasty thumbnail critique amused Mr. Hookstratten and the cousins, leaving Tull hurt and betrayed. Stung by the remarks, he suddenly noticed his mother fleeing into one of the pathways. Everyone disappeared. The boy knelt to examine Pullman, who was festooned with strange open sores, and was glad they didn’t seem to be causing the beast any pain. He sprinted down the dark lane toward Trinnie. Instead of reaching the heart of the labyrinth, he found himself in an open clearing—that of La Colonne Détruite. There, his grandfather, as if orchestrating the arrangement of stones in a cemetery, directed deformed workers while they raised up more cracked columns, ragged drapes flapping like crows in the frame of each eyeless window-socket. He heard his mother call out, and ran toward one of the mysterious buildings. Inside, the furnishings were uncovered. The Dane clambered up the spiral stairs, slipping on marble as Tull overtook him. The boy reached the topmost bedroom and tentatively entered. The bathroom light was on …

  “Dad?” Tull bolted upright. “Daddy!” he shouted, blinking sweat from his eyes.

  Lucy rushed over to minister; she felt as if they were onstage in that part of a play where the invalid’s fever breaks.

  Seeing it was she, he became embarrassed. “I … I was dreaming of my father,” he stammered, almost politely.

  Like most on board, Tull slept the entire flight back to California, with nary a ghost of present, past or future to invade unconsciousness.

  Settling into the comfort of their respective homes, the youngest Trotters kept to themselves for a full week, hardly even speaking on the telephone—though, with usual aplomb, Edward sprang back in record time, the only toll paid for his resilience being a harsh and intractable case of acne.

  Tull was slower to surface. He was glad to see Pullman again, but the dream had sorely spooked him; it was a while before he dared take his old friend on a constitutional in the sealed park, fearing what they might find.

  †Something must be aired, if a bit prematurely. A question may arise: Why, or how, could such an impossible array of peculiar places be visited in so short a time? An eclectica of destinations was culled from the exotic wish list that Lucy and her brother had whimsically drawn up; their father was committed to fulfilling those wishes to the letter. The logistics were a challenge, but it would get done. There is no limit to wealth and its imaginative excesses, just as there is no limit to the proscriptions of poverty—but the details of both extremes are sometimes difficult to comprehend. Just as a sixty-year-old woman might spend three days knee-deep in recycling bins so she might gather the capital to buy her grandson shoes, so may a father fly a chef from Hong Kong to Palos Verdes with ten $20,000 boxes of saliva-thread swallows’ nests to make special soup for his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Such is the world.

  †It should be noted that the Trussardis were $5,000 apiece, retail. Well, whether it should be noted or not, the author begs indulgence for his catalogue des excès and would argue it to be something more; that such details are relevant to this chapter and of legitimate ethnographic interest. In this vein, he will add that the eager students were cautioned to steer clear of Gothick Hall, which harbored a secretary built by Rhode Island cabinetmaker Christopher Townsend, its silver fixtures smithyed by one Samuel Casey, and recently acquired by Lord Went at Sotheby’s for the not unlordly sum of £7 million. Nor were they to approach the $210,000 bottle of Château d’Yquem, personally engraved with Thomas Jefferson’s initials—though grown-ups were allowed to have a look if not a taste. The good lord also happened to be a collector of money itself. As a hobby, he enjoyed buying uncirculated legal tender: $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills (he’d purchased one of the latter for around $115,000), whose value increased exponentially each year.

  †Against all intentions, the Keatons did not make it that far. Young Dexter’s earache precluded her flying; the two graciously took their leave in Tel Aviv, and were much missed to journey’s end.

  CHAPTER 27

  For the Child Who Is Not Present

  “I want everyone to look for the mosasaur, OK?”

  The teenage docent held a shark fin in his hand. The children reached out carefully, as if the fossil might still cause mayhem.

  “And when you find the mosasaur—you’ll see how really huge it is—when you find the mosasaur, just remember: this very huge creature was eaten by the much smaller shark.”

  He stroked the hooked piece of cartilage to emphasize its role as David to the mosasaur’s Goliath. Then he held it in front of Amaryllis, cuing her to touch. She wouldn’t, a fact not lost on Dézhiree. The fin wound up at the wheelchair, in Cindra’s lap; the disabled girl squirmed and rolled her eyes in delight.

  There were two MacLaren field trips that summer—the mosasaur having been encountered on a sweaty, bus-rattled fiesta to Exposition Park’s stately Natural History Museum. Though nearly ruined, the coliseum abutting that place was far from Rome; a newly minted IMAX behemoth had infected adjacent buildings with its garish pastels and multiplex aesthetic. “Dancing Waters,” those cheap public-space ejaculations that soak the kids during parental cigarette breaks, added to the sprucing up—all this part of the rankly meretricious, cheesily stimulating great American playground, arty and self-aggrandizing, thrilled with itself no end. The whole chain-linked grid, surrounded by a flatland of jaundiced soccer-trodden crabgrass, was supposed to be a free-spirited architectural tribute to the putative joys of Science and Learning yet was in fact an ugly hodgepodge of loading zones and dented dumpsters that no one, not even the brightest design intern, had thought to conceal from general view. But the children of MacLaren weren’t critics—they were just happy to be in the “outs,” roaming the cool halls of glassed-in bison and saber-tooth. The dioramas were as calming as meds.

  In the three months since Amaryllis became a Pixie, she had been taken to children’s court on the occasions that her stay at Mac exceeded the amount of time prescribed by law; in those same three months, two suitable placements had been found that were quickly deemed otherwise (though not at all in the league of the perilous Canyon klatch of E. Woolery).

  For example, on the weekend of her arrival at the well-kept, super-stuccoed home of the Barnard Tofflers of R
osemead, she was sent packing due to an allergic reaction to the family cat—severe enough to require a trip to the emergency room at the ungodly hour such trips typically demand. Rosemead was not big enough for both of them, but Mrs. Toffler would not part with her beloved. This standoff, coupled with the girl’s habitual under-sheet flashlight explorations of the machinery of martyrdom, had the effect of making the whippet-size, already skittish Mrs. Toffler more skittish still. After a day or so of relative segregation from the pet, Amaryllis was remanded to Mac. To be fair, the Tofflers bought her a dress in consolation.

  In the second instance, she remained with the Alfredo Quiñoneses of Diamond Bar for a relatively carefree three weeks. The rural home had a big backyard with swings, barbecue and aboveground pool. Besides Amaryllis, five children lived there, all told; two were “real” Quiñoneses, while three were adopted (a palsied one among the latter, the disabled being a sacrosanct—and lucrative—cliché of Adoption World). A few weekends in, before school began, the mellow Mr. Quiñones, aged fifty, had a coronary and died. Soon after, a wet-eyed Quiñones aunt dutifully returned Amaryllis to MacLaren, along with Palsy Girl, who barked and wept the whole ride back.

  Yet the vicissitudes of an adoptee’s life were nothing compared to Amaryllis’s wrenching separation from the babies. Their initial reunion was short-lived; knowing the inevitable, the Mac staff was more lenient than usual in providing the star-crossed family with “together time.” (Only once did Saffron ask where her mother was. “Heaven,” said Amaryllis, and her sister seemed satisfied. When she inquired if it would be possible to visit that place for a picnic, Amaryllis wished her nominated to the Congregation for the Causes right then.) The age and adorableness of the babies made them “bull’s-eyes”: within five days of their arrival at the center, they were placed in a private home. Amaryllis dehydrated herself with tears. Lani Mott showed up to reassure that “family lawful visits” would be arranged—as the girl’s official CASA (the court paperwork had just gone through), the baker’s wife informed that she was “launching a third world war” to find a single placement for the three siblings so they could remain together. Everyone knew the chances of that were almost nil. But each time Amaryllis returned to Mac, she futilely asked for her Saffron and Cody, awaiting word that never came. No one would tell her where they were; she couldn’t even call them on the phone.