I'll Let You Go (83 page)

“Oh.”

“So I don't want you to worry.”

“Doddie—there's something I read in the paper—while I have you on the phone … did you hear about Lillian Hammersmith? A
glorious
dancer. Friend of Alice's—Astor. Had a house in Rhinebeck, one of those fancy places high on a hill. I always wanted your father to buy in Rhinebeck, but he was obsessed with the Adirondack ‘style,' had to have his Great Camp. But, my
God
, Hudson Valley was grand. So green, so stately! Alice had fireplaces in the bathrooms, and
that
, I think, is the greatest luxury known to man. If you stood in the backyard, you could see the Roosevelts on one side and the Stuyvesants on the other.”

“Mother? I'm sorry, I didn't … what was the last thing you said?”

“Ninety
-two
she was, poor Lillian. That's marvelous genes, isn't it? A
great
, great friend of Bill's—and Tennessee's—and Cecil and Evelyn too. They were
all
at Rhinebeck. Well as you can imagine I was
deeply
impressed. I was barely twenty-five!”

“Little hard to hear you, Mother. Connection isn't good.”

“The
Times
didn't say how she passed away—at that age, they never do! It's considered poor form. But it seems she held on to her money, and I'm glad for that. Doddie …”

“Yes, Mother? I can hear you now.”

“There's someone else who passed on.”

He was certain now that she knew about Edward too, and girded himself to respond.

“Do you remember Bluey Trotter? Née Twisselmann, of the Pittsburgh Twisselmanns? She married Louis Trotter, the Bel-Air waste-removal king.”

“Mother?”

“Doddie, can you hear me?”

“Yes—”

“Because I know how busy you are …”

“I'm not busy at all. I just couldn't understand what you—”

“
Bluey Trotter née Twisselmann
. Have you already heard?”

“Heard what, Mother?”

“She passed, Doddie! And so young. Well, relatively—do you
remember her? We all seem to have lost touch. I wanted you to know before you read about it or heard it from a stranger.”

“I don't know what you're saying.”

“Don't be stupid, Doddie! You're always so stupid!”

“Is Winter there?”

“I'm telling you that she
passed
. But I know how busy you are.”

“Mom, can you please put Winter on?”

“I'll let you go, dear. You take care now, Puddin'-head.”

“Can you just let me talk to Winter a second?”

“I just wanted you to know so you wouldn't read about it in the paper. So don't be sorry. Say hello to the Indians, said she, and don't be ‘sari'!”

I
t was Marcus who made the suggestion that proved pivotal to his wife's recovery.

When Samson Dowling confided the putative reason behind her breakdown, Marcus quickly formed a stratagem in keeping with the nimble warriorship of his storied agenting days. A summit with Dr. Kindman was held at his magnificently restored Pasadenan Greene & Greene. Digger and Duffer had first met in the Pacific Theater, before an agreement was struck stateside; Mr. Trotter would make his friend filthy rich if the latter would deign to improve his golf game. (Each held up his end fairly well.) More than anyone, Dr. Kindman had been privy to the panoramic events comprising
toutes les affaires Trotter
. He was present at the births of Katrina and Dodd, who in turn came to know him as a frequent dinner guest (and Twig House crony, too—he canoed with the best of them). Suffice to say he was close at hand while a third generation was brought into the world, some with more trouble than others, and was a great comfort to the parents of Edward, seeing them through the difficult times and always making sure they had access to the best care available.

The good Dr. Kindman had in fact intervened on Trinnie's behalf when it seemed that her fiancé might benefit from a little professional counseling after the incident of the stolen book, and was the very same Mr. Trotter thought to call to La Colonne on that faraway, inconsolable morning to administer tranquilizers to his wounded girl. And while the old man had demurred in asking his advice on the matter of the collars that would not button, Dr. Kindman
had
been furnished with a blow-by-blow
of Marcus Weiner's extraordinary Twin Towers adventure. Upon his release, the physician spent several afternoons at the Hotel Bel-Air and subsequently Montecito, feasting on the ex-convict's truffled grits and mango'd foie gras. (Though it has already been shown that his “family” credentials could not be more impeccable, it should be noted that Dr. Kindman still made the once-a-week trip to Woodland Hills and wandered there with Bluey, who never screamed in his presence. He was at bedside the exact moment Louis chuffed off this mortal coil.)

As Marcus laid the whole thing out over coffee, the doctor knew early on where he was heading, for he understood the headstrong woman's sensitivities and always felt the needless torture she had inflicted upon herself throughout the years to be a crying shame—this latest being “the topper.” While it was arguable that the physical blow she had inflicted upon her father was the contributing factor, or even the cause, of his death, Dr. Kindman (and of course Marcus) realized that in order to secure her peace of mind, such a thing would need be indelibly disproven, which it, naturally, could not. An alternative course of action was proposed. By the end of the day the very pathologist who had given Trinnie the news of the fateful arterial “rip” stood in great officialdom before her hospital bed with a raft of MRI, CAT scan and “autopsy” results (the latter had not actually been performed) while Marcus, Dr. Kindman, two psychiatrists and three others from Mr. Trotter's health team hung fire.

Trinnie sat with knees drawn to chest, like a despondent bookend.

It is unnecessary to go into any great particulars regarding the tender machinations that led to the assembly's cogently convincing refutation of an earlier-stated now wholly “speculative” cause of death, or the passionate assertion of the “absolute impossibility” of such a blow having played any part in said demise. The true culprit, they averred, lay in a pre-existing condition of which Dr. Kindman and the deceased himself had been long aware, a condition for which our carefully prepared team had gathered enough corollating data to sway the grandest of grand juries. It
is
enough to say that these were men whose predilection and training was to do no harm, or, at least, to ease human suffering, and that the situation at hand—a distraught, borderline-delusional woman who needed to hear certain things in order to get on with her life—brought out their very best.

The present company, some of whom were already well disposed
toward Trinnie for not having sued them, was beholden to her father for his selfless disbursement of grants and private research fundings, large amounts of which had yet to be released. In other words, they depended on the largesse of the executor of the estate, a role that happened to be filled by none other than Dr. Kindman, a detail offered here without irony or cynicism and not meant to dilute the wonderful thing they did that drizzly, gray afternoon. Which was: they lied. They lied to Katrina Trotter. They lied to save her—she tenuously came to life before their eyes—and in so doing, were born again to the qualities of healing and mercy which most had forgotten (or left by the wayside), the very things that first inspired them to take the Hippocratic Oath. They lied, and slept like babes that night, awakening to a day that was new. They were full of grace and heroic virtue, and whether that venerable mood lasted an hour, a week or forever is of no concern here. This is all that mattered: in the course of twenty-odd minutes, a diabolical, potentially fatal burden was lifted from Trinnie's frail shoulders by her husband and his cohorts—an ingenious act of merciful aplomb that could not have been orchestrated any better by Louis Trotter himself.

We
are
that malleable, usually punishing ourselves for no good reason, and are happy-go-lucky and indifferent while leaving sorrow and havoc in our wake.

T
rinnie divided her time between the presidential suite of the Peninsula Hotel and Cañon Manor (where Toulouse was installed), for the solitariness of Saint-Cloud was too much to bear. Over the next few months, the seeds the doctors had planted finally took root so that, looking back, she could recall the time she thought herself a patricide as one recalled the paranoid Technicolor of a fever dream. Slowly, her father's memory was able to take its rightful, benevolent, quietly riotous place in her garden.

The social cachet of the Weiners, steadfastly building after fits and starts, achieved a kind of flash point with the publication of “The Man Who Would Be William Morris” in
Vanity Fair
. John Burnham felt terrible for having initially provided access, but there was nothing he or anyone in his circle could do to quash the piece. The profile, one of those lush, quasi-literary tabloidal numbers that tipped their hat to Oliver
Sacks, contained a treasury of La Colonne wedding photos and even Weiner juvenilia (to wit, a grainy shot of the boy staring directly to camera, Portrait of the Itinerant Schizophrenic as a Very Young Man). What disturbed Marcus most was that the writer had duped poor Harry into handing one of the old albums over. He thought that unforgivable, but graciously shook it off, for he was glad just to be whole again, and reunited with his family. Besides, a certain amount of notoriety accompanying their “coming-out” (as Burnham put it) was inevitable; the agent in him was savvy enough to know the publicity apparatus would soon enough move on to fresher prey. The article was optioned as a feature film, but certain forces—which did not exclude the artful designs of Dodd Trotter or, for that matter, those of Mr. Burnham himself—had conspired to guarantee that nothing would ever come of it.

M
arcus, who still took his constitutionals to and from the cemetery, one day found Joyce crouching over her son's grave, agitated beyond the norm.

“Are you all right, girl? What is it?”

“I'm just heartsick—some heavy equipment came through here, and look what happened.”

The plaque had cracked in two, with only the bottom-most half remaining. It now read:

“It's going to take three weeks to repair.”

“What a shame! What a shame …” They knelt there staring at it awhile before he spoke up. “Joyce—have you been to potter's field?”