I'll Let You Go (10 page)

“
We
were homeless once,” said Boulder.

“The earthquake doesn't count.”

“It killed our beach house.”

“You had
two
beach houses.”

“It killed them
both
.”

“She stayed in a hotel for three months.”

“A hotel is not a home.”

“You stayed at Shutters.”

“That's a beach hotel,” said Tull for Amaryllis's edification—then hated himself some more.

“That's where I live,” chimed the orphan, then frowned. Again, she wished she hadn't spoken. “A motel. The St. George—with my mother and brother and sister.”

“A motel! The St. George?” queried Lucy. “I haven't heard of it. Now, is that near the Bonaventure or the Biltmore? Is it four- or five-star?”

Before the torture could continue, there was a sharp rap at the door and Amaryllis nearly jumped from her skin. The arrival of Mr. Hookstratten—Four Winds teacher of the year, private tutor to moguls and occasional on-set educator—was not unexpected, but the children
(all but Edward, of course) scurried about as if they'd been up to great mischief. The balding scholar beamed from the driver's side, hand of a raised arm gripping the Mauck wing, blinking in through bulgy, light-sensitive eyes. Boulder and Lucy rushed forward, trying to distract from the sight of Tull, who shadowed the orphan girl as best he could while she seized her backpack and made her way to the passenger-side portal whence she had come—clinging all along to the walls like a tiny cat burglar.

“And who's this?” Mr. Hookstratten cheerily inquired. Boulder said she was the daughter of a grip; Lucy said she was part of “the research project”; Tull said she had helped bring the food trays—all in unison, while Amaryllis quit the luxuriant specialty vehicle, vanishing into the brightness of day.

W
hen she got to the St. George, there were patrol cars and sedans with revolving red lights stuck on khaki-colored roofs. The babies were already in one of the backseats, with a policewoman fussing over them; the froggy front-office Korean pointed at Amaryllis and the men set after her. She had never run like that before, and prayed to Edith Stein no one would catch her.

She would
have
to find Topsy now. He'd give her shelter, and she would finally tell him everything.

F
ive in the morning. Will'm stood among ovens and large iron machines, unfurling canvas stored in a hard long tube. The hawk-nosed baker, Gilles Mott, held the bird-and-berry scene (the very same depicted in the “Cadillac” 's mural) carefully in flour-dusted hands, an auctioneer apprizing maps of a medieval world.

“It's
very
detailed,” he remarked. “Is it a painting?”

“
Fabric
, man—one of our more popular patterns. We call it the Strawberry Thief. Indigo-discharge on block-printed cotton. That's what stained me blue!”

He waved his arms, which, at shoulder joint, were thick as cadets' thighs, but Gilles saw no dye. The baker
did
think it an amazing business, though: this colored parchment with inked green foliage shot through by cocky thrushes, their beaks cadging strawberries hung from tendrils like swollen lanterns.

“Will'm … you've been to France, no?”

“I'm not fond of the Frankish tongue nor Frankish things.”

He rolled up the “Thief” and replaced it in the scabbard. For a moment, the baker worried his segue had offended, but an old memory stubbornly asserted itself.

Will'm unceremoniously began mopping the concrete. For this and other chores, Gilles paid him minimum wage plus bread, scones and other delectables. Once in a while, the mystery man announced the urge to bake; on such days, his startled benefactor wisely sat back to watch artistry unfold. Tossing off scintillating ciabatta and pane pugliese as if it were child's play, his skill with sweet things was elysian—it was during
one of those rare incursions that Bluey's recent favorite, the mille-feuille of almonds and pomegranates, was born, and christened The Persephone. (
If only the old woman knew
, thought the baker,
the circumstances of its preparation
.) Yet whenever Gilles offered steady work, the prodigy angrily balked. He soon gave up his entreaties, fearing the man would never come around again.

“You'd look amazing there,” said Gilles. “I mean, in France. The French would love you. They wouldn't know what to
make
of you, but they'd love you. That pattern made me think of something. My fiancée and I were having a look around Paris. An arrondissement near the Père-Lachaise—the famous cemetery.
Every
cemetery in France is famous. We thought we could run into Marlene Dietrich, who supposedly lived in an apartment house nearby; we were a little drunk. We finally found the place and stood knocking for fifteen minutes.” A polite listener, the transient leaned on the mop to hear him out. “We were just about to leave when a middle-aged woman came to the door.
Not
Marlene. What I remember were her eyes: dilated. One of those opium eaters. She looked like a fish coming at you from twenty thousand leagues. We followed her down—she
floated
down—to a six-hundred-year-old wine cellar. Well, we turned the corner and eighteen people looked up and stared. An amazing
shock
. Their eyes peeked over napkins; they were covering their faces like dignitaries caught in a raid. And formally dressed! Very
Discreet Charm
, do you know Buñuel? He was a Spaniard—an Andalusian, actually. Well, can I tell you what the occasion was? We later found out. It was a bunch of rich gourmands, and they had paid a
huge
amount of money to eat these songbirds. Little songbirds!
Completely
illegal—the birds were on the endangered species list. Very Kosinski, do you know him? Killed himself in the bath. Never had a tastier treat in my life: sweet, crunchy … bitter, too. My fiancée said they kept them in dark cages for months—”

“The dinner guests?”

“The birds! Gorged them on millet, then drowned them in snifters of Armagnac. And the reason they held up their napkins, so they said, was because you were supposed to eat the birds
hot
. You just popped them in and chewed with your mouth open or else you got burned.”

“That
is
the Frankish way, isn't it? Murder a thrush behind veils of civility! Truth be told, the French
are
a dishonorable and troublously shoddy race.”

Gilles Mott had known the hulking homeless man for six months. He found him to be thoughtful, gentle and diligent at menial tasks, of which he neatly did a baker's dozen. Gilles was something of a scholar of the fractured souls who wandered from dark and dirty wings onto his stage; of all the players he'd known, the one called Will'm was the most “accomplished.” He
looked
magnificent—his face had the ruddy plein air nobility of a streetwise sage, without the astringent lunacy in the eye. He was truculent but never uncivil. The hair swept back like a Big Sur poet's (he said he was nicknamed for his locks; friends got Topsy from the slave girl in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
), and his beard grew like cliff bush over tweedy layers of dress, its wiry, earthen, sun-bleached colors blending with sport coat, vest and wan-pink debuttoned Brooks Brothers blouse fastened at collar with twine. How clothes were found to fit the dimensions of this man remained, for the baker, a puzzle. His voice too was distinctive, a contained whisper emanating from the citizens of a thousand nodal villages sitting upon cords buried deep as transatlantic cable within a meaty, blushing throat. Gilles thought of the self-averred Oxford-educated wanderer as a ghost who walked the urban heath, otherwise imagining him a character from H. G. Wells dislocated in Time. He worried about this tender mountain and keenly wondered about the origins of his elaborate personal myth. Like the student he was, Gilles nudged and probed, but not too hard—the baker's wife, a volunteer caseworker herself, had cautioned him against it.

“Will'm,” he said, cutting dough for croissants. “Where exactly were you born? I mean, if you don't mind.”

“All that's public knowledge!” he snapped, mopping with new resolve. “If it must be said again, I came into this world in Elm House, Walthamstow—dead on Clay Street.”

“But when?”

“That, man, is also for the record: March of 'thirty-four.”

“
Nineteen
thirty
-
four …” said the baker, the slight emphasis giving him away.

Will'm stopped his chores and horse-laughed. Gilles was actually relieved—mindful of his wife's admonition, for a split second he'd seen himself tossed to the floor and gutted.

“If that
is
the case, then something's
very
wrong indeed!”

“So it's eighteen thirty-four then—”

“Man, are you daft? Of course eighteen. We're not in Utopia yet, are we?”

“Most certainly not! But well—could you—can you
tell
me about it?
Some
thing—say, about where you were raised?”

“Epping Forest, man! That's where we moved, when I was six. That's what's most vivid. A mystical place: boon and balm to a child. Lived at Woodford Hall. Now,
that
was fifty acres and six hundred pounds to let, six hundred the year. For the rest of my
life
I never paid more, not even at Kelmscott. So you can see how lavish it was. Father'd made his fortune in copper, so we were set.” His eyes crinkled and gleamed. “Had my own coat of armor as a boy. A smithy did it up, all to my design—well, perhaps I ‘borrowed' one or two touches from a Negrolian ‘bat-wing' burgonet—quite the swashbuckler I was! We (all the garrulous
Waverly
boys) lived and breathed Walter Scott. Rode ponies past blue plums and pollarded hornbeams to watch low-slung craft loiter on the glassy river: then on to Shooter's Hill and the wide green sea of marshland at Essex.”

Maybe
, thought Gilles,
Will'm
had
been a professor, a professor at Oxford who was visiting the States (one somewhat eccentric to begin with), whose mad cow virus kicked in halfway through term at Claremont or USC, the insidious Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy herding him to skid row and such
. Maybe if he got to the bottom of it, Gilles could help.

“But
how
, Will'm—how did you get
here
?”

“Do you mean the Abbey?”

“Well … yes! If that's where we are now.”

“Then if
you
don't know—!” He began to laugh.

The baker, yet again mindful of his wife and seeing himself pummeled and bleeding as the morning's first cheerful customers arrived, thought well enough of today's session being done. So they worked in relative silence, with Topsy back to his mopping, on occasion muttering epithets toward “those bilious Frankish people,” until the store opened and the lapsed don discharged.

Watching him leave, Gilles Mott ruminated awhile on Paris and that long-lost fiancée; someday if possible he would make amends. Until then, he felt like one of those characters he read about in the paper, who, ensconced in happy second lives, await authorities to enter the workplace and handcuff them so they may at long last answer charges from another time.

T
here was too much to do. There were designs for textiles that crowded his head like vernal snowflakes; the medieval cathedrals—and St. Mark's, in Venice—that needed to be cataloged by his Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings; a mental inventory of stained glass and tile, wood furnishings and tableware; correspondence to be kept up, with Ruskin and Rossetti and Georgiana Burne-Jones; fresh lectures on socialism and the decorative arts; and the charting of his daughter's seizures and wife Jane's infidelities. Most important, he must continue his life's work, a book written in his own fine hand, a book called
News from Nowhere
. He kept it in a downtown locker and went there to work on it three times a week. And so it began

For that is who he thought he was: William Morris, robust, protean, Promethean William Morris, the Victorian genius of design.

While it has become simple for laymen to know a ruined mind when they see one—any worthwhile psychotic hears voices through teeth or television—the gods of madness are surely in the far-fetched details that often astonish with the fabulous, unexpected poignancy of cracked new worlds revealed. Those unhinged men and women, having left the ocean of our experience, now reside in stagnant pools and brackish backwaters, encamped by polluted river or stream from which there is no return. Before his descent (until we know his Christian name, we will oscillate between Topsy and Will'm), a friend at his workplace found him acting strange. When told as much, Will'm recounted a dream he'd had that affected him in a most peculiar way. A group of ghouls, he said, asked if he would please to consider the newly formed position of Chairman of the Disembodied. The co-worker laughed uncomfortably, before asking how he replied. “I told them yes,” said Will'm. But his addendum is what set the listener's teeth on edge: “Because I knew I would soon have time on my hands.”