I'll Let You Go (47 page)

“My name is Edward Trotter,” he said, handing her a cup of lovingly,
if laboriously prepared, hot chocolate. “You, if I recall, are
Amaryllis
—like the flower. And, more vaguely, as my dear friend Tull attested, like the Texan city.”

She nodded gravely at her host, as if he had exposed her last and deepest secret.

“Can you talk?” he asked. She cautiously indicated that she could. “Well then,
would
you?”

“Where am I?”

“At my home,” he said, “otherwise whimsically known as the Boar's Head Inn—there's even a sign ouside: established 1843. It's where I maintain my apartments and workshop. My parents—you shan't be meeting
them
—stay in the main house; and my sister—who you
have
met—lives up the ‘street,' above the Majestyk—that's the movie palace—the whole of our fair town being called Olde CityWalk and bordered by Stradella Road, which passes through the exceedingly dull principality of Bel-Air … itself a part of Los Angeles County, I believe. I don't think we've seceded quite yet.”

The shell-shocked Amaryllis could make no sense of what he was saying. She dumbfoundedly looked to the dog, whose long, fat body now hibernated amid piles of books and dry, deformed papier-mâché.

“And
that
,” he went on, “is Pullman, noblest of harlequins (remember?)—property, so to speak, of cousin Tull, né Toulouse, who I'm confident you
do
recall. At any rate, he was the first of the clan you laid eyes on. It was actually Tull who introduced us: ‘us' being myself, the well-known Boulder Langon and the less-well-known Lucille Rose Trotter, sister and future novelist of note.”

This time she didn't ask about his condition, which gave him leave to inquire after hers. Did she hurt anywhere? Was she feverish? Did she—yet before he could finish his examination, Amaryllis doubled over and ran to the trash, where she threw up what little she'd imbibed. With clucking self-reproach, Edward realized the poor girl was starving; cocoa may not have been the best idea. While she lay on the divan, peering at him from beneath a comforter, he rang the house kitchen for chicken broth and Popsicles.

A
few days later, the cousin invited Tull and Boulder to join him and Lucy for a light supper at the Boar's Head. Edward forsook
his customary face covering and, while not commenting directly, the children thought that remarkable. A molten rage of pimples had subsided, leaving a rash of burnt-out villages in its wake, their charred remains artfully covered by hypoallergenic makeup.

After heartfelt remarks on how well he looked and how buoyant seemed his spirits, the children occupied themselves with Four Winds gossip—fallout from the Easter Island faculty debauch, et alia—while young Candelaria shyly set the table. Another helper wheeled in a cart with boeuf bourguignon, yellowfoot mushrooms and Ligurian chickpea cake stowed in heated steel cabinets. A box of Le Marmiton tartes Tatins and thumbprint cookies awaited for dessert, wedged prominently between a Yupik Eskimo puppet and Julie Taymor–made goblin that Aunt Trinnie gave Edward on his last birthday. After the tossing of the mâche salad the couple was dismissed.

But a fifth place had been set.

“Who are we expecting?” asked Boulder, glancing at the empty spot.

“Wouldn't be Detective
Dowling
, would it?” added Lucy, an eyebrow archly raised. It was obvious she had in her possession an insider's “piece of intelligence”—some fresh mischief of her brother's was afoot.

“I don't
think
so,” said Tull. “He's with my mom at a screening.”

“Poor Rafe,” said Lucy wistfully.

“It's Ralph,” amended Tull.

“So easily replaced!”

“Don't worry about
him
,” said Tull, blasé. Then he turned to his cousin, tired of the game. Edward smiled like a mosaic mandarin; his much-operated-upon face looked digitized. “I hope it isn't some
Jewish
thing—you know, waiting for Elijah-slash-Marcus Weiner? That would be
so
dumb.
And
boring.”

“Two things I've never been accused of,” he said smugly.

The invalid used a cane while meandering to an open door. He stood inside its frame and looked expectantly offstage. With not a little sense of showmanship, he faced the group again, ridiculously clearing his throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I reintroduce to you … Amaryllis Kornfeld!”

The appearance of his father may have been the only thing to surprise Tull more than the sight of the girl, who had never really left his thoughts. The orphan haltingly entered as she had the Mauck that long-ago
day, but the old terror was supplanted by a diffidence, a charming acquiescence that filled Tull's heart.

Lucy ran to shore up their guest, who in the last seventy-two hours had already regained some weight if not a good part of luster. Aside from making sure that she fed her face around the clock, Edward had steeped her in the finest of emollients, and her hair, though in need of shaping—the MacLaren “stylist” left much to be desired—seemed to grow wilder and more beautiful by the hour. Tull (he still thought of himself as Toulouse around her) now waited nervously in the reception line, directly behind Pullman, who for some intolerably annoying reason chose this very moment to spend more time with the wayward child than he ever allotted to anything, living or dead. Lucy stroked the girl's rosy gold-brown cheek while Boulder, above it all, busied herself with Edward, praising his gambit and twittering over its daring illegality.

It was Tull's turn at last. The braided detective watched as the two locked eyes; and Lucy's face became a flowery field overtaken by dark clouds. She withdrew with a forced smile, joining Boulder and her brother.

He said hello and asked if she remembered his name. When she gave it to him, he was beside himself—he would be Toulouse forevermore.

He stood and blinked, dragging upper teeth against lower lip. Finally: “How did you get here?”

“I—I came to your school.”

“But how did you know—”

“Boulder visited the place I was staying.” It secretly thrilled her to so casually invoke the famous name. “They asked where she went, and she said Four Winds—”

“Visited?” exclaimed Boulder, having overheard. Edward hovered blissfully, like a playwright watching from the wings. “Visited where?”

“MacLaren Children's Center.”

Boulder was stymied for a second. “Oh my God! You mean that prison for kids? You were
there
?”

Amaryllis nodded. Mercilessly, Lucy smelled subplot. “But how did you escape?”

“My friend and I ran away.”

Edward hobbled forth and solemnly waved, forbidding her to finish.

“I am compelled to say,” he began with great flair, “that by harboring
this girl
sub rosa
—this innocent—we have each placed ourselves in jeopardy.” He pulled a card from his embroidered tunic. “I have here the name of Amaryllis's legal counsel, which, for the record, the young fugitive offered to me unsolicited. In fact, there were
two
of the barrister's cards, were there not?” He sounded like a magician setting up a trick. “I will retain one while my lodger retains the other. Upon this card are telephone, fax and e-mail contacts. Will I attempt to get in touch? Absolutely not!”

He tore up the card as if dispensing with a ruined queen of hearts. Everyone laughed but the orphan, who smiled pathetically. Watching Amaryllis—her small joys and terrors—had for Tull quickly become a warm avocation.

They took their seats and Boulder helped lay down plates. When Tull awkwardly attempted to engage the guest of honor in conversation, Lucy ordered him to get up and serve the damn salad. Which he did.

With spirited promptings from her Mauck Daddy, Amaryllis mesmerized them with fabulist tales of woe. The numerous, thimble-size portions of cognac with which they celebrated their reunion (partly medicinal) did nothing to hinder the orphan's dizzying, colorful amplifications—alcohol or no, she had found her tongue as never before. She spoke of canyons and witches, and deaf-and-dumb supergirls (though there was much she
didn't
tell); of her father held prisoner in the forbidden Valley of Carceration and her mother now with the angels (Amaryllis said she died but wouldn't say how); and lamented over her precious babies, cruelly stolen away. There were Fátima saints and advocating devils, popes and postulators and vast stone courthouses where children were chained with leg irons to bloody stone benches; a journey to
another
canyon (not Tunga) and how she slept under the stars with a white-fanged hot-breathed coyote watching her every move then stole a motorcycle from a biker on “the parole” and crashed it on a winding canyon road then called 411 to ask for “Santa Monica's Famed Four Winds School”—that's what they called it in Boulder's
Twist
profile—she took a limousine to the address they gave but it was Saturday and no one was there and she hid for twelve days and twelve nights (actually, just the weekend) before seeing the Mauck—… and by the time she was done, Lucy had long abandoned her Smythson pad and with it any hope of being a teller of stories; Boulder had decided to produce and star in an
Oscar-winning film of the orphan's life; Edward was happier and handsomer and higher than he'd been in who-knows-when; Pullman was fast asleep; and Tull—who, having come of age and into his own name, should henceforth be called Toulouse, for if Rafe Mirdling can warrant a rechristening, then so should the boy—Toulouse, a name of murky origins, which only his grandfather and Amaryllis had ever called him—well … our dear, suffering Toulouse was in love.

T
he gang looked after her in turns—except for Boulder, who was more or less busy with shooting a film and all the important folderol that entailed—and set about her tutoring with gusto. The orphan, who turned twelve that first week of October (and was duly feted in a secret ceremony), took in the world afresh, albeit with somewhat shorter hair: as a cloak of anonymity against those who might be in pursuit, Edward had insisted a visit be paid to Frédéric Fekkai. She tearfully emerged from the salon looking like the most beautiful boy imaginable and was immediately treated to as many of Cañon Drive's 31 Flavors as she desired.
^†

Amaryllis was an eager bride. In exchange for the teaching of insipid social graces, Lucy conscripted the pint-size Scheherazade to spin yarns of a netherworld that the authoress hoped “to make her own.” (The character of a wandering waif was now central to the
Blue Maze
opus.) After all, Mr. Hookstratten said the scribbler's credo was to “write what you know”; Lucy took that to mean what
others
know, too.

This was the time of Sukkoth and a great hut was constructed at school—as was a temporary dwelling on the lower Stradella campus, made from cornstalks, and hung with figs, dates, grapes, olives and pomegranates. Eager to hammily underscore the real-life exodus—Amaryllis's—unfolding before him, Toulouse edified his favorite student about the Jewish holiday in hortatory tones that promptly sickened him.

“ ‘You shall dwell in booths seven days,' ” he read, “ ‘that your generations may know that I made the
children
[italics Toulouse's] of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.' That's Leviticus,” he said bombastically, closing the book with a flourish. He couldn't seem to help himself. Any metaphors were lost on the girl, who at the mention of Israel thought only of Edith Stein; unhappily, the open-air evergreen “booth” only served to remind her of Topsy's GE box beneath the 4th Street Bridge.

There was much recreation for Amaryllis, who, aside from swimming, skating and soccering, was not infrequently seen aboard the spotted back of Pullman, hugging his flanks while he lagged behind the fat-wheeled buggy—it wasn't the easiest thing to catch up with Edward as he careered his way over Stradella House's great expanse. The cousin would finally stop for lunch in the sukkah, where the girl held her own in conversation, showing a fine instinct and wider apprehension. She told him everything she knew about saints, an instructive amount indeed. Their encounters left him positively ebullient; even his complexion cleared.

As for Toulouse, she continued to provoke and enthrall the boy whom she had forever marked. With a sophistication that belied her years, Amaryllis experimented in both elating and angering him with as little space between as could be managed. Just when he began to shudder and his lips went bloodless and he prepared to scold, Amaryllis smiled or kissed his cheek or threw a small, sweet punch to a shoulder that made him glad he hadn't been petty—and terrified that if he ever was, she might vanish forever. It confused and upset him that he sometimes had the same anxieties about the girl that he had for Trinnie.

The gang alternated playing hooky in order to show Amaryllis the sights and buy her things—clothes and accessories that not only enhanced mood and appearance but allowed for a general blending-in with her new surroundings. It must not be forgotten that these children of privilege (as long as their schoolwork was deemed not to suffer) were afforded such leeway in their personal schedules that even at night—with cowed, overworked Eulogio at the Mauck's helm—they moved more or less with the freedom of adults. Of course Edward had always done as he pleased, especially as he got older; those who loved him wished his happiness unrestricted. On a school night, then, it was not unusual to see the foursome gorging on puu-puu platters at Trader Vic's
or à table oceanside at Casa del Mar. In a two-week period, Amaryllis saw her very first concert and more movies than she had in her entire life, a slew of the latter screened at Stradella's own Majestyk, the existence of which continued to puzzle her—as did the surrealistic whole of Olde CityWalk. Some things one could never fathom. She walked on the beach for the first time too and looked through telescopes at the Observatory, forded Raging Waters, climbed Magic Mountain and went to a place called the Bowl for an evening picnic—which in fact
did
look like a bowl, but one upright and half-buried in the earth. They had their own private little outdoor room with a low fence around it, and an orchestra serenaded them under starry skies. Afterward, Toulouse suggested they drive to the motel where she had once lived, but her face darkened and he saw he had somehow trivialized her. He had not meant to make her life into another entertainment. He said he was sorry and left it at that. Why, he wondered, had he told her nothing of his own history and travails? Did he feel himself above that? He had deliberately mentioned his mother, but only to throw her off the scent of the missing dad; thankfully, she hadn't been curious enough about fathers—any fathers at all—to follow up. So at least he never lied outright about his “situation.” But he was
already
ashamed, and the shame of not being candid with her shamed him further.