And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffered change:
For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
In comparison to Marcus’s previous lodging, the Hotel Bel-Air — though more an antacid pink than Red House — was most congenial (at least it was no Big House). He occupied a large series of rooms and was never left alone.
He even cooked for the men who guarded him, wearing a dainty, ill-size apron about his waist for the task. He made a mean pomegranate sabayon — the color of which resembled the aforementioned bismuthal lodgings — that when poured over mille-feuille pillows melted in the mouth like stardust.
The entourage of healers was vast: psychotherapists and physicians, nutritionists and body-workers, barbers and manicurists and of course the hulking men in well-tailored suits who stood at the door with tiny earpieces, as if covertly auditing the drone of a bureaucratic god. He did not find the circumstances at all oppressive, and actually marveled at the suite’s wallpaper and chintz, which though not topflight had the effect of reminding him of patterns designed by that distinctive genius with whom he once shared such affinity and ardor, and from whom he felt himself sadly receding each fallish Californian day, days marked less by chill and chimney smoke than by the sight of the hostelry’s storybook swans.
For after a week had passed, Louis Trotter, at the urging of his son-in-law’s mental-health supernumeraries, declared it a fine idea for him to stroll the grounds with the men in suits as chaperons. Tourists and other passersby must have thought him to be a King Nerd who had bottomed out à la Brian Wilson when, in fact, Marcus’s world had gone from “lockdown” sandbox to oysters indeed.
The education — or re-education — of Mr. Weiner proceeded with uncommon speed. He had always been an apt pupil, but now that it was his own life he was studying, he did his homework with especial rigor, unclouded by hallucination.†
With the case happily resolved, the detective was allowed to come and go as he pleased, and the expansion upon their already cordial bond was mutually healing. They made small talk and took their meals by the patio or pool. Out of the blue, Marcus spoke of wishing to visit the new cathedral downtown before it was filled with “tiresome” parishioners; he had a fondness for empty churches. Along that vein, he unleashed an impassioned filibuster on “the preservation of ancient buildings,” radiantly evoking St. John’s in the Wilderness — his sanctuary in the early fugitive days of his Adirondack unraveling. Just as Samson was wondering if he should delve into that episode, Marcus himself brought up the arrest, even referring to the detective’s “official” visits those many years ago.
“No Twin Towers that,” he said, with gentle irony. “The woman — the one who said I struck her? Crazy as a loon! I never raised a hand to a woman in my life! Beaten by a ‘john,’ she was. But I was in terrible shape — oh, terrible. Wasn’t I, Sam? Oh good Lord.”
“How did you wind up there, anyway? I thought you’d hardly visited Twig House before the wedding.”
“How? Don’t know. Some things — a lot of things — are just lost. We did go there once or twice; the lakes always had a strong and lovely pull. Tear o’ the Clouds … been up there, Sam?”
“Not in a long while.”
“Perhaps because it was Essex County — I have ties there, you know. Across the Atlantic.” He brought himself up. “Or had ties, should I say. I’m losing some of those old ties,” he said, with a wink of apprehension.
So they sat or sunned or strolled among the swans, talking of this and that: a bit about Mr. Trotter and the twenty-four-cylinder, $3 million, quarter-million-ton, two-stories-high earthmover he’d bought, with tires that dwarfed a man — and a bit about Dodd — and a bit about the movie world and popular culture — but never a word of their shared true love. Sometimes they watched television, an activity interrupted by the hilarious regularity of Marcus’s “Oh, good God!” outbursts. Once, a film featuring his old client Tom Hanks and a bulldog came on through the satellite dish and Marcus was riveted. “That’s Tom,” he said. “By God, that’s Tom, isn’t it?” He said it over and over. “But the story — it’s mad, isn’t it? But charming! But absolutely mad.” (He was still determining what and who was crazy, and when and if it was all right to say or be so.) At night, while the men in suits sat before the droning tube, he lay on his bed staring at the letter from Gilles, exhausted — there was so much to do, and yet it seemed he’d forgotten how to do anything. A torrent of thoughts and schemes and projects rushed to his head, just as they had in the William Morris mind-set of old. But he was sorely paralyzed; and could not go marathon-walking, even if he had a mind to.
Harry and Ruth delivered a trove of picture albums, and Marcus soon ran “Red” and “Lands” together like a native, no longer infusing his boyhood community with comic biblical import. Though images of himself as a toddler left him scratching his head, he began to scrutinize the souvenirs with a growing titillation — bar mitzvah photos were of exorbitant interest, like clandestine documents detailing the arcane rites of Guinean tribes. Delicately, with Polaroid and Kodachrome time line, the Weiners drew him toward adulthood. He loved the snapshots taken at the Huntington — here they huddled at the foot of the Japanese bridge; there, crouched at the lily pond. Young Marcus stood in the library of that great institution beside a tapestry, and his older self brought it closer and cooed, as if recognizing something he had woven with his own hands.
His parents were grateful to be asked the random personal question — for example, What happened to his father’s face? “I had a stroke, son,” Harry said. “But it hasn’t slowed me a whit.”
Marcus nodded and cooed, like an acolyte handed a koan.
Ruth brought pomegranate preserves made especially for him; he slathered them on a cracker, wincing as they hit the palate — the three had a good laugh about that, because even thirty years ago he had not liked her results. The men in suits admired the jelly well enough and were given some to take home. The men in suits seemed to eat pretty much anything.
Ruth Weiner left the wedding album home, for a mother’s instincts told her it was too soon. But Harry, rascal that he was, managed to smuggle something past — not that his wife knew, even in hindsight, that she would have objected. One day at the Bel-Air, he presented his son with a package wrapped in rice paper. Marcus tore it open and stared blinkingly at News from Nowhere, the very book that Toulouse, whose existence was still unknown to him, had held in his hands not long ago.
The former agent hung his head and remembered. (But could not remember why or when he had mailed it to Redlands.) This was the thing he’d been accused of stealing, and had stolen, but had lied about when confronted; not even his parents knew of that episode — nor was their son aware that Mr. Trotter, using Detective Dowling as a go-between, had compensated the aggrieved booksellers shortly after his final flight. The longer he held it, the heavier it became, its history soaking his cells the way certain medicines act on the muscles of a horse when sponged upon its coat; for this book of William Morris’s marked a kind of beginning of the end. He had taken its name for his own diary …
He pressed the book to his chest and sunk into the divan, disconsolate. Ruth and Harry rallied futilely around him. His mother suggested it was time to go home, but when she tried to take the book, thinking it had already vexed him enough, he resisted, so Harry told her to let it be.