The Quincunx Holding Company undauntedly continued to acquire rectangles of real estate in the Beverly Vista matrix and was now in possession of nearly one hundred houses and apartment units. Like an embittered dramaturge (but more like a broker calling in margins), the billionaire ordered the division to take possession of the deeded homes that surrounded the school. It would be a three-month process, for that was the amount of time the tenants — former owners who had continued to “squat” on the properties — agreed they would need in order to move, upon notice to vacate. (Many of the homes whose original owners had already taken the money and run were currently inhabited by Quincunx employees.) Within six weeks, Dodd Trotter’s hydra-headed enterprise had transplanted itself to Northern California, and the eighty or so employee-participants of the Middle School Adjunct Residency Program had followed, leaving empty residences behind.
A series of increasingly frantic calls to the Quincunx CEO from honorary PTA president Marcie Millard went unreturned. As one by one the dwellings around the school went dark — and the student body dwindled accordingly — Dodd Trotter’s disappearing act became fuel for the media. Stories of the unfolding suburban debacle invariably contained two sides: that the celebrated nerd had avenged himself Carrie-like on an ungrateful school district for failing to allow him to remake the alma mater in his own image (and name), and the counterspin being that any reports to this effect were patently absurd, the vacancies an unfortunate by-product of a recessionary downsizing. For a few months the Trotters, Dodd in particular, endured more scrutiny than may have been desired. They would endure.
Neither the New York Times Magazine cover (“An Unsentimental Education”) nor the intercession of various moguls, senators and billionaire busybodies — most of them friends and colleagues or at least high-level acquaintances of Dodd’s and his father’s — did anything to sway him. His lawyers said the courts would eventually force Quincunx to sell off the marooned properties, but such a decision might take two years, at least. By then the paint would have faded and the lawns died, and Dodd Trotter’s interest along with them. He never held on to the empty buildings in his portfolio for longer than that anyhow.
When approached by outraged do-gooders, Trinnie chose not to get involved. Was she supposed to have an opinion? Did they think she was going to get big feelings over her kooky brother’s little stunt? She actually liked it when Dodd took some kind of action; the more bizarre, the merrier. Anyhow, who gave a shit. Beverly Hills could go fuck itself. He had always been there for her, and had suffered his own terrible losses; she would stand by him. She didn’t think it was any of her business to meddle — hers or anyone else’s.
One weekend, after paying a purely social visit to Marcus at Cañon Manor, Dodd took a dusk-time walk to old BV. For a half-mile around ground zero, there was the eerie absence of customary sights, sounds and smells — the lived-in-ness of a neighborhood. A few cars idled here and there while tourists snapped pictures of loved ones posing in the driveways of vacant houses as if they were their own. City-leased klieg lights lined the sidewalks to ward off vandalism. He saw a few media vans rumble past, and private patrol cars. Some of the news teams were from other countries.
When he was sure no one saw him, Dodd entered the apartment building on the corner of Rexford and Charleville. He passed the dry lobby fountain and rode an elevator to the fourth floor. Using a master key to gain entry to one of the empty units, he walked out to the patio that overlooked the darkening playground where the ugly bungalows still held dominion.
He watched the night fall.
Coda
Now sleep, the land of houses,
And dead night holds the street,
And there thou liest, my baby,
And sleepest soft and sweet;
My man is away for a while …
With some reluctance, the author concedes that he has reached the end of his story. The garden will be frozen in time and yet, paradoxically, grow wild outside these pages. Some last trimmings are in order.
At the age of eighteen, Lucille Rose Trotter gave her hand to the son of Lord Tryeferne, thereby becoming the fairest component of that entity known in English society sheets as the Hon Travis and Lucille Rose Tryeferne. Through an unfortunate act of terrorism, she somewhat prematurely became Lady Tryeferne and Lady Tryeferne she would remain, through miscarriage and divorce and romantic entanglements thick and thin. Our dear cousin, who wore braids when we first met, would not settle down until her mid-twenties, when, after the usual diversions — stints at fashion and auction houses, jewelry designing, handbag making, hospice working and even finally a passing stab at children’s-book authoring — she regained her senses and went to work for her dad. Taking to Quincunx like koi to water, she quickly proved herself to be more than a nepotistic adornment, and those who doubted her talents certainly suffered, though not for long; Mrs. Tryeferne (she detached the aristocratic handle in the workplace) had a way of wielding a blade so that its business was done before there was time to notice a spot of blood. She had always gotten on well with Frances-Leigh, who was endeared by the girl’s bossiness, especially after a star turn as the former secretary’s maid-of-honor at the most spectacular Scottish castle anyone in the world had ever seen. (Her father had bought it especially for the wedding ceremony and the three-day gala that followed.) Lady Tryeferne — or Our Lady of the Tryeferne, as Trinnie liked to call her — was also keen on South Sea pearls, and looked more and more like her auntie each day: lanky, freckle-flecked, willowy and red, red, red, with a keen look in her eye that made one fear she knew, or at least had known, too much. Now, whether the lady would one day have children — she had no hankering to marry again, nor did she pine for the patter of little feet upon marble — is not for us to guess; though she did take the loss of the child she had conceived with Travis as an omen, and was sorely reminded of the bittersweet genes that had ushered her brother into the world. (It mattered little that she’d been told she was no likelier to have a child with Apert than anyone else.) While Lucille Rose could not imagine another Edward in spirit, she could conjure one in body; that would have been a terrible thing to inflict upon anyone. So she put off thoughts of childbearing for a while and told herself she was doing the responsible thing. But time is on her side. Her life, we can say with certainty, shall be a long one, with never a use for a wandering garden.
She found her mother’s adoption of the McDonald’s baby galling. In her mind, he hadn’t so much been adopted as co-opted — a fledgling, deputized into Edward’s memory posse. It was just so blatant and, as she put it to friends, “unattractive”; happily, such judgments coincided with the arrival of that age when a young girl cultivates her innate desire to cannibalize or at least crucify the woman who bore and raised her (the very woman who, in therapists’ undying jargon, “had done the best she could”). Well, Lucille Rose did her best to loathe her put-upon mom. Yet each time she saw Ketchum, he was a little bit bigger and a little bit older, and a bit more affectionate, too, until Lucy (that’s what she let him call her) began to see him as a person in his own right rather than a substitute for the loveliest, most poetic soul she’d ever known. Watching Joyce with the boy, watching her chide and correct, hold and fuss, watching her love in a way the woman had never been able to with Edward (not to mention Lucy herself), she grew to respect and forgive, and to imagine her mother anew. It brought her close to godliness, for she finally untied what up till then had been the banal knot of Christian charity: that to save a life — such as Ketchum’s had been saved — to love for love’s sake alone created a chain reaction that truly changed the world. During yoga, or in moments of repose, Lady Tryeferne felt herself on the receiving end of her mother’s selfless act and was invigorated to start her own “chain”—when and where and whatever that might be. Her heart overflowed with hope and abundance.