He had gory theories galore: someone had struck the dog with a car then buried him in a literal cover-up — or that Pullman had collapsed and fallen into a street-maintenance dugout, where the body was inadvertently mutilated by pipe cutters or whatnot, then simply buried by workers out of sheer expediency. Awakening in the middle of the night from a dream, he was certain the dog was in the maze, but would then remember it had been uprooted and that the house on Saint-Cloud was no more.
About a year after Marcus moved to Cañon Manor, Trinnie began taking lovers again, as she had all those years he was absent. If Marcus knew, he kept his feelings close; she was a good mother and a good friend and he had no right to tell her anything. Their own lovemaking had come and gone like a freakish meteorological event that would never recur. (She had been wrong when she thought she conceived in the tower on their return; the doctors said she was now barren.) Katrina Berenice Trotter Weiner made excuses, telling herself they just needed time. He was having relapses — an accent had crept back to his voice, and the tailor Montalvo called to say that Marcus had ordered a dozen suits in “the bespoke Victorian cut.” The bill was to be sent to a certain W. Morris of Kelmscott Manor. But the details of his infirmity no longer seduced — once the stained glass was broken, the rebuilt church could not allure. When she left for Slovakia (Ralph Mirdling and Ms. Keaton had since broken up and he was directing a film there) and stayed six weeks, husband and wife spoke twice a day, and that gave Marcus great joy. Sometimes when she returned from her travels, she was so exhausted that he nursed her. Once she almost needed to be hospitalized again, and he brought her to Cañon Manor because she couldn’t sleep. She paced like a wraith at all hours, muttering in a fugue state, “I killed him! I killed him — it was my blow that killed him!” He shushed and kissed and rocked her in his arms; it was so beautiful and so awful that the boy could hardly watch.
La Colonne Détruite outlived all the Trotter residences. Ironically, it was Marcus who exhorted for its preservation, as had William Morris for the preservation of cathedrals “and other ancient buildings.” (He had in fact been acting as a kind of informal curator for the structures in his brother-in-law’s shrinking portfolio of skeletal landmarks.) He argued that the broken tower was simply too grand a curiosity to demolish. But there was another, far more compelling, reason not to tear it down.
Marcus Weiner continued to frequent the Westwood cemetery — why beat about the bush? It may now be said that with the dotty Ms. Campbell’s blessing, Mr. Weiner eventually took over the duties of Sling Blade, who, as the result of a small inheritance left him by Louis Trotter, renounced his career as park caretaker. (Mr. Blade was unsure of his future and needed time to lay fallow; he was, as he put it, “on sabbatical.” More certain of their path were the indomitable Monasterios: Epitacio, Eulogio and Candelaria. With money bequeathed them by Edward — who, aside from having feelings of great affection, had harbored a residuum of guilt for having forced them to betray their employers in the matter of the AWOL orphan — the hardworking family bought a fleet of Town Cars and founded a livery company, which they christened, in eccentric yet poignant homage, E. A. Trotter & Sons.) He raked and watered and polished, pointing tourists toward celebrity stones — but never got over a gnawing sense of incompletion during his “unquiet” peregrinations of the digger’s monumentless greens.
On a day in which the Santa Ana winds lived up to all the morose and mystical things ever written about them, Marcus called a meeting between himself, Dodd and his “Katy” in which he made a proposition so startling and bizarre it could not be ignored. After much thought, much agonizing thought, he said, he’d come to conclude that the body of Louis Trotter should be exhumed and reburied on the grounds of La Colonne — or better still, burned there and thrown to the winds.
Brother and sister thought he’d gone mad yet again. But as the minutes ticked on, then the hours and the days, they realized it was the most sound and gorgeous of proposals. Louis Trotter would finally have a memorial that was fitting, or, to put a finer point on it, fit for the digger’s grandiose, quixotic imaginings.
And so it was achieved — the hows and whens and legalities thereof have no import here. A small service was performed on what was now most assuredly Carcassone Way. In years thereafter, only one family member would ever set foot upon those strange and hallowed grounds again.
When he turned twenty-eight, Dr. Trotter made the trip to Redlands. Ruth had died the year before, and Harry was looked after by around-the-clock nurses, their salaries paid by the estate of Louis Trotter. He was frail but comfortable.
Suddenly, the journal was back in his hands. He went to the swinging couch on the porch and opened it. The pages were empty of handwritten text but filled with aged clippings and photos: Variety blurbs, rare-book-auction announcements, Oxfordiana, SRO rooming-house vouchers, Frenchie’s receipts for payment of services rendered (signed by “G. Mott”) — that sort of sad miscellany. For years, the son had had his own ideas of what was between the covers of News from Nowhere, fueled in part by Marcus’s occasional references to “the work,” something of high literary merit, a tour de force with bravura passages offering insights of a life hard lived, hard fought and hard-won. Like an archaeologist in virgin tombs, he expected to uncover whole sections of cramped cursive — the cacoëthes scribendi that is the hallmark of any schizophrenic worth his salt — and had already envisioned himself in New York while his father took the stage amid thunderous applause to collect his National Book Award from Philip Roth. As a parting gift, Harry gave him a manila envelope of photographs, some of which he’d looked at more than fifteen years ago while sitting on the couch beside Grandma Ruth — and again, in his father’s boyhood bedroom.
With the ragtag anthology on the seat beside him, the doctor drove directly to La Colonne. He ducked through the privet as he once did with Pullman (he had ordered the illicit entry never to be repaired). Approaching the tower, he pretended to see the great speckled jowl of that “continental gentleman” jut neatly from the ocular penthouse window. He could hear chuffing in the air; the ashes of his grandfather — and Bluey too — had long since been scattered through the meadow, and God-knew-what innumerable castle niches that sweet-soul’d couple had found, white-gray smudges on the cracked stones of eternity. He imagined them all inside: Edward coquettishly swathed in tulle, Trinnie and Marcus on their wedding, and Amaryllis and his boyhood self, awkwardly groping. The property was eventually to be given to the city as a public park maintained in perpetuity by the family trust, and he did not think he would visit until then, when its history would be softened by time and the impersonal mass of the world.
He reached into the envelope and pulled out a photo of his parents standing before the tower throwing rice on departing guests. As he left La Colonne, he brushed the tiny blossoms from his coat, thinking how much they looked like the celebratory grains of farewell.
Yes, his accent had returned full-blown, as had most of his bulk and prodigious physical energy — he did the work of ten men around the graveyard, and it had never looked better. He supervised new plantings (some at the suggestion of his wife) and carved beautiful flowers into the wooden benches, painting them so subtly that their effect was visible only at close inspection. In other words, he was mindful of the visitors, whether tourists or mourners, and would do nothing to intrude upon or upset the spirit of place. The caretaker would not disturb or senselessly upgrade that which was already aesthetically pleasing; he would, as he put it, “have no part of grimthorpery.”