But have we gone off-trail? Then let us speed the pace.
The billionaire has been steadily adding to his ghost portfolio of empty tenements, and it bothered his wife not a little. Outlaid moneys were not the issue; such a burden Dodd Trotter could easily bear. It wasn’t the cost of the forays that disturbed her but the compulsive behavior surrounding them.
As private wealth increases, cities and states struggle for revenue. Structures once deemed historic are sold off; that is how Dodd came to own the oldest government building in Newark, the Essex County Jail (put up in 1837, it was made by the designer of the Tombs). Mr. Trotter also traveled to Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, to purchase the four-hundred-acre High Victorian Italianate Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane. He is now landlord of the crenellated asylum on the hill in Binghamton, with its trefoil-embossed stair treads and floors embedded with glass blocks; he has bought a somber, elegant bluestone palace with fifty-foot Doric columns, once the Utica State Hospital for the Mentally Ill. He acquired the Traverse City asylum (1885), too, in Michigan, another turreted affair high on the preservationist list.
Dodd Trotter leaves Detroit. From the 40,000-foot-high cocoon of his bed, he daydreams of Beverly Vista School’s vast tarry playground and early-morning fog, where boys floated toward him from the mist like foretellers of doom and misfortune — wrong answers in a novelty eight ball. It strikes him as ironic that he’s helping Marcie Millard and her committee refurbish the edifice, the only vacant building he has ever actually restored.
He notices a blinking light on the console. A steward peeks in and, seeing he’s resting, discreetly begins to exit. The fitful sleeper inquiringly raises his head. It’s your mother, says the steward, and Dodd picks up.
She is calling with today’s deaths.
We’ve almost come full circle.
Bluey too is in bed, happy to have reached her son, imperfect as the satellite connection may be. There’s a little Cessna crash in the local Times—a CEO and his three children — because Dodd is airborne, the item is bypassed in favor of the New York paper’s listing of a one-hundred-year-old “socialite-turned-big-game-hunter and prisoner of war”; then, a famous singer Bluey never heard of, dead at forty from “total organ failure.” She thinks it suspect; sounds like AIDS.
Winter sullenly pastes notices into the suede memory album. Since Pullman’s birthday gala, the Icelander has been somewhat “off,” so grumpy that Bluey calls her “the Winter of my discontent”—which only exacerbates her mood.
After lunch, they walk to the maze and Bluey sits on the granite bench at its entrance. (Trinnie likes that spot, too.) There, she decides to tell the helpmeet she’s going to leave her something in the will. Winter scowls, but the old woman with will-o’-the-wisp hair and translucent bluish temples persists, calm and imperious enough so the younger must listen. She is going to leave her a condo, she says. It is already paid for. Winter gasps as the words sink in — and cries, because no one ever gave her anything, ever, not even the Trotters, not in the thirty-five years she has served them.
Bluey turns to stare down a wall of boxwood leading to the maze’s center. She remembers reading how slaughterhouses were designed with curves so the animals couldn’t see where they were heading. Panicking, she lifts her head to the sky and searches for the plane. “Dodd? Dodd? Doddie!”
Chastened, Winter walks her to the house.
Her daughter, at an AA meeting in an old wooden church on Ohio Avenue.
A homely woman stands to say she turned everything over to God and that meant “antidepressants and nicotine patches, too”—a tacit indictment of the weak hypocrites in the room who cannot do without. She says she isn’t going to celebrate her AA birthday this year (Trinnie thinks: as if anyone cares) because her home group “forces women to put on dresses” to accept their sobriety cakes. She says she won’t put on a dress for anyone.
You dyke, thought Trinnie. You’re not going to make it. You’re going to die.
She dreamed of Marcus Weiner and spent her days in the vast archives of the Withdrawing Room. Her father thought she was researching the wandering garden, but it wasn’t so; she was busy unearthing blueprints and photos of the Bel-Air Colonne Détruite. Soon after her husband disappeared, Trinnie ordered that an inventory be taken of the marital house — all objects and their placement in each room painstakingly measured and documented. Everything — furnishings, clothes, books, utensils — was subsequently placed in storage.
Now, like a necromancer, she pores over the fastidious records, looking for signs of life.
†Of his sudden, compelling memory of that ruined column (both, incomplete), Will’m could make no sense or give good context. We offer that sidebar as sheer human interest — for it is a rare, poignant, shivery thing to glimpse the metaphor of one’s coming disarray, in a storybook garden to boot. That house cracked his head, then made him take up fractured residence.
†Simply because Mr. Mott’s agonies are of lesser general interest than our principal players’ does not rob them of meaning, for pain is pain. Consolation comes more to the earnest reader who may have been briefly hoodwinked, in a simple truism: when invariably one is misled — in book or in life — better it be for a price not too high or investment too dear. We are early enough in our history for the latter to hold true.
CHAPTER 21. The Secret Agent
“Thanks for looking at the script,” said Ralph. “But I’m on to something else now.”
Tull was actually disappointed. He had found the copy of How to Marry a Billionaire, A Screenplay by Ralph Mirdling, Third Draft, Second Polish, A Method to His Sadness Productions, Registered at Writers Guild West — all 154 pages of it — gathering dust in the nook of his room, where the boy had abandoned it some months before.
ANGELA
(SELF-RIGHTEOUS)
YOU’RE AN UNTREATED SEXAHOLIC!
SEBASTIAN
(HEATED, WILD-EYED)
AND YOU’RE A NEW AGE PREDATOR!
It wasn’t too bad a read after all. A breezy comedy involving a Beverly Hills limo driver and runaway socialite, it aspired to Lubitsch but had more the Mirdling touch.
Ralph was in the kitchen, noshing as usual. His hair shorn militarystyle, he looked stylishly commanding — part of a new regimen. As if taking a cue from Trinnie, he had cleaned up his act. In his shabbily chic navy-blue Costume National he looked like a survivor of Appomattox who with steady rest and diet might soon be attending the officers’ ball. Today, Tull found him reassuringly unneurotic.