“Marcus …” said Ruth, hand rushing to mouth, unable to conceal her emotions. She was certain as only a mother could be. “Do you know who we are?”
He nodded solemnly.
Ruth suppressed another outburst.
Most of the men on the seventh floor were sedated and Marcus was no exception. But thanks to his remarkable constitution and the intervention of private shrinks, he’d managed to elude the zombified look worn by most of his cell mates.
“You,” he said, rather diffidently, “are the people from the Red Lands.”
“Redlands?” said Harry, with great enthusiasm. “Redlands, yes! Still the same house! Though the bakery’s gone — we sold it.”
“Harry!” chastised Ruth, not wishing her son to be overrun by extraneous detail — particularly that of loss, in any way, shape or form. “We ate some of your jam … you made the jam, didn’t you? The pomegranates—”
He looked them in the eye and smiled — the seed-stained smile of their precocious boy, who at Toulouse’s age could play the cello with thick, agile fingers; who took the bus to the Vagabond near MacArthur Park to see the entire oeuvre of Buñuel; who dragged them to the Huntington’s Japanese moon bridge — and exhibitions of branchy intricacies perpetrated by William Morris & Company.
“Yes!” he said, and laughed, not the laugh of a madman but of a man come home. “Yes, I made the jam. Didja like it?”
“Oh yes!” they said in chorus. It was marvelous! Better than they’d ever had! Much better than your mother’s! Always had been—
They laughed some more, and then his tremendous body undulated as he sobbed.
Not being able to reach out to him was for Ruth a fine torment. “We’re here now, Marcus!” she said. “We’re here!”
“She’s right — listen to her. You’re home now, son!”
Marcus dried his eyes, having calmed a bit after a look from one of the guards. “I don’t know you — or, suffer me, barely do — or much of what has happened for such a long time … I know that you are from the Red Lands—”
“Redlands,” corrected Harry enthusiastically, until Ruth kicked his foot.
“—that you are from the Redlands, and have been kind enough to see me … I do remember you — but there are so many memories that I don’t know what’s real and what’s conjured. I was at Oxford, no?” he asked, with faint English affectation. “But at another time than Rossetti and my friends?”
“Yes! Yes! You were at Oxford!” cried Ruth.
“You see? Things are coming back!” exulted Harry.
“The medicine will help you.”
“The medicine!” said Harry.
The keeper indicated that their time together had ended.
“We’ll see you through,” said his father.
Ruth was without words, squinting at him as he stood because she could not bear to see her boy in chains.
He smiled as they led him away, turning at the last moment to shout, “Bon appétit!”
We chose to ignore a certain gentleman who attended the arraignment (a few rows behind the Weiners) because, well, parents take precedence.
That “silhouette” was none other than Gilles Mott, whom the reader already knows to be the current owner of an establishment once held in highest esteem by that grandest of dames, Bluey Twisselmann Trotter, an establishment now prominent on her shit list. For when the erstwhile Topsy abandoned ship so did the old woman, eventually finding succor at Montana Avenue’s Le Marmiton. Fortunately for Gilles, the two establishments were not in any direct competition.
The baker and his wife were contacted by Detective Dowling on the Sunday following Marcus’s arrest, the latter occurring scant days after the remarkable sighting of Amaryllis at Saint-Cloud. Without much embroidery, he informed them of the charges being brought; but the real purpose of the call was to apprise the couple of the girl’s dire straits. Lani told him she was already aware of the AWOL, having learned about it the hard way when arriving at MacLaren for a scheduled visit. And, no, Amaryllis hadn’t been in touch.
The detective and the Motts weren’t exactly strangers. After the MacLaren psychologist told her of his interview with Amaryllis, the feisty CASA had taken the liberty of dropping by Rampart unannounced to introduce herself (she had of course accompanied the child there once before; as far as Lani was concerned, she and the detective were practically colleagues). She told him all about her husband’s long-term relationship with the suspect, and naturally Samson wanted to hear more, for until then his only real character witness had been the execrable signboard beggar. So he took them to lunch at the Pantry. There, both husband and wife reiterated the peculiar history, including their last, rather strained encounter — how incensed the man had been that they’d “turned the girl over.” Lani was a little surprised that none of this information had been conveyed, because the Motts had dutifully spoken to a policeman after William’s tirade regarding the child. (Though her instincts told her he wasn’t a predator, her role as CASA still demanded that she let such developments be known through official channels; she was sworn to the court, and so legally bound.) The detective merely said that sometimes “things fall through the cracks.”
Now, starved for information, Lani and Gilles swamped him with questions about the imprisonment. Between the two of them, they felt oddly responsible for the woes that had befallen that unforgettable Victorian gent.
It may be recalled that after William had made a fuss about their handling of the girl, Lani had been overcome by remorse. She had, in her own mind, self-righteously passed the “social” buck — she, Lani Mott, who was capable of ruining a Sunday brunch with a strident serenade against the L.A. Times or the corruption of the MTA or the soul-killing hypocrisy of the child welfare system or what have you. Yet what did she have to show for her coffeehouse activism? She’d become a volunteer at children’s court (her friends never heard the end of it) but had spent a year saying no: no to advocating for this child and no to advocating for that … and then, as fate would have it, came her big chance — an orphan dropped at their very door, a discarded little being—and what had she done? Obediantly called the hotline, strictly by the CASA book … the useless right thing. She may as well have phoned the SPCA and had the child picked up in a perforated metal box. Lani Mott had barely gotten her hands dirty. And everything she had done for the girl since (none of which seemed enough) was to atone for that moment at Frenchie’s when William — crazy, stinky, delusional William — had delivered a moral coup d’état.
Husband Gilles had his own cross to bear, for he had been the one to have strong suspicions that William was a molester or child aggravator or whatever; and too, that day at the Pantry, had blindly accepted the detective’s assertion of the vagrant’s involvement in the murder of Ms. Kornfeld. When Samson called that Sunday after the arrest and Gilles broached the touchy subject of an “inappropriate relationship with the girl,” the detective tersely said that as a result of his interview with the child herself, “nothing like that was on the table.” (“I told you so,” interjected his wife.) He wouldn’t elaborate, but Gilles got the sense it wasn’t the type of situation — not that Gilles had claims of knowing anything about the machinations of the law or its enforcers — where the charges of rape and homicide eclipsed or took precedence over a middling one of, say, child-bothering, thus rendering the issue moot; instead, the baker inferred from Samson’s tone that such an accusation was bogus and insupportable and had no basis in fact. Suddenly, Gilles felt like a snitch — as if he had perversely betrayed his original instincts, and done a good man a great wrong.