Praise for I’ll Let You Go
“A panoramic portrait of Los Angeles, from the homeless shelters of the inner city to the middle class suburbs of the Valley to the princely mansions of Bel Air … Mr. Wagner delineates his characters with such sympathy and verve, such a sharp eye for the status details that reveal their social standing (and secret pipe dreams), that they become palpable human beings, real in their griefs and yearnings and illusions.… Luxuriant, bewitching prose.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Wagner’s competing mythologies of millennial California mesh with the precision of gold-plated gears in a luxury timepiece. Up-to-the-minute cultural allusions … complement a vision that is rich with comic plot threads and a brash authorial voice but also tinged with melancholy.… A sincere exploration of life, death and immortality.”
—People
“Wagner’s astute portrayal of the follies of the rich is exceeded by his skill at rendering the lives of the poor. The chapters on Amaryllis, for example, are worthy of a latter-day Dickens.… The book succeeds, for it champions elements of fiction too often neglected in contemporary literature—plot, character, suspense—elements proved by the Victorians to have an enduring capacity to delight.”
—The Washington Post
“A tour de force.”
—Library Journal
“A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The author of the audacious I’m Losing You extends his comic vision to epic proportions.… Proust meets Prozac along the class divide in Los Angeles.… [A] smart, funny novel.”
—Book
“While The Corrections was the family epic that topped every critic’s list in 2001, Bruce Wagner’s I’ll Let You Go is the saga posed to carry the literary baton this year.… The language is elaborate and rich.… A rich Tenenbaums for the West Coast set? Yes, and so much more.”
—Dailycandy.com
“Wagner’s Los Angeles [is] a city overflowing with eccentric philanthropists and violent madmen.”
—The New Yorker
“If Dickens were writing in 21st century Los Angeles, he might produce something akin to Bruce Wagner’s capacious new novel.… Wagner’s narrative style is unique—sometimes lushly romantic, other times acerbically satiric.… [Wagner] manages to pull it all off with considerable aplomb.”
—BookPage
“Dickens? Forster? These are heavy comparisons for a … contemporary writer to live up to, but Wagner compels you to think along these lines.… A book that is clearly intended to be a major novel and, more often than not, manages to succeed. [Wagner’s] is one of the more exciting talents in American fiction.”
—The Sunday Star-Ledger
“I’ll Let You Go is thoroughly engrossing and destined for greatness.”
—Time Out New York, Fiction Roundup
“Wagner revels in the opulent lifestyles of his eccentric cast of characters and … requests the reader’s indulgence in allowing him this luxurious revelry.… It’s well worth the time.”
—Booklist
“The first must-read novel of the year.”
—Gear
“An elegant and bitter family saga that owes as much to Dickens as it does to Chinatown.”
—Talk, Talk Ten
“Wagner takes so many chances, breaks so many rules and gets away with it so spectacularly that it seems as if he has dragged Dickens into the 21st century by his boot heels.… A great novel for the new millennium.”
—Booksweek, The Sunday Oregonian
“The sprawling, Dickensian story [Wagner] tells in I’ll Let You Go, one of compassionate oddballs simply trying to find a little love, is something every substance-starved reader will savor.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“[Wagner] continues his exploration of the social customs of the Left Coast. [I’ll Let You Go] ups the ante with a ripping neo-Victorian novel centered around the three-generation Trotter dynasty of Bel-Air.… Once begun, I’ll Let You Go doesn’t.”
—Flaunt
“A robustly populated, fiendishly complicated story of class inequity and high romance.… There are moments when a reader thinks Wagner himself must be a foundling, some long-lost bastard son of Dickens and Jane Austen.… Hugely lovely … and, for all its debt to the past, altogether singular.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A modern-day book of marvels …”
—The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Virginia
“A stunning saga of modern Los Angeles … Outrageously extravagant … It’s astonishing, this novel. No other word quite fits.”
—Polly Paddock, Times Union Albany
I’ll Let You Go is a work of fiction, and all of the events, situations, incidents, and dialogues contained in it are products of the author’s imagination. Other than those well-known persons whose inclusion is incidental to the plot, the characters in the work are inventions of the author, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Where the names of actual persons are used, or symbols or names of actual entities are referred to, the situations, occurrences, and descriptions relating to them, and the statements and dialogues attributed to them, are completely fictional and are not to be construed as real.
2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2002 by Bruce Wagner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Random House Trade Paperbacks and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wagner, Bruce.
I’ll let you go : a novel / Bruce Wagner.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-112-7
1. Beverly Hills (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Homeless persons—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Rich people—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.A369 I45 2001
813′.54—dc21 2001026729
Frontispiece illustration: Sandow Birk c/o Koplin Gallery
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Carcanet Press Limited: “Warning to Children,” from Complete Poems, by Robert Graves. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.
Chronicle Books, San Francisco: Four lines from “The House that Crack Built,” from The House That Crack Built by Clark Taylor. Copyright © 1992 by Clark Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Chronicle Books, San Francisco.
Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. and A. P. Watt Ltd.: Five lines from “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised, by Richard J. Finneran. Rights outside of the United States are controlled by A. P. Watt Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and A. P. Watt Ltd.
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1
Warning to Children
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel—
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still unopened on his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives—he then unties the string.
—Robert Graves
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.
—William Morris (“The Earthly Paradise”)
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1. Born Toulouse
2. The Digger’s Tomb
3. Saint-Cloud Road
4. The Labyrinth
5. A Lucy Trotter Mystery
6. The Great Race
7. Song of the Orphan Girl
8. Concentric Circles
9. Squatters
10. Shelter
11. Last Looks
12. The Well
13. Imaginary Prisons
14. Little Search Engines That Could
15. Revolution’s Eve
16. Advocates
17. When a Child Dies in the Home
18. Little Girl Lost
19. Gatherings
20. Inventories
21. The Secret Agent
22. The Disorderly World
23. To Redlands and Beyond
24. Pixies and Tigers
25. Carved Fungi
26. Globe-Trotters
27. For the Child Who Is Not Present
28. The Book of Hours
29. Doggish Days
30. To the Four Winds
31. Harvest
32. Les Miz
33. Assisted Living
34. An Early Winter
35. Probable Cause
36. Reunions
37. Twin Towers
38. Awakening
39. Thanksgivings
40. Phantoms and Convocations
41. Worries and Wrinkles
42. An Epistolary Homecoming
44. Close to Home
45. Termination of Parental Rights
46. Forgotten Prayers
47. The Wheel
48. Aftershocks
49. Pied-à-Terre
50. Misery House
51. Restless
52. At the End of the Day
Coda
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
The Trotter Family
LOUIS AHERNE TROTTER (“the digger”), patriarch and benefactor.
BLUEY TWISSELMANN TROTTER, his wife. A socialite.
KATRINA BERENICE TROTTER, their daughter, a designer of gardens.
MARCUS WEINER, her husband.
TOULOUSE (“TULL”) TROTTER, the offspring of Katrina and Marcus.
DODD TROTTER, son of Louis and Bluey; brother of Katrina. A billionaire like his father.
JOYCE TROTTER, his wife. A philanthropist.
EDWARD AURELIUS TROTTER, their son, a brilliant invalid.
LUCILLE ROSE TROTTER, their daughter. A budding author.
PULLMAN, a Great Dane.
Servants
WINTER, the Trotter’s longtime nanny and helpmeet.
THE MONASTERIOS:
EPITACIO, EULOGIO, CANDELARIA housemen and housekeeper. They are siblings.
“SLING BLADE,” a cemetery worker and part-time Trotter family employee.
Other Noteworthy Characters
AMARYLLIS KORNFELD, a homeless orphan.
WILL’M AKA “TOPSY,” an English eccentric. The orphan’s protector.
SAMSON DOWLING, a detective and Trotter family friend.
JANE SCULL, a deaf and dumb girl.
GEO. FITZSIMMONS, a former caseworker.
CHAPTER 1
Born Toulouse
The boy took long walks in the countryfied Bel-Air hills with Pullman, the stately Dane—ears like membranous tepees, one eye blue, the other a forlorn and bottomless brown, jowls pinkening toward nose, arctic-white coat mottled by “torn” patches characteristic of the harlequin breed, the whole length of him an inkspot archipelago—even though the animal didn’t seem particularly fond of such locomotion. Great Danes were majestic that way. They could take their jaunt or leave it.
When people learned what each was named, they usually said the two had it wrong—better the noble, gigantine champion to bear the burden of whimsy (Best of Breed to Trotter’s T. Lautrec) while his master coupled to Pullman, steady, scholar’d, sleeping car Pullman, nostalgically trestle-trundling under bald hills and starstruck sky, velour shadow of midnight passengers murmuring within. Not that “Pullman” fit so well for the boy, though it might: twelve-year-old Toulouse was thin and dreamy, with the requisite bedroom eyes. His tousled red hair verged on blood-black, and his skin was so clear that the freckles seemed suddenly evicted, their remains the faintest of blurred constellations.
So: Toulouse—etymology unknown. He suspected it had something to do with his dad, as most things cryptic or unspoken usually did. They had christened him Louis, after Grandpa Lou (Mr. Trotter, to the world), and his grandfather was the only one ever to call him that. For all the rest he was Tull. His mother had started it. An abbreviation in his own life, she was a connoisseur of abridgments. Toulouse: the boy always used that name in his head, the way one thinks in a different language. A father tongue.
There are no sidewalks in Bel-Air to speak of, and though his mother, Trinnie, forbade it, the boy and his dog regularly ventured from Grandpa’s estate on Saint-Cloud Road to walk the musky, sinuous asphalt lanes—baked warm as loaves—against traffic, so as not to be run down by neighborhood denizens in careering, souped-up Bentleys and polished, high-end SUVs or by celebrity-hunting tourists, who traveled at less speed but were likelier to remain at the scene of an accident. If Pullman was struck, Tull suavely imagined, there’d be victims galore. Like plowing into a mule deer.
They always found themselves at the strange house down the hill, on Carcassone Way. Well, from the road there was no house at all, no sign of the living, not even a graveled drive; merely a filigreed gate with the obscure and rusted barely discernible motto LA COLONNE DÉTRUITE. The entry’s metal wings, fastened with a cartoonishly oversize padlock, were under siege by a dusty, haughtily promiscuous creeper, evoking melancholy in the boy—the crass finality of a dream foreclosed. They discovered another way in. He rode the dog’s back through a desiccated hedge, the scratchy privet andromeda of a once finely pruned wall, until Pullman reached a clearing—quiddity of lawn smooth as the brim of some kind of wonderland bowler hat.
Inside, the
sudden magical oddness of a centuries-old park. The empty, vaulted space, so queerly “public”-feeling, was serenely at odds with the neighborhood’s proprietary nature. Intersecting rings of a sundial armillary sphere sat atop a pedestal of English portland stone, and though Pullman drew near, it was not to relieve himself. Rather, he became instantly mindful and mannered; each time they broke in, the animal invariably yawned, downplaying his bold, jungly efforts. Tull Trotter’s heart sped, as it did with any adventure to this meadowy place, dipped as it were in trespasser’s spice. Mother being a landscape architect of world renown, his catchall mind knew its flora—there, in the green all-aloneness, he communed again with the elegantly attenuated pyramid of the Cryptomerias and pines; the billiardist whimsy of great clipped myrtle balls so carefully, carelessly scattered; a cutting shed made of morning glory; the junipers and wisteria that flanked the still, square ponds; then began his saunter toward the ominous allée of flat-topped Irish yews.
He knew where those ancient columned soldiers led.
As he entered, the air chilled and darkened. Pullman had vanished as surely as a magician’s offering. Tull walked through a phalanx of sentries until far enough in to see the wild, weird thing, two hundred yards off, set apart on a hillock … a stout, ruined column, fluted as Doric columns should be, rent with fissures, at least fifty feet in diameter, proportions suggesting it was all that remained of a temple forty stories tall. Whatever peculiar god had made this base had provided it with crazily bejeweled windows too, oval, square and pentagonal, then snapped the tower off five floors up, where tufted weeds sprang from its serrations like hair from an old man’s ear. What could he make of it? The boy had never even gotten close enough to peer in. Now he moved inexorably nearer, at once cool and febrile, the capricious breath of open fields rushing at him like a breezy compress on the forehead during a sickbed hallucination.
Now he could see white, tented forms—furniture?—in the rooms within, but was interrupted when a daymare shape came from nowhere shouting, “Little fucker!” Tull was startled enough that he couldn’t read any features, though it was wearing bib overalls, the perfect parody of a ghoulish Mr. Greenjeans. In a blink, the figure rudely tumbled, care of a certain Dane; the terrified man, having met a fair match for the Olympian pedestal’s remains, retreated to the severed column while Tull made a sprinting Hardy Boy getaway. Regal and unruffled, Pullman strutted a beat in his master’s direction, then paused, slyly turning with calm eye and tarry muzzle to fire a last warning shot toward the groundskeeper—the astonished head of whom already appeared in an upper portal of the cylindrical mirage. Then, like a Saturday-morning-television creation, the aristocratic beast leapt toward his charge, through the chilly gantlet of yews, past the huge myrtle balls leading to the brambled entry that would carry them back to Carcassone Way and the homely, reassuring traffic of the world.