Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  Father Clarence moves through the audience, shaking hands and checking seat numbers on ticket stubs. Father Chris, a pace or two behind, feeds him names and nuggets of personal data. Father Chris carries a small grease-stained paper bag that turns out to contain some sticks of beef jerky, which Father Clarence presents to a dowager in a green floor-length number. The dowager's name is the same as a famous brand of flour. Father Clarence knows the importance placed by persons of enormous resources on the small economy. His six-dollar trip to the butcher may pay off ten thousand fold.

  Jo Bailey grabs Agnes. There is an emergency—one of the techies has the flu. Would Agnes mind helping out? Not at all, she answers, grateful for something to do besides watching Shakespeare.

  "You're a lifesaver," says Jo.

  She hastily coaches Agnes. Agnes will run the tape with the music to be played between scenes. Jo gives her a copy of the script with the cues marked.

  The scenes from Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice proceed smoothly. Agnes, her eyes glued to the script, misses none of the cues.

  The sequence from Macbeth climaxes the first act of the show. The set, the heath, looks fantastic, a chilling purple landscape with twisted trees and a malevolent moon. The three witches surround their cauldron. They wear phosphorescent yellow make-up.

  Jo Bailey beats a drum in the wings. Boomboomboom. Boomboomboom.

  The luminous witches play their brief scene to the hilt. Doreen has developed a gargly delivery; she is best. Perri phones it in. Smoke rises from the pots and the witches vanish beneath the stage via an elevator.

  Now that's impressive, thinks Agnes. It's nice to have a big budget. The staging is Broadway-caliber and the actors can't even see what's happening. In the plays mounted by St. Mary-Star-Of-The-Sea, Agnes's alma mater, if it couldn't be done with oaktag then it simply wasn't done.

  The lighting turns neutral for the next scene, featuring Duncan, Malcolm and the bleeding Sergeant. The movements of the actors are limited but smooth; their blindness is not apparent. Then the witches rise up again. Boomboomboom. Macbeth and Banquo stand beside Agnes, waiting to enter. Much of the witches' dialogue is obscure. Agnes reads from the script, trying to make sense of the references to swine and sailors' wives, chestnuts and a pilot's thumb. Boomboomboom. The witches join hands for an invocation. Macbeth and Banquo step onstage. Agnes notices that a line has been drawn through Macbeth's first line: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." Macbeth skips the line. It has been cut, obviously because of the cast's blindness.

  The edit seems over-sensitive and prissy. Would the audience have sniggered at the irony? Then Agnes remembers the account of Barbara's complaining about lines being cut. Have the sisters been cast yet? The woman at the temp agency heard Barbara ask. Agnes turns to the front of her script, to the dramatis personae. The three old hags on the heath aren't listed as Witches at all. They are the Weird Sisters.

  Boomboomboom.

  Barbara was at St. Basil's, and Agnes would have known it earlier if she had a better education. Agnes could just shoot herself. If she'd gone to a better school she would have made the connection immediately. She would have known that the word "weird" comes from the Saxon "wyrd" meaning fate; she would have known that original single goddess, Wyrd, evolved into the trinity of She-whowas, She-who-is, and She-who-will-be; she would have seen the links between the Weird Sisters and the Scandinavian Norns, the Greek Moerae, and the Roman Fortuna.

  Agnes looked at the Sisters and their cauldron and saw black cats and warts and pointy hats. She saw a Halloween display at Woolworth's.

  A cold hand rests on her shoulder. She turns with a start.

  "Hello there," says Father Chris.

  He could kill her where she stands. He could squeeze the life right out of her.

  "Father, you startled me."

  The priest scratches his knobby head. "This Teaspoon part always gives me the willies. Have you seen Miss Bailey?"

  "She was banging a drum a few minutes ago. I don't know where she went."

  He hands Agnes a paper bag. "I brought the extra stage blood she asked me for. Tell that since it's the last night she should use it all up. It doesn't keep."

  Cassock rustling, Father Chris mounts a ladder and vanishes into the flies.

  Agnes opens the paper bag carefully. No, he wasn't lying—Stein's Stage Blood #6, Guaranteed Not To Fade and Featuring A Heat-Activated Coagulant For Super-Authenticity! The imp on the bottle says, "So realistic, ya better have it screened!"

  During intermission, Jo Bailey asks Agnes to take the Weird Sisters and some of the other players upstairs to the dressing rooms so they can begin changing out of their costumes. Agnes leads Perri, Doreen and Grace and a half-dozen others up the four flights of stairs. She helps them locate their things. She goes out into the hallway to retrieve a dropped doublet and sees that the dressing rooms are right next to Father Chris's office.

  The kids rattle on noisily about the show, criticizing the audience, tossing barbs at each other. Agnes is dying for a peek inside that office. She knocks at the door and gets no answer. She knocks again. There is not even a rustling within.

  Suddenly, she feels imbued with the spirit of the great detectives, Dupin and Poirot, Marple and Drew.

  She slips into the girls' dressing room. She tiptoes over to the French windows, which open onto a balcony. She opens the windows a crack. The sounds of the city enter the room, and the actors, with their acute hearing, freeze.

  "Is it warm in here?" says Agnes. "Maybe not."

  She closes the window and tries to get everyone to hustle a little bit. After an eternity, the boys and girls are dressed. She brings them downstairs to Jo's office. Hoping that no one will miss her, she tiptoes back upstairs to the dressing room. She opens the French doors and steps out onto the balcony.

  The floodlit buildings glow around her. For the first time she can see, in a single vista, the towers of One Grand Central and its westerly counterpart, One Times Square. One Grand Central, site of the Great Man's shooting, is penile. One Times Square, so identified with Madelaine, is crowned with a postmodern conch shell affair—unmistakably vulvoid., Madelaine and Wegeman are fucking in the skyline.

  Agnes climbs over the balcony railing onto a ledge about a foot wide. She must navigate that, then climb onto another balcony, the one outside Father Chris's office window.

  Father Chris's office is littered with the same sort of school-related junk as his boss's. The violent misogynist psychopath is also a slob; on the desk sit two unwashed bowls of hardened gruel leavings. Also scattered about are some band instruments. Agnes picks up a glockenspiel. The bars of a glockenspiel are laid out like piano keys; on this particular instrument, what would be the shortest, uppermost "black key" is missing.

  That's what they found in the turtle tank.

  Agnes almost has to laugh. "Don't drop it," said Tommy to Agnes repeatedly. Oh, he's a crack detective, all right. His police instincts were never sharper. If she had dropped it (perhaps on a tile floor) they might have figured out what the damn thing was.

  Agnes hears the faint roaring of applause downstairs. Intermission is over.

  She searches the office rapidly. Father Chris's desk drawers haven't been cleaned in years. One double drawer is stuffed full of mimeograph stencils. The smell of ink is intoxicating. Some serial killers fortify themselves with drugs before each attack; Agnes imagines Father Chris with crumpled, inky stencils pressed to his face, inhaling orgasmically.

  At the bottom of the double drawer she finds the tissue of lies that is Barbara Foucault's resume.

  "Fuck me," she says. Her heart is hammering. She's never been so frightened.

  She can't believe that she is actually holding the artifact in her hands. There are the classroom one-acts, the church basement showcases, her runs in the tiny off-off Broadway theatres of the wholesale flower district. She has listed all her special skills: Westphalian and East London dialects, light horsemanship
, fencing, tumbling, embroidery, manual transmission, stage dining.

  Agnes places the resume on the desk. She tries to replace everything in the drawer. She is shaking terribly. She keeps dropping things. Stencils and papers and manila folders tumble to the floor. As though in a bad dream, the more organized she tries to be, the more things seem to go flying all over the place, apparently possessed of a life of their own. A fagot of pencils strapped together with rubber bands hurtles under the desk. Agnes gets down on all fours to retrieve the bundle. She experiences a curious tingling on one side of her face and a rushing in her ears. Cincin nadam? No, hyperventilation, which apparently never afflicted Poirot and Drew and the rest of them.

  Father Chris approaches the office singing "Close To You."

  With a groan of despair Agnes shuts up the desk and sprints on tiptoe back to the balcony. She pulls the French windows shut behind her.

  Of course she left the resume in plain sight on the desk.

  Cautiously she peeks in. The priest seems unaware that anything is amiss. He hoists two cases of soda and a bag of chips onto the desk. He gathers up all the papers on his desk and slides them into a folder, then puts the folder in a briefcase. He stacks the briefcase on the soda, turns out the light, picks up the pile and leaves.

  Agnes knows she has blown it. When he looks at those papers he'll know that someone knows. He will destroy the evidence, hunt down Agnes and slaughter her—it's as simple as that.

  Agnes makes her way back to the girls' dressing room. Jo Bailey is there, looking for her. Agnes steps quickly through the French window.

  "Hi," she says casually.

  Jo is alarmed. "Where were you?"

  "I had to get some air. I felt sick."

  "When you didn't show up to work the sound I got worried," says Jo.

  "I'm really sorry."

  "It's okay. I got Doreen to do it. She knows the cues. You know, you really don't look so hot." She puts her hand behind Agnes's head and strokes her hair affectionately. Then, in a move that strikes Agnes as shockingly inappropriate, she kisses Agnes's cheek. It's not a peck, either. It's a kiss.

  Agnes wipes away the moisture.

  Jo realizes her mistake. "I'm sorry."

  Agnes regrets displaying her revulsion. "I don't like to be touched, that's all."

  Jo avoids Agnes's gaze. "Will you still come to the cast party?"

  "Of course."

  "It's at Father Chris's apartment. He's ordering the pizzas now."

  "Sounds great."

  Jo's expression darkens. "He said he was getting soda. I hope he remembered tonic."

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Twenty-two blind teenagers eat pizza in Father Chris's studio apartment. Father Clarence sweeps into the gathering, issues congratulations to cast and director, takes a ceremonial slice of pizza and is gone, off to a fund raiser at the Met or perhaps supper with the mayor or, perhaps, to fuck Madelaine Wegeman.

  The kids love Father Chris. (Sweet innocents! thinks Agnes. Would they love him if they could see those cunning and passionate eyes?) They tease him about his unworldly, ascetic persona. They tease him, also, about his subservient relationship with Father Clarence. The kids think Father Clarence has a woman somewhere.

  "But she'd have to be someone stupid," observes Grace. "She'd have to believe he'd leave God for her."

  Agnes cannot take her eyes off Father Chris's closet, for that is where he stashed the briefcase. If people lived in normal three- and four-room apartments, as they once did, it would be a simple matter for Agnes to retrieve Barbara's resume on the way to the bathroom. It's difficult to find a private corner in a studio apartment.

  Jo Bailey wasn't kidding about the tonic. She's got several bottles of it, and a bottle of Bombay gin, and she's getting plastered. The kids know that she has a real drinking problem. There is an uncomfortable silence whenever she bumps into something on her way to get another drink, or when she makes an incoherent comment that's meant to be funny. Jo starts to fix Agnes with the aggressive, paranoid eye she gets when she is drunk, but Agnes has too many other things to worry about. Within the hour, Jo is asleep in an armchair as Paul Simon's Graceland blasts out of a speaker a foot from her head.

  At one o'clock, the party ends. Father Chris has arranged for a pair of minibuses to take the children home. He piles all but three of the kids into the buses. Perri, the girl who played Beatrice in the Much Ado segment, and the boy who played The Merchant of Venice's Antonio all live in Brooklyn Heights, in the opposite direction from everyone else. Father Chris will take them home in his car.

  Father Chris nods in Jo's direction and asks Agnes, "Any suggestions?"

  "I'll take her home," says Agnes warily.

  "Let her sleep a while," he advises. "She might be easier to manage."

  Jo shifts in her chair. She groans and drools.

  "I think we have to do something about her," says the priest.

  His tone alarms Agnes. "Like what?"

  "The usual. Maybe we need to have an intervention. She's a good teacher. It's a shame."

  Agnes helps organize the three Brooklyn-bound children.

  "I'll be about an hour," says Father Chris. "I'll drop them off, then I have to drop off some sheet music I forgot to leave at the church for the morning."

  He leads the children to his car, a battered flaming yellow Le Baron. It takes him a long time to get the thing started.

  It seems that Father Chris doesn't know that Agnes knows. Thank God, she thinks.

  Agnes steels herself for the next set of tasks. She retrieves the resume from the briefcase. She holds it by the corner and stuffs it into a plastic sandwich bag. She starts shaking her comatose companion.

  "Jo! Jo! Wake up."

  The task seems hopeless.

  "Bailey! Come on. We've got to get out of here."

  Jo stirs and makes an indistinguishable comment. Agnes shakes her again.

  "Jo! Two women alone in the Minotaur's apartment is a bit risky, don't you think?"

  Jo opens her eyes. She tries to get a handle on her surroundings.

  "Listen to me," says Agnes slowly. "We're in a dangerous place. Father Chris wants to hurt us. He likes to hurt women. Do you understand?"

  Jo closes one eye, trying to focus.

  "Jo! Josephine!"

  "It's Joanne, actually," comes the thick reply.

  "Whatever," says Agnes.

  Jo sits up. "I feel sick."

  "You may feel a lot worse if we don't get out of here."

  She breathes deeply and squints up at Agnes. She is unconcerned about the Minotaur. "I had high hopes for us. I was attracted to you immediately."

  "Jo, I'm not gay."

  "You don't know that," says Jo. "I didn't know I was for the longest time."

  "I've got to call Tommy," says Agnes.

  She dials the Minotaur hot line. Whitey Walker picks up. His hello sounds guarded.

  "This is Agnes, Whitey. Is Tommy there?"

  "He's downstairs. I can send someone for him. You want to hang on?"

  "Just tell him I was right. I found the resume. Father Chris is the Minotaur. Jo and I are in his apartment now. We're going back to my place. Tommy can meet us there."

  Whitey doesn't answer. Agnes doesn't hear any ambient noise, either. Jo has unplugged the telephone from the wall jack.

  "I hate it when you talk to your cop," she pouts.

  "Of all the stupid things," says Agnes. "Jo, this is a really terrible time for this."

  Jo isn't rational. There's still a lot of alcohol coursing through her system. "We have to talk."

  "If we get out of this alive, I promise you, we'll sit down in some dyke bar and hash this all out. We'll get drunk together and cry and sing every old tune we can think of. But first we've got to get out of here alive."

  Jo's response is immediate and startling. She picks up the telephone and throws it out an open window. It smashes to smithereens on the sidewalk.

  Agnes runs to the window
. "You could have killed somebody."

  "I wanted your full attention."

  "Jo, take it easy—"

  Jo lunges and grabs Agnes. She is a lot stronger than Agnes and, it seems, more agile, even with all that Bombay in her. She starts kissing Agnes. She forced

  her tongue into Agnes's mouth. (It feels a lot different from Tommy's, Agnes discovers: smaller, firmer, more darting, like a snake.) Jo loosens her grip to grab Agnes's cunt, and Agnes breaks away. Agnes's fear is replaced by anger. How dare this drunk attack her! And with the Minotaur nipping at their heels! Agnes grabs a broom and, enraged, starts swinging wildly. She will kill Jo Bailey if she has to. She hits the wall with her broom, gouging a hole in the plasterboard. She swings again and knocks one of Father Chris's crucifixes to the floor. On impact, the crucifix breaks apart, and out spill the contents of an inside compartment, a candle and a vial and the Oil of the Sick.