Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Mrs Sole turned slowly back to the stove. She put her spoon back in the pot – weakly, it seemed. She stirred with slumped shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘Call Daddy. He’s on the back porch.’

  ‘Come on,’ Agnes said to me. She scampered out the kitchen door. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ we heard her call.

  I’d lingered there and stood behind Mrs Sole, squinting up at her back. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Sole,’ I said. ‘I ought to call my mother.’ Her head came up; I heard her make a noise – a laugh, I think. A sort of wild, frightened laugh. ‘To tell her I won’t be home for lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, Harry.’ She turned, just barely, pointed with her wooden spoon at a phone screwed into the side of a cupboard. ‘The phone’s right over there.’

  So over I bounced. Lifted down the receiver. Dialed Mom. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m staying at a friend’s house for lunch. Okay. Okay. Bye.’ I fit the phone back in its cradle and turned around.

  Agnes’s Mom was staring at me. Bent over her pot, gripping her spoon, holding it into the steam without stirring. Staring at me over her shoulder like a terrified animal. She licked her ashen lips – she seemed about to smile, about to speak. But then her stare, as if at a shrill alarm, shot elsewhere. Nervously, I followed the line of it to the kitchen door.

  Agnes had returned. She stood in the doorway. She was hanging happily onto her father’s sleeve, bouncing up and down by his trouser waist, as he surveyed the kitchen, me, his wife, through inconsolable eyes.

  ‘Lunch time!’ Agnes sang.

  Dr Sole. Dr Chaim Sole. The first thing that struck me about him, naturally, was how old he was. You couldn’t help but notice it. The way he walked, shuffling slowly in pants a size too large. The grizzled wattle at his neck, his limp yellow-gray hair, his damp, uncertain lips, his rheumy eyes. Even I, blithe and stupid, thought he must be Agnes’s grandfather really. But Agnes said, ‘Daddy, this is Harry. Harry, this is my Daddy.’ And in they came.

  He’s what I remember best about The Queer Lunch, what made it truly queer, deeply queer, though he said hardly anything to me. Just brushed by above me with a distracted smile when we were introduced, and patted my hair with his dry palm – like any old man. We ate in a sunny alcove off the kitchen, with screen doors letting onto the slate patio, the small yard, the treeline and the spring weather. There were modern paintings on the white wall, I remember. Drips and smears of pastel that you couldn’t focus on, and that were oddly disturbing. The Doctor sat at the head of the glass table. He ate salad and bread and spoke to his wife, when he asked for anything, in a thick voice with some sort of accent. He spoke with formal, courtly sweetness to her: it was nerve-wracking, and made me sit up straight and say, ‘Thank you’ a lot and keep my mouth shut otherwise whenever I could. Agnes, though – she chattered away. Seated across from me, her eyes brown and bright, her head up like a twittering bird’s.

  ‘Jessica says she’s not sure she’s even going to invite Michelle to her birthday party because she’s so annoying, but she says she probably will because Michelle is still her best friend although I’m her best best friend. Michelle thinks she’s so great because she can do cartwheels, but Jessica says she’ll teach me to do cartwheels too, she taught Michelle and she says it’s not so hard …’

  ‘The bread please, my dear,’ said the doctor.

  Mrs Sole handed me the basket and I passed it on to him, then stole a glance back at her. She was sitting like a ramrod, watching him. Her breath held, her cheeks still pink as if with kitchen steam, her eyes fairly glittering with hectic terror. Only when Agnes’s prattling paused, did she seem to come awake, round on her daughter desperately with:

  ‘Have you told Harry we visited a farm, Agnes? Why don’t you tell him about the farm?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. That was fun. Well, we went to a farm …’

  And off Agnes went again. And up again sat Mrs Sole, swallowing with relief, resuming her anxious watch along the table. And I, with my nose buried in my bowl of wagon wheels, oppressed by Mrs Sole’s strange nerves and Dr Sole’s bizarre old age, and with the foreign aura of formality and a gothic closeness that pressed in on top of me like gloom, only just dared, clamping my mouth on my buttery spoon, to hazard a look also at Agnes’s father. And, well, he, during all this, was staring at the bread. That’s all he was doing. Staring at a hunk of bread he’d lifted from the basket. What an expression he gave it too, as he held it there like Yorick’s skull, absently mashing his salad with flaccid, lettuce-flecked lips. A hunk of hand-sliced rye, it was. He turned it a little, this way and that, as if studying the facets in the light; the shape, the crust, the seeds, I don’t know. Tragic, intimate, ardent, amused, enraged: if you held in your hand your own malignancy and found it had the face of the woman you love – that was the gaze he was putting on that wedge of rye. While Agnes blathered about funny-smelling sheep, and Mrs Sole sat rigid, flushed and saucer-eyed; and I, finally, laced into those noodles again, scraping the bottom of the bowl with my spoon, and politely declining seconds.

  ‘Why don’t you two take your cookies outside?’ said Mrs Sole when she had doled them out to us two apiece. ‘Agnes, why don’t you take Harry down to the stream and play there?’

  It was a relief to tumble with Agnes out the patio doors back into that pillowy spring day, and lunch was forgotten at once. Agnes, still in her Girl Scout uniform, her scraped knees bare, skipped along ahead of me, over the slate, then over the grass, then up to the edge of the trees where we could hear the stream riffling below us. I came up beside her and we stood munching our vanilla cremes intently until our hands were free. Then, when our mouths were stuffed, we dusted the crumbs off our fingers. Agnes gulped her cookies down.

  ‘Now!’ she said.

  And there, at last, it was again. A genuine thrill to see it, too; a goosey scare even. Her crimped face was of a sudden all witchery, with arched brows and torchlight eyes. Her voice was that mysterious whisper. The weird voodoo girl I remembered from last April had returned.

  She pressed in toward me until I nearly leaned away. ‘Now,’ she hissed, ‘I’m going to take you to … the star rock! Follow me!’

  Arms out like wings, she ran into the trees. She’d left her Girl Scout beret inside, and her braids, which had been pinned up before, bounced around free behind her. I felt a little stupid, I reckon, but I sure enough jogged after her all the same. Losing her for moments in the maze of trees. Sliding down the slope to the muddy streambank. Leaping the water on a bridge of stones. Then scaling the opposite slope over rocks and roots, litter, beer cans and pine needles until finally, panting, we pushed together through another stand of conifers and oaks, and came out into an empty lot.

  Not much romance here at first sight. A dusty half-acre. Gravel, scrub and broken glass. The far side was bordered by a chain-link fence and down to the right you could see the brick medical offices on Middle Neck Road. You could even see the rear of the parking lot and hear the traffic down there. But the sky was big above us, pale and blue and laced with clouds. And there was a great gray boulder rising from the dirt on the edge of the treeline, and Agnes was full of its mysteries.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  She climbed it, scraping the scabs from her knees afresh. She knew the rock all right, because she went straight up the smooth surface like a beetle while I had to run my fingers over the stone like a blind man to find the obscure points of purchase. Soon, though, I stood panting over her where she sat with her oozing knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them and her chin in close. I surveyed the view and drank in the power of it: houses through the far fence, cars pulling in and out of the medical parking lot – the town going about its business, in other words, while I watched without being seen.

  ‘This is the star rock,’ Agnes breathed with her creepy stare at nothing. ‘This is where I come to put my spells on the stars.’

  I snorted. ‘Oh yeah?’ But she lifted her scrunched face to me and somewhere inside my dim boy�
�s brain I registered the neediness beneath the necromancy. So I played along gruffly. ‘Well, what kind of spells?’

  And she put her chin on her knees again. I sat down next to her, drawn despite my qualms to her worried little profile.

  ‘The stars aren’t really close, you know,’ she said. ‘They aren’t really next to each other the way they look, they’re far apart in space. Some of them aren’t really even there anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I blurted out – I forgot to pretend that I knew that already.

  ‘They’re dead,’ she whispered. ‘But the darkness hasn’t reached us yet from so far away so we still see the light.’ And here she fell into an eerie kind of sing-song. ‘And so I climb up to the star rock sometimes – and I cast my spell – and all the stars come together in people’s eyes – in constellations – Orion …’ she nodded toward the west, then a little eastward, ‘and Gemini, the twins, and the big dipper and the lion. And everyone has to see them even though they’re not really there – no one can look without seeing the shapes of the constellations in all the stars even though they’re really dead and far apart in space.’

  She paused and licked her lips. My nervous check on the broad and domey sky confirmed the daylight there and the wispy clouds across the blue. But I could sense them, I confess, night and the stars, lurking right behind that scrim: like a gaze behind a veil, like a village in mist. What a spooky little girl she was.

  ‘Like the sky, you mean,’ I said, mostly to hear my own voice. ‘Like they have to see the sky even though it’s not there?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘No. No. Because this is my spell, that I put on them. And sometimes, when I feel like it, I can climb up to the star rock and wave my hands …’ And she did, sitting up, lifting them crossed before her face and drawing them apart in a slow arc. ‘… and take it off, and all the constellations disappear and there’s just one star after another, a million zillion stars, far and close and dead and not dead and every one alone, even in the Pleiades, even in the Milky Way, and no pictures in them anywhere, only stars, star after star after star after star, millions and zillions.’

  Yes, well, of course, there’s not a whole lot you can say to something like that, so I kept my mouth shut. And she’d fallen silent too, peering up into the veil above us. I couldn’t help watching her, studying her. Her crimped features, her permanent expression of wariness and concern. She must’ve felt me doing it, I did it a long time, but she didn’t stir, she let me.

  Then, without thinking at all, I piped up, ‘Hey, Agnes, how come your Mom was so nervous at lunchtime?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wasn’t nervous,’ she said. She turned her head, lay her cheek on her knees and peered back at me dolefully.

  ‘Well, maybe not nervous,’ I said. ‘She just seemed … I dunno. But I mean, how come your Dad stared at the bread like that? He was looking at the bread, I dunno, really funny.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’ Her voice was small now, a monotone, as if she were answering mechanically.

  So, what the heck, I shut up again, scratching my head. I was getting tired of this game. I felt cooped up as if I’d been indoors too long. I had an almost homesick yearning for Hampshire Road, Freddy and Dave, a game of ball.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t want to talk about my parents,’ said Agnes, in that same small voice. She nested on her knees another silent second or so while I shifted uncomfortably. Then, all at once, her head popped up. Her eyebrows lifted, she gave me the big lamps, the whisper: ‘I know! From now on, let’s only meet here! Okay? Or down by the stream. And we won’t see my parents, and we won’t see anybody. Okay? We won’t tell anyone. We’ll only meet here and it’ll be secret. Okay?’

  I returned her stare without answering. This, more than anything, spooked me good, made me sour inside – nearly nauseous – with fear. What sort of compact was I into here – and so suddenly – and with a girl besides – and with this girl, this queer, queer creature?

  Yet there was no time to think and I was mesmerized and even the instinct to make excuses had only a weak glimmering power beneath the other forces that drew me in with her.

  There we stared back and forth on that rock together silently. And then I heard myself saying: ‘Okay. Okay.’

  Freddy and I were digging in my backyard – chink, chink, chink – trowels in the stony earth. This was months after the Queer Lunch and the star rock. Summer was just coming. School was out for good tomorrow.

  ‘No more Miss Truxell,’ said Freddy, spearing the loose soil.

  We faced each other across the hole, on our knees.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ I said, ‘if she taught sixth grade too?’

  ‘Or what if you just had to have Miss Truxell forever?’

  ‘Oh God!’

  The hole was almost two feet deep now, and wide, maybe a foot and a half across. We had set it just at the back gate, which led out onto Chadwick Road, around the corner from our front door. Next to the hole, we had the front page of the Times lying in the grass. LBJ PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR SOUTH VIETNAM, it said. CALLS FOR GREAT SOCIETY. We piled our spadesful of turned earth between our dirty knees.

  ‘Boy, I am really dying to get to camp,’ Freddy said. ‘I found out yesterday my team is called the Tigers. I’m gonna play second. We’re gonna win the league, I swear.’

  He was going away for the full two months, to a baseball camp. They played a whole season, with two leagues, and then a World Series too. I had to admit it sounded pretty cool.

  ‘That’s deep enough,’ I said.

  We lay our trowels aside. We lifted the newspaper, carefully, both of us, each holding two corners between thumb and finger. We lay the paper down gently over the hole, like making a bed. It covered the hole and then some.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We started placing pebbles on the paper’s corners to hold it in place.

  I was only going away to camp for two weeks, at the beginning of August. It was my first time at sleepaway. I was glad it was such a long way off.

  Gently now, gently, we began to spread the turned earth over the surface of the newspaper. Sprinkling it on with our hands at first then using the trowels to spread it thin and even. Fragments of words, photographs, fists, bearded mouths on angry faces appeared through the dirt for a while, then they were covered over. The entire newspaper began to disappear. Our hole began to look like just another section of the yard.

  ‘Oh man!’ said Freddy. ‘This is great! If Ira comes by here, we’ll just shout something at him, like, “Hey, Ira, your mother wears boots to bed.” Then when he comes running after us – boom! – man, he’s gonna fall right into the trap, he’ll, like, break his leg and we’ll make him lie out here until he starves to death. I mean, you could really do this in a war or something, you know. Like when the Japs came at you, you could just, like, run away …’

  There was still a whole month, I told myself. I shaped the dirt, not listening to Freddy. All of July, I thought, before my camp began. I didn’t think: all of July – with her. I didn’t think about her at all, or about our solemn hoodoos by the stream the night before. Or about all the nights we had been together through that spring. What I did think about – while Freddy, bless him, put paid to Pearl Harbor with a few well-positioned ditches – was afterwards, the walk home from her house alone, the bizarre welling in the long summer dusk of the dreamless quiet inside me, the flamboyant, nearly garish limning of the details without – the barking of a distant dog, the smell of mown grass, house lights through maple leaves – and that dizzying sensation that came and went of the world’s objects loosed from their moorings, floating, my attention lodged within them, toward infinite night and outer space. It was always like that after I’d been with her.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ said Freddy breathlessly.

  Really spooky, I thought. A spooky, spooky little girl.

  The bell rang on the last half-day of school and I with the other kids gushed cheering out the d
oors into the summer noon. We boys shouted to each other in loud, high voices, bursting with exquisite witticisms about Miss Truxell as we strode down the path to the road and freedom. Hilarious puns about trucks and old maids flew back and forth among us. We even stood on the corner an extra few minutes to further abuse that poor, ugly, lorn and probably miserable creature before we finally parted to go home for lunch, secretly sad about the whole thing.

  I, with a fine summer melancholy on, went by way of Piccadilly – out of my way completely, that is. Not that I expected to find Agnes by the stream this early in the day. I just figured I’d sit there by myself a while and toss pebbles in the water and take stock of things. I came down to the bank from the culvert, the secret shortcut I always used when I did meet her. Really all it was was cutting through the woods near the ghost house at the top of the hill. Skirting past the wooden shack’s darkened windows always gave an extra spurt of terror to the proceedings, and then I could jump Batman-like off the rim of the big culvert and stroll with casual heroism along the bank to our usual spot.

  So I did – and I was surprised to see that Agnes was there after all. She was kneeling by the water, bright and small with the sun right above her, the trees full green and bright overhead and the stream glittering. I was glad to see her, glad for the company, and quickened my pace. But Agnes only looked up briefly when she heard me coming. She was fiddling with something on a rock and there was a puckered scowl on her round monkey mug.

  ‘Hey, Agnes,’ I said, giving it a try anyway. ‘Hooray, huh? School’s over.’

  ‘So?’ she said. ‘I hate summers!’ I could see now that she was mashing up some Play-Doh, savagely kneading the jolly reds, blues and yellows into a single ball, streaked, mucky, brown. ‘Jessica and Michelle are going to camp together, all summer. I’m going to fly there at night and haunt them! I’m going to scare Michelle so much she’ll turn white and die.’

  ‘Whoa.’ I tugged my ear, stifled a yearning for lunch and my mother and home. These moods of hers could be suffocating, but they were part of the spirit of the place. ‘Can’t you go too?’ I asked.