Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  My sugar sank – and, before I even realized why or what had been said or how it poisoned everything, my little Harry heart slowly started going down with it, glub, glub, glub, Captain …

  ‘Oh well,’ said Aunt May, sighing like an ingenue, ‘I guess you can never bring back the past.’

  My first reaction to an emotional blow was always indifference. Kind of a mental anesthetic, like when a dying man has visions of a passage into divine radiance rather than, say, a clown face shrieking, ‘So long! You’re ceasing to exist!’ Whenever cause for anguish struck me, I’d be as if immersed into a solution of indifference and then drawn out only slowly, maybe over days, into what you might call a general atmosphere of pain. By the time the last of the indifference evaporated, I would usually have lost the connection between my misery and the original source of it: I would just feel bad somehow – bad for no reason or for some other reason, the wrong reason. Camp, it was this time. From that breakfast onward, I began to grow depressed because I didn’t want to go away to camp.

  Aunt May left us, but the house did not seem our own again, not to me. To me, it just seemed empty and odd, with the floral smell of her lingering, like the music of her voice, like the soggy nylons on my bathroom towel rack that no one removed for days. For days, I wandered through the rooms, all fraught with woe, shuffling after my mother, repeating, ‘I don’t wanna go to camp,’ over and over again. My mornings in front of the TV grew longer. I could zombie-glide right through the game shows sometimes, The Price Is Right and Concentration, both of which I hated. ‘Harry, would you turn off that TV and go outside,’ my mother would say. And I would roll onto my back and stare up at her with hollow eyes. And whine at her: ‘I don’t wanna go to camp.’ Before she could bully me into my clothes it was nearly lunchtime, and when she hurled me outdoors, I would linger in the backyard like my own ghost, haunting her with an I-don’t-wanna-go-to-camp stare through the kitchen casements. Harry’s Raiders were soon disbanded on account of this depression. How long could they sit in the womblike dark of the lumber pile with their fearless leader sunk in dejected reverie?

  And as for Agnes – I did not see her. In all that time, that whole last week. I didn’t understand that she was at the heart of this, I just didn’t feel like going over there anymore, that’s all. Sometimes, some afternoons, I would wander aimlessly up toward Piccadilly Road, but I was never abuzz with the old expectations. I was steeped instead in fantasy: King Harry at the Judgement Day, his dread sceptre tilting left or right, the naked women wailing in their terror, and flailed across the tush, many of them, to insure obedience or simply for good measure not to mention that it was such breathless fun. And then, somewhere along the road, at the top of Wooley’s Lane usually, before the curve, before the ghost house, I would stop. I would look around me and find myself cotton-headed with dreams and out-of-sorts. I did not want to see her; even the thought of it depressed me even more. I wanted to go home, to spend these precious moments of the fleeting July with that dear, dear mother from whom I would too soon be cruelly sundered.

  So, shrugging, sighing, miserable – God, miserable – I would turn again and head back down the hill, angrily kicking stones, angrily dreaming, wasting what could have been our last days together, Agnes’s and mine, and laying – or so I tell myself on those nights I want to rip my own head off in paroxysms of regret – the groundwork of our lifelong ruination.

  Signs of the Dreaded Day accumulated: Mom sewing name tags into shorts and T-shirts, clothing strewn on bedspreads, suitcases brought up from the basement and a camp trunk, with stout metal hinges and latches everywhere, brought home from the city by my Dad. My parents were taking advantage of my absence to spend a week in Europe so the packing was general and, to my tragical mind, it looked as if my entire existence were being struck like a set.

  Finally, as it must to all men, Sunday came, the eve of my departure. The various packing paraphernalia had converged in the guest room. Thoughtful, nimble, my tubby Mom stepped among the neat piles of clothing on the carpet there, returning inevitably to the suitcases set open upon the bed and the trunk on the floor, all of which became, inevitably, nearer and nearer to being full. The condemned man sat in the midst of this. On the edge of the bed with head hung down, with hands clasped between his knees and shoulders bowed under at least a ton of fear, homesickness, helplessness, dread. And something else, some nameless suspense. Outside, through the glass door that led onto the garage roof, the sun could be seen setting, a dragon-toothed splotch of light poised on the peak of the Rothmans’ roof next door.

  ‘Why do you have to go to Europe?’ I groaned.

  ‘We’ll be back before you get home,’ said my mother wearily. She pressed a finger to her lip as she swiveled indecisively between a poncho and a pile of underpants.

  ‘I don’t wanna go to camp,’ I said.

  The underpants, Mom decided, and leaned down to lift the stack between her two hands.

  ‘I don’t wanna …’

  ‘Oh, Harry, it’s only two weeks. You’ll have a wonderful time. Just be careful, that’s all. Don’t go crazy.’ She divided the stack in two and bent to set it neatly into the trunk’s corners. ‘Don’t start any trouble. Don’t let them make you do anything dangerous.’

  My whole slumped body rose and fell with a moaning breath. I lifted my head slowly against the weight of apathy and doom. Now the sun was sinking past the Rothmans’ roof and turning yellow and throwing shadows of the burly trees across the pitched slate. Time, that’s what the suspense was, the running out of time. And nothing I could do. I was pilloried with despair. I looked around the room. The mounds of clothing were fewer and fewer. The suitcases were nearly full. The ordinary contours of the room were returning. I wished it was more familiar, a room we used more, a room I knew, I wanted to embed myself in those known things. But the guest room always seemed strange. Not colonial like the rest of the house, more modern, like my room, with white walls, and orange carpeting and indigo bedspreads. There was a dresser in the far corner from me, a piece I almost never noticed. Not the sort of exact thing my mother usually liked, but just functional, knobby, stained tan. I saw now that there was even a picture on it that I had never seen before. Something May had left behind maybe. A black-and-white photograph veiled with yellow age. A young man in funny old clothes, wearing a high collar, stiffly holding a derby under his chest with one bent arm. He was standing off to one side, proudly displaying the legal offices behind him. I wanted to ask who he was, but was too lethargic to say the words.

  I glanced out the glass door again. The sun went down behind the roof. ‘Why did Aunt May leave?’ I asked suddenly, without thinking.

  Mom, already holding a pair of pants, averted her face as if searching for something else. ‘Well,’ she said with some gravity, smoothing the pants absently over her arm, ‘she had to go back to her own life.’

  ‘Why is she so strange though?’ Blurted again, almost with anguish, with some new emotion anyway glimmering under the big dark dolmen of all the others.

  Of course, Mom was interested in this, whatever truths about her sister a child might stumble onto. She set a smile on her lumpy, sagging features, and asked me, ‘Why strange?’

  ‘I dunno. She just … she always has to be in everybody’s business and part of everything. I dunno.’

  My mother snorted softly. Finished folding the pants and avoided my eyes as she set them in a suitcase. ‘Oh, these things,’ she said. ‘They’re just sillinesses. People carry them around with them. They ought to just get rid of them. But they don’t –’ She gave the packed pants a definitive pat. ‘– and that’s why there’s so much silliness in the world.’

  Thus my mother’s wisdom; make of it what you can. I only half heard it myself anyway. My attention was on the window and the first hulking violet of this final night. I did not want to pull myself away from my mother’s side, not even to think of it. There was so much still to say to her: I don’t wanna go to camp, for instan
ce. But there was this other urgency percolating now. I stood up. With a beleaguered, nasal drawl, I said: ‘I’m gonna go out for a while.’

  And my mother, surprised: ‘It’s almost seven o’clock, where are you going?’

  ‘Out. I’ll be back.’

  Behind me, as I went out the door, she called: ‘Not for too long, Harry. I want you in bed by eight, we have to get up very early tomorrow.’

  I took my bike. These Shakespearean tragedy links – I have nightmares about them. I’d never taken my bike before because there was nowhere to hide it and Agnes and I had this vow of secrecy between us. But tonight I took it, afraid, after all this time, that she wouldn’t wait for me by the stream. I stood on the pedals up Wooley’s Lane, anxious to be on, eager to get back. I didn’t even park it by the ghost house at the top but raced it dramatically, with flurrying feet, down the steep of Piccadilly almost to her front walk. Recklessly, I set the kickstand on the sidewalk just a little before her driveway. And even so, I didn’t realize what a dither I was in for a rendezvous until I looked up to see the peaked white aluminum cubes of the Sole place sinking into insubstantial shadow against the still summer background of trees and sky. The house was dark. Although an air conditioner was muttering in an upstairs window, the lights were all out – it seemed no one was home – and I could’ve torn my hair in aggravation. This made things more dramatic still. I ran without caution past her windows, across her back lawn to the stand of trees. Panting heroically, I worked my way among the thick leaves of oak and hickory, the spindles of pine, over the acorns bulging up beneath my Keds, through the spider webs clinging to my lashes and lips. I crashed through to the top of the slope above the stream. It was already thick dusk there, the leafy tree crowns on the far side huddling against the sunset. And, posed rather handsomely in the last movement of my dynamic breakthrough, I peered along the banks through the uncertain light.

  And there was Agnes, kneeling quietly at the edge of the water.

  I hated her. I only realized it when I set eyes on her. I was furious at her, so mad it was as if the whole reason I had had to come – the matrix of the suspense and the urgency that had got me there – was that I needed to tell her what a stinko she was. I was metamorphosed on the spot. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing how I’d hurried to find her. I stopped panting. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I skittered casually down to the bank, and strolled along it toward her as if I’d just happened by.

  A twig snapped under me and Agnes looked up. Looked up, and lit up when she saw it was me.

  ‘Hi, Harry!’ She got to her feet, smiling, dusting off her shorts and her scabby knees. ‘I thought you went to camp or something.’

  I shrugged. Grunted a hello. Gave her the side of me, and swung my foot, kicking a clod of dirt into the water. It hadn’t rained in weeks and the stream was low, an avid trickle humping it over the bottom rocks. ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. And then: ‘I guess you were busy and had to get ready and everything.’ She jutted eagerly at my grumpy profile. ‘I almost didn’t come out tonight. Only there’s a full moon and it’s supposed to come up just at dark.’ I sniffed at that; I gave her nothing. She tried again: ‘See, the moon comes up at different times, a little later, every day, every different size of moon comes up at its own …’

  ‘I know how you know all this stuff, Agnes. My father tells you.’

  The heave of rage, the way my mouth twisted, the way I spat out the words: I’d been so busy putting on the show of anger, I was surprised at how real it turned out to be. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what this was, this acid in me. What did I care about what my stupid Aunt May said?

  But Agnes, Agnes the Witch, she got it right away. She was meek. She was conciliatory. She made an offering. ‘Some of it my mother tells me.’

  ‘Oh yeah, right! Because my father tells her.’

  ‘Well …’ She licked her lips. ‘Maybe he’ll tell you too soon. He probably tells you lots of other things.’

  I glanced at her to see if she was making fun, but she was all face, desperate for forgiveness. ‘Sure he does,’ I said nastily. ‘He tells me lots of things. He tells me things all the time.’ I kicked out again – a white stone plinked into the trickle. ‘Anyway, I just didn’t want to come here cause I don’t want to play on your stupid rock anymore, that’s all. It’s all stupid.’

  With which, unnoticed, gray, grainy twilight with no friendly intent closed in around us poor two. Agnes frowned as if she would cry. Maybe she did cry, but by then, she was kneeling again so I couldn’t see, standing some twigs in the soft earth where the stream had receded, laying others in the small current as part of her secret ritual – it’s what she had been up to when I broke in.

  ‘My Daddy never says anything,’ she said. The priestess now, incanting it to the elements, but small too, a little voice, pitiable. ‘He never says anything. He can’t. He can’t talk.’

  ‘Oh, he can talk,’ I said. ‘I heard him.’

  ‘No, I know, but he can’t tell me about anything. I couldn’t ask. My mother says so. It would make him too sad. He’s not like your father.’ And, lifting to me all at once her graven suffering, she broke forth right earnestly: ‘I’m sorry, Harry!’

  Well, the Har was moved. A guy’s not stone, after all, even in his rages. Even hurt – and hurting stupid too, because I didn’t know, not even now quite, what the hell this was all about – I began, in increments for pride’s sake, to relent.

  ‘Well, what’s he so sad about? Your father.’

  Back at her twigs, swallowing hard, she laid it out for me. ‘He was there – in that place I told you about? – where they killed all the children. He had to watch them being killed. They killed his wife – his wife before my mother. And my half-sister, Lena. That was his daughter. They killed her too.’

  Around us, unnoticed, the volume of the place was slowly rising, the night syncopations of frogs and cicadas coming up from the grass, hatches of gnats and mosquitoes buzzing under the trees, birdsong floating from the topmost branches, from the high leaves. I shifted my shoulders suspiciously. ‘What did they kill them for? Where was this?’

  ‘In Poland, where he’s from. They wanted to kill all the Jewish people.’

  ‘What, you mean, like, the Nazis?’ I’d heard about that, of course. Nazis killing Jews. A very bad thing. Fortunately, my father had gone over there personally to help put an end to it. ‘The Nazis killed them?’

  Agnes nodded, kneeling there. And – though it was getting harder and harder to make her out, to distinguish her outline from the thickening obscurity – I could tell that her hands were unsure in their movements now, going from twig to twig, place to place, hovering frantically, never quite coming to rest.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They had a place they had to go to. My mother told me.’

  ‘Was she there too?’

  ‘No. But she knows about it. She told me some of it. She said everybody had to go to this place, all the Jews did, to see Hitler – he was the King Nazi. And everybody had to go up to him. First they had to give everything they had to the other Nazis, all their money and everything, even their clothes. So they were all naked so they couldn’t do anything, and they had to stand in line and walk up to where Hitler was, and he would point with his, what do you call it, that stick king’s have …’

  I stared down at her through the darkness. ‘A scepter,’ I said softly.

  ‘Yes. He would point with it, with his scepter, like, to the left or to the right. And the people he pointed to the right had to go in a big room to be killed. And the people he pointed to the left had to be his slaves and do, like … I don’t know, like, hard work, in the snow and everything, like breaking rocks with a hammer or something. I just know it was very hard.’ She shook her head, her braids stirring. ‘I don’t want my Daddy to have to talk about it. I don’t want him to have to be sad about it anymore.’

  Night fell then, mercif
ully dropping its velvet veil over my slack-jawed stupidity, my willed density, the stone synaptic wall I’d thrown up between connection and connection. Even hidden though, even with all that self-deception – woof! The guilt, the ignorant guilt. The poignant whining within to be justified to her. ‘I’m only going to sleepaway for two weeks,’ I said for no reason I could think of. ‘I’ll be back for the whole rest of August. Okay? We can go back to the rock or whatever then. I didn’t really mean it was stupid or anything, okay, Agnes?’

  As if mollified on the instant, Agnes hopped up. ‘Then you’ll be back in time for the Perseid showers,’ she said. She stood so close to me that her features loomed – loomed pleadingly. ‘They’re late at night, but maybe we could get to stay up for them. Or maybe – maybe I could watch from my window and you could watch from yours and we’d be seeing them at the same time.’

  ‘Uh – okay. Sure.’ I sounded a lot more eager than I felt, a lot less nauseous than I felt too. And I forced myself to ask – I didn’t want to, knowing the source, but I made the effort: ‘So, like, what are they? The – what showers?’

  ‘Perseid. ’Cause they’re in the constellation Perseus. They’re meteor showers. Showers, like, of falling stars. You want to go up on the rock? I could show you where they’ll be. We could watch the moon come up, okay?’

  For the first time, finally, I remembered that I had to be home – and now that I did remember, I couldn’t tell her. How could I? And leave it like this between us, everything messed up, alchemy reversed, her mystic enthusiasm forced, or sounding forced to me at least, and the night leaden – black and loud and summery, but leaden, dead; etched in close by the usual forest lineaments, the alleyway of fresh stars between the high leaves above us, but flat-seeming and leaden; the invisible water’s gurgling, the oompah frogs, the rest of the chattering insect masses – all supposed to be charged and twinkly with our conspiratorial demonry and just small, I don’t know, messy, plopped too close to the road and the lights of houses, and with me plopped in it, leaden too in the belly, wanting to be home, sick and heavy and sour at the prospect of hearing this shower stuff, my own father’s meteor stuff, from her – what could I do? I was desperate to restore our ruined thing.