Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  When I grew older, I mostly avoided the place. I even took the longer route to high school to stay out of its range. But then too there were occasions when I came back, folly-worn, seeking a draught of adolescent melancholy and nostalgia. The house never failed me. I would stand outside with my hands hooked rebelliously in my jeans, my shoulders up around my ears – that was the way kids stood then, to look alienated, to look sullen. I’ve been hurt, man. I would tell the house; I’ve been through the mill. Fifteen, sixteen years old, with death ‘s-head patches on my denim jacket, my hair down long around my ears. Listening for the sound of the brook out back, and fairly melting to a delicious goo of tristesse. Once, a younger kid, about nine years old, coasted up behind me on his bike, his wheels clicketing. Like the phantom of my former self (a romantic conceit that wasn’t lost on me).

  ‘You know,’ he told me, ‘that house – it’s haunted.’

  So perfect, such a setup line. I felt as if I were in a movie. I tightened my lips, hardboiled, and gazed off wistfully into the middle distance.

  ‘Yeah, kid,’ I said. ‘I know it is.’

  When I was eighteen – my last year in town – a younger couple bought the place from the Liebermans, though they didn’t move in right away. Soon after the For Sale sign went down, pickup trucks arrived in the driveway, workmen started hammering inside. They were always inside. You hardly ever saw them, just heard them, wham, wham, wham reverberating in the stillness of May. For weeks, the exterior looked the same as ever, just a little murkier, a little hollower at the windows, as the house was gutted. One summer dawn, during this period, I parked by the lawn in my father’s Volvo. I’d fallen asleep at Kate’s, at my girlfriend’s. Had to creep out her back door before the neighbors saw and informed on me to her mother, a kite of some ferocity. This wouldn’t last into college, Kate and me, and I was beginning to realize that, so I went to the Sole house. Stepped from the Volvo, shouldering my usual sack of blues.

  I walked to the door across the dewy grass. It wasn’t locked – it didn’t even have a latch – it just swung open. In I stepped and saw the waste-scape they had made of the place. Every wall that wasn’t holding up the roof had been demolished. There was lumber lying here and there, electric wires dangling. From the doorway, I could plainly see a window that used to be in a back room down a hall. I could see right to it, and through it to the mists of dawn and the slender trees that overhung our brook, Agnes’s and mine. That was the only time in my life, standing there, that sounds, smells, presences ever came back to me that clearly. The clink of lunchware, the steam of boiling noodles, the louring of the ancient survivor with his rheumy eyes. Woeful stuff. Unbearable. Ah, what might have been! I did the whole maudlin routine. I even spotted movement at the corner of my eye and turned to see if anyone was really there. Nope. No one. Not a Sole.

  In the end, when I was heading off to college, I went to say goodbye to the house, but it was no good. A disappointing experience. The exterior was finished and the whole place looked completely different. Bigger, huskier, healthier. Siding gone from white to jolly yellow. Red shutters; I swear it. The garage had been walled in, a story added over it, a new garage tacked on. A great rolliking burgher’s manse had been constructed where the old joint used to be. Bozo the house. What a gyp. I felt as if the pants had been yanked right off my melancholy, the polka dot boxers revealed underneath. All those memories, regrets, yearnings scattering like foreign coins on the sidewalk. Worthless in this country, corresponding to nothing except maybe themselves. Ho ho, m’boy! the house seemed to say through its chuckly door, Where are these things I hear so much about, these million things that might have been? I don’t see ’em – you? Show ’em to me. Go on, I dare ya.

  The Sole house – the Finkelsteins’ now. What could I do? I pulled up my melancholy, gathered my shekels, and shuffled off into the next chapter of life.

  With which instructive detour completed, I returned my attention to the water in the pot, which was boiling.

  ‘Oh God!’ she said, rolling her eyes, when I brought her the coffee. I’d poured a scotch for myself too, just to annoy her. She accepted the mug from me all the same. Cradled it in both hands, in a gesture both womanly and childlike. She was sitting on the living room loveseat now in front of the old fireplace. Dampening the loveseat’s green velour. She blew on the coffee, shivering.

  ‘I’ll build a fire,’ I said. I put my drink on the mantel out of her reach and knelt down under it, unwrapping afire starter. I could feel her watching me, hear her slurping coffee as I stationed the briquette on the grate.

  ‘I don’t hate reporters, by the way,’ I said. ‘They disappear, you know, if you just stop reading the newspapers, or watching TV. They stop mattering to you.’ I picked up a logfrom the carrier and faltered at the feel of the rough bark in my hand. Now why was that? I put the log down quickly beside the briquette. I went on nervously. ‘You’re always arguing with them in your head otherwise.’ I lifted another log – got another nervous thrill. What the hell was this? ‘Or not with them exactly. With the world’s opinion. Reporters are just … cogs in the machinery of the world’s opinion. Grinding everything into World Opinion Paste.’ I dropped the log in the grate as if it were already burning. ‘Used to be the church, grinding up everything. Now it’s the world’s opinion.’ I put my hands on my knees, breathing too heavily. Glanced around at her where she huddled over her mug. ‘I mean, look at you. You’re probably in college, right? Some professor teaching you the going thing – late-post-modern-feminist-correctism – grinding up everything into the going thing. You probably haven’t had an original idea since you were three years old.’

  She plucked her rosy lips from the mug’s rim. Gave me a blast of placid superiority: Hell, she had a father; she was used to the ravings of bitter old men. ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said killingly. And wrapped the rosebud round the rim again.

  I turned back to the fireplace, braced myself to grab a third log. ‘Well, pardon me if I don’t want to feed my life into the machine. I don’t need it to be ground up into your philosophy or commentary or …’ Ah, but now I did it: I wrapped my fingers round the log, felt the shaggy wedge where the axe had split it. And three was the charm all right. It came to me – not who she was – but why I recognized her, where I’d seen her face before. Oh boy. No wonder the Book of Agnes, the Boy’s Book of Agnes, had to be opened again. Shit.

  ‘I’m not in college, you know,’ she broke out in a so-there voice.

  I lay the last log across the other two, over the briquette. Sagged, ass on heels. Shit, shit, shit. ‘No …’ I had to clear my throat. ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ Smarty-pants, she might’ve added. But she slurped her coffee. ‘Okay, you’re right, I’m not a journalist. Okay? And I’m not twenty-three.’ I shook my head at the pyre in the grate. ‘I’m seventeen – but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. And I do have original thoughts, I don’t just, like, believe whatever anyone tells me.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I murmured, stunned by the suddenness of my understanding.

  ‘That’s why I didn’t want to go to college in the first place.’ She snorted. ‘But try explaining that to my father.’

  I nodded. Reached, with mortal sigh, for the box of matches by the carrier. Her father. Right. Of course. And her facades. And her arrogance. Her barely hidden turmoil. The pure self-absorption, too, of a girl who’d bother to hover about in graveyards and root cellars. She’d come to me with all of it, hadn’t she?

  I stole another look at her sitting there. Physicists tell us that what seem to us solid forms are really only hot spots in the continuous field of energy and composed mostly of empty space. I think this is particularly true of adolescents.

  I came back round to the pyre, plucked out a wooden match. Set the blue head against the flint on the side of the box. Oh boy. Oh, Agnes. You witch, you witch from beyond the grave, you. Whoever she is, this creature of yours (and I was already beginning to guess), she’s brought me her ever-fasc
inating young self, hasn’t she? Her arrogance, her turmoil, her father, the whole shmear. Her all-absorbing self to save. She wants me to help her – how would she put it? – get her head straight, get her shit together, get her show on the road? I’d bet that’s it. I’d bet anything. She wants you, Agnes. She wants me to give her you.

  ‘So,’ I said – hoarsely – after a long pause. ‘You’re some kind of artist then.’

  That took the child aback – to her, there still seemed so many other possibilities. ‘Well … yeah,’ she said, surprised. ‘At least, I mean – I want to be.’

  I struck the match. I torched the briquette. The flames danced quickly up into the dry wood.

  Soon, the fire was snickering merrily, and the girl was posing on the sofa with downcast eyes. Arranging her face into various expressions of milky sensitivity with which she hoped, I guess, to meet this last, long silence of mine. I was standing by the window, looking at the window, drink in hand. Secretly studying her reflection there, searching it for vestiges of that other face I remembered – and for vestiges of Agnes too, for any resemblance at all. Then, after another moment, my eyes shifted and I saw myself, my own reflection. If it had been a movie, I thought, there’d have been my transparent image upon the pane and, through that, the water trickling down the glass like tears, the tumult of the storm in the silhouetted trees – visually representing my turbulent inner state, see, with maybe a symbolic commentary on the veil of perception. And well, that’s how it was, that’s just what I did see. Which galled me. Because it was her movie. Because, I mean, it must’ve been something like this when she imagined it, in the movie that went through her mind when she was deciding to defy her poor old Dad and come: First, I’ll lurk in the trees, then I’ll hang out in the graveyard, then, by the fire, I’ll be beguiling – mysterious yet somehow innocent and poignant – and the gruff but lovable old exile, touched, will wrestle with his inner anguish and finally purge his autobiography into my inspired eyes, freeing his tortured soul and mine at once and giving me the power to go forth, tra-la.

  I swallowed my gorge. Gruff but lovable. Dear God, had it really come to that?

  In college, in Byronic mood, I used to follow girls down the street sometimes – nothing threatening; at a distance, I mean – if they had black hair and small heads and a certain sinuosity: that was the way I imagined Agnes had grown up, you see. It was funny, because that wasn ‘t what I wanted at all – in women, that is – in the long run. I took what I could get, of course, but fey blondes were what I set my hat for. Fey blondes with crystal blue eyes. Large-ish round breasts were also a favorite or small, shy, refined ones that perked up when you touched them. I taught a few such girls what it was to be adored, anyway. My little letting-outs of breath when they’d strip down, the more off-handedly the better. My raptures at the sight of their vaginas and buttocks – the fact that they had vaginas and buttocks – how wonderful! – I could go on and on about it. What must they have thought, the poor creatures, sitting on the things all day, casually crossing their legs this way and that over them, to have some dreamer go all religious about it? They must have wanted like crazy to believe me – who wouldn’t? – especially at that age, feeling all misshapen and messy and secretly deficient – to be told, no, no, it’s the greatest, it’s the Coliseum. Well, I was tied to the cock-rocket like any young man and the transcendence went out of me with the gism and the girls would be hurt and disappointed, having gotten their hopes up. But fey blondes and their pudenda – call it a third-generation American trying to dive dick-first into the melting honey-pot, but I was there, and the physical facts took precedence – these still, always, drew me on.

  And yet – and yet, I’d follow a sinuous black-haired girl down the street now and then, someone like Agnes, my version of Agnes, though the rest of it, of our time together, had more or less receded from me. I’d forgotten the details, the actual incidents. I never thought about them anymore. And it was only much later that I began to think she might have had any real, any lasting effect on me, or have left a part of herself in what I hankered after. To give an example: I think I’ve always been a fairly conservative sort of person, in spite of my youthful liberalism. Work and money, living in houses, dressing in ties, I’ve always liked all that stuff. Even at NYU, in the early seventies, leftism fading but still a habit, a glow: even then, when I was sitting tailor-style in the dorms, wearing jeans and shaggy hair, smoking hashish, calling the president a fascist and so on, I always admired his suits – Nixon’s. Even then, the Jewish tradition of extravagant condemnations of the corrupt and the hard-lined, while convenient for the time, sat uncomfortably on me. Later on, I made a philosophy out of this. I would point out that the embattled bourgeoisie, for all its complacencies, was really the last bastion of practical tolerance; that the left and the right were always imposing their wills on others, and finally forging their perfect worlds with censorship and guillotines and gulags and concentration camps. Only the middle ground knows how to live and let live, I’d say. But that was just a philosophy. The real point was that always, in my heart of hearts, I was a bourgeois, always. I always suspected that even the very best rock songs were simplistic, poorly written tripe, and that eventually, in every system everywhere, the sedate, the industrious, the pleasant were meant to inherit the earth. All right. So – that said – I studied Zen. This is what I mean about Agnes. I was deep down a practical, thoroughly un-mystical kind of a guy. Except when it came to yellow-haired pussy, satori was nowhere on my deepest agenda. Yet twice a week, all through college and law school too, I would close my books and tramp down to the Washington Square subway; ride the train all the way to and from Amsterdam Avenue; walk to the rundown brownstone off Columbus Avenue, and climb the narrow stairs to the shabby, plant-infested third floor one-bedroom apartment where Janet Hastings held her Transcendence Seminars. Pretzeling my legs with deep, cynical and witty groans into the half-lotus position I would sit narrow-eyed in a circle with six others, a candle burning among us on Janet’s thinning living room carpet. I would try to carry out her solemn instructions to ‘Follow your energy,’ or ‘Visualize your breath.’ This, even though such language struck me as incredibly vague and silly. And the discussions afterward – gad, they made me downright squeamish. Janet was into the New Testament in a big way and always quoted Jesus as if he were some great guy she knew personally, a dutch uncle whose advice was so clear, so in keeping with eastern principles of inner vision that all this Catholic and Protestant nonsense that had been going on these past twenty centuries would just make him slap his knee with holy hilarity. The joy of clarity and revelation would well up in her throat when she talked and into the others’ throats too and even into my throat sometimes, which just made my hair stand on end. I distrusted it entirely. But – but the meditation itself – helped along sometimes by Janet’s mystifying Zen tales of broken buckets and tasty strawberries – that kept me coming back for more. And I think – think now though it would never have occurred to me at the time – that it was Agnes I was after, my lost Sole, that Walk Home From Her House feeling. It didn’t come naturally to me without her and I missed it. I wanted it back.

  I would even go so far as to say that this had something to do with my marrying Marianne. Marianne with her fairy tendrils of corn-colored hair, and her upstate dairy farm childhood, and the gray leotards she meditated in which served to inflame my suspicions that she sure enough possessed the articles of my one true faith. She was one of Janet’s students too. In fact, she worshipped Janet. She would tell me, breathily, ‘Janet is so deep. She understands so much.’ The goof. This made me jealous, on the one hand, but it also suggested a talent in her for selfless devotion, something I wanted in a wife, and which I saw confirmed in her vulnerable, domitable not to mention crystal blue eyes. She was – not to oversimplify, but to make the point – everything I was looking for, yet with just that added flip of kookiness that was the legacy of my lost little girl companion.

  Turned out
there was no resemblance. Not only between Marianne and Agnes but between the soggy ghost on my sofa here and the dead sculptress of beloved memory. She, the girl on the sofa, was more my type, the Marianne type. Light hair, apple cheeks, bright, pellucid, innocent eyes. And it saddened me to realize this, oddly enough. As if America were rinsing the mad Jewish witch out of its bloodlines and leaving this pale spectre of itself to go searching across the graveyards of the earth blah blah blah … Dear Christ, listen to the bullshit. The big thoughts, the stupid generalizations. She was doing it to me. Sucking me bodily into the cinema of her soul.

  I tore myself away from the window and, in doing so, rounded on her dramatically, which must’ve been just what she wanted. God, how to break the fetters.

  ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘what do you want? We’ve done the root cellar, we’ve done the graveyard. The journalist lie, the age lie.’ She tried to look smart-assed but her cheeks colored. ‘What do you want?’ I said again.

  And surprise, surprise – call me a feather and blow me away – she leveled her baby greens at me and said – said gravely as if expecting a chord to strike:

  ‘I want to know about Agnes Mallory.’

  Her letters started twenty years later, in the era of Buckaroo Umberman. Buckaroo was a Manhattan real estate attorney. Also a part-time tax commissioner. Also the president of the MacBride Democratic Club, with offices in the heart of the Deuce. He was also, I’ve come to suspect, my id, foul as he was. I think that had to be it, else how could he have corrupted me so easily? Of course in those days, when I was young and so half mad, everyone was something to me. Ralph Myers was my father, Marianne my mother, Umberman my id, and so on. Some hooker who called herself Juliet I think was my vacuous, beautiful, sold-out soul. Everything fit in somewhere. That’s what craziness is: imposing the template of your psyche on an indifferent world. Of course, that’s also what sanity is, which is what causes so much of the terror and confusion about the two states. But crazy or sane is not the point: it was youth. I was young, and as far as I was concerned, everyone had a role to play in the extravaganza of my existence. That’s what they were there for.