Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  So the lights come up on me again when I’m twenty-nine. Briefcase in hand, I’m storming with virile and righteous anger past the reception desk at Myers & Weiss. The secretaries loved me when I was like that. They’d go slack, their pupils dilating. Six feet tall and very thin, blond still, with boyish features, I usually tried for an expression of old-fashioned, square-jawed rectitude tempered by man-of-the-world cynicism which of course failed to quite conceal my indomitable fighting spirit. It was good stuff. Even Weiss, the junior partner, wanted a piece of it. When I passed his open door, he called out to me. ‘Hey! Harry! Hold on!’ When I stopped, all impatient and dynamic, he came around his big desk to me, partner though he was.

  In my arrogance then, I could find no easy way to relate to Weiss. I liked him, but looked down on him too. Even literally, down on his amiable pug features, his bald head with the frizzy black fringe. At forty or so, he had gone where he was going more or less, whereas I radiated a Big Future. He liked, therefore, to play adviser to me, get his licks in, secure his mentor role in my biography. The pleasanter I was about it, the more he sensed I was merely tolerating him and the more desperate and pushy he got. It was not a comfortable relationship.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said, laying a friendly hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Plunkitt Towers,’ I said grimly. ‘The fix is in.’ I’d been reciting this phrase to myself all the way in from the Bronx and thought it sounded great.

  ‘This is the Article Five case.’

  ‘Yeah.’ It was one of my favorites. Its outrageousness made it a tale worth telling, especially as I was on the side of the angels. Having left Legal Services a couple of years back, it was just the sort of thing I had to root around for more. Briefly, Plunkitt Towers was part of a Fifties slum-clearance project: subsidized low-income housing on the West Side. Originally, it was packed with deserving, mostly Jewish, mostly socialist types. According to the law, as these people prospered or died or moved away, the new low-income groups, namely blacks, Hispanics, Orientals and so on, were supposed to move in. But that’s not the way it happened. When the Lincoln Center theater complex went up, the value of the neighborhood went up with it. Suddenly, the Plunkitt Towers residents found themselves living in a very low-rent goldmine. In the meantime, some of those same residents had become fairly powerful themselves, with connections to the city government and political clubs. So, while the city Housing, Preservation and Development Agency turned a blind eye, the residents stacked the building’s waiting list with friends, relatives and heirs, and the new low-income people had to go fish for somewhere else to live. Okay – now, in Washington, president Reagan and the Republicans had arrived. Real Estate Summertime: the borrowing’s easy and the market runs high. On top of which, the City’s contract on Plunkitt was about to expire, which meant that, with a two-thirds majority vote from the co-opers, the building could go private, ensuring large profits all around and leaving legitimate low-income folks out in the cold. Just another New York scam: fine speeches and good intentions twisted to line the pockets of the powerful. But wait! What’s this on the horizon? Is it? Yes. Sir Harry of Bernard, riding in pro bono to stop the vote on the grounds that a lot of the voting residents shouldn’t have been in the building to begin with. A cry of ‘Huzzah!’ Followed by a loud: ‘Shit!’

  ‘They gave the case to Judge Montanti,’ I told Weiss. ‘The opposition walks in with Murray Seidenfeld, who just sits there, right? Just giving the judge the eye. So Montanti suddenly decides I have to serve the entire board – most of whom are out of town – and he lifts the TRO on the vote, which is next week.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I gotta talk to Myers.’

  I marched on, eager to get away from him before he loaded me up with bad suggestions and weak contacts I’d have to waste time on in order to soothe his ego. For his part, he hurried ahead and managed to be the one who burst into Myers’ office first.

  ‘They set the kid up on Plunkitt Towers,’ he announced, pointing a thumb at me. ‘Listen to this shit.’ We all loved to talk like that.

  I went through it again for Myers and he listened quietly, slumped in his swivel chair, his pants riding high on his round paunch. There was a moist smile on his face – a face like crumpled putty in which the eyes glittered mildly, full of Jewishness, Jewish wit and wisdom. When I was done, he shook his head.

  ‘You can’t win this one, Harry, they want it too badly. Murray Seidenfeld owns the whole surrounding block. He doesn’t want all those low-income people moving into Plunkitt; it would kill his property values. And if Seidenfeld is involved, so is Hank Cohen. And with Montanti on the bench, the best you can do is make ’em keep whatever low-income units are left.’

  ‘Yeah, but once they go private, the ballgame is over,’ I said.

  Nodding absently, Myers considered. I watched him and so did Weiss. Our respect for Myers was powerful, all our feelings for Myers were very strong. At moments like this, in fact, I admired him so much that it was important to me to remind myself why I was essentially better than he was. He was old, for one thing. He was satisfied with his lot. He was Jewish in the old-fashioned way and was satisfied with that too, with his rabbinical softness, his sighing acceptance; he said ‘oy’ a lot, and used Yiddish expressions – ‘Fidugula. You know what’s a fidugula? You don’t know a fidugula? What kind of a Jewish bocher doesn’t know what’s a fidugula?’ I was proud not to understand what the hell he was talking about. Still, there was no denying what I felt for him. Now, for instance, watching him, I experienced real tremors of excitement and anticipation. What would he say? What was the word from on high?

  He thought a long time, nodding like that. Framed against his modest window with its modest view of the Municipal Building. He was senior partner; he could have had Weiss’s panorama of downtown, the Brooklyn Bridge, the twin towers.

  ‘Maybe we could blackmail HPD,’ Weiss chimed in, ‘wake ’em up with some scandal stories in the Times …’ He was just throwing this out in the hopes he’d get lucky and get to be my expert this time. But his voice trailed off as Myers made a moue and shook the suggestion away.

  ‘I think,’ Myers said finally, ‘a case like this: you might just be able to go to Umberman.’

  ‘Umberman. Who’s Umberman?’ I asked.

  ‘“Who’s Umberman!”’ snorted Weiss, enjoying his superiority while he could.

  But Myers – this is what Myers answered, shifting in his chair, sinking into what I believed to be a shamanistic trance – and this is why, at the hard core of feeling, we all worshipped the man:

  ‘Well, until two years ago, you know, Manhattan and the Bronx were a single judicial district, and Freeman in the Bronx only controlled a third of the nominating panel’s delegates. Everytime he tried to sell a judgeship, the Manhattan reformers got in his way, which embarrassed the mayor no end, since he’d have been only too happy, his deal with Freeman being what it was, to let his nominations ride. Now two years before that, Freeman had already tried to split the districts up, but the reformers got to Governor Carey first and shot him down. So this time, Freeman – and Cohen too, for that matter – approached Umberman, who’s now president of the MacBride Club but at the time had some Carey plum and was very in with the Governor. To make a long story short, Umberman sold the district split to Albany, Freeman got his own judicial district to play around with and, in return for the favor, he gave Umberman one Bronx judgeship for himself. Which, in the fullness of time, was presented to our boy Montanti. All of which means that, even though he’s a Bronx judge, Montanti belongs to Umberman.’

  I mean, I loved this stuff, loved it. I loved the whole city when it was explained to me this way. Political New York. We all loved it, the whole youthful firm of us, and Myers was its master, he had it down pat. The layers, the details, the intricacies of corruption. No one did it like he did. You didn’t even have to understand what he was saying to appreciate the way he said it, the dropping of names, the sardonical phrasings – ‘o
ur boy Montanti,’ ‘the fullness of time’ – the gimlet in-ness, the gimlet eye. When Myers starting talking, it was like looking at one of those cross-section models of the earth in which you can see the strata and the roots, the interchange of minerals, the slug-life, all the underworkings of the innocent’s green-blue surface world of trees, houses, avenues and lies. We lived to breathe that knowing of his, that unshockable grasp of chicanery with its bedrock of unstated moralism. We too would be incorruptible but know the ways of the corruptible and walk among them, as he did, without sanctimony but weary-faced and wise.

  So now I perched on the edge of his desk and gestured with my hand, just as I would have if we’d been wearing snap-brim hats and smoking cigarettes like the tough guys in old films. ‘Why should Umberman do a dance with me?’ I said.

  Myers answered with a classic Semitic gesture: closing the eyes, tilting the head, spreading the hands a little. ‘I’ll call. We’ll talk. He’ll dance.’

  As we were walking away from our audience with Myers, Weiss, completely overshadowed, had to get in his word. Hands in his pockets, he hoisted his shoulders. He corkscrewed his lips knowingly and shook his head. ‘Buckaroo Umberman,’ he said musingly.

  In my condescending compassion for him, I took the bait. ‘Buckaroo? Why Buckaroo?’

  And Weiss, pausing at his office door, dropping his voice, tapping the fingertips of his open hand against my shirt front, a little too eager, a little too giddy, a little too little informed, did his version of the great Myers’ routine. ‘The babes love their Umberman, see. Don’t ask me why, okay? It’s a mystery of female sexuality. Anyway. When he was up in Albany, he was schtupping all of them. Constantly. Every aide, every secretary, every court clerk he can stick his dick in, he schtups.’ Glancing toward the secretarial caroles, he moved in on me. I could smell the egg sandwich on his hot breath. ‘So he starts to play this game with his staff, all right? He gets a girl into his office and gets her to bend over. So he can schtup her from behind, see?’ He was almost whispering now out of one corner of his mouth. ‘Then, just as he’s going good, right? – schtupping her – suddenly, four or five of the guys in the outer office burst into the room. You know, they shout, like, “Hooray!” Well, of course, the babe is horrified. She tries to get away.’ Weiss’s face reddened as his whisper rose to a high-pitched squeak of laughter. ‘Only Umberman won’t let go, right? So she’s screaming and throwing herself around like a bucking bronco and Umberman holds on for dear life, and the guys are shouting, “Ride ’em. Ride ’em, Buckaroo.” I swear to God. They used to take bets, they used to time him to see how long he could stay on. That’s why they call him Buckaroo.’

  Weiss’s high-pitched giggling went on for some time. He shook his head, his round face scarlet. He had to knuckle-dry his eyes. I did my best not to hurt his feelings, of course, glancing heavenward, murmuring breathlessly, ‘You’re kidding. Are you kidding me?’ and so on. But this was no good. It was not a Myeresque story at all. It was even faintly pitiful that he would tell it. For one thing, it probably wasn’t true, or was an exaggeration, which Myers would have pointed out. And for another thing, it was cruel. Humiliating some girl like that. That was awful. That wasn’t like selling a judgeship or miscounting a vote or signing a dead guy to a nominating petition. Those you could admire in a way: the endless ingenuity of greed – that was part of the idea, part of our easy, cynical knowledge of human nature. But this: this stank. It was brutal. You didn’t stand there and giggle about it. Cruelty – rape, murder, child abuse – you could joke about these things under Myerism if no women were around, but only to mask your outrage, to relieve your heart. ‘Oh, a wonderful guy our Mr Umberman,’ you might say. Or ‘Hell, in Albany, that’s how they treat all the voters.’

  And then, too, the story was demeaning to womankind. We Myerists didn’t do that. We believed in women, as coworkers, mothers, wives. We treated them with courtliness and bemusement. And if there was something a little patronizing about that, well, it was because we knew, in spite of their trumpetings of strength, that a certain gentleness was required for the maintenance of their humanity which was not required with us. Some of them might insist, in the abstract populism of the age, that there was no difference between their sex and ours, and the courtly Myerist would go along. Hell, the world would be a lot easier and a lot fairer if that were true. But facts were facts – that was the foundation of our creed. Women, whether they liked it or not, were strange and mysterious and wonderful beyond their own control or understanding. You did not abuse that or truck lightly with those who did.

  And finally, the story gave me a hardon. A big one. Not right then, while he was telling it to me, thank God, but later, when I had time to consider it and form a picture in my mind. In the cab going up to see Umberman a few days later, for instance, I had to keep my raincoat over my lap: my dick could have cut glass. I looked out on the Park Avenue pedestrians as they headed into the strong September wind, under a gray sky, under imperious walls of white brick and red brick. I fixed a solid image in my mind of the imagined Umberman’s satyr-like thrusting, the girl’s bare ass bouncing and bucking as she struggled to get away from him. I imagined her high-pitched cries. I suppose I half believed it had actually happened now, if only for my own excitement’s sake. Then, a jack hammer riddled the pavement and I came around. I saw a colossal crane hoisting a girder on a side street. Hard hats and scaffolding. A grinding steam shovel. Pulling out of the daydream, looking up ahead, I saw Grand Central drawing close, the big clock and Mercury with outstretched arms. I knew I had to ditch the erection before we pulled up at the MacBride Club, and I cast around for neutral thoughts. My pregnant wife … no. My last handball game at the NYU club. All the construction everywhere, all the money and property changing hands as the government led us on a borrowing and spending spree. That did it, and nervousness helped too: my fear at the big meeting, my general anxiety these days.

  My dick safely receded. Still, moments like this were very difficult for me. I had a feeling sometimes, when I was pried from my imagination like this, as if a barrel ring had been removed from my Self, as if the barrel staves of my personality had fallen away and I was left naked, with no personality at all. Anxious, acidic, depressed, really, for no reason I could think of, I had to remind myself what a happy guy I actually was. An up-and-coming legal star fresh from a good-guy apprenticeship at Legal Services. Loving husband of a beautiful, gentle and service-minded wife. Father-to-be of our first baby. Everything, as people kept telling me, was going great.

  But the Inner Man, oh, the Inner Man. With my wife, for example. Just that morning, I had snapped at her, and pretty savagely too – about towels no less. She had used the last towel in the bathroom and hadn’t replaced it. I had to come out into the hallway sopping wet to get another. I’d snarled at her all through breakfast and while I’d managed, by an effort of will, to keep from turning really cruel, the Inner Man – oh, the Inner Man was in an uproar about it. To Him, it was a problem with universal implications, these missing towels. It showed her lack of consideration. It demonstrated women’s refusal to accept responsibility for their actions. It was indicative of a falling off of courtesy and respect for others throughout the entire society. God knows what else. The Inner Man had been spouting silent jeremiads like this all morning. He was practically on fire with them. Whereas I personally felt like shit for being mean to her, Marianne, the sweet, whispery soul.

  And it was like this a lot. I was not at peace with Him, this Inner Man. He was angry at my wife more than half the time, even when I would have been perfectly placid. He was flamingly enraged when I might have been merely annoyed. He sniped at her enterprises, was scornful of her condition. He was a total stinker. And it wasn’t just with her either. It was everything; His whole outlook, His attitude. I was concerned with big topics. With the liberalization of the Law versus the responsibility of the State, with the intrinsic relationship between corruption and democracy, blacks and whites, women a
nd men, rich and poor. With the decency of my own career, with doing Good, with being Good. The Inner Man, meanwhile, was preoccupied with topics such as shit. Literally shit. He could go on and on about it. Oh, that was a good one, He’d say, just the consistency I like; stick with that cereal in the morning. Or: I feel a bit of pressure, maybe we should do it now, save us trouble later on. Or: What do you think, if we fart here, will the stench have cleared away before anyone comes into the room? On and on and on like that. In sexual matters, too, He was awful: infantile, domineering, secretly terrified. Made giddy and giggly by words like titty, tush, bounce, buck, thrust. Nourishing his sultanic fantasies. Avid for news stories about rape. Nauseous at the mention of castration or impotence. And politically: He was secretly glad – glad, I tell you – that Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the right in power; we’d make more money that way. And He’d thought many of my poor black clients had been lazy idiots. He burst out at them sometimes, right across the desk: Nigger! Ignorant Nigger! Christ, what if I accidentally spoke aloud?

  Call it a version of the old mind-body problem – well, I guess it was – but that made it not one whit less painful and disorienting for me personally at twenty-nine. All that rage, all that fear, all that shit. And the suspicion – no, the conviction – never articulated, hardly framed – that He was I, this Inner Man, that I was a mere construct, a falsehood, no one.