Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  I was ready for Umberman to come into my life. I make no excuses. My very confusion conjured him from beneath the sidewalks of New York.

  The most memorable moment of our first meeting was just before the aide opened his door. The aide – or whatever he was – was a sinister, sharp-faced young man in heavy, black-framed glasses that showed, I thought, an almost vengeful disregard for fashion. He led me through the wide outer office of gunmetal desks and strewn paper and campaign bumper stickers stuck to the wall. He took me to a door at the back, let me approach it first. Then, while I stood there, he reached around me. He twisted the knob, pushed the door open. What was I to think? Was this it? Would he shout, ‘Hooray!’ Would they be there, right there before me, the struggling girl, the thrusting Buckaroo? Would I be confronted with the entire spectacle? Worse, would it render me helplessly lubricious? Would I stand flabbergasted, breathless and erect while some poor woman’s dignity was violently stripped from her and her round, rosy, convulsing buttocks bared for all to see?

  This – this fearful anticipation – was the only comic anecdote I came away with afterward, although I had to modify my own reactions in the telling. I had to delete, that is, my panting excitement. Comic anecdotes, see, were an important element in my defense against the sovereignty of the Inner Man. When told with wit and apparent modesty, they established the decency of my Real Self in the admiring minds of others. You just had to lie about what you were really thinking, that’s all.

  Anyway, nothing actually happened, of course. The door was flung in and there was Umberman. An enormously fat man with thinning black hair and heavy features: jowls, lips, nose, eye-pouches all heavy and drawn toward the earth. I couldn’t imagine women exactly swooning at his feet. He didn’t get up from behind his desk when I came in but leaned back in his creaking chair, spreading his arms to welcome me in a gravelly voice.

  ‘Harry Bernard! We meet at last!’

  I laughed, coming forward to shake his hand. I felt superior to him already. He reeked of the way of things, and I was clean. ‘I wasn’t aware we’d been missing each other.’

  ‘Ah now.’ He wagged his finger at me. ‘A name gets around. A man has a reputation. A man has a future. Nothing is secret in this city, Harry.’

  He gestured me to the metal chair across from him. I was much too concerned with my own image, with projecting confidence and the moral necessity of my cause, to take much notice of the surroundings. There was a good view of the Terminal and Mercury through the window behind him, and I got a sense of some pretty fancy prints on the wall, seascapes and sailing ships he might have picked up in Italy and England. For the rest, I had an impression of a swamped desktop, stacks of briefs against the wall and that sort of thing.

  Umberman was going on, nodding slowly, heavily, with solemn appreciation. ‘The Harlem clinic thing. These incidents get around. Many men were bought off. Many others would have been. There’s a drumbeat in this city, Harry. I keep my ears to the wind.’

  I’d fought the mayor’s office to keep the clinic open as he’d promised he would during his campaign. I lost, but Umberman was right, it made some noise. And of the three lawyers on the case, I was the only one who didn’t wind up with a choice job working for the opposition. I earned a lot of credit for this in some circles, distrust in others.

  ‘This is the future. You. I know that. The future belongs to reform. That’s the way it should be, Harry, believe me. The machine is gone. The machine has lived out its usefulness.’ Already, as I settled in, he was lecturing, making grand sweeps with both slabby hands, letting them fall to his stomach with a slap. ‘The old days – oh, the old days, you know, you did a favor, you helped a friend. A Christmas turkey for a poor family, a home for someone who was burned out, a job for a young man trying to make his way in the world. It had a point then, a purpose. You didn’t ask – Republican, Democrat. You knew where they would be on election day.’

  For this I had my Youthful Smile of Credulous Admiration, but we Myerists were proof against sentimentalizing the old days, Tammany. That unfinished courthouse behind City Hall? That sucker cost the grateful poor thirteen million of their tax dollars in 1868 and most of that went straight to the bosses in kickbacks. We Myerists knew our history, see, our facts. In spite of our cynicism, we knew corruption never worked. Never.

  ‘FDR, La Guardia, the New Deal – now, the government does the favors for people. That’s the way it should be. I mean that. The Civil Service gives the jobs. There’s no real patronage in this city anymore,’ said Umberman, his big chin dropping with a thud to his chest. ‘In Manhattan – pfft – forget it. The Mayor hates the party Chairman, the Chairman won’t make peace with the Mayor. You think there’s patronage out of City Hall here? Forget about it. There’s nothing to give. And now: TV. Commercials. You don’t even need the party to run for office anymore. You go right on TV, you go right to the people. Sometimes I ask myself: what am I doing here? The party is nothing now. The people are what matter.’ He spread his hands again and laughed, his jowls rippling. ‘And the people, Harry. The people, you know, they want issues. Each one has his issue. It’s all division, there’s no unity. Each one, you’ve got to tell him what he wants to hear. See? The people – they like words. You gotta give them nice words all the time. If it’s a shvartze, you gotta call him black. Then he wants to be called an African–whosits or whatsis, whatever. If it’s a cripple in a wheelchair, he wants to be handicapped, and then that’s no good, he wants to be physically challenged. The girls can’t be girls, they gotta be women, then something else – uy, they have very high hopes for the English language, these people. But that’s what you gotta do. Because it’s all TV now, it’s all talking to people. And every year, you gotta learn a whole new vocabulary. Why? Because every year people find out – surprise! – a new name doesn’t make you white. It doesn’t make you walk, it doesn’t give you respect from men. It doesn’t give you a fucking turkey at Christmas time either. People feel the same goddamned way about you they always did except now they lie to you about it. You’re an African–whosits, you’re a woman – they lie. TV, Harry. The party’s gone, the parry’s over. A guy like me – what? I’m an old man. An old hack. I have no power anymore. My day is past. And this is as it should be.’

  All this by way of hello – we hadn’t even gotten to Plunkitt Towers yet. And as I sat there, waiting for my chance, raincoat over my arm, sympathetic smile plastered to my face, I was beginning to indulge, all unwillingly, in some slightly more complex reactions. I responded to his ontology; it spoke to my not-very-secret secret heart. Well, sure, I too had begun to notice the language of public life being drained of pain and human feeling – and therefore of truth. I even suspected that the Inner Man was feasting on this phenomenon. That he was thriving on the new, politicized vocabulary the way the gangsters used to thrive on Prohibition: peddling the forbidden thoughts I could no longer say aloud. And I confess: I admired Umberman for speaking out about it when even Myers simply shrugged and went along. Oh, Umberman still disgusted me, right enough. Just looking at him. He was reclining with his hands on his belly now, and his eyes were narrowed, almost closed, and his breathing made a damp rumble – it was as if he’d sunk, between diatribes, into a lizardly snooze. And there was a stream of spittle, too, descending slowly, slowly from the corner of his mouth. He was horrible. But all the same, I, wrestling with the prissy angels, saw a certain courage in his awfulness, I guess; an honesty – or at least an honest mockery beneath his lies. He was mocking me – I was pretty certain of that – mocking and watching me through those lowered lids.

  ‘So?’ he said, barely moving now. ‘Nu? This is what I contend with. My kind. No power anymore. Our day is over, Harrykins. Still – hey – I’m glad you felt you could come to me, a good man like yourself, a man who cares, an honest man, not to be had, not be bribed. It does me good, at the end of my life, to see this, the way of the future, a man I can admire …’

  ‘Well,’ I said, weighing
in with an earnest expression of respect, ‘Ralph Myers felt that in the matter of Plunkitt Towers, a certain number of units might be set aside …’

  ‘Ach – that!’ He waved it away lazily. He sneered into his shirt collar. ‘Consider it done. For a young man like you, that’s done already. Poor folks gotta live somewhere too. It’s done.’

  I gaped, I admit it. My mouth, open on a word, just stayed that way, open, as I stared at the semi-napping fat man. That was done? That was it? We were talking about Seidenfeld, remember, who meant billions in realty deals to the city. And Cohen – they called him The Fixer, he was that tough, that connected. That’s who I was up against. And it was done? Oh, I felt this, all right, the unbridled power of this, for only a moment maybe but from my gonads to my soul I felt it go through me with a certain brisk hilarity. On the instant, I ceased to doubt that there were women who would hike their skirts for this creature. The Buckaroo scenario even returned to me for an instant, and I felt the excitement of that go through me too.

  For an instant, as I say, only for an instant. Then, settling back, I managed an uncertain laugh. ‘Uh – okay,’ I said.

  And without opening his eyes, Buckaroo Umberman smiled pinkly, damply. ‘Harry, I’m glad you could come by,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to have a look at you.’

  About three months after this, a surprising thing happened. It was dreary and cold and December then. Marianne was at the West Side Y teaching her meditation class. Yes, she had taken on the Janet Hastings mantle and was doing Transcendence Seminars of her own now. Janet herself had moved to Santa Fe to paint and it was her parting wish that, as she had continued the seminars of her guru, whose name I forget, others would continue her seminars and so on until it was just one big Janet Hastings kind of a world. So this was what my wife was up to in the final month of her pregnancy.

  The Y provided a small classroom for this, and Marianne and her pupils had pushed the tablet chairs to the wall and set their blue gym mats down in the center of the floor. Marianne had herself all lotused up at the head of a semi-circle. The midsection of her purple leotard ballooned painfully over her swollen thighs and her breasts sagged so wearily it weighed all the other women down as well. But she, her face, her manner, as always, were radiant, were by Raphael. Her eyes sparkled like the surface of fresh snow as they gazed into the middle distance with inspirational joy. ‘When Jesus …’ she said, and she got just that Janet Hastings swelling of ecstasy in the throat when she spoke the name, ‘When Jesus said, “If your eye offends you pluck it out,” he was talking, I think, about your rage, about how useless it is to take offense at what we think are the evils of the world. Before you tell your neighbor he has a speck in his eye, remove the mote from your own: don’t direct your energies toward the object of your anger, direct them toward the anger itself. Whatever is happening is just … happening! You’re the cause of your own reactions.’

  She only had six students of this philosophy, thank Heavens: six women, six tense faces seared with lines. Each was concentrating intently on how awkward she felt in her own leotard: like a collection of gangling stalks sprouting from lumpy putty. In truth, they’d all given up hope on this stuff lessons ago, and were beginning to drop their false enthusiasm for it as well. Recently, during the breaks, they’d abandoned the pretense of philosophical converse altogether, and had begun gossiping about my wife instead. They’d discuss whether her bliss was merely a palliative for her neuroses, which palliative, by the way, they secretly envied her in any case, feeling nothing themselves at this point between the dentist drill of life and their own exposed nerves. They envied her her baby too and her marriage too – or at least her delusions about them, because they knew, as she did not, what the former would tear out of her and wear down in her and how the latter would scorch the girlhood from her soul as it plummeted in flames, or poison it as it lingered in the blood like gall. Ultimately, they assured each other, she would learn, and then she would be like them – just like them despite her protests to the contrary, which would be just like their protests – with even her day’s work robbed of its fulfillments by unseen conspirators as she began to realize that her epiphanies had become a farce wearily played out for those, like themselves, stupid enough to shell out eighty-five dollars on one more straw to grasp at as, notwithstanding the strident battle cries of their generation, they sank into their mothers’ dissatisfaction and ultimately death.

  ‘So! Let’s try a meditation exercise,’ said Marianne, sprightly. ‘Think about the person who makes you angriest … Oh.’ At this point, narrowing her brows, she stopped. Puzzled, she bent over herself, trying to peer down into her own lap. ‘I – I must’ve spilled something …’

  Whereupon, the once-wealthy matron who had been robbed of both dignity and security in a relentless divorce gasped, ‘Oh Christ, Marianne, your waters broke.’

  My ditzy wife, still transcendent, blinked at her. ‘What?’

  And the divorcee, and the single mother, and the out-of-work executive, and the former cocaine addict and the stay-at-home feminist and the terrified spinster who didn’t need a goddamned man to feel fulfilled, all cried out together: ‘Marianne, you’re in labor, you’re having your baby!’

  Marianne, God love her, was speechless. Simply astounded.

  It was a fourteen-hour thing, little Charlie coming. She wouldn’t take drugs for it, not any. Natural childbirth was all the rage that year, and of course Marianne swore by it, one of the few women nutty enough to actually stick it through. She wouldn’t even let the doctor do that spinal block that became so popular a few years later. She had that with our daughter – there were complications then – but not with Charlie. Charlie she did on her own.

  We’d gone to classes about this, the two of us. They gave them at the hospital, at Lennox Hill. A pretty nurse with a model’s figure put us through breathing exercises each week or blithely stood at the blackboard with a pointer, telling us what to expect and what to do. When the time came, I was there, phoned in from work by the receptionist at the Y. And I did my bit, sitting at Marianne’s bedside, massaging her spine with a tennis ball, feeding her ice chips, coaching her through the contractions and all that. Yeah, and it worked great for the first ninety minutes or so. That, we found out later, was when the other girls in our class started screaming for the demerol. But not my Marianne. Now, as convulsions and agonies and exhaustion racked her, as I hunched fretfully beside her wishing she’d cave in, as the fur on that stupid tennis ball turned to algae in my sweating palm, now she, like a sorceress marshalling her fairy gang, called on all her mysticism, all her techniques, all those mantras and huffings and those stupid eye movements and all that ridiculous shit, and she took it, the pain – or let it pass through her or happened with it or whatever the hell she did – she took it, without a curse, with hardly a complaint, for twelve and a half hours more.

  By eight o’clock or so on the next snowy morning, she lay sprawled on the blood-stained and piss-stained and shit-stained sheets with only her blue eyes bright in a face as white as paper. Her limbs lay limp at accidental angles all around her and all the energy seemed drained from her, so that it looked as if she was staring out at me all alive from within a dead thing, a log or a clump of earth. And yet, mercilessly, the contractions went on and on, wringing the dry rag of that poor body, while she murmured and breathed and zenned her way all through it. Even the doctor – an imperturbable Chinese woman – was popping in every few minutes now, begging her to medicate. Not Marianne. She never broke. She held the mystic line. Her mind and her body were one, see, there was no chance of her giving over.

  Me, I was demolished by this time. I was the ruins of Harry, a pile of Harry rubble on the hospital floor. Any beliefs I had, any convictions or philosophies, you could basically forget them. I was praying to a God I didn’t think existed, I was working out superstitious rituals to ease her pain – trying to appease Baal by pacing between the cracks in the hallway tiles or flipping a coin to proph
esy if it would come to an end in the next half hour – generally cowering, as it were, in the reptilian stem of the brain for all I was worth. In fact, when the end finally did come, I was in direct confrontation with Jehovah in a men’s room stall. Shaking my fist at the tiled ceiling, snarling, ‘Let up, you fuck.’ Sweat and tears streaming down my face together.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly the Lord’s Prayer, but it did seem to do the trick. When I stepped out into the hall, there was Marianne rolling toward me, her doctor pushing her, bed and all, to the delivery room with nurses dancing attendance. I grabbed a gown and a hat and went with them. The rest happened very quickly.

  And this was the surprising thing:

  When I saw my son Charlie born, I was posted close by my wife’s tormented belly, clutching her damp, weak hand and looking down between her legs. The only man in the room, I felt worn down by the difficult hours to what seemed an almost edenic humanity, with no feelings but tenderness and protectiveness and dependency for these good laborers of the companion sex. I had a clear overview of Marianne’s straining snatch – a part of her, by the by, for which I’d always felt enormous warmth and friendliness: such a raw, living orifice to be set so wittily beneath her delicate blond curlicues, with a bosky odor that was generally female but had a unique taste like sour red wine; I’d always liked it and I was surely rooting for it now. I had a clear view of it and all the proceedings, and was surprised to find I felt no queasiness, but if anything a heightened sense of normalcy. Despite my pulsing excitement and fear, despite the shouts on all sides of ‘Push!’ and ‘It’s coming!’ and my wife’s animal cries and the indifferent antiseptic wall tiles and the bright lights and the brutal metal instruments, it all seemed pretty much to me like the proper business of the day which, again, surprised me.

  Anyway, in about ten minutes, Charlie came, and this is the point. It was a messy affair. The doctor said ‘Push,’ and the nurses were all yelling, and I may have called out something too, and Marianne lifted up on her elbows with a nurse supporting her behind and her whole face balled up like a fist and she bore down. She gave a prolonged, wet fart and a gout of loose shit arced from her exposed anus and splatted dully across the sheets. Then, as she renewed the attempt, there was a great spray of piss from her, angry and yellow and pungent. Charlie’s head squeezed out of her into the doctor’s hands, not looking like a head at all but white and crusty and nearly featureless and the neck so twisted around that it sent my eyebrows clear up under my hairline. ‘One more,’ said the doctor, all of us shouting, and the dear girl gave it everything she had. And what a geyser there was from between her legs of blood and water and fetal matter and God knows what else. And out between the lips of her vagina in the very midst of that gush, curled all the while between her bloody thighs as if in peaceful sleep, slipped the baby, our baby, to a chorus of grateful cries.