Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Now then, the thing, the surprising thing that happened: I had a mystical experience. Nothing else to call it; it was none of your meditative states or exalted periods of understanding but a mental event, a thing that occurred. I felt a rush of love for my wife, and it became a tide – all this, by the way, in an instant – a tide of feeling on which I was washed clean out of my sense of physical presence and into Marianne’s – what? – being, essence, whatever. I was washed from my body into her being and then with her into the new baby’s – and then, all together, in the final squib of that second, began to mushroom out like a split atom into what I saw to be the Universal Thing. Imagine: a New York City lawyer. Then right away, back I snapped, the Harry we know and love, crying with joy and generally kvelling as young Charlie Bernard was laid, whimpering, between Marianne’s bounteous breasts. I was no different than I was the moment before and knew no more than ever. But as I stood there in my stupid-looking paper hat and medical apron, beaming down on my ecstatic wife and murmuring son, I did have the anxious suspicion that something stinking of destiny had been set free in me, was slowly rising, like the kraken from its watery bounds, and I was half conscious of a painful and childlike yearning which I had repressed for ever so long, and which was attached in my mind to a long-forgotten prospect: the darkening sky above me, and the night’s first stars.

  In six weeks time, I was pretty well sick of the whole thing: the kid shitting, crying, my wife, all martyred, complaining of too little sleep, me trying to help, not wanting to help, not really caring. Marianne loved the boy so much she could not even begin to imagine my inner shrug at him. Well, he was my son and all that and I supposed I’d come to love him in time, but he didn’t do anything and he didn’t know me from Adam – why exactly should I have liked him, if it came to that? Naturally, at the time, I lied about all this, to Marianne and to myself, but the gibberings of the Inner Man were insistent. Every day, I fantasized that a plane would crash into the house and kill them both so that I’d be free.

  I worked as much as I could. Made a great show of it too. Rubbing my eyes wearily, sighing over my workload and my responsibilities, my miserable clients and so on. I had to match Marianne burden for burden, you see, or she’d gain the moral high ground and want more out of me at home. Sometimes, I left for work early and subwayed under the west side down to lower Broadway only to spend the next hour or so alone doing nothing in the Starlight diner, a bagel joint south of Canal. I would sit there at a back table – salt and pepper linoleum littered with sesame seeds. I would sit very still with the Times draped over my hands and my bagel half-eaten and my coffee cold. And I would stare into space. Sad. Helplessly aching. Remembering and remembering, after these two decades of forgetfulness, all the details of that spring and summer I was nine years old. And I wanted it back, that season. More than words can say. I wanted to have it turn out right. I wanted it back.

  My mother, fat as a peasant, had grown into her face somehow. It was as if it had been waiting for her to actually become what she’d looked like all her life: an old, frightened woman in a mind-maze of superstitious terror. Jowls of leather, lips white and tight with fear, eyes overheated with the ceaseless ratiocinative work of fending off any secret betrayals: that was Mom these days. The first time Marianne and I brought the baby out to the Long Island house, Mom could only hover over him and fret. She was afraid even to touch him: the Envious Gods, you know. Marianne, her sweet, whispery self, coaxed her as if she were a child, working Charlie by stages into her arms – whereupon Mom sat rigid with him in an absolute horror of joy, then, quickly, handed him back.

  We were in the back room where we’d all gathered in the old days to watch TV. Marianne and Mom were sitting with the baby and his assorted bunny-bedecked paraphernalia on the braid rug. My father was slumped in the cushioned chair. Nearing sixty now, paunchy and bald, he exuded lethargy in long, moaning sighs.

  ‘It’s so wonderful what you can do now with them,’ Mom said, leaning wistfully over the blessed babe. ‘I see the young girls carrying them everywhere in those pouches, those Snuglis. Breastfeeding everywhere, right out in the open. In my day, they wouldn’t let you do any of that. The doctors would tell you it was no good, your husband wouldn’t encourage you. All the men – they’d get together and talk it over and then tell you what to do.’

  ‘They didn’t get together,’ my father groaned.

  ‘They got together,’ she insisted. ‘They got together and talked it over and told you what to do.’

  ‘Where would we get together? What did we know?’ he muttered mournfully.

  But the women went on talking between themselves.

  It was a Sunday afternoon in late February. There was a wet snow falling. I saw it melting on the empty branches of the old cherry tree.

  ‘So,’ said my father, cranking around to me. ‘How’s the job?’

  I never meant to get talkative around my parents. I always meant to maintain my privacy, play the cards close to the vest and such like. But so many things came into play, so many impulses. I wanted my father to know what a success I was so he’d be proud of me. I wanted him to know what a success I was and he wasn’t so fuck him. I wanted to show off my inside knowledge of political arcana, which I loved. And, maybe more than anything, I wanted my mother to know how honest I remained, how good, how golden with integrity. I didn’t know why it mattered so much. I didn’t know anything about her father then and the secret reasons behind her childhood poverty. But I felt just the same now as when I was a kid, when we sat at the breakfast table and I rattled off stories about my own heroism. I felt the same urgency to let her know this thing.

  So I said, ‘It’s incredible, Dad,’ leaning over the sofa arm into his glazed hostility. ‘The things I’m seeing. There’s never been a western city as layered with corruption as New York, not since maybe Rome. The baksheesh, the levels of bribery and influence. The intricate systems of legal graft – ’cause it’s all legal, the way they work it out: legal fees instead of payoffs, hiring the councilman’s illiterate brother to do your PR. The stuff you read in the newspapers is nothing – the newspapers are in on it …’ blah, blah, blah, on and on, flaunting what passed for my expertise.

  My father sighed, creaking like a hinge. ‘You gotta make compromises in this life,’ he sighed. ‘You gotta make compromises.’

  Naturally, this only fired me up more. That was his life – compromises, moral failure – which in his paternal largesse he wanted to be sure to hand down to me. But not this guy – not Harry – and I wanted Mom to know it. I said: ‘You know, the one possible bright spot is this woman Manero in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Their anti-corruption unit. She’s Republican, for one thing, which means she wants these guys but good. She also wants to be Governor, I think. And she’s supposed to be honest on top of it all. Anyway, there’s rumors she’s dropped some baited hooks into the swamp. I hear there could be some big-time busts coming down soon. I’ve been seriously thinking of sending a resume over there.’

  This was a lie, or at least an exaggeration. I hadn’t, not seriously – and I felt like an idiot for saying it, for puffing myself up. And God knows, if I’d been trying to impress my mother … Well, I couldn’t have been more surprised by her reaction.

  ‘Oh, these people!’ she said suddenly, sniffing, working herself to her feet. She stood over Marianne and the baby – not looking at me, looking down at them still. ‘These humorless people. Like the Seaburys and the Deweys. With their agendas, with their ambitions. Never trust these humorless people.’

  For a second, I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. I said, ‘You mean Hortense Manero?’

  ‘Yes. Yes!’ Mom said fiercely to Marianne. ‘What’s her racket? That’s what I’d like to know? Who appointed her the guardian of public morality?’

  ‘Uh … the President, I think.’

  ‘Pah!’ she said, or something like it; it took care of the President anyway. But she continued to look down at Marianne.
And Marianne, her skirt fanned out around her, sat on the floor, cradling our son in her arms, and looked up at Mom blankly, bewildered. ‘They all put themselves forward like little angels,’ Mom said. ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. You think they’re not into somebody? You think they’re not on the take? Seabury – he used to sit in that big Park Avenue office of his and the newsies on bicycles used to bring him his envelope wrapped in the Tribune.’

  ‘Seabury?’ I said. ‘No!’ I was shocked. He was one of my civic heroes – all the books described him as dead honest. I’d have thought she’d have loved the guy. This was a puzzlement, a disappointment. Even Marianne, who’d never heard of Seabury, blinked, and Charlie squirmed in her arms and he wasn’t even two months old. ‘Not Seabury, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘Seabury! You don’t know about these people. Oh, they’re all …’ But in her passion, she left the sentence unfinished. She gave another dismissive sniff and marched out of the room into the kitchen.

  Of course, my father’s whining self-justifications and his subterranean rage, my mother’s conspiracy theories and her fearful watching for signs of treachery – these things drove me crazy, but I couldn’t get enough of them. I sat there on the sofa for a moment after Mom walked out, shaking my head at her paranoid nonsense, and yet wishing she’d stayed, wanting to hear more. I heard her turn the water on in the kitchen sink – that’s what she did when she wanted to get away: drowned us all out with the hiss of the water. And I thought: Seabury? Seabury? He really was one of my role models. I mean, I knew it was La Guardia who’d actually cleaned the city up in the Thirties, and I loved the guy, sure, but he was a sweaty Wop-slash-Jew, all energy and uncouth doings: my mother hated that type. Seabury – Seabury was like the marble statue of Anglican Virtue standing behind him, bestowing the blessing of the western pieties on the brash new boy. It was he who gave his name to the hearings that busted the corrupt worker bees of the Tammany machine. I’d have thought Mom would have adored him, really. But newsies? Newsies hiding bribes in the Trib? She couldn’t have made that up, I thought. Because I didn’t know then what had been going on in that mind of hers. The mental stretches she’d had to make, the elaborate ‘deductions’ and workings-out – the fantasies, basically – she’d had to concoct in defense of her dead father. I didn’t know anything about her life really. I thought she must just have gotten her facts confused.

  I stood up and went into the kitchen to straighten her out – and also to bait her into some more of the familial craziness that was meat and drink to my lorn soul. She was vigorously working the brunch dishes under the faucet, her head bowed into the gray winter light that came through the casement window. The kitchen lights themselves were off, that was probably why she seemed so pale there and marbly. On the other hand, maybe she was shocked herself at having spoken her imagination like that, having slandered the good old judge with the secret glyphs and scenarios of this obsession I knew nothing of. In any case, the second I stepped onto the mock brickwork of the floor tiles, she raised that Litvak life mask to me and I spied such a hunted fear and so much sadness there that I clammed up and said nothing.

  She went back to her dishes. ‘Your friend,’ she said, above the gurgle and hiss. ‘What was her name, that little girl, that Agnes something?’

  My lips parted stupidly. I was stunned. Here, I’d been snorkeling in sentiment about her for weeks and I was completely unprepared for the surge of feeling, the loss of equilibrium. First Seabury, now this; what a day. I could only murmur: ‘Agnes Sole?’

  ‘Agnes Sole,’ she said into the sink, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘You mean the one whose mother Dad was fucking?’ No, I didn’t say that, but the urge to tear the veil away was sudden, unexpected and powerful. Yet, again, Mom lifted her face to me – that face that had been imposed upon her and had then molded her into itself – and I hadn’t the heart.

  ‘She called me up the other day.’

  ‘What?’ More flutterings and pulsings, bewildering how strong. ‘Agnes called you? How is she? What did she say?’

  Mom shrugged, sniffed, rubbed her nose with a soapy knuckle – all to play it down, as she always did with momentous things. And the suspense, meanwhile, riveted me.

  ‘Well, what did she …?’

  ‘We hardly talked at all,’ Mom said. ‘She just called to get your address. She said she wanted to write to you. She said she’s been wanting to write to you for years.’

  The letter didn’t come for weeks. It was a period of intense excitement for me. Before Christmas, the Plunkitt Towers affair had been settled and now, in the New Year, Buckaroo Umberman had begun to invite me places. First, I got a printed card inviting me to a fundraiser. Given his favor to me, I could hardly refuse. Then came phone calls and I went to lunches and to club meetings and was introduced around. I had a very serious conversation with Donald Leamer, the president of Queens, about the outlook for development there, and Stu Freeman, Cohen’s law partner and the party leader in the Bronx, regaled me one evening with rough stories about his cabby father. Buckaroo even introduced me to the Mayor once at a charity function in the Sheraton ballroom. ‘Oh yes, Harry Bernard,’ the Mayor enunciated in his precise way. ‘I have heard many, many things about you. All of them good,’ and then he laughed and all the people around him laughed loudly.

  Such occurrences struck me as glamorous and valuable. They were inside experiences in places most people didn’t get to go. I had a great drive to see such things, to see things in general. I felt very competitive about it. Movies, plays, art shows that my friends might have missed – these were coin of the realm to me. And other things, chance realities, these were even more important. I would walk along Fifth Avenue or Columbus or anywhere, hoping to spot a movie star or a former President or a car jumping the sidewalk to smash into a store window or, if I was very lucky, a gunfight or someone falling dead. It was New York, I was a New Yorker, and you could make these events into exciting anecdotes and put yourself forward and other New Yorkers could only try to outdo them with what they’d seen in the past. Out-of-town friends and suburbanites had never seen anything like it except on TV or in the army, and you could hold center stage with them for half an hour at a time. But, again, these sights were right in the open and momentary. The places Buckaroo took me to: many of them were closed rooms where even reporters were not invited, where men I recognized from the papers and the evening news chatted amiably together and used obscenities and laughed with smoke and whiskey fumes coming out of their mouths. These experiences were very valuable indeed.

  Still I knew, unless you stumbled upon such scenes, that you had to somehow get involved in order to see them and that that meant paying a price in time and sinfulness. I knew that people who were envious of my experiences – my father, for instance – would be quick to say I was being corrupted. My intention was to be very careful, to walk and witness and deal, yes, but with radiant probity. Like Myers did. This was no easy thing; the game was afoot. Because I knew too that Buckaroo Umberman was trying to corrupt me in fact.

  He did it laughingly, as if for sport. He told me he was doing it, as if that somehow made it all right. But I wasn’t fooled, I knew he was out for blood. He was, I felt, fascinated by my honesty. It challenged him, it challenged his view of life, his sense of self. And he had, what’s more, an instinct for the Inner Man. It made him laugh to see what a jerry-rigged job this outer Harry was. I, on the other hand, was completely deluded. I felt very strong. I felt I understood my Buckaroo, I recognized my id when I saw him and had been proof against him for years and years. Buckaroo would say, ‘You sure you wanna be seen with me, Bernard? I’m drawing you into a life of corruption, ya know.’ And I would wink at him arrogantly. I’d tell him, ‘The angels will protect me, Buckaroo.’

  He made his play finally in March over supper. That Immortal Supper, that will forever shine upon the ‘inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.’ We went to an Italian
place on Mulberry Street. I do believe Umberman picked it because of its mob associations and its mob feeling – gaudily elegant blond wood walls; too many empty tables with white cloths marred by candle wax; abrupt waiters with meaningful glances who didn’t depend on you for their jobs; quiet meetings, in the corners, of fat slobs in expensive suits: Buck was taunting me, see, with his sumptuous dishonesty. It was supposed to be dinner with Leamer, which already made it very important. But then, as we began dessert, Freeman dropped in too, and, seeing him, I took a strong gulp of my heavy wine. These three men – Leamer, Freeman, Umberman – they had enormous power here in the solar system’s capital. Maybe most of the power, behind the scenes. I felt the great glamor of sitting with them in there, leaning into the candlelight to hear their lowered voices, with all the rest of the world excluded.

  Leamer was a jovial, overweight man. He liked to refer to himself as the King of Queens. He kept saying, ‘No, I shouldn’t, I can’t do this, stop me,’ as he hovered over his tiramisu, hoisting forkfuls with one hand, holding his tie out of the whipped cream with the other. Freeman was cool and devilish: he cultivated the look with a mephistophelean goatee. I’d heard he had a sign in his office that said ‘Crime doesn’t pay – not like politics.’ He sat back against the wall and eyed me shrewdly over a glass of red wine.