Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Fat as he was, Buckaroo had hardly touched his dinner and ordered no dessert. He reclined on his groaning chair with his hands folded on his huge belly, his chins on his chest, all the heavy pouches of his face folding into that sleepy serpent look he got.

  ‘Marsha Zimmerman. Very sick,’ he said to no one. She was the city Tax Commission President.

  ‘Cancer. Dying. A shame,’ Leamer said, attacking his sponge cake again.

  Frowning, drawing a long breath into his big frame, Buckaroo let it out with, ‘Todd Winger: not up to the occasion.’

  ‘Who’s Winger?’ I asked.

  ‘Commission council,’ said Freeman quietly. His witty gaze never left me.

  Buckaroo again: ‘Need a council in there who can run the Commission. For – what?’

  ‘Year. Six months. How long can she last?’ said Leamer.

  ‘Then they can move him up to President,’ Umberman said.

  ‘Hizzoner can’t sack Marsha when she’s dying,’ Freeman observed. ‘It looks bad. “Sorry you’re dying, kid – you’re fired.”’

  Leamer laughed around a mouthful of cake.

  ‘He needs a new council,’ said Umberman, lifting one thick shoulder. ‘He can run the Commission till Marsha goes, then they make him Commission President.’

  ‘Todd they can fire,’ Leamer laughed. ‘Todd is screwed.’

  Freeman shrugged, narrowing his eyes. ‘I’ll give him something in General Services. He’ll be okay.’

  All this they said as if gossiping, as if in casual conversation among themselves. That was the technique, and I was so slow, it took several moments of silence before I realized what they were really offering. I looked up startled from my crème bûlée. I looked from one to the other of them.

  ‘Well, don’t look at me, guys,’ I said, smiling. ‘I’m an honest man.’

  That got a big laugh. I was very proud of it. They all ha-ha’d loudly and exchanged glances and leaned back in their chairs with their teeth flashing bright. Umberman, his body quivering, reached over and gave my arm a paternal squeeze.

  Freeman raised his wine glass to me as if in a toast. ‘That,’ he said softly, ‘is exactly what we want.’

  That was a Tuesday night, the Immortal Supper, March 13th. Two years exactly from the day, Leamer killed himself as his father had before him. After the scandals did finally break that winter and spring, he snatched a knife from the kitchen cutlery drawer and drove it into his chest, puncturing his heart. He was on the phone extension at the time, talking to his therapist. A year after that, Freeman was sentenced to twelve years in prison and led away in handcuffs. Umberman only got six months because his heart was failing, but a good chunk of his millions was eaten up in fines and legal fees. As I say, these were important men.

  At the office, Steve Weiss was mad with envy at my adventures, which added to their value. I could hardly come down the hall anymore without he would waylay and question me. He wanted to make sure there were no new developments, nothing he hadn’t advised me on.

  ‘It’s a set-up,’ he said excitedly when I told him about the Immortal Supper. ‘What, they’re gonna take a guy, a non-party regular, they’re gonna make him President – President? – of the Tax Commission, it’s not gonna be a set-up? It’s Manero, they’re scared shitless of her. Umberman must have some little meshigas going on at the Commission, he wants you to front the thing so the Feds’ll stay away.’

  I condescended to him, pretending to take him seriously, which made him all the madder.

  Myers’ reaction to what was happening was harder to judge. He must have known already that his little do-good firm was too small to hold me. Was he envious too or genuinely concerned? As he was my father figure – and as my father was my father – I couldn’t imagine he wasn’t jealous, as my father was. Yet, if anything, there seemed a weight of sadness to his recitations now. They took on, at least in light of the guilt and arrogance I brought to them, the nature of talmudic instruction.

  ‘The Tax Commission, the Tax Commission,’ he said after the Immortal S. He deflated in his chair with a tired moan. His sparkling eyes dimmed as he sank again into his Encyclopedic Reverie. ‘It’s a small Commission, the President, six part-time commissioners, I don’t know that much about it.’

  I waited impatiently, silently listing my superior qualities. But when he began again, I listened with all due care.

  ‘The story go-oes,’ he chanted cantorly, tilting his head to one side, ‘that the guys who assess the buil-dings … are all in the MacBride Democratic Club … and the hearing officers who hear the assessment appeals … and the lawyers who plead the cases … they’re also all in the MacBride Democratic Club. Personally, I don’t know this. But what they say is: the assessor guy goes out and bumps the client’s building up to fifty thousand dollars in taxes. Then the client is steered to the lawyer guy who goes to the hearing guy at the Commission. Then the hearing guy drops the assessment to twenty thousand. So the lawyer guy gets a third of the client’s savings for his fee which then he pumps back into the MacBride Democratic Club where it’s divided among Umberman and the other parties involved. But this,’ he repeated, swiveling until his moist, gentle smile was upon me, ‘this, personally, I do not know.’

  I, meanwhile, was full of hope and energy. I was happier at home, affectionate toward my wife, helpful with the baby and patient with him. I was sharp and quick and tough on the job. Things were good, things were happening in my life, opportunities were percolating. And every day, I looked for Agnes’s letter.

  She was, Agnes, in my mind at this point, a woman of pre-Raphaelite beauty. I was very unreasonable about it. Sable cascades of hair I gave her, voluptuous lips, pillowy, maternal breasts against which she’d hold my weary head with a delicate and slender hand. I pictured a big shade tree of some sort up above us. I pictured her eyes as wells of wisdom and placidity. We were going to have an affair, the two of us, when her letter came, when we got back together. I wouldn’t have said it outright, but I was virtually certain of it in my heart. Maybe a plane would crash into Marianne and the boy and maybe not, but it would all work out somehow with major, even salvific, ramifications. It had to: I was sure that this secret moral emptiness I felt was not my true destiny.

  Finally, on the last day of March, the letter came. Marianne had left it on the hall table with the junk and the bills. It was in a cream envelope and addressed in purple ink in a fine feminine hand which seemed then and there to confirm my heart in its aspirations. There was no return address on it, but who else could it be from? I gathered it up inconspicuously in a handful with the rest. Maybe Marianne hadn’t noticed it, I thought hopefully.

  Now, our apartment was small, though elegant in its way with high ceilings and ornate molding and wainscot – a pre-war West Side place off Columbus. There was a cramped living room, the furniture huddled together under Marianne’s potted plants, the odd rattle and teddy bear strewn on the dark rug. Our bedroom on one side was practically filled by our bed, and the nursery on the other was little more than a closet and packed tight with Charlie’s crib. There was no getting away from anybody, that’s my point. Charlie, with only a single good inhalation, could send his baby screams vibrating through every inch, even through the heavy doors. And he was screaming now. Shrieking from our bedroom, where Marianne had him. And when Marianne heard the front door close behind me, she was out like a shot, after me like a heat-seeking missile, just as I slipped the mail under my arm. ‘Can you take him for a while?’ she asked. With the kid over her shoulder wailing at full volume, and her hair in lank strands on her brow, and that look that you see only on new mothers and Save The Children ads.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘let me just go to the bathroom.’

  ‘There’s a letter for you,’ she shouted over the clamor as I hurried away.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘From a woman, it looks like.’

  ‘Oh boy. Hope she’s childless.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ she said,
but it got a smile out of her. She thought I was kidding.

  Moments later, I had Charlie’s screaming muted at least by the closed bathroom door. With my pants around my ankles for realism and my buttocks wedged in the chilly toilet ring, I sliced the envelope open with my thumb and drew out four sheets covered on both sides with the words of a woman I hadn’t seen since our childhood, twenty years before.

  Hi, Harry.

  Remember me? I hope I have the right address – your mother gave me this one. So you’re in New York now. God, the last time I thought about New York was after that terrible murder last summer in Queens. A man came into a house and said he was with the FBI, and then took out a gun and made everyone kneel in a line. Seven people altogether, three children, one of them a little four-year-old boy. The man just walked down the line behind them. He told each one in turn to hold still, and they did, and he shot them in the back of the head. Only one teenaged boy survived as a witness because he’d hidden under his bed in the next room. I remember thinking to myself: Why did they just kneel there and hold still like that? Why didn’t they try to run or fight – or anything? I had a lot of fantasies about it, about how I would have run or wrestled the gun away from the guy and rescued everyone. And then I realized: Shit, that’s just the way people think about the Holocaust, isn’t it? I would have fought, I would have done something. I guess it’s a way of denying that it could’ve happened to you. Even the way the story was reported kind of acted that process out. (Unfortunately, you can get the Times up here at the General Store so I started buying it again to follow the story.) The first day, it was big front page news, just the basic details. Then on the second day, it came out that the victims were Hispanic, illegal immigrants, so the story got smaller and was only in the second section – because so many white, middle-class editors and readers were saying: ‘Oh, they were Hispanic, illegal, they weren’t like me.’ Then it developed that it was all some sort of Colombian drug thing or other and the story just shrank and shrank smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper inside the paper. You could almost hear this fading whisper of law-abiding Times readers everywhere saying, ‘Not me, not me, they weren’t like me, it couldn’t have happened to me.’ So the story finally just disappeared, poof. I don’t even know if the police solved it, but then I stopped buying the paper after a while. I hate the fucking Times. Their shallow cultural sections make me crazy. I used to use them for kindling until Roland made me stop buying it – he said it made me too angry. But that story was interesting. It was just like when I was in Paris at the Rodin Museum about five years ago. This was my Grand Tour. I was still living in New York myself then, although out in Long Island City. Being an Ah-tist, you know. I even had a torn-up leather flight jacket I used to wear. My artist friends and I used to sit in this cafe between the warehouses under the 59th Street bridge talking Theory with a big T and making our eyes look sleepy and our underlips protrude. The trucks from the bread factory used to rumble by and we had to shout things like ‘hermeneutics!’ and ‘anti-aesthetic!’ over the noise. Of course, our work was more or less shit. Mine was all metal poles and guy wires, and I used to have to explain it by talking about reinventing positive space and neo-negativism and all that. Mostly, I think I spent my time gossiping about all those dirty bastards who got into the galleries with shit that was no better than my shit. Of course, I didn’t care about the fame or the money, you understand – it was just the fame and the money I cared about. Anyway, I don’t know if you remember my father at all, but he died about that time and left me some dough – a lot more than I’d expected – so I went to Europe: Italy and France. It was a pretty depressing trip. I was all by myself, first of all. I’d had this really ugly nympho phase about a year before and I’d only been off the tranquilizers for about six months, so I was being strictly celibate. Frankly, I’d have sewn myself up like a de Sade victim but I was afraid I’d have my period and explode. So there I was alone, and the idea was to hit the galleries and see the new Euro stuff and meet some in people, you know. But I figured I ought to at least go to the Vatican and the Uffizzi and so on first. So I wound up spending the entire trip standing in front of things like the Laocoon and Aphrodite of the Cnidians, the Michelangelos in Florence, the Nike in Paris – the Venus fucking de Milo, for God’s sake. I’d wear my flight jacket and sort of slouch in front of the statues with this post-modern ironical smile on my face, but all the while I felt this despair seeping into me. My work was shit. Everyone’s work after nineteen hundred was shit. The whole age was mediocre shit! Your typical artistic crisis. Very depressing. Anyway, by the time I got to the Rodin Museum, I was on cigarettes again and wondering where I could score some barbs. The museum is this beautiful eighteeth-century mansion on the Rue de Varenne, all grand stone but made featherweight by riddling it with huge French windows and fanlights. Inside, there are these big empty sunlit rooms with towering mirrors over sculpted mantelpieces and filigreed walls and glittering chandeliers and curving stairways with wrought iron railings – and Rodin’s sculpture everywhere. In every room, you’re surrounded by these tortuous bronze nudes with wracked planes and melting curves, and these really breathless exposures coming together in tidal couplings – and in my chaste condition too! My heart was in my shoes, my knickers were clinging. I wanted to fly home on the next plane and throw away every scrap of work I’d ever done. And outside, there was more: this gorgeous maze of hedges under this enormous aqua Paris sky with sculpture in the groves and on the pathways. And then the really great stuff was around in front: the Thinker – with the Dome of des Invalides in the background – and the Balzac and the Burghers among these rose bushes – and finally, the Gates of Hell. The Gates of Hell is just unbelievable. I’d seen it before in Philadelphia but it was nothing like seeing it here. Back in Phili, all I could think of was the art school stuff I’d been swallowing. You know: no base, the ambiguity of the sculptural space, the overturning of narrative and so on. The Gates are a very big deal when you’re in art school. One of my teachers called it the gateway to modernism, but I think that’s crap. People are always saying this or that is where modernity began. Ever since Constantine converted – that was the first use of the word in that sense: it was modernus to be Christian and old-fashioned to be pagan. So then you could just as easily say that Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem was what loosed the Jewish cult of Christ from its ancient territorial moorings and sent it into the wider world. See what I mean? Then you could say, well, the misguided notion that a revolt against Rome could succeed had its roots in Modin with Matthias at the altar. Which could take you back to Moses or Abraham. You might just as well say the gates of modernity were between Eve’s legs. Did you know that Rodin spent hours and hours just sketching pictures of pussy? No symbolism, no romance, just dozens and dozens of pure pussy sketches: spread, hairy, damp, blood-flecked, sperm-flecked, the genuine article. Which, anyway, brings us back from Eve’s legs through the Arch of Titus to the Gates of Hell. So I was standing in front of the Gates of Hell just exhausted and horny and miserable. And it’s this just unimaginably great work: these two enormous bronze doors with the three grim shades on top, imperious, mournful, gesturing down into the pit, and the Thinker is brooding over it all from the lintel and then all these tormented figures are being shoveled by demons off the toprail into Hell. The illusion of depth in the Gates is incredible and there are at least a hundred bodies in there tangled up in this kind of chaos of inner torture with the empty space around them swirling like hellfire. And standing next to me, looking at this, were this reedy British father and his two kids, a girl of five, say, and a boy of maybe six. And they were very prim and proper, all dressed up, the man in a suit and the boy in this cute blue uniform with this adorable cap and the girl in a pleated navy dress. And the boy, very English, said, ‘What is it, Deddy?’ And the father, very precisely, launched into an explanation of how, you know, well, children, this is Hell where bad people go when they die – although they don’t really, it’s just a legen
d; we don’t really know where people go when they die but this is one idea. So, of course, the kids are absolutely terrified. None of this reasonable explanation stuff for them. They’re staring right into this nightmare and they’re starting to feel pretty sure that this is exactly where people do go when they die. And their eyes are getting bigger and bigger. And the father, who knows he’s blown it, is gnawing the perspiration off his stiff upper lip. And finally the boy asks hopefully: ‘Do … children have to go there?’ And the father wants to be honest so he says, well, yes, of course, they would, if they were bad, if it were real, which it isn’t – you see? But this just gets him in deeper. The kids’ eyes get even bigger, they’re even more scared. And after a moment, the little girl figures, well, my brother’s screwed but maybe I can save myself. And she blurts out: ‘Ladies too?’ And the father coughs and clears his throat and says, well, yes, there would be, uh, ladies too, yes. Well, the kids move a little closer to each other, still staring. And they lick their lips and swallow hard. And then, all at once, the boy has an inspiration. He studies the tortured figures for another second, and he brightens with hope. And he looks up at his father and he asks: ‘But only the French, right?’

  I remember I laughed out loud. I thought the father should’ve grabbed the kid by the lapels and screamed in his face, ‘It’s you, pal! It’s all you! It’s not the fucking French! It’s not the fucking Jews! You’re going to Hell! Bye!’ That would’ve put hair on his chest. Back in my hotel, I sat up all night writing this insane diatribe which I called ‘Yes, You!’ all about how the post-modern search for positive artistic values was doomed to collapse as modernism had into its own inherent negativity because of its basic attempt to deny – what Rodin and Michelangelo and Praxiteles knew – that even otherness is experienced solely through the repetitive doomed realism of the decaying flesh. More theoretical bullshit. Thank Heavens I couldn’t get it published. But while I was writing it: that’s when I started to think about wood and the relationship between wood and flesh and so on, the way they both live and decay and betray imposed patterns. So I guess you could say that that – that moment at the Gates of Hell – was when I first started on the work I’m doing now. Or maybe it was when Titus sacked Jerusalem, I forget.