Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  As you can tell from reading this, I’m alone too much up here. This winter especially. I had literally no one to talk to: that’s why I run on and on. All I really meant this letter to say was: Hi, Harry. How are you? Hope your life’s going okay, and so on. My life, by the way, is absolute shit …

  Well, thank God, she didn’t send her return address, I thought. At least I don’t have to write back. Oh, well, yes, and I was disappointed too. She wasn’t exactly the Eternal Feminine, was she, come to lead me on to salvation. More, I’d say, like a foul-mouthed drug-crazed nympho artist manque with enough problems to drag a man under the earth. I did wonder if she looked pretty, though, in that torn leather flight jacket of hers.

  The baby had settled into steady, rhythmic shrieking in the battle zone beyond the bathroom door. I could hear Marianne’s increasingly desperate and exasperated comfort murmurs. On top of that, my legs were beginning to fall asleep from the pressure of the toilet seat against my thighs. But scanning the rest of the letter I had spotted some passages that fired my interest – that is, they concerned me. Or they concerned my mother really. But in any case, along with the deadness creeping up my legs, I could feel that other deadness – that emotional deadness which I now knew was my reaction to a mental blow – seeping down from my brain to meet it. At the same time, that old devil Inner Man was saying something to the effect of: well, since you’re sitting here anyway, perhaps a nice, satisfying bowel movement would relieve some of the intestinal pressure before dinner, no? That’s what he was like.

  So, to make a long story short, I bore down and read on:

  … although I don’t know why I should burden you with it. I don’t know why I’m writing to you at all actually, it’s just you’ve been in my thoughts a lot lately. But it must be important to me, because it sure as hell wasn’t easy calling your mother to get your address. The last time I saw your mother was when she came to my house right after you went to camp that summer. Christ, you might not even know about that. It’s true, though: She did. I never, never saw such a look of terror in my mother’s eyes as when my father opened the door and found short, fat, steaming mad Mrs Bernard standing on the front step. Mom sent me upstairs to my room right away, and I just sat on the bed up there, staring at my David McCallum poster. And then the screaming started downstairs. Your mother did the screaming. My mother just let out these wild, tearful cries: ‘Stop! Please!’ And my father didn’t say anything. It was an awful-sounding brawl. I finally got down on the floor and crawled under the bed (just like the boy who survived the murder, come to think of it). I lay there, softly singing ‘Puff, The Magic Dragon’, and holding my fingers in my ears. Even after I heard the door slam, I just lay there. I thought my mother would come up to fetch me or something. Put me to bed and sit on the edge of the bed and explain everything, you know. But she didn’t come for the longest time, not until half an hour after my bedtime. And then she just tucked me in with this distracted air and floated off downstairs again. I could see she’d been crying. What on earth did your parents tell you when you got back? Did you wonder where I’d gone to so suddenly like that? Scarsdale, just in case it still matters to you. I really did want to write to you at the time, but you know how it is when you’re a kid: you don’t. And it was all so fast and traumatic. A therapist once told me that that incident was the key to my obsession with roots and the past, and my need for bourgeois security, and my dependence on men, and my recurring urinary infections, and a verruca I had to have removed from the big toe on my right foot. Then she sent me a bill for fifteen hundred dollars. But what I can’t figure out to his very day is how my father managed to move us out of town in something less than ten days. For a while, I remember, we had to live in an apartment, but still it was incredible: ten days after your mother’s visit, we were gone. I remember the look on his face – even though I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, I watched him in the days after your mother came, and his cheeks were all sallow and sunken, his forehead all moist and sickly. His eyes were the size of tennis balls; they were practically bugging out with fear. It was like he was running away from the Nazis, which I guess was the general idea as far as he was concerned. And it took months after we’d moved for that look to go away. Then it became something else, something worse, harder to define. Before we moved, he used to talk to my mother with this sort of formal, wistful sweetness, the way an old man talks to a pretty young girl before he pats her on the head and sends her off to play with her friends. But after that, he was just scrupulously polite to her and I guess what you would call faintly sardonic. He would look at her with this almost imperceptible smirk at the corner of his mouth, this terrible knowing look. I think for my father humanity was divided between the Pitiful and the Unforgiveable. I was always the former to him: he was always gentle with me – and I adored him anyway, which I think he needed from people. But after we moved, my mother, she was in the latter camp definitely. Not that he ever said anything, not that I heard. There was never any shouting or growling or even sniping remarks that I heard. It was just that look, that awful knowing. And it was unshakeable, unchangeable. My mother did everything she could. I mean, before we moved, she’d had a life. She was always a very dedicated housewife – she knew my father was old world and demanded that of her – but she also had some kind of woman’s club she belonged to and she went into the city to see shows and did volunteer work at this special teaching program and so on. But after we moved: nothing. Just the house. Cleaning the house. Fanatically. She cleaned and cleaned that place until it was practically transparent. Scrubbed the walls, the floors, down on her knees with a sponge on the floors half the time. And she made these elaborate meals and set them out on these beautiful table settings with linen edged with tatting she’d made herself. She also knitted bedspreads, made needlework pillows, lace antimacassars, and did her own upholstery. I have nothing against any of that, mind you, but there was a sort of fever to it. She worked at it so desperately. It ate lines into her face. It made her old. And the house – it was like living in some Eastern European cottage somewhere, that’s what she turned it into. And my father never changed anyway. He just kept looking at her: she was one of the Unforgiveable Ones; ‘Now I know,’ – that was the look. When my mother finally took me and moved out, he still hadn’t said anything, but he might just as well have stood in the doorway pointing us sternly into the Beyond like in one of those Victorian illustrations: ‘A Daughter’s Disgrace.’ My therapist – a different therapist – once told me that I’d never rebelled when I was a teenager because I thought my parents had already suffered too much. That’s why I was such a mouse when I finally went off to art school, and a virgin besides. Maybe that’s true (it better be, it fucking cost enough!). But after we moved, things were actually better, I thought. We moved to Mahopac up in Putnam, a nice little exurban-type town with a big lake and a little mall to hang out in. And my mother did some temp work and finally got a job in a real estate office and my father always sent us money, and always let me visit him when I wanted to. It wasn’t all that terrible really. Still, all my therapists, they always light up like lightbulbs when I tell them about you and this whole story. Roland, also: he’s always saying it’s the cause of all my obsessions and craziness. The beginning of the modern Agnes. You’re my Gates of Hell, Harry.

  Roland is my husband, by the way. Or he was. I guess he still is technically, but he left me this winter, just after New Year’s. It was exactly right of him too: I’d gotten myself on the tranks again and it was getting dangerous for the baby. But anyway, just so you know: I’m Agnes Mallory now.

  Five months later, I was in my office at the Tax Commission when my old pal Buckaroo Umberman waddled in.

  ‘Hey!’ I said, looking up from my files. ‘The Buckster!’

  He made a comical gesture: stopped short just within the doorway with both of his arms upraised. Indicating my office, or, that is, the ailing president’s: the vast oaken presidential desk, the homey sofa, t
he broad band of glass behind me which showed both the famous skyline to the north and the western view across the river into Jersey. His effect was pseudo-biblical: Moses looking over Jordan; ‘There is the land.’ Except Buckaroo was so fat and had features like a wax eagle that had melted, and was huffing after his walk from the elevator, his skin filmy with excretions.

  ‘Life,’ he said gruffly, ‘has meaning!’ I grinned. He let his hands collapse to his belly with a slap and held them there as if to contain himself. Wheezing and snuffling with the effort, he crossed the tan carpet to the western window, presenting me with his visionary profile as he gazed out dramatically. ‘You have no money, no success, no recognition – what? Life is fraught, am I right? Death looms large, philosophical questions make us ponder. Morality – it’s impossible, this one against that one, who can figure it out? Suddenly: poof! A man is somebody. He has some money, some respect. Suddenly – he understands all.’ He glanced over at me where I swiveled and chuckled in my high leather throne. He nodded with mock solemnity. ‘There is wisdom throughout the land, correct? Life works? God exists – or not, who cares? My point is: the facts can be dealt with. We take our old friends out to dinner. We explain to them in their confusion. “It’s just a matter of taking life by the cohones,” we say. “It’s just a matter of hard work and decision-making and inner strength.” You, Harry Bernard, are a happy man.’

  ‘Ecstatic, Buck. I got thirty-two letters demanding a review of phase-in mechanisms and no council to pass them to. I’m thrilled.’

  He hoisted his shoulders. ‘Give ’em to clerical. The important thing is: you talk to the Mayor, he puts his hand on your shoulder, you meet with commissioners, men kiss your ass, girls want to suck your dick. Creation wasn’t such a bad idea after all.’

  ‘Let’s not get carried away. It’s a small Commission. Practically a backwater.’

  ‘Oh, this, that. You’re thirty years old.’ He reached down and patted my cheek with a damp palm. ‘It’s a big suck of the tit.’

  He elephant-walked over to the sofa and I watched his vast stern, smiling, shaking my head. He was still taunting me, you see, for my past heroics and my earnestness even now. But he was communicating too, and I understood the truth of what he said. Even Marianne – lifter-of-the-veils-of-Maya by avocation – had recently snuggled naked against me in our bed, her pupils dilated, her nipples hard, her loins in action, and whispered with appealing hoarseness and unnerving honesty: ‘It turns me on, you know, that you have power.’ This is a very grand thing to hear from your wife, despite the pressures. It was almost enough to make the point. But the Times had also picked me out in an editorial as an ‘adornment to the administration.’ They’d recommended that the Mayor move me ‘closer to the centers of power with all deliberate speed.’ Anyone can imagine my daydreams at this point and my sense of possibility as well; my overall sense of well-being.

  But these other revelations – these insights into the mutability of the moral universe, its relativity as per the discourse of the Buckaroo – these were secrets, secrets of success. They were not for the frustrated or for the judgemental. They were not for the wife either. In fact, with remnants of my old fastidiousness, I had hardly acknowledged them to myself. So it was a relief to hear it from the Buck on these occasional visits of his, all as easy and acceptable as that. It did endear him to me. When he sank down onto my sofa – looking something like a cement truck with a couple of flats – I confess I felt a genuine warmth of affection for him.

  ‘So?’ he said, stretching his arms along the sofa back, circling one hand. ‘You’re still an honest man?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m still an honest man.’

  Both his thick forearms lifted and fell. ‘So the Buckaroo’s not so bad, after all,’ he said.

  Now Myers, on the other hand, told me a story. Took me to lunch for it – a rare enough event to carry some weight in itself. We went to a Chinese place he favored. It was hidden away in a Pearl Street basement and the government types avoided it, so this too was portentous.

  Fired up as I was, though, I had to wait for his purposes to be made manifest. Toying with my plastic chopsticks, smiling shrewdly as best I could. There was no use expecting Myers to talk while he was eating: Suprisingly, the man was one of the most disgusting and voracious eaters I’ve ever seen. It was the outlet in his gentle Jewish soul for all the demonic powers. He shoveled it in. Tie tucked in his shirt front, napkin over that and tucked into his collar. He worked the sticks like a crank and made sucking noises like a straw at the bottom of a milkshake while noodles and shrimp tails and broccoli spears shot and slithered over his face into the hole. Like a film of a man vomiting shown in reverse. Then, his plate shiny and clean, he sat back as from a job well done and sipped from his water glass – his kidneys couldn’t deal with Chinese tea. And he said mildly: ‘Hortense Manero. You know Hortense Manero?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Federal prosecutor. Sure.’ I picked at my chicken bits with the chopsticks; I always ate very delicately around him, hoping he’d catch on.

  ‘Funny story,’ said Myers. ‘Remember – oh, about a year ago – the Barco killings in Queens? Guy came in said he was an FBI agent …’

  ‘Made the people kneel down …’ I said softly.

  He yanked his napkin free and daubed his chin with it. ‘Drug killing, right, terrible, seven people shot dead.’

  I whispered: ‘Yes.’

  Well, this sort of thing happens, of course. You hear a word for the first time and the next day it turns up in a crossword puzzle and so on. Synchronicity; no call for panic. It had been months since Agnes’s letter, and it was a fairly spectacular case, still unsolved, anyone might have mentioned it. But for all that, I met this introduction of Myers’ with your basic thrill of superstitious terror. I was given to superstition about the letter anyway because its effects on me were both unexamined and profound. My father’s relationship with Evelyn Sole – I’d fretted plenty over that now and then through the decades. But my suspicions about my mother’s actions lo those twenty years ago, these were unacknowledged, so their confirmation in the letter – and the jolt of that confirmation – were also subterranean events. When Myers mentioned the killings – shot that bridge from the silent imagination to our rollicking, urgent and political world – it was as if I’d dreamed about a specter who handed me a golden key, and then woke to find the key clutched in my hand. I shuddered. I got goose flesh on my arms.

  ‘The FBI part, though, was apparently on the bothersome side,’ Myers said. ‘To the investigators. They thought it might have accounted for why the Barcos let the killer in. Because they were already afraid, the Barcos, they were taking precautions. So, you know, the investigators were worried the killers might have had actual credentials of some kind. It might also,’ he went on in a speculative tone, ‘have accounted for why they were so obedient. You know, the killer ordered them to kneel down …’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’

  ‘Anyway, Joey Turpentine. He’s this guy, this informant. Probably a killer, should be in prison two, three times already, consecutive life terms. Bu-ut – the FBI – he tells the FBI he can get them this, get them that, go undercover: they let him out and he works for them. The question is: who else does he work for? Because recently, he’s been making some important connections with the Colombians. In all events, Miss Prosecutor Manero, she should live and be well, invites him in for a chat because she’s working with him on some fakakta drug corruption thing. “Joey, what can you tell me about the Barco killings?” she says. Joey smiles – this is what I heard – he gets out of his chair. He walks to her desk and there are newspapers all over it: Times, Newsday, Post, News. He picks the newspapers up one after another. Drops them down. He says, “You see the Barco killings? Does anyone care about the Barco killings? You solve the Barco killings, you get, what? One headline, two headlines.” He opens the papers. He starts pointing to stories, like, here, here and here. “Leamer,” he says to her. “Freema
n,” he says. “Umberman. The Mayor. You’re anti-corruption, Hortense,” he says. “Stick with corruption. Me – I can get you Buckeroo Umberman. Umberman – he can get you everybody else.” And Hortense, God love her, Hortense says,’ – and here he suppressed a laugh to signal the punchline – ‘“All right. That makes sense. So get me Umberman.’” Myers sipped his water. He shook his head. ‘That makes sense,’ he repeated, relishing the humor of it.

  After I’d managed to wrestle my eyeballs back into their sockets, I found myself babbling, ‘Well, I don’t know what Umberman’s up to. The assessors are over at the Board of Assessment. The hearing officers were all in place before I got there. I hear some cases, I see some files, but half the time I’m in meetings. I’m swamped under piddling review requests. I mean, until the president dies, I don’t even have any real power.’

  ‘A funny story,’ said Myers, ignoring me. He tilted his head sleepily to one side. Closed his eyes, lifted his shoulders, smiled his moist, rabbinical smile. ‘I thought you’d enjoy it.’

  It was like a bout of hypochondria for the next week or so, that sort of waffling panic. Is it cancer or just a mole? Was I in jeopardy from the Feds or was I not? Did I know anything? Well, what? That some assessments were ridiculously low? That some were unnecessarily high and then knocked down instantly while the lawyers from the MacBride Club took their fees? What was an assessment but a matter of informed opinion anyway? And besides, I might not have even noticed these things. I was scrupulously honest myself, and I had lots of plans for reforms once I actually took the reins. I was really in the clear – or was I? Cold sweats in dead of night were followed by unearned, illogical waves of relief. Yet relief won out in the end. The panic was just worn away by inaction, which I suppose is how hypochondriacs finally die.