Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil,’ I said. ‘You’re Lena, aren’t you?’

  Caught out, her reaction was less than subtle. She looked like the heroine in some B-movie thriller. Backed to the wall by the claws of an oncoming shadow: panicky, trapped.

  I pulled up the other Windsor – the one she hadn ‘t put her dripping things on. I drew it nearer the sofa and sat down on the edge of it, leaning toward her over the cobbler’s bench, elbows on my knees. I did this because my legs were getting tired from standing, but perhaps it was suggestive to her of greater kindness, more earnest intimacy. At any rate, she settled down. Her face went still, blank. She waited.

  ‘Evelyn,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s who you look like really. You look like Evelyn.’

  She pressed her lips together, casting her eyes down in sensitive distress. Yes, this was better. This was the kind of melodrama she’d had in mind all along.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘Is she still alive?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘She’s pretty much all right right now, I guess,’ she said. ‘But she’s been sick a lot lately. She had a blood clot in her leg or something. And she has arthritis, which bothers her because she likes to work in her garden. She has a house in San Mateo. My father got it for her. It has this, like, really nice border of flowers around it – these impatiens – and then a trellis of roses on one wall. They were really, really nice when she could still keep them up. Sometimes I go up and help her with it, with the gardening. She likes to see me. And I like her too but, you know, I don’t get to go up there too much. Uh – what else can I tell you?’ She shrugged. ‘She’s, like, getting old, you know. She must be, like, almost seventy or something.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. She’s not that old.’

  She shrugged again. ‘Sixty-five.’

  ‘And so she lives all alone there?’ I asked her.

  ‘Well, my Dad has a woman look in on her every day. He’s offered to bring her down to Los Angeles, but she says she doesn’t want to be a bother. I don’t think she gets along with my Mom very well.’

  I nodded. I was moved. Moved simply by having news of her. And by her old age. And by the girl’s father – Lena’s father – and his kindness. He was always like that. A good straight guy, didn’t question the verities, did what had to be done. I sometimes thought – and it was a thought I could really torture myself with late at night, a thought that could close my throat with tears on a moment’s notice – I sometimes thought that he was the man I had wanted to be when I was nine years old. The kind of steady-shooting hero-type I pretended to be back then. Which, with my Marianne theory, would pretty much bring the Agnes-Harry circle to its miserable close: she had married what she thought I was and I had married what I thought I loved in her.

  ‘I went and saw her just before I left,’ the girl offered now. ‘I told her I was coming here. She’s the only one who knows. She said to say hello.’

  ‘Did she?’ The feeling welled in me and that was all I could trust myself to say.

  ‘Yeah.’ She hesitated. ‘We wrote down some questions. I mean, I wrote them down, but I talked them over with her: the things we thought you could help with. Some of them – the questions – were hers.’ She made a diffident gesture at the wet clothes on my other chair. ‘They’re in my vest.’

  With an expression of long suffering, I indicated my permission. She lifted off the sofa and reached across me for the soggy down vest. She hung there across me, futzing with the vest’s inner zipper, so that her armpit was in front of my nose and I could smell her sweet deodorant and the rain in her hair and steal a look down over the curve of her backside as she lifted her leg up to make the stretch. I toyed briefly with the idea of reaching inside my chest and squeezing my heart to cinders to stop its agony of longing, but I figured another thirty years or so and I’d be dead anyway. And then, anyway, she sat down again.

  She sat down again, and she had a notebook in her hands. One of those small, thin ones reporters use. It must have been part of her original disguise. She flipped it open quite professionally too; maybe she’d spent nights practising in her garage. Goofily – attractively – she made nervous circles in the air with one white, glossy-nailed hand – she went into a ditzy preamble that went like this: ‘So these are … It got a little wet in the rain. These are just, like, some things I just sort of, you know, wrote down.’ I chewed my cud and watched her, damned if I’d help her along. ‘So, like, one thing I wanted to know was, like: Were you, like, in love with her?’

  I laughed. ‘Is that what you wrote? Were you comma like comma in love with her?’

  She deflated; made a face: I was being a paternalistic asshole.

  ‘Here. Here,’ I said. I extended my hand. ‘Don’t sit there reading them to me. Let me see.’

  She had another face for this: reluctant, but what the hell. She handed the notebook over. It was damp, thickened with the rain. The pages were gray at the edges. Some of the writing near the edges was blurred. But it was all legible. She’d made her list of questions neatly in a round, schoolgirl script. Each one numbered, with a few lines under it left blank – space for the answer, I guess. This was the first page:

  1. Were you in love with her?

  2. Did you recognize her genius?

  3. Do you know how she died (accident? suicide?)?

  4. Do you have any of her letters?

  It went on. Four or five more pages, four or five questions each. I riffled through them. When did you first see V. of D. Elms? was one I picked out.

  I leaned back in my chair, back against the fanned spindles supporting the headboard till the whole apparatus creaked and crackled. 1 fixed a sardonic smile on my kisser and opposed it to her bobbing, eager, teenaged anticipation. All the same, I knew I was weakening. The habit of silence was wearing thin. Somehow, I had to re-immerse myself in the ethic of it. I had to think of Perseus, of those poor waifs playing Perseus and Andromeda in the vacant lot, all that stuff, its reality, the privacy that kept it real. Confession, I thought: Confession is the enemy. Confession is the secret weapon of a society crazed with envy and suspicion of our private lives, of an empty, jealous society trying to root out individual reality before it strikes. Confess, says the priest; confession is good for your soul. So you confess, and he prays as they burn you at the stake to cleanse you of your sins. Confess, says Officer Bill, get it off your chest, son. So you confess, and he shakes his head sadly when they hang you from the highest tree. Confess, says Reporter Shitferbranes, the people have a right to hear your side of the story. So you confess, and the public and the press and the professors and the true believers – they swarm over you like red ants with their judgements and theories and interpretations and opinions until your moral compass and the general imbecility of the age become inextricably intertwined.

  I gritted my teeth triumphantly. I was on a roll now. I had some big thoughts and stupid generalizations on my side too.

  And now she comes to me, I continued, working myself up. This Lena-ghost, of all people, this white-washed American specter of the thoroughly Jewish dead, this sungrown pipsqueak who thinks history is a factory churning out guiding lights for her improvement, she comes here and she says: Confess – because this country is all highways and no signposts and I’m lost as hell; confess – for me – because I’m so cute, and Daddy wants me to go to college and gee I don’t know what to do and maybe hearing about how Agnes died in agony and terror would help me figure out what I want to major in; or confess – yes, even better – confess for yourself: free yourself from your own history and join the national pastime of regeneration, the great American nulling of the tragic sense. Liz Kicks Drugs! Jill Kicks Cancer! Rock Kicks Bucket! I mean, for God’s sake, man, tell your story, triumph over your suffering, inspire us, teach us that life can be mastered – Christ, what do you want to be, obscure? The magazine cover is there for the taking. Inside This Issue: Scandal Attorney Harry Bernard Learns to Live Again, and Gets Multi-Mil Contract
to Write The Agnes Story. Plus, Learn How to Make the Best Holiday Truffles Ever! Just open your mouth, my son. Surrender your memories to our understanding, and we’ll make you a star. Confess.

  I breathed deeply, squaring my shoulders. Nothing like some bitter railing to restore your resistance, refresh your failing strength. Thus fortified, I resolved once again to defy her. To continue to defy them all – I alone. I alone am survived to not tell thee. I insist on Agnes’s life to myself, not because I’m worthy of it but because I was there. I insist on her real life, unredeeming; on the details unstained by theory; on the uninterpretable sensations; on the utter incomprehensibility of her blind, head-clutching stagger from the vagina to the grave.

  And so I sat there, leaning back in my chair, with Lena leaning in waiting to be saved, with the storm at the window setting the scene, and the snickering fire lighting the stage. I sat with her water-rippled notebook flipped open in my hand, and the questions in her round schoolgirl script staring up at me. Were you in love with her? Did you recognize her genius? Do you know how she died (accident? suicide?)? Do you have any of her letters?

  And I thought: Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

  Then I slapped the girl’s notebook down on the cobbler’s bench between us. ‘It’s no good,’ I told her. ‘I want you to go.’

  That seemed to spark some actual emotion in her finally. Frustration, more than likely. How deep do you go in your teens? She pulled back on the sofa, pulled straight, out of the firelight, with a noise of exasperation. The wind rose and the hail spattered on the windows. Her hands went up and down, up and down, and her bottom seemed to hop and bounce on the cushion.

  ‘How can you say that? How can you say that if you know who I am? How can you refuse to tell me anything?’

  I shrugged. ‘I just don’t want to, kid.’

  Suddenly, she bounded off the sofa, striding away from me across the room. I expected that, though: the next scene. I had the rhythm of her dramatics pretty well down now.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ she said, and there were tears in her voice stretching it to a thin whine. She went pacing back and forth before me in the energy of her tantrum, her arms still going, her hands palm-upward, flopping around as if she were trying to shake some water off. ‘You can’t just sit there, you can’t just go, like, “Oh. You must be Lena,” and then go, like, “Oh, sorry, you’ve got to go now.” You just can’t, like, do that.’

  ‘I guess someone forgot to fax me the new rules,’ I answered with what I hoped was infuriating calm. ‘I thought I could go, like, any damn way I chose. That’s why I love America, darling. If you can pay for your own groceries and cut a deal with the prosecutors and ignore the women and the children and the press, you can still say just about anything you want. I’m saying nothing, Lena. I really do want you to go.’

  Well, I thought that was a pretty good speech right off the top of my head like that. She obviously thought so too because she started crying then, when I thought she might have stretched the tantrum out a little more.

  She did the crying well, though. She didn’t push it too far; underplayed it rather. Swiping her eyes angrily before the tears even fell, swiveling with real petulance away from me.

  ‘There’s a box of Kleenex on the windowsill behind you,’ I said cooly. But I must admit: I wished she’d stop. She had that instinct for my weak spots, this girl, she made her mark. With these memories of mine alive and electric and with the traitorous clamoring for confession loud, she had Marianne’s tears to reverberate off of, a real woman’s tears of betrayal and pity: you can’t just pocket those, they made embers of the nerve ends yet. Annoyed, I sat stonily and watched the girl. The jireglow was lambent in the shadows around her as she trumpeted her nose into a tissue. The space between us, firelit – the rumpled sofa, the smeared notebook on the cobbler’s bench beside her coffee mug – seemed very empty and depressing with her gone. I suspected it was going to be rough again for a while, when I finally kicked her out of here. Lonely until I hardened over again. That was the whole trouble, of course. That was my incentive to keep this argument going between us as long as I could. Silence is no business for the weak, I tell you.

  ‘I need her, Harry,’ she said now – and didn’t snuffle much; was annoyed at herself, in fact, and erect and struggling for dignity. Or at least she played it that way.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Mr Bernard,’ I said.

  That set her off again. I knew the sort of liberal parenting crap she was used to. ‘Mr Bernard. Mr Bernard. It’s not fair!’ She daubed at her eyes with the crumpled Kleenex. ‘I’m not some historian or reporter or something. I don’t want some, like … idea of her. Or theory or whatever it is you’re afraid of. I want …’ She raised her hands, clutching the tissue. She searched the rafters for her thought. ‘You know? To touch the things she touched, to read the things she wrote. I want to talk to you – or listen to you – because you knew her. Because … like, you were there, where she was. When she left – when she died, I mean.’ She leveled her glistening eyes and begged. ‘And I’m here, see. I’m still here, and I need to know why she did that. I just need to hear. I’m not going to judge you or anything. I promise!’

  Well, even I had to smile. Lowering my chin to my chest, clasping my hands between my knees where I sat. It really was cute. Just the sort of promise a kid would make, like I’ll walk the dog or feed the goldfish. To not judge me. To go into the thing, open and quiet like that; to hear my story. To let the juice of it into her marrow, no babbling, no theories, no questions asked. I mean, hadn’t she read the newspapers? Didn’t she keep up with politics? The Tao of No-opinion – that Negative Capability – it was like mummification or piety or something: a lost art. Some people didn’t even believe it had ever existed. Christ, with any luck, I would’ve been one of them. But again, she had that girlish talent for my underbelly. I’d worked with Myers, after all, the mellow Hebe; Christ, I’d married Marianne, the ditz: I knew that transcendental quietude was still around, could still be done, even now. It was just – like silence – no business for weaklings.

  I heaved a sigh, genuinely tired of this. ‘Look, kiddo,’ I said, almost kindly, ‘your mother made two, three dozen works of art, genius some of them, lots of them. And I led your father to them. I did my bit for mankind. Go to the museum and touch those, and glom those with your no-judgements.’’

  She stepped forward urgently. ‘I have! I do!’

  ‘Well, then you’ve got the best of her.’

  ‘I don’t want the best of her!’ Another step brought her over me, back into the range of the fire, between the white bricks of the hearth and the sofa’s edge. My sensation when it happened was of a desperate warm relief: I mean, I was glad the room was full of her again. Dangerous stuff that. I really had to close this up. She looked down at me. ‘I mean, you know, it isn’t like I’m trying to, I don’t know, get a grant or something or write an article or a book about her or something. I mean, like, I see your point about that. Then you could go, like, “Okay, you have the best of her, don’t be an idiot, buzz off.” Okay?’ Her hands fell, she went limp and plaintive. ‘But I’m different. I have a right to all of her. It’s part of who I am.’

  ‘Oy,’ I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. The kid was killing me. It really would be tough to take when I finally gave her the boot. But then again, the suspense was trying too. And this weariness was a downright peril. And I had to toss her out sometime anyway if I was to keep on. Raising my head, still forced to smile, clasping my hands again in a fatherly way between my knees, I went, like, ‘Lena. You’re a nice girl, and I wish you well. But I really do want you to go. I’ll drive you to your car, if you have one …’

  ‘Forget it!’ she said angrily.

  ‘I’m sorry about the storm. I didn’t ask you to come.’

  This to her as she streaked past. She was already marching to the other chair. Snatching her sopping vest from it, pulling it back on, shrugging it into place over the stained patches on her
workshirt. The earmuffs she snapped on too in her huff. And while I sat, still looking mildly upon the space where she had been, she tromped away behind me to the door.

  I took a breath and braced myself there on my Windsor. This was not, I knew, the end of Lena yet, not quite. Once she had her hand on the knob, the urge to dart a savage glance over her shoulder at me, the pressure to pose like that and make a final, dramatic, even devastating speech before her triumphant exit was sure to be overwhelming. I dreaded it, but at least I knew it was coming. It was, I hoped, my one big advantage over her in the way of self-defense: She’d never heard of the Parthians, but I had been to the movies.

  I had every gesture she was going to make down pat.

  I stood above the White River on a ledge of rock. Below me was a swimming hole, empty in the early morning. To my right was a high metal bridge; it led across the water to a dirt road that snaked up into the wooded hills. Beyond the bridge was a campground, yellow tents on the river bank, the smoke of breakfast fires rising. To my left, upstream, the river wound around a bend and out of sight. There would have been heavy rapids up there a month or two before. Even now, it was white water, sluicing into view around jutting gray boulders, slapping into the sides of the ledge upon which I stood before smoothing out over the deep water below me. As I looked in that direction, there came a high, delighted, feminine cry. A girl rounded the bend of the river, riding a yellow inner tube over the swift waves.

  She had a tangled blonde mane. She was suntanned and sleek. She wore a small bikini that left the sweet upper globes of her breasts bare. She dangled her hands in the water and threw back her head as she rode and screamed and laughed. She was in her teens – in her twenties maybe – and how she made me ache, my soul in my groin. I watched her sail under me, heard her cry out wonderfully to her boyfriend, who now came around the bend after her in a tube of his own. I could have died of the longing. Oh, oh, oh, I thought. Oh, youth irretrievable. Oh schmuck, schmuck, schmuck.