Agnes Among the Gargoyles

by Patrick Flynn

  "I like him," says Agnes.

  "You go for the rococo—all those gargoyles and things," says Tommy. "Do you want to go to the Morris-Jumel house?"

  "Could we?" says Agnes.

  "You're tough," says Tommy, looking at his watch. "Now's the best time. Everyone's gone home."

  Dressed but still dripping from his shower, Ivan totters into the living room. He has his knapsack with him. Agnes gives him toast and coffee. He sets himself up in one of the living room chairs.

  "I'm going to die," whispers Sarah. "Die or puke."

  "What's the problem?" says Ivan. "Can't a guy have his coffee and the Times in peace?"

  From his knapsack he takes out the latest issue of The Monster Times.

  "I see they've signed Mary Stuart Masterson for the remake of The Creature Walks Among Us," he says, half to himself. "So there's some good news, at least."

  Sarah speaks with disdain. "He and a bunch of other pimply-faced dweebs used to sit in his dorm room and talk about hobbits for days on end."

  "And barely scratch the surface," says Ivan. "Those were good times."

  Tommy tells Agnes that they'd better be going.

  Sarah's eyes get wide. "You're leaving me here? With him?"

  "Don't be melodramatic," says Agnes.

  "Okay," says Sarah, taking one of Agnes's carbon steel knives out of a kitchen drawer. "If he tries anything we'll reenact the Friday The 13th series."

  "Now she's speaking my language," says Ivan without looking up from his paper. "It's so condescending, but I love it."

  Agnes says to Ivan, "Don't bother Sarah, okay?"

  "I'm already bothering her," he points out. "My sitting here bothers her. The sound of my cells replicating bothers her."

  "Don't actively bother her."

  "For you, Agnes, angel of mercy, I won't."

  "Thanks. And this afternoon I'll hand you over to your uncle."

  "I am resigned to my fate," he says.

  Wearing her granny nightgown and carrying the long chef's knife, Sarah goes to her bedroom.

  "Like fucking Lady Macbeth," says Ivan. "And she says I'm weird."

  * * *

  There is a tablet mounted on the wall of the 157th Street subway station. TO WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS, it reads, and an arrow points toward the Morris-Jumel House, where Washington did stay during the Revolutionary War and which later was the home of Aaron Burr. Whenever she sees the sign, Agnes thinks of a time when socialites danced in Harlem, and a tourist might actually find his way up to the Jumel House.

  Tommy leads Agnes onto the grounds. They duck under the CRIME SCENE— DO NOT CROSS signs, which wave in the chill air like nautical flags. The house is white, Georgian Colonial, simple and spare. There are a few reporters bivouacked in front. They sit on the cannons and smoke cigarettes as though this were a Founder's Day picnic.

  Inside, Tommy and Agnes breathe the distinctive smell of an old wooden house. The rooms are blocked off with velvet rope. Agnes catches glimpses of harpsichords and spinning wheels. In the main hallway they are hit by several separate drafts. The insulation hasn't been upgraded since Aaron Burr's time. It is hard to believe that this was ever a home to the wealthy. It seems rustic and uncomfortable.

  "Downstairs," says Tommy.

  They descend a set of dank steps to a dank basement, which serves as a museum. There are display cases containing letters and pottery, rifles, a redcoat uniform. In the center of the basement, where the floor funnels down into a drain, there is a large bloodstain, and a taped outline marking where the bodies were found. The shape is strange—a central mass with four legs sticking out—until Tommy explains that the murdered women were found sitting back-to-back.

  "Mrs. Josie Chesser," Tommy says, pointing to the tape legs farthest from the steps. "The caretaker. She had a room on the top floor. Her daughter Mary was visiting. Mary was enrolled in Medieval Studies at Princeton. Dinner for two was set up in Mrs. Chesser's room. There was a cot for Mary in the bedroom."

  Next to the house is a willow tree said to have been planted by George Washington himself. Its tendrils brush lightly against a cellar window. Agnes hears a crash and a whirring and nearly jumps out of her skin.

  "Boiler," says Tommy calmly. "Don't feel bad; it got me before."

  He crosses the basement to a window above a sink. "The mother was strangled, the daughter's throat was cut. See the hole in the glass? We're wondering if that's the entry point."

  Agnes has almost gotten used to the idea of Barbara's murder. Sometimes the whole tragic event seems predestined to Agnes, as though Barbara brought it on herself. She was careless about men, careless about her safety. There was a grim logic to the way he died. Coming to the Morris-Jumel House is the best way Agnes knows to rejuvenate her shock and outrage. She shakes with fright and anger and revulsion, and this time she's determined that she won't relinquish those sensations. Barbara deserves that.

  "It's freezing down here," says Tommy, and they go back upstairs. They sit in the music room. Tommy hits middle c on the harpsichord. They sit in a loveseat, which is the only thing that looks sturdy enough for the two of them.

  "We have the weirdest dates," says Agnes.

  Tommy shifts his weight, and the loveseat groans.

  "Dating is all I'm doing on this case," he says. "The only progress I'm making is with you."

  "And you're not even doing that."

  In the next room, a clock ticks portentously. There are scratchings at the floorboards.

  "You're doing your best, Tommy," says Agnes. "What else can you do?"

  "That's what I've always said to myself, and it's always been enough. Now I don't know. Meeting you has opened my eyes."

  Agnes laughs. "To what?"

  "To my job. You know how they're always talking about residency requirements for cops? Maybe what we really need is for every cop to be in love."

  Agnes and Tommy kiss—an enormous, muscle stretching, soul-exhaling, passionate joining. Loveseats were made for such things.

  Think of Barbara, says Agnes to herself. Think of the Minotaur.

  -

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Tommy drops Agnes off at her building. Upstairs, she finds Ivan watching Sarah eat a breakfast of melon, buttered rye toast, and shredded wheat.

  "This is what Sarah ate every morning at Clavelle," says Ivan. "I went out to the bodega and got it for her.

  "Broken arm and all," says Agnes, mildly enjoying Sarah's discomfort.

  "You know how it is when you love someone," says Ivan. "You deconstruct their every move. I used to think a lot about Sarah's breakfast. I was always struck by the clash of opposites, sensuality and asceticism, buttered toast and shredded wheat. She likes a lot of butter, as you see. And the melon—so frankly sexual that I would sometimes blush."

  Sarah takes her plate to the sink. Her place at the table is a mess. She is indifferent to crumbs, never having had to worry about roaches.

  "See what I put up with?" she says.

  Agnes turns on the radio. The Morris-Jumel killing is the lead story. The mayor pours forth rhetoric like water from a broken blister. New York City, he says, will simply not stand for being stalked by a maniac. "Maybe in other places this happens," he says. "Maybe in desperate places like Philadelphia or Detroit. But not here! There's simply too much going on. We have the finest restaurants on the planet...."

  Ivan packs his things. Agnes pages through a few of his comic books. In Shock SuspenStories, a man invents a time machine and records "Rock Around The Clock" a few years before Bill Haley would have. He records "Johnny B. Goode" before Chuck Berry and "Pretty Woman" before Roy Orbison. He starts rock and roll a few years early and becomes wildly famous, only to be assassinated by a half-crazed ex-G.I. garage mechanic named Presley. Legion of Superheroes 198_ is meant to be humorous, a take-off on the original Legion, which Agnes dimly remembers reading once when she had the chicken pox. In this modern version, the superpowers are absurd: Superlative (from the plane
t Norrisross) can duplicate any feat found in the Guinness Book of World Records. He can outrun an impala, push a freight train unassisted, and do incredible mathematical calculations in his head; he has also failed his driver's test 113 times. The third comic, Marisol, is arty and dirty. The murky story has something to do with a naked girl wandering the streets of some post-apocalyptic hellhole of a city.

  "Look at Marisol," says Ivan. "Look at the care with which her nipples are drawn. Look at her pubic hair. Seurat didn't use so many brush strokes."

  His collection of comic books is approaching ten thousand. "I would have had twelve thousand, but I donated nineteen-hundred of my lesser numbers to Father Clarence for some charity thing. Wasn't that just splendid of me?"

  "Ten thousand!" says Agnes. "What's something like that worth?"

  "I have no plans to sell."

  "But if you did."

  He purses his lips. "I have no plans to sell. Would you adjust my sling?"

  He smiles giddily. His furry teeth go in all kinds of directions. His mouth is like a rush hour subway car. "I hate comics now anyway. They suck. In the old days, people writing them drifted into the business by accident. They were failed novelists and playwrights. They'd read Shakespeare and Gibbon. It made for a good product. Now, the only thing comic book writers have ever read is comic books, and you can tell."

  He looks at Sarah, who is reading Marisol with a clinical curiosity. "Decadence," he says. "The center cannot hold. We are the hollow men. We are stardust, we are golden. Sarah, I love you."

  "Agnes, beam him the fuck out of here."

  * * *

  Agnes is ready to bring him to St. Basil's rectory, but instead he steers her across the street to the church.

  "I know a short cut," he says.

  The ascend the great stone steps of the church. A dozen or so blind children from the St. Basil School stand in little clumps, waiting for some activity to begin. Some have seeing-eye dogs with them. Agnes and Ivan walk down the church's northern aisle toward the altar. Ivan leads her into the baptistry, which smells of wax.

  "You'll love this," he says.

  Next to the baptismal font is a carton of hymnals. Ivan moves it aside with his foot, revealing a steel door set in the floor. With his good arm, he pulls the trapdoor open.

  Agnes is leery. "Where does this go?"

  "To the rectory. I find it a useful entrance. Sad to say, there are people over there bent on keeping me out."

  Agnes climbs down the ladder. She finds the light switch. The walls are streaked with blue mold. Getting Ivan and his broken arm down the trapdoor without inflicting additional damage to anyone is difficult; Agnes plants her hands on his butt and eases him down one step at a time. She pulls the trapdoor shut.

  "You're right, I do like this," she says. Her words seem to die as she speaks them.

  They are in a narrow tunnel with stone walls. The wooden supports make it look like a mine shaft. Light comes from a string of bare light bulbs. There is water dripping somewhere, and as they walk car horns become audible overhead. The whole structure shakes alarmingly when the subway passes.

  "The catacombs—the dark secret of the church," says Ivan. "This is where V.D. Garg hid the booze during Prohibition."

  They go up a long flight of steps and emerge on the top floor of the St. Basil's rectory, in a little-used bedroom. Agnes's years in Catholic school have left her with an undiminished interest in the living arrangements of the clergy, and she notes the furnishings in the spare, pleasing room: the four-poster bed, the basin and pitcher on the washstand, the chest of drawers, the thin woven carpet, the traditional crucifix over the bed and the more modern version—Christ as a shaman with an elongated body—hanging outside the bathroom. In a corner is a free-standing mirror in a cherrywood frame; a palm frond is taped to the glass.

  They tiptoe downstairs, Ivan in the lead. Agnes is sure she will be arrested before the day is ended. They pass through some servant's quarters and into the rectory kitchen. A woman in a flowered dress peels potatoes at the sink.

  "Criz?" whispers Ivan.

  "Away with ye, Satan," she says, frightened by his voice. She hurls a potato at him. He closes the door just in time.

  "Spuds are very effective against demons," he comments to Agnes.

  He opens the door.

  "Child, you gave me a fright," says the woman. "And look at that wing of yours!"

  Edith Criswell, cook and housekeeper, is about fifty years old. She has a scrubbed, kindly face; her almond eyes suggest compassion, and her lips tremble with grandmotherly concern. She has a cantilevered bosom and gray hair in a net.

  "Criz, this is Agnes Travertine," says Ivan as the housekeeper undoes his sling and examines his arm. "She's the one who brought me to the hospital. She's a saint. I'd be in love with her if I wasn't already in love with Sarah."

  "You're always in love with somebody," says Criz.

  "It's always the same person. In this age of rampant divorce, I'm incredibly faithful."

  "I'm sure you're sorry, but thank you for helping him, Agnes."

  Ivan tells Criz about the accident. Agnes is captivated by the aromas in the kitchen. Seafood and garlic and fennel and all sorts of peppery spices and what might be molasses and honey and mustard and pork. Agnes has never smelled anything so good. Two covered skillets sizzle on the stove.

  "Is he home?" Ivan asks.

  "Who he? What the cat dragged in?" snaps Criz.

  "Is Clarence here?"

  "Yes, so you be quiet."

  Agnes takes note of what must be Father Clarence's lunch set up on a tray on the sideboard—a small lettuce and tomato salad, a monkish brown roll, a split of white wine in an ice bucket, and the plate that will hold the main course. The china has a blue and white pattern and the slimmest of gilt edges.

  Mrs. Criswell's blunt fingers arrange rice, sautéed greens and crusted shrimp in a brown sauce on the priest's plate. She leaves the kitchen with his meal, then returns to feed Agnes and Ivan. Ivan tells Criz stories of how he tried and failed to get Sarah to go out with him at Clavelle.

  Agnes eats her lunch and moans with pleasure. The sauce is so heavy and flavorful that it is almost tiring to eat.

  "Then there was the time I went to the pro-choice demonstration—you know, to show her where I was politically," says Ivan. "I got to see her in handcuffs, so that was okay."

  Mrs. Criswell has heard enough. "Boy, I do worry about you. I used to work for his mother," she tells Agnes. "I was afraid to go into his room. He had zombies on the wall. And Frankenstein."

  "It's Frankenstein's Monster, thank you, and I've never owned a zombie poster in my life. Where do you get such ideas? And why aren't you afraid of the monster you work for?"

  "Sshh. Remember whose hospitality this is. Your uncle has been nothing but good to me, ever."

  Ivan stares at the ceiling. "I'm the only one who sees through him. I feel like the guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the one who sees the truth."

  Mrs. Criswell hits him sharply on the shoulder with a ladle. "Always steering the talk around to zombies! You've got to learn that life ain't the comic books."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Merely that it can be dangerous to divide the world into heroes and villains," says Father Clarence as he enters the kitchen. "Comic books are not drawn in shades of gray. I assume that my nephew has been assassinating my character."

  "Just runnin' off at the mouth," says Criz.

  "You were eavesdropping," cries Ivan.

  The priest smiles. "Just making an assumption. You're always assassinating my character. What happened to your arm?"

  Ivan lowers his gaze. "Couple of hoods on the subway were saying nasty things about the Pope, so we mixed it up."

  The priest shakes Agnes's hand. He uses two hands. He has a top-notch manicure.

  "Are you by any chance the Agnes that Madelaine—"

  "That's me."

  He nods. "They're marvelous people,
the Wegemans. And they think the world of you, Agnes. Agnes is such a marvelous name! Have you ever read David Copperfield? His Agnes is the embodiment of all that is good and kind and blushing and sweet. Is that you?"

  He's a big presence, this priest of the old school. He's physically big as well; he played baseball and football at Notre Dame. He makes Agnes feel as tongue-tied as a five year old. "I don't think so, Father."

  "It's just as well, believe me. I could never tell the difference between Agnes and Dora and Emily and Nell or any other of Dickens's heroines. I'm sure you're a lot more interesting."