Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  My mother’s pen hovered and hesitated over a twelve-letter word for ‘monopolized resort,’ and she wondered to herself, How much has he told her? How much does she know? Thinking about Aunt May, that is. Her younger sister, my Aunt May. She had had a phone call, a series of phone calls over the last few days. Aunt May’s marriage was collapsing. This much I had overheard though it was mostly a matter of indifference to me. Aunt May had fled the man Mom called Mr Slick Hollywood Producer. With his half-buttoned flowered shirts and the chai medallion gleaming on his hairy chest – everyone had to know how Jewish he was, Mom said because she felt it was not quite the thing, being Jewish, though Jewish she was.

  Anyway, May was down in Florida now, sobbing out her troubles to their aged father. And my mother had invited her to come north and spend the summer with us. This, as I’d gleaned from certain grumblings in the walls, did not make my father happy. Dad and Aunt May had never gotten along, I knew that. It couldn’t be pleasant: the two of them sharing a house all summer. My mother knew it too, but she had had to invite May anyway. She had not been able to help herself somehow.

  My mother was never pretty, not even as a girl, which was important, because her sister was, Aunt May was always beautiful. Mom got all the Litvak features, the babushka stuff, the beezer, the hound dog eyes, the cheeks like lead. Aunt May was the Austrian rose, with black hair you wanted to lift to your face in handfuls, skin like blushing ivory, and mysterious, beryl, love-song eyes. She had bigger tits than Mom too. And a waist you could touch your fingers around. Poor Mom, in youth, had been reduced to imitating her younger sister, mimicking her frailty, her whispery fascination with even the boys who bored her senseless: a desperate attempt to lure some of May’s suitors, even one of her suitors, into saving her from her parents’ gloomy house in the Jersey marshes.

  It was mortifying for her, I guess. But then as now, Mom consoled herself with her intelligence, her deductions. I think they really were still deductions at that point; they didn’t become paranoid fantasies until later on. She deduced motivations, she uncovered buried histories. Why her father’s gaiety had faded. Why her mother used to sit by the radio cursing the newsmen in some unknown tongue. Why was her family so poor for so long? Why had they moved from place to place all through her childhood, falling and ricocheting from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan to the Jersey outlands like a pachinko ball? These questions, which were never discussed in her home, Mom had answered, or thought she had answered, figuring out her own life-story from half-heard clues and conversations. Silently, all her childhood long, she shared her father’s tribulations; knew them without revealing that she knew; understood his tragedy without telling him she understood. She had always prided herself on this and on the fact that May had never had an inkling of any of it. It was the achievement of my mother’s youth, I think. And now, as I cleaned the bottom of the breakfast bowl, as I recounted my historic Rescue of the Little Kid From Ira’s Clutches, she thought to herself, What is he telling her down there? How much is he letting her know?

  It bothered Mom: her father and May alone together in Florida. It gnawed at her that they were down there, talking about who knew what. And that was why, over my father’s groans of protest, she had invited May to spend the summer with us. Though, of course, Mom wouldn’t have admitted to herself that that was the reason. Her own motives, in this as in everything, were an absolute enigma to her.

  So she sat at the end of the table with her pen poised and her sad saggy aspect and her quick but inward-turning eyes and the birdsong and spring aromas all around us. And she looked up, suddenly, startled, when I pushed back from the table and said, ‘I gotta get to school.’

  She blinked and came into the moment. ‘Be careful,’ she said, her eyes lingering on my strong limbs, my blond good looks, the beauty she loved. ‘Be careful.’

  The rest of the day, until Agnes, was pretty much my usual thing: all-powerful in the morning, a sniveling turd by afternoon. In the morning, that is, I walked to school, hiking jauntily up Bunker Hill with books beneath my arm and daydreams of sovereignty beneath my semi-crew. News of the telepathic mind-burst I’d used to heal Grandpa had spread and I’d been made king of the world now, nine years old though I was. I was a greatly intentioned king. Enlightened rule for the entire planet was just around the corner. First, though, I was working out the details of an apocalyptic purge. Mobsters, Russians, rapists, Arabs, the guys who’d killed Kennedy – it was a bad day to be any of that gang. As I walked along beneath the budding canopies of trees, I imagined myself, slouched on a throne, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt I particularly liked with blue horizontal stripes. In trooped the population of the earth to stand before me. With a slight tilt of my scepter I sent them left or right. Good guys into the dawn of a magical new era, mobsters et al into a black room where a red ray made them dance in agony for a while and then dissolved them. Frankly, it all seemed to be going like clockwork … and then the next thing I knew, I was sitting in my combination chair and desk, inwardly cowering as Miss Truxell prowled up and down the classroom aisle. It had somehow become two-thirty – the morning was suddenly dreamed away. We were doing Reports – Reports! for the pity of sweet heaven. We were supposed to have one prepared today on one of our Founding Fathers. Mine was supposed to be on Jefferson and I knew exactly nothing about him except that he had a ponytail and spent a lot of time gazing off into the horizon. I slouched and ducked and trembled as Miss Truxell went up the aisle right past me and down the next aisle right past me on my other side. Monstrous with her razor smile, her blackboard stick, her frizzy hair receding from a high forehead that was mottled and stained. Scanning the rows of neatly trimmed heads for someone to call on next. There seemed no hope the schoolday could end before she saw through my attempts to become invisible and singled me out to die the death of the ignorant and ignominious.

  And yet, minute by minute, three o’clock came. Susan smugly proclaimed the life of Hancock, Freddy mumbled his way through Franklin – and the bell rang and I was free. By three-thirty, I was out on the baseball field, shouting manly encouragement to the baserunners, settling disputes. Striding around with my arm outstretched toward the trouble spots, trying to keep things fair for one and all.

  I figure it was about six-thirty, and just beginning to get dark, when I finally set out for home.

  There was no homework that Friday so I wasn’t carrying any books – God knows what I was planning to do about Thomas Jefferson. I walked with my hands in the sidepockets of my windbreaker. Daydreaming mostly, then sometimes taking notice of things. The air was a little cooler now, but it still had that hankering spring smell in it. There were robins pecking around some of the lawns and sparrows perching here and there on the telephone wires.

  I went up Bunker Hill a block, then cut across Warwick past Jay Friedman’s house just for a change of scene. The sidestreet was shaded over by budding oaks and maples so the light was already reddish here and dusky. But even on Piccadilly Road up ahead, the day was growing pale. Still, it was brighter when I reached the corner and stepped out from under the trees. I cut across the lawn of the nearest house, and was just coming down onto the sidewalk, when I heard a car door thunk shut behind me. I glanced back casually down Piccadilly and then away – and then looked back again, surprised. There was my father.

  He had just stepped out of the brown Cadillac. It was parked at the curb about a block away. I stood still and watched while he came around the front of it. He hadn’t seen me, and I thought if I was careful and crept up quickly I might be able to shout boo and spook him. As soon as he had his back to me, I started forward, smiling in anticipation, crouching low.

  Then Dad did a sort of odd thing. As I was creeping up on him, he walked straight over the sidewalk onto a lawn and headed between two houses. Piccadilly wasn’t lined with trees like Bunker Hill was. There were more lawns, more open spaces. The houses on the south side, though, where he was, across from me, had trees in back, a thick stand of tall h
ickories, maples and dull-green pines. Behind these, and down a short slope, was a stream. Not much of a stream, a run-off of some kind that flowed from a culvert at the top of the hill to I don’t know where. You couldn’t see it from the road, but I’d been to it a couple of times for rock battles with my friends – standing on either side of the water, tossing rocks in to splash each other – so I knew it was there. It seemed to me that my father was headed for the trees behind the houses, and for the stream.

  That stopped me a minute. Why would he be going in there? I straightened and watched. My father went out of sight behind the houses. Interested then, I crossed the street, trotting after him.

  When I got to the opposite sidewalk, I saw him again. He was threading his way into the screen of hardwoods. Bending the leafless branches down with his hands. Heading in toward the stream bank. He looked weird to me in that sylvan setting, wearing his navy suit and his thin tie. And as he started down the slope to the bank, he became an obscure, dark figure, moving behind brown trunks and conifers.

  I started after him again, panting now, though mostly for show. I plunged into the trees with great shuffling and crackling. Battled my way to the crest of the slope and then side-heeled my way down it to the stony strand. It was darker there. The opposite side of the stream was steeper and pretty high. The trees on its rim were taller and there were more pines and hemlocks that blocked the westering sun. In this twilight, I found my father again. He had planted himself in the black mud of the bank. He was looking away from me, his hands in his pants pockets. Beside him, the stream trickled around rocks and over pebbles making its small noise.

  I loped up to him, panting for all I was worth.

  ‘Dad!’

  It spooked him, that’s for sure. His whole upper body whipped around to me, his hands flying out of his pockets, out to the side.

  ‘Harry? Harry?’

  ‘Hi. I saw you from the road,’ I said, between heavy gasps for air.

  ‘You scared the heck out of me.’ He smiled wanly. His eyes really looked wide and frightened. He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. ‘Jeepers. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was going home this way. How come you’re down here by the stream?’

  ‘I … I’m meeting someone.’ A branch snapped downstream. He whipped around at this too. Then came back to me, nervously. ‘A client,’ he said. ‘I’m meeting a client. We have to talk about a parcel of land back here. Why don’t you go on home, and I’ll be back in time for dinner.’

  More branches crunched. I tilted over to look around my father. I saw two figures coming toward us along the bank. A woman and a girl, moving in shadows. They came on slowly, and passed into a patch of latticed sunlight. The woman, I saw then, was tall with tawny hair worn long. She walked with stately care, a sweater over her shoulders, a long skirt swaying. I could hear her talking pleasantly to the little girl. The girl was thin and had dark hair in a braid down her back. She was carrying a basket over her arm. She answered her mother in a low voice. I didn’t remember seeing either of them before.

  ‘Go ahead,’ my father said again. ‘I’ll be back for dinner.’

  The woman indicated a place by the stream and the little girl carried her basket to it and knelt down cautiously. The woman left her there and continued along more quickly by herself. By this time, it did seem a good idea to get out of there before I had to talk to her. But it was too late. The woman greeted us before I could make up my mind.

  ‘Hello, Michael. And hello,’ she added to me.

  She seemed nice enough. With round cheeks and brown freckles and not much makeup. Nervous hands; fretful eyes. A Mom, and pretty. She made me shy. I managed to mutter something to her.

  ‘This is Harry,’ my father said. ‘Harry, this is Mrs Sole.’ The two grownups exchanged a look. I believe my father shrugged at her and sighed. ‘I was just saying he should go home while we do our boring business. Go ahead, Harry.’

  ‘Agnes has some people she made from cookie dough,’ said Mrs Sole. She made a reticent gesture with her hand. ‘She’s playing in the stream with them, why don’t you go have a look. We won’t be long.’

  ‘Nah, thanks, I’ll just go home,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, she’s not playing house or anything,’ said Mrs Sole kindly. ‘In fact, I think she’s drowning them.’

  My father laughed in a peculiar way, a phony, dinner party laugh. ‘Well, you won’t want to miss that,’ he said.

  I wagged my head. It did sound kind of interesting. ‘Okay.’ I moved away from them.

  ‘He’s at shule,’ Mrs Sole said softly behind me – a remark which meant nothing to me then and didn’t recur to me until I was seventeen, when it made me sit bolt upright in bed and rollick my head in my two hands.

  Now, though, I just continued down the bank to the girl.

  She had moved downstream from her original position and was kneeling by the water again farther on. I approached her in the semi-dark. The low voices of the grownups fell away behind me. Bashful, I walked with elaborate caution over the soft earth of the bank and stared down at the stream as I went. As I came closer to the girl, I saw something white in the water. I stopped to squint down at it. It was one of her figures. She’d put it in the water to float along, I guess. It had snagged on a twig and the current was nudging it and slipping around it on either side. I pulled an appreciative face: it was pretty good, pretty real-looking, almost like something you could get in a store. A girl figure, hand painted with a red skirt and yellow hair and pink skin. As I watched, it worked free of the twig and went turning and bouncing downstream.

  ‘Here conies your figure,’ I said. I followed it from the bank until I was standing over her. ‘It’s going by.’

  For another second, the girl didn’t even look up. She just went on, arranging her three other figures in the sparse waterside grass. Then, slowly, she did look. A long, slow look up at me. Very queer. She had a small brownish face, grim, constricted; a face like a monkey working out a chess problem. Kneeling there in her little green jumper with her little bare knees in the dirt, she made her eyes go all wide and magical.

  ‘That one’s my sister,’ she said.

  She said it in a half-whisper, intoned it, with low echoing notes. A witchy business there in the shadows. Without thinking, I took a nervous peek back over my shoulder, checking to make sure my Dad and Mrs Sole were there. They were – still talking in the gloaming under the trees. Standing very close, Dad gesticulating in the small space between them. Now and then the sound of their voices rose wordlessly over the gurgle of the stream.

  I turned back to the girl. I shrugged. ‘Yeah. My friend Freddy has a sister. He wants to drown her too. He says he wants to set her on fire while she’s asleep.’

  But the girl took no more notice of me. She’d returned her attention to the figures in the grass. Arranging them, pacing them through some mysterious, girly hoo-ha. I stood over her, hands in my pockets, observing distantly. The figures were two men and a woman, just as life-like as the one she’d drowned. One of them even looked like a soldier, which was admirable enough. I wasn’t too sure about this cookie-dough angle – it smelled of sissiness – but I couldn’t help thinking: You could make whole armies of these things. Any kind of soldiers you wanted. Romans, say, with swords and shields. Or the guys from the Alamo. You could work out whole massacres not sold in any store. You’d be the only one who had them.

  I relented, squatted next to her. ‘So, like, you made these?’

  She nodded. Grimly. Working her witchy work.

  ‘Out of cookie dough, huh?’

  Another solemn nod. ‘You glaze them. And bake them in the oven,’ she said. And with another sorcerous glance my way: ‘That’s what turns them real.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ I saw what she meant. They did have a quality about them. Shiny, pliant-looking; made you want to touch them. ‘I’m no good at art. If I made them, they would all just be …’ Doody with arms, I wanted to say, but I was a gentleman. �
�Lumps with arms,’ I said.

  At that, she surprised me by letting out your standard issue giggle – and then immediately kneaded her grin back into the wrinkled mask.

  I plucked up courage, reached for the soldier. ‘Can I see one?’ She didn’t stop me. I picked it up. Examined it appreciatively. No gun, mind you, but a very promising barbarity about the mouth and eyes. ‘Man, you could sell these,’ I said. ‘You just gonna let that one float away?’ Actually, the girl figure was caught now in the roots under the bank a short way down. ‘It looked good.’

  ‘It was good,’ she said softly. ‘I told you. It was my sister. Lena.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m an only child.’

  Slowly, she turned her spectral gaze downstream. ‘So am I.’

  Right. That called for another reassuring glance upriver at the big folks. Uncomfortably enough, the light seemed to have faded some around them since my last look. They were dappled shapes now, gesturing at each other against the grainy vista of naked trees and burbling water. Their faces, in-leaning, were laced with branch shadows, and Mrs Sole had one of Dad’s hands clapped in both of hers – as if she were trying to slow him down so she could get a word in.

  ‘I thought you said you had a sister,’ I said to the girl again. I handed back the soldier. She took it from me with tiny girl fingers that brushed against mine. She lay it in the basket. Picked the others from the earth and bedded them down too.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘Well, what is she, like, imaginary?’

  ‘No. She’s not imaginary.’ More eyes, half-whispers, sorcery. ‘She’s a ghost!’ And back she went to the figures in her basket with much mysterious maneuvering, voodoo passes of her hand. ‘She died before I was even born. She’s a ghost now.’