Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Sometimes I didn’t see her at all, or couldn’t come, or came too late, like the night I arrived as dark fell, and climbed up the bank and struggled through dense maple and hickory boughs, and came to the very edge of the treeline, my hand resting against shagbark, and saw her through her house’s glass doors in back, spied on her there. Not that I witnessed anything too shocking. They were lighting the Sabbath candles, the three Soles. The dining room amber around them, the candelabra set on a corner table. Agnes with a shawl over her hair, furrow-browed with concentration, looking like an old peasant woman as she stretched the match out unsteadily to draw a tear-shaped flame from each wick in turn. Her mother hovered over her, likewise shawled, and apple-cheeked and attentive, the firelight in her eyes. And the old doctor, on the far side, chewed his wrinkled lips and looked about the room impatiently.

  I watched a while, then, lonesome, melted back into the territory of shadows whence I’d come.

  ‘In March – that’s when my birthday is – Gemini is right there, right in the middle there.’

  We were on her star rock at the edge of the vacant lot at the very beginning of a night soon after. She was pointing straight above us to where she’d just sketched Bootes, which I couldn’t really make out, and the star Arcturus, which was neat because it was orange.

  ‘Gemini is the twins,’ she said, bringing her arm down, wrapping it round her knees, resting her chin on her scabs. ‘One twin was regular, and one couldn’t ever be killed because his father was one of the gods. Then, one day, the regular one, Castor, was hit by a spear and he died. So Pollux, the god one, he asked his father – I can’t remember his name – if Castor could live in his body one day and Pollux would be dead, and then the next day, Pollux would live in the body and Castor would be dead. And the father said yes. So that’s how they lived forever after that.’

  She paused. I nodded appreciatively, though of course she was gazing off mystically God knows where. Still, it was a pretty cool story and, boy though I was, I wasn’t too proud to admit that I’d never heard it before – or seen Bootes before or Arcturus. I wasn’t too proud about any of that with her anymore these days. In fact, I could almost admit to myself how much I liked to have her tell me such things. I was almost conscious of feeling close to her when she did, and when we sat like this together, with the warm, quiet darkness of the lot lapping at our rock and then stretching away as far as Middle Neck Road where streetlights beamed and headlights hissed softly past. That evening, I guess, that was probably the best of us. That was our peak before Aunt May said what she did.

  ‘One night, we were in our village,’ Agnes said then, ‘and policemen came.’ She had dropped her voice to her ghostly whisper, and I perked up, my spine going icy.

  ‘What?’

  She swung her huge, spiraling glare on me. ‘They took all the children out of the houses and made them march down to the river. And if the mothers and fathers tried to stop them, they hit them, or they shot them with their guns.’

  I snorted. ‘Come on. What do you mean? That can’t even happen. Policemen don’t shoot good people.’

  ‘This was in another country where the police were bad,’ Agnes intoned. ‘And they made the children line up at the edge of the river, and then they pushed them in – even the babies. And all the children drowned in the water, even the ones who could swim, because the policemen wouldn’t let them come out. We just had to do the dog paddle in the river until we got so tired we drowned too. It was night and so dark. I kept crying for my father, but he couldn’t come because the police wouldn’t let him. He wanted to, he wanted to a lot, but they wouldn’t let him. And the river was so cold. And it was black, it was blacker even than the blackest night you could imagine.’

  She paused to swallow. She swallowed hard, swallowed her own terror it sounded like.

  ‘Well, I’d have killed them first,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘You couldn’t, because they had guns. They were the police.’

  ‘You can’t be the police, Agnes, if you shoot good people. I’d have gotten my own gun, anyway, and shot them back.’ I thought about this a second, and felt very sure of it. ‘You know what I would do if I lived in a country like that? I would get a band of outlaws, and we would hide in the woods and then if stuff like that happened we would come out suddenly and rescue people.’

  For a moment, her round, worried face just hung there dimly in the night, still inner lit and full of witchery. Then, all at once, she burst out: ‘I wish I were like you, Harry! I wish I could be a hero like you!’

  I was surprised at that, completely. And pleased: well, I swelled like a bullfrog, I was that pleased. But even as I shrugged modestly, full of myself, a bulb went on in that dim bean of mine, and a frightening thought took half the wind right out of me. ‘Well, wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Like, what is this? Is this something real? Is this, like, what happened to your sister or something, to Lena?’

  And in the same anguished little voice Agnes cried, ‘Sometimes I am my sister, Harry.’ She swallowed again. She went on breathlessly: ‘My father is so sad. My mother says he’s so sad and misses her so much. So sometimes – sometimes I let her live in my body – so she can be alive too, like Castor and Pollux. And then I have to go and live in a coffin in a grave until she’s ready to come back. And then I can live again.’

  I looked at her, and she at me. I think I can safely say that was just about the spookiest thing anyone had ever said to me. One faction of the inner Harry was lobbying hard for flight, but another … no. As scared as she made me, as big as she made the dark around me seem – well then, we were that much more together on our star rock island, weren’t we? In fact, I do believe I wanted to be even closer to her then. I wanted to throw my arms around her, to hold her tight. To do something, anyway, I didn’t know what. I didn’t know much about sex – for all the bare-assed slaves who paraded through my imagination, I still had only a technical sort of inject-the-baby notion of it – so the impulse flooded through me as an inarticulate ache to be nearer, nearer than near, to her frail, creepy being and I wanted … what goodness for myself of her, what protection for herself in me I really couldn’t have begun to say. And I really couldn’t have begun to know whether I was bursting like this in solitude or whether she felt it too or – or what. We just gaped there at each other with a wild surmise.

  And then I said quickly, ‘Wulp, guess I better be getting home.’ And pushed to my feet, dusting off my bottom.

  We were out later than usual that night – yes, it was the best of us, no question. I walked her back up to her house even though she said I didn’t need to. I saw her inside manfully and then – not for a moment about to go back into those scary woods the way I felt – ducked my head and sneaked past the side of her house and over her front lawn to Piccadilly Road.

  I began walking home, hands in the pockets of my shorts, whistling tunelessly for fear of the night around me. The looming tree silhouettes, the spidery alleyways of hedges and grass between the houses: each seemed spring-loaded with potential horror. The ghost house – the abandoned shack lurking in overgrowth at the top of the hill – peered out at me with broken windows. I jogged past that, I confess. But then, as I came round the corner onto Wooley’s Lane, as I started down into the gracefully descending prospect of homes and oaks and willows, that sensation welled in me, as it did so often when I’d left Agnes in one of her weirder moods, that sensation of terror and intimacy somehow working to produce a dizzying clarity of vision. The inner monologue quieted and I became aware – swimmingly aware – of the silken warmth and blackness of the night, the ragged borderlines of leaves against the sky, the depth of the stars beyond them, the whole reality shebang. And, startled, I became aware too that someone was walking on the road before me.

  In the normal way of things, that might have made me nervous. It was a grownup – a man – about twenty yards ahead. I might have been cautious of him and held back. Instead, in that queer post-Agnes state
in which I halfway seemed to become whatever I beheld, I fell in with him – mentally, I mean. Strolling along behind his slumped, brooding figure, observing all, in with the spirit of all, I entered into his rhythm as well, his progress, the very fact of his being there together with me on the sloping road in the vasty night. Sometimes there was simply a peaceful unison with him, knowing we meditated over the same pavement or heard the same electric frizz of cicada from a pacysandra patch nearby. And at other moments, I do declare, there were rushes of dissolution, almost passionate release, in which my goofy nine-year-old self seemed to extend to him, to envelop him, to balloon through him to global dimensions – and I loved him, to use the right word for it, I loved that man on the street ahead of me, downright fearlessly.

  And so I tagged after him, loafing through these emotions, all the way to Plymouth Road, and around the corner to the short connector lane called Andover and thence finally to the bottom of Old Colony Lane and to my own house where I hung back only long enough to let him go through the door before me, and then followed him in, wondering what was for dinner.

  One night, as I was watching TV with my mother and Aunt May, my father came storming in through the back door. He was limping. He was holding what looked like a tattered rag, shaking it in the air like a DA with an indictment. Particles and clods of dry earth were shaken from it and pattered onto the floor.

  ‘Did you do this?’ he said fiercely. He was looking at me, rattling that thing. ‘Was this your bright idea?’

  Until then, I had been reclining apathetically on the sofa, resting my elbow on the armrest, resting my cheek on my hand, staring at the set. Aunt May was next to me, smelling too good and chattering too much through the program, and my mother was in the cushioned chair with her crossword, too far away. It was beginning to occur to me that my trip to camp was not as far off as it used to be, hardly more than a week or so away. The dread of it was weighing heavy on me and I wanted to be near my mother, and alone with her for comfort, without the visitor’s interference.

  Then my father thundered in.

  ‘Damn it!’

  Whoa! I thought, quailing: My father had cursed.

  He hobbled to the breakfast table, leaned on the back of a chair for support. My mother was already up and waddling toward him. I stood up too, and May cast her beauty in his direction.

  My father pushed the indictment at me with his free hand. ‘I could’ve broken my leg!’

  ‘What is it, Dad?’ I said, stalling for time. I knew what it was all right. Even from where I stood, I could now read the faded scrap of headline through the encrusted dirt: LBJ … VIETNAM … GREAT SOCIETY.

  Dad turned to Mom. ‘It’s a piece of the newspaper. Your … son laid it over a hole and covered it up with dirt. Someone could’ve come by and broken his leg and sued us for a fortune.’

  ‘I was just playing around with Freddy!’ I cried out. ‘We were making a trap!’ I had forgotten all about it. It was weeks ago.

  ‘Well, it was a damned stupid thing to do!’ my father said.

  My mother was working him into the chair, calming him, saying, ‘All right, all right, let me see your foot. Can you move it?’ She took the paper from him and put it on the table. I thought I detected the tremor of a smile at the corner of her lips. I felt awful, scared and awful, but it looked like it was going to be all right. I was almost beginning to breathe again.

  And then, from the sofa next to me, May had this to say: ‘Michael, what is it you do on all these secret night-time rambles you’re always on anyway? It’s no wonder you fall into things, creeping around the backyard in the pitch dark like that.’

  It was an instinct I think she had – I’ve known people since who’ve had it too, people whose early lives proved unreliable somehow and collapsed around them. They develop this sort of compulsion to test the structure of things by jarring the stones that support it. May, I guess, was like that; she must’ve felt most at home with the catastrophes that followed, whatever the cost to herself. Her timing, anyway, was just impeccable. My father looked raw murder at her – raw murder, like nothing I’d ever seen in him before.

  ‘Go to your room, Harry,’ he said in a soft, strangled voice. He never took his eyes off May.

  ‘Go on,’ my mother said to me, but no one had to tell me twice.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said miserably. And, hangdog, I got the hell out of there.

  There had never been anything in my house like the screaming there was then. My parents didn’t scream as a rule – it was, in fact, exactly what they didn’t do – and so I knew nothing about that kind of unbridled, free-galloping rage. It must’ve been building up in all of them for some time. But me, I’d had no idea. And to hear it now coming up through the floor of my room, well, it seemed as if hell had yawned belowstairs without warning. I seriously wondered if there would be anything left of home and family and everyday life when it was over. I lay on my bed, wobble-lipped, wet-eyed. My Yankee pennant was blurry through my tears. The models on my bookshelves – Frankenstein’s monster, a knight in armor, Kennedy’s war craft PT 109, even Agnes’s grinning Play-Doh skull – seemed to hover over me in helpless pity like cherubim viewing the Crucifixion. I prayed for courage to my framed photograph of Mickey Mantle.

  ‘But you don’t know what it’s like to be alone!’ These words, Aunt May’s unholy wail, reached me clearly. And my father’s carnivorous rumble after that. And then the low warble of my mother – who never cried – pleading with her sister in tears.

  Then May again: ‘Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? You have everything, Claire! I don’t have anything!’ The words seemed to be ripped brutally out of Aunt May’s throat. ‘Keep your money! I don’t want your dirty money!’ And her sobs – it sounded to me as if they would tear her apart. ‘Oh God! Oh God!’

  I tensed on the bed almost to the point of trembling and stifled a sob or two myself as I heard her footsteps rushing to the stairs, rushing up the stairs, closer and closer to me. I half expected her to burst in through the door next, shrieking, ‘See what you’ve done, with your stupid trick!’ I didn’t mean it, I thought, clenching my fists, bracing myself.

  But she veered off, of course. The guest room door slammed shut. I heard her sobbing and coughing in there, calling on God. I thought that it was just chaos, chaos everywhere, chaos and the end of the world.

  Then, the next morning, everything was fine. Dad and Aunt May were at the breakfast table with me. Mom was in and out of the kitchen, bringing us cereal and bowls. Dad’s foot was fine, much better, he told me when I worked up the courage to ask. He sat abstracted over his Times while Mom, a little stone-jowled maybe, still came and went, keeping her thoughts to herself. May? She couldn’t have been sprightlier, all clear weather after the storm. Trailing scent with balletic sweeps of her downy arm. Catching the morning sun from the big window behind me. Her voice, as always, trilled its jolly little tune.

  ‘I thought I’d drive down to Washington to do some sightseeing,’ she called over her shoulder into the kitchen. ‘I might even go to Florida by way of Atlanta – I hear it’s beautiful down there.’

  ‘Just be careful in the South these days,’ my mother said darkly, re-entering. She dealt the bowls out to us. ‘Put an American flag on your aerial or something. You don’t know what those people are up to.’

  ‘So you’ll finally be rid of your old Aunt May,’ Aunt May said to me now. ‘Will you miss me, Harry? Just a little bit?’ I made a face and hunched my shoulders. She laughed delightedly, and reached across the table to tousle my hair. ‘Just grateful to have your bathroom back, I’ll bet. Oh, Claire, you don’t know how I envy you – really.’ She smiled at my Dad; he had looked up at the sound of that laughter of hers, half bray as ever, half heavenly psalm. ‘To think,’ she said, ‘your husband might have been mine if I’d only been smart enough to jump at a good thing. You have to admit you were at least a little in love with me before Claire stole you away, Michael.’

&nb
sp; ‘Do you want Rice Krispies or Raisin Bran?’ my mother asked me.

  ‘Uh … Rice Krispies,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone was in love with you, May,’ said Dad. He opened the paper wide so that he was hidden behind it. ‘You were a great beauty,’ came his voice. ‘You still are.’

  ‘Oh, the gallant gentleman,’ said May. ‘Harry, you wouldn’t believe it, but your father used to be so romantic. He drove me home once from the beach in Atlantic City. Oh! He was Prince Charming.’

  I poured milk on my Rice Krispies and tilted my ear to the bowl to hear the snap, crackle and pop.

  ‘All right, May,’ said Mom. She lowered herself formidably into her seat at the end of the table.

  ‘Well, he was!’ squealed May, notwithstanding. ‘All the way home, he talked about the stars, that’s it. He could absolutely turn a girl’s heart to sauce, Harry. I remember it as if it just happened. Do you remember, Michael? That drive we took? You have to remember. What all did you say?’

  ‘Uy,’ my father groaned. He turned the page and shut the paper, folding it over expertly.

  I was spooning sugar into my cereal now, one teaspoon after another, the spoon clinking against the sugar bowl. I liked to pile the sugar up, then watch it sink slowly into the milk of its own weight. When the cereal was finished, I liked to eat the milky spoonfuls of sugar on the bottom.

  ‘Well, he was the total, total cavalier, Harry,’ May said, and I think she glanced my way as I studied how the sugar darkened just before it was submerged, as I thought to myself, We’re taking on water, Captain! The ship is going down! ‘Talking all about the sky and the stars, that’s it,’ May went on. ‘Oh, and how the sky was like love because you couldn’t make it go away even if you knew it was an illusion. God, we were young. And that the – what do you call them – the constellations were that way too, only sometimes, if you concentrated, you could make them go away and you would just see the beautiful, beautiful stars themselves. You see, I do remember, Michael, even though I didn’t understand it all. You see how you stole my heart? And you told me all those stories about the constellations too. I remember. About the two brothers – right? – and how sad it was because one of them died, poor thing, and they had to live together in one body after that. And what else?’