Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  ‘Okay!’ I forced myself to say. ‘Great!’

  And we leapt the stream energetically and clawed up the far bank side by side, making our expressions seem bright and excited.

  In the big sky above the lot, the stars were out, the first layer of bright constellations, Cygnus, the dipper, Cassiopea.

  ‘Perseus will come up later, there,’ she said when we had climbed the rock. She pointed hard above the treetops just behind us. We didn’t sit, we were standing together on the boulder, our shoulders touching, our faces lifted, hungering, toward the sky. She strained for that tone of mystery, and began to tell me the Perseus story and it was a good story too but Jesus, it was agony, agony to listen to it. Everything she said now seemed underlaid, thick with hauntings, palimpsests and pentimenti. Her forced whispers, her outsized gestures were warped by all the storytelling I’d been gypped of, the forfeited ranges of paternal chumhood. I mean, I might have known this stuff and told her! She’d stolen it from me, maybe innocently, but still. I tried hard to do the rapt audience bit. I nutcracked the logic of the arcane Greek offenses and the unnecessary hero trials, and I conjured a seaweedy ocean god like the ghost of a sunken man, and I even chimed in with a gout of blood for the beheading scene, always a major plus. But my mind drifted too, and at the same time that Perseus was doing that neat trick of reflecting Medusa on his shield so he could decapitate her without being turned to stone, I was half-imagining homey scenes that might have been, in my home, in her home, in some television home – who knows? – with a sort of red mist of unacknowledged rage hissing up over everything. What a shame, what a shame. Because there it all was too, or would be, she said, come the middle of August, right up in the sky by way of the constellations. There was Cepheus the King and Queen Cassiopea – all right, she looked like a lawn chair but there she was; and Perseus was rising; and just now, the brighter stars in Andromeda and in Pegasus, the winged stallion – a real stallion with wings just like the Amoco gasoline sign! – were burning their way through the purple dark. And at midnight, when deep August came, so she told me (so my father must have told her), the kraken would breach the eastern horizon to devour the chained princess and Perseus would hie it to the rescue brandishing the basilisk ugliness of Medusa’s head (still gouting) to turn the monster to stone. And stars would fall, dozens of shooting stars like fireworks to celebrate the event – I mean, what would it take to get us in the mood?

  Whatever it was, this wasn’t enough, not tonight. I tensed every time her shoulder brushed me. I felt morose. I wanted it to work too badly; too much damned presence of mind ruined the best effects. And then, anyway, the moon rose, the full moon she’d told me about. Back in the trees but bright enough to whitewash the dimmer stars away just as they struggled to show themselves. And it bared us to each other too, fruit-of-knowledge-like, more’s the pity, so that Agnes finally gave it up, falling silent during the embellishments, and we looked at each other hopelessly in the silver light. I almost said: I have to go home now; and I did have to – to get to bed, to get ready for camp. But I fought the impulse. How could I say it? How could I go? After our whole spring together, after all July? Was there nothing we could do?

  ‘Hey!’ I said too loudly. ‘You wanna pretend it? Like I’ll be the Perseus guy and – this could be the rock and you could be chained here? Okay?’

  She hesitated – it was a little rowdy, a little boyish – but then she agreed, and we began to play it out in the empty lot.

  Lord, Lord, Lord. I will not tell her this. My little visitor from the root cellar, from the sleet-streaked night. I will not tell her, I will not tell anyone. When I think what they would say – what Agnes’s biographers would say, and the art critics, and the feminist angerheads. When I imagine the dental vaginas, and the castrated witch-mothers they’d come up with. The post-Holocaust Jews relating to the western myth inheritance, they’d say, or an early experiment with the transubstantial artistry that turned monsters that night to statues, to stone. When I picture, I mean, the vomit of words they would drench those children with, those two poor defenceless waifs – the little girl dead now, the boy vaporized to an unsalvagable walking fart of corruption – oh man, I would rather drink blood than tell them, than breathe a word of this to anyone. Leave them alone, you bastards! I shake my fist at you! I goblin dance like Rumpelstiltskin till you run away. (Because you’re all cowards else you’d get out and work for a living, get some exercise.) I’ll die a wooden Indian, a blank tomb, an ur-stone. I’ll live a mirror: you can all trace your own fucking faces in me till you drop. I alone remember – I alone am survived to not tell thee – how the big purple-white sky was littered, behind our self-consciousness and the moonglow, with creatures, damsels and champions which we, small and far below in the broad, dusty lot, so desperately reflected and replayed. And how the stones crunched beneath my sneaker soles. And of Agnes’s hilarious ‘Help, Perseus, help!’ And the way I almost forgot myself a moment as I thought to intertwine my fingers in the snakes of the gorgon’s hair. Soul-heavy though I was, I remember, I forced out a TV-adventure riff – ‘Ba-dum ba-daaa!’ – as I galloped on my Amoco gasoline steed with the squiggling Medusa-head upraised. And I meteored down as best I could, so sick at heart, to petrify the breasting beast. And Agnes cowered very convincingly against her star rock and twisted in her chains and made a fuss, though I think she was praying all the while – I could just about hear her in my own mind – for the impossible resurrection of our late, lamented zing. And the air was warm and clear and smelled of dust. I was there, you assholes. It was my life, I was there.

  And that, at any rate, was what we were up to when I heard my mother calling me from the road.

  We stopped, breathless. My mother’s voice reached us again. ‘Harry?’

  I lowered the hand with the gorgon’s head in it, my fist still clenched. ‘That’s my Mom,’ I said. ‘I gotta go.’

  Agnes stepped away from the rock. Halfway across the lot, I could see her clearly in the moonlight. ‘Bye, Harry,’ she said. ‘Have a good time at camp.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll meet you by the stream when I get back.’

  ‘Bye,’ she said. She stretched her hand out to me, waving.

  ‘Harry!’ my mother called, sounding more worried than annoyed.

  I waved to Agnes. ‘Bye, Agnes,’ I said. I felt her looking after me as I jogged past her and ducked into the trees.

  My mother called one more time as I carefully made my way over the stream in the dark. ‘Harry!’ Then, as I was climbing the opposite slope, I heard her start to call again – and stop. When I broke out of the trees, I could see her at a distance. She was standing on the sidewalk beside my bike. She had spotted it, my bike, as she drove around in search of me.

  She was standing in the light: the light of the full moon, which had risen here above the treetops, and the headlights of her Country Squire station wagon which she’d left running at the curb. And there was light too in the upstairs window of Agnes’s house – the window that had been dark before: it shone brightly now. I could see my mother with her face upraised, staring at it. My poor, dumpy, onion-shaped Mom. I could see her frozen there, trying to frame her reaction to what she’d just witnessed – bemusement, indifference, fury. I called out to her as I ran across the Soles’ lawn, but she didn’t turn. She kept staring up at that window. It was empty now – I checked it, vaguely curious, as I ran. The guilty parties had recovered, I guess, from their first panicky reflex when the sound of Mom’s voice reached them over the air conditioning. They had ducked down again although, of course, too late. But Mom kept staring, staring. Poor old Mom. Always working out the family secrets, always getting to the bottom of things. It was what she had instead of beauty. It must have taken all her motherly fortitude just to turn, when she finally did; just to smile at me ruefully, to shake her head mother-like, to croak in a distant, unsteady voice: ‘Oh, so there you are. I was worried about you. Well, put your bike in the back, and I’ll drive you home.’
>
  Camp, it turned out, was fine. I had a good time for the most part. I got a certificate for winning a badminton tournament and my softball team lost only once the whole time I was there. I used to join in the general uproar of complaint about the freezing waters of Lake Placid, but I had a wry fondness for it secretly, especially in the morning, with the mist coming off the surface and the surface like steel and the sky an uncanny blue above the green-blue foothills of the Adirondacks which ringed it round. I was homesick only three times – badly, I mean: The first night, when I lay on my bottom bunk in tears, clutching a Civil War soldier I’d brought with me, and biting my lip so as not to call out for my mother. Then another night when some jerk told a story after lights out about how a guy had drowned in the lake a hundred years ago and how now, every so often, bubbles rose to the surface and popped with a soft cry of ‘Help! Help!’ Then, on a night toward the end of the second week, Uncle Chuck or Bobby or Neil – one of the college-age counselors – led us out to a campsite in an open field beyond the surrounding woods. We had a fire and sang songs and roasted marshmallows till nearly midnight. Then we lay on our backs in our sleeping bags and oohed and aahed into the deep black sky where meteors streaked back and forth across the Milky Way in unimaginable numbers, dying in July Fourth explosions in the bowl of the Dipper or the Great Square, leaving trails of white fire burning all the way back to Perseus, whence they had come.

  As my mother predicted, it was all over before I knew it. And as I boarded the motor boat to go, I felt very brave and vowed to come back for the whole summer next year which, for one reason and another, I never did.

  It was kind of depressing to be home, in fact. Only a few of my friends had returned so far. There wasn’t that much to do. I missed my camp buddies. School loomed.

  My first day back, I scouted out Dave and we biked over to Allenwood Park and played catch. That was all right. But as the afternoon came on, I began to feel somewhat heavy-hearted. I knew I had to give Dave the slip and head over to Piccadilly. I’d said I would, after all, those many days ago. And, as I put it to myself, I did sort of want to go, but I sort of didn’t too.

  Around four, with a suave excuse – ‘I gotta go, Dave, I got stuff to do,’ – I parted from him. He headed off to his Bunker Hill home, and I to Old Colony where I parked my bike in the garage and started out again on foot.

  I was nervous as I crossed under the ghost house and into the trees. I was excited at the thought of seeing Agnes, but I wanted things to be different between us too. Camp, I felt, had changed and matured me. I wanted to act with more authority around her so she wouldn’t always ensorcel me so. I didn’t want everything to be just the same as it was.

  I jumped the culvert and strolled the bank and reached our spot, but she wasn’t there yet. I waited for her, splashing stones, but the light ebbed and she didn’t come. Finally, as I sometimes did, I climbed up the bank and wove through the trees to the edge of her backyard. I came to the brink of the treeline and poked out into the Soles’ lawn. It looked different somehow. I couldn’t figure what it was – then I could. The patio furniture was gone. So was the sprinkler the Doctor generally left lying around. In the house, the lights were out, but it wasn’t night yet and the more I looked, the more I sensed a certain emptiness indoors as well in the dining area which I could just make out through the glass doors. Moving closer cautiously, it began to seem to me that the dining room table was gone, that all the furniture was gone. I edged closer. I leaned forward, peering through the glass. Yes, it was gone, all right. And, moving around to the side of the house and trying a window there, I could see the furniture in the living room was all stacked up. There were boxes in there and upside-down tables and rolled carpets. I kept moving slowly around to the front.

  There was a For Sale sign planted in the grass. The garage was empty. The Soles’ name had been taken off the mail box – I could see the outline of the letter-stickers on the black metal.

  I stood on the front lawn with my hands in my pockets – the first of the several times I would confront that empty place.

  Hmph, I thought indifferently after a moment, I guess they moved away.

  Then I shrugged and ambled back up Piccadilly, daydreaming.

  She was in now. The root cellar girl. I had shut the door. She stood dripping on the wooden floorboards. Peeling off her sodden earmuffs. Prying her down vest away from a blue workshirt, which matched her jeans, both of them dark in patches with rain.

  ‘Let me get you a towel. How come you’re spying on me?’ I said.

  I climbed back up the narrow stairs, hauling myself up by the rope bannister, panting.

  ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ she called after me.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I whispered.

  Head bent beneath the eaves, I ducked down the hall to the bathroom. I still couldn’t remember who she was, or who she reminded me of. Or why Agnes – why Agnes came back to me now. Only I did know too; it felt obvious. I was blocking it, that’s all.

  The towel was hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. I sniffed it for mildew. Very nice, lovely. I headed back down the hall with it. Well – the Agnes part was easy enough. What else could it be, after all? Aside from Marianne and the kids sometimes, who else came around here, and who else snuck around outside, who else besieged me like this? Agnes’s biographers. And the occasional glitz-eyed twit from the feature mags. Maybe some hunched newspaper hawkshaw looking for an anniversary follow-up. Even the TV people came once: I was actually on screen slamming the door in their faces.

  I worked my way downstairs and tossed the girl the towel.

  ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ she said again. She began to dry her hair. Her long hair. Brown, it turned out, when wet. She was fresh-faced I saw now, freckle-faced, and pretty. And, Christ, young. Young, young, young. She had draped her vest on one of my chairs, one of the colonial Windsors from the junkshop. She’d balanced her earmuffs on top of the vest. Both dripped water onto the floorboards, pit, pit, pit.

  Outside, the wind was up again. The freezing rain lashed the house. The gale hurled great stones of ice against the windows. Like a poltergeist.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ she said. She sneezed loudly. Wiped her nose on my towel. Shivered painfully.

  ‘Oh, bullshit,’ I said. ‘No, you’re not. I’ll get you a brandy or something. Hold on.’

  I headed for the other breakneck staircase, the one down to the kitchen.

  ‘What does that mean: I’m not,’ she said. ‘Yes. I am. I’m a … I’m, like, a reporter for a newspaper.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re not old enough.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three!’

  ‘Bullshit.’ I headed down the stairs, bracing myself on the white planks of the narrow walls. ‘Come to think of it, you’re not even old enough to drink,’ I called back to her. ‘I’ll make you coffee.’

  She came to the door above me, just her soggy sneakers visible. ‘Christ, I am so. I want a brandy. I want scotch, in fact.’

  ‘My ass,’ I muttered. Yeah, but who the hell was she? Agnes’s ghost, maybe, judging by the flood of feeling. Only not this sparkly-eyed little goy, not the ghost of my witchy Jew-girl, no sir.

  The kitchen was in what used to be the cellar so the ceiling was low. I could just feel it brush what used to be my hair as I moved to the sink. I hunched over a little as I filled a pot with water.

  ‘I want scotch,’ she warned me, when she heard the faucet go.

  I tossed the pot on the old gas stove, turned up the flame. ‘You take milk and sugar? I don’t have any milk.’

  The wind howled. The rain pattered against the downstairs door. It was a dark and stormy night.

  ‘Look,’ she said wearily from the stairs. I was leaning against the stove, studying her stupid sneakers. My arms crossed, my soul leaden with sorrow. ‘I just didn’t want to approach you too fast. I know you don’t like journalists. I saw you on TV: slamming the door? That’s why I was watching …’

 
‘Oh, admit it: you were being mysterious and romantic’.

  ‘Jesus!’ One of her little sneaks gave a little stomp. ‘You sound just like my father.’

  Fortunately, this arrow went directly through my heart and came out the other side so there was no need to have it surgically removed, which can be expensive. The pain, however, was not to be denied. It wasn’t just that I had happened, at that moment, to be reflecting on her youth, my middle age, my regret – which is pervasive actually, but was taking the form right then of regretting – that I would never hold a woman that young in my arms again and that her firm tits would probably have rippled lusciously as she came beneath me screaming, which I had a very clear mental image of, not having been laid in about six weeks. But it was also that, well, I could’ve been her father. I had a sudden, deep, aching sense of that when she said it. Of that, and the other so many things, the billions of things, infinite things, that could have happened, that hadn’t. That never would.

  Apropos of which, I flashed back here to the Sole house – or the Lieberman house, because an old German couple bought it after the Sole family was gone. That small, modest work of aluminum and wood: it called to me, of course, as the years went by. Often and often I had returned to it. In the suburban dusk. When I was eleven, twelve, when something had made me cry. A sentimental tyke, sitting on my Schwinn by the curb, I would tell my troubles to the ghosts in there, even sometimes – I blush to tell it – calling to them, whispering their names.