Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

  Well, it was the hospital for me, old friend. Lena was born in about an hour and I was practically comatose the whole time, thank God. I don’t remember any of it. I just woke up and there she was suddenly. In my arms in her little blanket. With her little face and fingers. Little tiny Lena. Oh, people who don’t have children don’t know. They talk and talk and I don’t know why they’re talking because they don’t know anything. They don’t know about love or terror or bliss or remorse, and not even grief, which they think they know. Maybe they can know math or how to play chess or something. I’m not sure. But for the rest of it, I think they’re looking at a closed door. It’s like a closed door with a trompe l’oeil on it, a painting of the room beyond. And, oh yes, they think, we know the room, we do know. But it’s really just a door, a closed door, and they don’t know. Anything. I loved that little baby, Harry. The fact that I’d thought I loved her before – the fact that I thought I understood the word love before – were just tokens of the hugeness of what I didn’t fucking know. That was real, definitely. No one ever can say I didn’t love her, because my atoms had turned to love, there was love in the interstices.

  But, hey, Har, you know me: What’s love for this gal if not an opportunity for unthinkable suffering? Oh, I had it all worked out. Sitting at home with her in my arms, at my breast, looking down into that tiny scrunched face, loving her impossibly, I had thought it all through: Crib death. Undetected congenital heart disease. Choking. A sudden fever in the night. And how impossible it would be to live after you came into her room and looked down and found her glassily staring out of her crib. I pumped a lot of drugged milk into that kid, I know. But taking drugs was better than the alternative, than just sitting there, thinking those things with nothing to protect me from the fact that they happen, they do happen. Drugged, at least, was plausible, was bearable. So that was me and my baby. Mother and child.

  Roland, of course, got wise eventually. It was pretty hard to hide from him after a while. He pleaded with me to give the drugs up, reasoned with me, screamed at me finally. I promised him I’d try. I tried to stop. I failed. Then, when I just couldn’t do it, he got this look in his eyes, on his face. This wary look. Watching me all the time when I was with the baby. Following me around, pretending he wasn’t. I guess he thought that any moment I was going to do some terrible, druggie thing, like drop her or cut off her finger instead of her nail or God knows what else.

  Well, my personal choice, finally, was the river. Lena was almost six months old by the time the water was warm enough. But then, in the afternoons, when the sun had been on it, I could take her down there through the woods for a bath. We have a private place on my land where the water gets deep, a swimming hole. Roland and I used to skinny dip there sometimes. I still swim there every morning. There’s a little backwash upstream a few yards with gentle eddies over a bed of smooth stones. It’s about two feet deep, if that, in mid-summer. Lena just loved it. I’d sit on the stones and hold her around the middle. Lower her in and let her legs swirl in the current and dandle her up and down to make a splash. She used to positively scream with glee and slap her hands around on the surface. And I remember she would stare these big serious stares at the frogs and the fishes going by. We had a wonderful time the two of us. Or the three of us. Because Roland came down with me whenever he was home. He would pretend he wanted to watch or help out or have a swim or whatever. Then he would sit on the bank and stare at us playing. With this frozen smile on his face. I knew he was thinking that his wife was such a drughead that she might let the baby go any minute, lose hold of her and let her drown. Or possibly it was just me thinking it. Because I did think it, all the time, every minute. I’d be sitting in the water, splashing her around, laughing with her, and my heart just swelling up with all that love. And I was terrified. What if I did let go? What if she drowned? What if a water moccasin swam up and bit her? While she was shrieking and splashing, I could see it all happening in my mind. I could see her slipping away from me. Pulled out of reach by the current. Pulled down into the deep water, her white body still visible under the surface, her suffocating face. I thought of her giving one last uncertain little baby cry before going under. I saw her hands waving helplessly. I thought of it again and again. I saw the whole thing happening over and over.

  So when I actually did let her go, I just sat there helplessly. I mean, for a second, I couldn’t make the transition from my imagination to the real thing. The baby just slipped away. She went straight under. She was gone in an instant. And the current did pull her away from me over the stones toward the deep water. If Roland hadn’t been there, watching me, distrusting me, I really don’t know what would have happened. I came awake and he was already splashing into the river. He grabbed Lena not two feet away from me. Hauled her up while I was still struggling to my feet with my mouth hanging open, trying to call out. Lena was coughing and gasping and fighting to breathe, smushing her face with her tiny hands, then flailing around with them, reaching for me. Then – a tad too late, I’d say – I was all over her, sobbing, hugging her, kissing her. I put my arms around her as best I could, considering the fact that Roland wouldn’t let her go.

  Well, you can bet your boots we had a solemn discussion about that little event, by golly. Roland explaining in a quiet, measured voice why he thought separation might be best for all of us for a while. And how I would be able to see the baby anytime I wanted and so on. And me just sitting there numbly, dumbly, staring, nodding. Thinking: Yes, yes, for Christ’s sake, save her, get her away from me, shut up and go. I was still sitting there when his face crumpled and he walked out of the room to do his crying in private. I was sitting on the sofa, staring, thinking: Ah well, what the hell, it’s high time I get back to my work anyway. I’d been blocked by then for almost a year. But I knew it would come back now. The flow, the ideas, the sureness in my hands. I was thinking: yes, yes, I’ve suffered now finally. Now finally, I’ve suffered enough.

  It broke off there, no signature. I folded it quietly and put it in my shirt pocket. I felt a certain lightness with the burden of hope taken away. I don’t even know what I’d been hoping until then, but I wasn’t hoping it anymore. I stood up, sighing, at loose ends. Marianne glanced at me from the sofa and smiled placidly. I started wandering among the crowd of potted plants and creepers. I wandered past her head into Charlie’s room. I stood by his crib in the dark a few moments. I watched him sleeping with his baby intensity, his whole face set on it. Fucked up your life for you, Chuckster, I thought. Sorry, little guy. Then I had to pull out before I broke down and woke him.

  I checked my watch. It was ten pm.

  ‘I’m going to go see if the Sunday paper’s out yet,’ I said.

  Marianne nodded, giving a sleepy snuffle, rubbing her pregnant belly with her hand. ‘I may just haul the old anvil off to bed.’

  ‘Yeah, don’t wait up. I may take a walk.’

  I bent over the sofa and kissed her gently, which made her smile up at me again. I pulled my windbreaker from the hall closet and headed out the door.

  The streets were bopping. It was a summer Saturday night and warm and easy. Everyone seemed young and walked with long, loping strides. I headed down to the bank on 72nd. I went into the foyer where the cash machines were. We had three different accounts and every day you were allowed to take up to five hundred dollars out of each. I took out fifteen hundred dollars, which left plenty behind. Then I stepped outside and hailed a cab and rode down to the Port Authority. The place was hell at that hour. Carpeted with sleeping beggars, reeking of urine. Hustlers shimmering dangerously along the walls. Black faces slowly turning to follow me with sallow eyes. But a bus to Vermont was parked outside one of the gates, its engine already thudding. As easy as sleepwalking, I was in it, and we were pulling away. And what was strange – what I hadn’t expected – was how free, how fine, I felt suddenly; when we had crossed the George Washington Bridge, I mean, when we were rolling past the black Hudson and the looming palisades.
As if you could really get away like this, lighting out for the territory, as if the idea were still there, anyway, dyed in the wool, even with the territory gone. After a while, I pressed my face against the window almost eagerly, shading my eyes from the reading lights with my hand. I thought I could make out Pegasus rising over Rockland County. And I remembered a poem I’d read once, something about Chaldean constellations over crowded roofs. Christ, it seemed like forever I’d been stuck in that light-blinded city. It seemed like just forever since I could look up and see the stars.

  ‘Agnes Mallory,’ I said now to the girl. Her on the couch, nursing her coffee, bathing her nose in the steam. Me by the mantelpiece, elbow on the mantelpiece, scotch in hand. Trying to keep the emotion out of my face. And the wind falling and rising outside, the rain hissing and pattering. And the fire crackling. ‘Agnes Mallory,’ I said. ‘The name’s familiar. Why do you want to know about her?’

  The girl did her impression of a thoughtful gaze across the surface of her coffee mug. ‘Well … because … Like I said – or like you said – I want to be an artist. A sculptor. And as a woman sculptor, she’s, like, this important influence for me. I feel’ And she tucked her legs up under her and swiveled that ingenue kisser on me, all blinky with youthful candor.

  I could barely stand to look at her – I could barely stop – now that I recognized the face. ‘So read her biography,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, great.’

  ‘There are several. Three, I think:‘

  ‘Great. Are you gonna, like, toy with me?’

  I, like, might, I thought. ‘Dweller In A Secret Place. That was one, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You know, obviously.’

  ‘Yeah. Arthur Levine. That was the best one, I thought. The heroine artist. From the psalm: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night …” and so on. Then there was Shaping the Night, the critical one. Sheila Solotoff. Which wasn’t bad either as far as it went. Agnes chisels the horrors of the twentieth century into art. Simple, but not stupid anyway. Which brings us to the feminist one, what was it …?’

  She sucked her cheeks in to hide a smile. ‘In the Valley of the Dead Elms.’

  ‘Right, right. Those sterile, phallic elms standing envious guard over the fruitful valley. Those bad, bad elms.’

  She pressed cute lips together hard; raised pert chin defiantly. ‘You were there, weren’t you? In the actual valley?’

  I snorted and swigged scotch, to show I couldn’t be tricked out of my eternal silence that easily. Then I treated her to a nice, hard study, swirling my drink, feeling the heat of the fire on my calves. Feeling her face, the memory of her face, the memory of the mornings in Vermont. ‘So who are you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what’s your name to start with?’

  A suspicious pause. ‘Uh … Anne Truitt.’

  ‘Honk. A lie.’

  ‘Anne Truitt! That’s my …’

  ‘Sorry. She’s a famous sculptress.’

  ‘Well … I was named after her.’

  ‘Both names?’

  ‘Well …’ She burst out laughing. ‘God. You’re being such an asshole.’

  I laughed too, mighty pleased with myself. I shook my head. ‘Mystery and romance,’ I said into my drink. ‘Mystery and romance.’

  She forced herself to stop laughing – and then went right on with the melodrama, solemn and watery-eyed, as if her laughter had just been erased, edited out like a blown take in a movie. Kids. ‘Look, it’s just important to me, okay? It’s something I need to know about. You were, like, right there. Right in the valley of the dead elms and everything.’ She actually said that. In the valley of the dead elms. Like something out of H. Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle. The romance was suffocating, the past like a hand on my throat.

  ‘Christ,’ I said.

  ‘You knew her. You were with her. You were there when she died.’ And she really wound up for the next pitch, setting her coffee mug down on my cobbler’s bench, lifting her eyes – where did this cherub get such a range of gazes? ‘And you have her letters too, don’t you?’

  Nothing from me. I watched it go by.

  ‘Arthur Levine wrote about it in the New York Times. He said you had no right to keep history from people.’

  ‘Oh yeah. History:’

  ‘He said you admitted you had them by refusing to give them to him.’

  My scotch was gone but I grinned at the ice cubes. ‘I told him if he didn’t get off my lawn I’d stuff them so far up his ass he’d be eating her word.’

  ‘Then you do have them.’

  With nothing to say, I rattled the cubes against my teeth. This was no good, I thought. You could get to enjoy this. The fencing with her. Even the fencing with myself, knowing who she was, not quite letting myself know. Like one of those relationships where you spar about sex so much it becomes impossible, the sparring becomes everything. What was I going to do about her? that was the question. I thunked the empty glass onto the mantelpiece.

  ‘It’s like I said,’ I told her. ‘I don’t need my life interpreted for me. It bugs me. I’ve resigned from the Zeitgeist. Okay?’ I wanted to leave it at that but, ah, bitter, bitter, bitter boy; on I went. ‘I was there – you’re right. And somehow, call me shallow, but I missed seeing the heroic artist unafraid of the terror by night or the sculptor shaping the chaos of the twentieth century and – hey, maybe I just don’t get it, but I didn’t even see any phallic elm trees, silly me.’ I managed to shut it off. ‘Ach! Have you got a car somewhere? I’ll give you a lift.’

  ‘But I’m not a biographer.’

  ‘That’s right. You’re Annie Truitt. Not that Annie Truitt, this one. Only not. Have I got it now?’

  She was having a problem hiding that smile of hers. I guess she was enjoying it too, all this sparkling dialogue. But she soldiered on. ‘Listen, Mr Bernard,’ she said. Leaning forward earnestly now with a Listen-Mr-Bernard sort of expression worked onto her tilted face. She rested her crossed arms on her knees in a manner meant to be engaging. ‘I understand it must, like, hurt you to talk about these things. And I don’t mean to be mysterious. It’s just … Well, I’m not supposed to be here. Okay?’

  Her father again, I thought – and then wondered if I’d muttered it aloud.

  ‘And I need to know, that’s all,’ she went on anyway. ‘It’s not, like, so ridiculous or anything. She’s an inspiration. A lot of people say so. I mean, when someone dies, a famous artist – especially, for me, a woman artist, you know – and they die and no one knows who they are and then their art, you know, becomes recognized, becomes famous …’ I was nodding now: yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Well, it’s, like, inspiring. You know? It is. I mean, it’s like … she didn’t die. Like … her art lives on. Or something. And so, like, if you’re going through a hard time, you can think to yourself well, this happened to this other person too, you know, so it’s not so bad. You can think: well, look at Agnes Mallory.’ A noise aloud from me: exasperation, disbelief: gah! ‘Well, you can,’ she said. ‘It can teach you, you know, how to live. And I happen to be having kind of a hard time with that right now. How to live. So, like, I need to know.’ She gave a simple, ingenuous shrug. Was there no bottom to the girl’s performance?

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘The Easter story of art.’

  ‘What? I don’t …’

  ‘An artist dies obscure, or kills herself or whatever? And then her work is resurrected and she ascends into the heaven of our admiration and the faithful learn how to live? Horseshit. She just be dead, kiddo. All of them. John Keats. Jesus Christ. A million and a half murdered children. Dead, dead, dead. That’s the only thing you need to know. That oughta be the headline every fucking morning.’

  Anne Truitt (the younger) closed her eyes tight and opened them as if she were having an hallucination and wanted it to go away. ‘Uh – what murdered children?’ she said. ‘Like, what are we talking about?’

  I laughed. I put my hand to my forehead, dragged it
down over my nose, over my mouth, wiping my lips dry. Trapped in the cinema of her soul. One of those chubby-but-hardboiled character actors was going to play me, I could tell. With a gravelly voice and narrowed, twinkling eyes. How could I tell her this story, if she wasn’t wise enough to despair?