by Mary Gordon
Ag was a disappointment, for she was the only woman any of them knew who lived in sin, and she made such a dowdy appearance. Really, Nora felt, and anyone with sense would have agreed with her, if you were going to be somebody's mistress, you should look— how? You should be overdressed and overly made-up with loud dyed hair that was itself a challenge, a large bosom and a shocking, sticking-out behind, a waist you drew attention to with tight, cinched belts. You should smoke cigarettes and leave them in the ashtray marked with your dark lipstick, piles of them so people would count them when you were gone, and make remarks. But Agnes looked, Nora had always thought, like a wet bird, with her felt navy blue hat in winter, her straw navy-blue hat in summer, with her damp hands that she kept putting to her face as if she were afraid that if she didn't keep checking, she'd find her face had fallen off.
Sometimes, though, the difference between Ag's fate and her appearance raised in Nora a wild hope. Ag looked as damaged as Nora with her one short leg knew herself to be. But Ag provided a suggestion that it could be possible to live a life of passion nonetheless. How could this be anything to Nora but a solace? At thirteen, she dreamed identically to her girlfriends. Rudolph Valentino would carry her off somewhere, his eyes gone vague and menacing with love. He would hold her at arm's length, staring at her face, unable to believe in his good fortune. They would lie down together on soft sand. He would not have noticed her leg, and when she tactfully brought it up he would laugh, that laugh that could have been a villain's but was not, and say, “It is as nothing with a love like ours.”
Sometimes in the middle of this vision, Nora grew embarrassed at herself and angry, and her anger grew up like a bare spiked tree against an evil sky; it grew and spread until it became the only feature in the landscape. “Fool,” she called herself, for everybody knew that no one would forget her leg, it was the first thing anybody saw about her, it was the thing the merciful looked past, remarking on her hair, her eyes; the thing that most people could not get past, so that they did not look at her. She would never be beloved, carried off. She would take a commercial course, forget the academic that the teachers told her she belonged in, forget that stuff, for she would always be alone, and when her parents died she would live in the house alone. She would always support herself so she would never have to rely on her four brothers. At such moments, a last resort but one she dared to trust, Ag's face would swim up among the others in her mind. For Nora knew her uncle Des could have had anybody, but he'd stuck with Ag. Ten years he'd stuck with her, and all that time she'd asked for nothing. Supported him and said okay when he said he would never marry, that he had no patience for the priests and couldn't be tied down. Still he stayed with her, and the example of Ag and her uncle suggested to Nora that if she could bring a man to see that she would ask for nothing, she too could have a passionate life.
But in the end, there was no comfort in it, for the life so obviously weakened Ag and made her hungry for respectability. Ag was no help to her, and Nora grew resentful of the cruelly false hint Ag did not know she proffered. She could only just bring herself to be civil to Ag, and she allowed her parents to believe that she judged Ag's morals as harshly as her aunt Bridget did.
Now she felt bad about not having liked Agnes, and it was typical of Agnes, she was great at making everyone feel bad. She came into a room like the end of the party: no one could enjoy themselves with her around; nobody could relax. She should have seen it and kept away. But she didn't see it, of course, and kept on coming. You could say, perhaps, that it was Uncle Des's fault: he should never have brought her in the first place, acting as if it was respectable. But she came more than he did: three times to his one, although the sisters always knocked themselves out asking him to come and knocked themselves out when he got there.
Nora knew her uncle Desmond was a bootlegger. She'd heard the word before. It was a queer word, she thought, “bootlegger,” it sounded innocent like “shoemaker” or “fireman,” far more innocent than names of other jobs: “chauffeur,” “handyman,” that men in her family without much comment seemed to hold. But because of Des there were odd night stirrings, brisk events involving whispers and rushed trips downstairs to the coal cellar and then up again and downstairs in a greater rush, and Nora being told to keep the children back, but told not one thing else. And then the arguments, the terrible dangerous anger when her father came home and was told: Des had to hide some of his liquor in the cellar, he could be killed or be arrested, there was not another blessed place.
Edmund Derency paced, he literally pulled his hair, he told his wife her brother was a thief, a wastrel, and he didn't give a tinker's damn for her or for her family, and they would lose it all, lose everything for him, and because of his damn laziness and trickery it all would go for nothing, the trip over and the years of work so they could have what they had now: the house, a girl in high school, jobs in the government you kept forever unless they found out about something like this, and then it was all gone.
Look at the house, Kathleen, he said, take a good look at it, remember it so you can think of it when us and all the kids are living on the street because of your damn brother and his damn fast tricks.
But then it was over, Des was back with money in his pocket and a gift for everyone, a radio big as a piece of furniture that even her father could not resist. Nor could he keep up his grudge against Des, spectacularly handsome in his shirtsleeves, the sight of him a gift, like a day at the beach for all the children issued fresh, as if it was the thing they all deserved, they knew it now, but had been all along afraid to wish for. When Des put his hands on Ed Derency's shoulders and said, “God, Edmund, I'd have shot myself in the foot rather than do this to you and Kath. If there had been a God's blessed way out of it. But they were on my neck, and I don't need to tell you of all people what that could have meant.”
“Not another word, Des. What else would family be for? God knows they're trouble enough at the best of times, if you take my meaning.”
There were the two of them, drinking her uncle Desmond's whiskey, the very bottles Nora's father had threatened to smash up with an axe, winking, their arms around each other, men together, as if women and all that had to do with them— the children and the houses and the family meals— were just a bad joke that had been forced upon their kind. Nora hated them for that, she hated what was clearer to her daily: the adult world of false seeming, lies and promises you couldn't trust an inch. There was Des, just having made a joke, or laughed at one, about the weight of women on the world, singing “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” while her mother played the piano for him, tears dropping on her fingers while she played. And the aunts crying in their chairs and Agnes sitting there patting her eyes with a twisted-up handkerchief as if she were afraid that if she made a noise or if her tears fell on the furniture she would be a nuisance. Nora hardened her heart against her uncle, against all of them, and turned away when he sang the song he used to sing to her when she was little: “With someone like you, a pal good and true / I'd like to leave them all behind.”
She thought with anger how she once had loved it, what a fool she'd been, a fool he'd made her, and the family'd allowed. He knew that he had lost her, and he made his eyes go sad. “There's no more time for your old uncle now you're a young lady, is there?”
How could anybody look so sad? He needed all her comfort. She was about to say, “Oh, Uncle Des,” and put her arms around him, smell the smell of his tobacco and the starched collar he always wore. But something in his look gave him away, some insecurity. He looked around the room, hedging his bets, looking toward the younger children, giving up: they were all boys. But in that moment he had lost her, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I have lots to do. With school, you know, and all.”
Afterward she was glad she had done it. For that was the last time he had come with Agnes; it all happened not long after that: he must have known. Must have known when they made him sing “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”
a second time, and he looked at all of them, especially at Agnes though, and said, bringing his fist down on the radio, “We'll all go back. I swear it to you. It's the one reason I'm in this rotten business. If I make a killing, it's back home in triumph for the lot of us. First class. We'll turn them green.”
He hadn't meant a word of it. Two weeks later he was on the train to California with his brand-new wife.
“Well, it's ridiculous, he's never even brought the girl around. How could he have just upped and married somebody we've never met? You must have read it wrong, the letter. Let me have a look at it,” said Bridget.
She read the piece of paper— hotel stationery— as if she were a starving person looking in a pile of rot for one intact kernel. Then, Nora could see, she hated herself for her fool's work and looked around her for someone to blame.
“ ‘Twas fast, like, you'd have to say that,” Nettie said timidly. “Perhaps they had to.”
“I'd say Des would know better than that,” said Edmund Derency, “I'd say that for him.”
The sisters turned upon him then, their eyes hard with the fury of shared blood.
“You never knew him,” Kathleen said with tight lips to her husband. “There's something he's keeping from us. The woman could be sick, dreadfully sick. Or dying, and he wouldn't want the three of us to know.”
Ed Derency threw down his newspaper. “She's a rich girl whose family threw her out for marrying a greenhorn. That's as sick as she is.”
“And how will he support a wife in California? He'd got nothing put away. Too generous,” said Kathleen.
“And Agnes Martin to count on with the money she got wiping the noses of the Yankee brats,” said Edmund.
“She worked for the finest families in New York, Ed Derency, don't you forget it,” Bridget said.
“Since when are you on Ag's side?” he asked.
“What will happen to Ag now?” said Nettie.
“I hate to think of it,” said Edmund.
“No one's asking you to think of it,” Bridget said. “It's none of your affair. Someone should phone her.”
“I'll telephone her,” said Kathleen, rising as if she'd waited to be asked. “I'll invite her for Sunday dinner.”
Nora ran upstairs to the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and ran the water in the sink as loudly as she could. She dreaded the thought of Ag and wished her mother had the courage to cut her off. There was nothing they could do for her, nothing that anyone could do. She hoped Ag knew that and would have the sense to stay away. But then she knew Ag wouldn't, and her vision of Ag sitting in the living room and hoping for a scrap of news hardened Nora's heart. She'd be damned if she'd be nice to Ag; if Ag had pride, she'd stay away. But if she'd had the pride, she'd never have taken up with Uncle Desmond and embarrassed everyone and put herself in this position so she would be hurt. She'd be better off dead, Nora said to herself, enjoying her cruel face in the mirror.
When Ag arrived, she looked no different; if she'd spent nights weeping, it had left no mark. She talked of Desmond's marriage, his departure, reasonably, as if it were something they had discussed together and agreed to.
“He pointed out to me,” Ag said, “that really he had no choice but to marry her. ‘She's not like you and me, Ag,’ he said. ‘She was brought up with the silver spoon. I couldn't do it to her, leave her in the lurch. She stood up to her parents for me. She lost everything. She wasn't like the two of us. She really had something to lose.’”
Ag said this proudly, with a pride Nora had never seen in her when she'd had Desmond actually with her. And Nora hated her because Ag didn't see how she'd been taken in. Desmond had gone off with another woman, had given her everything that Ag had wanted from him, and Ag acted as if he'd given her a gift. Disgust welled up in Nora, and at the same time fear; she wanted Ag to know what had happened to her, but she didn't want anyone to say it. She was petrified every second that Bridget would open up her mouth.
But the visit passed with not much more than the usual discomfort; Ag had always been so troublesome a presence that her new estate hardly made a difference.
“Do you think we've seen the back of her at last?” asked Bridget.
“There's no one else for her on holidays and things. In charity, I'd say we'd have to ask her,” Kathleen said.
“Charity my foot,” said Ed.
“You talk big, Ed Derency, but you'd be the last to turn her out. Or have her sitting by herself on Christmas.”
“It's just February, Kath. Let's see what the year brings,” said Nora's father, but Nora couldn't tell whether or not he meant it kindly. She could see that they felt relieved that Agnes hadn't come apart over Desmond's leaving; their relief had made them quiet. They discussed Ag's folly, her gullible swallowing of the story Des had fed her, less than they might have, or than they'd discussed anything else she'd ever done. They were quiet because they were cowards, and they couldn't say a word about what had happened without putting Desmond in a light which even their love couldn't render flattering.
Agnes phoned whenever Desmond wrote her.
“Well, at least he keeps in touch with her, that's something,” Kathleen said.
It was from Ag and not from Desmond that they learned Desmond's wife had had a baby. Desmond's letters were about weather, about his new job in a haberdasher's, about how a customer who worked in Hollywood had said that Des should have a screen test. Not a word about his wife, as if she were a temporary measure, and the important things in life were weather, scenery, the movie industry, the cut of clothes. It was only from Ag that they learned how he met his wife. Des was her father's bootlegger; her father was a big lawyer in New jersey. Tenafly, Agnes had said. No one could tell Nora how it happened: that he went from chatting the girl up, leaning his foot on the running board of some big car, and then the next thing, they were on the train to California. Was it that it was obvious to everyone but her how it had happened? Or was it that she was the only one who had the sense to know that the time in between was the real clue, the real important time, the time that held what she and Agnes needed to know: what had happened that had made Des give this woman easily the thing Ag wanted and would never get, or ask for, or after a while think of as any possibility at all.
Agnes was cheerful at the news of Desmond's baby's birth. She had become, Nora could see, more family to him than his own family. Her new responsibility gave her a pride of place that she had never had, as if she'd landed a good job at last and reveled in the title. Nora saw that all this made the sisters hate her, and she knew that Agnes didn't have the sense to see. Proudly, without apology, she brought them news of him as pretext for a visit. She came often, for Desmond called her often for advice: she was a children's nurse, and Des said, Ag reported proudly, his wife had never been around a baby in her life.
“I even wondered if I should go out there. Lend a hand, you know. Poor thing, she sounds so overwhelmed. You see it all the time. She's very young, you know.”
Bridget put her full teacup heavily down in her saucer. They all knew she was about to say something terrible, but for this once no one tried to shift the conversation to distract or stop her. Nora saw that they wanted Bridget to do the dreadful thing, to hurt Ag, that they— her mother and Nettie, with their famous reputations, in her mother's case for being kind, and in her aunt's for being too cheerful to think a bad thing about anyone— wanted now for Agnes to be hurt. Nora saw that only she did not want it, but she was afraid, not strong, a child, and to prevent it you had to be stronger than all that hating of the three of them, than all that wish to hurt. She saw them look at Bridget, and saw her take it as a sign.
“She's young, all right, but you're not, Agnes. Old enough, I'd say, to know better. Stay out of where you're not wanted. The minute she finds out about you, she'll stop you herself. Have a little pride for once in your life. Tell him you're not his free advice bureau. Tell him to pay some greenhorn girl himself.”
After Bridget had said what they ha
d wanted her to say, Nora could see that they were sorry. She saw Nettie desperately looking at Kathleen to say something to smooth things over.
“Of course she didn't really mean that she was going to go out there, Bridget. It was just a way of talking, like. A way of saying that she wished them well.”
Ag neither confirmed Kathleen's words nor denied them: she had sense enough to let the matter drop, to let Bridget sniff silently, convinced that she was right, but too much of a lady to press home her point.
In the end what bothered Nora most was how right Bridget had been. Desmond's wife found out about Ag and brought all communication to an end.
She had come upon a letter Des was writing to Agnes. “She's awfully pretty, Ag, but very young and doesn't understand a thing. It's very often now I long for our good old chats.” Underneath this, which had been written in Des's formal copperplate, was scrawled in a back-slanting script: “I have found this in my husband's desk, and having informed him of my discovery, he has agreed that from this moment all communication between you two must cease. There is a child to be considered after all.” And she had signed her name: Harriet Browne O'Reilley. Underneath her signature, as if she were continuing a conversation, Ag had scratched: “This is the thing I cannot bear.” And then she hanged herself.
Nora made herself imagine it: the letter with the three different handwritings, the things that Ag had done between the time she'd put the pen down and the time she'd tied the dressing-gown sash around her neck and kicked the chair away. She imagined Ag had done some ordinary things: made tea, perhaps, or washed out stockings. She knew Ag had never been upset or agitated: killing herself must have seemed to her simply the next thing to be done, like boarding a bus or shopping for a pair of shoelaces. “This is how it is,” she must have said. “And I will do this now.” Nora could see just how it was, Agnes's small efficient movements canceling her pain. Each night Nora would think of Ag before she went to sleep. She didn't want anyone else to think about her. She resented that she had not been the one to find her. It should have been Nora, not a neighbor breaking down the door with the police, afraid because they hadn't seen Ag leaving the apartment. It should have been herself, not the police, who'd called up Des in California. It should have been she, not her mother, who took the instructions from Des about the disposition of the body. No, not that: Des should not have been consulted. Nora should have made the plans. She would have stood up to the priest who refused Ag a Christian burial. She would have made up a story to fool him; she would have found a way to hide the circumstances of Ag's death. She would have seen to it that Ag had a proper funeral, that everyone came to pay respects and brought in Mass cards and took holy pictures with Ag's name on the back of them to put into their prayer books so that they'd remember her at Mass.