Agnes Mallory Read online

  ‘Car!’ Dave called from the outfield.

  ‘Hey, Harry!’ said Freddy. ‘Isn’t that your Dad?’

  I looked over my shoulder. I saw the widely spaced headlights of my father’s Cadillac. He had the dome light flicked on inside so I could make him out behind the wheel. He beckoned to me. The headlights went off, then on again, then off, then on.

  ‘Now I just want to tell you one thing,’ my father said as we drove along. He was speaking in his Serious Voice. ‘Your grandfather is very ill.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Well, I just want to tell you.’

  ‘Well, I know,’ I said.

  I slumped in my seat blowing long breaths from puffed cheeks. Tapping out a rhythm on my folded baseball mitt. We were zipping quickly along the road to the train station, a wider road than most where the huge Caddy could flex. Outside, in the dark, in the fall wind, the waggling fingers of the trees had a nicely spooky effect. The yellow lights of houses at suppertime seemed very cozy as we passed them by.

  ‘Well, he might look different, that’s all,’ my father said. ‘I don’t want you to be shocked or to say anything that might hurt his feelings.’

  ‘I won’t, okay? I won’t,’ I said.

  He made me very uncomfortable, my father. Just his presence. His aura of obscure misery. The sloped shoulders, the podgy middle, the thin, patrician face beginning to grow saggy and foreign and Jewish. Even the way his skin smelled, even the hair on the back of his hands as he gripped the wheel. And whatever it was about his life that made him this way, I was always aware that I could never make it up to him.

  Tonight, he was making me even more jittery than usual: the way he was making a state occasion of this. Coming to get me this way, speaking now in portents. I didn’t know my grandfather all that well anyway. I’d only seen him once since he’d moved to town, several months ago. Before that, once or twice each year, he had come out from Brooklyn. Patted me on the head. Brought me silver dollars. I had a stack of them on my shelf next to my president milk bottle tops and my Martian invasion cards.

  Gazing out the window at the eerie trees and the homey suburban windows shining in the night, I thought about him now. Grandpa. I thought about him looking ‘different’, being ‘very ill’. It made me nervous, yes, but I was excited too. I had to keep my face turned away from my father to hide my smile of anticipation. I had never seen real sickness before. It might be neat, it might be gruesome. I could already imagine myself casually tossing off gory details to my friends.

  The anticipation swelled as we arrived at the end of the road, at the railway station. It was fueled by the sight of Grandpa’s building. Ours was a well-to-do Long Island town of stalwart houses and imperious lawns. There weren’t many apartment houses around, hardly any. But there was a block-long collection of them here across the street from the station. The Colony Arms, they were called, or the Estates or the Towers or something like that. Clean, old brick buildings with courtyards and gardens – but foreign and even forbidding to young Harry, who hadn’t been in such a place since I was three. There were great thuddings in my chest as we got out of the car, as we walked side by side through the lobby, rode silently up in the elevator, as we went down the hallway together toward Grandpa’s apartment. A ghost house journey, it seemed to me, down this thin corridor, toward that closed door. Amber lanterns burning dull on the wall. Custard wallpaper with port paisley flock; burgundy carpet that muffled your footsteps – uncanny colors at once posh and sepulchral. And smells; there were smells – or I imagined smells: slack skin and old men’s potions, cobwebs, dust, orange photographs, porcelain shepherd boys from another country, the old country.

  Now – creak – the ghost house door was opening – my father had a key. And he was there, Grandpa, in his big chair, in the circle of light from a standing lamp, with the TV glow flickering on the carpet beneath him but not quite reaching his slippered feet. My father had not exaggerated. It was a creepy thrill to see him all right. He looked like a marionette collapsed in the plush chair; a homemade marionette, just matchsticks held together with twine. And the skull sort of jogged up when he saw us, and the arms bounced and danced just like a puppet’s pulled by strings.

  ‘Harry … Harry … Oh!’ He was so happy to see me. ‘Come give your old Grandpa a kiss.’

  I ran right to him. I was a Good Guy, I knew how to be brave. I leaned into his lap as the stick arms flopped around me. I kissed him a good one on his rough, moldering cheek.

  ‘Harry …’ he said.

  I smiled up into his rheumy eyes. ‘How are you, Grand-pa?’

  ‘How am I?’ He beamed down at me. He gave a phlegmy laugh. ‘Listen to him. How am I? What a good boy. How should your old Grandpa be? He’s great. He’s never better. You’re a loving boy. You know that? Huh? So – what? You do well in school, Harry?’

  ‘Uh … yeah. Pretty good, I guess.’

  ‘Sure. Heh, heh. A smart boy this Harry. Eh, Michael?’

  My father had moved to the television and turned it off. He didn’t answer. I don’t think he’d heard. He was gazing at my grandfather across the dim room with a kind of vague, angry wonder. What was he thinking? He was thinking: An astronomer! That would be my guess. Because he remembered the old man as he used to be. Stolid and imposing; dark, brown, hairy arms pressing out of his plaid short sleeves; a head hewn out of stone, jagged and Moses-browed, the deep eyes glistering with wisdom and necessity. Sneering at him. An astronomer! Mr Big Shot, Mr Intellect. Who becomes an astronomer and makes a living? A lawyer. A lawyer can always study the stars. What does an astronomer know about the law?

  ‘Very smart boy,’ Grandpa repeated. He pressed my head so close to his bathrobe that I saw the green fabric blur. He clamped his flaccid lips shut over a cough. He coughed harder and had to grab a handkerchief off the nearby stand with his free hand to wipe the spittle from his mouth. ‘Heh heh,’ he said, patting my shoulder. He noticed my jacket now. ‘Baseball. Uh? You play baseball, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Uh huh.’ My smile was getting a tad painful about now, but I couldn’t smell him anymore and that was something.

  ‘A regular Babe Ruth, right?’ he said. ‘A Lou – what’s his name? – Garnig? Gellig? He died, I don’t know. You hit a lot of home runs, Harry?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘What? Hanh?’

  ‘I’M OKAY!’

  ‘He’s okay. Sure you are. Heh heh. A good boy. A good boy.’

  He nodded for a while, his skull leaden, the string jerking it up and down. My father stood slumped by the TV set. Contemplating us, his hands in his pockets. Thinking: My life! Oh-ho, my life! Or words to that effect. Remembering a woman now. By way of submerging himself in this oceanic emotion of loss, remembering a woman he had loved, the only woman ever. He had driven her home one day from the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. He was twenty-two, just back from manning a desk through the War. He had talked to her about the stars, about how much he loved the stars. He had told her about his mother’s finger pointing out the pictures of them in A Boy’s Book Of The Constellations. The flesh tones of the naked Gemini, the scarlet skirt of Andromeda, the silver flash of Perseus’ sword – all gleaming in a Brooklyn of brownstones, in the heavy velvet atmosphere of their rooms above his father’s pawn shop.

  Grandpa noticed him now, standing there. ‘How are you, Michael?’ he whispered to him over my head.

  My father blinked. ‘Hm? Oh. Good. I’m good, Dad. I’m really …’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘I’m really good!’ he shouted. ‘It looks like …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Looks like I may have a chance to run for the Planning Board.’

  ‘Eh? The Planning Board?’

  ‘Yeah, I may be running for it!’ my father cried out.

  ‘The Planning Board …’ Grandpa went on nodding, his head slowly dropping lower, lower. ‘The Planning Board. Work. Eh. You can’t always think about work all the time, Michael. Re
member that, Harrela.’ He regarded me heavily, his chin nearly grazing the grizzled wedge of flesh above his robe. ‘Children. Children are the important thing. Remember that. Heh heh heh.’ He laughed breathlessly, giving me a little shake. He coughed deep in his chest. ‘What a good boy,’ he said.

  We drove home a different way. Down Middle Neck Road, the town’s main drag, bright with streetlamps and traffic. The card shops, drug stores, clothing stores were all mostly closed already. But the deli door was still swinging out and in, and the two movie theaters with their marquis confronting each other across the street were selling tickets for their last shows of Mary Poppins and James Bond. We went more slowly now than we had coming. There were stoplights and narrow stretches and lines of parked cars. And other Cadillacs too, coming at us, squeezing us over. All Cadillacs. Jews still didn’t buy Mercedes back then.

  ‘You all right?’ my father asked me. Glancing over, working his sad jaw.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Steak, I think. Did it frighten you – seeing Grandpa?’

  ‘Nah.’

  I fiddled absently with the new silver dollar in my fingers. I looked out the window as the big car cornered onto Piccadilly Road.

  Dad meant to go on being fatherly, to draw out my feelings on death, reassure me on the subject of illness and so forth, but his mind drifted. There were few streetlights here and the shadows enfolded him, and thickened between us, and in the dark – the sad mouth working – he began to consider himself and became absorbed. He was thirty-eight, he thought. Thirty-eight years old and he had lied to impress his father. That crap about running for the Planning Board. Bill Farber, one of his partners at the law firm, had mentioned the possibility to him. But that was it, that was all. He wasn’t running for anything. He’d lied to win some praise, he’d demeaned himself. And his father – Work! You can’t always think about work! Dismissing him. Just the same as always. The same massive, beetle-cragged, ham-handed, bouldery, sarcastic tyrant. Trying to look benign in his cancer costume, behind his cancer mask. Holding me in his lap like that. Children are the important thing. As if he had ever taken him on his lap and kvelled so. Astronomy! What a smart boy! What a good boy! A regular Albert what’s-his, with the frizzy hair, Einstone …

  We drove up the hill toward the next corner. In that last moment before he fell in love for the second time in his life, my father’s hands were wrapped so tightly around the Caddy’s steering wheel, his teeth were clenched together so hard that it was as if a bolt had shot through him, a thunderbolt of rage. And when the rage let him go, it let him go and go, down into the tarriest depths of his loss and his longing.

  What am I doing? he thought. Aching, aching. Am I crazy? Why am I torturing myself with all this old business? He really didn’t know the answer; it was too big, it was right in front of him. Thinking of that drive home from the boardwalk. He had never gone out with the girl again. She had never answered his calls. He had even humiliated himself, gone to her house to find her … Why am I bringing all this up again now?

  As for me, I was still staring out the window just then. Twiddling my silver dollar. Sometimes, at home, watching television, say, I would daydream that I had magic powers. The show would be boring and I would think: I’ll change the channel without moving from this spot, I’ll change it with my mind – twink. At night, awake in bed, I would go farther, mentally moving any object I pleased, controlling events around me with alternating wisdom and mischief until the entire elementary school became my private Punch and Judy Show. Ira Wertzer would be vanquished, Andrea Fiedler would be in my thrall, Miss Truxell, my fifth grade teacher, would be kowtowing before my superior powers …

  And now, in the car, gazing out the window, I was dreaming that I would come to Grandpa. I would sneak from my house one night through a downstairs window, I would walk the miles to the Colony Arms. I was working out every step of it, building it logically to the dramatic climax. I would stand before Grandpa’s big chair. With my brow heroically contorted, I would raise my hands. I would zap Grandpa with an extra-super mental blast. At the very touch of it, he would well from his big chair like an inflated bop toy. Harry! Harry! I’m healed! I’m well! Oh! What a good boy! The entire fifth grade would rise up and call me blessed. Andrea would have her hands clasped, her lips parted. Miss Truxell would be on her very knees …

  But wait, the car had stopped. We’d come to the corner, to a stop sign. We’d stopped and now we were just sitting there, the engine idling. I turned to my father.

  ‘What’s up, Dad?’

  He was looking my way, his face in shadow. The downward lines of his features, the melancholy glint of his eyes, were focused on my window, through my window. I turned back to follow his gaze.

  There was nothing particular out there that I could see. A white house on a little lawn. A line of trees rising behind it, branches swaying in the wind. The downstairs windows were cosily lit. And through one window, the one to my left, you could see a ways into a small den or parlor. You could see a woman in there, reading a book to her daughter. They were sitting on a sofa together. The mother looked very domestic and appealing with her hair tied back and her lips moving and her eyes serenely on the page. The daughter, a brown-haired girl about my age, sat beside her with her hands folded passively in her lap. She was staring off into space very solemnly.

  ‘Sorry,’ my father murmured. ‘I – I just wanted to see something about that property.’

  He stepped on the gas and we drove on up the road as I tried to pick up the thread of my fantasy.

  And that was the first time I saw Evelyn Sole – and her daughter; Agnes.

  How do you know? That would be her first question. This damp little visitor of mine, my mystery guest. If I even began to tell her, if I even tried to make a start – how do you know? she would ask me. What your father was thinking about. Or what your mother was afraid of, or what happened to Agnes that last night behind the closed door, or any of the pieces of it that had nothing to do with you? Because she was a kid – my lady of the root cellar – she was seventeen, eighteen. Life was still such a riddle to her. How do you know what other people were feeling or thinking about? Did your father break down in tears in his old age and confess all? Did your dying mother draw you to her bedside with papery hands, croaking, ‘I have to tell you, my … son … everything …’? And no, as a matter of fact, they didn’t. My father till he died last year never let fly a peep outside the standard paternal self-justifications. And Mom’s doing quite well in the complex, thank you, and can even carry on a rational conversation if you avoid talking about government conspiracies or the mafia’s role in the Kennedy assassination or the nature of love.

  Well, then, you’re just making it up, she would say. You’re just turning people into characters in your head. It’s all just about you really, that’s all. Isn’t that the kind of thing kids are always saying? When they aren’t drooling drug-sluggish monosyllables and listening to loud, bad music and blowing their brainless politics out their ass. How do you know? If the chair still exists when you turn away? If the universe is a grain of sand on a policeman’s hat? If a great poem is great? If the truth is true? Because they’re kids. Because they think all kinds of things are possible. Instead of only a few things. Maybe even only the one thing.

  Oh, and all right, because, of course, I don’t know. Some of it, much of it, all of it. I never knew. My parents sure never told me. They never told me anything, not if it smacked of human emotion, of suffering and pain. My mother’s two miscarriages, which left me an only child? Never heard of them. My father’s disappointments in local politics? I simply wasn’t informed. I had a dog when I was seven. Clancy. He got sick; they didn’t tell me. They had to put him down; I never knew. I just came home one day and – whammo – he was gone. Like walking into a wall.

  But then; ah then, the things I understood, the gamut of things. Lying awake at night, wandering alone by day in the backyard where the ter
rier and I had roamed together. Imagining the trips to the vet while I was out, the whispered parental conferences behind my back, the drive in the station wagon down the last mile … I saw it all – all of it – then.

  And likewise, that winter – all that time between the night we drove past the Sole house and the evening I saw Agnes again – I built my merry igloos in the snow, I had my snowball fights, I engineered great tunnels beneath the wind-hammered drifts – and Dad watched Grandpa die and never said a word about it. He stood by the old man’s bedside. He squelched his horror at the lung-retching agonies. He wrung his heart dry through the glazed, uncommunicative end. And never told me. No one ever told me. My parents boxed that old man up and buried him and didn’t mention a thing, didn’t break it to me till months and months afterward. All that winter went by in ignorance – and then suddenly – whammo – without understanding why – I met Agnes, and the rest of it happened.

  And that’s how I know.

  That day – the day I met Agnes – was an April day. A Friday, with spring just coming. The weather, I remember, was incredibly fine, the air wonderfully sweet – it was the kind of weather a sloppy drunk remembers when he maunders about the past. The sky was blue, the breezes were cool and wistful. I ate breakfast in our back room, surrounded by high sliding windows slid wide, and the air wafted in through the screens, smelling of the grass, the backyard, our cherry tree.

  My father had already gone to work. My mother sat at the foot of the table across from me, working on the Times crossword puzzle and her greater familial mysteries as well. I was prattling at her through gobfuls of Special K. Gabbling all the more urgently as I could see she was distracted. Telling her stories, mostly, of my courage and integrity. Of my stand for justice against the fire-breathing Miss Truxell, my raw bravery against the bully Ira Wertzer and his gang. They were, all these yarns, about half-true, and I knew she only about half-believed them. But it was imperative somehow that they be told, that she hear them. I needed her to know what a good, what an honest guy I was. So I talked fast, embellishing with a broad stroke, as breakfast was only a matter of minutes with me, and childhood only a matter of years.