Agnes Mallory (10 page)

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.'

‘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?'

My sugar sank – and, before I even realized why or what had been said or how it poisoned everything, my little Harry heart slowly started going down with it, glub, glub, glub, Captain …

‘Oh well,' said Aunt May, sighing like an ingenue, ‘I guess you can never bring back the past.'

My first reaction to an emotional blow was always indifference. Kind of a mental anesthetic, like when a dying man has visions of a passage into divine radiance rather than, say, a clown face shrieking, ‘
So long! You're ceasing to exist!
' Whenever cause for anguish struck me, I'd be as if immersed into a solution of indifference and then drawn out only slowly, maybe over days, into what you might call a general atmosphere of pain. By the time the last of the indifference evaporated, I would usually have lost the connection between my misery and the original source of it: I would just feel bad somehow – bad for no reason or for some other reason, the wrong reason. Camp, it was this time. From that breakfast onward, I began to grow depressed because I didn't want to go away to camp.

Aunt May left us, but the house did not seem our own again, not to me. To me, it just seemed empty and odd, with the floral smell of her lingering, like the music of her voice, like the soggy nylons on my bathroom towel rack that no one removed for days. For days, I wandered through the rooms, all fraught with woe, shuffling after my mother, repeating, ‘I don't wanna go to camp,' over and over again. My mornings in front of the TV grew longer. I could zombie-glide right through the game shows sometimes,
The Price Is Right
and
Concentration
, both of which I hated. ‘Harry, would you turn off that TV and go outside,' my mother would say. And I would roll onto my back and stare up at her with hollow eyes. And whine at her: ‘I don't wanna go to camp.' Before she could bully me into my clothes it was nearly lunchtime, and when she hurled me outdoors, I would linger in the backyard like my own ghost, haunting her with an I-don't-wanna-go-to-camp stare through the kitchen casements. Harry's Raiders were soon disbanded on account of this depression. How long could they sit in the womblike dark of the lumber pile with their fearless leader sunk in dejected reverie?

And as for Agnes – I did not see her. In all that time, that whole last week. I didn't understand that she was at the heart of this, I just didn't feel like going over there anymore, that's all. Sometimes, some afternoons, I would wander aimlessly up toward Piccadilly Road, but I was never abuzz with the old expectations. I was steeped instead in fantasy: King Harry at the Judgement Day, his dread sceptre tilting left or right, the naked women wailing in their terror, and flailed across the tush, many of them, to insure obedience or simply for good measure not to mention that it was such breathless fun. And then, somewhere along the road, at the top of Wooley's Lane usually, before the curve, before the ghost house, I would stop. I would look around me and find myself cotton-headed with dreams and out-of-sorts. I did not want to see her; even the thought of it depressed me even more. I wanted to go home, to spend these precious moments of the fleeting July with that dear, dear mother from whom I would too soon be cruelly sundered.

So, shrugging, sighing, miserable – God, miserable – I would turn again and head back down the hill, angrily kicking stones, angrily dreaming, wasting what could have been our last days together, Agnes's and mine, and laying – or so I tell myself on those nights I want to rip my own head off in paroxysms of regret – the groundwork of our lifelong ruination.