Agnes Mallory (2 page)

The cold marched over me like a parade and the icy rain stung me. The wind went wild in the tortuous dead trees on the opposite hill. There was turbulent swaying of branches; howling, eeriness; the whole horror-show effect
.

‘
For Christ's sake,' I shouted, ‘you wanna catch pneumonia?
'

All nature did not exactly pause at the sound of my voice. The rain seemed to grow stronger, in fact. It beat a savage tattoo on my forehead and cheeks. And the air continued freezing. But, for a second or two, the winds did settle a bit. They quit their howling and seemed to skulk away into the forest depths. The trees on the opposite slope fell hangdog over the ruined root cellar. I spat a cube of hail into the night and squinted at the darkness. A moment passed
.

‘
Goddamnit,' I muttered
.

Then, slowly, out she came. Out of the woods. Side-footing down the hill. Crossing the street – checking both ways for traffic first, the good girl. Stepping into the cone of light from the open door. A sullen mess she was. Her down vest plastered to her. Her fuzzy muffs drooping with rain. Hail sparkling in her hair and melting on her cheeks like tears
.

Man, she was young. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – definitely no older than that. So what did she have to come here for? What could any of it matter to her? What could I matter? I was out of it Agnes Mallory now. I was not pertinent to the question at hand – to any question at any hand. When I wasn't scratching out my living with meaningless bullshit, I was reading – old books, old novels, old histories, histories of art. Anything concrete enough, specific enough, to conjure up the past, the dead, the sense of the dead, Agnes's sense of the unnumbered, the unforgiving dead. That was my life now. That'd been my life all these years since Agnes had died, that and rolling from one side of bed to the other, tearing at my hair in torments of remorse. And it had made me distinctly unpleasant to know, let me tell you. Narrow-eyed, scowl-faced, old in my mere forties, acidly indifferent to whatever waif-like concerns she was traipsing in here to plague me with
.

So why should she turn off the warm way of the world to come worry at me who did not want her?

And how could I tell her this story if she wasn't even wise enough to despair?

Agnes would've started it with Auschwitz. Or the American Revolution maybe. Or Jacob's Pillow – I don't mean in the Berkshires either, I mean Jacob's fucking pillow. Agnes never saw a tear fall but she blamed it on
the fiat lux
. But, by my lights, it was some time after the creation of the world when I first saw her. An autumn in the Sixties. An autumn dusk.

I was playing fungo, first, on Hampshire Road. The dark was thickening. When I whopped the tennis ball into the air, it would nearly vanish in the purple line of sky between the trees. My friends, Freddy and Dave – the two who had not been called in yet for dinner – would wait for it down the street, frozen, mitts tensed at their thighs. Then, out of the twilight, the dirty old thing would fall. Bounce right between them more often than not. And there would be much lunging, pivoting and hurling as we had seen it done in ballgames on TV.

We played in the street in front of a house, a specific house, which was directly in line with the sewer we used for home plate. It was a small ranch-style house, the broad boards painted gray. It had a picture window out in front – that was the main point, that was the whole idea. When it got dark enough like this, and the lights were off inside, the wide picture pane took on an ebony sheen on which soft reflections rippled: the branches of the apple tree on the narrow lawn, the sweep of the batter when he came around, and so on. When this time came, when you couldn't see, in other words, through the glass, Andrea Fiedler, so I believed, would stand inside the house and watch me. I didn't dare to glance over much, not much, but I thought I'd spotted her outline hovering in the dark interior once or twice. Always, to be safe, I assumed she was stationed there, looking on. It brought out the masterful in me. The home-run swing, the hot corner snag when the ball was tossed back; every movement very dramatic. The window was a grand canvas – and baseball was a fine setting – for my heroism, my rectitude.

I was nine years old then. I was blond and lithe and fine-featured with noble blue eyes. I was a leader on the street or in the playground, looked to by the others for rulings and judgements. At games like these, bat in hand, I would stride the field, pointing to errors, settling disputes. Smaller kids would appeal to me as if by nature when they were shouldered out of a play. And when bullies – like Ira Wertzer and his pals – biked in to start trouble, they saw that I was on the scene and pedaled past. I was a man of peace, of course, but quick with my fists when I had to be. Better yet, I had perfected a menacing glint in my blue eyes from watching old movies like
Davy Crockett
and
Shane
on TV. All this, a measure of all this, was being drunk in, I figured, by the window's ebony depths, by Andrea's shadowy form behind the glass.

Now, as night gathered finally, I had set myself up for one last Homeric blow. My bat was in my right hand, the barrel on my shoulder. My left hand was slung low with the ball cupped in it. I had to squint to see my friends out there. I heard them laughing about the dark. The smell of wet leaves and the cold were in my nostrils and I could feel Andrea watching me, I could imagine her eyes.

‘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.