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Agnes Mallory

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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.

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. Remember 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.

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Excerpted from Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan. Copyright © 1996 Andrew Klavan. Excerpted by permission of A MysteriousPress.com.
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