Agnes Mallory (26 page)

‘Money. I'll give you money so you can go. I …' He searched the surface of his desk with bulging eyes as if he expected to find the cash right there. Then he looked up in terror at me. ‘They want me, Harry. Me. The Buckaroo. They want me.'

To my dismay, I had to fight back tears again. ‘If you wanted an honest front man, why the fuck did you corrupt me, you son of a bitch? Why couldn't you control yourself?'

Buck grabbed a fistful of the loose flesh of his own cheek to indicate exactly whom we were talking about. ‘Mmmmeeeeeeeee,' he said desperately, shivering the jowl in his hand.

I turned and walked out.

‘Guatemala, Harry!' he called after me.

So that was the day Agnes's last letter came. It was waiting for me when I got home. I clung to the Jungian timing of it as if there might be some sort of rescue in that. I patted it in my pocket with superstitious hope. I did not read it until that evening because I spent all day sadly hovering around Marianne and Charlie; her lucency, his sweetness, clinging to the aura of them like a blanket in the night. It was just the way I had hovered round my mother that day before I went to camp. Then, when my son was in bed – and my wife lay weary on the sofa reading Boehme – I sat in the stuffed chair with the leaves of her umbrella plant tickling the back of my neck and opened the envelope. The letter inside was not long. It had been scrawled quickly by a troubled hand.

Dear Harry,

Don't worry. I won't write to you anymore after this. I won't even send this, I will burn it this time, I promise. It's not that I expect you to save me or anything. That is, I do, but I don't really. I just have no one else to talk to – even in the summer now no one comes. And I don't go anywhere. I just work and work. And the work sucks. Everything sucks. (Always a pleasure to hear from me, isn't it?) Roland says I should take my daughter back now, at least some of the time, because I've been off the barbs again since April. He says it would be good for both of us. I've been stalling him, but I know it won't work. Christ, why does he think I let him go in the first place? In his fat-cheeked decency. Why does he think there were no lawyers and lawsuits and hysterical scenes? I mean, he knows how much I love my baby. My baby. She's almost two and a half now. But I still wander around the empty cabin nights mewling ‘my baby, my baby' over and over like in a mad scene in a play. I don't even know if the sentiment is real anymore. I was never sure which was the real stuff and which was for form, for show. I remember, when I was about six months pregnant, we all sat around in the cabin together, Roland and I and all our friends. We sat in a semi-circle of chairs in our living room, and Roland made a little speech: ‘We want you guys to be part of naming the baby because we want the baby to be part of all of us.' And I sat at the head of the semi-circle. Leaning back with my hand on my belly, smiling serenely, feeling her stir. Everyone was grinning at me. And I was watching them all through my secret valium haze, and thinking, Oh, my friends, my friends, they're so wonderful, I love them so much, I can get by with my friends, and so on. And after Roland spoke, there were a few nervous jokes and then this solemn silence. And after a long pause, somebody – Margaret from the restaurant, I think – spoke up and said: ‘Lena. We have to name her Lena. That has to be her name.' And everyone nodded. Solemnly, solemnly approving. Solemnly raising their bottles of beer. And I nodded too, approving. And thinking: Yes, yes, it's all so perfect, they're all so decent, we're a new generation mending the scars of the past. And believing it! As if you could replace someone, as if you could undo something, as if you could put anything right ever anywhere. Well, I was tranked out of my mind at the time, what did I know? But it was real for them, or they thought it was. All my decent, clean-living, back-to-nature friends. And nobody suspected their anti-Holocaust madonna was floating cross-eyed through the borough of loons. It was how I occupied myself, now that I couldn't make art anymore. Finding the doctors to prescribe by phone, finding the different pharmacies, driving to Rutland to pick up my stash. Oh, that would've made them solemn if they'd found that out, my friends, migh-ty solemn indeed, indeed. But no, they were too busy being righteous. And ‘healing'. Naming her Lena! I mean, that's exactly what I was afraid of, wasn't it? Even with the drugs, I was lying awake half the night thinking about it. Imagining all the atrocities that could happen to
this
baby, the new Lena. She could be born with half a skull. She could be a staring, dribbling mongoloid. She could be strangled on the umbilical cord and born hanged.
These things do happen!
I tried once to tell my friend Julie. Because she was an artist too and she had two children. I thought she might understand. And she said, ‘Oh, Agnes, every mother-to-be thinks things like that sometimes.' Which may be true – but it doesn't mean those things don't
happen!
And then she went on to tell me how I ought to have natural childbirth – no doctors, no drugs – how wonderful, how natural it would be. She had a midwife she knew who was just so wonderful. We could do it right in my house. Oh, sure, I thought. So wonderful, so natural. I mean, when exactly did Nature become our friend? When she was inventing stillbirths? Or germs? Or pain? Or tornadoes? My pal Nature. Not for me, boy. I'd had amnio once already and would've gladly done it every goddamned day till my delivery. Christ, I was ready to check into the hospital now. I wanted a team of doctors choppered in from fucking Manhattan. I wanted to be drugged until the baby just wafted out of me. Leave it to fucking Nature and I was sure there would be nothing but racking, violent pain until my baby was spewed out of me in this bloody mess of organs and twisted limbs. And then I would have to survive. That's what really frightened me. I would survive to live with that. And I loved her so much already.

Well, it was the hospital for me, old friend. Lena was born in about an hour and I was practically comatose the whole time, thank God. I don't remember any of it. I just woke up and there she was suddenly. In my arms in her little blanket. With her little face and fingers. Little tiny Lena. Oh, people who don't have children don't know. They talk and talk and I don't know why they're talking because they don't know anything. They don't know about love or terror or bliss or remorse, and not even grief, which they think they know. Maybe they can know math or how to play chess or something. I'm not sure. But for the rest of it, I think they're looking at a closed door. It's like a closed door with a
trompe l'oeil
on it, a painting of the room beyond. And, oh yes, they think, we know the room, we do know. But it's really just a door, a closed door, and they don't know. Anything. I loved that little baby, Harry. The fact that I'd thought I loved her before – the fact that I thought I understood the word love before – were just tokens of the hugeness of what I didn't fucking know. That was real, definitely. No one ever can say I didn't love her, because my atoms had turned to love, there was love in the interstices.

But, hey, Har, you know me: What's love for this gal if not an opportunity for unthinkable suffering? Oh, I had it all worked out. Sitting at home with her in my arms, at my breast, looking down into that tiny scrunched face, loving her impossibly, I had thought it all through: Crib death. Undetected congenital heart disease. Choking. A sudden fever in the night. And how impossible it would be to live after you came into her room and looked down and found her glassily staring out of her crib. I pumped a lot of drugged milk into that kid, I know. But taking drugs was better than the alternative, than just sitting there, thinking those things with nothing to protect me from the fact that they happen, they
do happen
. Drugged, at least, was plausible, was bearable. So that was me and my baby. Mother and child.

Roland, of course, got wise eventually. It was pretty hard to hide from him after a while. He pleaded with me to give the drugs up, reasoned with me, screamed at me finally. I promised him I'd try. I tried to stop. I failed. Then, when I just couldn't do it, he got this look in his eyes, on his face. This wary look. Watching me all the time when I was with the baby. Following me around, pretending he wasn't. I guess he thought that any moment I was going to do some terrible, druggie thing, like drop her or cut off her finger instead of her nail or God knows what else.

Well, my personal choice, finally, was the river. Lena was almost six months old by the time the water was warm enough. But then, in the afternoons, when the sun had been on it, I could take her down there through the woods for a bath. We have a private place on my land where the water gets deep, a swimming hole. Roland and I used to skinny dip there sometimes. I still swim there every morning. There's a little backwash upstream a few yards with gentle eddies over a bed of smooth stones. It's about two feet deep, if that, in mid-summer. Lena just loved it. I'd sit on the stones and hold her around the middle. Lower her in and let her legs swirl in the current and dandle her up and down to make a splash. She used to positively scream with glee and slap her hands around on the surface. And I remember she would stare these big serious stares at the frogs and the fishes going by. We had a wonderful time the two of us. Or the three of us. Because Roland came down with me whenever he was home. He would pretend he wanted to watch or help out or have a swim or whatever. Then he would sit on the bank and stare at us playing. With this frozen smile on his face. I knew he was thinking that his wife was such a drughead that she might let the baby go any minute, lose hold of her and let her drown. Or possibly it was just me thinking it. Because I did think it, all the time, every minute. I'd be sitting in the water, splashing her around, laughing with her, and my heart just swelling up with all that love. And I was terrified. What if I did let go? What if she drowned? What if a water moccasin swam up and bit her? While she was shrieking and splashing, I could see it all happening in my mind. I could see her slipping away from me. Pulled out of reach by the current. Pulled down into the deep water, her white body still visible under the surface, her suffocating face. I thought of her giving one last uncertain little baby cry before going under. I saw her hands waving helplessly. I thought of it again and again. I saw the whole thing happening over and over.

So when I actually did let her go, I just sat there helplessly. I mean, for a second, I couldn't make the transition from my imagination to the real thing. The baby just slipped away. She went straight under. She was gone in an instant. And the current did pull her away from me over the stones toward the deep water. If Roland hadn't been there, watching me, distrusting me, I really don't know what would have happened. I came awake and he was already splashing into the river. He grabbed Lena not two feet away from me. Hauled her up while I was still struggling to my feet with my mouth hanging open, trying to call out. Lena was coughing and gasping and fighting to breathe, smushing her face with her tiny hands, then flailing around with them, reaching for me. Then – a tad too late, I'd say – I was all over her, sobbing, hugging her, kissing her. I put my arms around her as best I could, considering the fact that Roland wouldn't let her go.

Well, you can bet your boots we had a solemn discussion about that little event, by golly. Roland explaining in a quiet, measured voice why he thought separation might be best for all of us for a while. And how I would be able to see the baby anytime I wanted and so on. And me just sitting there numbly, dumbly, staring, nodding. Thinking: Yes, yes, for Christ's sake, save her, get her away from me, shut up and go. I was still sitting there when his face crumpled and he walked out of the room to do his crying in private. I was sitting on the sofa, staring, thinking: Ah well, what the hell, it's high time I get back to my work anyway. I'd been blocked by then for almost a year. But I knew it would come back now. The flow, the ideas, the sureness in my hands. I was thinking: yes, yes, I've suffered now finally. Now finally, I've suffered enough.

It broke off there, no signature. I folded it quietly and put it in my shirt pocket. I felt a certain lightness with the burden of hope taken away. I don't even know what I'd been hoping until then, but I wasn't hoping it anymore. I stood up, sighing, at loose ends. Marianne glanced at me from the sofa and smiled placidly. I started wandering among the crowd of potted plants and creepers. I wandered past her head into Charlie's room. I stood by his crib in the dark a few moments. I watched him sleeping with his baby intensity, his whole face set on it. Fucked up your life for you, Chuckster, I thought. Sorry, little guy. Then I had to pull out before I broke down and woke him.

I checked my watch. It was ten pm.

‘I'm going to go see if the Sunday paper's out yet,' I said.

Marianne nodded, giving a sleepy snuffle, rubbing her pregnant belly with her hand. ‘I may just haul the old anvil off to bed.'

‘Yeah, don't wait up. I may take a walk.'

I bent over the sofa and kissed her gently, which made her smile up at me again. I pulled my windbreaker from the hall closet and headed out the door.

The streets were bopping. It was a summer Saturday night and warm and easy. Everyone seemed young and walked with long, loping strides. I headed down to the bank on 72nd. I went into the foyer where the cash machines were. We had three different accounts and every day you were allowed to take up to five hundred dollars out of each. I took out fifteen hundred dollars, which left plenty behind. Then I stepped outside and hailed a cab and rode down to the Port Authority. The place was hell at that hour. Carpeted with sleeping beggars, reeking of urine. Hustlers shimmering dangerously along the walls. Black faces slowly turning to follow me with sallow eyes. But a bus to Vermont was parked outside one of the gates, its engine already thudding. As easy as sleepwalking, I was in it, and we were pulling away. And what was strange – what I hadn't expected – was how free, how fine, I felt suddenly; when we had crossed the George Washington Bridge, I mean, when we were rolling past the black Hudson and the looming palisades. As if you could really get away like this, lighting out for the territory, as if the idea were still there, anyway, dyed in the wool, even with the territory gone. After a while, I pressed my face against the window almost eagerly, shading my eyes from the reading lights with my hand. I thought I could make out Pegasus rising over Rockland County. And I remembered a poem I'd read once, something about Chaldean constellations over crowded roofs. Christ, it seemed like forever I'd been stuck in that light-blinded city. It seemed like just forever since I could look up and see the stars.