Agnes Among the Gargoyles (17 page)

   It is a rectangular piece of shiny, bluish metal roughly three inches by an inch in width. Reflecting the dirty water in the tank, it was all but invisible. After determining that it is not part of the tank or the pump or the heater, Agnes picks it up by the edge and shows it to Tommy.

   "Don't drop it," he cautions.

   "Barbara was fastidious about those turtles," says Agnes. "Maybe one of your guys dropped it in."

   "It's nothing they use," he says.

   "Then it must have fallen in when, you know, everything else happened."

   They work until late afternoon. Tommy plays classical music on the radio. Vivian goes looking for a screwdriver under the kitchen sink. She opens the doors and jumps backwards with a cry.

   Agnes and Tommy race into the kitchen.

   "It's nothing," says Vivian. There are four or five glue traps under the sink, and they are filled with dead mice curled up like gray croissants.

   "She hated mice," says Vivian. This small victory of nature over her dead sister seems to take all the fight out of her.

   It is getting dark by the time Agnes and Vivian get into Tommy's cold car. Vivian is angry: angry at the killer, angry at Barbara for making such a hash of her life, angry at the neighborhood for allowing such a terrible thing to happen.

   "She had no business living here," says Vivian.

   "She said Judaism was in her blood," says Agnes. "She wanted to be near it."

   "That's a lot of bull."

   Vivian is correct. Agnes is sure that Barbara lived in Borough Park for reasons of sentimentality and nostalgia and reverse snobbery. It had nothing to do with her religion.

   "These aren't pious people," says Vivian, peering out the car's window. "They're dirty and suspicious and full of hate. Look at them—so worried about the sun setting. They're like vampires."

   They drop off Vivian. Tommy helps her unload the boxes of clothing. There are only four boxes.

   "I thought there'd be more, somehow," says Vivian. "She always bought too many clothes."

   Agnes and Tommy drive back to Washington Heights. They sit in the car for a moment, collecting their thoughts. There is an explosion in the distance. Instinctively, Tommy turns around to look. Agnes doesn't.

   "Car backfiring," she says calmly.

   They hear the same noise again.

   "There's another," says Tommy drily.

   A look of reciprocal understanding passes between them.

   "The streets are full of Tin Lizzies," says Agnes.

   Not until she is in bed that night does it strike Agnes that she and Tommy never discussed her riding all the way up to Mount Vernon to drop off Vivian.

   She wonders if Vivian thought it a bit strange.

Agnes talks to Hannah on the telephone.

   Hannah says, "Losing a child—you never recover from that. I feel so sorry for her mother. And how are you holding up?"

   "All right. I've been busy, which is good."

   "You sound funny."

   "I'm lying down."

   "It's probably the best thing for you."

   Not the way Agnes is doing it. There is no telephone in her bedroom. She is in the kitchen, stretched out on the butcher block that runs the length of one wall.

   "I didn't realize what Barbara meant to me," Agnes admits.

   "You don't. That's how it is with your friends. Children are a different story. You always know what they mean to you. You're always aware of the love you feel. It's kind of like having a lifelong toothache."

   Sarah comes into the kitchen for a honey-wheat cookie. She wouldn't dream of eating sugar, but she has a large honey habit. She also worries about her weight, and will remove only one cookie from the kitchen at a time.

   "I don't know how you went on after Brigette," says Agnes.

   Agnes wishes that she had known her sister. In the Travertine home movies Brigette seems like a charming little girl, joyful and self-possessed, whether playing with a litter of puppies or using a hula hoop as a jump rope. In the later family movies it is obvious that Agnes is not the child her sister was. She does the kid act with a decided lack of brio. Hannah and Johnny egg her on. They thrust big teddy bears at her, but Agnes is like the unfortunate actor who replaces the star in a Broadway show. When Agnes watches her own 8mm film image she can't help wondering how much more Brigette would have made of the carving of the jack o'lantern. Agnes's performance in the petting zoo seems especially perfunctory; she fails to develop any chemistry with even a nuzzling llama.

   Agnes sits up on the butcher block. "What's happening with social security?"

   "You won't believe it."

   "Try me."

   "Mrs. Fuentes can't find my marriage license anywhere."

   "Did you try the state records office?"

   "It's not there either. Isn't that funny?"

   Agnes is troubled. "Hilarious."

   "So let me tell you what I did. I rode a subway and two buses to St. Bernard of Clairvaux," says Hannah, referring to the church in Brooklyn where she and Johnny were married. "Guess what? It's St. Timothy's."

   St. Bernard of Clairvaux has always played a large role in the Travertine family mythology. Hannah wouldn't get married in the parish church, stodgy St. George's, because St. George's was the Lithuanian church, the church of her mother. Normally, Hannah would have had no choice in this matter, but the war was on, and rules had been relaxed so that our Catholic boys could get hitched in a hurry. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, with its exotic name, has come to symbolize the breaking with tradition that Hannah imagines to be at the heart of her marriage to Johnny.

   "What do you mean, it's St. Timothy's?" says Agnes.

   "It's St. Timothy's now and it's always been St. Timothy's."

   "I don't get it."

   "Your father found the church for us. He made up the name because it sounded so beautiful. He wanted to surround me with beauty, and this was all he could afford."

   "Ma, didn't you notice?"

   "It
was
my wedding day."

   Johnny always had a problem with the truth. He had lied at his first meeting with Hannah. They met in the Diplomat movie theater, where Hannah spent so much time that she was friendly with the projectionist, Seymour Anzelone. To modern eyes, Seymour was a tragedy waiting to happen—a three-hundred-pound mama's boy with a compulsion to take off his shoes in front of women. "Oh, these corns!" he'd complain to the popcorn girl as his penis poked at his zipper—but back then, who knew? Seymour appeared to be a solid citizen. Hannah was shocked when he attacked her in the projection booth. One minute they were discussing her favorite male stars—and she was proudly idiosyncratic in her tastes: Robert Walker, Basil Rathbone, Elisha Cook—and the next....Seymour took Hannah's stated disdain for conventional good looks in a way she hadn't intended.

   "His breath reeked of liverwurst. It overpowered me," she told the policeman who spirited her away to the manager's office for questioning. When she regained her composure she looked the policeman up and down.

   "Where's your uniform?"

   "I'm plainclothes."

   "Plain indeed," she sniffed.

   Did she know that Johnny Travertine was not a detective but the man who delivered the candy? If she did, she never let on. That he would lie to be near her was flattering. She married him, and the deception was never formally corrected. After a while, he just wasn't a detective anymore. He hauled Jujubes and Tootsie Rolls. Maybe Hannah thought he was on a very long undercover assignment.

   "What about Daddy's first marriage?" asks Agnes.

   "Those papers are all in order," Hannah huffs. "Isn't it always the way?"

   "Why are we having problems with Social Security? After Daddy died, didn't you collect surviving children's benefits?"

   "Never."

   "Then what were those green checks that came the first of every month?"

   "They were from the Veteran's Administration."

   Agnes's teeth clench. "You always called it your Social Security money."

   "I can't see that it matters what I called it."

   "I'm coming to see you tomorrow," says Agnes urgently. "We'll go to Social Security together. And I'll bring you those library books I promised."

   "Forget about those," says Hannah.

   "Why? What are you planning to read?"

   "We have a library here," Hannah informs her.

   "Which you refuse to set foot in."

   "Well, I finally did and it's not so bad," says Hannah without irony. "They had a Spinet I haven't read—A
Tisket, A Tasket, A Teal And Ecru Casket.
It was in the pay collection."

   "I thought Queens residents were too backward for Basil Spinet."

   "As a matter of fact, they are," says Hannah. "The library was deserted. I was like a kid in a candy store. I checked out ten books. Ten! I had to take a cab home."

   "A cab?" says Agnes, calculating the fare. "Do me a favor, Ma. Go easy on that pay collection."

Detective Whitey Walker ushers Agnes into a dark office. On the other side of a one-way mirror, Tommy sits across a table from Rabbi Bloch and Dov. Rabbi Bloch is at least ten pounds lighter. His face is lined and pouchy.

   "We're sorry to drag you down here again," says Tommy, "but there are a few things we still have to clear up."

   Dov sits with one foot on a chair. a sidecurl wrapped defiantly around his finger.

   "I'm a Jew," he says. "I'm not comfortable here. For the Jew, the doors to the police station open only in."

   "Be civil," says the rabbi.

   Downstairs, in front of the precinct, a crowd of Orthodox men has gathered. They are angry. They want an arrest. The police are not doing all they can because the victims were Jewish. Inspector Razumovsky is on his way to placate them.

   Tommy has Dov retrace his steps on the night of the slayings. Dov cannot explain why he didn't hear the telephone when the matchmaker called to tell him he had forgotten
The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto.
Tommy then reads from a statement sworn by a neighbor of the Blochs', a Mr. Berman. Mr. Berman says that he came to the Blochs' at approximately 10 p.m. to show the rabbi a newspaper article about the Congregation Mount Horab of Rivington Street, the synagogue to which both men had belonged in the 1970s. Mr. Berman rang the bell repeatedly and received no answer.

   The rabbi looks at Dov for an explanation.

   "Berman is an old lunatic," says Dov. "Always telling me how Christ was a good Jew. A good Jew! A man who turns his back on the faith to start his own religion, a good Jew!"

   "Can Berman ring a doorbell?" says the Rabbi.

   Dov's face twists into a frown. "He knew you wouldn't be there."

   "I did tell him I'd be with my brother," says the rabbi.

   "So why did he come?" says Dov. "Berman doesn't make sense."

   Tommy asks the rabbi if he may speak with his son privately.

   There is a commotion downstairs. Agnes looks out the window. On the steps of the precinct, a big barrel-chested cop with a thick beard is explaining something to the crowd of Orthodox men, who shake their heads skeptically.

   With the rabbi gone, Tommy says, "I need to know if you were on the roof that night."

   Dov stands up and paces the room. "I don't know what you mean."

   "Admit it, Dov. I know about the skylight and the chair."

   Dov stops at the mirror. Agnes looks right into his eyes. She tries to imagine him without the accessories of his belief, the sidecurls and hat, and dark suit, the tzitzis, the coarse collarless yellowing white shirt.

   "We all like looking at naked women. It's no crime, says Tommy."

   Agnes sees what Tommy can't: Dov closes his eyes and winces.

   Behind Agnes, a door flies open. The lights go on. The big bearded cop she saw downstairs heaves his bulk into the room. His coat is open. Agnes's eye is caught by his nameplate: Razumovsky. He wears the many-pointed star of the Inspector. It looks like a magical symbol. Its center is a deep blue, like the iris of some all-penetrating eye. He is obviously not Irish or Italian or Hispanic or black; his Eastern European features look odd in a New York City police uniform.

    "Walker!" he barks. "Where's the rabbi's kid?"

    Whitey points to the mirror.

    Dov has a strange look on his face. His streaky eyes are wide. Tommy will explain later that Razumovsky's turning on of the lights made Agnes partly visible in the one-way glass. She appears to Dov as a ghost—the spirit of moral rectitude, her eyes hooded with disapproval—hovering just above his shoulder.

    "Her!" he cries. He shudders and moans. His shoulders sag.

    "You're right," he says, turning to Tommy. "I was on the roof. I saw it all. I saw him shoot my mother. I saw him stab the whore." His voice is oddly flat.

    "Who, Dov?"

    "It was the boyfriend," Dov answers, his voice breaking. "The one you are looking for."

    Dov collapses. He weeps with guilt and relief.

    The rabbi returns. He folds his son into his arms. He looks confused. Tommy leaves looking-glass land and comes into Agnes and Whitey.

    Whitey loosens his tie. "Unbelievable."

    All Tommy's attention is on Agnes. Razumovsky and Whitey and the rabbi and a clutch of uniforms swirl around him, vying unsuccessfully for his ear.