Agnes Among the Gargoyles (32 page)

   It is finally time for the Great Man to speak. Sarah wheels her father to the podium. He wears dark glasses, and cradles his monkey in his lap. Madelaine, overcome by her husband's courage, sobs softly. She is looking very 1960s today, with lilac lips and a flip hairdo.

   "He dropped a lit match on his leg yesterday," Syker tells Agnes.

   Agnes waits for the other shoe to drop. "What happened?"

   "What usually happens? He screamed like nobody's business."

   "I have come to hate making speeches," says the Great Man. "So if there's anyone out there planning to shoot me, do it now and save me some misery."

   A ripple of laughter, small and nervous, seems to die in the shore breezes.

   A small plane trails a banner over the ocean: CONGRATS, RON, ON YOUR PALACE OF V'SAILLES. The flags atop the Palace snap all green and gold in the wind. Cops and horses carrying cops shift restlessly from foot to foot. Agnes hears a loud grinding of machinery. Over near the boardwalk they are testing some of the rides. The Octopus comes to life for the first time that season.

   The party moves indoors. Various suites and common areas have names taken from the great palace—the Peace Drawing-Room, the Gilded Cabinet, the Duchess of Burgundy's Former Cabinet, the Apollo room; the lounge, where Jackie Mason is already booked, is the Royal Opera; the casino is called Louis XIV's Game Room—but all resemblance between the interiors of the two structures ends there. Wegeman and Clark Ho have built a standard resort/business hotel, except that some of the furniture is kind of spindly. The chambermaids look as though they have stepped out of a French farce. In The Quincunx, the bistro serving hamburgers and potato skins and deep-fried cheese sticks, the be-toqued chefs bustle about in close-order drill. brandishing whisks and artfully slicing club sandwiches.

   Wegeman and his Director of Hotel Operations, Dick Somebody, conduct a tour of the casino. The dealers and croupiers, hired from the surrounding neighborhood and schooled in "The Wegeman Way," stand nervously at their posts, dice stacked, card shoes stocked, bank at the ready. After the tour there is thirty minutes of mock gambling. Wegeman has printed currency bearing his own portrait and the motto
fortuna meliores sequitur,
"fortune follows the better man." He propels himself around the casino, which is completely accessible to the handicapped. He kibitzes at baccarat, loses at roulette, spins the chuck-luck cage and takes a simpleminded delight in the slot machines. He sits transfixed by the spinning wheels like a child before a Busy Box. One of the Courtesy Girls pulls the lever for him, puckering her ass as she does. The Courtesy Girls are barely dressed, top-heavy with breasts and teeth; their purpose is to assist the high rollers, fetching drinks and sandwiches and more drinks and providing moral support. They are trained in unobtrusive cigarette-lighting and brow-mopping. "They'll do anything short of clipping your nose hair," Wegeman tells a pack of duly impressed bankers, "and we're forming an elite squad to take care of that."

   Wegeman buttonholes Agnes. "I want to show you something."

   Wegeman and one of the Dicks take Agnes downstairs to an enormous subbasement parking garage.

   "You're interested in building design and shit like that, so you'll appreciate this," he says to her. His voice echoes portentously, caroming from pillar to concrete pillar like a pool ball. "Look where the buses park! Sheer genius. The old people ride in with their social security money, get off the bus, and the first thing they see is the slots! They don't have to walk at all. We don't want them to strain themselves. They can stay basically in one area, and not inflict their depressing presence all over my beautiful hotel."

   He waits for a reaction from Agnes.

   "You enjoy irritating me, don't you?" she says.

   "I enjoy trying. What do you think of my set-up here?"

   "I wouldn't want to make money that way."

   With a great heaving display of upper-body effort, he adjusts the position of his legs on the footrests of the wheelchair. "People like you are the biggest snobs there are."

   "Like me?"

   "People with nothing."

   Wegeman engages the motor on his wheelchair. "You've hurt my feelings, but I forgive you. Let me show you something else."

   They climb a ramp, and emerge at the side of the hotel, in the Marble Courtyard.

   "Sarah's on me about the gambling," he says wearily. "I think it's her time of the month. She thinks people are like children. She wants to protect them. Me, I give them a lot more credit."

   "I'm sure you do," says Agnes "At usurious interest rates."

   The Great Man snorts. "I like that one, Travertine."

   What Wegeman wants to show her is the Neptune Hotel, over one hundred years old and still standing. Wegeman has fixed up its outside and actually erected the Palace of Versailles around it. The four-story one-time Single Room Occupancy is attached to the south wing of the Palace like a boxy brownstone carbuncle.

   The sight pains Agnes. Wegeman has humiliated a noble old building.

   "It looks ridiculous," says Agnes.

   "Boy, you really can't be nice," says Wegeman. "But you're right. It does. Is this what you people want? Is it really so important to have this old shitbox tenement standing? You're so obsessed with these stupid fucking buildings. It's like if we keep the old ones around it'll just turn into the good old days again, and we'll have cholera and polio and the eighteen-hour workday."

   Back in the casino there is excitement at the craps table. Duck the monkey has commandeered the dice, and has racked up over twelve thousand Wege dollars. The pit boss doesn't know what to do. When Wegeman rolls up, he delivers frantic explanations. The Great Man waves his hand, unconcerned.

   "Don't worry," he says, jerking his thumb at the monkey. "He doesn't know when to quit."

   Sure enough, on the next throw, the monkey loses it all. The croupier sweeps in the money. A Courtesy Girl appears with a silver tray. On the tray are bananas, a pear, and a baby bottle of milk. The monkey takes a swig of milk and buries his sad, chattering face in the Courtesy Girl's cleavage.

   During dinner, in the Marble Courtyard, the protesters arrive. They march four abreast down the sidewalk, led by the Rollicking Reverend Lenten Gunn himself. The protesters sing
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
The Reverend's bass voice carries below everyone else's. It can be heard cutting through the Benny Goodman arrangement and the drunken reveling and the fireworks exploding over the ocean.

   There must be 200 marchers. The cops tense. The horses whinney. The marchers approach the Palace. Reverend Gunn holds up his arm like a trail boss, and the march comes to a stop. Reverend Gunn is streaked with perspiration. Two nurses descend on him with stethoscope and sphygmomanometer.

   Monkey perched on his shoulder, the Great Man meets the marchers. Fireworks continue to explode; green and red spiders appear and fade slowly in the sky.

   "Hello, Rev," says the Great Man.

   "Evening, Mr. Wegeman," comes the reply. "Lovely night, isn't it? A sugar breeze and a pancake sky. You ever been to the Carolinas?"

   "Only to check my strip mining interests."

   "We are here to bless this enterprise," says the Reverend. "May hostilities cease between us. We shall interfere no longer."

   Wegeman throws open his garden party to the Reverend's flock. Two hundred members of the First Congregation of Neptune Avenue eat the food, gawk at the architecture, and sway (they are too pious to dance) to the Big Band music.

   Madelaine Wegeman looks like one of the caged dancers on
Shindig.
She pulls Agnes off to the side. "Isn't it marvelous? Things are really working out. I'm so happy for Weege. You're a good luck charm. Tell me, while we're on the subject of my family, is Sarah happy, do you think?"

   "I guess so," says Agnes. "She's excited about her movie."

   Madelaine finishes her drink and sucks in her cheeks. "She doesn't seem happy when we're together. She can be very critical of me. But I think all mothers have that effect on their daughters."

   "I think you're right," says Agnes.

   "Wait until you have children," says Madelaine.

   "The way things are going, I don't see it happening," says Agnes.

   Madelaine doesn't seem to hear her. "God, this has been a bad year. Weege still isn't functioning."

   Agnes is unprepared for such intimacy. "I'm sorry."

   "Sarah loves staying with you," says Madelaine brightly. "I wish I could be her friend. Do you think she could call me? Once a week, late at night..."

   So sad, thinks Agnes. So pathetic. So like her own relationship with her mother. "I'll put in a good word for you."

   "She can call any time at night," says Madelaine. "Take this phone number. I'm there after ten. Thank you, Agnes. Thank you. And take these—I insist."

   Madelaine hands Agnes front row seats to the controversial all-Korean
Le
Nozze di Figaro,
the one set in a fruit market.

   Madelaine glides away. Agnes absently looks at the phone number she has provided.

   424-8399.

   Meaningless digits, a seven-number coordinate, pinpointing some unspecified location in the city.

   GA-4-8399.

   Agnes can see the ghosts of extinct telephone exchanges. GAmmadion served the district just west and slightly north of Times Square, including Roseland and St. Basil's.

   Isn't that funny? thinks Agnes.

   Agnes harbors a deep suspicion. In a few weeks she will read a blind item in Cholly Knickerbocker's column in the
Graphic:
"What fabulously wealthy architectrix/urban reformer/social darling/lapsed Catholic can be seen each morning coming out of Mass at St. Basil's?" Could working on the Times Square Project actually have brought Madelaine and Father Clarence that close together? The notion intrigues Agnes. She thinks old Cholly should stake out St. Basil's the night before. She imagines Madelaine's heels clicking on the stone floor of the catacomb. The passage is very narrow—she must not wear shoulder pads.

   "Do you believe in God, Mr. Wegeman?" asks Reverend Gunn.

   "I have people studying the question."

   "Can't study it, Mr. Wegeman. Got to feel it."

   The Great Man grunts.

   "You got to surrender to the faith, Mr. Wegeman. I tell my people: trust in God—that nigger provides."

Agnes supervises the documentation of her mother's marriage. Did Hannah and Johnny actually live together as man and wife from the time of the ceremony in April 1944 until his death in 1961? Agnes must assemble a file. She obtains depositions from people she hasn't seen in years, people like Johnny's brother Carl, who still lived in Florida, still plays the horses, and probably still looks like his clothing would slide off him if he changed direction too quickly. "After the accident with Brigette he just stopped drinking cold," Carl tells Agnes. "I never saw him take so much as a sip ever again. That's how your father was." Agnes laughs to herself when she remembers how thrilling she found her father's passion for 7Up and Coke and root beer; soda was a bond they shared.

   Agnes also talks to Hannah's brother, Leon. Leon worked for the telephone company in Nassau County his whole life. He bowled for the telephone company and went on telephone company picnics and spent every New Year's Eve with his wife and fifty other telephone company couples at the elegant Charles' Off The Sagtikos Restaurant. Here was a man who came out of World War II without a marketable skill and owned three homes by the time he retired. Hannah, who could not amass a pension, nonetheless sneered at his enmeshment in the Bell System. Growing up, Agnes loved visiting Uncle Leon. She loved his house with its upstairs, and his reclining chairs, and his TV room, and the bowling alley right down the road (Old Country Lanes--48 Maple Lanes—AMF AccuSet Pinspotters—No Pinboys!) When Agnes talked up Uncle Leon's lifestyle to her mother Hannah would peer down at her daughter with a sour expression and say, "I wouldn't much relish answering to Ma Bell for the rest of my days, Agnes dear. She's rather an overbearing parent." Agnes would be quashed because her mother sounded so right. Hannah had an answer for everything.

   Talking to her relatives about her mother's foolishness makes Agnes angry. She takes out her aggressions in Jo Bailey's martial arts class. She hasn't done Tae Kwon Do since that fateful day she saved the Great Man's life, but it all comes back to her and she competes like a woman possessed, and one symbol for Hannah after another slaps the mats in defeat.

   Agnes sits in on a rehearsal of
Scenes From Shakespeare.
The Witches are already on stage, Braille scripts in hand. Grace looks bored; Perri dances in place; Doreen studies her lines. The stage lights dim and brighten as Jo works on a technical problem. The lighting director, a sighted boy from Art and Design wearing a ripped tank top and wristbands, comes down from the flies to work on the difficulty. Meanwhile, the cauldron is not in its proper place. "Gem, didn't I tell you to spike this?" says Jo. The other techie, a girl with a crew cut, bounds to the apron of the stage. She lays out the adhesive tape markings within which the cauldron should be positioned.

   Jo's voice rings out from the back of the auditorium. "Let's do it, ladies."

   "When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" says Perri.

   "When the hurlyburly's done/When the battle's lost and won," says Doreen. Agnes doesn't think her delivery quite menacing enough; she might as well be lamenting the cancellation of her Sweet Sixteen party. Perhaps the cloak will help her.