Agnes Among the Gargoyles (33 page)

   At the end, all three chant, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and filthy air."

   Jo mocks them without looking up from her script. "Fair is foul and foul is fair and all the rest have thirty-one except little February with twenty-eight...."

   The Witches laugh uneasily. They don't like to displease Miss Bailey.

   "Can we try not to sound so incredibly bored?" says Jo.

   They go through it again. Agnes admires the way she has staged the thing. The actors' movements are necessarily minimal, but the scene never looks static. After a while, Agnes almost forgets that the whole cast is blind.

   The rehearsal is marred by a disagreement between Jo and Miss Lenihan, the Assistant Principal, who has been watching from the back of the auditorium. Miss Lenihan is a frail old woman in a woolen suit. She has a long haggard face. Incongruous diamond posts grace her earlobes, and she wears a cheap bluish-black wig. She is undergoing radiation treatment for liver cancer. "Miss Bailey," she says, "I must remind you to shut off all the lights when you leave at night."

   "I always do."

   "Last night I found a light blazing away right on stage."

   Perri chimes in. "That was the ghost light, Miss Lenihan."

   "The what?"

   "It's a theatrical custom," says Perri. "You leave a light burning for the ghosts that haunt the theater."

   "There are no ghosts here," says Miss Lenihan.

   "Every theater has ghosts," says Jo pleasantly.

   "The point is, Miss Bailey, that we can't be wasting money on this sort of thing," says Miss Lenihan. "Lights for ghosts—our children can't see, I don't understand why our ghosts should be able to."

   "Don't let her bully you, Miss Bailey," says Grace. "If we all just stood up to her, she couldn't get away with it." She flees the auditorium in tears. Being blind, she can't do it that quickly. Jo and Miss Lenihan hang back, permitting her the dramatic gesture.

   Later on, in the bar, Jo tells Agnes, "Lenihan just doesn't like me. When Mr. Pakula left, and I asked to take over the show, she nearly had a fit. I love theater, and I know more about it than anyone else on the faculty. But she said she didn't think a history teacher could do the job."

   "She's living in the past," says Agnes. "She comes from a time when the arts had some mystery to them. Now the whole country knows about the lack of kineticism in Kubrick—his dirty little secret is out in the open."

   "I'm supposed to be a math teacher, but I fell into a history slot, and I didn't see her complaining about that. Anyway, Father Clarence was good about the whole thing. He interviewed people from the outside for Lenihan's benefit, but he told me privately I'd be doing the shows."

   Jo stares coldly and fixedly at the bartender.

   "What's the matter?" Agnes asks.

   "That son of a bitch is pouring me light," says Jo. She says it loudly enough for the bartender to hear, but his face registers no reaction. Jo gets angrier at him, and when she asks for a refill her tone is downright nasty.

   "Excuse me," she says combatively.

   He turns to her. "Hmm?"

   "That's not a double shot. Not anywhere in the country."

   "I'll get the manager."

   "Wait a second," she says. "Don't do that. This is between you and me. Don't call the law. Let's work this out on our own."

   "Look," he says wearily, folding the towel with which he has been wiping down the bar. "I don't measure out the booze. I just program
double shot
into the register, and out it comes. Only the manager can make adjustments."

   Jo is a bitter, paranoid drunk. Only Agnes is exempt from her wrath. Agnes takes the keys to Jo's jeep and stuffs her in a cab. How can Jo ever look her in the eye again? They have a date to meet in the city the next day; Agnes keeps waiting for Jo's embarrassed call of cancellation. But the telephone never rings. Jo is there at the appointed time, on the steps of the Fifth Avenue Library, all scrubbed and cheerful in khakis with knife pleats and sneakers so white they must dazzle her hung-over eyes.

   "I brought you a coffee," she chirps to Agnes.

   They both have business in the library. Jo is taking graduate courses, on the road to a doctorate. Agnes is here to look up old newspapers. Her lawyer suggested that they obtain the records from the lawsuit Hannah and Johnny filed against the man who ran over Brigette. Agnes needs to find out his name. (Hannah never told her, and Agnes never asked because of the histrionics that were sure to follow.) It never before occurred to Agnes that the account of Brigette's death would be in the newspapers, but why wouldn't it? There were more papers then, and Agnes would bet that there was less mayhem.

   She tries the
Times
first, but the good gray paper took no notice of the passing of Brigette Travertine. The
Herald-Tribune
is also silent on the matter. This is a tabloid story, and Agnes finally finds it in the
Mirror.

   Her heart pounds as she reads.

   Oh my.

   If she climbed to the library roof and threw herself down upon the great stone steps, she would not suffer the shock she feels at this moment. She slumps back in her chair.

   Jo, sneaking a celery stalk, says, "You okay?"

   All Agnes can do is point to the screen of the microfilm reader. A weight seems to press down on her chest.

   "You're white as a ghost," says Jo. She leans over Agnes's shoulder. Always reluctant to put on her reading glasses, she squints at the screen.

   When, Agnes wonders, was the last time someone threw up in the Main Reading Room?

   Jo reads the story. Her lips move slightly She catches her breath sharply and emits a small cry of fright.

   "Agnes, I'm so sorry. I had no idea."

   "You want to know something?" says Agnes. "Neither did I."

   She knew that Brigette was killed by a drunk driver. And she knew that her father gave up drinking right after the accident. But she never put the two events together. No one ever put them together for her.

   Her father killed her sister.

   Agnes's mind races. Was it kept from her all these years? Or did she know it and purposefully forget it? Hannah has always been willing to talk about the aftermath of Brigette's death, but Agnes can't remember having ever heard her discuss the specifics of the accident.

   The
Mirror
fills in the gaps.

   May 7, 1950. Hannah was at the hairdresser. Johnny, working nights, was to pick up Brigette at school. He cashed his check at Ehring's Tavern and stayed for a while. At ten minutes to twelve, he remembered his daughter and left the gin mill in a drunken flurry. He drove quickly to the school and, just at the moment he saw little Brigette waiting for him, lost control of the car.

   Agnes cries wildly. She buries her face in Jo's shirt. A guard makes them go to the bathroom. Agnes walks stiff-leggedly. She feels as though
she
has been in a car crash, as though, newly pried free with the jaws of life, she can still feel the wreckage wrapped around her. She feels mangled. She keeps seeing Brigette's little face, a small oval of innocence. She sees Brigette brighten at the sight of Daddy's car, and then she sees the shadow of uncertainty when the machine heads right for her.

   When Agnes and Jo return to the microfilm readers, someone has taken Agnes's machine. The
Mirror
and the other newspapers have been put back in their boxes and sent downstairs. They were very dusty when Agnes got them. No one has asked to see them in years. Maybe no one else will ever again.

   Nothing has changed, really. Agnes knows more, that's all.

For the next week, Agnes moves as though in a fog. She wanders aimlessly around the
Infertility
offices. She is absolutely useless, but no one seems to mind, least of all her boss.
Infertility
certainly doesn't put a lot of pressure on Agnes. She feels hardly employed at all. Margaret has her interviewing potential assistant editors and paging through other magazines in search of design ideas. Maybe they're getting ready to fire her, finally, and they don't want her starting any significant projects.

   "Why don't you take some time off?" says her editor.

   "I thought I already was."

   "Do it at home. It's more fun."

   Agnes calls her mother—finally.

   "I'm quite sure that you knew, Agnes."

   "I didn't. I had no idea. Ma, how could he have done it?"

   "It was an accident."

   "Why didn't you tell me?" says Agnes.

   "You knew. I'm sure you knew. You must have forgotten, somehow."

   "You should have made sure I understood," says Agnes. "That was your job. How could you leave me with him? It could have happened again."

   Hannah sounds heartbroken. "You can't live your life in fear."

   "I feel like I've been wrong about everything," says Agnes. "How many simple things have I misunderstood? It's like I went out for popcorn and I missed a crucial scene in a movie. Oh, you mean Norman Bates and his mother are the same person?"

   Agnes tries to keep her mother's suffering in mind.

   "How did you go on living with him, Ma?"

   "I loved your father."

   Agnes is impatient. "I don't know what that means. How does the feeling survive?"

   "If it doesn't survive, then it's not love," says Hannah.

   She's got all the answers, thinks Agnes. Like every other woman of her age, she is wrapped tightly in the standard of love, and she is invulnerable. What a wondrous garment! Agnes would have killed somebody: maybe Johnny, maybe herself, but the marriage wouldn't have continued, not in any recognizable form. How many would Johnny have had to kill to destroy Hannah's love for him? Brigette and Agnes both? The two girls and Uncle Leon? Five prostitutes in Whitechapel? Thirty coeds in Washington State? Six million Jews?

   "Tommy, promise you'll never do anything to screw us up. I'm not forgiving."

   "I promise."

   "It works both ways, of course," says Agnes. "I won't do anything either."

   Tommy laughs at that. "As a rule, women don't."

   Telephone numbers are pouring into Tommy's beeper. It's the Minotaur. He has taken victims number seven and eight. Once again his dark cloak has brushed up against Agnes. One of the murdered women is the Assistant Principal of St. Basil's School for the Blind, Catherine Lenihan.

Before Miss Lenihan's funeral, Agnes journeys to Pennsylvania Station. It seems so long ago that Mr. Kamakura revealed the Byodo-in syndicate's grandiose plan the rebuild the old Pennsylvania Station on the waterfront. It embarrasses Agnes to remember how excited the idea made her at the time. Mr. Kamakura and his associates were fulfilling one of her dreams. She would stand on the steps of the grand concourse; she would see the grandeur of the waiting rooms.

   But the plan never actually made Agnes happy at all. Life intervened. Agnes barely followed the machinations that ruled out the waterfront site and brought the project to where it had really belonged all the time: Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Third Street, where Pennsylvania Station had stood and where it would stand again. Penn Station wouldn't be just a mall. Penn Station would be Penn Station again.

   The first reclaimed pieces from the Meadowlands were carted in—but Agnes was thinking too much about Barbara and Tommy and Hannah to care. She kept vowing at take a look at how the work was going, but somehow never got around to it.

   The station just beginning to take shape. A tangle of girders pokes out of the foundation like the legs of a giant movie tarantula. Two marble columns are complete. Agnes waits for her pulse to quicken, but it doesn't happen. She wants to think about Penn Station and its future, but she keeps thinking about Miss Lenihan and the Minotaur.

   It used to be Agnes's fondest wish to go back in time and see New York as it used to be. What would it be like, she would think, to stroll the Manhattan of, say, 1940? What did the typical New Yorker of that era think of his beautiful city? Now Agnes has her answer. She looks at Pennsylvania Station as millions before her have looked at it. It barely makes an impression on her. Who can think about beauty and architecture when life is so worrisome?

* * *

Miss Lenihan is laid to rest with all the pomp Father Clarence and Madelaine Wegeman can muster. The limousines are lined up for a block outside St. Basil's. The mayor is there, and Senator McKibbin, looking tanned and jowly and, with his head buried in a missalette, not very familiar with the liturgy. The old accusations of devil-worship just won't go away. On a radio call-in show that afternoon: "He didn't say the prayers. He stood when he should have kneeled. He was having his own Black Mass right in front of everybody."

   The faculty and student body of St. Basil's sit in the front pews. Jo Bailey, on the aisle, could reach out and touch Miss Lenihan's coffin.

   Hundreds of candles light the sanctuary. Eyes begin to water from all the incense. Father Clarence praises Miss Lenihan's devotion. "She said to me often that faith is not something you fall into but rather aspire to."

   Agnes leaves her seat in the back of the church. She slips outside and breathes in the sulphurous fumes of New York City. Above her look two of the Great Man's Times Square Towers, shafts of opaque glass with nothing to reflect but each other.

   There was some doubt, at first, that the crime was the work of the Minotaur. Miss Lenihan and Helen Mahler, a thirty-five year old registered nurse expecting her first child, were slain in the automated elevator bringing them from the 168
^th
Street platform of the number 1 IRT train up to the street and their common destination of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. The women, who did not know each other, apparently found themselves alone in the elevator with the Minotaur. He worked quickly, shooting Mahler and cutting Lenihan's throat. The women were D.O.A. at Columbia Presbyterian. The Minotaur had not struck in a public place before, and some said that it was not really his work. But it was. The Crime Scene Unit found traces of that mysterious mud, as well as several long white fibers that turned out to be wool—but wool from what? The fibers were too long to have come from a rug, and too fine to be from any garment.