Agnes Mallory Read Online Free PDF Page A

May had never gotten along, I knew that. It couldn’t be pleasant: the two of them sharing a house all summer. My mother knew it too, but she had had to invite May anyway. She had not been able to help herself somehow.
    My mother was never pretty, not even as a girl, which was important, because her sister was, Aunt May was always beautiful. Mom got all the Litvak features, the babushka stuff, the beezer, the hound dog eyes, the cheeks like lead. Aunt May was the Austrian rose, with black hair you wanted to lift to your face in handfuls, skin like blushing ivory, and mysterious, beryl, love-song eyes. She had bigger tits than Mom too. And a waist you could touch your fingers around. Poor Mom, in youth, had been reduced to imitating her younger sister, mimicking her frailty, her whispery fascination with even the boys who bored her senseless: a desperate attempt to lure some of May’s suitors, even one of her suitors, into saving her from her parents’ gloomy house in the Jersey marshes.
    It was mortifying for her, I guess. But then as now, Mom consoled herself with her intelligence, her deductions. I think they really were still deductions at that point; they didn’t become paranoid fantasies until later on. She deduced motivations, she uncovered buried histories. Why her father’s gaiety had faded. Why her mother used to sit by the radio cursing the newsmen in some unknown tongue. Why was her family so poor for so long? Why had they moved from place to place all through her childhood, falling and ricocheting from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan to the Jersey outlands like a pachinko ball? These questions, which were never discussed in her home, Mom had answered, or thought she had answered, figuring out her own life-story from half-heard clues and conversations. Silently, all her childhood long, she shared her father’s tribulations; knew them without revealing that she knew; understood his tragedy without telling him she understood. She had always prided herself on this and on the fact that May had never had an inkling of any of it. It was the achievement of my mother’s youth, I think. And now, as I cleaned the bottom of the breakfast bowl, as I recounted my historic Rescue of the Little Kid From Ira’s Clutches, she thought to herself, What is he telling her down there? How much is he letting her know?
    It bothered Mom: her father and May alone together in Florida. It gnawed at her that they were down there, talking about who knew what. And that was why, over my father’s groans of protest, she had invited May to spend the summer with us. Though, of course, Mom wouldn’t have admitted to herself that that was the reason. Her own motives, in this as in everything, were an absolute enigma to her.
    So she sat at the end of the table with her pen poised and her sad saggy aspect and her quick but inward-turning eyes and the birdsong and spring aromas all around us. And she looked up, suddenly, startled, when I pushed back from the table and said, ‘I gotta get to school.’
    She blinked and came into the moment. ‘Be careful,’ she said, her eyes lingering on my strong limbs, my blond good looks, the beauty she loved. ‘Be careful.’
    The rest of the day, until Agnes, was pretty much my usual thing: all-powerful in the morning, a sniveling turd by afternoon. In the morning, that is, I walked to school, hiking jauntily up Bunker Hill with books beneath my arm and daydreams of sovereignty beneath my semi-crew. News of the telepathic mind-burst I’d used to heal Grandpa had spread and I’d been made king of the world now, nine years old though I was. I was a greatly intentioned king. Enlightened rule for the entire planet was just around the corner. First, though, I was working out the details of an apocalyptic purge. Mobsters, Russians, rapists, Arabs, the guys who’d killed Kennedy – it was a bad day to be any of that gang. As I walked along beneath the