Free Agnes Among the Gargoyles by Patrick Flynn Page A

ninety-odd pound frame. She looks like the woman on the Breck bottle. She brought Christie's into the twentieth century? Agnes, who wasn't even aware there was a problem, feels hopelessly inadequate. Mrs. Blair Stanhope makes her feel worse by being friendly and not in the least condescending. It's easy for her to be well adjusted, thinks Agnes.
    Â Â Â Mrs. Blair Stanhope goes back to her duties. Madelaine fires questions at Agnes, then asks the very same question that everyone winds up asking when getting to know Agnes.
    Â Â Â "Why the army?"
    Â Â Â Why indeed? There is no easy answer. It is difficult for Agnes to summon up all that she was thinking upon her graduation from St. Mary-Star-Of-The-Sea Academy, an all-girl Catholic high school perched on one of the few verdant hilltops in the East Bronx. Agnes had a three-quarter scholarship to Yale and a belief that the conventional routes in life were traps for the unwary. Favorably impressed by Israel's compulsory national service, she had argued for years in Social Studies classes that America needed the same thing.
    Â Â Â "So I enlisted," says Agnes.
    Â Â Â "Just because you believed in it?"
    Â Â Â "I was very silly."
    Â Â Â "What on earth did your mother say?"
    Â Â Â "In my mother's world, it's still V-J Day. She thought it was a perfectly sensible thing to do, which should have been a tipoff."
    Â Â Â "Would you do it again?"
    Â Â Â "Of course not," says Agnes. It was an absurd decision, even though the experience left her with some fond memories, and she did learn a few things—the types of hornets and wasps indigenous to the Carolinas; black slang and Spanish curses; she was stationed outside Stuttgart and picked up a good working knowledge of German; she learned to think on her feet while avoiding the sexual advances of a dyke quartermaster with a nose like a potato, Sgt. Avis; she learned about court-martial proceedings and how to prepare meat loaf and turnip puree for 1500 and—too late—why you should be very careful not to plunge your hands into a pot of simmering soybean oil. They took her to the base hospital but, delusional with fever, she chose not to stay. She wandered around the compound for an hour, somehow avoiding the M.P.s, her eyes wide, her bandaged hands preceding her like steamed lobster claws. She was amazed at the warlike atmosphere of the place. Her thoughts were profound. They're acting as if there's a war on in the hope of bringing one on! If war is an industry, then this is a shutdown plant!
    Â Â Â "It was then that I realized I was feeding the war machine. Two years in fatigues and third-degree burns later."
    Â Â Â "And what about love?" says Madelaine.
    Â Â Â Agnes butters another sourdough roll. "What about it?"
    Â Â Â "Where does it fit in your life?"
    Â Â Â "I could squeeze it in, if something came up."
    Â Â  "Then you're not seeing anyone?"
    Â Â  It strikes Agnes as odd that she cares. "No."
    Â Â Â "My daughter hates it when I ask her that," says Madelaine. "She calls me a sexist. But I'm not. I just want her to be happy. I want her to have someone special. Loving Ron's made all the difference to me. That's why I owe you everything. Really, I couldn't go on without him."
    Â Â Â The woman must surely be batty. How could she possibly feel love for that piece of flesh convalescing on the other side of the triplex? It doesn't make any sense. If loving Ron's made all the difference, then she's got to get out in the world a little more. Agnes finds her fascinatingly grotesque—the tears she cries for her husband's fate which she allows to adhere to her cheeks for an unseemly length of time; her undulating blond pageboy; her expressive, perfectly painted mouth (undercoat and highlights and glosses, three coats)--as the meal progresses Madelaine's presence starts to bear down on Agnes, like a movie viewed from the front