Agnes Among the Gargoyles by Patrick Flynn Page A

trend."
    Â Â Â "I thought you were gentrifying," says Madelaine vaguely.
    Â Â Â "We're a little far up for that sort of thing."
    Â Â Â Madelaine heads determinedly for the cream-colored Rolls that has pulled silently to the curb.
    Â Â Â "I'm off to get Ron his Valentine's Day present," she tells Agnes as she gets in the car. "May I offer you a lift?"
    Â Â Â "I'll take the subway, thanks anyway."
    Â Â  "Are you sure?"
    Â Â  "It's quicker. I'll take the Fifth Avenue Line."
    Â Â Â Agnes feels a little like her mother. Hannah was always talking up the virtues of the El, and feeling sorry for rich people stuck in limousines.
    Â Â Â "Okay," says Madelaine. "I'll be in touch."
    Â Â Â The Rolls glides away. The license plate reads WEGETTE. Agnes suffers the hollow feeling of one who has behaved badly. Madelaine is pleasant enough, considering her caste, and she and the Great Man have been generous. So what if she doesn't know that there's no such thing as the Fifth Avenue Subway?

Chapter Ten

    "Ma, is something wrong with the phone?"
    Â Â  "What? I don't think so." 
    Â Â  "What's that noise?"
    Â Â  "You must mean the vacuum cleaner. Ken's doing the drapes." 
    Â Â  "Ken who?"
    Â Â Â "Ken Park Rhee. His parents have that little fruit market on Queens Boulevard. He does odd jobs for pocket money."
    Â Â Â Agnes knows that store. When Salvatore Vincenza came over from Genoa and strung a canopy over his pushcart on Mott Street, that was a little fruit market. What the Park Rhees have is nothing less than a fruit-o-rama, a wonderland of produce and impulse purchases, 900 square feet of vegetables and salads, cold cuts and cookies, imported beers, Gotham Amber, Gotham Lager, Gotham Premium Porter, ladyfingers, dense ice cream, eggplants in three colors.
    Â Â Â "There's an attachment for the molding, Ken," says Hannah.
    Â Â Â Agnes burns. She's giving him pocket money! The world will forever be divided into the Park Rhees and the Travertines, the producers and the consumers, the accumulators and the dissipaters.
    Â Â Â Partly to blame is Hannah's mother, Leta Brezcouscus. Leta was a Lithuanian firebrand, a perpetually hoarse little stewpot of a woman who worked as a building superintendent and moved in a cloud of coal dust and bacon drippings and mothballs. She embodied all the peasant virtues and shortcomings. She never spent a dime she didn't have to.
    Â Â Â "She had a heart as black and cold as one of her skillets," was Hannah's verdict.
    Â Â Â Hannah could never quite get out from under the old girl's thumb. She married Johnny Travertine to spite her because Johnny was so handsome and glib and fundamentally American, pointedly not Lithuanian, and of course Leta loved him, couldn't do enough for him, and Johnny could never understand his wife's antipathy toward her mother. A pox on both of them, thought Hannah. That was when she started having cleaning women in.
    Â Â Â "Pay me! I'll do it," Leta would cry, clutching what looked like her heart but was actually the chamois moneybag she wore around her neck.
    Â Â Â Eventually, Hannah had her own daughter, Brigette. Brigette died, so Hannah had Agnes. Hannah had always hoped for a girlish girl, someone with whom she could giggle and make cookies and lemonade, but the poor luckless woman was to be disappointed in that regard. The cookies grew stale and pond scum formed on the lemonade while little Agnes fretted over her electric trains—their going in a circle disturbed her sense of realism; the figure-eight intersected itself near the water tower, which would only be possible in a small town on the edge of hyperspace.
    Â Â Â "I have to tell you something," says Hannah. "I spoke to Mrs. Fuentes at Social Security. There's been some sort of snafu. Your father's divorce decree seems to have disappeared."
    Â Â Â Johnny's brief first marriage isn't