Agnes Among the Gargoyles Read Online Free
Author: Patrick Flynn
costs, featherbedding, and litigation brought when a contract is shifted to a new manufacturer under mysterious circumstances. Tollivetti will break the story of how the city paid almost twenty-five thousand dollars to replace that shattered glass globe.
Chapter Five
Agnes lives in a sprawling turn-of-the-century apartment house on Riverside Drive in the West 150s. This part of the drive hasn't seen an Astor or a Vanderbilt for a long time, but a few Kennedys and McKibbins may have passed through in the 1970s looking to score heroin. There are plenty of working people here, but the flavor of the neighborhood comes from those who are most visible, the dealers and crackheads, the alcoholics, the screeching lunatics who wander away from the Fort Washington shelter. This is a place of bodegas sheathed in Plexiglas, of stores that sell nothing but glass pipes, of cuchifritos and check-cashing emporia. In the summertime, the orange vendors crouch over their machines and score the skins with a spiral groove, looking like Hispanic Thomas Edisons cranking the first phonograph.
   Agnes lives here because the apartments are beautiful. Where else could she afford eight rooms, including a study and a formal dining room, parquet floors with walnut braid, built-in bookshelves? Where else could she have a view of the Hudson? Only in what many would call a slum.
   Agnes's building is called the Duke of Exeter. It was built by a woolens magnate named Randolph St. John Christopher, for whom Christopher Street is named. Obsessive about detail, Christopher hounded his architect about the placement of every sconce and flower box.
   It doesn't take very long for the reporters to find Agnes's apartment. They set up a command post outside her door. Agnes can hear them talking and telling dirty stories and growing increasingly giddy as the night wears on and she doesn't appear.
   Figures from the peripheries of her life have already begun showing up on the TV news. Tollivetti, guesting on The Bulldog Report, interviews Agnes's Tae Kwon Do instructor. Someone else talks to the recording secretary of the Telamones Society. Mike Masters, with whom Agnes once went on an excruciating date, who used to work for Infertility and now writes copy for The Bulldog Report, drops the bombshell that Agnes Travertine is pregnant.
   The telephone rings. It is Agnes's mother, Hannah.
   "I think it's an absolutely marvelous way to break the news," says Hannah.
   Agnes had fallen prey to the notion that she should date more, and the disastrous evening with Mike Masters was the result. Mike, was retiring and bookish, not to mention movieish and theaterish and recordsish. He was thoroughly steeped in art; the movie he and Agnes were to see would be his second film of the day. (Agnes's vanity was a little wounded by this; in her mind, their dinner took on the character of a short subject between features.) Mike described the movie he had seen that day as "important." This was more than Agnes could bear. "Important for the director and actorsâthey made a fortune," she hooted. Mike just looked at her in a puzzled fashion. She spent a few minutes trying to dissuade him from his life of aesthetic consumerism. She tried to see how much money he was spending on other people's half-baked notions. Then she stopped. Why was she doing this? Mike Masters was perfectly happyâmore content with his life than Agnes would ever be, certainly. He was an innocent monument of welladjustedness, a monument on which Agnes was spray-painting graffiti.
   She felt guilty about raining on Mike Masters' parade, even though he seemed oblivious. She felt so guilty when he asked her for another date that she took a coward's way out. She told him she was pregnant.
   "Relax ma," she says. "I'm not pregnant."
   "But Mike Mastersâ"
   "Mike Masters misunderstood
Chapter Five
Agnes lives in a sprawling turn-of-the-century apartment house on Riverside Drive in the West 150s. This part of the drive hasn't seen an Astor or a Vanderbilt for a long time, but a few Kennedys and McKibbins may have passed through in the 1970s looking to score heroin. There are plenty of working people here, but the flavor of the neighborhood comes from those who are most visible, the dealers and crackheads, the alcoholics, the screeching lunatics who wander away from the Fort Washington shelter. This is a place of bodegas sheathed in Plexiglas, of stores that sell nothing but glass pipes, of cuchifritos and check-cashing emporia. In the summertime, the orange vendors crouch over their machines and score the skins with a spiral groove, looking like Hispanic Thomas Edisons cranking the first phonograph.
   Agnes lives here because the apartments are beautiful. Where else could she afford eight rooms, including a study and a formal dining room, parquet floors with walnut braid, built-in bookshelves? Where else could she have a view of the Hudson? Only in what many would call a slum.
   Agnes's building is called the Duke of Exeter. It was built by a woolens magnate named Randolph St. John Christopher, for whom Christopher Street is named. Obsessive about detail, Christopher hounded his architect about the placement of every sconce and flower box.
   It doesn't take very long for the reporters to find Agnes's apartment. They set up a command post outside her door. Agnes can hear them talking and telling dirty stories and growing increasingly giddy as the night wears on and she doesn't appear.
   Figures from the peripheries of her life have already begun showing up on the TV news. Tollivetti, guesting on The Bulldog Report, interviews Agnes's Tae Kwon Do instructor. Someone else talks to the recording secretary of the Telamones Society. Mike Masters, with whom Agnes once went on an excruciating date, who used to work for Infertility and now writes copy for The Bulldog Report, drops the bombshell that Agnes Travertine is pregnant.
   The telephone rings. It is Agnes's mother, Hannah.
   "I think it's an absolutely marvelous way to break the news," says Hannah.
   Agnes had fallen prey to the notion that she should date more, and the disastrous evening with Mike Masters was the result. Mike, was retiring and bookish, not to mention movieish and theaterish and recordsish. He was thoroughly steeped in art; the movie he and Agnes were to see would be his second film of the day. (Agnes's vanity was a little wounded by this; in her mind, their dinner took on the character of a short subject between features.) Mike described the movie he had seen that day as "important." This was more than Agnes could bear. "Important for the director and actorsâthey made a fortune," she hooted. Mike just looked at her in a puzzled fashion. She spent a few minutes trying to dissuade him from his life of aesthetic consumerism. She tried to see how much money he was spending on other people's half-baked notions. Then she stopped. Why was she doing this? Mike Masters was perfectly happyâmore content with his life than Agnes would ever be, certainly. He was an innocent monument of welladjustedness, a monument on which Agnes was spray-painting graffiti.
   She felt guilty about raining on Mike Masters' parade, even though he seemed oblivious. She felt so guilty when he asked her for another date that she took a coward's way out. She told him she was pregnant.
   "Relax ma," she says. "I'm not pregnant."
   "But Mike Mastersâ"
   "Mike Masters misunderstood
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