We Were the Mulvaneys

So what they did was, actually they did nothing.

That’s for the cemetery!—the guys would snigger behind their hands.

Hoo! One for the cem-e-tery!—the girls would overhear, perplexed and vaguely embarrassed.

Keep it for the cemetery! Right on!—giving one another the peacenik sign, laughing like hell. Sometimes under their teachers’ very noses and if it was a woman teacher, all the more hilarious.

Girls knew nothing about it. At any rate not the good girls. So if one could be enticed into saying, “‘Cemetery’?—why?” this was quite a coup.

In the junior high, where Della Rae Duncan was a student, the girls knew even less. The smartest girls, the leaders, the most popular girls—Marianne Mulvaney, Suzi Quigley, Trisha LaPorte, Bonnie Sherman and their clique. These were cheerleaders, class officers (Marianne Mulvaney was secretary), members of the Drama Club, the French Club, the Quill and Scroll Literary Society, the school chorus. They were Honors Students. They were active in the Christian Youth Conference. Because they were good-girl girls they believed they were not snobbish and they competed with one another in being friendly, being nice, to the most obscure students; the most pathetic losers; like Della Rae Duncan, and other “trailer-village” kids. Their smiles were golden coins scattered carelessly in the school corridors, their Hi’s! and H’lo’s! and How are you’s! were melodic as the cries of spring birds.

It wasn’t until after the Christmas holiday, when school resumed again in January, that Marianne Mulvaney turned a corner in the girls’ locker room and saw, to her discomfort—Della Rae Duncan. Just sitting there, slump-shouldered, on a bench in front of her opened locker. Staring at the floor. Della Rae’s face was puffy and embittered like a grown woman’s. Her lips appeared to be moving. Her oily hair lifted from her head in stiff coils. Gym class had begun ten minutes before, and at roll call Della Rae had been marked absent, but she was in no hurry now, just slouched there in a kind of torpor. Marianne, so fastidious in her personal grooming, saw in dismay that Della Rae was partly undressed, in baggy gym shorts that ballooned about her hips and a frayed, grimy-gray bra (what heavy breasts!) held together by safety pins. Her flesh that looked stained, with its oily glisten, and a smell of talcumy sweat, seemed on the verge of spilling from her clothes.

For all her social poise at the age of fourteen, Marianne was a shy girl; physically shy; never comfortable in the locker room undressing with the other girls, still less in the communal showers. At church, Reverend Appleby spoke in his flushed, impassioned, somewhat tongue-tied way of sins of the flesh as temptations to us all but Marianne could see little temptation. At home, she would have been mortified with embarrassment had even her mother glimpsed her in just underwear.

Too late to retreat, Della Rae had seen her. Marianne’s pretty face lit up in its customary dazzling smile. “Hi, Della Rae!”—the very voice, a lilting soprano, of Caucasian privilege. The girls’ eyes locked. Sharp as a blade was Della Rae’s black stare: Marianne felt her face burn at once, and her heart kicked as if she’d been shot, like a bird in flight, yet like a wounded bird carried forward by sheer momentum, scarcely faltering in her stride. Marianne had returned to the locker room to get a packet of Kleenex from her locker but she couldn’t remain in the other girl’s presence, not a moment longer! She retreated, still smiling, her face aching with the effort, as Della Rae Duncan stared at her with undisguised hatred.

But why me? What have I ever done to you? Whatever has been done to you—how is it my fault?

In a daze, as if she’d been slapped—she, Marianne Mulvaney!—Marianne returned to gym class, where a volleyball game was just beginning. Miss Deltz, the gym instructor, asked Marianne if she’d seen Della Rae Duncan, and Marianne nodded yes. Miss Deltz, a short, wiry, white-blond woman of about thirty, regarded Marianne, one of her favorites, with a look of cautious confidentiality. “Those people, they cause more trouble … That kind of a girl. Sad!” It was a murmur, more like thinking out loud than actual speech. Marianne stared at her gym shoes, cleanly white, with white laces perfectly tied, white-ribbed woollen socks. She could not think of a word to say.

Della Rae never did show up for gym that day and if any of the girls missed her, not a word was said.

PROVIDENCE

Well then! Don’t believe if you choose not to. I know what happened and I know what truth is and God’s purpose is not altered whether such as you believe, or not. And we’d laugh, protesting. Oh Mom.

It was December 1938, between Christmas and New Year’s. Corinne was seven years old. Ida Hausmann, her mother, was driving the family car with just Corinne as a passenger, that car that was a battered old 1931 Dodge like a sunk submarine gray and speckled with rust like pimples. They were at about the midpoint returning home from the village of Ransomville, about four miles yet to go, and a storm was blowing up, rain and sleet and then sleet and snow, the sky above the mountain-rim of the Valley a frightening bluish black roiling with clouds like those fleeting distorted faces you see as you’re beginning to fall asleep, and the sun a smoldering red eye at the horizon like the last coal in the smithy engorged with flame by the blacksmith’s bellows. (Corinne’s grandfather Hausmann was a blacksmith, as well as a farmer.) And you could hear a strange sound like the hoarse-breathing suck! suck! suck! of the bellows that was the wind sucking at the struggling car wanting to pluck it from the road.

Against her husband’s wishes (Mr. Hausmann was parsimonious regarding gasoline and the general upkeep of the family car and did not approve of “jaunts” to town except for practical purposes like shopping) Mrs. Hausmann had driven backcountry crudely plowed roads to visit a sickly older sister who lived in Ransomville; now on the return trip she was beginning to panic, the way the snow was coming down, an unexpected blizzard. Corinne’s mother was one of those women susceptible to “nerves”—“agitations”—of unknown origin, and in emergency situations she either took control completely, as when Corinne’s twelve-year-old brother lost several fingers in a threshing accident, or broke down completely, talking and moaning to herself, praying aloud, shaking her head as she was now, oh! they’d never make it home, if they were stuck in snow she’d never be able to shovel out (there was a snow shovel kept in the car trunk for such purposes), why had she gone to visit her sister oh why, why! Her eyes began to glisten, she was blinking rapidly. It was Corinne’s task to keep the inside of the driver’s windshield clean where it steamed up, swiping at it with mittened hands, but the steam kept coming back, and snow and ice particles were sticking to the outside, and Mrs. Hausmann wept and scolded as if it were Corinne’s fault.

Corinne was a big girl in her own eyes, not a scaredy-baby, and she didn’t cry easily, but the way the wind rocked the car! and sucked at it! and snow was swirling and rushing toward them like a tunnel they had no choice but to drive into, for there was no turning back. And the windshield wipers were going slower and slower, encrusted with ice. And Mrs. Hausmann cried I can’t see, Corinne keep the window clear I told you! And Corinne wiped frantically at the glass, leaning across the steering wheel, but what could she do?—the ice was on the outside. And Mrs. Hausmann could drive only ten miles an hour, or less. And at a plank bridge over a creek invisible in a haze of seething white there was a ramp so icy-steep the Dodge’s tires even with their chains began to spin, and slip, and the Dodge began to slide backward and Mrs. Hausmann gunned the motor and still the car was sliding, then the motor sputtered and died, Mrs. Hausmann screamed as the car tilted off the ramp entirely, the most sickening sensation Corinne would remember all her life as they fell, overturning into a twelve-foot culvert beside the road. God help us! Mrs. Hausmann screamed. God help my baby and me, don’t let us die!

It might have been that God heard, and took mercy: lucky for mother and daughter, the culvert was solid ice at its base, not water. The car upended and came slowly to rest and there was silence save for the wind and the sifting-hissing sound of the snow that was like something alive, and malevolent. Corinne saw that her mother’s mouth was bleeding, and her black wool cloche hat, her only good hat, was crooked over one eye, its sprig of shiny red holly berries askew. Later, Mrs. Hausmann would discover that two of her front teeth had loosened, where she’d been thrown against the steering wheel, but she didn’t notice now, she had no time. She panted, grunted like a man forcing the driver’s door open, and outward, then crawling out, with much difficulty into the freezing snow, her heavy skirt hiking up revealing lardy-pale thighs and thick-mesh beige stockings in such a way Corinne had never seen before. Corinne! Take my hand! Hurry! she cried. Corinne grabbed her mother’s gloved hand and climbed, for all the terror of the situation, monkey-nimble out of the car into a roaring of snowflakes so fierce she could barely see her mother only a few inches away.

Then on their hands and knees they crawled back up the incline to the road now so drifted in snow it was hardly recognizable as a road. Ice-rivulets began to form on their faces; snowflakes caught in their eyelashes like living, lashing cobwebs. It was a cold beyond cold, you couldn’t register it, fingers and toes going numb, faces chill and brittle as ceramic. Mrs. Hausmann shouted to Corinne that they’d go to the Gorner farm close by—wasn’t it close by?—though she seemed confused about which direction it was. She set out one way, crossing the bridge, then suddenly halted and reversed, gripping Corinne’s hand. She removed her woolen scarf from around her neck to wrap it around Corinne’s head, to protect Corinne from frostbite. Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid! Momma will take care of you.

It would seem afterward that they walked, trudged, for many miles, heads bent against the wind. Yet they could not have gone very far at all. Were they walking in circles? It wasn’t clear which side of the creek they were on, Mrs. Hausmann couldn’t remember. It was not even clear where the road was, exactly. There was a high ringing sound in the air, above the tolling of the wind. Like a voice, the words so drawn out you couldn’t hear them. Like high-tension wires, except of course there were none along the Ransomville Road, electricity had not yet come to this remote part of the Chautauqua Valley. Corinne, don’t give in! Stay with Momma! Mrs. Hausmann pleaded. She had never been a demonstrative mother, still less a warm mother, she’d had four or five babies before Corinne, of whom only two had lived, and who knew how many miscarriages, “accidents” as they were elliptically called, never clearly distinguished from other species of “female troubles,” yet now, in the blizzard, she seemed to Corinne so loving! so loving! hugging Corinne tight, scolding and pleading, blowing her warm desperate breath into Corinne’s face. Corinne was so sleepy, her eyelids wanted to shut. Her knees inside her thick wool leggings were like water—boneless. She wasn’t afraid now and wasn’t even cold, wanting only to lie down in the shelter of a snowdrift and cradle her heavy head in her arms and sleep, sleep. But her mother kept shaking her, slapping at her cheeks. Her mother’s swollen mouth glistened where blood had coagulated into ice. God help us! Mrs. Hausmann prayed. God help us! I’ll never drive that car again, nor any car I swear to you God.

There came then an eerie smoldering-red glow as if the dying sun had slipped its moorings and sunk to earth, buffeted by the terrible wind. It splintered into a myriad of fragments, glowing-red sparks, tiny as fireflies. And in fact—they were fireflies! Mrs. Hausmann saw with dazed eyes what could not be, but was. Corinne, look! A sign from God! Mother and daughter stumbled in the direction of the fireflies which led them not as they would have gone (so Mrs. Hausmann swore afterward) but in another direction entirely, and so saved their lives. For within five minutes something dark hulked above them in the blizzard: the schoolhouse! The single-room schoolhouse that was in fact Corinne’s own school, closed for Christmas recess. Mrs. Hausmann had no time to wonder how they had found their way to the school, for hadn’t she been headed in the opposite direction?—but the fireflies led them on, winking, almost invisible, dancing several yards before them, emitting too (for so it seemed) that strange melodic high-pitched sound that must have been a voice of God, too pure for human ears. At the school, Mrs. Hausmann lifted a rock, and threw it clumsily into a window, so the glass shattered; and she and Corinne crawled through the window, in their numbed, distracted states tearing their clothes on the jagged glass in the frame, but at last they were inside, in a sheltered place, panting and sobbing with relief. Inside it was freezing cold, and dark as the interior of a cave, but Mrs. Hausmann located the woodburning stove, and Corinne found the tin box containing her teacher’s kitchen matches, and Mrs. Hausmann was able with her stiffened, shaking fingers to start a fire, and so—they were saved.

They would not be rescued for nearly twenty-four hours, by a sheriffs rescue team accompanying a snowplow along the Ransomville Road, but from that point onward as Mrs. Hausmann would say they were in the bosom of the Lord.

Another, less fortunate traveler on the road that day, a neighbor of the Hausmanns, froze to death when his pickup stalled and he tried to walk to shelter. On a county highway, a young couple abandoned their car to the storm and set out bravely on foot, lost their way and crawled into an irrigation ditch to escape the wind, the man lying on top of the woman and so saving her from freezing; he survived, too, but only barely, both legs having to be amputated at the knees. And many head of cattle died in the Valley, trapped outside when the storm swept upon them. Canada geese were said to have dropped like shot out of the air, transformed to ice. Even in the towns of Ransomville, Milford, Chautauqua Falls, and Mt. Ephraim there were deaths and near-deaths. The Yewville River froze so solidly it didn’t thaw until late April. Snow endured for months, well into spring, hard-crusted unnatural snow it seemed, acrid and bitter on the tongue, hiding the bodies of numberless wild creatures, revealed only in the thaw. But Mrs. Hausmann and Corinne were spared, the spirit of God dwelling forever afterward in their hearts.

That’s why I love fireflies so, Corinne would say, her eyes shining like a seven-year-old’s, they saved Momma’s life and mine.

And some of us would be laughing. Oh Mom!

And Mom would flare up, quick as a cat might turn on you and hiss, her fur stroked the wrong way, “Don’t you ‘Oh Mom’ me! I remember that day as clearly as if it was last week, not thirty-eight years ago. Yes, and I can see those fireflies as clearly as I see you.”

Dad, Mikey-Junior and Patrick would try to keep straight faces. The story of Grandma Hausmann and Mom as a little girl of seven, lost in a blizzard on the Ransomville Road, was one of the oldest Mulvaney family stories, and a favorite, but as we got older one by one (except Marianne, of course: she always defended Mom) we came to wonder how accurate it was.

Most embarrassing was when Mom told the story to people she hardly knew like my eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Cole, or some lady she’d run into at the A & P, or friends of ours spending the night at the farm—how God watches over us all, how Mom’s life was changed forever by an act of “providence.”

Just the way Mom uttered that word: providence. You saw a tall black marble column with a cross at its summit. You saw a blue sky so vast and deep you could fall into it forever.

So Dad couldn’t help commenting behind his hand, with that wink that squinched up half his face, it was surely an act of providence that his mother-in-law Ida Hausmann never drove any vehicle ever again—“That was a blessing of God’s, yessir!”

To us kids, who’d known her only as a nervous-skinny, querulous, gray old woman with thick eyeglasses, the thought of Grandma Hausmann driving any vehicle on the road was hilarious.

But Mom held her ground. Mom was stubborn, and eloquent. She said, in a hurt, dignified tone, that her mother was a country woman of the old days, German-born and brought to America at the age of less than a year; she’d always been a commonsense Lutheran, not given to flights of religious fancy; when such people are confronted by a truth they know to be true they never change their minds, ever. Mom said you have to experience certain things to know certain things. Like an explorer to Antarctica, or to the moon—once you stepped foot in such a place, you’d never doubt it existed. Like giving birth—that, just once, you’d never doubt. “If you’ve done it, you know; if not, you don’t.” Mom would smile beatifically, and fix her glowing blue gaze on us one by one until we’d begin to squirm. Even Dad.

For that was Mom’s trump card: she was the mother, and so possessed a mysterious and unquestioned authority. Dad was the boss, but Mom was the power. Mom in her manure-stained bib overalls, or, in warm weather, her MT. EPHRAIM HIGH T-shirt and khaki shorts, an old hand-knit sweater of Dad’s pushed up past her elbows, her boots she called combat boots, or hippie-style leather sandals worn with cotton socks. Mom with her frizzed hair that shone a luminous carroty color in the sun. Mom’s smile that could turn sweet and teasing, or pucker into her “vinegar” look; her loud neighing laugh that made people want to join in, just hearing it. Here I am, a funny-silly woman, an ordinary woman, a TV mom, but God has touched my life nonetheless.

Mike Jr. (who was the most like Dad) might tease, daringly, “Hey Mom: what about Doughnut?”—one of the barn cats—“she’s had thirty kittens, what kind of authority does that make her?”

And Mom would retort, quick as, at Ping-Pong, she was capable of returning a killer serve, “It makes her an authority on kittens.”

And we’d all laugh, including Mom. Yet the fact she was our mother remained.

Of us kids it was always Patrick who was most skeptical about the blizzard-fireflies story. (Maybe because Patrick, the smartest of us, wanted so badly to believe?) There was a way he had of leaning his elbows on the table (the kitchen table: where we’d likely be) and shoving out his lower lip, his warrior-stance in Debate Club at school, and saying, “Oh, Mom! Come on! Let’s examine this rationally. It could not have been ‘fireflies’ in a blizzard in December. Ple-ease.”

And Mom would retort, her cheeks reddening, “What were they, then, Mr. Socrates? I was there, and I saw. I know a firefly when I see one.”

“How would I know what they were?” Patrick protested. “It might’ve been a hallucination.”

“Two of us? Momma and me? An identical ‘hallucination’ at the identical moment?”—Mom was incensed, leaning across the table toward Patrick.

“There’s such a phenomenon as mass hysteria,” Patrick said importantly. “The power of suggestion and wishful thinking. The human mind is—well, real weird.”

“Speak for your own ‘human mind’! Mine happens to be normal.”

Mom was laughing, but you could see by the glisten in her eyes she was getting miffed.

Yet Patrick persisted. Mike might kick his ankle under the table, Marianne might poke him in the ribs and tease “Pinch!”, but Patrick couldn’t stop. There was something wonderful in the hot harried look in his eyes, especially the bad one. “O.K., Mom, but consider: why would God send a blizzard to almost kill you and Grandma, then rescue you by sending ‘fireflies’? Does that make sense?” Patrick’s glasses winked with adolescent urgency. His voice cracked like a radio beset by static. Here was an American teenager who just wanted things to make sense. “And what about the other people who died that day, in the blizzard? Why did God favor you and Grandma over them? What was so special about you?”

That was Patrick’s trump card, he’d toss down onto the table in gloating triumph.

By this time Mom had gone dangerously red in the face, that mottled look you sometimes get without being aware of it, working in the barns on a stifling hot day, even if you’ve avoided the sun. Her hands fluttered like hurt birds, her words came stammering. All of us, even Dad, watched closely, wondering how Mom would answer these challenging words of Patrick’s, to silence his doubts, and ours, forever. Damn old Pinch!—I wanted to punch his smug mouth, making us all anxious, after Sunday supper (Sunday nights were always “super-casserole” occasions, meaning Mom and Marianne would concoct delicious refrigerator-leftovers unique and not-repeatable), and the dogs and cats gobbling away at plate scrapings, in their separate corners, anxious too, with that twitchy animal anxiety that shows as rapacious appetite, muzzles lowered to the bowl. And by this time Feathers would have woken from his earlyevening drowse to scold, chatter, chirp in sounds sharp as the twining of a fork on a glass. Patrick took no notice of such upset as he’d himself caused but leaned farther forward, his bony vertebrae showing through his shirt, and he’d shove his prissy John Lennon glasses against the bridge of his nose, and beetle his brow so he’d be staring at Mom like she was some kind of specimen, one of those poor sad dead “nocturnal” moths pinned to a Styrofoam board in his room.

Corinne drew her shoulders up, and threw back her head. However she was dressed, however flyaway her hair, she spoke calmly, with dignity. Always, you maintain your dignity: that was Captain Mulvaney’s charge to his troops. “I believe what God requires me to believe, Patrick. I would not ask of Him that He explain His motives any more than I would wish that any of you might ask of me why I love you.” Mom paused, wiping at her eyes. Our hearts beat like metronomes. “It was providence, and it is, that I was spared from death in 1938 so that—” and here Mom paused again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it, “—so that you children—Mikey, Patrick, Marianne, and Judd—could be born.”

And we sighed, and we basked in that knowledge. Even Pinch, who bit his lip and frowned more deeply. Yes it made sense, yes it was our truth, Dad grinned and nodded to signal his agreement.

Hell, yes: providence.

STRAWBERRIES & CREAM

That Sunday afternoon, upstairs in her bedroom, Marianne methodically emptied her garment bag of everything except the satin prom dress, her fingers moving numbly and blindly, yet efficiently. She then zipped the bag shut again and hung it in the farthest corner of her closet beneath the sharp-slanting eaves.

Always, you maintain your dignity.

At High Point Farm in the big old house she’d lived in all her life. What began to beat against her nerves was the familiar sound of clocks ticking.

Clocks measuring Time, was what you’d think. That there was a single Time and these clocks (and the watches the Mulvaneys wore on their wrists) were busily tick-tick-ticking it. So that in any room you needed only to glance at a wall, or a mantel, or a table, and trust that the time you’d see measured there was accurate.

Except of course that wasn’t how it was. Not at High Point Farm where Corinne Mulvaney collected “antique” American clocks.