We Were the Mulvaneys

“In the sense of friendship. Pure and simple.”

“I don’t understand.” Patrick’s mild provoking manner, his level gaze, indicated otherwise. A tawny look had come up in his eyes.

Dad said, pleasantly, “Friendship with a person of Ben Breuer’s quality means a hell of a lot more to me than winning a game.”

“Isn’t that hypocritical, Dad?”

A look of hurt flickered across Dad’s face. He’d been spooning cherry cobbler out of Mom’s bowl which she’d pushed in his direction, seeing how he’d been casting yearning glances at it, and now he said, fixing Patrick with a fatherly patient smile, “It’s sound business sense, son. That’s what it is.”

After supper there was the danger of Corinne knocking at her door. Of course the door could not be locked, impossible to lock any door at High Point Farm and violate family code.

In fact there were no locks on the children’s bedroom doors. For what purpose, a lock?

God help me. Jesus have pity on me.

During the meal Marianne had had a mild surge of nausea but no one had noticed. She’d conquered it, sitting very calmly and waiting for it to subside. As Dad said, An act of will.

But it was there, still. The nausea that had spread through her body like that species of thick clotted green scum that, if unchecked, spread through the animals’ drinking pond and despoiled it each summer. Microorganisms replicating by an action of sunshine, Patrick explained. Only drastic measures could curtail them.

But the nausea remained, and a taste of hot yellow bile at the back of her mouth. Like acid. Horrible. It was the vodka backing up, vodka and orange juice. She hadn’t known what it was, exactly. Zachary prepared the drink for her saying it was mild, she wouldn’t notice it at all. How happy she was, how elated! How easily she’d laughed! You’re so beautiful Marianne he’d said staring at her and she’d known it was true.

Jesus have pity on me, forgive me. Let me be all right.

As soon as she’d come home that afternoon she took two aspirin tablets. To get her through the ordeal of supper, two more. It seemed to her that the pain in her lower belly, the hot sullen seepage of blood in her loins had lessened. Her skin was hot, her forehead burning. If Mom had noticed she would have said in her usual murmurous embarrassed way, dropping her eyes, that it was just her period. A few days early this month.

How to examine her dress without touching it or smelling it.

The left strap was torn from the pleated bodice but did not appear to be otherwise damaged, it should be easy to mend. More difficult would be the long jagged tear in the skirt, upward from the hem on a bias. She could hear still the shriek of the delicate fabric as if her very nerves had been ripped out of her flesh. Nobody’s gonna hurt you for Christ’s sake get cool. Where she’d gently hand-washed the dress with Pond’s complexion soap in lukewarm water in Trisha’s bathroom sink the stains were still visible, blood- and vomit-stains. The satin was still damp. When it dried, it would wrinkle badly. But she would try again of course. She would not be discouraged.

Picking up the dress between her thumb and forefinger as if she feared its touch might be virulent, she turned it over on the bed.

Oh. Oh God.

The scattered bloodstains across the front of the dress were light as freckles but the darker stains on the back, a half dozen stains as long as six or seven inches, had turned a sour yellowish shade, unmistakable. Like the stained crotches of certain of her panties which Marianne scrubbed, scrubbed by hand to rid them of traces of menstrual blood before drying them in her closet and dropping them into the laundry chute. Ashamed that Corinne, who did the laundry, might see. Oh, ashamed! Though Corinne would never say a word, of course—Corinne who was so kind, so gentle. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Button, really, Mom insisted, perplexed at her daughter’s sensitivity. But Marianne could not help it. These panties weren’t disreputable enough to be discarded yet were not fit to wear; especially on gym days at school. One by one they’d collected at the back of Marianne’s underwear drawer in her bureau, to be worn, if at all, only in emergency situations.

Look, you know you want to. Why’d you come with me if you don’t?

Nobody’s gonna hurt you for Christ’s sake get cool!

At the prom she’d been photographed with the Valentine King and Queen and the Queen’s “maids-in-waiting” of whom Marianne Mulvaney was the only girl not a member of the senior class. Up on the bandstand. Smiling and giddy. The band was so loud! Sly-sliding trombone, deafening cymbals and drums. The Valentine King who was a tall blond flush-faced boy, a basketball star, kissed Marianne—full on the mouth. There was a smell of whiskey, beer, though drinking on school property was forbidden. Confetti caught in her hair. The band was playing “Light My Fire.” She was dancing with a senior named Zachary Lundt and then another senior named Matt Breuer who was the son of Dad’s close friend Mr. Breuer. In the excitement she could not recall with whom she’d come, which “date.” Then she caught sight of Austin Weidman’s long-jawed glum face and waved happily.

Her friends had come out to High Point Farm to see her dress and to stay for supper. Mom loved Marianne’s girlfriends—how lucky Marianne was, Mom said, to have such good friends! Such sweet girls! Her own girlhood had been lonely, she’d been a farmer’s daughter of the kind who had to work, work, work. That way of life was past now, like kerosene lamps, outdoor privies, snow chains on tires.

In her room, Marianne modeled the dress for Trisha, Suzi, Merissa, Bonnie. They were themselves very pretty girls, from well-to-do families in Mt. Ephraim, they were “good, Christian” girls—generally. Suzi and Merissa were cheerleaders like Marianne. Bonnie was class secretary. Trisha would be editor, the following year, of the school newspaper. They all had “dates” for the prom of course but their “dates” were with boys they’d gone out with in the past, boys of a certain quality. They teased Marianne about Austin Weidman whose name they pronounced in four flat-stressed syllables—“Aust-in Weid-man”—as if it were the funniest imaginable name. Suzi who was the boldest of them said slyly, What a shame, Button wasting that dress on Aus-tin Weid-man. All the girls laughed, including Marianne who blushed fiercely. She’d been prancing about her room in the shimmering satin dress with the strawberry-pink chiffon netting at the waist and hips, the finely stitched pleated bodice, elegantly thin straps. (Yes, she would have to wear a strapless bra beneath! Imagine.) She’d parodied the sexy arrogant pelvisthrust stance of a fashion model, lifting her arms above her head, but now froze in that position, confused.

Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Marianne.

“Marianne Mulvaney”—hot shit.

You’re pissing me off, you know it?

Everyone in the school had voted for the Valentine King and Queen and the names of the eight finalists were announced on Friday morning over the intercom in each homeroom and Marianne Mulvaney was the only junior in the list and her friends had shrieked with excitement and hugged, kissed her. Marianne had been dazed, disoriented, a little frightened. Who had voted for her? Why would anyone vote for her? This was not like being elected to the cheerleading squad for which she’d practiced tirelessly for weeks, nor was it like being elected secretary of her class which might have been perceived as an honor few others would have coveted. This was grace falling from above, unexpected. This was high school celebrity.

Was it a sin, such happiness? Such vanity?

Later, she would try washing the dress again in the bathroom sink. She would have to wait until everyone had gone to bed. And then she would have to be very quiet, stealthy. If Mom heard. If Mom knocked on the door. If Mom whispered, Button—?

Quickly Marianne folded the dress back up, to the size of a T-shirt. A spool of thread among her sewing things she’d spread on top of her bed went rolling, and Muffin leapt to pursue it. He’d been watching her from across the room. The dress was still damp, but Marianne placed it on a high shelf in her closet beneath some summer clothes. Zipped up the garment bag and hung it in a corner of her closet. Out of sight.

Fortunately Marianne hadn’t a mother like Trisha’s. Poking about in her room. That look in Mrs. LaPorte’s eyes, that nervous edge to the voice.

I’m fine, thank you. Really!

A little tired I guess. A headache.

That look passing between Trisha and Mrs. LaPorte. They’d been talking of Marianne of course. Last night, those long hours she’d been out. Hadn’t returned with Trisha and the others. Went where?

O Jesus truly I do not remember. I have sinned but I do not remember.

Between her legs she was bleeding into a sanitary napkin. Her lower abdomen ached. There was comfort in this ache which meant cramps: something routine. A few days earlier this month but nothing to be alarmed about, was it. Take two more aspirin before bed. Put your mind on other things.

It was too early for bed. The telephone had not once rung for her, all that Sunday.

She sat at her desk. Opened her geometry book. The printed words, the figures began to swim. She read, reread the problem and even as she read she was forgetting. The cat batted the spool of cream-colored thread about on the carpet until Marianne could not bear it any longer and scolded, “Muffin! Stop.”

Cruel and unfair, certain of the rumors at Mt. Ephraim High. That the “good, Christian” girls—the “popular” girls—the “nice” girls—if they were pretty girls, in any case—were subtly upgraded by their teachers. Marianne was sure this was not true—was it? She worked hard, she was diligent, conscientious. True, her friends were happy to help her with problems of math, science that gave her trouble. Boys in her class, senior boys. Not often Patrick, though: Patrick disapproved.

At the thought of Patrick, Marianne began to tremble. She was convinced that he knew. In the station wagon, driving home—the way he’d glanced at her, frowning. Certainly he would know by the end of homeroom period tomorrow morning. Or would no one dare tell him? There would be, in any case, murmured jokes, innuendos for him to overhear. Mulvaneys! Think you’re so good don’t you!

At Trisha’s she’d bathed twice and a third time since returning home that afternoon and now at 10 P.M. yet a fourth time cautiously lowering herself, her clumsy numb body, into water so hot it made her whimper aloud. The bathroom was filled with steam so she could barely see. The tub was an enormous old-fashioned clawfooted vessel of heavy chipped white porcelain. As a child, Marianne had been lost in it, giggling just slightly frightened as the buoyancy of the water lifted her feet and legs, tilting her backward. Mom had bathed her in this tub, careful not to run too much water into it, and to keep the water from getting too hot. Scalding water issued from the right-hand faucet, cold water from the left. You would not want to lift your foot experimentally to that right-hand faucet.

Nothing happened you didn’t want and ask for.

So shut up about it. Understand?

He’d shaken her, hard. To stop her crying, sobbing. Choking-vomiting. The stink in his car that made him furious.

In the tub the currents of scalding water twined and twisted with the currents of cold water. A noisy gushing that muffled any other sound. Her heart was beating strangely as it had beat the other morning when she’d heard her name—her name!—over the loudspeaker. She shut her eyes not wishing to see her naked arms and legs, milky-pale, floating like a dead girl’s. Her pale bruised breasts, floating. The ugly plum-colored bruises on the insides of her thighs. Especially she did not wish to see any thin tendrils of blood.

O Jesus have pity, Jesus let me be all right.

Always, you maintain your dignity. You’re a Mulvaney, you will be judged by different standards.

It came to Marianne then, late in the evening of that windy-frigid Sunday in February, that you could make of your pain an offering. You could make of your humiliation a gift. She understood that Jesus Christ sends us nothing that is not endurable for even His suffering on the cross was endurable, He did not die.

Dissolving then like a TV screen switched to an empty channel so there opened before her again that perfect void.

SECRETS

In a family, what isn’t spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Because Judson Andrew Mulvaney was the last-born of the Mulvaney children, because I was Babyface, Dimple, Ranger, I was the last to know everything—good news, or bad. And probably there were lots of things I never knew at all.

This was long before the trouble with Marianne, I mean. When I was a little cowlicky-haired kid all eyes and ears like, if you’d imagine me as a cartoon figure I’d be a fly with big bulging eyes and waving antennae. For years I was undersized for my age, and a quiet boy, so to compensate sometimes I’d chatter loudly and importantly at school and, if it was just Mom and me, or Mom, Marianne and me, at home. I’m embarrassed to remember, now. And maybe I still behave that way, unconsciously, now. In imitation of Mikey-Junior who was my hero until I was in high school.

Secrets excited me, secret talk! What I’d understand was not for Ranger’s ears.

How many times I’d overhear Dad and Mom talking just out of earshot—their lowered, conspiratorial voices, mostly Dad’s—and Mom murmuring what sounded like Oh! oh yes! and occasionally Oh no!—and my heart would contract like a fist—what was wrong?—no joking?—no outbursts of laughter?—Dad and Mom not laughing? The memory of it makes me uneasy even now.

Say Dad and Mom were upstairs in their bedroom with possibly the door ajar, but I’d be scared to eavesdrop, scared of being discovered. Or they’d be in the kitchen with the stove fan roaring and rattling to drown out their conversation. (At least I’d think that was its purpose.) Or they’d meet up (accident? not likely) in one of the barns, or out in the driveway, strategically far enough from the house or any outbuilding, and they’d talk, talk. Sometimes for as long as an hour. Serious adult talk. Once I was crouched peering over the railing of the screened-in back porch and Patrick crept up behind me and we observed Dad and Mom talking together, out of earshot, for a long time. They were standing in the driveway by Dad’s Ford pickup, one hot-gusty summer afternoon: Mom in manure-stained jeans and dirty T-shirt and a bra strap showing, raggedy straw hat, dabs of white Noxzema on her sunburned face, and Dad in his summer town clothes, short-sleeved sports shirt, loosened necktie, neat khaki trousers with a braided belt fitting him snug around the waist. Dad was rattling his ignition keys in that way of his (had he just returned home from Mt. Ephraim? or was about to drive out again?) and talking rapid-fire, and nodding, not smiling though not exactly grim either, like a stranger to Patrick and me, one of those adult men you’d see in town or on TV speaking with another adult man or woman not as he’d speak to a child or a young person but in that special way like it was a different language, almost. Dad was a good-looking man in those days built like a steer (we kidded him) with a thick neck, solid torso, somewhat short legs in proportion to his body; he always took up more space than anyone else; his speech and gestures, even when he was confused, had an air of authority. A man you would not want to cross. A man you would want to please. Probably he was discussing money with Mom—money-problems were a major category of such private conversations, or, what was about the same thing, some vehicle or machine or household appliance in need of repair or replacement (“Everything’s collapsing on this goddamned farm!” Dad would groan, and Mom would reply, “Not everything, Mr. Mulvaney!—speak for yourself”—a line that doesn’t sound so funny in retrospect but was guaranteed to crack up anybody who happened to overhear); or, maybe, what was most unnerving, one of us. That day I asked P.J. in an undertone what did he think Dad and Mom were talking about like that?—and P.J. said with a shrug, “Sex.”

I was nine years old. Too young to know what “sex” was or even what a kid of fourteen, P.J.’s age, might imagine it was. I looked at my brother amazed. “Huh?”

“Don’t you know, Babyface, everything is about sex? It’s the primary law of nature of living things—what keeps us going.”

P.J. was the reader of the family, hidden away much of the time with science books and magazines and his “projects”; he’d discovered biology in eighth grade, and believed that a man named Charles Darwin who’d lived in the nineteenth century had had “the answer.” Half the things he said were purposefully inscrutable: you never knew if he was serious, or just being, as we’d say, Pinch.

I asked, “Keeps who going? How?”

“I don’t know how,” P.J. said loftily, looking over my head, “—I just know it’s sex. Like if a man and a woman are arguing, or whatever, it isn’t about money or needing to get things done or—whatever: it’s about sex.”

Which impressed me, but also scared me.

Because as I’ve said, you never could trust Pinch to say what was serious, or even what was true.

But there was the time years before, when I was really small, maybe three years old, wakened at night by a bad dream or by the wind banging something against the house, I ran next door into Dad’s and Mom’s bedroom uninvited and unexpected and their bedside light was on and I climbed right in bed with them, burrowed against them, so focussed on my own childish fear I hadn’t the slightest awareness of surprising them, annoying or embarrassing them, in the midst of what I could not have named, at the time, robust lovemaking. I can remember only the confusion, the creaking of bedsprings and Dad’s exclamation (I think it was “What the hell—!”) and Mom quickly pushing Dad from her, his bare sweaty shoulders and back, covered in frizzy hair, his bare buttocks, and hairy muscular legs, both my parents breathing hard as if they’d been running. Mom gasped, “Oh Judd!—Judd, honey—is s-something wr-wrong?” trying to catch her breath, shielding herself, her naked breasts, with the sheet, even as I continued to burrow blind and whimpering against her, and Dad flopped onto his back beside us with a forearm across his eyes, softly cursing. I said I was afraid, I didn’t want to be alone, I kicked and wriggled and of course Mom comforted me, possibly scolding me a little but her naked arms were warm and her body gave off a wonderful yeasty odor. Above my head Mom whispered to Dad, “I thought you said you locked the door,” and Dad said, “You locked it, you said,” and Mom said, “Judd’s had a scare, Michael—he’s just a baby,” and Dad said, “Fine! Good night! I’m going to sleep.” And Mom whispered to me, and got me to stop crying, and we giggled together, and Mom switched off the light, and soon we all fell asleep together, a warm sweaty tangle. And it wasn’t until years later I realized how I’d intruded upon my parents in their secret lives, and it was too late to be embarrassed.

And if I force myself to think of it, maybe I’d have to admit that I’d done this more than once, as a small child. And each time Dad and Mom relented, and took me in. He’s just a baby.

(Corinne and Michael Mulvaney were so romantic! All the while we kids were growing up, until this time I’m telling of when things changed. Mike thought they were embarrassing but sort of funny, you had to laugh, smooching like kids like they were just married or something; P.J. was plain embarrassed, and sulky, turning on his heel to walk out of, for instance, the kitchen, if he’d walked in upon Dad and Mom kissing, or, as they sometimes did, breaking into impromptu dance steps to radio music appropriate or not—a dreamy-dithering fox-trot, or a faster, less coordinated step, what they called “jitterbugging,” poor Feathers in his cage trilling wildly. When Dad and Mom met in public, even if they’d been apart only a few hours, and where they were was a Friday night football game at the school, a hundred people milling around, Dad would greet Mom with a big grin and “Hello, darling!” and he’d lift her hand to his lips to kiss it tenderly—even Marianne cringed at the sight, it was too, too embarrassing. Once, one of Mom’s women friends asked what was the secret of her and her husband, and Mom replied, in a lowered voice, “Oh, that man isn’t my husband. We’re just trying things out.”)

Secrets! As a child you come to see the world’s crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can’t know. Not, as kids say, for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it’s like you’ve pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you’re brave or reckless enough you can even step inside—taking a chance what you’ll learn is worth what it costs.

This other time I’m thinking of, when Mike Jr. was a senior in high school, and a star player on the football team, his picture in the local papers often and the name “Mule” Mulvaney famous in the county—I did barge in on a secret, sort of. Dad was talking to Mike and P.J. in the family room, the door shut against intrusion (you’d have to know that our family room door was never shut, I’d have thought there wasn’t even a door to the room), and I came downstairs and overheard just enough to arouse my curiosity, something in Dad’s usually congenial jokey voice that was low and earnest and quivering with emotion and exciting because I understood this was not for Ranger’s ears. I went to crouch by the door and pressed my ear against it. Dad was saying, “—I don’t care who the girl is. What her reputation is, or people say it is. Or she herself thinks it is. No sons of mine are going to be involved in behavior like that. If anybody’s treating a girl or a woman rudely in your presence—you protect her. If it means going against your friends, the hell with your ‘friends’—got it?” Dad’s voice was rising. I could picture his creased forehead, the set of his jaws, his eyes that seemed, at such times, to snap. Just—snap! You’d feel the sting of his glance like a BB pellet in the face.

Now I know it must have been Della Rae Duncan Dad was speaking of, in such outrage. Word was spreading through town, half the Mt. Ephraim football team had “had relations” with the drunken girl, after the Rams had won the Chautauqua County high school championship.

Finally Mike was allowed to speak, pleading, “But I wasn’t with those guys, Dad! I d-didn’t know anything about it until afterward.” Dad asked skeptically, “Oh yes? How long afterward?” and Mike said, “I—don’t know, exactly.” “An hour? Five minutes?” “Gosh no, Dad—the next day, I guess.” Mike’s voice was weak and scared and I’d guess he might be lying. Or maybe Dad just scared him so, he was breaking down. It was fascinating to me to hear my big brother Mule speaking to our father like a small child—like me, aged ten. The thought came to me Don’t we ever grow up? For some weird reason this was consoling.

They talked a while longer, Dad and Mike, and finally Dad relented, saying, “All right, Mikey. But if I ever learn you were involved, even just that you knew, at the time, I’ll break your ass. Got it?” Mike murmured, “Yes sir,” like he was grateful! All the while P.J. must have been sitting there, stricken with alarm and embarrassment, only fifteen at the time and not what you’d call “socially mature” for his age—Dad must have figured he was old enough to learn certain facts of life, even if they didn’t immediately apply to him.