We Were the Mulvaneys

Innocently vain at eighteen, Patrick Mulvaney thought of himself as an experimental scientist, a biologist. He’d been awarded quite a prestigious scholarship from Cornell University to study “life sciences” there. His dad, who hadn’t gone to college, boasted that Cornell was “one of the great American universities”—embarrassing to Patrick, though surely true. Patrick intended to push on for a Ph.D. and devote himself to original research in molecular biology. His grades in science at the high school were always high A’s; his grades in solid geometry and calculus were high A’s too, but Patrick sensed his limits, knew he hadn’t natural aptitude for higher math. It filled him with dismay and panic to think that the laws of nature might be mathematical in essence and not a matter of indefatigable observation, data, experimentation. It was unfair! Unjust! Yet—was it correct? Science is a continuous text ceaselessly being written, revised, redacted, expanded and edited, while mathematics is pure and ahistorical. Much of today’s science will be refuted, but not mathematics. Was this so? How could it be so? What could mathematics say of life? the simplest unicellular life? What could mathematics say of the mysterious evolutionary branchings of life through the millions of years of earth’s existence? Patrick murmured aloud, “They don’t know everything.”

A fine powdery snow was blown against his face, from the ground. Above, the sky was clear—a hard wintry blue like ceramic.

Patrick hiked on, and began to smile. Recalling the “exquisitely beautiful watercolors”—Mom’s words—he’d slyly tacked up on the kitchen bulletin board, aged fourteen. Mysterious prints of what appeared to be brilliantly adorned suns, moons, comets—whatever? After keeping the family guessing for a few days Patrick revealed what the prints were: magnified slides of the dogs’ saliva.

The looks on their faces.

How Patrick had laughed, laughed. All of them, even Mike, staring at him in disbelief and revulsion. As if he’d betrayed them, or some sacred trust. As if he’d betrayed the dogs! Patrick demanded to know why the dogs’ saliva, teeming with microbes (not so very different from their own) had seemed “exquisitely beautiful” to them one day, but not the next. Never mind, Patrick, Mom had said huffily, just take those things down at once, please.

Now Patrick laughed aloud, remembering. The memory had quite vanquished his anxiety of a few minutes before. “They don’t know anything!”—he heard his bemused voice, aloud.

He meant not just the Mulvaneys, but most of mankind.

Hearing the cowbell, a summons from his mom, Patrick cut his hike short and trotted the mile or so back to the house, Silky panting excitedly beside him, but the trick was on him this time—“I’m sorry to bother you, P.J., but Button needs a ride home from the LaPortes. Can you drive in?” Mom was apologetic, smiling, in that shamelessly exploitive way of hers none of her children could resist, Corinne Mulvaney playing at and perhaps even imagining herself as flustered, helpless—so contrary to her true nature, which was all efficiency. She was in the midst of refinishing a piece of furniture and couldn’t stop, she hoped he’d understand, she was sorry to be intruding on his time to himself after he’d done his chores and did them so well and—anyway—it was a favor for Button, wasn’t it? “Take the Buick, hon. Dad’s out with the pickup. Here, catch—” fishing the keys to the station wagon out of a deep pocket of her stained coveralls and tossing them with inappropriate gaiety to Patrick, who glared at her with all that he could muster of adolescent irony. “Gee thanks, Mom,” he said, shoving his glasses against the bridge of his nose, “—a Sunday drive to Mt. Ephraim and back. Just what I need.”

Fourteen miles, round-trip. No, closer to fifteen since the La-Portes lived on the far side of town. It was a trip he took five days a week, back and forth, usually on the school bus.

So he’d driven into Mt. Ephraim, and picked up his sister, and yes he’d possibly noticed that something was wrong, Marianne’s smile less convincing than usual, an evasiveness in her eyes, and certainly she wasn’t her usual chattery-brimming self, a purely and profoundly and to Patrick’s superior mind often exasperatingly girl-self; but frankly he’d been relieved not to hear about the prom and the party and her “date” and her familiar litany of girlfriends Trisha, Suzi, Bonnie, Merissa—how “fantastic” the decorations in the gym, how “terrific” the local band, what a “wonderful, unforgettable” time everyone had had. And how “honored” she’d been, in the Valentine Queen’s court. Patrick, a senior, hadn’t the slightest interest, not even an anthropological interest, in the frantic febrile continually shifting social lives of any of his classmates. Corinne was disappointed in him perhaps, he’d scarcely known the Valentine’s Day prom was the previous night until the commotion and fuss over Marianne and her new dress, Dad taking Polaroids as usual, and the “date” showing up—Austin Weidman in a dark suit that made him look like a funeral director, poor adenoidal Austin who was in fact a fellow senior, a shy frowning nervous-handed boy intelligent enough to have been a friend of Patrick Mulvaney’s through the years but was not. Patrick simply wasn’t impressed with Austin and smiled coolly at him, looked through him. Why? Just Patrick’s way.

Marianne had once complained to Mom, why was Patrick so unfriendly? so rude? to her friends? to her friends who admired him in fact? and Corinne had said soothingly, in Patrick’s earshot, Oh, that’s just Patrick’s way. Which had quite boosted his ego.

So he hadn’t paid much attention to his kid sister as he considered her, a year younger, a year behind him in school but light-years distant from him, he was sure, in matters of significance. He may have asked her how the dance—“or whatever it was”—had been and Marianne might have replied murmuring something vague but in no way alarming; adding, with an apologetic little laugh, touching her forehead in a gesture very like Corinne’s, “—I guess I’m tired.”

Patrick laughed, one of those coded mirthless brotherly laughs signaling So? He’d tossed Marianne’s garment bag into the back of the Buick where it upended, and slid down, and oddly Marianne hadn’t noticed, or in any case hadn’t reached around to adjust it. In that bag were Marianne’s new prom dress, her prom shoes, toiletries. Patrick didn’t give it a thought.

Why didn’t you tell me? Why, as soon as you got into the car? As soon as we were alone together?

Afterward he would think these things but not at the time. Nor did he think much of the fact (he, who so prided himself in his powers of observation) that when he’d turned into the LaPortes’ driveway there was his sister already outside waiting for him. Waiting out in the cold. Garment bag, purse at her feet. Marianne in her good blue wool coat. Just waiting.

In truth Patrick might have felt relief. That Marianne’s best friend Trisha wasn’t with her, that he didn’t have to exchange greetings with Trisha.

He’d backed out of the LaPortes’ driveway without a second glance, wouldn’t have noticed if anyone had been watching from one of the windows, behind the part-drawn blinds. Marianne was fussing with the seat belt, at the same time petting Silky’s persistent head as he poked against her from his awkward position in the backseat, forbidden to climb into the front as he dearly wanted, but she hadn’t let him lick her face—“No, Silky! Sit.” Silky was Mike’s dog he was always neglecting now.

Afterward Mom would say, I thought you and Marianne were so close. Thought you shared things you wouldn’t share with Dad or me.

Patrick hadn’t even thought to inquire why Marianne needed a ride home, in fact. Why Austin Weidman—her “date”—hadn’t picked her up, driven her. Wasn’t that a “date’s” responsibility? Marianne often stayed overnight in town with one or another girlfriend and nearly always she was driven home, if not by a “date” then by someone else. Marianne Mulvaney was so well liked, so popular, she rarely lacked for people eager to do her favors.

Nor did Patrick inquire after Austin Weidman. It was absurd, that Marianne had gone to the prom with Austin. A dentist’s son, fairly well-to-do family, very Christian, bookish. Marianne had agreed to go with him only after consulting her conscience, and no doubt asking Jesus’ advice, for though she didn’t “like” Austin in the way of a seventeen-year-old girl’s “liking” a boy, she did “respect” him; and he’d asked her weeks ago, or months—the poor jerk had actually written her a letter! (Which she’d showed only to Corinne, not to the derisive male Mulvaneys.) Crafty-desperate Austin had dared put in his bid to Marianne Mulvaney, a junior, and hardly a girl who’d encouraged him, well in advance of other more likely “dates.” Marianne was so tenderhearted, so fearful of hurting anyone’s feelings, of course she’d said yes.

Last year she’d done the same thing, almost. Jimmie Holleran in his wheelchair. Jimminy-the-Cricket Holleran the kids cruelly called him behind his back, a boy in Marianne’s class long stricken with cystic fibrosis, in fact vice-president of the class. He and Marianne were friends from Christian Youth and he, too, had asked her to a dance months before. Though even Mom had wondered about that—“Oh, Button, won’t it seem like, well—charity?” Marianne had said, hurt, “I like Jimmie. I want to go to the dance with him.”

Impossible to argue with such goodness.

“Button” Mulvaney was so sweet, so sincere, so pretty, so—what, exactly?—glimmering-luminous—as if her soul shone radiant in her face—you could smile at her, even laugh at her, but you couldn’t not love her.

As a brother, that is.

Patrick disdained high school sports, most clubs and activities and competitions of popularity in whatever guise, but he could hardly ignore the presence of “Button” Mulvaney at Mt. Ephraim High. (Even as, grinding his teeth, he could hardly ignore the fallout of his similarly popular older brother Mike—“Mule”—“Number Four”—who’d graduated in 1972.)

Not that he was jealous. Not Pinch.

In fact his sister’s popularity this past year at Mt. Ephraim High was an embarrassment to him. He squirmed having to watch her with the other varsity cheerleaders at assemblies before games—the eight girls in their maroon wool jumpers that fitted their slender bodies snugly, their small perfectly shaped breasts, flat bellies, hips and thighs and remarkable flashing legs. They were agile as dancers, double-jointed as gymnasts. They were all very, very good-looking. They wore dazzling-white cotton blouses and dazzling-white wool socks and their smiles were identically dazzling-white—such joyous smiles! And all in the service of the school football team, basketball team, swim team. Boys. Boys whom Patrick privately scorned. Grimly Patrick stared into a corner of the auditorium as into a recess of his own labyrinthine mind, as about him hundreds of idiots yelled, clapped, whistled, stamped their feet like a single great beast.

TWO! FOUR! SIX! EIGHT!

WHO DO WE AP – PRE – CI – ATE?

MT. EPHRAIM RAMS!!!

Too silly, too contemptible for words.

But try explaining that to Michael Sr. and Corinne, the proud parents of “Button” Mulvaney. As they’d been for four glorious years the proud parents of “Mule” Mulvaney.

Patrick had never told his parents how he dreaded one day discovering Marianne’s name in a school lavatory. Whenever he saw obscene or suggestive words, nasty drawings, above all the names or initials of girls he believed he knew, Patrick rubbed them off in disgust if no one was around, sometimes inked them over with a felttip pen. How he despised his male classmates’ filthy minds! their juvenile humor! Even the nice guys, the halfway intelligent guys could be astonishingly crude in exclusively male company. Why, Patrick didn’t know. Every other word “shit”—“fuck”—“bugger”—“asshole”—“cocksucker.” Patrick himself was too pure to tolerate the breaking of taboos not wholly intellectual.

Another thing Patrick had never told his parents: how Marianne, for all her popularity, was considered one of the “good, Christian” girls. Virgins of course. But virgins in their heads, too. There was something mildly comical about them—their very piety, decency. A tale was told of how Marianne had asked one of the science teachers why God had made parasites. In the cafeteria, amid the bustle of laughter, raised voices, high-decibel jocularity, Marianne was one of those Christians who bowed their heads before picking up their forks, murmuring prayers of gratitude. Most of these conspicuous believers were girls, a few were boys. Jimminy-the-Cricket Holleran was one. All were unperturbed by others’ bemused glances. Or wholly unaware of them.

In conversation, exactly like her mother, Marianne might speak so familiarly of Jesus you’d swear He was in the next room.

The previous fall, one of the popular football players was injured at a game, hospitalized with a concussion, and Marianne Mulvaney had been one of the leaders of a fervent all-night prayer vigil on the field. The injured boy had been admitted to intensive care at Mt. Ephraim General but by the time the prayer vigil ended next morning at 8 A.M., doctors declared him “out of immediate danger.”

So you could smile at Marianne Mulvaney and the “good, Christian” girls of Mt. Ephraim. You could even laugh at them. But they never seemed to notice; or, if they did, to take offense.

Why didn’t you tell me? Anything.

How could you let me drive you home that day, not knowing what you were feeling. What you were enduring.

By 5 P.M. the sky was streaked in dusk. Plum-colored crevices in patches of cloud. Blowing, flying high overhead. Patrick tried not to be spooked by the sight of snow-covered vehicles on the roadside, abandoned days before during a blizzard. The Haggartsville Road was fair driving but High Point was basically a single crudely plowed lane. He’d gotten out, so he supposed he could get back. And school again in the morning. That damned school bus he was bored by the sight of.

Saying something of this to Marianne, who was clutching her pink-angora hands on her lap and didn’t seem to hear or in any case didn’t reply. The stiffness, the tension in her. Was she frightened of her brother’s driving? The heavy car skidding? Beneath loose powdery snow the hard-packed snow of High Point was smooth as satin. Treacherous.

That satin dress: cream-colored, with strawberry chiffon trim: St. Valentine’s. Mrs. Glover the senior English teacher speaking coyly of Cupid, “romantic love,” Eros. Does anyone know what “Eros” means?

At the curve in the road just beyond the Pfenning farm the station wagon’s rear tires did spin for several sickening seconds. Patrick quickly shifted gears, pumped the brakes. He knew not to turn the steering wheel in the direction instinct suggests but in the opposite direction, moving with the skid. And in a moment the vehicle was back in control. He’d reached out to shield Marianne from the dashboard but there hadn’t been that much momentum and her seat belt held her in place. He saw, though, how stiffly she held herself, oddly hunched and her mittened hands gripped together tight against her knees. Her pale lips were moving silently—was she praying? Patrick had broken into a quick nervous sweat inside his sheepskin jacket.

“Marianne? You all right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Sorry if I shook you up.”

Why didn’t you tell me about it then? Why, not even a word?

Was it that you didn’t want me to become contaminated, too?

Frankly, by this time, miles of driving, Patrick was becoming annoyed, hurt by his sister’s silence. And now this silent-prayer crap! An insult.

High Point Road, haphazardly plowed, wound along the ridge of the ancient glacial striation. Out of the northeast, from the vast snowy tundra of northern Ontario, came that persistent wind. Rocking the station wagon as it frequently rocked the school bus. Like ridicule, Patrick thought. Like jeering. Invisible air-currents plucking at your life.

He remembered, in ninth grade. In the boys’ locker room. Boys talking of their own sisters. Maybe it was one boy, and the others avidly listening. Patrick had not been among them, rarely was Patrick among these boys but at a little distance from them, swiftly and self-consciously changing his clothes. In that phase of his early adolescence in which the merest whisper of a forbidden word, a caress of feathers, a sudden sweet-perfumy scent, the sound of fabric against fabric, silky, suggestive—the mere thought of a girl’s armpit! nostril! the moist red cut between the legs!—would arouse Patrick sexually, to the point of pain. He’d hidden away in disgust, in shame. Hadn’t yet cultivated the haughty Pinch-style, staring his inferiors down.

Patrick Mulvaney a genius? Come on! His I.Q. was only 151. In tenth grade he’d taken a battery of tests, with a half dozen other selected students. You weren’t supposed to know the results but somehow Patrick did. Possibly his mom had told him, absurdly proud.

Not a genius but still rumors spread. Like the rumor that he was blind in one eye. Did Patrick care, Patrick did not care. Telling himself he’d rather be respected and feared at Mt. Ephraim High School than liked. Popular!

His heroes were Galileo, Newton, Charles Darwin. The Curies, Albert Einstein. The scientists of whom he read voraciously in the pages of Scientific American, to which he subscribed. You couldn’t imagine any of these people caring in the least about popularity.

It did upset him, though, that everyone seemed to know his secret: he was in fact blind in one eye. Almost.

Mom had surely confided in his gym teacher, when he’d started high school. She’d promised she would not but probably yes it had been Mom, meaning well. Not wanting his other eye to be injured—that would have been her logic, Patrick could hear her pleading, could see her wringing her hands. Patrick had had an accident grooming one of the horses, in fact his own horse Prince he’d loved, young high-strung Prince who was both docile and edgy and somehow it happened that the two-year-old gelding was spooked in his stall by something fleeting and inconsequential as a bird’s whirring wings and shadow across a sunlit bale of hay and suddenly to his terror Patrick, at that time twelve years old, weighing not much more than one hundred pounds, was thrown against a wall, found himself down beneath the horse’s terrible malletlike hooves screaming for help. His left arm had been broken and his left eye swollen shut, the retina detached and requiring emergency surgery in Rochester. Of the experience Patrick recalled little, out of disgust and disbelief. It had long wounded his pride that of the Mulvaneys he was the only one obliged to wear glasses.

Driving, Patrick shut his left eye, looked with his right eye at the snowy road ahead, the waning glare of the snow, the rocky slope down into the Valley. This should have been a familiar landscape but was in fact always startling in its newness, its combination of threat and promise. He was never able to explain to anyone not even to Marianne how fascinating it was, that the world was there; and he, possessed of the miracle of sight, here. He would no more take the world there for granted than he would take being here for granted. And vision in his right eye at least. For the eye was an instrument of observation, knowledge. Which was why he loved his microscope. His homemade telescope. Books, magazines. His own lab notebooks, careful drawings and block-print letters in colored inks. The chunky black altimeter/barometer/“illuminator” sports watch he wore day, night, awake, asleep, removing only when he showered though in fact the watch (a birthday gift from the family, chosen by Marianne out of the L.L. Bean catalogue) was guaranteed waterproof—of course. And he loved his shortwave radio he’d assembled from a kit. Plying him on insomniac nights with weather reports in the Adirondacks, Nova Scotia. As far away as the Canadian Rockies.

You could trust such instruments and such knowledge as you could not trust human beings. That was not a secret, merely a fact.

Patrick was driving his mom’s Buick station wagon carefully along this final stretch of High Point Road. He was thinking that the horizon he’d grown up seeing without knowing what he saw here in the Chautauqua Valley, 360 degrees of it, was a hinge joining two spaces: the one finite, a substance inadequately called “land” that dropped to the Yewville River, invisible from this distance, and the other infinite, a substance inadequately called “sky” overhead. Each was an unknown. Though Patrick tried to imagine the glacier fields of millions of years ago, an epoch to which had been given the mysterious name Pleistocene which was one of Patrick’s words reverently spoken aloud when he was alone.

Pleistocene. Mile-high mountains of ice grinding down everything in their paths.

You could see Patrick was hurt, obviously it showed in his face. If Marianne had noticed.

Gunning the motor as he turned up the rutty-snowy drive, racing the station wagon in the home stretch to announce Here we are! And parking noisily in front of the antique barn inside which Corinne was working. Marianne might have begun to say, “Thank you, Patrick—” but she spoke too softly, already he was out of the vehicle, in one of his quick-incandescent and wordless furies, and there came Silky exploding comically out of the rear of the vehicle too, to dash about in the snow, urinating in dribbles, shaking his ears as if he’d been confined for days. Marianne was carrying her garment bag in the direction of the back door and somehow the plastic handle slipped from her fingers and Patrick hesitated before helping her to retrieve it and Marianne said quickly, her voice quavering, fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall, “No!—it’s fine, I have it.” Marianne smiled at him, unconvincingly. Her tall impatient brother loose-limbed and nerved-up as one of the young horses. “Suit yourself,” Patrick said. He shrugged as if, another time, he’d been subtly but unmistakably rebuffed, turned to slam into the house, upstairs to his room, his books.

It’s fine, I have it. It’s fine.

FAMILY CODE

Many things were coded at High Point Farm. Like our names which could be confusing for they depended upon mood, circumstance, subtext.

For instance, Michael Sr. was usually Dad but sometimes Curly and sometimes Captain. He could be Grouchy (of the Seven Dwarves), or Groucho (of Groucho Marx fame), he could be Big Bear, Chickie, Sugarcake—these names used exclusively by Mom. My oldest brother was usually just Mike but sometimes Mike Jr. or Mikey-Junior; sometimes Big Guy, Mule, Number Four (his football jersey number for the three years he excelled as a fullback at Mt. Ephraim High). Patrick was frequently P.J. (for Patrick Joseph) or Pinch. Marianne was frequently Button or Chickadee. My names, as I’ve said, were many, though predominantly Baby, Dimple, Ranger.

Mom was Mom except for special names which only Dad could call her (Darling, Honeylove, Sweetheart, Sugarcake). Occasionally Mom could be called Whistle—but only within the family, never in the presence of outsiders.

It was a matter of exquisite calibration, tact. Which code name at which time. Especially in Mom’s case, for there were times when being called Whistle seemed to vex her and other times when it was exactly what she wanted to hear—she would laugh, and blush, and roll her eyes as if her innermost soul had been exposed.

Why Whistle? Because Mom had a habit of whistling when she believed herself alone, and to those of us who overheard, her whistling was a happy contagious sound. In the kitchen, in the antique barn; tending the animals; in her garden through the long summer and into the fall. Mom’s whistling was loud and assured as any man’s but with a shift of mood it could turn liquid and lovely as a flute. You’d listen, fascinated. You’d think Mom was speaking to you, without exactly knowing it, herself. Locking stanchions around the thick neck of a cow, scrubbing a horse’s mud- and manure-splattered coat, fending off enraged fowl who’d hoped to hide their eggs in the hay barn, especially in the early morning when she and our canary Feathers were the only ones up—there was Mom, whistling. “Faith of Our Fathers”—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—“Tell Me Why the Stars Do Shine”—but also “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” (a year-round favorite, to Dad’s exasperation)—“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”—“I’ll Be Seeing You”—“Heartbreak Hotel”—“Hound Dog”—“Blue Suede Shoes” (though Mom claimed to disapprove of Elvis as a poor moral example for the young). When she was in the house, Mom was likely to be whistling with Feathers, who, like most male canaries, responded excitedly when he heard whistling in or near his territory. Whistling was a quick expedient way of communicating with the livestock, of course: the horses whinnied alertly in reply, pricking their ears and flicking their tails as if to say Yes? Time to eat? Cows, goats, even sheep blinked to attention. Two deft fingers to her mouth, a shrill penetrating whistle, and Mom could bring dogs, cats, barnyard fowl and whatever else was in the vicinity to converge upon her where she stood, usually beneath one of the carports in an area designated for outdoor feeding, laughing and bountiful as the Goose Lady in our well-worn old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.