We Were the Mulvaneys (14 page)

For even Marianne wanted to belong to the Mt. Ephraim Country Club. Especially Marianne—so many of her friends' families belonged.

So Corinne, who was a good sport after all, bought a
CONGRATULATIONS!
card for Michael, got the kids to sign it, and added smudged paw prints with dogs' and cats' names attached; added a warning, in parenthesis,
A woman convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.
She signed the card
LOVE ALWAYS YOUR
‘
2WHISTLE33
' and dropped it off with a bottle of champagne at Mulvaney Roofing.

So Michael Mulvaney was inducted into the Mt. Ephraim Country Club one evening in May 1973. And quickly became an involved, active member, generous with his time, eager to serve on committees, offer his practical advice on such matters as building maintenance, plumbing, public relations. You would think your father is running for political office, Corinne observed dryly to the children, he's become such a
handshaker
. Watching affable Michael Mulvaney, smiling, gregarious, in his navy blue blazer with brass nautical buttons and his bright plaid necktie, moving about in the atrium dining room at Sunday brunch, greeting friends, being introduced to potential friends, shaking hands, laughing, flirting with women who clearly adored him—all very innocently of course (of course!)—Corinne had to acknowledge with a sigh that the Mt. Ephraim Country Club made her husband glow with pleasure in a way that High Point Farm, for all its beauty, no longer could.

Am I disappointed with him?—oh just a little.

Corinne did admire the Club, from a distance: the colonial-style building of fieldstone and spotless white clapboard, overlooking the golf course of gently rolling, sculpted-looking hills; the fir-lined gravel driveway with the ominous sign at the entrance:
MT. EPHRAIM COUNTRY CLUB PRIVATE MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY
Of course, there were numerous decent people who belonged, people she knew well, and liked very much, as they liked her, quite apart from the Club. It was just that she couldn't overcome her prejudice against it. People whom she could respect outside the Club she did not, somehow could not, respect there. How would Jesus Christ fit in, in such a milieu? Would
He
have been blackballed for membership, year after year? Over time, Corinne visited the Club less and less frequently, and then only when Michael insisted. “Oh Mom, you're not
trying
,” her shrewd children objected. But why should she
try
? Whom was Corinne Mulvaney hoping to impress, or deceive? True, women like Lydia Bethune were friendly enough to her, but probably (almost certainly) out of pity; she felt their eyes crawling over her, assessing. Who was Corinne Mulvaney but a gawky farm wife trying to pass herself off as someone she wasn't; someone who belonged in overalls, jeans, polyester slacks or shorts, not cotton pastels, linen skirts, “chic” black, shoes with ridiculous heels and fussy little straps. She was miserable at the Mt. Ephraim Country Club, couldn't her family see? Michael compounded her misery by insisting she was a “damned attractive woman” except why didn't she have her hair cut and styled? wear a little makeup, at least lipstick? smile more? buy some new clothes? Marianne said, “Mom, you're just as nice-looking,
nicer
-looking, than any of the women your age at the Club.” When the other Mulvaneys laughed at this innocent slight, Corinne the loudest, Marianne quickly said, blushing, “I mean, Mom, you look just as nice as
anybody
. You
do
.”

The Mulvaneys, a family who loved to laugh, hooted with laughter at such a notion.

 

Thinking of such things, smiling and grimacing to herself, Corinne wasn't prepared for—yet again!—Lydia Bethune appearing suddenly before her. Corinne came to a dead stop on the sidewalk, staring at the woman. What
was
this? What on earth did Mrs. Bethune the doctor's wife want with her? So commanding a presence in her russet rabbit-fur, her sleek frosted-blond hair, glowing makeup. She was smiling uneasily at Corinne, knowing how close Corinne was to bolting past her. “Corinne, please?—let me
tell you
—about your daughter?”

Corinne stared at Lydia Bethune, blinking. Her luminous blue eyes had gone hard and blank and opaque and she was gripping her packages and tote bag as if fearing the other woman might snatch them from her. “What—what about Marianne?”

Lydia Bethune swallowed. “Well, I don't know, exactly,” she said apologetically. “It's just something Priscilla mentioned and I—I've been seeing her, by accident, not in school. I mean, during school hours. I'm wondering—is anything wrong?”

Corinne asked evenly, “Where have you been seeing Marianne?”

“In St. Ann's Church. You know—on Bayberry. Yesterday afternoon, when I dropped by. And I think today—I mean, I happened to see her go in, this morning around eleven.” Lydia tried to smile at Corinne, one mother of an adolescent girl to another, but the pink-glossy smile disintegrated like wet tissue. The women regarded each other with raw, perplexed eyes.

Corinne bit her lip, and said, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “Well. Thanks, Lydia. I do appreciate it.”

 

Driving to St. Anne's Corinne thought, calmly
So this is how it will be revealed to me: by a stranger.

M
emory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

Labor
was the right word for it. You surely do
labor
. Like pushing a wagon loaded with cement blocks uphill, three wheels stuck. Grunting, sweating, straining like a sow to
give birth
as it's called. There came a high-pitched roaring, and a muscular contortion not to be believed
like pulling yourself inside out, like you're a glove.
And then suddenly, after how many hours it would always seem suddenly, a rushing out of the tunnel into blazing, blinding light.

Here I come, here I come, oh! here! I! COME!

Michael Mulvaney her husband grinning and gritting his big teeth, droplets of sweat gleaming on his face like shiny transparent beetles. Oh his bloodshot eyes! No sleep for eighteen hours!
Push! push! push! uuuuhhh!
he and the nurse were urging like demented cheerleaders. Veins stood out on the young husband's forehead, close to bursting.
Corinne I love you, love love love you, that's my girl thatagirl! that-a-girl! PUSH!

Then suddenly it was out of her, and in others' rubber-gloved hands. The baby!—she'd almost forgotten, that was the point of this ordeal wasn't it, so much fuss—the baby, squirming and red-slippery as a sea creature, incongruously lifted into raw air. Where did so much lung power, so much volume, come from? What if the baby had begun to wail like that, that loud, inside the womb? Corinne laughed at the thought, drunk and dazed. Jammed her scraped knuckles against her teeth and laughed, wept behind her hand.
Oh God, am I worthy? Are You sure You didn't make a mistake?

Four times Corinne would
give birth
. And never grow wiser. In fact each time it would seem more preposterous—she'd done so little, and reaped so much. Were she and Michael Mulvaney really good enough, strong enough, smart enough,
deep enough
to be entrusted with babies?

That first time, in the Rochester hospital, March 1954, euphoria swept over her like a drug. Red-slippery baby in her arms: a boy. A boy! Michael Jr.! (In fact, was Corinne drugged? What was it—Demerol? She'd been brave and brash asking the doctor please not to sedate her, please no thanks but maybe with her anxious husband's complicity he'd dosed her anyway on the sly? guessing it would be a protracted labor he'd hoped to maintain her screams at a respectable decibel level, was that it?) And there was her husband, her Michael Mulvaney she'd married after only a few months of knowing him, loving him more than her life, her life she'd have tossed into the air confident he'd catch it, yes and she'd
given birth
to this astonishing kicking-crying boy-baby for his sake.

Joking amid the sticky bedclothes, lifting the tiny baby in her arms, for always they were great kidders, a comic duo to crack up the nurses—“See what you made me do, Michael Mulvaney!”

They were married, it was quite legal. But Corinne had removed her plain, worn-gold, pawnshop-purchased wedding band months before, worried she'd never get it off her swelling fingers. The only mother in the maternity ward with no ring, just—fingers. So Michael couldn't resist quipping, loud enough to be heard through the room, “Well. Guess I'll have to marry you now, kid, eh?”

The looks on those strangers' faces.

So Corinne was a new mother: slightly touched by new-mother craziness. She hoped to dignify herself by commenting sagely to the doctor (always, you want to impress them: men of authority) about “the sucking reflex”—“the bonding instinct”—and similar clinical-anthropological phenomena. She wanted to impress this man she hardly knew, she'd been a college student after all, even if it was only at Fredonia State, and she'd dropped out between her junior and senior years to get married. She wasn't some immature girl like others in the maternity ward with her—seventeen, eighteen years old, just
kids
. She, Corinne Mulvaney, was a mature young wife of almost twenty-three.

Plucking at the doctor's sleeve as he was about to move on, “Oh! doctor, wait!—one thing!” and he'd smiled at her breathlessness, “Yes, Corinne?” and she'd said in a rush, stammering, “Y–You don't think God made a mistake, do you? That He might change His mind, and take our baby back?”

 

Marianne, the third-born, the sole daughter, was to be the
miracle baby
.

You only get one of them, once. If you're lucky. But most people aren't lucky. (So you mustn't gloat, of course.) Corinne and Michael Mulvaney seemed to understand, though they were still young parents when their daughter was born, in their twenties. This was in June 1959.

Already, they had two boys. Two boys! But where Michael Jr. and Patrick Joseph had been screamers and thrashers virtually from birth, strong-willed, stubborn, crying through the night in a contest of wills (“Pick me up! Nurse me! I know you're there!”), their intransigent male selves assertive as their tiny, floppy penises, Marianne was sweet and amiable, an angel-baby, a
friendly baby
. A baby, as Michael Sr. observed, who actually seemed to be
on our side
. Within two weeks of coming to live with them at High Point Farm, this baby slept seven hours through a night, allowing her exhausted mother and father to sleep seven hours, too. Corinne and Michael grinned at each other. “Why didn't we try one of these, right away?”

Not that they weren't crazy about their sons, too. They were, but in a different way.

Boy-babies: unpredictable surges of animal-energy, even in the crib. Mauling and bruising Corinne's milk-heavy breasts. With sly goo-goo eyes
Love me all the same!
When they slept, they did sleep hard. Especially Patrick, in his first six months. But more often there were thumps, crashes, the sound of breaking glass. Earsplitting heartrending baby-shrieks. Kicking and splashing bathwater, refusing food, refusing to be diapered, flush-faced, flailing like beached little sharks.

Mikey-Junior, the firstborn, the biggest baby (nine pounds, two ounces) would come to seem in time the most distant: he'd been born, not in Mt. Ephraim, but in Rochester; in a “big-city” hospital; brought back to a rented duplex in an almost-slummy neighborhood near downtown, not to High Point Farm like the other babies. This seemed to cast him, in retrospect, in a kind of gritty urban light; amid traffic noises, frequent sirens, the isolated and mysterious shouts of unknown men in the middle of the night. Sometimes it almost seemed that Mikey had been born to strangers—young, clumsy, frightened parents who hadn't yet decided exactly whether they wanted to have children; whether all this they'd set into motion by their passion for each other was
serious
.

Michael Jr., Mikey-Junior, Big Guy, one day to be called “Mule” and “Number Four”:
all boy
as a certain kind of sausage might be said to be
all sausage
. Uncanny how he'd resembled his young (twenty-six, and scared) father, already in the delivery room: the puggish nose, the squarish jaw, the close-set warm-chocolatey-brown eyes, the dark-red curls like wood shavings. The belligerent mouth that turned, when kissed, to sugar. Within his first year alone Mikey got his head so stuck between stair railings (in the rented duplex) his terrified father had had to remove one, to free him. He'd snatched at and trapped in his hand a bumblebee (yes, he was stung); tackled a young cat and was scratched above his right eye; hung on his mother so much she'd begun to be lopsided, with a chronic aching neck. His first words, in comical imitation of his parents' admonitions, were
Mikey! Baby!
and
Noooo!
As soon as he grew teeth he used them: gnawing at newspapers like a hungry rodent, gnawing at his crib railings, biting through a toaster cord—fortunately, the toaster hadn't been plugged in at the time. Very quickly, being mechanically-minded like his father, he learned to switch on the radio, the TV, the washing machine; to unplug the refrigerator and start it defrosting; to pick his father's jacket pockets for loose change, which with gleeful squeals he'd toss rolling and bouncing across the floor. More dangerously, he learned to turn on stove burners and the oven, to strike matches into flame. He was comically aggressive in “protecting” his Mommy when visitors dropped by. Once the Mulvaneys moved to the country (what a wonderland for an active child, the many rooms in the old house, the outbuildings, fields and woods) he cultivated a habit of escaping parental vigilance, climbing out of his playpen and wandering off, sniffing like a dog, inexhaustibly curious. Always, Corinne was calling, “Mikey! Mikey where are you!” and trotting after him. Once, aged two, he drifted out of her sight when she was working in the garden and disappeared for ninety minutes—only to be discovered peacefully asleep in a dark, stiflingly hot corner of the hay barn by his distraught parents. Mikey-Junior was as finicky an eater (Corinne joked) as Porky Pig. Indeed, he had a cast-iron stomach: if he didn't vomit immediately after gobbling down some problematic food (for instance, rancid dog food) he digested it with no evident side effects. He weathered falls, cuts, bruises, insect bites, poison ivy and poison oak. Bouts of furious weeping passed swiftly as storm clouds scudding overhead, no sooner gone than forgotten. Like an amphibious creature, he seemed already to know how to swim before, at the age of three, he was led gently out into shallow water at Wolf's Head Lake, hand in hand with his Dad. By the age of five, he was diving unassisted into the lake, nimble and monkeylike in imitation of Michael Sr. (at that time almost-slim, boyish, with powerful shoulders, arms and strongly muscled legs that propelled him through water hell-bent as a torpedo). A sunny, uncomplaining, good-natured child—“but, wow!” as Corinne so frequently sighed, “—two handfuls.”

By contrast, Patrick, born when Mikey-Junior was four, was a fretful, nervous baby. The kind that flails and kicks as a mode of expression. They'd laughed at him, in delight—his oddly long, narrow little feet like flippers. His pale blue bug-eyes, earnest like Corinne's. Fair brown hair growing in peculiar little tufts on his eggshell head, like inspired thoughts imperfectly formed. A baby with high standards, the Mulvaneys boasted. A baby to keep you on your toes.
Think-think-thinking
like a clock ticking in your hands. Yet capable of heartrending sweetness—that was Patrick, little “Pinch.” By eleven months teetering on his feet and chattering high-decibel nonsense with the aplomb of a baby Mozart, to the astonishment of his parents. Corinne was enchanted, mystified. Her infant son was as opinionated and as assertive in expression as his father, and as strong-willed. He wanted his “own” way yet, a moment later, dissolved in tenderness, he wanted only to be hugged, comforted. He might have been overwhelmed by his older brother Mikey except he was in awe of Mikey—so much more physical and forcible than Patrick. No doubt he couldn't distinguish, for some time, among “Mommy,” “Daddy,” and “Mikey” as figures of household authority. Even as a baby Patrick had an instinctive sense of
right
and
not-right
, and frequently embarrassed his parents by screwing up his earnest little face at people he didn't like, as if in the presence of a bad odor. Patrick would rear back, thrust out his lower lip, point and jabber disapprovingly. “No like, no like” he seemed to be declaring. Overly made up or perfumed women disturbed him, Reverend Earkin (of the First Baptist Church of Eagleton Corners) who spoke in a high-pitched, nasal voice, people who spoke too emphatically, or laughed too loudly, or condescended to him, or overstayed their visits at High Point Farm. In those years before he'd settled into knowing who Michael Mulvaney was, in Mt. Ephraim terms, Michael Sr. was friendly with a number of local men—Wally Parks, for instance, who operated a small airport in Marsena, “Haw” Hawley who owned a tavern at Wolf's Head Lake and was stocky and black-bearded and smoked a bitter-smelling ropy cigar. These men Patrick particularly disliked, and let his feelings be known. “Lucky the kid approves of
me
,” his father said dryly.

Then came, unexpected, Corinne's third pregnancy. Her third!—so soon after Patrick's birth. Breathless, a bit dazed, Corinne told her little boys that God was sending them a surprise because they'd been such special babies, He wanted to make more of them to send to High Point Farm. Mikey was thrilled, but Patrick was too young to comprehend. When, one day, the tiny girl-baby was brought home, and presented as “your baby sister Marianne,” he'd stared at the infant, thrust out his lower lip, and, wide-eyed, began to jabber excitedly.

Years later Patrick would insist he remembered that day. He'd thought his baby sister was a baby pig.

So came the
miracle baby
to High Point Farm, the Mulvaneys' little girl.

Corinne joked that God had sent Marianne a little quicker than they'd anticipated (yes, they were practicing birth control—sort of) to prove that a baby could be, well—an experience just a little different from the usual.

It was no exaggeration: Marianne was a beautiful sweet-natured baby with gray-blue eyes, dark curly hair, features exquisite as a ceramic doll's. So lovely, Corinne hung over her crib just to stare and stare and stare. A baby who slept, and woke, with a smile. Who nursed at the breast, and allowed herself to be bathed, her wriggly little body dried and powdered and diapered and dressed, with a wet cooing-clucking sound as of perpetual surprise and delight.
Why, life is fun! I love you!
Her crying spells were infrequent, her tantrums rare and brief. (Unlike Patrick, who'd raised the art of tantrum-throwing to new heights.) As soon as anyone, dogs and cats included, entered her field of vision, Marianne raised her little arms eagerly to be hugged or lifted. There were older women, mothers with grown children, who, to Corinne's embarrassment, burst into tears at the mere sight of her, as of memories too precious to be borne.