We Were the Mulvaneys (30 page)

“—I'm not sure how to explain it—”

“I'm sure you aren't!”

“It's just that there are different ways of perceiving the same thing,” Marianne said uncertainly. “I mean—aren't there?”

“There are scientifically demonstrable ways, and there are superstitious, self-deluding ways,” Patrick said curtly. “You can choose one or the other but not both.”

Marianne stood from the table, shakily. Patrick thought she was going to walk away but instead she went to slice more bread, he'd eaten all the slices she'd laid out.

When Marianne returned to the table, Patrick made an effort to speak more moderately. Really, he wasn't a bully, so hotheaded!—he'd be ashamed of himself afterward. It was
Pinch-instinct
, screwing up his face like a spoiled brat. There were excellent reasons why people like his sister—and his mother, and her mother—in fact, most of humanity—believed what they believed, in the face of reason itself: they
believed
because, like children, they were terrified of the dark. Mistaking the luminosity of an inhuman and implacable Truth for mere dark.

In high school, Patrick had read Charles Darwin's great works
The Origin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle
. James Watson's
Double Helix
which his biology teacher had given him, as an acknowledgment of Patrick's special status. Darwin the visionary, Watson and Crick the careerists. Well, science was both, wasn't it?—
he
, Patrick Mulvaney, didn't intend to separate the two.

Marianne was an avid listener as Patrick spoke of his courses, his professors, his work; she didn't inquire into his grades, but Patrick informed her—all A's, through three semesters of five three-credit courses each, except for goddamned organic chemistry where he'd managed only an A-, in a pack of premed majors some of whom were rumored to have cheated on the final—well, not only on the final.

But Patrick, flush-faced, indignant, didn't want to go into
that
.

The cheating, dishonesty, cynicism, beer-drinking drug-taking sexual promiscuity of his undergraduate classmates—not all, but a sizable percentage—no, Patrick didn't want to go into
that
.

Instead he told Marianne of his hopes for a career: after his B.A. he would enter a Ph.D. program, possibly here at Cornell where he could work with Maynard Herring, one of the most distinguished of living microbiologists (who'd already singled out Patrick Mulvaney as bright, promising); he would win a fellowship, or if not a fellowship a teaching assistantship; he would complete his Ph.D. in three years—“If all goes as planned.” Earnestly Patrick spoke of certain mysteries of science that intrigued him: why viruses can't replicate themselves, for instance, but have to insert their genetic information into a host and force the host to reproduce the virus; how can so many totally disparate components—microorganisms, chemicals, atoms—constitute an individual human being, with a unified personality? And what is “personality,” given such a galaxy of components? Why have so many plant and animal species become extinct?—more than ninety percent of all species that have ever lived. And what does it mean in evolutionary terms that the maternal egg is so much more influential in reproduction than the paternal, thousands of times larger than the paternal, and containing all the cellular mitochondria? And how did such an extraordinary organ as the eye evolve, in so many disparate species of creatures, through millions of years, out of sheer blind undifferentiated matter?

Marianne interrupted to ask, with sisterly solicitude, “Your eye, Patrick—is it all right?”

Patrick stared at her. “My eye? What?”

“Your—you know,” she said, faltering. “Your injured eye.”

Patrick scowled, shoving his glasses against the bridge of his nose. He was huffy, indignant. “We're not discussing my ridiculous eye,” he said, “—we're discussing the phenomenon of
eye
. It's so amazing. How a mechanism so intricate and ingenious evolved out of blind matter. Who could have imagined an
eye
,
eyesight
, in the dark?”

Marianne had risen unobtrusively to clear the table. She shook her head, with a wan smile. “Someone with an ingenious imagination,” she said softly.

“Hmmm! Very funny, Marianne.”

Vehemently Patrick continued to speak, not knowing what he said or why, at this moment, he was driven to say it; the words long pent-up, the solitude of his life erupting suddenly, in a passion he hadn't known he possessed. Marianne moved quietly and surely clearing the table, rinsing the dishes, all the while listening to Patrick, murmuring words of assent or surprise, occasionally wincing as if his sharp words hurt. Somehow Patrick had swerved from the subject of science's great mysteries to humankind's collective failure. These were thoughts he'd had numerous times, in high school even, but he'd never spoken of them to another person before. “Look, it's so damned depressing! Why after all this time, all that science has discovered, the human race is so
ignorant
. So
superstitious
and
cruel
. Consider: the Nazis murdered sixteen million men, women, and children; Stalin murdered twenty million; even more millions—
more!
—were victims of Chinese Communist ‘ideology.' Just in the twentieth century alone. Our civilized century. That's the mystery, not nature—why human beings are so vile.”

Marianne had come to stand staring at Patrick, her eyes almost frightened. “Patrick, you sound so angry.”

“Shouldn't I be? Why aren't
you
?”

Patrick had risen from the table, trembling. He'd had no idea he was so angry, a pulse beating in his left eye, furiously.

Quickly, without a word, Marianne came to him. Gripped his arms and on her toes leaned against him, pressing her cool, thin cheek against his. Not quite an embrace but it was comforting, consoling.

I love you. We love each other. That's enough.

 

He wanted to believe her, she insisted she was happy.

She
was
happy, her soul shining in her deep-socketed eyes.

Last time Patrick had spoken with his mother on the phone, mentioning Marianne's upcoming visit to Ithaca, Corinne said evasively, guiltily,
Oh give Marianne our love! She's doing very well at that little college, she'll make a wonderful teacher I'm sure. Judd and I are going to drive down some weekend soon.
A pause and a choked-pleading voice,
Hon, I wouldn't interfere with your sister if I were you
and Patrick said coolly,
Yes, but you aren't me, Mom. And I'm not you.

What secrets lay between them, Mom and Button?—mother and daughter?

Just possibly, none.

MMMMM SUCKS COCK! That time, at the start of gym class, at the high school, Patrick swung around the row of lockers and saw a friend of his hastily rubbing something off the corrugated front of Patrick's locker with the flat of his hand, a look of distaste on his friend's face and Patrick walked by pretending he'd seen nothing. Afterward unable to face the friend. Could not recall whether, from that day until graduation, he'd ever spoken to him again.

 

Would he die for Marianne, yes he believed he would.

Yet: had he ever confronted Zachary Lundt, or any of the pack of guys who were Zachary's friends and who, it was rumored, would “stand up for Zach” if the police investigated?—no, he had not.

That wasn't Patrick's way. That wasn't Pinch's way.

Aloof and furious and deeply unspeakably hurt.

Nor had he confronted his father, with whom, since February 1976, he'd scarcely spoken.
You go your way and I go mine.
His father seemed to him mad: it was pointless to talk to him, still less argue. He'd banished Marianne from the household and from his life so that he could banish her from his thoughts. It was simple as that, and Patrick understood. He understood, but couldn't forgive. To Corinne he said
It's cruel, it's ridiculous, I hate him, how can you? and Corinne said angrily, You don't hate your father, Patrick!—you know that. As for Marianne, she's happy and she's adjusted, her faith sustains her just as it sustains me. Don't interfere!

But Pinch would interfere, if only at a distance.

 

He wanted to believe her, she insisted she was happy.

Didn't want to sit staring at her, trying to figure out what was her life now.

Life after high school: cheerleader, prom princess.

He didn't want to interrogate her yet had to ask: how had her first semester at Kilburn gone?—and when, another time, she told him with girlish enthusiasm, plucking at her shorn hair, how happy she was at the college, how much she'd been learning in her classes, especially a course in American history, focussing upon the Abolitionist movement, readings in Thoreau, Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Patrick interrupted to ask, “But, Marianne, how did you
do
? I mean—your grades?”

Crude blunt Pinch.

Marianne had been smiling and now her smile faltered. Her bruised-looking eyelids began to flutter, so like Corinne's. Is there a gene for such related mannerisms, or are they purely learned, conditioned? She said, quietly, so quietly Patrick almost couldn't hear, “I—didn't exactly complete two of the courses. I had to take incompletes.”

“Why?”

“Well—” Marianne squirmed, pulling at her spiky hair. “Things sort of came up. Suddenly.”

“What kind of things?”

“An emergency at the Co-op, just after Thanksgiving. Aviva who was assistant store manager got sick—”

“
Store?
What store?”

“Oh Patrick, I must have told you—didn't I? In Kilburn, in town, we have a Green Isle outlet. We sell preserves, fresh produce in the summer, baked goods—my zucchini-walnut bread is one of the favorites. I—”

“And you work in this
store
? How many hours a week?”

Marianne dipped her head, avoiding Patrick's interrogative gaze. “We don't think in terms of hours—exactly,” she said. She was sitting on Patrick's sofa (not an item from home, part of the dull spare slightly shabby furnishings of the apartment) while Patrick sat facing her, in a rather overbearing position, on his desk chair, his right ankle balanced on his left knee in a posture both relaxed and aggressive.

Thinking Pinch-style
I have a right to ask, who else will ask if I don't?

“What terms do you think in, then?”

“The Green Isle Co-op isn't a—formally run organization, like a business. It's more like a—well, a family. People helping each other out. ‘From each what he or she can give; to each, as he or she requires.'”

“Who said that? P. T. Barnum?”

“Oh Patrick,
no
.” Dutifully Marianne laughed at Patrick's adolescent sarcasm, as a sister must. For an instant they were twelve and thirteen years old, and Pinch was being dourly witty at the supper table. “It's the Co-op motto, it's Abelove's, derived from some nineteenth-century philosopher I think.”

“Karl Marx.”

“Whoever.”

Marianne smiled anxiously, forehead creased. Since Patrick had picked her up at the depot she'd been plucking at her hair, half-consciously; stroking the nape of her neck as if it were tender, and ached; groping to make sure the flimsy straps of her T-shirt were in place. You would wonder (Patrick would wonder) why a young woman of nineteen would wear such a shirt, and nothing beneath it; why, when it was only just April in upstate New York, and far from summer. And why the pebble-colored slacks with the elastic waist, in so synthetic a fabric it had no weave at all, smooth as Formica—slacks that might have been bought in a bargain basement children's department.
I am so small and inconsequential, please don't be angry at me.

But Patrick was angry. Bristling with anger. He said, “‘From each, what he or she can give'—sure. Who's helping
you
?”

“But Patrick—”

“You're clerking in a store? You're baking bread? What else?”

“Patrick, these people are my friends. You'll have to come visit us—maybe the weekend Mom and Judd drive down? Kilburn is a small place, the town and the college, nothing like Cornell. No one is suspicious of anyone else there. No one would ever
cheat
, for instance.”

Patrick let this pass. He listened in silence as Marianne spoke of how she'd been approached by some of the Green Isle people on her second day at Kilburn, she'd been wandering in the bookstore sort of lost and confused, to tell the truth she'd been almost crying, the textbooks cost so much, even the used textbooks, and the first thing Felice-Marie and Birk said was hey don't worry, there's probably some of these books out at the house, we have a library, you can use ours. She spoke of the “wonderful old” house that had once been the Kilburn Inn “going back to stagecoach times.” The greenhouses they'd restored to almost perfect condition, the pear orchards, meadows, fertile soil—“Mom would love.” She spoke of the Co-op membership, currently twenty-three, of whom eighteen lived in the house. They had a single bank account, they pooled all their finances, if they worked outside the Co-op (as, sometimes, Marianne did, shelving books in the college library) they pooled their earnings. Green Isle was synonymous with “honor system.” Green Isle was a “communal oasis in an American capitalist-consumer desert.” (These were Abelove's words, reverently quoted.) In just five years since the Green Isle Co-op had been founded by Abelove, it had acquired an excellent local reputation, and many loyal customers at the store. In fact, Kilburn State was itself a customer: Abelove had negotiated a contract with the food services department.