We Were the Mulvaneys (48 page)

Preposterous: Abelove gazing at Marianne Mulvaney with such open emotion, yearning, why was she reminded of poor Silky?

She backed away, toward the door. Abelove followed almost humbly.

“You do love me a little, Marianne? You said?”

“Oh, yes,” Marianne said nervously. “But right now I have to—”

“You're not in love with Hewie? Are you sure?”

“Am I—
sure
?”

“He didn't take advantage of you yesterday, did he? You were alone together all those hours….”

“Advantage? Hewie?” Marianne was upset, incensed. “Hewie is as good and decent a man, Abelove, as
you
.”

She'd opened the door, desperate to escape before Abelove persuaded her to stay. He was saying, in a lowered voice, so that no one could overhear, a voice that was an echo of Marianne's own most secret yearning, “Will you come back, Marianne, as soon as you can? We'll go somewhere away from here to talk—we have so much to talk about! Marianne?
I love you.
”

Headlong in flight, Marianne was already out of earshot. Or almost.

 

Out of obscurity I came. To obscurity I can return.

W
ho could have foreseen? Not Marianne Mulvaney herself. How, on the day following her attempted return to the Chautauqua Valley, the very day of Abelove's declaration of love for her, what Corinne had already shrewdly identified as her
rag-quilt life
would seriously begin.

No one at the Green Isle Co-op would have guessed why, nor would Abelove volunteer or offer any explanation. Stricken, humiliated, bewildered as he'd been when Birk had vanished, he'd gone to look for Marianne in the late afternoon—finding only Felice-Marie in their room, baffled as well. Where is Marianne? Abelove asked, trying to keep his voice level, and Felice-Marie shook her head numbly. She didn't know! She hadn't seen Marianne all day!

It was obvious that Marianne had packed most of her belongings, leaving behind only larger, unwieldy items (overcoat, boots, a scattering of hardcover textbooks); she'd taken her quilt, most of her paperback books, and her few clothes, apparently stuffed in a duffel bag. And, of course, she'd taken Muffin.

Where had they gone, without anyone observing?

Where had they gone, leaving no explanation or note of farewell?

“Vanished off the face of Earth”—Abelove's words had a grimly prophetic tone.

T
his is a hard reckoning for a son to make. I'm not sure how to begin.

How Judd, too, went away—left my mom when she needed me. Thinking
I want my own life
.
I'm not just Mulvaney, I'm Judd.

How I struck my dad, and was struck by him. Struck down, on my ass on the ground is frankly how you'd put it.

This was in Marsena, in the new place we came to live. That long wet spring 1980. I was seventeen, just transferred to the Marsena High School for the remainder of my junior year.
New kid
with no friends, and wanting none. Slouch-shouldered, scowling, a habit of shaking my head like a horse harassed by flies. If I smiled, which wasn't often, it was a quick come-and-gone twitch of the lips. Mom joked, sighing, “Judd, hon, you're becoming—well, some kind of
upright tic
.”

Looking at me, the youngest of the Mulvaneys, all that remained of her children at home, as if looking into a mirror.

 

When I say this is a hard reckoning I mean it's been like squeezing thick drops of blood from my veins. Just to set down what requires saying in some semblance of chronological order. For every statement of historic fact like
High Point Farm was finally sold, February 1980
or
The remaining Mulvaneys, Michael, Corinne, Judd, two aging dogs and three nervous cats, moved to a “split-level ranch” in a cornfield outside Marsena, New York
or
However many loans my father took out to relocate Mulvaney Roofing in Marsena, he was forced to declare bankruptcy anyway by June
strikes my ear like a lie, reverberating like tin. What actually happened was so much more complicated.

“A man gets to be the sum of his bad luck”—Dad was in the habit of saying, smiling bemused as he'd open another can of ale or, carefully so his hand wouldn't shake, pour something stronger and darker into a glass.

Trying to sell High Point Farm when real estate in the Chautauqua Valley was what the realtors called a buyer's market, and mortgage interest rates were high—that was
bad luck
. And Dad with debts to pay. Taking out loans, loans to repay loans, not always telling Mom what he was doing exactly, and maybe not always knowing himself; trying to negotiate a partnership with a roofer-sider in Yewville that finally fell through, and another with a businessman in Marsena that dragged on for weeks and finally fell through, too—
bad luck
. “It's like somebody, or something, is fixing the dice against me,” Dad said, with his shrugging smile meant to indicate he wasn't much surprised, only just a little curious. He'd always been, in the old days, a man of
good luck
.

It was like the tragical-farcical Delta rescue mission in Iran, President Jimmy Carter's desperate jinxed attempt to free our hostages from their imprisonment in the center of Tehran under the directive of the Ayatollah Khomeini—in theory, the American military strategy might have worked, but in reality things went wrong. Badly wrong.

Mom watched TV nonstop when the terrible news broke on April 25, 1980. Our TV in a corner of the new, unfamiliar living room, reception wavering and ghostly. She wept for the eight young American servicemen who'd died in the helicopter crashes—men “chosen from all four branches of the armed services” as the Joint Chiefs of Staff so meticulously stated, and she wept for ashen-faced, badly shaken Jimmy Carter who was more and more looking like an ordinary man, a decent good Christian-Caucasian-American man as out of his depth in the riptide of history as a person not knowing how to swim in a deep, rough sea. What was this but American
bad luck
—smashed and burning helicopters, rubble where triumph might have been, an officially “aborted” mission and a rapid clumsy retreat to Egypt. Naked, exposed in the eyes of the entire world: what
shame
.

Mom said, wiping her eyes, “Oh, at least Mike wasn't one of them! Oh, thank you, God, at least for that.”

 

Just to make the statement
High Point Farm was sold—finally!
doesn't give any true sense of that disjointed time in our lives that dragged on, and on, and on. There must have been thirty or forty “prospectives” who drove out to gawk at the property, in the company of a real estate agent; even more made appointments and were “no-shows.” Some of the people who tramped through our house were locals with no intention to buy. You couldn't screen them out very well, the real estate agent explained to Mom. It's an open market, you've listed your house, in theory anyone can buy.

Like selling your soul. Once you make the decision, sign the contract, you can't back out.

Selling High Point Farm fell to Mom mainly. She was always on the telephone, or in a frenzy of housecleaning; wildly brushing at her hair, slipping on a sweater or jacket to cover her stained shirt. She had to play “Mrs. Mulvaney”—“the lady of the house”—when at last the awaited car or cars drove haltingly up the driveway. She had to be polite, smiling, hopeful and
never
,
never betray the misery she felt
. Never scream into these strangers' faces, “Go home! Go away! This is madness! Leave us alone!”

No, Corinne Mulvaney was a good sport about her own bad luck.

Michael Mulvaney Sr. was busy elsewhere. Not of a temperament to permit strangers to prowl through his property staring and assessing, shaking their heads at “needed repairs.” To Dad, the potential buyers of the farm were “bloodsuckers” or “just plain suckers” depending on his mood.

As for me, Judd—I tried to stay out of everyone's way. If I was doing barn chores when the real estate agent showed up with whoever, I'd hide until they were gone; hardly breathing, my forehead pressed against a bale of hay. Sometimes I'd overhear snatches of conversations not meant for my ears—
Oh this is a run-down place isn't it, but so attractive, but how much would it cost to, but what a lot of work, oh but why would anyone in his right mind, yes but it's so beautiful out here, yes but it's so far out here, is it true the farm might be sold at auction, for bankruptcy? should we wait, until then?

A knife blade turned in my heart.
I will never, never forgive you,
I thought. Not knowing who
you
was.

Over the many months the farm was for sale, the list price was frequently “readjusted”—downward. I'd overhear Mom on the phone, her hurt, faltering voice, “Oh, but I can't take that offer to my husband, I'm sorry I just can't. That offer is an insult—don't you know that offer is an insult?”

And, once, suddenly furious: “All right, then! I warned you! We will list High Point Farm with another realtor starting this minute!
Please do not attempt to contact us again!
” Slamming the receiver down so I felt the thrill of it along my spine.

Yayyyy Mom!

Eventually, though, in February 1980, after we'd about given up hope, a potential buyer made an offer that Mom dared bring to Dad. Only two thousand dollars below the list price. Dad shrugged and said, “Sure. How soon?”

So, High Point Farm was sold.

So, in March 1980 strangers came to live in the house in which Mulvaneys had lived since 1955. Supplanting Mulvaneys as if we'd never been. Hillside Estates people, a family of four plus a nervous little dachshund. Showy silver-gray BMW and canary-yellow Toyota station wagon. The adults were youngish middle-aged, the children, boy and girl, were ten and twelve. The father was a cardiologist at the new Chautauqua Medical Center, he claimed never to have heard of Dr. Oakley, now retired. It had long been his dream, he told Mom, to breed Black Angus cattle on a “dream-farm” like High Point. Both the children were “crazy for horses”—the girl had already begun riding lessons. The mother proudly described herself as a full-time housewife-mother and something of a perfectionist “bordering on the neurotic.” She wore designer jeans, cashmere pullovers in bright, soft colors. She was almost beautiful in a way Corinne Mulvaney had never been. Deftly this woman met Mom's nervous chatter with shrewd questions about soil drainage, house maintenance, which “interesting” pieces of furniture, clocks, carpets, quilts, decorative objects Mom wanted to sell. Where Mom tried to quick-connect by searching out mutual friends or acquaintances, in the hopeful female way, this woman shook her head as if she'd never heard these names, smiled hard and directed the subject back to the purely practical.
Can't we be friends? Surely we're meant to be friends if you're buying this farm I love?
Mom pleaded in the face of one who held firm, having no sentiment to spare for strangers. Especially luckless strangers about whom the terrible word
bankruptcy
was being whispered.

Mom was rebuffed, hurt, chagrined. But after a while, being Mom, philosophical and even approving—“I understand her, of course! She's afraid I might turn out to be the kind of person who'd want to come back and visit, try to be friends. Some kind of crazy thing like that. I don't blame her at all!”

 

After so many months of delay and frustration, the sale was disconcertingly swift, the closing within fifteen days: the cardiologist and his perfectionist wife didn't require a mortgage but bought the property outright. And this, before they'd even sold their own house and five-acre lot in Hillside Estates. The day we moved into our new home in Marsena, Mom said, smiling, “There! Thank God that's behind us.” She made a dismissive gesture in the vague direction of whatever it was we'd left.

The new house was only temporary of course. A tacky “split-level ranch” with glary-white aluminum siding like corrugated metal, “simulated redwood” trim, “picture window,” carport on a two-third acre lot. The cement block basement showed peculiarly like bared gums in a giant mouth, only a few scrawny bushes grew around the house and there could not have been more than five spindly trees on the entire property. We were just outside the Marsena town limits, on a country highway where trucks traveled at sixty miles an hour, sometimes more, rattling everything not cemented in place, though the speed limit was fifty, and, inside the town limits, thirty-five. There were small doomed farms in the vicinity, several with
for sale
signs out front. There was a large, busy Kmart a half mile away, there was a prosperous-looking Ford dealership, there was a mini–shopping center with 7-Eleven store, Exxon station, car wash. Marsena was a town of 3,400 people and where we'd live permanently Dad said but the house itself was temporary. He'd been in a hurry, pressed for time, had to make a quick decision on his own. A small down payment and a deal in which he took over the previous owner's mortgage without the intervention of lawyers. Just to find his family an interim house until, with the money realized from selling High Point Farm, he could reestablish Mulvaney Roofing and they could look around for a more suitable house. Maybe build?

Mom in her open-eyed daze, smiling at every surface in the new house, every remark put to her, murmured, “Oh, yes, Michael. That's always been our dream anyway—to build our own house.”

 

High Point Antiques hadn't been abandoned exactly. Like Mulvaney Roofing, it was to be relocated in Marsena.

Except Mom hadn't much space for her precious things in the “split-level ranch” which was primarily a single floor sprawled out in a formula rectangle, living room/dining room/kitchen/“rec room”/three bedrooms at the rear of which two were small, meant for children. There was a toolshed beyond the carport only large enough to hold Dad's Toro lawn mower, the tractor, gardening tools, etc., and there was basement space immediately crammed with furniture that couldn't be fitted in upstairs and movers' crates, boxes, barrels that weren't unpacked, and would not be unpacked for a long time. There was an attic no larger than our corncrib at High Point Farm and this too was crammed solid. All the rooms of the new house were full to bursting with familiar things made strange and disturbing by their crowdedness and juxtaposition in this new setting, like an unwieldy nightmare into which an entire life has been shuffled out of impersonal malicious glee. “It's like the inside of a skull,” Mom marveled, with her fluttery laugh. “We just have to deal with it one day, one hour at a time. We just have to keep calm and retain our sense of humor. We should think of it as camping out, sort of—not real. Just temporary. Oh, but that basement—I'm afraid even to
peek
.” She shuddered, and laughed.

Mom did peek, though. And more. While Dad was out on business, and I was at school, she'd run back and forth, upstairs and down, checking to see if some beloved item (lamp, watercolor, pendulum clock, quilt, wine-colored crystal goblets, etc.) had been packed and brought along, a dog or two whimpering or yapping at her heels. (We had only Foxy and Little Boots, and of the cats only Snowball, Marmalade, and a pure black barn kitten, Sin, Mom had taken pity on and carried away with her to Marsena. The new owners of High Point Farm had been ambiguous about how they would deal with the ever-shifting population of semiferal barn cats and Mom dreaded the worst—“What if they hire old Zimmerman to come out and shoot them? What if that nasty old man suggests it? I wouldn't put it past him, or them. But I don't want to know about any of it.
Thank God that's behind us.
”) There was a way she had of running with her eyes slitted almost shut, hair frizzed out gray-laced-with-red like a Hallowe'en wig and there was a way she had of abruptly halting because she'd forgotten where she was going; or, arriving there breathless, basement, attic, toolshed, back bedroom she'd swear she'd never seen before, and the view from the window of an empty weedy backyard ending at a ditch—she'd have forgotten why. She drew up lists of purchases to make in town (one of these, a replacement for poor Feathers who'd died just before the move) but lost the lists and had to draw them up again and this list too she'd mislay, or find crumpled with others in her pocket, handwriting unintelligible.
Make new friends (women!)
it looked like she'd scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Seek out new church (local!).
Naturally it fell to Mom to make arrangements with the telephone company for new phones, the gas and electric company, the oil delivery company, the Marsena public school district, the Marsena post office. The First Bank of Marsena—checking account, savings account. “Home owner's protection” for the new Mulvaney property at 193 Post Road, Marsena, New York. She rushed out intending to drive into town but found herself headed into the open country where, taking a wrong turn, she'd get lost for a half hour; or, on her way to the discount stores south of town, she'd find herself cruising the two-block Marsena downtown looking for a familiar storefront—some store she'd been shopping in for the past twenty years, in Mt. Ephraim. In the midst of so much confusion, why not take the animals for their much-procrastinated rabies and distemper shots? And little Sin, rapidly maturing, why not have her “fixed”? It would only save grief later. So single-handed, not even waiting for Judd to get back from school to help, Judd who was always Mom's assistant on these tumultuous outings, Mom hauled Foxy, Little Boots, Snowball, Marmalade, and Sin to a new vet six miles away—an adventure that would afterward require the thorough cleaning of the interior of the befouled station wagon, disinfectant and three Airwicks!
Well, we all had quite a time today
Mom would chuckle hoping to entertain her husband and her son when, and if, the three of them sat down together for dinner at the same time that evening.
Look at my war wounds!
—holding out her arms to show the scratches.