We Were the Mulvaneys (60 page)

C
remate my body and scatter my ashes and that's the kindest thing you can do for me. Amen.

That gusty October morning. The sky pebbly-pale with streaks of vivid blue like swaths of a housepainter's brush.

Wind, wind. A high keening sound. Rocking the car as we ascended. On the rear seat of Mike's car, between Marianne and me, the box containing the remains of Michael Mulvaney Sr. Of about the size and proportions of a hat box.

I'd peeked, I had to know: these were sizable bone fragments, grit like chunks of gravel, as well as powdery fine “ashes.”

It was the morning following the funeral in Rochester. We were silent mourners.

There was little to say that had not been said.

I did not say, bitterly
Where the hell is Patrick! I hate that bastard.

We passed High Point Farm on our left but I was looking resolutely away and did not see. Or my eyes may have been shut tight.

Abruptly then High Point Road narrowed and became more rutted, jolting. In winter, snowplows wouldn't bother much with this stretch.

Dust rose in angry swirls in our wake.

By instinct Mike was taking us to the perfect place. I knew exactly where he'd park. No houses for miles, no one to drive by gawking curiously at us.
Mulvaneys? Back? What on earth are you doing here?

A high windy glacier ridge overlooking a near-vertical drop of hundreds of feet, scarred-looking boulders strewn below, vivid patches of scarlet sumac. It was fall, a cold-tasting fall, the leaves having quickly turned bright, brilliant shades of orange, yellow, russet-red, to be quickly torn from the trees.

Dad's voice came teasing in my ears.
Be sure to keep the wind at your back, kid! Don't err at such a crucial time, you're not going to get a second chance.

Scattering the earthly remains of Michael John Mulvaney, Sr. to the wind. And how swiftly the wind tore at them, a savage appetite. Hyena-keening, roaring up out of the Valley.

Mom said suddenly, “I can hear Dad laughing, can't you? Oh, this
is
funny—somehow. He'd think so.”

Mike and I lifted the clumsy box, shaking out the last of the grit and ashes. As the wind took them, so roughly.

And gone.

REUNION:
FOURTH OF JULY 1993

 

 

 

 

 

T
he phone rang. I picked it up and it was Mom, breathless and hopeful as a girl—“Come for a Fourth of July cookout, Judd! Come for a Mulvaney family reunion! Come help Sable and me celebrate Alder Antiques and
independence
!”

It was mid-June, weeks ahead of time. Remarkable for my mom who usually telephoned to invite me over at the last minute. I said yes, of course I'd come, sounds like a great idea I said, but what's this about a Mulvaney family reunion? Mom insisted it was so—“All of you are coming. Including Patrick.”

This, I let pass in silence. I asked what would she and Sable like me to bring? and Mom said, “Just yourself, honey! And, you know, if you had a, a—”

“A girl? But I don't.”

“Well—you know.”

“Maybe I'll acquire a girl between now and then,” I said, teasing, “—how's that?”

“Bring yourself and whoever you'd like. This will be our first annual Mulvaney family reunion.”

I must have sighed. Did I believe for a fraction of a second that Patrick would show up? After fourteen years?

Marianne and Whit, sure; Mike and Vicky, yes probably; but Patrick?—never.

Mom said reproachfully, as if I'd spoken aloud, “Judd, this time he's
promised
. We were just now talking on the phone.”

Mom and Patrick were in touch sporadically. The last news I had of Patrick firsthand, he was living in Berkeley, California and training to be a therapist of some kind. Or was he training others to be therapists? So far as I knew he'd never finished his degree at Cornell. He'd been out of contact with us at the time of Dad's death, which was why he hadn't come to the funeral and helped us scatter Dad's ashes—though possibly he wouldn't have come, anyway. All these years, he hadn't come east to see us and if Mom suggested flying out to see him he'd seem to vaporize, disappear. I had a picture of swirling molecules where a human figure had been, so dissolved into its elements there could be no identity.

Still, Mom had gotten it into her head that Patrick would be coming for the reunion on July Fourth. Yes he'd promised, and he was even planning to bring a friend; a woman friend, Mom believed, though she was vague about this as no doubt Patrick had been purposefully vague in telling her. He'd be traveling all that distance by motorcycle, backpacking en route. “Can you imagine, Judd? P.J. on a motorcycle!” Mom was incredulous and hopeful as a girl.

I said, “Frankly, Mom, no, I can't imagine.”

 

In Chautauqua Falls where I now live, and work as editor of the
Chautauqua Falls Journal
, I went shopping on the morning of July Fourth, buying a bushel of sweet corn at a farm stand, selecting the ears individually, carefully. I went to our local beer and wine store and bought six-packs of beer, ale, soda pop. Then to a food store filling the cart with giant bags of potato chips and pretzels, costly little containers of dip (“Mexican Fiesta Hot Sauce,” “Spicy Authentic Indian Curry”) feeling generous, elated, giddy and anxious, and the girl at the checkout counter, who knew me, laughed and said, “Looks like
you're
going to a Fourth of July cookout!” and I said, proudly, “That's almost right, yes. It's a family reunion, too.”

My fingers so mysteriously numb, one of the tins slipped and tumbled to the floor.

ALDER ANTIQUES
BARGAINS & BEAUTY!

Mom's new home, which she shared with her friend Sable Mills, was on a hillside on New Canaan Road, about six miles south of Mt. Ephraim and eighteen miles southwest of High Point Farm. I'd seen my mom's place a number of times of course, since Chautauqua Falls was only forty miles away, and in fact I'd helped her move in; I'd helped her and Sable fix up the property, and given my advice about whom to hire for renovations. (Not that they listened, much. And if they'd asked my advice at the outset, which of course they had not, I'd have advised them not to buy the property at all. I suppose I take after my dad, viewing ramshackle “quaint” farms in the Valley with an un-sentimental male eye, not my mom's romantic farm-girl eye.) Still, I have to admit the place is attractive. The house and outbuildings and pastures, what you can see from the narrow country road. That pert little barn freshly painted an eye-catching royal blue with the sign
alder antiques
prominently displayed.

“My dream,” Mom would say, giving her voice a lightly ironic lilt so you'd know she meant to make fun of herself, even as it was all so terribly serious, “—my heart's desire. If only we don't go bankrupt!”

Oh, it was just a coincidence, Mom insisted, that Alder Creek, beautiful Alder Creek, narrow and treacherously swift-flowing, was less than a mile away from the property, traversing New Canaan Road; the same Alder Creek that ran through our old High Point Farm property to the north.

The Alder Creek of my boyhood. That trickling splashing sound of water over rocks; a sound like voices in the distance, murmurous, questioning.

But Mom insisted it was just a coincidence. “Sable and I fell in love with the property, and just had to have it,” Mom said, and Sable added, emphatically, “Love at first sight!”

The house was just a modest farmhouse, the kind of place my dad would have rolled his eyes at, saying it's hardly worthwhile for the owner to install a new roof. But Mom and her friend bought it with a bank loan and paid for enough renovations to make it habitable, dividing it “straight across the middle, the kitchen between.” Living with a dog, numerous cats and a pair of canaries they'd managed to get through not one winter, but two. The house was two storeys, rotted-looking clapboard siding, a tilting stone chimney, badly sagging porches at front and rear. A dank cellar with an earthen floor. The barn had been in good enough condition to be converted into a shop—
ALDER ANTIQUES
—painted a bold eye-catching blue like no other barn on the New Canaan Road. On the roof was a row of old-fashioned school desks of the kind connected by runners, like a toboggan. “They were dismantling the one-room schoolhouse in Ransomville, where I'd gone for eight grades. Imagine!” Mom told me. “So Sable and I drove over for the auction, and came away with so many wonderful things, we had to rent a U-Haul.” They'd bought the faded-nearly-colorless American flag from the school, the old potbellied wood-burning stove that had heated the single schoolroom, tattered old “readers” and anthologies of long-forgotten patriotic authors. “The only drawback is,” Mom admitted, “—once you get to love these old things, you can't bear to part with them.”

In good weather, there was placed beside the antique shop's front door a dressmaker's dummy with an hourglass figure in an elegant satin-and-lace wedding gown with a five-foot train, circa 1910, faded to the color of weak tea. Sable Mills says dryly of this artifact, “It sure does help to be headless and lacking a crotch if you're about to be a bride.”

And Mom would murmur, blushing, “Oh, Sable! Really.”

Corinne Mulvaney's specialty at Alder Antiques was refinishing furniture, re-covering cushions, etc.; Sable's specialty was repairing rattan, wicker, etc. Corinne's inclination was for hominess, housekeeping; Sable's for keeping accounts, business. The one was all breathy sweetness on the phone, the other staccato as a machine gun, thrilling in her own decisiveness. Sable was a good-looking trim woman of five feet one, brassy-dyed hair, cruel-stylish ear clamps, magenta lipstick, flashy sporty clothes, expensive high-heeled boots. She'd had experience selling “antique” furniture and clothes off and on over a period of twenty years. She too had grown children, in fact several grandchildren, and she too was unmarried at the present time. She liked to discomfort my mother by remarking she hadn't any idea if her ex-husbands (yes, plural: three) were living or dead, nor any great desire to be illuminated on the score. “When I'm finished with a person, I'm finished,” Sable boasted, drawing a forefinger across her throat, “—whether
he
is, or not.”

Mom would glance at me, tremulously. Both of us thinking of Dad.

I don't know what Mom told Sable Mills about Dad. About our family. I'm inclined to think she's told Sable very little. For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

The vision of the wind off High Point Road, bearing bone, grit, ash away into infinity.

So Mom and her friend Sable Mills teamed up to buy the three-acre Alder Creek property, house and barn and a few ramshackle outbuildings, in the summer of 1991, and began
alder antiques
with Sable's savings and a bank loan; if they weren't exaggerating or embellishing, they would have repaid the loan completely by July 4, 1993—“Independence Day! So come help celebrate.”

I was proud of Mom, and hopeful for her. After Dad's death she'd gone through a bad spell. Not actively unhappy and never complaining, certainly not what you'd call depressed, but for a long time just not herself.

It was during this time Mom's hair turned silver, glittering like mica, and seemed even to have lost its kinky wave. She wore it plaited into a thick braid that swung between her shoulder blades. She'd become a striking woman after whom people glanced admiringly on the street as if wondering:
Who's that?
I must have observed the change so gradually, the way I register changes in myself, my own face that isn't a boy's face any longer (I would be thirty years old, July 11!)—there was never a moment when I actually
saw
.

Marianne and I discussed Mom on the phone. I remarked, how long ago and far away it seemed, now—lanky carroty-haired Whistle making such a commotion in the kitchen. “The way she'd call us down for breakfast—remember? ‘WAKE UP! RISE 'N' SHINE, KIDDOS!'”

But Marianne, nursing Willy even as we spoke, said gently, “You know, Judd, maybe Mom doesn't want to be ‘Mom' right now. Maybe she's taking time out.”

Then Sable Mills came into Mom's life like a hurricane. And no looking back.

After Dad left her, and the property out in Marsena was repossessed, Mom came to live in Mt. Ephraim where people knew her, and liked her. There came a succession of slow dull safe jobs—in the Mt. Ephraim Public Library, in a day-care center, at the Chautauqua County Bureau of Records where eventually she would be promoted to office manager. She lived in an apartment building downtown and of course she was miserable there—Corinne Mulvaney, in a pokey little apartment with no lawn! And no animals! She had many women friends, and of course she had church (in fact, she continued to drive over to Marsena, to Sunday services at the New Church of Christ the Healer, where the Reverends Pluckett had been so kind to her in her time of need), yes she was lonely sometimes when she allowed herself to think of her losses, but of course she was a Christian, and an adult; an optimist, and a farmer's-daughter pragmatist; she knew not to dwell upon what can't be changed.

And there was her “antiquarian” soul.

Always going, with women friends or alone, to auctions in the Valley, to rummage sales, flea markets. Once she drove all the way to Chautauqua Falls—eighty miles round trip—to attend an estate auction, where most of the items were far out of her price range; I met her there and took her to dinner afterward and she said, apologetically, yet defiantly, “Judd, I know you disapprove, you think it's a silly waste of time, but, well—I'm
looking
. I'll never stop
looking
.”

On the tip of my tongue was a son's embarrassed question—
For God's sake, Mom, at your age looking for what?

She bought things sparingly, and always small items, for of course she hadn't much room in her pokey little apartment; but always at the back of her mind she was planning, plotting how to start a shop of her own again. It happened that she and a brassy-haired woman of some age between forty-five and fifty-five who favored brightly colored cloche hats, snug-fitting jodhpurs, lizard-skin boots became aware of each other at auctions: Sable Mills was always out-bidding Corinne Mulvaney for the same items, and Corinne looked with longing at the younger woman's acquisitions. The more forlorn, left-behind kinds of things—a badly frayed silk fan in the shape of a butterfly, a heavy ceramic teapot on whose curved surface someone (children?) had mischievously scratched their initials, a packet of love letters from a World War I soldier to someone named Samantha, a soiled needlepoint pillow in the shape of an elephant's head, complete with drooping tusks—the more likely Corinne and Sable were drawn to them. Sometimes out of apparent kindness, Sable would allow Corinne to outbid her; calling then across the room sotto voce, with malicious glee, “Whew! Thank God! Who in her right mind would want such junk!” Others were shocked but Corinne just laughed. She liked being teased, even mocked: no one ever behaved that way with her any longer. Since her husband had gone away she was always being treated, by her children especially, like some fragile about-to-shatter old
thing
.