We Were the Mulvaneys (31 page)

Patrick resisted his Pinch-instinct and asked casually, politely about Abelove. And of course Marianne spoke warmly, at length; describing this “wonderful, dedicated” person with a “wonderful, kindly sense of humor”; a musician (guitar, banjo); an artist (clay sculpting); an organic gardener (no artificial fertilizers or insecticides); but primarily an intellectual, a theorist with advanced degrees in psychology and anthropology. Abelove had been an assistant professor at Kilburn who'd become disillusioned with the “straightjacket conformity” of the academic world; he'd dropped out to found the Green Isle Co-op, a private vision he'd had as an idealistic teenager camping alone on Mount Katahdin which is somewhere in Maine.

Patrick interrupted to ask, “How old is this person?”

“Old? Why, I don't know—in his early thirties maybe.”

“I'd guess he just didn't get tenure at Kilburn State. That's why he ‘dropped out.' And where are his ‘advanced degrees' from, do you know?”

Marianne plucked at her hair, trying to recall. “Somewhere in Boston, I think.”

“Harvard?”

The question was very lightly, ironically put. Marianne missed the tone and said, “Yes, I think maybe. One of them, at least. Actually Abelove won't talk about himself. Things are known about him—people talk about him, because they admire him so—but he rarely talks about himself.”

Patrick said stiffly, “The Green Isle isn't some sort of ridiculous cult, is it?—and ‘Abelove' some sort of megalomanic guru?”

“Oh, Patrick,
no
.”

Patrick sucked at his lower lip. Harvard, really! He very much doubted Harvard. He said irritably, “Well, is there a religion involved? Do you all ‘worship' together?”

Marianne said, hurt, “You know I have my own religion, Patrick. I've been attending a wonderful little church in Kilburn—actually it's outside of Kilburn a few miles. ‘The Church of the Apostles.' It's a farm community congregation—Mom would love Reverend Hooker and his wife who's this ‘free spirit' type, sort of like Mom in fact. We—”

Patrick interrupted, “Marianne, what happened to your courses last semester? You're in Kilburn to study and get a degree, aren't you?—not to work for this Co-op as an indentured servant.”

“But—I have to help out, if there are emergencies,” Marianne said pleadingly. “It happened so unexpectedly! Poor Aviva had some sort of—breakdown. She just disappeared from the house—we didn't know where she'd gone—I mean, at first—I volunteered to take over her duties and of course I had my own—and my classes—and, well—things got complicated.” Marianne paused, smiling at Patrick; she was sitting with her legs drawn up beneath her, in what could not have been a very comfortable position. “I only just did what anyone would do, Patrick, in such circumstances.”

Patrick let this pass. “Are you making up those courses now? This semester?”

“Well—not exactly.”

“What's that mean? No?”

Marianne said softly, “I'm going to enroll in summer school, in about six weeks. The dean of students has been very understanding.”

“You mean—you're not taking classes now?”

“Well—no. I just haven't had time, with so much—”

“You've dropped out of school? God, Marianne!”

“I haven't
dropped out
, didn't I just say I'm going to enroll in summer school? Why are you so angry, Patrick? I don't get angry at
you
.”

“Wait. Those incompletes are on your transcripts now as
F
's, aren't they? If you didn't make them up.”

Marianne sat wordless, plucking at her hair.

Patrick sighed heavily, removing his glasses. Rubbed his eyes roughly. But what point in anger, really.
Wouldn't interfere with your sister. If I were you.

Strange, Patrick thought. He, Patrick Mulvaney, was this young woman's brother: they'd been
brother-and-sister
through all of their conscious lives: each was more closely related to the other genetically than either was to either of their parents. Yet he believed he scarcely knew Marianne at all. He loved her, but scarcely knew her. Members of a family who've lived together in the heated intensity of family life scarcely know one another. Life is too head-on, too close-up. That was the paradox. That was the bent, perplexing thing. Exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. For of course you never give such relationships a thought, living them. To give
a thought
—to
take thought
—is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.

An image of a broken cobweb, glistening-sticky across his knuckles, came to Patrick. As he'd walked through the tall grass behind the horse's barn. Once you see a web in such a way it's too late. It's no longer a web.

 

It was late, past ten o'clock. Not late by Patrick's usual schedule but it felt late, the visit with Marianne had drained so much energy from both. Yet, unpredictably, Marianne jumped up from the sofa saying she had a surprise for Patrick she'd almost forgotten—in fact, two surprises.

She'd brought dessert, lemon tarts, from Kilburn, another of her specialities. Patrick protested he wasn't hungry but found himself eating three of the tarts. Marianne picked sparingly at hers, eating crumbs and licking her fingers. Her sallow complexion glowed as Patrick complimented her—“You never made anything like this at home, did you? Terrific.”

And she had a packet of snapshots of High Point Farm that Judd had taken to send her, at Easter.

Mulvaney family snapshots! At such a time.

Patrick swallowed nervously. He dreaded looking through these with Marianne—but how could he refuse?

Such family snapshots had always fascinated Patrick. The only ones he ever felt comfortable with were those he'd taken himself—there would be a reason, a logic, why he, Patrick, wasn't in a picture. Any snapshot that included him was naturally of intense interest—though usually, being vain, and in his own eyes homely, gawky frowning bespectacled Pinch, he yearned to tear such snapshots into pieces; yet a snapshot that excluded him aroused even more anxiety.
Where am I? Didn't I get born? Has it all happened without me?
He wondered if there was a region of the human brain, somewhere in the cerebral cortex, specifically in the visual cortex at the back of the brain, that was triggered to register metaphysical anxiety over such absences.

How close we've all come, to never having been born. Out of what unfathomable infinity of possibilities, the slender probability of a single egg's fertilization by a single sperm.

It was something Patrick did not want to contemplate.

These two dozen Polaroids, taken by Judd over the past several weeks, excluded both Marianne and Patrick, of course. And Mike, now in the Marines. Patrick's fingers were damp and shaky as he held them, each in turn, and Marianne, who'd surely looked at them a hundred times already, was breathless, wiping at her eyes. Repeatedly she exclaimed, “Look! Oh, Patrick, look here—” at familiar sights somehow unfamiliar, exotic. There was Troy with his narrow, intelligent head cocked at an odd angle, doggy-brown eyes shining; there were two drowsy cats luxuriantly lying together on one of Mom's quilts—“I didn't know Snowball and E.T. could get along so well, did you?” Marianne observed, as if this were quite a revelation. There was Mom, irrepressible Mom, clowning on the back porch in a shabby old plaid parka of Mike's, gripping a thick five-foot stalactite icicle descending from the roof, grinning at the camera; overexposed in the sunshine of late winter, harsh lines bracketing her mouth. Another of Mom taken in the kitchen, apparently unaware of the camera, poised in chatty conversation with Feathers in his cage, the canary a blur of yellow. And there was Dad glimpsed unaware of the camera too, bareheaded, graying, in his camel's-hair coat, seen through a kitchen window as he was about to climb into the Mulvaneys' new gleaming-silver car. (“New car? I thought Mulvaney Roofing was having financial problems,” Patrick protested to Corinne on the phone, when she'd informed him that his father had gotten a great deal on a secondhand 1975 Lincoln Continental, from a car dealer in New Canaan where he'd done some roofing work—“You know your wily old dad, ‘Make me an offer I can't refuse.'”) There were shots of the dun-colored late-winter landscape taken from Judd's bedroom window, views of the barns, the weathercock, Mt. Cataract in the distance; shots of interiors of High Point Farm, an empty—and oddly long—living room, the cluttered staircase seen from the second floor, Little Boots gazing up expectantly as the camera flashed. And, in his stall, Judd's cockeyed little horse Clover, snapped in midchew, hay burgeoning from his rubbery-damp mouth.

The other horses were gone, only Clover remained. Did Marianne know? Of course, Patrick thought, she must know—Molly-O is gone.

Molly-O, Prince, Red. Our childhood.

Neither spoke of the horses.

One of the snapshots was of Blackie and Mamie the handsome mated goats, in their pen: how quizzical their expressions, as the camera flashed. Another, somewhat blurred, was of several browsing cows by the pasture pond. Another was of Mom glimpsed outside, through a kitchen window, in conversation with—could it be Dad? in khaki-colored jacket?—no, probably a hired man, maybe Zimmerman from down the road.

Patrick sorted through the snapshots with a mounting sense of alarm. His left eye ached. Something, someone was missing.

Marianne said, wiping at her eyes, as if he'd spoken aloud, “I wish Judd had had Mom take a picture of
him
. It just seems so—” she paused, not knowing what she wanted to say, “—strange and sad without him.”

Without us, Patrick thought. Any of us.

But he said nothing. His left eye was watering seriously. He was wearing his glasses of course, shoved against the bridge of his tender nose. He saw that Marianne was trembling; pale with strain and exhaustion. Why didn't she put the snapshots away? Why had she brought them at all? Did she imagine that he was as obsessed with the Mulvaneys as she?

Softly Marianne said, “I was disappointed there weren't more of Mom and Dad, too. Judd didn't actually take a real picture of Dad.”

Strange on her bloodless lips:
Dad
.

Dad, Dad. Who is
your
Dad?

Is a
father
a dad, always? Is Dad a
father
?

Is Dad a
dad
, or just a
father
?

Patrick said abruptly, “What a ridiculous word—‘Dad.' Did you ever hear it, actually?” He laughed, a sound as of dry twigs snapping.

Marianne was replacing the snapshots in the envelope, slowly.

“Patrick, I think Dad will be calling me home sometime soon.”

Patrick wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. He didn't ask Marianne to repeat her words.

Marianne began to speak, not quite coherently, of the last time Corinne had called, Easter Sunday it had been, in the evening, she'd called at the Co-op and Marianne picked up the phone herself, what a surprise, what a wonderful surprise, to pick up a ringing phone just knowing
It can't be for me, it would never be for me,
and such knowledge completely matter-of-fact, not at all disturbing—and it was Corinne, it was Mom! With a just-perceptible air of childish pride Marianne said, “We talked for a long time—forty minutes! And before she hung up Mom said, just out of nowhere, ‘If Dad was home right now, Marianne, I think maybe he'd like to speak with you.' I didn't know what to say, I was so—scared. Mom said, ‘Marianne, are you listening?' and I said yes and she said, ‘It might be Easter or it might be just—the time. I shouldn't talk like this maybe, I'm just guessing but it's what I think.' So I asked if I should call them later that night when Dad got home? when should I call? and Mom started crying, I think—I think she was crying—and
I
was crying—” Marianne laughed, shaking her head. Her deep-socketed eyes glistened with tears. “Oh, Patrick, it was so—wonderful. I couldn't sleep all that night.”

Patrick thought, Don't say a word.

Patrick stood, almost overturning his chair. Marianne cowered before him, seeing something terrible in his face.

“‘Dad'!—how can you call him ‘Dad'! He's a blind, selfish man. He's cruel. He's crazy. The way he's treated you—crazy! Why care about him, or her? Let them go.”

Patrick slammed out of the room—into his bedroom, blindly—didn't know what he was doing—couldn't believe his anger. It had erupted so suddenly, out of—where?

Immediately he was ashamed of himself. Why frighten Marianne, his sister? To what purpose, saying such things to her?

She, to whom such a filthy thing had happened.

The terrifying possibility came to Patrick: our lives are not our own but in the possession of others, our parents. Our lives are defined by the whims, caprices, cruelties of others. That genetic web, the ties of blood. It was the oldest curse, older than God.
Am I loved? Am I wanted? Who will want me, if my parents don't?