We Were the Mulvaneys (44 page)

By 11
A.M.
the wind had been blowing boiled-looking clouds across the sky in a vivid procession and it had turned into a mild, fragrant, dazed sort of spring day. At least Marianne felt dazed. Staring avidly at everything she saw, rubbing her eyes to see if her vision was real. Why, she hadn't been in Ransomville for—four years? Yet the little crossroads town seemed unchanged, same two-pump gas station, convenience store and tackle shop combined, a teenager's long-faded sign
NIGHT CRAWLLERS BARGINS
! The same post office–volunteer firemen's building, the same elevated railroad tracks, several wood-frame churches, surrounding farmland. The two-lane blacktop highway leading out into the country, to the remote Hausmann farm, was more cracked and potholed than Marianne recalled. And where was the Lutheran church, hadn't it been at a fork in the road? How many miles from town?

Marianne was beginning to tremble, felt the need in her fingers to dart about, plucking at her hair or, like Mom's, fluttering. She clasped them, icy-cold, together in her lap.

She would be welcome at her own grandmother's funeral, with the other Mulvaneys—wouldn't she?

Mom would give a little cry and run to hug her, squeeze the breath out of her—wouldn't she?

Ransomville was in a remote corner of the Chautauqua Valley, far from the more populous Mt. Ephraim and the far more affluent, expanding area of Yewville and Route 58. Until the mid-Fifties, many farms didn't have electricity, let alone indoor plumbing.
A place time has forgotten
Corinne used to say, and Michael Sr. was quick to quip,
Right! and we know why.
In fact, the landscape was beautiful and possibly intimidating to a self-styled city boy. The rolling hills and abrupt glacier-ravines, the fast-running pebbled creeks, the sudden sweeping views, vast skies susceptible to change within minutes from overcast to clear, from clear to stormy, were very like the rockier, wilder stretch of High Point Road beyond the Mulvaney property where the asphalt became gravel.
Human beings always think
Patrick once said
how, on the other side of their property line, civilization ends.
Marianne couldn't have explained what Patrick meant by that but she guessed he might be right.

So strange, and distressing—about Patrick. He'd telephoned her just after Easter, the previous month, a midnight call when Marianne was groggy with exhaustion, wakened by Felice-Marie for this “emergency” call from her brother, and she'd been scarcely able to comprehend Patrick's excited rushed words, let alone what they meant. He wanted her to know, he said, that
justice had been executed
; and that he was dropping out of Cornell before graduating, he'd decided not to go to graduate school just yet but to forestall making any decisions about the future. He was going to travel, he said—maybe the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains. Marianne listened in horror. She'd stammered
Yes but Patrick aren't I coming to your graduation? Aren't all the Mulvaneys coming to your graduation? I've got May 30 marked on my calendar, oh Patrick wait—

Afterward, the call had seemed like some bizarre dream. Marianne was increasingly susceptible to bizarre dreams now that she'd taken on so many of Birk's duties in the Co-op and fell into bed exhausted every night. But the most bizarre thing about Patrick's call was that he'd sounded so happy, so relieved, so—un-Pinch-like. Yet he'd been delivering catastrophic news, hadn't he?

Now that Hewie had actually turned onto Marianne's grandparents' road, now that they were actually approaching the Lutheran church at the crossroads—there, suddenly, it was: dull gray stone, gaunt and so much smaller than Marianne remembered—Marianne began to feel panic. It was that fear, her special fear. A cold sweat beaded on her forehead and in her armpits. She heard herself plead in a whisper, “Hewie, I guess I—can't.” The young man, driving the rattly Dodge in his careful, steadfast way, leaned an ear toward her. “—I guess I'm not ready.” What a shock to see amid a dozen or so vehicles parked at the church Corinne's old Buick station wagon—4-H sticker on a rear window, faded
ELECT
C
ARTER
-M
ONDALE
'76!!! on the rear bumper. Several people, black-garbed, stood in the church doorway—
Is one of them Mom? Is one of them Dad?
Ludicrous among farmers' modest cars and pickups was a long black hearse out of place as a giant fancy polished boot from a fashionable store window. Grim-faced oniony-smelling Ida Hausmann, with her disdain for what she called showy earthly vanities, squired about the Ransomville countryside one final time, in
that
!

Marianne pleaded, hiding her face so she couldn't be seen by anyone at the church, “Oh, just drive by, Hewie! Please! I—can't.”

Waiting for Hewie to reason with her, for hadn't they come a long distance only to rush on by like fugitives, wasn't the older, male presence always one to reason with her—but Hewie didn't utter a word. He was like that at the Co-op, too—broody eyes and mouth so you'd imagine he was thinking deep thoughts, contrary thoughts, even mutinous thoughts (Abelove often cast uneasy glances at Hewie, while presiding over meetings), but Hewie never made trouble, rarely spoke at all. He scowled, that was about it. Yet you couldn't judge whether Hewie's scowls were meant to be smiles, or not meant to signal anything at all, just nervous tics. He was good-looking in a carved-walnut way, his dark hair grown shaggy past his ears. A man like that is so
frustrating
! Amethyst complained, sighing. Marianne was genuinely baffled. Frustrating? Why?

Atop the hill beyond the Lutheran church there was a rutted cow lane, Marianne asked Hewie quick to turn off, he maneuvered the Dodge in and parked behind a screen of straggly trees. In such a confused state she halfway forgot anyone was with her, and might be wondering at her sanity, Marianne hurried out of the car, stumbled into a field, thistles and briars tugging at her clothes. Stealthily she made her way downhill behind the church to the edge of the cemetery; crouched there to wait for her grandmother's funeral to proceed to the grave site—you could tell poor Ida Hausmann's destination, a gouged-out angry-seeming red-dirt rectangle in the moist earth. Oh, what a heartbreaking sight!
If it wasn't for Jesus Christ, and His Love, and His promise of Heaven and life-everlasting—it couldn't be looked upon at all.

Was she hidden well enough?—behind a partly collapsed wall of rocks dragged from the fields and cemented together decades ago, and one of the largest tombstones in the cemetery, a granite pedestal and a human-sized stone angel with weatherworn but soaring wings. All about Marianne mayflies and gnats and what looked like junior honeybees droned and buzzed. Hewie descended the hill behind her, near-silent in his soiled running shoes as a deer. Marianne was aware of him yet not aware of him, at the same time—she'd shut her eyes tight, clasped her hands together, bowed her head in prayer. Inside the stone church, a minister was intoning words of scripture over Grandmother Hausmann's casket. Whatever exactly the Lutheran service was, it would be prayer, humble submission to God's will and Jesus' love.
Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Marianne told herself: if Corinne knew she was crouching out here hiding behind the cemetery, she couldn't truly be angry, or even embarrassed, so long as none of the others knew. That was always the case with Mom—it was Marianne who'd fussed, fussed, fussed over her 4-H projects, hand-stitching her hems perfectly or tugging out the thread and beginning again, preparing her baked goods from scratch and never, never using a mix, while Mom took the position, which she claimed was the American-pragmatist position, that if things work just fine who's to know exactly how they're working, and what business is it of other people's, anyway? They all loved Mom's slapdash cooking that was delicious, you didn't need to know that she'd rushed into the kitchen just in time to wrest chicken pieces from a cat's mouth, or hastily scraped up from the floor, where it had fallen in an appalling heap that might nonetheless be reshaped by hand, some pie, pudding, casserole or quiche. The last time Marianne had spoken with her mother, the evening of Easter Sunday, Corinne had evaded Marianne's shy questions about the farm (was it truly for sale? were they really thinking of moving across the Valley, to Marsena?—but they didn't know anyone in Marsena, did they?) and made some cheery glimmering remark about Marianne's
rag
-
quilt life
at the Green Isle Co-op, she'd sounded halfway envious,
You young people! practically in a hippie commune and having the time of your life, not like my generation, I was training to be a public school teacher and your father had been on his own, working, self-supporting since the age of eighteen.
Marianne had smarted at the allegation, somehow the term
hippie
didn't strike the ear right, or justly, for Marianne like most of the other Co-op members worked very hard even if, academically, she hadn't all that much to show for it after five or six semesters. But of course she hadn't objected, just laughed uneasily as Corinne chattered on.
Rag-quilt life:
was that how her life was adding up to, in the judgment of her mother?
Rag-quilt life:
well, maybe that was apt.

But Marianne had made an effort to improve her usual appearance for the occasion of Grandmother Hausmann's funeral—surely Corinne would note, and appreciate, that? She'd shampooed her hair until it shone, scrubbed her hands and dug dirt out from beneath her broken-off nails, soaked in the big claw-footed tub on the top floor of the Co-op (not much used, you had to scour the tub with steel wool afterward to remove the stains, no one had time for anything much except showers) until she was
clean, clean, clean.
For the first time in a long time. (Except now, nervous as a cat, sweating—what a sight she probably looked!) On her head, not exactly straight, was a wide-brimmed black straw hat with a crinkly black straw band from the Second-Time-'Round Shop in Kilburn, and from the same shop an ankle-length long-sleeved waistless dress of a similar soft-crinkly fabric, midnight blue that could pass for the black of mourning. Unfortunately the dress was too large for her and had a dipping boat-neck that showed her sharp collarbone so, inspired, in haste, she'd wrapped a strip of black velvet around her throat with a tiny glass ruby pasted on it—a “touch,” Amethyst insisted, the dress badly needed. On her feet were a pair of black “ballerina flats” and she wore gauzy black-mesh knee-length stockings. Seeing Marianne rush downstairs that morning, where he was already waiting, Hewie glanced up at her startled, his downturned mouth actually dropping, as if he'd never set eyes on such a person before.

Apologetically Marianne murmured, “I guess—I'm in mourning, Hewie. I hope that's all right?”

At this, too, Hewie glared at her, his mouth working, but in silence. As if her question had annoyed, even offended him. He'd stalked out to his car and started the motor.

After about forty minutes, the funeral party left the church and proceeded into the cemetery. Marianne spied on them shamelessly, biting at her thumbnail, peering out from behind the soaring stone angel. Now and then a gust of wind threatened to knock her hat askew so she had to clamp it down on her head, mashing the crown. Hewie must have been crouching somewhere behind her, peering into the cemetery, too, but Marianne had forgotten him. There was the minister who didn't look quite like Reverend Schreiber who'd been pastor of the Ransomville Lutheran Church for decades, and there were the pallbearers, four men, must be Hausmann relatives but Marianne could recognize only the youngest, a cousin of her mother's now bald and stoop-shouldered. The coffin was a shock—maybe coffins are always shocks, to the unexpecting eye?—such a shiny-glary black, like the hearse. Such ostentation and fuss weren't Grandmother Hausmann's
style.
And there were several elderly female relatives Marianne recognized, unsteady on their feet in the spongy soil, and darting among them a tall lean elbowy woman who managed to assist all three simultaneously, a woman in what appeared to be a shiny black vinyl raincoat and a wide-brimmed black hat (straw?) tied tight beneath her chin with a black ribbon. Marianne stared—it was Corinne! It was Corinne of course, and behind her was a skinny boy in a dark blue suit, uncomfortable-looking, fawn-colored hair stirring in the wind—Judd. Marianne jammed her knuckles against her mouth, emitted a small unconscious cry like a kitten's mew.
Mom! Mommy!

But where was Dad, wasn't Dad there, Michael Sr. not at his own mother-in-law's funeral, oh, what did that mean?

Yet it was logical her father wasn't there, for Marianne had so deduced from seeing her mother's station wagon parked in front of the church; if Dad had driven, he'd surely have taken his own car, not Mom's. It was a newly purchased car Patrick had described at length over the phone: one of those overpriced ostentatious American gas-guzzlers, a Lincoln Continental of all things, wouldn't you think a man on the verge of bankruptcy and in this era of gas shortages would have more sense than to buy such a relic?—Patrick had gone on and on as if he'd not only seen the infamous car, but ridden in it, but Marianne gathered he had not. Anyway—that car, and not Mom's battered old Buick, would have been out front if Michael Sr. had been present.