We Were the Mulvaneys (52 page)

H
e'd married young, that was his story. You don't know what your story is going to be until looking back.

Because he'd fallen in love with a girl strong enough to keep him faithful. And he'd wanted children with her as ballast, to keep his rocky little boat from careening off course, carried away by the first big swell. A son, another son, a daughter, and a third son. Their small limbs, warm and pulsing, unbelievable soft skin, faces eager with love for Daddy, for now
he was Daddy that was who he was
, holding him tight, holding him safe.

God, he'd loved them! Those kids. The first baby, named for him, had scared him a little, the love came so strong, and the love for the woman, so strong, he'd felt panic touch the base of his spine light as a stranger's fingertips
You did this, Mulvaney? that's your son? your responsibility for life?
But then it was all right. It was just life. It was American life. Look around, everybody's marrying young, it's an economic boom too, all the world's watching in awe, post–World War II United States of America mushrooming up, up, up like the A-bomb cloud—
Sky's the limit!
Forty million American babies predicted for the Fifties. It was just life, normal life, and it was good.

Like God said gazing upon His creation in the Garden of Eden, it
was
good.

And then—they were gone.

The Mulvaneys who bore his name, not just the kids but the woman, too. (In fact, he'd been the one to move away. Just took off, threw a few things in the car, moved to Yewville. There gets a point, a man can't take it any longer.) Life started going fast, and faster, and he'd been taken by surprise. And not old, damn it, either—in his early fifties. Suddenly his little boat was in rough, unfriendly waters. Storm winds, heaving waves spinning him out of control. And there, above, on a bridge he'd have to pass under, there stood his father—his father he hadn't seen for a lifetime! The bridge was one of the old Pittsburgh bridges over the Allegheny River, he recognized the knotty black shape of it, the looming silhouette, and he recognized his father astonished that the man wasn't elderly but a man Michael's own age, his father was shouting at him, his voice forlorn yet angry, over these many years still angry, and the jaws thickset in the stubborn inviolable rectitude of the damned, and there was the upraised fist—
Go to hell, then! No son of mine.

A father's curse! Michael Mulvaney Sr. had lived his entire adult life in the wake of his father's curse.

 

So too he'd sent his own daughter away, not with a curse but in the name of love. He believed, he would swear to his very death—it had been love.

 

And how strange time was. Once you veered away from shore, and flew along, borne by the river's current beneath the bridge and out to what looked like sea, as if it hadn't been the Allegheny after all but the mouth of a vast dark thundercloud-sea—somewhere you can't recognize.
What the hell is this? Who's making these decisions?

After thirty years living a bachelor's life again. But the world wasn't a bachelor's world now. Not the world of Michael Mulvaney's young adulthood when he'd thumbed his nose at the old man,
Go to hell yourself!
and left Pittsburgh forever.

Now there was a confusion of times, places. It was like switching TV channels—you never knew where exactly you were, or how long you'd be there.

How Corinne had cried, cried. It wasn't like her, and it scared him. That first full day the three of them were in the new house in Marsena when Corinne hadn't the manic excitement of preparing to move, the great effort ahead. She'd cried like a helpless child
Where are our trees? Oh Michael, where are our trees?
As if she hadn't actually noticed until then, hadn't allowed herself to look, to know what the new property was: a plot of land less than an acre.

So he'd gotten good and drunk, left her there bawling. What good would it do, the two of them bawling together like sick calves?

Thinking
A man deserves some freedom for Christ's sake. A furlough.
If he wanted to drink, he'd drink. Fed up with being made to feel guilty every time he popped a can of ale, or stayed away missing a meal, or took the name of the Lord “in vain” making his Christian wife flinch. She wasn't his mother for Christ's sake.

 

The first place he lived was a good-sized furnished apartment overlooking Outwater Park, in Yewville. The second was a smaller apartment on Market Street, New Canaan. The third was a room and a half on East Street, Port Oriskany. He'd never again return to the Chautauqua Valley, that was a dead region to him now.

Working where he could. As often as he could. Nonunion, hourly wages. Sure he'd had serious problems of attitude, adjustment, at first. Michael Mulvaney's new status being not
employer
as he'd been for nearly thirty years but
employee
. A sensation like stepping into an elevator but there's no elevator there, just the shaft.

At first, he'd tried to get managerial jobs, salesman positions. But there were none of these jobs available, at least not for him. That look of belligerence in his face, the tight, taut mouth. He'd caught sight of himself once in a window, looked like a pike. Slamming along. Impatient, furious. Forcing a smile. A pike's smile. How quickly he was recognized: one glance at this job applicant entering an office not entirely clean-shaven, clothes just slightly rumpled, the hurt puckered furious pike-look in his eyes.

Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken.

Once, in Port Oriskany, a young bespectacled man smirked uttering these words
Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken
but Michael Mulvaney didn't slink away like a kicked dog, instead he leaned over the man's desk trembling with indignation shoving his fine-stubbled jaw and bared teeth into the bastard's face.
Yes? Taken by assholes like you?

That story—how many times he'd tell it, for the remainder of his life. In how many bars and always it would get laughs. True belly laughs. Even the women, they'd laugh—he was a man who loved making a woman laugh.

It had done him good to see that prissy bastard cower, the quick fear in the bastard's eyes. One of the enemy. His comeback hadn't gotten him a job in that office nor any job ever again in which he would wear a fresh-laundered shirt, a tie and coat and gleaming leather shoes, and be called “Mr. Mulvaney.”
He
, who'd once had capital and assets approaching two million dollars. But still it had done his soul good.

Two years, three years, five years—he would lose count. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States now and poor sad Jimmy Carter was not only gone but forgotten. Supplanted as if he'd never been.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Working where he could, where they'd hire him on. Scanning the
help wanted
—
male
columns of the papers. Some employers knew him—which was good sometimes, bad others. He was a damned good worker but he did have a short fuse. He was good at giving orders but not so good at taking them. Where he couldn't be foreman, things didn't always work out. Crews of mostly younger men. Somedays, he wasn't in top physical condition. Hacking cough from those damned cigarettes he couldn't seem to kick, puffy boiled-looking face, the bleary no-color of eyes determined not to give away the
beat beat beat
of a hangover's pain. Also, his joints were giving him trouble—fingers, shoulders, knees. Also, he needed glasses but never got around to getting them.

Working where he could, and when. He let his employers know he'd had plenty of experience with roofing, siding, construction but he never went into details.
Last thing you want the bastards to know is who you are. Your true identity. No one wants to hire a man who, if there was justice in the world, deserves to be the one behind the desk hiring.

For a while he was foreman for an Elmira roofing-siding company and that was a decent-paying job, nobody knowing the name Mulvaney. But there were “temperamental differences” with the owner so he moved on, to Cheektowaga, to Batavia, to Rochester. He couldn't hope to get into the trade union, too old and anyway you need to know the right people. Bastards have the unions shut up tight. Exactly why, as an employer, he'd hated the unions. Roused him to fury, those sons of bitches telling him, Michael Mulvaney, what to do. What hourly wages to pay, overtime and social security and pension and sick-time and the rest of it—bullshit. No man of integrity and pride can tolerate such intrusion.

Y'know what he hoped?—that Reagan would bust their asses, all of them. Starting with the air controllers and blitzing them all. Sure he believed in the free market, “deregulation”—if that was what it sounded like, what it seemed to promise.

Life is dog-eat-dog, why not acknowledge it? He'd been cheated of the business he'd spent a lifetime building up, his farm-home had been taken from him, his family. Sucked dry and tossed down like a husk. His enemies ganging together against him, bringing him to ruin.

Blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in heart
—poor deluded Christians you want to laugh in their faces. Turn the other cheek?—you get walloped.

Michael! You don't mean that. That's hardening your heart to God, you know you're not such a man.

Which was exactly why he'd left her. Threw his things into the Lincoln and fled. A woman too good for him from the first and love shining in her eyes he didn't deserve and had never deserved and the strain of keeping up the deception was too much. Driven out into the world by a father's curse, aged eighteen.

 

I love you so, Michael. I wish I could give you peace, peace in your troubled heart.

Yes he knew she was praying for him—he could practically feel the vibrations in the air. Wanting to cup his hands and yell, in the direction of Marsena,
Stop! Cease and desist! Let me go!

At least, he believed she was in Marsena. He hoped to hell she hadn't moved to Salamanca to live with that old maid-mutt cousin of hers Ethel.

Maybe she'd gone to live with Marianne. That thought, like a beacon shining too brightly into his eyes, he couldn't deal with.

High Point Farm. The memory of it, the lavender house atop a wooded hill. He couldn't deal with that, either.

It was in Rochester that his drinking gradually increased until such a time that he was never what you'd call sober nor was he (he believed) what you'd call drunk. If he drank just to this degree he could anesthetize himself so there was minimal danger of flashes of memory of High Point Farm; but if he drank too much, got sick to his stomach, vomiting and choking—there was that danger. And afterward a sensation of something spongy, swelling inside his head.

Oh, but he couldn't bear it!—the farm in its final days. The pickup had been sold. The barnyard was deserted. Weeds grew everywhere. Most of the animals and the fowl were gone—the new tenants said they were “leery” of taking on the Mulvaneys' creatures, and preferred to populate the farm with their own. You can't blame them, Corinne said, they're worried about—well, diseases. But, God damn them to hell, Michael Mulvaney did blame them.

On Michael's last day at High Point Farm he'd tramped about the property, alone. He saw a half dozen deer grazing in the back pasture, drifting into the orchard. He saw that the pond had become so shallow, choked with cattails and rushes, it was hardly more than a declivity in the earth. And what a rank-rotting odor lifted from it—you had to know something had died there, maybe a deer run to death by dogs, only a part of the carcass remaining. But he didn't really know, and didn't want to know. Let the fastidious new tenants deal with it.

In fact, Michael Mulvaney had moved out three days before Corinne and Judd, before the moving van's arrival. He couldn't bear to be a witness to the very end. His excuse was he had business in Marsena and Corinne and Judd could oversee the actual moving, the details; he'd be at the Marsena house, preparing for the arrival. In the new house he slept on the floor in an old thermal sleeping bag belonging to one of the children. He brought Foxy along with him, for company. That, and a fresh quart bottle of whiskey.

Poor Foxy: whimpering and shivering in this new, unfamiliar place. Why was his master behaving so strangely? Why was his master
alone
, sleeping on bare floorboards? The red setter Michael remembered as a puppy and then a sleek, slender young dog with liquid-brown eyes was now thick-bodied, losing his eyesight, frequently off balance; he had a tendency to favor his right front paw, though the vet couldn't find anything wrong with it. He was just an old, aging dog. A dog's life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.

“It's a dog-eat-dog world, eh, Foxy? You're a dog, but you've been shielded from it until now.”