We Were the Mulvaneys (61 page)

So Corinne Mulvaney and Sable Mills came to be friends, going out for coffee, or drinks, or a meal, after one or another of these exhilarating exhausting frustrating auctions, and talking for hours. “My goodness, we have so much in common!” Corinne marveled. She and Sable had both lived in the Ransomville area as girls, Sable in town and Corinne in the country; they'd both married young, had children young, and lived alone now; their children were “grown and mainly scattered”; they had grandchildren (by this time Mike and Vicky had two children, Marianne and Whit had had their first baby) whom they adored but saw infrequently. What was most amazing to Corinne was the way in which her life and Sable's had intersected without their knowing. When they first met, Sable was forty-nine to Corinne's fifty-nine: she'd attended Ransomville High and had had certain of Corinne's old teachers, she'd swum on Saturdays at the Y where a certain female instructor had “tried to exert her will” on the girls, there was a librarian at the public library named Miss Grimsley—yes, truly that was the woman's name, both remembered how
grim
she was!—there were bus drivers, storekeepers, a miscellany of nameless people who had played marginal roles in both their lives, unremarked upon at the time of course but now, in recollection, how vividly
there
. And there were places, too—so many places! Sable had lived intermittently in Mt. Ephraim and knew the landscape, as she called it, like the back of her hand.

I was mystified why these “coincidences” meant so much to my mom and her lively new friend. As a reporter, though, I'd quickly learned to keep a neutral position: when in doubt,
don't express it
. Mom would explain excitedly, as if she and Sable had uncovered a long-sought mystery of nature, “Sable and I remember identical things as if, somehow, we'd been the identical person, at different times! The strange part of it is—isn't it, Sable?—we don't seem to have known anyone in common central or important to our lives, it's just these background people, like in a movie. Sable says she'd heard the name ‘Mulvaney' many times—”

Sable interrupted, “Oh, for God's sake, ‘Mulvaney' is such a well-known name around here, you'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to have heard of it.”

But Corinne persisted, “—Yet Sable never set eyes on any of us, in person. All those years.”

“Until you, sweetie,” Sable said, winking.

She gave Corinne's fluttery hand a tap and the women laughed, laughed.

 

When I arrived at Alder Creek it wasn't yet 3
P.M.
and already cars, pickups, even bicycles were parked everywhere in the drive and on the grassy lawn. So many! What was Mom thinking of, calling this a family reunion? Scram, Mom's and Sable's antic beagle, came rushing at me, barking and sniffing excitedly, tail thumping. The first people I ran into were the Plucketts, hauling enormous watermelons up the drive—Jimmy Ray and Nanci and their three freckle-faced teenagers so alike in appearance I could never tell them apart—but the Plucketts, sunny, good-hearted people, wouldn't have expected me to remember their names, just called out, all smiles, “Judd, hello! Happy Fourth of July!” The next people I ran into were my gorgeous sister-in-law Vicky, Mrs. Mike Mulvaney Jr. with the caramel-colored hair—
very
pregnant—again—and her little girl Chrissy, my firstborn niece, for whom my heart always gave a lurch. Vicky cried, “Judd, aren't you looking handsome!” standing on tiptoe to give me a breathy little kiss, her basketball-belly poking against me, and I lifted Chrissy in my arms with a mock grunt—four years old already, what if she'd forgotten her Uncle Judd she hadn't seen in a year?—but she hadn't. And where was Mike?—playing softball, Vicky said, in the goat pasture. And there were damp smeary kiddy-kisses from two-year-old Davy, Mike and Vicky's other child, and there came rushing at me my sister Marianne in
STUMP CREEK HILL
yellow T-shirt and shorts, baby Molly Ellen in her arms, and three-year-old Willy toddling behind, and we hugged, and kissed, clutching at each other as always as if in the other's absence each of us had imagined catastrophes, and these phantoms to be laughed eagerly away, dispelled like bad dreams in daylight, and we exchanged a minute's quick news, and I saw that Marianne was in the prime of her young womanhood, the color restored to her skin, a fullness to her face, the stress lines eased, the liquidy yearning in the eyes eased, now she was thirty-four years old, and married, and a mother, and a devoted worker at Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital, and her life independent of all Mulvaneys if she should wish it. And what a husband she had!—I didn't always get along with bluff opinionated Whit West, but I admired him immensely. I asked, “Where's Whit? I don't hear him,” and Marianne laughed, poked me reprovingly in the chest, and said, “He's on the phone. We haven't been here an hour—have we, Willy?—and already Whit is checking back. He was up late doing emergency surgery on Smoke—remember Smoke?—one of our black bears—an appendectomy. Oh but Judd,” Marianne said, just remembering, “—
he's
here, he's actually
here
. And he has a
girl
.” Marianne pointed toward the pasture where a rowdy game of softball was in progress.

I didn't need to ask who
he
was.

I said, “So Mom was right.”

Marianne said, “Isn't Mom always right?—I mean, when she's serious.”

Trembling with excitement I dumped my bushel basket of sweet corn and groceries onto the nearest picnic table, and snatched up a beer from an ice-packed tub, and hurried to the pasture behind the blue
ALDER ANTIQUES
barn where Effie and Eddie the coarse-haired black goats were watching the game, in a shady corner. I took my place beside them, climbing onto the fence. Of the fifteen or sixteen players, adults and teenagers, I recognized almost no one at first. I felt a pang of hurt, childish disappointment—why had Mom promised a Mulvaney family reunion, when so many strangers were being invited, too? I hoped that no one would sight me and invite me to join the game.

The pitcher was a stranger, or so I thought, one of Sable Mills' younger relatives?—in dark glasses, sinewy-lean and about my age, but fitter than I was, with hard tight compact arm-and shoulder-muscles, ropey-muscled legs gleaming fuzzily bronze, his hair sun-bleached and shaggy to his shoulders—
My God could this be Patrick?—my own brother?
—the thought flashed to me yet somehow in the excitement of the moment did not adhere. All eyes were on this man as with almost ritualistic earnestness, in the midst of much joking, laughing, clowning about of the players, he pitched underhand the dazzling-white softball to a figure crouched at bat—Sable Mills, herself—an energetic and feisty figure, yet not much of an athlete—Sable with her brassy hair newly cut in a virtual flattop, a wicked silver clamp on one ear, in black sleeveless sweater and matching jodhpurs that fitted her wiry body as if she'd been poured into them like melted wax. The pitches came courteously and it almost seemed unnaturally slow as if the ball were floating through a substance more solid than air yet managed to drop as it neared the plate in such a cunning way that Sable swung the bat with a grunt and missed, and a second time swung and missed, and the call was “Two strikes!”—the umpire was a neighboring farmer, an oldish man with a Father Time wispy beard and an air of quirky authority—and with the third pitch either Sable or the pitcher had so adjusted to each other that Sable was able to swing the bat and actually strike the ball, sending it scuttling at a sharp angle along the third-base line, an easy catch for a lanky teenaged boy (a second cousin of mine, a Hausmann from Ransomville) who scooped it up bare-handed and pitched it to the first baseman, a stout white-whiskered fellow whom I recognized as an antique shop proprietor in Mt. Ephraim, clearly not much of an athlete either as to groans and cheers he fumbled the catch, the ball bounced from his awkward hands and rolled away even as, with much attendant squealing, clapping, cheers Sable rushed to first base there to stand panting and triumphant. I saw Mom in center field—no mistaking that silvery-glittery hair—Mom in sunflower-print culottes and sandals—clapping, crying, “Hooray, Sable! Show these kids!” For her age, Corinne Mulvaney was in fact something of an athlete, capable and lithe and smart about conserving her energy. My eye snagged on the second baseman, or-woman—a petite dark girl, a stranger I was sure I'd never seen before, in fact like no one I'd ever encountered in the Chautauqua Valley, with olive-pale skin and perfect features and a Greek sailor cap tilted seductively over her forehead, though she was dressed like any teenager in T-shirt, jeans, sneakers without socks. Next at bat was a boy of about twelve, another of my distant cousins, the horsey-faced Hausmann look, and he seemed shy, so the pitcher sent several teasing-slow underhanded balls in such a way as to allow him, too, to connect on what would have been the third strike—a pop fly, unluckily, which the pitcher himself easily snatched from the air. By this time I'd been drawn into the mood of the game, cheering and clapping at virtually all the plays without discrimination. (I'd just noticed a familiar face among the spectators—was it “Aunt” Ethel Hausmann? Her hair now steely-gray, her figure grimly turnip-shaped in slacks and loose-fitting shirt but she appeared to be in a genial mood as if determined to have a good time.) There was a murmur of excited expectation as there came trotting to the plate my big brother Mike!—handing his beer can to a bystander as he took up the bat with a flourish and balanced it on the palm of his hand, “Mule” Mulvaney soaking up the quick round of applause, and gentlemanly-charitable enough, since he was prob ably the only real athlete on the field, to volunteer to bat southpaw. The lanky pitcher shoved his dark glasses against the bridge of his nose—his face was suntanned, lean—
Patrick? was it possible?—my brother who'd scorned all team sports?
—and coolly studied his formidable opponent. People were trailing over from the house to watch—Marianne with her children, Vicky and her children, Chrissy running crying, “Dad-dy! DAD-DY!” Even Effie and Eddie who'd been imperturbably munching grass paused to watch.

The pitcher wound up like an elastic knot, unleashed himself and the initial pitch, though underhand, flew across the plate conspicuously faster than the pitches directed at Mike's predecessors, and Mike swung, swung hard, and missed, coloring and laughing good-naturedly, leaning over to spit on the ground in mock-macho style, returned the bat to his shoulder with a determined look and again the pitch came flying fast, deviously dropping just as it crossed the plate, and again Mike swung and missed. “Mule” Mulvaney, soon to be forty: how was that possible? He'd been discharged several years before from the Marines with the rank of sergeant and was now a civil engineer with the state of Delaware, living with his family in Wilmington, husband and father and upstanding American citizen it would seem; something of a stranger to me now though I'd visited him and his family a few times in their upscale residential neighborhood, and saw him at least once a year in the company of Mom. Mike was still good-looking—what girls call, so vulgarly and poetically, a hunk—though his jowls had thickened and his fading-brown hair was receding severely from his forehead; not a heavy man but beefy-solid in the torso and abdomen in the way of a former athlete now easing into middle age. His skin burnt red as if with sun though he was genial, grinning. Another time the pitcher wound up, lanky and sinuous, and the ball came flying—“Too wide, outside! Ball one!” declared the umpire. And the next pitch too was declared a ball, and may even have been one. And the next pitch flew unerringly toward the plate—which was, in fact, a paper picnic plate—and Mike swung the bat with blind impulsive faith and there was a
crack!
as bat and ball connected and for a fraction of a second the ball seemed virtually to pause in midair before sailing up, up, up—as Mike began to run—and finally down into a grove of trees on the far side of the pasture, where squealing children ran to fetch it. There were manic cheers, applause as Mike trotted like royalty around the bases, blowing kisses to all, paused to take up Mom's hand and kiss it in the outfield, trotting then to third, and home, and my eyes seized with moisture thinking
How like Dad!
for it was as if Michael Mulvaney Sr. at the age of almost-forty had appeared before us, the glimmer of the man at least, the hazy sunstruck aura out of which Mike Jr.'s features smiled in triumph. So Mike trotted home, carrying Chrissy from third base, and I was whistling and applauding with the others, for so spectacular a home run in Mom's and Sable's goat pasture was something of an occasion, after all. I shaded my eyes then studying the stranger who was the pitcher standing abashed now but grinning, a good sport, too, as Mike trotted back to home, hands on his lean hips, the lenses of his dark glasses winking, and of course it was Patrick, who else but my lost brother Patrick? By this time Mom had seen me and cried, “Judd! There's Judd!” and Patrick turned blinking to see me, and ran over at once, and grabbed me in a bear hug like no imaginable gesture of P.J.'s, still less Pinch's, saying, his voice choked with emotion, “Jesus, kid! You're all grown up.”

 

Ringing the cowbell!
—there on the back veranda of the clapboard farmhouse on the New Canaan Road, her hair turned completely silver and glittering like mica, braided into a single thick plait swinging between her shoulder blades, there was Corinne Mulvaney, sixty-two years old! Laughing like one of her own grandchildren, the color up in her cheeks, tugging the cord of the old gourd-shaped cowbell to summon us all to eat, at last.