We Were the Mulvaneys (62 page)

It was nearing 6:30
P.M.
but still bright as midday except in the shadows beneath the tall chestnut trees where picnic tables had been set, covered in bright American-flag paper runners. Fourth of July but no fireworks, no “explosive devices”—Mom and Sable had insisted. Just red-white-and-blue napkins, streamers. Tiny American flags fluttering from the veranda. Scram, in a delirium of joy at so many children, so much loving attention, wore an American-flag kerchief around his neck.

There were Whit and Marianne playful as newlyweds overseeing the grilling of hamburgers, hot dogs, and spicy Italian sausage at the pit barbecue, and there were Mom and Sable overseeing the preparation of chicken pieces brushed with Sable's Texas Hot Sauce, at the portable grill. On the buffet picnic table were enormous bowls of homemade salads, a platter heaped with raw vegetables beautiful as works of art—bell peppers, tomatoes, sliced cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash from Mom's garden. There were platters of fresh-baked breads, muffins, biscuits. Ethel Hausmann's pineapple-glazed Virginia ham that must have weighed twenty pounds. A small gang of us husked the ears of sweet corn I'd brought, and my perky sister-in-law Vicky and I boiled them in the kitchen, in immense pots of water on Mom's and Sable's old-fashioned gas stove. Vicky set the timer—“Five minutes exactly! Overcooking makes corn mushy.” Vicky had a bossy-flirty manner I'd have adored if I had been the type to fall in love with an older brother's wife. Saying, as we waited for the timer to ring, with an air of one imparting a secret, “Judd, I just can't get over your brother Patrick! He isn't at all what I'd expected.” I asked, curious, what she'd expected, what Mike had led her to expect of Patrick, and she said, “Well, I guess I expected someone not so—
Mulvaney
.” I asked, “But what is
Mulvaney
?” for the concept was genuinely baffling to me. Vicky said, stroking her belly that was so pert and round beneath her buttercup-yellow maternity smock, and fixing me with a look as if I must be joking, to ask such a question, “Why, you. All of you.”

 

There were twenty-seven of us, adults, children, babies in high chairs and on laps, beneath the tall chestnut trees behind Mom's and Sable's house. The sky overhead glowed with a warm sepia cast as if flames licked beyond the scrim of cloud. Barn swifts soared and darted overhead—they nested under the eaves of the outbuildings, Mom explained, dozens of them, and neither she nor Sable had the heart to run them off.

Whit West rose to propose a toast to Corinne Mulvaney and Sable Mills and all the Mulvaneys present—naming us in turn, insisting we rise blushing in our places—and all the Hausmanns present—five, no six Hausmanns: how had Mom talked such unsociable folks into coming here today?—and the toast included, too, relatives of Sable Mills—of whom there were a half dozen—and people who'd come a long distance—who, in fact, had come the longest distance?—Whit West peered out among us like an affable just slightly bullying master of ceremonies until Patrick laughingly volunteered, “Katya and me, I suppose”—and we all applauded.

No wonder I was a little drunk, such a humming buzzing day! Cicadas shrieking out of the trees like an aberration of the inner ear.

Thinking
How did we get to this?—how do we deserve this?

In late October it would be five years since Dad died. Five years.

For Mike's and Marianne's children, who'd never known their grandfather, a lifetime.

 

Someone poked my shoulder, I turned and there came Mom, Marianne, Vicky and Sable bearing candlelit cakes, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” loudly and it took me a beat or two to catch on—what was this? Feebly I protested my birthday wasn't until the eleventh but no one paid the slightest heed. What amazing cakes were presented to me—a three-tiered chocolate fudge, a carrot-pumpkin-ginger-yogurt pound cake (Whit West's special recipe), an angel food with stiff sculpted egg-white frosting, and a strawberry ice-cream cake in a heart-shaped tin. Each cake glimmered with candles—
thirty
? Which added up to a phantasmagoric
one hundred twenty
? “God, am I this old?” I groaned. Much laughter, as if I'd meant to be funny. I stood swaying at my place at the table, cheeks burning with self-consciousness, dazed, disoriented, I'd suspected nothing, not a thing, hadn't given any thought to my upcoming thirtieth birthday except a twinge of dread.
Once you turn thirty in America, you really are not a kid any longer. No more excuses!
Now came a flurry of kisses aimed at my face, Mulvaneys and others, my little nieces and nephews held up for special hugs—“Say ‘Happy Birthday, Uncle Judd!'”—“Say ‘I love you, Uncle Judd!'”—and a succession of blinding Polaroid flash-shots—“For posterity,” Whit, whose camera it was, said, “—and to prove that you Mulvaneys all exist in the same time frame.”

Witty Whit West! How well my brother-in-law knew us.

I was equal to the task, but just barely: blew out every candle of the one hundred twenty. I was applauded, cheered. I was prevailed upon to speak and I stood mute and blushing and stammered finally, “—Thanks! I'll never forget this, I guess,” and they applauded anyway, as if I'd been brilliant. My head was buzzing like a hornets' hive, a roaring in my ears that was happiness on the brink of passing over into something else—terror, paralysis. Mom must have seen it in my face, that happiness that's almost too much to bear, she stood beside me lifting her glass, voice rapturous, “I'm just so, so happy every one of you is here! It just seems so amazing and wonderful and, well, a miracle, but I guess it's just ordinary life, how we all keep going, isn't it?”—suddenly stammering herself, and sniffing, and everyone laughed and quickly applauded and Sable leapt to her feet raising her glass, too, and cried, “You tell 'em, sweetheart! You're the girl who knows.”

 

It was so, as Vicky had said. Patrick had become a Mulvaney at last, in his long exile from home.

Unless it was California that had loosened and lightened him? Even sun-bleached his hair that grew long and shaggy to his shoulders. Tanned him dark as a walnut from spending so much time outdoors he said, backpacking in the mountains of northern California, hiking along the Monterey Coast. He and Katya had made the journey east on Patrick's 1988 Honda in a looping route up through northern Nevada and Utah and southern Wyoming, taking fifteen days. He had a month's leave from the Berkeley Institute of Child Development, where he was assistant to the director; he'd developed a technique for treating autistic children, and seemed to be, so far as I could gather, a licensed physical therapist as well—“Our work is continuously experimental, and evolving, there's no point in trying to define it.” Katya was a graduate student in mathematics at UC–Berkeley, the Russian-born daughter of Jews who'd been allowed to emigrate out of the Soviet Union in the mid-Sixties, both of them scientists at Cal Tech. When Patrick introduced me to Katya, she smiled shyly at me from beneath her oversized Greek sailor's cap, lovely thick-lashed black eyes, and said, “Oh, Judd!—I have heard so much about you, from Patrick.”

I said, “You have? What?”

Katya bit her lower lip. Like a child who has blundered into inviting more attention than she'd wished.

Patrick just laughed. “Go on, Katya, tell him. What?”

Amazing how the Pinch-crease had vanished from between Patrick's eyebrows, as if it had never been. My brother was more boyish at the age of thirty-five than he'd been at fifteen.

“Well—” Katya smiled at me hesitantly, and frowned, and touched one of her delicate earlobes where a tiny gold stud gleamed, “—he has said, you are a good brother. He loves you very much.”

I laughed, embarrassed. “Well.”

Impossible to say
Patrick hey: I love you.

Patrick I'm angry as hell at you, I'll never forgive you for abandoning us but now you're back, now I've seen you and touched you I guess I love you again, so that's it.

Patrick laughed, and let his hand fall on my shoulder. Brotherly, affectionate. As if I'd spoken aloud.

Now he'd come back to us, it was as if that old Patrick, and those old sorrows, had never been.

I saw how powerfully, it must have been erotically, passionate my brother and the young Russian-born woman were; even as they spoke with others, their eyes drifted back onto each other. Their favored stance was side by side, Patrick's arm around Katya's slender waist and her fingers hooked in companionable intimacy in the belt of his khaki shorts. Was I jealous, a little? Envious? At supper, Katya sat between Patrick and Marianne and across from me; I kept stealing glances at her, so quiet amid the noisy gathering she might almost have been overlooked. She and Patrick nudged against each other unconsciously, bare arms touching, caressing. Without the Greek sailor cap, Katya looked even younger. She must have been no more than twenty-five or-six. Her black hair was wound in several long thin braids around her head, wisps of hair springing from them like tiny question marks. Around her neck were several thin gold chains. I wondered how long she and Patrick had been together, how they'd met. How unexpected, my brother in love.

Katya saw me looking at her, and smiled shyly. “Judd? Your former house?—‘High Point Farm'? I hope to see it tomorrow, Patrick says we must go. To look.”

“Well, it's changed. It isn't the same now.”

“Not the same?”

“The house has been painted white. The front yard has been ‘landscaped.' Some of the big old oaks are down.”

Patrick overheard, and said, “You've been back, Judd?”

“Not really.” I was embarrassed, speaking with such bitterness. “I've driven by a few times, parked on the road. But not recently.”

“What about Mom?”

We looked to the head of the table where Mom was lifting a sleep-dazed Molly Ellen in her arms. The baby's mouth gleamed smilingly with wet and her bare feet paddled like a frog's. Mom's face was suffused with emotion, tenderness. Lanky rawboned Whistle had gone, and who had taken her place?—a silvery-haired woman of sixty-two with a ravaged throat but a surprisingly smooth face for one who'd spent so much time outdoors with no care for outward appearances.

“No.”

“She hasn't tried to make friends with the new owners?”

“Mom has better things to do.”

For a while then Patrick brooded in silence. I guessed he might want to change the subject, as Mike shrank visibly from speaking of the farm, why rake over that old hurt, and had never taken Vicky and his children anywhere near it. Nor had Marianne, of course—oh, the Wests were always too busy! Whit was a dynamo of a man, living in
present time
.

I thought I would change the subject, and asked Katya how she and Patrick had met. Katya colored pleasurably, for this was a good memory, and said, in her lightly accented English, what sounded like, “At a hunger strike.” I cupped my hand to my ear, not certain I'd heard correctly. “A—what?” Katya laughed at the expression on my face, and said, “Yes, a hunger strike, in Oakland.” Patrick said, “It was more than just a hunger strike, it was an active demonstration, too. The Berkeley Peace Coalition was demonstrating to protest Oakland police brutality against ethnic minorities, and some of us were arrested for blocking the street in front of police headquarters and that's how Katya and I met. In the back of a van.” Patrick spoke so matter-of-factly, I responded in kind, to show how I took such bizarre information in stride, “Well, was the strike effective?” and Patrick smiled at me, yet with his old Pinch hauteur, a just perceptible curl of the upper lip just so you'd know what the perimeters of his new tolerance were, “About as effective as you'd expect any feeble human action to be in this galaxy that's a river of blind matter rushing at four hundred miles per second toward the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster of galaxies.”

Katya winced, and bit her lower lip, her gaze plummeting. As if in embarrassment of me, that I should ask Patrick such a question.

“Oh! Oh, Mommy!”—it was little Willy, that excitable child. One of Mom's and Sable's cats, a sleek sand-colored tom named Tiger, had darted brazenly along the table to seize in his jaws Willy's part-eaten hamburger where it lay on a paper plate, and leapt with it to the ground before anyone could prevent him. Willy, who of all children you'd expect to be used to animals, tugged at his mother and cried, “Oh, Mommy, the bad kitty!” Marianne laughed, and kissed his forehead, and said, “Now, honey, you know better—no kitties are
bad
. And you weren't going to finish that, anyway.”

So whatever we'd been discussing, almost heatedly, Patrick, Katya, and Judd, was deflected, and dropped.

 

Whit was saying, “Darwin leaves too many crucial questions unresolved. Of course I respect his genius, and I understand the magnitude of his contribution to knowledge, but his isn't a concise, coherent theory like Einstein's that can be tested, confirmed or refuted. It's pure abstraction, ultimately,” and Patrick said, with an air of incredulity, “Abstraction? The theory is based upon minute observations!” and Whit said, waving a forefinger, “But the minutiae of a thousand thousand observations fail to add up to a single demonstrable equation,” and Patrick, beginning to become impatient, protested, “Science can't be held to a single paradigm, ‘science' can be many points of perspective,” and Whit said, more excitedly, the moon-shaped scar in his forehead squinching with intensity like a third eye, “Hell it can't! It
should
!” and Patrick said, leaning forward on his elbows, glasses winking in the candlelight, “It wasn't until Darwin that a changing, ‘evolving' theory of history was seriously conceived, before Darwin all of history was frozen, the species were frozen, this ‘Mind precedes Being' superstition, God precedes His creation, centuries of Platonic nonsense,” and Whit said excitedly, “So they were deluded! So they were wrong about almost everything! So time isn't cyclical so far as we can measure it! That doesn't mean there isn't any guiding intelligence behind the forms of nature, that the extraordinary forms we discover in nature aren't purposeful,” and Patrick said, excitedly too, “Look, there's plenty of disorder, too, in nature,” and Whit said, laughing, glancing about to see how his listeners were appreciating his performance, “Tell me about it, kid!—I'm ‘Dr. West,' I'm the poor besieged sucker who knows about disorder,” and Patrick said, “Where there's design there
is
purpose, but how did the purpose arise?—out of accident, millions of advantageous accidents over millions of years,” and Whit said, “Oh, hell. I know that's Darwinian sacred script but I happen to subscribe to Fred Hoyle's belief—you know who Hoyle is, the maverick Brit scientist?—‘I'd as easily believe that a 747 jet was assembled out of a junk-yard by a passing tornado as that “natural selection” can account for a single specimen in nature,'” and Patrick said, exasperated, running his hands through his shaggy hair that looked now wild, windswept, “Whit, come
on
. That's just wishful thinking,” and Whit grinned, sliding an arm around Patrick's shoulders and giving his hair a shake, as if the two of them were old pals, brothers-in-law who'd been quarrelling in this vein for decades, to the amusement of their families, neither able to budge the other an inch, “That's the best kind of thinking, Patrick—wishful. You'll learn.”