We Were the Mulvaneys (16 page)

All that, in her shyness, so doubtful of herself, Corinne Hausmann had known could never happen to
her
.

Marianne had taken a much-wadded tissue out of her purse and was wiping her nose with it surreptitiously. Corinne restrained herself from saying, in her practiced-mom's way, take a fresh Kleenex out of my purse, please. Instead she looked at Marianne with a smiling frown, not wanting to appear anxious. All this while she'd been chattering, had Marianne even listened?

“Honey? Please? Look at me—what
is
it? Are you sick? Is it the—flu?” She paused, hopeful. How her mind was set to run, run with this new, plausible notion. “Some new strain of flu has been going around town, I guess. Plus strep throat. Strep throat is dangerous. Shall we take you to see Dr. Oakley?”

Dr. Oakley was the Mulvaneys' family doctor, a gentlemanly old G. P. they'd been seeing forever. Just the thought of Dr. Oakley was a solace—wasn't it?

Marianne murmured quickly, “Mom, no.”

“But if you're not feeling well, honey? You certainly don't look well. I mean—you don't look like yourself.”

“I don't want to see Dr. Oakley.”

“But—” Corinne felt as if she were sinking, drowning,
“—what's wrong?”

Marianne shook her head with surprising stubbornness, swiping at her nose with the wadded tissue. “I—I just don't feel like being in school right now.”

But that isn't like you. I know my Marianne and that isn't like her.
Instead Corinne said, “But to behave so secretively, hiding away in a Catholic church of all places!” The attempt at a joke fell dismally flat. “Well. I think we're going to see Dr. Oakley before we go home. I think that's best.”

“Mom,
no
. Please.” A look of panic registered in Marianne's sallow face. “I just—I just want to go home, Mom. I'll be all right if—I can just go home.”

“You're sure?” Corinne said doubtfully.

“Yes, Mom. Oh yes.”

Corinne's mind ran with this new thought: bringing her daughter home to make her well again. Was it that simple?

She drove, nervously humming to herself. Possibly she wasn't aware of humming to herself. Or of repeatedly touching her chin, her nose. Her nose itched! The sky overhead was a harsh deep blue tracked with filmy clouds like cobwebs: reminded her of a certain corner of the antique barn, back behind stacks of furniture she hadn't been able to reach, to clear of cobwebs, in a long time. The sun was bright but seemed to give no warmth. Over the radio came one of those earnest-sadistic announcements of “bitter cold” impending—wind from the northeast out of Canada, expected low minus twelve degrees Fahrenheit and a wind-chill factor of minus twenty-five. But how cozy the Mulvaneys would be, at High Point Farm. Dad could make a fire in the big fieldstone fireplace in the living room, Marianne could curl up on the sofa with a book, Muffin in her lap, Troy stretched on the floor in front of the sofa. But no: if Marianne really had flu, she had better stay upstairs in her room. Warm as toast in her flannel nightgown in her pretty white-rattan bed beneath the hand-knit quilt Corinne had found in a Chautauqua Falls secondhand shop. Such beautiful, fine work! A rag-quilt of dozens of squares, rectangles and oblongs, a rainbow of colors. Just because it badly needed dry cleaning, no one had cared to buy it, probably hadn't even examined it carefully until sharp-eyed Corinne Mulvaney came along. She would always recall Marianne's surprise and pleasure opening the present, for her thirteenth birthday: Oh Mom! It's so beautiful! Oh thanks! And a hug and a kiss for Mom, and a sly-teasing query, Did you sew it yourself, Mom?—so all the family laughed, including Mom.

That was a lovely memory. A memory to be treasured.

Yes, Marianne would doze up in her room, and Muffin beside her. Corinne would bring her hot soup (chicken-corn chowder?—so rich, so delicious) and buttery baked rolls and a tall glass of milk. Marianne no longer drank milk, no longer ingested enough calcium, Corinne was sure. That might be part of the problem. Vitamin deficiency. Obviously the girl had allowed herself to become exhausted, pushed herself too hard. Those school activities! The cheerleading alone was terribly time-consuming. (Corinne's mind was working rapidly now, constructing a narrative, an anecdote. She'd be on the phone telling her women friends for days.) Oh and you know what teenaged girls are like—dieting continuously. So self-conscious, such emphasis upon being thin. Marianne had never been thin as a young girl, but entirely normal according to the weight charts. So she'd allowed herself to become run-down, her resistance weakened. So she'd caught this flu that's making the rounds. And the excitement over being elected to the Valentine's Day prom court—the only nonsenior to be elected. You know what high school celebrity can be—exhausting!

Why hadn't I seen the signs, have I been blind?

Am I blind?

And this Weidman boy, what was his first name, an awkward, well-intentioned and stiffly courteous boy, who'd written that pathetic but somehow pushy, aggressive letter to Marianne—was he possibly in love with her? Exerting pressure on her emotionally? Marianne was not the type to speak of such things, she'd worry she was betraying the boy's confidence. But if the boy was pursuing her, so much more doggedly than other boys had pursued her, Marianne would be terribly distressed. Nothing worried her more than the possibility she'd hurt someone's feelings.
But why didn't Patrick seem to know about any of these things?

Corinne depended upon her second-oldest child to inform her of “situations.” He'd long been her ally, in his prickly way. A kind of miniature adult as he'd grown up, surrounded by children and childish behavior. (Yes, Dad and Mom frequently behaved childishly. That was a fact.) Corinne wondered if in all families of a certain size and heft there are those who, regardless of age,
know
; and those who carry on obliviously, happily, because they
don't know
. The blissful well-being of the latter depends upon the complicity of the former—but what if the complicity breaks down?

Corinne was leaving Mt. Ephraim, picking up speed. This familiar reassuring route. Like a horse knowing its way home. Past the Eastgate Shopping Center (where Corinne had intended to shop, at Kmart and T-J's, no time for that now) and the fast-food restaurants, gas stations, car wash. (Oh, she'd promised the family she would have the Buick washed, hadn't she. Well—another time.) There was Spohr's, Hendrick Motors, Harvey's Fence City. Country Club Lane and Hillside Estates—expensive houses looking like cardboard in their snowy nearly treeless lots. In the front yard of a rundown old Victorian farmhouse once owned by friends of the Mulvaneys, now rented by strangers, was a red Olds Cutlass sedan
FOR SALE!
BARGAIN!
resembling an older beat-up model of the very car Mike Jr. had bought, and was making exorbitant payments on each month, to his dad's disgust. Thank God Route 119 was reasonably dry and clear, they'd be home soon. Out here, you could breathe! Snowy fields stretching away for miles like the tundra, stubbled with broken cornstalks. You never outgrow the landscape of your childhood, Corinne supposed. What's oldest in your memory you love best, cherish. She hoped she and Michael had provided their children with a landscape that would accompany them all their lives. A solace, a comfort.

If in fact they actually left the Chautauqua Valley. But why? Why would they ever leave?

Corinne was about to ask Marianne what sort of soup she'd like when they got home, there was chicken-corn chowder left over in the refrigerator, always more delicious the second time, how's about that?—turning to Marianne with a smile, but seeing the girl's face registering horror. What? What was wrong? Corinne was confusedly aware of something dashing in front of the station wagon at the crest of a hill—a gray-furry shape blurred with speed—and before Corinne could think to brake the vehicle's front wheels ran over it with a thud—and beside her Marianne began to scream, and scream.

T
hey'd met in the summer of 1952, at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. Corinne was waitressing at a resort hotel, Michael had summer employment with a local construction crew. It had not been love at first sight except as each would insist afterward. Perhaps Corinne was telling the truth—she'd flushed and stammered in Michael Mulvaney's presence when they were first introduced.
My God, of course I knew! How could I not know!
Michael would recall and retell with zest, how many times, how he'd first laid eyes on his wife-to-be in a loose, giggly group of girls, summer employees at Schroon Lake including the girl with whom he'd been “involved” at the time. (Michael Mulvaney's second “involvement” of the summer, in fact—and the season had scarcely begun by July 1.)
Hey sure I knew! One look, even with that hair of hers, I knew.

Though had he noticed her at all, really? A shy, awkward girl who wore her carroty-fair frizzy hair in tight, tidy braids wound around her head like a maiden in a Grimm fairy tale. Too tall for his taste—nearly his own height, five feet nine. (Short men go for short women, no mystery why.) Corinne Hausmann was twenty years old, a college girl at Fredonia State with a 3.7 (out of 4) average, yet she might have passed for fifteen. Not a very experienced or self-confident fifteen. Rangy and rawboned and disappointingly small-breasted, freckled as if someone had playfully splattered paint drops across her, face and forearms especially. No need to ask if she was a farm girl! Her smile was slow and shy as if there were something shameful about her teeth (only a slight gap between the two front teeth) and her fingers and eyelids were fluttery, her laughter breathless. Clear wide luminous-blue eyes given to shifting evasively when anyone, a young man for instance, a good-looking darkly tanned sexually aggressive young man for instance like Michael Mulvaney, stood too close, or spoke too pointedly.

Well, I was afraid of you! I couldn't help it.

Hey, I was afraid of you—the virgin milkmaid!

And Michael would laugh, laugh. Happy-hyena laugh, you had to love him. Poor Corinne blushing to the roots of her carroty hair.

The truth was that Michael Mulvaney, when he'd first met his wife-to-be, was crazy about a girl named Donna whose last name he'd quickly forget but not his wild adventures with her, making love where and whenever they could, often in risky places like the backseat of a stranger's fancy car, in a just-vacated room at the hotel, on an isolated stretch of beach. This was not an era in which good girls or even not-so-good girls succumbed to sexual pressure from men but Donna (from Glens Falls: “speedcar capital of New York State”) was a notable exception. She too was a college girl, a third-year nursing student at Cornell. Liked to drink and got high—“high” not “drunk” which didn't sound so good—and meltingly amorous. How could Michael Mulvaney keep sweetly shy Corinne Hausmann in mind, or even, to be frank, remember her name, overwhelmed as he was by Donna? Her supple hips and pelvis, her bold exploring hands, her astonishing mouth that was so ardent, beyond even his lurid ex-Catholic-boy fantasies—Michael was prone to fall into an open-eyed stupor in the midst of work (roofs his specialty, from the start: being short-legged, compact, deft and muscular, with a strong tolerance for working in the sun, had its distinct advantages) contemplating Donna, the night-before and the night-to-come. He was just twenty-three years old and had been living on his own, parentless, family-less, for the past five years. His “real” life. He was a fast, reliable worker but clearly too smart to remain only a worker, you'd naturally give Michael Mulvaney more responsibility than you'd give the rest of the crew who were older, dumber. It helped that he was in peak physical condition (he swam, he dived, loved to show off at the lake) so he could subsist on four or three, occasionally two, one or even no hours of sleep, after a night of drinking and lovemaking with Donna before showering and hurriedly shaving and dressing and beginning the next long, so very long (you had to be at the work site by 7:30
A.M.
) workday.

He'd have to admit: his attitude toward females, especially college females, was predatory. It wasn't just the Fifties, it was Michael Mulvaney. He bore a grudge against his several sisters for reasons we won't go into, still more against his mother about whom he'd never speak, so don't ask. But college girls! He resented them almost as much, and as unfairly, as he resented college boys, contemptible in his mind as mere
boys
while he, on his own for years, was a
man
.

Also he was determined he'd make his way with no need for a college degree or any of
that
.

So, in July 1952, when Michael Mulvaney first met Corinne Hausmann, he wasn't in love with Donna what's-her-name, or any of them. He was hot-blooded, tireless, even after a day of hammering and tarring roofs in the Adirondack sun (so crystal-clear it seemed to be filtered through a pane of magnifying glass), a pump-handle of a kind wild to spurt seed, liquid seed, enough to populate a small city. Oh yes! Summers in the Adirondacks, everything is
temporary
—what happiness in
temporary
! It suited him just fine. All he had to be cautious of was knocking up a girl, otherwise just take and enjoy, take what you can while you can, no regrets and don't look back and after Labor Day he'd be hundreds of miles away. Hadn't his own asshole old man kicked him out, shut the door after him?—and his mother and sisters he'd thought had loved him, his sister Marian three years younger especially, and all but two brothers ceased to know him?—just wiped him out of existence, at the old man's bidding?
Can't trust them, can't trust women
he blamed them, the women, the most.

Jesus! his veins beat with rage just to think of it! so he rarely thought of it, at least while sober. And when not sober Michael Mulvaney was in the presence of amorous females ninety-nine percent of the time so he rarely thought of it then, either.

 

Now somehow it happened, never did figure out the connection, Michael's girl Donna was a friend of a friend of Corinne's; or, if not a friend, a friendly acquaintance. (It puzzled Michael, maybe it puzzles most men? how girls and women can befriend each other so quickly? intimately?) So after he'd broken up with Donna who'd been putting the screws on him and she'd gotten what you had to call
upset, distraught
, one early evening there came the tall carroty-haired girl from the hotel (Carol? Cora? Corinne?) to the boardinghouse where Michael was staying, and she bore him a message from all the girls, she said, except Donna, who didn't know anything about it. “She's so hurt! She loves you.”

Michael was so surprised, he had to take a step back.

Stammering, “N–No, she does
not
.”

“Of course she does! You should hear her talk about you.”

“I don't want to hear her talk about me—I've heard it.”

“We're afraid she might hurt herself, somehow. She's a nurse, she knows too much!”

Michael broke into a sweat, imagining Donna dead: the girls at the hotel accusing him, the police arresting him, his picture in the papers.

He said, gaining a little more control, “She's exaggerating, and you're exaggerating. Donna might imagine she loves me but she
does not love me
—she's too shallow for love.”

“Too shallow for love! Listen to him—what an authority!”

Corinne was literally breathless, her cheeks flushed as if she'd rubbed spots of rouge on them quickly and carelessly. She trembled with indignation, fingers and eyelids fluttering. The ridiculous braided hair weighed upon her head and slender neck like a crown of a kind a demented child might fashion and in her off-hours summer clothes—dime store sleeveless T-shirt, blue cotton “pedal pushers” and straw made-in-Japan sandals—Corinne did resemble an overgrown child, excited and audacious and—well, dangerous.
No telling what this babe might say!

Michael took her arm, her firm upper arm in his firm fingers, led her panting and protesting out of the boardinghouse, walked with her—who knows where: he'd have liked to steer them to one of the lakeside places where they could get beers, sit down and discuss this like rational human beings—in a park, around a kind of lagoon, where families were picnicking, barbecuing, the kids running around, people tossing bread pellets and other treats to a noisy flock of ducks, Canada geese, resident swans with their brood;
life as usual
in the background which is usually the case when your own life is being decided without your knowing it; walked, and grew earnest in conversation, for Michael Mulvaney at twenty-three was in his deepest most secret heart a serious and not-predatory young man, perhaps not even a young man as he appeared but already beyond youth, impatient for the next phase of his life to begin. On their third or fourth time around the lagoon their attention was drawn to a tremendous squawking and wing-flapping in the water, a big white goose had gotten snarled in some nylon fishing line, his legs, webbed feet, and even his bill entangled, and Corinne cried, “Oh, look! That poor goose! We'll have to help it!”—with no hesitation, as if she'd been primed for just such an emergency, wading out into the brackish thigh-high littered water, taking it for granted that Michael, whom she hardly knew, would follow. Which, what the hell, he did. Dozens of geese and even killer swans honking, hissing, flapping their wings as these importunate strangers invaded their territory. But there was no choice, was there? Michael cursed, stumbling in Corinne's wake, and grabbed the afflicted bird, its eyes glaring in panic, wings flapping like a deranged windmill until Michael managed to pinion them against its sides, and deft-fingered Corinne, quicker and stronger than any girl Michael had known, managed to untangle the nylon line, maybe six feet of it, not an easy task in these circumstances, as, attracted by the commotion, a small appreciative crowd gathered on the bank of the lagoon to shout encouragement and break into cheers and applause when at last the goose was freed, and half swam half flew amphibian-airplane style to join the other indignant, honking and wing-thrashing birds at the far end of the lagoon.

Michael muttered, “Bastard didn't even thank us!”

Corinne said, “
I'll
thank you, Michael Mulvaney!”

Not a kiss, as he'd hoped, but a handshake. A good strong man-to-man handshake.

 

So it began: what he wouldn't have wished to call
love
exactly—at least not so soon. He cringed at the thought of seeming, or actually being, weak and sentimental.
How'd we meet?—over a goose, for Christ's sake! In the middle of a goose-pond! No, I'm not kidding.
He had to admit that this odd pushy prim (and virginal) farm girl possessed an abundance of what you'd call
character
of a kind he hadn't previously encountered in any female of his acquaintance; certainly not in such easy-lay girls as Donna the nursing student, nor in his own pious-Catholic sisters. And
character
could be sexy in its own way—oh, boy!—you'd arouse opposition, resistance, for sure—nothing
easy
about Corinne the freckled farm girl from Ransomville, New York.

How many times, how many years Michael Mulvaney would joke and tease about the goddamned goose, the kind of guy who doesn't let things go, but the fact was he'd been impressed by the way Corinne went for that goose to save it—hadn't been capable, you could figure, of looking the other way, passing it by like most people would. She'd recognized the situation as calling for immediate moral involvement. He, Michael Mulvaney, showered for the second time that day and dressed in clean pressed chinos and a sports shirt and new crepe-soled canvas shoes, might easily have passed by the goose—well, not easily, maybe guiltily, but, well—he could have. Probably would have. (He'd have gone to look for a park cop—maybe.) By way of this train of thought he concluded that Corinne Hausmann was morally superior to him, as a woman should be morally superior to any man; and that this fact would be of benefit to him one day, as you might assume that the friendship of rich people might be beneficial, who knows exactly how.

So, aged twenty-three, working at Schroon Lake for good summer wages, not a thought in the world for any immediate future that included a woman, let alone marriage, Michael Mulvaney fell in love.
Hell, I was relieved it was so easy, after all. Didn't hurt a bit.
There was the added enticement that Corinne confessed she'd been about to become engaged, to a fellow student at Fredonia State. Immediately Michael flared up, “Don't tell me anything about him, Corinne! Not even his name.” Corinne said, astonished, “But, Michael, there isn't much to tell. Jerry is a sweet, quiet, serious boy—he's majoring in music education, plays the—” Michael interrupted, in anguish, “Corinne,
no
. As long as you didn't—well, sleep with the guy—that's all I want to know.” Corinne said, hurt, “But you had girlfriends, Michael.
I
don't expect you not to have had girlfriends!” By this time Michael was on his feet, pacing about, grabbing at his hair. He said, “Honey, what a guy does, what men do—it isn't anything like what a girl like
you
—your quality—does, or even wants to know about. Believe me!”—adding, excitedly, as it flew into his head, “‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.'” When Michael quoted the words of Jesus Christ to her, Corinne grew grave, glowing, transfixed. (Was he conning her?—she seemed never to catch on, if that was so.) She said, taking his hand, “Anyway, I didn't love Jerry, I see that now. Oh, let me say it! What I felt for him wasn't one ounce of what I feel for you, Michael Mulvaney!” Michael's heart swelled. He said, joyously, “One
iota
, honey. You mean one
iota
. That's a helluva lot less than one
ounce
.”