We Were the Mulvaneys (17 page)

Still, Michael was unforgiving. Stubborn as a balking goat. When, after they'd become engaged, Corinne had wanted to see her friend one final time to explain what had happened, Michael was obdurate in opposition:
no
. Hadn't Corinne written to the guy, hadn't she spoken with him on the phone? She wouldn't be returning to Fredonia in the fall, what difference did it make? He'd broken off completely with his ex-girlfriends, hadn't the slightest interest in seeing any of them ever, ever again.

So when Corinne hesitantly suggested inviting Jerry to their wedding, as a gesture of goodwill and friendship (it was to be a small church wedding at the Ransomville Lutheran Church, all but a few of the guests Corinne's), Michael vetoed it at once. Grabbed her in a bear hug so tight it squeezed the breath out of her, kissed her and said, “Darling, you love
me
, Michael Mulvaney. I'll show you I'm more than enough for you.”

 

Is nothing lost? Corinne wondered. Twenty-four years later, thinking these things, in a consulting room in Dr. Oakley's office, she heard again her young lover's ardent voice ringing in her ears and saw again the distinct webbing of shadow and light on the wall of the room (Michael's room at the boardinghouse), the outline of a lilac tree outside the window that fixed these words permanently in her memory.

Love me! I'm more than enough.

S
he would have wished him not to know. Never to know. For once he knew, once they shared the bitter knowledge, never again would he be able to look at her in the old way. The old loving kidding-around
How'd all this happen?
way. (Meaning High Point Farm. The kids. The animals. The whole
shebang
as Michael Sr. called it. Plus the mortgage.) Never without each of them thinking
Our daughter! our baby girl!
—eyes snatching at each other's, helpless, in fury and unspeakable hurt.

 

She waited for him not in the house in the warm-lit kitchen where Patrick, Judd, the animals would be crowding her, but in the converted barn.
HIGH POINT ANTIQUES.
Space heaters thrummed heroically but emitted little palpable heat beyond a few feet, their red-heated coils like X rays of raw nerves. The stark overhead light caused ugly shadows to veer upward from the floorboards. Her cold-stiffened fingers moved fumblingly, varnishing the hickory armchair. Varnish fumes so sharp her cheeks were streaked with tears.

Keep busy! Just keep busy.
Wisdom of the Hausmanns who'd been farm people for centuries.

Marianne was upstairs in her room, sedated, calm and possibly sleeping. She was all right, she'd be all right.
HEAD HEART HANDS HEALTH
the watchword of the American 4-H movement
HEAD HEART HANDS HEALTH
and Marianne Mulvaney would be all right.

Corinne hadn't been able to pray, not exactly. As if, if she did, she might reproach God? blame Jesus? for what had happened to her daughter? For what had been allowed to happen to her daughter? Instead the words repeated
HEAD HEART HANDS HEALTH
like a flashing neon sign she couldn't turn off.

Michael was late coming home. It was dark as midnight by 7:20 when at last his headlights ascended the bumpy drive. Corinne had called him at work from Dr. Oakley's office but he'd been out, his secretary said, on a work site miles away, a Valu-Right Drugs in a new shopping center on Route 119 where a five-man crew was putting in a hot asphalt roof. That was at 4:30. Again she'd called him from home but he was still out. He'd told her that morning he'd be late for supper, he was meeting some men friends at the Club, the taproom. Business he'd said. But he'd be home by seven at the latest.

She hadn't wanted to call him at the Mt. Ephraim Country Club. Hadn't wanted to risk upsetting him in front of his friends. And the situation was under control now wasn't it. Marianne safely home, upstairs in her room. Sweet throaty-purring Muffin snuggling beside her on top of the quilt.

The wind was out of the northeast, gaining strength. A powdery glisten to the windowpanes, fine gritty sandlike snow blown against the glass. And there stood Michael in the doorway, in his good camel's-hair coat and the jaunty fedora with the tiny pheasant feather in the rim, looking puzzled, concerned. “Hon, what the hell are you doing out here? Something wrong?”

Michael's cheeks were ruddy, healthily flushed from the cold and the two or three drinks he'd had, his eyes quick, staring. Those eyes, Corinne used to say with a shivery laugh, like X-ray eyes seeing what you'd never expect them to see.

The varnish brush had slipped from Corinne's fingers unnoticed. She'd been squatting by the armchair on its messy outspread newspapers and now stood, trying to smile but in fact she'd begun to cry. Exactly what she'd vowed she would not do.

“Jesus, Corinne—what is it?”

He came to her, she fumbled to take his hand. Michael's hand she'd long ago teased was the size of a bear's paw. It came to her then—when there was disturbing family news (Patrick's terrible accident with his horse had been the worst, but there'd been others—oh, others!) it fell to Corinne the mother to inform Michael the father. How Corinne came by such knowledge, such cruel expertise, was a mystery. Softly she said, “It's Marianne, darling. Something has happened to her.”

“Marianne? What? Where is she?”

She gripped Michael's hand tighter, to steady him. There was no way to say this, yet she would find a way.

“She's all right now—she's upstairs in her room. I mean, she isn't in danger, and she isn't ill. But something has happened to her.”

That sick, sinking look in Michael Mulvaney's face. He was a man, he knew.

The father of a seventeen-year-old daughter. He knew.

 

After the front wheels of Corinne's station wagon ran over the creature, there was nothing for her to do except make an emergency U-turn on the highway and speed back into Mt. Ephraim, to get medical help for Marianne who was sobbing convulsively—choking, breathless, hysterical. Hyperventilating! Corinne was in such a distraught state she hadn't seen what she'd hit—thank God she hadn't had an accident, swerving and weaving on the highway as she tried to comfort, with one groping hand, the weeping, thrashing girl in the seat beside her. Like a woman in a dream she sped back into Mt. Ephraim tapping her horn to clear a way for herself when necessary. In the exigency of her need, her need to get help for her daughter, she might have struck other vehicles, pedestrians—might have killed Marianne and herself both.
God help us, God take care of us. God we are in Your mercy.

What had she struck back there on the hill, a dog?—but the creature had seemed too small for a dog, and wrongly shaped. A cat? It hadn't a cat's shape, either—more like a raccoon, bulky and waddling side to side in that way of raccoons—but you rarely saw a raccoon in winter, still less in bright daylight.

On hilly Cassadaga Street just inside the town limits there was Dr. Oakley's old gray-shingled house. Corinne parked, and half walked half carried sobbing Marianne inside and explained to the astonished nurse-receptionist that her daughter needed immediate medical attention. And of course Dr. Oakley the Mulvaneys' old friend took Marianne into the back at once, before the half dozen other patients seated hushed and staring in the waiting room. (Corinne, accompanying Marianne into the rear, had no time to take notice of these staring witnesses except one or two were familiar faces, from P.T.A. perhaps, acquainted with the Mulvaneys, surely. And so this episode, Corinne Mulvaney bursting into Dr. Oakley's office with her hysterically weeping young daughter, would be murmured of, spoken of, relayed by telephone and in person like an electronic news bulletin flung in myriad directions simultaneously through Mt. Ephraim before Michael Mulvaney would have heard of it himself.)

In Dr. Oakley's consulting room, as Corinne would tell Michael that evening, Marianne grew calmer. It was a familiar place, and Dr. Oakley urged her to sit, offered her a tissue, spoke comfortingly to her. Corinne pulled up a chair close beside Marianne's and held her hand as she spoke. Marianne's face was streaked with tears that glistened like acid and her skin was drained of color and she could not bring herself to look at Dr. Oakley behind his desk, nor at Corinne. She said in a small almost inaudible voice that she'd been “hurt.”

“Hurt, Marianne?” Dr. Oakley asked. “How?”

The other night, after the prom. Very late after the prom. It might have been three o'clock in the morning.

“And where did this happen, Marianne?”

In a boy's car. In a—she couldn't recall exactly—parking lot somewhere. Behind some buildings. By a row of Dumpsters. She'd been drinking, and she'd been sick. Her memory was confused and she would not wish to speak in error.

“Who was the boy, Marianne?” Dr. Oakley asked quietly. “What did he do to you?”

Marianne didn't reply at first, then said, in the same near-inaudible voice, that she did not wish to say the boy's name. She did not believe that what had happened had been his fault to any degree more than it had been her fault. She'd been drinking at the party, and she had never been so sick in her life. She had made a mistake to drink and believed that friends had warned her but she could not remember clearly. She could not remember much of what had happened and even the memory of the prom itself had become blurred like a dream you know you've had yet can't recall. It was there, it was real, yet she had no access to it. And she did not wish to speak in error.

Dr. Oakley said, frowning, “But something was done to you, Marianne? You've been—‘hurt'?”

There was the evidence she'd discovered, Marianne said slowly, of certain injuries. On her body. She had struggled with him, the boy whose name she did not wish to say, but he'd ripped her dress, and might have struck her—unless she'd fallen, slipped and fell in her high heels, on icy pavement. Trying to run from his car. It had been very cold and windy and she didn't know where her coat was and she'd been sick. She had never been drunk before but believed that that was what had happened to her—she'd been drinking something made of orange juice and she'd been warned but had not listened, or could not remember having listened, and could not remember who'd warned her. She did not wish to name any names and to involve her friends or anyone for no one was to blame except possibly herself. She might have been running and stumbling from the boy's car because she was going to be sick. Ashamed to be sick, vomiting in his car. She'd believed they were parked in the LaPortes' driveway because the boy had said he would drive her there but apparently they were somewhere else and she could not say where. Afterward, he had driven her to the LaPortes'. Yet she could not speak in absolute certainty about any of this: whether in fact the boy had said he would drive her to Trisha's house or whether she had misunderstood. For the past few days she had been praying and meditating upon what to do, and she had decided she must do nothing, for it was she who had made the mistake and not the boy and she must not bear witness against him. And Marianne began to cry again, helplessly. And Corinne hugged her, herself in tears, as Dr. Oakley looked on, and Corinne wept, wept as if her heart had broken. And Marianne sat stiff yet unresisting, allowing her mother to embrace her but not returning the embrace until, after a short while, Marianne said calmly, looking now at Dr. Oakley, “I'm ready to be examined now, Dr. Oakley, I guess.”

Dr. Oakley's nurse escorted Marianne into an examining room and Corinne would have accompanied them but Dr. Oakley suggested it might be better if she waited here. And Corinne waited, and after what seemed like a very long time Dr. Oakley reappeared, and his expression was grim, sympathetic—“It appears that your daughter has been sexually abused.”

Corinne was on her feet, anguished. “Oh God. Oh Jesus. She's been—raped?”

Dr. Oakley paused. Licked his lips. His thick bifocals, which left such deep indentations on the bridge of his nose, reflected an opaque light. He held a sheet of paper in his tremulous hands and frowned at it, as if his own handwriting perplexed him. “There is evidence of ‘forcible penile penetration,' yes. The hymen has been ruptured and there are bruises and lacerations in the vaginal and pelvic area and bruises elsewhere—thighs, abdomen, breasts. It's been several days since the assault and so there wouldn't be—I'm sure—” and here Dr. Oakley, the most gentlemanly of elder men, faltered, “—any traces of semen remaining. But I've taken a smear, and we'll see.”

“Raped? Marianne?”

“Corinne, she doesn't say—that. She hasn't said that, dear, you see.”

“But of course that's what it is, Dr. Oakley!
Rape.
”

Dr. Oakley was shaking his head, visibly nervous, frowning at the report in his fingers. He was a man whose courtly, warmly gracious manner could sometimes shade into awkwardness—he was an old-style general practitioner, of an era that preceded what he perceived as trendy psychologies, “therapies.” He said, carefully, “I've prescribed painkillers for your daughter, and something to help her sleep. She's a brave young woman, and it may be that you and—and Michael—need to listen to her, and not—” again he paused, with a fastidious licking of his lips, “—do anything rash.”

 

These things Corinne reported to Michael in as calm and measured a voice as she could manage. She dreaded his rage, his terrible temper that erupted rarely, yet with alarming force.
The bastard! I'll kill the bastard!
she'd anticipated his words for hours.
Tell me who it is, I'll kill him!

Yet, initially, what frightened Corinne more, Michael took the news as one might take news of one's imminent mortality. He did not interrupt, he did not speak at all. He was having difficulty breathing and grasped at both her hands, his face suddenly ashen, eyes an old man's eyes, watery and incredulous. He seemed to have lost his balance—stooped, and swayed—sat heavily on an upended wooden box. One of his gloves had fallen from his overcoat pocket and his jaunty fox-colored fedora lay on the floorboards at his feet. Quickly, pleading, thinking he might be having a heart attack or a stroke (his blood pressure was high—oh why hadn't she remembered!), Corinne said, “Michael, darling, it's all right—
she's
all right. Marianne's very brave, and Dr. Oakley says she needs to rest—she wasn't hurt badly, really!—I mean—” Crouched in Michael's arms, the clumsy embrace of his arms in the sleeves of the camel's-hair coat, pressing her anguished face against his.