We Were the Mulvaneys (23 page)

Corinne said anxiously, “Michael, what are you planning? Not some sort of civil lawsuit? It would destroy Marianne—it would destroy us all—if this becomes any more public than it already is! Imagine Marianne testifying in court, having to say such awful things, then being cross-examined by some merciless, vicious lawyer! Oh, Michael, promise me, please,
no
.”

Michael shook his head vehemently, backing off from her, bent on escape. He had work to do, calls to make. He was a damned busy man. Not looking back at his distraught wife wringing her hands like any distraught wife on TV, tears streaking her face.

“Trust me!” he called back. Jamming the fedora with the jaunty little feather onto his head, rushing out. A cold April rain was being blown slantwise against the house. Michael's khaki raincoat was rumpled behind as if he'd been sleeping in it.

 

Then, a week or so later, Corinne learned, again by chance, that Mr. Costello, whoever he was, hadn't “worked out”—he'd been “terminated.” But instead of feeling gratitude, immense relief, Corinne steeled herself to wonder,
Is he hiring another? What are his plans?

 

Corinne knew: Michael was sick not just with
it
, with what had happened to Marianne, but with what he felt to be the betrayal of their Mt. Ephraim friends. He told her bitterly, one night as they lay in bed, in the dark, unable to sleep, “Between Mort Lundt and me, naturally they're choosing Lundt. Siding with him. Because the bastard's got money and connections, he's one of
them
.”

“Don't think of it that way, darling,” Corinne said fumblingly, “—think of it that, well—they just don't want to get involved. You know how people are.”

“I guess I didn't, actually,” Michael said. “But I'm getting to know how our friends are. Our ‘friends.'” Corinne could imagine his mouth twisting in the dark. “Fucking ‘friends.'”

She cringed as if he'd struck her. It was so unlike Michael Mulvaney to utter any obscenity in a woman's presence.

Michael claimed that people avoided him downtown. At the Odd Fellows', at the Sportsmen's Club, most of all at the Country Club. (Oh, but why go
there
? Corinne wanted to protest.) “Am I a leper? Am I the Walking Dead?” Michael laughed. They saw him, he said, and quickly looked away. Shaking his hand was a chore, he could see it in their eyes. He could feel it in their grip. Why, that hypocritical old fraud Ben Thorsen, who'd bellyached to Michael he couldn't pay straight-out for the roofing repairs he'd had done on his house, so Michael had agreed to monthly payments, at
no interest
—he was one of the worst. “But you never did like Ben Thorsen,” Corinne objected, as if that were the point.

Mulvaney Roofing hadn't gotten the contract for the Civic Center renovations. Nor for the St. Matthew's Hospital project. Maybe he'd demand an investigation—why a certain rival roofer's bid was accepted and his rejected. Just maybe!

Suddenly, too, Ben Breuer never had time for squash with him, or a quick drink. Nor Charley MacIntyre, Jake Spohr. If he dropped in somewhere for lunch, one of the clubs, or the Blue Moon Café where everyone knew him, he'd be made to feel how unwanted, how unwelcome he was. Oh of course he'd be invited to sit down at a table—if there was room—but it was obvious that Michael Mulvaney's presence dampened the mood. Laughs subsided, there was nothing to talk about except weather, politics, sports.

What were they talking about before he'd joined them?

What did they talk about when he excused himself to use the men's room?

“People have their own lives,” Corinne said gently, caressing her husband's shoulder. “They don't always—think of how others are perceiving them. You don't want to exaggerate this, Michael. You know you have a tendency to—”

Michael continued, contemptuously, as if he hadn't heard. Telling of how, that day, for the hell of it, he drove out to Spohr's Lumber to have a few words with Jake. If anybody knew about the Civic Center and St. Matthew's deals it would be Jake. Hadn't he, Michael Mulvaney, always gotten along fine with Jake Spohr?—the two weren't close friends by a long shot, but they respected each other, had what you'd call a reciprocal relationship, throwing business each other's way, and Jake came from a background like Michael's—he'd moved to Mt. Ephraim from Buffalo, no roots in the Valley and no fancy education, just a reputation for doing good work. So Michael asked Jake point-blank what was going on behind his back?—was he being squeezed out, or what? And Jake shook his head like this was a question he couldn't comprehend, much less answer. Jake acknowledged there was probably “personal politics” behind the contracts but wasn't there always? (Spohr's Lumber had the contract for the hospital wing, but not for the Civic Center.) Michael then asked what was being said about him and his family?—
what was being said about his daughter Marianne?
“And Jake looked me straight in the eye, Corinne, and said, ‘Not a thing.' And I was sweating like a winded horse, scared as hell but I had to push it asking was he sure? and there was a beat, and I could see Jake swallow, but he said, still looking me in the eye like we were brothers or something, going way, way back so for sure I could trust him, ‘Sure I'm sure, Michael. I'd tell you if I knew anything.'”

Beside her in the dark Michael began suddenly to laugh—hoarse, wheezing laughter so the old wickerware bed creaked as if laughing, too. Corinne lay stricken in dismay amid such merry laughter she could not join.

 

Sometime after midnight, then, groggily aware of Michael easing from bed. She sighed, turned, shut her eyes tight, pretending to be asleep, yes she
was
asleep, burrowed in sleep as in salvation.

She would find him in the family room. Or the kitchen. Or his office. If she looked. She'd discover an empty Early Times bottle in the trash, beer conspicuously missing from the refrigerator. If she looked. Probably there'd be an empty glass somewhere on the floor, tipped on its side: Michael wasn't troubling to hide his tracks, much, any longer. Too angry, and since anger wears you out, too exhausted.

 

Her worst fear: the telephone ringing.

At 12:50
A.M.
, and Michael not home.

It was late April, after Easter. Corinne was in bed upstairs, propped up with pillows, too anxious to sleep; reading, or trying to read, one of Patrick's science magazines. Though every cell and nerve ending in her brain quivered with wakefulness, she could not concentrate on a passage she'd read, reread how many times….
No evidence either in the living world of today or of past geological epochs for a continuous transition of species…what we actually find are separate and well-distinguished species…intermediate stages from one species to another which should be found…are not met with. The worlds of organisms, living and extinct, do not represent a continuum but a discontinuum…. Certain conditions of stability exist notonly for the individual genes but also for genomes…. A “species” represents a state in which a harmoniously stabilized “genetic balance” has been established, that is…
Thinking of Marianne who was so deeply unhappy at school. Yet never spoke of it. Poor Marianne with so few friends now, few telephone calls, and all that visiting the girls had done back and forth at one another's houses—suddenly, for Marianne, all that had ceased as if it had never been. She'd quit the cheerleading squad, rarely attended club meetings or her Christian Youth meetings. Her grades had dropped to C's but seemed to have levelled off. She was happiest at church, so far as Corinne could judge. Singing hymns in her thin, sweet soprano voice—“Rock of Ages,” Corinne's favorite hymn of all time, was Marianne's, too. It was the only public place she felt comfortable: the First Church of Christ of South Lebanon was a one-room foursquare white-shingled church miles from Mt. Ephraim; the congregation was mostly country people; no one knew the Mulvaneys except as relatively new churchgoers, Corinne Mulvaney and her three children. Corinne drove to church in the mud-splattered rust-speckled Buick station wagon with the bumper sticker 4-H: H
EAD
H
EART
H
ANDS
H
EALTH
and, on a rear window, a frayed decal F
UTURE
F
ARMERS OF
A
MERICA
1974. No one would have judged her the wife of a prosperous businessman, or, maybe, anyone's wife at all. If there was a Mr. Mulvaney, no one had ever sighted him in South Lebanon, nor would.

It was a tenet of the First Church of Christ not to judge one's brothers and sisters in Christ.
Let him that is without sin first cast a stone. John 8.

Corinne knew she was neglecting her sons. The youngest especially—poor Judd! Babyface, Dimple—Ranger. She loved the boy but hardly dared hug him, now he was thirteen. A quiet, good-natured child, all but lost in the ferocity of Mulvaney family life; he'd stopped asking about Marianne, stopped asking about his father.
Only a phase
Corinne would tell him.
God sends us sorrow sometimes to strengthen us.

Do I believe that? Corinne wondered.

Of course, I believe. I must.

Then there was Patrick. Haughty P.J.! The child least like either of his parents. It was a mystery to Corinne how Patrick continued to accompany her to church services at the little South Lebanon church, now he was eighteen years old, a tall, restless, skeptical-minded young man. “Monosyllables of wisdom” Patrick cruelly and wittily described their minister's sweetly simple sermons. The congregation he called “the flock”—if you know animals, you know there's nothing dumber, less attractive, than an adult sheep. As a boy he'd tried to take part in hymn singing but now he seemed merely to be mouthing the words, his mind elsewhere. He was visibly embarrassed when “witnesses for Christ” came forward; he shuffled to the communion rail with an expressionless face, like a stoical child taking his medicine. His participation in “clasping of hands in Christ” was distinctly less than enthusiastic. Yet, he continued to accompany his mother, sister and younger brother to church; it was their custom for Patrick to drive the station wagon home, so that Corinne could sit quietly beside him, fingers to her eyes, adrift, her soul almost palpably buoyed by the love of Jesus Christ she'd taken into her heart anew. Patrick was being, Corinne guessed,
a good son. Mom's good son.
Acquitting himself dutifully and with a measure of good humor, just possibly counting the days until he left High Point Farm for college and could leave his Christian faith behind. It worried Corinne terribly, but—well, she just knew!

What her sensitive, easily offended son was thinking about
it
, what experiences he was having at the high school in the wake of
it
, Corinne shrank from imagining. She knew what adolescent boys could be like—what cruelty, dirty-mindedness, mockery of those perceived as weaker, or as outsiders. Yes, and girls, too! The cruelty of the barnyard: how chickens peck fiercely, relentlessly at an afflicted chicken in their midst, pecking to the raw flesh, seeking blood. She supposed Patrick must suffer as Michael Sr. suffered. She supposed he couldn't help but overhear remarks about his sister and Zachary Lundt; he'd have to see the Lundt boy every day, Mt. Ephraim High was so small, only a few hundred students. Yet he was managing, he was quiet but resolute. If he shared his innermost thoughts with anyone, it was no longer Mom.

As for Mike—eldest son, firstborn baby, so
grown
. Mikey-Junior who'd turned twenty-one—no: twenty-
two
—last month. Corinne had been stunned by Mike's abrupt decision to leave home and live in Mt. Ephraim, just at the time of his birthday. But why? Corinne had asked, for to her High Point Farm was paradise, and why would one leave paradise willingly? Mike said, Well, it's time. Corinne asked again, But why? and Mike said, shifting his shoulders restively, clenching and unclenching his fists, It makes sense to live where you work, right? and Corinne said, Yes but you could ride in with Dad instead of driving in yourself, the way you used to—how can that be a reason? and Mike laughed and said, Mom, you just don't get it, and Corinne said, hurt, I guess I don't. Michael Sr. didn't approve of the sudden decision, either. Why the hell did Mike want to move to town, to an apartment!
A mere apartment.
And in a cheaply flashy stucco building in the new Riverdale section of Mt. Ephraim where the Mulvaneys knew no one. Corinne tried for a lighter tone, teasing Mike about how he'd prepare his own meals?—for Mike was the biggest eater of the Mulvaneys, always hungry. Mike said with a shrug he'd eat in restaurants mostly, and Corinne said, chiding, Restaurant meals!—they aren't very nourishing, and they're expensive. And Mike said, in that winking way he had with his mom, as if there were a subtext to their conversation she hadn't been getting, Hey Mom: it all depends upon the restaurant.

All depends upon the restaurant.