We Were the Mulvaneys (58 page)

Marianne said, faltering, though it was the simplest sort of truth, “I just thought, you know—it would be easier. If I didn't go so far away.”

 

Muffin was brought back from the Pittsburgh clinic, his left foreleg shaved, where the intravenous needle had gone in. He would regain his lost appetite and some of his lost weight, and would live for another thirteen months. By the time he died, for the second time it almost seemed, Marianne would have joined the full-time staff of Stump Creek Hill and would have been living on the premises for most of those months. It was the most wonderful job, she never ceased to marvel, she'd ever had in her life: she answered the telephone, did both clerical and manual tasks in the office, helped design the new fund-raising flyer (“12 Good Reasons You Should Be Generous to Stump Creek Hill”—with photo inserts of twelve of the most appealing and photogenic resident animals); she helped in the dog-and cat-kennels, in which there were both private animals, temporary visitors, and animals for adoption; she helped with grounds maintenance in the zoo, which was her favorite work. She told Whit West she wished she'd gone to college, to study veterinary science; and of course Whit replied, in that contrary way of his, “Why speak in the past tense? There's nothing to stop you going, right now.” Which made Marianne blush in confusion, and back off—that wasn't what she meant, at all.

Rhoda told her, “Don't be hurt by Whit, he doesn't mean to be rude. It's just how he
sounds
.”

Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital had been established by Whit partly through a family inheritance and numerous solicited donations. The property itself, fifteen acres and a once-elegant English-style manor house, had been willed to Whit by an elderly widow whose eleven Siamese cats he'd treated for years—quite well, evidently. (One of the provisions of the widow's will was that the eleven Siamese should continue to live in the manor house exactly in the style to which they were accustomed, which Whit had no problem in obliging.) The widow's outraged relatives had contested the will and there had been a protracted lawsuit, with a good deal of publicity through western Pennsylvania—“In certain quarters I was made out to be a gigolo,” Whit complained, “in others, St. Francis of Assisi.” In the end, Stump Creek Hill had emerged ninety percent victorious. The gilt-ceilinged ballroom of the house was used for the kennels; the glass-topped conservatory was an aviary for injured, convalescent and “retired” birds (among them an African gray parrot and a snowy white cockatoo—amazing, intelligent birds of a kind new to Marianne); a former drawing room, still furnished with faded, plush-upholstered chairs and sofas, now wonderfully shredded, was the site of “Kitty City” ( a haven for as many as fifty cats sponsored by the well-intentioned who either could not or did not wish to bring them home). Most of the many smaller rooms of the house were empty; a few staff members lived on the premises, the rest commuted to their nearby homes. When Marianne was hired on, Whit took her upstairs, throwing open doors to rooms he hadn't, it seemed, glanced into in a long time—“Take any room you want, if you can find one that's livable. And furniture, anything—use your imagination.” Whit himself lived in the carriage house adjoining the veterinary. He was obsessed with the place, he acknowledged—maybe a little crazy. “The thought of going away, on a vacation for instance, if only for a few days, fills me with panic,” he said.

Marianne said, “Oh, why would anyone ever want to leave
here
?”

She could not imagine such a prospect. In the several years between her moving into the manor house, in August 1984, and Corinne's sudden call summoning her to Rochester, in October 1988, Marianne would not have been away from Stump Creek Hill for more than a day.

So, inspired, Marianne put together a room for herself on the second floor of the house, overlooking the tall oaks of the zoo and with a view of the elephants' rocky compound. What a bliss of housewifery, furnishing her room with odd wonderful shabbily elegant pieces of furniture scattered through the house! If only Corinne could see! But Marianne hesitated to call her mother for months. And even then, she was reluctant to confide in Corinne too fully. For what was so precious to Marianne it seemed at times a dream she and Muffin had concocted together would appear less so to Corinne. “Rag-quilt life!” Corinne would sigh heavily over the phone. By implication, her own life was so fixed, so settled, so
defined
.

The “blood cleansing” had certainly worked magic on Muffin. Even Whit West was surprised. As soon as Muffin was returned to Marianne, and settled into his new quarters, he began to regain his health; within a few days he appeared normal, or nearly—the shaved foreleg gave him a somber look, which his gleaming white fur and addled, clownish markings did not dispel. Whit said warningly, “Now you know this is only a temporary respite, don't you, Marianne?” Marianne murmured yes. She was prepared to accept Muffin's second death, whenever. Thinking
I'm temporary, too. I don't expect anything more.

At Stump Creek Hill, days melted into days, weeks into weeks and months in a frenzy of activity punctuated by oases of relative calm—“Therapeutic boredom,” Whit called it. Boredom! None of his staff shared Whit's attitude: they were grateful for quiet, when it came. But in a place devoted to so many infirm and elderly creatures, with an emergency veterinary service to which people brought animals in desperate states (run over on the highway, for instance), there was little quiet. The ballroom-kennels were filled with yipping, yammering, yowling creatures like an anteroom of Hell. Thanks to Whittaker West's promotion of Stump Creek Hill, the shelter-zoo was known for hundreds of miles—through the Associated Humane Societies, across the continent—and so the telephone was forever ringing, people were forever driving up the sandy front lane with injured animals, strays, litters of unwanted puppies and kittens, ex-baby chicks and Easter bunnies grown to unwanted adult sizes. (Big Girl, the three-hundred-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig, had actually been given as a piglet to a child.) There were animals who were the casualties of other animals—severely dog-bitten dogs and cats, bucks terribly injured in rutting season by rival bucks—but most of the animal casualties, of course, were human afflicted. Starvation, mistreatment, actual torture. (Whit's boxer Luther had been, as a puppy, doused in kerosene and set on fire by boys.) After a few days at Stump Creek Hill, Marianne learned not to ask detailed questions. When someone told her bluntly, “Hey. You really don't want to know,” she took them at their word.

When Marianne was new at answering calls, she had a conversation with a distraught woman who told her she was “doomed to die” despite surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and what worried her most was the fate of her two cats. “Mimi and Fifi have no one but me. They're not young. What will happen to them? As soon as I'm gone—what will happen to them?” The woman broke down sobbing and it was all Marianne could do not to break down herself. Marianne promised she would personally take care of the cats. Without telling Whit, she drove ten miles to fetch them in the Chevy pickup—a pair of sleek-furred black cats with white-marbled markings and long tails prehensile as monkey tails. Their skeletal-thin mistress, weeping as she saw them off with Marianne, could have been no older than forty. She reminded Marianne of Corinne, fluttery eyelids and fingers, a steely resolve beneath. “I won't mind dying nearly so much if I know that Mimi and Fifi are in good hands,” she said anxiously, and quite literally she seized Marianne's hands in hers. “You will promise? You will?” “Oh, yes,” Marianne said, blinking away tears. “I promise.” She drove back to Stump Creek Hill, Mimi and Fifi yowling in the backseat, in a wire carrier.
O God help us, what a world of suffering.

When Whit came by later that afternoon, he discovered Marianne ashen-faced, kneeling on a floor in a back room of the office, trying to coax Mimi and Fifi out from their hiding place behind boxes of Nu-Plus Canine Kibble. She'd been crying and looked so desolate, Whit resisted whatever sardonic remark might have sprung to his lips. He asked her what on earth was wrong and Marianne told him about the terminally ill woman and her cats and she told him, too, she'd been reading some of the reports he'd filed with the Humane Society of the United States and the American Horse Protection Association, the unspeakable cruelty endured by horses shipped to slaughter was something she hadn't known about and she'd had a horse she'd loved and her parents had sold it and she wasn't sure she was strong enough or courageous enough for this work after all—and Whit interrupted, “Marianne, we're here to serve these animals, not ourselves. We're dedicated to making what remains of their lives reasonably happy and if you can do only a little, that little is of great worth to the animals involved. Right?” Marianne shook her head yes, no—she wasn't sure. She'd used up her last tissue and her nose was running badly. Whit said, cheerfully, “One day at a time! You'll see.”

Just as, in time, Mimi and Fifi emerged from hiding, and were taken by Marianne upstairs to her room, to live, more or less harmoniously, with Muffin, so too in time Marianne came to share Whit's attitude. Or to see its logic. It was the attitude, the philosophy, of all of Whit's staff, at least those who didn't quickly burn out and depart. How they all admired, and were intimidated by, Dr. Whittaker West! He was one of those persons who seemed to thrive upon emergencies, tension, “challenge” as he called it. He travelled frequently to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to argue for legislation to “reduce animal suffering at the hands of mankind.” He had the look of an impatient, ungainly bird—an ostrich, a stork—lank-limbed, quick-darting. His eyebrows were untidy tufts, hairs grew in his ears and nostrils. His forearms, bared in his soiled white coat, were a tangle of wiry dark hairs. His features were so motile, you couldn't say if he was an attractive man or homely; his manner so direct, eyes so glaring, it was difficult to “see” him at all. He bore scars on his face and arms from animal assaults over the years; the most prominent, a two-inch crescent moon above his left eye, was from a rabid bobcat. Marianne often did not look at him at all, even when he was speaking to her; like Penelope Hagström, Whit West was just too—
real
. And the trouble with such people was, they seemed always, simply by singling you out for attention, to make you
real
, too.

Whittaker West was said to be the son of a well-to-do Philadelphia businessman who'd owned Thoroughbreds and who had been involved in a scandal in the 1950s in which stables had been set afire, by a paid arsonist, to collect insurance money on racehorses not performing so well as their owner would have liked. He was said to have been badly hurt and embittered by an early, long-since terminated marriage—his former wife, also of a well-to-do Philadelphia family, had divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty, charging in divorce court that he'd preferred “the love of animals” to “the love of a spouse.” There had been much local media attention, and embarrassment for Whit. That had been years ago, and of the present staff only Irma, a woman in her fifties, recalled Mrs. West: a glamorous, high-strung, fashionably dressed young woman who'd never seemed to approve of her husband's work, still less of his devotion to it. At that time, however, Whit lived with his wife in a real house and not on the estate grounds. Mrs. West came to visit rarely. When she did, she seemed invariably to find fault with the staff, or to suffer comical mishaps. Once she'd amazed Irma by rushing terrified into the office, staggering in high-heeled shoes, claiming that a “gigantic” peacock had screamed and flown straight at her head. The woman was white-faced, fainting, and Whit was quickly summoned, rushing out from the rear of the office, a fresh-bleeding welt in his cheek where a parrot had just gashed him with its beak. Mrs. West, seeing him, gave a strangled scream and fell heavily to the floor.

Oh, it was funny! Sad, but funny. For of course Whit was the one to be hurt, finally. But, Irma insisted, it
was
so—always when Mrs. West arrived in her sporty little white Fiat coupe, the peacocks seemed to be screaming that peacock-shriek that could break your eardrum. One of the feral tomcats would dart out to spray the gleaming white-walled Fiat tires and, sometimes, Mrs. West's slender ankles. If Mrs. West visited the zoo, the monkeys cavorted shamelessly, even squirted water at her from their fluted little mouths. Though Stump Creek Hill animals were generally past the age for mating, or distracted by infirmities, it would happen that, if Mrs. West appeared, two of the younger animals were mating, shamelessly, too, in full view. The water bucks were the worst! Other animals squabbled, fought—the younger barnyard goats and the younger roosters seemed always to be taunting and feinting at one another. It was always too windy at Stump Creek Hill, or raining in gusts; or hot, and sand flies were biting, unless it was horse-flies, or mosquitoes from the marshy land bordering Stump Creek close by. If there was a sudden outbreak of fleas—fleas you could see, like antic punctuation marks leaping from the ground onto your legs—poor Mrs. West was sure to arrive before the situation was under control. She was sarcastic with the young women staff workers, imagining they had “designs” on her husband; yet she was too vain to imagine that Whit, in turn, could be attracted to any of them. Such a scruffy, stringy-haired, poor-white-trash-looking crew! Marianne asked, guardedly, for she did not want to appear curious, “What did Mrs. West look like, exactly?” and Irma said vehemently, “Exactly like a cheerleader. Very blond, self-assured. Miss Personality Plus, except when things didn't go her way. You could see that Whit must have married her for love, there wasn't a thing else they had in common.”