Joyce Carol Oates - We Were The Mulvaneys Read online

  Another half mile and you see, on the left, a large handsome black mailbox with the silver figure of a rearing horse on its side and the name M U L V A N F Y in lipstick-red reflector letters. Across from the mailbox there's a driveway nearly obscured from view by trees and shrubs, and the sign Mom painted herself, so proudly- HIGH POINT FARM 1849

  The gravel drive is lined with tall aging spruces. Around the house are five enormous oaks and I mean enormous-the tallest is easily three times the height of the house and the house is three storeys. In summer everything is overgrown, you have to stare up the drive to see the house-what a house! In winter, the lavender house seems to float in midair, buoyant and magical as a house in a child's storybook. And that antique sleigh in the front yard, looking as if the horse had just trotted away to leave the lone passenger behind-a human figure, a tenderly comical scarecrow wearing old clothes of Dad's.

  A storybook house, you're thinking, yes? Must be, storybook people live there.

  High Point Farm had been a local landmark long before my parents bought and partly restored it, of course. Most recently it had been the secluded homestead of an eccentric German-born gentleman farmer who'd died in 1951 and left it to young, distant relatives living in cities far away with little interest in the property except as an occasional summer place or weekend hunting retreat. By 1976, when I was thirteen, High Point Farm was looking almost prosperous and it wasn't unusual for photographers from as far away as Rochester and Buffalo to come out to photograph it, "historic" house and outbuildings, horses grazing in pastures, antique sleigh and "quaint" little brook winding through the front yard. Each year, High Point Farm was featured on calendars printed by local merchants, the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger, the Western New York Historical Society.

  On the wall of my office at the newspaper there's a Historical Society calendar for 1975, opened permanently to October- "Pumpkin Time at High Point Farm!" A glossy picture of the scarecrow figure in the sleigh in Dad's old red-plaid jacket, earfiap cap, bunchy khaki trousers, surrounded by Day-Gb orange pumpkins of varying sizes including, on the ground, an enormous misshapen pumpkin that must have weighed more than one hundred pounds. Beyond the figure in the sleigh is the lavender-and-fieldstone farmhouse with its numerous windows and steep-pitched roofs.

  I've had the page laminated, otherwise it would long be faded and tattered.

  Our house was a rambling old farmhouse of seven bedrooms, verandas and porches and odd little turrets and towers and three tall fieldstone chimneys. Dad said of the house that it had no style, it was styles, a quick history of American architecture. Evidence showed that as many as six builders had worked on it, renovating, expanding, removing, just since 1930. Dad kept the exterior in Al condition, of course-especially the roofs that were covered in prime-quality slate of a beautithl plum hue, and drained with seamless aluminum gutters and downspouts. The old, central part of the house was fieldstone and stucco; later sections were made of wood. When I was very little, m the mid-Sixties it must have been, Dad and two of his Mulvaney Roofing men and Mike Jr. and Patrick repainted the wood sections, transforming them from gunmetal gray to lavender with shutters the rich dark purple of fresh eggplant. The big front door was painted cream. (Eighteen gallons of oil-base paint for old, dry wood had been required, and weeks of work. What a team effort! I'd wished I was big enough to use a brush, to climb up onto the scaffolding and help. And maybe in my imagination I've come to believe I had been part of the team.)

  Part of the house's historic interest lay in the fact that it had been a "safe house" in the Underground Railroad, which came into operation after the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the most shameful legislative measures in American history. My mother was thrilled to discover documents in the Chautauqua County Historical Society archive pertaining to these activities, and wrote a series of pieces for the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger on the subject. How innocently vain she was! How captivated, as she said, by "living in a place of history"! She'd been born on a small farm about fifteen miles to the south where farm life was work, work, work and the seasons simply repeated themselves forever, never adding up to what you'd call "history."

  It was after I started school that Mom became seriously interested in antiques. She'd fttrnished much of the house with authentic period items, those she could afford, and it became her notion to buy and sell. She acquired some merchandise, set up shop in a small converted barn just behind the house, advertised in one or another local antique publications and painted a sign to prop up beside the scarecrow in the sleigh- HIGH POINT ANTIQUES

  BARGAINS & BEAUTY!

  Not that many customers ever came. High Point Farm was too far from town, too difficult to locate. Sunday drivers might drop by, enthralled by the sight of the lavender-and-stone house atop the hill, but most of Mom's visitors were fellow dealers like herself. If in fact someone wanted to buy an item of which she'd grown especially fond, Mom would seem to panic, and murmur some feeble apology-"Oh, I'm so sorry! I forgot-that item has been requisitioned by a previous customer." Blushing and wringing her hands in the very gesture of guilt.

  Dad observed, "Your mother's weakness as a businesswoman is pretty simple: she's a hopeless amateur."

  Scouring auctions, flea markets, garage and rummage sales in the Chautauqua Valley, not above browsing through landfill dumps and outright trash, about which Dad teased her mercilessly, Mom only brought home things she fell in love with; and, naturally, things she'd fallen in love with she couldn't bear to sell to strangers.

  What is truth?-Pontius Pilate's question.

  And how mysteriously Jesus answered him-Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

  Once I thought I understood this exchange but no longer.

  In setting forth this story of the Mulvaneys, of whom I happen to be the youngest son, yet, I hope, a neutral observer, at least one whose emotions have been scoured and exorcised with time, I want to set down what is truth. Everything recorded here happened and it's my task to suggest how, and why; why what might seem to be implausible or inexplicable at a distance-a beloved child's banishment by a loving father, like something in a Grimm fairy tale-isn't implausible or inexplicable from within. I will include as many "facts" as I can assemble, and the rest is conjecture, imagined but not invented. Much is based upon memory and conversations with family members about things I had not experienced firsthand nor could possibly know except in the way of the heart.

  As Dad used to say, in that way of his that embarrassed us, it was so direct, you had to respond immediately and dared not even glance away-"We Mulvaneys arejoined at the heart."

  THE DOE

  Like whispering the furtive rustle. Judd. Judd. Judd.

  I must have been eleven years old, that night I was wakened by the deer, and followed them back to the pasture pond.

  Wakened not by hooves outside my window (I had no idea the sound was hooves) but by a rustling in the tall dry grasses. Judd. Oh Judd!

  Judd sleeps so hard, Mom used to tease, when he was a baby his dad and I would lean over the crib every few minutes, to check of he was breathing!

  It was so: up to the age of about thirteen, I'd sleep so hard, I mean-hard. Sunk to the bottom of a deep, deep well.

  Wonder why? Weekdays at High Point Farm never began later than 6 A.M. when Mom hollered up the stairs, "WAKE UP! RISE `N' SHINE, KIDDOS!" And maybe whistled, or banged a pot. Barn chores before breakfast (my God it could take as long as an hour to wash the cows' filth-encrusted milk-swollen udders, hook up the milking machine to each cow, drain their heavy milk bags dry, empty the milkers into pails) and barn chores after school (horses, mainly-as much work, but at least I loved our horses), approximately 4:30 P.M. to 6 P.M. And then supper-in our family, intense. Just to hold my own around our table, for a kid like me, the youngest of the Mulvaneys, used up energy, and staying power, like keeping on your toes through twelve rounds of a featherweight boxing match-it might look almost easy to outsiders but it isn't easy, for
sure. And after supper an hour or so of homework, also intense (Mom insisted that Patrick or Marianne oversee my efforts: worrying I wasn't the high-nineties student it was her conviction I should be) and more excitement among the family, watching TV for a while if something "worthwhile, educational" was on: history, science and biography documentaries on public television were favored by our parents. And we'd discuss them during, and afterward-we Mulvaneys were a family who talked. So when around 10 P.M. I staggered upstairs to bed it was with the gravity of a stone sinking slowly through deep, dark water. Sometimes I fell asleep half in my pajamas, lying sideways on my bed, and Little Boots curled up happily beside me. Sometimes I fell asleep in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. "Oh, Judd! Goodness! Wake up, honey!" Mom might cry, having pushed open the door I'd neglected to lock.

  No privacy at High Point Farm.

  What with the six of us, and the dogs and cats and frequent visitors and overnight guests (my parents were what's called hospitable, and Marianne was always inviting girlfriends to stay the night-"The more, the merrier!" Mom believed)-privacy just wasn't an option.

  Patrick was the self-declared loner of the family. He'd read Henry David Thoreau's Walden at the age of twelve and often camped out overnight on Alder Creek, in the woods-even so, he'd have one of the dogs with him, or more than one. In his room, there was always a dog or a cat and I'd peek in on him sometimes (the kind of dumb-adniinng thing a kid brother does) to see him asleep twisted in his bedclothes with a heavy furry shape slung across his chest, both of them snoring softly.

  God, did I sleep hard as a kid! Everything in those days was stark and intense and almost hurtful-I mean, it had the power to make me so happy, so excited. I'd fall into bed and a switch in my brain turned off and I was gone, out. And if anything suddenly woke me in the night (you'd be surprised, it was never the wind: High Point Farm was buffeted constantly by wind that made the oak limbs creak, rattled windowpanes and whined under the eaves and down the chimneys, but we never heard it, only if the wind died down we'd get a little anxious) it was like someone shone a flashlight into my face. My eyes would fly open and I'd lie in bed with my heart pounding, covered in sweat. The time of quick terror when you don't know who you are, or where.

  Then I would recall my name, my true name: Judson Andrew Mulvaney. Dad liked to hint I'd been named after a "rich, eccentric" relative of his, an "Irish landowner of County Kildare" but I guess that was some kind ofjoke, Dad hadn't any relatives at all in Ireland that he knew, nor any relatives in this country he'd acknowledge. But what a name for a little boy! What promise of dignity, worth! Just the sound of it, shaping the words aloud-it was like Dad's new overcoat, camel's hair, Mom's Christmas present for him she'd bought on sale the previous March in Yewville's best department store, that coat so many sizes larger than anything scrawny Ranger might wear yet a coat I might grow into one day. Like Dad's classy riding boots, another bargain-sale item, and Dad's fur-lined leather gloves. His Ford pickup, and Mom's Buick station wagon, and Mike's lipstick-red Olds Cutlass and the Jeep Wrangler and the John Deere tractor and other farm machinery and vehicles I might one day be capable of driving. All these, Judson Andrew Mulvaney summoned to mind.

  Shivering with excitement I stood at my window staring down at the deer. Counting six, seven-eight?-cautiously making their way single file through our yard. They were white-tailed deer probably headed for our pasture pond where it extended twenty feet or so beyond the fence. Where by day our small herd of Holsteins drank, grazed, drowsed on their stolid feet slowly filling their enormous milk-bags, near-motionless as black-and-white papier-mache, beasts, only the twitching of their tails, warding off flies, to give you the idea they're alive.

  It was 3:25 AM. A strange thrill, to think I was the only Mulvaney awake in the house.

  There were many deer on our property, in the remoter wooded areas, but it was rare for any to pass so close to our house, because of the dogs. (Though our dogs never ran loose at night, like the dogs of certain of our neighbors and a small pack of semi-wild dogs that plagued the area. Mom was furious at the way people abandoned their pets in the country-"As if animals aren't human, too." And there were miserly farmers who didn't believe in feeding their dogs so the dogs had to forage the countryside.) Mulvaney dogs were well fed and thoroughly domesticated and not trained to be hunters though they were supposed to be watchdogs "guarding" the property.

  I wanted to follow the deer Made my way barefoot Out of my room and to the stairs thinking None of them knows where lam, Ranger is invisible. Little Boots slept so hard on my bed, he hadn't even known I was gone.

  Troy, sleeping somewhere downstairs, didn't seem to hear me, either.

  You could do an inventory of the Mulvaney staircase and have a good idea what the family was like. Staircases in old farmhouses like ours were oddly steep, almost vertical, and narrow. Our lower stairs, though, were always cluttered at their edges, for here, as everywhere in the house, all sorts of things accumulated, set down "temporarily" and not picked up again, nor even noticed, for weeks. Unopened mail for Dad and Mom, including, sometimes, bills. L.L. Bean catalogues, Burpee's seed catalogues, Farm & Home Supplies circulars. Back issues of Farm Life, Time, Newsweek, Consumer Reports, The Evangelist: A Christian Family Weekly. Old textbooks. Single gloves, a single boot. Stiffened curry combs and brushes, thumbtacks, screws, stray buttons. Certain steps had been unofficially designated as lost-and-found steps so if you found a button, say, on the living room floor, you'd naturally place it on one of these steps and forget about it. And there it would stay for weeks, months. For a while there were two blue ribbons from the New York State Fair on the stairs, won by Patrick for his 4-H projects. There was a necktie of Mike's stained with spaghetti sauce and wadded up, he'd tossed down and forgotten. Every few weeks when the staircase got so congested there was only a narrow passageway at the bottom, Mom would declare a moratorium and organize whoever was around to clear it; yet within days, or hours, the drift would begin again, things accumulating where they didn't belong. Dad called this the fourth law of thermodynamics-"The propensity of objects at High Point Farm to resist any order imposed upon them."

  At the bottom of the stairs I paused to get my bearings. Except for the rattling and creaking of the wind which I didn't hear, the house was silent.

  I tiptoed through the dining room, pushed the swinging door open cautiously (it creaked!) and tiptoed through the kitchen hoping the canary wouldn't wake up and make a noise. Off the back hall was a small bathroom, and across from it Mike's room, his door closed of course. (Mike, the oldest child, was special, and had had special privileges for years. He didn't sleep upstairs with the rest of us but had his own large room downstairs, near the back door so he had virtually his own entrance, his privacy. Now he was twenty years old, working for Dad at Mulvaney Roofing, he wasn't a kid any longer but wanted to be considered an adult. Often he was out late at night, even on weekdays. I didn't know if he was home even now, at this hour.) The back door of the house wasn't locked, I smiled turning the knob it was so easy!-slipping from the house, and no one knew.

  Ranger's the baby of the family but he's got some surprises for us. Wait and see.

  How bright, glaring-bright, the moon. I hadn't expected that. Shreds of cloud blowing across it like living things. Almost, the bight hurt my eyes.

  All those stars winking and pulsing. That look of being alive, too. So many! It made me dizzy, confused. Of the constellations Patrick had been trying to teach me, looking through his telescope he'd assembled from a kit, I could identify only the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion?-but where was Andromeda? The sky seemed to shift and swim the harder I stared. The wind seemed to make the Stars vibrate.

  The hard-packed dirt of the driveway was wonderfully cool and solid beneath my feet. My bare feet still toughened from summer when I ran around barefoot as much as I could. Up in my room it hadn't seemed cold but now the wind fluttered my pajama legs and lifted my hair from my forehead, I was shivering. And
the moon so bright it hurt my eyes.