Joyce Carol Oates - We Were The Mulvaneys Read online

  That's why I love fireflies so, Corinne would say, her eyes shining like a seven-year-old's, they saved Momma's life and mine.

  And some of us would be laughing. Oh Mom!

  And Mom would flare up, quick as a cat might turn on you and hiss, her fur stroked the wrong way, "Don't you `Oh Mom' me! I remember that day as clearly as if it was last week, not thirty-eight years ago. Yes, and I can see those fireflies as clearly as I see you."

  Dad, Mikey-Junior and Patrick would try to keep straight faces. The story of Grandma Hausmann and Mom as a little girl of seven, lost in a blizzard on the Ransomville Road, was one of the oldest Mulvaney family stories, and a favorite, but as we got older one by one (except Marianne, of course: she always defended Mom) we came to wonder how accurate it was.

  Most embarrassing was when Mom told the story to people she hardly knew like my eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Cole, or some lady she'd run into at the A & P, or friends of ours spending the night at the farm-how God watches over us all, how Mom's life was changed forever by an act of "providence."

  Just the way Mom uttered that word: providence. You saw a tall black marble column with a cross at its summit. You saw a blue sky so vast and deep you could fall into it forever.

  So Dad couldn't help commenting behind his hand, with that wink that squinched up half his face, it was surely an act of providence that his mother-in-law Ida Hausmann never drove any vehicle ever again-" That was a blessing of God's, yessir!"

  To us kids, who'd known her only as a nervous-skinny, querulous, gray old woman with thick eyeglasses, the thought of Grandma Hausmann driving any vehicle on the road was hilarious.

  But Mom held her ground. Mom was stubborn, and eloquent. She said, in a hurt, dignified tone, that her mother was a country woman of the old days, German-born and brought to America at the age of less than a year; she'd always been a commonsense Lutheran, not given to flights of religious fancy; when such people are confronted by a truth they know to be true they never change their minds, ever. Mom said you have to experience certain things to know certain things. Like an explorer to Antarctica, or to the moon-once you stepped foot in such a place, you'd never doubt it existed. Like giving birth-that, just once, you'd never doubt. "If you've done it, you know; if not, you don't." Mom would smile beatifically, and fix her glowing blue gaze on us one by one until we'd begin to squirm. Even Dad.

  For that was Mom's trump card: she was the mother, and so possessed a mysterious and unquestioned authority. Dad was th- boss, but Mom was the power. Mom in her manure-stained bib overalls, or, in warm weather, her MT. EPHRAIM HIGH T-shirt and khaki shorts, an old hand-knit Sweater of Dad's pushed up past her elbows, her boots she called combat boots, or hippie-style leather sandals worn with cotton socks. Mom with her fnzzed hair that shone a luminous carroty color in the sun. Mom's smile that could turn sweet and teasing, or pucker into her "vinegar" look; her loud neighing laugh that made people want to join in, just hearing it. Here lam, afunny-silly woman, an ordinary woman, a TV mom, hut God has touched my l-f- nonetheless.

  Mike Jr. (who was the most like Dad) might tease, daringly, "Hey Mom: what about Doughnut?"-one of the barn cats-"she's had thirty kittens, what kind of authority does that make her?"

  And Mom would retort, quick as, at Ping-Pong, she was capable of returning a killer serve, "It makes her an authority on kittens."

  And we'd all laugh, including Mom. Yet the fact she was our mother remained.

  Of us kids it was always Patrick who was most skeptical about the blizzard-fireflies story. (Maybe because Patrick, the smartest of us, wanted so badly to believe?) There was a way he had of leaning his elbows on the table (the kitchen table: where we'd likely be) and shoving out his lower lip, his warrior-stance in Debate Club at school, and saying, "Oh, Mom! Come on! Let's examine this rationa]ly. It could not have been `fireflies' in a blizzard in December. Ple-ease,"

  And Mom would retort, her cheeks reddening, "What were they, then, Mr. Socrates? I was there, and I saw. I know a firefly when I see one."

  "How would I know what they were?" Patrick protested. "It might've been a hallucination."

  "Two of us? Momma and me? An identical `hallucination' at the identical moment?"-Mom was incensed, leaning across the table toward Patrick.

  "There's such a phenomenon as mass hysteria," Patrick said importantly. "The power of suggestion and wishful thinking. The human mind is-well, real weird."

  "Speak for your own `human mind'! Mine happens to be normal."

  Mom was laughing, but you could see by the glisten in her eyes she was getting miffed.

  Yet Patrick persisted. Mike might kick his ankle under the table, Marianne might poke him in the ribs and tease "Pinch! ", but Patrick couldn't stop. There was something wonderful in the hot harried look in his eyes, especially the bad one. "O.K., Mom, but consider: why would God send a blizzard to almost kill you and Grandma, then rescue you by sending `fmreffies'? Does that make sense?" Patrick's glasses winked with adolescent urgency. His voice cracked like a radio beset by static. Here was an American teenager who just wanted things to make sense. "And what about the other people who died that day, in the blizzard? Why did God favor you and Grandma over them? What was so special about you?"

  That was Patrick's trump card, he'd toss down onto the table in gloating triumph.

  By this time Mom had gone dangerously red in the face, that mottled look you sometimes get without being aware of it, working in the barns on a stifling hot day, even if you've avoided the sun. Her hands fluttered like hurt birds, her words came stammering. All of us, even Dad, watched closely, wondering how Mom would answer these challenging words of Patrick's, to silence his doubts, and ours, forever. Damn old Pinch!-I wanted to punch his smug mouth, making us all anxious, after Sunday supper (Sunday nights were always "super-casserole" occasions, meaning Mom and Marianne would concoct delicious refrigerator-leftovers unique and notrepeatable), and the dogs and cats gobbling away at plate scrapings, in their separate corners, anxious too, with that twitchy animal anxiety that shows as rapacious appetite, muzzles lowered to the bowl. And by this time Feathers would have woken from his earlyevening drowse to scold, chatter, chirp in sounds sharp as the twining of a fork on a glass. Patrick took no notice of such upset as he'd himself caused but leaned farther forward, his bony vertebrae showing through his shirt, and he'd shove his prissy John Lennon glasses against the bridge of his nose, and beetle his brow so he'd be staring at Mom like she was some kind of specimen, one of those poor sad dead "nocturnal" moths pinned to a Styrofoam board in his room.

  Corinne drew her shoulders up, and threw back her head. However she was dressed, however flyaway her hair, she spoke calmly, with dignity. Always, you maintain your dignity: that was Captain Mulvaney's charge to his troops. "1 believe what God requires me to believe, Patrick. I would not ask of Him that He explain His motives any more than I would wish that any of you might ask of me why I love you." Mom paused, wiping at her eyes. Our hearts beat like metronomes. "It was providence, and it is, that I was spared from death in 1938 so that-" and here Mom paused again, drawing in her breath sharply, her eyes suffused with a special lustre, gazing upon her family one by one, with what crazy unbounded love she gazed upon us, and at such a moment my heart would contract as if this woman who was my mother had slipped her fingers inside my rib cage to contain it, as you might hold a wild, thrashing bird to comfort it, "-so that you children-Mikey, Patrick, Marianne, and Judd-could be born."

  And we sighed, and we basked in that knowledge. Even Pinch, who bit his lip and frowned more deeply. Yes it made sense, yes it was our truth, Dad grinned and nodded to signal his agreement.

  Hell, yes: providence.

  STRAWBERRIES &

  CREAM

  That Sunday afternoon, upstairs in her bedroom, Marianne methodically emptied her garment bag of everything except the satin prom dress, her fingers moving numbly and blindly, yet efficiently. She then zipped the bag shut again and hung it in the farthest corner of h
er closet beneath the sharp-slanting eaves.

  Always, you maintain your dignity.

  At High Point Farm in the big old house she'd lived in all her life. What began to beat against her nerves was the familiar sound of clocks ticking.

  Clocks measuring Time, was what you'd think. That there was a single Time and these clocks (and the watches the Mulvaneys wore on their wrists) were busily tick-tick-ticking it. So that in any room you needed only to glance at a wall, or a mantel, or a table, and trust that the time you'd see measured there was accurate.

  Except of course that wasn't how it was. Not at High Point Farm where Connne Mulvaney collected "antique" American clocks.

  Not even that she collected them-"More like the damn things accumulate," Michael Mulvaney Sr. complained.

  So it was not Time at High Point Farm but times. As many times as there were clocks, distinct and confusing and combative. When the hand-painted I 850s "banjo" clock in the front hail was musically striking the hour of six, the 1889 "Reformed Gothic" grandfather clock on the first-floor landing of the stairs was clearing its throat preparing to strike the quarter hour after one. On the parlor mantel were a Chautauqua Valley "steeple" pendulum clock of the l890s and a Dutch-style painted walnut pendulum clock of the 1830s, one about to strike the hour of nine and the other importantly chiming the hour of eleven-thirty. In the family room was a crudely fashioned 1830s eight-day clock with a tarnished brass eagle at its top, that clanged the hour, half hour, and quarter hour with a jazzy beat; in the dining room, a mantel clock of golden pine with a river scene hand-painted (and now badly faded) on its glass case, of the 1870s, and a delicately carved mahogany Chautauqua Valley grandmother clock of the turn of the century, with ethereal chimes. Scattered through the house were numerous other antique clocks of Corinne's, each a treasure, a bargain, a particular triumph. If there wasn't an excess of competing noise from radio, TV, tapes, records, raised voices or barking dogs you could move through the house in a trance of tick-tick-ticking

  Of course there were a number of clocks, including the most beautiful, that had long ago ceased ticking completely. Their pendulums had not moved for years; their slender black hands, pointing at black numerals, were forever arrested at mysterious fatal moments.

  You would think that Time "stands still." But you'd be wrong.

  Always, Marianne had loved the clocks at High Point Farm. She'd thought that all households were like theirs. So many clocks ticking their separate times. Striking the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour whenever they wished. Friends who came to visit asked, "How do you know what the real time is?" and Marianne said, laughing, "Oh, the real time is in the kitchen: Dad's electric clock." She would lead her friends into the big country kitchen where, above the fireplace, was a moonfaced General Electric clock in the design of a sunburst, with fat black hands and bulgy black numerals and a maddening little hum like something grinding its teeth. The clock had been a gift to Dad on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday from his poker-playing circle. The men of the circle were local businessmen and merchants and their dominant attitude toward one another was one of goodnatured bantering. Since Michael Mulvaney Sr. was notorious for being late for many occasions, including even his poker nights which meant so much to him, there was significance in the gift clock.

  In any case, here was High Point Farm's "real" time.

  Except, of course, as Mom liked to point out, when the elecrncity went out.

  Up in Marianne's room were several more of Mom's clocks, of which only one "kept time" and that fitfully: a small cream-colored ceramic mantel clock with garlands of tiny painted rosebuds, golden pendulum and delicate hands, a chime like the sweetest of birdcalls. It was turn-of-the--century and a genuine antique, Mom insisted. But its time couldn't be trusted, of course. So Marianne kept a windup alarm clock with a plastic face, luminous green hands and numerals that glowed in the dark. Five nights a week Marianne set the alarm for 6 AM, though it had been years since she'd needed an alarm to actually wake her. Even in the pitch-dark of winter.

  She took up the clock suddenly, wanting to bury it under her pillow to smother its snug tick-tick-ticking- But of course she didn't. For what would that solve?

  And there was her watch, her beautiful watch, a white-gold battery-run Seiko with tiny blue numerals; a gift from Mom and Dad for Marianne's sixteenth birthday. She'd taken it off immediately when she'd come home. She hadn't examined it too closely, knowing, or guessing, that the crystal was cracked.

  How many times compulsively she'd run her thumb over the crystal feeling the hairline crack. But she hadn't actually examined it. And if the minute ticking had ceased, she didn't want to know.

  She was not a girl accustomed to thinking, calculating, plotting. The concept of plotting an action that might be broken down into discrete, cautious steps, which Patrick would have found challenging, was confining to Mananne. A kind of static intervened. But this was so: Mt. Ephraim was such a small town, if she took the watch to Birchett's Jewelers where it had been purchased, Mr. Birchett might mention the flhct to her mother or father if he happened to run into them. He would mention it casually, conversationally. And if she ceased wearing it, Dad who was sharp-eyed would notice. There were other watch repairmen in the area, at the Eastgate for instance, but how would she get there? Marianne felt fatigued, thinking of the problem. Maybe it was wisest to continue wearing the watch as if nothing were wrong, for unless she examined it closely nothing was wrong.

  Patrick would guess, unless Patrick had already guessed. He frightened her with his talent for seeing what wasn't there to be seen. His mind worked like a calculator: a quicksilver adding of digits, an immediate answer. He had not asked her much about the previous night because he knew. In disgust of her he held himself stiff against the knowledge. Not a word about Austin Weidman. Why isn't your "date" driving you home? Under normal circumstances her brother would have teased her but these were not normal circumstances.

  Cutting his eyes at her, outside when she'd dropped the garment bag in the snow. And she'd murmured quickly, shamefully, it's fine, I have it, it's fine. And he'd walked away, not another word.

  You know you want to, Marianne-why'd you come with me -f you don't?

  I'm not gonna hurt you for Christ's sake. Come on!

  Nobody plays games with me.

  And this was a strangeness she'd recall: how when she entered her room which was exactly as she'd left it the day before, yet irrevocably changed, she'd known what a long time she'd been away, and such a distance. As if she'd left, and could not now return. Even as, numbly, she stepped inside, shut the door.

  "Muffin! Hello."

  Her favorite cat of all, Muffin, fattish, very white with variegated spots, lay dozing in a hollow of a pillow on her bed, stirring now to blink at her, and stare.

  Away so long, and such a distance.

  She unzipped the garment bag and removed her toiletry kit, her badly stained satiny cream-colored pumps, wadded articles of underwear and the ripped pale-beige stockings, placed everything except the toiletry kit in the bottom of her wastebasket without examining. (The wastebasket was made of white-painted wicker, lined with a plastic bag for easy disposal; Marianne would be emptying it into the trash can herself in a few days, as usual. No one in the family would have occasion to see what she was throwing Out, still less wonder why.)

  She didn't remove the crumpled satin-and-chiffon dress from the garment bag. Didn't glance at it, or touch it. Quickly zipped the bag up again and hung it in the farthest corner of her Closet, beneath the sharp-tilting eaves. Then rearranged her clothes on hangers, not to hide the garment bag exactly but simply so that it wouldn't be seen, first thing she opened the closet door.

  Out of sight, out ofmind!-one of Corinne's cheerful sayings. Not a syllable of irony in it, for irony was not Connne's nature.

  In the closet, three white cotton cheerleader's blouses on wire hangers. Long ftiIl sleeves, double-button cuffs. If you were a cheer- eader at Mt. Ephr
aim High, generally acknowledged the most coveted of all honors available to girls, you were required to buy your own blouses and maroon wool jumper and to maintain these articles of clothing in spotless condition. The jumper was dry-cleaned of course but Marianne hand-laundered the blouses herself, starched and ironed them lovingly. Inhaling the good, familiar, comforting smell of white.

  Which she stooped now to inhale, closing her eyes.

  Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there.

  Corinne was so amusing! Like a mom on TV. She'd tell stories on herself- to the family, or relatives, or friends, or people she hardly knew but had just met, how she'd have loved to be a housewife, a normal American housewife, crazy about her kids, in her heart she loved housewifely chores like ironing, "calming and steadying on the nerves-isn't it?" yet in the midst of ironing she'd get distracted by a telephone call, or a dog or cat wanting attention, or one of the kids, or something going on outside, she'd drift off from the ironing board only to be rudely recalled by the terrible smell of scorch. "It's my daughter who's the real homemaker: Button loves to iron."