We Were The Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The thought that she might not have come, and he'd be alone that evening, filled Patrick with dismay.

  Or-something had happened to her? In Kilburn, or on the bus, or here in Ithaca? He was the one who'd arrived almost an hour late.

  The interior of the Trailways bus depot in downtown Ithaca was a shabby slipping-down sort of place, connected with a diner; there was a prevailing odor of cigarette smoke, griddle-grease, wet wool (it had been a chill, rain-darkened April day, rife with puddles) and inadequately washed human bodies. An odor of the left-behind, the losers of America: everyone who could afford it traveled by air now. Or, poor even as Patrick Mulvaney, drove his own car. Passengers for the now-boarding bus shuffled out of the depot and only a few parties remained. An elderly black man muttering to himself- trying to get a locker open; a very pale teenaged boy, with short, spiky hair and spindly limbs, nodding off against a rear wall; two light-skinned black girls, giggling and whispering together; a middle-aged woman with her heavyset, apparently retarded son, Patrick's age; a sailor, duffel bag on his lap, smoking, and casting furtive glances at the giggling girls-or was it at the sleeping boy beyond, who looked about twelve years old? A disheveled man smelling of burnt orange peels approached Patrick with-what?-a ballpoint pen to sell-but canny Patrick turned away and pushed through the doors to the outside. There were benches here, and a few stragglers sitting on theni, but no Marianne.

  He realized how much he wanted to see her, now she wasn't in sight.

  He realized how much he was depending on this visit of hers, he who had so few friends-well, no friends at all, exactly.

  Prowling the bus-boarding area, circling the depot to check all the buses in sight. Thinking just possibly he'd gotten the time wrong and Marianne was only now due, 6 P.M.?-but she wasn't here, wasn't anywhere. He stared grimly as a northbound bus, up from Binghamton en route to Syracuse, discharged passengers. All strangers. The Erie, Pennsylvania bus, with its Kilburn connection, had obviously come and gone an hour ago. Patrick saw an Ithaca patrolman talking with a security guard and approached them to ask if they'd seen Marianne but at the last moment he passed on by, he was too confused. He could not think how to describe his sister! His mind had gone blank and his last clear memory of her was of the radiantly smiling cheerleader in the maroon jumper and long-sleeved perfectly starched white cotton blouse, eyes shining, curly-brown hair bouncing as in an advertisement for American happiness itself "Button" Mulvaney. Immortalized on Mom's bulletin board.

  Except: hadn't those snapshots been discreetly removed, hidden away or even destroyed. Two years ago.

  Patrick pushed through the swinging doors into the waiting room another time and to the ticket counter. Asked the severely frowning middle-aged woman behind the counter if she'd happened to see a girl come into the waiting room, after the 5:05 P.M., bus from Erie? A girl about nineteen? The woman said no, not that she recalled, with a shrug of one shoulder to indicate she wasn't trying very hard to recall, Patrick's question was naive. "Well, she'd look younger, I guess," Patrick said, faltering. "My sister. But she doesn't look much like me, she's Sort of-" Again his mind went blank. It was like a blackboard carelessly erased, by hand. The ticket-counter woman shook her head, whether meaning "no" or in bemused pity of Patrick who was visibly perspiring, glasses sliding down his nose.

  It was 6:07 p.M. And then it was 6:12 P.M. Patrick had Marianne's number to call at the Green Isle Co-op, Kilburn, New York but he dreaded making the call, as always there would be happy frantic mealtime-sounding noises, and whoever would answer, male or female he couldn't always determine, would yell Marl-anne! Hey Marl-anne! Who's seen Marl-anne! Telephone for Marl-anne! and he'd shut his eyes tight bitterly resenting this stranger who so familiarly called his sister's name; resisting the impulse to imagine her life there amid young and presumably attractive, idealistic men and women like herself, in the

  Co-op's residence which Marianne had described to Patrick as a big old ramshackle inn with several greenhouses, two acres of good rich soil where they grew their own vegetables, communally-owned cars and a pickup truck. The residence, in "condemned condition," had been bought by Kilburn College, then leased to the Co-op for a token payment, one hundred dollars yearly; the Co-op members had repaired it, furnished it, made it "like home." No, Patrick didn't want to call the Green Isle Co-op just now.

  It was 6:20 p.M. Patrick circled the waiting room, asked a woman if she'd go into the women's rest room to check if his sister was inside but of course she was not. His lips moved silently. Marianne. Marianne! He should have sought out Zachary Lundt, long ago, and killed him. In his fantasy, a smart-boy A-student fantasy, he'd force his sister's rapist to swallow poison-Lysol: flaming agony, mouth, esophagus, stomach, liver. It would look like suicide- And not detectable, as the hydrogen sulfide stink bomb, the proudest project of Patrick Mulvaney's high school career, had not been detected, so flit as he knew. (No, Patrick hadn't made any inquiries about who the prankster might be. That was what guilty parties always did: couldn't resist. But Patrick, who was smarter than smart, could resist, for all his life. Just watch!) Weak, breathless, he leaned against the badly scratched wall of lockers, too shaky to continue pacing yet not wanting to sit down amid the shabby, torn plastic seats and relinquish his advantage which was the advantage of height. But his left eye, which always betrayed him, was dimming with fatigue. The thy had begun so long ago, in a rainy, snow-gritty twilight before dawn, in dreams in which Marianne and his Biology of Organisms lab were mixed together-he could scarcely remember. Awake before dawn in his third-floor room in the stucco house on Cook Street, waking beneath the eaves of his dormer bedroom, as at High Point Farm, his quick-pulsing nerved-up body waking him in lieu of an alarm. Sometimes in this strange place in Ithaca hundreds of miles from home he heard in his sleep a rooster crowing, and another rooster crowing in reply. Now it was spring, the early-morning cries of red-winged blackbirds, cardinals. And Wake up kiddos! Wake-up thne kiddos! and Mom's friendly whistle. Smelled frying bacon, for always Mom insisted upon good, solid, hot breakfasts, no going with just cereal dumped in a bowl, breakfast was the most important meal of the day Mom and Dad both insisted. He'd hear the dogs' toenails excitedly clicking on the kitchen floor as quickly he descended the stairs, Mom whistling to Feathers who trilled and warbled in return. And that damned radio station, out of Yewville, the announcer Mom swore by, her favorite. And Marianne would be downstairs already in the kitchen helping Mom get breakfast on the table, the two of them talking and laughing together, almost if he shut his eyes very tight he could see her: his lost sister.

  The man in the waiting room Patrick had assumed was a sailor obviously wasn't-he wore a navy-blue nautical-looking jacket, and biker's boots, and his dark hair grew long and greasy onto his neck. He was about thirty, unshaven, with quick-darting eyes and a damp mouth. As Patrick watched, the man rose stealthily, not straightening to his full height, carried the duffel bag with him and went to sit two seats from the oblivious sleeping boy.

  But the boy wasn't a boy!-Patrick saw, to his astonishment, that this was Marianne, his sister-her hair cut cruelly short, face waxy- pale and mouth slack, so without expression, in the daze of sleep, he hadn't recognized her. She looked so young, so-childlike. She wore a thin corduroy jacket, unbuttoned, and slacks with a stretch- band waist, and a flimsy white cotton T-shirt stamped in green GREEN ISLE co-oP; her left breast, the size and apparent hardness of a green pear, was sharply outlined by the ribbed white fabric. On her feet, badly worn sneakers and no socks. On the seat beside her was a grimy canvas bag, also stamped in green GREEN ISLE CO-OP, stuffed with items. Patrick saw to his disgust the man in the nautical jacket staring at his sister and in that instant saw her through the man's hungry eyes-a girl-boy, sexually tantalizing because sexually ambiguous, vulnerable, unprotected, provocative.

  "Marianne!"

  Marianne's bluish-bruised eyelids flew open, as if she hadn't been fully asleep.

  Pinch-style Patrick scolded, "
What the hell!-I've been waiting around this dump for you, for an hour! J-'Vhat are you doing asleep?"

  Cook Street, in heterogeneous Collegetown, near an edge of the gigantic Cornell campus, was one of Ithaca's numerous steep-banked streets: Patrick estimated it at about seventy degrees. His two-room apartment at 114 Cook was at the top of a moldering stucco house long ago partitioned into "apartments" for students, mainly foreign graduate students. Patrick had moved there the previous summer, from an even shabbier place on College Avenue. His fellow tenants were all young men, from India, China, Pakistan, studying science or engineer- ing; they were as fanatic as he about work and quiet, shyly friendly with him but not inquisitive-not very real to Patrick as, he guessed, he wasn't very real to them. Patrick might have lived more convemendy in a residence hail on campus, within closer walking distance of his classes, but he valued privacy, relative isolation. And he couldn't tolerate his fellow undergraduates' juvenile behavior, noise at all hours, binge-drinking, vomiting and brawling, ceaseless rock music.

  His problem was, and would always be I hate my own kind.

  The ugly scrawls in red Magic Marker on the lavatory walls, inside the toilet stalls, at Mt. Ephraini High School. Patrick Mulvaney, trembling with rage and humiliation, had tried to rub them off with his bare hands.

  MM; MARYANN MtJLVANY. MMMMM SUCKS COCK.

  At Cornell, no one knew the name MULVANEY. Twenty thousand students. When Patrick had driven through campus, Corinne beside him in the station wagon loaded with his things, he'd been dazed and euphoric contemplating size, distance, anonymity while Corinne wrung her hands in her lap fretting like any mom But you'll he lost here, oh Patrick you'll be lost here, no one will know who you are!

  At the rooming house on Cook Street, Patrick parked his Jeep at the curb. Expertly turned the wheels inward, put on the emergency brake. Marianne who had been exclaiming happily over the Cornell campus (Patrick had driven her through the main campus, along elegant East Avenue and down the long hill to Central Avenue and back then to Collegetown, wanting her to see the enormous sloping hill behind the dignified old buildings, windswept, beautiful even at twilight in drizzle) stared up at the smudged stucco house that was so ugly, so melancholy and squat-and seemed to be at a loss for words.

  Patrick laughed. "Not quite the `purple' house, is it?"

  Marianne murmured it was certainly a wonderful location, only a few blocks from campus.

  Inside, they climbed the stairs to the third floor. Patrick carried Marianne's bulky Green Isle bag over his shoulder. A cloying, oily odor of cooking wafted upward from the kitchen at the downstairs rear. There was a pervasive smell of mildew, mice, drains, Airwick. Patrick hoped that one or another of the other residents might be around so that he could introduce Marianne, but all doors were shut. My life here. My l-fe now. I'm no Mulvaney, see?-I could be anyone. Citizen of any country. Since their meeting, and their embrace, in the bus depot, Patrick had been telling Marianne, almost boasting, how much he liked Cornell. His courses, his professors, his work. He'd been singled out for praise frequently enough, the vast impersonality of the campus, which so upset other undergraduates, didn't faze him. In fact, it suited him. After the small-town claustrophobia of Mt. Ephraini- yes, it suited him. Here he worked, worked. He'd become inI-ituated with his work because it was meaningful, it was important, real. A course called Biology of Organisms-so exciting! He'd found a home you could say. A spiritual place. The more he concentrated on his work the more guaranteed his reward. Of course, he didn't work for a "reward"-exactly. But there was, he believed, a direct correlation. As there isn't always, in lifi-. Between what you do and what happens to you. What you deserve and what you get.

  Seeing Marianne's quizzical smile, Patrick quickly added that he didn't always work, of course. He had a few friends, he'd gone out with a few girls. No one special, but-he didn't always work. Sometimes when he got restless he went running-across Cascadilla Creek and down Central Avenue below the hill and over to Fall Creek, to the gorge (he would show her the gorge tomorrow: the famous suspension bridge from which suicidal students threw themselves) and across and around Lake Beebe and back to Cook Street-how many miles, he didn't know. He ran in a kind of trance, his mind stilled. In rapid motion, his body seemed to catch up with his metabolism, he felt right. And he didn't mind bad weather-"Reminds me of home." Other nights he'd go downtown, to State Street, where there was a cheap movie house, old and crummy and smelling of rancid popcorn, he'd see whatever was playing, the last show ended after midnight and he'd return home and work for maybe another hour or two-by the time he hiked up from State Street, the movie would have faded from his consciousness. He loved how unreal movies were, like certain people.

  Marianne looked at him oddly. "People?" They were in Patrick's apartment now, switching on lights. "But, Patrick," Marianne said, "people are real."

  "That's what I said," Patrick protested, with brotherly impatience, "-movies aren't real, the way people are real. You know-" setting Marianne's bag on the table, where a vase of fresh-cut flowers had been placed for Marianne's arrival, "-too real. Take themselves too seriously."

  He spoke with a boyish vehemence Marianne didn't seem to understand. But he was happy, couldn't have been happier. What vast relief Marianne was there with him, and safe. And would be returning to Kilburn the following afternoon.

  To prepare for Marianne's visit, Patrick had hauled the residence vacuum cleaner up two flights of stairs and thoroughly vacuumed both his rooms. He'd dusted windowsills, lampshades, blinds. Whistling, he'd mopped the floors. He'd been in a good mood: mildly apprehensive but not anxious. Oh Patrick I can't wait, I miss -OU SO! But are you sure you have time for me? He'd washed his several old_fashioned loose-fitting windows not only inside, top to bottom. but outside, as well as he could manage with Windex and paper towels, leaning out backward from the sill. (Told himself he was a roofer's son: accustomed to climbing on roofs, helping out Dad, he'd grown up unafraid of heights.) He'd scrubbed his miniature kitchen sink with steel wool and vacuumed, cleaned, scrubbed the third-floor bathroom Marianne would have to use, which Patrick shared with two other residents. (In theory, this bathroom was kept clean by the custodian, who lived on the ground floor; in fact, it was often dirty, unspeakably dirty. and Patrick didn't intend for his sister to see it in such a state.) He'd left his windows open a few inches to air out the rooms. Are you sure you have time for me Patrick, I know you work so hard. But I'd love to see you! He'd repositioned some of the artworks he'd taped to his walls, and added more: Xerox color reproductions of stained cell slides, many times magnified, bold primary colors and dreamy melting hallucinatory shapes, as striking, to Patrick's eye, as anything painted by Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso. Yet they were only lab slides, of cellular life as common as the grains of sand of all the oceans of the world.

  The first time he'd looked through a microscope, in seventh grade, he'd been shocked, and perplexed. So beaut-fu1, it almost hurts.

  Of course, he knew beauty doesn't exist. He hadn't known then but he knew now. Beauty is a matter of perspective, subjectivity. Cultural prejudice. You require a human eye, a human brain, a human vocabulary. In nature, there's nothing.

  Still, beauty gives comfort. Who knows why?

  Maybe Patrick Mulvaney would discover the answer, some day

  He'd removed from his bed the handmade rag quilt, red whitt and blue squares elaborately sewn together, of contrasting fabric: (cotton, denim, velvet, taffeta, corduroy, muslin) Corinne had giver him from home; folded it and hid it away in his closet. Because h- coi ddn't be sure that their mother had given Marianne anything quite so nice to take with her to Salanianca.

  On Dryden Road, at a florist's, he'd bought a dozen fresh-cut flowers. Yellow daffodils he hoped wouldn't remind Marianne too much of High Point Farm where they'd grown in wild profusion, multiplying each spring, bulbs planted by Corinne along the driveway, in the front lawn, Out near the road. And hyacinth too Corinne had grown, cutting sprigs to bring in
to the house, the sweet smell, so sweet. And jonquils with their papery petals. In a glass vase Patrick set these flowers on his single table, to greet Marianne.

  So she'd exclaim, as soon as she entered the room, Oh Patrick how nice. Wiping lightly at her eyes.

  He dreaded her crying. He was not going to cry, himself.

  Never cried. Couldn't remember the last time. When Prince had trampled him, practically knocked out his eye? God damn making him a freak for life.

  Still, no one's fault. In nature, no one's to blame.