We Were The Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Marianne listened respectfully as Ethel Hausmann rattled on. She interrupted only with difficulty, to ask about the family, and the funeral. What a shock-Grandmother Hausmann was dead! Marianne would never see her again! Yet she hadn't, in fact, seen her grandmother in years, nor even spoken with her on the phone since leaving High Point Farm. She had the idea (well, Patrick had been blunt about telling her) that the old woman had disapproved of her; of what Marianne had "done" with some high school boy or what "had happened to her"-whatever. Something embarrassing, shameful, to which no name need be given.

  Of course, Marianne had sent Christmas and birthday cards to Grandmother Hausmann, year after year. But her grandmother had never replied.

  Another person I've disappointed. No wonder Mom is so ashamed of me.

  Ida Hausmann, Will's wife. Of the old Ransomville farm. That generation of German immigrants, settlers in the Chautauqua Valley in the l88Os. Rarely had Marianne's grandparents driven to High Point Farm to visit Coriime and her family-"Too far to drive, for a meal," they said. Of course, they wouldn't have considered an overnight visit. They were farm people, after all. You know what disasters can happen on a farm, if you turn your back for five minutes

  So the Mulvaneys had had to drive to Ransomville, for Sunday dinner, once or twice a year. It always seemed more often-"Oh, already?" the children would cry. There was Grandmother Hausmann no one called "Grandma"-Grandmother who was Corinne's mother, but so different from her!-rarely smiled, still more rarely laughed, and then it sounded like thistles being cracked. Her hands smelled like onions and hadn't there been something oniony about her eyes? She complained of arthritis in a reproachful way so you'd know she blamed you for not having arthritis. Silly and sad, Marianne's mother offering up a litany of aches and pains, colds, mishaps to the older woman, to cheer her up. What was Grandmother Hausmann's secret, she seemed so tight and settled inside herself- She, too, believed in Jesus as her savior, but He was an angry Savior, an overseer of Hell.

  Driving to Ransomville, approaching the Hausmann farm, Michael Sr. would clown wickedly, wrapping a muffler around his neck-"Brrr! I'll sure be needing this!" Corinne would slap at him, hurt, or pretending to be hurt, as the children dissolved into giggles- Marianne, Mikey-Junior and Pj. in the back of the car, Judd squeezed up front between Dad and Mom. Mom would cry, "Michael Mulvaney, that isn't the least bit funny!" and Dad would wink into the rearview mirror at his adoring audience in the backseat, "It sure isn't, honeybunch. Brrr!"

  Once, Dad had actually worn a muffler during the visit, claiming, convincingly, that he had strep throat.

  Oh and what a stiff solemn, smile-and-get-through-it Sunday meal. Going to church services at the Lutheran church a few miles away never seemed to lighten the day for the elder Hausmanns. Marianne recalled grimly chewing gristly pork roast laced with fat, trying to moisten lumpy mashed potatoes with a thick, porous gravy. String beans, boiled to a mush. Winter squash. Of all the delicious pies you could bake, Grandmother Hausmann favored rhubarb.

  But afterward, on the long, two-hour drive home, how good to be just themselves again, the Mulvaneys! Giddy with relief and happiness in a vehicle driven by Dad! Dad would lead them singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with a much-repeated refrain- Buy me some pea-nuts and CRAC-KER JACK!

  I don't care if I NEV-ER COME BACK!

  Excepting Mom, who frequently had a headache, everyone shrieked with laughter; even Marianne who knew it wasn't very nice to make fun of her grandparents. Dad was merciless, now he was free to work off steam, "Some households you have to leave to appreciate, eli?" and, "The taste of begrudged food is unmistakable, isn't it, kids?" Morn slapped at Dad across Judd until finally she too broke down in giggles. "Oh, well," she said, sighing. "It's just an older generation's way, I think. Not the Mulvaney way, thank God."

  "Amen to that," Dad said loudly.

  As a reward for all they'd endured, Dad would swing over to Mt. Ephraim instead of coming directly home. To the Tastee-Freez, or the Royal Ice Cream Parlor next to the movie theater. A cheer would go up from the back seat. "Yayyyy Dad-dyyyy!"

  A nasal voice inquired suspiciously, "Marianne? Are you there?"

  "Y-Yes, Aunt Ethel." Marianne was crying in that breathless hiccuppy way she hated.

  "The funeral is Thursday at eleven, as I've said. At their church." A pause. An intake of breath. "But your mother doesn't want you to attend, I'm afraid."

  "Excuse me? What?"

  Primly Ethel Hausmarin said, like one obliged against her wishes to deliver the worst news, "Corinne does not want you to come to her mother's funeral, please don't ask me why. She doesn't know I'm calling you, even. But I thought I should. I do feel some moral obligation. After all, Ida F-Iausmann was your grandmother." There came a sound of a nose being blown, a moist peevish sound.

  Marianne was stunned. She couldn't think of a single thing to say except a faint, "Oh."

  "Yes, I thought you would want to know. Your Grandmother Hausmann is dead." There came another weighty pause, an intake of breath. Then, more curiously, "Do you even have another grandmother, Marianne? A Mulvaney grandmother?"

  The words Muluaney grandmother had a strange, surreal sound in Aunt Ethel's mouth. Like the improbable name of one of Patrick's microorganisms.

  Marianne stainmered, confused, "I-don't know."

  "Don't know if you have a grandmother! Your father's own mother! Really, Marianne. There's a sorry tale there, I don't doubt." Ethel Hausmann spoke both reproachfully and with satisfac tion. "I have to hang up now, Marianne. Don't tell your mother I called? She might object to me jntefferiflg in her precious -mily."

  "Y-Yes?"

  "Well, I'm not! I just think it's a decent Christian thing to do."

  "Thank you, Aunt Ethel, I-"

  "I'm not really your `aunt,' you know, Marianne. To be tech-cal, we're just coUSlfl5 twice removed."

  Ethel Hausmafln hung up. Marianne stifled a sob that turned into laughter sudden and lunatic as a sneeze.

  She would -o to the funeral! She would be welcome!

  Marianne hurried from the parlor- tears dirnniing her eyes, not quite seeing where she was headed so that she nearly collided with a young man squatting just outside the doorS It was Hewie, one of the Co-op members, repairing a collapsed step with hammer and nails. Had he been --vesdropping on Marianne's conversations? He squinted up at her as she was about to fly past, remar-ng, -Matia11fl--Y0u need a ride anywhere- like to a funera' or anything, I can drive you. I've got a cat."

  Marianne's face stung with tears. She hadn't time to consider Hewie's offer. Or the way he looked at her. She laughed and said, halFway up the stairs, "Oh, yes_thanks!"

  So it happened that Marianne slipped away, at 6:00 AM. of an overcast May morning, to be driven to Ransom1Ti-, to Ida Hausmann's funeral to which she was not invited, riding with Hewie the Co-op carpenter in his big old battered-plum boat of a 1969 Dodge. Did she imagine it?-a vague impression of someone peering at them out of a downstairs window of the house.

  Yes of course Marianne was going to nilss her final exam, Marianne was going to fail the course, she hadn't given the exam a second thought. Farewell to IntrodUCti0-- to English Literature! She thought, Out of obscu-ity 1 came. Wasn't that solace enough? It was-

  So by 11 A.M., at about the midpoint of what would have been the exam, she found herself three hundred nifles away in rural Ransoinville, west of Mt. Ephraim in the Chautauqua Valley. Thank God, 1-lewie wasn't a talker! Nor a questioner! He was a taciturn young man with broodling dark eyes and a chronic downturfled mouth, usually unshaven, like the elusive Birk a Green Isle member who'd been taking courses at Kilburn State for years, nowhere near graduating. There were things whispered of Hewie that Marianne hadn't heard, nor cared to hear. She didn't believe in gossip. She'd warned Hewie at the start of their trip, "I might be-oh, I don't know-behaving kind of-strangely. It's my grandmother dying and this funeral and-you know. I hope-you won't judge inc harshly?" Hewie stared at Marianne as i
f he hadn't heard correctly. He muttered, almost inaudibly, with a scowl, "Hell, I wouldn't judge you at all, Marianne." He seemed annoyed at the suggestion.

  By 11 AM, the wind had been blowing boiled-looking clouds across the sky in a vivid procession and it had turned into a mild, fragrant, dazed sort of spring day. At least Marianne felt dazed. Staring avidly at everything she saw, rubbing her eyes to see if her vision was real. Why, she hadn't been in Ransornville for-four years? Yet the little crossroads town seemed unchanged, same two-pump gas station, convenience Store and tackle shop combined, a teenager's long-faded sign NIGHT CRAWLLERS BARGINS! The same post office- volunteer firemen's building, the same elevated railroad tracks, several wood-frame churches, surrounding farmland. The two-lane blacktop highway leading out into the country, to the remote Hausmann farm, was more cracked and potholed than Marianne recalled. And where was the Lutheran church, hadn't it been at a fork in the road? How many miles from town?

  Marianne was beginning to tremble, felt the need in her fingers to dart about, plucking at her hair or, like Mom's, fluttering. She clasped them, icy-cold, together in her lap.

  She would be welcome at her own grandmother's funeral, with the other Mu/vaneys-wouldn `f she?

  Mom would give a little cry and run to hug her, squeeze the breath out of her-wouldn't she?

  Ransoinville was in a remote corner of the Chautauqua Valley, far from the more populous Mt. Ephraim and the far more affluent, expanding area of Yewville and Route 58. Until the mid-Fifties, many farms didn't have electricity, let alone indoor plumbing. A place time has forgotten Corinne used to say, and Michael Sr. was quick to quip, R-ght! and we know why. In fact, the landscape was beautiful and possibly intimidating to a self-styled city boy. The rolling hills and abrupt glacier-ravines, the fast-running pebbled creeks, the sudden sweeping views, vast skies susceptible to change within minutes from overcast to clear, from clear to stormy, were very like the rockier, wilder stretch of High Point Road beyond the Mulvaney property where the asphalt became gravel. Human beings always think Patrick once said how, on the other side of their property line, civilization ends. Marianne couldn't have explained what Patrick meant by that but she guessed he might be right.

  So strange, and distressing-about Patrick. He'd telephoned her Just after Easter, the previous month, a midnight call when Marianne was groggy with exhaustion, wakened by Felice_Marie for this "emergency" call from her brother, and she'd been scarcely able to comprehend Patrick's excited rushed words, let alone what they nieant. He wanted her to know, he said, that justice had been executed; and that he was dropping out of Cornell before graduating, he'd decided not to go to graduate school just yet but to forestall making any decisions about the future. He was going to travel, he said- maybe the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains. Marianne listened in horror. She'd stammered Yes but Patrick aren't I coming to your graduation? Aren't all the Mulvaneys coming to your graduation? I've got May 30 marked on my calendar, oh Patrick wait- Afterward, the call had seemed like some bizarre dream. Marianne was increasingly susceptible to bizarre dreams now that she'd taken on so many of Birk's duties in the Co-op and fell into bed ex- hausted every night. But the most bizarre thing about Patrick's call was that he'd sounded so happy, so relieved, so_un_Pinch_like. Yet he'd been delivering catastrophic news, hadn't he?

  Now that Hewie had actually turned Onto Marianne's grandparents' road, now that they were actually approaching the Lutheran church at the crossroads-there, suddenly, it was: dull gray stone, gaunt and so much smaller than Marianne rememberedMatian- began to feel panic. It was that fear, her special fear. A cold sweat beaded on her forehead and in her armpits. She heard herself plead in a whisper, "Hewie, I guess I-can't." The young man, driving the rattly Dodge in his carefuh steadfast way, leaned an ear toward her. "-I guess I'm not ready." What a shock to see amid a dozen or so vehicles parked at the church Corinne's old Buick station wagon 4-H sticker on a rear window, faded ELECT CARrER_MO-DALE `76!!! on the rear bumper. Several people, black-garbed, stood in the church doorway-Is one of them Morn? Is one of them Dad? Ludicrous among farmers' modest cars and pickups was a long black hearse out of place as a giant fancy polished boot from a fashionable store window.

  Grim-faced oniony.snie]Jing Ida Hausmann, with her disdain for what she called showy earthly vanities, squired about the Ransomville countryside one final time, in that!

  Marianne pleaded, hiding her face so she couldn't be seen by anyone at the church, "Oh, just drive by, Hewie! Please! I-can't."

  Waiting for Hewie to reason with her, for hadn't they come a long distance only to rush on by like fugitives, wasn't the older, male presence always one to reason with her-but Hewie didn't utter a word. He was like that at the Co-op, too-broody eyes and mouth so you'd imagine he was thinking deep thoughts, contrary thoughts, even mutinous thoughts (Abelove often cast uneasy glances at Hewie, while presiding over meetings), but Hewie never made trouble, rarely spoke at all. He scowled, that was about it. Yet you couldn't judge whether Hewie's scowls were meant to be smiles, or not meant to signal anything at all, just nervous tics. He was goodlooking in a carved-walnut way, his dark hair grown shaggy past his ears. A man like that is sof-ustrating! Amethyst complained, sighing. Marianne was genuinely baffled. Frustrating? Why?

  Atop the hill beyond the Lutheran church there was a rutted cow lane, Marianne asked Hewie quick to turn ofl- he maneuvered the Dodge in and parked behind a screen of straggly trees. In such a confused State she halfway forgot anyone was with her, and might be wondering at her sanity, Marianne hurried out of the car, stumbled into a field, thistles and briars tugging at her clothes. Stealthily she made her way downhill behind the church to the edge of the cenietery; crouched there to wait for her grandmother's funeral to proceed to the grave site-you could tell poor Ida Hausmann's destination, a gouged-out angry-seeming red-dirt rectangle in the moist earth. Oh, what a heartbreaking sight! If it wasn't for Jesus Christ, and His Love, and His promise of Heaven and l-fr-everlasting__it couldn't be looked upon at all.

  Was she hidden well enough?-behind a partly collapsed wall of rocks dragged from the fields and cemented together decades ago, and one of the largest tombstones in the cemetery, a granite pedestal and a human-sized Stone angel with weatherwom but soaring wings. All about Marianne mayflies and gnats and what looked like junior honeybees droned and buzzed. Hewie descended the hill behind her, near-silent in his soiled running shoes as a deer. Marianne was aware of him yet not aware of him, at the same time-she'd shut her eyes tight, clasped her hands together, bowed her head in prayer. Inside the stone church, a minister was intoning words of scripture over Grandmother Hausmnann's casket. Whatever exactly the Lutheran service was, it would be prayer, humble submission to God's will and Jesus' love. Lo, lam with you always, even unto the end of the world.

  Marianne told herself: if Corinne knew she was crouching out here hiding behind the cemetery, she couldn't truly be angry, or even embarrassed, so long as none of the others knew. That was always the case with Mom-it was Marianne who'd fussed, fussed, fussed over her 4-H projects, hand-stitching her hems perfectly or tugging out the thread and beginning again, preparing her baked goods from scratch and never, never using a mix, while Mom took the position, which she claimed was the American-pragmatist position, that if things work just fine who's to know exactly how they're working, and what business is it of other people's, anyway? They all loved Morn's slapdash cooking that was delicious, you didn't need to know that she'd rushed into the kitchen just in time to wrest chicken pieces from a cat's mouth, or hastily scraped up from the floor, where it had fallen in an appalling heap that might nonetheless be reshaped by hand, some pie, pudding, casserole or quiche. The last time Marianne had spoken with her mother, the evening of Easter Sunday, Corinne had evaded Marianne's shy questions about the farm (was it truly for sale? were they really thinking of moving across the Valley, to Marsena?-but they didn't know anyone in Marsena, did they?) and made some cheery glimmering remark about Marianne's rag-quilt l-
fe at the Green Isle Co-op. she'd sounded halfway envious, You young people! practically in a hippie commune and having the time of your life, not like my generation, I was training to be a public school teacher and your father had been on his own, working, self-supporting since the age of eighteen. Marianne had smarted at the allegation, somehow the term hippie didn't strike the ear right, or justly, for Marianne like most of the other Co-op members worked very hard even if, academically, she hadn't all that much to show for it after five or six semesters. But of course she hadn't objected, just laughed uneasily as Corinne chattered on. Rag-quilt l-fes was that how her life was adding up to, in the judgment of her mother? Ragquilt l-fe: well, maybe that was apt.

  But Marianne had made an effort to improve her usual appearance for the occasion of Grandmother Hausmann's funeral-surely Corinne would note, and appreciate, that? She'd shampooed her hair until it shone, scrubbed her hands and dug dirt out from beneath her broken-off nails, soaked in the big claw-footed tub on the top floor of the Co-op (not much used, you had to scour the tub with steel wool afterward to remove the stains, no one had time for anything much except showers) until she was clean, clean, clean. For the first time in a long time. (Except now, nervous as a cat, sweat- ing-what a sight she probably looked!) On her head, not exactly straight, was a wide-brimmed black straw hat with a crinkly black straw band from the Second-Time-'Round Shop in Kilburn, and from the same shop an ankle-length long-sleeved waistless dress of a similar soft-crinkly fabric, midnight blue that could pass for the black of mourning. Unfortunately the dress was too large for her and had a dipping boat-neck that showed her sharp collarbone so, inspired, in haste, she'd wrapped a strip of black velvet around her throat with a tiny glass ruby pasted on it-a "touch," Amethyst insisted, the dress badly needed. On her feet were a pair of black "ballerina flats" and she wore gauzy black-mesh knee-length stockings. Seeing Marianne rush downstairs that morning, where he was already waiting, Hewie glanced up at her startled, his downturned mouth actually dropping, as if he'd never set eyes on such a person before.