We Were The Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

  A father's curse! Michael Mulvaney Sr. had lived his entire adult life in the wake of his father's curse.

  So too he'd sent his own daughter away, not with a curse but in the name of love. He believed, he would swear to his very death-it had been love.

  And how strange time was. Once you veered away from shore, and flew along, borne by the river's current beneath the bridge and Out to what looked like sea, as if it hadn't been the Allegheny after all but the mouth of a vast dark thundercloud_sea_somewhere you can't recognize. What the hell is this? H/ho's making these decisions?

  After thirty years living a bachelor's life again. But the world wasn't a bachelor's world now. Not the world of Michael Mul- vaney's young adulthood when he'd thumbed his nose at the old man, Go to hell yourse-fl and left Pittsburgh forever.

  Now there was a confusion of times, places. It was like switching TV channels-you never knew where exactly you were, or how long you'd be there.

  How Corinne had cried, cried. It wasn't like her, and it scared him. That first full day the three of them were in the new house in Marsena when Corinne hadn't the manic excitement of preparing to move, the great effort ahead. She'd cried like a helpless child 11'here are our trees? Oh IWichael, where are our trees? As if she hadn't actually noticed until then, hadn't allowed herself to look, to know what the new property was: a plot of land less than an acre.

  So he'd gotten good and drunk, left her there bawling. What good would it do, the two of them bawling together like sick calves?

  Thinking A man dese?ves some freedom for Christ's sake. A furlough. If he wanted to drink, he'd drink. Fed up with being made to feel guilty every time he popped a can of ale, or stayed away missing a meal, or took the name of the Lord "in vain" making his Christian wife flinch. She wasn't his mother for Christ's sake.

  The first place he lived was a good-sized furnished apartment overlooking Outwater Park, in Yewville. The second was a smaller apartment on Market Street, New Canaan. The third was a room and a half on East Street, Port Oriskany. He'd never again return to the Chautauqua Valley, that was a dead region to him now.

  Working where he could. As often as he could. Nonunion, hourly wages. Sure he'd had serious problems of attitude, adjustment, at first. Michael Mulvaney's new status being not employer as he'd been for nearly thirty years but employee. A sensation like stepping into an elevator but there's no elevator there, just the shaft.

  At first, he'd tried to get managerial jobs, salesman positions. But there were none of these jobs available, at least not for him. That look of belligerence in his face, the tight, taut mouth. He'd caught sight of himself once in a window, looked like a pike. Slamming along. Impatient, furious. Forcing a smile. A pike's smile. How quickly he was recognized: one glance at this job applicant entering an office not entirely clean-shaven, clothes just slightly rumpled, the hurt puckered furious pike-look in his eyes.

  Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken.

  Once, in Port Oriskany, a young bespectacled man smirked uttering these words Sorry Mr. Mulvaney, that position has been taken but Michael Mulvaney didn't slink away like a kicked dog, instead he leaned over the man's desk trembling with indignation shoving his fine-stubbled jaw and bared teeth into the bastard's face. Yes? Taken by assholes like you?

  That story-how many times he'd tell it, for the remainder of his life. In how many bars and always it would get laughs. True belly laughs. Even the women, they'd laugh-he was a man who loved making a woman laugh

  It had done him good to see that prissy bastard cower, the quick fear in the bastard's eyes. One of the enemy. His comeback hadn't gotten him a job in that office nor any job ever again in which he would wear a fresh-laundered shirt, a tie and coat and gleaming leather shoes, and be called "Mr. Mulvaney." He, who'd once had capital and assets approaching two million dollars. But still it had done his soul good.

  Two years, three years, five years-he would lose count. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States now and poor sad Jimmy Carter was not only gone but forgotten. Supplanted as if he'd never been.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Working where he could, where they'd hire him on. Scanning the HELP WANTED-MALE columns of the papers. Some employers knew him-which was good sometimes, bad others. He was a damned good worker but he did have a short fuse. He was good at giving orders but not so good at taking them. Where he couldn't be foreman, things didn't always work out. Crews of mostly younger men. Somedays, he wasn't in top physical condition. Hacking cough from those damned cigarettes he couldn't seem to kick, puffy boiled-looking face, the bleary no-color of eyes determined not to give away the beat beat beat of a hangover's pain. Also, his joints were giving him trouble-fingers, shoulders, knees. Also, he needed glasses but never got around to getting them.

  Working where he could, and when. He let his employers know he'd had plenty of experience with roofing, siding, construction but he never went into details. Last thing you want the bastards to know is who you are. Your true identity. No one wants to hire a man who, -f there was justice in the world, deserves to be the one behind the desk hiring.

  For a while he was foreman for an Elmira roofing-siding company and that was a decent-paying job, nobody knowing the name Mulvaney. But there were "temperamental differences" with the owner so he moved on, to Cheektowaga, to Batavia, to Rochester. He couldn't hope to get into the trade union, too old and anyway you need to know the right people. Bastards have the unions shut up tight. Exactly why, as an employer, he'd hated the unions. Roused him to fury, those sons of bitches telling him, Michael Mulvaney, what to do. What hourly wages to pay, overtime and social security and pension and sick-time and the rest of it-bulishit. No man of integrity and pride can tolerate such intrusion.

  Y'know what he hoped?-that Reagan would bust their asses, all of them. Starting with the air controllers and blitzing them all.

  Sure he believed in the free market, "deregulation"-if that was what it sounded like, what it seemed to promise.

  Life is dog-eat-dog, why not acknowledge it? He'd been cheated of the business he'd spent a lifetime building up, his farm-home had been taken from him, his family. Sucked dry and tossed down like a husk. His enemies ganging together against him, bringing him to ruin.

  Blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in heart-poor deluded Christians you want to laugh in their faces. Turn the other cheek?- you get walloped.

  Michael! You don't mean that. That's hardening your heart to God, you know you're not such a man.

  Which was exactly why he'd left her. Threw his things into the Lincoln and fled. A woman too good for him from the first and love shining in her eyes he didn't deserve and had never deserved and the strain of keeping up the deception was too much. Driven out into the world by a father's curse, aged eighteen.

  I love you so, Michael. I wish I could give you peace, peace in your troubled heart.

  Yes he knew she was praying for him-he could practically feel the vibrations in the air. Wanting to cup his hands and yell, in the direction of Marsena, Stop! Cease and desist! Let me go!

  At least, he believed she was in Marsena. He hoped to hell she hadn't moved to Salamanca to live with that old maid-mutt cousin of hers Ethel.

  Maybc she'd gone to live with Marianne. That thought, like a beacon shining too brightly into his eyes, he couldn't deal with.

  High Point Farm. The memory of it, the lavender house atop a wooded hill. He couldn't deal with that, either.

  It was in Rochester that his drinking gradually increased until such a time that he was never what you'd call sober nor was he (he believed) what you'd call drunk. If he drank just to this degree he could anesthetize himself so there was minimal danger of flashes of memory of High Point Farni; but if he drank too much, got sick to his stomach, vomiting and choking-there was that danger. And afterward a sensation of something spongy, swelling inside his head.

  Oh, but he couldn't bear it!-the farm in its final days. The pickup had been sold. The bar
nyard was deserted. Weeds grew everywhere. Most of the animals and the fowl were gone-the new tenants said they were "leery" of taking on the Mulvaneys' creatures, and preferred to populate the farm with their own. You can't blame them, Corinne said, they're worried about-well, diseases. But, God damn them to hell, Michael Mulvaney did blame them.

  On Michael's last day at High Point Farm he'd tramped about the property, alone. He saw a half dozen deer grazing in the back pasture, drifting into the orchard. He saw that the pond had become so shallow, choked with cattails and rushes, it was hardly more than a declivity in the earth. And what a rank-rotting odor lifted from it-you had to know something had died there, maybe a deer run to death by dogs, only a part of the carcass remaining. But he didn't really know, and didn't want to know. Let the fastidious new tenants deal with it.

  In fact, Michael Mulvaney had moved out three days before Corinne andJudd, before the moving van's arrival. He couldn't bear to be a Witness to the very end. His excuse was he had business in Marsena and Corinne and Judd could oversee the actual moving, the details; he'd be at the Marsena house, preparing for the arrival. In the new house he slept on the floor in an old thermal sleeping bag belonging to one of the children. He brought Foxy along with him, for company. That, and a fresh quart bottle of whiskey.

  Poor Foxy: whimpering and shivering in this new, unfamiliar place. Why was his master behaving so strangely? Why was his master alone, sleeping on bare floorboards? The red setter Michael remembered as a puppy and then a sleek, slender young dog with liquid-brown eyes was now thick-bodied, losing his eyesight, frequently off balance; he had a tendency to favor his right front paw, though the vet couldn't find anything wrong with it. He was just an old, aging dog. A dog's life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to he a witness.

  "It's a dog-eat-dog world, eh, Foxy? You're a dog, but you've been shielded from it until now."

  I love you so, Michael darling. Why is it co hard now for you to love me?

  These words were whispered, never spoken aloud. And then only in the dark. When, under pretense of sleep, he could pretend not to hear.

  Yet he heard, and turned away; didn't care to hear again, so he began to sleep elsewhere in the house. Another wife might have screamed Bankrupt! Failure! Impotent! but never Corinne who had given her life to him, and would surely have died for him. Hadn't she sacrificed their only daughter to his blind, raging self-righteousness?

  So Michael had stopped coming upstairs to their bedroom, to sleep in that bed, weeks and even months before the move to Marsena. Long before his actual declaration of banknmptcy. Maybe it had nothing to do with the collapse of Mulvaney Roofing and the public humiliation, maybe it was simply the wearing-down of their marriage. Like one of Corinne's "antique" clocks that one day ceased ticking.

  Frequently Michael fell asleep on the sofa in the family room, or in Mike's room where the bed was neatly made, surfaces kept free of dust, in readiness for their Marine son should he come home to visit. (He'd come home only twice, in three years. For brief weekend visits.) He slept on top of the bed, inhaling a faint melancholy dogodor-poor Silky, a ghostly presence. Drifting off to sleep amid shiny sports trophies and plaques, framed team photos signed by all the boys, laminated newspaper features and banner-headline clippings devoted to "MULE" MULVANEY. In that almost mystical state of consciousness that accompanies just the right degree of drunkenness Michael Mulvaney came to realize It's a boy's world in America-hut only -f you're a winner.

  Once he woke with his feet tangled in the bedspread, alert and agitated. Somehow confused thinking he was Mule Mulvaney. Damned good-looking kid, but young. Smart-ass. What's required is a few punches to the jaw to wise a kid like that up.

  Married but no longer married. A husband and father but no longer. He'd taken away with him from the house in Marsena, carelessly dumped into a box with financial papers and documents, a handful of snapshots from Corinne's albums. Stone cold sober, he dared not look at these snapshots; drunk, he had no need.

  There were women symnpathetic to him, women he'd buy drinks for to whom he spoke not bitterly but bemusedly of his past life-you could sum it up, thirty years of it, in one word: Betrayal.

  How exactly was he betrayed?-that's nobody's business.

  Saying, I don't discuss my personal 1-fi- with anybody.

  In Rochester, he worked for Ace Roofing & Siding, not regular employment but when they called him. The business was run by a man given to dishonest tactics, cheating on estimates, inflating bills, substituting inferior materials where he knew he could get away with it. Michael Mulvaney saw, and saw that others of the work crew saw, but they said nothing. Ace hired nonunion workers, you had to be grateful. At this time Michael lived on a south-side street above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Restaurant & Takeout where sometimes he ate, pork-fried rice and "chow mein" which were the cheapest dishes on the menu and he'd drink from a bottle in a paper bag placed discreetly beside him in the booth. He was a sunburntlooking man in his fifties with squinty eyes, deep creases in his cheeks, fleshy-muscled shoulders and arms, a hefty paunch growing out of his midriff like a giant fetus. He wore not workmen's clothes but rayon shirts, gabardine trousers. Not a visored work-cap but a fedora. He chain-smoked Camels, the first and second fingers of his right hand were stained the color of jaundice. Black raging moods swept over him like sudden storms in this part of New York State south of Lake Ontario but when he was in a good mood he was in a j-'ood mood and let the world know. Smiling at the shy Chinese waiter who looked like a kid of fourteen and even, when he had the cash, tipping generously-a one-dollar bill discreetly tucked beneath his plate. In the Golden Pavilion, sitting in his usual booth, he felt pulsing-warm faded-pink neon light falling upon his face from the sign in the front window like the blessing of a God distant and rapidly receding as in that terrifying vast universe of which his son Patrick used to speak, with glib schoolboy pedantry, a lifetime ago.

  Patrick. One who'd betrayed. As young as eleven, that frowning scrutiny had been unnerving. Gone away to fancy Cornell University and never returned. Four weeks before his graduation they'd received from him a terse, typed pronouncement on a sheet of paper with the letterhead CORNELL UNIVERSITY DEPT. OF BIOLOGY MEMO.

  The first words as if he'd spat into their faces. When you read this I will be a thousand miles away.

  Corinne had almost fainted, reading these words thinking the boy had killed himself

  And there was Judd. Damn, it was heartbreaking, the mistakes he'd made with his youngest child-who'd turned stubborn, and hotheaded like his dad, moved out of the Marsena house and refused to speak to Michael. Well-let the kid go. He'd be sorry. Maybe he was sony, right now. Serve him right.

  And there was Marianne.

  He could talk about his sons, his sons who'd betrayed him, but never about his daughter.

  Once, he'd bloodied a woman's nose, she'd beea pawing through his things and came across the hoard of mostly c:eased and torn snapshots and waved a snapshot of Marianne in his fice asking was this his daughter. Might've killed her, he hadn't been so drunk.

  Marianne he'd loved most. Who'd hurt him most. Betrayed. He could not always remember why, exactly. But there wa- a reason. Michael Mulvaney always had reasons. Oh, but never mind about Marianne-have another drink.

  It was in the Golden Pavilion that he and Mike Jr. lad a meal together. Their first in years, and it would be their last. Late August 1986. How Mike had tracked his elusive father down in Kochester, the elusive father didn't know and didn't inquire. It was a humidsulfurous evening. About ninety degrees and a single antiquated airconditioning unit vibrating at the rear of the narrow tunnel of a restaurant. The look in Mike Jr.'s eyes taking in this place his ravaged old dad was bringing him-just downstairs from where he lived! The look in Mike Jr.'s eyes taking in his ravaged old dad. Staring, and swallowing. For a moment speechless. They'd shaken hands, wasn't that what you did? Mike Mulvaney Jr. wa- a Marine sergeant now, a grown man, in ne
at pressed civilian clothes and his hair trimmed so it looked sculpted on his head. Yet those were a boy's eyes, a scared-son's eyes, seeing Michael Mulvaney after how many years.

  "Not exactly the Blue Moon, eh?"-the old dal laughed wheezily, leading Mike to one of the sticky plastic boo:hs. There was a smell of something brown-scorched in the stale-circalating air. They sat, and the effort began. Mike Jr. had to do most cf the talking. He'd driven up from-the information drifted past, lost in the air conditioner's rattling. He was engaged to be marricd to-the girl's name was something bright and perky ending in y. The wedding was scheduled for-whenever. Michael Mulvaney who was playing the role of the ravaged old alcoholic dad in this TV sitcom nodded and grunted and grinned and cupped his hand obligingly to his ear. Blame it on the goddamned airconditioner, he was missing syllables now and then.