We Were The Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There were Masha, Iriria and Olga, capuchin monkeys "abandoned by the roadside" in North Carolina, crowding against the wire fence, peering at Marianne as if they recognized her. There was Hickory the blind mule pony from New Jersey. There was Big Ben the Bengal tiger "rescued" from a traveling circus in New Mexico, there was Rocky the silver fox, three-legged since "misfortune in a hunter's trap" in Maine, there was Lena the llama, "donated" by a circus owner when he discovered she had cataracts in both eyes-a shy creature, handsome, the size of a mature deer, with white facial markings and the thick, nappy fur of a well-worn teddy bear. There was Joker the rhesus monkey, "sole survivor" of a shut-down research institute in New Mexico. There was Big Girl the Vietnamese potbellied pig who'd "outgrown her owner's affections" arid was donated to the zoo, an enormous gray creature, no eyes that Marianne could see, creased like a satchel and stretched out luxuriantly in the shade. There was Princess the jaguar, a beautiful black_spotted big cat discovered "abandoned and starved" by a roadside in Minnesota. There was Sweetheart the Adirondacks bobcat missing a leg, there was Hickey the hyena, another mistreated former zoo resident, there were Cinderella and Svengali the "Thoroughbred ex-trotters from Saratoga Springs." There were donkeys, sheep, goats in barnyard pens and free-ranging fowl of all sorts-chickens, ducks, geese.

  Shyly tame, there were `oose deer. The zoo's main attraction, apart from the big cats and the playful chattering monkeys, were Delilah and Samson the African elephants who had been slated for "termination" by their Oregon zoo owner unless a new home could be found for them, fast-"As devoted a married pair as you'll ever meet, and just look at the size of those feet-" Marianne laughed she wondered if Whittaker West had written that. She wondered if the entire zoo was his-his idea, his scheme.

  All that day, and it was a hot, dry, baking August day, Marianne wandered about the zoo. She helped staff workers scatter seed for the fowl; she helped a harassed young woman, name tag TRUDI, hose down the elephants and pigs. She'd forgotten to eat that morning, so made a meal, salty and delicious, of peanuts and popcorn from the vending machines marked BUY HERE 10 -EEI) ANIMALS- washed down with a lukewarm Royal Crown soda. More visitors caIne, more children. The zoo was a popular place, it seemed. Marianne sat for a while on a rickety bench in the shade of a big oak, watching Ezra, Smoke, ChaCha and Fleur the black bears being fed by their attendants-bare-chested teenaged boys who reminded her so much of her brothers, years ago, she had to shut her eyes finally. Moved to another rickety bench to watch Bo, Peep. Louie and LaLa, wild Barbary sheep in their compound, until she dozed off. Midafternoon, late afternoon. Sun-dappled shade. She had nowhere to go. She had found her way here, and had nowhere to go. But no-of course she did--he'd forgotten the little whitewashed wood-frame cabin in the Wayside Motor Court in-where was it? Not Spartansburg, she'd left Spartansburg weeks ago. The name would come to her in a minute, not that she needed a name to find her way back. Not that it mattered where she was exactly since she'd be moving on soon. When Muffin was returned to her she would know more clearly what her plans might be.

  She thought of this strange zoo, this haven for animals. The abandoned, the mistreated, the sick, the injured. "Survivors." What would Patrick think? It's ridiculous to be sentimental about animals, he'd said. The individual doesn't exist, only the species. And maybe not even the species, for long-every day, every hour, species are becoming extinct. Many of these species, animal, bird, reptile, amphibian, never known to Homo sapiens, at all.

  Religion is a comforting fantasy, Patrick said. Christianity above all. Just another story people tell themselves so they're spared telling themselves the story they don't want to hear.

  Marianne felt something nudge her elbow-"Oh, who are you? Are you hungry?" It was one of the tame deer. A young velvetyhorned buck the size of a children's pony. There didn't appear to be anything wrong with the deer-it wasn't missing a leg, and didn't seem to be blind. Marianne laughed in delight, feeding it the remainder of her popcorn, which it ate quickly out of the palm of her hand. That damp ticklish sensation, so familiar.

  Dr. West who'd seemed so impatient with her, begging for an aged cat's life, had told her to telephone next morning to hear how things had gone in Pittsburgh. Marianne fully intended to leave Stump Creek Hill and return to her dreary little rented cabin, and in the morning make that call, but somehow there she was lingering in the zoo; feeding more popcorn to the velvety-horned buck and a half dozen of his friends. Then she was feeding a bevy of longnecked white geese in a farther corner of the enclosure as an announcement came over a loudspeaker that the zoo was closing in five minutes. Then she was in a women's rest room not exactly hid- ing but hardly in view, either. Only at dusk did she emerge, feeling an immense sense of peace, tranquility. No 1-lomo sapiens here now, except for her- She made a nighttime meal of more peanuts- popcorn, soda from the vending machines, climbed from a bench to the crotch of an oak tree arid from the crotch of the tree to the roof of a shed behind Cinderella's and Svengali's compound where, very early the next morning, she was discovered just waking from a dazed, stuporous sleep-by Whittaker West himself, who stared at her in utter amazement. "Miss Mulvaney, what on earth are you doing here?"

  Marianne said, faltering, though it was the simplest sort of truth, "I just thought, yoi-t know-it would be easier. If I didn't go so far away.'

  Muffin was brought back from the Pittsburgh clinic, his left foreleg shaved, where the intravenous needle had gone in. He would regain his lost appetite and some of his lost weight, and would live for another thirteen months. By the time he died, for the second time it almost seemed, Marianne would have joined the fulltime staff of Stump Creek Hill and would have been living on the premises for most of those months. It was the most wonde-ul job, she never ceased to marvel, she'd ever had in her life; she answered the telephone, did both clerical and manual tasks in the office, helped design the new fund-raising flyer ("12 Good Reasons You Should Be Generous to Stump Creek Hill"-With photo inserts of twelve of the most appealing and photogenic resident animals); she helped in the dog- and cat..kennels, in which there were both pr- vate animals, temporary visitors, and animals for adoption; she helped with grounds maintenance in the zoo, which was her favorite work. She told Whit West she wished she'd gone to college, to study veterinary science; and of course Whit replied, in that contrary way of his, "Why speak in the past tense? There's nothing to stop you going, right now." Which made Marianne blush in confusion, and back off-that wasn't what she meant, at all.

  Rhoda told her. "Don't be hurt by Whit, he doesn't mean to be rude. It's just how he sounds."

  Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital -had been established by Whit partly through a family inheritance and numerous solicited donations. The property itself, fifteen acres and a once- elegant English_style manor house, had been willed to Whit by an

  elderly widow whose eleven Siamese cats he'd treated for yean- quite well, evidently. (One of the provisions of the widow's will was that the eleven Siamese should continue to live in the manor house exactly in the style to which they were accustomed, which Whit had no problem in obliging.) The widow's outraged relatives had contested the will and there had been a protracted lawsuit, with a good deal of publicity through western Pennsylvania-_"In certain quarters I was made out to be a gigolo," Whit complained, "in others, St. Francis of Assisi." In the end, Stump Creek Hili had emerged ninety percent victorious. The gilt-ceilinged ballroom of the house was used for the kennels; the glass-topped conservatory was an aviary for injured, convalescent and "retired" birds (among them an African gray parrot and a snowy white cockatoo--arnazing intelligent birds of a kind new to Mariatme); a former drawing room, still furnished with faded, Plush-upholstered chairs and sofas, now wonderfully shredded, was the site of "Kitty City" (a haven for as many as fifty cats sponsored by the well-intentioned who either could not or did not wish to bring them home). Most of the many smaller rooms of the house were empty; a few staff members lived on the premises, the rest commuted to thei
r nearby homes. When Marianne was hired on, Whit took her upstairs, throwing open doors to rooms he hadn't, it seemed, glanced into in a long time-"Take any room you want, if you can find one that's livable. And ifirniture, anything-_use your imagination." Whit himself lived in the carriage house adjoining the veterinary. He was obsessed with the place, he acknowledged_ma)-be a little crazy. "The thought of going away, on a vacation for instance, if only for a few days, fills me with panic," he said.

  Marianne said, "Oh, why would anyone ever want to leave here?" She could not imagine such a prospect. In the several years between her moving into the manor house, in August 1984, and Corinne's sudden call summoning her to Rochester, in October 1988, Mananne would not have been away from Stump Creek Hill for more than a day.

  So, inspired, Marianne put together a room for herself on the second Boor of the house, overlookii-g the tall oaks of the zoo and with a view of the elephants' rocky compound. What a bliss of housewifery, furnishing her room with odd wonderful shabbily elegant pieces of furniture scattered through the house! If only Corinne could see! But Marianne hesitated to call her mother for months. And even then, she was reluctant to confide in Corinne too fully. For what was so precious to Marianne it seemed at times a dream shc and Muffin had concocted together would appear less so to Corinne. "Rag-quilt life!" Corinne would sigh heavily over the phone. By implication, her own life was so fixed, so settled, so defi-i ed.

  The "blood cleansing" had certainly worked magic on Muffin. Even Whit West was surprised. As soon as Muffin was returned to Marianne, and settled into his new quarters, he began to regain his health; within a few days he appeared normal, or nearly-the shaved foreleg gave him a somber look, which his gleaming white fur and addled, clownish markings did not dispel. Whit said warningly, "Now you know this is oniy a temporary respite, don't you, Marianne?" Marianne murmured yes. She was prepared to accept Muffin's second death, whenevcr. Thinking I'm temporary, too. I don't expect anythinR more.

  At Stump Creek Hill, days melted into day-, weeks into weeks and months in a frenzy of activity punctuated by oases of relative calm-"Therapeutic boredom," Whit called it. Boredom! None of his staff shared Whit's attitude: they were grateful for quiet, when it came. But in a place devoted to so many infirm and elderly creatures, with an emergency veterinary service to which people brought animals in desperate states (run over on the highway, for instance), there was little quiet. The ballroom-kennels were filled with yipping, yamniering, yowling creatures like an anteroom of Hell. Thanks to Whittaker West's promotion of Stump Creek Hill, the shelter-zoo was known for hundreds of miles-through the Associated Humane Societies, across the continent-and so the telephone was forever ringing, people were forevcr driving up the sandy front lane with injured animals, strays, litters of unwanted puppies and kittens, ex-baby chicks and Easter bunnies grown to unwanted adult sizes. (Big Girl, the three-hundred-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig, had actually been given as a piglet to a child.) There were animals who were the casualties of other animals-severely dog-bitten dogs and cats, bucks terribly injured in rutting season by rival bucks-but most of the animal casualties, of course, were human afflicted. Starvation, mistreatment, actual torture. (1X/hit's boxer Luther had been, as a puppy, doused in kerosene and set on fire by boys.) After a few days at Stump Creek Hill, Marianne learned not to ask detailed questions. When someone told her bluntly, "Hey. You really don't want to know," she took them at their word.

  When Marianne was new at answering calls, she had a conversation with a distraught woman who told her she was "doomed to die" despite surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, and what worried her most was the fate of her two cats. "Mimi and Fifi have no one but me. They're not young. What will happen to them? As soon as I'm gone-what will happen to them?" The woman broke down sobbing and it was all Marianne could do not to break down herself Marianne promised she would personally take care of the cats. Without telling Whit, she drove ten miles to fetch them in the Chevy pickup-a pair of sleek-furred black cats with white-marbled markings and long tails prehensile as monkey tails. Their skeletal- thin mistress, weeping as she saw them off with Marianne, could have been no older than forty. She reminded Marianne of Corinne, fluttery eyelids and fingers, a steely resolve beneath. "I won't mind dying nearly so much if I know that Mimi and Fifi are in good hands," she said anxiously, and quite literally she seized Marianne's hands in hers. "You will promise? You will?" "Oh, yes," Marianne said, blinking away tears.." I promise." She drove back to Stump Creek Hill, Mimi and Fifi yowling in the backseat, in a wire carrier. 0 God help us, what a world of sufferinR.

  When Whit came by later that afternoon, he discovered Marianne ashen-faced, kneeling on a floor in a back room of the office, trying to coax Mimi and Fifi out from their hiding place behind boxes of Nu-Plus Canine Kibble. She'd been crying and looked so desolate, Whit resisted whatever sardonic remark might have sprung to his lips. He asked her what on earth was wrong and Marianne told himn about the terminally ill woman and her cats and she told him, too, she'd been reading some of the reports he'd filed with the Humane Society of the United States and the American Horse Protection Association, the unspeakable cruelty endured by horses shipped to slaughter was something she hadn't known about and she'd had a horse she'd loved and her parents had sold it and she wasn't sure she was strong enough or courageous enough for this work after all-and Whit interrupted, "Marianne, we're here to serve these animals, not ourselves. We're dedicated to making what remains of their lives reasonably happy and if you can do only a little, that little is of great worth to the animals involved. Right?" Marianne shook her head yes, no-she wasn't sure. She'd used up her last tissue and her nose was running badly. Whit said, cheerftuly, "One day at a time! You'll see."

  Just as, in time, Mimi and Fifi emerged from hiding, and were taken by Marianne upstairs to her room, to live, more or less harmoniously, with Muffin, so too in time Marianne came to share Whit's attitude. Or to see its logic. It was the attitude, the philosophy, of all of Whit's staff; at least those who didn't quickly burn out and depart. How they all admired, and were intimidated by, Dr. Whittaker West! He was one of those persons who seemcd to thrive upon emergencies, tension, "challenge" as he called it. He travelled frequently to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to argue for legislation to "reduce animal suffering at the hands of mankind." He had the look of an impatient, ungainly bird-an ostrich, a stork-lanklimbed, quick-darting. His eyebrows were untidy tufts, hairs grew in his ears and nostrils. His forearms, bared in his soiled white coat, were a tangle of wiry dark hairs. His features were so motile, you couldn't say if he was an attractive man or homely; his manner so direct, eyes so glaring, it was difficult to "see" him at all. He bore scars on his face and anns from animal assaults over the years; the most prominent, a two-inch crescent moon above his left eye, was from a rabid bobcat. Marianne often did not look at him at all, even when he was speaking to her; like Penelope Hagstr"m, Whit West was just too-real. And the trouble with such people was, they seemed always, simply by singling you out for attention, to make you real, too.

  Whittaker West was said to be the son of a well-to-do Philadelphia businessman who'd owned Thoroughbreds and who had been involved in a scandal in the 1950s in which stables had been set afire, by a paid arsonist, to collect insurance money on racehorses not performing so well as their owner would have liked. He was said to have been badly hurt and embittered by an early, long-since terminated marriage-his former wife, also of a well-to-do Philadelphia family, had divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty, charging in divorce court that he'd preferred "the love of animals" to "the love of a spouse." There had been much local media attention, and embarrassmnent for Whit. That had been years ago, and of the present staff only Irma, a woman in her fifties, recalled Mrs. West: a glam.orous, high-strung, fashionably dressed young woman who'd never seemed to approve of her husband's work, still less of his devotion to it. At that time, however, Whit lived with his wife in a real house and not on the estate grounds. Mrs. West came to
visit rarely. When she did, she seemed invariably to find fault with the staff, or to suffer

  comical mishaps. Once she'd amazed Irma by rushing terrified into the office, staggering in high-heeled shoes, claiming that a `gigantic" peacock had screamed and flown straight at her head. The woman was white-faced, fainting, and Whit was quickly summoned, rushing out from the rear of the office, a fresh-bleeding welt in his cheek where a parrot had just gashed him with its beak. Mrs. West, seeing him, gave a strangled scream and fell heavily to the floor.

  Oh, it was funny! Sad, but funny. For of course Whit was the one to be hurt, finally. But, Irma insisted, it was so-always when Mrs. West arrived in her sporty little white Fiat coupe, the peacocks seemed to be screaming that peacock-shriek that could break your eardrum. One of the feral tomcats would dart out to spray the gleaming white-walled Fiat tires and, sometimes, Mrs. VJest's slender ankles. If Mrs. West visited the zoo, the monkeys cavorted shamelessly, even squirted water at her from their fluted little mouths. Though Stump Creek Hill animals were generally past the age for mating, or distracted by infirmities, it would happen that, if Mrs. West appeared, two of the younger animals were mating, shamelessly, too, in full view. The water bucks were the worst! Other animals squabbled, fought-the younger barnyard goats and the younger roosters seemed always to be taunting and feinting at one another. It was always too windy at Stump Creek Hill, or raining in gusts; or hot, and sand flies were biting, unless it was horseflies, or mosquitoes from the marshy land bordering Stump Creek close by. If there was a sudden outbreak of fleas-fleas you could see, like antic punctuation marks leaping from the ground onto your legs-poor Mrs. West was sure to arrive before the situation was under control. She was sarcastic with the young women staff workers, imagining they had "designs" on her husband; yet she was too vain to imagine that Whit, in turn, could be attracted to any of them. Such a scruffy, stringy-haired, poor-white_trash_looking crew! Marianne asked, guardedly, for she did not want to appear curious, "What did Mrs. West look like, exactly?" and Irma said vehemently, "Exactly like a cheerleader. Very blond, self-assured. Miss Personality Plus, except when things didn't go her way. You could see that Whit must have married her for love, there wasn't a thing else they had in common."