We Were The Mulvaneys Part 13

Labor was the right word for it. You surely do labor. Like pushing a wagon loaded with cement blocks uphill, three wheels stuck. Grunting, sweating, straining like a sow to give birth as it's called. There came a high-pitched roaring, and a muscular contortion not to be believed like pulling yourseif inside out, like you're a glove. And then suddenly, after how many hours it would always seem suddenly, a rushing out of the tunnel into blazing, blinding light.

Here I come, here I come, oh! here! I! COME!

Michael Mulvaney her husband grinning and gritting his big teeth, droplets of sweat gleaming on his face like shiny transparent beetles. Oh his bloodshot eyes! No sleep for eighteen hours! Push! push! push! uuuuhhh! he and the nurse were urging like demented cheerleaders. Veins stood out on the young husband's forehead, close to bursting. Corinne I love you, love love love you, that's my girl thatagirl! that-a-girl! PUSH!

Then suddenly it was out of her, and in others' rubber-gloved hands. The baby!-she'd almost forgotten, that was the point of this ordeal wasn't it, so much fuss-the baby, squirming amid red-slippery as a sea creature, incongruously lifted into raw air. Where did so much lung power, so much volume, come from? What if the baby had begun to wail like that, that loud, inside the womb? Corinne laughed at the thought, drunk and dazed. Janimed her sc.r.a.ped knuckles against her teeth and laughed, wept behind her hand. Oh G.o.d, am I worthy? Are You sure You didn't make a mistake?

Four times Corinne would give birth. And never grow wiser. In fact each time it would seem more preposterous-she'd done so little, and reaped so much. Were she and Michael Mulvaney really good enough, strong enough, smart enough, deep enough to be entrusted with babies?

That first time, in the Rochester hospital, March 1954, euphoria swept over her like a drug. Red-slippery baby in her arms: a boy. A boy! Michael Jr.! (In fact, was Corinne drugged? What was it- Demerol? She'd been brave and brash asking the doctor please not to sedate her, please no thanks but maybe with her anxious husband's complicity he'd dosed her anyway on the sly? guessing it would be a protracted labor hed hoped to maintain her screams at a respectable decibel level, was that it?) And there was her husband, her Michael Mulvaney she'd married after only a few months of knowing him, loving hini more than her life, her life she'd have tossed into the air confident he'd catch it, yes and she'd given birth to this astonishing kicking-crying boy-baby for his sake.

Joking amid the sticky bedclothes, lifting the tiny baby in her anns, for always they were great kidders, a comic duo to crack up the nurses-"See what you niade me do, Michael Mulvaney!"

They were mamed, it was quite legal. But Connne had renioved her plain, worn-gold, p.a.w.nshop--purchased wedding band months before, womed she'd never get it off her swelling fingers. The only mother in the maternity ward with no ring, just-fingers. So Michael couldn't resist quipping, loud enough to be heard through the room, "Well. Guess I'll have to marry you now, kid, eh?"

The looks on those strangers' faces.

So Corinne was a new mother: slightly touched by new-mother craziness. She hoped to dmgni-y herself by commenting sagely to the doctor (always, you want to impress them: men of authority) about "the sucking reflex"-"the bonding instinct"-and similar clinical- anthropological phenomena. She wanted to inipress this man she hardly knew, she'd been a college student after all, even if it was only at Fredonia State, and she'd dropped out between her junior and senior years to get married. She wasn't some immature girl like others in the maternity ward with her-seventeen, eighteen years old, just kids. She, Corinne Mulvaney, was a mature young wife of almost twenty-three.

Plucking at the doctor's sleeve as he was about to move on, "Oh! doctor, waitl-one thing!" and he'd smiled at her breathlessness, "Yes, Corinne?" and she'd said in a rush, stammering, "Y-You don't think G.o.d made a nimstake, do you? That He might change His mind, and take our baby back?"

Marianne, the third-born, the sole daughter, was to be the miracle baby.

You only get one of them, once. If you're lucky. But most people aren't lucky. (So you mustn't gloat, of course.) Corinne and Michael Mulvaney seemed to understand, though they were still young parents when their daughter was born, in their twenties. This was in June 1959.

Already, they had two boys. Two boys! But where Michael Jr. and Patrick Joseph had been screamers and thrashers virtually from birth, strong-willed, stubborn, crying through the night in a contest of wills ("Pick me up! Nurse me! I know you're there!"), their intransigent male selves a.s.sertive as their tiny, floppy p.e.n.i.ses, Marianne was sweet and amiable, an angel-baby, a friendly baby. A baby, as Michael Sr. observed, who actually seemed to be on our side. Within two weeks of coming to live with them at High Point Farm, this baby slept seven hours through a night, allowing her exhausted mother and father to sleep seven hours, too. Corinne and Michael grinned at each other. "Why didn't we try one of these, right away?"

Not that they weren't crazy about their sons, too. They were, but in a different way.

Boy-babies:unpredictable surges of animal-energy, even in the crib. Mauling and bruising Corinne's milk-heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. With sly goo-goo eyes Love me all the same! When they slept, they did sleep hard. Especially Patrick, in his first six months. But more often there were thumps, crashes, the sound of breaking gla.s.s. Earsplitting heartrending baby-shrieks. Kicking and splashing bathwater, refusing food, refusing to be diapered, flush-faced, flailing like beached little sharks.

Mikey-Junior, the firstborn, the biggest baby (nine pounds, two ounces) would come to seem in time the most distant: he'd been born, not in Mt. Ephraim, but in Rochester; in a "big-city" hospi tal; brought back to a rented duplex in an almost-slumnmy neighborhood near downtown, not to High Point Farm like the other babies. This seemed to cast him, in retrospect, in a kind of gritty urban light; amid traffic noises, frequent sirens, the isolated and mysterious shouts of unknown men in the middle of the night. Sometimes it almost seemed that Mikey had been born to strangers-young, clumsy, frightened parents who hadn't yet decided exactly whether they wanted to have children; whether all this they'd set into trio- tion by their pa.s.sion for each other was serious.

Michael Jr., Mikey-Junior, Big Guy, one day to be called "Mule" and "Number Four": all boy as a certain kind of sausage might be said to be all sausage. Uncanny how he'd resembled his young (twenty-six, and scared) father, already in the delivery room: the puggish nose, the squarish jaw, the close-set warm-chocolatey- brown eyes, the dark-red curls like wood shavings. The belligerent mouth that turned, when kissed, to sugar. Within his first year alone Mikey got his head so stuck between stair railings (in the rented duplex) his terrified father had had to remove one, to free him. He'd s.n.a.t.c.hed at and trapped in his hand a b.u.mblebee (yes, he was stung); tackled a young cat and was scratched above his right eye; hung on his mother so much she'd begun to be lopsided, with a chronic aching neck. His first words, in comical imitation of his parents' admonitions, were Mikey! Baby! and Noooo! As soon as he grew teeth he used them: gnawing at newspapers like a hungry rodent, gnawing at his crib railings, biting through a toaster cord-fortunately, the toaster hadn't been plugged in at the time. Very quickly, being mechanically-minded like his father, he learned to switch on the radio, the TV, the washing machine; to unplug the refrigerator and start it defrosting; to pick his father's jacket pockets for loose change, which with gleeful squeals he'd toss rolling and bouncing across the floor. More dangerously, he learned to turn on stove burners and the oven, to strike matches into flame. He was comnically aggressive in "protecting" his Mommy when visitors dropped by. Once the Mulvaneys moved to the country (what a wonderland for an active child, the many rooms in the old house, the outbuildings, fields and woods) he cultivated a habit of escaping parental vigilance, climbing out of his playpen and wandering off, smffing like a dog, imlexhaustibly curious. Always, Corinne was calling, "Mikey! Mikey where are you!" and trotting after him. Once, aged two, he drifted out of her sight when she was working in the garden and disappeared for ninety minutes-only to be discovered peacefully asleep in a dark, stiflingly hot corner of the hay barn by his distraught parents. Mikey-Junior was as finicky an eater (Corinne joked) as Porky Pig. Indeed, he had a cast-iron stomach: if he didn't vomit immediately after gobbling down some problematic food (for instance, rancid dog food) he digested it with no evident side effects. He weathered falls, cuts, bruises, insect bites, poison ivy and poison oak. Bouts of furious weeping pa.s.sed swiftly as storm clouds scudding overhead, mio sooner gone than forgotten. Like an amphibious creature, he seemed already to know how to swim before, at the age of three, he was led gently out into shallow water at Wolf s Head Lake, hand in hand with his Dad. By the age of five, he was diving una.s.sisted into the lake, nimble and monkeylike in imitation of Michael Sr. (at that time almost-slim, boyish, with powerful shoulders, arms and strongly muscled legs that propelled him through water h.e.l.l-bent as a torpedo). A sunny, uncomplaining, good-natured child-"but, wow!" as Corinne so frequently sighed, "-two handfuls."

By contrast, Patrick, born when Mikey-Junior was four, was a fretful, nervous baby. The kind that flails and kicks as a mode of expression. They'd laughed at him, in delight-his oddly long, narrow little feet like flippers. His pale blue bug-eyes, earnest like Corinne's. Fair brown hair growing in peculiar little tufts on his eggsh.e.l.l head, like inspired thoughts imperfectly formed. A baby with high standards, the Mulvaneys boasted. A baby to keep you on your toes. Think-think-thinking like a clock ticking in your hands. Yet capable of heartrending sweetness-that was Patrick, little "Pinch." By eleven months teetering on his feet and chattering high-decibel nonsense with the aplomb of a baby Mozart, to the astonishment of his parents. Corinne was enchanted, mystified. Her infant son was as opinionated and as a.s.sertive in expression as his father, and as strong- willed. He wanted his "own" way yet, a moment later, dissolved in tenderness, he wanted only to be hugged, comforted. He might have been overwhelmed by his older brother Mikey except he was in awe of Mikey-so much more physical and forcible than Patrick. No doubt he couldn't distinguish, for some time, among "Mommy," "Daddy," and "Mikey" as figures of household authority. Even as a baby Patrick had an instinctive sense of n-ht and not-right, and frequently embarra.s.sed his parents by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his earnest little face at people he didn't like, as if in the presence of a bad odor. Patrick would rear back, thrust out his lower lip, point and jabber disapprovingly. "No like, no like" he seemed to be declaring. Overly made up or perfumed women disturbed him, Reverend Earkin (of the First Baptist Church of Eagleton Corners) who spoke in a highpitched, nasal voice, people who spoke too emphatically, or laughed too loudly, or condescended to him, or overstayed their visits at High Point Farm. In those years before he'd settled into knowing who Michael Mulvaney was, in Mt. Ephraim terms, Michael Sr. was friendly with a number of local mnen-Wally Parks, for instance, who operated a small airport in Ma.r.s.ena, "Haw" Hawley who owned a tavern at Wolf s Head Lake and was stocky and blackbearded and smoked a bitter-smelling ropy cigar. These men Patrick particularly disliked, and let his feelings be known. "Lucky the kid approves of me," his father said dryly.

Then came, unexpected, Corinne's third pregnancy. Her third!- so soon after Patrick's birth. Breathless, a bit dazed, Corinne told her little boys that G.o.d was sending them a surprise because they'd been such special babies, He wanted to make more of them to send to High Point Farm. Mikey was thrilled, but Patrick was too young to comprehend. When, one day, the tiny girl-baby was brought home, and presented as "your baby sister Marianne," he'd stared at the infant, thrust out his lower lip, and, wide-eyed, began to jabber excitedly.

Years later Patrick would insist he remembered that day. He'd thought his baby sister was a baby pig.

So came the miracle baby to High Point Farm, the Mulvaneys' little girl.

Corinne joked that G.o.d had sent Marianne a little quicker than they'd antic.i.p.ated (yes, they were practicing birth control-sort of) to prove that a baby could be, well-an experience just a little different from the usual.

It was no exaggeration: Marianne was a beautiful sweet-natured baby with gray-blue eyes, dark curly hair, features exquisite as a ceramic doll's. So lovely, Corinne hung over her crib just to stare and stare and stare. A baby who slept, and woke, with a smile. Who nursed at the breast, and allowed herself to be bathed, her wriggly little body dried and powdered and diapered and dressed, with a wet cooing-clucking sound as of perpetual surprise and delight. Why, l!fe is fun! I love you! Her crying spells were infrequent, her tantrums rare and brief. (Unlike Patrick, who'd raised the art of tantrum-throwing to new heights.) As soon as anyone, dogs and cats included, entered her field of vision, Marianne raised her little arms eagerly to be

JUDSON ANDREW MU-VANEY.

July11, 1963

lbs., 4 oz.

brown hair, brown eyes, pug nose

PRAISE G.o.d THE MULVANEY CABOOSE HAS ARRIVED-.

hugged or lifted. There were older women, mothers with grown children, who, to Corimne's embarra.s.sment, burst into tears at the mere sight of her, as of memones too precious to be borne.

Those years. They'd still been young, and they'd certainly seemed to themselves blundering, humble, groping, inexperienced; inventing their lives as they went. You Mulvaneys! how lucky are you! the refrain went. (For Michael was proving himself as a Mt. Ephraim merchant, too, at this time-a dynamo of energy guiding Mulvaney Roofing.) Such p.r.o.nouncements left them, Corinne in particular, uneasy, apologetic, vaguely guilty. Yes hut we don't deserve. Do we? Their beautiful Baby Marianne, their precious Patrick and Mikey-already, as in a dream, they'd harvested of their love afamily.

Lying beside her husband in bed, at night, as his breathing slowed and thickened, Corinne tried to sleep, for she was always exhausted, yet she couldn't prevent her mind from racing-flying- sorting through the memories of the day as one might rummage through a drawer in search of some utterly commonplace household object; as if searching for a clue; and suddenly, awake after all, Michael would murmur, "Of all of them"-requiring no preamble, no explanation, as if simply voicing Corinne's womes, a continuous stream of thought flowing through both mother and father, parents, "-it's her I wonder about." Her: our baby girl Marianne. (Asleep in her crib a few feet away.) And Corinne would say quickly, "Wonder what?" The more uneasy Corinne was, the lighter, more jovialjoshing her middle-of-the-night tone. Michael would say, shrugging in the dark, "Oh h.e.l.l, it's hard to explain, it's a little crazy I guess- like G.o.d is trusting us with something we're possibly not good enough, not strong enough, to deserve." And Corinne would laugh, sliding an arm across her husband's burly, warm chest, feeling the p.r.i.c.kly-wiry hairs through the thin cotton of his T-shirt and nuzzling against him. "Michael Mulvaney, what a thing to say! As if G.o.d doesn't know what He's doing. That's about the silliest thing I've heard from you, yet." Her eyes starkly open in the dark, her lips drawn back from her teeth.

And what, in this recitation of Mulvaney babies, of "Judson Andrew"? I'd almost forgotten to speak of myself. It's easy for me to forget myselfi I'm told I was a "perfectly adorable" baby, by which I think is meant a "perfectly ordinary" baby-no distinguishing features, no memorable acts. A predilection for wakefulness, a puppy- like devotion to my older brothers and sister. There are snapshots of the three of us-I mean, the four of us-in which Mikey-Junior, a husky curly-haired little boy, cuddles me, a small infant, in his arms, with a dazzling grin at the camera; there are snapshots of the four of us posed with family pets, or perched atop porch railings, or ponies-Dad or Mom steadying the smallest of us from behind, crouched out of sight. One of my favorite snapshots, which I'd stolen away with Re: when I left High Poimit Farmn, is pencilled on the back in Mom's handwriting, Chickadee & Baby Judd, Xmas 1964; it shows my beautiful five-year-old sister, all smiles and bouncy curls, posed with me, a rather odd-looking, astonished-appearing toddler in a green playsuit, posed amid a glittering mound of Christmas presents.

Marianne was "Little Mother"-helped take care of me, feed, bathe, clothe me. Morn boasted that "Little Mother" was as capable as "Big Mother" in many ways. Changing diapers, helping with toilet training. On the potty, Baby Judd had been "eager to please" and what that meant exactly, I didn't want to know. Naturally there are fewer snapshots of me than of the other babies in the overflowing faniily alb.u.m, which I didn't interpret as a lack of interest in i-ne personally (I know Mom loved me, a lot) but a diminution of baby as a subject. After all, who could blame my parents? To announce my birth, Mom sent out several dozen brightly inked cards she'd made herself- depicting a cartoon caboose at the end of a long, winding freight train:

DAMAGED GIRL.

I hadn't known, G.o.d help me I hadn't guessed. Yet I think it must have been partly myfi-ult. I'm her mother, it must have been partly my fault. I'm waiting, 0 G.o.d I'm hoping to understand.

St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church, at the hilly crest of Mercer Avenue, a snowy-glaring cemetery behind it, was one of the few Mt. Ephraiin churches Corinne had never once stepped inside. Not just that St. Ann's was a Catholic church (and Corinne, Protestant to her fingertips, had a nervous apprehension of the Holy Roman Faith) but, somehow, she and Michael Sr. didn't seeni to have any close friends in the parish who might have invited them to weddings, baptisms, funerals.

Corinne wondered; Did Marianne have a special friend in St. Ann's?-was that the connection?

She parked the station wagon hurriedly in front of the church, one wheel up on the curb and she hadn't even noticed. Thank G.o.d, her husband wasn't a witness. Thank G.o.d, the church parking lot was almost empty, no ma.s.s at this hour of niidafternoon, no one around. Corinne hoped. She brightened at the thought that the heavy wooden doors were probably bolted shut from the inside.

St. Ann's Church was large by Mt. Ephrairn standards. Dark red brick, weatherwom; aged, but dignified; bell tower overhead. Mourning doves fluttered about its eaves and their droppings were like ossified tears, streaking downward. The church was in an affluent residential neighborhood in north Mt. Ephraim, attractive treelined streets of single-family dwellings in acre-sized lots. A neighborhood in which many members of the Mt. Ephraim Country Club lived. Corinne felt a tinge of old, automatic dismay and had to check herself. There came Michael Sr.'s laughing-chiding voice in her head: Look, kid, you re one of those people yourself

It occurred to Corinne, a bit desperately, that the LaPortes lived only a block or so away. Trisha was Marianne's closest friend. Might that be the connection?

A stained-gla.s.s rose window overlooked the sidewalk. Corinne had a love of stained gla.s.s, especially old pieces. So beautiful, if skillfully executed, especially seen from inside a building, sunshine behind it. Maybe that was what attracted Marianne to a Catholic church?-things to see? Stained gla.s.s, statues. Altars decked with gold leaf The somber little wood-frame country churches to which Connne took her children (the First Church of Christ of South Lebanon was their current place of worship) were all so plain and spartan and scrubbed-looking. Not much for an adolescent imagination to seize upon. But wasn't that the point, after all?

Jesus is a spirit in us. Not an object to behold.

Corinne tried one of the heavy doors, cautiously-it opened. Her heart was beating painfully. She stepped inside the dim-lit vestibule and a sweet-rancid odor made her nostrils pinch. Incense. An undercurrent of mildew. That unmistakable smell of so-aged-itcan't-really-be-cleaned--any-longer linoleum tile. As if rehearsing a way in which to speak of this adventure, a way of most artfully recounting it to make her listeners laugh, Corinne thought ftliy, you know right away it isn't one of our churches, it's one of theirs!

In a flash it came to her: of course she'd known something had been wrong with her daughter, these past few days. Something notright. Since Sunday. Since the telephone call. A mother always knows, can't not know. But Connne had been so busy, hadn't gotten around to investigating. And hadn't she always been proud she wasn't the kind of mother to "investigate"-on principle. Iwant my children to trust me. To think of tne as an equal.

A cruel counterthought mocked No, you're just afraid of what you might discover.

A new church is always forbidding and St. Ann's with its high ceiling and ornamental interior seemed to Connne not-welcoming. There were statues positioned along the walls, statues meant to represent Jesus, His mother Mary, and other saints-richly robed, life-sized, Caucasian. To be worshipped as pagans might worship: the eye fastened to an object, confused about what an object is. And the spirit indwelling. Near the back of the church was a miniature side altar before which votive candles had been lit, their flames flickering. An elderly woman knelt before this altar, head bowed, whispering prayers with a rosary clutched in her fingers. Up the wide aisle, at the front, was the main altar, prominent as a stage, glittering with gold or gilt; draped in satiny white, with much ornamentation, and vases of flowers beginning to wilt. Overhead was a large cross upon which was impaled Jesus Christ, crowned with thorns, dabbed with blood, a dark-haired dark-bearded tender-eyed Savior, contorted in an ecstasy of suffering. Corinne stared. The wonder and honor of the crucifixion swept over her anew.

Jesus forgive us, we know not what we do.

In fact, St. Ann's was not deserted. There were several persons scattered amid the wooden pews. At the far right, in a slanted net of pale amber light from a stained-gla.s.s window, sat Marianne. She was wearing her sky blue parka, the hood lowered; her hair was unkempt and her head sharply bowed, a hand lifted to her eyes. It looked as if her lips were moving silently. Corinne tiptoed to her and leaned over. "Marianne?" she whispered, straining her mouth in a smile. "Honey-?"

It was as if she'd shouted into the girl's ear. Marianne started, drawing back. Her eyes were puffy-lidded and gla.s.sy and she seemed scarcely to show, in that first instant, any sign of recognition.