We Were The Mulvaneys Part 26

Sounding almost hurt. In just Corinne's tone, if one or another of her children hadn't been hungry for a meal, or hadn't wanted to take time to sit down at the table and eat with the family.

So Marianne had brought with her on the Trailways bus, in the canvas bag, two quarts of a tomato-based soup stock, raw vegetables, and macaroni; two loaves of bread she'd baked herself, zucchiniwalnut and nine-grain whole wheat; a jar of Green Isle raspberry jam; even, in a plastic bag, salad greens and vegetables. Preparing the meal in Patrick's alcove kitchen (no stove, but a double-burner hot plate, a squat little Pullman refrigerator on the floor, a small aluminum sink, a single counter and cupboard) she'd chattered to him, glowing with pleasure and purpose. Almost, she was b.u.t.ton Mulvaney. If Patrick didn't stare at her.

In the bus depot, G.o.d he'd been shocked! The sight of her going through him like a sharp blade.

Marianne?-wa.s it possible?

In the room here when she'd removed her jacket. He'd swallowed hard, how thin she was. Upper arms no larger than his wrists. Collarbone jutting and b.r.e.a.s.t.s tiny as a twelve-year-old's and anyone who would gaze upon such a child with l.u.s.t was sick, depraved, repellent. The spiky hair, brutally shorn at the back and sides. Faint blue veins at her temples and eyes threaded with red as if she'd gone without sleep recently. Or had been crying.

Equally disturbing, the odd clothes. Discount-store clothes. Like no clothes worn by Cornell students, even those eager to define themselves as "characters," "freaks." The ifimsy white cotton T-s.h.i.+rt with the thin, loose straps and, in green stamped letters

-S{E on the front. Sarcastically Patrick asked, "Are you in disguise, Marlanne?-as what?" He'd meant to be funny but Marianne only stared at him, confused. She'd touched her hair nervously as if trying to smooth it down. It occurred to him that she didn't know what she looked like.

Patrick had read about rape victims, he'd done research in his methodical Pinch-style, in the Cornell psych library. Ills common for a rape victim,female or male, to avoid mirrors and direct confrontation with all images of the "self" As if- where there had been a person, there is now no one.

Patrick offered to help Marianne prepare supper but she said she didn't need help. The minestrone was her own recipe, never the same twice. Patrick murmured he wasn't used to being waited on any longer, it made him uneasy, and something in his voice tipped off Marianne, who laughed, teasing, asking who'd been cooking for him lately? a girl? and Patrick blushed and said no one.

Marianne smiled. "No?"

It was true in a way. No one had cooked for Patrick here, in his own kitchen.

They Sat down to eat. Marianne's minestrone was the most delicious soup Patrick had ever tasted: steaming-hot, in stoneware bowls, a thick broth seasoned with fresh basil and oregano, containing chunks of celery, tomato, carrots, red onion, beans, chickpeas and macaroni. The nine-grain whole wheat bread was crumbly, chewy, delicious, too. And a green salad with red leaf lettuce and endive, cuc.u.mber, pepper, alfalfa sprouts, a vinegar-and-atl dressing flavored with dill. Patrick was surprised at his appet.i.te, his hunger. Usually he prepared for himself quick meals out of cans, dumped in a pan or stirfried in a skillet. Sat at his desk and worked as he ate, hardly tasting his food, was.h.i.+ng it down with numerous gla.s.ses of fruit juice. Leanlimbed, lanky, with a flat stomach, Patrick had always had nearly the appet.i.te of his heftier brother Mike but no one had seemed to notice. He ate, ate, ate and retained only ropey muscle on his bones. Marianne had always been slender, small_boned; she'd eaten sparingly, as she ate now, taking pleasure in Patrick's appet.i.te and his reactions to her nieal-"W0W. Terrific. This is really good."

Marianne blushed: like Corinne, she was uneasy receiving praise.

Saying, disparagingly, "-I think I put too much oregano in the soup. If it's overdone"

"h.e.l.l, no," Patrick said severely, "-it's perfect."

Marianne smiled, laughed nervously. In the overhead light her eyes were enormous and the sockets deeply shadowed.

Patrick reiterated how happy he was at Cornell, how rarely he was lonely. Marianne's wistful smile seemed to inquire -3ut don't you miss me?-he took no notice. He was feeling rather boastftil, a quiet boy running at the mouth, in the way of stiff shy vain young men who imagine themselves brilliant, and are so perceived by others. He spoke warmly if vaguely of his fellow tenants in the house, foreign students so much more serious than most American students. Civilization, for them, was a very different matter than it was for Americans, Patrick believed. We tend to take it for granted, it'sjust there. We tend to think it'sfor us, a gift. But others, from the East especially, seem to know something else. "Almost, when you talk with them," Patrick said earnestly, "you get the impression they're s.h.i.+elding us-I mean, a kid like me. Typical spoiled American kid like me."

"Oh, Patrick," Marianne laughed, with sisterly reproach, "-you're hardly typical."

Patrick said loftily, "I don't want to be. But I see the world through the prism of my culture, not through 'objective' eyes."

"But why would anyone else be more 'objective'? I don't understand."

"Because their civilizations are older, more fatalistic. It's like contingency in evolutionary theory-sheer chance. There seems to be design, in fact it's ingenious design, no mere human brain could have devised it, there seems to be 'intelligence' manifested-but it's the accidental, mechanical acc.u.mulation of 'natural selection' over a period of millions of years. No G.o.d, only just nature. And accident." Patrick spoke dogmatically, in the tone of Dr. Herring in the lecture hail. Marianne was sitting meekly hunched at the table, bone-sharp elbows on the table, eyes downcast and forehead creased. She'd virtually stopped eating.

Shyly she said, "My friend Abelove-that's his last name, he's called by his last name-he's executive director of the Co-op-he says that evolution and creation can be reconciled. Evolution through nature and creation through-"

"G.o.d?-don't be silly," Patrick said, snorting in derision.

"-I'm not sure how to explain it-"

"I'm sure you aren't!"

"It's just that there are different ways of perceiving the same thing," Marianne said uncertainly. "I mean-aren't there?"

"There are scientifically demonstrable ways, and there are superst.i.tious, self-deluding ways," Patrick said curtly. "You can choose one or the other but not both."

Marianne stood from the table, shakily. Patrick thought she was going to walk away but instead she went to slice more bread, he'd eaten all the slices she'd laid out.

When Marianne returned to the table, Patrick made an effort to speak more moderately. Really, he wasn't a bully, so hotheaded!- he'd be ashamed of himself afterward. It was Pinch-instinct, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his face like a spoiled brat. There were excellent reasons why people like his sister-and his mother, and her mother-in fact, most of humanity-believed what they believed, in the face of reason itself they believed because, like children, they were terrified of the dark. Mistaking the luminosity of an inhuman and implacable Truth for mere dark.

In high school, Patrick had read Charles Darwin's great works

The Ortgin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle. James Watson's Double

Helix which his biology teacher had given him, as an acknowledgment of Patrick's special status. Darwin the visionary, Watson and

Crick the careerists. Well, science was both, wasn't it?The, Patrick

Mulvaney, didn't intend to separate the two.

Marianne was an avid listener as Patrick spoke of his courses, his professors, his work; she didn't inquire into his grades, but Patrick informed her-all A's, through three semesters of five three-credit courses each, except for G.o.dd.a.m.ned organic chemistry where he'd managed only an A-, in a pack of premed majors some of whom were rumored to have cheated on the final-well, not only on the final.

But Patrick, flush-faced, indignant, didn't want to go into that.

The cheating, dishonesty, cynicism, beer-drinking drug-taking s.e.xual promiscuity of his undergraduate cla.s.smates-not all, but a sizable percentage-no, Patrick didn't want to go into that.

Instead he told Marianne of his hopes for a career: after his B.A. he would enter a Ph.D. program, possibly here at Cornell where he could work with Maynard Herring, one of the most distinguished of living microbiologists (who'd already singled out Patrick Mulvaney as bright, promising); he would win a fellows.h.i.+p, or if not a fellows.h.i.+p a teaching a.s.sistants.h.i.+p; he would complete his Ph.D. in three years-"If all goes as planned." Earnestly Patrick spoke of certain mysteries of science that intrigued him: why viruses can't replicate themselves, for instance, but have to insert their genetic information into a host and force the host to reproduce the virus; how can so many totally disparate components-microorganisms, chemicals, atoms-const.i.tute an individual human being, with a unified personality? And what is "personality," given such a galaxy of components? Why have so many plant and animal species become extinct?-more than ninety percent of all species that have ever lived. And what does it mean in evolutionary terms that the maternal egg is so much more influential in reproduction than the pater- nal, thousands of times larger than the paternal, and containing all the cellular mitochondria? And how did such an extraordinary organ as the eye evolve, in so many disparate species of creatures, through tniilions of years, out of sheer blind undifferentiated matter?

Marianne interrupted to ask, with sisterly solicitude, "Your eye, Patrick-is it all right?"

Patrick stared at her. "My eye? What?"

"Your-you know," she said, faltering. "Your injured eye."

Patrick scowled, shoving his gla.s.ses against the bridge of his nose. He was hufl-, indignant. "We're not discussing my ridiculous eye," he said, "-we're discussing the phenomenon of eye. It's so amazing. How a mechanism so intricate and ingenious evolved out of blind matter. Who could have imagined an eye, eyesight, in the dark?"

Marianne had risen un.o.btrusively to clear the table. She shook her head, with a wan smile. "Someone with an ingenious imagination," she said softly.

"Hrnnim! Very funny, Mariaime."

Vehemently Patrick continued to speak, not knowing what he said or why, at this moment, he was driven to say it; the words long pent-up, the solitude of his life erupting suddenly, in a pa.s.sion he hadn't known he possessed. Marianne moved quietly and surely clearing the table, rinsing the dishes, all the while listening to Patrick, murmuring words of a.s.sent or surprise, occasionally wincing as if his sharp words hurt. Somehow Patrick had swerved from the subject of science's great mysteries to humankind's collective failure. These were thoughts he'd had numerous times, in high school even, but he'd never spoken of them to another person before. "Look, it's so d.a.m.ned depressing! Why after all this time, all that science has discovered, the human race is so-.ignorant. So superst.i.tious and cruel. Consider: the n.a.z.is murdered sixteen million men, women, and children; Stalin murdered twenty million; even more millions-more!-were victims of Chinese Communist 'ideology.' Just in the twentieth century alone. Our civilized century. That's the mystery, not nature-why human beings are so vile."

Marianne had come to stand staring at Patrick, her eyes almost frightened. "Patrick, you sound so angry."

"Shouldn't I be? Why aren't you?"

Patrick had risen from the table, trembling. He'd had no idea he was so angry, a pulse beating in his left eye, furiously.

Quickly, without a word, Marianne came to him. Gripped his arms and on her toes leaned against him, pressing her cool, thin cheek against his. Not quite an embrace but it was comforting, consoling.

I love you. We love each other. That's enough.