We Were The Mulvaneys Part 48

For a while he was foreman for an Elmira roofing-siding company and that was a decent-paying job, n.o.body 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. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have the unions shut up tight. Exactly why, as an employer, he'd hated the unions. Roused him to fury, those sons of b.i.t.c.hes 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-bulis.h.i.+t. No man of integrity and pride can tolerate such intrusion.

Y'know what he hoped?-that Reagan would bust their a.s.ses, 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 Ma.r.s.ena, Stop! Cease and desist! Let me go!

At least, he believed she was in Ma.r.s.ena. He hoped to h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 barnyard 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, G.o.d d.a.m.n them to h.e.l.l, 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 carca.s.s 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 Ma.r.s.ena and Corinne and Judd could oversee the actual moving, the details; he'd be at the Ma.r.s.ena 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 s.h.i.+vering 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 s.h.i.+elded 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 Ma.r.s.ena. 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 doG.o.dor-poor Silky, a ghostly presence. Drifting off to sleep amid s.h.i.+ny 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. d.a.m.ned good-looking kid, but young. Smart-a.s.s. 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 Ma.r.s.ena, carelessly dumped into a box with financial papers and doc.u.ments, a handful of snapshots from Corinne's alb.u.ms. 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 n.o.body'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, subst.i.tuting 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 s.h.i.+rts, 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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. d.a.m.n, 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 Ma.r.s.ena 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 h.o.a.rd 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 neat 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned airconditioner, he was missing syllables now and then.

They must have ordered from the stained menus, foi food was brought. Mike Jr. had splurged and ordered beef Szeciwan-style and prawns in garlic sauce and General's Chicken. No liquor license so the old dad had brought his usual bottle of Gallo wine in a paper bag, poured into one of the teacups, would Mike like some?- thanks, Mike did not. After a moment's hesitation he'd declined buying a six-pack of cold beer up the street to drink with the meal. Explaining he had a long drive back that night to-wherever.

"Well. Good to see you, son."

"Good to see you, Dad."

Those eyes so like his own had been, once. A boy's eyes. Gazing at his dad in pity, misery, disbelief. Dad? My dad? That's my dad? Michael Mulvaney?

Polaroid snapshots were being pa.s.sed across the table to the shaky-handed dad, or was it the air-conditioning unit that made everything seem to tremble? Dad picked them up, dropped them, squinting and grinning. Hard to see in this wavering light, his eyesight grown unreliable. Nor was it clear why exactly he was being shown these snapshots of happy strangers, why the transaction was important and what sort of response was expected. How seriously human beings took themselves!-it really became clear, when you're asked to examine pictures of strangers. Mike was identifying X, Y, Z. That girl with the name ending in y, and some others. Was Mike already married, and this was his new family? A pretty moonfaced girl with caramel-colored hair and bright lips smiling so happily you'd worry her face might crack. Cinched-in waist and heavy full b.r.e.a.s.t.s in a s.h.i.+mmering red dress that looked like liquid coalesced on her body. And there was Mike Jr. with this voluptuous girl, goodlooking Marine-Mike, arms around each other's waists and both grinning like they'd won the lottery. Other scenes at what looked like a barbecue, unknown men, women, children some of them with caramel-colored hair and moon faces, grinning happy as lunatics on a Sunday outing. "Mighty pret-ty," the ravaged old dad said, sighing. Pushed the snapshots back at his son after a discreet interval of trying to figure them out.

Son and shaky-handed dad were eating, or going through the motions. Salty-gummy food, tasting of something brown-scorched. Always at the Golden Pavilion they brought you tea in a tin pot though you'd as soon drink warm p.i.s.s. Mike talked, and his dad gave every impression of listening, leaning forward, belly creased against the tabletop. In fact he was distracted wanting very badly to maintain his good mood in these try- ing circ.u.mstances. The good mood had been initiated early that day, as soon as he'd gotten out of bed in fact. An antidote to the other mood which was not good and which had a foul tarry taste. Hadn't worked in two weeks, his money about gone. Well, in fact gone. He'd had an accident, slipped and fell from a ladder onto a concrete drive practically smas.h.i.+ng his kneecap, twisting his spine, his neck. Sure they claimed he'd been drinking and it was his fault, the sons of b.i.t.c.hes. And the aching in all his joints, really bad in humid weather. And the spongy sensation in his head. But none of this was going to get him down, spoil his good mood he deserved. This evening with the only child of his marriage he guessed loved him any longer or at least tolerated him. So maintaining the good mood required concentration. Tricky as the performance of a high wire artist for whom the slightest misstep or even hesitation could be fatal. So he had to concentrate on the s.p.a.cing of wine and food, food and wine, wine, food, and wine, mouthflils in discreet alternation and succession. Though it was only the liquid that mnattered: warm, tart, reverently swallowed, making its way down his gullet into what felt like the very cavity of his heart, empty, cavernous as the Grand Canyon, and yearning to be filled. Gab, red. Sour-sickish aftertaste but cheap, couple of bucks a bottle. Did the job.

Then these words sprang out, with no warning.

The way he'd grabbed the youngest kid, Judd-slarmned him against a wall.

"Eh, son-you're looking at your father like he's some kind of dog."

But he was grinning, chuckling at the kid's face. For Mike Jr., taken by surprise, looked guilty as h.e.l.l.

Mike said quickly, "No, Dad! h.e.l.l-" his big-boned handsome face reddening, how like his mother, that instant blush, acknowledgment he'd been found out. Saying, shrugging, with a frowning glance at other customers in the restaurant, "-it's just that I have a hard time, sometimes, places like this, I mean the civilian world-not you, Dad, really. On the base you get used to a different atmosphere. Off base, things are-" staring at a couple close by, the woman obese, sallow-skinned, some sort of glittery rag tied around her head, laughing and swilling noodles out of a bowl, the man in a paint-stained unders.h.i.+rt, crinkly-haired, pigeon-chested, baring his gums and laughing loudly, drunk. In the booth behind Mike, an elderly Chinese man was coughing in prolonged spasms, rapid staccato barks that caused the Mulvaneys' booth to shake. "-kind of coming apart, you know? No purpose to them. n.o.body seems to know what the h.e.l.l they're doing, or why. Why they're even alive." His voice gave him away, quavering with contempt.